Handbook of Intelligence Studies

The Handbook of Intelligence Studies examines the central topics in the study of intelligence

organizations and activities. This volume opens with a look at how scholars approach this

particularly diﬃcult ﬁeld of study. It then deﬁnes and analyses the three major missions of

intelligence: collection-and-analysis; covert action; and counterintelligence. Within each of

these missions, some of the most prominent authors in the ﬁeld dissect the so-called intelli-

gence cycle to reveal the challenges of gathering and assessing information from around the

world. Covert action, the most controversial intelligence activity, is explored in detail, with

special attention to the issue of military organizations moving into what was once primarily a

civilian responsibility. The contributions also cover the problems associated with protecting

secrets from foreign spies and terrorist organizations: the arcane but important mission of

counterintelligence. The book pays close attention to the question of intelligence account-

ability, that is, how a nation can protect its citizens against the possible abuse of power by its

own secret agencies – known as “oversight” in the English-speaking world.

The volume provides a comprehensive and up-to-date examination of the state of the ﬁeld

and will constitute an invaluable source of information to professionals working in intelligence

and professors teaching intelligence courses, as well as to students and citizens who want to

know more about the hidden side of government and their nation’s secret foreign policies.

Loch K. Johnson is Regents Professor of Public and International Aﬀairs at the University of

Georgia. His books include Secret Agencies (1996); Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, and Thugs (2000); Strategic

Intelligence (2004, co-edited with James J. Wirtz); Who’s Watching the Spies? (2005, co-authored

with Hans Born and Ian Leigh); American Foreign Policy (2005, co-authored with Daniel Papp

and John Endicott); and Seven Sins of American Foreign Policy (2007).

Handbook of

Intelligence Studies

Edited by

Loch K. Johnson

First published 2007

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

270 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group, an informa business

Johnson, selection and editorial matter; individual chapters, the contributors

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or

other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying

and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Handbook of intelligence studies / edited by Loch K. Johnson.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Intelligence—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Johnson, Loch K., 1942–

UB250.H35 2007

327.12—dc22

2006021368

ISBN10: 0–415–77050–5

ISBN13: 978–0–415–77050–7

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s

collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

ISBN 0-203-08932-4 Master e-book ISBN

(Print Edition)

Contents

List of ﬁgures and tables viii

Notes on contributors ix

Glossary xiii

Introduction 1

Loch K. Johnson

Part 1: The study of intelligence

1 Sources and methods for the study of intelligence 17

Michael Warner

2 The American approach to intelligence studies 28

James J. Wirtz

3 The historiography of the FBI 39

Rhodri Jeﬀreys-Jones

4 Intelligence ethics: laying a foundation for the second oldest profession 52

Michael Andregg

Part 2: The evolution of modern intelligence

5 The accountability of security and intelligence agencies 67

Ian Leigh

6 “Knowing the self, knowing the other”: the comparative analysis of security

intelligence 82

Peter Gill

7 US patronage of German postwar intelligence 91

Wolfgang Krieger

Part 3: The intelligence cycle and the search for information: planning,

collecting, and processing

8 The technical collection of intelligence 105

Jeﬀrey T. Richelson

9 Human source intelligence 118

Frederick P. Hitz

10 Open source intelligence 129

Robert David Steele

11 Adapting intelligence to changing issues 148

Paul R. Pillar

12 The challenges of economic intelligence 163

Minh A. Luong

Part 4: The intelligence cycle and the crafting of intelligence reports:

analysis and dissemination

13 Strategic warning: intelligence support in a world of uncertainty and surprise 173

Jack Davis

14 Achieving all-source fusion in the Intelligence Community 189

Richard L. Russell

15 Adding value to the intelligence product 199

Stephen Marrin

16 Analysis for strategic intelligence 211

John Hollister Hedley

Part 5: Counterintelligence and covert action

17 Cold War intelligence defectors 229

Nigel West

18 Counterintelligence failures in the United States 237

Stan A. Taylor

19 Émigré intelligence reporting: sifting fact from ﬁction 253

Mark Stout

CONTENTS

20 Linus Pauling: a case study in counterintelligence run amok 269

Kathryn S. Olmsted

21 The role of covert action 279

William J. Daugherty

22 The future of covert action 289

John Prados

PART 6: Intelligence accountability

23 Intelligence oversight in the UK: the case of Iraq 301

Mark Phythian

24 Intelligence accountability: challenges for parliaments and intelligence services 315

Hans Born and Thorsten Wetzling

25 Intelligence and the rise of judicial intervention 329

Fred F. Manget

26 A shock theory of congressional accountability for intelligence 343

Loch K. Johnson

Appendices 361

A The US Intelligence Community (IC), 2006 363

B Leadership of the US Intelligence Community (IC), 1947–2006 364

C The intelligence cycle 366

Select Bibliography 367

Index 371

vii

CONTENTS

Figures and Tables

Figures

10.1 Relationship between open and classiﬁed information operations 131

10.2 Information continuum and the Seven Tribes 132

10.3 OSINT relevance to global security threats 134

10.4 OSINT and the four levels of analysis 136

10.5 OSINT as a transformative catalyst for reform 137

10.6 Fundamental functions for online analysis 139

10.7 World Brain operational planning group virtual private network 140

10.8 Standard OSINT cell 144

24.1 Best practice to ensure ownership over parliamentary intelligence oversight

procedures 319

24.2 Best practice aimed at creating “embedded human rights” 322

24.3 Best practice to ensure the political neutrality of the services 324

26.1 The dominant pattern of intelligence oversight by lawmakers, 1975–2006 344

Tables

6.1 A map for theorising and researching intelligence 87

18.1 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court Surveillance Orders issued annually 248

26.1 Type of stimulus and intelligence oversight response by US lawmakers, 1975–2006 347

26.2 The frequency of low- and high-threshold intelligence alarms, 1941–2006 349

viii

Notes on Contributors

Michael Andregg is a professor at the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota.

Hans Born is a Senior Fellow in Democratic Governance of the Security Sector at the

Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of the Armed Forces (DCAF). He holds a Ph.D. and is

a guest lecturer on civil–military relations at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in

Zurich and on governing nuclear weapons at the United Nations Disarmament Fellowship

Programme.

William J. Daugherty holds a Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School and

is Associate Professor of Government at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah,

Georgia. A retired senior oﬃcer in the CIA, he is the author of In the Shadow of the Ayatollah:

A CIA Hostage in Iran (Annapolis, 2001) and Executive Secrets: Covert Action & the Presidency

(Kentucky, 2004).

Jack Davis served in the CIA from 1956 to 1990, as analyst and manager and teacher of

analysts. He now is an Independent Contractor with the Agency, specializing in analytic

methodology. He is a frequent contributor to the journal Studies in Intelligence.

Peter Gill is Professor of Politics and Security, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool,

United Kingdom. He is co-author of Introduction to Politics (1988, 2nd ed.) and Intelligence in an

Insecure World (2006). He is currently researching into the control and oversight of domestic

security in intelligence agencies.

John Hollister Hedley, during more than thirty years at CIA, edited the President’s Daily Brief,

briefed the PDB at the White House, served as Managing Editor of the National Intelligence

Daily, and was Chairman of CIA’s Publications Review Board. Now retired, Dr Hedley

has taught intelligence at Georgetown University and serves as a consultant to the National

Intelligence Council and the Center for the Study of Intelligence.

Frederick P. Hitz is a Lecturer (Diplomat in Residence) in Public and International Aﬀairs,

Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.

Rhodri Jeﬀreys-Jones is Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh. The

author of several books on intelligence history, he is currently completing a study of the FBI.

Loch K. Johnson is Regents Professor of Public and International Aﬀairs at the University of

Georgia and author of several books and over 100 articles on US intelligence and national

security. His books include The Making of International Agreements (1984); A Season of Inquiry

(1985); Through the Straits of Armageddon (1987, co-edited with Paul Diehl), Decisions of the Highest

Order (1988, co-edited with Karl F. Inderfurth); America’s Secret Power (1989); Runoﬀ Elections in

the United States (1993, co-authored with Charles S. Bullock, III); America As a World Power

(1995); Secret Agencies (1996); Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, and Thugs (2000); Fateful Decisions (2004, co-

edited with Karl F. Inderfurth); Strategic Intelligence (2004, co-edited with James J. Wirtz); Who’s

Watching the Spies? (2005, co-authored with Hans Born and Ian Leigh); American Foreign Policy

(2005, co-authored with Daniel Papp and John Endicott); and Seven Sins of American Foreign

Policy (2007). He has served as Special Assistant to the chair of the Senate Select Committee on

Intelligence (1975–76), Staﬀ Director of the House Subcommittee on Intelligence Oversight

(1977–79), and Special Assistant to the chair of the Aspin-Brown Commission on Intelligence

(1995–1996). He is the Senior Editor of the international journal Intelligence and National Security.

Wolfgang Krieger is Professor of History at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, and

a frequent contributor to the international journal Intelligence and National Security.

Ian Leigh is Professor of Law and the co-director of the Human Rights Centre at the

University of Durham. His books include In From the Cold: National Security and Parliamentary

Democracy (1994, with Laurence Lustgarten); Making Intelligence Accountable (2005, with Hans

Born); and Who’s Watching the Spies (2005, with Loch K. Johnson and Hans Born).

Minh A. Luong is Assistant Director of International Security Studies at Yale University

where he teaches in the Department of History. He also serves as an adjunct Assistant Professor

of Public Policy at the Taubman Center at Brown University.

Fred Manget is a member of the Senior Intelligence Service and a former Deputy General

Counsel of the CIA.

Stephen Marrin is an Assistant Professor of Intelligence Studies at Mercyhurst College. He

previously served as an analyst in the CIA and the Government Accountability Oﬃce.

Kathryn S. Olmsted is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. She holds a

B.A. degree with Honors and Distinction in History from Stanford University, and a M.A. and

Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis. She is author of Challenging the Secret

Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (University of North Carolina

Press, 1996) and Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (University of North Carolina

Press, 2002).

Mark Phythian is Professor of International Security and Director of the History and Govern-

ance Research Institute at the University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. He is the

author of Intelligence in an Insecure World (2006, with Peter Gill), The Politics of British Arms Sales

Since 1964 (2000), and Arming Iraq (1997), as well as numerous journal articles on intelligence

and security issues.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Paul R. Pillar is on the faculty of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University.

Concluding a long career in the CIA, he served as National Intelligence Oﬃcer for the Near

East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.

John Prados is an analyst of national security based in Washington, DC. He holds a Ph.D. from

Columbia University and focuses on presidential power, international relations, intelligence and

military aﬀairs. He is a project director with the National Security Archive. Prados is author of

a dozen books, and editor of others, among them titles on World War II, the Vietnam War,

intelligence matters, and military aﬀairs, including Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How

Bush Sold Us a War, Inside the Pentagon Papers (edited with Margaret Pratt-Porter), Combined Fleet

Decoded: The Secret History of U.S. Intelligence and the Japanese Navy in World War II, Lost Crusader:

The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby, White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the President

(edited), America Responds to Terrorism (edited), The Hidden History of the Vietnam War, Operation

Vulture, The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA

and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II Through the Persian Gulf, Keepers of the Keys:

A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush, and The Soviet Estimate: U.S.

Intelligence and Soviet Strategic Forces, among others. His current book is Safe for Democracy: The

Secret Wars of the CIA.

Jeﬀrey T. Richelson is a Senior Fellow with the National Security Archive in Washington,

DC, and author of The Wizards of Langley, The US Intelligence Community, A Century of Spies, and

America’s Eyes in Space, as well as numerous articles on intelligence activities. He received his

Ph.D. in political science from the University of Rochester and has taught at the University of

Texas, Austin, and the American University, Washington, DC.

Richard L. Russell is Professor of National Security Studies at the National Defense Uni-

versity. He is also an adjunct Associate Professor in the Security Studies Program and Research

Associate in the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. He previously

served as a CIA political-military analyst. Russell is the author of Weapons Proliferation and War

in the Greater Middle East: Strategic Contest (2005).

Robert David Steele (Vivas) is CEO of OSS.Net, Inc., an international open source intelli-

gence provider. As the son of an oilman, a Marine Corps infantry oﬃcer, and a clandestine

intelligence case oﬃcer for the Central Intelligence Agency, he has spent over twenty years

abroad, in Asia and Central and South America. As a civilian intelligence oﬃcer he spent three

back-to-back tours overseas, including one tour as one of the ﬁrst oﬃcers assigned full time to

terrorism, and three headquarters tours in oﬀensive counterintelligence, advanced information

technology, and satellite program management. He resigned from the CIA in 1988 to be the

senior civilian founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Command. He resigned from the

Marines in 1993. He is the author of four works on intelligence, as well as the editor of a book

on peacekeeping intelligence. He has earned graduate degrees in International Relations

and Public Administration, is a graduate of the Naval War College, and has a certiﬁcate in

Intelligence Policy. He is also a graduate of the Marine Corps Command and Staﬀ Course, and

of the CIA’s Mid-Career Course 101.

Mark Stout is a defense analyst at a think-tank in the Washington DC area. Previously, he

has served in a variety of positions in the Defense Department, the State Department, and the

CIA. He has a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University (1986) in Political Science and

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Mathematical and Computational Science, and a master’s degree in Public Policy from the John

F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (1988). He is presently pursuing a

Ph.D. in military history with the University of Leeds.

Stan A. Taylor is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University in

Provo, Utah. He has taught in England, Wales, and New Zealand and in 2006 was a visiting

professor at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He is founder of the David M.

Kennedy Center for International Studies at Brigham Young University. He writes frequently

on intelligence, national security, and US foreign policy.

Michael Warner serves as the Historian for the Oﬃce of the Director of National

Intelligence.

Nigel West is a military historian specializing in security and intelligence topics. He is the

European Editor of The World Intelligence Review and is on the faculty at the Center for

Counterintelligence and Security Studies in Washington, DC. He is the author of more than

two dozen works of non-ﬁction and most recently edited The Guy Liddell Diaries.

Thorsten Wetzling is a doctoral candidate at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International

Studies (IUHEI) and is writing his dissertation on international intelligence cooperation

and democratic accountability. He teaches seminars in political science and international

organization at the IUHEI.

James J. Wirtz is a Professor in the Department of National Security Aﬀairs at the Naval

Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. He is the Section Chair of the Intelligence Studies

Section of the International Studies Association, and President of the International Security

and Arms Control Section of the American Political Science Association. Professor Wirtz is the

series editor for Initiatives in Strategic Studies: Issues and Policies, which is published by Palgrave

Macmillan.

xii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Glossary

AFIO Association of Former Intelligence Oﬃcers

AG Attorney general

Aman Agaf ha-Modi’in (Israeli military intelligence)

AVB Hungarian intelligence service

AVH Hungarian security service

BDA Battle damage assessment

BfV German equivalent of the FBI

BMD Ballistic missile defense

BND Bundesnachrichtendienst (German intelligence service)

BW Biological weapons

CA Covert action

CAS Covert Action Staﬀ (CIA)

CBW Chemical/biological warfare

CCP Consolidated Cryptographic Program

CDA Congressionally directed action

CE Counterespionage

CHAOS Codename for CIA illegal domestic spying

CI Counterintelligence

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

CIC Counterintelligence Corps (US Army)

CIG Central Intelligence Group, precursor of CIA

CMS Community Management Staﬀ

CNC Crime and Narcotics Center (CIA)

COINTELPRO FBI Counterintelligence Program

COMINT Communications Intelligence

CORONA Codename for ﬁrst US spy satellite system

COS Chief of Station (CIA)

COSPO Community Open Source Program Oﬃce

CT Counterterrorism

CTC Counterterrorism Center (CIA)

xiii

CW Chemical weapons

D & D Denial and deception

DARP Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Program

DAS Deputy assistant secretary

DBA Dominant battleﬁeld awareness

DC Deputies Committee (NSC)

DCD Domestic Contact Division (CIA)

DCI Director of Central Intelligence

D/CIA Director of Central Intelligence Agency

DDA Deputy Director of Administration (CIA)

DDCI Deputy Director for Intelligence (CIA)

DDO Deputy Director for Operations (CIA)

DDP Deputy Director for Plans (CIA, the earlier name for the DDO)

DDS & T Deputy Director for Science and Technology (CIA)

DEA Drug Enforcement Administration

DGI Cuban intelligence service

DGSE Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (French intelligence service)

DHS Department of Homeland Security

DI Directorate of Intelligence (CIA)

DIA Defense Intelligence Agency

DIA/Humint Defense Humint Service

DIE Romanian intelligence service

DINSUM Defense Intelligence Summary

DNI Director of National Intelligence

DO Directorate of Operations (the CIA’s organization for espionage and covert

action)

DoD Department of Defense

DOD Domestic Operations Division (CIA)

DOE Department of Energy

DOJ Department of Justice

DOS Department of State

DOT Department of Treasury

DP Directorate of Plans (from 1973, the CIA’s DO)

DS Bulgarian intelligence service

DST Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (France)

ELINT Electronic intelligence

EO Executive order

EOP Executive Oﬃce of the President

ETF Environmental Task Force (CIA)

FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation

FBIS Foreign Broadcast Information Service

FISA Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978)

FOIA Freedom of Information Act

FRD Foreign Resources Division (FRD)

FSB Federal’naya Sluzba Besnopasnoti (Federal Security Service, Russia)

GAO General Accountability Oﬃce (Congress)

GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters (the British NSA)

GEO Geosynchronous orbit

xiv

GLOSSARY

GEOINT Geospatial intelligence

GRU Soviet military intelligence

GSG German counterterrorism service

HEO High elliptical orbit

HPSCI House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

HUMINT Human intelligence (assets)

HVA East German foreign intelligence service

I & W Indicators and Warning

IC Intelligence Community

IG Inspector general

IMINT Imagery intelligence (photographs)

INR Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State

INTELINK An intelligence community computer information system

INTs Collection disciplines (IMINT, SIGINT, OSINT, HUMINT, MASINT)

IOB Intelligence Oversight Board (White House)

IRBM Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile

ISC Intelligence and Security Committee (UK)

ISI Inter-Services Intelligence (Pakistani intelligence agency)

IT Information technology

JCS Joint Chiefs of Staﬀ

JIC Joint Intelligence Committee (UK)

Jstars Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar Systems

KGB Soviet secret police

KH Keyhole (satellite)

MASINT Measurement and signature intelligence

MFA Soviet Ministry of Foreign Aﬀairs

MHBK Magyar Harcosok Bajtársi Közössége or Association of Hungarian Veterans

MI5 Security Service (UK)

MI6 Secret Intelligence Service (UK)

MONGOOSE Codename for CIA covert actions against Fidel Castro of Cuba (1961–62)

MOSSAD Israeli intelligence service

MRBM Medium Range Ballistic Missile

NBC Nuclear, biological, and chemical (weapons)

NCTC National Counterterrorism Center

NFIP National Foreign Intelligence Program

NGA National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

NGO Non-governmental organization

NIA National Intelligence Authority

NIC National Intelligence Council

NID National Intelligence Daily

NIE National Intelligence Estimate

NIO National Intelligence Oﬃcer

NKVD National Commissariat for Internal Aﬀairs, the Soviet secret police under

Stalin

NOC Non-Oﬃcial Cover

NPIC National Photographic Interpretation Center

NRO National Reconnaissance Oﬃce

NSA National Security Agency

GLOSSARY

NSC National Security Council (White House)

NSCID National Security Council Intelligence Directive

NTM National Technical Means

OB Order of battle

OC Oﬃcial Cover

ODNI Oﬃce of the Director of National Intelligence

OMB Oﬃce of Management and Budget

ONI Oﬃce of Naval Intelligence

OSD Oﬃce of the Secretary of Defense

OSINT Open-source intelligence

OSS Oﬃce of Strategic Services

P & E Processing and exploitation

PDB President’s Daily Brief

PFIAB President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (White House)

PM Paramilitary

RADINT Radar intelligence

RCMP Royal Canadian Mounted Police

SA Special Activities Division (DO/CIA)

SAS Special Air Service (UK)

SBS Special Boat Service (UK)

SDO Support to diplomatic operations

SHAMROCK Codename for illegal NSA interception of cables

SIG Senior Interagency Group

SIGINT Signals intelligence

SIS Secret Intelligence Service (UK, also known as MI6)

SISDE Italian intelligence service

SMO Support to military operations

SMS Secretary’s Morning Summary (Department of State)

SNIE Special National Intelligence Estimate

SO Special Operations (CIA)

SOCOM Special Operations Command (DoD)

SOE Special Operations Executive (UK)

SOG Special Operations Group (CIA)

SOVA Oﬃce of Soviet Analysis (CIA)

SSCI Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

StB Czech intelligence service

SVR Russian foreign intelligence service

TECHINT Technical intelligence

TELINT Telemetery intelligence

TIARA Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities

TISC Trade and Industry Select Committee (UK)

TPEDs Tasking, processing, exploitation, and dissemination

UAV Unmanned aerial vehicle (drone)

UB Polish Intelligence Service

UN United Nations

UNSCOM United Nations Special Commission

USFA US Forces in Austria

USIB United States Intelligence Board

xvi

GLOSSARY

USSOC United States Special Operations Command

USTR United States Trade Representative

VENONA Codename for NSA SIGINT intercepts against Soviet spying in America

VX A deadly nerve agent used in chemical weapons

WMD Weapons of mass destruction

xvii

GLOSSARY

Introduction

Loch K. Johnson

The meanings of intelligence

In a “handbook” for intelligence studies, the place to begin is with a deﬁnition of what

intelligence means. Formally, professional oﬃcers deﬁne the term in both a strategic and a

tactical sense. Broadly, a standard deﬁnition of strategic intelligence is the “knowledge and

foreknowledge of the world around us – the prelude to Presidential decision and action.”

the more narrow or tactical level, intelligence refers to events and conditions on speciﬁc

battleﬁelds or theaters of war, what military commanders refer to as “situational awareness.” In

this volume, the focus is chieﬂy on strategic intelligence, that is, the attempts by leaders to

understand potential risks and gains on a national or international level.

The phrase may refer to concerns about threats at home – subversion by domestic radicals

or the inﬁltration of hostile intelligence agents or terrorists inside a nation’s borders; or

it may focus on dangers and opportunities overseas. In the ﬁrst instance in the United

States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the lead agency; in the second instance, the

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a host of military intelligence organizations take

the lead. (See Appendix A for an organizational diagram depicting America’s sixteen major

intelligence agencies, and Appendix B for the names of the leaders of the “intelligence

community”).

In addition to the two geographic dimensions (global versus local), “strategic intelligence”

has a number of other possible meanings. Most frequently, the phrase refers to information, a

tangible product collected and analyzed (assessed or interpreted) in hopes of achieving a deeper

comprehension of subversive activities at home or political, economic, social, and military

situations around the world. An example of an intelligence question at the international, stra-

tegic level would be: to what extent are Al Qaeda cells located in and operating from the nation

of Pakistan? A related question: do these cells enjoy allies in that nation’s oﬃcial intelligence

and military bureaucracy? In contrast, at the tactical level overseas, one can imagine a US

military commander in Iraq demanding to know the location of the most well-armed strong-

holds of the insurgency in the suburbs of Baghdad. Or how much additional armor is necessary

on the side paneling of Humvees to defend against rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) ﬁred by

insurgents in Iraq?

On the home front, a strategic intelligence question for American intelligence oﬃcers might

be: how many Chinese espionage agents are inside the United States and what are their

objectives? Or: are there any more home-grown terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, the man

convicted of bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, and are they planning the

use of violence against other government institutions inside the nation?

Intelligence as information is diﬀerent from the kind of everyday information one can ﬁnd

in the local library, because intelligence usually has a secret component. Those in the business of

gathering intelligence blend together the open-source information gleaned from the public

domain (newspapers, magazine, blogs, public speeches) with information that other nations try

to keep hidden. The hidden information must be ferreted out of encoded communications or

stolen from safes and vaults, locked oﬃces, guarded military and intelligence installations, and

other denied areas – a potentially dangerous task involving the penetration of an enemy’s camp

and its concentric circles of defense, from barbed-wire barriers patrolled by armed security

forces and sentry dogs to sophisticated electronic alarms, surveillance cameras, and motion

detectors. As intelligence scholar Abram N. Shulsky has written, intelligence often entails access

to “information some other party is trying to deny.”

While the overwhelming percentage – sometimes upwards of 95 percent

– of the informa-

tion mix provided to America’s decision-makers in the form of intelligence reports is based on

open sources, the small portion derived from clandestine operations can be vital, providing just

the right secret “nugget” necessary to understand the likely plans of a foreign adversary. After

all, the New York Times provides good information about world aﬀairs for the most part, but it

has no reporters inside North Korea, Al Qaeda cells, or several places around the globe that

might be of interest to the United States (say, Angola or Darfur in Sudan). So the government

must send its own intelligence oﬃcers to such places. Even in locations from which the Times

reports on a regular basis, such as France and Germany, its correspondents may not be asking

the questions that an American secretary of state, treasury, or defense may wish to have

answered. That is why the United States has a CIA and other secret services: to go where

journalists may not be allowed to go, or where they are not assigned to go by their managing

editors, and to seek the answers to questions that a nation’s leaders may need to know beyond

what may interest the average newspaper reader.

In short, the world has secrets that the United States and other nations may want to know

about, especially if they threaten the safety and prosperity of their citizens or their foreign allies.

Sometimes stealing this kind of information is the only way to acquire it. Beyond secrets that

may be obtained through theft or surveillance by satellite cameras and listening devices (such

as the number, location and capabilities of Chinese nuclear submarines and intercontinental

missiles), the world also has mysteries, that is, information that may well be impossible to know

about regardless of how many newspaper reporters and spies one may have. Who knows, for

instance, how long Kim Jong il will survive as the leader of North Korea, or what kind of

regime will follow in his wake? Who knows who will succeed President Vladimir Putin in

Russia? The best one can hope for, from an intelligence point of view, is an educated guess by

experts who have carefully studied such questions. These hunches are called “estimates” by

intelligence professionals in the United States, or “assessments” by their British counterparts.

A useful metaphor for thinking about strategic intelligence is the jigsaw puzzle. The

aspiration in both cases is to gather as many pieces as possible to provide a thorough picture. In

the case of intelligence, the “picture” one seeks is full information about subversive activities

at home or the capabilities and intentions of existing and potential adversaries on the world

stage. Most of the intelligence pieces of the puzzle will be from publicly available documents;

some will be derived from spying, whether with human agents or machines (such as satellites

LOCH K. JOHNSON

and U-2 reconnaissance aircraft). Almost always there will be missing pieces: the mysteries of

the world or, in some instances, secrets that are so well hidden or guarded that they remain out

of sight or out of reach. The great frustration of strategic intelligence is that rarely does one

operate in an environment of full transparency. Rather, the world is replete with uncertainties

and, as a result, intelligence gaps are inevitable and sometimes result in the failure of intelligence

oﬃcials to provide robust and timely warning of dangers. In the words of Secretary of State

Dean Rusk, “Providence has not given mankind the capacity to pierce the fog of the future.”

No one has a crystal ball.

At times, intelligence failures are the result of missing pieces of the puzzle. Sometime, though,

mistakes stem from the inability of individuals to accurately analyze the meaning of the pieces

that are available, improperly judging their meaning and signiﬁcance. Usually failures are a

product of both problems: an incomplete jigsaw puzzle and an inability to decipher the com-

plete picture from the few pieces one does have. Thus, both an exhaustive collection of

information and a sagacious analysis of its meaning are indispensable for skillfully estimating or

predicting what events may mean for a nation’s future. Above all, every nation seeks informa-

tion that will provide an adequate alert about impending attacks – “indicators and warnings”

or I & W, in the vernacular of professional intelligence oﬃcers. The surprise attacks against the

United States at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and, more recently, against the Twin Towers and

the Pentagon in 2001 illustrate the importance of accurately, timely, and speciﬁc I & W

intelligence.

A nation seeks to know much more, though, than warnings about potential attacks. For

example, leaders want to understand the weapons capabilities of potential adversaries, such as

Iraq in 2002. In that instance, US and British intelligence agencies estimated that the Saddam

Hussein regime probably had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). America and the United

Kingdom went to war against Iraq, in part, to eliminate these weapons – only to discover that

the intelligence estimates had been incorrect. There were no WMDs to be found in Iraq in

2003, when the British and the United States invaded. The 9/11 and WMD cases vividly

underscore the importance of having reliable intelligence, what President George H.W. Bush

often referred to as the nation’s “ﬁrst line of defense.”

Intelligence has a second meaning beyond that of an information product, such as the

number of tanks in Iran and their ﬁrepower. Intelligence is also thought of as a process: a series of

interactive steps, formally referred to as an “intelligence cycle.” (See Appendix C for a diagram

of the cycle.) The process begins with intelligence managers and policy oﬃcials planning what

information to gather related to threats and opportunities at home and abroad. They must also

determine what methods to use in the gathering of this information – the right mix of human

agents and surveillance machines, for instance. Then the information is collected, to the extent

one can succeed in this regard against adversaries who are skillful at concealing their activities.

This information must be processed into readable text, say, from an intercepted telephone

conversation in Farsi; and the contents must be analyzed for its meaning to American interests –

all as quickly as possible. Finally, the “ﬁnished” information – that is, intelligence that has been

studied and interpreted – must be disseminated to those oﬃcials in high public oﬃce or troops

in the ﬁeld who rely on these insights as they plan their next policy initiatives or military

moves.

From a third perspective, intelligence may also be thought of as a set of missions carried out by

secret agencies. The premier mission is that of collecting and analyzing information. Important,

too, though, is the mission of counterintelligence and, its subsidiary concern, counterterrorism.

These terms refer to the methods by which nations try to thwart secret operations directed

against them by hostile foreign intelligence services or terrorist organizations. Yet another

INTRODUCTION

mission is covert action – the secret intervention in the aﬀairs of other nations or organizations

in hopes of improving America’s security and other interests, such as economic prosperity.

Covert action goes by a number of euphemisms, including “the quiet option” (that is, less

noisy than sending in the Marines), the “third option” (between diplomacy and open war), or

“special activities.”

Before turning to an examination of these missions, a fourth and ﬁnal deﬁnition of intelli-

gence is oﬀered: intelligence may be considered a cluster of people and organizations established to

carry out the three missions – the sixteen entities and staﬀ of Appendix A. “Make sure you

check with intelligence before completing your invasion plans,” the prime minister might

advise his minister of defense. “Get intelligence on the line and ﬁnd out the exact coordinates

of the insurgents in Kirkuk,” a US artillery commander in Iraq might order.

The US intelligence “community,” as the cluster is called, is led by the president and the

National Security Council (NSC), who in turn rely on a Director of National Intelligence

(DNI, before 2005 known as the Director of Central Intelligence or DCI) to manage the

sixteen agencies. (Appendix B provides a list of the twenty men – no women yet – who have

served as either DCI or DNI.) According to various newspaper accounts, the intelligence

community or IC employs over 150,000 people and has a budget of some $44 billion a year,

making it the largest and most costly collection of intelligence organizations ever assembled by

any nation in history.

The CIA and the FBI are the most well-known of these agencies. The CIA is located in a

campus-like setting along the Potomac River in the Washington, DC, suburb of Langley,

Virginia, fourteen miles north of the White House. The CIA is mainly responsible for

managing the collection of intelligence abroad by human agents, and for analyzing the informa-

tion gathered by agents and machines. The FBI has a primarily domestic focus, with responsi-

bilities for tracking the activities of suspected subversives, terrorists, and foreign intelligence

oﬃcers inside the United States. Several of the remaining intelligence agencies are embedded

within the organizational framework of the Defense Department, including the National

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which handles the photographic side of foreign sur-

veillance; the National Security Agency (NSA), responsible for codebreaking and electronic

eavesdropping; the National Reconnaissance Oﬃce (NRO), chartered to coordinate the

development, launching, and management of surveillance satellites; the Defense Intelligence

Agency (DIA), in charge of military intelligence analysis; Coast Guard Intelligence, a part

of the new Department of Homeland Security; and the four military intelligence services,

Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, each gathering tactical intelligence related to their

missions.

Joining the CIA and the FBI on the civilian side of intelligence (in the sense that they are

located in civilian departments, rather than within the Department of Defense) are the Bureau

of Intelligence and Research (INR) in the Department of State; an intelligence unit in the

Department of the Treasury; the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the Department

of Justice; an intelligence unit in the Department of Homeland Security; and an intelligence

unit in the Department of Energy, responsible for tracking the world’s supply of uranium and

other nuclear materials, as well as guarding the nation’s weapons laboratories.

Among all of these organizations, the CIA is unique in that it stands outside any Cabinet

department; it is an independent agency. It is unique as well in being the centerpiece of the

National Security Act of 1947, the founding legislation for America’s modern intelligence

establishment. Originally, President Harry S. Truman envisioned the CIA as the central

coordinating structure for American intelligence, designed to draw together the work of all the

other agencies into a package that a president could deal with more readily than hearing

LOCH K. JOHNSON

separately from an array of agencies. The DCI was the individual Truman chose to manage this

important coordinating role.

The plan never worked, though, because Truman – buckling under pressure from the

Pentagon, which opposed a strong civilian leader for intelligence – failed to provide the DCI

with adequate budget and appointment power over all of the agencies. Instead, the DCI became

the leader of the CIA, but only the titular head of the full intelligence community.

After the 9/11 attacks, reformers vowed to correct this ﬂaw, but again the Pentagon was able

to dilute eﬀorts to establish a strong DNI with funding and appointment powers over all

of America’s intelligence agencies. The DNI, like the DCI before, became the nation’s chief

spymaster largely in name only, with each of the sixteen agencies having a large degree of

autonomy, enclosed or “stovepiped” within their own walls and enjoying considerable leeway

to resist the orders of a DNI. This resistance was especially notable from the defense intelligence

agencies – NGA, NSA, NRO, DIA, and the military services – who enjoyed the bureaucratic

protection of the powerful secretary of defense, a member of the NSC.

The Oﬃce of the DCI had been located on the CIA’s seventh ﬂoor. Since 2005, soon after a

law was passed that replaced the DCI with a DNI, the nation’s intelligence chief has moved

from the CIA into temporary quarters at the DIA, also along the Potomac, only this time south

of the White House by seven miles. A search is underway for a building inside the District of

Columbia where the DNI can set up shop closer to the White House.

The DNI move out of the CIA Headquarters Building cast into doubt that agency’s role as

the central coordinating entity in the government for intelligence, as did its mistakes related to

9/11 and the Iraqi WMD ﬁasco. Consequently, in the quest for a more eﬀective intelligence

community after the 9/11 attacks, the United States ended up – ironically – with a weakened

CIA and an even more emasculated intelligence chief, now removed from the one major

resource that had given the nation’s spy chief some clout in Washington circles: the analytic

resources of the CIA.

The methods of intelligence

Regardless of which aspect of intelligence one has in mind – product, process, mission, or

organization – the bottom line is that good governmental decisions rely on accurate, complete,

unbiased, and timely information about the capabilities and intentions of other nations, terrorist

organizations, and subversive groups. “Every morning I start my day with an intelligence

report,” President Bill Clinton once remarked. “The intelligence I receive informs just about

every foreign policy decision we make.”

The intelligence agencies face quite a challenge in meeting the government’s needs for

insightful information about threats and opportunities. The world has some 191 countries and

an untold number of organizations and groups, many that are hostile toward the United States

and its allies. Further, these adversaries have become skillful in hiding their plans and operations

from the prying eyes of espionage agents and spy machines. North Korea, for example, has

constructed deep underground bunkers, where its scientists work on nuclear weaponry out

of the sight of foreign surveillance satellites. A former US secretary of state has commented on

the fear of intelligence failure: “The ghost that haunts the policy oﬃcer or haunts the man who

makes the ﬁnal decision is the question as to whether, in fact, he has in his mind all of the

important elements that ought to bear upon his decision, or whether there is a missing piece

that he is not aware of that could have a decisive eﬀect if it became known.”

In their search for as perfect information about risks and opportunities as they can ﬁnd,

INTRODUCTION

nations turn to a wide array of spying methods. Foremost among them, for nations with large

enough budgets, are the expensive instruments of technical intelligence (or “techint”). By

deﬁnition, techint refers chieﬂy to imagery intelligence (“imint”) and signals intelligence

(“sigint”). Imint employs photography, such as snapshots of enemy installations by surveillance

satellites, for example; sigint encompasses the interception and analysis of communications

intelligence, whether telephone conversations or e-mail transmissions.

In a time of accelerated technological advances around the world, the United States faces

serious challenges in trying to maintain an information advantage over other nations. Its

current edge in satellite photography is rapidly eroding. In 1999, the private US company Space

Imaging launched a surveillance satellite named Ikonos II that yields photographs almost as

detailed as the American government’s most secret satellite photography, pictures of almost

any part of the planet for sale to anyone with cash or a credit card. Within a few years, Iran and

other nations at odds with the United States will be able to manufacture home-grown spy

satellites or acquire commercially available substitutes (the Rent-a-Satellite option) which will

provide them with their own capacity for battleﬁeld transparency – a huge advantage for the

United States during its wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003.

America’s advantages in signals intelligence are in decline as well. The listening satellites of

the NSA are designed to capture analog communications from out of the air. The world,

though, is rapidly switching to digital cell phones, along with underground and undersea

ﬁber-optic modes of transmission – glass conduits (“pipe lights”) that rely on light waves

instead of electrons to carry information. These new forms of communication are much harder

to tap, leaving the NSA with a sky full of increasingly irrelevant satellites. Furthermore, the

NSA has traditionally depended on its skills at decoding to gain access to foreign diplomatic

communications; but nations and terrorist groups are growing more clever at encrypting

their messages with complex, computer-based technologies that can stymie even the most

experienced NSA cryptologists. Under pressure from the US software industry and the

Department of Commerce, the Clinton administration decided in 1999 to allow the export of

advanced American software that encrypts electronic communications, making it more diﬃcult

for the NSA and the FBI to decipher the communications of foreign powers that might intend

harm to the United States. Responding to market pressures of its own, the European Union

is considering the removal of its restrictions on the sale of encryption software by European

companies.

America’s intelligence community suﬀers as well from an excessive redundancy built into its

collection systems, with satellites, airplanes, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) often staring

down at the same targets. Moreover, many of the satellites are gold-plated Cadillac de Ville

models, with all the latest accessories. For certain missions, as in the broad coverage of a

battleﬁeld, they are valuable; but for many others, they could be replaced with less expensive,

smaller satellites: serviceable Chevies. (The smaller the satellite, the less expense involved in

positioning it in space, since launch costs are linear with weight.) The U-2 Dragon Lady piloted

aircraft and the RQ-4A Global Hawk UAV are also far less expensive than the large, fancy

satellites and much more eﬀective in locating foes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of the most important responsibilities of the intelligence agencies is to warn the United

States about terrorist eﬀorts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, an extraordinarily diﬃcult

mission. The case of a suspected chemical weapons plant in Sudan is illustrative. In 1998 at a

pharmaceutical factory near Khartoum, CIA sensing devices sniﬀed out what seemed to be the

chemical Empta, a precursor for the production of the deadly nerve agent VX. The intelligence

community had already collected signals intelligence and agent reports that linked the factory

in the past with the terrorist Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization. Putting two and two

LOCH K. JOHNSON

together, analysts estimated with a high degree of conﬁdence that the factory was manu-

facturing chemical weapons. This intelligence led the Clinton administration to attack the

facility with cruise missiles. In response, the Sudanese government denounced the United

States and claimed that it had gone to war against an aspirin factory. The CIA stuck with its

original assessment, but did acknowledge that detective work of this kind is diﬃcult and

imprecise. “The turning of a few valves can mean the diﬀerence between a pharmaceutical

company and a chemical or biological plant,” said the agency’s leading proliferation specialist.

The failure of the CIA to anticipate the Indian nuclear test in 1998 is also instructive.

America’s intelligence agencies were well aware that the Indians intended to accelerate their

nuclear program. After all, this is what top-level party oﬃcials had been saying publicly

throughout the Indian election season. Even the average tourist wandering around India in the

spring of that year, listening to the local media, would have concluded that a resumption of

the program was likely. What surprised the intelligence agencies was how fast the test had

taken place. It was “a good kick in the ass for us,” admits a senior CIA oﬃcial.

In part the

miscalculation was a result of what a CIA inquiry into the matter, led by retired Admiral David

Jeremiah, referred to as “mirror imaging.” Agency analysts assumed that Indian politicians were

just like their American counterparts: both made a good many campaign promises, few of

which were ever kept. To win votes for boldness, Indian politicians in the victorious party (the

BJP) had promised a nuclear test; now that the election hoopla was over, surely they would back

away from this rash position. Such was the thinking at the CIA.

Further clouding accurate analysis by CIA analysts were successful eﬀorts by oﬃcials in India

to evade America’s spy satellites. The Indians knew exactly when the satellite cameras would

be passing over the nuclear testing facility near Pokharan in the Rajasthan Desert and, in

synchrony with these ﬂights (every three days), scientists camouﬂaged their preparations.

Ironically, US oﬃcials had explicitly informed the Indian government about the timing of

US satellite coverage for South Asia, in hopes of impressing upon them the futility of trying to

conceal test activity. Even without this unintended assistance, though, the Indians could have

ﬁgured out the cycles for themselves, for even amateur astronomers can track the orbits of spy

satellites.

Moreover, the Indians had become adroit at deception, both technical and political. On the

technical side, the ground cables normally moved into place for a nuclear test were nowhere to

be seen in US satellite photographs of the site. The Indians had devised less visible ignition

techniques. The Indians also stepped up activities at their far-removed missile testing site in an

attempt to draw the attention of spy cameras away from the nuclear testing site. On the political

side, Indian oﬃcials expanded their coordinated deception operation by misleading American

and other international diplomats about the impending nuclear test, oﬀering assurances that it

was simply not going to happen.

Finally, a dearth of reliable intelligence agents (“assets”) contributed to the CIA’s blindness.

During the Cold War, spending on techint far outdistanced spending on old-fashioned

espionage, known as human intelligence or “humint.” A strong tendency exists among those

who make budget decisions for national security to focus on warheads, throw weights, missile

velocities, and the speciﬁcations of fancy spy satellites – things that can be measured. Humint, in

contrast, relies on the subtle recruitment of foreign agents, whose names and locations must be

kept highly secret and are not the subject of budget hearings. Yet, Ephraim Kam has emphasized

the importance of humint. An adversary’s most important secrets, he notes, “often exist in the

mind of one man alone.. . or else they are shared by only a few top oﬃcials.”

This kind of

information may be accessible only to an intelligence oﬃcer who has recruited someone inside

the enemy camp.

INTRODUCTION

During the Cold War, South Asia received limited attention from the US intelligence

agencies, compared to their concentration on the Soviet Union and its surrogates; therefore,

building up an espionage ring in this region after the fall of communism still had a long ways to

go at the time of the Indian nuclear tests. These excuses notwithstanding, American citizens

may have wondered with a reasonable sense of indignation – not to say outrage – why their

well-funded intelligence community proved ignorant of what was going on inside the largest

democracy and one of the most open countries in the world.

Far more diﬃcult than keeping an eye on India is the challenge of gaining access to intelli-

gence on reclusive terrorist organizations and renegade states like Iran and North Korea –

dangerous, isolated, and unpredictable adversaries known to leave footprints of ﬁre. It is diﬃcult

as well to keep track of companies engaged in commercial transactions that aid and abet the

spread of weaponry, like the German corporations that secretly assisted the Iraqi weapons

buildup and the construction of the large chemical weapons plant at Rabta in Libya.

During the Carter administration, the nation was reminded of the importance of humint

when Iranian student militants took American diplomats hostage inside the US embassy in

Tehran. America’s satellites had good photographs of Tehran and the embassy compound; but

to plan a rescue operations, the White House and the CIA needed information about the

whereabouts of the hostages inside the embassy. Recalls one of the planners:

We had a zillion shots of the roof of the embassy and they were magniﬁed a hundred times. We

could tell you about the tiles; we could tell you about the grass and how many cars were parked

there. Anything you wanted to know about the external aspects of the embassy we could tell you in

inﬁnite detail. We couldn’t tell you shit about what was going on inside that building.

The methods of intelligence collection became skewed as well during the Cold War. Awed

by the technological capabilities of satellites and reconnaissance airplanes (U-2s, SR-21s,

UAVs), oﬃcials channeled most of the intelligence budget into surveillance machines capable

of photographing Soviet tanks and missiles silos and eavesdropping on telephone conversations

in communist capitals. Human spy networks became the neglected stepchild of intelligence.

Machines certainly have their place in America’s spy defenses and they played an important

role in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, as US satellite cameras stared down at Kabul and

Kandahar, and UAVs swooped into mountain valleys in search of Al Qaeda terrorists and their

Taliban accomplices. But these cameras cannot peer inside caves or see through tents where

terrorists gather. A secret agent in the enemy’s camp – humint – is necessary to provide advance

warning of future terrorist attacks. Humint networks take time to develop, though, and only

recently have the last DCI (Porter Goss) and the new DNI (John Negroponte) launched major

recruitments drive to hire into the intelligence community Americans with language skills and

an understanding of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and other parts of the world largely ignored by

the United States until now. American intelligence oﬃcers with these skills are needed to

recruit local agents overseas who carry out the actual espionage for the CIA. The 9/11 attacks

and the Iraqi WMD controversy accelerated these recruitment eﬀorts, but it has proven diﬃcult

to ﬁnd Arabic, Farsi, and Pushto speakers who are citizens of the United States and who want to

work for the CIA abroad at a modest government salary and in conditions that are less than

luxurious – and sometimes downright dangerous.

LOCH K. JOHNSON

The intelligence missions

Collection-and-analysis. The foremost intelligence mission is to gather intelligence, whether by

technint or humint, then analyze its meaning, bringing human insight to bear on the mountain

of data that has been collected. At the beginning of every administration, senior oﬃcials work

with the DNI to prepare a “threat assessment” – a priority listing of the most dangerous

circumstances facing the United States. These oﬃcials then decide how much money from the

annual intelligence budget will be spent on the collection of information against each target

nation or group.

Throughout the Cold War, the United States concentrated mainly on gathering intelligence

against the Soviet Union and other communist powers, giving far less attention to the rest

of the world. Terrorism has been on the list of intelligence priorities for decades, but until

September 11, 2001, it was treated by the intelligence agencies as only one of several assign-

ments. Now it has jumped to a position of preeminence on America’s threat list, resulting in a

greater focus of US intelligence resources on Osama bin Laden and his associates.

When a recent director of the NSA was asked what his major problems were, he replied, “I

have three: processing, processing, and processing.”

In this phase of the intelligence cycle,

information is converted from “raw” intelligence – whether in Arabic or a secret code – into

plain English (see Appendix C). Beyond needing more language translators, the chief diﬃculty

faced by intelligence oﬃcers is the sheer volume of information that pours into their agencies.

Each day millions of telephone intercepts and hundreds of photographs from satellites stream

back to the United States. A former intelligence manager recalls feeling as though he had a ﬁre

hose held to his mouth.

The task of sorting through this ﬂood of information to isolate the important facts from the

routine can hinder quick access to key information. Before the September attacks, for example,

FBI agents dismissed as routine a CIA report concerning two individuals headed for the

United States and suspected of associating with terrorists. The men turned out to be among the

nineteen suicide hijackers of 9/11.

Once information is processed, it must be studied by experts for insights into the intentions

of our adversaries – the step known as analysis. If the CIA is unable to provide meaning to the

information gathered by the intelligence community, all the earlier collecting and processing

eﬀorts are for nought. Good analysis depends on assembling the best brains possible to evaluate

global events, drawing upon a blend of public knowledge and stolen secrets. Once again a

major liability is the CIA’s shortage of well-educated Americans who have deep knowledge of

places like Afghanistan and Sudan. While all of the intelligence agencies have been scrambling

to redirect their resources from the communist world to the forgotten world of the Middle

East and Southwest Asia, hiring and training outstanding analysts takes time, just like the

establishment of new humint spy rings.

Finally, the analyzed intelligence is disseminated to policymakers. It must be relevant, timely,

accurate, comprehensive, and unbiased. Relevance is essential. Intelligence reports on drug-

traﬃcking in Colombia are good to have, but what the White House and Whitehall want right

now is knowledge about Bin Laden’s operations. Analysts can become so wedded to their own

research interests (say, the eﬃciencies of Russian rocket fuel) that they fail to produce what

policymakers really want and need to know.

Timeliness is equally vital. The worst acronym an analyst can see scrawled across an intelli-

gence report is OBE – “overtaken by events.” Assessments on the whereabouts of terrorists are

especially perishable, as the United States discovered in 1999 when the Clinton administration

ﬁred cruise missiles at Bin Laden’s supposed encampment in the Zhawar Kili region of

INTRODUCTION

Afghanistan’s Paktia Province, only to learn that he had departed hours earlier. Similarly, the

accuracy of information is critical. One of America’s worst intelligence embarrassments came

in 1999 when the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) misidentiﬁed the Chinese

embassy in Belgrade as a weapons depot, leading to a NATO bombing of the building and the

death of Chinese diplomats.

Intelligence must be comprehensive as well, drawn from all sixteen intelligence agencies and

coordinated into a meaningful whole – what intelligence oﬃcers refer to as “all-source fusion”

or “jointness.” Here one runs into the vexing problem of fragmentation within the so-called

intelligence “community” – a misnomer if there ever was one. The US secret agencies often act

more like separate medieval ﬁefdoms than a cluster of agencies working together to provide the

president with the best possible information from around the world.

Intelligence must also be free of political spin. An analyst is expected to assess the facts in a

dispassionate manner. Usually intelligence oﬃcers maintain this ethos, but occasionally they

have succumbed to the wiles of White House pressure for “intelligence to please” – data that

supports the president’s political agenda rather than reﬂecting the often unpleasant reality that

an administration’s policy has failed.

Much can go wrong, and has gone wrong, with intelligence collection-and-analysis. For it to

function properly in America’s three ongoing wars – against insurgents in Iraq, remanent

Taliban ﬁghters in Afghanistan, and the global struggle against terrorism – collection must

employ an eﬀective combination of machines and human spies. Moreover, data processing must

be made more swift and more discerning in the discrimination of wheat from chaﬀ. Analysts

must have a deeper understanding of the foreign countries that harbor terrorist cells, as well as a

better comprehension of what makes the terrorists tick. Further, at the end of this intelligence

pipeline, the information provided to the policymaker must be pertinent, on time, reliable,

comprehensive, and unbiased. Finally, the policymakers must have the courage to hear the truth

rather than brush it aside, as President Lyndon B. Johnson sometimes did with intelligence

reports on Vietnam that concluded America’s involvement in the war was leading to failure.

Counterintelligence. The term counterintelligence (CI) encompasses a range of methods used

to protect the United States against aggressive operations perpetrated by foreign intelligence

agencies and terrorist groups. These operations include attempts to inﬁltrate the CIA, FBI, and

other US intelligence agencies through the use of double agents, penetration agents (moles),

and false defectors. Counterintelligence employs two approaches: security and counter-

espionage. Security is the defensive side of CI: physically guarding US personnel, installations, and

operations against hostile forces. Among the defenses employed by America’s secret agencies

are codes, alarms, watchdogs, fences, document classiﬁcations, polygraphs, and restricted

areas. Counterespionage represents the more aggressive side of CI, with the goal, above all, of

penetrating with a US agent the inner councils of a foreign intelligence service or terrorist cell.

Aldrich Ames (CIA) and Robert Hannsen (FBI), the premier spies in the United States run

by the Soviet Union and then Russia, caused the most grievous harm to America’s intelligence

operations and stand as the greatest counterintelligence failures in US history. As a result of

their handiwork in stealing top-secret (“blue-border”) documents – for which the KGB, and

later, the Russian SVR paid Ames alone over $4 million – the espionage eﬀorts of the CIA and

the FBI against the Soviet Union lay in tatters at the end of the Cold War. The Kremlin

executed at least nine of the CIA’s assets in Russia and rolled up hundreds of operations. Ames

and Hannsen also disclosed some of America’s most sensitive technical intelligence capabilities

to their Moscow handlers, including (from Hannsen) details about US listening devices in the

new Russian embassy in Washington, DC.

Covert action. Here is the most controversial mission of the three, as exempliﬁed by the Bay of

LOCH K. JOHNSON

Pigs ﬁasco in 1961 – a failed paramilitary covert action against the Castro regime in Cuba.

Covert action consists of aiming secret propaganda at foreign nations, as well as using political,

economic, and paramilitary operations in an eﬀort to inﬂuence, disrupt, or even overthrow their

governments (as in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and – without success – Iraq in the 1990s).

The objective of covert action is to secretly shape events overseas, in so far as history can be

shaped by mere mortals, in support of US foreign policy goals.

The most extensively used form of covert action has been propaganda. As a supplement to

the overt information released to the world by the United States under the rubric of “public

diplomacy,” the CIA over the years has pumped through its wide network of secret media

agents a torrent of covert propaganda that resonates with the overt themes. These foreign agents

have included reporters, magazine and newspaper editors, television producers, talk show hosts,

and anyone else in a position to disseminate without attribution the perspectives of the US

government as if they were their own. One of the major examples of a CIA propaganda

operation was the ﬁnancing of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty during the Cold War.

These radio stations broadcast into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with programming

geared to break the communist government’s totalitarian control over news, entertainment, and

culture, as well as to advance America’s views of the world. These programs are credited with

having helped sustain dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain, and to have contributed to

the eventual fall of Soviet communism and Moscow’s control over Eastern Europe.

Of greater controversy were the CIA’s propaganda eﬀorts in Chile during the 1960s

and 1970s. In 1964, the CIA spent $3 million – a staggering sum at the time – to blacken the

name of Salvador Allende, the socialist presidential candidate with suspected ties to the Soviet

Union. Allende was elected, nonetheless, in a free and open democratic electoral process. The

CIA continued its propaganda operations, now designed to undermine the Allende regime,

spending an additional $3 million between 1970 and 1973. According to US Senate investiga-

tors, the forms of propaganda included press releases, radio commentary, ﬁlms, pamphlets,

posters, leaﬂets, direct mailings, paper streamers, and wall paintings. The CIA relied heavily on

images of communist tanks and ﬁring squads, and paid for the distribution of hundreds of

thousands of copies, in this very Catholic country, of an anti-communist pastoral letter written

many years earlier by Pope Pius XI.

Covert action sometimes takes the form of ﬁnancial aid to pro-Western politicians and

bureaucrats in other nations, money used to assist groups in their electoral campaigns or for

party recruitment. Anti-communist labor unions in Europe received extensive CIA funding

throughout the Cold War, as did many anti-communist political parties around the world. One

well-known case involved the Christian Democratic Party in Italy during the 1960s, when it

struggled against the Italian Communist Party in elections. The CIA has also resorted to the

disruption of foreign economies. In one instance, during the Kennedy administration (although

without the knowledge of the president), the CIA hoped to spoil Cuban–Soviet relations by

lacing sugar bound from Havana to Moscow with an unpalatable, though harmless, chemical

substance. A White House aide discovered the scheme and had the 14,125 bags of sugar

conﬁscated before they were shipped to the Soviet Union. Other methods have reportedly

included the incitement of labor unrest, the counterfeiting of foreign currencies, attempts to

depress the world price of agriculture products grown by adversaries, the contamination of oil

supplies, and even dynamiting electrical power lines and oil-storage facilities, as well as mining

harbors to discourage the adversary’s commercial shipping ventures.

The paramilitary, or war-like, forms of covert action have stirred the most controversy.

This category includes small- and large-scale “covert” wars, which do not remain covert for

long; training activities for foreign military and police oﬃcers; the supply of military advisers,

INTRODUCTION

weapons, and battleﬁeld transportation; and the planning and implementation of assassination

plots. This last endeavor has been the subject of considerable criticism and debate, and was

ﬁnally prohibited by executive order in 1976 – although with a waiver in time of war. That year

congressional investigators uncovered CIA ﬁles on assassination plots against several foreign

leaders, referred to euphemistically in secret CIA documents as “termination with extreme

prejudice” or simply “neutralization.” At one time the CIA established a special group, called

the “Health Alteration Committee,” to screen assassination proposals. The CIA’s numerous

attempts to murder Fidel Castro all failed; and its plot against Congolese leader Patrice

Lumumba, requiring a lethal injection of poison into his food or tooth paste, became a moot

point on the eve of its implementation when Lumumba was murdered by a rival faction

in Congo.

After the end of the Cold War, spending for covert action went into sharp decline. It has

been revived, though, with the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and against global terrorists. The most

lethal new form of paramilitary covert action is the Hellﬁre missile, ﬁred from UAVs like the

Predator.

Intelligence and accountability

The existence of secret agencies in an open society presents a contradiction and a dilemma for

liberal democracies. In the 1970s, investigators discovered that, in addition to carrying out

assassination plots, the CIA had spied against American citizens protesting the war in Vietnam

(Operation Chaos and Operation HQLINGUAL), the FBI had spied upon and harassed

citizens involved in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests (Operation Cointelpro), and

the NSA had intercepted and read the cables of citizens to and from abroad (Operation

Shamrock). In response to these abuses of power, America’s lawmakers created an exceptional

approach to the problem of restraining intelligence agencies, including the establishment of

Senate and House intelligence oversight committees. Since 1975, both branches of government

in the United States have struggled to ﬁnd the proper balance between legislative supervision

of intelligence, on the one hand, and executive discretion for its eﬀective conduct, on the other

hand. Although the quality of congressional supervision of intelligence has been inﬁnitely

better since 1975, accountability in this domain has suﬀered from inattention by members of

Congress and a rising level of partisan debates when intelligence does come into focus for the

members.

The Handbook of Intelligence Studies

Here, then, are the main topics addressed in this Handbook, in essays written by many of the top

intelligence authorities in the United States and abroad. Michael Warner, an historian with the

CIA’s Director of National Intelligence, begins Part 1 of the volume with a broad look at

sources and methods for studying intelligence, which is a relatively new ﬁeld of intellectual

inquiry. Before 1975, the number of reliable books and articles on this subject was few. In the

past three decades, however, the scholarly literature on intelligence has mushroomed, thanks in

large part to a series of congressional and executive-branch inquiries into espionage failures

that unearthed and placed in the public domain a rich lode of new data on the workings of

America’s secret agencies. In the second chapter, James Wirtz of the Naval Postgraduate School

writes about the approach to intelligence studies that he observes in the writings of American

LOCH K. JOHNSON

researchers. Next Professor Rhodri Jeﬀreys-Jones at the University of Edinburgh examines

research speciﬁcally related to the FBI. Almost every government activity has an ethical dimen-

sion and Michael Andregg of the University of St Thomas explores the moral implications of

secret intelligence operations in the fourth chapter.

Part 2 turns to the evolution of intelligence in the modern era. British scholar Ian Leigh

provides a legal analysis of how the subject of accountability has come to play an important role

in intelligence research; and Peter Gill, another British scholar, oﬀers a comparative perspective

on intelligence studies. Professor Wolfgang Krieger of Germany discusses the development of

modern intelligence in his nation, which was heavily inﬂuenced by the United States.

The Handbook moves in Parts 3 and 4 to an exploration of key issues related to the core

mission of intelligence: collection-and-analysis. In Part 3 Jeﬀrey Richelson, a leading researcher

on techint, lays out the central debates over this approach to intelligence collection. He is

followed by a former inspector general of the CIA, Frederick P. Hitz, who makes the case for

the importance of humint. Next, Robert David Steele argues in favor of a more eﬀective

use of open-source materials in the preparation of intelligence reports; and Paul R. Pillar

presents a case for the improved adaptation of intelligence to the changing policy issues that

confront government oﬃcials. Minh A. Luong takes on the increasingly vital topic of economic

espionage – how nations use intelligence to seek an advantage in a highly competitive global

marketplace.

Shifting in Part 4 from collection questions to the subjects of intelligence analysis, pro-

duction, and dissemination, another group of experts oﬀer decades of experience and research

about how these ﬁnal phases of the intelligence cycle work – or fail to work. Jack Davis, a long-

time CIA analyst, dissects the critical topic of early warning intelligence; Richard L. Russell

explores the goal of all-source intelligence fusion, the goal envisioned by President Truman

in 1947 before “stovepiping” got in the way of interagency cooperation; Stephen Marrin

ponders how to add value to intelligence products, bringing to top policy oﬃcials insights

beyond what they can acquire in the pages of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times; and

John Hollister Hedley, too, probes the possibilities for improved analysis.

Part 5 of the Handbook takes up the missions of counterintelligence/counterterrorism

and covert action. Another British scholar, Nigel West, scrutinizes the value of defectors – often

considered a major source of intelligence about the machinations of anti-democratic nations

and factions in the world. Professor Stan Taylor of Brigham Young University reviews the CI

record in the United States, shedding light on the failures that have occurred and why. Mark

Stout focuses on a major diﬃculty for counterintelligence oﬃcers: how to tell when an émigré

with intelligence knowledge is telling the truth to US interrogators. In the next piece on

counterintelligence, Kathryn S. Olmsted provides by way of a case study a sense of how

overzealous CI oﬃcers can damage the reputation of a law-abiding American citizen.

Turning to covert action, William Daugherty, who has had hands-on experience in this

controversial compartment of intelligence activities while serving in the CIA, makes a case for

this approach to foreign policy, but is quick to point out its hazards, too. John Prados, an

independent scholar, examines what is currently the hottest topic within the rubric of covert

action: the uses and misuses of paramilitary operations.

Finally, in Part 6, the Handbook oﬀers a series of essays on the challenges of maintaining

accountability in the secret domain of intelligence. British scholar Mark Phythian begins the

section with a close look at the experience with intelligence supervision on his side of

the Atlantic, while Hans Born (Netherlands) and Thorsten Wetzling (Germany) provide a

comparative examination of how a variety of nations have approached the challenge of intelli-

gence accountability. The judiciary plays a part in the supervision of intelligence, too, and CIA

INTRODUCTION

attorney and former Rhodes Scholar Fred F. Manget sheds light on the workings of the Foreign

Intelligence Surveillance Act court. Finally, the editor presents a “shock theory” of intelligence

accountability on Capitol Hill, underscoring the reactive nature of Congress in fulﬁlling its

oversight responsibilities.

I am pleased to acknowledge my gratitude to Andrew Humphrys, Editor for Routledge,

who encouraged the writing of this Handbook and helped shepherd it through the various gates

to completion, and Colin Morgan and Richard Willis of Swales & Willis, who oversaw its

production with great skill and patience; Julie Maynard at the University of Georgia for her

administrative assistance; Larry Lamanna for his untiring research assistance; Leena Johnson

for her encouragement and counsel; and the contributors for their thoughtful research and

willingness to meet deadlines.

Finally, the Handbook is enthusiastically dedicated to all the young scholars who are entering

the ﬁeld of intelligence studies. Welcome! I hope these essays will suggest future research

directions for you, and that they will also provide insights to the general reader interested in

intelligence and national security aﬀairs.

Notes

1 Factbook on Intelligence, Oﬃce of Public Aﬀairs, Central Intelligence Agency (September 1991), p. 13.

2 Abram N. Shulsky, Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence, 2nd ed., revised by Gary J.

Schmitt (New York: Brassey’s US, 1993), p. 193.

3 Aspin-Brown Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the US Intelligence Community, Prepar-

ing for the 21

Century: An Appraisal of US Intelligence (Washington, DC: US Government Printing

Oﬃce, March 1, 1996), p. 88.

4 Comment to the editor, Athens, Georgia (July 4, 1983).

5 Remarks to the CIA (July 14, 1995, editor’s notes).

6 Dean Rusk, testimony, Hearings, US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (December 11, 1963),

p. 390.

7 Loch K. Johnson, Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, and Thugs: Intelligence and America’s Quest for Security (New York:

New York University Press, 2000), p. 24.

8 Loch K. Johnson, “The CIA’s Weakest Link,” Washington Monthly 33 (July/August 2001), p. 11.

9 Ephraim Kam, Surprise Attack (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 62.

10 Quoted in Steve Emerson, Secret Warriors: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era (New

York: Putnam’s, 1988), p. 20.

11 Editor’s interview with senior NSA oﬃcial (July 15, 1994); see Loch K. Johnson, Secret Agencies:

US Intelligence in a Hostile World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 21.

12 See Thomas L. Hughes, “The Power to Speak and the Power to Listen: Reﬂections in Bureaucratic

Politics and a Recommendation on Information Flows,” in Thomas Franck and Edward Weisband,

Secrecy and Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 28–37.

13 See Loch K. Johnson, America’s Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1989); and Johnson, Secret Agencies, see n. 11.

LOCH K. JOHNSON

Part 1

The study of intelligence

Sources and methods for the study

of intelligence

Michael Warner

Intelligence can be thought of as that which states do in secret to support their eﬀorts to

mitigate, inﬂuence, or merely understand other nations (or various enemies) that could harm

them. By its nature as an activity that could involve the loss of fragile sources or means of

understanding and inﬂuence – not to mention the lives of troops, subjects, and even leaders –

intelligence is treated by its practitioners as sensitive and conﬁdential. Even the accidental

disclosure of some analytical, informational, or operational advantage over a rival or an enemy is

presumed to be tantamount to the loss of that advantage while it is still potentially useful. Thus

the penalties for disclosure have always been severe – and those for espionage even harsher.

Nations have sought thereby to terrify disloyalty and also to protect the advantages that secret

means seem to bring to decisionmaking. Wherever such life-and-death stakes obtain, intelli-

gence is conducted with some full or partial cloak of secrecy, and the evidence of it is typically

unavailable to onlookers.

Intelligence thus by deﬁnition resists scholarship. As a result, the study of intelligence is

not one ﬁeld but two. Intelligence studies have been conducted one way on the “outside,”

with no oﬃcial access to original records, and another way on the “inside,” where a few

scholars have intermittently enjoyed sanctioned (if not always complete) access to the extant

documentation. The diﬀering natures of the source materials available to scholars on the

inside and the outside, naturally, have caused academic researchers and students of intelli-

gence to work diﬀerently from oﬃcial historians and investigators in the employ of the

state.

The sources and methods of both the “outside” and the “inside” scholars, interestingly

enough, can bring their practitioners quite close to genuine historical understanding. Over the

last 60 years, a handful of governments have episodically sought to understand the experiences

of their various intelligence services. The results have been uneven, across and within govern-

ments, but they have been real, and in places they have laid a solid foundation for historical and

even theoretical work on intelligence on the outside. Intelligence studies in academia, on the

other hand, have quickened over the last two decades in the ﬁelds of history and political

science as more scholars of the diplomatic and military arts grasp the importance of intelligence

for their own disciplines, and gain familiarity with the relevant documentation. In so doing,

they have begun to create a community of intelligence scholars and have helped to reclaim

the study of intelligence from those who would have us believe in the omniscience or the

omnipotence of the discipline’s practitioners.

Both inside and outside scholars, however, labor under diﬀering strains imposed by the

nature of intelligence as a secret enterprise. These strains need not be debilitating, but they

impose signiﬁcant impacts on the quality of the ﬁnal products. What follows is not a biblio-

graphical or archival guide to records-holdings in any particular country. It is not possible in

one article to survey the literature and collections around the world that hold documents of

possible interest to researchers in the intelligence ﬁeld. Even for researchers of intelligence in

the United States, such a survey would have the ironic disadvantages of being both lengthy and

vague. It would also be quickly out of date as new ﬁles are released. This chapter is rather a set

of ﬁeld notes for using the sources that are available and are likely to emerge over the foresee-

able future. It is also a reﬂection on the burdens that must be shouldered by researchers on both

sides of the wall of secrecy that surrounds intelligence.

What are the sources?

In describing the sources used in the historical study of intelligence, it is easier to start on the

inside and work outward. That is, by examining ﬁrst the way in which intelligence activities

appear to those holding access to the oﬃcial records, and then how they appear to the much

larger set of scholars who do not enjoy such access. Historians in the employ of their

governments work primarily from the oﬃce and operational ﬁles, from cable traﬃc and budget

data, and from interviews, artifacts, and other sources, to identify and assemble the clues to what

happened and what it meant.

The ﬁrst place for the oﬃcial historian to look is always “the ﬁle.” Like virtually all govern-

mental organizations from the late nineteenth century onward, intelligence agencies are

hierarchies, and their oﬃcers at multiple levels have created and preserved ﬁles on their

activities. The growing professionalism and rationalism of the various agencies gradually sup-

planted the work of the amateurs, the friends of royalty, and the charlatans who had dominated

espionage since ancient times. Eﬃcient paperwork and good ﬁling systems were keys to this

evolutionary triumph. The sort of ﬁles that got saved – and eventually made their way to oﬃcial

historians – have tended to be archived by oﬃce ﬁrst, by subject next, and then sometimes by

operation or activity, according to the records protocols governing the larger department or

organization in which they are embedded. Even the independent intelligence agencies of the

United States adapted this classiﬁcation scheme from the ﬁling systems of the State and War

Departments, without much change. Indeed, ﬁling systems in their fundamental outlines

seem so similar across organizations and eras that they would seem to be following almost a law

of nature.

A mature organization will follow protocols governing how and when ﬁles are opened,

maintained, archived, or purged. The extent to which such protocols are set and followed is an

indicator of the quality of the organization’s leadership – or at least of its administrative acumen.

The researcher typically checks all the extant and relevant ﬁles he or she can locate, which

means reading those from all the organization’s levels of approval and review. Activities or

subjects enduring over several years will have multiple ﬁles, some of them running for multiple

volumes. Smaller and simpler activities or operations (which is not to say less successful or

important ones) will obviously have thinner ﬁles. Files kept overseas are typically abbreviated;

those at headquarters in the capital are longer, because there is more time to keep them, more

clerical staﬀ to do so, and usually more storage space.

MICHAEL WARNER

One rule of thumb for the oﬃcial researcher is that the more expensive the activity or topic,

the more places one ﬁnds ﬁles on it. Costly activities and projects ordinarily require more

personnel and logistical expenses, hence more accounting and security controls, and therefore

more legal counsel, and thus more ﬁles. The agency’s legal, ﬁnancial, logistical, and security

oﬃces can be expected to keep their own ﬁles on larger activities. The director of the agency

may have a ﬁle on it, if it demands his attention or a brieﬁng for higher authorities. Something

really important will merit ﬁles in other agencies, and in the executive branch’s archives as well.

These can be quite valuable for the researcher because they provide a diﬀerent (if not always

more objective) perspective on the activity.

Not all important incidents, projects, issues, or events are well documented. The converse is

also true: events or topics with scanty documentation are not always insigniﬁcant. Here is a

quandary in intelligence research: what to infer from a situation in which there are few or no

ﬁles? That can happen in at least two circumstances. First is when events are happening too

quickly for everything to be documented by the people on the spot. In such cases the docu-

mentation will typically come in the form of summary cables and after-action reports, which

are good to have, but not always as accurate and complete as a researcher might wish. The

second case is when the head of the agency or one of its units was speciﬁcally ordered to keep

the “paper trail” as short as possible – possibly by destroying it. Such instances would seem to be

rare, even in secret services, but there are exceptions that prove the rule (like the CIA’s “Track

II” in Chile in 1970), for reasons that should be obvious.

It is diﬃcult to do anything in a

bureaucracy without authorizations and funds, and diﬃcult to show such authorization if it is

not written down somewhere. More typical is that some extraordinary aspect will be added

to an operation already under way, as with the abortive assassination plotting in the CIA’s

Guatemala coup operation in 1954.

Such operational annexes will most likely have been

authorized orally.

Various oﬃcials for reasons of their own will sometimes keep “private” ﬁles. As these ﬁles

are by deﬁnition maintained outside of the oﬃce’s records management protocols, they are

naturally structured in whatever way that keeps them useful and convenient for the individuals

who created them. The saintly and conscientious intelligence oﬃcer who deliberately seeks

to keep future historians well informed, however, is another rarity. Indeed, a savvy oﬃcial

historian immediately (if silently) questions the motives of anyone who keeps such a ﬁle, and

wonders what axe he or she is grinding. The ﬁrst such collection this author ever encountered

was surely started because the compiler of it thought he should have been kept on as head of an

oﬃce that had been assigned to the care of a younger rival. Simply put, he saved the items that

made him look prescient, and hoped someone would notice someday. The more common

private ﬁles to be saved, however, are compiled willy-nilly over the course of a career, as the

oﬃcial runs across something he thinks is interesting or amusing or otherwise worth squirreling

away. Eventually he leaves or retires, and either “wills” his collection of miscellany to some

colleague, or leaves it behind in a desk or safe to be found months or even years later by

successors who might or might not take the trouble to save its contents.

The next place to look for records, especially if the activity took place overseas, is in the cable

traﬃc. Intelligence agencies (even domestic ones) live by their oﬃcial communications chan-

nels, and the messages sent along them are meticulously preserved and organized. Cable ﬁles are

rigidly chronological, and cables themselves are supposed to be drafted so as to be economical

and clear in their prose. They have to be, for the safety and success of the operation and the

people involved, not to mention the expense of sending them.

Cables can be a wonderful source for historians, even when misleading, trivial, or turgid – or

sometimes all at once. Indeed, when compared with staﬀ memoranda produced at a leisurely

SOURCES AND METHODS FOR THE STUDY OF INTELLIGENCE

pace in the home oﬃces, cables generally seem terse, articulate, and deﬁnitive. Cables are the

residue of a dying technology, however, and thus in reading them it is vital for the contem-

porary researcher to understand how cable traﬃc diﬀers from modern messaging over com-

puterized, global networks. Cables could take many hours to reach their recipients, especially

if there were signiﬁcant time-zone diﬀerences between the end points of the messages. In

the days of hand encoding and decoding, moreover, a long cable usually meant late hours in the

coderoom for some poor junior oﬃcer. Not a few cabled instructions had been overtaken by

events by the time their addressee ﬁnally read them.

It almost goes without saying that telephone conversations are usually lost. Senior oﬃcials

have always had their aides or secretaries keep oﬃce diaries and phone logs, and perhaps to

paraphrase important calls as well. Prime ministers or presidents may even have had their

conversations taped. The era is long past, however, and it did not last long to begin with, when

senior intelligence oﬃcials would tape phone calls. By the 1960s important intelligence tele-

phone calls were supposed to be placed on secure phones, the use of which has increased

steadily over time as the secure phone networks expanded. Sometimes phone calls have pre-

sumably been recorded by foreign adversaries, but such third parties are rarely so kind as to

release the transcripts to scholars.

A third key source for insider researchers is budget data. Budgets are sure indicators of the

priorities of an organization, and to that organization’s priority in the larger scheme of policy

implementation. They are also an index for comparison in looking at operations themselves;

they indicate the relative size of the operation, giving a rough indication of whether the project

in question represents a barn, a table, or a thimble.

Agency-wide budgets serve another purpose – that of giving the researcher a benchmark for

the quality of and challenges facing the organization’s leadership. Declining budgets are a severe

test of a leader’s ability. Indeed, sometimes it can be high praise indeed to say that a agency head

was only able to hold his ground; that he preserved the organization’s core mission and staﬀ and

even maintained its operational tempo while his budgetary base eroded. Tough decisions are

forced on a leader in such times; he or she has to trim somewhere to preserve other priorities,

and such choices generally result in disagreements and even bitterness among the managers

whose projects and oﬃces lose out. On the other hand, growing budgets force a diﬀerent set of

challenges on a leader. Budget hikes allow him to throw money at problems, and many directors

are tempted to do just that, often with meager and short-lived results. In a situation of sharply

increasing resources, merely maintaining previous levels of staﬀ and activities is a sign of poor or

challenged leadership.

Another help on the inside, sometimes, is the personnel ﬁle of someone involved in an

activity. This is helpful especially when living memory is deﬁcient. If it contains performance

evaluations for the time in question, or names of other people involved, such a ﬁle gives a

researcher important reference points. It also provides clues to the orientation of the oﬃcer in

question – his professional training and background – that may have had a bearing on the

decisions or operation in question. A roster of the personnel involved also helps in surmounting

the diﬃculties posed for intelligence scholarship that are caused by secrecy and compart-

mentation. One cannot assume that an event that was prior in time helped to cause a later one,

or a prior report caused a subsequent decision, since the personnel involved may have had no

access to such information. Sometimes it is possible to show that someone involved in an earlier

operation was – or could not have been – in a position of responsibility to have had a role in

a later one. The converse is true as well – sometimes two things that looked similar were really

independent, with no common personnel.

Lastly, for intelligence agencies after the mid-1980s, internal electronic mail records can be

MICHAEL WARNER

important, or even vital. American governmental agencies began putting crude computers on

the desktops of their oﬃcials in the 1980s; the employees using these early hub-and-spoke

systems could sometimes communicate with one another via simple messaging programs. It

took another decade, and the decisive victory of the IBM-clone personal computer, for such

technology to become ubiquitous in the government and its intelligence bureaus. After about

1995, the internal e-mail becomes an indispensable source.

