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ON INTELLIGENCE
Robert David Steele
11 October 2003
Table of Contents
What Is Intelligence and Why Does It Matter? 1
Four Threats, Four Quadrants 2
9-11: What Went Wrong and Why? 4
Iraq: What Went Wrong and Why? 6
America As Others See Us 7
Historical Endeavors to Reform U.S. Intelligence 11
Fixing Intelligence—National Security Act of 2005 14
New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence 17
The Emerging Intelligence Renaissance 18
Prognosis: Power to the People Through Public Intelligence 21
Bibliography 21
About the Author 23
What Is Intelligence and Why Does It Matter?
America as both a government and a people is confused and uncertain about the definition of intelligence.[1] At a higher level, there is a tendency to confuse spies, satellites, and secrecy with intelligence—this causes the existing $35 billion a year national intelligence shotgun to completely discount and ignore the 90% of the relevant international information that is not online, not in English, and not secret. Absent a good grip on open sources of information, the U.S. government can be said to be operating on perhaps 2% of the available relevant national security information, in part because it has not mastered the 29 foreign languages that are a minimalist starting point for comprehensive global coverage.[2]
At a lower level, there is a tendency to believe that only national governments “do” intelligence. While this is somewhat true in that the private sector (including non-governmental agencies with extraordinary access to ground-truth through direct observation) are generally not skilled at applying the proven process of intelligence to their decision-support needs, this has the effect of shutting out the bulk of the global knowledge available within our borders, or from experts resident in other countries. The fastest way to improve national intelligence is not necessarily by reorganizing the secret bits, but perhaps, instead, by expanding the definition and making networked and truly national intelligence possible—we must harness the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth, beginning with all of our experts here at home.
Here is my definition of intelligence: Intelligence is decision-support, where a proven process—requirements definition, collection management, source discovery and validation, multi-source fusion, compelling and timely presentation—relies predominantly on open sources of information, burden-sharing among both tribes and nations, and a focus on creating public intelligence that can drive sensible public policy.
A process that does not integrate the seven tribes[3], that does not do multilateral burden- sharing for global coverage, and that does not operate routinely and daily in 29 languages, is by contrasting definition, not intelligence.
Four Threats, Four Quadrants
A major flaw with national intelligence occurs as a result of obsession with one specific kind of threat—the traditional nation-state with organized armed forces. The obsession further corrupts intelligence when attention is narrowly focused on what are called “hard targets”, those seven states considered to be a strategic nuclear threat or conventional state-sponsored communist or terrorist threat: Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Libya, Iraq (more of a threat today than before we invaded), and Pakistan.
In the 1980’s I conceptualized the below illustration of four threat classes, each of which requires co-equal intelligence resources and intelligence leadership.[4]
There is another way to look at the global intelligence challenge. Taking our lead from the above, and thinking in policy terms now, i.e. what should intelligence be able to
support, I conceptualize four quadrants where America must devise consistent, holistic, sustainable foreign affairs and global security policy.
In brief, invading another country and winning a military war with a heavy-metal force structure is not only a last resort in terms of policy, it is also the least likely to result in the desired outcome. National security today is about moral legitimacy, moral capitalism, moral democracy, environmental integrity, and the sustainment of our own homeland in terms of education, public health, and critical infrastructure. The longer we allow our political and corporate and media leaders to lie to us, the longer we fail to revitalize the democratic process by demonstrating that votes can still count for more than money, the less likely we are to assure the security and prosperity of our children and what the Native Americans call “the seventh generation”—this is the generation whose needs should drive all major policy decisions.[5]
9-11: What Went Wrong and Why?
9-11 was both an intelligence failure and a policy failure. It continues to trouble me that in the two years prior to 9-11, capping decades of Presidential and Congressional commissions on intelligence reform, no fewer than fifteen books on intelligence deficiencies and intelligence reform were published. All were ignored. Unfortunately, 9-11 and the tragic deaths of over 3,000 Americans, including a number in that previously impregnable bastion, the Pentagon, have failed to inspire mature reflection and the necessary redirection of intelligence and policy. Absent the election of an unconventional and open-minded President, I predict that America will suffer another 5,000 dead in the next five years, both here at home and through devastating attacks against hotels, office buildings, tunnels, and mass commercial transportation.
