12
The New Craft of Intelligence:
Europe as Victim, Europe as Leader
Robert David STEELE Vivas[1]
· Abstract 1
· A Short History of Intelligence—Europe as Victim 2
· The Purpose of Intelligence—Modern Theory and Practice 3
· The Threat Today—Internal, External, and Common 3
· Rethinking Intelligence in a Multipolar World—Change as Challenge 5
· The New Craft of Intelligence—An Alternative Approach for the 21st Century 5
· Encryption: Gaining Control by Giving Up Control 6
· Intelligence in the 21st Century: Thinking Creatively 7
· Requirements Definition 7
· Collection Management 7
· Processing Information 8
· Producing Intelligence 9
· Paying for Intelligence 9
· The Failure of the American Model—Europe as Leader 11
· Endnotes 11
Abstract
Over the course of human history, "intelligence"—the art of knowing the plans and intentions of one's enemies—has become confused with spies and secrecy—the methods have come to dominate the objective. The Americans, with their vast sums of money and their obsession with satellite technology, have corrupted the modern understanding of intelligence. At the same time, as we enter the 21st Century, each nation faces new and unusual internal threats, more complex external threats, and many non-traditional common threats including ethnic conflict and water scarcity along the Slavic-Islamic borders and the Sino-Slavic borders. There are two other major changes each government must accommodate: the international information explosion has shifted the challenge from one of stealing a few secrets to one of "making sense" of vast quantities of open information; and at the same time, "who decides" has changed from a top-down command mode driven by elites, to a bottom-up consensus mode driven by non-state actors. Under these circumstances, spies and secrecy must yield to scholars and open source information as the primary foundation for national decision-making. The Internet is now the common international vehicle for communicating and sharing information. Encryption must not be controlled, so that the Internet can prosper as a means of sharing both open and restricted information. National intelligence agencies must be recapitalized and restructured. They must learn to discover, discriminate, distill, and deliver exactly the right information, even if it is not secret. They must shift their spending from spies and satellites to analysts, analytic tools, and open sources. Finally, each government must learn how to share the financial and intellectual burden of "Global Coverage" by working closely with its national business, academic, and media partners to create a "virtual intelligence community" that uses the Internet to produce reports, administer expert forums, and provide distance learning on any topic to any citizen. The American model for national intelligence has failed; so has the old European model. The new European Parliament and the European Commission could now lead the way in creating a new "internationalist" model of intelligence, a model better suited for the realities of the 21st Century.
A Short History of Intelligence—Europe as Victim
It is an honor to be here, speaking at the first truly European conference dedicated to the future of intelligence. As Europe reconsiders the Atlantic Alliance, its new regional relationships, the growing threats from the fringe regions to the West and from the Islamic, Arabic, and North African zones of instability, as well as the new global economic and technological environments, it is appropriate that we have a fresh review of this important topic.
First, the history of intelligence in three minutes. It started long before Christ, and initially consisted of forward scouts and merchants—today we call them "legal travelers." Over time, and particularly in China, it matured into a complex secret network of spies, counterspies, and counter-counter-spies. It remained largely human in nature until World War II. Espionage was the secret side of the "game of Nations," the sport of kings, and at its most ruthless, was a form of permanent secret war between states.
The United States of America, despite its successful use of military spies in the Revolutionary War, was by its nature not well-suited to the art of espionage. As Christopher Andrew has documented so brilliantly in his book on intelligence and American presidents, only four American presidents have properly understood national intelligence in over 200 years: George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and George Bush the father.[2] The son gives no sign of appreciating the value of intelligence, and his current Secretary of Defense is on record as saying that the Director of Central Intelligence has a "a crappy, irrelevant job."[3]
The Americans, the newcomers to the world of intelligence in the 1940's, made up with money and technology what they lacked in finesse and analytical insight. Sherman Kent, a brilliant man, introduced the new American definition of intelligence, one focused on analysis rather than secret warfare.[4] Unfortunately, the Americans have only paid lip-service to analysis in relation to the over-all roles and missions of the larger U.S. Intelligence Community. If one examines the record of U.S. intelligence spending since World War II, it is easy to establish that the Americans are spending roughly 85% of their $30 billion dollars a year on satellite-based covert technical collection. This is bad, but it gets worse—the Americans are only processing 10% of their collected images, 6% of their Russian and Chinese signals, approximately 3% of their European signals, and less than 1% of their "rest of the world" signals. They have sacrificed analysts, analytic tools, and access to open source intelligence; in their obsession with waste and mismanagement in outer space. The latest plans to recapitalize satellites continue this pattern.
Europe would be foolish to follow this example. Europe is already a victim of the American way of espionage because Europe has become too reliant on American intelligence products and the American intelligence relationship at the same time that Europe has failed to properly capitalize its own national and regional intelligence architectures. Europe has also been "sucked in" at the highest levels to a "systems of systems" approach to military and intelligence communications and computing that demands interoperability with the Americans. I am here to tell you that the American approach to communications and computing is not affordable by the Europeans and that it also cuts its commanders off from 98% of the relevant information that is available only from the private sector. Spies and secrecy are a very small part of national intelligence in today's world. The new European intelligence community must find a new model for its future.
The Purpose of Intelligence—Modern Theory and Practice
Each nation and each private sector organization has a choice about how it approaches the mission of intelligence. In theory, in the ideal, the mission of intelligence is to inform policy. That is the argument I make in my book and that is the argument I have made to over 6,000 officers from over 40 countries who have chosen to attend my annual May conference on intelligence reform and open source intelligence.[5]
In practice, the reality is that most nations focus on expensive technical collection that they cannot process, and on secret clandestine activities that are very inefficient as well as insecure. We like to pretend that our spies, most of whom are working out of official installations, are doing important secret work. The reality is that local liaison—the local government's counterintelligence organization—knows with certainty who all of our spies are, and is controlling at least half of our so-called secret agents.