These various forms of e-mail present several problems to the researcher. They might

not exist for certain oﬃces or periods, given the archiving requirements and habits of

the agencies and the oﬃcials manning them. They may not reﬂect the views of all the

important oﬃcers involved in a decision or an operation. The most important oﬃcials in any

organization typically have the least time to write them, and thus an agency head will

typically leave behind a thin collection of e-mails. E-mails collectively carry a huge amount

of information – and more importantly, circumstance – but it is often highly fragmented

and elliptical. They cannot substitute for traditional sources, both oral and documentary,

because even in the age of e-mail, many decisions still get made face-to-face, or over the

telephone.

Inside scholars use published secondary materials as much as they can get them, but generally

for establishing context for narratives that are based primarily on still-classiﬁed ﬁles. It can be

tough to square the outside histories with the inside information, and the insiders always worry

that something produced on the outside is incomplete. Oﬃcial researchers can rarely call a

colleague on the outside to ask if she checked collections X and Y in preparing her latest book

– in part because security considerations can preclude such contacts. This is the signature

weakness of inside scholarship – it can never be placed fully in the context of the literature

written on the outside and reviewed by all the people in the various scholarly disciplines who

might be able to explain or expand upon its ﬁndings.

This lengthy discussion of sources for oﬃcial research in intelligence must seem quite

elementary to any historian working in the documentary record of twentieth-century military

or diplomatic history. That is no coincidence, for military and diplomatic history is precisely

what historical research in intelligence is. Intelligence is not some privileged realm where the

usual dynamics of organizational and group behavior do not apply; intelligence agencies are

bureaucracies, and thus no exception to the rules of historical scholarship. In studying them, the

scholar gathers the records and facts and arranges them according to the time-honored ways

of archival practice and scholarship. An intelligence service will possess more secrets, and

sometimes more colorful characters, but its job is to assist the making and the implementing of a

nation’s strategic decisions. Its records therefore exist in the same milieu and the same patterns

as the diplomatic and military ministries that intelligence serves.

Sources on the outside

Scholarly work on the inside is often dedicated to the production of uncomplicated organiza-

tional or operational narratives. In contrast, writing intelligence history from academia or

private life – that is, without access to the oﬃcial, classiﬁed documentation – is in some ways

more interesting because it is more diﬃcult, depending on the availability of declassiﬁed docu-

mentation. Where there are ﬁles to work from, the outside researcher will use them in ways

quite similar to that of his or her counterparts on the inside who have access to the complete

oﬃcial record. On the other hand, where few records have been released, the researcher has to

appraise his or her sources in the knowledge that they are surely fragmentary. He has to word

SOURCES AND METHODS FOR THE STUDY OF INTELLIGENCE

his judgments accordingly, erring always on the side of caution, and building to generalizations

only on stable bases of fact.

Such a labor has traditionally resembled the writing of ancient history, with the advantage

(sometimes) of having living participants to interview. Like ancient history, much of the best

work is heavily literary in character, rather than historical in the Rankean sense of depicting

events wie es eigentlich gewesen war (“as they actually happened”). This is not meant as a criticism

or a pejorative. Livy, Tacitus, and Thucydides, to name but three ancient historians, sought by

the portrayal of fascinating but ﬂawed characters against the backdrop of grand narratives to

illustrate the larger themes of nature, society, and Man himself.

Where histories of intelligence

aspire to be more Rankean than literary, they tend to resemble in some ways the works of

modern historians writing about ancient times. They have to rely on fragments, not ﬁles. Their

chronologies are sometimes hazy. Physical evidence is sparse, and mostly monumental (i.e. on

the scale of ruined public works). There are few surviving pictures to consult. Rumor and

myth are everywhere, often so intertwined with fact that, in some cases just beyond the reach

of living memory, truth and ﬁction can no longer be separated. The one obvious advantage that

intelligence historians have over ancient historians is in the opportunity to interview their

subjects – if they will talk.

A careful researcher ﬁrst tracks down any and all oﬃcial documents, studies, reports, and

histories that might be available on his or her topic. In Western countries these documents are

usually well-intended attempts at explaining their subjects. Such oﬃcial releases have their

distinct limitations: they are restricted by the scope of their charters (sometimes lamentably

narrow), by the rigors of the declassiﬁcation process (sometimes exhaustive), and by the

objectivity, aptitude, and curiosity of their authors (sometimes curiously lacking). Nonetheless,

they provide an important touchstone of accepted fact that the researcher can use as a platform

for further inquiry, or at least a landmark along the way.

Such oﬃcial products can be crucial. Indeed, the quality of the work done on the inside

can eventually determine the prospects that outside scholars have for getting a story right (that

should be a sobering thought for oﬃcial historians). The multi-volume history of British

intelligence in World War II produced under the supervision of Sir F.H. Hinsley in the 1980s

remains a seminal work and a guide to scholarship not only in British but in Allied and Axis

activities as well. The big break for scholars of the US Intelligence Community was the

publication of the Final Report of the US Senate’s special committee that met under the

leadership of Sen. Frank Church in 1975–76. The so-called Church Committee’s seven

volumes mark the watershed in forming public knowledge of American intelligence. The

Committee’s survey of the history of the Central Intelligence Agency from its founding to the

mid-1970s is not comprehensive but it is still particularly valuable, in being balanced, insightful,

and reliable (in large part because it was based on the still-classiﬁed histories produced or held

in the CIA’s History Staﬀ). The Church Committee volumes laid the bedrock for academic

work on the Intelligence Community.

The researcher next looks for the declassiﬁed documents themselves, beginning with the most

authoritative. The availability of such records depends on the country and the time period in

question. For the years before World War II, many Western nations have made military and

diplomatic ﬁles related to intelligence available to scholars, although often not the ﬁles of the

actual intelligence bureaus. Many researchers in intelligence are interested in the period of the

Cold War and its aftermath, however, and declassiﬁcations for them are typically piecemeal and

incomplete. In some countries few if any records have been declassiﬁed. The bulk of those

released in the United States represent ﬁnished intelligence products.

Few policy or adminis-

trative documents, and even fewer operational records, are available. Complete ﬁles are rarer still.

MICHAEL WARNER

Integrating the inside and the outside is another parallel with ancient history. When real

documents begin turning up in public archives, it can be tricky to match them up with the

accreted legends that both informed and were themselves formed by an earlier body of

literature written without any access to the sources. Ancient historians have to do a similar

thing in trying to square the tangible discoveries of modern archeology with the epics of

Homer, for instance, or the writings of Herodotus. Indeed, here is the capital shortcoming

of intelligence scholarship on the outside: the lack of reliable data, and the consequent inability

to determine when all the important records have been consulted.

News reports that are roughly contemporaneous with the activity under scrutiny are useful

for both inside and outside research. They are fragmentary and often wrong, but they have a

certain vitality and immediacy, and they not infrequently touch on ground truth (sometimes

better than reporters know). Some intelligence operations show up in garbled form in the

newspapers not long after they take place. The trouble for any outside observer is that of

determining which of the myriad press reports accurately reﬂect real activities. This can be all

but impossible to do, even for friendly intelligence oﬃcers reading in the newspapers about

contemporary operations that security compartmentation gives them no formal access to. For

adversaries it can be even tougher.

Memoirs of intelligence professionals, and of decisionmakers who relied on them, are often

useful, especially if one bears in mind the adage that no memoirist loses an argument in his own

memorandum-for-the-record. There are few “inside” memoirs, produced by an oﬃcer given

access to the classiﬁed ﬁles and written as part of his oﬃcial duties. Occasionally, a senior oﬃcial

will be given limited access to selected ﬁles some years after her retirement, and her manuscript

will be sanitized to remove any classiﬁed information before it is published. More typical is the

memoir produced with no access at all. A handful of memoirs are themselves small-scale

intelligence operations – witness Kim Philby’s My Silent War, produced while Philby was a pet

of the KGB in Moscow.

His subtle mockery of CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton

– to name but one example – must be viewed according to how it may have served the KGB’s

interests to embarrass a pillar of its Main Enemy’s defenses.

Oral histories should be viewed in a similar light. There are a surprising number of former

intelligence oﬃcers at large who can be (but usually have not been) interviewed. Indeed, at the

time of this writing, there are still several hundred living intelligence veterans of World War II,

a handful of them actually working with US intelligence organizations today, six decades

removed from the end of the war. This (sometimes) allows researchers to have their drafts

commented on by participants in the historical events, or at least by people who knew “how it

felt” to do intelligence work in 1944, or 1964, or 1984. Oral history, however, falls in the same

historiographical genre as the memoir literature and has to be judged by basically the same rules

(indeed, when the subject of an oral history has died, the transcript of his or her interview is for

all intents and purposes an informal memoir). The advantages and pitfalls of oral history are

well known, and need not be reviewed here. Researchers on the outside probably make better

use of oral history than their counterparts on the inside, in part because for the former,

memories may be their only sources.

Research methods

Intelligence emerged as a professional discipline before and during World War I, ﬁrst in Britain,

and soon afterward in the other belligerents. It developed from three prior disciplines:

diplomacy, reconnaissance, and internal security, and the dividing lines between it and these

SOURCES AND METHODS FOR THE STUDY OF INTELLIGENCE

ﬁelds have remained ambiguous, and porous. The scholar of it must know something of each of

these ﬁelds – particularly how states defend themselves and employ their “levers of national

power” – to understand intelligence. Just as the sources for intelligence history are often the

same as those used by military and diplomatic historians, the methods are similar as well.

The sources largely determine the methods, in the sense that one must work with what one

has. Over the last three decades we have seen rapid progress in the methods of historical inquiry

in intelligence. The key to this development has been scholarly access to (and use of) declassi-

ﬁed intelligence ﬁles from several of the combatants in World War II. That war was a conﬂict so

vast and revolutionary (for some aspects of intelligence) that a familiarity with its details aﬀords

insights into the functioning of all twentieth-century intelligence disciplines and many of

the organizations that undertook them. The beneﬁts of this heightened understanding have

particularly enriched scholarship among academic and private researchers in intelligence, but its

independent impact on oﬃcial historians in the intelligence agencies should not be overlooked.

It aﬀords them detailed knowledge of the personnel and precedents of Cold War agencies,

and provides bases for comparison across agencies, disciplines, and even national intelligence

systems. The resulting progress in methodology, both inside and outside the intelligence

agencies, has at last raised intelligence scholarship in many instances to the level of quality

achieved by diplomatic and military historians a generation or more earlier.

The key method for inside researchers – and their chief methodological advantage – is the

drafting of a reliable chronology for the activity or organization under scrutiny. It is easier

to write a coherent narrative when one can say what happened ﬁrst, next, and last. Where

chronology is not, or cannot be, established, the conclusions drawn from the evidence must be

regarded as tentative or even as suspect. Chronology is a vital clue in sorting causes and eﬀects,

and more than one “urban legend” circulated among intelligence oﬃcials (and even among

scholars) has been debunked by the simple method of carefully charting events along a reliable

time sequence.

Chronology is vital in another way as well. Knowing not only the sequence of activities and

events but also the timing of the production and subsequent release of (both internal and

public) information about them helps one judge the value of secondary reference materials

(and even of some primary sources). It is crucial to understand how much material was and was

not available to the author of a history or the drafter of a memo. This is an obvious factor to

consider in reading the work of historians on the outside. Anything written about strategic

intelligence and military campaigns against Germany in World War II, for instance, must be

read with particular care if it was published before the revelation of the ULTRA secret in 1974.

Similarly with works on certain Cold War espionage cases in the United States, if published

before the public release in 1995 of the “Venona” cables (the decryptions of Soviet intelligence

telegrams sent to and from foreign posts, mostly during World War II). It is a factor to consider

when reading histories written by government historians as well. Several early oﬃcial histories

of US intelligence, for example, were written without access to the mysteries of signals

intelligence or “humint” operations. This reality does not falsify the arguments or discredit

the facts cited in works published before these key releases, but it does make them incomplete

in important ways.

Inside researchers also have an advantage in being able to establish reliable organizational

charts. They can determine the degrees and channels of command and control. It is crucial to

chart the hierarchy of organizations, sub-units, and personnel; accurate knowledge can hardly

be overstated in its importance to understanding activities that take place in secret for the

beneﬁt of a handful of decisionmakers. This can also be done by outside researchers, when

enough ﬁles are available; witness the labors of Philip H.J. Davies in charting the early history

MICHAEL WARNER

of Britain’s MI6.

Determining subordination can be tricky for an observer of intelligence

agencies, however, even when the individual under scrutiny held military rank. Not a few

intelligence oﬃcers in the past have held deceptively insigniﬁcant ranks or titles, yet wielded

considerable inﬂuence in their own agencies, and even over rival or allied organizations

working in the same locale (Sir William Wiseman of MI6 during World War I comes to mind

in this context).

Another avenue into what intelligence was doing in a particular capital or operation is to

undertake a careful reading of the political, diplomatic, and military events that provided the

backdrop for the intelligence activities in question. Understanding what a president, premier, or

commander had in mind (and what was far from his mind) provides a vital clue to a researcher.

It allows later observers to speculate as to what those decisionmakers might have asked their

intelligence operatives to obtain, to do, or to prevent. Whether one ﬁnds documentation of

such “requirements” that way will obviously depend on whether the requirements were levied

or not – on whether the leader actually asked for such results from his intelligence services, and

whether the operatives in those agencies had the will and the capability to meet his needs.

The researcher should also read what the target of the intelligence activities has to say about

the subject operation (or the agency that mounted it). That is, if a target says anything at all – in

some instances an adversary never notices his pocket was picked. But ordinarily the adversary

discovers the operation or activity at some point, and reacts. The scope and sharpness of that

reaction can reveal how eﬀective the operation might have been. Indeed, this gets close to

another “method” for understanding intelligence activities: that of gauging the impact of an

operation on the enemy. What if anything did it make him do, or what options did it deny him?

If it seemingly did nothing, why not? These are vital questions to ask, and to answer, although

they entail a signiﬁcant risk. More than one researcher (and practitioner) has become captivated

by the action-reaction-deception nature of the clandestine world and consequently been lost in

the “wilderness of mirrors” that some critics take all intelligence work to be.

Conclusion

Guarding against such wandering among the mirrors of spy legends can be a diﬃcult task, given

the paucity of sources, but it is ultimately a worthwhile one. The researcher has three principal

defenses, or rather three standards that transcend the seemingly closed world of secret activities.

These are comparison, objectivity, and impact. All are tough to achieve, but consistently

aspiring to achieve them has the beneﬁcial eﬀect of keeping intelligence scholarship from

wandering into partisanship or irrelevance.

Both inside and outside scholars have sought to compare and contrast intelligence disciplines

and organizations across multiple national experiences and time periods. Unfortunately, this is

not yet possible to do in a systematic manner. Among large nations, only the United States has

declassiﬁed almost all of its intelligence ﬁles from before 1941, and US intelligence before

World War II still lacked certain operational components that several other countries had

already developed. Undeterred, several scholars – Glenn Hastedt, Kevin O’Connell, and the late

Adda Bozeman, among them – have done promising work in this ﬁeld, drawing what seem to

be valid generalizations from the secondary literature.

But even these pioneers of comparative

intelligence systems would readily concede that their judgments must be tentative ones for the

time being.

Objectivity is vital in intelligence scholarship. Partisan or bureaucratic biases have always

aﬄicted writings about recent and contemporary events, of course, but they are easy to spot and

SOURCES AND METHODS FOR THE STUDY OF INTELLIGENCE

probably do not do permanent harm. Many authors, of many persuasions, have managed to set

such biases aside and write valuable works on intelligence. What is more debilitating in the long

run is the subtler (and less conscious) bias that seeps in from the researcher’s basic approach to

writing intelligence history. One should remember that a bias can be for something or some-

one as well as against it. In the present case, one may be forgiven for concluding that academic

historians will tend to favor “complexity” in their explanations; that journalists like to tell a

good story, and that oﬃcial historians will give their own agency the beneﬁt of the doubt when

narrating disputes with other agencies. All researchers, moreover, can tend to privilege the

views of the people who talked to them or were thoughtful enough to write things down and

save their ﬁles. The historian must bear in mind the adage that “the man who saves his ﬁles tells

the story” – but that man’s piece of the story may not always be the most interesting or

important part. Bias is admittedly a hazard for scholars working in the records of any organiza-

tion, and not just for intelligence historians. It probably is a more serious one for intelligence

scholars, however, given the paucity of reliable source material. Therefore the obligation to

adhere to objective standards and judgments is all the heavier.

What these methods collectively point to is a constant need to search for the impact

that intelligence made on events. The researcher, both inside and outside the organization,

must constantly ask what it was that an intelligence agency actually accomplished with the

mission, resources, and authorities allotted to it. How well did it serve decisionmakers in their

deliberations and the conduct of their oﬃces? These are tricky questions to answer even with

full access. Determining how well an agency worked with what it had to work with is the

intelligence scholars’ contribution to achieving the ultimate goal of all intelligence scholarship:

learning how intelligence made a diﬀerence. Did it make policy more eﬀective, or less, and

why? That in turn is a question that ultimately has to be answered by a community of

intelligence scholars, both those on the inside and those on the outside, who can compare their

respective sources and methods and reach consensus on the best ones to apply to various

historical issues and questions. It is also a question that must be addressed by scholars of national

and international aﬀairs writ large, who must bring their techniques to bear alongside the

ﬁndings of the intelligence scholars in crafting a fuller understanding of the past.

Patient and sometimes brilliant scholarship, both inside and outside the spy agencies, has

taught us much about the history and the nature of intelligence. Such progress has been

accomplished despite the problems faced by both “inside” and “outside” researchers. Those on

the outside lack access to the full oﬃcial record, while those on inside have a subtler but still

serious impairment: their inability to have their ﬁndings reviewed by the optimum range of

scholarly peers, and thus to consider the fullest possible context for their conclusions. None-

theless, one can be encouraged by the growing tendency of oﬃcial, academic, and private

researchers alike to conclude from their studies that intelligence is, in the most charitable sense

of the term, subordinate. By deﬁnition, it does not make decisions, negotiate treaties, win wars,

or settle disputes; those functions are performed by policymakers, diplomats, judges, com-

manders, and their staﬀs. It is neither an omniscient conspiracy, nor an omnipotent panacea.

Intelligence is a support function, sometimes usefully informing and implementing decisions.

Its contribution assists (or hampers) national leaders in the conduct of their duties, but it cannot

perform said duties for them. Beware any piece of scholarship that says it has.

Michael Warner serves as the Historian for the Oﬃce of the Director of National Intelligence. The opinions

voiced in this article are his own, and do not represent those of the Oﬃce of the Director of National

Intelligence or any other US Government entity.

MICHAEL WARNER

Notes

1 The Chilean campaign is discussed in detail by Kristian C. Gustafson in “CIA Machinations in Chile

in 1970,” Studies in Intelligence 47 (2003).

2 See Gerald Haines’ addendum on this plot in Nicholas Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classiﬁed

Account of its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

3 “My purpose is not to relate at length every motion, but only such as were conspicuous for excellence

or notorious for infamy. This I regard as history’s highest function, to let no worthy action be

uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.”

Tacitus, Annals, III:65.

4 James Van Hook of the Department of State observes that the most authoritative varieties of ﬁnished

intelligence – such as the American “National Intelligence Estimates” – are truly committee products

produced under tightly controlled conditions. In that way, and others, they may represent prime

specimens for the application of textual “deconstruction” and other critical methods.

5 Kim Philby, My Silent War (New York: Grove, 1968).

6 Philip H.J. Davies, MI6 and the Machinery of Spying: Structure and Process in Britain’s Secret Intelligence

(London: Frank Cass, 2004).

7 Richard B. Spence, “Englishmen in New York: The SIS American Station, 1915–21,” Intelligence and

National Security 19/3 (2005).

8 Glenn P. Hastedt, “Towards the Comparative Study of Intelligence,” Conﬂict Quarterly, 11/3 (Summer

1991). Kevin O’Connell, “Thinking About Intelligence Comparatively,” Brown Journal of World Aﬀairs,

Vol. 11/1 (Summer/Fall 2004). Adda Bozeman, “Political Intelligence in Non-Western Societies:

Suggestions for Comparative Research,” in Roy Godson, ed., Comparing Foreign Intelligence: The US,

the USSR, the UK, and the Third World (Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1988).

SOURCES AND METHODS FOR THE STUDY OF INTELLIGENCE

The American approach to intelligence studies

James J. Wirtz

Introduction

Is there an American approach to the study of intelligence? The question calls to mind Russell

Weigley’s The American Way of War, which suggested that Americans did in fact have a national

“style” when it came to warfare. According to Weigley, Americans preferred to obliterate their

opponents through attrition, not to use limited means for limited objectives.

Although many

have disputed Weigley’s characterization of the American way of warfare,

his work renewed

interest in the idea that the way oﬃcers and oﬃcials wage war is inﬂuenced by strategic culture,

and this idea has been championed and contested by succeeding generations of strategic theor-

ists. Yet, this debate about strategic military culture has not been mirrored by a similar discussion

about the existence of a speciﬁc American approach to intelligence or intelligence studies.

Some might argue that it makes little sense to describe a national approach to intelligence or

intelligence studies because any such characterization would have to reﬂect either unﬂattering

stereotypes or overly generous depictions of a nation’s intelligence attributes or weaknesses.

Moreover, it would be easy to think of an exception that disproves every observation about

national style. For example, Americans are not particularly accomplished practitioners of denial

and deception because they prefer to ﬂaunt their superior military capabilities before potential

opponents in the hope of getting them to comply with US demands without a ﬁght.

British

oﬃcers and oﬃcials deserve the bulk of the credit for Allied deception operations during

World War II. Analysts repeatedly warned about the eﬀectiveness of Soviet maskarova (decep-

tion) during the Cold War, while noting that the United States lacked a similar capability. Yet,

Barton Whaley, one of the greatest students of deception, is an American.

Consequently,

Whaley’s body of work could easily be used as a prima facie refutation of the idea that

“Americans don’t do deception.” National intelligence style also is a relative term. Americans’

apparent lack of interest in human intelligence (HUMINT) only becomes clear when one

contemplates how Russian or Chinese intelligence agencies strive to cultivate networks of

active agents and sleeper cells across the globe to seek out information of interest. Without a

complete and consistent comparative framework for assessing intelligence culture, it will always

be a simple matter to point out inconsistent, partial or biased characterizations of national

intelligence eﬀorts and scholarship. Additionally, by highlighting some scholarly eﬀorts at the

expense of others, any attempt to identify a national approach to intelligence or intelligence

studies will further downplay the part played by scholars, practitioners or literatures that are

already in short supply in a given state.

With these caveats in mind, however, one may venture to characterize the American study

of intelligence, which to some extent is also reﬂected in the actual conduct of foreign and

domestic intelligence in the United States. Four factors shape the American approach to

intelligence studies. First, Americans are relatively open even about their most secret intelli-

gence organizations and practices. As a result of deliberate and inadvertent revelations about

ﬁnished intelligence and the sources and methods employed in intelligence analysis, Americans

periodically obtain accurate and important insights about the actual capabilities and state of

aﬀairs within the US intelligence community. Second, American intelligence professionals and

scholars have embraced an intelligence paradigm that uses a combination of the scientiﬁc

method and history to understand both intelligence pathologies and best practices. While some

foreign intelligence agencies and scholars treat intelligence as a subject worthy of organized

inquiry – here Israeli scholars and intelligence practitioners come to mind – most countries

lack a scholarly community that addresses the subject of intelligence. Third, Americans focus on

intelligence oversight and the issues raised by the presence of secret organizations within

democracy. Indeed, concerns about the abuse of secrecy and surveillance have recently been

exacerbated by intelligence activities undertaken on the domestic front in the Global War

on Terror. Fourth, Americans have a strong bias towards technical intelligence. This emphasis

on technical collection systems comes at the expense of HUMINT and better tradecraft, and

creates an expectation that no area of the earth is beyond technical surveillance. Yet technical

collection systems are not equally capable against all targets, and some opponents have become

quite sophisticated in defeating “overhead surveillance” systems.

The chapter will unfold by discussing each of these traits that contribute to the American

approach to intelligence. It will conclude by oﬀering some observations about the ability of this

style of intelligence study and practice to cope with today’s security challenges.

A culture of openness

The US intelligence community is made up of bureaucracies that work in secrecy and deal in

secrets. Its personnel are screened through rigorous procedures to help prevent leaks of classiﬁed

information and penetration by foreign intelligence agencies. Counterintelligence programs

and hiring procedures also attempt to stop unstable people, who might have habits or weak-

nesses that make them vulnerable to blackmail, from ever getting on the intelligence payroll.

Information also is restricted in terms of levels of secrecy and compartmentalization, i.e.

regardless of one’s security clearance, access to information is granted on a “need to know”

basis. In terms of day-to-day operations, the US intelligence community is set up to maintain

the secrecy of its operations. Its output, ﬁnished intelligence, is intended for senior oﬃcials and

oﬃcers. Most countries have intelligence organizations that would more or less match this

description of the US intelligence community.

Compared to other nations, however, Americans appear to be remarkably open about dis-

cussing policies, procedures, failures and even the tradecraft employed by their intelligence

organizations. There are several traditions that create this culture of openness. First, in the

aftermath of strategic surprise, oﬃcial intelligence post-mortems, often conducted by blue-

ribbon commissions or Congressional committees, collect the facts about the disaster that has

recently transpired. These committees attempt to determine exactly what intelligence shortfalls

THE AMERICAN APPROACH TO INTELLIGENCE STUDIES

contributed to the calamity, and to suggest ﬁxes to prevent future instances of strategic surprise.

The most famous, or at least the longest-lived, intelligence inquiry involved the surprise attack

suﬀered by the United States at Pearl Harbor, Oahu on December 7, 1941. To date, there have

been ten oﬃcial investigations of this incident. In fact, the last, oﬃcial word on the attack was

issued December 15, 1995 when Undersecretary of Defense Edwin Dorn rejected a plea to

restore posthumously Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, USN (who was the commander

of the US Paciﬁc Fleet in December 1941) and Major General Walter Short, USA (who was

responsible for the defense of Hawaii in December 1941) to their highest wartime rank.

Similarly, the Congressional Joint Inquiry into the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the

United States, chaired by Senator Bob Graham and Congressman Porter Goss, and the sub-

sequent 9/11 Commission (the National Commission on Terror Attacks) issued signiﬁcant

reports on the events leading up to the al-Qaeda strikes against the World Trade Center and the

Pentagon. Inﬂuenced by the Pearl Harbor inquiries, especially the way Roberta Wholstetter

used the ﬁndings of the penultimate investigation of Pearl Harbor, the Joint Congressional

Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor attack, to write her famous treatise on

surprise, Pearl Harbor Warning and Decision, the 9/11 commissioners attempted to capture the

context of the September 11, 2001 disaster. The Commissioners wanted to create an historical

record that would be a launching point for future scholarship on the tragedy.

In the aftermath

of intelligence failure, the American intelligence community has been subjected to intense

public and oﬃcial scrutiny, which creates a treasure trove of information for scholars interested

in intelligence.

Second, accusations of scandal or abuse of intelligence power often push aside the veil of

secrecy surrounding intelligence organizations, providing scholars with additional insights into

relationships between oﬃcials and intelligence professionals. These investigations not only

reveal much about the sources and methods used to produce ﬁnished intelligence, but also

information about covert intelligence operations. Investigations by the Pike and Church

Committees in the 1970s, for example, produced a laundry list of questionable Central

Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations, everything from experiments with LSD to various

assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. In a political atmosphere dominated by the US

defeat in Vietnam and revelations about the Watergate scandal, many Americans believed that

the CIA was a “rogue elephant” that was beyond the control of elected oﬃcials and standard

government regulation. More recently, Congressional scrutiny of the Iran-Contra scandal

during the Reagan administration provided insights into the shadowy world of covert

operations and diplomacy.

The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United

States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction also oﬀered insights into US collection and

analytic capabilities following the failure to assess accurately the status of Iraq’s ability to

manufacture and stockpile chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Third, elected oﬃcials sometimes deliberately reveal classiﬁed information in support of

US foreign policy and diplomacy. These revelations not only divulge classiﬁed information, but

they also disclose much about the sources and methods that go into intelligence production.

Probably the most famous and dramatic use of intelligence to bolster US diplomacy was

undertaken by the John F. Kennedy administration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. On

October 25, 1962, Ambassador Adlai Stevenson’s use of photo reconnaissance pictures taken by

U-2 spy planes and low-level surveillance aircraft in a presentation at a UN Security Council

meeting convinced the world that the Soviets were deploying ballistic missiles in Cuba, while

simultaneously highlighting US photoreconnaissance capabilities. In a speech delivered to the

nation on September 5, 1983, President Ronald Reagan also provided insights into US Signals

Intelligence (SIGINT) capabilities by playing a tape of conversations between Soviet ground

JAMES J. WIRTZ

controllers and the pilots of Soviet interceptor aircraft as they zeroed in on Korean Airlines

Flight 007. The decision to release intercepts of Soviet military communication helped gain

international support for the idea that the Soviet government and military acted in a reckless

fashion by shooting down a civilian airliner on September 1, 1983, but it also revealed much

about US SIGINT capabilities. In fact, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the UN

General Assembly on February 13, 2003 incorporated misleading SIGINT and photographic

intelligence of Iraq’s alleged WMD capabilities. Powell, who described the speech as “the

lowest point” in his life, provided a convincing demonstration of the limits of technical

intelligence and the weaknesses of US analytical capabilities.

Fourth, in the United States, intelligence commissions and blue ribbon panels often attempt

to identify problems and make recommendations to improve intelligence procedures or

organizations.

Several of these studies provided recommendations that would have improved

coordination between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the intelligence com-

munity, possibly eliminating the “seams” between US domestic and international intelligence

and law enforcement activities and institutions that were exploited by al-Qaeda on September

11, 2001. A report issued in 2000 by the National Commission on Terrorism, which was

headed by Ambassador Paul Bremmer, for example, called for a series of reforms that would

have improved the ability of the US intelligence community to meet the terrorist threat.

The Commission called for measures clarifying the FBI’s authority to investigate terrorist

groups, eliminating CIA regulations that hindered the use of informants linked to terrorist

organizations, placing terrorism high on the agendas of oﬃcials at the CIA, FBI and National

Security Agency, and establishing new reporting procedures to deliver quickly information

related to terrorism to all interested oﬃcials.

Fifth, deliberate or inadvertent leaks of classiﬁed information are commonplace. Much to the

chagrin of intelligence professionals, elected oﬃcials can and do reveal classiﬁed information

when they believe that such information should be in the public realm or if disclosure becomes

a convenient means to achieve a political end. Sometimes the disclosure of classiﬁed informa-

tion is inadvertent. Sometimes it is undertaken because it is sensational or helps to undermine

existing policies. Classiﬁed information that the intelligence community had monitored over-

seas calls made by US citizens, maintained prison facilities for terrorist suspects in foreign

countries, or even monitored mosques in the United States for evidence of radioactive sub-

stances became public, despite the fact that these programs were considered important national

security secrets. This unauthorized and illegal disclosure of classiﬁed information gives intelli-

gence professionals ﬁts,

but as long as oﬃcials have an interest in providing this information to

the press, “leaks” will remain commonplace.

When combined, intended and unintended disclosures of ﬁnished intelligence reports,

information about intelligence operations, and insights into intelligence sources and methods

provide scholars with large amounts of what was recently classiﬁed information from secret

organizations. This information provides a suﬃcient historical record to support serious

scholarship on intelligence matters in the United States. Few states generate as much docu-

mentary evidence about their intelligence activities as the US government, and this relative

openness is a necessary condition for the American approach to intelligence.

The intelligence paradigm

The intelligence paradigm developed by the American scholarly community is an eﬀort to

apply analytic methodologies and insights drawn from the social sciences, to understand the

THE AMERICAN APPROACH TO INTELLIGENCE STUDIES

fundamental nature of intelligence, to explain the history of intelligence successes and failures,

to understand intelligence organizations and processes, and to assess and improve upon the

craft of analysis itself.

While Israeli

and British

scholars have contributed greatly to this

paradigm, other states and scholarly communities often fail to apply any sort of social science

methodology to their study or production of intelligence. For instance, Soviet intelligence

services, the KGB (Komityet Gosudarstvennoii Bezopasnosti) and the GRU (Glavnoe

Rasvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie) relied on espionage or the open press for information and

largely functioned as a clipping service for the Kremlin. During the Cuban Missile Crisis,

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev also served as his own intelligence analyst.

Because many

dictatorships have used intelligence agencies as instruments of domestic surveillance and terror,

the “counterintelligence state,” in its many varieties, was never a safe subject for study by those

subjected to its abuses.

Political scientists, historians, psychologists and practitioners have all played an important

part in creating the intelligence paradigm. Those who work within this paradigm, unlike most

other endeavors in the social sciences, share a general agreement about methodology, data, the

issues to be addressed, and the problems that remain to be resolved. Most are concerned with

exploring the intelligence cycle: setting intelligence requirements, collecting data, analyzing

data, and disseminating ﬁnished intelligence. Alexander George, for example, has suggested that

intelligence failure can occur at any point in the intelligence cycle, if intelligence professionals

and policymakers fail to answer any one of six questions: (1) identifying the adversary (who?);

(2) estimating the probability of attack (whether?); (3) determining the type of action involved

(what?); (4) determining the location of the attack (where?); (5) estimating the timing of the

action (when?); (6) determining the motivation behind the initiative (why?).

This scholarship

strives to understand why failures of intelligence occur and to devise best practices when it

comes to analyzing and disseminating intelligence.

In their search for answers to the questions that frame the intelligence paradigm, scholars and

practitioners focus on four levels of analysis: factors that are idiosyncratic to the production of

ﬁnished intelligence; human cognition; organizational behavior; and the relationship between

the intelligence community and policymakers. In terms of idiosyncratic factors, analysts often

explore problems that complicate the intelligence cycle. The “Cry Wolf,” syndrome, for

example, occurs when analysts repeatedly sound false alarms that causes recipients to dismiss

what eventually turns out to be a legitimate alert. The “Ultra” syndrome, named after the

codeword given to Allied signals intelligence intercepts during World War II, occurs when

analysts become overly reliant on an accurate and timely source of information.

Although

the information revolution has created many beneﬁts and challenges for society, it also has

introduced new intelligence pathologies. Observers ritualistically point out that analysts are

constantly at risk of being overwhelmed by a deluge of information from both open and

classiﬁed sources. Yet, the real danger may be the fact that, within this data stream, there is little

valuable information about the highest priority targets and issues facing analysts. Additionally,

the demand for current, original and even entertaining intelligence products is so great that the

drumbeat of constant intelligence warning and analysis output may take on a life of its own,

creating an impression of certainty, threat, and immediacy that is not justiﬁed by the contents

and data used in the production of ﬁnished intelligence.

Scholars have turned to human cognition and psychology to understand both intelligence

successes and failures. Scholars have identiﬁed several common cognitive biases that can impede

analysis. Mirror imaging, the tendency to interpret another actor’s behavior using one’s beliefs,

experiences, values, or standard operating procedures, can impede the creation of accurate

estimates. Individuals also tend to see the behavior of other actors to be highly rational in the

JAMES J. WIRTZ

sense that all policy and action is directed toward achieving speciﬁc objectives, even though

similar behavior is beyond their own personal or even bureaucratic capacity.

A host of these

biases can bedevil analysts; practitioners have even devised methodologies to help analysts avoid

common cognitive errors.

Today, many observers criticize analysts for a lack of imagination or a failure to “connect the

dots” when it comes to anticipating the nefarious activities of terrorist syndicates or the next

move made by the megalomaniacal leaders of kleptocracies. There is, in fact, a little recognized

“rationality bias” inherent in oﬃcial analysis, making it diﬃcult to acknowledge truly irrational

or maniacal behavior on the part of states, criminal syndicates or terrorist networks. Yet, what

generally inhibits “imaginative” analysis is “the concept”: shared assumptions among analysts

and policymakers of what constitutes rational behavior on the part of a potential opponent.

Prior to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, for example, Israeli oﬃcials based their defense policy on

three assumptions: Egypt would be at the center of any Arab coalition against Israel, Egypt

would not undertake a signiﬁcant attack without a strong prospect of victory, and, unless Egypt

destroyed the Israeli Air Force, an Arab victory was not possible. Israeli oﬃcials also believed

that their intelligence agencies would provide a “war warning” in time for them to mobilize

their reserves or even launch a pre-emptive attack, actions that would produce an Arab rout.

The eﬀects of “the concept” on policymakers and analysts alike was staggering. Even though

they were equipped with actual Syrian and Egyptian war plans, reconnaissance photographs

showing unprecedented force deployments along the Suez Canal and Golan Heights, a warning

from a credible and trusted spy within the inner circle of the Egyptian government, information

that Soviet personnel and dependents were high-tailing it out of Cairo and Damascus, and

signals intelligence suggesting that their opponents were about to strike, the Israelis never

managed to act as if they were about to be hit by an all-out Arab assault. As a result, the outbreak

of the 1973 Yom Kippur War was marked by one of the greatest intelligence-command failures

in military history.

The “concept” held sway, despite some unusually compelling contradict-

ory evidence. Similarly, the idea that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons, had gone to

great lengths to procure WMD, and appeared willing to bear enormous costs to hide his WMD

infrastructure from the prying eyes of UNSCOM, was seen by US analysts as prima facie

evidence that Iraq retained a WMD capability. Their concept of Iraqi behavior and intentions,

not hard evidence, shaped analysts estimates of Iraq’s WMD capability.

Scholars also have turned to organizational behavior for insights into the production of

ﬁnished intelligence. Compartmentalizaton, for example, is endemic in intelligence production

because the “need to know” principle governs individual analysts’ access to information. But

organizations are jealous guardians of information and bureaucratic rivalry or diﬀerences in

standard operating procedures can slow the ﬂow of information within organizations or across

the intelligence community to a trickle. Bureaucratic rivalry also can take on a life of its own;

the quest to trump analysts from other organizations can take precedence over the eﬀort to

serve the needs of policymakers.

Small-group dynamics can also shape intelligence estimates:

the well-known phenomenon of “group think” can emerge among small teams of analysts

and intelligence managers. Institutional aﬃliation also tends to color one’s perceptions and

prescriptions, and it is a rare analyst or manager who will advance a position that is at odds with

the interests of his or her home organization or career interests. Bureaucracy itself – hierarchy,

specialization, centralization, routine, and secrecy – and the need to continuously justify

budgets and priorities, which creates an endless reporting requirements and innovative

“metrics,” all work to impede creative thinking and eﬀective analysis.

The fourth level of analysis, the intelligence–policy nexus, focuses on how relations between

intelligence professionals and policymakers shape the dissemination and response to ﬁnished

THE AMERICAN APPROACH TO INTELLIGENCE STUDIES

intelligence and warning. A variety of problems can emerge to bedevil relations between the

intelligence and policymaking communities. The best-known pathology, politicization,

emerges when policymakers place overt or subtle pressure on intelligence analysts and

managers to produce intelligence estimates that support current political preferences or pol-

icies. Although there is no consensus about what constitutes best practices when it comes to

intelligence–policy interaction, two schools compete as a guide to relations between policy-

makers and the intelligence community. One school of thought, most closely associated with

the work of Sherman Kent, focuses on ensuring the independence of intelligence analysts.

Kent’s thinking, which shaped the evolution of the US intelligence community, identiﬁes the

importance of political and policy detachment in producing ﬁnished intelligence. The other

school, most closely associated with the reforms instituted in the mid-1980s by then Director

of Central Intelligence Robert M. Gates, focuses on producing “actionable” intelligence,

information of immediate and direct use to policymakers.

To produce actionable intelligence,

analysts have to maintain close working relationships with policymakers, literally looking into

the policymakers’ inboxes to make sure ﬁnished intelligence addresses important policy issues

of the day.

Scholars also are beginning to explore new developments in the intelligence–policy nexus.

The information revolution is creating new points of friction as intelligence analysts and

policymakers interact using less formal channels of communication, producing new challenges

for those charged with monitoring the contents of ﬁnished intelligence – formal written

reports that reﬂect a deliberate judgment made by analysts and backed by the intelligence

community. Other scholars are focusing on the political costs of responding to surprise. In

contrast to the tentative estimates often oﬀered by the intelligence community, the costs of

responding to possible threats are clear, which makes elected oﬃcials leery of responding to

warnings that might turn out to be false alarms. To overcome this reluctance to act on all but

the most compelling warning, new ways to undertake limited alerts of military and police

forces have to be devised, eliminating the need to place an entire city on a “war footing” in

response to uncertain threat assessments.

Intelligence oversight

Students of public policy and government also have contributed to the American approach to

intelligence studies by undertaking an open and evolving project dealing with the oversight

of secret organizations within a democracy. The United States is based upon the idea of limited

government: intelligence operations and intelligence agencies are subjected to uneven

government oversight. During the Cold War, many elected oﬃcials believed that the intelli-

gence community needed to be given free rein, at least overseas, in ﬁghting the militarily

powerful Soviet Union and the ideological menace posed by communism. In the aftermath of

the Vietnam War, however, this attitude changed and during a series of hearings in 1975,

Congressional committees heard about a variety of misdeeds perpetrated by the intelligence

community: plots to assassinate foreign leaders, wiretaps, drug experiments and plans to con-

duct surveillance against US citizens who chose to express their right to protest government

policies. In response to these revelations of misconduct, improved Congressional and executive

branch oversight was launched: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the White House

Intelligence Oversight Board, and a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence were

all created during the 1970s.

The academic question at the heart of intelligence oversight has been stated succinctly by

JAMES J. WIRTZ

Marvin Ott: “Can a democracy maintain an eﬀective, capable intelligence service without

doing violence to the norms, processes and institutions of democracy itself?”

Thus, the debate

about intelligence oversight is generally between those who want more Congressional eﬀort

to monitor intelligence activities and to protect civil liberties, and those who believe that too

much oversight can hamper the intelligence community, especially in its conduct of covert

operations overseas and domestic intelligence-gathering. In the American context, democracy

usually trumps the needs of secret organizations: Congress, an institution based on the open,

public debate of policy issues, has responsibility for oversight of the intelligence community.

But the proper balance between secrecy and openness, between the needs of national security

and civil liberties, at least from a political perspective, reﬂects threat perceptions. When threats

are high, most observers seem willing to give the intelligence community more leeway.

When threats are reduced – a time when past “intelligence abuses” often become public – most

observers clamor for greater intelligence oversight.

The September 11, 2001 attacks revealed that terrorist cells had indeed penetrated the

United States and that al-Qaeda was committed to killing Americans. Events overseas – the

bombings in 2004 of Madrid trains, of Bali tourists in 2002 and 2005, of the Marriott Hotel

in Jakarta in 2003, and in 2005 of the London Underground and Amman hotel – continue to

highlight the fact that al-Qaeda and its sympathizers are hell bent on creating death and

destruction. To many observers, this ongoing threat is evidence of a need to strengthen US

foreign and domestic intelligence and police eﬀorts. Debate about these eﬀorts, and the renewal

by Congress of the USA Patriot Act of 2001, are just the latest chapters of the ongoing debate

about the role of secret organizations and surveillance in democracy. This dialogue is likely to

continue indeﬁnitely because scholars, and the American public, want both civil liberties and

a shield against foreign threats. As Loch Johnson has recently noted, both scholars and intelli-

gence practitioners alike will continue to “search . . . to ﬁnd the right formula for power

sharing in this most diﬃcult of government domains – knowing full well that no formula exists,

only the hope that in the spirit of comity, the Congress, the executive, and the courts will carry

on the quest for a modus vivendi that takes into account liberty and security.”

The American technological bias

Americans have an obsession with technology, which is reﬂected in their approach to intelli-

gence. US HUMINT eﬀorts are relatively undeveloped. Intelligence managers are limited in

their ability to traﬃc with the kinds of unsavory characters who are able to penetrate terrorist

or criminal networks. Gaining access to agents in “denied areas,” a signiﬁcant problem during

the Cold War, still hamstrings HUMINT operations today. Targets of greatest interest – North

Korea comes to mind – are probably the most closed and tightly policed societies in the world.

Intelligence managers and analysts increasingly turn to open-source intelligence (OSINT) to

make up shortfalls in HUMINT, but they apparently have a bias against over-reliance on

sources readily available to the public. If the Internet is all that is required to stay informed, then

who would need special organizations with access to secret information?

Since the early 1960s, analysts have come to rely increasingly on technical collection

methods to access denied areas of interest or for general surveillance. Some of these systems

are ground-based or rely on aerial reconnaissance, but most of them are deployed in space and

are dependent on satellite access to low-earth or geo-synchronous orbit. The best-known

technical collection systems rely on satellite photography (imagery) or IMINT. Originally

based on technology requiring the physical retrieval of exposed ﬁlm, which parachuted to earth

THE AMERICAN APPROACH TO INTELLIGENCE STUDIES

in a capsule, today’s IMINT satellites can provide digital high-resolution images in real time.

SIGINT, or signals intelligence, is eavesdropping on all sorts of communication and often

provides insights by listening into unencrypted conversations. Over time, even encrypted

transmissions can be made to reveal important information By undertaking analysis of

encrypted communications, command relationships as well as patterns and levels of activity

can be discerned. The movements of speciﬁc individuals can be tracked, especially if they use

cellular or satellite telephones to communicate. Measurement and Signatures Intelligence

(MASINT) is the collection of information about the capabilities and location of an opponent’s

electronic systems or even industrial processes. For instance, waste plumes emanating from

smokestacks can be monitored to detect the presence of trace elements associated with the

manufacture of chemical weapons.

Although the American fascination with and reliance on technical collection systems has

yielded enormous beneﬁts, these systems also create costs. There is a tendency, for example, to

believe that they have increased international transparency and that virtually nothing is beyond

their reach. In reality, technical collection systems are best at monitoring signiﬁcant industrial

processes and manufacturing operations, large military units, and crew-served weapons. Small

manufacturing operations and micro-scale industry are diﬃcult to identify. Individuals or small

units can blend into the background of everyday activities, making them diﬃcult to detect

or monitor. Some opponents also are aware of US surveillance capabilities and can take

rudimentary measures that signiﬁcantly degrade the ability of US systems to monitor their

activities.

The emphasis on technical collection systems also draws interest and attention away

from HUMINT and eﬀorts to improve tradecraft. Technical collection is important, but it must

be incorporated into an eﬀective analytical process to yield real beneﬁts.

In lieu of conclusions

Is there an American approach to intelligence studies that diﬀers from other national styles?

This chapter suggests that the American approach to intelligence and intelligence studies shares

several characteristics that support this idea. Americans live in an open society and are kept

relatively well informed through a variety of inadvertent and deliberate revelations about the

intelligence community. American scholars also combine history and an approximation of the

scientiﬁc method to study intelligence pathologies and best practices. Indeed, the intelligence

paradigm emerged nearly twenty years ago and continues to produce a coherent research

agenda. American scholars and practitioners also devote much attention to understanding the

role of secret organizations within democracy and devising the proper balance between

eﬀectiveness and restraint when it comes to intelligence organizations. The American

fascination with technology also inﬂuences the US approach to intelligence collection:

practitioners and scholars alike are preoccupied with technical collection systems at the expense

of other methods for collecting information.

American and non-American participants in the intelligence paradigm exhibit a vitality

not present among other scholarly communities. Unlike other countries, where the study of

intelligence might be underdeveloped or even taboo outside of oﬃcial circles, intelligence

studies are considered to be a legitimate academic ﬁeld within the United States. Scholars

continue to address new problems uncovered by the latest intelligence ﬁasco or to devise better

methods of intelligence oversight. In a negative sense, a preoccupation with technology

threatens the American analytic tradition as both scholars and practitioners mistakenly seek

technical solutions for problems rooted in the limits of human cognition or bureaucracy. Yet, as

JAMES J. WIRTZ

long as a spirit of inquiry animates the American study of intelligence, scholars will continue to

search for best practices and to understand how new security threats create unique intelligence

challenges. The American approach to intelligence studies has no ready response to these

challenges, but it does have a community of scholars who are willing to address the issues

confronting not only the intelligence communities, but the societies in which they are

embedded.

Notes

1 Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of US Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington,

IN: Indiana University Press, 1973).

2 For example, Max Boot, Savage War of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic

Books, 2002).

3 Walter Jajko makes the point well: “The United States armed forces, despite the revolutionary rhetoric

of the National Military Strategy concerning the information dominance of the battle-space, are

predisposed to attack an enemy’s capabilities, not an enemy’s strategy. Systematic shaping of an

enemy’s strategy and attacking an enemy’s intentions through deception in peacetime are unusual

undertakings.” See “Commentary,” in Roy Godson and James J. Wirtz (eds.), Strategic Denial and

Deception: The Twenty-First Century Challenge (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002),

pp. 115–122.

4 Barton Whaley, “Stratagem: Deception and Surprise in War,” Rand Corporation, 1969; Barton Wha-

ley, Codeword BARBAROSSA (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971); and J. Bowyer Bell and Barton

Whaley, Cheating and Deception (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991).

5 James J. Wirtz, “Responding to Surprise,” Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 45–65.

6 United States Congress, Report of the congressional committees investigating the Iran-Contra Aﬀair: with

supplemental, minority, and additional views. H. rept., no. 100–433. S. rept., no. 100–216. Washington, DC:

For sale by the Supt. of Docs., US GPO, 1987.

7 The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass

Destruction, Report to the President of the United States, March 31, 2005.

8 “Former aide: Powell WMD Speech ‘Lowest point in my life’.” http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/

?q=node/1907

9 Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community. Preparing for

the 21st Century: An Appraisal of US Intelligence : Report of the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of

the United States Intelligence Community (Washington, DC: The Commission, 1996).

10 Amy B. Zegart, “September 11 and the Adaptation Failure of US Intelligence Agencies,” International

Security Vol. 29, No. 4 (Spring 2005), pp. 78–111.

11 James B. Bruce, “How Leaks of Classiﬁed Intelligence Help US Adversaries: Implications for Laws

and Secrecy,” Studies in Intelligence Vol. 47, No. 1 (March 2003), pp. 39–49.

12 James J. Wirtz, “The Intelligence Paradigm,” Intelligence and National Security Vol. 4, No. 4 (October

1989), pp. 829–837.

13 For example, see Ephraim Kam, Surprise Attack: The Victim’s Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1988); and Ariel Levite, Intelligence and Strategic Surprises (New York: Columbia Uni-

versity Press, 1987).

14 Michael Herman, Intelligence Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Nigel West, Ven-

ona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (London: Harper Collins, 2000); and Christopher M. Andrew,

Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (New York: Penguin Books,

1987).

15 Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “Soviet Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” in James

G. Blight and David A. Welch (eds.) Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis (London: Frank Cass, 1998),

pp. 64–87.

16 Thomas C. Bruneau, “Controlling Intelligence in New Democracies,” International Journal of

Intelligence and Counterintelligence Vol. 14 (Fall 2001), pp. 323–341. The term “counterintelligence

state” was coined by John Dziak to describe the Soviet Union, a state where the domestic police/

intelligence function was synonymous with the dominant governing body of the state. See John

THE AMERICAN APPROACH TO INTELLIGENCE STUDIES

Dziak, forward by Robert Conquest, Chekisty: A History of the KGB (New York: Ballantine Books,

1988).

17 Alexander George, “Warning and Response: Theory and Practice,” in Yair Evon (ed.) International

Violence: Terrorism, Surprise, and Control (Jerusalem: Leonard Davis Institute, 1979).

18 Kam, Surprise Attack, pp. 42, 64, 186.

19 Report to the President of the United States, pp. 12–14.

20 Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1976).

21 Richards J. Heuer, Jr., Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (CIA: Center for the Study of Intelligence,

1999).

22 “The concept” was the term originally coined by the Agranat Commission Investigation into the

failure of Israeli intelligence prior to the Yom Kippur War; see Ephraim Kahana, “Early Warning

Versus the Concept: The Case of the Yom Kippur War 1973,” Intelligence and National Security Vol. 17

(Summer 2002), pp. 81–104.

23 Uri Bar-Joseph, The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise of Yom Kippur and its Sources (Albany, NY: State

University of New York Press, 2005).

24 William E. Odom, Fixing Intelligence: For a More Secure America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,

2003).

25 Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1946).

26 H. Bradford Westerﬁeld, “Inside Ivory Bunkers: CIA Analysts Resist Mangers’ ‘Pandering’ – Part II,”

International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 10 (Spring 1997), pp. 19–54; Richard K. Betts,

“Politicization of Intelligence: Costs and Beneﬁts,” in Richard K. Betts and Thomas Mahnken

(eds.) Paradoxes of Strategic Intelligence (London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 59–79.

27 Loch Johnson, Bombs, Bugs, Drugs and Thugs, Intelligence and America’s Quest for Security (New York:

New York University Press, 2000), pp. 188–195.

28 Marvin C. Ott, “Partisanship and the Decline of Intelligence Oversight,” International Journal of

Intelligence and Counterintelligence Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring 2003).

29 Johnson, Bombs, Bugs, Drugs and Thugs, p. 222.

30 Stephen Biddle, “Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare,” Foreign Aﬀairs Vol. 82, No. 2 (March/April

2003).

JAMES J. WIRTZ

The historiography of the FBI

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

By studying what historians in diﬀerent eras and of various persuasions have written about the

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), scholars in this ﬁeld can place their own work in a more

meaningful context. But there is an immediate problem here. Can an institution, as distinct

from great events or political tendencies, have an independent historiography, or must there be

dependency, with institutional historiography drawing on the historiographies of contextual

problems and events?

In the case of some commanding institutions, for example the Presidency or the Supreme

Court, independent historiographies have developed. But the argument in this chapter is that

the FBI, a commanded institution, has no autonomous historiography, and that the prospects for

its emergence are slim. However, dependency historiography has produced and continues to

yield some promising lines of investigation into the FBI’s history.

While crediting other dependency strategies, the essay argues that the link to African

American historiography produces the most promising results. This seems the likeliest

hypothesis after an assessment of possible typologies, a chronological review of works, and a

consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of pertinent parent historiographies.

The need for this explanatory approach arises because of the scarcity, hitherto, of general

historiographical analysis. To be sure, those writing about the FBI have been inﬂuenced by

what has been written before. But, perhaps partly because the FBI itself has been until recently

a practical rather than an intellectual organization, they have stopped short of introspection.

They have rarely analyzed the existing literature in the manner of historians who, in other ﬁelds,

consciously place their work in an intellectual context.

Exceptions can be found in specialized aspects of FBI history. For example, David J. Garrow

wrote an article on “FBI Political Harassment and FBI Historiography.” Here, he took issue

with Gary Marx’s view that FBI surveillance of the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist

Party had little impact on the development of those organizations. But Garrow’s essay was not

only specialist in scope, but also more a methodological than a historiographical plea – he made

the case for wider use of oral history and for closer attention to the role of FBI informants.

The Danish scholar Regin Schmidt also oﬀered, in the year 2000, an explicitly historio-

graphical analysis. His book on the FBI and the early development of American anti-

communism contained a review of the literature in the ﬁeld. He took issue with civil liberties

historians like Frank Donner and Kenneth O’Reilly, arguing that they had accepted un-

critically Richard Hofstadter’s thesis that social paranoia lay at the root of anti-communism.

Schmidt argued that historians such as Athan Theoharis had paid too little attention to the

FBI’s political role prior to 1936, that the ﬁeld was overly dominated by biographies of J. Edgar

Hoover and under-populated by “comprehensive” histories, and that the study of the FBI was

marred by a heavily bureaucratic focus and by assumptions that “the Bureau was out of political

control.” Though Schmidt by deﬁnition had a narrow focus of the type he seemed to deplore

in others, he at least oﬀered, perhaps assisted by a certain European detachment from the

American scene, a perspective on the literature concerning his particular branch of FBI studies.

Such attempts have been rare.

A list of general typologies of use in classifying works on the FBI might well begin with the

bureaucratic approach that so upset Schmidt. Here, a leaf may be taken from the historiography

of labor history. This is generally understood to begin with the Progressive-era institutional

school associated with the University of Wisconsin scholar, John R. Commons. In a useful

manner, and drawing on conveniently preserved records, journals and other publications, the

institutionalists recorded the histories of individual labor unions and employers’ associations.

Subsequently, the historiography marched on, with the institutional approach giving way to

other schools of thought: Old Left, New Left, New Social, Corporatist, Neoconservative.

There are certainly institutionalist traits in the historiography of the FBI. Some weaknesses

are shared: just as the Commons school neglected workers who were not organized into unions,

and thus the entire pre-history of the modern wage-earner, so historians like Don Whitehead

ignored federal law enforcement before the creation of the Bureau of Investigation in 1908/9.

However, the shortcomings of FBI historiography would appear to be more deep-seated than

those of labor. Possibly because the institutional records are less accessible on account of secrecy

requirements, and because this presents a mesmerizing challenge, historians are still striving to

tell the story of the FBI as an institution. The temptation is to use the Bureau’s own records

insofar as they are available, neglecting a broader evidential approach. Compared with labor

historiography, the progression of viewpoints has been relatively stunted.

As Schmidt observed, biographies have loomed large in the historiography of the FBI. It

might be argued that, as history is about people, biography is the most helpful way of explaining

the FBI’s past. The case might be considered stronger on account of the striking personality of

Hoover, who was director from 1924 until his death in 1972. Hoover did have a major impact,

but there are nevertheless dangers, even in his case, in reliance on biography. With the passage of

time, his role is beginning to sink into a proper perspective. Signiﬁcant leaders like John Wilkie

preceded him, and subsequent directors like Louis Freeh have been just as controversial.

It is becoming evident not only that other personalities need to be considered, but also that

personality is not the only factor of importance. Historians who look at particular problems

closely tend to see more complex factors at work. For example, in his book on the FBI’s

investigations of the New Left and the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, David Cunningham

remarked that this kind of intelligence work “clearly transcends Hoover” and noted that it had

continued since his death.

A third type of approach to FBI history is that of the civil libertarian. If one sets aside

popular works such as adventure stories, and focuses on books and articles written by scholars,

the civil libertarian approach has probably been the most frequent type of endeavor. In a nation

dedicated to justice and liberty, such scholarship serves a deeper purpose than that found in

most historical writing. Yet, for precisely that reason, civil libertarian historians tend to plow

their own furrow, disregarding the ﬁeld beyond. To treat the history of the FBI as the story of a

conspiracy against civil liberty is to ignore the facts that its origins lay in an eﬀort to protect civil

RHODRI JEFFREYS-JONES

liberty, that causes and eﬀects of important events are not always connected with civil liberties,

and that most of the work of the FBI is not intrinsically political in nature. In one of his books,

Athan Theoharis implicitly defended civil libertarians against the charge that they were

indiﬀerent to the need for an eﬀective FBI. The Bureau’s obsession with political work, he

argued, undermined its eﬀectiveness against spies and terrorists. But such arguments are not

characteristic of the main thrust of civil libertarian history.

A fourth way of looking at FBI history might be through the prism of police history,

especially when broadly deﬁned to include urban and crime history. The work of the historian

Eric H. Monkkonen, for example, contains lessons for any student of the FBI – about the need

for caution in treating some of the more lurid claims about murder rates, about the limits to

what police forces can achieve, and about the plurality and variety of the American police

system. Nor can historians aﬀord to ignore the work of sociologists like Gary Marx, who

pointed out that when J. Edgar Hoover died and special agents were allowed discard their

suits and to venture in disguise into the gutters of the American drug trade, corruption and

contamination set in, the inevitable price of the long overdue victory against the Mob. The

public puritanism of the old cross-dresser had at least some uses after all, it seems. However,

while Monkkonen, Marx and their like provide ample inspiration for FBI historians, there has

thus far been little inclination to take up the challenge that their work represents.

Rounding out our list of possible typologies are two approaches that will receive further

attention later in this essay, but can be mentioned here to serve the needs of symmetry. The

ﬁrst is national security and intelligence studies. The historian Richard Aldrich noted the

emergence of a “division between institutionalist and contextualist writings” in this ﬁeld,

arguing that while the insitutionalist approach had advanced beyond the “airport bookstall”

school of history, contextualists like Robin Winks and W. Scott Lucas were still eﬀectively

challenging it. Although Aldrich referred chieﬂy to foreign intelligence, subject to qualiﬁcations

made later in this essay that ﬁeld shares at least some methodologies with the study of the

domestically orientated (if increasingly international) FBI.

The last typology is the study of race relations. Here, as in labor history and intelligence

history, there has been an institutionalist tendency. Established in 1909, the National Associ-

ation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is virtually the same age as the

Bureau. As in the case of the FBI, the identiﬁcation of an independent historiography for

that institution is problematic. But the NAACP does have a vibrant context in which it may be

intelligently considered, namely the historiography of black America. Given the deep and tragic

intertwining of FBI and African American history, is black-history historiography the most

promising context in which to place the Bureau’s past, as well?

The need to impose some kind of shape on FBI historiography is conﬁrmed by its sheer

quantity. For while the literature on the Bureau does not match in scale that on topics like the

American Revolution, Civil War, or Vietnam War, each of which prompts more than 10,000

book hits when entered as a keyword in the Library of Congress electronic catalog, keying

in “FBI” still calls up 986 books. If popular interest is the bedrock of historical inquiry

and if Google hits are an index of popular interest, the need for imposing some kind of order

on a chaotic mass becomes even more apparent: 48 million hits for the FBI, compared with

47 million for the Vietnam War (the American Revolution and Civil War generate 70 and

121 million hits respectively, and the CIA 53 million).

What follows is not a review of all or even a fraction of the books written on the FBI, but

a chronological survey of a selection of works. However, the coverage does extend beyond

scholarly items. All those shelves groaning under the weight of junk history should not be

allowed to obscure the real insights into the Bureau’s past oﬀered by non-academic writers such

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE FBI

as memoirists, journalists, and practicing lawyers. The focus here will be on those authors who

aimed, or purported to aim, substantively to comment on and to interpret FBI history and

prehistory as a whole. It reveals, as one might expect in any ﬁeld, a progression of period

concerns, conﬁrming the existence of at least the raw materials for FBI historiography. It

also signals the absence of referentialism. Writers on the FBI may have been inﬂuenced by what

previous writers said, but they tended not to critique, refer to, or even admit those inﬂuences.

Finally, the following literature review oﬀers clues to what might be useful historiographical

contexts within which the history of the FBI can be considered.

The acronym “FBI” entered the English language in July 1935 when, after a number of

name changes, Washington settled on the enduring title, “Federal Bureau of Investigation.” But

the FBI’s continuous institutional history stretches back further, to the formation of a Special

Agent Force in 1908, renamed the Bureau of Investigation one year later. And its prehistory

started even earlier, with the formation of the Department of Justice in 1870 and its borrowing,

in the following year, of a group of US Secret Service detectives. President Lincoln had

established the Secret Service in 1865, and in the 1860s its detectives operated against

moonshiners and counterfeiters, bringing it under the supervision of the Treasury Department.

On loan to Justice and known as “special agents” (a commonly used contemporary term), these

detectives had the task of penetrating and destroying the Ku Klux Klan. The search for com-

mentaries on the FBI’s history must, then, begin with works published not just before 1935, but

also before 1908.

Memoirists supply some of the earliest commentary. Hiram C. Whitley was chief of the

Secret Service from 1869 to 1874. His autobiography, In It, contained both self-promotional

tales of detection and some insights into the development of an embryonic federal police force.

But he glossed over his post-1871 period of service to the Justice Department. In his book,

Whitley referred to one of his earlier investigations of the Klan, to President Ulysses S. Grant’s

“hearty indorsement” of that work, and to the “bitterness of the rebels” whom he brought to

trial. But, he wrote, “I will not go into any particulars in regard to the case.” His reluctance to

go into detail reﬂected changing times. For, by the year of publication of the book, 1894, the

Jim Crow reaction to Reconstruction was in full swing. In white southern society and indeed

beyond, the Klansmen were being reconstituted as heroic ﬁgures who had resisted federal

oppression. Truth in its customary manner had become a casualty of racism, and proto-FBI

historiography had oﬀered itself as a candidate for dependency.

William J. Burns served as director of the Bureau of Investigation from 1921 to 1924.

But, by this time, he had already published a memoir – in 1913, it appeared under the not

very unassuming title, The Masked War: The Story of a Peril that Threatened the United States

by the Man Who Uncovered the Dynamite Conspirators and Sent them to Jail. Potentially, Burns had

an interesting tale to tell and perspective on events. He was a brilliant detective who as a

Secret Service agent had helped to crack Spain’s Montreal-based spy ring in the War of 1898,

and to put timber robbers behind bars in a case that had led directly to the formation of the

Bureau of Investigation. Moreover, he would soon win fame for working for the accused in

the notorious anti-semitic trial in the state of Georgia that culminated with the lynching of

Leo Frank.

His book, however, appeared at a time when Burns was promoting his recently formed

private detective agency, which would soon rival the Pinkertons as a successful business enter-

prise. In an era when Americans worried that European-style class conﬂict might arrive on

their shores, Burns advanced a hypothesis that was, we can see with the wisdom of hindsight,

absurd – that a pair of Irish-American Catholic labor leaders, the Bridgeworkers’ Union’s

McNamara brothers, were spearheading a proletarian revolution in the United States. Instead

RHODRI JEFFREYS-JONES

of commenting in his memoir on the development of a federal police system, he drummed up

business for his private agency by inventing a revolutionary threat and posing as America’s

savior.

It is popularly perceived that William J. Donovan, head of the Oﬃce of Strategic Services in

World War II, was a seminal force in the creation (in 1947) of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Just so, in 1908 John E. Wilkie was a prominent mover in the creation of what came to be

known as the FBI. Wilkie was the dominant federal investigative and counterintelligence

oﬃcer of the William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt presidencies. However, like

Donovan, the Secret Service chief was too controversial a ﬁgure to head the new agency he had

advocated. Given this turbulence, the biography of him by his son Don is of interest. It appeared

in 1934 at a time of heightened interest in law and order and in federal policing, and in the wake

of legislation that dramatically increased the powers of the FBI.

Like his father, Don Wilkie worked for the Secret Service, so he was doubly partisan. Written

at a time when the burgeoning Bureau of Investigation was eclipsing the Secret Service, his

book was an implicit corrective to the idea that the FBI was the only show in town. Indeed,

the book is eloquent in its omissions. Don Wilkie enlivened his pages with an account of his

father’s ﬁght with the corrupt Congress of 1908, but contrives not to mention that the Bureau

of Investigation was formed in that year. In fact, neither the Bureau nor J. Edgar Hoover appears

in the book at all. It would be an understatement to say that Don Wilkie eschewed the

prerequisites of historical balance.

If the 1930s revitalization of federal policing inspired Don Wilkie to write as he did, it also

prompted the birth of oﬃcial FBI history. It might be objected that this is a more recent

development, as the Bureau’s ﬁrst oﬃcial historian was not appointed until 1984.

But the

propagation of an oﬃcial version of history does not depend on the engagement of in-house

professionals, and, in the case of the FBI, started well before that happened. In the 1930s, it was

New Deal policy to remake the image of the FBI to portray it as a valiant corps of men who

could take on the mobsters and put them in jail or the morgue. Hoover encouraged Hollywood

to cease depicting the gangster as a romantic, Robin Hood type of hero, and to replace him, in

the role of the hero, with the G-Man, the Fed who could shoot straight. He began what became

a lifelong publicity habit, and started to sponsor a particular image of the FBI, an image that

contributed to an oﬃcial view of its history.

In 1938, Hoover published his book Persons in Hiding. This was a collection of stories

indicating the ingenuity and valor of the FBI’s special agents. The main text was probably

shadow-written like most of the director’s publications, and the historical introduction was

authored by Courtney Ryley Cooper. This journalist had published an earlier work on a similar

theme, with the same American publishers, Little, Brown, and with an introduction by Hoover.

Cooper had also developed what one cultural historian called “the oﬃcial FBI formula” for

radio broadcasts based on the Bureau’s crime records. But it should be remembered that

Hoover worked hand in hand with Cooper and other sympathetic writers, and that the point of

view in all resultant publications was that of “The Boss.”

Though brief, Cooper’s introduction outlined the lineaments of what became an oﬃcial

approach to FBI history. It lionized Hoover. In Cooper’s version, the business of seriously

coordinating the American ﬁght against crime “really began in 1921,” when Hoover became

assistant director. In the 1920s, the Bureau chief remained at the mercy of diﬃculties stemming

from the federal nature of the American political system. Major criminals were adept at

“jumping the fence,” moving, when things got too hot where they were, to another state. That

put them beyond the jurisdiction of local policemen, and, because of the scarcity of enabling

legislation, immune to federal agencies.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE FBI

According to Cooper’s account, Hoover knew that he had to play catch-up and win

increased FBI powers that would override states’ rights objections and the vanities of local

policemen. But he had to bide his time until the political climate was right. The propitious

moment arrived in 1933, with the conjunction of a sympathetic attorney general, Homer

Cummings, and the Kansas City massacre in which “Pretty Boy” Floyd and his confederates

cold-bloodedly shot dead a Bureau agent and two local law oﬃcers, shocking the nation. Now,

Hoover started a campaign to disabuse “the average honest citizen” who “secretly admired the

gangster.” New laws swept through Congress. Henceforth, the Feds could make arrests, carry

guns, and enforce a wider range of laws.

With the coming of the Cold War, debate on security arrangements intensiﬁed. Possibly with

a view to curtailing Hoover’s inﬂuence, President Harry Truman encouraged his friend Max

Lowenthal to write a book on the agency. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Lowenthal had

run his own ﬁrm and had served as a consultant to the Senate Committee on Interstate

Commerce. After prodigious research, the veteran lawyer in 1950 published his tome, The

Federal Bureau of Investigation. His account started in 1908 not the 1930s, and oﬀered the ﬁrst

informed narrative of FBI history, running through to 1950.

Instead of focusing on Hoover, Lowenthal detailed concerns, especially as expressed in

Congress, that the FBI was propelling America toward becoming a police state. He showed how

President Theodore Roosevelt and his attorney general Charles Bonaparte had sneakily set up

the new agency during a congressional adjournment, and how outraged legislators attacked this

high-handed action by the great-nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor who (as critics

gleefully pointed out) had employed the notorious internal security chief, Joseph Fouché.

Lowenthal gave full vent to the Gestapo anxieties expressed in America in the wake of the war

against Hitler, and to suspicions that the FBI was backing the new Red Scare of the early Cold

War. These critical civil libertarian concerns caused him to overlook the Bureau’s pre-1908

antecedents, and to ignore the point that, as Attorney General Bonaparte’s agents had been

investigating corrupt practices in the “millionaire senate,” criticism from the Hill might best be

taken with a pinch of salt.

Hearing of the imminent publication of the book, Hoover tried to stop it. Failing in that

endeavor, he took steps to limit its circulation, to intimidate Lowenthal’s publisher, and to smear

Lowenthal as a Pinko. This might be taken to indicate that Lowenthal’s book was, manna to the

historiographer, “revisionist.” In one sense, it was, as it marked a signiﬁcant and persuasive

departure from the oﬃcial version of FBI history – even the FBI now traces its origins to 1908,

rather than the 1930s. On the other hand, it was not referential, avoiding discussion of previous

literature, and today it reads more like a single-minded defense of civil liberties than a serious

historical investigation.

Lowenthal’s book marked an intensiﬁcation in the ping-pong debate between defenders of

civil liberties who excoriated the FBI, and Bureau supporters who justiﬁed its actions. Hoover’s

next book, Masters of Deceit, dealt with the history of the Communist menace, not the FBI, and

testiﬁed to the way in which the Bureau changed its targets over time. But he had no need

to address the Bureau’s history directly, as he had already rolled out his heavy artillery in the

shape of a court historian.

In his preface to Don Whitehead’s book The FBI Story, Hoover expressed his “complete

conﬁdence” in the author, who was the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and had

already done some reporting on the Bureau. For his part, Whitehead was indebted to the

director for allowing him “a look behind the scenes” and for making available to him “a

tremendous amount of unpublished material.” Whitehead essentially added ﬂesh and bones

to the outline of FBI history supplied in Courtney Ryley Cooper’s 1938 mini-oeuvre. While

RHODRI JEFFREYS-JONES

there was still no mention of the Bureau’s antecedents, there were additional details about

the menace of organized crime in the 1930s and how Hoover and his men had triumphed.

Appearing in 1956, the book gave a boost to the Bureau at a time when McCarthyism and FBI

anti-Red activities were losing their appeal, and when the Bureau’s ineﬃcacy against the Maﬁa

was an embarrassing talking point. In 1959, a movie based on Whitehead’s book starred James

Stewart and was a box-oﬃce hit.

To borrow from Newton, to every ping in FBI historiography there was an equal and

opposite pong. Fred Cook’s The FBI Nobody Knows (1964) was incipiently referential. Like

Lowenthal, Cook operated within a tradition of liberal journalism that was critical of the

FBI – he had contributed on the subject to the journal Nation – and he both drew on

Lowenthal’s book and speciﬁcally defended him as a non-partisan writer who had been

smeared as “pink.” Cook repeated the claim that the Bureau had been “created in secrecy, by

executive order, in deﬁance of the will of Congress.” But he added his individual gloss.

Cook highlighted, in a manner that reﬂected the civil rights crusade of his day, the FBI’s

pervasive racism. Here, he was assisted by the testimony of an apostate, Jack Levine, who

had trained with the FBI before leaving it in disgust on account of its agents’ overt racial

prejudice. Cook also anticipated a concern that would fuel congressional discontent in the

1970s, the notion that the FBI was too “autonomous.” His book reﬂected the emerging

intellectual disorientation of the liberal left in America, for he attributed to the “liberal”

presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) the creation of an “all-

powerful” FBI, and acknowledged that the Bureau, with Assistant Director Hoover

masterminding operations, had smashed the Klan in Louisiana in 1922. In the absence of

historiographical guidelines, it was becoming diﬃcult for “liberal” writers to make sense of the

FBI.

In 1971, John T. Elliﬀ published a historical monograph on the FBI. Elliﬀ had recently

received a doctorate in political science from Harvard University, and was now a professor

at Brandeis University. His contribution was entitled “Aspects of Civil Rights Enforcement:

The Justice Department and the FBI, 1939–1964.” It attracted no publicity or controversy,

appearing initially in Harvard’s Perspectives in American History, a serial publication dedicated to

the publication of items that would normally be considered to be too long for publication in

a journal, and then, in 1987, as part of a learned, 814-page tome.

This background helps to explain why Elliﬀ broke out of the ping-pong mold, supplying a

perspective that was both civil libertarian and broadly supportive of the FBI. Though Attorney

General Cummings had been aware that Justice Department agents had operated against

the Klan in the 1870s, most people had forgotten that Justice meant justice, and remembered

only that Hoover was a racist. But Elliﬀ detailed the work of the Justice Department’s Civil

Rights Section (CRS), ﬁrst established by Attorney General Frank Murphy, in the area of

investigations into lynching and other terrorist actions against black citizens.

Elliﬀ’s quiet, scholarly contribution took second place, in the 1970s, to sensational media

revelations about the FBI’s dirty tricks campaign against Martin Luther King, Jr. But, in more

recent times, historians Kevin J. McMahon and Christopher Waldrep have developed the theme

that the FBI’s civil rights work in support of the CRS diminished the climate of terror in the

South, thus contributing to the rise and triumph of the civil rights campaign of the 1950s and

1960s.

In spite of Elliﬀ’s 1971 disquisition, David Garrow complained in 1981 about the “poor

quality” of public discourse on the FBI, a deﬁciency stemming from the fact that “academic

curiosity about the FBI appears almost nil.” His complaint appeared in the afterword to a book

he published on the FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. Here, he also challenged prevailing

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE FBI

assumptions that most FBI ills could be traced to J. Edgar Hoover, and that the Bureau enjoyed

“autonomy” from political control.

As things turned out, though, academic work on the FBI was on a boom trajectory.

The post-Watergate investigations of the intelligence community by journalists and by

congressional investigators, especially the Church inquiry of 1975–6, stimulated the “curiosity”

that Garrow craved. Loch Johnson, a Church inquiry staﬀ worker who became a proliﬁc

writer on intelligence aﬀairs (and is the editor of the volume in which this essay appears)

noted that the Church investigation unearthed “a huge amount of new information for

scholars to study” and got him “completely hooked” on the ﬁeld in which he was to make

his name. Others labored in the same vineyard, and there was an upsurge in scholarship on

the FBI. This was already under way when Garrow made his observation, and gathered pace

thereafter.

John Elliﬀ headed the Church Committee’s Domestic Task Force. He engaged Athan

Theoharis, already an established historian, to scour the presidential libraries. In trying to

uncover FBI records, Theoharis encountered serious obstruction. However, the obstruction

was counter-productive, as it spurred him to ever-greater eﬀorts. He devoted much of the

remainder of his career to publishing proliﬁcally on the FBI. He also advised graduate students

at Marquette University who went on to write about the Bureau, assisted by an FBI archive that

Theoharis built up at that institution.