With respect to intelligence failures, 9-11 happened because the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is incompetent at clandestine operations (my former career), incompetent at open source information collection and exploitation in foreign languages (my current career), and incompetent at processing multi-media information such that the dots can be detected and connected (my avocation). The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is incompetent at counter-terrorism, inattentive with respect to immigration matters, and still in the 1970’s with respect to archaic information technology systems.
Generic intelligence failures included
· a failure in intelligence collection caused by a continuing obsession with satellite-based technical collection (we process less than 10% of our images, fewer than 6% of our Russian signals, fewer than 3% of our European signals, and fewer than 1% of all signals);
· a failure in intelligence data entry—notably a CIA failure to report a warning from the Taliban foreign minister and two separate FBI failures to take walk-ins—one in Newark and one in Orlando—seriously;
· a failure in intelligence translation, both CIA incompetence and inattention to Farsi, Urdu, Arabic, Pashto, and Dari over-all, and FBI refusal to fund the translation of all the Arabic documents captured after the first World Trade Center (car) bombing and in the Philippine arrests;
· a failure in intelligence processing, in that there is no one place in the entire U.S. government where all known information comes together, in part because of out-dated “codeword” restrictions, in part because 80% of what the CIA and FBI know is still not in digital form;
· a failure in intelligence analysis, in that insufficient resources were applied to the terrorist target (even after the DCI “declared war” on Al Qaeda); and finally
· a failure in intelligence liaison, in that we permitted Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, among many others, to sponsor terrorism while giving us chicken feed, at the same time that we eschewed serious clandestine penetrations of both “friendly” governments exporting radicalized Islamic terrorists, and the internal opposition groups themselves.[6]
On the policy side, and here I will be brief, there were five failures: first, in the aftermath of the World Trade Center (car) bombing, a deliberate decision was made to treat the matter as a law enforcement issue, with no recognition of the true meaning of the event as a direct attack on America; second, in the aftermath of the various attacks and loss of life in two Embassy bombings, the US military barracks bombing in Saudi Arabia, and the attack on the USS Cole, the Clinton Administration—and Tony Burger and Madeline Albright specifically, down-played the threat and refused to “alarm” the American people.; third, after a lucky break in intercepting a terrorist arriving from Canada to execute a millenium bombing, no substantive changes were made in border or immigration control, and state troopers continued to lack access to any sort of terrorist watchlist (two 9-11 terrorist were stopped prior to 9-11 for traffic violations, and not noticed as a result); fourth, despite years of warning from terrorism experts, and a commendable job on this specific points by Senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) yielded to industry pressure and failed to demand substantive improvements to airport security screening or cockpit defenses; and fifth, for lack of the kind of warning that Albright and Berger prevented, Americans failed to recognize the terrorists as they integrated themselves into flight training programs and safehouses—and even when a flight school reported anomalous behavior (i.e. no interest in learning how to land, just how to redirect in mid-air), the FBI ignored the warnings because terrorism was not a national priority.
There is in my opinion one secret of the Bush Administration remaining to be exposed: the assignment to Vice President Dick Cheney, immediately following inauguration, of the terrorism portfolio. In my judgement, it was Dick Cheney’s refusal to listen to DCI George Tenet, and his obsession with catering to his energy pals in the early months of the Bush Administration, that actually allowed the 9-11 terrorist conspiracy to come to its tragic fulfillment.
Iraq: What Went Wrong and Why?
Iraq is a much greater tragedy than 9-11, for it is we ourselves who have chosen to destroy the U.S. Army in the sands of Iraq, to destroy decades worth of multi-lateral relationships and institutions, and to incur what will eventually be thousands of casualties from depleted uranium, residual petro-chemical toxicity, and random guerilla attacks. The harm to our economy is equally devastating—we have now to deal with a self-inflicted wound, a $250 billion unplanned budget deficit on top of our $7 trillion budget deficit.
In my view, and here we need to wait for more detailed investigations, but the preliminary results are in, Iraq also was both an intelligence and a policy failure.