Both governments and corporations have a similar problem in their general approach to information and information technology. Most have made the mistake of spending money on information technology—on expensive communications and computing equipment—without giving any thought to the sources of information that they are seeking, or the analytic processes they wish their experts to pursue, or to the products that are to be created and distributed to policy makers. An expensive cooking pot will not improve old fish or a bad cook.
It has been my experience that 80% of what we need to know to produce useful intelligence is not secret, is not online (either on the Internet or available from premium commercial sources such as Factiva), and is generally not even published in hard-copy. It has also been my experience that governments and corporations are not competent as discovering, discriminating, distilling, and digesting open sources of information. We have much to learn.
The purpose of intelligence must be to inform policy-makers, acquisition managers, and operational commanders including law enforcement commanders. Anyone who persists in the belief that the purpose of intelligence is to collect secrets is betraying their responsibility to their country and undermining the national security as well as the national competitiveness of their home country. Intelligence in the 21st Century must focus on open source intelligence, on many smart analysts working together, and on analytic tools. Spies and secrecy have a role to play, but it is a very small role and must be carefully managed within a larger holistic approach to the new craft of intelligence.[6] Let me be clear: my vision for intelligence reform includes dramatic improvements in our clandestine service—we must have spies that the French cannot find—but this is a very small part of the much larger issue of how we manage the totality of national intelligence collection and production.
The Threat Today—Internal, External, and Common
Before we consider how best to rethink intelligence in a multipolar world, let me spend just three minutes on the nature of the threat today. This is an area where the preceding speaker, Dr. John Gannon, not only excels, but in so doing he sharply outlines a new globalized understanding of non-traditional threats. I agree with everything he says. I wish to focus in general terms on three areas of concern: internal threats, external threats, and common threats.
Internal threats are growing with the open borders that characterize most of the world and especially the European community of nations. Internal threats are also growing with our reliance of electronic systems whose genesis and internal coding we do not understand. New means must be found to provide intelligence and counterintelligence support for internal stability, crime-fighting, disease control, and electronic systems. The proven process of intelligence has much to offer to internal decision-makers, but we must set a new standard for decision-making about all internal matters—all decisions must be informed by basic, estimative, and counterintelligence operations and analysis.
External threats cannot be denied. I believe in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that is represented at this conference by Brigadier General James Cox, and I believe that both NATO and the various combinations of European nations, including those contemplating a separate European rapid reaction force, must recognize that the security of Europe is rooted in out of area instability and will require out of area military and assistance operations.[7] In this regard, NATO, and other European coalitions are urgently in need of new methods for sharing information that permit the inclusion of non-governmental organizations in planning and operations—this generally means that most of the information cannot be secret information. For this reason, I am very pleased that as a result of leadership from the German, Dutch, Norwegian, and Canadian flag officers within NATO, that today there exists a NATO Open Source Intelligence Working Group that is specifically focused on a vision for future intelligence sharing with the Partners for Peace and the Mediterranean Dialog nations. The future intelligence architecture vision of NATO, if it is separated from the American obsession with very expensive technology, has much to offer all of Europe as a model for thinking about the future of intelligence.
Finally there are common threats where we have failed to establish useful means of sharing the cost of collection, processing, and analysis. OSS has been tracking eighteen different genocide campaigns around the world. How many others are doing the same thing? Or when East Timor became a nightmare, how many different Nations and organizations were duplicating one another's work in basic collection and analysis? Then there is the fact that conflict is pervasive throughout the world. Today we have 26 high-intensity conflicts, 78 low-intensity conflicts, and 178 violent internal political conflicts.[8] Can each of our countries and businesses afford to be monitoring all of these conflicts all of the time? I do not think so! In terms of future threats, I am especially concerned about water scarcity, and the fact that water scarcity and ethnic conflict are especially strong along the Slavic-Islamic and the Sino-Slavic borders. The proliferation of bio-chemical weapons, trade in women and children, toxic dumping in European rivers as well as in Africa, and the collapse of global public health, at every level and in every nation, are among the things we must all worry about.
Spies and secrecy have very little to contribute to our understanding of these topics of common concern, yet we have failed to establish alternative means of sharing open source intelligence that are as structured as our many bilateral arrangements for sharing secrets.
Rethinking Intelligence in a Multipolar World—Change as Challenge
What has changed? Let me contrast the nature of intelligence during the Cold War with the demands on intelligence in a new globalized world where instability and disease and water shortages in otherwise insignificant areas can bring severe danger to Europe.
During the Cold War, we focused on collecting secrets about one denied area target, the Soviet Union. Our customers for these secrets were the policy elite within government. We collected a relatively small amount of information, and from this we made grand deductions.[9]
Today our challenges are completely different. Instead of stealing a few secrets we must make sense of vast quantities of information that overwhelm us—information that is not secret. The average man on the street has access, in one day, to more information on the Internet than any President or Prime Minister receives during their entire Administration from their secret intelligence services.
We must also accommodate ourselves to a complete change in "who decides." Instead of government leaders deciding and issuing instructions in a top-down "command" fashion, today decisions are made by multi-cultural and transnational groups, most of whom are non-state actors. Openly-arrived at consensus, rather than secretly-derived command, is the operational concept most relevant to thinking about the future of intelligence and its role in support of national and regional decision-making.