Theoharis himself made an early imprint on FBI studies. In the course of the Church

investigation, the Republican administration had resorted to the tactic of releasing information

on how Democrats had used the FBI to undermine civil liberties, with the iconic FDR and

John F. Kennedy receiving special attention. In an article for the Political Science Quarterly in

1976, Theoharis implicitly challenged the Republican premise when he argued that Hoover’s

interpretation of FDR’s directions did “not capture the more limited nature of the president’s

objective.”

He also spread the blame, claiming “no president after Franklin Roosevelt spurned

the opportunity to obtain valuable political intelligence.”

However, the Republicans were joined by incongruous bedfellows in taking a harsher view

of the architect of the New Deal. Adherents of the New Left thought Roosevelt had not gone

far enough in pursuit of social and racial reforms. Expanding their attack, Stanford University’s

Barton J. Bernstein drew on congressional hearings and on Theoharis’s scholarship but also on

the Oﬃcial File in the FDR Library in expounding his view that FDR had personally directed

the FBI to overstep the mark in keeping tabs on his political opponents, and in authorizing

wiretapping.

With the old Democratic coalition crumbling away and with “liberal” presidents under

scrutiny, civil libertarians began to adjust their perspectives. One such was Frank Donner, a

lawyer who had argued cases before the Supreme Court and directed an American Civil

Liberties Union project on political surveillance. His well-researched 1980 book on the latter

subject noted how FDR had given the FBI greater powers and jurisdiction, but, while noting

the Bureau’s “Southern mentality,” Donner drew attention also to its COINTELPRO “White

Hate” operation against race supremacists. The old game of unconscious historiographical

ping-pong was getting increasingly blurred around the edges.

In a nation dedicated to free speech and based on pluralism, the evolution of new attitudes

rarely proceeds in a uniform manner, and this was the case with writings on the FBI. In 1989,

Princeton University Press issued a book in which political scientist William Keller argued that

the FBI placed “liberals” in a quandary. They were dedicated to the principle of statism, and the

Bureau was a prime example of that, but they just could not warm to the institution. To

extrapolate from Keller, this opened the door for conservatives to re-embrace the Bureau. By

RHODRI JEFFREYS-JONES

the twenty-ﬁrst century, “neoconservatives” had re-indorsed both the FBI and statism in the

interest of national security.

But did that mean the restoration of J. Edgar Hoover’s reputation? This was by no means

necessarily the case. William C. Sullivan had already published a memoir that was critical of the

formerly powerful but now deceased director – and Sullivan wrote from a staunchly pro-FBI

perspective, having at one time been its third most senior oﬃcial. On the other hand, in a 1995

memoir Cartha DeLoach, who in the course of his 28-year career with the Bureau had headed

its Crime Records Division, staunchly supported Hoover. DeLoach denied the long-serving

director had been gay, described a critical biographer as “disingenuous,” and claimed that

Hoover’s war on organized crime had been more eﬀective than his critics allowed.

But, to borrow a phrase from the British political lexicon, there was by now a tradition of

“loyal opposition.” Ronald Kessler was a prominent case in point. Kessler, who as a Washington

Post journalist in the Watergate era had gained the conﬁdence of FBI oﬃcials, received from

Bureau director Williams S. Sessions (1987–1993) the kind of access to inner sanctums that

Don Whitehead had once enjoyed. In his books and columns, Kessler shed light on FBI history

as well as on current practices. But when he found out that Sessions was taking advantage of

the US taxpayer through various ﬁnancial scams, he reported adversely and helped to bring him

down. Later, he was critical of Director Louis J. Freeh (1993–2001) out of a similar motive,

the desire to see an important agency headed only by the best people. For Kessler was a staunch

supporter of the Bureau – even before the new imperatives of 9/11, he was pressing for an

expanded FBI budget.

FBI loyalism lived on not just in modiﬁed mode, but also in original format on the lines

of the Hoover-friendly perspective of Courtney Ryley Cooper and Don Whitehead. Bryan

Burrough’s book Public Enemies (2004) may have sniped at the legendary director’s vanity, but

its subtitle indicates how ﬁrmly Burrough was wedded to the Cooperite view that a positive

revolution took place under Hoover’s leadership early in the New Deal: America’s Greatest

Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34.

In his dissection of schools of intelligence history, Richard Aldrich mentions what he terms

the cost-beneﬁt approach.

This was much in evidence in America after 9/11. The FBI

came in for more criticism than any other agency in connection with the alleged negligence

that lay behind US lack of preparedness in the face of imminent terrorist attack. The main

concern now was not how to protect America against the Gestapo-like activities of the FBI,

but how to equip the Bureau more eﬀectively to confront future threats to American

security. Scholars, journalists and legislators began to reconsider the FBI’s past in this

functionalist light.

The tendency did not grow out of a vacuum. For some time, historians like John E. Haynes

and Harvey Klehr had been attacking the evidential basis of the work of civil libertarian

historians like Athan Theoharis who, they claimed, “made a career out of deploring in

extravagantly sinister terms FBI monitoring of domestic radicals and others suspected of being

involved in espionage and political subversion.” The Communist Party of the United States,

they pointed out on the authority of newly declassiﬁed evidence, was not an innocent if

misguided victim of Bureau harassment. Its instructions and money had always come from

Moscow, and its leaders wittingly engaged in or allowed systematic espionage against the

United States.

With the Cold War over, such revelations might seem to have been archaic. But they did

prepare the way for the post-9/11 challenge: look not at what the FBI does wrong, but at how

it might become more eﬀective, and how it might be freed from arcane criticisms and from

regulation based on unfounded police state fears.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE FBI

From this background sprang the utilitarian tendency in the assessment of FBI history. One

of its notable practitioners, Richard Gid Powers, was already known as a biographer of J. Edgar

Hoover and as a slightly waspish authority on the FBI’s publicity eﬀorts. After 9/11, Powers

formed the view that the problem lay more with the FBI’s critics than with the Bureau itself.

He now argued in a general history of the FBI that the Bureau was shackled by excessive

restrictions that had been placed on it by 1970s reformers. Because of the critics’ strictures,

it had become “risk averse.” This functionalism began to aﬀect other historians, too, even those

excoriated by Harvey and Klehr. In response to 9/11, Theoharis turned his critique of the FBI’s

political work into a critique of its eﬀectiveness, arguing in a concise overview of FBI history

that if you concentrate on surveillance against your own citizens, you will be unable to spot the

threat from strangers.

The foregoing chronological review of historical literature on the FBI indicates that writing

in this ﬁeld is no exception to the rule that interpretations of the past often reﬂect current

concerns. But it also reveals a continuing lack of historiographical awareness. That absence

of self-awareness breeds an approach whose aridity threatens to be self-perpetuating, as, by

deﬁnition, it fails to irrigate the parched ground of FBI historiography.

It seems that an institution, even one with a long history and with changing goals, does not

always lend itself to sui generis historiography. However, that does not absolve the FBI historian

from the duty to be historiographically self-aware, for it is possible to borrow from kindred or

parent disciplines. One of these might be intelligence history, for the FBI has ever since World

War I been engaged in counter-intelligence. In recent times, there has been urgent attention to

that and to its cousin, counter-terrorism.

One could treat FBI historiography as an intellectual client of CIA historiography, a ﬁeld

that has both embraced institutionalism and moved beyond it.

The FBI, like the CIA, has

been subject to the vigorous debates associated with the Cold War. The surprise attack on Pearl

Harbor, with which 9/11 has understandably been compared, generated a whole school

of interpretation and debate. The Pearl Harbor debate for that reason serves as contextual

historiography for both the CIA and the FBI.

To give another example, there are parallels

between the founding of the FBI in 1908 and the CIA in 1947: both were the products of

reform impulses; snoopery fears and police state fears (Fouché/Gestapo) were prominent on

each occasion; in both cases, the prime architects of intelligence reform (Wilkie/Donovan)

were jettisoned as part of the acceptance compromise. The riches of 1940s historiography

have been visited in the debate on the founding of the CIA, and there is every reason why FBI

historiographers should learn from that.

On the other hand, there are diﬀerences. One of the features of CIA historiography is the

asynchronicity of oﬃcial and revisionist history. The CIA supported in-house oﬃcial history

from the very start. Because in-house oﬃcial histories were classiﬁed documents, they were

sometimes not released to the public until revisionist interpretations were already in print. As

the FBI has not had in-house histories, this issue simply does not arise.

It can further be noted that CIA historiography, or even foreign intelligence historiography

more broadly deﬁned, is no more a sui generis ﬁeld than FBI historiography. Intelligence history

is now regarded as the missing dimension of diplomatic history, but it is still only a dimension,

or, as one pair of scholars phrased it, a “sub-ﬁeld.” Should FBI historiography be allowed to

become a sub-ﬁeld of a sub-ﬁeld?

More important than all this, though, is the fact that, for all the Bureau’s overseas expansion

in recent years, FBI history has been, primarily, domestic. For this reason especially, a closer

match, given the Bureau’s Justice background, is with the historiography of African American

history. The prehistory of the FBI, the struggle of federal special agents against the Klan in the

RHODRI JEFFREYS-JONES

1870s, has been forgotten for precisely the same reasons that gave rise to amnesia about Black

Reconstruction and the later scourge of lynching. The emergence of the Dunning school of

Reconstruction historiography coincided with the founding of the Bureau of Investigation,

and, as historian Eric Foner puts it, exercised a long-lasting, “powerful hold on the popular

imagination.”

The lessons of its obliteration of signiﬁcant memories are as applicable to the

historiography of the FBI as they are to the understanding of black historiography. The later

work of the Bureau in crushing white terrorism and upholding civil rights can be considered in

tandem with the decline of the Dunning school and the rise of its competitors.

The black history framework of discussion has been a good ﬁt for FBI history in a number

of diﬀerent circumstances, and right down to the present day. After 9/11, there was a debate

between twenty-ﬁrst-century cosmopolitans who believed it would be good for FBI analysts to

be able to read Arabic, and nationalists who saw political correctness as the enemy of security.

The debate took place not in a vacuum, but in the context of a living tradition with its roots in

the debate on black history.

As in the case of other institutional historiographies, the historiography of the FBI raises

questions of frameworks and of interpretive dependency. The historian of the FBI is not only a

child of his age, but also a child with a borrowed compass. But he is also free to choose his own

map, be it that of labor, urban, intelligence or race historiography. With the proviso that he

shows cartographic awareness, that may one day free him (or her) to stumble on the truth with a

little less ideological and cultural impediment.

Notes

1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented as a paper to the American History Research Work-

shop at the University of Edinburgh. On that occasion, Alex Goodall, Susan-Mary Grant, and Vassiliki

Karali oﬀered helpful comments. Further learned instruction came from Athan Theoharis. Douglas

Charles, Frank Cogliano, and Christopher Wardrep read a draft of the essay and supplied informed

critiques. The essay is a product of the “History of the FBI Project” funded by the Leverhulme Trust

and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The author is most grateful to all of these individuals

and institutions.

2 David J. Garrow, “FBI Political Harassment and FBI Historiography: Analyzing Informants and Meas-

uring the Eﬀects,” The Public Historian, 10 (Fall 1988), 5–18 at 16.

3 Regin Schmidt, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States (Copenhagen:

Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), pp. 12, 15, 18.

4 Reviews of American labor historiography have appeared with regularity. See, for example, Ronald

Ziegler, “Workers and Scholars: Recent Trends in American Labor Historiography,” Labor History,

13 (Spring 1972) and David Brody, “Reconciling the Old Labor History and the New,” Paciﬁc

Historical Review, 62:1 (1993). For yet another challenge to preconceptions about labor history, see

Joseph A. McCartin, “Bringing the State’s Workers in: Time to Rectify an Imbalanced US Labor

Historiography,” Labor History, 47/1 (February 2006), 75, 87.

5 Don Whitehead, The FBI Story (London: Frederick Muller, 1957).

6 David Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintel-

ligence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), p. 8.

7 Athan Theoharis, The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History (Lawrence, KS: University

Press of Kansas, 2004), pp. 2, 3, 13.

8 Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1981), p. 7; Monkkonen, “Policing in the United States since 1945” in The State, Police and Society

(Brussels, 1997), pp. 285–306; Monkkonen, Murder in New York City (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2001), p. 8; Gary T. Marx, Undercover; Police Surveillance in America (Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 1988), pp. 4–5, 169–171. Rather more spectacular indications of local FBI corruption

appeared in connection with the James J. “Whitey” Bulger case: see Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill,

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE FBI

Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance between the FBI and the Irish Mob (New York: Perennial/

HarperCollins, 2004).

9 Richard J. Aldrich, Espionage, Security and Intelligence in Britain, 1945–1970 (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1998), p. 6.

10 The Library of Congress catalog was accessed for these data on 30 November 2005, and Google on

6 February 2006. For an annotated bibliography of a selection of books, articles, congressional hearings

and microﬁlm reprints concerning the history of the FBI, see Athan G. Theoharis, ed., The FBI:

A Comprehensive Reference Guide (New York: Checkmark/Facts on File, 2000), pp. 385–396.

11 Hiram C. Whitley, In It (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1894), p. 91.

12 William J. Burns, The Masked War (New York: Doran, 1913). For a more sober account of the

events that Burns describes, see Sidney Fine, “Without Blare of Trumpets”: Walter Drew, the National

Erectors’ Association, and the Open Shop Movement, 1903–1957 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan

Press, 1995). Steve Oney portrays Burns and his men as “bullying dissemblers” in his book And the

Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (New York: Pantheon, 2003),

p. 416.

13 Donald W. Wilkie, American Secret Agent (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1934), pp. 67–70.

14 Susan Rosenfeld Falb served in that capacity from then until 1992, and issued a number of guides to

facts and sources on the FBI. More recently, John F. Fox, Jr., has served in the post. He unearthed some

documents on early FBI history which, for a while, the Bureau mounted on its website. Fox also

published articles on counterintelligence in World War I in the journal Studies in Intelligence, a publica-

tion run by the CIA, but nevertheless having a semi-oﬃcial imprimatur as far as the Bureau was

concerned. See Susan Rosenfeld (prior to 1992, Susan Rosenfeld Falb), “Organization and Day-to

Day Activities” and “Buildings and Physical Plant” in Theoharis, ed., FBI, pp. 205–259; Fox, “Bureau-

cratic Wrangling over Counterintelligence, 1917–18,” Studies in Intelligence, 49/1 (2005), accessed on

the web: http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol49no1/html_ﬁles/bureaucratic_wragling_2.html.

15 Richard Gid Powers, “The FBI in Popular Culture,” in Theoharis, ed., FBI, pp. 261–307 at 276.

16 Cooper, Ten Thousand Public Enemies (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1935); Cooper introduction to

Hoover, Persons in Hiding (London: J.M. Dent, 1938), pp. viii–xvii.

17 Max Lowenthal, The Federal Bureau of Investigation (New York: William Sloane, 1950), chapters 1, 38.

18 Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (New York: Henry

Holt, 1958).

19 Whitehead, The FBI Story (London: Frederick Muller, 1957 [1956]), pp. 7, 16, 96–98, 103.

20 Fred J. Cook, The FBI Nobody Knows (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965 [1964]), pp. 1, 22, 49, 70n3,

123–125, 363, 405–411.

21 Homer Cummings and Carl McFarland, Federal Justice: Chapters in the History of Justice and the Federal

Executive (New York: Macmillan, 1937), p. 230; John T. Elliﬀ, “Aspects of Federal Civil Rights

Enforcement: The Justice Department and the FBI, 1939–1964,” Perspectives in American History,

5 (1971), 605–673 and The United States Department of Justice and Individual Rights, 1937–1962 (New

York: Garland, 1987); Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the

Road to Brown (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 144–150; Christopher Waldrep,

“American Lynching, Civil Rights, and the Changing Meaning of Community, 1865–1965” (paper

delivered on January 11, 2006 to the School of History and Classics staﬀ seminar at the University of

Edinburgh, supplied by kind courtesy of its author, and forming the basis of an anticipated book).

22 David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983 [1981]), pp. 221,

223.

23 Email, Johnson to author, February 10, 2006. Johnson mentioned Richard K. Betts, Fritz Schwarz, and

L. Britt Snider as examples of other Church staﬀ who wrote or are writing in the intelligence ﬁeld. On

the workings of the Church inquiry staﬀ, see Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate

Intelligence Investigation (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), pp. 15, 25–26, 33.

24 Letter, Theoharis to author, January 19, 2006. Douglas Charles, one of Theoharis’s MA students,

identiﬁed the following historians of the FBI as having come from the same stable: Susan Dion,

Christopher Gerard, Patrick Jung, Francis MacDonnell, Kenneth O’Reilly and David Williams: email,

Charles to author, 15 January 2006.

25 Athan G. Theoharis, “The FBI’s Stretching of Presidential Directives, 1936–1953,” Political Science

Quarterly, 91 (Winter 1976–77), 654.

26 Theoharis, Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan (Philadelphia, PA:

Temple University Press, 1978), p. 156.

RHODRI JEFFREYS-JONES

27 Barton J. Bernstein, “The Road to Watergate and Beyond: The Growth and Abuse of Executive

Authority since 1940,” Law and Contemporary Problems, 40 (Spring 1976), page 58n3, page 62nn11,

12, page 63n16.

28 Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System

(New York: Knopf, 1980), pp. 204–211, 289.

29 William W. Keller, The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence State (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 6, 190; Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American

Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 171–172.

30 William Sullivan, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 203–204;

DeLoach, Hoover’s FBI: The Inside Story by Hoover’s Trusted Lieutenant (Washington, DC: Regnery,

1995), pp. 61, 299ﬀ.

31 Ronald Kessler, The FBI: Inside the World’s Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency (New York: Pocket

Books, 1993), pp. 484–485; Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (New York: St Martin’s

Press, 2002), pp. 400–411; Kessler quoted in The Christian Science Monitor, June 25, 2001; FBI veteran

William W. Turner’s review of Kessler’s The Bureau in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 19,

2002.

32 Burrough, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34 (New York:

Penguin, 2004), p. 248n.

33 Aldrich, Espionage, p. 5.

34 John E. Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage (San Francisco, CA:

Encounter Books, 2003), p. 197 and passim. The earlier evidential challenge posed by Haynes and

Klehr is encapsulated in their Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 1999).

35 Richard Gid Powers, Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI (New York: The Free

Press, 2004), pp. 24–25; Theoharis, FBI and American Democracy, p. 3.

36 For some examples of writing on CIA and foreign intelligence historiography, see Rhodri Jeﬀreys-

Jones, “Introduction: The Stirrings of a New Revisionism?” in Jeﬀreys-Jones and Andrew Lownie,

eds., North American Spies: New Revisionist Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991),

pp. 1–30; John Ferris, “Coming In from the Cold War: The Historiography of American Intelligence,

1945–1990,” Diplomatic History, 19 (Winter 1995), 87–115; Gerald Haines, “The CIA’s Own Eﬀort

to Understand and Document its Past: A Brief History of the CIA History Program, 1950–1995,” in

Jeﬀreys-Jones and Christopher Andrew, eds., Eternal Vigilance? 50 Years of the CIA (London: Frank Cass,

1997), pp. 201–223.

37 David Ray Griﬃn, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and

9/11 (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2004).

38 Len Scott and Peter Jackson, “The Study of Intelligence in Theory and Practice,” Intelligence and

National Security, 19 (Summer 2004), 139.

39 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unﬁnished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row,

1988), p. xxi. William A. Dunning’s inﬂuential work appeared in 1907: Reconstruction, Political and

Economic, 1865–1877 (New York: Harper). For a concise history of the Dunning School, see Foner,

Reconstruction, pp. xix–xxi.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE FBI

Intelligence ethics

Laying a foundation for the second

oldest profession

Michael Andregg

Introduction

The ﬁrst reaction to the idea of ethics for spies is often a big laugh or comments with

“oxymoron” in them. Spies lie, cheat, steal, deceive, manipulate and sometimes do much worse

in the course of their work, so this reaction is understandable. That masks a more important

point. The world needs a professional code of ethics for spies and other “intelligence pro-

fessionals.” So some are working hard to create one now.

A former operator asked, why have

intelligence agencies at all if you want to encumber them with rules? Because the nation is in

danger, and our world is at war with “terrorists” who don’t obey any rules at all. To win, spies

must be better than mere terrorists.

Before discussing that developing code of ethics, a brief review of the varieties of spy is in

order, since diﬀerent types of intelligence professional often have diﬀerent ideas of virtue

and vice. For example, those who monitor phone calls or read other people’s mail every day

often take great oﬀense when lumped into the same category as the “spies” who betray their

countries for us, or betray us to serve some other country. I will reduce the many diﬀerent kinds

of intelligence professionals into ﬁve broad types.

• Collectors gather information, data or both, usually by technical means like satellites or

from human agents, and feed it up a chain of command. Protecting “methods,” “sources”

and especially their own anonymity are cardinal virtues to them.

• Analysts process that information, and combine it with “open sources” information to

generate higher order papers or other “products” that provide their policy masters with

more useful information. Usefulness means timely, relevant and “actionable” as well as

accurate information. Avoiding “politicization” of their information products is an

important virtue to analysts. Politicization means altering one’s formal opinion to suit the

prejudices of policy makers, and this is a special but common sin among analysts.

• Operators go places and do things, sometimes very dramatic things like starting wars and

such, but more often they are doing quiet things they would prefer we not observe or

talk about. Of all the types of intelligence professional, operators are the most likely to

kill, blackmail, extort or torture in their work, and they often “handle” spies who are at

risk from their own governments. So guarding “operational security” is a core value to

operators in order to protect their operations, the people they employ, and themselves.

• Managers organize the work of all of these people and the budgets that support them.

Managers must contend with many bureaucratic forces, so their morality or lack thereof is

more familiar to us all. And ﬁnally,

• Policy makers, in theory, make the decisions that have the greatest impact. In theory, all the

others are working to support good decisions by policy makers in governments. The most

obvious policy makers are politicians, who also must contend with odd forces in their

work. Most have security clearances, but some do not. All lie; it is required by the job. So

in contrast to analysts, “truth” is far less important to most policy people than expedience,

or practical utility in their political struggles, 80 percent of which are domestic.

These types of real intelligence professional are all diﬀerent from the James Bond-like image of

a spy who sails into town in a cool car, steals secrets from rich bad men, grabs a beautiful woman

or two and leaves just in time to avoid the building blowing up. They are also diﬀerent from

the Mata-Hari image of a beautiful woman who trades sex for secrets and then kills the foolish

king or bureaucrat. The real spies also need a real professional ethic more sophisticated than that

found in James Bond movies.

Ethics is the study of moral logic and paradigms, but it is not just lists of rules or laws. If ethics

were that simple, attorneys would have a diﬀerent reputation than they do. In ordinary life we

can more easily observe the ancient moral virtues: be honest, don’t steal, kill or assault, respect

your neighbors, honor your debts and so forth. But the world of oﬃcial intelligence involves

activities in many grey areas of moral thought, and generates perplexing dilemmas where agents

must balance the national interest in security, which they are bound to protect, against some

other virtue like the ancient rules against lying, stealing, killing and so forth.

Classical Western philosophy as written by Plato, Aristotle and others concentrated on

identifying moral “virtues” and asked how these could be cultivated in civilized men. Later

Europeans generated doctrines that are now called “deontological” (or rule-based) as in Kant,

or “consequentialist” (based on the consequences of an act) of which a good representative is

the philosopher John Stuart Mill. To put these broad theories of moral reasoning into a small

frame, any serious decision involves three things: an actor, an act and consequences of the act.

Virtue theory concentrates on the actor, deontological theories concentrate on the morality of

acts, and consequentialist theories focus on what happens after.

These Western theories of ethics often ignore parallel but not identical thinking from

Asia, Africa and indigenous peoples world-wide. Buddha had many things to say about this,

for example, as did Confucius and Lao Tzu. There are also more elaborate theories from

Western tradition that are especially appropriate models for the spy world, like “Just War

Theory” developed by Catholic priests and theologians searching for their own guides to moral

clarity in diﬃcult circumstances. There are many connections and similarities between

“national intelligence” and war, so Just War Theory is sometimes used in training spies too.

At least, it is referred to occasionally! Such complex ideas are what philosophy courses are for.

With this sparse introduction, we will now turn to the major ways that spies or intelligence

professionals of any kind must struggle with the moral dilemmas most peculiar to their unusual,

but ancient profession.

INTELLIGENCE ETHICS

Covert action

The most serious ethical dilemmas occur in the realm of covert, or secret, action. A career

covert operator once told a colleague that “we use less than 10 percent of the budget, but we

generate over 90 percent of the bad publicity.” This is true because covert operations may

employ all of the dark arts, and are responsible directly or indirectly for millions of deaths

during the twentieth century. On the other hand, covert operations can also prevent wars from

starting and there is no accurate way to number the lives saved by such methods. This captures

the core dilemma of spies and spying quite sharply. Spies are extremely important to the

question of whether wars start or do not start, as well as to who wins and who loses. Con-

sequences for life and death can be vast. But measuring those eﬀects is almost impossible, even

after the events in question.

This is a problem for consequentialist theories of what constitutes moral behavior. If you

cannot really know consequences, how can you judge if an act is moral? If you could save a city

from a nuclear terrorist, for example, a consequentialist would usually conclude that it is

perfectly OK to torture that terrorist if one might obtain information enabling you to recover

and neutralize the bomb before it goes oﬀ. But who can know for sure, especially during

crisis moments? These situations, called “ticking time bomb” scenarios, are discussed in law

schools when they are considering the laws that (most say) strictly forbid torture under any

circumstances. The deontological group would generally conclude that if the law forbids

torture under any circumstances, well, that is the rule and it should be obeyed regardless of

consequences. Others conclude that it would be cruel to let a silly rule keep one from saving

thousands of innocent children. I leave the reader to determine what course of action the

virtuous person would pursue.

Let us consider a more complex case based on real events. During the early and mid-1980s

the US President Ronald Reagan decided that a political party in Nicaragua called the

Sandinistas who had deposed a previous dictator was too closely aligned with the Soviet Union

and should be removed. Simpler measures failed, but energized some in the US Congress,

who wrote amendments to national legislation prohibiting any US intelligence agency from

trying to overthrow the Sandinista government. Frustrated by these “Boland Amendments,”

the then-Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, authorized an “oﬀ the books” project

in 1983 run out of the National Security Council which raised tens of millions of dollars by

various clever and illegal means like selling American weapons to a country that was an oﬃcial

enemy at that time, Iran. This aﬀair became known as the “Iran-Contra” scandal.

That operation broke a great many national and international laws, but it is important to

recognize that it also accomplished its political goals. A “secret” army was created, armed, and

funded which came to be known as the “Contras.” They created such chaos in Nicaragua that,

combined with clandestine economic warfare and psychological operations from abroad, they

managed to push the Sandinistas from power.

Regardless of whether one approves or disapproves of that political goal, this case vividly

illustrates the dilemmas and the powers of secret operations. They won, by cheating. One

document that was written by a CIA contract oﬃcer (on loan from the US Army) and

published in tens of thousands of copies distributed to Contra troops, for example, called for

selected assassinations of mayors and attacks on humanitarian groups, schools and medical

clinics to demoralize Sandinista supporters. It was titled “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla

Warfare”

and it is well worth study by professionals interested in insurgencies or in developing

an ethic for spies that is higher than the gutter. To win the secret war, America was disgraced,

with powerful long-term consequences that continue to this day. No longer would the USA be

MICHAEL ANDREGG

seen as a genuine moral leader in the international eﬀort to establish and strengthen human

rights.

It has been a canon of diplomacy for centuries that morality has no place in international

aﬀairs, and putting ethical boundaries on projects like the Iran-Contra operation seems near

impossible. This is the reasoning of cynical men. In a world with weapons of mass destruction

(WMDs) and millions of people angry enough to use them, we must do better than that. So I

want to share the simple guidance of an operator I know well. His rules, based on experience

rather than books, are:

• First, do no harm, especially to innocents. (Innocents have a very high place in his moral

framework – this is not true for all operators or all “intelligence professionals.”) When

colleagues laugh, he tells them “Be an artist, not an oaf, and if you absolutely must; be a

sniper, not a bomb. Most missions can be accomplished without undue harm, and even

wetwork can be quite precise – stop excusing incompetence.”

• Second, and only if techniques under rule 1 cannot protect the people, chose the lesser

evil when moral dilemmas cannot be avoided. Thus if you must lie, cheat and steal to

protect the people, this is permissible with reservations. Torture, murder, extortion and

so forth should not be used except under the most extreme, compelling circumstances.

• Third, remember that the law of unintended consequences is real, and that perfection is

not possible. So, he urges us to remember that the means chosen to do a thing usually

determine the actual results achieved. Intentions matter little, consequences much, and

millions of people have tried to do good by doing a little evil ﬁrst. This almost never

works in the long run. Rather, one wins tactical battles while losing the strategic war.

• Thus he urges spies to go back to the gold standard rule of solving one’s problems

without doing harm, especially to innocents. Avoid harsher measures unless absolutely

compelled by extreme circumstances. The argument that good ends justify any practical

means to achieve them is a treacherous, slippery ethical slope. Down that slope lie the

rationalizations that excuse murdering doctors in clinics or teachers in schools or children

in a village as a method of war to accomplish political objectives.

Handling agents

America’s CIA has a category of career employee called a case oﬃcer whose primary job is to

recruit and to manage (or “handle”) spies from foreign countries (called assets or agents).

Avoiding more jargon, the core point of this section is to point out that these agents often have

families at risk, and a spy always risks his freedom or her life when s/he agrees to betray their

country to beneﬁt ours. This risk may be assumed for money, or it may be assumed for

ideological reasons or for other reasons, although money and politics are by far the most

common. Sometimes agents are blackmailed or may become victims of extortion and, in this

manner, pressed into serving their handlers, so coercion may be involved. But always the agent

has put his or her life in the hands of the oﬃcer who handles them. This puts enormous

responsibility on the case oﬃcer, and presents some extraordinary moral dilemmas.

For example, what do you do if your superiors order you to send your agent into a trap to

serve the larger interests of the nation? There is a reason some agents are called “expendable”

but that will not help you sleep better at night if you betray someone you have spent years

building trust with. On the other side of moral dilemmas, what do you do if your trusted agent

begins blackmailing you, by threatening to reveal your entire espionage operation to their

INTELLIGENCE ETHICS

counterintelligence people, for example? This could endanger many other agents in the ﬁeld,

maybe even you if you are in the country in question right now.

It is for reasons like this that “protecting sources and methods” is such a core value to so

many intelligence professionals. First, the eﬀectiveness of the operation is usually destroyed

if it is discovered. But also they recruit each other to take mortal risks sharing secrets when

the penalty for detection can include at best prison and disgrace, and at worst, torture and

death. They tend to recruit each other after long periods of earning trust slowly. But spying is a

business of deception and betrayal, so sometimes these arrangements go awry. This is painful

enough if it involves only individuals. If it involves war plans or national secrets, thousands

of people may die because of bad decisions made in the darkness of false, incomplete or

compromised information.

Analysis

Analysts are more like college professors who don’t talk openly about their work than like the

action commandos and sneaky divas called covert operators. Thus one might think their moral

dilemmas are small, and they certainly would prefer to think so too.

But this is not true. Rather, this is an illusion encouraged by the “compartmentation of

information” within oﬃcial intelligence agencies. Analysts send their papers into a kind

of black hole from which they seldom receive feedback whether anyone cared or took action

on their recommendations. But the opinions of intelligence analysts can have profound

consequences far from the desks where they were written. For example, one colleague spent

three years of his life researching ways to destroy the economy of a small and already poor

country. Economic warfare can have very profound eﬀects. While many papers are ignored

in oﬃcial intelligence as in life, it is escapism to pretend that such analyses are never used,

especially when covert wars are involved.

One cardinal sin among analysts has already been mentioned, politicization. Analysts are

never, ever supposed to color their analyses to suit the prejudices of policy makers, even though

policy people are often making very clear what they want to hear. Analysts are supposed to

“speak truth to power” “without fear or favor,” telling things like they are, no matter what. Of

course, reality diﬀers from theory here, since the easiest thing a policy maker can do (rather than

changing their own mind) is to stop listening to one analyst and start listening to another who

says what the politician wants to hear.

A reciprocal issue of especial importance to analysts is to avoid making policy oneself by

what one writes. This is easy to say, but hard to do. Analysts are supposed to remain as objective

as possible and to let the policy people do the policy. But being human beings, analysts

inevitably develop opinions and even political values of their own.

This can become a signiﬁcant moral dilemma when analysts warn about grave dangers,

but are ignored by policy makers intent on other objectives. Those who warn loudest may be

dismissed or just ignored by politicians who don’t want to hear contrary views or who have

simply already made up their minds on a course of action. Losing the ear of leaders is a serious

issue to analysts; it is a grave issue to others when life and death is involved. Whether Iraq had

active weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs before the Gulf war of 2002 or not, for

example, generated great controversy when such weapons were not found. A closely related

question was whether this was a failure of intelligence or of policy, since the policy makers had

made their preferences very well known before hand. Thus many analysts in the CIA and

elsewhere had to ponder what they should do when the leaders were clearly determined to

MICHAEL ANDREGG

pursue a course of action with great peril, and on false evidence, no matter what analysts wrote

or said.

Whistle blowers vs. leakers; treason vs. saving the nation from

mad leaders

To “leak” secret information to the press is considered a cardinal sin among those for whom

protecting sources and methods and also operational security are prime values. Yet to reveal

criminal activity among governments is considered a virtue among the media and many

citizens of democracies. When is a person bravely “blowing the whistle” on wrong doing,

and when are they merely “leaking” secret information for bad purposes? These two inter-

pretations involve exactly the same act, telling a reporter something that he or she wants to

write about, but that someone else wants to keep secret. Finally, leaking information is as

common as dirt among politicians. Who prosecutes them?

This dilemma is of the same kind, but much less severe than another which many intelligence

professionals have had to face. What should one do if the supreme commander becomes insane,

and orders things that put the nation itself at risk? Closely related to this is the issue of hubris.

Derived from a Greek word, hubris means “overweening pride” or “dangerous arrogance” and

it is an occupational hazard for kings, spies and professors. Any of these may come to believe

that they are so special or so smart that rules which apply to lesser people need not be obeyed

by them. Such overweening pride can lead to serious disasters if combined with power. Hubris

is also extremely corrosive to wisdom, which is quite a diﬀerent thing from intelligence.

Most intelligence professionals work for governments, or if not for governments for kings

and other supreme commanders. They are pledged, and paid, to serve those institutions and

individuals with great loyalty on some of their most diﬃcult tasks. What does one do if the

commander threatens the lives of all the innocents in his domain? Issues of nuclear war and

other WMDs make this not a theoretical question.

Here there may be (should be) a signiﬁcant diﬀerence between dictatorships, police states,

and constitutional democracies. In constitutional democracies all power is ultimately derived

from and vested in the people, and states are empowered in order to protect the people

primarily. In kingdoms and police states power is held by a single man, or by one political party

or government, not by the people per se. To legalists this is a very signiﬁcant diﬀerence, because

the relevant laws are certainly diﬀerent. But intelligence professionals are distinguished by a

degree of indiﬀerence to laws. At a deeper level, even democracies are ruled by men and

women with mixed motives, and even tyrannies require a substantial degree of active support

by the people they organize and oppress. What does one do if the sovereign goes nuts, and

threatens the very life of the state, and the lives of its people?

Do not expect an answer here, because this is the most delicate question intelligence pro-

fessionals must face, and its answer depends on many nuances one cannot truly address in an

academic exercise. But have no doubt there are reasons why sovereigns both value, respect, and

fear their intelligence communities.

Just be advised that people who deal in the life or death of millions actually have to ask

questions like that, and answer them. Like a commander in the ﬁeld who must decide whether

to blow up a building full of armed men who are killing his troops (plus a few dozen utterly

innocent children held as hostages) these are questions that tear hearts apart. What to do when

one must choose between evil alternatives? What to do when sacred values conﬂict? It appears

that the hardest questions are often those where two “good” values come into conﬂict. These

INTELLIGENCE ETHICS

are the same kind of questions whistle blowers ask. They have been taught from the beginning

that revealing secrets can harm many people far away. But they also see something criminal, or

dangerously wrong, which cries out to be revealed to the public that, in theory, the state is

created to protect. What should spies or junior commanders do if their leaders become insane

or grossly corrupt?

What is the responsibility of democratic citizens under the same circumstances? What about

the ordinary soldier, pledged to support his leaders and his team? What about ordinary people,

who also have great stakes in the life or death of their communities? These are diﬃcult

questions for anyone, but they are questions life presents from time to time. Citizens may chose

to answer or ignore them, but sometimes intelligence professionals must decide concretely

because the lives at risk are in their eyes.

Propaganda and psychological operations

The previous section may have left an impression that intelligence agencies rarely leak infor-

mation to the press. On the contrary, this is a primary operational method for inﬂuencing

political opinions. Amateurs call this propaganda, which is common as dirt in political

discourse. Professionals use a near-science called psychological operations, which is more

devastating precisely because such “PsyOps” are professionally designed, managed and

deployed with the resources only governments possess. The evolution from propaganda as

practiced by the Germans and many others during World War II to modern psychological

operations is one of the darker chapters of spy history.

Space does not allow even an outline of techniques involved, except to note that they employ

all the methods of advertising and public relations that are taught in business schools, as well as

darker arts employed to destroy individual people’s minds or to hoodwink whole populations.

Some of those darker arts were discovered during a period of great fear in America, when

apparently “brainwashed” prisoners of war prompted a massive eﬀort to ﬁnd drugs or other

methods by which individual beliefs and behaviors could be manipulated. That program, called

MKULTRA among other names, remains one of the least discussed chapters of the hidden

history of American intelligence. Of course, the Russians had their version too, and the British,

the Israelis, the Chinese and the Koreans who started this ball rolling. It appears that most large

intelligence agencies have some psychological operations capability in their inventory.

The primary ethical problem with psychological operations is that its foundation is cal-

culated lying. In theory, the ultimate goal of intelligence agencies is pursuit of “truth”

uncontaminated by the prejudices of top leaders, biases of the analysts, or by the propaganda of

other nations that are ever intent to conceal their dark secrets. In theory, bumblebees can’t ﬂy.

In reality, even simple propaganda often works, so it is routinely employed in statecraft. The

problem is that lies sent to alter behavior in other nations often “blow back” to contaminate

thinking among domestic populations too.

This violates a bedrock principle of democracies, which is that the people need to

know what is going on so that they can wisely select leaders based on realistic consideration of

the policies they propose. For this reason the CIA was expressly forbidden from conducting

propaganda operations within America when it was created. Unfortunately, even when the

letter of this law is followed, modern technology makes a story planted in an obscure paper half

way around the world instantly accessible to anyone who seeks it. Thus lies sown to bamboozle

others far away may quickly blow back to contaminate domestic thinking. There is a reason

many spies snort at public news.

MICHAEL ANDREGG

Despite these grave complications of propaganda and psychological operations, it is impor-

tant to recognize that there are some very good uses to which they may be put. For example, if

one is about to destroy an enemy army, what is wrong with bombarding them with surrender

leaﬂets ﬁrst? This is now a standard practice, and when thousands do surrender, their lives are

spared along with allied troops who would also die if compelled to destroy their enemy in close

combat. And is it not better for professional interrogators to use sophisticated and less brutal

means of persuasion to get tactical information from their prisoners of war, than to try torture,

which is ever a temptation?

Technology and the surveillance society

Not long ago, to bug a telephone required a human being to put a physical device on the phone

or physical phone line, and to do that legally required an actual warrant signed by a live judge

attesting to probable cause to believe that the owner was a danger to someone. Now the NSA

(National Security Agency) can tap almost any ordinary telephone just by pushing a button

thousands of miles away, and they do so every day. Controversy over the laws involved is being

overrun by technical developments which make it ever easier to monitor anyone, and as

importantly, everyone.

In fact, it is much easier to monitor anyone if you are routinely but secretly recording

everyone, which is the darkest secret of modern eavesdroppers. When the “Echelon” system

was adopted by the signals intelligence agencies of the United States, Great Britain, Canada,

Australia and New Zealand, they relied on trapdoors built into almost every communications

satellite deployed in space, or major relay station on the earth’s surface. These trapdoors split the

signals, sending a copy to massive arrays of supercomputers whose job was to scan everything

looking for keywords or codewords or simply picking oﬀ all communications to any designated

number for review by human analysts. That was 20 years ago; we have come a terribly long way

since then.

Today, the more electronically connected you are, the more accessible you are to automated

systems looking for “terrorists” or whatever they are told to look for. And it is not just phone or

computer data. The average person in London, for example, is photographed or videotaped

at least 50 times per day, by cameras installed to watch the streets and deter crime. Such systems

are incredibly useful for looking back when a serious crime has been committed, because

real culprits may then be observed, their faces analyzed by specialty software and coded like a

ﬁngerprint. Your cell phone can be used to track you, and a phone in a home can be turned

into a microphone for others to listen with, even when the phone is not being used for its

normal purpose. Technical enthusiasts drool at what modern digital devices can do, especially

when employed by the secret services of major nation states. Civil libertarians despair, and they

don’t know half of what is out there.

For just one more obvious example, your computer keeps the most detailed records on what

you look for, write or do, and the same kind of trapdoors that were built into satellites were

built into many mass market computer systems by agreement with the governments that could

say yes or no to many aspects of business important to large corporations. So if they want to,

they can peek from very far away and you will never know unless they knock on your door.

The surveillance society is here. The question for professionals and for ordinary citizens is what

to do about that?

One concept oﬀered by some signals intelligence people is that of “minimum trespass”

which roughly corresponds to the police ethic of “minimal force.” In other words, they urge

INTELLIGENCE ETHICS

their colleagues to pry as little as possible into the private lives of their citizens while doing

the business of looking for “terrorists” or other criminals out to do harm. This standard is

notoriously weak because “minimal” is a very subjective concept and there is no real guarantee

that the powers of surveillance won’t be used for private gain, or for those currently in power

to cripple those who aspire to power. The latter is fundamentally undemocratic, but ever a

temptation to governments anywhere. In police states, this is actually the main job of the

security services rather than protecting the people per se. That presents ethical dilemmas to

some, who quickly become not employed by the secret political police . . . or suﬀer much

worse fates.

A diﬀerent conundrum presents itself. When one can look at what nearly everyone is saying

or writing, one is immediately paralyzed by the vast volume involved. So most of the snooping

is done by automated software instead of by human beings, and even those humans who must

read the sifted gleanings are routinely overwhelmed by the volume of “potentially interesting”

but ultimately irrelevant stuﬀ that hits their screens. Second, to the consternation of professional

intelligence agencies, the best media and the best academics are now getting more accurate

answers to many questions faster than the professional spies. This is very disconcerting to

intelligence professionals.

The reason why this is so provides a clue to resolving the inevitable ethical tensions that

come when people spy on everyone. The best media and academics must collaborate with

others every day. So accuracy, honesty, and open information sharing are core values to them.

When reporters or professors make mistakes, these are quickly exposed by others in the

business, which is embarrassing. So when working on collaborative projects, these “open

source” professionals routinely ask each other to expose their mistakes while material is in draft

form, so that errors will be corrected before public release. This concept of openly sharing

information instead of keeping secrets and of collaborative searching for truth rather than

solitary, aggressive attempts to penetrate information barriers, is absolutely central to the ethics

and to the performance of top-quality media and academic people and institutions. Betraying

people you share with ends the sharing; this is the misery of many spies today.

Restoring a more healthy relationship between spy agencies more sharply focused on con-

sensus endeavors (like protecting the people) with the academic and media communities is the

key to a revolution in intelligence aﬀairs more fundamental than mere computer power. As

I write, Google is trying to create a global brain accessible to all. Wish them well, because you

can be sure that dark forces will also try to build the brain, but they would like to keep its power

entirely to themselves. This is the fundamental ethical dilemma for those in the electronic

intelligence domain today.

Codes of ethics for government agencies and commercial spies

There is a Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) that concentrates on those

who work for businesses, full-time or often as contractors. Their code of ethics is among the

simplest and has been reproduced in hundreds of places, so we shall begin this section there. The

University of Illinois has a collection of ethical codes from many sources at its Institute of

Technology Code of Ethics website, http://ethics.iit.edu/codes. This site was gleaned from Jan

Goldman’s excellent book on the “Ethics of Spying,” which has the unclassiﬁed versions of

ethical codes from most of the main American intelligence agencies, and of a few international

groups like SCIP, in its Appendix A. He also provides cases in Appendix B, which are especially

useful for realistic training.

MICHAEL ANDREGG

The SCIP Code of Ethics is:

• To continually strive to increase the recognition and respect of the profession.

• To comply with all applicable laws, domestic and international.

• To accurately disclose all relevant information, including one’s identity and organization,

prior to all interviews.

• To fully respect all requests for conﬁdentiality of information.

• To avoid conﬂicts of interest in fulﬁlling one’s duties.

• To provide honest and realistic recommendations and conclusions in the execution of

one’s duties.

• To promote this code of ethics within one’s company, with third-party contractors, and

within the entire profession.

• To faithfully adhere to and abide by one’s company policies, objectives and guidelines.

As you can see, there is nothing here about industrial espionage much less blackmail, theft,

assassination or the many other dark arts, except the injunction to “obey all laws.” If theory and

reality were more closely related, we would have little to write about!

Government ethics codes face a more diﬃcult problem, because many governments have

special laws for their spies that grant them immunity from laws that apply to ordinary citizens.

Some of those special laws can be found in the public domain, but many are secret. In America,

the annual Intelligence Appropriations Acts often contain classiﬁed codicils related to current

operations of political importance. Another source of special laws are “Executive Orders” by

the President, most of which are published, and a range of other orders that are more or less

secret. During Reagan’s time, these were called National Security Decision Directives or

NSDDs. The First President Bush called his NSDs, Clinton called them PDDs, and George W.

Bush issues NSPDs and HSDDs (the latter are Homeland Security Decision Directives). The

acronyms chosen do not matter: the fact that special and often secret rules are created for spies

does.

Furthermore, every national governmental spy agency expects its agents to obey most

domestic laws, but speciﬁcally empowers many to go break the laws of other countries. And

ﬁnally, agencies of police states may or may not have any legal boundaries at all on their

activities, but if any exist, these are widely seen as window-dressing only. So the gap between

written codes and actual practice is, as one might expect, quite wide!

A brief look at assassination is in order here. In 1976 US President Gerald Ford issued

Executive Order 11905 to speciﬁcally forbid assassinating foreign leaders, partly because CIA

plots to assassinate Fidel Castro had become publicly embarrassing, and partly due to the

historic memory of the murders of President John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King by

dark forces. To this day, despite vast international skepticism, the CIA denies any involvement in

the murders of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic,

Salvador Allende of Chile and a long, long list of other political leaders and ordinary people.

And who doubts that America wants to kill Osama bin Laden today (2006) whatever domestic

or international law says about that?

But let us be fair. “Targeted killing” is employed by many, many nations. The Russians

certainly killed Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov by inserting a platinum pellet loaded with

ricin (a specialty poison) into his thigh, and when they killed Chechen Rebel General Dzokhar

Dudayev, the US actually helped them home in on his cell phone which provided the target

data for the missile they used. The Israelis certainly killed most of the Palestinians who had been

involved in the murders of athletes at the Munich Olympics (along with an utterly innocent

INTELLIGENCE ETHICS

man in Lillehammer, Norway); and even the gentle French killed an innocent man who was

sleeping on a Greenpeace boat they decided to bomb in New Zealand. When innocents die, it

is always an “accident” in spooky-luky land. Back to American sins, we wanted to kill an

Al Qaeda leader in Yemen, so we blew up his car with a high-tech missile ﬁred from a pilot-

less airplane. Four other people were in the car including an American citizen, but guilt by

association is often assumed when intelligence agencies wage war. Death squads empowered

by intelligence entities murdered six priests, their cook and her daughter at the University of

Central America in El Salvador in 1989, and another assassin killed the Archbishop Romero

while preaching at his church in 1980. The list of people murdered in Latin America, Africa

and Asia alone by agencies of various governments would be too long for this book if it could

be written accurately. And when politicians desire a ﬁg leaf, some hire mercenary killers from

the contract world. So do not be deceived when governments say they have “outlawed”

assassinations. This is what propagandists call a “partial truth,” that is, technically true but quite

misleading.

Most of these assassins thought that they were obeying the laws of their governments and

whatever ethical codes their agencies employed for training. But deception and betrayal are the

business of spies, and the principal tools called tradecraft have always been extortion, blackmail

and murder or threats of murder whatever they say on paper or in public. So the presence of

secret laws and special codes for secret agents is a central problem for those who would attempt

to create a professional ethic for spies.

The oﬃcial codes of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the DIA and the US government in

general are full of excellent words like “integrity” and “honesty” and avoiding conﬂicts of

interest and such. This is not to denigrate excellent words and noble goals, but rather to

highlight the diﬀerence between legalistic codes and the core of moral thought.

In the nature of their work spies must deal with issues that challenge the best moral thinking,

and while most people who enter this strange business are not moral morons, they are also not

Snow White Bambi-kissers either. Many were military oﬃcers ﬁrst, so many are accustomed to

accomplishing missions as a primary value, some of which risk death of someone. So while

codes, and rules of engagement, or lists of do’s and don’t can help, they cannot ever deal well

with wrenching dilemmas like what do you do if terrorists threaten an entire city, but shield

themselves with babies? Or what do you do if the leadership is insane, or just so blinded by lust

for power or hubris that they would destroy society in their quest for some objective? What

does one do, when the ancient laws of God and the modern codes of men are inadequate to the

challenges before you? This is a question for you, dear citizen reader, as much as it is for spies.

Conclusion

Every era has pivotal forces or events that deﬁne that generation. The pivotal forces of today

are Peak Oil, Globalization and the technical information revolution that has so empowered

police states and the wealthy everywhere. As we come down from the peak of global oil

production, energy will become more expensive faster because the easiest, cheapest and best

has already been used. Globalization and the information revolution cause problems anywhere

to metastasize much faster than before, from emerging diseases to the latest device for spying on

your neighbor.

Rather than engage in the global struggle between those who have and those who don’t, it is

the sacred duty of intelligence professionals during this generation to rise above the habits of

the past. Your policy masters will give you many missions, some wise, others not. It is imperative

MICHAEL ANDREGG

for you to distinguish between the two, and to help your leaders to comprehend that the only

way to beat this crisis is to save almost everyone. The nation is in danger and the children are in

peril . . . from ignorance and hubris, as much as from any other forces at work on this earth. Be

professional, and protect them.

Notes

1 Ethics of Spying: A Reader for the Intelligence Professional. Edited by Jan Goldman, 26 contributors,

published by Scarecrow Press of Lanham, Maryland, 2006.

2 “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare.” By “Tayacan,” a pseudonym for a U.S. Army psycho-

logical operations professional who wrote this for the CIA for use during the Contra war in Nicaragua.

Original text can be accessed at a Federation of American Scientists website, http://www.fas.org/irp/

cia/guerilla.htm. A paper edition was published in 1985 by Random House, under the title Psychological

Operations in Guerilla Warfare: The CIA’s Nicaragua Manual, with essays by Joanne Omang and Aryeh

Neier (human rights advocates who put the text in contextual perspective). Like the CIA’s earlier

torture manual (called “KUBARK” and still used during the 1980s) they would prefer you not read it at

all, but especially not with “context” unauthorized by their publications review board.

INTELLIGENCE ETHICS

Part 2

The evolution of modern intelligence

The accountability of security and

intelligence agencies

Ian Leigh

Intelligence is an inescapable necessity for modern governments. Few states take the view that

they can dispense with an intelligence service and none is suﬃciently immune from terrorism

or the inquisitiveness of its neighbours to forgo a security service. It is true that a variety of

patterns for organising security and intelligence exists. Some states (for example, Bosnia

and Herzegovina, the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey) have a single agency for security and

intelligence (both domestic and external). Others have distinct agencies for domestic and

external intelligence and security, with either separate or overlapping territorial competences,

as in the United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary and Germany. More rarely, a state may have a

domestic security agency but no acknowledged or actual foreign intelligence agency; Canada

is the exemplar of this approach. A further variable is that either intelligence or security

services may have either a more pro-active mandate or be restricted to the gathering and

analysis of information. However, whatever the precise organisational structure or govern-

mental setting, security and intelligence pose a common set of challenges for accountability the

world over.

The basic problem is easily stated: how to provide for democratic control of a governmental

function and institutions which are essential to the survival and ﬂourishing of the state but

which must operate to a certain extent in justiﬁable secrecy. Sir Humphrey Appleby, the civil

servant anti-hero of the classic BBC television series “Yes Minister”, was parodying a bureau-

cratic maxim when he advised his political master Sir James Hacker that “Open Government”

was a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, in contrast to many other areas of governmental

activity, in the case of security and intelligence it is widely accepted that oﬃcial advice cannot

be transparent, otherwise operations, sources and assets will be compromised. This implies

corresponding restraint in the oversight and accountability of the secret world. Restraint

is perhaps the wrong word, for, due to the secrecy involved, the need for rigorous control is

greater not less than with more mundane government functions, such as education or transport.

The necessary secrecy surrounding security and intelligence runs the risk of encouraging

illegal and ethically dubious practices on the part of the agencies involved. The democratic

process itself may be subverted by inﬁltration of political parties, trade unions or civil society

groups. The privacy of countless individuals may be interfered with by the collection, storage,

and dissemination of personal data, whether accurate or ﬂawed. Ineﬃciency and corruption

may go unchecked. In the increasingly multi-lateral spirit of intelligence co-operation after

9/11 the risk has grown also of sharing information with discreditable regimes.

The discussion that follows ﬁrst considers the place of administrative and executive account-

ability, then the role of parliamentary accountability, followed by legal accountability. Finally

attention turns to the procedures for handling complaints and forms of independent review. In

all these ﬁelds we shall see that the challenge is to balance justiﬁable secrecy with accountability,

democratic governance and the rule of law.

Administrative and executive controls

In modern states the security and intelligence agencies have a vital role to play serving and

supporting government in its domestic, defence and foreign policy by supplying and analyzing

relevant intelligence and countering speciﬁed threats. This is equally true of domestic security

(especially counter-terrorism, counter-espionage and countering threats to the democracy

nature of the state) and in the realm of international relations, diplomacy and defence. It is

essential, however, that the agencies and oﬃcials who carry out these roles are under democratic

control through elected politicians, rather than accountable only to themselves: it is elected

politicians who are the visible custodians of public oﬃce in a democracy. The risk of a state

within the state, accountable to no one, is a real one, unless there are mechanisms in place for

ﬁrm control by elected politicians.

Yet there is an opposite and just as real danger: the temptation for politicians to use these

exceptional agencies to serve a domestic party political agenda. The possibility of gathering

information to discredit or inﬂuence domestic politics must be guarded against.

There is an inherent tension between these two concerns. Sensitive accountability structures

therefore attempt to insulate security and intelligence agencies from political abuse with-

out isolating them from executive governance. On the whole the solutions adopted by

democratic states deal with this paradox in two ways. Firstly, by balancing rights and responsi-

bilities between the agencies and their political masters and, secondly, by creating checking

mechanisms outside the executive branch.

Balancing rights and responsibilities

Eﬀective democratic control and policy support depends on a two-way process of access

between politicians and oﬃcials. Ministers need access to relevant information in the hands of

the agency or to assessments based upon it through intelligence assessments and, they must also

be able to give a public account where necessary about the actions of the security sector. Con-

versely, oﬃcials need to be able to brief government ministers on matters of extreme sensitivity.

Commonly on the ministerial side, intelligence legislation deals with the allocation of

responsibility for formulating policy on security and intelligence matters (within, of course, the

legislative mandate of the agencies); it also covers a right to receive reports from the agencies

and a reservation of the right to approve matters of political sensitivity (for example, co-

operation with agencies from other countries) or activities that aﬀect fundamental rights (such

as the approval of the use of special powers, whether or not additional external approval is

required, for instance, from a judge). In contrast, the agency may be under a duty to implement

government policy, to report to ministers and to seek approval of speciﬁed sensitive matters,

such as covert action. Ministers may set written policies or targets to guide agency priorities,

and be involved in processes of budgetary approval, reporting and audit.

IAN LEIGH

Approval of covert action is a special case deserving of mention. Covert action raises issues

of accountability for at least two reasons. Firstly, since this type of action is secretive it will be

diﬃcult for the legislature to control (even if legislators are aware of it). Nevertheless, there is a

legitimate parliamentary interest in action taken by the state’s employees and using public

money. Secondly, there is an ethical dimension. Historically, a number of covert action pro-

grammes have involved controversial strategies and techniques. The fact that these are covert

and usually illegal according to the law of the state in whose territory they take place makes the

temptation to abuse perhaps all the greater. It is therefore all the more important that elected

politicians set ground-rules for what is acceptable (for instance, compliance with international

human rights law) and are responsible for authorising covert action. For example, the US

Executive Order asserts a measure of Presidential control: “No agency except the CIA (or the

Armed Forces of the United States in time of war declared by Congress or during any period

covered by a report from the President to the Congress under the War Powers Resolution

(87 Stat. 855)) may conduct any special activity unless the President determines that another

agency is more likely to achieve a particular objective.”

In some countries, the executive is aided in the task of control by an Inspector-General, an

institution most often established by law and endowed with various rights and responsibilities

vis-à-vis both the executive and the parliament. In this context, the Inspector-General monitors

whether the government’s intelligence policies are appropriately implemented by the services

(Intelligence and Security Committee, 2002, Appendix 3 for a comparison of Inspectors-

General). These oﬃces exist to provide assurance for the government that it has all the relevant

information and that secret agencies are acting according to its policies. In other instances

(discussed below) they report to parliament rather than to the government.

A variety of safeguards on the agency side against political manipulation and abuse can be

used. One method is to give legal safeguards for the agency heads through security of tenure,

to set legal limits to what the agencies can be asked to do, and to establish independent

mechanisms for raising concerns about abuses. These provisions help safeguard against both

improper pressure being applied on the director and abuse of the oﬃce. Hence, it is common to

ﬁnd provisions for security of tenure, subject to removal for wrongdoing, as in the case of a

legislation example from Poland (Article 16, Internal Security Agency and Foreign Intelligence

Act 2002, Poland). Where staﬀ from security agencies fear improper political manipulation

it is vital also that they have available procedures with which to raise these concerns outside

the organisation. These include the right for oﬃcials to refuse unreasonable governmental

instructions (for example, to supply information on domestic political opponents) and whistle-

blowing or grievance procedures.

There are also commonsense reasons for a formal separation between executive oversight

and managerial control of the agencies and their operations. It will be impossible for political

leaders to act as a source of external control if they are too closely involved in day-to-day

matters, and the whole oversight scheme will be weakened. There is the danger also (seen

during the build-up to the second Gulf war) of politicising the intelligence cycle, with the

consequence that the analysis stage and the end-product will be less useful (Gill 2005). This

suggests that there should be a clear delineation of distinct but complementary roles for the

executive and agency heads. Canadian legislation embodies the principle in the Canadian

Security Intelligence Service Act 1984, referring to the director of the service having “the

control and management of the Service” that is “under the direction” of the Minister. Similarly,

Polish intelligence legislation clearly distinguishes between the respective competences of the

Prime Minister and the heads of the agencies (Art. 7 Internal Security Agency and Foreign

Intelligence Agency Act 2002).

THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AGENCIES

Checking mechanisms

The purpose of embodying checks and balances on executive governance of the agencies is to

enlist either a cross-section of political opinion or to involve politically neutral institutions.

These checks may take the form of external approval or conﬁrmation of certain decisions

or – somewhat weaker – a duty to inform external actors of sensitive or controversial matters.

The mere existence of such duties may serve as a deterrent and act as safeguard for the agency.

One safeguard is for external involvement or scrutiny of the appointment of the director of

the intelligence and security agencies. The head of agency will inevitably be a senior oﬃcial

position and it is important that the process of appointment reinforces and guarantees the status

of the position and ensures the necessary qualities of leadership, integrity and independence.

In some countries (for instance, the United Kingdom) the safeguards against abuse in oﬃcial

appointments such as this rest on conventions which, if broken, lead to political criticism and

possible censure by independent oﬃcials. Other countries employ formal conﬁrmation or

consultation procedures, to allow the legislature to either veto or express their opinion on an

appointment. There may be a constitutional requirement either that oﬃcial appointments must

be approved by parliament or, at least allowing them to be blocked by a parliamentary vote

(e.g. the practice in the US). In Belgium, the director-general is obliged to take the oath before

the chairman of the Permanent Committee for Supervision of the Intelligence and Security

Services before taking oﬃce (Act Governing the Supervision of the Police and Intelligence

Services, 1991, Art. 17). In Australia, the Prime Minister must consult with the Leader of the

Opposition in the House of Representatives concerning the proposed appointment (Part 3,

Section 17 (3), Intelligence Service Act, Australia, 2001 (Cth)). The aim of such provisions is to

achieve a broad political backing for the director’s appointment.

Another area for safeguards concerns political instructions. A legal requirement that certain

ministerial instructions be put in writing (for example, Canadian Security Intelligence Service

Act 1984, Sections 7(1) and (2); Act on the National Security Services 1995, Hungary, Section

11) can act as aid to accountability by preventing “plausible deniability” and even some

questionable instructions from being given in the ﬁrst place because to do so would involve a

paper trail. An example combining protection of human rights is the Australian legislation

requiring the ministers responsible for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, and the

responsible minister in relation to the Defence Signals Directorate, to issue written instructions

to the agency heads dealing with situations in which the agencies produce intelligence on

Australians: the Intelligence Services Act 2001, s. 8(1). In addition, a requirement that

ministerial instructions must be disclosed outside the agency may act a checking device.

Examples can be found in Canadian law, which requires them to be given to the Review body,

and Australian legislation, requiring them to be given to the Inspector-General of Intelligence

and Security as soon as practicable after the direction is given (Canadian Security Intelligence

Service Act 1984, s. 6(2), and Australian Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Act,

1986, Section 32B, respectively).

One important consideration in maintaining a bipartisan approach to security and

intelligence is to include prominent opposition politicians within the “ring of secrecy”. In the

United States and the United Kingdom intelligence brieﬁng of senior politicians (for example

in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq) is a relatively informal practice, but with obvious political

beneﬁts. In Australian law there is a formal duty on the Director-General of the intelligence

service to brief the Leader of the Opposition (Intelligence Services Act, Australia 2001,

Section 19).

Scrutiny of the security sector cannot, however, remain the exclusive preserve of the

IAN LEIGH

government alone without inviting potential abuse. It is commonplace, aside from their role in

setting the legal framework, for parliaments to take on the task of scrutinising governmental

activity. There is no inherent conﬂict between eﬀective executive control and parliamentary

oversight. Quite the contrary: eﬀective parliamentary oversight depends on eﬀective control of

the agencies by ministers. Parliaments can only reliably call politicians to account for the actions

of the intelligence agencies if ministers have real powers of control and adequate information

about the actions taken in their name. Where this is lacking, the only democratic alternative is

for a parliamentary body or oﬃcial to attempt to ﬁll the vacuum. This, however, is a poor

substitute because legislative bodies can eﬀectively review the use of powers and expenditure

ex post facto, but they are not inherently well equipped to direct and manage these matters,

whereas governmental structures are.

Oversight by parliament

The case for the involvement of legislators in oversight rests on several factors. The ultimate

authority and legitimacy of intelligence agencies rest upon legislative approval of their powers,

operations and expenditure. The security and intelligence sector should not be a zone sanitaire

for democratic scrutiny, otherwise there is a risk that the agencies may serve narrow political or

sectional interests, rather than the state as a whole and protecting the constitutional order.

Proper control ensures a stable, politically bipartisan approach to security which is good for

the state and the agencies themselves. Since the agencies have large budgets (the more so since

9/11), the involvement of parliamentarians can also help ensure that the use of public money in

security and intelligence is properly authorised and accounted for.

Although the case for parliamentary oversight is compelling, there are some risks. The

security sector may be drawn into party and political controversy; an immature approach by

parliamentarians may lead to sensationalism in public debate, and to wild accusations

and conspiracy theories being made in the chamber with all the attendant publicity.

Away from the public gaze eﬀective scrutiny of security is painstaking and unglamorous

work that may be unattractive to politicians who seek immediate public credit for their

contribution.

Mandate of the parliamentary oversight body

From a comparative international perspective the most frequent arrangement is for parliament

to establish a single oversight body for all the major security and intelligence agencies, rather

than having multiple oversight bodies for speciﬁc agencies. Where there is one single oversight

body this facilitates seamless oversight. Since diﬀerent parts of the intelligence machinery work

closely with each other, an eﬀective oversight body needs to be able to cross agency boundaries.

Correspondingly, oversight arrangements designed to track separate agencies can be hampered

if they lead in the direction of information supplied by or to an agency outside the legal range

of operation.

There are some signiﬁcant divergences from the single all-agency parliamentary oversight

body model, however. In the US there are separate congressional intelligence committees in the

House of Representatives and the Senate, each with legal oversight of the agencies (Johnson

2005). In the United Kingdom the Intelligence and Security Committee’s legal remit covers

only part of the intelligence establishment (Defence Intelligence Staﬀ, the Joint Intelligence

Committee and National Criminal Intelligence Service are not included in the legal remit

THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AGENCIES

of the committee). In practice, however, and with the cooperation of the government, the

Intelligence and Security Committee has examined their work as well (Leigh 2005).

The remit of these parliamentary oversight bodies varies considerably. Some have the power

to scrutinize the operations of intelligence agencies. Thus, both the US congressional oversight

committees as well as the Control Panel of the German Bundestag have the right to be briefed

about the operations of the agencies (Bundestag 2001). Where a parliamentary oversight body

is able to examine intelligence operations clearly, its reports may have greater credibility. It may

also be given greater powers (for example, to compel the production of evidence). However,

inevitably some operational detail will have to be excluded from its reports to parliament and

the public. Operating within the ring of secrecy in this way runs the risk of creating a barrier

between the oversight body and the remainder of parliament. There is also the danger of a too

close relationship between the oversight body and the agencies it is responsible for overseeing.

For example, although a legal requirement that it be notiﬁed in advance of certain actions by

the agency may appear to strengthen oversight, it could also inhibit the oversight body from

later criticism of these operational matters.

A parliamentary oversight body whose remit is limited to scrutiny of matters of policy,

administration and ﬁnance (as is the case in the United Kingdom) is able to work more readily

in the public arena and can operate under fewer restrictions on what is disclosed. This second

approach, however, detracts from one of key tasks of parliamentary scrutiny of the eﬀectiveness

of the agencies in carrying out government policy. To assess that eﬀectiveness, access to some

operational detail is necessary so that an oversight body can provide public assurance about the

eﬃciency of the security and intelligence agency in implementing published policies. This

applies also to auditing issues of legality or the agencies’ respect for human rights (as is the

case with the Norwegian Committee: The Act relating to the Monitoring of Intelligence,

Surveillance and Security Services, Act No. 7 of 3 February 1995; Sejersted 2005). Exercises in

parliamentary oversight such as these will appear hollow unless based on clear evidence about

the behaviour of the agency concerned.

The diﬀerence between oversight bodies designed to review policy and those concerned

with operational matters is inevitably reﬂected in the powers that such bodies have. This

explains why the approach in the United Kingdom and Australia has been to give a wide remit

and then to detail speciﬁc matters which may not be investigated (respectively, Intelligence

Services Act 1994, s. 10; Intelligence Services Act 2001 No. 152, 2001, ss 28 and 29). In the US,

however, the law provides a comprehensive list of oversight functions of the parliamentary

oversight body (Section 13, United States Rules of the US Senate Select Committee on

Intelligence).

Access to classiﬁed information

The extent to which a parliamentary oversight body requires access to security and intelligence

information and the type of information concerned depends on the speciﬁc role that it is

asked to play. An oversight body whose functions include reviewing questions of legality,

eﬀectiveness and respect for human rights will require access to more speciﬁc information

than one whose remit is solely policy (for examples of powers to obtain documents see the

[Australian] Intelligence Services Act 2001, s. 30.2(4)). Similarly, it will have a stronger case for a

right of access to documents (rather than information or testimony from identiﬁed witnesses).

These diﬀerences in role explain some of the variations in the extent to which oversight

bodies are given access to operational detail in diﬀerent constitutional systems. Some countries,

e.g. the US, provide that the executive has the legal responsibility to keep the Congressional

IAN LEIGH

intelligence committees fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United

States. Moreover, the US Congressional Oversight Provisions demand that the President keeps

the Congressional intelligence committees informed about all covert actions operations,

including signiﬁcant failures, before initiation of the covert action authorised by the Presi-

dential ﬁnding (United States Code, Title 50, Section 413). In the Intelligence Authorization

Act of 1991 the President promised to continue to inform the Congress in advance in most

instances, but he insisted on ﬂexibility in times of crises – as deﬁned by the White House

(Johnson 2005: 64–65).

Systems vary also in how they handle reporting of sensitive material. In the US, the onus of

being informed not only rests with the oversight body, but with the executive as well. In Australia,

in contrast, the Parliamentary Committee is forbidden from requiring “operationally sensitive

information” from being disclosed (Intelligence Services Act 2001, s. 30); requests for

documents cannot be made be made by the committee to agency heads or staﬀ members or to

the Inspector-General, and ministers may veto evidence from being given (Intelligence

Services Act 2001, s. 32). A power of veto of this kind eﬀectively returns disputes over access to

information to the political arena.

Adequate support is important to the success of parliamentary oversight. Some countries

have stipulated therefore that the oversight body is also entitled to obtain information and

documents from experts, for example in think tanks or universities. For example, in

Luxembourg the Parliamentary Control Committee can decide, with two-thirds majority and

after having consulted the Director of the Intelligence Services, to be assisted by an expert

(Art. 14(4), Loi du 15 Juin portant organisation du Service de Renseignement de l’Etat,

Memorial-Journal Oﬃciel du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg, 2004, A-No. 113). This allows

for alternative viewpoints to those of the government and the services to be considered.

Naturally, however, oversight bodies of various countries have made great eﬀorts to protect

information and documents related to sensitive issues (about persons) and/or about national

security from unauthorised disclosure. Unauthorised disclosure of information may not only

harm national security interests, but may also harm the trust which is necessary for an eﬀective

relationship between the oversight body and the services. This may be governed by legislation;

see for example, United States Code Section 413, General Congressional Oversight Provisions,

(d) and the Act Relating to the Monitoring of Intelligence, Surveillance and Security Services,

1995, Section 9, (Norway). It is also, however, partly a matter of proper behaviour of the

members of the oversight body in dealing with classiﬁed information with care and attention.

Leaks of sensitive material will almost certainly undermine the relationship of trust with the

agencies themselves and, therefore, adversely aﬀect oversight.

Membership of the parliamentary oversight body

The appointment of the membership of oversight bodies is inevitably a key factor aﬀecting

public conﬁdence in and the success of new oversight arrangements. Two factors in particular

enhance legitimacy. First is the question of “ownership” of the oversight arrangements, for

example reﬂected in the power of the parliament to make appointments and cross-party repre-

sentation. Second, there is the need for a clear demarcation between the oversight body

and the agencies overseen; this is often part of a more general “civilianisation” of transitional

societies. A particular diﬃculty arises in transition states: the presence of former members of

the security agencies on the oversight body. Where the services were implicated in maintaining

a repressive former regime this is bound to undermine conﬁdence in the oversight process and

is best avoided, if necessary by a legal prohibition.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AGENCIES

There is a clear distinction between those states where legislators themselves take on the

oversight role through a parliamentary committee (for example, Argentina, Australia, South

Africa, United Kingdom and the USA) and those where a committee has been set up outside

the parliament, whose members are not parliamentarians, but reporting to parliament (e.g. the

Netherlands, Belgium, Norway). The former may seem more democratically legitimate.

However, the latter allows for greater expertise and time in the oversight of security and

intelligence services and avoids the risks of political division and grand-standing to which

parliamentary committees can be prone. A third possibility should be mentioned also: in the

case of Canada there are proposals to supplement the long-standing (non-parliamentary)

Security Intelligence Review Committee with a committee of parliamentarians (Farson

2005).

There are various options for appointing the membership of parliamentary oversight bodies.

The head of government may appoint (after consultation with the leader of the opposition, in

the case of the United Kingdom; see Intelligence Services Act 1994, s. 10). The executive may

nominate members but parliament itself appoints (as in Australia; after consultation of other

party leaders by the Prime Minister: Intelligence Services Act 2001, s. 14). Finally, there are

countries in which the legal responsibility for appointment rests solely with the legislature, as in

Argentina, Germany and Norway (see respectively: Estevez, 2005; Law on the Parliamentary

Control of Activities of the Federal Intelligence Services [PKGrG] [1978; 1992, 1999 and 2001

amended version]; Instructions for Monitoring of Intelligence, Surveillance and Security

Services [EOS], 1995, Section 1). Although traditions vary within parliamentary systems

concerning the chairmanship of parliamentary committees, it can be safely stated that the

legitimacy of a parliamentary oversight body is enhanced if it is chaired by a member of the

opposition (as in Hungary, Section 14, 1, Act nr. CXXV of 1995 on the National Security

Services), or if the chairmanship rotates between the opposition and the government party, or

if the chair is chosen by the committee itself (as in Argentina), rather than being appointed by

the government (as in the United Kingdom).

Legal accountability

The previous sections have described the importance of the executive and of parliament in

relation to accountability of intelligence agencies. However, the third organ of the state – the

judiciary – also has a role to play, both as the ultimate guardian of the constitution and the law,

and, outside of court, in various review functions. This section begins with an explanation of

the need for legal standards, followed by a discussion of the role of the judiciary.

The need for legislation

The rule of law is a fundamental and indispensable element of democracy. Only if security and

intelligence agencies are established by law and derive their powers from the legal regime can

they be said to enjoy legitimacy. Without such a framework there is no basis for distinguishing

between actions taken on behalf of the state and those of law-breakers, including terrorists.

It is therefore appropriate that in democracies where the rule of law prevails, intelligence and

security agencies derive their existence and powers from legislation, rather than exceptional

powers such as the prerogative. This enhances the agencies’ legitimacy and enables parlia-

mentarians to address the principles that should govern this important area of state activity

and to lay down limits to the work of such agencies. Moreover, in order to claim the beneﬁt

IAN LEIGH

of legal exceptions, for the sake of national security, to human rights standards it is necessary

that the security sector derive its authority from legislation.

Within Europe the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”) – a regional

human rights treaty ratiﬁed by 46 states and interpreted by the European Court of Human

Rights at Strasbourg – has been an important inﬂuence in promoting reform. The European

Convention allows restrictions to the rights of public trial, respect for private life, freedom

of expression and of association “in accordance with law” where “necessary in a democratic

society” in the interests of national security (see Cameron 2000 and 2005). Additionally, if the

services possess the legal power to interfere with private property and communications, citizens

should have a legal procedure available for making complaints if any wrongdoing occurs. This is

one way in which states that are signatories to the ECHR can meet their obligation to provide

an eﬀective remedy for arguable human rights violations under Article 13 of that Convention.

As a result the European Convention has been inﬂuential in requiring signatory states to

introduce legislation giving a clear legal basis for the actions of the services in these ﬁelds and

to provide domestic means for challenging the actions of the services aﬀecting human rights.

Several states have been found by the European Court of Human Rights to have breached the

Convention where these laws were defective or where individual practices, such as telephone-

tapping or bugging, lacked clear legal authority (Harman and Hewitt v. UK [1992] 14 EHRR

657; Rotaru v. Romania, No. 28341/95, 4 May 2000, European Court of Human Rights; V and

Others v. Netherlands, Commission Report of 3 Dec. 1991). The Convention requires more than

a simple veneer of legality, however. The Court refers additionally to the “Quality of Law” test.

This requires the legal regime to be clear, foreseeable and accessible. For example, where a

Royal Decree in the Netherlands set out the functions of military intelligence but omitted

any reference to its powers of surveillance over civilians, this was held to be inadequate.

Similarly, in Rotaru v. Romania the Strasbourg Court held that the law on security ﬁles was

insuﬃciently clear as regards grounds and procedures since it did not lay down procedures with

regard to the age of ﬁles and the uses to which they could be put, or establish any mechanism

for monitoring them.

It is no surprise then to ﬁnd that over the last three decades many states have reformed

or introduced laws governing the security and intelligence agencies. Some recent European

examples include legislation in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2005), Slovenia (1994), Lithuania

(1996) and Estonia (2000).

The role of the judiciary

There are two main strengths to judicial scrutiny. Judges are perceived to be independent of

the government and, therefore, have the appearance of giving an external view which lends

credibility to the system of oversight in the eyes of the public. A traditional role of the courts is

the protection of the rights of the individual, and judges are well suited to oversight tasks where

the interests of individuals are involved, for example, surveillance.