Iraq was an intelligence failure because the U.S. intelligence community simply did not know what it needed to know in order to provide both the Executive and the Congress with essential information. We know from open sources of information that Saddam Hussein distributed most of his experts on weapons of mass destruction in the early 1990’s, and I find the report of his defecting program manager, to wit, that he destroyed the stocks but kept the cookbooks, quite credible. I also believe that some of his capabilities—modest but potent—are in concealed storage in Russia,, Syria, and Algeria, with the active complicity of those governments.
Iraq was a policy failure in two parts: on the one hand, the Administration was captured by a small band of neo-conservative under the leadership of Dick Cheney and with the operational force being provided by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz—this group decided that 9-11 was the perfect pretext for executing their life-long ambition, the capture of the Iraqi oil fields and the eradication of radical regimes in Arabia by force. As General Wesley Clark tells the story publicly, on 9-11, as Americans were jumping to their deaths to escape being burned alive, the White House called him and told him to “pin it on Iraq.” The White House had no proof then, when General Clark asked for it, and they did not develop any substantive proof in the months leading up to the war. On the contrary, the White House and its Pentagon leadership chose to tell the American Congress, the American people, the United Nations, and the other national leaderships no fewer than sixty-two (62) documented lies. This is surely a betrayal of the public trust that merits impeachment, but Republican control of the two chambers of Commerce—and the naivete of the American public in continuing to believe White House propaganda that would make the Nazi’s proud, make impeachment a moot issue as we approach the November 2004 elections. For its part, Congress, with the exception of Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia, failed America. Congress proved gutless, inattentive, and all too willing to be led by specious politicized and fabricated “intelligence” that was concocted by a special unit in the Pentagon, based largely on fabrications fed to them by Chalabi and others with their own agenda.[7]
America As Others See Us
Thomas Jefferson said it first: “A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry.” James Madison contributed his views with respect to the importance of an informed citizenry in a democracy that means to be governed by the citizens themselves. More recently, alarmed by the stupendous ignorance of both Congress and the public with respect to the real world and foreign threats to domestic prosperity and security, both Senator David Boren and David Broder have called for the “internationalization of education.”[8] Their concern can be summed up in a South African quoted by Mark Hertsgaard in Eagle’s Shadow: “...we know everything about you, and you know nothing about us.”
In this one section, rather than articulating my own thoughts, I want to highlight several books and one map—in addition to those already noted—whose authors represent the very best insights available to all Americans. These books are but a small sample of what can be known, but is now ignored, at the policy level and by the media. Indeed, surveys of the American people about such issues are now so watered down, according to Matthew Miller, author of The 2% Solution, that the actual scale of problems has been deleted from most survey questions because—heavens—if folks realized just how bad these problems are, they might insist that we do something about them! National intelligence must serve the public, for only by serving the public can we ensure that policy makers, both elected and appointed, are held accountable for dealing with global realities that impact on domestic prosperity and security.
· Ziauddin Sardar and Merry Wyn Davies, WHY DO PEOPLE HATE AMERICA? (Icon, 2002)
Opening with a quote from Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1775, to wit, that “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” the authors are helpful in documenting how most good-hearted Americans simply have no idea how big the gap is between our perception of our goodness and the rest of the world's perception of our badness. According to the authors, a language dies every two weeks. Although there are differing figures on how many languages are still active today (between 3,000 and 5,500), the point is vital. If language is the ultimate representation of a distinct and unique culture that is ideally suited to the environment in which it has flourished over the past millenium, then the triple strikes of English displacing the language, the American "hamburger virus" and city planning displacing all else, and American policy instruments--inclusive of the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund--eliminating any choices before the Third World or even the European policy makers, then America can be said to have been invasive, predatory, and repressive. At multiple levels, from "hate" by Islamic fundamentalists, to "fear and disdain" by French purists, to "annoyance" by Asians to "infatuation" by teenagers, the Americans are seen as way too big for their britches--Americans are the proverbial bull in the china shop, and their leaders lack morals--the failure of America to ratify treaties that honor the right of children to food and health, the failure of America to respect international conventions—the average of two military interventions a year since the Cold War (not to mention two countries invaded but not rescued), all add up to “blowback.” The authors stress the urgency of improving public understanding of the world and how the world sees America. They say: "And the power of the American media, as we repeatedly argue, works to keep American people closed to experience and ideas from the rest of the world and thereby increases the insularity, self-absorption, and ignorance that is the overriding problem the rest of the world has with American."