However, there are a number of problems also. Some are in-built tensions in judicial review

of any governmental function, others are speciﬁc to the ﬁeld of security (Lustgarten and Leigh

1994: ch. 12). Judicial involvement inevitably means that sensitive data has to be shared outside

of the controlled environment of the security sector itself. Even if public proceedings in open

court are avoided, the judge, court staﬀ and lawyers may be required to handle the information.

The seniority and reputation of the judges involved may be suﬃcient guarantee that they can

be trusted with secret information (although some in countries judges are vetted; in others this

would be constitutionally unacceptable).

THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AGENCIES

Too intrusive control by the judges carries them into the executive sphere, i.e. it blurs the

separation of powers between the two branches of the state. The use of judges to conduct

inquiries with a security dimension in particular runs the risk of the politicisation of judiciary.

This suggests that judicial involvement may only be suitable for some functions, and not,

perhaps, where policy is a substantial element.

Legal control by the courts proper only operates within the limited sphere where a person’s

rights are aﬀected. Since much security work is below this horizon of visibility (e.g. gathering

information on individuals from public sources/surveillance in public places), the courts are

ineﬀective as sources of control in these areas. Moreover, by their nature the operations of the

security sector are often not apparent to the individuals most aﬀected (for example, the targets

of surveillance). Unless legal procedures, such as prosecution or deportation, are invoked these

people will therefore be unlikely to challenge the legality of the activities, and those activities

will remain immune from review. However, most security work is not directed towards legal

procedures and it is therefore likely to remain unchecked by these processes. In other countries

legal barriers eﬀectively prevent review; for example, in the United Kingdom evidence

obtained from telephone tapping is generally not admissible in court under the Regulation

of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, consequently the propriety of warrants for phone tapping

cannot be challenged by that route.

Several states employ specially adapted judicial procedures in a security context: in Canada

designated Federal Court judges hear surveillance applications from the Canadian Security

Intelligence Service and deal with immigration and freedom of information cases with a

security dimension (Leigh 1996). In the US the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has cast

judges in the guise of approving intelligence-related surveillance for nearly two decades. In the

United Kingdom designated judicial commissioners deal with some forms of authorisation

of surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 while others are respon-

sible for reviewing the system and the grant of ministerial warrants and authorisations to the

security and intelligence services.

Even where judges are used for tasks aﬀecting the rights of individuals there is a danger that

they will in eﬀect lose the qualities of independence and external insight through a process

of acclimatisation. For example, as judges hearing warrant applications based on security infor-

mation become familiar with the types of techniques, information and assessments used they

may become, in eﬀect, “case hardened”. This suggests a pattern of declining eﬀectiveness in

protecting individuals’ rights in practice. Evidence from countries which require prior judicial

approval of surveillance warrants such as Canada and the USA does not suggest high rates of

refusal. There may be little diﬀerence in the end result to approval within the agency itself or by

a government minister.

Some of these processes have produced innovations designed to balance “open justice” with

the state’s security interests. One idea, adapted from Canadian procedure, is the use of special,

security-cleared counsel, in deportation and employment cases, and (increasingly) in criminal

cases (Treasury Solicitor 2005). This gives protection for state secrets without totally excluding

any opportunity of challenge to the evidence on the applicant’s behalf (in the United Kingdom,

see especially the Special Immigration Appeals Commission). It allows a vetted lawyer to test

the strength of the government’s case even where the complainant and his lawyer are excluded

from parts of the legal process on security grounds. Such procedures have been commended by

the European Court of Human Rights as a means of satisfying Article 6 (the right to a fair and

public trial), even in security cases (Chahal v. UK (1997) 23 EHRR 413). They have, however,

received more critical responses from some of those involved in the role of special counsel and

from a parliamentary select committee (Constitutional Aﬀairs Select Committee 2005).

IAN LEIGH

These innovations apart, for the reasons discussed regular courts are not well suited as

instruments of accountability for or redress against security and intelligence agencies. This leads

naturally to a discussion of other processes for handling complaints.

Complaints processes

There is a clear need for some avenue of redress for individuals who claim to have been

adversely aﬀected by the exceptional powers, such as surveillance or security clearance, often

wielded by security and intelligence agencies. In addition, as an aspect of accountability, com-

plaints may have a broader role to play also in highlighting administrative failings and lessons to

be learned, leading to improved performance. Clearly, however, any system for redress needs to

be designed to prevent legitimate targets of a security or intelligence agency from ﬁnding out

about the agency’s work. Achieving this balance in a complaints system between independence,

robustness and fairness, on the one hand, and sensitivity to security needs on the other is

challenging but not impossible. The requirements of human rights treaties, and especially for

European states, the European Convention on Human Rights, with its attendant protection

of fair trial, respect for private life and the requirement of an eﬀective remedy also have a

considerable bearing on these matters (see further Cameron 2000 and 2005).

Diﬀerent oversight systems handle complaints in a variety of ways. An independent oﬃcial,

such as an ombudsman, may have power to investigate and report on a complaint against

an agency; this is the case in the Netherlands (Intelligence and Security Services Act 2002,

Art. 83). In some countries an independent Inspector-General of security and intelligence

deals with complaints against the services as part of the oﬃce’s overall oversight remit in a

rather similar way. This is the case, for example, in New Zealand (Oﬃce of Inspector-General

of Intelligence and Security, established in 1996) and South Africa (Oﬃce of Inspector General

of Intelligence, appointed pursuant to section 12 of the Constitution). In addition, speciﬁc

oﬃces established under freedom of information or data protection legislation may have a role

in investigating complaints against the agencies.

Ombudsman-type systems place reliance on an independent oﬃcial investigating on behalf

of the complainant. They usually exist to deal with an administrative failure rather than a legal

error as such. They give less emphasis to the complainant’s own participation in the process

and to transparency. They typically conclude with a report and (if the complaint is upheld) a

recommendation for putting matters right and future action, rather than a judgment and formal

remedies.

Less commonly some countries deal with complaints and grievances of citizens through

use of a parliamentary intelligence oversight committee, as is the case in, for example, Germany

and Norway (Sejersted 2005). There may be a beneﬁt for a parliamentary oversight body

in handling complaints brought against security and intelligence agencies since this will give an

insight into potential failures – of policy, legality and eﬃciency. Yet, if the oversight body is too

closely identiﬁed with the agencies it oversees, or operates within the ring of secrecy, the

complainant may feel that the complaints process is insuﬃciently independent. In cases where a

single body handles complaints and oversight it is best if there are quite distinct legal procedures

for these diﬀerent roles. On the whole it is preferable that the two functions be given to

diﬀerent bodies but that processes are in place so that the oversight body is made aware of the

broader implications of individual complaints.

In some countries not only citizens but also members of the services are permitted to bring

service-related issues to the attention of an ombudsman or parliamentary oversight body.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AGENCIES

For example, in Germany oﬃcials may raise issues with the Parliamentary Control Panel

(Bundestag 2001: 19–20) and in South Africa members of the service may complain to the

Inspector General.

Another method of handling complaints is through a specialist tribunal. This may be

established to deal with complaints either against a particular agency or in relation to the use of

speciﬁc powers, as in the United Kingdom (the Intelligence Services Commissioner and the

Commissioner for the Interception of Communications). Or complaints may be handled in a

tribunal-type procedure but by a specialist oversight body, as with the Security Intelligence

Review Committee in Canada. A tribunal of this kind has some advantages over a regular court

in dealing with security- and intelligence-related complaints: it can develop a distinct expertise

in the ﬁeld of security and intelligence, and follow procedures devised for handling sensitive

information. In view of the nature of the subject matter these are unlikely to involve a full

public legal hearing. In contrast, while some tribunals may give the complainant a hearing, he

or she is likely to face severe practical diﬃculties in proving a case, in obtaining access to

relevant evidence, or in challenging the agency’s version of events. To combat some of these

problems special security-cleared counsel have been introduced in Canada and in the United

Kingdom. These counsel have the task of challenging security-related arguments, especially

those aspects not disclosed to the complainant. This can help the tribunal reach a more object-

ive assessment of the evidence and the arguments.

Inspectors-general and audit

The ﬁnal area of accountability to be examined is the role of independent oﬃcials. Apart

from redress of complaints another reason for the creation of independent oﬃces is to pro-

vide impartial veriﬁcation and assurance for the government that secret agencies are acting

according to its policies, eﬀectively and with propriety. For this reason a number of countries

have devised oﬃces such as inspectors-general, judicial commissioners or auditors to check on

the activities of the security sector and with statutory powers of access to information and staﬀ

(Intelligence and Security Committee 2001: Appendix 3).

This notion derives from the US intelligence community, which now has around a dozen

inspectors-general. All are independent of the agencies concerned. There are, however, signiﬁ-

cant variations among them: some are established by legislation (for example, the Inspectors-

General for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense), others are the

creatures of administrative arrangements established by the relevant Secretary (for example,

with regard to the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Oﬃce).

Irrespective of this distinction some report to Congress as well as to the executive branch.

A number of these oﬃces have a remit that extends to eﬃciency, avoiding waste and audit, as

well monitoring legality and policy compliance.

Inspectors-general (I-G) commonly operate within the ring of secrecy: their primary func-

tion is not to provide public assurance about accountability, but rather to strengthen account-

ability to the executive. The Canadian Inspector-General is a clear illustration of this type of

oﬃce and the I-G is entrusted with unrestricted access to information in the hands of the

service in order to fulﬁll these functions (Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act 1984, ss

33.2 and 33.3). Likewise in Bosnia and Herzegovina the Inspector-General exercises “an

internal control function” (Law of the Intelligence and Security Agency of Bosnia Herze-

govina, Art. 32). To this end, the Inspector-General may review the agency’s activities, investi-

gate complaints, initiate inspections, audits and investigations on his or her own initiative, and

IAN LEIGH

issue recommendations. The Inspector-General has a duty to report at least every six months

to the Security Intelligence Committee and to keep the main executive actors informed

of developments in a regular and timely fashion. The Inspector-General’s powers include

questioning agency employees and obtaining access to agency premises and data.

In other countries – notably South Africa – the role is diﬀerent, i.e. to report to Parliament.

In this respect the oﬃce bridges the ring of secrecy: the purpose is to provide public assurance

in a report to Parliament that an independent person with access to the relevant material

has examined the activities of the security or intelligence agency. However, inevitably most of

the material on which an assessment of the agency’s work is made has to remain within the ring

of secrecy, although it may be shared with other oversight bodies.

Even some inspectors-general whose statutory brief is to report to the executive may

maintain an informal working relationship with parliamentary bodies; this is so in Australia for

instance and, as noted above, a number of the US inspectors-general report periodically to

Congress.

Whether an oﬃce of this kind reports to the government or to Parliament, in either case

careful legal delineation of its jurisdiction, independence and powers are vital. Independent

oﬃcials may be asked to review an agency’s performance against one or more of several

standards: eﬃciency, compliance with government policies or targets, propriety or legality.

In any instance, however, the oﬃce will need unrestricted access to ﬁles and personnel in order

to be able to come to a reliable assessment. In practice an independent oﬃcial is unlikely to be

able to scrutinize more than a fraction of the work of an agency. Some of these oﬃces work by

“sampling” the work and ﬁles of the agencies overseen – this gives an incentive for the agency

to establish more widespread procedures and produces a ripple eﬀect. Some also have juris-

diction to deal with individual complaints (as in Australia, Inspector-General of Security and

Intelligence Act 1986, ss 10–12).

A second independent review function concerns ﬁnancial propriety (Born and Leigh

2005: ch. 23). Both the executive and the legislature have a legitimate interest in ensuring that

budgets voted for intelligence are spent lawfully and eﬀectively. However, as with the handling

of complaints, it requires some ingenuity to devise systems for protecting secrecy while

nevertheless ensuring that auditors have the wide access to classiﬁed information necessary to

certify whether the services have used government funds within the law. Understandably

limited restrictions to protect the identities of certain sources of information and the details of

particularly sensitive operations may be imposed on the access granted to an auditor-general.

Primarily what distinguishes the auditing of security and intelligence services from regular

audits of other public bodies, however, are the reporting mechanisms. In order to protect

the continuity of operations, methods and sources of the services, in many countries special

reporting mechanisms are in place. For example, in the United Kingdom only the Chairmen of

the Public Accounts Committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee are fully briefed

about the outcome of the ﬁnancial audit. These brieﬁngs may include reports on the legality

and eﬃciency of expenditure, occurrence of possible irregularities, and whether the services

have operated within or have exceeded the budget. In many countries, the public annual

reports of the security and intelligence service (e.g. in the Netherlands) or of the parliamentary

oversight body (e.g. in the United Kingdom) include statements about the outcome of the

ﬁnancial audits.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AGENCIES

Conclusion

As we have seen there are some recurring issues in the design of oversight procedures. First

is the need to establish mechanisms to prevent political abuse while providing for eﬀective

governance of the agencies. Overall, the objective is that security and intelligence agencies

should be insulated from political abuse without being isolated from executive governance.

Second is the upholding of the rule of law in the sense of subjecting the agencies to legal

control. As in other areas, one key task of the legislature is to delegate authority to the adminis-

tration but also to structure and conﬁne discretionary powers in law.

The challenge for oversight and accountability is to adapt or devise processes that simul-

taneously command democratic respect while protecting national security. This is a theme that

runs through all of the approaches to accountability discussed in this chapter, whether by the

executive, to parliament, in the courts, or during complaints processes or independent audit

procedures.

A useful, if overly simplistic, distinction is between issues of policy, operations, and review.

Policy matters include the issues of: what constitutes a security threat; which actions should

be criminal; which powers should be available; which agencies should be established and on

what terms? On the other hand, the case for secrecy here is weak and that for public disclosure

as an aid to accountability very strong. Operations, on the other hand, covers issues such as:

should this group/country be targeted and with what priority; should this form of surveillance

be conducted on X? Operational detail aﬀecting the methods, sources and speciﬁc activities of

the agencies has a much more convincing case for secrecy. Operational matters are primarily

for the executive and controls would reside at the administrative level. Review takes place ex

post facto and considers, for example, whether the operational action was in accordance with

policy, proportionate, legal, economical, and eﬀective. Review, however, is more problematic, as

parliament, the executive and the judiciary all have legitimate interests in aspects of it.

These distinctions should not be taken too rigidly. The development of policy must be

informed by intelligence and operations which in some cases it may be necessary to keep secret.

However, where governments perceive it to be necessary, ways can be found around this:

witness the recent release of intelligence assessments in the United Kingdom in order to win

over public support for potential military action against Iraq. Another borderline issue concerns

the development of surveillance methods or technologies; these may raise controversial policy

issues which are diﬃcult to discuss publicly without rendering them ineﬀective by eﬀectively

giving notice to potential targets. There are diﬃculties too in fully diﬀerentiating operations

and review. The continuing nature of some intelligence operations makes it diﬃcult to draw a

line between authorisation and review, or to engage in review without compromising secrecy.

Nevertheless, and with those provisos, the distinctions between policy operations and review

can help to sharpen our understanding of accountability. They make clear that in policy issues

there is a strong democratic interest in favour of public discussion and accountability. Secrecy in

this ﬁeld requires compelling argument to tip the scales.

Although the case of operational secrecy is much stronger, that does not mean that this is a

road-block to accountability. It is right for the executive to set the parameters for security and

intelligence operations, and to be involved in the approval of controversial operations even if,

quite properly, the services are insulated from political pressure. Moreover, at the level of review,

independent oﬃces such as inspector-general can bridge the barrier of secrecy and provide

assurance for the executive, legislators and the public that operations are being carried out

eﬀectively, lawfully and in accordance with policy. Some countries have gone further and allow

parliamentary committees to review operational detail.

IAN LEIGH

No one level of accountability stands alone. They are interlinked, complementary and inter-

dependent. What is clear, however, is that with so many innovative models for oversight on

display, it is no longer open to any state to argue that the secret world and accountability are

mutually incompatible.

References

Born, H. and Leigh, I., Making Intelligence Accountable: Legal Standards and Best Practice for Oversight of

Intelligence Agencies (Oslo: Norwegian Parliament Printing House, 2005).

Born, H., Johnson, L. and Leigh, I. (eds), Who’s Watching the Spies? Establishing Intelligence Accountability

(Dulles, VA: Potomac Publishers, 2005).

Bundestag, Secretariat of the Parliamentary Control Commission, Parliamentary Control of the Intelligence

Services in Germany (Berlin: Bundespresseamt, 2001).

Cameron, I., National Security and the European Convention on Human Rights (Uppsala: Iustus Forlag, 2000).

Cameron, I., “Beyond the Nation State: The Inﬂuence of the European Court of Human Rights on

Intelligence Accountability”, in Born, H., Johnson, L. and Leigh, I. (eds), Who’s Watching the Spies?

Establishing Intelligence Accountability (Dulles, VA: Potomac Publishers, 2005).

Constitutional Aﬀairs Select Committee, Seventh Report for 2004–5, The Operation of the Special Immigration

Appeals Commission (SIAC) and the Use of Special Advocates, HC 323-I.

Estevez, E. “Argentina’s New Century Challenge: Overseeing the Intelligence System”, in Born, H.,

Johnson, L. and Leigh, I. (eds), Who’s Watching the Spies? Establishing Intelligence Service Accountability

(Dulles, VA: Potomac Publishers, 2005).

Farson, S., “Canada’s Long Road from Model Law to Eﬀective Oversight of Security and Intelligence”,

in Born, H., Johnson, L. and Leigh, I. (eds), Who’s Watching the Spies? Establishing Intelligence Account-

ability (Dulles, VA: Potomac Publishers, 2005).

Gill, P., “The Politicization of Intelligence: Lessons from the Invasion of Iraq”, in Born, H., Johnson, L. and

Leigh, I. (eds), Who’s Watching the Spies? Establishing Intelligence Accountability (Dulles, VA: Potomac

Publishers, 2005).

Intelligence and Security Committee, Annual Report for 2001–2, Cm 5542.

Johnson, L., “Governing in the Absence of Angels: On the Practice of Intelligence Accountability in the

United States”, in Born, H., Johnson, L. and Leigh, I. (eds), Who’s Watching the Spies? Establishing

Intelligence Accountability (Dulles, VA: Potomac Publishers, 2005).

Leigh, I. “Secret Proceedings in Canada” (1996) 34 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 113–173.

Leigh, I. 2005, “Accountability of Security and Intelligence in the United Kingdom”, in Born, H.,

Johnson, L. and Leigh, I. (eds), Who’s Watching the Spies? Establishing Intelligence Accountability (Dulles,

VA: Potomac Publishers, 2005).

Lustgarten, L. and Leigh, I., In From the Cold: National Security and Parliamentary Democracy (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1994).

Sejersted, Fredrik, “Intelligence and Accountability in a State without Enemies”, Born, H., Johnson, L.

and Leigh, I. (eds), Who’s Watching the Spies? Establishing Intelligence Accountability (Dulles, VA: Potomac

Publishers, 2005).

Treasury Solicitor, Special Advocates: A Guide to the Role of Special Advocates (London: HMSO, 2005).

THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AGENCIES

“Knowing the self, knowing the other”

The comparative analysis of security intelligence

Peter Gill

Introduction

By comparison with other social sciences the academic study of intelligence

is young. It has

been dominated to date by Anglo-American work with primarily an historical focus, especially

in the UK, and more work examining issues of organisational structure and process in the US.

In the last ﬁfteen years this has been supplemented by an increasing body of writing about

other countries, especially those in Eastern Europe, Latin America and South Africa where

regime change has been accompanied by some process of democratisation. Therefore what

we have is an increasingly rich array of accounts of national intelligence systems including

fascinating insights into processes of transition. Analyses of single agencies, companies, countries

and even non-governmental organisations involved in intelligence will always provide the

bedrock for intelligence studies but even where these accounts are collected together they may

amount to no more than juxtaposition. Although Glenn Hastedt pointed out ﬁfteen years ago

that the comparative study of intelligence was but a ﬂedgling,

it is still the case that too much

writing is structured with too little thought given as to how it might facilitate comparison. This

chapter does not attempt a comprehensive review of the intelligence literature but draws on

social science literature more generally in order to identify major issues and suggest a way

forward.

Why do comparative analysis?

We need to note, ﬁrst, the argument that we have no choice:

All science is comparative in the sense of depending upon analysis of multiple cases. Science is the

systematic observation of many instances of a phenomenon...

When people talk about comparative work, they often assume that this refers to cross-national

studies; this is not necessarily the case, as we shall see below, but it is true that particular

issues and problems arise in the case of cross-national work. Here, the ﬁrst reason for doing

comparative analysis (as with indulging in any science) is curiosity about how the world works.

But the point of comparison is not just to ﬁnd out about how other people do things but also

to ﬁnd out about one’s own country through the study of others, as Adda Bozeman put it:

“Knowing the self, knowing the other, and knowing how to measure the distance between the

two . . .”

Therefore comparative analysis is the ﬁrst antidote to ethnocentrism; to argue against

international study “elevates parochialism to the level of scientiﬁc principle”.

Second, classiﬁcation is the ﬁrst step of any science and clearly we are interested in the

classiﬁcation of intelligence systems. This requires the study of multiple systems in order to

generate the empirical material on which comparison can be based; some of these may be intra-

national, some cross-national. Classiﬁcatory schemes in turn depend on our use of models and

theory, as discussed below.

Third, any classiﬁcation will throw up similarities and diﬀerences that we need to understand.

But these cannot be understood simply by close examination of intelligence for

. . . intelligence is not an isolated activity. It is an integral part of government. It reﬂects the

character of national constitutions and the societies in which it is set.

Yet intelligence is just not any government activity – along with other security functions it has

a “peculiarly intimate relationship to political power”.

Therefore we need to examine how

national systems are related to the social, political, economic and cultural conditions within

which they have developed.

Fourth, this will help us to develop theory via our reformulation of problems in the light of

moving beyond our own country and culture, including understanding “the other” without

resorting to stereotypes or denying “diﬀerence”.

In our writings, many of us have identiﬁed

the problem of “mirror-imaging” as it aﬄicts analysts and prevents them from understanding

other countries – we must try to avoid a similar fault.

Fifth, while the blurring of national borders that has resulted from globalisation might

seem to have reduced national diﬀerences and thus the need for comparative analysis, the per-

ceived need for greater cross-national co-operation with many more countries than was the

case during the Cold War has dramatically increased the need for awareness of diﬀerent

intelligence traditions and practices. For example, this is required if intelligence-sharing agree-

ments are to be negotiated and even more so if joint operations such as peacekeeping are

contemplated.

Sixth, it is not just national boundaries that are blurring, so too are the traditional distinctions

between the “INTS” and the sectors within which intelligence is organised. Therefore, it is

no longer possible, if ever it was, to account for a national intelligence system simply in terms

of, say, its state sector foreign intelligence agencies. National systems need to be examined in

terms of security intelligence networks including foreign, domestic and police systems across

public and private sectors.

This is given added weight by the fact that in many areas, especially

the Middle East and Africa, the state is not the “decisive working unit” for intelligence studies

– it may be a clan, tribe, warlord or gang.

Seventh, Security Sector Reform (SSR) and within that intelligence reform, requires a

sophisticated understanding of the extent to which laws, institutions and practices may be

transferable from one country to another.

Great care must be taken that inappropriate struc-

tures are not foisted on countries in transition by international organisations, even if they have

good intentions, or adopted by reformers simply in the hope that the ambition of early entry to

EU and/or NATO will thereby be enhanced. Governing processes are complex systems and the

outcome of transferring institutions will be subject to various interactions, most of them

“KNOWING THE SELF, KNOWING THE OTHER”

unpredictable. In the worst case, the adoption of democratic forms may actually be regressive if

they simply provide a cloak of legality for unreconstructed authoritarian practices.

How to do comparative analysis?

Comparative work in social science reﬂects the general tension between more positivist or

behavioural approaches, on the one hand and interpretive or constructivist approaches on the

other. The former seek to generate general law-like propositions that can be subjected to

empirical research and validated or modiﬁed accordingly and has preferred to work quantita-

tively. The latter reject the possibility of generating useful generalisations and emphasise instead

the importance of understanding cultural speciﬁcity by means of qualitative methods, some-

times described as “thick description”.

Within intelligence studies, a similar debate has existed

between those emphasising the shared features of diﬀerent intelligence systems and those

stressing the enormous diﬀerences between them. The most signiﬁcant diﬀerences facing us are

those between Western and non-Western societies.

As far as the study of intelligence systems and processes are concerned, we have to recognise

the signiﬁcance of these diﬀerences and acknowledge the fundamental trade-oﬀ between the

respective virtues of complexity and generalisation.

For now, we are left with little choice but

to conduct relatively small-scale qualitative analyses since the large data sets used in, for

example, comparative voting and crime studies, simply do not exist. Even where statistics are

available, they must be used with due regard for the purposes for which they were prepared.

Peters notes ﬁve types of study that are considered to be comparative within political science:

(a) Single country descriptions

(b) Analyses of diﬀerent processes and institutions in a limited number of countries

units

(d) Statistical or descriptive analyses of data from a sub-set of the countries selected in order

to test a hypothesis

(e) Statistical analyses of all countries attempting to develop patterns and/or test relation-

ships across the entire range.

Intelligence studies has a signiﬁcant volume of (a) but their utility increases to the extent that

they deploy some common framework of analysis. Certainly, the value of collections of country

studies is much greater if the editors provide contributors with a brief rather than simply

requesting an account of the country in question. There is also a growing number of (b) and (c).

For example, we have had for some time comparative work that focuses on “surprise”,

on the

legal basis for intelligence

and, more recently, on the democratisation of intelligence.

We are

some way oﬀ developing (d) and I cannot imagine (e) in the foreseeable future.

Whatever our approach, however, our comparison must be adequately theorised if we are to

avoid merely describing diﬀerences. Theory and empirical work are inextricably linked:

. . . theory is a guide to empirical exploration, a means of reﬂecting more or less abstractly upon

complex processes of institutional evolution and transformation in order to highlight key periods

or phases of change which warrant closer empirical scrutiny. Theory sensitises the analyst to the

causal processes being elucidated, selecting from the rich complexity of events the underlying

mechanisms and processes of change.

PETER GILL

Even if we are contemplating a single agency or country case study, our work should be

theorised so that it will be of most use to other scholars embarking on comparative work.

While we may be a long way oﬀ generating the quantitative law-like propositions sought

by behaviouralists, we can make use of some core concepts that appear to have applicability well

beyond Anglo-American intelligence studies. I would suggest the following: surveillance,

power, knowledge, secrecy and resistance.

Surveillance is constituted by two components: ﬁrst,

the gathering and storing of information and, second, the supervision of people’s behaviour. In

other words, it is concerned with knowledge and power: “Much of the study of intelligence

concerns the relationship between power and knowledge, or rather the relationship between

certain kinds of power and certain kinds of knowledge.”

Arguably, all the non-trivial

study of intelligence is concerned with this relationship. It is not a linear relationship: some-

times “knowledge is power” while at others knowledge may inform the exercise of

power. Yet, as we have seen in the case of Iraq, at other times power may determine what is

“knowledge”.

Suggesting concepts have universal application is to invite accusations of cultural imperialism

but we need to start somewhere. Indeed, establishing the diﬀerent national understandings

of core terms is itself an important study in order to avoid “careless conceptualisation”.

interviewer and interviewee use the same words but understand quite diﬀerent things by them

we have a serious problem. This can occur even within one’s own culture but the danger

increases in line with the cultural distance between those involved – concepts do not always

travel well. Yet “surveillance” travels better than most.

In contemporary Western social theory surveillance is seen both as the central aspect of

the establishment of modern “sovereign” state forms

and of the more recent decline of

sovereignty as it is replaced by “governance” including the concomitant recognition of the

signiﬁcance of private forms of governance. Furthermore, studies of non-Western societies

show that surveillance is similarly central there: its philosophical basis may be crucially diﬀerent,

for example, rooted in the rejection of individualism, but its core goals – understanding and

control – are constants.

So, not surprisingly, global surveillance is argued to be an intrinsic

part of the general economic restructuring of capitalism that is referred to as globalisation, and

post-9/11 developments have served only to accelerate this already existing trend.

Secrecy is not just a deﬁning element of intelligence because it distinguishes intelligence

structures and processes from many other aspects of governance but also because its targets –

individual, organisational and state – seek to keep their aﬀairs secret. Secrecy may also apply

to power: some actions make no sense unless carried out with an element of “surprise” such as

arrests. But there are other, more controversial examples where actions are taken secretly in the

hope that responsibility can be disguised or “plausibly denied”.

Attempts to maintain personal privacy or business conﬁdentiality are forms of resistance to

the eﬀorts of others to collect information. But if privacy fails then lying and deception are

other forms of resistance. Evaluation or analysis is, in turn, an attempt to resist the attempt of

others to mislead. Resistance to other forms of power such as coercion may well take on a more

physical aspect but often these will be intertwined with the use of information. The central

point here is that the relation between surveillance and its subjects is dialectical: eﬀorts at

gathering information and wielding power (in whatever form) will provoke greater or lesser

attempts to resist. If resistance succeeds then fresh approaches to surveillance may be deployed

and so on.

“KNOWING THE SELF, KNOWING THE OTHER”

Pathways for comparative research

Surveillance is the core governing process that incorporates the central knowledge–power

relationship. Within intelligence studies our more speciﬁc research focus is a sub-set of sur-

veillance: the intelligence process. This is a commonly deployed tool already and is normally

characterised in terms of targeting, gathering, analysis and dissemination. Of course, this is an

analytical device; in practice intelligence is far from linear. Just how “process” is understood in

diﬀerent national systems is a fundamental research question. (Phrases in italic indicate headings

in Table 6.1 that appears below)

In social sciences the device of “levels” is used in order to simplify what is a highly complex

reality. The research elements correspond to the “levels” of analysis usually identiﬁed: individual,

small-group, organisational, societal and trans-societal. Each provides the context for, and is

inﬂuenced by, the actions and dispositions of those “below”. But phenomena or actions at any

one level cannot be explained simply in terms of processes or properties at lower “levels”: new

causal factors and mechanisms emerge at each level – the whole is greater than the sum of the

parts.

At each of these levels we can identify theoretical approaches that already exist within social

science and that can be deployed by scholars and researchers. Our choice of theoretical

approach will depend largely on the “level” of our analysis but, in order to develop our

discipline, analysts must test out alternative approaches with a view to identifying those that are

most fruitful. For example, if, at the macro level, we are seeking to explain the diﬀerent

capacities of national intelligence systems then an approach drawn from political economy

relating governmental structures and ideologies to national wealth would seem to be appro-

priate.

If we were interested in examining the conditions under which international

intelligence-sharing is most likely to take place, then relevant theories from international

relations would be appropriate.

Comparisons may be made along a historical dimension: it was noted at the outset of the

chapter that historical work constitutes the bulk of UK research and this has been much

invigorated by the continuing ﬂow of ﬁle releases that commenced in the post-Thatcher era.

Studies of single agencies, operations and countries at particular times are important both in

their own right and as potential building blocks for broader, comparative work but there are

signiﬁcant methodological diﬀerences between, for example, comparing diﬀerent historical

“snapshots” and examining the process of change itself, as in the work of historical

institutionalists.

Also, in the form of comparative analysis with which we are most familiar, studies may be

conducted on a spatial dimension. In order to build on the now extensive array of country

studies, the time is now ripe for more detailed comparative work, for example, at the meso level,

comparing who are recruited as intelligence oﬃcers to agencies in the same country or to

equivalent agencies in diﬀerent countries. Similarly, the impact of organisational cultures and

the phenomenon of “groupthink” might be studied intra- or inter-nationally. Phil Davies

provides an interesting comparison of intelligence cultures in UK and US with their relative

tendencies to collegiality or conﬂict and how these account for failures up to and including

Iraq.

But are “groupthink”, “turf wars” and other “pathologies” of the intelligence process

conﬁned to Anglo-American liberal democracies or are they also a problem in Rechtstaat

countries of Europe, or Asian countries with a more communitarian approach to matters of

security?

Analysts will use various research techniques as they focus on diﬀerent levels of intelligence

processes in order to produce the detailed empirical work we need but individual case-studies

PETER GILL

must be conducted with an awareness of the larger picture. We know already how important are

the mutual interactions between these “levels”: for example, how the organisation of intelli-

gence agencies reﬂects broader issues of political culture and regime type or how the formal

bureaucratic organisation of agencies clashes with the working preferences of oﬃcers working

in specialised groups. At the organisational level a particularly important issue for research is the

relationships between state agencies and those “beyond the state” in the corporate and com-

munity sectors. If cases are to be compared, there are two main ways in which this can be done:

taking those agencies or countries that are apparently similar and examining their diﬀerences or

taking those that are ostensibly very diﬀerent and looking for similarities.

Another approach

Table 6.1 A map for theorising and researching intelligence

Historical

dimension

Research element Research focus: intelligence process Theoretical

approaches

Spatial

dimension

context (a)

(trans-societal)

international relations; transnational

corporations; international co-operation

macro (a):

realism,

international

political

economy,

constructivism

nature of

regime

through

history

context (b)

(societal)

macro social organisation: values,

traditions, forms of organisation and

power relations, e.g., types of regime,

macro (b):

hierarchies,

markets,

networks;

realism,

idealism,

constructivism;

social divisions

(i) study of

intelligence

at diﬀerent

“levels”:

transnational

national

and of

transition

sectors of intermediate social organisation: meso:

local/

regional

between

regimes

setting

(organisational)

state:

departments,

agencies

corporate:

proﬁt-

making

corporations

community:

neighbour-

hood,

community

associations,

non-gov-

ernmental

organisa-

tions

(NGOs)

incrementalism;

rational action;

bureaucratic

politics;

cybernetic

systems; proﬁt-

maximisation;

risk-minimisa-

tion;

organisational

cultures

(ii)

comparative

studies

situated activity

(small group)

face-to-face activity in small work micro (a) social

psychology;

“groupthink”

self (individual) self-identity and individual’s social micro (b)

cognitive

psychology

Research

techniques

Taking “slices” across levels and sectors, applying theoretical approaches to case studies, for

example, comparisons between states, regime transitions, intelligence “successes” and

“failures”, modifying those approaches in the light of research ﬁndings and so on...

Source: Peter Gill and Mark Phythian, Intelligence in an Insecure World, Cambridge: Polity, 2006, p. 37.

“KNOWING THE SELF, KNOWING THE OTHER”

might be problem-oriented, for example, how do diﬀerent agencies or national systems deal

with the problem of politicisation? Hypothetical questions might be posed: if a minister or

political appointee orders an intelligence oﬃcial to carry out an intelligence operation that the

oﬃcial believes to be illegal, what happens? If a group of analysts believe that their product is

being ignored or distorted, what can they do about it?

The pitfalls of comparative analysis

Comparative work as between countries is, to put it mildly, challenging. First and foremost

is that our own location in a particular country, culture and language combine to give us a

worldview that will always struggle to comprehend “the other”. However, languages can be

learnt and countries visited so perhaps all is not lost. Nelken has distinguished between being

“virtually there”, “researching there” and “living there” as diﬀerent ways in which we might

try to surmount this problem.

Whichever approach is taken, language is a major problem

and this fact, apart from the relative size of both the intelligence and interested academic

communities, may well account for the fact that the overwhelming majority of intelligence

literature studies the Anglo-American countries and is in English. If the time and money for

extended visits to other countries are not available, then Nelken’s ﬁrst option is left. This may

rely on the study of documents – not always plentiful or enlightening in the intelligence area –

or on country experts. Given the paucity of comparative work in intelligence this is worth

doing but we must remember that local experts may have “interested as well as interesting

views”

or may miss factors just because they are so familiar.

Whether our sources are written

– oﬃcial, media and so on – or oral, issues of validity always arise.

“Researching there” has the advantage of giving the analyst ﬁrst-hand experience of the

country, and interpreters can be hired. Perhaps paradoxically, my experience (and of others

with whom I have discussed this) is that it can be easier to get access to intelligence oﬃcials in

countries not one’s own, but one must be beware the danger of being fed an oﬃcial view that is

highly contestable. The exoticism of “the other” may reduce us to the equivalent of intellectual

tourists. But, in any case, it is more diﬃcult than “at home” to understand the nuances in what

one is being told, especially if working in another language. “Living there” is simply not an

option open to many but clearly provides the best opportunity for an individual to carry out

a systematic and culturally sensitive analysis between countries. Yet analysts must retain some

intellectual distance – “going native” is no more helpful to the comparative project than

ethnocentrism.

Whatever the source of our information, there are procedures that need to be adopted in

order to reduce the dangers of misinterpretation: triangulation is required so that diﬀerent

sources are examined in order to provide conﬁrmation or disconﬁrmation.

When data can

be so hard to come by in studying intelligence, this can be seriously frustrating and, being

pragmatic, often one has to take chances with information that is not triangulated. Prior to

publication in these cases, the sensible course is to submit drafts to all interviewees and other

“experts” in the hope that someone will point out any serious errors of fact or interpretation.

Conclusion

We really have no choice: if “intelligence studies” is to build on its growing store of historical

accounts and institutional-legal descriptions, we need to get serious about theoretically

PETER GILL

informed comparative work both within and between nations and sectors. This is potentially

a very rich ﬁeld for development but cannot be undertaken purely for intellectual pleasure.

The issues at stake for intelligence reform (and regression) within nations and for intelligence

co-operation (and conﬂict) between nations are just too important.

Peter Gill is Professor of Politics and Security at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. An earlier version

of this chapter was presented to an Intelligence Studies Panel at the International Studies Conference, San

Diego, March 2006 and grateful acknowledgement is made to the participants for their helpful comments.

Notes

1 To the extent that deﬁnitions of intelligence vary, comparative analysis is hindered. At a minimum,

those carrying out comparative analysis need to make clear how they are deﬁning the term. Here,

intelligence is deﬁned as “the umbrella term referring to the range of activities – from planning and

information collection to analysis and dissemination – conducted in secret, and aimed at maintaining

or enhancing relative security by providing forewarning of threats or potential threats in a manner that

allows for the timely implementation of a preventive policy or strategy, including, where deemed

desirable, covert activities.” Gill, P. and Phythian M., Intelligence in an Insecure World, Cambridge: Polity,

2006. Of course, comparative analysis will examine also the other two senses of the term identiﬁed by

Sherman Kent: the agencies conducting the activities and their product.

2 Hastedt, G.P., “Towards the Comparative Study of Intelligence,” Conﬂict Quarterly XI:3, 1991, 55–72.

3 Bayley, D., Policing: The World Stage,” in R.I. Mawby (ed.) Policing Across the World: Issues for the

Twenty First Century, London: UCL Press, 1999, 3–12 at 3–4.

4 Bozeman, A., “Knowledge and Method in Comparative Intelligence Studies,” in Bozeman, A.,

Strategic Intelligence and Statecraft, Washington, DC: Brassey’s Inc., 1992, 180–212 at 182; cf. also Bayley,

ibid., 10–11; Nelken, D., “Whom Can You Trust? The Future of Comparative Criminology,” in

D. Nelken (ed.) The Futures of Criminology, London: Sage, 1994, pp. 220–243 at 221.

5 Bayley, ibid., 5.

6 Herman, M., Intelligence Services in the Information Age, London: Frank Cass, 2001, 138.

7 Cawthra, G. and Luckham, R., “Democratic Control and the Security Sector,” in Cawthra and

Luckham (eds.) Governing Insecurity: Democratic Control of Military and Security Establishments in

Transitional Democracies, London: Zed Books, 2003, 305.

8 Barnett, J.W., Insight into Foreign Thoughtworlds for National Security Decision Makers, Alexandria, VA:

Institute for Defence Analysis, 2004; Nelken, 1994, op. cit., 223.

9 This is clearly the case in, say, Canada, USA and UK. It is less true of, for example, France.

10 Bozeman, op. cit., 196.

11 Cf. Bayley, op. cit., 10; Born, H. and Leigh, I., Making Intelligence Accountable: Legal Standards and Best

Practice for Oversight of Intelligence Agencies, Oslo: Parliament of Norway, 2005.

12 For example, Nelken, 1994, op. cit., 225–226; also Pakes, F., Comparative Criminal Justice, Cullompton:

Willan, 2004, 14–16.

13 Bonthous, J.-M., “Understanding Intelligence Across Cultures,” International Journal of Intelligence and

Counterintelligence, 7:3, 1994, 275–311, especially regarding Japan; Bozeman, op. cit., 198–205; Hastedt,

op. cit., 65–66.

14 Peters, B.G., Comparative Politics: Theory and Methods, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, 5.

15 Ibid., 10.

16 For example, Betts, R., Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning, Washington, DC: Brookings, 1982;

Kam, E., Surprise Attack: The Victim’s Perspective, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

17 Lustgarten, L. and Leigh, I., In From the Cold: National Security and Parliamentary Democracy, Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1994.

18 Born, H., Johnson, L. and Leigh, I. (eds.), Who’s Watching the Spies? Establishing Intelligence Service

Accountability, Washington, DC: Potomac Books Inc., 2005; Brodeur, J.-P., Gill P. and Töllborg, D. (eds.),

Democracy, Law and Security: Internal Security Services in Contemporary Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003;

Bruneau, T., (ed.) Reforming Intelligence Across the World: Institutions and Cultures, Austin, TX: University

of Texas Press, forthcoming, 2007.

“KNOWING THE SELF, KNOWING THE OTHER”

19 Hay, C., Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.

20 Gill and Phythian, op. cit., ch.2.

21 Scott, L. and Jackson, P., “The Study of Intelligence in Theory and Practice,” Intelligence and National

Security, 19:2, 2004, 139–169 at 150.

22 Hopkin, J., “Comparative Methods,” in D. Marsh and G. Stoker (eds.) Theory and Methods in Political

Science, 2nd edn., Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, 249–267 at 259–260.

23 Dandeker, C., Surveillance, Power and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 1990; Giddens, A., The Nation

State and Violence, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985, 181–192.

24 Bozeman, op. cit., 198–205; Der Derian, J., “Anti-Diplomacy, Intelligence Theory and Surveillance

Practice,” Intelligence and National Security, 8:3, 1993, 29–51 at 34–35.

25 Cf. Herman’s spiral of threat perceptions, Intelligence Power in Peace and War, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996, 371.

26 Danermark, B. et al., Explaining Society: Critical Realism in the Social Sciences, London: Routledge, 2002,

60–61; cf. also Hastedt, op. cit., 62–64; Peters, op. cit., 43–46.

27 Cf. Johnson, L., “Bricks and Mortar for a Theory of Intelligence,” Comparative Strategy, 22, 2003, 1–28.

28 Hay, op. cit., 135–167; Hopkin, op. cit., 260–263.

29 Davies, P.H.J., “Intelligence Culture and Intelligence Failure in Britain and the United States,”

Cambridge Review of International Aﬀairs, 17:3, 2004, 495–520.

30 For example, Bonthous, op. cit.; Bozeman, op. cit.; Leishman, F., “Policing in Japan: East Asian

Archetype?” in R. Mawby (ed.) Policing Across the World, London: UCL Press, 1999, 109–125.

31 For example, Hastedt, op. cit., 68; Peters, op. cit., 37–41.

32 Nelken, D., Contrasting Criminal Justice: Getting from Here to There, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.

33 Roberts, P., “On Method: The Ascent of Comparative Criminal Justice,” Oxford Journal of Legal

Studies, 22:3, 2002, 539–561.

34 Bayley, op. cit., 6.

35 Peters, op. cit., 97–102; cf. also Hastedt, op. cit., 60.

PETER GILL

US patronage of German postwar intelligence

Wolfgang Krieger

The American involvement in setting up what eventually became the Bundesnachricht-

endienst (BND), today’s German foreign intelligence service, has long been common know-

ledge. From the summer of 1945 until March 1956 the US engaged, developed, and ﬁnanced

a German intelligence organization which was led by former Wehrmacht oﬃcers and

intelligence professionals and which essentially provided Washington with information and

studies on the Soviet Union and its satellites. The ﬁrst detailed account was published by the

key ﬁgure on the German side, Reinhard Gehlen, in his 1971 memoirs. Later publications

elaborated somewhat on that story but failed to add much because archival sources were tightly

closed on both the American and the German sides. No original documents from that period

were available until 2002 when the CIA released a “documentary history” prepared by Kevin

C. Ruﬀner of the CIA history staﬀ. A year later, and obviously in tandem with those CIA

releases, James H. Critchﬁeld published his book Partners in the Creation. Critchﬁeld had been an

important ﬁgure on the US side of that peculiar intelligence relationship, acting as an on-site

CIA supervisor of the Gehlen group.

Quite possibly those two eﬀorts to release original testimony would not have happened

without the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act which demanded the disclosure of all US

government contacts with Nazi criminals. This initiative touched on the sensitive issue of how

to label the Gehlen group. While Gehlen and his senior associates were never charged with

Nazi war crimes there was no way to overlook the fact that German military intelligence –

leaving aside SS-intelligence – was deeply involved in the brutal ways in which Nazi Germany

conducted the war. What is more, Gehlen’s organization harbored a number of individuals of

highly questionable background in the SS or the Gestapo or elsewhere in Heinrich Himmler’s

vast “security” empire.

On the basis of the source material released so far it is quite clear that the worst Nazis to be

employed or used by US intelligence were handled outside the Gehlen group, as several

American specialists have shown in their book US Intelligence and the Nazis published in

2005.

Nevertheless the disclosures demanded by the 1998 law could not leave the Gehlen

group unblemished and therefore it appears reasonable to assume that the work of Ruﬀner

and Critchﬁeld was an eﬀort to protect the German–American intelligence relationship as

much as possible. After all, Gehlen was at the head of the BND until 1968; his close associate

and successor Gerhard Wessel retired in 1978; Eberhard Blum, another former Wehrmacht

oﬃcer, who had joined the Gehlen group as early as 1947, headed the BND from 1982

to 1985. Beyond any doubt, therefore, German–American intelligence relations were

profoundly shaped by people who had directly worked for or with US intelligence for

40 years.

Although the German side has so far released no original documents on this most peculiar

intelligence relationship, the new American documentation ﬁlls many gaps in what is publicly

known about that remarkable history. It is now possible to strip away much of the layered

ex-post justiﬁcations which Gehlen and his faithful associates had publicized in order to glorify

their own role in the success story of West German history. Now we also see more clearly what

was done on the part of US military oﬃcers and intelligence oﬃcials. But we should not

deceive ourselves into thinking that everything has now been disclosed. The new material

leaves many of the essential issues hidden behind a foggy screen of archival denial. A careful

reading shows that the relased material does not only protect “sources and methods” but also

institutional reputations.

Here is how the Gehlen memoirs capture the origins of that intelligence relationship.

During the last weeks of the Third Reich a handful of oﬃcers from the Wehrmacht’s military

intelligence organization on the eastern front (“Fremde Heere Ost” or FHO) made

preparations to put their knowledge of the Soviet military at the disposal of the Americans.

They packed copies of their most valuable ﬁles into metal boxes, hid them in the Bavarian Alps,

surrendered to the American forces and eventually convinced some key ﬁgures in US military

intelligence to reassemble the former FHO ex-Wehrmacht oﬃcers in order to build up an

intelligence outﬁt, led by Gehlen, which would produce raw intelligence and some analyses of

Soviet activities in central and east-central Europe. Gehlen’s ultimate purpose was to be at the

helm of Germany’s future intelligence service.

No source material is publicly available which allows us to reconstruct what was on Gehlen’s

mind in early 1945. We can only speculate on the basis of his acts and of his later explanations.

If, indeed, he thought the Americans would urgently need to be told “the truth” about

Soviet communism he would only have subscribed to a myth widely shared at the time by

conservative minds in postwar Germany and indeed thoughout western Europe. Given its wide

acceptance among American critics of Roosevelt’s Soviet policies it may well have been a

transatlantic myth, which, in turn, is of interest here because it may shed some light on the

communalities which eventually evolved between the Germans and the Americans as they

faced the Soviet threat.

It also serves to remind us that the author of the Gehlen 1971 memoirs was no longer the

same person, mentally and perhaps even politically, as the ex-chief of FHO in 1945–1946 when

the German–American intelligence relationship began. In 1968, when Gehlen retired from the

BND and sat down to write his book, he was a highly unpopular ﬁgure in Germany, laden with

all sorts of BND “scandals and failures”. Since then various eﬀorts have been made to come to

grips with his biography and his record in intelligence, none of them entirely satisfactory to the

critical historian. In turn, this diﬃculty poses numerous problems in assessing the source

material released recently. But even with this caveat it is impossible to accept Gehlen’s own

claim, and the claim of his many admirers within the BND, that it was essentially his own

expertise and forceful personality which convinced the Americans to place him at the head of

German intelligence. As the new source materials overwhelmingly document, it was a much

more complicated story in which Gehlen’s role is signiﬁcantly less prominent than earlier

accounts have made it out to be. Among the most important yet so far unresolved issues remains

the question of the actual intelligence value of what Gehlen’s group did. By hiding “sources

WOLFGANG KRIEGER

and methods” from the public the present-day US intelligence establishment is in fact making it

impossible to answer that most obvious of questions.

This chapter explores what new information has now come out, how it ﬁts into the larger

picture of early cold war politics, and what its limitations are in explaining the peculiarities

of the German–American intelligence relationship. For the reasons indicated some of this will

have to be speculative, more focussed on phrasing questions than on providing conﬁdent

answers.

Diﬀerent from what Gehlen may have assumed, the US military had no particular agenda in

how it dealt with the remains of German military intelligence. It certainly did not pursue any

phantasies of continuing the war against the Soviet Union. Few American oﬃcials believed

that a confrontation with the Soviet Union was “inevitable”. Their interest in FHO derived

from that simple but powerful idea that military history was the essential resource of military

professionalism. Therefore one would harvest all the military experience which had been

accumulated on the Germans side. Whatever the Germans had developed in terms of

weaponry, tactical experience, intelligence and so on would be assembled and exploited

because it might ultimately be useful to the American military – somehow, somewhere.

Banal

as this conclusion may be, there is little or no indication to the contrary for the years 1945 to

1946, when Gehlen’s group was put to work for Washington.

The extent to which the US exploited German military hardware and expertise has long

been obscured by a rigorous policy of denying archival access. The same, incidentally, is true of

the other three victor powers who occupied Germany.

While it has long been known that

senior Wehrmacht oﬃcers were thoroughly debriefed and were asked to write numerous

military studies on their wartime experience, we have only begun to realize the depth of

intelligence exploitation and especially of intelligence relating to advanced German tech-

nology.

Therefore we are only beginning to understand what part the Gehlen group played

(or did not play!) in this wider context.

There has been the cliché that during and right after the war the Americans in particular, but

also the other western powers, had very little intelligence on the Soviet Union and greatly

beneﬁtted from what the Germans could tell them. Since the Gehlen group was the only

example of German–American intelligence cooperation “known” publicly, all the beneﬁt

somehow accrued to that project. Recent work by Richard Aldrich has reconstructed in

considerable detail the multi-year British–American intelligence eﬀort to secure Luftwaﬀe

overhead photography, which was taken to England and exploited by a very large staﬀ.

Quite

possibly, that project, with the help of dozens of Luftwaﬀe specialists, yielded much more useful

intelligence material than what could be gathered from Gehlen’s secret FHO boxes. While the

Luftwaﬀe photography and mapping covered a huge number of permanent installations such

as bridges, airﬁelds, power stations, military depots and so on, Gehlen’s order of battle tables and

situation reports essentially addressed tactical situations which had long passed. His order of

battle information contained numerous Red Army units which no longer existed. Other

American or British–American intelligence projects which targetted the Soviet Union must

have yielded considerable amounts of information. How much, we still do not know for sure.

But it seems clear that the German–American intelligence exchange took place in a much

wider context of exploiting German resources. It also gave the Americans many points of

reference from which to judge and to verify the Gehlen output.

From a considerable number of reports on the circumstances under which Gehlen’s group

came to work for the Americans one thing becomes quite clear. Gehlen’s initiative to surrender

himself and his documentary materials could be interpreted in various ways and did not

US PATRONAGE OF GERMAN POSTWAR INTELLIGENCE

necessarily indicate that he had left behind all thinking which had hitherto guided his work. As

the CIA’s documentary history shows, the American oﬃcials who took charge of him and of

his associates checked and rechecked the genesis of this oﬀer very carefully. Even as late as late as

1953 they had Heinz Herre, one of Gehlen’s closest associates, write down his recollections of

what had happened in 1945/1946.

On several occasions Gehlen was asked to describe, in fact

to justify, his relations with Walter Schellenberg, the SS oﬃcer and overall German intelligence

chief since mid-1944. At issue was an understanding he had reached with Schellenberg in

March 1945 to transfer both FHO staﬀ members and working ﬁles to southern Germany

for the purpose of organizing a German guerilla eﬀort along the lines of the Polish armed

resistance against Germany. While Gehlen claimed that this was a ploy directed at Hitler and

his entourage to cover the transfer of his assets, thus saving both his staﬀ and his ﬁles from

falling into the hands of the Soviets, several German oﬃcers interrogated by the Americans

conﬁrmed that a Gehlen plan for post-defeat resistance against the western forces had actually

existed.

This issue could not be resolved at the time and even today, six decades later, it is hard to

know what was on Gehlen’s mind in early 1945. Surely he needed an excuse to move his staﬀ

far away from the Red Army frontline. But what did he intend to do with it? Did he hope to

continue “the war against bolshevism” under US leadership? The beneﬁts to the Wehrmacht

leadership would have been obvious. Such a new military alliance would have amounted to

justifying the German war against the Soviets and would have made the German war crimes

into somewhat “exaggerated” eﬀorts to overcome Polish and Soviet resistance. In that way the

Nazi and Wehrmacht leadership might have been forgiven rather forced to stand trial on war

crimes charges as had repeatedly been announced by the Allied powers.

This logic points to the debate raised by the late Andreas Hillgruber in 1986 when he

asserted that German soldiers on the eastern front were genuinely motivated by their fear

of bolshevism rather than by Nazi propaganda and were ready to ﬁght the Red Army to the

bitter end.

Might Gehlen have hoped (rather than feared) that the war against the Soviets

would be continued? Was he thinking primarily in terms of the obvious beneﬁt which such a

constellation would have had for all but the worst of the Nazi and Wehrmacht leaders?

No documentation appears to exist which allows us to answer those questions. But they are

useful in as much as they call to our attention the mind-set of Germans who oﬀered their

services to the western powers. Their motives may have been quite far from noble. They may

have been unrelated to freedom and democracy as understood by the west – and later on by the

political leadership around German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. In other words, to make

Reinhard Gehlen the logical protector of the Adenauer government, as he later saw himself, is

to stretch one’s imagination unduly.

While the Americans were well aware of those potentially questionable motives they

focussed on the immediate beneﬁts of their new intelligence client. In fact they were, at least

initially, less interested in Gehlen’s grand strategy or even in his Red Army analysis. Among the

ﬁrst studies to be undertaken was a history of German counter-intelligence methods in dealing

with the Soviets. Among their cherished exploits were the manufacturing of a printing press

with Russian type, the theft of several hundred original pay books and the forging of several

Soviet army documents and stamps.

Next came the intelligence-gathering units which

Germany had employed on its front with the Red Army to collect information from enemy

civilians, from POWs and from radio intelligence. Of those groups the one headed by Oberst

Hermann Baun was the most discussed in 1945/46 though Baun’s proposal to make available

his agent network was exaggerated, given the tight control the Red Army established quickly

east of the Elbe river and the general turmoil in that area. His specialists on Soviet radio traﬃc,

WOLFGANG KRIEGER

however, were assembled on the outskirts of Frankfurt am Main and put to work for the US

Army’s G-2 as early as January 1946.

Getting control of Baun was Gehlen’s third leadership challenge after redeploying to south-

ern Germany and after convincing the Americans to “reactivate” parts of the FHO. During the

war Baun’s organization (Stab-Walli) had been independent of Gehlen’s FHO. In early April

1945, Gehlen and his FHO-deputy Gerhard Wessel visited Baun at Bad Elster to make a deal

with him with respect to the planned transfer to the Americans. Baun went along but resented

Gehlen’s claim to overall leadership. And many others more or less agreed with him on that

point, for Gehlen was neither a recognized Soviet expert – he spoke no Russian (and indeed

no foreign languages at all) – nor an expert in intelligence-gathering. FHO never handled any

agents or any radio intelligence or code-breaking. What is more, Gehlen had no experience in

counter-intelligence and indeed developed little understanding of that specialty even later on –

which was to get him into all sorts of troubles!

It was mostly Baun’s diﬃcult personality which convinced Army G-2 to favor Gehlen for

the leadership of RUSTY, a task which became increasingly diﬃcult as its operations were

expanded from handling an agent network in the Soviet zone of Germany to operations in

Austria and in other parts of eastern Europe.

Since RUSTY’s American patrons badly lacked the staﬀ needed to supervise and coordinate

its activities various problems developed which time and again put the whole idea of a German

intelligence outﬁt into question. By expanding so quickly in various directions RUSTY

became a heavy ﬁnancial burden on the Army. Poor management led to the hiring of

numerous useless, even dangerous people often engaging in black market activities. The Army

feared for its budget as well as for its reputation.

By the fall of 1946 a stormy debate evolved at the upper levels of US intelligence. When

Maj.-Gen. Withers A. Burress took over as intelligence chief of US Army in Europe, he

suggested that the newly created Central Intelligence Group (CIG) take charge of RUSTY.

But CIG was not prepared to have “any large scale US-sponsored intelligence unit” operate

“under even semi-autonomous conditions”.

Too diﬃcult to control, too expensive, too

much exposed to Soviet penetration, and too potentially damaging to America’s international

reputation – those were the main charges.

To end the experiment would have amounted to an indictment of senior army leaders like

General Edwin Sibert, Burress’s predecessor, who had made the initial deal with the Gehlen

group. And it would have come at a bad time when the Soviets had already shown a great

deal of unwillingness to come to a European peace settlement and when war-torn Europe

faced its worst winter of hunger and deprivation. On December 19, 1946, the CIG leadership

in Washington commissioned a more extensive study of RUSTY’s “value . . . to a peace time

intelligence organization”.

Samuel B. Bossard from CIG was given two months to prepare a

comprehensive report. In parallel, certain “German” ﬁles, particularly counter-intelligence

material concerning communists and refugees in Germany, would be cross-checked with

US-only material to assess their reliability and intelligence value.

Before Bossard arrived in Germany, US military intelligence tried to control RUSTY more

tightly. They issued an itemized “Assignment of Responsibilities” to Gehlen.

But too few

qualiﬁed US personnel was available for the task. The situation only began to improve some-

what when a large part of the Gehlen group was brought together, in December 1947, in a big,

fairly isolated compound south of Munich – which in 1956 became the headquarters of the

German Bundesnachrichtendienst in Pullach. When Bossard undertook his ﬁeld trip he found

an American lieutenant-colonel “enlisting the various skills of some 2500–3000 bodies”, that

is people undertaking intelligence work in “an area roughly embracing Stockholm, Prague,

US PATRONAGE OF GERMAN POSTWAR INTELLIGENCE

Soﬁa, Rome, Paris”.

He may have exaggerated somewhat, since most of the work was done in

Germany. But he could not possible exaggerate the lack of US supervision, since the afore-

mentioned senior US military oﬃcer was only assisted by a Captain Eric Waldman, who turned

out to be an important ﬁgure in that story, three non-commissioned oﬃcers plus a civilian

secretary. Apart from processing about 200 reports per month those people had to manage the

supplies, ﬁnances, quarters, transport, and much else for hundreds of German staﬀers and

their numerous people in the ﬁeld. The cost to the US tax-payer was estimated at some

US$47,367.29 a month or about $15 dollars per capita.

Was this a good bargain? Was the glass half full or half empty? Mr Bossard came to the

optimist’s conclusion. He assured his bosses in Washington that responsible accounting and

ﬁle-keeping was in place and that there were considerable intelligence assets all around eastern

Europe which made RUSTY much more than an operation for observing Soviet forces and

policies in Germany. After discussing the various American concerns with America’s most

unsusual intelligence arm, Bossard refered to its potential “as a German postwar underground

movement. Since [the] organization leaders have it within their power to resurrect former

German collaborators throughout Central Europe and [since] longterm agents have already

been planted in Soviet occupied territory, the organization could turn into a partisan band.”

By the same token, however, that German outﬁt could become a danger if cut loose from the

American purse, as Bossard added in his report.

Eventually, Bossard proposed a thorough reform but not a liquidation of RUSTY. Personnel

and projects should be reviewed. Those to be kept on should be more tightly controlled.

SIGINT components should be transferred to American SIGINT services (in the Army and

the Navy). In the battle between Gehlen and Baun a clear preference is expressed for the

former. (“[E]very eﬀort should be made on the part of the American authorities to allow G to

dominate the organization at the expense of B.”

) American military government as well as

British and French services should be oﬃcially informed of RUSTY’s existence, presumably to

ease political tensions.

When judging those recommendations it must be kept in mind that four-power policy in

German was still in limbo. While Soviet aggressive and subversive policies in eastern Europe

and the failure to implement key provisions of the 1945 Potsdam agreement were already

deﬁning US security policy a European settlement had not been completely ruled out by

the west. General Lucius D. Clay, the American military governor in Germany, forcefully

respresented that position.

If therefore Bossard stated: US intelligence “will have at its disposal

the nucleus of a future German Intelligence Service”,

he was not necessarily thinking of the

kind of western Germany which emerged in 1948/1949 from the fusion of the three western

zones of occupation. A united Germany, based on some sort of compromise with Moscow, was

still considered a possibility. Even less could one foresee in 1947 that a western Germany

founded in 1949 would have to wait until 1955/1956 before it could reestablish its own armed

forces and foreign intelligence service.

Another point deriving from those 1947 debates on US and German intelligence needs to be

placed in its context: the issue of employing SS/SD personnel. The origins are to be found

in the years 1944 to 1945 when US intelligence feared that Allied forces might encounter

fanatical Nazi resistance and that measures would have to be taken against the possibility of

clandestine Nazi stay-behind networks running violent operations against Allied forces as well

as against newly-installed post-Nazi German administrations established by the four victor

powers. To guard against this potential threat it seemed appropriate to build up an early warning

system consisting of mid-level and junior ﬁgures who were likely to have access to such

underground networks. Some of them had come to the attention of the Americans during the

WOLFGANG KRIEGER

chaotic ﬁnal weeks of the war when local commanders, and even some senior SS-leaders,

negotiated local cease-ﬁres and surrenders. (Operation SUNRISE in northern Italy, which

involved SS-General Karl Wolﬀ among others, is perhaps the best-known example.) Both

assumptions were reasonable under the circumstances: (1) precautions were required against

clandestine Nazi networks; and (2) cooperative people could be found and employed from

among the ranks of former SS and SD members.

It was therefore only logical that such people

would be engaged both in CIG, which had prime responsibility for anti-Nazi and anti-terror

intelligence, and in RUSTY, particularly in its counter-intelligence side. The latter point

remained relevant for some time since Soviet behavior toward former SD/SS people was

unknown. (As it turned out they also employed a considerable number of them for intelligence

as well as for scientiﬁc research.)

When, however, such clandestine Nazi operations did not materialize US intelligence was

burdened with those unpleasant people. Clearly, one did not wish to discharge them summarily

since many had useful contacts to ex-Nazis employed by the Soviets and to anti-communist

groups around Europe. As Bossard wrote: “[E]very instant of employment of a former member

of the Nazi party or the SS should be made a separate case for consideration and the employ-

ment of individuals in this category should be restricted to the agent level as far as possible.”

Keep them away from the center but leave at least some of them in the ﬁeld! – that was his

recommendation.

In Washington the Bossard report met with considerable scepticism, particularly among

civilians. But US military intelligence did not wish to lose RUSTY, particularly the tactical

intelligence on Soviet forces. Its chief, General Stephen Chamberlin, insisted “that, if necessary,

he thought G-2, EUCOM, could run the operation.”

On 26 June 1947, at a meeting of

military and civilian intelligence chiefs in Washington, it was decided to do just that as an

interim measure. More study would be needed to consider a large-scale restructuring. In

December 1947 a military unit named the “7821st Composite Group” was founded in Pullach,

near Munich, where RUSTY would now be centered.

During 1948 the problems associated with RUSTY remained but the importance of its

tactical intelligence became a critical element in American policy during the Berlin crisis. In

fact, it may well have been a precondition for initiating and sustaining the Berlin airlift. By

observing each and every Soviet unit deployed around Berlin Gehlen’s agents could be relied

on to provide suﬃcient advance warning in case of a planned Soviet attack. In addition they

had access to the top echelon German communists who were in constant touch with local

Soviet military commanders. Across the open borders of the four Berlin sectors intelligence

reports could be received frequently and in person from many of the agents.

Without such frequent and timely reporting the airlift might have been considered too risky.

After all, the US committed a vast number of modern US transport aircraft, putting them

almost undefended within easy reach of Soviet tactical air units. Thus the Berlin airlift is a

classical example where intelligence made it possible for decision-makers to take considerable

military risks for the beneﬁt of a non-military political strategy. In this case the focus was on

demonstrating to Stalin that he could not grab West Berlin or West Germany by political means

– that is without risking major war.

In November 1948, right in the middle of the Berlin crisis, a new eﬀort was made to evaluate

the entire RUSTY operation. James Critchﬁeld, an Army colonel with extensive experience in

post-1945 intelligence work around Europe, was put in charge of supervising RUSTY.

Critchﬁeld had recently joined the CIA and began to work hard to overcome anti-Gehlen

feelings in Washington. His support for Gehlen and his ex-Wehrmacht entourage is evident

from his ﬁrst cable reports. He strongly emphasizes the tactical value of RUSTY’s intelligence

US PATRONAGE OF GERMAN POSTWAR INTELLIGENCE

work: “Airforce [ha]s greatest interest in RUSTY and in results of RUSTY monitoring, DF-ing

[direction ﬁnding] and cryptoanalyzing Soviet air force radio traﬃc which is only source of

timely info[rmation] on Soviet tactical air activity in central Europe. . . . Airforce has further

suggested that RUSTY look into possibilities of developing air crew evacuation and escape

routes out of [the] USSR.

. . . In the strategic ﬁeld RUSTY is doing valuable work in the

preparation of target folders for [the] Air Force.”

From his reporting we also learn that RUSTY had “completed [its] detailed emergency plan

to be implemented in [the] event of war [with the Soviet Union].” It provided for relocating its

headquarters from Pullach to Switzerland and on to Spain. This had been coordinated “on [an]

oﬃcial level with [the] Swiss, Spanish and French . . .” – particularly with a view toward

continuing “collection eﬀort and radio communications from eastern and western Germany.”

Moreover, that plan had been integrated with EUCOM’s emergency plan.

Apart from violating Swiss neutrality this plan appears to indicate that France, or at least

some leading ﬁgures in the military as well as in foreign intelligence, was much more closely

associated with Anglo-Saxon planning and thinking than is usually assumed by historians.

This included secret preparations for German rearmament, complete with a revived German

intelligence system. As Critchﬁeld emphasized in his cable, the 4,000 people involved in

RUSTY were an important political factor with respect to Germany’s future. “Another factor

is that RUSTY has closests ties with German general staﬀ oﬃcers throughout Germany. If

Germany will, in any eventuality, play a role in a western European military alliance this factor

[is] important.”

This means that Critchﬁeld viewed the hiring of senior German Wehrmacht

oﬃcers no longer as a convenient way of acquiring intelligence expertise but as a hidden eﬀort

to recruit the nucleus of a future German military establishment and – most importantly – of

bringing it under the direct inﬂuence of the Americans. He saw in RUSTY a far-reaching

agenda related to the future of Germany and western European defense – far beyond the

original interest in German military expertise resulting from her war against the Soviet Union

and quite apart from the intelligence value the Gehlen group may or may not have had for

US forces in Germany.

It is this message which ﬁnally gets the CIA leadership interested in taking RUSTY under its

wings. Here was a way for the CIA to get involved in foreign policy-making. And here was also

a way in which it could acquire a piece of military intelligence work, a domain which the

Pentagon did not happily share with anyone. Of course there were serious risks attached to

this new relationship. RUSTY had grown much too fast and in too chaotic a fashion to allow

for the kind of careful screening and vetting which intelligence services like to see in their

recruiting and promotions. As Donald Galloway, the CIA’s assistant director of special

operations, wrote to his DCI on December 21, 1948: “[T]he security and basic orientation

of RUSTY is most dubious . . . we do not know very much about the inner workings of

the RUSTY organization, and it is probable that the [US] Army does not either . . . we might

well lay CIA open to wholesale penetration . . . [and] . . . we have no idea whether or not the

Russians are feeding deception into the RUSTY pipeline.”

In the ﬁrst half of 1949 the transfer to CIA was delayed because General Clay did not wish

for the CIA to operate in Germany on such a large scale, in potential rivalry with US military

government run by the US Army, and with such a politically questionable organization as

RUSTY.

But with Clay’s departure from Germany and the establishment of a German

government the Army’s administrative and political role was largely reduced anyhow. Reinhard

Gehlen used this transition to request a thorough review of his relationship with the Americans.

He did not wish to continue being subordinate to US military intelligence, given its narrow

interests and its lack of coordination, aggravated at times by incompetent US supervisory

WOLFGANG KRIEGER

oﬃcers. But there was also a more fundamental political issue to be resolved. If Germany, or

at least western Germany, was about to have a freely elected government based on a German

constitution and on German laws, though still supervised by an Allied High Commission,

German nationals could not serve – on their own territory – a foreign intelligence organization

without some sort of consent by the German government.

For these reasons Gehlen and the CIA concluded a written agreement, based on a draft on

June 13, 1949 and followed by an exchange of letters.

Such a contractual basis is common in

intelligence cooperation between nations. For example, the most extensive known example

involving the United States, that is their cooperation with the British since the 1940s, was based

on separate agreements for each and every project. In the case of the German–American

cooperation before 1955/1956, however, the west German government could not formally be a

party because it was not fully sovereign in matters of foreign and security policy. Thus the the

Gehlen–CIA agreements were of a special nature both in legal and in political terms. From

the available documents it is very clear that 1949 marked a turning point. And it did so not

simply because CIA took over from the US Army but because there was now a west German

government, headed since September 15, 1949 by Konrad Adenauer.

The prestige and credibility of that government was a huge stake for Washington and for its

British and French allies. To support and to preserve it was inﬁnitely more important than any

potential gains from the CIA–Gehlen relationship. And since Adenauer obviously had much

more to gain from getting on well with those three powers than from dealing with the “Gehlen

Organization”, as RUSTY now came to be called, Gehlen’s political leverage was very

limited.

Indeed, it is hard to see how his organization could have lasted until 1956 had it

not been for the aggressive communist policies in Asia, as exempliﬁed by Mao’s victory in the

Chinese civil war and in the Korean war soon thereafter, and for the new threat which Soviet

nuclear weapons posed to western Europe in particular.

Though many of the CIA–Gehlen agreements are of a technical and book-keeping nature,

a few points from them deserve to be highlighted because they characterize the scope of this

changed intelligence relationship.

Gehlen undertook to direct his organization “solely against communist Russia and her

satellite governments . . ., [to work] in the interest of the German people in combatting

communism . . . [and] to ensure that the acceptance and support of this project by the German

government is obtained.” In other words, he did not wish to engage in intelligence work of

interest only to the US and unrelated to Germany. In return, the Americans insisted on

controlling Gehlen’s relations with any other foreign power and on having access to the

“complete details of operational activities.”

The ﬁnancial picture had already changed after June 1948, with the introduction of the

Deutschmark, ending an era of uncontrolled inﬂation under the “cigarette economy” when

RUSTY had in part been ﬁnanced through its black market dealings. The remainder was to a

large extent charged via US Army accounting to the German economy as “occupation costs”.

In terms of per capita expenditure RUSTY was cheap intelligence but now in mid-1949 none

of those factors survived. Real US taxpayer funds would have to be expended. The CIA tried

to get the US Air Force to pay for activities it was particularly eager to have. Those parts of

RUSTY were estimated at 25 per cent of its total budget.

All of a sudden, however, the cost issue lost its importance. In September 1949, a few

weeks after the ﬁrst Soviet nuclear test, Gehlen was assured that the funding of operations

against the Soviet Union would no longer be a problem.

The Organization Gehlen was only

one of many cold war institutions which were ultimately prolonged as a result of outrageous

Soviet policies.

US PATRONAGE OF GERMAN POSTWAR INTELLIGENCE

After the Gehlen Organizations came under direct CIA control, its code name was changed

to ZIPPER. Gehlen was referred to as UTILITY, though his old cover as “Dr. Schneider”

remained in use within the organization until Gehlen’s retirement in 1968. Alas, there is as yet

little original source material on ZIPPER’s history. Gehlen’s “name ﬁle” at the National

Archives contains a few documents describing various personality conﬂicts. The old game of

“who is he really?” and “what is he up to” apparently went on right up to the spring of 1956

when ZIPPER became the Bundesnachrichtendienst under the Bonn government. Gehlen

spent a lot of time involving himself in the Bonn politics of rearmament. His key aim was not

only to become merely the chief of German military intelligence but to create a single foreign

intelligence organization which included military aﬀairs and was headed by himself.

The odds of reaching that goal were clearly stacked against him. Gehlen’s Pullach head-

quarters was 400 miles away from Bonn. He had to depend on all sorts of middle men to keep

track of what was discussed in political party circles and among the key ﬁgures around

Adenauer. The chancellor was not only deeply suspicious of Hitler’s former military oﬃcers.

He also deeply resented the old Protestant, Prussian, and military elites who had been instru-

mental in bringing Hitler to power and who once again sought to inﬂuence foreign and

military policy by hammering his rearmament policy and his search for a defense alliance with

western Europe and the United States. But Gehlen managed to make himself useful in two

ways. Firstly, he fed the chancellor’s close collaborator, Hans Globke, with all sorts of unsavory

personal information about various political ﬁgures from around Germany. Gehlen ran a

domestic spying service which went far beyond ZIPPER’s counter-intelligence mission. The

second way in which he made himself useful was to provide intelligence brieﬁngs not only to

the chancellor’s oﬃce but also to various members of the Bonn parliament. In the German

tradition key political decisions are made (or prevented) by the political party leaderships rather

than by the executive. Thus Gehlen’s brieﬁngs provided key parlamentarians with an informa-

tion advantage.

To this Gehlen added a third political eﬀort. He rudely fought any potential German

intelligence entrepreneurs who were not directly controlled by him. Within the emerging

Bundeswehr he could count on the support of ex-Wehrmacht oﬃcers who had been

employed by RUSTY during the darkest postwar days. One of his closest collaborators from

FHO times, Gerhard Wessel, pursued a career in the Bundeswehr. Many others were part of this

“early warning system” which Gehlen controlled thoughout the Bonn bureaucracy and the

Bundeswehr.

Absent the classiﬁed German ﬁles, it is still impossible to study ZIPPER or the early BND in

any depth. It is not even possible to track the exact decision-making process by which the

German government decided to create the Bundesnachrichtendienst on April 1, 1956.

Gehlen’s net-working skills must have contributed much to its outcome. So did the promotion

eﬀorts on the part of the CIA. Gehlen was taken on several oﬃcial tours to the USA and, in

September 1955, on a naval exercise of the 6th US Fleet in the Mediterranean. Such visits

were arranged for the purpose of “strengthening our position in general with the German

Intelligence Service” and in view of concluding “a secret Bilateral Intelligence Agreement

with ZIPPER” for the post-transition era.

Whether or nor the CIA–Gehlen relationship had

been fruitful for the US side, the opportunity to have intimate relations with west Germany’s

new intelligence service was of considerable value. Nothing the British or the French had built

up since 1945 was of comparable importance.

On the German side, the balance was perhaps a mixed one. By its peculiar history and due

to its weaknesses in personnel recruiting before 1956 the BND was wide open to Soviet

and East German subversion. Some of it was used to sabotage their intelligence work. But

100

WOLFGANG KRIEGER

perhaps the propaganda value which the East German communist regime got out of the

BND was the heaviest burden it put on the Bonn republic. If the Bundeswehr was suspicious to

many Germans the BND was outright hated and despised even more widely. Today, given

the archival access to the ﬁles of the BND’s East German rival, the “Stasi” (or Ministerium

für Staatssicherheit, MfS), it is possible discover why that propaganda was frequently so well

targetted. Both Stasi and Soviet intelligence had ample sources embedded in the BND. As

happens so often in intelligence history a proper historical balance sheet of failures and suc-

cesses would require more knowledge about the successes of the US–German intelligence

relationship. At the political level, things are much clearer. While the American side was able to

have a controlling inﬂuence on an important element of Bonn’s foreign and security policy-

making the Germans got at least some access to the power corridors of Washington. Intelli-

gence relations between states may be about exchanging secret information. But they can be

important far beyond. By controlling the Gehlen organization and, to a large extent, the later

BND the Americans could be sure that no secret preparations were made by the Bonn republic

which might have been hostile toward Washington. It was an insurance policy which turned

out to be unnecessary – like most insurance. But during the darkest days of the cold war that

particular insurance seemed worth its premium.

Notes

1 Reinhard Gehlen, The Service, transl. by David Irving (New York: World Publishing 1972, German ed.

1971); Kevin C. Ruﬀner (ed.), Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND,

1945–49 (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence 1999) 2 vols, declassiﬁed in 2002

[below quoted as CIA vol 1 or 2]; James H. Critchﬁeld, Partners at the Creation: The Men behind Postwar

Germany’s Defense and Intelligence Establishments (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press 2003).

2 Richard Breitman et al., US Intelligence and the Nazis (New York: Cambridge University Press

2005).

3 Cf. Kevin Soutour, “To Stem the Tide: The German Report Series and Its Eﬀect on American

Defense Doctrine, 1948–1954”, in Journal of Military History 57 (1993) 653–688.

4 Very little is known about German intelligence members who fell into the hands of the two other

western powers. As to the Soviets, there is the sad story of Walter Nicolai, Germany’s military

intelligence chief in World War I, whom the Soviets mistreated and killed in 1947 – apparently because

they refused to believe that the long-retired ex-colonel had ended his career in 1918! (The Russians

rehabilitated him in 1999.) See Z. Taratuta/A. Zdanovic: Tainstvennyj sef Mata Chari (Moskau:

Neisvestnaja vojna 2001).

5 A recent example would be a book on Hitler’s atomic weapons projects, based on amazing new

German as well as Russian sources. Rainer Karlsch, Hitlers Bombe: Die geheime Geschichte der deutschen

Kernwaﬀenversuche (München: DVA 2005).

6 Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (Woodstock,

NY: Overlook Press 2002).

7 CIA vol 1 pp. 11–15.

8 CIA vol 1, pp. 17–18.

9 Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäis-

chen Judentums (Berlin: Siedler 1986).

10 CIA vol 1 pp. 25–26.

11 CIA vol 1 p. 160; the overall evaluation by CIG is documented on pp. 159ﬀ.

12 CIA vol 1 p. 195.

13 CIA vol 1 p. 201 (dated 25 February 1947).

14 CIA vol 1 p. 333 and 341.

15 CIA vol 1 p. 344.

16 CIA vol 1 p. 353.

17 CIA vol 1 p. 357.

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US PATRONAGE OF GERMAN POSTWAR INTELLIGENCE

18 Wolfgang Krieger, General Lucius D. Clay und die amerikanische Deutschlandpolitik 1945–1949 (Stuttgart:

Klett-Cotta 1987); Jean E. Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life (New York: Henry Holt 1990).

19 CIA vol 1 p. 368.

20 This aspect is, alas, not given a fair hearing in the otherwise valuable studies found in Breitman et al.

(2005) discussed above.

21 CIA vol 1 p. 355. Later, in 1950, Gehlen employed a small number of former SD oﬃcers for counter-

intelligence operations inside West Germany. It was “Gehlen’s most costly mistake” as Critchﬁeld

wrote (Critchﬁeld, Partners, p. 164) because it allowed the KGB to insert at least two highly productive

spies, Heinz Felfe and Hans Clemens.

22 CIA vol 1 p. 392 record of Bossard’s discussion with Chamberlin and others on June 11, 1947.

23 Crichﬁeld, Partners, pp. 77ﬀ.

24 Cable dated December 17, 1948, see CIA vol 2 pp. 38–39. A more detailed account is on pp. 105–109.

25 This point concerns targetting and ﬂight route information needed for long-range bombers in atomic

warfare against the Soviet Union and is quoted from Critchﬁeld’s 17 December, 1948, report. See

CIA vol 2 p. 54.

26 CIA vol 2 p. 39; further information on emergency planning is found on pp. 71–72.

27 Wolfgang Krieger, “American Security Policy in Europe before NATO”, in Francis H. Heller/John

R. Gillingham (eds.), NATO: The Founding of the Atlantic Alliance and the Integration of Europe (London:

Macmillan 1992), pp. 99–128; George-Henri Soutou, “La sécurité de la France dans l’aprè-guerre”, in

Maurice Vaïsse/Pierre Mélandri/Frédéric Bozo (eds.), La France et l’OTAN 1949–1996 (Bruxelles:

Complexe 1996) pp. 21–52.

28 CIA vol 2 p. 40.

29 CIA vol 2 p. 126. This suspicion never subsided and turned out to be well-founded. Indeed, between

1950 and 1955 the CIC (US Army Counterintelligence Corps) ran operation CAMPUS which was

targetted on the Gehlen organization. The CIA was never informed and apparently never found out

(Critchﬁeld, Partners, pp. 167–171).

30 CIA vol 2 pp. 137ﬀ.

31 CIA vol 2 pp. 231–309 contains these agreements and letters, however, with major deletions.

32 For a more detailed discussion, see Critchﬁeld, Partners at the Creation, pp. 122ﬀ.

33 CIA vol 2 pp. 233–234.

34 CIA vol 2 p. 263.

35 CIA vol 2 pp. 282–286.

36 Memorandum for DCI, dated March 29, 1955 (based on suggestions from Col. Critchﬁeld).

102

WOLFGANG KRIEGER

Part 3

The intelligence cycle and the search

for information

Planning, collecting, and processing

The technical collection of intelligence

Jeffrey T. Richelson

Introduction

For much of mankind’s history, the collection of intelligence was conducted largely through

the eﬀorts of spies – who observed enemy activities and purloined documents. Intelligence

was occasionally acquired when coded messages were stolen and decoded. Only in the last

hundred years have technological advances allowed intelligence to be collected by a vast array

of mechanical systems, often operated a considerable at a considerable distance from the target,

an activity referred to as “technical collection.”

There are six key aspects to technical collection activities. One is the sensors – such as

photographic equipment – used to gather data. A second is the platforms that carry the sensors,

which with the sensors constitute a technical collection system. The targets of the collection

eﬀort – including missile ﬁelds, nuclear reactors, and terrorist training camps – constitute a third

component. Fourth is the product of the collection eﬀort – such as the images of the missile

ﬁelds, reactors, and training camps, or intercepted communications between the chief of a

weapons of mass destruction production facility and a senior government oﬃcial. In addition,

there is question of the value of technical collection operations – which is determined by the

uses to which the intelligence obtained can be put – such as supporting diplomacy, guiding

weapons acquisition, planning and carrying out military operations, treaty veriﬁcation, and

warning of upcoming attacks or other events that a nation might wish to forestall.

A ﬁnal, but important, consideration is the limitations of technical collection. While such

systems may produce a wealth of data, they do not guarantee that all key intelligence desired

will be obtained. The plans of a foreign government or terrorist group, for example, may be

unobtainable by technical means if the target government or group are suﬃciently vigilant in

the safeguarding their plans.

Imagery sensors, platforms, and targets

The value of observing foreign activities, particularly military-related activities, from overhead

has been apparent to military and intelligence oﬃcials for at least as long as there have been the

105

means for obtaining an overhead vantage point. According to Chinese and Japanese folklore,

spotters ascended in baskets suspended from giant kites or were strapped directly onto to them.

In April 1794, French forces were reported to have kept a balloon aloft for nine hours, with its

passenger, Colonel Jean-Marie Joseph Coutelle, making continuous observations during the

battle at Fleurus, Belgium. Balloons were used to carry observers and, less frequently, cameras,

during the American Civil War.

As a result of the Wright Brothers’ invention of the airplane in 1903, a key intelligence

resource in World War I were reconnaissance aircraft – planes equipped with cameras that could

photograph enemy fortiﬁcations, troop deployments, and the battleﬁeld. During, and in the

years leading up to, World War II photographic reconnaissance aircraft played an even greater

role. Britain managed to conduct covert ﬂights over Germany, while German aircraft brought

back photographs of Soviet territory prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in

June 1941. During the war, British and American planes photographed German military

and industrial installations and areas on a regular basis – to aid in targeting and damage

assessment.

The advent of the Cold War ensured that overhead reconnaissance retained its importance,

particularly for the United States, as it sought to pierce the veil of secrecy established about

almost every aspect of Soviet life – especially its military capabilities. The possibility that a

satellite could be outﬁtted with a camera to take pictures of any place on earth that it passed

over was noted by the RAND Corporation as early as 1946. In August 1960 that vision was

realized when the United States orbited a camera-carrying satellite codenamed Corona.

A satellite such as Corona, in a polar orbit that took it over all of the earth from pole to pole,

could photograph Soviet military activities in the northern reaches of the Soviet Union, air-

ﬁelds in the Middle East, and battles in sub-Saharan Africa. In the decades since the ﬁrst Corona

orbited the earth, the capabilities of such satellites have increased dramatically – as has the

number of nations that operate such satellites.

The photographic reconnaissance satellite has become the imagery satellite – for capturing

the visible light reﬂected by an object is not the sole means of obtaining an image of a target.

The infrared radiation (heat) reﬂected by an object can also be used to produce an image during

daylight, and in the absence of cloud cover (which blocks the reﬂected radiation). The heat

independently generated by an object can also be used to form an image, even in darkness.

That second type of infrared imagery can provide data on developments taking place at night

that ordinary visible light sensors cannot.

A third means of obtaining imagery from a satellite is through the use of radar (radio

detection and ranging). Radar imagery is produced by bouncing radio waves oﬀ an area or an

object and using the reﬂected returns to produce an image of the target. Since radio waves are

not blocked by clouds, radar imagery can be obtained not only day or night but even when

clouds block the view of a satellite’s visible-light and infrared imagery sensors.

Imagery satellite capabilities have also advanced in a number of other ways. The most

important is the development of real-time capabilities. The Corona satellites and several other

US and Soviet spy satellite systems operated in the 1960s, 70s, 80s were “ﬁlm-return” satellites.

An image was formed on ﬁlm, just as an image would be formed on a conventional camera.

When the ﬁlm supply carried by the satellite was exhausted, part of the satellite (in the case of

the United States, a capsule) carrying the ﬁlm would be returned to earth and recovered.

Today, almost all imagery satellites are digital and operate in near real-time – the optical

systems rely on charged couple devices which translate the varying visible-light levels of the

object viewed into numbers, which are immediately relayed back to earth (via a relay satellite)

and reconstructed into an image. Infrared and radar imagery are also transmitted in real-time.

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JEFFREY T. RICHELSON

Even before the advent of real-time satellites, whose lifetimes are not limited by ﬁlm supply,

the lifetimes of ﬁlm-return satellites grew from the single day of early Corona missions to

weeks, and, for some satellites, many months. But real-time imagery satellites can operate for

between ﬁve and ten years. Satellites today also have far greater resolution than the ﬁrst photo-

graphic reconnaissance satellites – that is they can detect far smaller objects than the ﬁrst

satellites. While it is incorrect to claim that a satellite can read a license plate, they can certainly

detect a white object of similar dimensions laid on a dark surface.

As noted, there has also been a growth in the number of nations operating high-resolution

imagery satellites. For the ﬁrst decade of space reconnaissance the United States and Soviet

Union were duopolists. In 1975, China launched its ﬁrst photographic reconnaissance satellite.

It would not be until 1995 that another nation would join the space reconnaissance club –

when France launched a spacecraft designated Helios into orbit from a site at Kourou in French

Guiana. Israel and Japan followed. Israel has launched several Ofeq (Horizon) satellites into

orbits that focus primarily on the Middle East. Japan has launched a pair of reconnaissance

satellites, one radar imagery satellite (Radar-1) and one visible-light satellite (Optical-ł). And

there is the prospect that a number of other nations, including Germany and Italy, will deploy

imagery satellites for military intelligence purposes.

Today, the United States operates a constellation of about six imagery satellites, all of which

provide real-time imagery. The constellation includes three advanced versions of the ﬁrst

real-time imagery satellites, the KH-11, which can produce both visible-light and infrared

imagery. It also includes two radar imagery satellites (codenamed Onyx) and one stealth

satellite (originally designated Misty) which was intended to be diﬃcult for target nations to

detect.

Russia, faced with resource constraints, operates a less extensive military space program than

did the Soviet Union but still operates real-time imagery satellites. France has continued to

launch Helios satellites, the latest being Helios 2A, which was launched in December 2004 and

is reported to carry both visible-light and infrared sensors. Meanwhile, Japan has plans to add

radar and optical satellites to its present constellation.

The targets for those satellites are determined by the national security concerns of each

nation, as well as by their intelligence alliances. United States satellites, reﬂecting their owners’

global interests, have been targeted on nuclear facilities in North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and other

nations; construction of underground weapons of mass destruction production or command

and control facilities in Libya and Russia, refugee movements in Africa, and terrorist training

camps in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Other nations’ targets will often be a subset of those of the United States. Russian satellites

undoubtedly photograph terrorist facilities in Chechnya, nuclear facilities in Iran, and missile

sites in China. Israeli satellites are focused on the Middle East – particularly terrorist and

weapons of mass destruction facilities, as well as airbases and other military facilities in the

region. Japan’s spy satellite program owes it existence to North Korea’s 1998 launch of a

ballistic missile that passed over its territory. North Korean missile and nuclear facilities and

activities are among the primary targets of Japan’s imagery satellites, along with Chinese missile

sites and airﬁelds. French military, diplomatic, and commercial interests in the Middle East, Asia,

Europe, and Africa provide its satellites with a large array of potential targets – including

military developments in the Balkans, Iran’s construction of nuclear facilities at Arak and

Natanz, and the territory surrounding France’s space launch facility at Kourou.

The initial development and improving capabilities of imagery satellites has not made other

forms of overhead imagery collection obsolete. During the early days of the Cold War, United

States Air Force pilots ﬂew modiﬁed bombers, equipped with cameras, along the periphery of

107

THE TECHNICAL COLLECTION OF INTELLIGENCE

the Soviet Union and China to obtain imagery of airﬁelds, ports, and other facilities that could

be photographed from outside those nations’ borders. Occasionally, those modiﬁed bombers

were sent into Soviet airspace to obtain imagery of targets farther inland.

Then in 1956, the CIA pilots began ﬂying deep into the Soviet territory employing a

specially designed plane, the U-2, which ﬂew at over 65,000 feet and which the CIA believed,

incorrectly, would not be detected by Soviet radar. It carried a special long-focal-length camera

capable of photographing objects as small as a man, and bringing back images of roads, railroads,

industrial plants, nuclear facilities, aircraft, and missile sites within a strip 200 miles wide by

2,500 miles long.

Overﬂights of the Soviet Union ceased after Francis Gary Powers and his U-2 were shot

down on May 1, 1960. But the US still continues to operate U-2s, and has employed a variety

of additional spy planes, particularly the Mach 3 SR-71, in the decades after the US mastered

the art of conducting reconnaissance from space – even after the quality of satellite photos

equaled or surpassed that of the lower-ﬂying aircraft.

Some countries were restricted to employing aerial reconnaissance until they developed

satellite imagery capabilities – for example, Israel and France. The United States continued their

use because, while satellites could provide far more extensive coverage and were immune to

being shot down like aircraft, planes still could play an important role.

They can supplement satellite coverage – a single plane costs far less than an additional

satellite. They can provide a quick reaction capability since an aircraft can head directly for a

target, while a satellite cannot photograph a target until its orbit and the rotation of the earth

place the target in view – a process which can take several days. Those same constraints mean

that a satellite cannot arbitrarily cover any stretch of territory desired – but aircraft can cover the

territory between any two points, for example, the movement of an invading army toward its

objective or the movement of refugees toward a border.

Another type of overhead imagery system has some of the virtues of satellites and aircraft, and

some of its own advantages. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with electro-optical

systems or infrared sensors are operated without a pilot by remote control – thus the political

risks and risk to life involved in manned reconnaissance operations are eliminated. And unlike

satellites or aircraft, UAVs can remain over a target, at high altitudes, for extended periods

of time (e.g. 20 hours) keep watching on a particular target or area – such as a terrorist training

camp or nuclear test site.

While the US began operating drones (pilotless aircraft that could not be maneuvered) and

UAVs during the Cold War, it is in the post-Cold War that UAVs have become a more

signiﬁcant component of US reconnaissance activities. The CIA began ﬂying Predator UAVs

over Bosnia in 1994. After the initiation of military operations in Afghanistan the US began

equipping Predators with Hellﬁre missiles so that immediate action could be taken if

imagery indicated the presence of a terrorist target. Even more recently, the US has been

deploying the Global Hawk UAV – capable of operating at over 60,000 feet for 20 hours and

carrying electro-optical, infrared, or radar-imaging sensors.

Signals intelligence sensors, platforms, and targets

Traditionally, signals intelligence (SIGINT) is treated as one of the most important and sensitive

forms of intelligence. The interception of foreign signals can provide data on diplomatic,

military, scientiﬁc, and economic plans or events as well as on the characteristics of radars,

spacecraft, and weapons systems.

108

JEFFREY T. RICHELSON

SIGINT can be broken down into two basic subcategories: communications intelligence

(COMINT) and electronics intelligence (ELINT). As its name indicates, COMINT is intelli-

gence obtained through the interception, processing, and analysis of the electronic communica-

tions of foreign governments, organizations, or individuals, excluding radio and television

broadcasts. The communications intercepted may be transmitted in a variety of ways – including

conventional telephones, walkie-talkies, cell phones, the Internet, and computer networks.

ELINT encompasses electronic non-communications signals, including the electronic

emanations of radar systems and foreign instrumentation signals – the signals transmitted during

the operation of space, aerial, terrestrial, and sea-based systems. The signals from radar systems

can be used to identify their existence as well as determine their characteristics, such as pulse

repetition frequency and pulse duration. Intelligence about pulse repetition and pulse duration

can be used in designing electronic countermeasures to neutralize the radars in the event of

combat.

One category of foreign instrumentation signals intelligence (FISINT) is telemetry intelli-

gence (TELINT) – obtained from intercepting the signals transmitted during missile tests

to those conducting the tests, permitting them to evaluate the missile’s performance. Inter-

ception of those signals by a foreign intelligence organization makes it possible for analysts

to determine many of the capabilities of foreign missile systems – including the number of

warheads carried, payload and range, warhead accuracy, and warhead size (which can be used to

estimate yield).

Collection of signals intelligence is accomplished by a multitude of systems, from satellites

in outer space to submarines under the seas. The proliferation of satellite reconnaissance

systems with imaging missions to a variety of diﬀerent nations has not yet been matched by an

equivalent proliferation of SIGINT satellite systems, and the US remains, by a large margin, the

foremost user of such systems.

Several types of satellites are used to collect signals intelligence – including geosynchronous

and low-earth orbiting satellites. Geosynchronous satellites operate about 22,000 miles above

the earth’s equator, with their rotation around the earth matching the rotation of the earth

below, so they, in eﬀect, hover over the same point on the equator. In that orbit the same

portion of the earth (about 1/3) remains in their electronic view constantly – which is impor-

tant in being able to continuously monitor a communications link or insuring that a satellite

is in the right place when infrequent missile tests take place. The United States pioneered the

use of such satellites for communications intelligence purposes in 1968 with the launch

of a satellite designated CANYON. Presently, the US operates two separate constellations of

geosynchronous signals intelligence satellites, which can intercept communications transmitted

on UHF and VHF frequencies, as well telemetry from missile tests.

The Soviet Union has been

the only other nation to operate geosynchronous signals intelligence satellites.

ELINT satellites operate in lower orbits. Both the US and Soviet Union/Russia have

operated ocean surveillance satellites, orbiting the earth at about 600 miles altitude, which

intercept the electronic signals from ships at sea as a means of detecting the presence of the ships

and tracking their movements. The US, Russia, and China have also operated satellites in about

500-mile orbits which targeted the electronic emissions from radar systems – including ballistic

missile warning radars as well as aircraft-detection radars. France has placed experimental

SIGINT packages on satellites with other primary missions, possibly as a prelude to developing

its own signals intelligence satellite. In the US, in the 1990s, the two systems were combined

into one system that targeted both ships at sea and radars on land.

Britain aborted plans in the 1980s to build its own geosynchronous SIGINT satellite,

codenamed ZIRCON, for budgetary reasons. A willingness to devote considerable ﬁnancial

109

THE TECHNICAL COLLECTION OF INTELLIGENCE

resources to a SIGINT satellite program is only one challenge facing a nation with such

ambitions. There is also the technological challenge involved in developing and operating

the satellites as well as the requirement for ground stations, often on foreign territory, to operate

the satellites as well as receive their data in a timely fashion.

One of the advantages satellites have over signals intelligence aircraft is that they can intercept

signals from across a much wider territory than aircraft. Thus, the ﬁrst US ELINT satellite,

GRAB, ﬁrst launched in 1960, could intercept signals from territory 3,790 miles in diameter,

while the P2V Neptune, an ELINT aircraft that operated in the same era could only target

signals within a 460 mile diameter.

In addition, such aircraft, and their crews, may be targets for hostile forces. Over one hundred

US airmen were lost in the early days of the Cold War on ELINT missions that ﬂew into or

near Soviet territory. In 1968, North Korea shot down a US EC-121 on a signals intelligence

mission, while in 2001 a Chinese aircraft forced a US Navy EP-3 to land on Hainan Island.

But given the economics involved, many more nations are involved in other forms of signals

intelligence collection. The US conducted the ﬁrst aerial missions during World War II, which

were targeted on Japanese radars in the Paciﬁc. Today, not only the United States, but China,

Israel, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia are among the nations that use aircraft to intercept

signals – both communication signals as well as radar emanations. And such aircraft, in addition

to being far more ﬁnancially viable than satellite systems for many nations, can get much closer

to the source of the targeted communications or electronic signals than a satellite – thereby

improving the ability to capture the signals of interest, some of which satellites may not be able

to intercept.

Ground-based signals intelligence systems are also deployed extensively throughout the

world. During the Cold War the United States operated a series of circular antenna arrays in

Europe and Asia targeted on the high-frequency communications of the Soviet Union, China,

and other communist countries. Unlike the VHF and UHF signals that leaked out into space,

making them vulnerable to space collection, high-frequency signals bounce oﬀ the atmosphere

and return to earth where they can be intercepted – often thousands of miles away. Not

surprisingly, the Soviet Union also operated an extensive network of ground stations, with

stations in widely dispered locations – including Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Cuba.

While the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the closure of many of sites where such

arrays were operated – in Augsburg, Germany and San Vito, Italy for example – another type

of ground-based SIGINT collection is ﬂourishing due to the growth of communications

satellites.

In the 1960s, the United States military and private corporations began placing satellites into

geosynchronous orbit to relay communications between widely distant spots on earth. The

Soviet Union followed with its own constellations of military and civilian communications

satellites. The signals sent to and/or from those satellites can be intercepted by satellite dishes

stationed in any areas that either receives the signals from the satellite or can access the signals

sent to the satellite.

The US ﬁrst targeted Soviet military communications satellites, such as the Molniya satellites

which operated in highly elliptical orbits, using intercept equipment located in Great Britain,

Japan, and elsewhere. In the 1970s it began improving its ability to intercept civilian satellite

communications. One outshoot of that eﬀort was the ECHELON program – an ability to do

keyword searches of the communications traﬃc (particularly written communications such as

faxes) intercepted at ground stations operated by the US and key SIGINT allies (including the

United Kingdom and Australia). But the United States and those allies are not alone in this

practice. The signals intelligence organizations of a number of nations – including China,

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JEFFREY T. RICHELSON

Switzerland, Germany, and France – also maintain one or more satellite dishes allowing them to

intercept the traﬃc being relayed through communications satellites.

Another often-used platform for intercepting foreign signals are embassy or consular roof-

tops. The United States and Soviet Union made extensive use of their embassies and con-

sulates to intercept communications in foreign capitals and other key cities during the Cold

War. That practice continues today, with internal military, police, political, and economic

communications all being targets.

Using ships outﬁtted with intercept equipment to monitor communications or intercept

other electronic signals was not uncommon during the Cold War. The Soviet Union main-

tained a large ﬂeet of antenna-laden ships, know in US terminology as AGIs (for Auxilliary

General – Intelligence), that operated near US submarine facilities in the United States and

abroad, as well as near US space launch facilities such as Vandenberg Air Force Base in Califor-

nia. For a time the United States maintained a set of ships dedicated to the SIGINT collection.

The risks involved in such activities were illustrated when Israel bombed a US ship collecting

SIGINT during the June 1967 Six-Day War and the following year North Korea seized a

similar ship. While the US stopped using such unarmed ships, it did outﬁt others with intercept

equipment and continues to conduct such operations today.

While most other nations are not able to, and have no need to, deploy ﬂeets of SIGINT

collection ships, they do operate some. Britain, France, Germany, and Italy are European

nations with such ships. Thus, in May 2000, the French newspaper Le Monde reported that the

French ship, the Bougainville, was headed for a secret destination on a signals intelligence

mission. Five years earlier, it had been reported that China was operating eight SIGINT ships –

including the Xiangyang Hong 09, which was used to monitor US–South Korean Team Spirit

exercises in the Sea of Japan and Yellow Sea.

Submarines have also been used for signals intelligence collection. During the Cold War a

US attack submarine might be instructed to locate itself in the White Sea, close enough to the

Soviet coast to allow it to intercept the telemetry signals associated with the test of a submarine-

launched ballistic missile. Other submarine missions involved transporting frogmen to locations

in the Barents Sea and Sea of Okhotsk so they could place taps on Soviet cables carrying

military communications. Many such SIGINT missions were conducted under a joint program

involving both US and British submarines. In 2006, a new US attack submarine was sent to

operate oﬀ the coast of Latin America, with a signals intelligence mission.

Collectively, signals intelligence systems can be used to gather intelligence about a wide

variety of foreign activities – the negotiating strategies of foreign nations; diplomatic exchanges

between a foreign ministry and its embassies or between countries; the details of military

exercises; the capabilities and performance characteristics of missile, space, aerial, and other

military systems; the intentions of foreign governments and terrorist groups, and the plans and

technical secrets of foreign corporations.

Measurement and signature intelligence, sensors, and targets

Photographic and communications intelligence can trace their identities as major collection

disciplines back to the early twentieth century. The broader imagery intelligence (IMINT) and

signals intelligence disciplines were clearly established between 1940 and 1965. In contrast the

concept of “measurement and signature intelligence” (MASINT) as a discipline encompassing

a number of distinct collection and analysis activities is far more recent, ﬁrst being coined by the

Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1970s. As will become clear, in many ways, MASINT is,

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THE TECHNICAL COLLECTION OF INTELLIGENCE

essentially, “all other technical collection.” MASINT categories include radar, geophysical,

infrared and optical, nuclear radiation, materials, and multi- and hyper-spectral imagery.

As noted above, radar can be used to obtain images of targets. But the use of non-imaging

radar for intelligence collection is the more traditional use. The US has used ground-based and

sea-based radars – such as COBRA DANE on Shemya Island and COBRA JUDY aboard the

USNS Observation Island – to detect and track missile launches and to gather data on missile

characteristics. In the 1970s, an oﬃcial historian of the COBRA DANE program described it

as providing the “primary source” of data on the Soviet missile tests that terminated on

Kamchatka.

Smaller radars, in aircraft, may be used to produce instantaneous intelligence

on whether an approaching aircraft is hostile. A radar on the F-15E aircraft, when focused

head-on another aircraft can determine the number of blades in the opposing aircraft’s engine

fan or compressor. The blade count helps determine the type of engine, and assess if the plane

is hostile. The shooting down of two Iraqi EXOCET-equipped Mirage F-1s during the ﬁrst

Persian Gulf War has been attributed to such collection and analysis.

Three sensors fall into the geophysical category: acoustic, seismic, and magnetic. Acoustic

sensors detect sound waves. In the 1960s the US employed ground stations with acoustic

sensors to detect the sound waves generated by atmospheric nuclear tests. Since the 1950s, the

United States has operated the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) – an network of undersea

hydrophones that can detect the acoustic signals produced by submarines. The data collected by

SOSUS allows far more than simple detection of submarines. The distinct noises made by

a submarines engine, cooling system, and movement of its propellers can be translated into a

recognition signal. And in 1995 and 1996, SOSUS hydrophones oﬀ California picked up the

sound of French nuclear weapons being exploded under the atolls in the South Paciﬁc.

Seismic sensors have been used by the United States and a multitude of other nations to

detect the signals generated by nuclear tests. Such detection relies on the fact that nuclear

detonations, as do earthquakes, generate waves that travel long distances either by passing deep

through the earth (body waves) or by traveling along the earth’s surface (surface waves). Body

and surface waves can be recorded by seismometers or seismic arrays at signiﬁcant distances

(over 1,200 miles) from the point of detonation. Exploitation of the data involves distinguishing

between earthquakes (which originate from two bodies of rock slipping past each other) and

detonations (a point source), ﬁltering out background and instrument noise, and converting the

seismic signal into an estimate of explosive yield when appropriate.

Magnetic sensors are often used on anti-submarine aircraft such as the P-3C Orion, which

the US employs and has sold to a variety of other nations in Europe and Asia. The plane’s

Magnetic Anomaly Detector (MAD) is used in concert with its Submarine Anomaly Detector

to determine whether known submarine magnetic proﬁles are present. To get a good MAD

reading, the plane must ﬂy as low as 200 to 300 feet above the water.

Infrared and optical sensors that are considered MASINT sensors are ones which produce

data without imagery. Both the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia have operated

satellite systems – the Defense Support Program (DSP) in the case of the United States – which

detect missile launches by the infrared (heat) signature generated by their missile plumes.

Beyond providing warning or notiﬁcation of missile launches DSP’s non-imaging infrared

sensor has proven capable of providing several types of intelligence information. In addition to

being able to identify speciﬁc missile types by the uniqueness of their plume’s infrared signature,

DSP satellites have proven useful, due to their ability to detect a variety of heat sources, in

monitoring the movement of aircraft ﬂying on afterburner, the movements of spacecraft, large

detonations (including exploding ammunition dumps and plane crashes), and certain industrial

processes.

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JEFFREY T. RICHELSON

Optical sensors, known as bhangmeters, have been placed on a variety of US (and probably

Soviet/Russian) satellites to detect the bright ﬂashes of light associated with the ﬁreball from an

atmospheric nuclear explosion. In September 1979, a US VELA satellite appeared to detect a

double ﬂash of light somewhere in the South Atlantic, which had uniformly been associated

with nuclear tests. That apparent detection set oﬀ a controversy, that persists to this day, as to

whether some nation had attempted to covertly set oﬀ a low-yield nuclear device.

Nuclear radiation sensors, largely placed on satellites, including the DSP, VELA, and Global

Positioning System (GPS) satellites, detect such phenomenon as the X-rays and gamma rays

associated with a nuclear explosion. Such information, along with other nuclear detonation

signatures, can help estimate the yield, location, and altitude of the detonation.

Materials sampling – the gathering and analysis of eﬄuents, debris, and particulates – associ-

ated with weapons of mass destruction programs has been a signiﬁcant element of the intelli-

gence activities of the United States, the Soviet Union/Russia, the United Kingdom, and

other nations for many decades. In World War II the United States obtained samples of water

from the River Rhine, in order to search for any signs that the Germans were operating a

plutonium-producing nuclear reactor in the vicinity.

Another aspect of these activities has been the use of aircraft and ground stations to gather

the debris from nuclear detonations – either atmospheric detonations, or underground

detonations that have vented debris into the atmosphere. Such debris can be crucial for

determining, among other things, whether the device employed plutonium or enriched

uranium, and whether it was a nuclear or thermonuclear device. The US ﬁrst determined

that the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb by the analysis of debris obtained by

a US weather reconnaissance aircraft. After the examination of the debris collected after

China’s ﬁrst test, in October 1964, US analysts concluded, to their great surprise, that

China’s ﬁrst atomic bomb had relied on highly enriched uranium rather than the expected

plutonium.

More recently, during William J. Clinton’s presidency, the US analysis of soil collected from

the vicinity of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory led to the identiﬁcation of EMPTA –

a precursor chemical in the production of chemical weapons. That identiﬁcation led to the

targeting of the factory in retaliation for the 1998 al-Qaeda attacks on two US embassies in

Africa.

Conventional visible-light, infrared, and radar systems produce imagery whose content can

be mined for intelligence by looking at its size and shape – e.g. does the image show a missile,

and if so, what are its dimensions? Or, does the image show a nuclear testing ground, a nuclear

reactor, or an airﬁeld? In contrast, intelligence is extracted from multi-spectral and hyper-

spectral imagery, which can be obtained from satellites (such as LANDSAT) or aircraft, on

the basis of detecting and understanding the spectral signatures of the targets, available from the

image.

Multi-spectral imagery is produced from the collection of multiple, discrete bands of electro-

optical imagery collected simultaneously. Hyper-spectral imagery employs at least sixty narrow

contiguous spectral bands, including the visible light, infrared, thermal infrared, ultraviolet, and

radio wave segments of the electromagnetic spectrum. The data produced by examining those

bands allows analysts to detect an object’s shape, density, temperature, movement, and chemical

composition.

The primary missions to which such imagery is expected to contribute are: support to

military operations; non-proliferation; counternarcotics; mapping, charting, geodesy; technical

intelligence; and civil applications (for example, urban planning). Speciﬁc applications may

include the determination of beach composition; the location of amphibious obstacles; battle

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THE TECHNICAL COLLECTION OF INTELLIGENCE

damage assessment; support of special operations; countering camouﬂage, concealment, and

deception; analysis of the terrain; and vegetative cover and stress determination.

Identiﬁcation and classiﬁcation of targets such as operational nuclear facilities can be

achieved by the exploitation of multi-spectral data – since such data yields “false color” images

in which hot water discharges from a reactor would appear in red and orange in the image.

Likewise, the reﬂectivity of healthy vegetation diﬀers from that of dead vegetation (as well as

vegetation which overgrows an earth-covered object such as a bunker) for wavelengths beyond

visible light. Thus, examination of multi-spectral photography can lead to visual identiﬁcation

of such camouﬂaged sites by their distinct colors.

The utility of multi-spectral imagery (MSI) was demonstrated during Operation Desert

Storm in 1991. Ground forces found the multi-spectral data useful in identifying disturbances

in the terrain (indicating possible passage of Iraqi forces), as well as detecting wet areas that

could slow down an advance. In addition, the “planning and execution of ground maneuvers,

including the ‘Left Hook,’ were highly dependent on multispectral imagery.” Naval forces

employed it to identify shallow areas near coastlines for operational planning, to determine

water depths, and to plan amphibious operations. Air Force planners used MSI data in conjunc-

tion with terrain elevation data to display attack routes and targets as they would appear.

Subsequently, MSI data was used in support of operations in Haiti, Bosnia, and elsewhere.

The value and limitations of technical collection

That technical collection operations can produce intelligence of signiﬁcant value was demon-

strated throughout the twentieth century. During World War I, photographic reconnaissance

provided intelligence on enemy troop movements. Communications intelligence allowed the

British, as a result of their interception and decoding of a telegram from the German foreign

minister to his envoy in Mexico, to accelerate US entry into World War I – for the telegram

oﬀered Mexico the chance to regain lost territory in the American southwest if it entered the

war on Germany’s side and attacked the United States.

In World War II, all sides conducted extensive photographic reconnaissance operations to

identify targets and assess the impact of bombing runs – particularly important in an era

where precision bombing was only a dream. The ability of British codebreakers to penetrate

the Germany Enigma machine proved of enormous value – both in ﬁghting the land war and

in the Battle of the Atlantic. America’s ability to break Japanese codes was crucial in winning

the Battle of Midway, the battle which turned the war in America’s favor.

World War II also saw the birth of two other forms of technical collection. As noted earlier,

the US conducted the ﬁrst ELINT mission – to gather the emissions from Japanese radar

systems – during that war. The collection of water from the River Rhine to determine if any

nuclear reactors were in operation represented one form of what would come to be known as

measurement and signature intelligence. Another US operation, the ﬂights of bombers

equipped to detect a gas associated with the production of plutonium was yet of another early

example of MASINT.

During the Cold War satellite imagery and the telemetry intelligence branch of ELINT were

of primary importance for the United States in assessing the capabilities of Soviet strategic

forces. Imagery was vital in determining the numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles

(ICBM) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and the locations of ICBMs ﬁelds. Telemetry

intelligence, whether obtained through space or other systems, allowed the US to determine

the speciﬁc characteristics of Soviet missiles, including the number of warheads each carried.

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JEFFREY T. RICHELSON

Soviet photographic reconnaissance satellites allowed the Kremlin’s rulers to be conﬁdent

that they had a good understanding of US strategic capabilities. Collectively, the existence of

overhead reconnaissance and other technical collection capabilities allowed the negotiation

of arms control agreements, since each side had an independent means of monitoring com-

pliance, and providing reassurance that the other side was not in the process of preparing for a

surprise attack.

Today the international environment is signiﬁcantly diﬀerent from what it was two decades

ago – with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the concern over rogue state acquisition of nuclear

weapons, the threat from fundamentalist Islamic forces, and the global reach of international

terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda.

Despite those developments technical collection capabilities remain a signiﬁcant factor in

the ability to gather intelligence. Imagery can still identify the dispersal of strategic and con-

ventional military forces, from missile silos to airbases, the presence of above-ground nuclear

facilities, and suspicious construction activities. It remains important to treaty veriﬁcation,

and can provide warning of events that a nation’s senior oﬃcials and diplomats would seek

to forestall with advance knowledge – as when, in 1995, the US was able to persuade India to

forego conducting a planned nuclear test after imagery indicated that preparations were

underway.

It also remains vital in providing support to military planners and combat commanders when

diplomacy fails. Imagery continues to help identify potential targets, particular points in such

targets to attack, and in assessing the damage done from such attacks. And with real-time

capabilities, properly equipped commanders in the ﬁeld have the ability to look over the

horizon and see the enemy – his numbers, deployments, and movements – without delay.

SIGINT as well as MASINT continues to be of relevance. Intelligence about the radar

systems of nations that might be the subject of air attacks is of great value to the potential

attacker. Intelligence about Iraqi radar systems was of importance to US and British air forces

during both wars with Iraq – allowing aircraft whose mission was to jam Iraqi radars to do their

job before attack aircraft arrived.

Telemetry intelligence also remains important to a number of nations – especially the United

States, whose senior oﬃcials are concerned with the development of new missile systems not

only in traditional countries of interest – Russia and China – but in Iran, North Korea, India,

and Pakistan.

Communications intelligence, in the form of intercepted and deciphered diplomatic com-

munications, ordinary telephone communications, cell phone traﬃc, e-mails, and Internet

traﬃc, continues to be a signiﬁcant activity of large and medium powers, as well as smaller

nations. Collectively the world’s signals intelligence organizations are looking for diplomatic

secrets, plans for military or terrorist actions, violations of arms and commercial agreements,

and industrial secrets.

The increased concern with the development of weapons of mass destruction by rogue states,

and the possible acquisition of such weapons by terrorist groups has only heightened the pre-

existing concern about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The potential ability

of a variety of MASINT systems and techniques – such as material sampling of soil and

water and collection of gases emitted by plutonium production – to provide warning that the

production of weapons of mass destruction is underway provides an incentive for nations to

develop and operate such systems.

Of course, the fact that technical collection systems can produce signiﬁcant intelligence does

not necessarily imply that they are not without their limitations or that they are, in relative

terms, as valuable as they were in an earlier era. Thus, key documents that may shed light on

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THE TECHNICAL COLLECTION OF INTELLIGENCE

diplomatic or military intentions or capabilities – unless foolishly transmitted by fax in an

insecure manner – are immune from technical collection systems. At times, such documents can

be obtained via a human source.

Technical collection systems can be subject to denial and deception. A nation which knows

or suspects that some activity – for example, preparations for a nuclear test or WMD production

– would be of interest to another nation’s reconnaissance satellites may take care to eliminate

or minimize the chance that those satellites will detect the preparations. Measures that might be

taken include operating at night, not operating when a foreign reconnaissance satellite is esti-

mated to be in range, and conducting test preparations under cover of another, more innocuous

activity. A signiﬁcant factor in India’s ability to surprise the US with its 1998 nuclear test was

the precautions taken to avoid detection by US spy satellites – including operating at night.

As both terrorist groups and some nations have learned, one means of avoiding having one’s

plans or activities detected through foreign communications intercept operations is to either

communicate by means that are either not subject to remote interception, suﬃciently cryptic to

provide no crucial information, or are transmitted in a manner unlikely to be detected. Use of

a courier, a phone conversation in which one terrorist alerts another that “tomorrow is the

day” without providing further information, and a covert message accessible only through an

obscure Internet site are respective examples.

Nations interested in hiding their weapons of mass destruction activities can also take actions

to prevent other nations’ MASINT collection from revealing those activities. During the Cold

War the US actively sought to suppress the emissions of the krypton-85 gas associated with

plutonium production. Other nations closely guard their WMD facilities, which can prevent

foreign intelligence assets from collecting soil or other samples that can be used to shed more

light on what is going on inside those facilities.

The international environment may also conspire to reduce the value of technical collection.

The Soviet Union was a nation that did not try to hide the fact that it had a nuclear weapons

program, engaged in extensive testing of its missile systems, and built a variety of naval vessels in

its well-known shipyards. In contrast, some nations have small nuclear programs, make an

enormous eﬀort to conduct such activities covertly, and may engage in minimal or no testing of

any nuclear devices they develop. Further, terrorist groups do not have the infrastructure that

allows accumulation of intelligence from monitoring a large number of facilities, and are adept

at covert communications.

The response from those seeking to detect such activities may include more intensive use of

resources. Wider satellite reconnaissance operations can reduce the ability of a target nation to

conduct operations in secret. Further, the distribution among the types of reconnaissance might

be altered – for example, relying more extensively on radar imagery. Attempts may also be made

to emplace technical collection devices – such as video cameras and eavesdropping antennae –

near a target to obtain continuous coverage, rather than relying on intermittent coverage from

satellites and aircraft.

Technical collection may also be conducted in diﬀerent ways. Diﬀerent types of sensors

might be used, which focus on diﬀerent parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum or collect

information in entirely new ways – just as the ﬁrst ventures to collect debris from a nuclear

explosion, or the gases emitted during plutonium production represent new ways to uncover

other nations’ nuclear secrets.

One can expect that the value of technical collection will continue to be signiﬁcant, but

to also rise and fall, reﬂecting the continued contest between hiders and ﬁnders – with the

developers of technical collection systems seeking to overcome the tactics that their targets

employ to evade their collection systems.

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JEFFREY T. RICHELSON

Notes

1 Technical collection is often incorrectly referred to as technical intelligence – this term, however,

means the intelligence concerning technical details of objects such as weapons systems, space systems,

and nuclear facilities.

2 William E. Burrows, Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security (New York: Random House,

1986), pp. 28–29.

3Jeﬀrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford, 1995),

pp. 33–37; 157–172.

4Jeﬀrey T. Richelson, “The Whole World is Watching,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January–

February 2006, pp. 26–35.

5 On the history of the U-2, see: Chris Pocock, The U-2 Spyplane: Toward the Unknown (Atglen, PA:

Schiﬀer Military History, 2000).

6 There are two types of geosynchronous satellites. One type, of which CANYON is an example, trace

ﬁgure-eights about the equator, rising to about 10 degrees above and below the equator. In doing so

their altitude above the earth varies from 19,000 to 24,000 miles. A second type is a subclass of

geosynchronous satellite – the geostationary satellite. Such satellites stay above the same point on the

equator, at an altitude of 22,300 miles, without tracing signiﬁcant ﬁgure-eights.

7 Dwayne A. Day, “Listening from Above: The First Signals Intelligence Satellite,” Spaceﬂight, August

1999, pp. 339–347.

8 Desmond Ball, “Signals Intelligence in China,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, 7,8 (August 1995),

pp. 365–370.

9 Dr Michael E. del Papa, Meeting the Challenge: ESD and the Cobra Dane Construction Eﬀort on Shemya

Island (Bedford, MA: Electronic Systems Division, Air Force Systems Command, 1979), pp. 2–3.

10 Science Applications International Corporation, Fifty Year Commemorative History of Long Range

Detection: The Creation, Development, and Operation of the United States Atomic Energy Detection System

(Patrick AFB, FL: Air Force Technical Application Center, 1997), p. 114; William J. Broad, “Anti-Sub

Seabed Grid Thrown Open to Eavesdropping,” New York Times, July 2, 1996, pp. C1, C7.

11 Jeﬀrey T. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and

North Korea (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 283–316.

12 Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002),

pp. 259, 355–356.

13 James R. Asker, “US Navy’s Haiti Maps Merge Satellite Data,” Aviation Week & Space Technology,

October 17, 1994, p. 49; Ben Ianotta and Steve Weber, “Space-Based Data Found Useful in Haiti,”

Space News September 26–October 2, 1994, p. 6.

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THE TECHNICAL COLLECTION OF INTELLIGENCE

Human source intelligence

Frederick P. Hitz

When President Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 into law, creating the

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he scarcely believed he was creating a new espionage

organization for the United States, but rather that he was greatly improving the manner in

which important national intelligence would ﬁnd its way to his desk. Earlier he had dis-

established the Oﬃce of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime foreign intelligence collection

and analytical entity, declaring that he did not want an American Gestapo in peacetime. By

1947, he had changed his mind on the need for a civilian intelligence organization for three

principal reasons. First, and most importantly, the lessons of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack

strongly suggested the need for greater early warning of a future surprise attack on the United

States. Second, he needed a centralizing intelligence organization that would gather and analyze

all the intelligence reports headed for the Oval Oﬃce and attempt to make something coherent

out of them so he would not have to do it himself. It is not clear that he wanted the new

organization to go out and collect intelligence information on its own, as this had been tasked

primarily to the Armed Services and to the FBI. Third, he was convinced by Secretary of the

Navy James Forrestal and others in his cabinet that the USSR would become a problem now

that the Nazis were defeated, and that he needed a window into Stalin’s thinking and imperial

ambitions, especially in Western Europe. The Cold War was beginning.

CIA got oﬀ to a slow start. Its early directors were military men who had a limited idea of the

coordinating role CIA was intended to play and were aware of the bureaucratic sharks circling

them, representing the parochial interests of the military departments, the Federal Bureau of

Investigation (FBI), and the State Department, all of which wanted to maintain their direct

access to the President on intelligence matters. Two events conspired to change this modest

approach. George F. Kennan penned his famous “Long Telegram” from Moscow, alerting

Washington in 1946 to Stalin’s imperialist designs on that part of Europe not already under

Soviet control, and recommending a policy of “containment” by the United States. At the very

least, this would require aﬃrmative action by the US in funding democratic political parties,

labor unions, student groups and cultural organizations in Italy, France and Western Germany

to oppose the Communist elements seeking to dominate these entities. In addition, to be

most eﬀective, the hand of the US should remain hidden. The military were not the appro-

priate weapon to oppose clandestine Soviet inﬁltration, and the State Department rejected

118

the assignment, so the ﬂedgling CIA got the job. Luckily, there was language in the 1947 Act

creating CIA that directed it to perform, with the authorization of the President,

Vice-President, and Secretaries of Defense and State acting as the National Security Council,

“such other functions and duties related to intelligence aﬀecting the national security as the

National Security Council may from time to time direct.” Thus was created the covert action

responsibility of CIA that grew enormously from 1948 to 1952 under the leadership of Frank

Wisner. Wisner’s so-called Oﬃce of Policy Coordination (OPC) was lodged ostensibly in the

Department of State, but in reality it was an operational element of CIA.

The second major development was the arrival on the scene of two savvy Directors of

Central Intelligence (DCI). Air Force Lieutenant General Hoyt S. Vandenberg and retired

Army General Walter Bedell Smith (who had been Eisenhower’s wartime chief of staﬀ ) knew

what the organization required to move up to the big leagues and were prepared to ﬁght for

it. Vandenberg was responsible for securing for future DCIs the requisites to do their job.

The National Security Acts of 1947 and 1949 that he had lobbied for (and that had also shown

the handiwork of an outside commission appointed by President Truman in 1949 that included

Allen Dulles) gave the DCI unparalleled authority in Washington. They gave Vandenberg

and his successors as DCI the power to hire and ﬁre his subordinates; gave them the power to

spend money on their own say-so without further justiﬁcation; gave them the power to short-

circuit the federal government’s cumbersome procurement authorities in order to perform the

intelligence mission; and gave them the power to act across the range of intelligence collection,

analysis and dissemination responsibilities. The scope of authority was to include activities from

classic espionage, to special operations (covert action), to all-source analysis, to brieﬁng the

President’s National Security Council. In short, Vandenberg got CIA, and the DCI especially,

oﬀ to a running start before he returned to the Air Force. Bedell Smith took the new organiza-

tion the rest of the way.

Bedell resuscitated CIA’s estimative intelligence, a function that had earned its stripes during

the wartime OSS period but had lain dormant upon OSS’s demise. Estimative intelligence

looks out to the future, attempting to foresee problems of concern to the President that may be

coming down the line. With Truman’s go-ahead, Bedell created a Board of National Estimate

reporting to the DCI, led by the same Harvard history professor, William Langer, who had put

it together for General Donovan during World War II. Professor Langer managed to convince a

number of wise men from the nation’s best universities to come to work for him and Bedell,

tasking them with tracking the future course of the Cold War rivalry with the USSR.

DCI Smith also made it clear that covert action and special operations existed in a chain of

command extending from the DCI, and in coordination with the other espionage capability

that the DCI oversaw for the President, the Oﬃce of Special Operations (OSO). He thus

contrived to bring Wisner’s OPC into the CIA in fact.

The OSO’s responsibility was to gather foreign intelligence information by secret means

(i.e. classic espionage). It was often stumbling over or wandering into operations conducted by

OPC, because the foreign actors who stole the secrets were often the same ones who could

manage the propaganda or organize the political meetings for OPC. This is an important

historical point. If CIA did not take the ﬁeld to secretly oppose Soviet propaganda, backdoor

electioneering and subversion in Western Europe, several of the United States’ most important

allies might have been in jeopardy. Furthermore, intelligence activity that connoted “action”

was very much in the American character. It drew many adherents in the early CIA both

because there was a perceived need (as the constant stream of National Security Directives from

the President and National Security Council attested) and because, if successful, you could

see the results. At the same time, the slow, painstaking process of recruiting spies to report on

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happenings behind the Iron Curtain and in the Soviet Union itself had to be undertaken. In the

late 1940s and 1950s, this was diﬃcult and dangerous work, new to Americans of whom very

few spoke the relevant languages, Russian, Polish, Czech and Hungarian. It required a patience

and professionalism in terms of tradecraft that the OPCers sometimes overlooked or made fun

of. The spy recruiters and handlers (of whom DCI-to be, Richard Helms was a prominent

representative) were dubbed “the prudent professionals” and were not as esteemed or pro-

moted as quickly as the OPC “action” types. Bedell tried to end all that by making of OSO and

OPC one clandestine service, directed by one chief, Allen Dulles, who reported to him. Over

time it worked. The two skill sets became a little more interchangeable, although DCI Smith

noted in his farewell remarks to President Truman that he thought CIA was expending far too

little eﬀort with too meager results in acquiring intelligence penetrations of the Soviet Union.

Bedell was, of course, succeeded by DCI Allen Dulles, who jumped on the Eisenhower

Administration’s desire to contain the Soviet Union by mounting covert action programs

rather than confronting it with US military force. As Supreme Commander Allied Forces,

Europe in World War II, General Eisenhower had been a consumer of Britain’s Enigma

German code-breaking successes and knew both the role and the limitations of intelligence.

As President, he believed strongly that the Soviet world-wide advance had to be stopped, if not

rolled back, and covert action operations seemed a cheap and relatively low-risk way to do it.

Enamored of early successes in overthrowing regimes in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), the

President and his advisors at CIA grew accustomed to pushing the envelope in operations,

overlooking close shaves and longer-term backlash. However, this extraordinary progress in

spying on the USSR and containing its inﬂuence during the Eisenhower years encountered

several highly public setbacks as well. The revelation in May 1960, initially denied by President

Eisenhower, that the Soviets had shot down a U-2 surveillance aircraft ﬂying over Soviet

territory, disrupted the Paris Summit. The plan to secretly train Cuban exiles to land on Cuban

soil to overthrow the Castro regime, later adopted by President Kennedy and put into practice

half-heartedly, and in an indefensible location at the Bay of Pigs, abruptly ended a run of

successes by CIA. Kennan’s X article had alerted Washington to the bitter adversities ahead in

confronting as politically hardened a foe as the Soviets; so it was naturally only a matter of time

before a handful of poorly conceived or blighted operations gave CIA an enduring notoriety

and taint abroad, and dispelled the aura of the agency’s infallibility around Washington. The

Bay of Pigs disaster triggered the replacement of Allen Dulles by John McCone, whose signal

innovation as DCI was to put the analytical consensus within his own agency under intense

personal scrutiny. The tattered doctrine of plausible deniability, however, still held an occasion-

ally disproportionate allure for Kennedy and later presidents. After a national wake-up on the

shores of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, JFK raised CIA’s operational arm from the ashes, only to shoot

for the moon all over again in Operation Mongoose, which saw the agency embark on a rash of

sometimes frantic missions to overthrow a now-entrenched Fidel Castro.

Despite the evident hazards of the profession, presidents relied substantially on CIA spies in

Berlin to counter Soviet pressure there. The Eisenhower-Kennedy years were the beginning of

the era of America’s greatest technical intelligence successes as well, with spies and electronics

working hand-in-glove in Berlin and elsewhere; with the construction of the U-2 high-

altitude photo-reconnaissance aircraft; and with the reﬁnement beginning in the 1960s of

overhead satellite surveillance, eventually able to communicate images and intercepted

electronic signals to Washington in real time. Nonetheless, it was on Cuba, in the October

missile crisis in 1962, that US intelligence showed that it had arrived at a position of suﬃcient

maturity in its collection systems to be able to support President Kennedy with intelligence

from all three principal collection branches: sigint, photint and humint. The U-2 ﬂyovers were

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the ﬁrst to supply photographs of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles

being transported to, unloaded and installed in Cuba. Signals intercepts pointed to a heavy buzz

of communications around the part of the island where the missiles were being installed, and

human sources witnessed the transfer of mysterious long tubes on highways too small to

accommodate them. Although there were many details that human sources were unable to

provide, our principal spy, Oleg Penkovsky, from his vantage point at the pinnacle of Soviet

military intelligence, reported on the ranges and characteristics of the IRBMs and MRBMs

which were being installed; and also revealed that General Secretary Khrushchev was way out

in front of his Politburo in thus challenging the US so close to its home territory. The fact that

President Kennedy had Penkovsky’s insights into Khrushchev’s over-exposure, conﬁrming the

observations of his own former ambassador to the USSR, Llewelyn Thompson, meant that

JFK was prepared to give up the strategic advantage of a surprise attack on the installation

and, in a masterstroke of statecraft, give General Secretary Khrushchev an opportunity to

escape from the corner into which he had painted himself. In my view, this was the apex of US

intelligence support to the President during the Cold War.

After October 1962, prosecution of the Vietnam War became the over-riding national

security concern of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. CIA built up its presence in

South Vietnam and collected useful human intelligence, from captured Vietcong and North

Vietnamese prisoners especially, that permitted it to report consistently that the Government of

South Vietnam (GOSVN) was unlikely to prevail in the war unless it took a more active role in

the ﬁghting and was able to win over greater support in the Vietnamese countryside. CIA’s

rejection of the validity of high body counts, that were held by American military intelligence

to signal attrition in the North Vietnamese capacity to wage the war, is reminiscent of

today’s intelligence controversy about the import of the non-existence of Weapons of Mass

Destruction (WMD) in Iraq. In the case of Vietnam, CIA more or less stuck to its guns that

North Vietnam was not being defeated in 1968 despite its loss of manpower, whereas it was

“dead wrong” in its assessment of the existence of chemical and biological weapons stores

in Iraq in 2003, according to the Silberman-Robb Presidential Commission Report. In both

cases the requirement of good, on-the-ground, contemporaneous human source reporting

was critical to CIA’s intelligence judgments. In Vietnam we had it, while in Iraq we did not.

Silberman-Robb found that the critical National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002

on Iraqi WMD was based on unilateral spy reporting that dated from 1991, and UN Weapons

Inspector reporting that dated to 1998. There was no direct, on-the-ground humint after that

before the outbreak of the war. Over the decades, the NIE process had taken on its share of

taxing intelligence puzzles, but it was clearly compromised and out of date in this one.

It is ironic that, as today, the great blows to the quality and competence of CIA human source

reporting in the 1970s were delivered during a Republican presidency, on the watch of a

national security establishment that valued and to some extent depended on good intelligence

for its activist foreign and defense policy. Although Richard Nixon privately disparaged the ivy

leaguers at Langley whom he believed had favored his opponent in the 1960 presidential

race against JFK, he needed good intelligence on Vietnam to support the Paris Peace talks his

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was conducting with the North Vietnamese, and also his

overtures to China. Indeed, when it looked as if an unabashed Marxist, Salvador Allende, was

poised to win the Chilean presidential election of 1970, it was to CIA that President Nixon

turned, improperly bypassing the rest of his foreign policy establishment and the US Congress

to mount a coup against a democratically elected Latin American leader.

Watergate and the Nixon resignation turned the tide against this manifestation of executive

imperialism, while the CIA caught a fair measure of popular and Congressional backlash.

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Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote a series of articles in the New York Times in

December 1974 setting forth the ways in which CIA (and the FBI) had illegally spied on

American anti-Vietnam War protesters; opened people’s mail; tested hallucinogenic substances

on unwitting subjects and otherwise acted outside the bounds of an already broadly demarcated

charter without the knowledge of Congress or the American people.

Congressional reaction

was swift and severe. The US Senate and House of Representatives each convened investigating

committees to hold extensive public hearings on CIA abuses. Senator Frank Church, a

Democrat from Idaho who was running for President, tried to lock then-DCI William Colby

into admissions that the agency had attempted to assassinate several world leaders such as

Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and

Salvador Allende, without a president’s authorization, and claimed that CIA was a “Rogue

Elephant.” In the end, the Church Committee was unable to substantiate these allegations.

There was some assassination plotting at CIA, directed by presidents, but none was shown to

have been carried out successfully.

However, the Senate’s inquiry caused President Ford to create a blue ribbon panel headed by

Vice-President Rockefeller to look into the matter and to pre-empt the Congress’s certain

desire to legislate restrictions on US intelligence activity. Thus was born the eﬀort to establish

greater executive and legislative branch oversight of the Intelligence Community. President

Ford promulgated Executive Order 11905 in February 1976, which banned assassination

of foreign political leaders by US intelligence operatives or their surrogates, among other

restrictions. The order contained a number of additional dos and don’ts that were binding on

the Intelligence Community, and it was re-issued by Ford’s successors, Carter and Reagan, in

substantially the same form. After several years of trying to pass legislation establishing more

comprehensive and binding charters for Intelligence Community agencies such as the FBI,

CIA, NSA, and NRO, real-world dangers posed to the United States by the Soviet Union

caused the public and Congress to regain some equilibrium on the subject of further restraining

US intelligence-gathering capabilities, and the eﬀort was dropped. The Congress settled for

one paragraph in the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1980. It required the DCI and the

President to keep the Congress “fully and currently informed” of all intelligence activities,

including covert action, consistent with the President’s constitutional authorities and the DCI’s

duty to protect “sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure.”

The Congress believed it could settle for this paragraph instead of the several-hundred-page

charter bill, because it had established in 1975 and 1976 permanent oversight committees of

the House and Senate to review Intelligence Community programs and operations, just as

every other department and agency in the executive branch is reviewed.

Some argue that since the creation of the House Permanent Select Committee on

Intelligence (HPSCI) and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), with rotating

memberships after seven years’ service, CIA has never been the same aggressive collector of

human intelligence that it was during the height of the Cold War. I disagree. The world had

changed by 1975. Although the Soviets still maintained a nuclear arsenal pointed at America’s

heartland, the USSR was on the downhill side of the slope economically and politically. It had

an aging leadership and an increasing inability to provide for the needs and wants of its people.

The US was receiving more volunteers as spies from the Soviet Union, as its high-ranking

cadres became increasingly gloomy about the country’s future prospects. In the US, Vietnam

had exploded the post-war consensus surrounding US foreign policy, and a stronger demand

for oversight and accountability for all of America’s overseas activities had emerged.

Within CIA, the chaos that followed the controversial CIA mail-opening program known as

Operation CHAOS lasted well into the Carter presidency and the tenure of DCI Stansﬁeld

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Turner. President Carter put CIA back on the oﬀensive in his changing attitude to the

Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the covert action he instigated to oppose the Soviet take-over of

Afghanistan in 1979. Still it remained for Ronald Reagan to initiate an across-the-board

revitalization of both US defense and intelligence resources that would reverse the post-

Vietnam War drawdown and counter ongoing outbreaks of Soviet aggressiveness. President

Reagan authorized a covert action to train and reinforce the Contra resistance to the Marxist

Sandinista revolution of 1979 in Nicaragua, and a second covert program to build up the

mujahideen factions opposing the Soviet-controlled government in Afghanistan. At the same

time, he initiated a research program to intercept incoming missiles in space. The Kremlin

began to believe the US was trying for a ﬁrst-strike capability against the USSR and initiated a

world-wide intelligence alert called Project Ryan to report on indicators conﬁrming such an

eﬀort. At the same time, old age and sickness were removing Soviet premiers at a record rate. In

March 1985, a completely new ﬁgure ascended to power in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev,

who was focused on curtailing Soviet commitments to defend communism everywhere (the

Brezhnev Doctrine) and reforming the economy to provide a better response to the needs of

the Soviet peoples. Meanwhile the Reagan administration was having a diﬃcult time keeping

the US Congress on board for the operation to support the Contras. After the second amend-

ment curtailing CIA support for the Contras passed Congress – and was signed into law by the

President because it was attached to an omnibus year-end appropriations bill – some members

of the administration on the National Security staﬀ and in CIA concocted a scheme to sell

embargoed weaponry to Iran in exchange for information about terrorists who had abducted

Americans in the Middle East, using the proceeds from the sales to supply weapons illegally to

the Contras. The Iran–Contra scheme ﬁnally blew up in the press in the fall of 1986, sending

the Reagan White House and William Casey’s CIA into a tailspin.

It took the appointment in 1987 of Judge William Webster as DCI, a former Director of

the FBI and US Court of Appeals judge, to restore legitimacy and integrity to CIA operations

after the Iran–Contra ﬁasco. Meanwhile CIA’s covert operators got Congressional approval to

supply Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujahideen, a policy that proved pivotal to driving the

Soviets out of Afghanistan. As unintentionally transparent as the Nicaraguan covert action was

to the world, so the cooperation by CIA with the Pakistani intelligence service to supply

armaments to Afghani and Arab guerillas in Afghanistan was painted as a state secret within

the boundaries of “plausible deniability.” The Soviets knew where the weaponry, especially

the Stingers, was coming from, but they were in no position to do much about it, despite the

concerns of Pakistan’s nervous chief of state, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq.

To date, the Afghan covert action has been the last big successful clandestine political

operation mounted by CIA, where the US hand did not show to an impermissible degree.

By and large, the CIA oﬃcers involved kept their promise to Pakistan’s rulers that they would

physically stay out of Afghanistan, and work through the Pakistani intelligence service, the

ISI. Both the advent of round-the-clock cable news programming, and instant world-wide

communications via the internet have successfully impinged upon the US’s ability to maintain

the necessary secrecy of a major covert political operation. This was made manifest in the

administration of President George H.W. Bush, when the President, despite his tour of duty as

DCI and his appreciation for the role of intelligence, turned instead to the American military

to deal with both Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989 and Saddam Hussein in the ﬁrst Gulf

War in 1991. When President Clinton sought to make use of covert action in overthrowing

Saddam in the mid-1990s he found it was impossible. Congress had gained an appetite

for micro-managing an operation that could have high domestic stakes, and CIA had too few

covert assets to bring it oﬀ.

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By the same token, viewed in retrospect, in the mid-1980s it would turn out that the US had

suﬀered unprecedented high-level penetrations of its intelligence services, through the handi-

work of Aldrich Ames in CIA and Robert Hanssen in the FBI. Ames began his espionage for

Soviet handlers in March 1985 in order to get $50,000 to buy himself out of debt. He was a

30-year spy in CIA’s operations directorate who had specialized in Soviet matters, arriving at

a senior level even though he had a mediocre record – which included numerous episodes of

alcohol abuse, security violations and a chronic inability to get his ﬁnancial accountings and

contact reports about meetings with Soviet oﬃcials in on time. In short, Ames probably should

never have been permitted to be on the front line, meeting and assessing Soviet oﬃcials one-

on-one. But he was. And he used his position and his knowledge of how both the Soviet and

US intelligence systems operated to betray, over a period of nine years, every agent working for

the US against the USSR; details of numerous US operations against the Soviets; and the names

of his colleagues who were engaged in the eﬀort. Ames’s betrayal led to the certain execution of

ten US spies and probably more, along with the compromise of hundreds of US intelligence

operations. The arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994 provoked a wave of disillusionment and dismay

in the American public, and among the Congressional oversight committees, that such a sloppy

and seemingly inept spy could betray so much over such a long period, not only without being

caught, but without CIA having mounted a serious eﬀort to track him. The damage to the

agency’s reputation was nothing short of devastating.

For the FBI, no less damaging was the tale of Robert Hanssen, a dour misﬁt who had used his

superior information technology skills to eventually burrow into the deepest corners of the

bureau’s counterintelligence operations against the USSR. Hanssen managed to turn over vast

amounts of operational detail and names of US agents to the Soviets in an on again-oﬀ again

career of espionage which began in the late 1970s and continued until his arrest in February

2001. Hanssen’s case was a tougher one to crack than Ames’s because Hanssen had been careful

never to meet with his Soviet handler, conducting all his business with the Soviets through dead

drops in a park near his home in Northern Virginia. Furthermore, Hanssen had compromised

many of the same spies named by Ames or by Edward Lee Howard, another CIA turncoat of

the period; so it took an analysis of operations that had gone sour that could not have been

compromised by Ames or Howard, and also the help of a Soviet source, before Hanssen’s own

activities could be distinguished, and an arrest ﬁnally made.

At the same time that these spy wars were taking place between the Soviet and US intelli-

gence services, CIA was beginning to enjoy real success in running Soviet and Bloc volunteer

spies who were supplying vast amounts of useful intelligence information about Soviet and

Warsaw Pact war-ﬁghting plans in Europe, and Soviet military R&D. In the former case,

Ryszard Kuklinski, a high-ranking member of the Polish General Staﬀ, passed CIA all of the

Warsaw Pact plans that crossed his desk from 1972 until his defection in 1981; and in the second

case, Adolph Tolkachev provided his US case oﬃcer with the latest Soviet military R&D on

stealth technology and air defense missilery from the late 1970s until 1985, saving the US

taxpayer millions of dollars in unnecessary defense expenditure. These successful Soviet spy

volunteer recruitments at the end of the Cold War, and others like them, proved the value of a

vigorous human source collection program at the time that the Soviet regime was under severe

internal stress.

The need for espionage did not disappear with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989

and the dismemberment of the USSR in 1991. The successor Russian government kept

its intelligence oﬃcers in the ﬁeld and the West at bay on a number of important issues. Yet

however slowly, over time, the threats targeted by American intelligence agencies began to shift.

As authoritarian regimes calciﬁed or collapsed over the decade of the 1990s – frequently

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FREDERICK P. HITZ

ex-Cold War client governments – the new threats would become proliferating weapons of

mass destruction and emerging non-state terrorist factions, exempliﬁed by Osama bin Laden

and al Qaeda.

Osama bin Laden mounted a series of bold and ever more sophisticated attacks, beginning

with that on the Khobar Towers, a US Air Force billet in Saudi Arabia in 1997; followed by the

bombings of US Embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998; and the attack on the USS

Cole in 2000. This aﬄuent Saudi veteran of the mujahideen eﬀort against the Soviets in

Afghanistan showed he was capable and desirous of inﬂicting unacceptable damage on the

United States in order to drive it out of the Muslim holy places of the Middle East. His

organization, known as al Qaeda, or the Franchise, had in 1991 volunteered to lead the Islamic

eﬀort to force Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait, but his oﬀer was overlooked by the Saudi

royals. Subsequently in exile in the Sudan, and after 1995 in Afghanistan as a guest of the

Taliban regime, Osama preached Islamic unity and deﬁance in opposing the West’s continued

military basing in the region and the support it was giving to autocratic and selﬁsh rulers in

Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf who were doing nothing to provide for their populations.

CIA, in particular in the US Intelligence Community, became alarmed at the growing strength,

sophistication and appeal of Osama’s rhetoric against the United States’ role in the Middle East,

which targeted it as the “far enemy.” After President Clinton’s weak and ineﬀective response to

the African embassy bombings, CIA established a task force to track Osama and al Qaeda, but

it was never able to deliver the knock-out punch on his compound in Afghanistan or stop

his continuing deadly momentum during the Clinton years, even though then DCI George

Tenet “declared war” on al Qaeda in an attempt to bring focus to American intelligence’s

counter-terrorist strategy.

In 2001, CIA began receiving heightened liaison reporting from US allies in Europe and the

Middle East that al Qaeda was planning something big. But where – in the region or against a

US installation overseas – was unknown. This was becoming Osama’s trademark: long months

of preparation and then a sudden strike. But just like the US Government’s previous experience

with a massive surprise attack on US territory at Pearl Harbor, we were not prepared nor really

expecting an attack in the continental United States. September 11, 2001 was an unforeseen

and life-shattering wake-up call on the capacity of non-state, religious-inspired terrorism to

threaten stable societies like the United States and our European allies. It took President George

W. Bush minutes to declare that the US was involved in a war against terror and that all the

military and intelligence resources of the United States would be deployed to win it.

What were those intelligence resources? In late 2001, in what condition did the Intelligence

Community ﬁnd itself to take on Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the challenge of religious-

based international terror? With the passing of the Cold War, CIA had been down-sized and

had in addition witnessed the dramatic departure of large numbers of expert spy handlers and

analysts whose skills had been shaped by the challenge of the Soviet Union, and who did

not have much interest in and familiarity with the milieu of terrorism, drugs, crime and

weapons proliferation, issues which would be the meat and potatoes of Presidential Decision

Directive 35 that set the blueprint for IC targeting after the Cold War ended. So they retired,

and took with them their knowledge of spy tradecraft and of foreign languages. On top of

that, as the 9/11 post-mortems would show, the intelligence agencies had grown into mature

bureaucracies without much initiative, imagination or creativity. They faced a target that

operated in the shadows of nation-states but wasn’t one; that had low overheads and a tight

network of collaborators that it deployed with iron-handed discipline; and that possessed one

unassailable attribute: many of its adherents were willing to commit suicide for the cause, and

would strap on a bomb just to take civilian bystanders with them.

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Other problems beset the intelligence agencies in 2001 as well. A division between domestic

and international spheres of terrorism no longer existed. A plot that could begin in a Hamburg

mosque or a Madrid suburb could be planned for immediate execution in New York or

Washington. The divided responsibilities between the FBI and CIA that historical accident and

concern about domestic civil liberties had spawned in the aftermath of World War II were

hindrances in the twenty-ﬁrst century to the kind of instant information-sharing and team-

work that cell phones and internet access in the hands of our terrorist attackers demanded.

Compartmentation and “need to know” take on sinister meanings, when the eﬀect is to deny

intelligence to a sister agency equally charged with the responsibility to pre-empt a terrorist act.

Some of the more egregious barriers to intelligence-sharing and teamwork between the

intelligence agencies were struck down in the USA PATRIOT Act passed in October 2002,

and in the Intelligence Reform Bill, passed in December 2004. Now, wiretap permissions,

when granted, run to the individual who is the target of the surveillance, not the instrument by

which he intends to communicate. Grand jury testimony in terrorist cases can be shared among

the law enforcement and intelligence entities having an interest in the matter. The Foreign

Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has been amended to include, among the parties against

whom the US Government may seek authorization for electronic surveillance from the special

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, not just spies but terrorists as well; and the standard for

authorizing surveillance has been broadened to encompass those as to whom terrorism is “a

principal purpose” of their activity and not “the” purpose. There are additional sections in the

2001 Act that beef up the anti-money-laundering provisions of federal statute and enhance

the “sneak and peek” possibilities open to law enforcement, as well as enable more internet

intrusion of suspected terrorists. It is possible that some of the more aggressive portions of the

PATRIOT Act may be modiﬁed somewhat to include a greater measure of accountability.

The intended changes included in the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 date back to the

Church Committee era, but trespassed on more turf, and would only see the light of day three

years after September 11th, with some of the most intense bureaucratic lobbying of any intelli-

gence bill. In the Act, there has been a concerted eﬀort to remedy one of the principal

perceived deﬁciencies in the performance of the intelligence agencies prior to 9/11, namely the

absence of “an attending physician” who could treat the patient as a whole and be responsible

for the work of all the specialists racing around performing tests on the patient on their own.

That metaphor, used by the 9/11 Commission to sway the Congress and the President, was the

premise behind creating the new position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The

DNI was intended to be the intelligence czar, a cabinet oﬃcer holding both managerial and

budgetary authority over the entire Intelligence Community. He would also be the President’s

principal intelligence adviser.

When the dust settled after passage of the Act, the DNI’s lines of command were not as clear

as the Commission hoped. The Defense Secretary and the Department of Defense (DOD)

continue to share many of the DNI’s management and budgetary authorities relating to the

intelligence agencies under the command of DOD. The DOD intelligence agencies, NRO,

NSA, DIA and NGA account for 80 percent of the intelligence budget. There is also the matter

of information-sharing, which the Act seeks to encourage by requiring the DNI to have a

subordinate who is responsible for creating an Information Sharing Environment in the Intelli-

gence Community.

The 2004 Act also treats the Intelligence Community’s self-inﬂicted wounds represented by

the failures to warn of the 9/11 attacks and to accurately account for the weapons of mass

destruction stockpiled by Saddam Hussein since 1991 – believed ready for dispersal to terrorists

by Saddam at some point if the U.N. embargo of Iraq was not lifted. The existence of Iraqi

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FREDERICK P. HITZ

WMD was one of the principal reasons cited by the Bush Administration for preparing to go to

war against Iraq. A seemingly authoritative National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) circulated by

CIA in October 2002 detailed the supposed holdings of chemical and biological weapons by

the Iraqi Ba’athist regime, and the eﬀorts of the regime to make nuclear weaponry advances.

Furthermore, United Nations testimony drawn from the NIE by Secretary of State Colin

Powell in February 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, was used to sweep aside Allied opposition

to the invasion. It has become painfully clear since, that Saddam suspended his WMD programs

after 1991 to get out from under the UN-sponsored embargo. There were no WMD stockpiled

in Iraq prior to the war, as Saddam had destroyed them.

What made the US Intelligence Community’s views on Iraqi WMD so objectionable was

not that they held such preconceptions (most other knowledgeable intelligence services held

identical views – the UK, Russia, Germany, France and Israel), but that the NIE sought to

justify the weapons’ existence on outdated and unconﬁrmed reporting. The proprietary data

dated from 1991; reports from UN Inspectors stopped in 1998; and assessments rested heavily

on unilateral sources like “Curveball” whose credibility was in question. The analytical trade-

craft employed by the CIA on the critical NIE was fatally deﬁcient.

Where does that now leave CIA and the Intelligence Community, who bear the prepon-

derant responsibility to inform the President about terrorists and their targets before these attacks

occur? Future performance alone will provide the answer. The Intelligence Community has

weathered its share of crises in the past. Yet there are some systemic reasons to be concerned.

To start with, the intelligence agencies allowed their capabilities to attenuate markedly

during that ten-year period between the disintegration of the Soviet Union and September 11,

2001. There are still too few intelligence oﬃcers who have studied and understand Arabic

civilizations or who have lived in the Middle East at some point in their careers. Moreover,

many of the collection techniques of the Cold War have been rendered obsolete by cell phones,

the internet and other aspects of changing technology. CIA cannot continue to operate as it

did in the pre-Iraq period, largely excluded from the hard targets that the United States is up

against. Where it has no physical presence, the agency has historically relied for humint primarily

on defectors, detainees, legal travelers, opposition groups and foreign government liaison

services, but these sources divulge their secrets at some distance in time and space from the

ongoing developments inside the target they are reporting on. Getting inside the adversary’s

organization is thus a higher priority than it was even in the Cold War. Yet even though the

Directorate of Operations budget is now more than double its pre-September 11th levels,

an estimated 80–90 percent of intelligence information about al Qaeda still comes in as sigint.

The whereabouts, goals and tactics of terrorists are thus available only imprecisely and

intermittently.

In the humint area, American intelligence is still behind other services in having linguists

who speak the hard languages of the Middle East, Central Asia or Southeast Asia. In addition,

this assignment is becoming less appealing to spy runners from the standpoint of safety and

quality of life. Increasingly, CIA’s operatives will bring back key intelligence only by acting

with the ﬂexibility, the skills, and the cover it takes to run operations unlinked with an oﬃcial

installation – under non-oﬃcial cover. Consequently, the problems spies face conducting

espionage will be more dangerous. Families too will be divided, as many overseas tours in areas

of prime concern to the intelligence agencies are not safe for young children.

An equally fundamental point is that Americans are not the “good guys” any more in many

areas of the Middle East. This sounds simplistic, yet much of US intelligence success during the

mature stages of the Cold War occurred because Soviet and Soviet Bloc oﬃcials volunteered to

work for the American or British intelligence services as a way to oppose the corruption and

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misery of their own lives behind the Iron Curtain. That motivation appears less prevalent in

the Middle East today. The USA is perceived as a threatening, non-Islamic outside force,

only interested in the region’s petroleum resources. Perhaps President Bush’s hard push for

democratic governments in the region will alter this attitude. It will be a hard sell.

The upshot of pervasive suspicions in the region about American aims is that, to be success-

ful, CIA and the other Intelligence Community humint collectors will have to work indirectly,

and multilaterally, through the good oﬃces of friendly intelligence services, the operational

channels called intelligence liaison. Since September 11th, CIA has been doing that in a major

way, trading superior resources and technology for on-the-ground intelligence information

about terrorist threats. The diﬃculty liaison relationships present, however, is that we are no

longer in complete control of the spy operation. Our liaison intermediaries will inﬂuence both

whom we target and how we manage the take. The result is bound in many cases to be a

dilution of the product and a diminished timeliness. But the most worrisome deﬁciency will be

a lack of conﬁdence that one is getting the full picture, with the ongoing potential to leave the

US vulnerable and the region unstable: it is worth remembering the lessons of the Pakistani

ISI’s control over our access to the mujahideen during the 1980s and 1990s in Afghanistan.

The Intelligence Community’s technical collection programs may not be in much better

shape than its humint. Signals intelligence-gathering is hindered by inadequate translation

capabilities, while a wary target will be more willing to communicate by word of mouth, cleft

stick and carrier pigeon, than by telephone or more modern means. From an operational

standpoint, the fallout from the brouhaha over warrantless surveillance by NSA of communica-

tions from potential terrorists abroad with individuals in the United States that arose in early

2006 may further limit the gathering of useful intelligence. Actually, it appears that most al

Qaeda instructions are moving through Arabic websites on the internet, which intelligence

services worldwide are not yet recovering or translating in a comprehensive or timely fashion.

When all is said and done, counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation intelligence-

gathering follows a new paradigm. It is less about classic espionage than persistent tracking of

terrorists and their potential weapons by good detective work and perceptive mining of reams

of open sources. This is no longer back-alley skulking in a trench coat. It is down-and-dirty

police investigative work, tracing radicals and their bomb-making materials, and recruiting

informants to watch mosques and radical meeting sites. That is why in the US it is so important

for the CIA to work well with the FBI, with Customs, with Immigration and Naturalization

and with local police ﬁrst responders. Intelligence gathering in the twenty-ﬁrst century is now

less about James Bond or George Smiley than it is a Frankenstein composite of law enforce-

ment, spies and forensics.

Notes

1 Seymour Hersh, “Huge CIA Operation Reported in US against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents

During Nixon Years,” New York Times, December 22, 1974; Hersh, “President Tells Colby to Speed

Report on CIA,” New York Times, December 24, 1974; Hersh, “3 More Aides Quit in CIA Shake-Up,”

New York Times, December 30, 1974.

2 Dana Priest, “Foreign Network at Front of CIA’s Terror Fight,” Washington Post, November 18, 2005.

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FREDERICK P. HITZ

Open source intelligence

Robert David Steele

Executive summary

Deﬁnition and scope

Open source intelligence, or OSINT, is unclassiﬁed information that has been deliberately

discovered, discriminated, distilled and disseminated to a select audience in order to address a

speciﬁc question. It provides a very robust foundation for other intelligence disciplines.

When applied in a systematic fashion, OSINT products can reduce the demands on classiﬁed

intelligence collection resources by limiting requests for information only to those questions

that cannot be answered by open sources.

Open information sources are not the exclusive domain of intelligence staﬀs. Intelligence

should never seek to limit access to open sources. Rather, intelligence should facilitate the

use of open sources by all staﬀ elements that require access to relevant, reliable information.

Intelligence staﬀs should concentrate on the application of proven intelligence processes to the

exploitation of open sources to improve its all-source intelligence products. Familiarity with

available open sources will place intelligence staﬀs in the position of guiding and advising other

staﬀ elements in their own exploitation of open sources.

Open source intelligence and joint or coalition operations

OSINT is a vital component of NATO’s future vision. Through its concentration upon unclas-

siﬁed open sources of information, OSINT provides the means with which to develop valid

and reliable intelligence products that can be shared with non-NATO elements of international

operations. Experience in the Balkans, and the increasing importance of the Partnership for

Peace and Mediterranean Dialogue members in security dialogue, illustrates the need to

develop information sources that enable broader engagement with these vital partners.

Private sector information offerings

The Internet is now the default Command and Control, Communications, Computing, and

Intelligence (C4I) architecture for virtually the entire world. The principal exceptions are

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most militaries and intelligence organizations. The Internet facilitates commerce, provides

entertainment and supports ever increasing amounts of human interaction. To exclude the

information ﬂow carried by the Internet is to exclude the greatest emerging data source

available. While the Internet is a source of much knowledge, all information gleaned from it

must be assessed for its source, bias and reliability.

As a source of reliable information, the Internet must be approached with great caution. As

a means with which to gain access to quality commercial sources of validated information, the

Internet is unbeatable.

A vision of open source exploitation must not be limited exclusively to electronic sources.

Traditional print, hardcopy images and other analog sources continue to provide a wealth of

data of continuing relevance to NATO intelligence.

The open source intelligence cycle

As the range of NATO information needs varies depending upon mission requirements, it is

virtually impossible to maintain a viable collection of open source materials that address all

information needs instantly. The focus should be on the collection of sources, not information.

With knowledge of relevant and reliable sources of open source information, an intelligence

staﬀ can quickly devote collection energy and analytical expertise to develop tailored OSINT

products to the mission need.

OSINT and the emerging future intelligence architecture of NATO

OSINT is an essential building block for all intelligence disciplines. Open sources have always

played a role in classiﬁed intelligence production. In the NATO context, a robust OSINT

capability greatly increases the range of information sources available to intelligence staﬀs to

address intelligence needs.

Nations are capable of tasking classiﬁed intelligence sources to address intelligence gaps.

Lacking organic intelligence collection assets, NATO intelligence staﬀs are unable to task

classiﬁed collection. Rather than immediately directing a Request For Information (RFI) to a

national intelligence centre, a robust OSINT capability enables intelligence staﬀs to address

many intelligence needs with internal resources.

While unable to replace classiﬁed intelligence production, OSINT is able to complement an

all-source intelligence production process with essential support including tip-oﬀs, context,

validation and cover for information sanitation.

Introduction to open source intelligence

OSINT is not a substitute for satellites, spies, or existing organic military and civilian intelli-

gence capabilities. It is, however, a foundation – a very strong foundation – for planning and

executing coalition operations across the spectrum from humanitarian assistance to total war.

OSINT provides strategic historical and cultural insights; it provides operationally helpful

information about infrastructure and current conditions; and it provides tactically vital com-

mercial geospatial information that is not available from national capabilities. In coalition

operations, OSINT is both the foundation for civil–military cooperation, and the framework

for classiﬁed bilateral intelligence-sharing.

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ROBERT DAVID STEELE

OSINT is distinct from academic, business, or journalistic research in that it represents the

application of the proven process of national intelligence to the diversity of sources, with the

intent of producing tailored intelligence for the commander. OSINT is also unique, within a

coalition operations context, in that it simultaneously provides a multi-lateral foundation for

establishing a common view of the shared Area of Operations (AOR), while also providing a

context within which a wide variety of bi-lateral classiﬁed intelligence sharing arrangements

can be exploited. Figure 10.1 illustrates these relationships.

Since 2001, the Swedish government has advanced a concept for Multinational, Multi-

agency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing (M4IS), and the author has put

forward the need for regional Multinational Information Operations Centers (MIOC). At the

same time, in the private sector, organizations such as the Co-Intelligence Institute have brought

forward robust concepts for Collective Intelligence, and books have been written about Smart

Mobs and Wisdom of the Crowds. It is clear from these developments that OSINT is taking on a

life of its own outside the government, in keeping with the author’s original depiction of the

seven tribes of intelligence (see Figure 10.2).

OSINT is less about speciﬁc sources such as are listed in the column on the right of

Figure 10.1, and more about “knowing who knows.”

Deﬁnitions

There are four distinct categories of open information and intelligence.

• Open Source Data (OSD). Data is the raw print, broadcast, oral debrieﬁng or other form

of information from a primary source. It can be a photograph, a tape recording, a com-

mercial satellite image, or a personal letter from an individual.

• Open Source Information (OSIF). OSIF is comprised of data that can be put together,

generally by an editorial process that provides some ﬁltering and validation as well as

presentation management. OSIF is generic information that is usually widely diss-

eminated. Newspapers, books, broadcast, and general daily reports are part of the OSIF

world.

Figure 10.1 Relationship between open and classiﬁed information operations

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OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

• Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). OSINT is information that has been deliberately

discovered, discriminated, distilled, and disseminated to a select audience, generally

the commander and their immediate staﬀ, in order to address a speciﬁc question. OSINT,

in other words, applies the proven process of intelligence to the broad diversity of open

sources of information, and creates intelligence.

• Validated OSINT (OSINT-V). OSINT-V

is OSINT to which a very high degree of

certainty can be attributed. It can be produced by an all-source intelligence professional,

with access to classiﬁed intelligence sources, whether working for a nation or for a

coalition staﬀ. It can also come from an assured open source to which no question can be

raised concerning its validity (images of an aircraft arriving at an airport that are broadcast

over the media).

OSINT in context

In this summary chapter we will touch lightly on the context of OSINT, while distinguishing

between OSINT as it supports government Intelligence & Information Operations (I2O)

where secret sources and methods play a paramount role, and OSINT as the sole legal means of

decision support for non-governmental organizations.

While OSINT is not “new” in that nations and organizations have always understood the

value of legal travelers, direct observation, structured reading, and legal purchases of information

services, what is new about OSINT is the conﬂuence of three distinct trends: ﬁrst, the pro-

liferation of the Internet as a tool for disseminating and sharing overt information in all

languages; second, the consequent and related “information explosion” in which published

useful knowledge is growing exponentially; and third, the collapse of formerly denied areas

accompanied by the explosion of non-traditional threats in the form of failed states and

transnational non-state threats to public security and prosperity.

Figure 10.2 Information continuum and the Seven Tribes

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ROBERT DAVID STEELE

Below are four perspectives of how OSINT relates to the secret intelligence world, to the

speciﬁc secret disciplines, to the wisdom of the crowds, and to the decision support process

of any commander or Chief Executive Oﬃcer (CEO).

1 Open source information (OSIF) is the earth beneath the temple, while OSINT is the

foundation, with each of the secret disciplines being a pillar, all holding up the temple’s

roof, all-source analysis. However, in recent years it has grown in importance, to the point

that Dr John Gannon, former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis &

Production (ADDCI/A&P) is now on record as saying “Open-source information now

dominates the universe of the intelligence analyst, a fact that is unlikely to change in the

foreseeable future.”

2 If intelligence were a baseball game, then the clandestine service would try to recruit

a player, the signals intelligence specialists would put a “bug” in the opposing team’s

dug-out, the imagery people would take a satellite picture of the game every three days.

OSINT tells everyone in the audience that if they catch the ball, we will pay cash and it is

an out. OSINT changes the rules of the game.

3 OSINT is both a subordinate discipline to each of the classiﬁed disciplines, and also

uniquely an all-source discipline that can “stand alone” when necessary, combining overt

humans, overt signals, commercial imagery, and public analysis.

4 OSINT is the only discipline that can simultaneously access all that can be known in all

languages back in time, harness all available expertise and manpower without clearances,

and produce intelligence that can be shared with anyone. This makes it especially

valuable for law enforcement investigations, humanitarian assistance missions, and early

warning for open discussion among members of the United Nations.

OSINT and information operations

Information Operations (IO) is comprised of Information Peacekeeping (IP) and Infor-

mation Warfare (IW). At the strategic level, IO is broadly related to inﬂuencing and messaging

all parties (hostile, neutral, and friendly) for national advantage. IO must integrate OSINT

(understanding their reality as well as our own), Joint Information Operations Centers

or Commands (JIOC) as well as multinational and national variants (MIOC, NIOC)

which comprise the tool-sets as well as the mind-sets; and Strategic Communication (the

message).

At the operational and tactical levels, this translates into assuring one’s own ability to see,

hear, know, understand, decide, and act on “all information, all languages, all the time,” while

denying or distorting or altering adversarial information capabilities.

This is an extraordinarily complex undertaking that has not been intellectually deﬁned. The

concepts, doctrines, tools, and mind-sets are a long way from being robust. What this means in

practice is that nations and organizations must be able to devise uniﬁed campaign plans that

fully integrate, on an interagency or inter-departmental basis, the activities of public diplomacy

and public aﬀairs or relations, strategic communication and inﬂuence (as well as strategic

acquisition and force structure management), perception management, psychological

operations (PSYOP), the propaganda and agent of inﬂuence aspects of covert operations

(among governments), denial and deception, space control, network attack and defense,

electronic warfare, information and communications and electronic security operations,

information assurance operations, counter-intelligence and counter-deception operations, and

so on.

Rarely emphasized except by the author, all of these demand that we understand reality,

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OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

and not allow the United States to be driven into bankruptcy by ideological fantasies and

consequent policy-level misjudgments.

OSINT and national security

It is a common misperception that most “intelligence” is classiﬁed and must come from secret

sources and methods that are very expensive and relatively risky. The “cult of secrecy” has put

us in a very disadvantageous position, where in the United States of America (USA) at least

$50 billion a year is spent on collecting the 5 percent of the information that is secret and can

or must be stolen, and virtually nothing is spent on the 95 percent of the information in all

languages that is relevant to all but the most secretive threats.

The importance of this observation can be emphasized by listing the top threats to global

security as documented in the Report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and

Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility:

The average utility and relevant of OSINT to these global threats is – on the basis of my

informed estimate – 82.5 percent, which comes very close to the generic “80–20” rule. We

must conclude that any nation that persists in spending 99.9 percent of its intelligence funds

on collecting secrets,

and less than one half of one percent of its intelligence funds on OSINT,

is quite literally, clinically insane (or insanely corrupt) at the highest levels.

Naturally there are those who will quibble about whether the budgets of the National

Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or

the Department of Justice (DoJ) should be “counted.” What matters here is that intelligence

is nothing more or less than decision-support for the President and the top members of

the Cabinet, as well as Congress in its oversight role. Most of the US Government budget,

by way of example, is spent on weapons, manpower, and administration. Research & develop-

ment (R&D) is focused on investigation, design, and the creation of capabilities, not on

decision-support. Intelligence is decision-support.

It merits comment that those business enterprises and religions that choose to emphasize

industrial espionage or the covert subversion of governments are making the same fundamental

error of confusing “secret sources and methods” with “intelligence.” Intelligence is information

that has been collected, processed, analyzed, and presented in order to support a decision that

increases security or proﬁt, or reduces risk or cost. Nowhere is it written that “intelligence”

must be secret or that intelligence is improved by a reliance on secret sources or methods.

Figure 10.3 OSINT relevance to global security threats

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ROBERT DAVID STEELE

Indeed, it has been demonstrated on more than one occasion, with Viet-Nam and Iraq as the

extant examples,

that not only is secret intelligence easy to ignore and manipulate, but a

reliance on secret intelligence can lead to a “shutting out” of overt common sense and open

sources of information.

Consider this, Daniel Ellsberg lecturing Henry Kissinger:

The danger is, you’ll become like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people

in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much

greater than yours [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect

secret information].

OSINT – intelligence that is publicly disseminated – is the single best antidote to the

pathologies of secret executive power.

OSINT and the larger customer base for intelligence

Most citizens, and most legislators, assume that national intelligence or corporate intelligence

is in the service of every part of the government, or every part of the corporation. This is

not actually the case. In the USA, speciﬁcally, the focus continues to be on “secrets for the

President,” and on a few “hard targets” considered to be of the gravest possible concern –

China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea. Within corporations, the emphasis is on serving the Chief

Executive Oﬃcer (CEO). Consider the following questions as both a litmus test for intelligence

managers, and as a broad deﬁnition of the possibilities for OSINT. To be explicit: every single

customer ignored by the mandarins of secrecy or the sycophants to the CEO is a customer for

OSINT.

• Do you believe that secrets are the ultimate form of knowledge, or do you believe that all

sources including open sources should be brought to bear on decision-support?

• Do you believe that intelligence should focus only on the gravest of threats, what some

call the “hard targets,” or do you believe there is merit to “global coverage,” seeking to

monitor and understand all threats at some minimal mandatory level of detail?

• Is intelligence something that should be done only for the leadership, or should intelli-

gence support – decision-support – be provided to agency heads, department heads, and

even the individuals in the ﬁeld, the front line that interacts with the real world?

• Is federal or corporate level intelligence only for the members of the federal government

or the corporate headquarters, or should it support state and local jurisdictions, or

subsidiaries?

OSINT and the levels of analysis

It is in the above context that we can conclude this overview by stating without equivocation

that OSINT must be provided to all levels of any enterprise. This about empowering every

individual, every segment of the enterprise, with decision-support (see Figure 10.4).

OSINT and coalitions

Although the concepts and doctrine that I have been developing for eighteen years recognize

the seven tribes of intelligence as distinct historical, cultural, intellectual, and direct-access

entities, it is the military and the concept of the military coalition that really serves as the spinal

cord and nervous system for “harnessing the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth.”

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OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

Within the USA, as within most countries, the military is consistently the most professional,

the most disciplined, the most structured, and the most reliable organization. It is also the

only one that treats Command and Control, Communications, Computing, and Intelligence

(C4I) as a distinct discipline with its own Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) for each

aspect.

It is a fact that the USA is simply not capable of ﬁelding suﬃcient citizens with suﬃcient

language and foreign area qualiﬁcations. Given the rapid rate at which available information

doubles (a rate that will accelerate as hand-held devices become the instrument of choice, and

are used to register photographs, videos, voice recordings, and text inputs from tens of millions

operating in all languages, all the time), there is only one possible solution for mastering “all

information, all languages, all the time.” We must provide our coalition partners, and par-

ticularly our military coalition partners, with the means to digitize, translate, and analyze (using

both automated tools and their own unique human expertise) all information of mutual

interest, and we must provide a global Information Arbitrage capability that enables all

coalition partners, each responsible for harnessing and nurturing their respective seven tribes, to

participate in what I call the Open Source Information System – External (OSIS-X). Bi-lateral

intelligence-sharing may still predominate in the secret world, but in the open source world, it

is M4IS – multi-lateral sharing – that will deﬁne the common approach.

OSINT and saving the world

C.K. Prahalad has taught us that our government and business focus to date, on the one billion

richest people on the planet, who represent a one-trillion-a-year marketplace, is short-sighted.

His brilliant book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, makes the important point that the

ﬁve billion poorest people on the planet, because of their numbers and despite their low wages

(an average of $1,000 a year, with half that number earning as little as $1 a day), actually

represent a four-trillion-a-year marketplace – in short, a marketplace four times larger than the

one that is active today.

It was not until I absorbed the wisdom of C.K. Prahalad that I understand that OSINT can

help the poor cut costs, reduce disease, improve health, and increase revenue. It is now possible

to show religions, labor unions, and civil societies how to leverage the Internet and low-cost

Figure 10.4 OSINT and the four levels of analysis

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ROBERT DAVID STEELE

hand-held devices (instead of the more expensive laptops or personal computers) to apply

OSINT from the “bottom up,” and consequently to double or triple revenue at the bottom of

the pyramid. The creation of sustainable indigenous wealth is without question the single fastest

way to save the world from itself.

OSINT as a transformative catalyst for reform

America has been adrift for some time. The “me” generation spawned the disengaged

generation, and we suﬀer now from the twin curses of an uneducated public that is also

inattentive to its civic responsibility. This aﬀects the rest of the world. It prevents us from

keeping our politicians and corporate leaders honest, and its spawns terrible mis-adventures

undertaken on the basis of ideological fantasies, without due policy process, or any semblance of

a coherent aﬀordable sustainable grand strategy. There is hope. See Figure 10.5.

Electoral reform, which could be inspired by multiple compounding failures of any

administration across the board, or alternatively by a more aggressive practice of collective

intelligence among the public, could lead to governance reform. A coalition government could

demand that intelligence reform be substantive and comprehensive. This would have the happy

outcome of imposing national security reform, which would not only reduce America’s

risk around the world, but would reduce the cost of the heavy-metal military, and free up

resources for waging peace. From peace will follow prosperity. The low-cost, high-return value

proposition from OSINT cannot be exaggerated.

Alvin and Heidi Toﬄer have focused in the manner in which information is a substitute for

violence, for capital, for labor, for time and space. Others followed, including Thomas Stewart in

The Wealth of Knowledge and Barry Carter in Inﬁnite Wealth.

This is real.

Figure 10.5 OSINT as a transformative catalyst for reform

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OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

Open sources of information

Open sources of information consist of the following general categories:

• Traditional media sources

• Commercial online premium sources

• Other niche commercial online sources

• Gray literature (limited edition locally available information)

• Overt human experts

• Commercial imagery and geospatial information

• The Internet and the world wide web (including emails and voice calls)

Open source software and software for exploitation

As a general statement, open source software is one of the ﬁve “opens” that will converge to

create the World Brain. The others are, apart from OSINT, open (electromagnetic) spectrum,

open access copyright, and open hypertext document system (OHS). The following standards

are emergent as enablers of M4IS while still compliant with copyright or other individual

caveats desired by the originator or owner of the information:

• RDF Resource Description Framework

• OWL Web Ontology Language

• SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol

• OHS Open Hypertextdocument System

• XML Geo eXtended Markup Language Geospatial

• IEML Information Economy Meta Language.

There is no one oﬀering that meets the need for a fully integrated analyst toolkit. This is

partly because of the lack of agreement on standards in the past, and partly because of the lack of

coherence in government and corporate contracting, where the emphasis has been on hardware

and proprietary software instead of generic functionality and ease of data integration. The good

news is that newly available oﬀerings such as CISCO’s Application Oriented Network (AON)

are eliminating middleware, at the same time that Google’s innovative approach to commodity

storage has eliminated conﬁguration management and back-up costs, while also reducing the

cost for eﬃcient global distributed storage and fast retrieval to one-third of the industry

standard. Below are listed the desktop computing functions established by the Oﬃce of

Scientiﬁc and Weapons Research at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1986 as essential

for analysis (see Figure 10.6).

Open source services

Open source services include collection, processing (inclusive of man-machine translation), and

analysis (inclusive of statistical or pattern analysis). When contracting for OSINT services, it is

very important to evaluate the capability from the bottom-up (actual indigenous or localized

capabilities to collect all information in all languages all the time) rather than the traditional and

unprofessional way, which throws money at large contractors who then “fake it” and keep the

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ROBERT DAVID STEELE

bulk of the money for themselves. Generally when contracting for professional OSINT

services, a good rule of thumb is to earmark one-third of the money for raw information

collection, one-third for small businesses providing world-class translation and machine analysis

services, and one-third for in-house or on-site analysts and related facilities.

The open source intelligence cycle

The open source intelligence cycle consists of the following steps that can be summarized

by remembering “the four D’s” of Discovery (Know Who Knows); Discrimination

(Know What’s What); Distillation (Know What’s Hot); and Dissemination (Know Who’s

Who).

• Requirements deﬁnition

• Practical triage

• Collection (FIND free, GET free, BUY cheap, TASK dear)

• Processing and exploitation

• Analysis and production

• Security

• Dissemination and evaluation (Feedback).

The OSINT intelligence cycle cannot make up for pathological mind-sets (including

ideological fantasy and political corruption) or poor management.

OSINT has one advantage over the other sources: its exposure to millions of pairs of eyeballs.

As it commonly understood in the open source software world, put enough eyeballs on it and

no bug is invisible.

OSINT also oﬀers analytic frames of reference that have stood the test of

time.

Another misconception relates to production. Too many people misconstrue reports and

page counts as “production” when in fact production does not consist simply of reports and

page counts, but also includes link tables, distance learning, and professional networking.

Figure 10.7 illustrates how one activates OSINT using the Internet.

Figure 10.6 Fundamental functions for online analysis

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OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

The common mistake that most vendors of OSINT make is to confuse the weekly report or

database-stuﬃng with “answering the mail.” In fact, the weekly review is the foundation for a

more complex process that requires each of eight distinct iterative and interactive capabilities to be

present at all times.

OSINT is a continuous process of collection, processing, analysis, sharing, feedback, and

expansion. Unlike secrets (for a spy, a secret shared is a secret lost), OSINT is enhanced,

strengthened, validated, and monetarized by sharing.

At root, OSINT is about smart people creating smart organizations by sharing the burden of

conceptualizing requirements, collecting all information in all languages all the time, doing

multi-cultural inter-agency analysis, and then producing credible reliable intelligence that is

actionable – it is useful and it leads to constructive outcomes. OSINT crosses all boundaries,

and in so doing, brings us all closer together and helps us to both understand and to address

common problems at every level of community and governance. OSINT saves lives, time, and

money.

Applied open source intelligence

Intelligence must be able to tell us, down to individual personalities and neighborhoods, “who,”

“where,” and “how much” of “what” is needed, and whether what has been applied has been

eﬀective. If it doesn’t know, it must have assets able to obtain and report the information within six

hours of demand.

(General Al Gray, Commandant, US Marine Corps)

When Dr Stephen Cambone, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, said in January

2004 that he needed universal coverage, 24/7, in all languages all the time, he was the ﬁrst

person at the highest levels of the US Government to formally adopt what General Al Gray

recommended in 1988.

Sadly, despite various Commissions including the 9–11 Commission,

as of this date the US Government is still not serious about open source intelligence.

Figure 10.7 World Brain operational planning group virtual private network

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ROBERT DAVID STEELE

There is a simple reason for any leader to apply OSINT. It oﬀers the best possible return on

investment (ROI) for whatever resources – be they man-hours or dollars or Command interest

– that can be earmarked for this emerging discipline. OSINT is the best possible way for any

mission area specialist or professional to enhance their knowledge and increase their inﬂuence.

Open source intelligence tradecraft

This section simply itemizes key elements of tradecraft that are explained in more detail, with

diagrams, in the SOF OSINT Handbook.

• The Expeditionary Factors Analysis Model. This model distinguishes between the four levels

of conﬂict (strategic, operational, tactical, and technical) and the three interactive domains

for conﬂict, military, civil, and geographic. The model also deﬁnes degrees of diﬃculty

for the various mission areas as well as how the threat changes depending on the level of

analysis.

• The Revolutionary Analysis Model. This model, for which a detailed analytic framework

is available, distinguishes between political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-

demographic, and natural-geographic conditions, along a spectrum of psycho-social

evaluation domains.

• Analytic tradecraft. Jack Davis is the de facto dean of the US national intelligence com-

munity’s analytic cadre. The purpose of analysis is to help key individuals make intelligent

decisions. The references should be read in their entirety.

• Social networking and expert networks. The concept of “six degrees of separation,”

and the

use of formal citation analysis,

will dramatically expand any analyst’s eﬀectiveness.

Mission relevance of open source intelligence

This section must of necessity be abbreviated. Twenty-ﬁve pages replete with search examples

using only Google are available in the free SOF OSINT Handbook.

• Strategic historical and cultural understanding addresses the critical importance to any mission

of going back in time to understand the history of the region, the history of foreign

powers as well as the US in the region, and the history of anti-americanism in the region.

If there is one thing we cannot aﬀord when going in-country, it is to be delusional about

just where we stand as we go about trying to win hearts and minds or as we capture single

hostile individuals in a context where we do not realize the odds are stacked against us.

The greatest threat to any mission is not armed forces but rather hostile observers. Understanding

history and culture is fundamental.

• Operational understanding for campaign planning connects open sources of information to the

theater level of warfare, and helps develop an understanding of open sources in relation to

the current situation. Regional power sources, status discrepancies among tribal groups,

change agents that are present or emergent, internal security and stability issues (water,

food, energy, health, crime, for example) are all essential to understanding the weak links

in a current social structure that we can either leverage for operational advantage, or must

be aware of to avoid operational failure.

• Tactical sub-state understanding for unit eﬀectiveness gets to the heart of the matter for units

that will be working in-country. This chapter focuses on tribal orders of battle down to

the village and elder level, on key leaders and value-based biographies, on understanding

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OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

the local media and how groups and individual communicate with one another, and

ﬁnally, on content analysis – understanding their PSYOP themes.

• Technical understanding for policy, acquisition, and operations begins with an introduction to the

NATO Open Source Intelligence Handbook, which is the technical reference and companion

to this volume, and then provides a very brief overview that relates open sources of

information to policy, acquisition, and operations in general. One of the great things

about OSINT is that it can be used to study domestic US policy debates as well as allied

debates. Understanding the players, both friendly and third party, and understanding how

the players are perceived locally, is at the heart of any successful CA or PSYOP endeavor.

OSINT can also enhance acquisition, and help decide what to leave on the pier and what

to take along on the mission.

Mission area applications

Thirty-three pages with additional detail are in the SOF OSINT Handbook.

• Civil aﬀairs can use OSINT in relation to human intelligence (understanding the demo-

graphics, the socio-economic environment, displaced persons, and crime, among other

topics); to technical intelligence about the local command and control, communications,

computing, and intelligence environment, the infrastructures of transportation, power,

and ﬁnance; to welfare intelligence (water, food, medical); cultural intelligence about

protected or restricted targets, and liaison intelligence.

• Psychological operations can use OSINT in relation to strategic, operational, and tactical

campaign plans; revisits the mapping of themes in play, especially anti-US themes; the

original collection and testing of themes for possible US play, and the litmus test for

successful PSYOP: does the message produce actionable intelligence from indigenous

volunteers?

• Target analysis discusses how OSINT might fulﬁll team needs in the absence of classiﬁed

intelligence support, to create a detailed description and vulnerability assessment, evaluate

the natural environment and the human environment, and carry out route-planning.

• Terrain analysis uses OSINT to establish key factors relevant to special aviation and covert

ground movement, in part by leveraging commercial and Russian military combat charts,

commercial imagery, and alternatives for terrain reconnaissance including unmanned

aerial vehicles and indigenous scouts.

• Weather analysis uses OSINT as a means of rapidly getting to the basics of temperature,

visibility and timing of sun and moon, wind, and inclement weather.

In addition to the SOF OSINT Handbook, see the Quick Links Guide for the Military

Analysis, included in the one-page list of links at www.oss.net/BASIC.

Conclusion

Money matters

Funding trade-oﬀs. As our larger world comes to grips with the end of cheap oil, the end of free

clean water, the rise of pandemic disease, the twin deﬁcits and rampant militarism of the USA

under the Bush–Cheney Administration, the bottom line is clear: we have no slack left, we are at

a tipping point, every mistake could be fatal. It is no longer adequate to muddle through, draw

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down on savings, or “make the best of it.” Any manager, any person, that does not invest the

time and as needed the money to make informed decisions using OSINT, is derelict in their

duty to their employers and themselves. OSINT is now an established discipline required for

“due diligence.” Perhaps more importantly, information is a substitute for time, money, labor,

and space. Practicing OSINT is a way of printing your own money! Practicing OSINT is also

a means of restoring power to the people, allowing them to better hold accountable their

policymakers and corporate executives all too inclined to manipulate or ignore secrets, or claim

special knowledge that does not exist, as a means of justifying actions and expenditures that are

not in the public interest.

Contracting mistakes. As a general comment, we have found that the biggest failure among

both government and private sector clients is that of almost total ignorance with respect to the

diversity and quality of open source services, and most especially of those oﬀered by foreigners

in their own localized environments. Even those organizations that have the wit to contract for

a variety of open source services generally do not have a single focal point nor do they attempt

to monitor best prices and best practices. The worst possible mistake is to attempt to procure

OSINT from a major defense corporation that specializes in massive expensive projects to

deliver technology that often does not work and “butts in seats,” rather than niche expertise or

direct access to all information in all languages all the time. It is also a mistake to contract for the

delivery of OSINT without making provision for a working requirements process that will save

time and money by getting the questions right in the ﬁrst place, or to contract for the delivery

of OSINT in hard-copy, without making provision for its delivery in a form that will allow its

easy dissemination throughout the sponsoring organization’s network. A more nuanced con-

tracting mistake is to avoid seeing that information, once purchased, has a tangible value that

can be used to barter for more information. Copyright issues notwithstanding, a coherent

program for sharing information with varied members of the seven tribes in one’s own home

country, and with counterpart organizations from other countries, will generally produce a ten

to one return on investment – ten new useful pieces of information for each single piece of

information that is shared broadly.

Metrics for measuring return on investment. There are three valuation metrics that can be applied

in evaluating the role of OSINT in any organization’s Information Operations (IO).

• Cost of secrecy. Transaction costs are higher. Classiﬁcation reduces competition from

domestic and foreign providers of better information. Functional costs come from

non-interoperability and operational disconnects. Clients tend not to access all that is

oﬀered because of the obstacles imposed by handling secret information (e.g. reading on a

trip).

• Relative value. Is the OSINT “good enough” now? Does it provide, in context, “good

enough” understanding to move forward? For the decision at hand, it is “good enough”

to allow the decision to be made? Can the information be shared and thus engage other

stake-holders?

• Return on sharing. Does this information, shared openly, attract other information that is

equally useful? Does this information, shared openly, reach others who have a “need to

know” and consequently include them and engage them in an expanded network for

mutual beneﬁt?

Commercial strategy. Dr Joseph Markowitz, the only truly competent manager of open source

information endeavors within the US Intelligence Community, published a commercial

strategy prior to resigning from government service. It has yet to be implemented.

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OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

Budget and manning recommendations. Detailed proposed budgets are online

for a national

Open Source Agency (OSA), a theater Multinational Information Operations Center (MIOC)

and network, and a subordinate commercial imagery and geospatial procurement plan. It

remains, then, to simply illustrate a standard OSINT “cell” such as could be added to any

corporate or government library, with the observation that OSINT should be accomplished in

three tiers:

• If it can be done online in less than 15 minutes, the analyst should do it.

• If it will take 15–60 minutes, or require specialized knowledge, the OSINT cell should

receive the task (see Figure 10.8).

• If it will take more than 60 minute or require very specialized knowledge or direct access,

it should be out-sourced to exactly the right source or service, by the OSINT cell, which

should be expert at best prices and best practices for all sources in all languages all the

time.

The value of sharing

We have, as J.F. Rischard puts it so well in High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve

Them,

reached the point of no return. OSINT is relevant to individual security and prosperity;

to organizational and national security and prosperity; and to global security and prosperity.

He writes about sharing our planet, sharing our humanity, and sharing our rule book. Tom

Atlee, founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute and author of The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-

Intelligence to Create a World that Works for All

adds another group to these three groups: sharing

our wisdom. Sharing our wisdom. That is what distinguishes OSINT from the secret collection

disciplines, and that is what distinguishes the role of OSINT in the world of analysis: it can

be shared without restriction. OSINT is democracy. OSINT is moral capitalism. OSINT will

make our lives better and oﬀer hope to future generations. E Veritate Potens.

References

Visit http://www.oss.net and see especially http://www.oss.net/BASIC. See also the books by Robert

Steele:

Figure 10.8 Standard OSINT cell

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ROBERT DAVID STEELE

On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (Foreword by Senator David Boren, D-KS), ﬁrst

published in 2000.

The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political – Citizen’s Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism,

Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption (Foreword by Senator Pat Roberts, R-KS), 2002.

Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future (contributing editor, Foreword by Dame Pauline

Neville Jones), 2004.

Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time – The New Semantics of War & Peace,

Wealth & Democracy (Foreword by Congressman Rob Simmons, R-CT-02), 2006.

The Smart Nation Act: Public Intelligence in the Private Interest (Foreword by Congressman Rob Simmons

(R-CT-02), sponsor of The Smart Nation Act), 2006.

Acronyms

Acronyms are included in the Glossary to this Handbook.

Notes

1 The executive summary is a precise replication from the NATO Open Source Intelligence Handbook

(November 2001), which remains the standard in the ﬁeld. Drafted by the author, with important

reﬁnements from LCdr Andrew Chester, RN Canada, and under the leadership of Capt. David

Swain, RN, United Kingdom, this volume was approved by General William Kernan, USA, then

Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic. The NATO documents and other essential references on

OSINT, including the original OSINT Executive Overview, are easily accessible by going to

http://www.oss.net/BASIC. This chapter is of necessity a very summative rendition of the 20,000

pages of accumulated knowledge in the Archives at http://www.oss.net, most of which can be

accessed in a structured manner via the above URL.

2 The most important new concepts to receive traction since the release of the NATO documents are

those of the Seven Tribes, Collective Intelligence, and the World Brain. The seven tribes, each of

which has unique access and perspectives, are those of government, military, law enforcement, business,

academic, ground truth (media and non-governmental organizations), and civil (citizens, labor unions,

and religions). Collective Intelligence and the World Brain are discussed in Note 3.

3 The Swedish concept was advanced at the third Peacekeeping Intelligence Conference sponsored by

the Folke Bernadotte Academy and Swedish National Defence College under the direct leadership of

the Supreme Commander, 4–6 December 2004. The Co-Intelligence Institute was founded by Tom

Atlee, author of The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to create a world that works for all (The Writer’s

Collective, 2003). Howard Rheingold, former editor of The Whole Earth Review, is the author of Smart

Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, 2002) as well as seminal books on Tools for Thinking, Virtual

Reality, and Virtual Communities. James Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of the Crowds: Why the

Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and

Nations (Doubleday, 2004). Key works on the emerging World Brain include those of H.G. Wells,

World Brain (Admantime, 1994 from 1938); Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World

in Cyberspace (Plenum Trade, 1997); Willis Harman, Global Mind Change: The Promise of the 21

Century

(Noetic Sciences, 1998); and Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big

Bang to the 21

Century (John Wiley, 2000).

4 This term was developed by Dr Stevan Dedijer, a Swede who was born and died in Croatia (former

Yugoslavia), widely recognized as the father of modern business intelligence. He led ﬁfteen Swedes to

the ﬁrst Open Source Intelligence Conference in 1992, where he made a passionate plea for govern-

ment attention to this vital independent discipline.

5 Dr Joseph Markowitz, the ﬁrst and only Director of the Community Open Source Program Oﬃce

(COSPO) before it was destroyed by the Community Management Staﬀ (CMS), devised this import-

ant distinction between OSINT such as can be done by private sector practitioners, and OSINT as

validated by government analysts with full access to classiﬁed sources and methods.

6 In “The Strategic Use of Open-Source Information,” Studies in Intelligence 45/3 (2001), pages 67–71.

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Dr Gannon is, with Dr Markowitz and Dr Gordon Oehler, one of a tiny handful of all-source

managers who understand the full range of OSINT. However, those who remain within CIA, well-

intentioned as they may be, are so mired in legacy mind-sets, legalities, security encumbrances, and

general malaise as to be pathologically ineﬀective at OSINT, even when trying to support only the

small cadre of analysts within the CIA. A careful reading of all public references to OSINT by CIA

managers shows a delusional focus on information technologies that have yet to be put on the analysts’

desktops, while deﬁning “sharing” as being limited to those with access to Top Secret “system-high”

clearances and terminals.

7 Detective Steve Edwards of Scotland Yard, honored by the Queen for his accomplishments in applying

OSINT to law enforcement, says this: “I now consider POLINT [Police Intelligence] to be a sub-

category of OSINT as the collection and sourcing are largely the same. Anything else needed is largely

supplied using other disciplines. OSINT is also the only real way for most interested parties to collect

the information without recourse to methods that could be seen as over-intrusive; bearing in mind

who the targets might be.” Professor Hugo Smith, in his seminal article on “Intelligence and UN

Peacekeeping” in Survival 26/3 (Autumn 1994), says: “The concept of ‘UN intelligence’ promises to

turn traditional principles of intelligence on their heads. Intelligence will have to be based on informa-

tion that is collected primarily by overt means, that is, by methods that do not threaten the target state

or group and do not compromise the integrity or impartiality of the UN.” Reprinted in Ben de Jong

et al., Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future (OSS, 2003).

8 Dr Robert Garigue, formerly a top practitioner of Information Warfare as a Canadian naval oﬃcer, has

articulated the new semantics of war and peace, wealth and democracy, in his Technical Preface to

the author’s book on Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time (OSS, 2006). His

views are well in advance of existing doctrine.

9 The author is indebted to Admiral Bill Studeman, USN (Ret.), former Deputy Director of Central

Intelligence (DDCI), former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), and former Director of

Naval Intelligence (DNI), who in his post-retirement years has become a master of IO and all that this

implies. In the age of information, IO is the manifestation of “total war” and the need – not yet

realized – to harness every source of national power including an educated citizenry and informed

politicians to further national advantage.

10 (United Nations, 2004), The endeavor beneﬁted from the participation of the Honorable LtGen Dr

Brent Scowcroft, USAF (Ret.), former national security advisor to President George Bush. Terrorism

is either ﬁfth on this list or seventh if the ﬁrst is counted as three. The report, 262 pages in length, can

be seen at http://www.un.org/secureworld/report2.pdf.

11 While not the focus of this chapter, it merits comment that according to the Commission on the

National Imagery and Mapping Agency, in a report published in December 1999, most of the intelli-

gence money is spent on esoteric collection systems, and almost none at all is spent on actually making

sense out of the collected information.

12 For Viet-Nam, the single best reference on cooking the books and spinning the truth is George Allen’s

None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (Ivan R. Dee, 2001). On the topic

of Peak Oil, 9–11, and Iraq, there are numerous books, of which three stand out: James Bamford,

A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies (Doubleday, 2004); James

Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (Free Press, 2006); and

Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of American Empire at the End of the Age of

Oil (New Society, 2004). Many other books address various aspects of how 9/11 represented both a

break-down of secret intelligence and a celebration of ideological fantasy unchecked by responsible

oversight.

13 During the eighteen years of my campaign to secure added funding for and emphasis on OSINT, open

source information has been derisively referred to as “Open Sores” by nominally intelligent but

foolishly unprofessional managers and some analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Even

the so-called open source professionals in the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) have

refused to be serious about anything other than mainstream broadcast media until allies of OSINT

ﬁnally got an Open Source Agency into the 9/11 Commission Report (page 413). The mind-sets

within CIA and its runt orphan FBIS (now nominally a DNI-level Open Source Center) have not yet

matured on this topic.

14 Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Viking, 2002). The three pages on

the pathological eﬀects of falling prey to the cult of secrecy, on pages 237–239, should be forced rote

memorization for all who receive clearances.

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ROBERT DAVID STEELE

15 PowerShift (Bantam, 1990). Stewart (Currency, 2001). Carter (Butterworth Heineman, 1999).

16 The next four sections are superﬁcial in relation to the NATO Open Source Intelligence Handbook. There

is no substitute for downloading and studying that reference as well as the NATO Open Source

Intelligence Reader and the NATO guide to Intelligence Exploitation of the Internet. These and other key

references are freely available at http://www.oss.net/BASIC.

17 This is the only standard that may not be readily apparent when this chapter is published. Invited by

Doug Englebart, inventor of the mouse and hypertext, this standard enables linkage of related content

to take place at the paragraph level, which also allows copyright compliance to be executed at the

paragraph level, for pennies instead of dollars.

18 Diane Webb, under the leadership of Dr Gordon Oehler, developed CATALYST: A Concept for an

Integrated Computing Environment for Analysis (CIA/DI SW 89–10052, October 1989). To not have this

now, close to eighteen years after precise requirements deﬁnition, tells us clearly of the sustained pathos

of US Intelligence Community “leadership.” Follow link at www.oss.net/HISTORY.

19 The actual quote is “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” This is generally attributed to Eric

Raymond, is known as the Linus Law, and is associated with the Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS)

movement.

20 See the analytic references at http://www.oss.net/BASIC.

21 General Al Gray, “Global Intelligence Challenges of the 1990’s,” American Intelligence Journal (Winter

1988–1989). At www.oss.net, Google for title.

22 The appointment of an Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Open Source

(ADDNI/OS) on 5 December 2006 was a step in the right direction, but this individual has no

program authority, no money, and no staﬀ. Meanwhile, the Open Source Center at the Central

Intelligence Agency, a cosmetic re-deﬁnition of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS),

has absolutely no likelihood of being relevant to anyone outside CIA in the next ten years. Fortunately,

the Open Source Information System (OSIS) is a national-level system belonging to the Senate-

conﬁrmed Chief Information Oﬃcer for the Director of National Intelligence, an Air Force Major

General who understands that the key to open source exploitation is sharing rather than secrecy,

standards rather than security. Applied OSINT will ﬂourish outside the secret intelligence world – to

the extent that OSINT is ably developed by the US Intelligence Community, it will be through OSIS

embracing the 90 nations forming the Coalition, rather than through the OSC/FBIS. We continue to

lack a national Open Source Center under the auspices of the Department of State, a sister agency

to the Broadcasting Board of Governors. In as much as 90% of the open source information we wish to

gain access to is controlled by individuals who have no wish to be associated with the US Intelligence

Community, US OSINT will not be eﬀective until a national agency is established under diplomatic

auspices – consequently, US IO will also be pedestrian absent that agency.

23 The compendium, the “New Rules” chapter from The New Craft of Intelligence, and a lecture on

“Analysis: Making Magic” are all accessible via www.oss.net/BASIC.

24 Stanley Milgram, “The Small World Problem,” Psychology Today, 1967. Google “small world

problem.”

25 Citation analysis is generally done for English-language information using the Social Science Citation

Index and the Science Citation Index. Other countries, such as China, are now creating their citation

analysis directories. Any analyst who does not know who the top 100 people in the world are for their

respective area of interest should go to their library and ask them to do a DIALOG RANK Command

for their topic. It will cost about $500. The superior analyst will then obtain biographies for each of

those individuals, engage with all of them, and through them, identify the top 100 individuals that are

not published (e.g. government and non-government oﬃcials).

26 See the link under Policy and Investment at www.oss.net/BASIC.

27 Ibid.

28 (Basic, 2002). The author is Vice President for Europe of the World Bank.

29 (The Writer’s Collective, 2003). Observation made in a personal communication (electronic mail) of

18 March 2006. The Co-Intelligence Institute merits more attention and support.

30 This is the motto for OSS.Net, Inc., and before that for the Marine Corps Intelligence Command

which the author helped create. It means “from truth, power” or literally, “one is made powerful by

the truth.” Thus does OSINT contribute to the power of every individual regardless of their race,

nationality, religion, or station in life.

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Adapting intelligence to changing issues

Paul R. Pillar

The shock of the new, and the not so new

The need to adjust US intelligence to address new, or newly salient, issues is one of the most

commonly sounded themes in public commentary about intelligence in the United States.

“The CIA” – or the entire US Intelligence Community – “needs to move away from a Cold

War way of doing business!” has been voiced so often in the decade and a half since the end

of the Cold War that it long ago became a cliché. The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001,

which was one of the greatest attitude-changing events in American history, boosted the

frequency and volume of this kind of call.

One reason for the strength and ubiquity of this theme since 9/11 is psychological. As

Martha Crenshaw – who has been an expert student of terrorism as long as any American

scholar – observes, the threat that manifested itself in the 9/11 attack is not nearly as new as it

usually is made out to be.

Terrorism itself is very old, the current religious variety of terrorism

that troubles us the most shares many characteristics with earlier varieties, and even the current

variety was becoming all too apparent several years before 9/11. Because that one attack in

2001 was so traumatic, however, Americans have had diﬃculty coming to terms with the idea

that their government could have allowed such a tragedy to come from a known and long-

standing threat. It is less disturbing to believe that the threat was new and that an intelligence

service stuck in old ways did not see it, implying that bringing that service up to date would

prevent a recurrence.

Another reason is more political. Members of Congress and commissions of inquiry are in

the business of identifying problems and making changes. Fish have to swim, birds have to ﬂy,

and politicians and commissions have to recommend legislative changes. The idea of new

threats is one of the more persuasive bases for making a case for change. And so “adjusting to

new issues” or something similar is a useful label to append to the rationale for changes to the

Intelligence Community, regardless of the actual impetus for change.

Of course issues involving overseas events and threats really do change in important ways,

and intelligence needs to change with them. But the use of this theme as a convenient label to

pin onto changes motivated more by other considerations has left disparities between the

concept of changing issues and what any particular change to intelligence can be expected

148

to accomplish. A prime example is the most recent reorganization of the US Intelligence

Community, enacted in December 2004 and implemented in the following year as a slightly

modiﬁed version of a plan that the 9/11 Commission conceived and pushed. The centerpiece

of that plan is separation of the jobs of director of the CIA and head of the Community, with

the creation of a new layer of management in the form of the Oﬃce of the Director of National

Intelligence. How exactly is this organizational scheme, compared with what it replaced, any

less “Cold War” and any more suitable for today’s issues than for the issues of 20, 30, or 50 years

ago? How does the wiring diagram for the Intelligence Community relate to the nature of

the issues it is charged with covering? Many other appeals to “move beyond the Cold

War ” similarly fail to explain what this idea means in terms of operational or organizational

realities.

The distortions caused by manipulative use of the “new issues” theme obscure not only what

new arrangements can be expected to accomplish in the future but also what old ones have

done in the past. Judging by much of the public commentary about US intelligence, there is

broad belief that the Intelligence Community in previous decades was much more narrowly

focused on the USSR and on true Cold War issues than it ever really was. One indicator is the

work of CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, which is the largest analytic component in the

Community (and a better measure of relative attention to diﬀerent issues than the agency’s

operational arm, which may recruit assets in one region to collect information about a country

outside the region). The Cold War was still going strong when, for example, the directorate was

also doing signiﬁcant work in the 1970s on the “north–south” issues of trade, investment, and

economics, not to mention energy. A reorganization of the directorate in 1981 moved from a

functional arrangement to a regional one, which facilitated integrated political, economic, and

military analysis on each of the world’s regions, and in which the oﬃce covering the USSR was

just one of several such components. As for terrorism, the big change came in 1986 with the

creation of the DCI Counterterrorist Center, a bureaucratic revolution that put analysts to

work alongside operators and other counterterrorist specialists. Led by this center, most of the

counterterrorist techniques involving intelligence agencies (such as supporting the US

Government’s renditions of suspected terrorists) that have come to be familiar in recent years

were being used long before 9/11. The common perception (again, psychologically and

politically driven) that a “war on terrorism” only began in September 2001 has missed this.

To a large degree, the American public (abetted by some of the politicians and commissions

looking for public support) has projected its own past inattention on to the Intelligence Com-

munity. Because most of the public was paying little attention to jihadist terrorism before

9/11, many believe the Intelligence Community was paying little attention as well. To some

extent the same is true of attention to certain other issues such as the proliferation of nuclear

weapons. The press, whose own attention tends to be heavily concentrated on hot topics of the

moment and which suﬀers no penalty for lack of coverage of emerging long-term issues, has

been part of this process. Pulitzer prizes, unlike Nobel prizes, reﬂect what seems important this

year rather than what turns out to be important a decade or more later.

All of the foregoing is to say that – while there are important points and principles to

elucidate, as will be done below, about keeping an intelligence service tuned to the challenges

of an ever-changing world – this topic suﬀers from a lot of noise. Filtering out the noise is the

ﬁrst step to understanding the subject.

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Mechanisms for prioritization

The US Government has a long history, ﬁlled with an alphabet soup of documents and

directives, of diﬀerent formal mechanisms for determining which topics warrant the Intelli-

gence Community’s attention. The procedures for prioritizing intelligence topics seem to have

changed at least as often as the substantive issues that the procedures have been designed to

track. To some extent this history reﬂects the political urges mentioned above and the desire to

be seen as more responsive than the next person (or than the previous oﬃce-holder) to the

national security challenges of the day. Changing the mechanisms for setting intelligence

priorities has been part of larger changes to the apparatus for formulating foreign policy,

including the structure of committees under the National Security Council. Each new

administration feels a need to do things diﬀerently, or at least to be seen doing things diﬀerently,

from the way its predecessor conducted business.

Underneath the political oscillations, however, has been a genuinely felt need to systematize

decisions on where the Intelligence Community should apply its resources. That need in turn

reﬂects the fact that those resources are limited. There always are important topics on which the

community could usefully devote more of its money and manpower, despite possibly diminish-

ing returns, if the supply of money and manpower were unlimited, which it is not. Responding

to emerging issues and new needs means not only increasing eﬀort on some topics but also

necessarily reducing it on others.

Eﬀorts to formalize an intelligence requirements process date from the earliest days of the

CIA under the Truman administration. Some of the ﬁrst few National Security Council

directives charged the new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) with outlining objectives

and requirements for national intelligence. During the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson

administrations, intelligence priorities were articulated in documents called Priority National

Intelligence Objectives, but the White House often supplemented or overrode these with

ad hoc directives. President Kennedy and his assistant for national security aﬀairs, McGeorge

Bundy, made liberal use of what were called National Security Action Memoranda for that

purpose.

Dissatisfaction with the ineﬀectiveness of the prioritization system was voiced in a task force

report during the Johnson administration and again in 1971 in the Nixon administration, in a

report written by James Schlesinger (a future DCI, but then in the Oﬃce of Management and

Budget). Schlesinger’s study noted that producers of intelligence were setting priorities more

than the consumers were, and that formal requirements lists the consumers submitted were

accomplishing little. In response, President Nixon directed then-DCI Richard Helms to review

the requirements process. This review led to creation of the Intelligence Community Staﬀ

(whose current incarnation constitutes part of the current Oﬃce of the Director of National

Intelligence).

Helms’s successor as DCI, William Colby, expressed his own frustration with the require-

ments process and tried to streamline it. As he later explained, “My object was to replace the

enormous paper exercise called the ‘requirements’ process – which pretended to tell the com-

munity precisely what it should be reporting on – with a simple set of general questions about

the key problems we should concentrate on.”

Colby’s questions were known as KIQs, or Key

Intelligence Questions. Under President Carter’s DCI, Stansﬁeld Turner, the KIQs transformed

into NITs (National Intelligence Topics). The overhaul of the national security apparatus at the

start of the Carter administration also established a Policy Review Committee of the NSC, one

of whose functions was to deﬁne and prioritize substantive intelligence requirements, although

the DCI retained responsibility for translating these objectives into speciﬁc objectives and

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targets. In 1981 President Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, which addressed a wide range

of intelligence policies (including a prohibition on assassination). This order stated that the DCI

was responsible for establishing criteria for determining priorities for national intelligence, as

well as for establishing mechanisms for translating objectives approved by the NSC into speciﬁc

guidance to the Intelligence Community.

The advent of the Clinton administration brought yet another reconstruction of the national

security apparatus, as well as a renewed eﬀort to involve senior oﬃcials in consumer agencies

more directly in the process of setting intelligence priorities. The most important step was the

issuance in 1995 of Presidential Decision Directive 35, which set priorities for speciﬁc, named

intelligence topics by assigning them to diﬀerent “tiers.” This directive, the contents of which

are still classiﬁed, was welcomed by intelligence oﬃcers as the meatiest, most authoritative

statement by senior policymakers of where the Intelligence Community should direct its

attention, and of how certain issues were to be deemed more important than other issues. To

get senior policymakers to agree on such a speciﬁc, substantive list – rather than leaving any

such task to the DCI while retaining freedom to complicate the Intelligence Community’s life

by throwing ad hoc demands at it – was a signiﬁcant achievement, which was partly why no

comparable document had been produced any earlier. But for the same reasons, it was diﬃcult

to produce any successor document. The intent at the time was for PDD-35 to be a living

directive, subject to periodic review and amendment by senior policymakers. But having

already invested considerable high-level eﬀort to produce this one PDD, the realities of limited

time and attention of senior oﬃcials dictated otherwise, and no successor was produced.

PDD-35 continued to be invoked as a reference point for decisions on deploying intelligence

resources, but each passing year increased the unease of using a document that everyone knew

was gradually becoming outdated.

Legislation in 1997 created new executive positions in the Intelligence Community that

were important for the requirements process: Assistant Directors of Central Intelligence

for Analysis and Production (ADCI/AP) and for Collection (ADCI/C). Subsequent DCI

directives made it clear that the ADCI/AP would have primary responsibility for developing

requirements and prioritizing those requirements to guide the allocation of resources and the

selection of topics for intelligence production. With the assistance of a National Intelligence

Production Board, he also would oversee the work of the Intelligence Community with an

eye to ensuring that work actually reﬂected the requirements.

In an unclassiﬁed strategic plan for 2000–2001, the ADCI/AP stated that part of the

challenge regarding intelligence priorities was that those priorities “shift frequently, com-

plicating planning for both collection and analysis.” Changes in the national security

environment combined with a smaller analytic work force “have intensiﬁed the competition

for analytic resources to meet both long-term priorities and near-term requirements.”

Responding to crises or other immediate needs often diverts analysts from their primary duties

and areas of expertise. Thus “the analytic community must choose and limit which intelligence

issues and targets receive priority coverage.”

The plan listed as the leading characteristics of

an eﬀective requirements system that it provide an “agile, accessible, and automated frame-

work” and a “rational, coherent structure to support analysis, collection, and systems acquisi-

tion,” and that it balance resources “to deal with priority targets and global coverage

requirements.”

The system that a task force under the ADCI/AP devised became known as the National

Intelligence Priorities Framework (NIPF). It is the most comprehensive of any of the

mechanisms for prioritizing intelligence work that have been tried. It involves a matrix that

plots states (and nonstate groups) along one dimension against functional issues on the other

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dimension. Priorities are assigned to selected cells in the matrix bearing in mind the overall

importance of the issue and the role that each state or group may play in it. The system is

automated and easily accessed by intelligence oﬃcers, and the priorities are revised at regular

intervals based on input both from intelligence oﬃcers and from representatives of policy

departments. The NIPF is the prioritization system in eﬀect today. Director of National

Intelligence John Negroponte, a couple of months after taking oﬃce in 2005, aﬃrmed his

commitment to the system as the central basis for planning the use of resources across the

Intelligence Community.

The NIPF probably is at least as well conceived and workable as any of the past formal

mechanisms for keeping intelligence in tune with changing issues. But the half-century-long

history of stumbling around for a better system, as well as the periodic expressions of dissatisfac-

tion with whatever system was in eﬀect at the moment, raises more fundamental questions

about how much can be expected from any formal procedure. It remains to be seen how much

impact the NIPF will have on decisions about reallocating resources. And the history of

stumbling suggests that no system is perfect or even close to perfect, however carefully any

particular mechanism has been conceived.

Moreover, in the real world of managers making decisions about personnel and programs,

any formal system tends to take second place to other practical exigencies and constraints.

There are some instances in which a number on a priority chart can be useful ammunition

for a manager seeking increased resources for a particular initiative. But the formal mechanisms

play little part in the professional life of most intelligence oﬃcers. Some oﬃcers see the

time required to support such mechanisms, by answering questionnaires or putting numbers

into a matrix, as a distraction from their main job of performing collection or analysis on

topics they already are convinced are important. Even most managers – those senior enough

to have a signiﬁcant say in allocating resources – probably do not bring up on their screens

the current NIPF numbers as their ﬁrst step in making programmatic decisions. Such a

decision is as likely to be inﬂuenced by something the manager hears on the news as he is

driving in to work that causes him to think “that’s a potential crisis we need to look into

more” or “the consumers are going to be asking more questions about that topic over the

next few months.”

Does a failure to conform to the dictates of a formal prioritization system indicate the kind

of bureaucratic inertia that critics of bureaucracies love to criticize? To some extent, perhaps.

And in the real world of Intelligence Community management such mundane matters as

personnel slots, budgetary red tape, and even available oﬃce space often lay a heavy hand on

decisions about expanding or contracting programs. There are more admirable reasons, how-

ever, for such decisions not to follow precisely the output of any formal system. Managers are

paid to exercise leadership and good judgment, and to apply their own expertise and that of

their subordinates to their decisions. So if a decision to move resources from issue X to issue Y

reﬂects the sort of morning commute ruminations mentioned above, as well as subsequent

discussions with subordinate managers about where they see those issues leading, isn’t that a

good thing, even if the decision cannot be matched with a number on a chart?

Moreover, maybe sound decisions about adapting intelligence to changing issues reﬂect so

many variables and dimensions that they could not possibly be incorporated into any formal

scheme, at least not without making the scheme so intractably complex as to be useless. It is to

those variables and dimensions that we turn next.

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Principles for allocating resources

Much of what the Intelligence Community does will not and should not change regardless of

the issues it addresses. This includes the housekeeping and overhead, from paper clips to parking

lots, which are a necessary part of any government bureaucracy, and to some extent of any large

organization. It also includes many other things that are peculiar to, and an intrinsic part of, an

intelligence service. A security structure, for example, which issues clearances to personnel,

controls classiﬁed information, and performs internal counterintelligence investigations, is a

necessary part of the intelligence business. Most of the recruitment, training, and management

of oﬃcers who perform the core functions of collection and analysis of intelligence applies

regardless of the topics on which those oﬃcers are working. Most of the same tradecraft skills

are needed whether collecting intelligence on Russia or Rwanda. Even those skills that vary

with the topic usually require a common infrastructure to develop and sustain them. Fluency in

a foreign language, for example, obviously is one such skill; although diﬀerent languages are

needed to work on diﬀerent issues, an agency is apt to have a common, ﬁxed training apparatus

for teaching all foreign languages. This unchanging core of functions means that even major

shifts in the issues to be followed may imply relatively minor shifts in the structure of an

intelligence service’s program. As with the overall US Government budget, in which “entitle-

ments,” interest on debt, and other ﬁxed obligations greatly limit what is subject to discretion,

senior managers of the Intelligence Community have much less ﬂexibility than the overall size

of their budgets might suggest.

Insofar as the changing substance of issues does call for changes in intelligence programs and

priorities, two basic criteria should govern which issues warrant attention. One is what the

policymakers of the day say are their greatest interests and concerns. The other is whatever

intelligence oﬃcers believe might aﬀect important national interests, whether or not any

current policymaker is asking about the topic.

The ﬁrst category of issues is generally the easier to deal with – at least for intelligence

oﬃcers, who can simply listen to the policymaker to determine what’s important and what’s

not. In one sense this is a form of buck-passing, but in another sense it is an appropriate

reﬂection of how a representative democracy like the United States works. What constitutes the

national interest can be a matter of dispute and debate, and the winners of elections, at least for

their terms of oﬃce, get to deﬁne it. Intelligence oﬃcers, who are not elected, need to follow

the politicians’ lead. (Following their lead in treating an entire subject as important is diﬀerent

from putting intelligence in the service of a speciﬁc policy or line of argument in favor of that

policy, which would constitute politicization of intelligence.)

A legitimate reason for change and adaptation in US intelligence, therefore, is not just change

in the world beyond America’s borders but also political change within the United States. The

Intelligence Community has in the past geared up to cover new and, for it, nontraditional issues

for this reason. When Jimmy Carter entered oﬃce in 1977, for example, his administration’s

strong interest in human rights resulted in that becoming an expanded analytic account at

the CIA.

Policymaker interests can be readily captured by a prioritization mechanism such as the

Clinton administration’s PDD-35. Most of those interests, however, are easily discernible any-

way in the speeches and statements of administration leaders. Intelligence oﬃcers, eager to be

relevant, usually learn much about administration priorities just from listening to those state-

ments and often redirect their eﬀorts accordingly, in addition to learning from the questions

and tasks they receive directly from policymakers. The learning process sometimes begins even

before a new president is elected. Some Intelligence Community components have tried in

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election years to get a head start in gearing up for new issues by quietly seeking out foreign

policy advisers to each of the candidates, to hear what subjects the Community is most likely to

be asked about in the ﬁrst months of a new administration.

The second category of issues – those that intelligence oﬃcers themselves think require

attention – is at least as important as the ﬁrst. Directing attention to subjects that policy

currently neglects but that in the future may threaten the nation’s interests is in some respects

the most important intelligence function of all. The judgments of the Intelligence Community

should guide the work and priorities of policy just as policy interests should guide the work and

priorities of the Community.

Sometimes this process of cross-validation goes in both directions at once, with neither side

having a monopoly on initiative. When the Intelligence Community was addressing in the

mid-1990s – in the form of a National Intelligence Estimate it initiated – what it regarded as an

increasing foreign terrorist threat to the US homeland, it focused partly on transportation

infrastructure as an inviting target. The aviation security oﬃce in the Federal Aviation

Administration requested that the Estimate pay special attention to its speciﬁc interest, which

was civil aviation. The judgments in the Estimate, which highlighted aviation as particularly

high-risk target, thus reﬂected both the Intelligence Community’s sense of a growing threat

and the FAA’s strong interest in its mission of aviation security. It was intelligence–policy

collaboration and good intelligence that – due mainly to economically motivated resistance by

the aviation industry – unfortunately did not result in the hoped-for beefed-up security

measures.

There is no set process for the Intelligence Community to make itself aware of issues that are

not seizing attention now but may go bump in the night later, let alone to generate enough

attention within the Community to make signiﬁcant transfers of resources from other issues.

There is, of course, a Catch-22 inherent in this challenge: if the Community is not already

devoting considerable collection and analytic talent to a topic, how can it be expected to be

expert enough to understand the dangers the issue poses to national interests? A systematic

procedure like the NIPF can help, by forcing regular rethinking of topics that are not receiving

priority treatment. Brainstorming with outside sources of expertise is also very useful. Ultim-

ately the process depends on intelligence oﬃcers being sensitive to happenings on the fringes of

their areas of responsibility that provide inklings of how those responsibilities might need to be

expanded or realigned.

Beyond these basic categories, other dimensions complicate the problem of choosing issues

worthy of intelligence attention. One dimension is time frame: short-term concerns versus

long-term ones. This is partially related to the distinction between policymaker-driven issues

and those issues the Intelligence Community itself has determined are worth watching.

Policymakers’ time frames tend to be short and often reﬂect the election cycle. Intelligence

oﬃcers who are part of the permanent bureaucracy may worry just as much about very long-

term problems as about short-term ones. How is one to decide which set of problems gets

highest priority?

The short-term versus long-term distinction is hardly unique to intelligence issues, of course.

Individual investors, for example, face similar choices in where to put their money. Investment

advisory services may recommend some stocks as oﬀering the best prospects for the next several

months and diﬀerent ones as better bets for performing well over the next several years. The

investor makes choices based on his individual needs and circumstances, such as whether he

has to ﬁnance a child’s college education now or several years from now. The Intelligence

Community, however, has no comparable benchmark for making similar choices. It needs to

serve the policymakers of the moment, but it also needs to be prepared to serve the next batch

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of policymakers, as well as highlighting threats and problems that may in the future force

attention from whoever is in oﬃce.

Investing too much in either short-term or long-term issues involves hazards. On one hand,

major investment in something like training people in a diﬃcult language to work on a current

problem focusing on a particular country or region may turn out to be wasted eﬀort as the

problem is resolved or fades in importance. The Intelligence Community could ﬁnd itself in

the situation of the US Army as the Vietnam War wound down in the 1970s, when it had an

excess of Vietnamese linguists who had been trained at considerable expense but had little

opportunity to employ their language skills. On the other hand, investments in training or

collection systems (either human or technical) aimed at an emerging or anticipated future

problem may be just as wasteful if the problem simply does not materialize to the degree

anticipated or is eclipsed by other concerns.

The short-term/long-term distinction is in turn related to another trade-oﬀ: between depth

and quality of coverage of any one issue and the ability to change quickly and nimbly to

coverage of diﬀerent issues. Some of the attributes of an intelligence service that make for high-

quality coverage of a particular country – such as a carefully cultivated network of human

agents, a corps of analysts with deep expertise in the country, and ﬂuency in the relevant

language – are the least fungible when it comes to shifting coverage to other countries or issues.

To take CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence again as an example, there has long been concern

about the relative emphasis the directorate gives to generalists versus specialists. A common

criticism has been that the former have been unduly rewarded in comparison with the latter.

Recent years have seen increased opportunities for analysts to be promoted to higher grades

while retaining their substantive specialties and not moving into management. The nimble

generalist, however, probably still has better prospects for rising to the top than an analyst

who makes his or her reputation as the Intelligence Community’s foremost expert on, say, the

Chinese economy. But what the directorate lacks in depth of expertise on selected issues is

oﬀset by its agility in very quickly responding to crises and bolts out of the blue by forming task

forces and shifting resources to meet policymakers’ current intelligence needs. In this respect,

talented generalists have proven very useful.

A further criterion is how much intelligence can contribute in comparison with other

sources of information and insight available to the policymaker. This distinction sometimes gets

lost in using the formal mechanisms to establish priorities; the natural tendency is to assign

numbers or tiers according to the overall importance of a topic rather than the particular niche

that intelligence can best ﬁll in addressing it. The Arab–Israeli conﬂict and Middle East peace

process exemplify issues that are very important to US foreign and security policy but on which

the intelligence contribution is relatively modest. The most important developments in that

conﬂict are covered well in the press, and many of the developments that are not covered

become known to policymakers through their own direct interactions with the protagonists.

On an issue in which policymakers are heavily engaged and knowledgeable, the contribution of

intelligence tends to be limited to more speciﬁc technical matters such as the monitoring of

troop movements. By the same token, intelligence’s contribution is broader on issues that have

not yet seized the policymaker’s attention. This points to the importance of staying ahead of,

not just abreast of, future or developing issues. That in turn underscores the importance of the

Intelligence Community – on its own initiative, not waiting to be pressured or told to do so –

adapting itself to be able to cover those issues.

A ﬁnal consideration in allocating resources is that what matters is not just the normative

ranking of diﬀerent topics but also the distribution of eﬀort down through the entire ranking.

What issue should be considered #1 in priority and what should be considered #2 often is

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widely discussed; much less discussed is how much intelligence eﬀort issue #2 should nonethe-

less still receive. And yet this is where some of the more diﬃcult management decisions about

allocating resources arise. The decisions get even more diﬃcult and more painful when looking

at issues 3, 4, 5 and lower.

There tends to be a bias toward concentrating resources even more heavily toward the

highest priority issues than would be the case in a rationally managed intelligence service that

is well designed to respond to both current and emerging concerns. It always is easy to argue

that issue X, if it is widely agreed to be of utmost importance, ought to receive more money

and people and attention. It is more diﬃcult to argue in favor of resources for issue Y when

resources are limited and most people agree that X is more important.

This bias, by stripping coverage of many currently lower-ranking issues to bare bones,

increases the diﬃculty in adaptation when events cause one of those issues suddenly to become

a focus of attention. The procedural adroitness of an agency such as CIA in setting up task forces

and the like can meet most of the policymaker’s current intelligence needs but is not a sub-

stitute for standing expertise. Contractual arrangements for tapping the expertise of outside

experts are used and can help, but only to a point.

Inﬂuence of outside pressure

The pressures exerted by consumers of intelligence in the executive and legislative branches,

which invariably emphasize the issues of highest current concern, exacerbate the tension

between focus on the most salient issues and coverage of the less salient ones. Former DCI

George Tenet, during his last couple of years in oﬃce, frequently reminded these audiences

that as long as he was expected to devote heavy attention to Iraq, terrorism, and weapons

proliferation, he could not be expected to cover everything else particularly well. And

yet, when a coup occurs in Chad, consumers expect to be able to pick up the phone and

immediately talk to an analyst who can say something smart about it.

Congress, the public, and the Intelligence Community’s executive branch masters not only

tend to focus disproportionately on a few front-page issues; they also are prone to focus on the

last crisis rather than future potential ones. This is a natural and unavoidable consequence of

how politics and public opinion work in a representative democracy. It may inhibit adaptation

to changing issues, however, by encouraging a “preparing to ﬁght the last war” syndrome.

Even the response after 9/11 to coverage of terrorism – which almost everyone agrees

should be a continued high-priority intelligence target – exhibited some of this syndrome.

A huge and sudden transfer of resources to counterterrorism took place not because the nature

or degree of the terrorist threat had suddenly changed – the threat of Islamist terrorism in

particular had been developing for several years, and the Intelligence Community had been

closely following it for years – but because a single event enormously altered the mood of the

American public, which expected to see big changes in response. Community management had

to respond the way they did, even though major questions can be raised about the eﬀectiveness

of some of the resource transfers that occurred. A surge in the number of analysts assigned to

counterterrorist components meant analysts were almost stumbling over each other in turning

out large numbers of papers, only a tiny proportion of which could be expected to be of real

use in heading oﬀ the next major attack. Meanwhile, the stripping of some of these resources

from other accounts with a country or regional focus may have decreased the chance of

intelligence providing early word of emerging threats to US interests, including threats that

might eventually materialize in terrorist attacks.

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Congress in particular is prone to exerting a related kind of unhelpful pressure, which is to

expect quantiﬁable measures – how many people, how many dollars – of the attention devoted

to speciﬁc issues. The trouble is that the most eﬀective way to cover a topic may not be to create

or enlarge components that are dedicated to that topic and appear as such as a line item in a

budget. To take another example from counterterrorism, the very heavy interest in the specter

of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) terrorism has meant pressure to

enlarge intelligence components devoted to that speciﬁc topic. But the best way to head oﬀ a

CBRN terrorist attack is apt to be to develop the kind of human sources who could give

warning of any kind of terrorist attack, CBRN or non-CBRN. A better use for resources –

even accepting the avoidance of CBRN terrorism as a paramount objective – may thus be these

recruitment eﬀorts, as well as the general tracking of CBRN materials that the Intelligence

Community does as part of its overall counterproliferation eﬀorts.

All of these distortions in allocation of intelligence resources are in addition to those caused

by the particular initiatives and preoccupations of whoever are the policymakers of the day.

Intelligence must serve those needs, but there always are trade-oﬀs. The biggest perturbation to

the US Intelligence Community in recent years has been the war in Iraq. Meeting the intelli-

gence requirements of that initiative has entailed an enormous drain on resources, at a time

when many components were still reeling from having surrendered personnel to the post-9/11

expansion of counterterrorism – and Iraq-related requirements have been a drain on counter-

terrorism itself. One result is diminished surge capacity and a lessened ability to respond to any

other crises or emerging issues.

Reorganization as adaptation

Although, as noted earlier, the urge to reorganize is largely background noise rather an eﬀect-

ive adaptation to changed circumstances, there are some respects in which reorganization –

more at the level of oﬃces than of entire agencies – can help to position an intelligence

service to deal with new threats, concerns, or interests. Some such reorganizations are simply

prudent measures to deal with management problems such as span of control. For example,

the heavy demands related to the Iraq war led CIA to create a new Oﬃce of Iraq Analysis

separate from the oﬃce that performs analysis on the rest of the Middle East. But an agency’s

organizational structure also can reﬂect – and promote – new and diﬀerent ways of looking at

an issue.

An example was CIA’s handling of German matters in the late 1980s. Analysis of East

Germany, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, had long been handled separately from

coverage of West Germany. An Eastern Europe division had been part of the oﬃce that

followed the USSR and later, still including the East German account, was moved to the Oﬃce

of European Analysis. Then – well before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and before any negotiations

on German reuniﬁcation – the East and West German analytic accounts were merged into a

single working group. It was a prescient move that enabled analysts to focus more sharply on

inner German issues and later to support eﬀectively the US diplomatic role in the reuniﬁcation

of Germany.

The placement of responsibility for whole regions or sub-regions may reﬂect an adaptation,

or failure to adapt, to the changing nature or importance of issues associated with those regions.

A reasonable argument could be made that South Asia – comprising a ﬁfth of mankind – has

been given insuﬃcient attention because of the tendency to make it an organizational

step-child of another region, most often the Middle East. Several South Asian issues would

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seem to call for increased intelligence attention, including heightened indications of Islamic

extremism, the development of a strategic relationship between India and the United States,

and the progression of the Indo-Pakistani confrontation to a new level since both countries

tested nuclear weapons in 1998. The Intelligence Community may be moving in response, as

suggested by the National Intelligence Council’s creation in 2006 of the new position of

National Intelligence Oﬃcer for South Asia.

The former Soviet republics of Central Asia raise similar issues. So far most parts of the

Intelligence Community have continued to group Central Asia with Russia. Changing this

organization could alter the framework within which intelligence oﬃcers think about Central

Asia and could entail either a response to, or an anticipation of, the changing salience of

issues there. Should the focus be on the Central Asian republics’ role in oil and gas exports,

their inﬁltration by transnational Islamist movements, their prospects for overcoming their

authoritarian Soviet past, or their place in a new Asian geostrategic game played by the great

powers? Each of these perspectives might imply a diﬀerent organization for coverage of the

region.

The most conspicuous organizational reﬂection of emphasis on a particular issue is the

establishment of a component dedicated to covering the issue on a transnational, cross-regional

basis. The creation of the DCI Counterterrorist Center, and subsequent centers modeled after

it for intelligence coverage of narcotics and the proliferation of unconventional arms, are clear

examples. To a lesser degree the same is true of analytic components that address other issues

such as energy supplies or ﬁnancial ﬂows. For an issue to have its own component assures not

just a certain way of looking at the issue but also a degree of clout in assuring continued focus

on it. An oﬀsetting hazard is that such components may acquire more permanence than the

issues they originally were designed to address, possibly meaning that much more structure

needs to be disassembled and reassembled as issues evolve further.

Collection disciplines

The primary structural divisions of the US Intelligence Community, and the basis for dis-

tinguishing entire agencies from each other, are the “ints” or diﬀerent methods of collecting

information. These include the collection of intelligence from human sources (HUMINT),

electronic signals (SIGINT), overhead imaging (IMINT), and various other technical means

(measurement and signatures intelligence, or MASINT), as well as open sources of information.

Some of the easiest as well as the hardest aspects of adaptation to changing issues inhere in these

methods of collection.

The easy part is that several of the biggest, most expensive components of these collection

systems are quite versatile and can be redirected to a wide variety of targets. The codes that are

broken as part of the National Security Agency’s SIGINT operations may be peculiar to

particular countries, for example, but the supercomputers and cryptologists who do the work

can be applied to the messages of any foreign government. Similarly, to put an imaging satellite

to work against a new target is usually as simple as aiming its camera in a diﬀerent direction

when it passes over that part of the earth. Both SIGINT and IMINT have well-established

structures, including committees representing analysts from throughout the Intelligence

Community, for quickly redirecting the collection systems. In fact, the responsiveness to short-

fuse requirements is so good that the main diﬃculty with these tasking structures is a tendency

for the short-fuse requirements to crowd out long-term ones. This is policed to some extent

through periodic comprehensive reviews of collection requests, which are the occasion for

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updating all of the requirements and bringing them into conformity with changing policy

needs and emerging threats.

Other elements of those collection systems, however, are more target-speciﬁc and not very

versatile. Foreign language is one such element, as it relates both to linguists needed to process

signals intelligence and operations oﬃcers who recruit human sources. In addition, long lead

times are required for most major shifts in capabilities, whether it is the development of a new

generation of satellites or the development of a network of human agents directed against a

particular country of heightened interest.

A further complication is that although the division into collection disciplines dominates the

structure of the overall intelligence eﬀort – with budgetary overseers able to see at a glance how

much money is spent on the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Reconnaissance

Oﬃce, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or CIA’s clandestine service – that

division does not correspond to the substantive issues being covered. Only imperfectly and to a

very limited degree can generalizations be ventured about how a particular “int” may be more,

or less, important in covering new issues versus old ones. One could argue, for example, that

overhead imagery was very important in monitoring Soviet strategic nuclear forces but is

useless in uncovering terrorist plots being hatched behind closed doors, and for that reason

imaging satellites should receive reduced priority. Valid or not, variations of that argument have

in fact been made. But what about, say, the SIGINT activities of NSA, which have played major

roles in monitoring Soviet military activity, terrorist operations, and much else besides? Staying

abreast of changing issues is not a good guide for deciding how large a proportion NSA’s

operations should be of the overall US intelligence eﬀort.

Issues of the present and future

So many words have been expended on the theme that the United States should “reform,”

“overhaul,” “revamp,” or “shake up” its intelligence programs to address new issues (again,

the idea of “moving beyond the Cold War”) that there is, at this level of generality, literally

nothing left to say. Those parts of this rhetoric that are not noise have become a kind of

mood music, constantly playing in the background of any discussion of US intelligence. And

some of the motifs in that music are valid. There is indeed a need, more now than 30 or 40 years

go, to pay as much attention to nonstate actors as to states and to pay heavy attention to

developments within the Muslim world. And such speciﬁc issues as transnational terrorism and

proliferation of nuclear weapons are not just trendy: they will require concentrated attention

from the Intelligence Community for years to come, not only because of what is going on

in the outside world but because of the policy attention those issues will continue to receive in

Washington.

More valuable than simply singing along with the mood music is to add a countermelody

or two. One such countermelody is the observation that once one drops below the level of

generality at which so much is being said and looks for more speciﬁc ways to operationalize or

implement the general themes, one discovers that almost nothing is being said. Exactly how

should the Intelligence Community change to be more adept at covering new issues rather

than old ones? What speciﬁcally about current intelligence activities is oriented toward old issues,

how is it so oriented, what alternative arrangements would be better suited to handling new

issues, and how and why would they be better suited? The absence of satisfactory answers to

these questions, and for most of them the lack of any answers at all, forms a stark contrast to the

ubiquity of the general rhetoric. The most plausible explanation for this absence is that there

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ADAPTING INTELLIGENCE TO CHANGING ISSUES

simply are no (or very few) good answers to the questions, that some of the expectations being

placed on intelligence go beyond inherent limitations to what it can accomplish, and that most

of the good ideas have already been tried and most of what the Intelligence Community does

already is about as well suited to tackling new and emerging issues as any possible alternatives.

That explanation is almost never voiced because it would inject a discordant note into the

mood music. Meanwhile, the urge to reform can lead (and in the case of the most recent

reorganization of the Intelligence Community, has led) to change for the sake of change, which

more likely than not will be counterproductive.

A more detailed look at the most salient issues reveals the opportunities for mischief. On

terrorism, what Americans most want from their intelligence services is the collection of

tactical information that is speciﬁc enough to roll up individual terrorist plots before they can

culminate in attacks. That objective has not changed; it always has been a major goal of

counterterrorist operations. Also unchanged is the impossibility of ever achieving that goal

completely, due mainly to the inherent diﬃculties of penetrating closely held terrorist plots in

which a very few people – who are ruthless, security conscious, and extremely distrustful – ever

have access to the information that matters.

One thing that did change after 9/11, of course, was the American people’s insistence on

expending more eﬀort and resources in striving toward the goal. That is a legitimate reason –

the suddenly heightened salience of an issue – for the Intelligence Community to consider

changing how it addresses that issue. But the increased salience of terrorism did not point to any

particular alterations in organization or operational technique, or to any better ideas on how to

crack the very tough nut of terrorist plots.

Even the resource aspect of the issue does not have an obvious answer. Given the impossi-

bility of ever warding oﬀ all terrorist plots, there is no level of eﬀort that can be said to be

“enough.” Whether to undertake additional eﬀort, however small the marginal return, involves

trade-oﬀs with other possible expenditures, either intelligence-related or not. Expanded

counterterrorist eﬀorts also may involve trade-oﬀs with privacy, civil liberties, or other con-

cerns, as demonstrated by controversies over interception of communications inside the United

States. In short, at stake are broader policy questions rather than just an adaptation or “reform”

of intelligence.

Besides seeking plot-speciﬁc information, the counterterrorist intelligence mission also

includes the strategic appraisal of terrorist threats. This part of the mission also is unchanged.

Moreover, it has been performed rather successfully: the Intelligence Community started

devoting concentrated attention to the radical Islamist terrorist threat and more speciﬁcally

Osama bin Laden’s part of it years before the 9/11 disaster, and its imparting of the seriousness

of the threat to policymakers was reﬂected in the latter’s own considerable attention to that

threat even before Al Qaeda attacked US embassies in Africa in 1998, more than three years

before 9/11. Again, it is very diﬃcult to see exactly what change in procedure, organization,

or technique is implied, or whether and how any such changes could be expected to be an

improvement.

The 9/11 Commission nonetheless successfully sold its own reorganization plan, partly

through its political and public relations skills and partly by distorting the intelligence story

alluded to above. In so doing, it promoted in the name of adaptation to changing issues a

scheme that, to the extent it has any eﬀect at all, makes the Intelligence Community less rather

than more adaptable. This eﬀect starts with the commission’s deﬁning of the problem not as

terrorism but more narrowly as Islamist terrorism.

In one sense this is commendable precision

in identifying actual adversaries rather than merely a technique those adversaries may use, and

radical jihadism probably will indeed continue to be the variety of terrorism of most concern

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PAUL R. PILLAR

to the United States over the next several years. But this deﬁnition also is a statement of

indiﬀerence to other varieties of terrorism – which a wide variety of groups, movements, and

ideologies have employed through the years – that may emerge.

That indiﬀerence is reﬂected in the organizational structure that Congress enacted on the

commission’s recommendation, which includes a National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)

separate from CIA and other existing intelligence agencies. In addition to the jurisdictional

confusion that creation of this additional body has caused, its separation from the country- and

region-focused analytic elements in a component such as CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence

lessens the likelihood that it will tune early into the next emerging terrorist threat. Any such

threat will not be detected by a group of counterterrorist specialists huddled in their own

separate center. It will be detected through dialogue between those specialists and country or

regional analysts who follow broader political and social trends and movements that could

provide the breeding grounds for future terrorists.

Some of the same questions can be raised about intelligence coverage of proliferation of

unconventional weapons. One also needs to ask what types of substantive information about

this topic the Intelligence Community ought to be collecting and analyzing. The technical

details of weapons programs surely are part, but only part. The intentions of regimes and the

political context in which decisions about weapons programs are made also are important.

And that implies intelligence eﬀorts, such as to recruit human sources in senior levels of a

regime, that may not bear the “nonproliferation” or “weapons of mass destruction” label and

may not look much diﬀerent from eﬀorts aimed at other sorts of issues. One of the lessons of

the Community’s analytical shortcomings regarding Iraqi weapons programs is the need to

integrate perspectives about a regime’s political needs, and even the personality of the leader,

into analysis of what invariably is ambiguous information about the weapons programs them-

selves. And when nonproliferation eﬀorts fail, the intentions of regimes regarding possible use

of their newly acquired weapons becomes highly important.

The organizational arrangement hatched by the 9/11 Commission and established in 2005

includes a new nonproliferation center similar in nature and mission to NCTC. The center

entails some of the same confusion as NCTC about division of responsibility with other

components covering the same issue, and the same disadvantage of being separated from other

analytic components following developments that may not be part of the same issue now but

may prove to be pertinent to it. Moreover, creation of these additional boxes on the Intelligence

Community’s organization chart makes the Community that much more of a stratifying,

pigeonholing bureaucracy. The new centers – unlike centers such as CTC that were created

within existing agencies – are in many respects new agencies in their own right, with all of the

additional turf and inertia that go with that. The Intelligence Community consequently has

become less nimble in adapting itself to future changes in the nature and priority of the issues it

must follow.

Perpetual adaptation

Against the backdrop of debate and confusion in recent years about intelligence “reform,” how

will one know when the Intelligence Community ﬁnally is well structured and well positioned

to address the newest, most pressing issues of the day? Answer: one will never know that, and the

Community will never achieve any such reformist nirvana. Because the issues keep changing,

even perfection – if it were achievable, which it is not – in procedures and organization to tackle

this year’s issues will be outdated next year. A distinction that is important but often overlooked

161

ADAPTING INTELLIGENCE TO CHANGING ISSUES

is between adapting intelligence to any one set of issues and making it more adaptable to any

issues. Narrow pursuit of the ﬁrst objective can hinder the second.

Would-be reformers of intelligence should keep in mind that however threatening and

pressing any one issue seems today, there will come along some other issue that, when it comes,

will seem even more threatening and pressing. We will expect our intelligence services to make

us pay attention to any such danger, and we will blame them for an “intelligence failure” if they

do not. And so the stakes involve not just Islamist terrorism and weapons of mass destruction

and anything else that worries us at the moment, but all manner of coups, revolutions, wars, or

other ogres or mayhem around the world that we may not even be thinking about now. The

possibilities might include – just to pick one at random – political developments in Russia (still

with its large nuclear arsenal) that make it a greater threat and more worrisome adversary than

it is today. Maybe that Cold War expertise will come in useful again after all.

Notes

1 Martha Crenshaw, “Old and New Terrorism: Lessons Learned,” Second Conference on Jihadi

Terrorism, Royal Institute of International Relations, February 13, 2006, at http://www.irri-kiib.be/

speechnotes/06/060213-jihad.terr/crenshaw.htm.

2 William E. Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1978), p. 361.

3 Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production, Strategic Investment Plan for

Intelligence Community Analysis, 2000–01, p. 47.

4 Ibid., pp. 49–50.

5 The 9/11 Commission Report (Washington: Government Printing Oﬃce, 2004), p. 362.

162

PAUL R. PILLAR

The challenges of economic intelligence

Minh A. Luong

Introduction

Information regarding the state of critical industries, technologies, and future investments of

other countries are among the most prized by intelligence services and their policymaking

consumers. The term “economic intelligence” refers to policy or commercially relevant

economic information, including technological data, ﬁnancial, proprietary commercial, and

government information, whose acquisition by foreign interests, either directly or indirectly,

would assist the relative productivity or competitive position of the economy of the collecting

organization’s country. Economic intelligence can be an important element in obtaining

economic security for a nation. The vast majority of economic intelligence is legally gathered

from open sources, involving no clandestine, coercive, or deceptive methods.

It is important to distinguish between the terms “economic intelligence” and “economic

espionage.” Economic espionage is the use or facilitation of illegal clandestine, coercive, or

deceptive means by a foreign government or its surrogates to acquire economic intelligence.

Economic espionage activities may include collection of information, or acquisition or theft

of a manufactured item through clandestine means with the intent of using reverse engineering

to gain proprietary or classiﬁed data.

In the twenty-ﬁrst century, economic espionage has

expanded to include theft of product plans and intellectual property such as software code that

is easily captured on thumb-sized storage drives and sent electronically around the world via the

Internet.

Virtually every national intelligence service gathers some form of economic intelligence,

with the world’s major economic powers having greatly expanded their economic intelligence

capabilities since the 1990s. For example, the British Parliament passed the British Intelligence

Services Act of 1994, which expanded the scope of its Secret Intelligence Service (SIS),

also known as MI6, to include areas relevant to “the interests of the economic well-being of

the United Kingdom.”

In March 1994, the French government authorized its intelligence

services to expand operations into collecting economic and industrial intelligence. Moreover,

the following year, the French government established the Committee for Economic Com-

petitiveness and Security which focused on protecting economic secrets and set up an economic

intelligence oﬃce in the French Foreign Trade oﬃce.

France, which has been cited by

163

numerous sources as one of the largest collectors of economic intelligence and foremost

practitioners of economic espionage, opened the École de Guerre Économique (EGE) or

School of Economic Warfare in 1997.

The EGE’s mission statement emphasizes “oﬀensive

strategy.” It trains students in a wide range of intelligence disciplines and awards degrees in

economic intelligence including the doctorate. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), also

frequently cited as a major collector of economic intelligence and a leading practitioner of

economic espionage, operates mainly through the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the

People’s Liberation Army, General Staﬀ Department, Second Department (also known as the

Military Intelligence Department), coordinating a vast and enhanced overseas collection

eﬀort.

In the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has maintained a large

economic intelligence analysis capability since the end of World War II which was enhanced

signiﬁcantly during the Cold War

but that capability was further expanded as the National

Security Agency (NSA) upgraded its signals intelligence collection capacity thorough its

ECHELON system that reportedly is capable of intercepting millions of electronic messages

per hour.

In 2001, US Presidential Decision Directive (PDD 75) on counterintelligence was

released and the directive created a new oﬃce, the National Counterintelligence Executive

(NCIX), responsible for protecting American economic and industrial interests.

Countries use economic intelligence to assess the state of their own national industries,

measure the competitiveness of industries in other countries, and inform policymakers and

industry leaders about which domestic industries are in need of further investment or

reorganization. Nations that engage in economic espionage do so to improve or maintain the

competitiveness of their own national industries by lowering or eliminating associated research

and development costs by illegally appropriating advanced technology and other proprietary

information: this brings products and services to market at lower cost and frequently faster than

if they were developed indigenously.

Economic intelligence: a key to national competitiveness

In an increasingly global marketplace, the competitiveness of domestic industries often means

the diﬀerence between national prosperity and security versus poverty and instability. National

governments, regardless of form or type, are under increasing pressure to satisfy the needs of

their domestic populations and maintain economic stability and growth. Growing populations

around the globe expect paying jobs in order to feed, house, and clothe their families and

an educated elite, frequently educated in the best universities in Asia, Western Europe and

the United States, have rising expectations for their own prosperity and well-being. For all

countries, making intelligent investments in the right industries at the right time is a critical

part of national economic policy. Economic intelligence gathered from competitor nations is

an essential component in making the right investment decisions. These investment decisions

aﬀect diﬀerent countries depending on their present stage of economic development. For

developing countries, accurate economic intelligence helps direct scarce investment funds to

industries that show the greatest promise for long-term growth. In the case of developed

countries, economic intelligence is used to help support established but aging industries which

need to improve its competitive standing against rival ﬁrms from other nations that frequently

operate on a lower cost basis. For all nations, capital investment funds at competitive interest

rates are a ﬁnite resource and managing those funds eﬀectively requires access to accurate,

complete, and timely economic intelligence.

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MINH A. LUONG

Economic espionage: the acquisition of industrial technology and

proprietary trade information

The National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX), the US government agency charged

with protecting American industry and trade information, noted that “[i]ndividuals from

both the private and public sectors in almost 100 countries attempted to illegally acquire US

technologies in FY2004.”

The report also observed that the United States is not the only

country that has experienced losses through economic espionage. The People’s Republic of

China, Russia, and South Korea all reported cases of foreign economic espionage occurring

within their borders.

Economic espionage is a global phenomenon that occurs at three levels

– national governments engage in economic espionage to beneﬁt their national industries

and military forces; companies steal intellectual property and trade secrets from competitors

and even joint venture partners; and individual data collectors, also known as industrial spies,

gain employment at target ﬁrms and steal proprietary information and trade secrets. This

information is then sold to competitor ﬁrms or foreign governments.

Countries that collect economic intelligence frequently discover that their national

industries require signiﬁcant capital and technological investments in order to become or stay

competitive in the global economy. The policy decisions that result from such ﬁndings

frequently cross the dividing line between economic intelligence and economic espionage.

For countries that can aﬀord to raise capital funds to improve their industries, they certainly

engage in economic intelligence but tend to avoid engaging in economic espionage in order to

maintain positive relations with larger trading partners and to maintain access to overseas

investment funds. But for countries which cannot aﬀord to pay to improve their industries,

they still face the same demographic, economic, and political pressures of other countries but

choose to acquire stolen technology and proprietary information to bolster their uncom-

petitive industries. These countries maintain legitimate businesses and interact in the global

economy but choose to supplement their economic growth with beneﬁts from economic

espionage.

The beneﬁts of engaging in economic espionage are clear and straightforward. For example,

by stealing completed or near-completed product plans, a competitor can produce and market a

copy of the product without incurring the normal research and development costs of bringing

that product to market. For industries with high research and development costs such as

pharmaceutical, biotechnology, computer hardware and software, and military equipment,

theft of even a single high-investment product can have enormous consequences. To make

matters worse for the original developer, if products derived from stolen proprietary data are

manufactured in a country with lower production costs, the original developers may ﬁnd

themselves in an uncompetitive position, even though they developed the product in the ﬁrst

place. Firms which manufacture products derived from stolen proprietary data frequently do

not market them in the country or region where the product plans were acquired. This tactic

reduces the likelihood of detection by the ﬁrms that originally developed the products.

Estimating the losses from global economic espionage is very diﬃcult, if not impossible, due

to the fact that some ﬁrms do not discover that their product plans or intellectual property have

been compromised for months or even years after the initial loss. Many companies never learn

of their losses and assume that their reduced market share or lack of success in the market is due

to other business factors. Some ﬁrms who discover that they have been victims of industrial

espionage make a business decision not to report the loss to the authorities for fear of negative

publicity, loss of customer conﬁdence, or even a drop in their stock prices.

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THE CHALLENGES OF ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE

Types of industries targeted

While nearly every industry is at risk, economic espionage collectors have concentrated their

eﬀorts on a number of speciﬁc industries. In the commercial sector, these include agriculture,

biotechnology, chemical, computer technology, ﬁber optics, medical devices, pharmaceuticals,

robotics, and telecommunications.

Commercial sector industries all play a role in fostering

economic growth. For example, in countries where domestic food production has leveled oﬀ

or has dropped, purchasing agricultural technology and materials has proven to be a costly

endeavor. Through industrial espionage, acquiring countries can obtain agricultural technology

and the formulations to produce fertilizers and pesticides at a much lower cost, provided that

they have the necessary domestic manufacturing capability and access to required raw materials.

An important point to note here is that while copy-cat equipment and chemicals derived from

economic espionage may not perform as well as products manufactured from its original

makers, that issue is not the primary concern. The key factor is whether the copy-cat products

are better than no products at all or are better than antiquated products currently in use. Given

the low cost, high payoﬀ of acquiring technology and products through economic espionage,

the improvements are worth the expense.

With respect to military technologies, many countries use economic espionage to improve

the capabilities of their military forces as well as to improve the competitiveness of their arms

industries. Targeted military industries include aeronautics, armaments, energetic materials,

chemical and biological systems, guidance and navigation systems, information systems, manu-

facturing and fabrication, marine systems, sensors and lasers, and space system technologies.

Countries that engage in economic espionage to collect military and dual-use technologies are

frequently trading partners but are restricted from receiving military-grade technologies due to

national security export restrictions. Countries with the most advanced military technology

and greatest number of export restrictions include the NATO countries of Western Europe and

the United States. The investments required to maintain military advantage of potential enemies

are signiﬁcant, running into the billions of dollars in research, development, and deployment

costs. Compromised technology losses through economic espionage put these investments at

signiﬁcant risk. One example from the 1980s comes from a subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation,

Toshiba Machine, which, in a violation of American and Japanese technology transfer restric-

tions designed and installed sophisticated milling machines in Soviet shipyards which enabled

the Soviet submarines to run as quietly as any British or American nuclear submarine. This

unauthorized transaction earned Toshiba Machine US$17 million but cost the American

military US$30 billion to regain that lost advantage in submarine operation and detection.

Collection methods

For collectors of economic intelligence, there is a signiﬁcant diﬀerence in operating between

open and closed economic systems.

In open economic systems, obtaining economic intelli-

gence is relatively easy and utilizes tools not unfamiliar to a stock investor. Government

economic reports and company quarterly and annual disclosures make up the foundation of

any country analysis. This information can be supplemented and cross-veriﬁed by private data

and analysis from research ﬁrms and investment companies. On-site visits of companies and

manufacturing plants are possible if arranged in advance. Even open source analysis of media

reports and academic and trade journals provide rich streams of economic data. In closed

economic systems, the economic intelligence collection task becomes more challenging.

Harassment from law enforcement oﬃcials and state security oﬃcers hampers collection

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MINH A. LUONG

activity. Government reports and company disclosures are frequently inaccurate, incomplete,

misleading, or simply unavailable.

Travel restrictions within the country and the need for

special permits encumber collection eﬀorts. When contacted for interviews, company oﬃcials

grow suspicious of any foreigners or persons asking for company data.

For countries with signiﬁcant national technical means such as satellites and communications

interception capabilities, a new dimension of economic data is available. Satellite imagery and

analysis can help produce accurate agricultural yield estimates, projections of industrial output,

even mortality rates. Interception of phone calls, Internet messages, fax transmissions and other

communications can be used to verify or conﬁrm intelligence ﬁndings. Finally, economic

intelligence sources can include businesspeople, academics, and researchers who live in or visit

targeted countries. Intelligence services around the world utilize these types of human sources

and while some services prefer to debrief citizens who have returned from abroad, others

provide a list of targets beforehand so citizens can exploit any opportunity that they encounter.

For economic espionage collectors, the method of operation can vary signiﬁcantly. Because

of their open economic systems, countries engaging in economic espionage frequently establish

front companies in Europe and the United States from which to base their operations. These

ﬁrms operate like domestic companies and their foreign ownership ties are either not disclosed

or are hidden. For the past decade, acquisition of sensitive commercial, military, and dual-use

technologies has been at the top of the target list for economic rivals of the European Union

and the United States. These front companies attempt to purchase restricted technology and

illegally transfer it out of the country. In other instances, these ﬁrms form joint venture partner-

ships with companies that have developed sensitive technologies and the foreign joint venture

partner transfers the proprietary information to a third party in violation of the joint venture

agreement. Another popular collection method is to arrange an on-site visit where the targeted

technology or products are produced. While the information exchange is supposed to be

bi-directional, there have been reported incidents of foreign experts entering restricted areas,

photographing sensitive areas, and discussing topics and asking questions that are outside the

agreed list of topics.

Some countries utilize their student and academic connections in

targeted countries, recruiting them to serve as intermediaries or even collectors at academic

conferences, university laboratories and libraries, industry meetings and trade shows. One

potential area of concern for signiﬁcant economic espionage losses is through compromised

computer systems. An industrial espionage collector, working within a targeted ﬁrm with

access to the company’s computer system, can download and collect computer ﬁles containing

critical proprietary data. With the advent of high-capacity, low-cost storage devices such as

small hard drives and thumb-sized memory sticks, gigabytes of information can be stolen in

minutes and detection is virtually impossible.

Economic espionage: a global challenge

Economic espionage can aﬀect any country regardless of the state of development. In fact, there

are countries that beneﬁt from economic espionage and yet are victims of it at the same time.

But the dangers to the international trade system from economic espionage are becoming

increasingly clear and this phenomenon aﬀects nearly every level of a nation’s economy.

Economic espionage greatly reduces or even destroys incentives to innovate. Inventors have

been deterred from developing inventions and bringing them to market for fear of having their

life’s work and investment stolen. Bankers are increasingly leery of making business loans to

ﬁrms whose products are at risk from industrial espionage. Investors may be discouraged from

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THE CHALLENGES OF ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE

making investments in companies operating in foreign countries or whose bottom line may be

negatively aﬀected by losses from economic espionage. And joint ventures, hailed by many

business scholars as a way of linking the developing and developed worlds, are fraught with

dangers from one partner stealing from the other. Oﬃcials in countries that engage in eco-

nomic espionage as national policy defend their practice by saying that their best minds study

in highly industrialized nations but never return to help their native country, so stealing

technologies and other industrial trade secrets is a way of equalizing for the potential loss of

these educated citizens. The “brain drain” eﬀect is diﬃcult to quantify but it does provide a

rationale for engaging in economic espionage.

These types of risks lead to reduced business eﬃciencies. The risk from economic espionage

has deterred companies from entering promising markets due to weak intellectual property

protections and from risk of economic espionage. The additional expense for enhanced

security increases overhead costs and reduces workplace eﬃciencies as more time is spent on

maintaining security measures. Economic espionage has even led to discrimination in the

workplace because certain nationalities and ethnicities are associated with industrial espionage.

Counterintelligence challenge

The counterintelligence challenge is to promote a robust international trading system while

discouraging economic espionage activity that threatens the integrity and health of that system.

Governments can work together to establish mutually acceptable intellectual property and

patent conventions with the agreement to enforce them uniformly regardless whether the

violator is from their country or another country. Companies need to be more aware of the

dangers of economic espionage and take active measures to protect their proprietary informa-

tion and inventions. Individuals should take responsibility if they encounter acts of industrial

espionage in their ﬁrms by reporting incidents to their ﬁrm’s security oﬃcer and law enforce-

ment.

Some of the largest targets of economic espionage such as the United States have

enacted laws punishing economic espionage collectors. For example, in 1996, the United

States passed the Economic Espionage Act (EEA) which punishes ﬁrms and individuals who

steals or transfers trade secrets with prison terms of up to 15 years and monetary ﬁnes up to

US$10 million.

In 2002, the US Attorney General strengthened the EEA by giving federal

prosecutors more latitude in interpreting violations of the Act. In 2005, the US adopted a new

national counterintelligence strategy that signals a change in approach in addressing economic

espionage. The new strategy shifts CI eﬀorts from a reactive to a proactive approach with more

emphasis on protecting sensitive technologies. Law enforcement agencies such as the Federal

Bureau of Investigation will devote more resources to defeating foreign intelligence operations

within US borders. The new strategy also promises to “ensure a level economic playing ﬁeld

for US businesses and industry.” Whether that means that US intelligence agencies will be

tasked to directly assist individual companies or industries is unclear but so far the oﬃcial US

government position is that the US intelligence community does not oﬀer assistance to speciﬁc

companies or ﬁrms.

Conclusion

There are relatively few objections to the collection of economic intelligence but there are

many concerns over economic espionage. The challenge for the global economic community is

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MINH A. LUONG

three-fold: ﬁrst, openness and transparency of all economic systems would allow other

countries to make proper policy decisions with regard to investments in their own national

industries. Second, promotion of fair and mutually beneﬁcial trading rules and relationships is

paramount, as is the need to continue to address the inequities that lead to the use of economic

espionage. Third, private corporations and ﬁrms need to be proactive and take prudent

measures to protect their own intellectual property and innovations. Governments can provide

a strong counterintelligence function, investigate losses via law enforcement, and negotiate with

other governments on behalf of ﬁrms, but governments are neither equipped nor able to

protect individual ﬁrm or industries.

As long as global economic espionage continues, there will continue to be an atmosphere

of distrust and unproductiveness that will permeate trade treaties, business negotiations, and

even individual employment decisions. If countries and ﬁrms can be dissuaded from engaging

in industrial espionage, then the global economic beneﬁt from increased innovation and

productivity would be signiﬁcant and meaningful.

Notes

1 Interagency OPSEC Support Staﬀ, “Economic Intelligence Collection Directed Against the United

States,” Operations Security Intelligence Threat Handbook, 1996. URL: <http://www.fas.org/irp/

nsa/ioss/threat96/part05.htm>.

2 Ibid.

3 Controller of HMSO (being the Queen’s Printer of Acts of Parliament), Intelligence Services Act of

1994. URL: <http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1994/Ukpga_19940013_en_2.htm>.

4 B. Raman, “Economic Intelligence,” South Asia Analysis Group Papers, February 1999. URL:

<http://www.saag.org/papers/paper50.html>.

5 URL: <http://www.ege.fr/>.

6 Nicholas Eftimiades, author of Chinese Intelligence Operations, statement before the Joint Economic

Committee, United States Congress, May 20, 1998.

7 By 1951, the National Security Council directed the CIA to determine the overall requirements for

the collection and management of “foreign economic intelligence.” See Philip Zelikow, “American

Economic Intelligence,” in Eternal Vigilance?: 50 Years of the CIA, ed. Rhodri Jeﬀreys-Jones and

Christopher Andrew (London: Frank Cass, 1997), p. 166.

8 The actual capabilities of NSA’s ECHELON system have been subject to intense debate. The Feder-

ation of American Scientists (FAS) maintains an ECHELON information website containing various

reports on ECHELON including those of the European Parliament Temporary Committee on the

ECHELON Interception System. URL: <http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/echelon.htm>.

9 National Counterintelligence Executive, “History of Counterintelligence,” undated. URL:

<http://www.ncix.gov/history/CIReaderPlain/Vol4Chap4.pdf>.

10 “The Key Collectors,” National Counterintelligence Executive Annual Report, 2004, p. 3. URL:

<http://www.ncix.gov/publications/reports_speeches/reports/fecie_all/Index_fecie.html>.

11 Appendix A, National Counterintelligence Executive Annual Report, 2004, p. 15. URL:

<http://www.ncix.gov/publications/reports_speeches/reports/fecie_all/Index_fecie.html>.

12 Ibid. at page x.

13 See Minh A. Luong, “Espionage: A Real Threat,” Optimize, October 2003. URL:

<http://www.optimizemag.com/issue/024/security.htm>.

14 Ibid.

15 Roderick Seeman, The Japan Law Letter, April 1987. URL: <http://www.japanlaw.info/lawletter/

april87/fdf.htm>.

16 For the purposes of this discussion, an open economic system is deﬁned as an economic system which

promotes transparent and accurate ﬁnancial and operations reporting. A closed economic system is

deﬁned as an economic system in which ﬁnancial and operations reporting is restricted, secret, or

distorted as to become inaccurate. Closed economic systems also tend to be heavily inﬂuenced or

controlled by the government.

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THE CHALLENGES OF ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE

17 Field researchers have discovered that economic reporting in closed economies is heavily inﬂuenced

by political concerns or to mask ineﬃciencies or corruption.

18 National Counterintelligence Executive Annual Report, 2004, p. 6. URL: <http://www.ncix.gov/

publications/reports_speeches/reports/fecie_all/Index_fecie.html>.

19 This point is discussed brieﬂy in John J. Fialka’s War by Other Means: Economic Espionage in

America, 1997.

20 Many acts of industrial espionage are caught by administrative assistants and support staﬀ who stop

and challenge individuals who are searching trash and recycling bins, attempting to access computer

equipment outside their normal work area, and who access sensitive company ﬁles without

authorization.

21 For the text of the EEA and other resources, visit the US Department of Justice EEA resource website

at URL: <http://www.cybercrime.gov/ipmanual/08ipma.htm>.

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MINH A. LUONG

Part 4

The intelligence cycle and the crafting

of intelligence reports

Analysis and dissemination

Strategic warning

Intelligence support in a world of

uncertainty and surprise

Jack Davis

This chapter is colored by the bold and devastating 11 September 2001 attack by al-Qa’ida

terrorists on the symbols of American power. Fear of another “9/11” – a surprise terrorist

attack within the United States – has focused the attention of government leaders and the

population at large on the centrality of eﬀective warning intelligence to the protection of the

national interest. The need for improved warning intelligence underlies both the recent sharp

increase in the national investment in intelligence collection and analysis and a congressionally

mandated reorganization of the Intelligence Community, namely the establishment of a

Director of National Intelligence. Fear and hope are joined in the title of the 2004 legislation:

The Intelligence Reform and Prevention of Terrorism Act.

That said, this article is not about the daunting challenges of tactical warning, an aspect

of intelligence covered at great length and impressive depth elsewhere. The focus, instead,

is on a less well-illuminated aspect of intelligence and the national interest – strategic

warning.

Warning analysis is the charge given to the Central Intelligence Agency and other govern-

mental intelligence units to help policy oﬃcials prevent or limit damage from threats to US

security interests. Tactical warning, as deﬁned in this chapter, seeks to detect and deter terrorist

attacks and other speciﬁc near-term threats to US interests; the objective is to avoid incident

surprise and thus block or blunt damage. Strategic warning addresses perceived dangers over

a longer period and in broader terms, in order to inform policymaker decisions on general

security preparedness – again to prevent or limit damage.

The analytic elements for tactical and strategic warning analysis are much the same: the

processing of a vast volume of information from open sources as well as from specialized

collection eﬀorts that could signal either pending or over-the-horizon threats; insights from

substantive expertise and practical experience regarding which of the many inconclusively

deﬁned threats deserve the most attention; and specialized tradecraft or analytic methodologies

to determine how to reach judgments amidst substantive or issue uncertainty and when to press

for policymakers’ attention and action despite uncertainty.

The intelligence imperative for tactical warning is self-evident. If an adversary is judged to be

about to launch an attack, develop a weapon, or eﬀect a policy initiative that can harm

US interests, intelligence analysts must set oﬀ an alarm bell, so to speak. US policymakers and

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action-takers need time for the appropriate response, whether to demarche, to detect, to deter, to

destroy.

The rationale for strategic warning stems from the fact that, though robust, US national

security resources are limited. Tactical warning cannot be counted on to support pin-

point deployment of defensive measures by providing timely notice of all speciﬁc attacks and

menacing developments. In this context, the challenge of strategic warning is to help policy

oﬃcials decide – in advance of speciﬁc indicators of danger – which of the many plausible

general threats to US security interests deserve concerted preemptive and defensive

preparations.

Strategic warning, to be eﬀective, has to be credible in assessing contingent dangers and has

to facilitate policymaker decision and action to protect against these dangers. If nothing else, the

events of 9/11 illustrate the diﬃculties of getting policy oﬃcials, and through them Congress,

aﬀected special interests, and the public at large, to pay the costs and brook the inconveniences

of a threat that, however serious intelligence analysts may see it to be, can only be depicted in

general terms.

The complexity and uncertainty surrounding generalized threats to US interests cast a

special challenge regarding strategic warning on both intelligence analysts and their policy-

making and action-taking clients – the inherent vulnerability to error of estimative judgments

regarding likelihood, character, and timing of threat.

Intelligence analysts must issue a strategic warning far enough in advance of a feared event

for US oﬃcials to take protective action, yet with the credibility to motivate them to do so. No

mean feat. Waiting for evidence that the enemy is at the gate usually fails the timeliness test;

prediction of potential crises without hard evidence can fail the credibility test. When analysts

are too cautious in making estimative judgments on threats, they risk incurring blame for failure

to warn. When too aggressive in issuing warning, they risk being criticised for “crying wolf.”

To address the consequence of this paradox and other obstacles that intelligence organiza-

tions must confront in order to produce eﬀective strategic warning, this chapter will conclude

by tabling a series of recommendations to advance two goals:

1 To reconstitute strategic warning as a collaborative governmental function by engaging

policy oﬃcials responsible for advocating and eﬀecting defensive measures in every step

of the analysis process, including topic selection and trend monitoring.

2 To warrant a distinctive intelligence contribution to a collaborative warning eﬀort by

expanding dedicated analytic resources and sharpening requisite substantive expertise

and specialized tradecraft.

Uncertainty, surprise, and warning

The central mission of intelligence analysis since the post-World War II reorganization of

national security structures (the National Security Act of 1947) has been to warn US oﬃcials

about foreign threats to US security interests. In large measure, determination to avoid another

devastating setback to US defense such as that caused by the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl

Harbor on 11 December 1941 convinced some reluctant members of Congress to support the

creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). At the time, inﬂuential critics charged that

the proposed agency would represent an “American Gestapo,” with powers that could threaten

US democracy.

Over the subsequent decades, and under the conceit that every CIA analyst was a warning

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JACK DAVIS

oﬃcer, the bulk of analysts’ written and oral deliverables pointed directly or indirectly to the

existence, characteristics, and implications of threats to the broadly deﬁned range of US

national security interests. According to some policy oﬃcials and other critical observers, much

of the output read more like quota-driven current reporting and research for the sake of

research than like warnings that commanded serious attention and justiﬁed costly action.

As titular head of the community of intelligence agencies, the Director of Central Intelli-

gence (DCI) would launch periodic reviews of what came to be known as the “National

Warning System.” The most recent review, in 1992 under then DCI Robert Gates, once again

deﬁned positions and mechanisms that had imposing titles and responsibilities. But their impact

on analytic performance was limited, and thus the impact on improving policymaker respect for

and reliance on warning analysis was limited.

As this chapter is written (April 2006), the National Warning System is supported by a

National Intelligence Oﬃcer for Warning, a Strategic Warning Staﬀ, and a Strategic Warning

Committee. Each element has worked diligently to fulﬁll its mandate, but none has had much

authority to aﬀect the priorities of the line analytic units of the Intelligence Community. In

recognition of this, the Director of National Intelligence has commissioned another eﬀort to

study and revamp the warning system, according to a recent unclassiﬁed memorandum of his

National Intelligence Council.

Personalities count as well as organizational mechanisms. Over the decades individual

analysts have had the will and talent to serve directly and well as warning oﬃcers for the policy

oﬃcials who encouraged them to do so. In good measure, the following text reﬂects the this

experience-based trail of “best practices.”

What, in this author’s view, are the characteristics and beneﬁts of an eﬀective warning

regime? The central analytic task is to peel back substantive uncertainty about the meaning

of past developments and the prospects for both pending and future developments that

could endanger US interests. Prescient, timely, convincing analysis regarding imminent and

potential dangers would then be an important force multiplier for US oﬃcials by reducing the

likelihood, ﬁrst, of incident surprise and, second, of inadequate defensive preparedness for

dealing eﬀectively with high-impact potential threats.

In order to identify and evaluate alternatives to current doctrine and practice of strategic

warning, a clear, even if arbitrary, distinction from tactical warning can usefully be made.

Tactical warning focuses on speciﬁc incidents that endanger US security interests, such as

military attack, terrorism, developments regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD), illicit

transactions, and political crises abroad. Tactical warning analysis is usually characterized by a

search for and evaluation of diagnostic information about incident, perpetrator, target, timing,

and modalities. The goal is to deter and limit damage by identifying in advance when, where, and

how an adversary will forcefully strike the United States directly, mount a challenge to US

forces, personnel, or interests abroad, or make a menacing weapons breakthrough. Notably,

counterterrorism, the most prominent and urgent target for tactical warning, has long been

detached from the National Warning, System and housed in variously named independent

“centers.”

Strategic warning aims for analytic perception and eﬀective communication to policy oﬃcials

of important changes in the character or level of security threats that therefore require re-

evaluation of US readiness to deter, avert, or limit damage – well in advance of incident-speciﬁc

indicators. Thus, strategic warning is characterized by inferential evidence and general

depiction of the danger. The issues addressed here are changes in the level of likelihood that an

enemy will strike, or that a development harmful to US interests (such as an oil embargo) will

take place, and changes in adversarial mechanisms for inﬂicting damage. The goal is to assist policy

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decisions on defensive preparedness and contingency planning, including preemptive actions –

ranging from diplomatic démarches to pre-positioning of military equipment and supplies – in

order to manage the risks of potential threats.

How are the two aspects of warning analysis related? The ultimate goal of eﬀective warning

is to protect US interests. Incident surprise can amplify damage, at times tragically. Fore-

knowledge can either avert or reduce damage. But not always, absent appropriate preparedness

for dealing with a speciﬁc threat once it is identiﬁed. Eﬀective strategic warning is often needed

to ensure the subsequent availability of an appropriate level of resources for detecting and

preventing speciﬁc attacks and harmful developments. That is, good strategic warning has the

potential to enhance both the ability of intelligence analysis to provide tactical warning and

the preparedness of government and society to avoid or blunt damage.

That said, a strong historical argument can be made that the occurrence of incident or

tactical surprise can be reduced but not eliminated. Even the best and most focused of intelli-

gence services cannot expect to penetrate every plot or otherwise anticipate every damaging

incident. Witness the number of successful terrorist attacks against Israel.

Oﬀensive forces – the perpetrators of military or terrorist attacks, for example – learn lessons

from past attempts about how, and where, to achieve surprise, just as defensive forces –

US intelligence, policymaking, war-ﬁghting, and law enforcement professionals – learn

lessons about prevention. Moreover, simple applications of denial and deception activities and

innovations in means and modes of attack by adversarial forces (such as suicide missions) can

increase the likelihood of incident surprise.

Some observers would argue that the absence of an attack on US territory since 9/11 is more

a matter of the deliberated strategic decision of al-Qa’ida and related terrorist organizations

not to attack, than of their inability to strike in, say, Washington, New York, or Los Angeles, as

they have in Madrid and London.

Regarding the onset of dramatic developments abroad that could damage US interests –

internal strife that threatens friendly governments, economic crises with global implications,

outbreaks of regional wars – the substantive uncertainty that reﬂects the complexity and ﬂuidity

of relationships and rationales of foreign groups and leaders also can hinder timely speciﬁc

warnings.

Finally, it is no easy matter for analysts who are convinced they have a sound tactical warning

case to galvanize policy oﬃcials to defensive action. Distraction of other calls on policy oﬃcials’

attention, their remembrance of unavoidable occurrence of warnings that proved to be false

alarms or aborted positives, and their concern about high opportunity costs for what could

prove to be “unnecessary” defensive measures can cause rejection or delay of preventive actions

to ward oﬀ a speciﬁc threatening incident.

What role for analysis if incidents of tactical surprise are inevitable? A robust strategic

warning eﬀort can serve as the indispensable analytic supplement to tactical warning – by

spurring, in advance of speciﬁc, harmful developments, preemptive and defensive measures that

can mute the negative consequences of tactical surprise.

To paraphrase a Cold War observation by an academic specialist on warning about the

danger of a surprise Soviet military attack on either Western Europe or the US homeland:

If surprise can succeed despite robust tactical warning, then defense must utilize eﬀective strategic

warning to prepare to succeed despite surprise.

Think in terms of the analogy between homeland defense and household defense. A concerned

and resourceful homeowner as a rule cannot know whether, when, and how a burglar or other

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predator will strike. Despite lack of incident foreknowledge, however, the homeowner (1) can

deter many planned “attacks” by investing in ample outdoor and indoor lighting, (2) can abort

attempted attacks with superior door and window locks, and (3) can reduce the damage should

a break-in nonetheless occur through an alarm system, which will encourage the burglar to

grab-and-run, rather than ransack. And if concern for security rises sharply – say, the neighbor-

hood becomes a more accessible and attractive target – still more protection can be eﬀected:

neighborhood patrols, gated communities, coordination of police and resident intelligence.

That said, the challenges of eﬀective strategic defense are formidable. The homeowner,

like the national security policymaker, has got to be willing to pay the direct costs of heightened

defense without being sure an attack will ever take place. Assuming a practical limit to expend-

itures to prepare for plausible but seemingly unlikely events, how much for ﬂood insurance, for

ﬁre insurance, and so forth?

Next, what of opportunity costs – inconvenience, reduced alternative consumption and

reduced savings? And what of resistance to eﬀort and expenditures (even ridicule) from

inside and outside the household? Finally, as the responsible “policymaker,” how best is the

concerned homeowner to garner diagnostic information and expert judgment for informed

decision making and action taking?

The imperative to seek more effective strategic warning

The terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 is fairly represented in open source commentary as a

tactical surprise – if nothing else, a reminder of the inherent limitations of tactical warning.

Judging whether there was a failure of strategic as well as tactical warning is a more diﬃcult task,

and depends largely on where one places the goal posts.

Evidence on the public record, especially The 9/11 Commission Report (2004), indicates that

intelligence oﬃcials communicated clearly and often in the months before 11 September the

judgment that the likelihood of a major al-Qa’ida terrorist attack within the United States was

high and rising. The Commission Report cites George Tenet, then the Director of Central

Intelligence, as saying that in the summer of 2001 “the system was blinking red.”

The public record also indicates that a number of responsible policy oﬃcials had been

convinced, from intelligence warnings and their other sources of information and analysis, that

US vulnerability to such attack had grown markedly. Both governmental and non-

governmental studies, in recognition of a mounting terrorist threat, had begun to recommend

national investment in numerous protective measures – tougher air passenger scrutiny, greater

cooperation between and among intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and stricter

enforcement of immigration laws, to name three.

The bottom line? Even after taking account of inevitable hindsight bias that accompanies

bureaucratic recollection of prescience of dramatic events, the public record indicates (1)

strategic warning was given, (2) warning was received, (3) warning was believed, at least by

some recipients. Yet commensurate protective measures were not taken.

Whether in theory this represents a strategic warning success or failure by intelligence,

the fact is that the national security components of the government, intelligence included,

failed to convince the President and his top aides to generate appropriate, prudent, and aﬀord-

able measures for increased preparedness.

Some observers have characterized the surprise attending the 11 September terrorist attack

as an instance of inconvenient warning. The President’s top policy oﬃcials, while convinced at

one level of engagement with the warning process of the reality of the threat, did not commit

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fully to the warning as perhaps they would have if the judgment reﬂected their own policy

priorities. They apparently were unwilling to divert their attention from an agenda of domestic

and other national security issues. And, if pressed, they were not ready to pay the political and

economic costs of direct expenditures, public inconvenience, disapproving special interests,

and the always diﬃcult task of breaking bureaucratic rice bowls.

It took tragedy to eﬀect what intelligence warning failed to do: move a concerned govern-

ment and polity to act like the aforementioned concerned homeowner. That is, take inconveni-

ent and expensive measures to deter or at least limit the damage to an attack that may never

come: by no means not all the measures recommended by thoughtful observers such as the

9/11 Commission, but nonetheless defensive measures that, again, intelligence warning failed

to launch. For one thing, the magnitude of intelligence resources and the skills of collectors and

analysts devoted to monitoring and countering the operations of terrorist organizations now

dwarfs pre-9/11 levels.

Whatever the ultimate judgment of the adequacy of measures taken to protect against the

current and ongoing threat from international terrorism, a critical examination is needed to

determine the adequacy of the doctrine, mechanisms, and practices for strategic warning

against other potential dangers. This includes the challenge of timely policy action as well as

eﬀective intelligence warning.

The following recommendations address the two main aspects of the challenge:

1 How to reconstitute strategic warning analysis from essentially an intelligence function

to a collaborative governmental responsibility – by engaging the policy community

much more directly in every step of the strategic warning process.

2 How to expand and upgrade the analytic resources devoted to strategic warning, in

order to ensure a distinctive intelligence contribution to policy decision-making and

action-taking in response to warning.

Strengthening strategic warning

1 Clarify the warning mission

Any critical examination of the mission of warning analysis should give primacy of place to

avoidance or limitation of damage – and not to the unrealistic standard of avoidance of surprise.

In other words, as much as it may go against the grain of intelligence and national leaders and

of the American public itself, the only realistic primary objective of an eﬀective intelligence

warning regime is to maximize damage limitation, not predictive accuracy.

Acquisition of foreknowledge to reduce incident surprise should be treated as an extremely

important means to the larger goal of, when possible, avoiding damage, but when necessary,

limiting damage to US interests. Security preparedness is also a means to the goal of avoidance

or limitation of damage.

As indicated by the United States’ relatively damage-free navigation of the Cold War,

preparedness supports the goal of damage avoidance from surprise attacks mainly through

the workings of deterrence. Preparedness advances damage limitation through erection of the

means for appropriate preemptive oﬀensive and post-attack defensive responses to all kinds of

challenges to US interests.

Over the decades, the Intelligence Community has generated many worthy deﬁnitions of

warning analysis. The one recommended here puts damage avoidance and limitation front and

center. It also speciﬁes decision-enhancing assessments as a requisite for a successful intelligence

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JACK DAVIS

warning eﬀort – that is, assessments with good potential to galvanize policy oﬃcials to take

actions and invest in measures that help avoid or limit damage.

Warning analysis seeks to prevent or limit damage to US national security interests via communication of

timely, convincing, and decision-enhancing intelligence assessments that assist policy oﬃcials to eﬀect defensive

and preemptive measures against future threats and to take action to defend against imminent threats.

Decisions on whether and how to take action and the eﬀectiveness of actions taken remain the

responsibility of policymakers and action-takers. The analysts’ responsibility is to facilitate

decisionmaking and action-taking processes by providing, for example, disciplined (that is, well-

argued) depiction of perceived changes in the likelihood or means of the threat and identiﬁca-

tion and evaluation of US options for preempting, blunting, or otherwise limiting damage from

the threat.

2 Increase resources for strategic warning

Which is the more important intelligence responsibility – tactical or strategic warning? A

strong argument can be made that the vital role of technical and clandestine intelligence

collection in executing tactical warning justiﬁes its dominant command, over the decades and

especially post-9/11 on analytic resources.

But intelligence scholars have argued that a government adequately prepared to respond to

hostile action and other damaging events which receives no warning of a speciﬁc incident is

better able to limit damage than a government that receives warning but is inadequately

prepared to respond.

In 2004 testimony to the 9/11 Commission, then DCI George Tenet made a similar point by

indicating that “good intelligence” (timely warning) would not by itself protect America.

“Good homeland defense” (preparedness to respond) was also needed.

Recognition of the need to prepare well in advance to meet threats to US interests calls into

question the extent to which the current division of analytic resources favors tactical over

strategic warning – in terms of dedicated personnel, perhaps in the order of 100 to 1.

When pressed, the leaders of CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence and other Intelligence

Community analytic units are likely to argue that every analyst is a warning oﬃcer.

Probably so, if intent rather than eﬀect is the standard. At the agency, at least through the

1980s, a rough balance prevailed between tactical and strategic warning, if all forms of

event-reporting and crisis management support were generously deﬁned as tactical warning,

and all forms of research and estimative work were deﬁned as strategic warning, with similar

generosity.

The major post-Cold War downsizing of analytic resources in the 1990s seemed to cut much

more sharply into strategic warning analysis and in-depth and long-term analysis generally than

it did into tactical warning analysis and overall current policy support eﬀorts. Understandably,

the response of intelligence leaders to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks was to eﬀect a

sizeable additional shift of a substantially enhanced total work force into the tactical warning

and current analysis eﬀorts.

For the Intelligence Community to meet its professional responsibility to prevent and limit

damage to national security in the uncertain years ahead, leaders now should expand substan-

tially and quickly the community’s capacity to execute a more robust strategic warning eﬀort.

This includes attention to (1) doctrinal development to clarify the essential characteristics of

eﬀective warning, (2) staﬃng levels for in-depth and over-the-horizon analysis generally and

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thus potentially for strategic warning as well, (3) career incentives, (4) continuous leadership

engagement, and (5) especially tradecraft training to ensure that policy oﬃcials receive warning

analysis they see as decision-enhancing.

Even before 11 September 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose position

aﬀords considerable inﬂuence over the partitioning of intelligence resources, called for

increased eﬀort to avoid strategic surprise. Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense during

2001–2005, is long on record with charging intelligence analysts with “helping policymakers

decide which seemingly unlikely threats to pay serious attention to.” Since 11 September, other

key policy oﬃcials have made statements that indicate they have joined this chorus.

Ironically, the war on terrorism and the Iraqi war have widened the gap between words and

action. However, the reorganization of the Intelligence Community symbolized by the

establishment of a Director of National Intelligence (DNI) supported by a large staﬀ to eﬀect,

among other objectives, improvements in the quality and utility of analysis, has led recently to

two promising initiatives.

First, CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, according to public statements by its leaders, and

other Intelligence Community analytic units plan to increase substantially the resources

dedicated to in-depth and long-term analysis. Second, as previously indicated, according to a

publicly available pronouncement, the DNI is considering a major initiative in support of

strategic warning, as this chapter is written (April 2006). Will the two initiatives be productively

joined?

3 Strengthen strategic warning as sound estimative analysis

Intelligence analysts, as strategic warning oﬃcers, often have made a convincing case for a

judgment that a danger overlooked or understated by policymakers is likely to occur. Analysts

leverage the strengths of the warning process at its best – mastery of collection guidance,

collaborative multidisciplinary substantive expertise, well-structured all-source information,

sound tradecraft for dealing with uncertainty, awareness of but some distance from the daily

policymaker pressures to “get things done.” The analysts produce an assessment about a

looming danger that is prescient, timely, and convincing, and thus provides a window for

eﬀective policy decision and action.

Many of the examples on the public record of strategic warning as sound estimative analysis

– such as the successful US defusing of India–Pakistan war preparations in the early 1990s –

depend on exploitation of all-source information that, while not conclusive, allows the accom-

plished analyst to make an estimative judgment about a looming danger with high conﬁdence.

As a rule, it takes both credible evidence and sound inference to galvanize responsible policy

oﬃcials into action.

While the overall record on “making the call” is a respectable one, doctrinal emphasis on a

straight-line estimative prediction – development of the seemingly most likely outcome –

has been the root cause of high-proﬁle warning failures. The analysts’ expertise, in eﬀect,

is trumped by the hazards of estimating. Available data on a complex issue is inherently

ambiguous, open to manipulation by denial and deception, and otherwise subject to mis-

interpretation. The analysts’ understanding of how things usually work regarding the issue

under scrutiny, what one academic observer calls “normal theory,” does not adequately

account for seemingly unprecedented or exceptional developments, often driven by foreign

actors’ distinctive – even unrealistic or self-defeating – risk-beneﬁt calculations.

This was more or less the case with the September 1962 Intelligence Community estimate

that judged the Soviet Union would not install nuclear weapons in Cuba – a warning failure

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JACK DAVIS

that could have triggered nuclear warfare. The US analysts, for example, did not know the

extent to which Nikita Khrushchev as dominant Soviet decision-maker was misinformed

about the seriousness of US warnings against the introduction into Cuba of oﬀensive nuclear

weapons. Even more important, US analysts did not know that Khrushchev was more fearful of

his own military, which could not tolerate the US advantage in deliverable nuclear weapons,

than of the risks involved in his Caribbean gambit.

Increased numbers of better-trained analysts, greater leadership engagement, and more

robust warning tradecraft (addressed in sections below) will improve the success record in terms

of making the right call as well as galvanizing policy oﬃcials to timely action. But as with

tactical warning, strategic warning as sound estimative analysis will inevitably produce what

are perceived to be “intelligence failures” that serve in turn to reduce the willingness of policy

oﬃcials to rely on intelligence warnings.

An admittedly apocryphal story has Sherman Kent, chief architect of the 1962 Cuban Missile

Estimate, soon thereafter visiting the oﬃce of John McCone, Director of Central Intelligence.

Kent looked out the Director’s vast seventh-ﬂoor picture window, and said, “Boss, it looks like

rain.” McCone who had had serious doubts about the Estimate, replied, “How would you

know?”

4 Strengthen strategic warning as alternative analysis

Almost by deﬁnition, an eﬀective strategic warning eﬀort should also be focused on threats to

US security interests that are surrounded by considerable, even impenetrable, substantive

uncertainty – potential threats that may or may not mature. Here, the analysts address a danger

they judge to be plausible and potentially highly damaging, but about the details of which –

timing, location, modalities, triggers, indicators, indeed, likelihood – they retain important

doubts.

Analysts address some issues, such as the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack during the Cold

War, because they judge that the danger, however unlikely, could prove to be so devastating that

it has to be better understood. On other issues, analysts warn when they judge a danger was

previously understated or has increased in magnitude or likelihood, and when policy oﬃcials

seek help in reﬁning contingency plans. But, again, for these strategic warning exercises, the

danger addressed is either judged unlikely under prevailing conditions or is seen as too highly

dependent on poorly understood factors and contingencies to assess with conﬁdence the

likelihood of its occurrence.

Strategic warning analysis, in these circumstances, should be treated as a branch of “alterna-

tive analysis,” in that its tradecraft places emphasis on disciplined, if “alternative,” tradecraft

for assessment of developments that are seen as unlikely or indeterminate. Related forms

of alternative or challenge analysis – including High Impact–Low Probability Analysis,

What-If Analysis, Gaps in Information Analysis, and Devil’s Advocacy – share the requirement

with warning analysis to marshal all-source information, expert insight, and specialized trade-

craft to illuminate developments that analysts judge to be plausible, potentially damaging or

advantageous for US interests, but seemingly unlikely.

In recent years, CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence and other Intelligence Community analytic

units, in response to criticism of analytic performance, have increased tradecraft training in and

production of alternative analysis. In fact, the requirement to establish alternative analysis units

throughout the Intelligence Community is mandated in the Intelligence Reform Act of

2004. Unfortunately, the value of alternative analysis for strategic warning has not been fully

realized.

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The connection of alternative analysis to strategic warning would be to use the methodolo-

gies developed for challenge analysis to provide distinctive intelligence support to policy

oﬃcials as they undertake the diﬃcult task of deciding whether and how to prepare for threats

to US strategic interests before the advent of speciﬁc indicators rings an alarm bell.

Perhaps High Impact–Low Probability Analysis (HILP) is the alternative analysis format best

suited for adoption for strategic warning. With HILP, analysts put aside projections of develop-

ments they think likely to happen, and focus on developments their policy clients do not want

to happen; in eﬀect the potential developments they fear would be the most damaging to US

interests. A military attack against a country the United States is treaty-bound to defend would

be one such event; collapse of civil authority in a country in which the United States has major

economic interests would be another example.

Under HILP, analysts develop one or more scenarios for the seemingly low-probability event,

spelling out the constituent plausible assumptions and trigger events that could lead to or

increase the likelihood of the high-impact development. As a strategic warning document, an

HILP assessment would include a series of signposts that would help both analysts and policy

oﬃcials monitor momentum either toward or away from the unwanted development.

Additionally, analysts could use their expertise on the characteristics and predilections of

foreign countries and players to provide, in cost-beneﬁt terms, a list of measures the United

States could take to deter the unwanted development and to limit damage if it occurred.

Here, too, there is reason to believe Intelligence Community programs that connect strategic

warning to an enhanced alternative analysis eﬀort will receive policymaker support. A key

proposal of the 1998 Report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United

States, which was chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, now Secretary of Defense, called for expanded

eﬀorts by analysts to address high-impact dangers they thought unlikely. More speciﬁcally the

report called on the policymakers to probe analysts to ensure they were not too quick to dismiss

dangers simply because of a lack of hard evidence or clear precedent.

5 Assign strategic warning efforts to regular analytic units

Most of an expanded strategic warning eﬀort should be undertaken by analytic production

units also responsible for tactical warning and other analytic deliverables. The goal should be

to increase the number of analysts engaged in strategic warning and their skills in meeting its

challenges – not the complexity of the table of organization. Closeness to colleagues engaged

in assessment of the same countries, non-state entities, and global issues would provide beneﬁts

to the warning analyst in terms of policymaker contacts, databases, and collective substantive

expertise.

Multi-function production units, admittedly, would face the age-old danger that crisis

support analysis and feeding of the “daily pubs” will drive out strategic warning and other

forms of in-depth analysis, either by management ﬁat or by implicit career-enhancing

incentives. Intelligence leaders would have to get the word out to middle managers that Peter is

not to be robbed to pay Paul.

Production unit analysts engaged in strategic warning at times will occupy the uncom-

fortable position of seeming to dispute and discredit not only their colleagues’ established

assumptions and conclusions about the issue at hand, but also their analytic acuity. This bureau-

cratic awkwardness would warrant an important role as well for specialized entities, including

the National Intelligence Oﬃcer for Warning. One contribution here would be to help

promote special formatting and a standardized explanation of the purposes and modalities for

strategic warning assessments.

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Another contribution would be to provide temporary work spaces for line analysts to engage

in a strategic warning eﬀort, that would both surround them with informed and supportive

warning specialists and remove them from the event-driven production pressures of their home

unit.

6 Expand tradecraft training and research

A sizeable reduction in numbers of analysts was mandated by Congress in the 1990s, in search

of a “peace bonus” to commemorate the end of the Cold War. Essentially, the process consisted

of non-replacement of retiring veteran analysts.

A decade later, largely in response to the events of 9/11, Congress mandated a sizeable

expansion in analyst numbers. One result of otherwise compensating workforce trends is the

existence of a much less experienced analytic cadre today than, say, in the 1970s and 1980s.

CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, to its credit, has responded to the challenge of its dependency

on a youthful workforce by moving to become a “learning organization.”

Many of the training courses oﬀered to new and journeymen analysts help prepare them for

the challenges of strategic warning analysis by focusing on the elements of analytic tradecraft

needed to assess substantive uncertainties and to ensure credibility with policy oﬃcials. None-

theless, a special strategic warning training course is needed to help speed the readiness of

analysts to meet these generalized challenges and to gain familiarity with specialized character

of strategic warning assessments both as estimative analysis and alternative analysis.

The course content should probably include an exploration in depth of the character and

analytic management of substantive uncertainty. This could include the implications for

warning of recent academic studies that convert the concepts of complexity theory from

mathematics and physics to political, economic, and societal systems. Especially over, say, a ﬁve-

year time span, the course of, say, complex foreign political systems can be aﬀected profoundly

by players, relationships, and trends not yet on the analysts’ scope. How, then, do warning

analysts address these “unknown unknowns”?

The strategic warning training course should also contain a “lessons learned” segment; in

eﬀect, successes and failures in strategic warning. The course additionally should provide an

opportunity for students to outline an approach to a strategic warning assessment in their areas

of substantive responsibility.

The analysts’ grasp of specialized skills for disciplined assessments of seemingly unlikely

dangers would be key to distinguishing strategic warning analysis from exercises in worst-case

speculation. As addressed in detail below, the analysts’ strategic warning eﬀort is most likely to

generate timely action if policy professionals have an analytic stake in all steps of the process –

from selection of priority warning issues to co-ownership of indicator or signpost lists that

monitor changes in the likelihood of a threat. Policymakers would be more likely to engage

in such close collaboration if intelligence analysts demonstrated specialized expertise that

generates distinctive analytic insights for managing substantive uncertainty and for the other

challenging tasks of strategic or over-the-horizon planning.

To strengthen policymaker reliance on strategic warning, research initiatives are much

needed to expand the armory of warning analysis tradecraft. Whereas much has been written

about the causes of warning failure, a search for a science or even a theory for strategic warning

success is well beyond reach. What can be developed are doctrinal and skills reﬁnements that

give all participants in the strategic warning process – collectors, analysts, policy oﬃcials –

increased conﬁdence in identifying, weighing, and tracking threats. For the most part, tradecraft

developments that serve to improve the quality and policy utility of warning as alternative

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analysis (for example, HILP) would also improve intelligence professionals’ performance of

warning as sound estimative analysis.

One promising area for more robust analytic tradecraft would be techniques for evaluating

the authenticity and diagnosticity of information.

Regarding authenticity, use of denial and deception (D&D) is usually central to the planning

of US adversaries, because of its eﬀectiveness in compensating for other power weaknesses.

From obsessive operational security to distractive reports about planned attacks overseas, D&D

probably increased the odds for success for the 9/11 terrorists. The Intelligence Community

has made important strides in understanding how a less powerful opponent can use D&D

against the United States. The main frontier for improving warning analysis is conversion of

this awareness into practical analytic tradecraft for identifying and countering an adversary’s

manipulation of specialized intelligence collection and open source information.

Regarding diagnosticity, the rapid expansion of both classiﬁed and open source information

can be a burden as well as a beneﬁt to the warning analyst. More than ever, powerful yet

practical user-friendly tradecraft is needed to distill information that serves as reliable “signal”

from the mass of collected information that is distracting “noise.” Sharper analyst insight on

what potentially collectable and accessible information holds the key to reducing substantive

uncertainty about potential security threats must then be used to rationalize intelligence and

open source collection eﬀorts.

7 Encourage warning analysts to engage in action analysis

Also to ensure that policy clients take strategic warning seriously, analysts have to be better

prepared to address with distinctive intelligence value-added the “so-what” of their assess-

ments. This includes addressing not only the likely implications of a threat to US interests but

also, in cost-beneﬁt terms, measures the United States can take to reduce the likelihood and

magnitude of potential damage.

Managers and senior analysts regularly join in policymaker eﬀorts to identify and evaluate

alternative measures the United States can take to avoid or limit damage from developments

that would harm security interests. This form of support, variously called action, implementation,

or opportunities analysis, is usually delivered in oral forums – including telephone exchanges, in-

oﬃce brieﬁngs, teleconferences, and interagency working groups and other decision-oriented

meetings. The analyst’s professional role in action analysis is to identify and evaluate; policy-

makers retain the professional responsibilities to recommend and choose.

All analysts, especially strategic warning analysts, have got to be well trained in the doctrines

and skills associated with this professional division of labor – in eﬀect, a replacement for the

previously imbedded doctrine that sets a wall of separation between intelligence analysis and

policy-support activities in any guise. Once analysts sense that policy clients have bought into

the need to review defensive preparedness and contingency planning in response to a strategic

warning eﬀort, the analysts can best ensure continued contact and guidance by directing their

substantive and tradecraft expertise to these “so-what-can-we do” issues.

The main intelligence asset that analysts bring to the table for action analysis is their expert

knowledge of the history and culture, political and leadership dynamics, and back-stage agents

of inﬂuence of the countries and organizations that could threaten US interests. While this

substantive expertise is also central to the risk analysis phase of strategic warning, the goal in

action analysis is to help US policy oﬃcials determine how best to demarche, divert, deter,

disrupt, and generally leverage a threatening foreign entity.

One thing needed here is more extensive analyst training in the instrumentalities of US

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power and inﬂuence and in decisionmaking processes regarding their use. Agency analysts

have come a long way from the point some 25 years ago, when a CIA Deputy Director for

Intelligence observed that his analysts knew how every government in the world worked –

except their own. But a continued shyness toward including action analysis in written assess-

ments probably reﬂects analysts’ insecurity about their understanding of the policymaking

process as well as about the ethics of their selective engagement in the process.

8 Select strategic warning issues carefully

If the goal is to provide distinctive analytic values that policymakers incorporate into their

national security decision-making and action-taking, the strategic warning eﬀort will be

resource intensive. In the CIA context, the analysis will usually require a multidisciplinary team

of analysts, well connected to the collection community, analytic colleagues in other agencies

and peer-level policy staﬀers. The National Intelligence Oﬃcer for Warning could serve to

provide guidance on tradecraft and process, and to ensure access to and credibility with key

policy oﬃcials and agency leaders.

The resource requirements for eﬀective strategic warning eﬀorts, thus, will dictate careful

selection of topics – in a sense a triage approach. As a rule, topic selection should favor the

national security threats deemed potentially most damaging rather than those viewed as most

likely – that is, the plausible developments whose consequences well-informed policymakers

fear most. Again, the main value of an expanded strategic warning eﬀort should be damage

limitation over the long haul and not short-term predictive accuracy.

This is not a call to avoid working on what was described earlier as strategic warning as

sound estimative analysis. What is to be avoided are disguised “training exercises,” where the

warning mission is used for analysts to build their credentials on a subject with nothing much

new to convey to well-informed policymakers who already have the dangers addressed well in

mind.

Illustrative examples for selection of topics on developments that could do the most damage

to US security interests include the prospects for a collapse of political stability in countries of

concern (either those generally supportive or generally adversarial to US interests); and for the

outbreak of regional warfare in potentially explosive regions such as the Middle East and South

Asia. Catastrophic terrorism, environmental, or humanitarian disasters that have a global reach,

and economic and societal breakdowns in world powers such as Russia or China might also be

topics on which strategic warning analysis could play a major role in identifying, assessing, and

monitoring major potential threats to US security interests.

Initially, while strategic warning resources are still scarce, policymakers should play a major

role in topic selection, to ensure their active participation in the warning analysis process. That

is, a production unit’s main policy clients should be polled on what developments they fear

most – the ones that keep them awake at night.

Once policymakers gain conﬁdence in the utility of a strengthened strategic warning regime,

and closer ties between the warning and policy planning process are thereby established, more

of the initiative for topic selection can reside with intelligence producers. Even then, validation

of topic selection should be obtained from the policy clients, whose active participation is

required for an eﬀective strategic warning eﬀort.

The objective is not to forfeit the responsibility of the intelligence professional to call

policymakers’ attention to dangers they seem to be overlooking or understating. It is, rather, to

increase the likelihood the busy policymaker’s attention will be gained when the intelligence

professional issues such warnings.

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9 Expand policymaker role in warning analysis

Relations between the strategic warning and the policy-planning processes have demonstrated

considerable variation over the decades, depending in good measure on the centrality and

urgency of the threat addressed. At one extreme, during the Cold War, the intelligence analysis

and policy-planning cycles regarding estimating and countering future threats from Soviet

strategic and theater weapons development were closely tied and timed both to the Depart-

ment of Defense yearly procurement planning schedules and to Congressional budgetary

calendars.

Longstanding crises, such as the Vietnam War, produced more ad hoc relationships – but lines

of communication that regularly put intelligence community assessment and policy com-

munity planning on the same page, even if not always harmoniously.

At times, strategic warning analysis and contingency policymaking develop useful lines of

connection on certain issues through the eﬀorts of individuals in both camps who actively seek

it and institutions such as interagency working groups that are charged with eﬀecting it.

That said, strategic warning on most issues, most of the time, has largely been an intelligence

function, the practitioners of which hope will be taken seriously in policymaking. And con-

tingency planning has essentially been a policy function, the practitioners of which hope to

garner useful Intelligence Community support. While the record shows a mixture of successful

and unsuccessful connections, policy community criticism of strategic warning comes across

more vividly in the record than does praise.

Sherman Kent, arguably the most respected observer of analytic practice during CIA’s ﬁrst

decades (1950s and 1960s), put his ﬁnger on the cause of disconnects between what he referred

to as “Warner” and “Warnee.”

• It is a lot easier for the Warner to warn than for the Warnee to get ready to take action.

• Realize that the Warnee has a full-time job and is not looking for extra work or needless

interruption of his regular duties. His circuits are already overloaded.

• Realize when the Warnee receives a warning and elects to act upon it, the least that he

must do is to begin some very speedy contingency planning. For a minor crisis in [an] . . .

African or Latin American republic the waves of activity will hit 100 oﬃcers.

• Mark well that the Warner’s record of fallibility is well known to the Warnee.

Kent’s observations would explain the two common complaints by concerned policy oﬃcials

about strategic warning eﬀorts in the decades immediately before 11 September 2001: (1)

inadequate inﬂuence over the timing and focus of National Intelligence Estimates and other

over-the-horizon assessments, and (2) concern that periodic warning reports showed

inadequate sensitivity to the wrenching shift in defensive resources that would be required if the

warnings were taken seriously.

Regarding timing, one former intelligence analyst who had crossed over to serve as a policy

oﬃcial observed that her analyst colleagues seemed not to understand that policy decisions will

be held up for many reasons – but not for lack of a well-timed intelligence input.

Regarding periodic warning lists, one senior policymaker expressed his indignation at what

he saw as the bureaucratic imperative to warn to meet weekly deadlines and quotas.

To overcome producer–consumer disconnects, strategic warning should be reconﬁgured, as

advocated throughout this chapter, as a governmental responsibility rather than an intelligence

responsibility. The policy oﬃcials who will have to make the challenging decisions about

resource commitments for defense against future threats should have a direct role at every

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JACK DAVIS

phase of the strategic warning process, including (1) intelligence resource allocations, (2) topic

selection, (3) general analytic standards, (4) speciﬁc warning methodologies, and (5) selection

and monitoring of indicators of change in likelihood, impact, timing, and character of dangers.

Under a collaborative system, when participants judge warning thresholds to have been

breached and diﬃcult policy decisions have to be made, policy oﬃcials would see the strands of

their own analytic thinking in the warning process ideally ampliﬁed by the all-source informa-

tion, expert insights, and distinctive tradecraft of intelligence analysts.

A rough (and perhaps romanticized) model for the relationship would be the workings of

the United Kingdom’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). The main JIC deliverable is a

“Government Assessment,” in all phases of which serving policy oﬃcials participate alongside

intelligence professionals. The policy oﬃcials are supposed to wear their “intelligence hat”

when appropriate, and when appropriate their “policy hat.”

Would such a system eliminate the phenomenon of “inconvenient warning” in the United

States – where the numbers of bureaucratic entities and people involved are greater and the

lines of intelligence–policy communication more stretched out than in the United Kingdom?

Probably not. But it should reduce its frequency, and also set up feedback loops and other

mechanisms for continual reﬁnements of the processes of intelligence–policy cooperation

needed to underwrite eﬀective strategic warning.

What of the dangers of policymaker domination of the strategic warning process, to the

derogation of analysts’ integrity and specialized expertise? The US record on certain highly

contentious issues – Vietnam in the 1960s, Central America in the 1980s – is a reminder that

professionals do not always wear the “appropriate hat.”

What is needed here is commitment of top leaders of the intelligence and policy camps –

perhaps with a push from Congress – to a regime of zero tolerance of abuses of established

warning ethics down the line. On their own, analysts can warrant policymaker respect for their

integrity by demonstrating command of distinctive warning expertise and tradecraft that help

get the diﬃcult contingency planning job done. In any case, in an era deﬁned by surprise and

uncertainty, walls that promote analysts’ irrelevance in the name of protecting their integrity

will not serve the National Interest.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reﬂect the oﬃcial

positions or views of the CIA or any other US Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be

construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or Agency endorsement

of the author’s views. The material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classiﬁed

information.

Note on sources

For a thorough examination of the 11 September terrorist attacks and recommendations for

improving homeland security:

The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the

United States, Oﬃcial Government Edition [2004].

For a description of CIA analytic reforms including increased emphasis on indepth or “stra-

tegic” analysis:

Kringen, John, “How We’ve Improved Itelligence: Minimizing the Risk of ‘Group Think’,”

Washington Post, 3 April 2006.

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STRATEGIC WARNING

For a series of views on warning, including those of three former National Intelligence Oﬃcers

for Warning:

“Strategic Warning,” Defense Intelligence Journal v. 7, no. 2 (Fall 1998).

For an explanation of High Impact–Low Probability analysis and alternative analysis generally:

George, Roger Z. “Fixing the Problem of Analytical Mind-Sets: Alternative Analysis,”

International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence v. 17, no. 3 (Fall 2004).

The following publications by the author address the concept and practice of strategic warning:

Davis, Jack, The Challenge of Managing “Uncertainty”: Paul Wolfowitz on Intelligence–Policy

Relations, CIA, Product Evaluation Staﬀ (March 1995).

Davis, Jack, Improving CIA Analytic Performance: Strategic Warning, CIA, Sherman Kent Center for

Intelligence Analysis, Occasional Papers, v. 1, no. 1 (2002).

Davis, Jack, Sherman Kent’s Final Thoughts on Analyst–Policymaker Relations, CIA, Sherman Kent

Center for Intelligence Analysis, Occasional Papers, v. 2, no. 3 (2003).

Davis, Jack, Strategic Waning: If Surprise is Inevitable, What Role for Analysis, CIA, Sherman Kent

Center for Intelligence Analysis, Occasional Papers, v. 2, no. 1 (2003).

Davis, Jack, Uncertainty, Surprise, and Warning. CIA, Product Evaluation Staﬀ (February 1996).

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JACK DAVIS

Achieving all-source fusion in the

Intelligence Community

Richard L. Russell

The surprise attack of 9/11 is seen by many as a failure of the multitude of American intelli-

gence agencies – collectively and euphemistically called the Intelligence Community (IC) – to

funnel their separate intelligence collection streams into a common pool. These observers

argue that had the various intelligence collection agencies shared their information more

widely and deeply with sister intelligence agencies, analysts might have been better able to put

together or “fuse” raw intelligence reports into a ﬁnished strategic intelligence assessment

which could have warned more concretely President Bush and his key national security

lieutenants of al-Qaeda’s plans and intentions. In post-9/11 parlance, this failure to fuse

intelligence is commonly referred to as the failure to “connect the dots.”

The tragic irony is that the Intelligence Community’s institutional foundations were laid in

1947 in large measure to ensure that US intelligence collection was fused by civilian analysts to

form strategic intelligence for the commander-in-chief. A root cause of the Japanese surprise

attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was the failure of the army and navy intelligence services as well

as the State Department to share intelligence from their ﬁeld collectors.

The United States also

lacked an institutional “clearing house” to put intelligence puzzle pieces together to accurately

assess Japan’s strategic plans and intentions. The National Security Act of 1947 created the

largely civilian Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to be principally responsible for the all-

source intelligence fusion for the president and his advisers.

Just as the intelligence failure of 1941 sparked intelligence reforms of 1947, the intelligence

failure of 2001 spawned the intelligence reforms of 2005. The creation of the Director of

National Intelligence (DNI) is the reform that has captured the most public and government

attention.

The new DNI post represents the de facto demotion of the head of the CIA, who

had been for nearly sixty years “dual-hated” as the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI)

responsible as the president’s principal intelligence adviser, the director of the entire IC, as well

as the head of the CIA. The DNI, Ambassador John Negroponte, has orchestrated numerous

changes to the IC. The DNI is now in charge of the National Intelligence Council (NIC),

which had been an advisory panel to the director of CIA. Negroponte also has created

the National Collection Service (NCS), the Open Source Center (OSC), and the National

Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), to name the largest changes.

Great public and government faith has been placed in the creation of the DNI, which many

189

see as the cure to all that ailed the old IC and its failure to competently fuse all-source

intelligence. A recent American public opinion poll, for example, found that “Some 65 percent

of Americans polled believe that reforming the intelligence services is the best way to

strengthen U.S. security signiﬁcantly” and that “a signiﬁcant minority of Americans (41 per-

cent) give the government an A or a B for already ‘making the changes need to improve U.S.

intelligence and spying.”

But is this faith well grounded in reality? Has the creation of the DNI and the new organiza-

tions under his wing improved the abilities of the IC to fuse intelligence and “connect all the

dots”? And if all the measures taken fall short, what must the DNI do to ensure that the fusion

of our intelligence today and tomorrow is qualitatively better than it was pre-9/11?

The nature of intelligence

The business of intelligence is shrouded in myth, much of which is perpetuated by spy novels

and movies. The reality of intelligence is much more mundane. Boiled down to its essence,

intelligence is information, which, in turn, is power. Intelligence or information comes from a

variety of clandestine sources such as human spies, defense attaché and diplomatic reporting,

satellite imagery, and intercepted communications and signals. These clandestine means are

used to “steal” information that potentially hostile nation-states or trans-national terrorist

groups want to hide from the United States. But intelligence also comes from publicly available

information from newspapers, radio, periodicals, trade, political, economic, and military

journals, as well as internet sources.

American intelligence during the Cold War heavily relied on clandestine intelligence

sources. And indeed, the American Intelligence Community had a comparative advantage

over private scholars and observers in providing intelligence to the president and his key foreign

and security policy advisers because the Intelligence Community’s primary target was the

Soviet Union. Penetration of the thick veil of secrecy regarding Soviet foreign and security

policy demanded that the United States use clandestine means to “steal” Soviet secrets. The

contribution of human intelligence in the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union has been

exaggerated in the public’s mind, but there can be no gainsaying the substantial contribution

that technical intelligence collection, especially satellite imagery, contributed to the United

States’ understanding of Soviet strategic forces during the Cold War.

The American Intelligence Community during the Cold War neglected the exploitation of

publicly available information, in part because it was enamored with clandestinely acquired and

classiﬁed information. But the keenest observers of the Soviet Union recognized that a great

deal could be gleaned about Soviet behavior and activities from public sources. Most notably,

diplomat and scholar George Kennan, who was more than anyone else the intellectual father of

the American strategy of containment against the Soviet Union, argued that

the need by our government for secret intelligence about aﬀairs elsewhere in the world has been

vastly overrated. I would say that something upward of 95 percent of what we need to know could

be very well obtained by the careful and competent study of perfectly legitimate sources of

information open and available to us in the rich library and archival holdings of this country.

And if that were true of publicly available information during the Cold War, it is doubly true

for today’s era of the global technological-informational revolution. The amount of and quality

of satellite imagery readily available today in the commercial marketplace is staggering and has

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RICHARD L. RUSSELL

shattered the IC’s Cold War monopoly on imagery. The resolution of commercial imagery

today is so good that it would have been classiﬁed as Top Secret during the days of the Cold

War. The amount of information, moreover, available with several computer key strokes today is

astounding. Major internet-accessible sources of information include major university research

libraries, oﬃcial government and unoﬃcial websites, and news agencies operating seven days

per week and 24 hours per day, to tick oﬀ just a few. These sources alone contain loads

of information that readily overwhelm the analytic capabilities of individual scholars and

observers of international aﬀairs.

The blizzard of public information – as well as a parallel surge in the quantity, if not quality,

of clandestinely acquired information – puts enormous strain on intelligence analysts tasked

with reviewing as much information as humanly possibly. Analysts are tasked to separate the

signiﬁcant from a mass of insigniﬁcant information, making analytic sense of situations and

crises, anticipating the likely evolutions and outcomes of situations, as well as examining the

implications for American security policy. And all this has to be packaged in succinct analyses

readily consumable by harried policy makers, most importantly the president and his National

Security Council.

Challenges of all-source fusion in the Intelligence Community

The fusing together of these unclassiﬁed and classiﬁed data streams in the American Intelli-

gence Community primarily takes place at the CIA. The CIA was formed in 1947 as a type of

central clearing house for intelligence analysis for the president in response, in large measure, to

the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. American intelligence was splintered

between the Army, Navy, and State Departments. Each of these services had signiﬁcant snippets

of information that pointed toward a Japanese surprise attack. But they failed to share them and

the United States had no analytic intelligence entity charged with putting all the snippets

together to form a strategic intelligence assessment, which might have warned policy makers of

Pearl Harbor’s vulnerability to Japanese surprise attack.

The CIA plays the central role in fusing intelligence today, although the IC continues to

suﬀer from agencies that allow them selves to be splintered by their intelligence collection

responsibilities. In contemporary parlance, this splintering is called “stove piping.” To name just

the largest intelligence agencies and their collection responsibilities to get a sense of the “stove

piping” in today’s IC: the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepts and decodes communi-

cations; the National Geospatial-Intelligence (NGA) analyzes satellite imagery; the Defense

Intelligence Agency (DIA) runs military defense attaché collection abroad; and the Department

of State collects information from its diplomats overseas. The CIA also has a collection mission

and is charged with recruiting spies to provide the United States with the plans and intentions

of actual and potential adversaries.

There is a tendency among these IC components to hoard information from the rest of

the community. Often the IC components have a legitimate reasons to severely restrict the

dissemination of especially sensitive information, in order to reduce the chances of leaks and

public exposures which would be damaging to the “sources and methods” of information

collection. But at other times, the hoarding practice is nurtured by petty bureaucratic rivalries.

The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research for example, has access to “No

Distribution” and Ambassador-to-Secretary of State cables that are jealously hoarded and not

routinely shared with its IC counterparts. The NSA is notorious inside the IC for strictly

limiting the distribution of highly sensitive intercepted communications, which are often

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ACHIEVING ALL-SOURCE FUSION

restricted to the most senior IC oﬃcials and policy makers. Working level analysts throughout

the IC often are ignorant of these reports and not given the opportunity to provide an analytic

context for these raw intelligence reports to better inform policy makers and senior military

commanders. The CIA also hoards its human intelligence reports, or HUMINT, from other

agencies and prefers to share the most sensitive – or perhaps sensational would be a more

accurate depiction – with senior-most intelligence oﬃcials and policy makers.

The CIA’s operational directorates’ bad hoarding habit also extends to relationships with

analytic counterparts in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence (DI). The then Directorate of

Operations’ (DO) failure to share full and accurate source descriptions on its reports was found

to be a key factor in the CIA’s failure to accurately assess the fact that Iraq’s weapons of mass

destruction programs were defunct in the run-up to the 2003 war. An internal CIA review on

the way it handled pre-Iraq war intelligence criticized the longstanding practice of the DO that

shields information about the identity, motivations and even access to information of its sources

from the directorate of intelligence. The reports produced by the operations directorate typically

identify sources only by numbers or code words and assess their credibility only in bland, generic

terms, often without sharing details about sources’ motivation or their precise access to

information.

The then head of DI told a meeting of CIA employees that the CIA internal review found

“cases in which a single source has diﬀerent source descriptions, increasing the potential for an

analyst to believe they have a corroborating source.”

The DO argues that vague HUMINT source descriptions are needed to protect the source’s

identity and “sources and methods” should HUMINT reports leak to the public. There is merit

to this argument, but in light of the longstanding failure of the DO to consistently or reliabily

deliver high-quality HUMINT intelligence, more than a handful of well-seasoned and skeptical

CIA analysts suspect that more often than not the DO does not adequately inform the DI about

HUMINT sources, in order to hide their shoddy and suspect quality. Although the DO has

pledged to make more source information available, the head of the DI has subsequently

changed and the DO is prone to return to its old bad habits after the controversy surrounding

intelligence failures, such as that surrounding Iraq, dies down.

A notable exception to this problem of fusing HUMINT intelligence with analysis in the

CIA has been in its Counter Terrorism Center (CTC). The CTC was established in the 1980s

and was bureaucratically innovative because it collocated DO and DI oﬃcers and harnessed

a synergetic relationship between human intelligence collectors and analysts. Both formal and

informal professional collaborative relationships were fostered between DO and DI oﬃcers

with their co-location in the CTC. DO oﬃcers beneﬁted from DI analysts evaluating the

quality of human intelligence reports as well as identifying collection gaps and opportunities.

DI analysts, in return, received greater access to operational reporting such as the context

of agent meetings, debrieﬁngs, and access to intelligence targets that often provides invaluable

background information for analysis.

Beyond the oﬃce spaces of the CTC, the fusion of agency intelligence had increasingly

suﬀered over the years due to excessive “compartmentalization” of intelligence. Intelligence,

especially from HUMINT sources, was increasing “compartmented” or restricted to limited

numbers of people who had a strict “need to know” the information. The use of intelligence

compartments, much as the use of water-tight compartments on ships limits the amount of

damage or ﬂooding in the event of hull breaches, is intended to limit the amount of damage in

the event of a public leak of intelligence. The CIA’s over-compartmentalization of HUMINT

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RICHARD L. RUSSELL

reports was in large measure an over-reaction to the treason and espionage committed by the

CIA’s Aldrich Ames and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Robert Hansen, who

both spied for numerous years for Soviet intelligence and severely compromised American

intelligence operations against the Soviet Union.

The excessive use of compartmentalization of intelligence caused an appreciable drop in

the ability of CIA analysts to adequately do their jobs. The Rumsfeld Commission charged

with investigating the IC’s poor performance in analyzing the proliferation of ballistic missiles

found that compartmentalization caused IC and CIA analysts not to have full access to all the

information available in the IC, which had a substantive negative impact on performing

their analytic duties. Intelligence is so compartmentalized, Rumsfeld complained, that wrong

information is sometimes given to policy makers because analysts do not have access to all the

relevant classiﬁed intelligence.

While the CIA, NSA, and the State Department are guilty of misdemeanors in hoarding

some of their intelligence – in fairness, they do share most of their collection with their sister

intelligence agencies – the FBI is guilty of serial felonies. Although the FBI is a component of

the IC, it traditionally has not shared intelligence in the IC, which gravely undermined the IC’s

ability to fuse intelligence analysis of al-Qaeda. As an illustration of this point, former National

Security Council counterterrorism oﬃcials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon lament that:

Every day a hundred or more reports from the CIA, DIA, the National Security Agency, and the

State Department would be waiting in their computer queues when they [policy makers] got to

work. There was never anything from the FBI. The Bureau, despite its wealth of information,

contributed nothing to the White House’s understanding of al-Qaeda. Virtually none of the

information uncovered in any of the Bureau’s investigative work ﬂowed to the NSC.

The FBI’s stubborn unwillingness to contribute information into the IC’s intelligence pool

contributed signiﬁcantly to the 9/11 tragedy. In July 2001 an FBI agent in Phoenix, Arizona

astutely warned FBI headquarters in Washington, DC about “an inordinate number of indi-

viduals of investigative interest taking ﬂight lessons” and he urged the FBI to collect data on

ﬂight training for foreign students in the US. In mid-August 2001 the Minneapolis, Minnesota

FBI ﬁeld oﬃce similarly warned of another foreign student taking ﬂight lessons, who authorities

now suspect was the planned twentieth hijacker of the 9/11 attacks.

Tragically, the FBI

headquarters had neither an analytic bureaucratic culture nor a critical mass of analysts to

“connect the Phoenix and Minneapolis dots.” Had the FBI shared its ﬁeld appraisals with the

IC pool of information, moreover, an analyst at the CIA’s CTC might have been able to

backstop the FBI’s lack of analytic expertise and put two and two together and anticipate that

al-Qaeda was planning to use commercial aircraft in a domestic attack. Notwithstanding the

public criticisms of the CIA’s intelligence failure on 9/11, the FBI shares a far greater burden of

guilt for falling to “connect the dots” which led to the national catastrophe.

The FBI had long and defensively argued that it needed to hoard information to protect it

from potential contamination and invalidate it for use in criminal prosecutions against al-Qaeda

operatives. The FBI’s bureaucratic culture and operational procedures were geared toward

preserving evidence for criminal prosecutions in a court of law and not to using intelligence to

preemptively make arrests before terrorist attacks occurred. The institutional and intellectual

barrier that separated the FBI’s law and enforcement mission from the IC’s intelligence mission

had come to be known as the “invisible wall.”

The “invisible wall” might well have been less a product of American law than a construct

made by the managerial practices. As Judge Richard Posner points out:

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ACHIEVING ALL-SOURCE FUSION

[B]efore 9/11 the CIA and FBI exaggerated the degree to which they were forbidden to share

information, and the FBI exaggerated the degree to which its intelligence oﬃcers and its criminal

investigators were forbidden to share information with one another. The Bureau was mainly

worried about transgressing legal limitations on the disclosure of testimony before grand juries,

and the CIA was mainly concerned lest secret information be disclosed in court proceedings.

The failure to clarify the limits on sharing was a managerial failure, however, rather than a structural

fault.

The dismantling of the “wall” to facilitate the fusion of IC intelligence and ensure greater

FBI participation therefore could have been simply accomplished by the director of the FBI

ordering his people to share intelligence and by the director of the CIA ordering his people to

keep tabs on the process to ensure implementation. This would have been a readily achieved ﬁx

for intelligence fusion, in comparison to the now massive undertaking entailed in the creation

of the DNI oﬃce.

Above and beyond the hoarding of FBI’s intelligence and some of the intelligence collected

by State, NSA, and the CIA among others, the globalization era has added other dimensions to

the all-source fusion challenge, dimensions with which intelligence oﬃcials and analysts still

have not yet come to grips. Since the Cold War CIA, defense attaché, and State diplomatic

reporting has been transmitted between foreign oﬃcial and diplomatic posts and Washington

via classiﬁed cable traﬃc. Today in the globalized world, an increasing quantity and quality of

government communications takes place by telephones – using encrypted lines called Stu-IIIs –

and e-mail exchanges, which are much easier and faster to use than cable traﬃc. This increasing

ﬂow of information bypasses the eyes of CIA analysts and increasingly leaves them “out of the

loop” in major international crises in which the United States plays a major role. The CIA is, of

course, not tasked to analyze American foreign policy, but CIA analysts need to take US actions

into account if they are to eﬀectively gauge the policy options and calculations of foreign actors.

And the increasing use of e-mail and Stu-III calls jeopardizes the CIA’s ability to carry out its

core analytic tasks.

The task for those responsible for fusing intelligence, especially CIA analysts, is to ensure

connectivity with their DO colleagues, counterparts elsewhere in the IC, as well as policy

makers. The potential pitfalls of close working relationships with policy makers will be dis-

cussed below, but these informal networks between working-level analysts are the means by

which the savviest CIA analysts keep tabs on counterparts and stay ahead of the information

power curve. And when analytic diﬀerences of opinion arise, these informal networks can play

constructive roles in ironing out disputes as well as reﬁning assessments. The task of forging

webs of informal relationships is daunting when it is added to the already heavy time burden of

mining the torrent of unclassiﬁed and classiﬁed data streams for nuggets of intelligence and then

converting these nuggets into analyses for US policy makers and military commanders.

Whether or not to “fuse” with policy makers

The fusing of intelligence inside the Intelligence Community is the process by which ﬁnished

intelligence is produced. But the production of ﬁnished intelligence analysis is not an end in of

itself. That analysis has to be shared with American policy makers. The relationship between

all-source intelligence analysts – especially those at the CIA – and American policy makers

is complicated. How these relationships govern both the provision of intelligence to policy

makers and the role that policy makers play in setting intelligence agency research agendas has

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RICHARD L. RUSSELL

been a perpetually running debate among intelligence professionals since the inception of the

American Intelligence Community in 1947.

The debate on the nature of the relationship between intelligence oﬃcials and policy makers

that has emerged in the post-9/11 environment has taken on a new intensity. Some observers

charge that policy oﬃcials unduly inﬂuence intelligence assessments to reﬂect policy, especially

on Iraq’s WMD programs and links to al-Qaeda in the run-up to the 2003 war against Iraq.

Others counter that policy makers did not tell intelligence communities what their assessments

were to be as much as they completely ignored intelligence assessments in making the decision

to wage war against Iraq. Most notably on this score, former National Intelligence Oﬃcer for

the Middle East Paul Pillar assesses, “What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on

Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a

role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in recent decades.”

This debate is too complex to fully assess here, but it is illustrative of the tensions between the

two major schools of thought on intelligence–policy relations. One school is characterized as

the Sherman Kent approach. Kent was a founding father of the National Intelligence Estimates

process in the CIA’s formative years. He wanted intelligence analysts to keep at arm’s length

from policy makers lest their analyses became tainted by policy interests. The contrasting school

is the Robert Gates approach. Gates – who rose up the CIA’s analytic ranks to eventually

become Director of Central Intelligence after a stint as Deputy National Security Adviser for

President George H. W. Bush – argued that intelligence analysts had to nurture relationships

with policy makers in order to intimately know what was on their policy plates. Gates judged

that such an awareness of policy was essential for producing timely and relevant intelligence

analyses to help inform policy decisions.

The largest downside of the Sherman Kent school approach is irrelevance, which may well

be a greater pitfall than the risks of political subservience run by the Gates school advocates. At

the risk of stating the obvious, the Intelligence Community does not exist as an end of itself,

but as a collection of institutions purposefully designed to serve national interests as articulated

by policy makers supported by the American public. A strict adherence to the Kent School runs

too great a risk of sanctioning an Intelligence Community that justiﬁes its existence in terms

of its own internal processes rather than the intelligence products that are relevant to the

interests of policy makers trying to advance national political interests. In the ﬁnal analysis,

the ideal intelligence–policy relationship is a pendulum swing towards the Gates school and

away from the Kent school.

The illusion of bureaucratic ﬁxes for all-source fusion problems

The 9/11 Commission recommended major bureaucratic additions and changes which it

assessed would ﬁx the IC’s problems and improve future capabilities to fuse all-source intelli-

gence and to “connect the dots.” President Bush accepted much of the 9/11 Commission’s

recommendations and the American public believes that the government has “solved” its pre–

9/11 intelligence problems. Sadly, that assessment probably is mistaken. And to add insult to

injury, the 9/11 Commission-inspired changes, in many respects, threaten to make all-source

fusion even more diﬃcult.

The 9/11 Commission recommended the creation of more vertical layers in the IC,

which does nothing to promote the working-level lateral sharing or pooling of intelligence.

The 9/11 argued that the creation of the DNI would in theory improve the unity and co-

ordination of the IC’s various components. In practice, however, the creation of the DNI post

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ACHIEVING ALL-SOURCE FUSION

added several layers of management to what was an already top-heavy and bloated IC manage-

ment structure. But these additions to the IC wiring diagram are essentially irrelevant to getting

the FBI to share intelligence generated by ﬁeld investigations with the CIA.

There could have been a much easier ﬁx to the all-source fusion that eluded the

9/11 Commission. The president could have simply ordered his attorney general and the FBI

director to share intelligence on al-Qaeda as well as ordered the Director of Central Intelli-

gence – the post has since been demoted to the director of the CIA with the creation of the

DNI – to monitor the FBI’s intelligence-sharing to ensure compliance with the president’s

order. In other words, all that was needed was a robust exercise in executive power, not more

ﬂabby and lethargic bureaucracy to further dilute IC management accountability.

The 9/11 commission also recommended the creation of the National Counterterrorism

Center (NCTC) under direct authority of the DNI. The NCTC combines the former Terror-

ist Threat Integration Center with counterterrorism elements from the CIA, FBI, and the

Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

Unfortunately, the NCTC will undoubt-

edly siphon away personnel from the Counterterrorism Center before the CIA has had a

chance to replenish the expertise needed to carry out the analysis performed by its counter-

terrorism unit. The joint House-Senate Investigation of the 9/11 attacks had assessed that

the CIA’s CTC was staﬀed by too many young and inexperienced analysts to be able to do

sophisticated strategic analysis of the al-Qaeda and terrorism threat.

Even more damaging to

all-source fusion is that the NCTC will not have direct access to CIA’s operational oﬃcers.

The divide will break the important synergizing eﬀects of collocating collection oﬃcers with

analysts that CIA’s CTC had successfully nurtured for some twenty years. That divorce over the

longer run might give CIA’s operational oﬃcers too much ﬂexibility to drift oﬀ and collect

human intelligence that is easiest to collect and of little consequence to US national security.

Analysts looking over operational oﬃcers’ shoulders had a tendency in CTC to pressure CIA

operational oﬃcers to go for harder human targets whose potential information would be of

more interest to American policy makers.

In 2005 the director of the CIA Porter Goss announced the establishment of the National

Clandestine Service (NCS) at the CIA, taking over what has been the called the DO for most of

the agency’s history. The NCS will coordinate but not direct the increasing spying and covert

activities conducted by the Pentagon and FBI.

A critical observer, however, looks at this

move as little more than a change of the DO’s nameplate in the hallway in CIA’s headquarters

building in Langley, Virginia. The odds are that notwithstanding the name change, the CIA will

simply go about doing business as usual just as it has in the wake of other reforms in the past.

The DNI recently announced the Open Source Center (OSC), which is intended to “gather

and analyze information from the Web, broadcasts, newspapers and other unclassiﬁed sources

around the world.”

But, much as in the case of the creation of the NCS, the creation of the

OSC may be less than meets the eye. It probably reﬂects a name change for the former Foreign

Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), and not a revolution in past CIA business practices.

The FBIS’s service throughout the Cold War and post-Cold War periods was the unsung

hero of American intelligence. It performed yeoman service in translating countless articles

from the foreign media for the IC and made much of its output of unclassiﬁed translations

available to scholars. The former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, paid

appropriate tribute to FBIS by writing that, “Though intelligence-community leaders have

little regard for unclassiﬁed information – it cannot be important if it is not secret, after all –

the FBIS should take comfort in knowing that it provided as much warning about bin

Laden’s lethal intentions as any other community component.”

The CIA’s institutional bias

has always been tilted toward espionage and analysis. And FBIS operations were expensive

196

RICHARD L. RUSSELL

undertakings that always fell between the bureaucratic cracks and never beneﬁted from the

personnel and budget support its mission deserved, especially not in the era of globalization in

which the ﬂoodgates of information have opened up. The DNI will have to keep a watchful

eye to protect the new OSC from the budgetary poaching of the CIA’s human intelligence

operations and analysis.

A signiﬁcant omission in the DNI’s reforms is the creation of an IC strategic studies center.

The Presidential Commission on Weapons Proliferation recommended the creation of “at least

one not-for-proﬁt ‘sponsored research institute’ to serve as a critical window into outside

expertise for the Intelligence Community” and that its “primary purpose would be to focus

on strategic issues.”

Such a center would be separated from the taxing burden of current

intelligence production, have more expertise, and be better positioned than the CIA rank-

and-ﬁle to fuse the information ﬂows from public and clandestine sources to form strategic

intelligence assessments.

The National Intelligence Council (NIC), which for much of the IC’s history was an expert

advisory board for the DCI, had traditionally been seen as the unit best situated to perform

strategic analysis. In 2005, the NIC was moved out from underneath the authority of the CIA

director to directly serve the DNI. The NIC might be able to perform this strategic intelligence

fusion function, but its manpower and resources would have to be signiﬁcantly expanded. The

NIC has long been too sparsely manned and funded to perform more than a modest role by

serving as a focal point for coordinating IC-wide intelligence assessments called National

Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) written by IC components. The NIC has generally lacked

the analytic depth to write its own NIEs or write strategic intelligence analyses to critically

challenge the analyses bubbling up from the separate intelligence agencies, the most active of

which are CIA, DIA, and the State Department’s INR.

A large and unsettled question regarding the IC changes in 2005–06 is whether the DNI will

have the stature and strength needed to deliver bad intelligence news to the White House.

Some observers argue that the DNI will be too beholden to the president to “speak truth to

power.” At the end of the day, the ability of the DNI to give the president bad news ultimately

will depend by the personal integrity and courage of the individual that occupies the DNI’s

chair, not the bureaucratic wiring diagram of the DNI’s position.

And ﬁnally, aside from media depictions the DNI has yet to demonstrate real power and

authority as a “uniﬁed commander” of the Intelligence Community. One potentially bold and

constructive move to exert real DNI control as well as to facilitate all-source fusion would be to

order a cut roughly by half in the number of hierarchical bureaucratic layers inside Intelligence

Community agencies. There has been a steady bloating and ossifying of IC bureaucracies

for decades and the creation of the DNI and his subordinates has signiﬁcantly added to the

problem. Major eliminations of bureaucratic rungs would make ﬂatter organization and more

nimble organizations across the IC. The working-level analysts responsible for “connecting the

dots” and fusing intelligence would be able to spend more time sharing and exchanging

information laterally in the IC in ﬂatter and less bureaucratically top-heavy organizations. As it

stands today, these overworked and underpaid working-level analysts spend too much of their

time pushing intelligence ponderously up through excessive layers of bureaucrats who rarely

add anything of qualitative substance to intelligence. These layers of bureaucrats routinely retard

the timely all-source fusion of intelligence, something that the IC can ill aﬀord with the

quickened pace of international security and policy-making in the globalized and wired world.

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ACHIEVING ALL-SOURCE FUSION

The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent the policy or position of the National

Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the US government.

Notes

1 For the landmark study of the Pearl Harbor intelligence failure, see Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor:

Warning and Decision (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962).

2 For the recommendation as to the creation of the Director of National Intelligence position, see The

9/11 Commission Report, 411–415.

3 Daniel Yankelovich, “Poll Positions: What Americans Really Think about U.S Foreign Policy,”

Foreign Aﬀairs 84, no. 5 (September/October 2005), 13.

4 George F. Kennan, “Spy and Counterspy,” New York Times, 18 May 1997.

5 For excellent introductions to the IC labyrinth, see Loch K. Johnson, Secret Agencies: US Intelligence in a

Hostile World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996) and Mark M. Lowenthal, Intelligence: From

Secrets to Policy, Third Edition (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2006).

6 Douglas Jehl, “Despite a Pledge to Speed Work, Fixing an Internal Problem Takes Time at the CIA,”

New York Times, 10 June 2004, A12.

7 Douglas Jehl, “Stung by Exiles’ Role, CIA Orders a Shift in Procedures,” New York Times, 13 February

2004, A14.

8 Walter Pincus, “Rumsfeld: Intelligence ‘Need to Know’ Smacks of Not to Know,” Washington Post,

5 May 1999, A29.

9 Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam’s War against America (New

York: Random House, 2003), 304.

10 R. Jeﬀrey Smith, “A History of Missed Connections,” Washington Post, 25 July 2003, A14.

11 Richard A. Posner, Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11 (New York:

Rowman & Littleﬁeld Publishers, Inc., 2005), 31–32.

12 Paul R. Pillar, “Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq,” Foreign Aﬀairs (March/April 2006), 16.

13 The author is indebted to Richard Betts for clearly articulating these schools of thought. See his

“Politicization of Intelligence: Costs and Beneﬁts,” Chapter 2 in Richard K. Betts and Thomas

Mahnken (eds.), Paradoxes of Strategic Intelligence: Essays in Honor of Michael I. Handel (London: Frank

Cass, 2003), 60–61.

14 Walter Pincus, “Bush’s Intelligence Panel Gains Stature,” Washington Post, 7 February 2005, A19.

15 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,

Report of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 (Washington, DC: December

2002), 59.

16 Walter Pincus, “CIA Spies Get a New Home Base,” Washington Post, 14 October 2005, A6.

17 Scott Shane, “Intelligence Center is Created for Unclassiﬁed Information,” New York Times,

9 November 2005.

18 Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror (Washington,

DC: Brassey’s Inc., 2004), xiii.

19 The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass

Destruction, Report to the President of the United States, 31 March 2005, 399.

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RICHARD L. RUSSELL

Adding value to the intelligence product

Stephen Marrin

The value of ﬁnished intelligence analysis is not measured solely by its accuracy, but rather by

the value it has for decisionmakers. This value, however, can change depending on the informa-

tion needs of the decisionmaker. Unfortunately, the intelligence community has – for the most

part – failed to incorporate diﬀerent perspectives and approaches into its standard operating

procedures for the creation of intelligence analysis, limiting the potential contributions that

intelligence analysis can make to decisionmaking. Improving both the art and the science of

intelligence analysis would better meet decisionmaker needs for information and knowledge by

providing them with analysis that is more rigorous, scenarios that are more imaginative, and

improved insights of the adversary derived from empathy rather than intellect.

Deﬁning the value of intelligence

The starting point for any assessment of intelligence analysis value should be the needs of the

ultimate user; the decisionmaker. There are many diﬀerent kinds of decisionmakers, depending

on the kinds of power they wield, but all go through a similar decisionmaking process. In the

1960s, Sir Geoﬀrey Vickers – a well-respected systems analyst and conceptualizer – articulated a

framework for understanding the steps in the decisionmaking process.

Vickers lays out a vision

of the world in which each individual or organization is tied to many others through many

diﬀerent kinds of relationships. In this world, the process of decisionmaking entails monitoring

both internal and external relations and comparing the current status with the norms and

standards set for the relations. If the monitoring uncovers a disparity between the two, then

actions to resolve the diﬀerence are considered. In this complex vision, any description of a

set of relationships is only a snapshot of a dynamically shifting reality that constantly changes

due to both internal and external forces.

In applying Vickers’s framework to the role of intelligence in the foreign policymaking

process, institutionalized intelligence monitors the external system for foreign policymakers,

and alerts them to changes in the dynamic balance of relationships. Vickers described this kind

of monitor as “a watchdog on a chain; he can bark and alert the householder, but he cannot

bite.”

In other words, while intelligence analysts can provide decisionmakers with warning

199

about the threats that might aﬀect US interests, only decisionmakers can decide what to do

about those threats. In addition, for decisionmaking to be eﬀective, there must be close co-

ordination between the intelligence analysts who interpret the meaning of the facts and the

decisionmakers who decide their importance.

Harvard University historian Ernest May has adapted Vickers’s decisionmaking framework

into a simple process that all decisionmakers – regardless of portfolio or discipline – go through,

in which they ask three speciﬁc questions:

“What is going on?”, “So what?” (or “What diﬀerence does it make?”); and “What is to be

done?” The better the process of executive judgment, the more it involves asking the questions

again and again, not in set order, and testing the results until one ﬁnds a satisfactory answer to the

third question – what to do.

In May’s three-step adaptation of Vickers’s framework, intelligence organizations perform a

delegated function, by ﬁrst ﬁnding out what is going on (collection) and then determining

what it means (analysis). Decisionmakers, on the other hand, engage in all three steps, focusing

their attentions on what to do about the situation at hand. The decisionmaking process that

May highlights is an iterative one entailing a process of continual learning.

As the process shifts from information-gathering to assessment to decisionmaking, both

greater amounts and diﬀerent kinds of information are needed. In order to tell decisionmakers

about what is going on overseas and who is doing it, intelligence analysts spend much of their

time linking disparate data together to either “connect the dots” or “create the mosaic,”

depending on the analogy used. For example, CIA’s leadership analysts compile data into

leadership proﬁles – or “biographic assessments of foreign leaders”

– so as to “help (senior US

policymakers) understand and eﬀectively interact with their foreign counterparts.”

To derive meaning from the aggregate data, however, requires linking the facts together into

a broader framework that explains what the facts mean in terms of US interests. For example,

practitioners of leadership analysis might look to a foreign leader’s past decisions for insight into

the decisions he or she might pursue in the future.

Unfortunately, because raw intelligence data of this kind is usually fragmentary – providing

an incomplete picture of what is actually going on overseas or in the mind of the adversary –

the gaps in the data must be ﬁlled in with assumptions drawn from various sources, running

from the theoretical literature to the analysts’ idiosyncratic judgment. In other words,

intelligence analysis entails telling decisionmakers what may be going on overseas rather than

what is going on overseas. But since intelligence is by deﬁnition fragmentary, this is an intrinsic

part of what it means to produce intelligence analysis.

For decisionmakers, however, the most valuable information is that which focuses on the

“why,” or the reasons a foreign government pursues a particular policy or a foreign leader acts

in a particular way. This knowledge of motivation or causation provides decisionmakers with

some basis of information regarding “what to do” by developing policies that can – to use a

medical analogy – focus on treating the disease itself rather than just the symptoms.

The diﬀerent explanations regarding the causes or drivers of terrorism each provide insight

into possible solutions. For example, if one accepts the argument that economic deprivation

contributes to terrorist recruitment, then using policies to encourage economic development

might alleviate the threat. Similarly, if one accepts the argument that the restrictive nature of an

authoritarian government prevents a particular political faction’s voice from being expressed

and this increases the risk of terrorism, then fostering democracy could alleviate the threat.

Alternatively, if a particular ideology espouses terrorism as a solution to political or social

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STEPHEN MARRIN

frustration, then fostering a counter-ideology could reduce the terrorist threat. The point is

that – regardless of the issue at hand – the solution to a problem frequently depends on an

assessment of its cause.

In the end, decisionmaking requires accurate knowledge of what is, what may be, and the

intangibles that aﬀect an adversary’s decisionmaking process. Intelligence agencies exist to

provide decisionmakers with some of this information.

Modeling intelligence analysis on the social sciences

In order to meet the decisionmaker’s requirement for information, intelligence analysts use an

approximation of the scientiﬁc method derived from the social sciences to determine meaning

from the raw intelligence. The use of social science methodology to understand the reasons for

the actions and policies pursued by adversaries and competitors is most explicit in the academic

study of international relations. In order to simplify real-world complexity, international

relations theorists have focused on causal forces that aﬀect state behavior primarily at three

levels: that of the individual, the state, and the international system. However, these categories

are not complete in and of themselves. Other theories have isolated additional variables on the

levels between the individual and the state including group decision-making, and the role of

bureaucratic politics and organizational culture. Still more theories have located causal impor-

tance between the level of the state and that of the system including transnational actors, and

global forces such as ideological and religious belief systems.

Debates over which level of analysis is best have occurred because the level chosen for

analysis creates a speciﬁc kind of cognitive ﬁlter that determines which facts and implications

are deemed relevant to study. In addition, the choice of a speciﬁc level of analysis determines

the kinds of information needed. The theories that predominate in academia – systemic

theories that assume states are rational unitary actors – are perhaps the most abstract and require

the most general kinds of information, but the closer one gets to the foreign policymaking

process the more important it is to provide information that a decisionmaker can use. Intelli-

gence agencies have embraced this social science approach to area studies and international

relations by breaking down the perspective of all-source intelligence analysts into “disciplines”

based on the factors that shape the behavior of other countries: most frequently political,

economic, military, and leadership. These causal factors are then interwoven into multi-

disciplinary ﬁnished intelligence products through a process of coordination that integrates the

various perspectives into a coherent whole, usually addressing a particular geographic area.

An intelligence analyst is someone who looks for patterns in the data, and tries to ﬁgure out

what those patterns mean. The linkage between the pattern and the meaning should come

from hypotheses drawn or derived from relevant academic theory such as economics, political

science, or psychology. For example, in the case of leadership analysis, the political psychology

literature provides the theoretical foundation for linking individuals’ prior history and behavior

to more fundamental issues such as personality or motivation, which can then be used to

produce – at its best – accurate and insightful predictive assessments of future decisions.

While intelligence analysts have used the scientiﬁc method for decades,

CIA institutional-

ized the explicit modeling of the analytic process on the scientiﬁc method in the 1990s by,

as former CIA oﬃcer and senior methodologist Jack Davis observes, replacing the term “key

variables” with “drivers” and “hypotheses” with “linchpins.”

These methodologies have

become, in essence, analytic doctrine. In 2001, the CIA Website noted:

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Invariably, analysts work on the basis of incomplete and conﬂicting information. DI analysts are

taught to clearly articulate what is known (the facts), how it is known (the sources), what drives the

judgements (linchpin assumptions), the impact if these drivers change (alternative outcomes), and

what remains unknown.

An open question, however, is whether or not intelligence analysis methodology as modeled

on the social sciences and the scientiﬁc method produces the kinds of analysis that would

be useful for decisionmakers. Or – as Columbia University Professor Mark Lowenthal has

observed – in terms of value-added, “what can the producer bring to the issue that is new,

insightful, and useful?”

Meeting decisionmaker needs?

The social science-based methodology applied by intelligence analysts is not without its critics.

In 2003, New York Times columnist and policy commentator David Brooks argued that CIA’s

rigorous social science methodology is not the most eﬀective way to meet the informational

needs of the decisionmaker because it fails to take into account the intangible aspects of

human behavior rooted less in rational decisionmaking than in cultural norms or idiosyncratic

personalities.

In 2004, Brooks added to this critique by saying that the CIA’s

false scientism . . . is terrible now in the age of terror, because terror is largely nonrational.... How

can corruption and madness be understood by analysts in Langley, who have a tendency to impose

a false order on reality? . . . The methodology is the problem.

Brooks makes a good point regarding the general problems of using social science methodology

to understand international relations because thus far the social sciences have not done a

good job in explaining or forecasting the kinds of speciﬁc international relations outcomes that

intelligence analysts need to make.

No one fully understands causality in international

relations. Practitioners have been engaged in the practice of international relations for millen-

nia, and academics have been studying it as a subset of political science for decades. But

no theoretical approach has been able to provide the same sort of explanatory power to

international relations as exists in the natural sciences or even economics. Theorists have been

unable to aggregate the many diﬀerent kinds of international relations theory that focus on the

various causal forces that impact the behavior of states, including our own, and as a result it can

be very diﬃcult to forecast how a particular country or state may respond in any particular

situation. As Columbia University Professor and noted international relations theorist

Robert Jervis has observed, “the impediments to understanding our world are so great that

. . . intelligence will often reach incorrect conclusions [because] . . . the world is not very

predictable.”

But Brooks’s assessment of how the social scientiﬁc approach is misapplied in intelligence

analysis is wrong on two counts. First, CIA has not ignored the eﬀect of personality on state

behavior. CIA’s leadership analysts have taken into account the importance of a foreign leader –

including the “passion” and “vision” that Brooks says is missing from CIA analysis – as well as

they are able to determine it. But even if this kind of leadership analysis was not performed

by CIA, Brooks would still be incorrect in arguing that that the CIA practices rigorous

social science methodology because in only rare instances do CIA analysts use the kind of

“sophisticated modeling” or “probability calculation” that he refers to.

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STEPHEN MARRIN

Instead, for the most part intelligence analysis tends to be intuitive and entails the use of

cognitive heuristics to simplify the process of generating hypotheses. Analysts tend to have a

two-step analytic approach. They use intuitive “pattern and trend analysis” – consisting of

the identiﬁcation of repeated behavior over time and increases or decreases in that behavior –

to uncover changes in some aspect of international behavior that could have national

security implications. Once patterns are detected, they rely on ad hoc rules derived from study in

relevant theory – for example, economics, political science, or psychology – to determine the

signiﬁcance of the pattern. However, most intelligence analysis is based more on informed

intuition than structured or rigorous methods. For example, in the case of political analysis,

frequently the hypotheses used to derive implications from the data are not drawn directly

from the political science literature, but are instead derived from the analyst’s idiosyncratic

perception of politics and policies that he or she has built up over a lifetime. The use of this kind

of personal intuition rather than structured methodologies frequently occurs in leadership

analysis as well.

So in the end, while Brooks would argue that CIA has ignored the art of analysis for the

science, others would counter that CIA has never actually implemented its social scientiﬁc

approaches rigorously; in other words, CIA has ignored the science of analysis for the art.

Since both critiques may in fact be correct, improving the contributions that intelligence

analysis makes to decisionmaking would require strengthening both the art and the science of

intelligence analysis. The rest of the chapter outlines a research program designed to do this

along three dimensions: by making intelligence analysis methodology more rigorous; by

developing alternative methodologies modeled on history rather than the social sciences; and

by examining the value of analytic empathy in understanding an adversary’s behavior.

Increasing analytic rigor

Improving the science of intelligence analysis will require building up an improved base of

knowledge regarding causation in international relations, evaluating analytic methods for

accuracy and reliability, and modifying the personnel system so as to encourage the use of more

structured and rigorous analytical techniques.

A ﬁrst step in developing a more rigorous approach to intelligence analysis would be to

improve the knowledge base that intelligence analysts have to work with regarding the causes of

state behavior. Historically, intelligence analysis has been practiced more as an art than a science,

reliant on each analyst’s idiosyncratic mix of substantive, procedural and disciplinary expertise

to derive meaning from the masses of raw intelligence. This occurs primarily because of the

weaknesses in social science’s ability to develop hypotheses that are both accurate and reliable in

predicting the future behavior of states.

Since social scientists in academia do not have access

to the kinds of speciﬁc data that intelligence analysts do, their models are usually general and

at a high level of abstraction. The establishment of an internal intelligence community unit

of social scientists devoted to the production of mid-level theory and hypotheses useful for

intelligence analysts would provide intelligence agencies with an improved base of theory

for ﬁnding meaning in the raw intelligence.

Additional work on the underlying “science” of

intelligence analysis, such as the eﬀort by Rob Johnston to develop a taxonomy of intelligence

analysis variables,

the articulation of a framework by Timothy Smith to develop a

“formal interdisciplinary science of intelligence,”

and the kinds of modeling and forecasting

methodologies proﬁled by Stanley Feder,

should provide a greater foundation of knowledge

that future intelligence analysts can use to create more accurate analysis.

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A second way to increase analytic rigor would be to evaluate analytic methods against each

other to determine their relative accuracy and reliability in diﬀerent situations. According to

Rob Johnston, there are over 200 analytic methods that intelligence analysts could choose

from,

but because they have not been rigorously tested, intelligence analysts do not know if

any particular method is better than any other. In 1999, Robert Folker – a military intelligence

analyst – demonstrated how the use of one particular analytic method – structured hypothesis

testing – produced better results than the use of an intuitive approach.

Additional research in

this area is greatly needed in order to provide the foundation of knowledge necessary for

intelligence analysts to apply the appropriate analytic method to each situation. In the CIA’s

journal Studies in Intelligence, Steven Rieber and Neil Thomason have recently recom-

mended that the intelligence community create a National Institute for Analytic Methods –

modeled on the National Institutes of Health – as a way to sponsor this kind of research on the

eﬀectiveness of analytic tools and techniques.

In this way it will be possible to gain knowledge

– scientiﬁcally – about the eﬀectiveness of diﬀerent approaches, rather than rely primarily on

anecdotal evidence as is currently the case.

A third way to increase analytic rigor would be to modify the personnel system so as to

encourage the use of more structured and rigorous analytical techniques. The CIA’s personnel

model inhibits the use of structured analytic methodologies in favor of an environment where

unstructured intuitive analysis dominates. The current structure is very ﬂat, with each indi-

vidual analyst considered to be an autonomous expert capable of producing the same kind

of output with proﬁciency expectations linked to the appropriate pay scale. The analysts

are responsible for their individual accounts and engage in teamwork only to the extent

that they “coordinate” with other analysts in the production of ﬁnished intelligence to inte-

grate their individual perspectives into a multi-disciplinary whole. However, since individuals

possess diﬀerent combinations of strengths and weaknesses, there is a legitimate question

regarding whether the current approach – in essence a one-size-ﬁts-all expectation – optimizes

organizational performance.

An alternative model for analytic production is provided by the Government Accountability

Oﬃce. Even though there are some diﬀerences in mission between the CIA and the GAO –

for example, that GAO supports the legislative rather than executive branch – there are

many similarities in process because both organizations require personnel with similar skill sets

to produce written and verbal informational products for decisionmakers. Yet GAO is able to

integrate the expertise of its specialists in a more eﬀective manner than that used by CIA.

To produce each written report, GAO analysts work in teams of substantive and disciplinary

experts under a single team leader. While all members of the team are evaluated according to

the same set of competencies, the team-based approach provides the opportunity for the team

leader to rely on the strongest member of the team at each stage in the process, running from

conceptualization through data collection and analysis to drafting. Each analyst has less auton-

omy than CIA analysts do, but responsibility for the ﬁnal analysis is more certain. GAO’s

substantive analysts are assisted by other experts including methodologists, accountants,

economists, lawyers and even experienced writers who are assigned to their project on an

as-needed basis. At its best this eﬀectively integrates specialists and methodologists into analytic

teams, providing the teams with their expertise on a daily basis during the information

collection, analysis, and drafting process.

The analytic process at GAO is also much more rigorous and thorough than that performed

by CIA. GAO has modeled its report production process on that used in academia to produce

dissertations, including external peer review through an adaptation of a dissertation proposal

defense, a research stage, a ﬁnal defense of the report’s reasoning and conclusions, and a drafting

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STEPHEN MARRIN

process requiring rigorous documentation of sources. Finally, the organizational structure and

matrix management enables greater rigor in the analytic process through the integration of

methodologists into teams of experts. Rob Johnston – a CIA oﬃcer in their Center for the

Study of Intelligence – has argued that greater integration of methodologists into the analytic

process was necessary because most intelligence analysts lacked the knowledge or training

necessary to choose the most appropriate analytic method and then apply it eﬀectively to the

situation at hand.

He recommended that analytic methodologists “act as in-house consultants

for analytic teams, generate new methods speciﬁc to intelligence analysis, [and] modify and

improve existing methods of analysis,” which is exactly what GAO’s methodologists do.

While not all of GAO’s speciﬁc processes may work if copied directly into a CIA context

due to the diﬀering timeframes in which reports are written, this more rigorous approach to

analytic production could be used to foster additional ways to improving CIA’s analytic pro-

cesses in the future. In the end, greater rigor in both the substantive knowledgebase and the

processes used to produce ﬁnished intelligence analysis should over time lead to more accurate

and useful assessments regarding the capabilities and intentions of the adversary.

Greater imagination

A second way to improve intelligence analysis contributions to decisionmaking would to

improve the art of analysis by incorporating imagination explicitly into the analytic process.

The 9/11 Commission Report highlighted a “failure of imagination” on the part of

intelligence organizations as one of the primary reasons for their inability to prevent the

2001 terrorist attacks.

The Report goes on to say that “imagination is not a gift usually

associated with bureaucracies.... It is therefore crucial to ﬁnd a way of routinizing, even

bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.”

The Report goes on to describe a methodology

for using imagination as part of a strategic warning process, by imagining “how surprise attacks

might be launched” and using these scenarios as starting points for intelligence collection

purposes.

But it does not suggest a way to foster the kinds of imagination necessary to

produce useful scenarios within an existing analytic process which – based on its approxi-

mation of social science methodology – does not rely very much on the imaginative abilities of

analysts.

A model for increasing greater imagination in the production of intelligence analysis may be

found in Yale University historian John Lewis Gaddis’s Landscape of History. In this book, Gaddis

compares historical methodology – in essence interweaving the various forces and inﬂuences

that shaped events in the past into a compelling narrative – to the knowledge-building eﬀorts of

the social sciences, and concludes that standard social science methodology is inadequate. He

argues that its structured methodology and emphasis on distinguishing causes from eﬀects

through articulation of independent and dependent variables fails to capture the inherent

interdependency of those variables. In other words, the social scientist’s strict diﬀerentiation

of cause and eﬀect fails to accurately capture the complexity of the real world, leading to

artiﬁcially abstract models which – as Gaddis contends – means that “the social sciences are

operating . . . at roughly the level of freshman physics experiments [and] that’s why the forecasts

they make only occasionally correspond with the reality we subsequently encounter.”

But Gaddis ﬁnds the comparison between historical methodology and that used by certain

natural sciences – speciﬁcally astronomy, geology, and paleontology – to be more palatable.

These sciences are those in which knowledge cannot be gained through direct experimenta-

tion, but instead must be inferred from the evidence left behind. Gaddis argues that these

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ADDING VALUE TO THE INTELLIGENCE PRODUCT

sciences require imagination to ﬁll in gaps in the evidentiary record in a way that does not exist

in most sciences, but is similar to that required for history. But because history deals with the

actions of people, it is less of a natural science than a social science, or as Gaddis concludes, an

“imaginative social science” because it relies primarily on imagination to understand how

people have acted in the past.

The fragmentary nature of evidence that historians have to deal with is very similar to the

fragmentary nature of evidence that intelligence analysts and national security decisionmakers

have about the current and future actions and intentions of adversaries. A narrative that links

the fragmentary information together into a story about what a foreign government may be

doing would likely be more useful to a decisionmaker than the fragmentary data points them-

selves. Deriving implications from a fragmentary evidentiary record requires that the gaps be

ﬁlled with something in order to create coherent stories of what a foreign government might

be doing or might do in the future. These stories – or scenarios – can be considered hypotheses

in a social science sense, but they also can be considered possible interpretations in a historical

sense. In social science these gap-ﬁlling hypotheses are usually drawn from the theoretical

literature, but for many intelligence issues the kinds of hypotheses necessary to link, for

example, speciﬁc incidents of unrest in a foreign country to a theory of political instability,

social change, or even revolution, do not exist. Rather, in the absence of useful hypotheses,

intelligence analysts tend to rely on intuitive judgment and imagination in much the same way

that historians do. In addition, just as disputes in historical interpretation frequently occur

because of diﬀerences in their imaginative vision of the past, disputes in intelligence or

decisionmaking frequently occur because of the interpretation of the meaning of gaps in the

data. Just as historians have been able to distinguish good historians from the mediocre based on

their ability to use imagination eﬀectively – the art of history – so we should be able to

distinguish good intelligence analysts and decisionmakers from the mediocre, based on their

ability to imagine the adversary accurately; the art of intelligence analysis.

But this kind of imaginative eﬀort is infrequently acknowledged or rewarded in the man-

agement and promotion of intelligence analysts, hindering an intelligence organization’s ability

to imagine the diﬀerent possible avenues that an adversary is currently taking or may take in the

future. As a result, improving the art of intelligence by enabling some analysts to shift their

methodology from a social science base to one that is more like the “imaginative social science”

Gaddis describes would be a step in the right direction. Improving the imaginative abilities of

intelligence analysts should enable them to provide decisionmakers with more useful scenarios

regarding what the competitor or adversary may be doing or may do in the future, thereby

leading to a better base of knowledge from which to decide what to do.

Greater empathy

A ﬁnal suggestion for improving the art of intelligence analysis to make it more useful for

decisionmakers would be to examine the possible beneﬁts arising from the use of empathy as a

way to understand how cultural and individual idiosyncrasies contribute to the behavior of an

adversary. In 1986, Ralph White – a former professor of psychology at George Washington

University – argued that intelligence analysts’ lack of empathy, which he deﬁned as “under-

standing the thoughts and feelings of others,” has led to “serious consequences” for decision-

makers and their respective countries because they misunderstood their adversaries and were

surprised by their actions. Accordingly, he recommended that empathy be incorporated in a

greater degree into intelligence assessments.

30,31

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STEPHEN MARRIN

A number of other scholars have highlighted the use of empathy as a speciﬁc device that

intelligence analysts can use to understand the actions of others within cultures that have

diﬀerent social or religious mores. Gordon McCormick – a professor at the Naval Postgraduate

School – has argued that intelligence analysts should “develop cultural empathy” for an

adversary in order to “forecast enemy behavior with greater accuracy than has been the case

historically.”

In addition, Columbia University professor Robert Jervis has said that lack of

empathy

is perhaps (one of) the two most important kinds of intelligence errors [because] states are unable

to put themselves in the other’s shoes and instead assume that the other’s behavior is driven by

unusual – and frequently malign – internal characteristics.... Empathy requires entering into the

other’s perceived world, and this is rarely easy.

Cultivating empathy is particularly diﬃcult for intelligence analysts, who tend to be more

scholarly than not, spending most of their day behind their computers reading and writing

about what goes on overseas. Intelligence analysis is usually a highly intellectual exercise

predicated on applying knowledge gained through area studies education – preferably

including time spent immersed in that culture – and foreign language training to understand

both the adversary and the situational context. Most of this kind of knowledge can be con-

sciously acquired, aggregated, learned, and taught, but intellect alone will not be able to

allow an analyst to put himself in the head of the other and understand the cultural and

emotional context that contributes to his or her decisionmaking process. Part of the reason

is because, as Robert Jervis has pointed out, intelligence analysts are not decisionmakers,

and as a result “may not understand the pressures on those who have to act in the name of their

states.”

It is the rare analyst that gets to experience ﬁrst-hand the color and dynamism of foreign

cultures or the drama and chaos of international crises. As many authors have observed, intelli-

gence analysts tend to be intellectual and introverted. As a result, while the emphasis on the

intellect may lead to greater knowledge, it does not provide a mechanism for understanding the

mindset of a foreign leader, or the kinds of emotional decisionmaking process that can lead a

person to risk his or her life in pursuit of an ideal like justice, or a group of people to risk their

lives to oppose an occupying force. Their distance from the action provides them with greater

objectivity but it is precisely this objectivity that also hinders understanding the emotional

component of the decisionmaking process.

As William Burris has observed, intelligence “analysts and managers [tend] to play down or

ignore the importance of aﬀections – that fertile ground of humanness where the greed,

irrationality, passion and lust of power that threaten our national security are often rooted.”

Yet it is exactly those emotions that are crucial for the United States government to understand

if it is to forecast a popular uprising or intractable guerilla conﬂict.

The kind of raw intelligence necessary to understand the motivations of an adversary

is frequently fragmentary. In the absence of complete understanding, the analyst must still

use some framework to interpret and forecast the actions of the adversary. Frequently this

will entail some application of a rational-actor assumption or mirror-imaging, but assump-

tions derived from stereotypes or prejudices about the adversary can also enter into the

analysis. Empathy can provide a corrective to these kinds of analytic distortions by providing

another way to understand the intangibles that can aﬀect an adversary’s decisionmaking

process.

According to Ralph White:

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empathy means understanding others from the inside looking out, not merely from the outside

looking in . . . to imagine what the world would look like through their eyes, as they watch what

we do, and through their ears, as they listen to what we say.... Empathy means “being” our actual

or potential enemy.

As such, White continues,

empathy permits intelligence analysts to make assessments and estimates that will enable consumers

to understand more precisely the target nation’s policy-makers, to inﬂuence them more eﬀectively,

and to predict their behavior more reliably. Such knowledge will also enable consumers to

pin-point the target’s most likely areas of compromise, concession, and tradeoﬀ.

In order for an intelligence analyst to cultivate empathy, White suggests that he or she

“continually ask oneself certain obviously relevant questions such as ‘How would I feel if I were

facing the situation they are facing now?’, ‘How would I feel if I had been through the

experience I know they have been through?’, and ‘How should I correct my ﬁrst answers to

those questions on the basis of what I know about the diﬀerences between their political

culture and mine?’”

The last question is particularly important, for as Gordon McCormick

has observed, “failure to distinguish between diﬀering styles of national behavior will result in

culture-bound assessments of enemy activities” in which “our adversaries . . . will be conceived

in our own image.”

As a result, use of empathy does not mean setting aside substantive expertise about the

adversary, but rather layering on top of that substantive expertise a more intuitive or empathetic

assessment of how that adversary might behave in diﬀerent situations. In this way, it can provide

a good corrective to “mirror-imaging or presumptions of rationality.”

In 2000, Ernest May

recommended that CIA “study why some analysts are better than others at empathizing – that

is, at understanding how leaders and policymakers think and make decisions.”

This kind of

study could provide a starting point for identifying the role that empathy plays in understanding

the adversary, and using that knowledge to hire and develop intelligence analysts who are able

to incorporate empathy into their analysis. The end result should be greater insight for the

decisionmaker regarding the intangibles that aﬀect an adversary’s decisionmaking process and

likely courses of action.

Conclusion

The needs of decisionmakers should drive the kinds of intelligence analysis produced, but

intelligence agencies have relied – perhaps too much – on a loose adaptation of the scientiﬁc

method as the primary methodology for producing ﬁnished intelligence analysis. Improving

both the art and the science of intelligence analysis should provide decisionmakers with analysis

that better meets their need for knowledge regarding what is going on overseas, what may be

going on today and in the future, and the various inﬂuences that impinge upon an adversary’s

decisionmaking process.

The next step in the process, after beginning to explore the value of improved rigor and

greater empathy and imagination, would be to institutionalize these kinds of eﬀorts.

The distinction between the art and the science of analysis roughly corresponds to the

diﬀerence between a craft and a profession, or the unstructured and the structured. A craftsman

is really an artist whose skill is developed through training and experience, while a professional

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STEPHEN MARRIN

is someone who has been educated in the “science” of his or her ﬁeld, and then uses that

knowledge in an applied way. Crafts rely primarily on the skill of the individual practitioner –

which does not change very much from generation to generation – while professions build on

the knowledge of past practitioners and relay it to new professionals through their educational

process.

Further developing knowledge about both the art and the science of intelligence analysis

should lead to improvements in both the craft and the profession. This kind of dual eﬀort will

enable the occupation as a whole to get past the unproductive debate over whether good

intelligence analysts are born or made, to a future in which the performance of all analysts –

regardless of their relative possession of scientiﬁc knowledge or artistic ability – can be

improved. In the end, institutionalizing improvement in both the art and the science of analysis

can only lead to an intelligence product that provides greater value to decisionmakers.

Notes

1 As Vickers observes, “facts are relevant only in relation to some judgment of value, and judgments

of value are operative only in relation to some conﬁguration of fact.” Geoﬀrey Vickers, The Art

of Judgment: A Study of Policy Making. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995: 50–51, 54.

2 Vickers, 225–226.

3 Vickers, 54.

4 Ernest R. May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000: 458–459.

5 According to a Congressional Research Service Memorandum, CIA’s Leadership Proﬁles “are bio-

graphic assessments of foreign leaders, generally 1–2 pages in length. They often are tailored for a

particular meeting or event. Whenever possible, LPs contain a photo of the leader being assessed.”

Alfred Cumming, “Congress as a Consumer of Intelligence Information.” Congressional Research

Service Memorandum. December 14, 2005. http://feinstein.senate.gov/crs-intel.htm For additional

information on CIA’s leadership analysis program, see Thomas Omestad, “Psychology and the CIA:

Leaders on the Couch,” Foreign Policy 95 (Summer 1994): 105–122.

6 Intelligence Community Website, Analysis: Occupations (Leadership Analyst). http://www.intel-

ligence.gov/3-career_analysis_occupations.shtml#17

7 For an example of this kind of analysis, see Jerrold M. Post and Alexander George, Leaders and Their

Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

8 According to Klaus Knorr in 1964, “it is social science methods of gathering data, of deducing data from

other data, and of establishing the validity of data that are of particular value – in principle at least – in

producing appropriate kinds of information for intelligence.” Klaus Knorr. “Foreign Intelligence and

the Social Sciences.” Research Monograph No. 17. Center of International Studies, Woodrow Wilson

School of Public and International Aﬀairs, Princeton University, June 1, 1964: 11.

9 Douglas J. MacEachin, “The Tradecraft of Analysis: Challenge and Change in the CIA,” Consortium

for the Study of Intelligence, Washington DC, 1994: 1; Jack Davis, “Improving Intelligence Analysis at

CIA: Dick Heuer’s Contribution to Intelligence Analysis,” Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, Center for

the Study of Intelligence, CIA, 1999: xvii–xix.

10 CIA Website, “Intelligence Analysis in the DI: Frequently Asked Questions.” http://www.odci.gov/

cia/di/work/analyst.html, as quoted in: Stephen Marrin, “CIA’s Kent School: Improving Training

for New Analysts.” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 16. No. 4 (Winter

2003/2004): 627. This website has since been deleted from the CIA Website, but a mirror of the

content can be found here: http://widit.slis.indiana.edu/TREC/showdocw.cgi?dname=-

web&docID=G25–55–1777388

11 Mark M. Lowenthal, “Tribal Tongues: Intelligence Consumers, Intelligence Producers,” The Washing-

ton Quarterly, Vol. 15. No. 1 (Winter 1992): 161.

12 David Brooks, “The Elephantiasis of Reason,” The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 29. No. 1 (Jan.–Feb. 2003):

34–35.

13 David Brooks, “The CIA: Method and Madness,” The New York Times, February 3, 2004: A 23.

14 For an evaluation of the limited value of the social sciences in intelligence analysis as compared to the

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ADDING VALUE TO THE INTELLIGENCE PRODUCT

value of the natural sciences in medicine, see Stephen Marrin and Jonathan D. Clemente, “Improving

Intelligence Analysis by Looking to the Medical Profession,” International Journal of Intelligence and

Counterintelligence, Vol. 18. No. 4 (2005): 716–719.

15 Robert Jervis, “Improving the Intelligence Process: Informal Norms and Incentives,” Intelligence: Policy

and Process, eds. Alfred C. Maurer, Marion D. Tunstall and James M. Keagle. Boulder, CO and London

Westview Press, 1985: 113.

16 For an excellent overview of the art versus science discussion as applied to intelligence analysis, see

Robert D. Folker, Jr, “Intelligence Analysis in Theater Joint Intelligence Centers: An Experiment in

Applying Structured Methods,” Occasional Paper Number Seven. Joint Military Intelligence College,

January 2000: 6–13.

17 For more on the few eﬀorts to develop the underlying “scientiﬁc” foundation of intelligence analysis,

see: R.A. Random. “Intelligence as a Science,” Studies in Intelligence, Spring 1958; Richards J. Heuer,

ed. Quantitative Approaches to Political Intelligence: The CIA Experience. Boulder, CO: Westview Press,

1978; Stanley A. Feder. “Factions and Policon: New Ways to Analyze Politics.” Studies in Intelligence 31,

No. 1 (Spring 1987): 41–57, reprinted in Inside CIA’s Private World: Declassiﬁed Articles from the Agency’s

Internal Journal, 1955–1992, ed. H. Bradford Westerﬁeld. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995:

274–292.

18 Marrin and Clemente, 724–725.

19 Rob Johnston, “Developing a Taxonomy of Intelligence Analysis Variables,” Studies in Intelligence,

Vol. 47. No. 3. http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol47no3/article05.html

20 Timothy J. Smith, “Network-Centric Intelligence: Toward a Total-Systems Transformation of Analysis

and Assessment,” Unpublished Manuscript, September 2005: 14.

21 Stanley A. Feder, “Forecasting for Policy Making in the Post-Cold War Period,” Annual Reviews:

Political Science, 2002 5: 111–125.

22 Rob Johnston, “Integrating Methodologists into Teams of Substantive Experts,” Studies in Intelligence,

Vol. 47. No. 1. http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol47no1/article06.html

23 Robert D. Folker, Jr., “Exploiting Structured Methodologies to Improve Qualitative Intelligence

Analysis,” Masters Thesis, Joint Military Intelligence College, July 1999: 2.

24 Steven Rieber and Neil Thomason, “Creation of a National Institute for Analytic Methods,” Studies in

Intelligence, Vol. 49. No. 4 (2005): 71–77.

25 Rob Johnston, “Integrating”.

26 The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United

States, Washington, DC: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004: 336.

27 The 9/11 Commission Report, 344.

28 The 9/11 Commission Report, 346.

29 John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, New York: Oxford University

Press, 2002: 60.

30 Ralph K. White, “Empathy as an Intelligence Tool,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintel-

ligence Vol. 1. No. 1 (Spring 1986): 57–59.

31 White is careful to distinguish empathy as an instrumental tool for understanding the adversary from

sympathy, which he deﬁnes as “sharing (or agreeing with) the thoughts and feelings of others.” In fact,

White says that those “intelligence analysts who ﬁnd that emotionally their understanding leads to

sharing should not be in the intelligence business.” White, 60.

32 Gordon H. McCormick, “Surprise, Perceptions, and Military Style,” Orbis, Winter 1983: 835; 838.

33 Robert Jervis, “Strategic Intelligence and Eﬀective Policy,” Security and Intelligence in a Changing World:

New Perspectives for the 1990s, eds. A. Stuart Farson, David Staﬀord, and Wesley K. Wark, London: Frank

Cass, 1991: 165–181 at 175.

34 Jervis, “Strategic Intelligence,” 176.

35 William C. Burris, “The Uses of History in Intelligence Analysis,” International Journal of Intelligence and

Counterintelligence, Vol. 6, No. 3: 301.

36 White, 58–59.

37 White, 69–70.

38 McCormick, 836.

39 McCormick, 833.

40 “Symposium on the Psychology of Intelligence Analysis” sponsored by CIA’s Center for the Study of

Intelligence and the Sherman Kent School. June 20, 2000. http://www.cia.gov/csi/bulletin/

csi11.html#toc2

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STEPHEN MARRIN

Analysis for strategic intelligence

John Hollister Hedley

The cable news channel interrupts regular programming to switch to the capital of a Central

Asian country. From the open window of a hotel in the city’s center, a reporter excitedly

reports that shots are ringing out. Tanks are blocking the boulevard leading toward the

presidential palace. The reporter thrusts a microphone from the window and, yes, we hear

the shots. A hand-held camera pointing from the window shows the tanks. Yes, we see them,

now ﬁlling the intersection. We hear screams and shouts. People are running. Explosions

reverberate.

In the oﬃces of Washington policymakers, heads turn toward the television monitor.

Simultaneously, heads turn toward monitors in the White House Situation Room and various

operations centers. Any moment, the phone will ring in the oﬃce of an intelligence analyst

who almost certainly has not been watching television. Through the phone will come urgent,

insistent questions: What’s going on? What does it mean? Who’s behind this? How serious is it?

The analyst understands that, lying behind the series of questions, is an implicit one: what

should we do about it?

The analyst is on the spot. Modern technology reveals far-ﬂung developments in real time.

The caller, however, will not say, “I know no one was expecting this, so please take your time

and try to get something to me in the next couple of days.” More likely the caller wants the

analyst’s thinking now, orally, with maybe an hour or two before a written situation report

must be on its way. There will be little if any time now for sharing views, testing alternative

hypotheses, conducting peer reviews, and doing in-depth research before assessing what might

be going on and making a judgment about what it means. This is when it pays for the analyst

to have developed expertise, to be doing in-depth research and in-depth thinking already, to

have been routinely consulting counterparts and exploring alternative hypotheses. This is when

training and experience count.

The bottom line

Episodes such as this are among the many kinds of challenge that illustrate why intelligence

analysis has been called “the most sophisticated and intellectually demanding activity in the

211

Intelligence Community.”

It is why Richard Helms, who distinguished himself at espionage

and served as a Director of Central Intelligence, called analysis “the bottom line of intelligence

work . . . where all the arcane techniques of intelligence come together.”

And in every

such instance – whether one that calls for a commentary on a fast-breaking development, or

for a product of collaborative, in-depth research – the analyst must go beyond what appears to

be happening and try to make sense out of often ambiguous, inconsistent, incomplete, and

sometimes contradictory data.

Inconclusive data feature prominently in the daily diet of intelligence analysis. Indeed, the

Intelligence Community owes its raison d’être to the “squishiness” of data. Policymakers need

someone to assess data objectively and make judgments without direct, conclusive evidence.

is unfortunate that the expression “connecting the dots” gained currency in discourse about

whether analysts should reach certain conclusions quickly and conﬁdently. It is not a good

metaphor or analogy. Making analytic judgments is not akin to painting by the numbers. Ask

any analyst how easy it is to connect the dots when you aren’t sure you have two “dots,” or

veriﬁable dots, dots that correlate.

It should be clear from the outset that there is nothing nefarious about trying to know

and understand as much as possible about what is going on in the world. And this is the purpose

of analysis: to discern pertinent facts from a ﬂood of information and apply judgments and

insights that can inform those who must make decisions and direct actions to address develop-

ments on a global scale. The essence of analysis is information plus insight, derived from

subject-matter knowledge. Intelligence analysis informs decisions and actions in ways that

can make a positive diﬀerence. Timely intelligence warns of looming crises, identiﬁes threats,

monitors fast-breaking situations, illuminates issues, and detects trends. Intelligence helps US

policymakers consider alternative options and outcomes.

Intelligence sources

The grist for the analyst’s mill is a mix of all the kinds of information the US government is able

to acquire. Much of the information is openly available in print or electronic form, including

the Internet, newspapers, television, radio, journals, commercial databases, videos, graphics,

maps, and drawings. A critical amount of intelligence information, however, is obtained from

highly sensitive sources. These include:

• Human-source intelligence, acquired openly by civilian and military personnel assigned to

US diplomatic posts, through oﬃcial liaison contacts with other intelligence services,

by debrieﬁng foreign nationals and US citizens who travel abroad and have access to

information of intelligence value; it is acquired clandestinely by recruiting foreign agents

with unique access to the hardest targets of all, not just documents but the people who

make policies and operational plans – and if possible, recruiting those people to be agents

themselves.

• Signals intelligence, derived from intercepted communications, radar and telemetry.

• Imagery intelligence, whether obtained overhead from satellites or aircraft or from the

ground.

• Measurement and signature intelligence involving a range of disciplines including nuclear,

optical, radio frequency, acoustic, seismic, and materials sciences that can locate, identify,

or describe distinctive characteristics of intelligence targets.

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JOHN HOLLISTER HEDLEY

Complicating the mix of these sources of intelligence reporting is its sheer volume, its rapid-ﬁre

receipt, the ever-present “noise” of contradictory and inaccurate information, and deliberate

deception designed to mislead.

The fact that analysts do “all-source analysis” reﬂects the reality that rarely is one source from

a single one of these collection categories suﬃcient. Sources need to be supplemented and

complemented to be as complete as possible and to be veriﬁed to the greatest extent possible.

Research and analysis in open sources may turn up information, for example, on the strategic

perspective of jihadist movements. But because these groups attach highest priority to the

security of their communications and operations, it is diﬃcult to identify leaders and uncover

decision-making and attack-planning. It is likely to require the full range of intelligence collec-

tion capabilities to penetrate operations by cells of a few, isolated individuals whose ﬂuid

movements are “beneath the radar.”

In making analytic judgments, the analyst facing a deadline typically yearns for additional

sourcing. But actually having multiple sources to corroborate each other is the ideal; it is by no

means the rule. And multiple sources can in some instances still lead you astray. Indeed, one of

the diﬀerences between intelligence writing and academic writing is having to write before

you feel ready to do so, before you have marshaled the supporting evidence you want to have

at hand in order to craft your position. In this sense, writing current intelligence is very much

like being a newspaper reporter or columnist; when it’s time to go to press, you have to have

your material ready to go.

From “raw” to “ﬁnished” intelligence

Intelligence analysis is the end product, the culmination of the intelligence process. Yet that

process actually is a never-ending cycle. Analysis drives collection by identifying information

needs and gaps, which in turn call for more collection which requires further analysis. What the

key recipients of intelligence analysis – the President, the National Security Council, and senior

oﬃcials in major departments and agencies – must be aware of, grapple with, or defend against

in the world around us dictates collection requirements. They reﬂect the core concerns of

national security policymakers and military commanders who need timely, reliable, and

accurate foreign intelligence information – especially the kinds of information that are not

readily available. As analysts address those needs from day to day, they identify and prompt the

collection mission again and again.

Before the raw information that human or technical collectors acquire can be analyzed,

however, some interim processing and exploitation may be needed to convert it into a usable

form for analysis. It may be necessary, for example, to decrypt or translate intercepts, or to

interpret images through highly reﬁned photographic and electronic processes. After all,

intelligence collection systems produce sensory data, not intelligence. Only the human mind

can add the discernment and knowledge that makes sense of it. It is only after “raw” data are

veriﬁed for accuracy and evaluated for their signiﬁcance can they become the substance of

intelligence.

Although personnel involved in this processing sometimes are referred to within

their organizations as analysts, their specialized work – involving judgments about rele-

vance and priority within a single collection category – is not the production of “ﬁnished”

intelligence.

Although producing intelligence is a dynamic, continuous process, the term “ﬁnished

intelligence” refers to any intelligence product – whether a one-paragraph bulletin or a lengthy

study – which has completed the rigorous, all-source correlation, integration, evaluation, and

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ANALYSIS FOR STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE

assessment that enables it be disseminated. As we have noted, the intelligence analyst who is the

author of such a product is expected to have checked it against intelligence information from all

sources pertinent to his or her area of responsibility. The analyst will have assessed its validity

and determined – with the substantive and editorial help of experienced managers and

colleagues – that it can usefully advance its recipient’s knowledge and understanding of a

pertinent security policy issue. It will have been coordinated with counterparts elsewhere in the

Intelligence Community, and oﬃcially reviewed before it is sent out.

Finished intelligence is made available in several forms, and analysts can expect to be called

upon to produce in any or all of them:

• Current intelligence addresses day-to-day events – new developments and possible indica-

tors of developments to come. Current intelligence not only reports intelligence informa-

tion but assesses its signiﬁcance, alerts readers to near-term consequences, and signals

potentially dangerous situations. Current intelligence is disseminated daily. Sometimes it

appears even more frequently, in the form of situation reports from a task force formed to

deal with a crisis. Often it takes the form of ad hoc written memoranda and oral brieﬁngs.

The President’s Daily Brieﬁng is the most elite example of current intelligence, but other

highly sensitive publications for the most senior levels of government and the military

appear daily, weekly or on request.

• Estimative intelligence takes stock of what is known and then delves into the unknown, even

the unknowable. International issues rarely are conclusive, yet policymakers must address

them with plans and decisions. Estimative intelligence provides strategic guidance for

developing policies, usually looking three to ﬁve years ahead. It suggests alternative

patterns that available facts might ﬁt, and provides informed assessments of the range and

likelihood of possible outcomes. The most formal and authoritative form of estimative

intelligence is a National Intelligence Estimate, which the pertinent organizations of the

Intelligence Community prepare collaboratively and issue collectively.

• Basic intelligence compiles reference data – biographic, geographic, military, economic,

demographic, social, and political – presented in the form of monographs, in-depth

studies, atlases, maps, order-of-battle summaries, and publications such as Chiefs of

State and Cabinet Members of Foreign Governments and an annual World Factbook that is a

comprehensive compilation of political, economic, and demographic data.

Other types of ﬁnished intelligence include warning intelligence (which necessarily should be

timely) designed to highlight threatening events that would require a potential policy response

and which could cause the engagement of US military forces, and intelligence for operational

support which, as the name indicates, is focused and tailored for the planning and conducting

of a speciﬁc operation. Scientiﬁc and technical intelligence assesses technical developments and

characteristics, and the capabilities and performance of foreign technologies including weapon

systems. Technical analysis usually relates to defense planning, military operations, or arms-

control negotiations.

None of these types of ﬁnished intelligence, however, brings the process to a conclusion.

Whether a daily item or a national estimate, their production is part of a continuum involving

dissemination, feedback, and more questions that fuel a truly dynamic eﬀort.

What’s more, whether current or longer-term, the analytic interpretation of intelligence

reporting requires making judgments that go beyond the available information. Such a leap,

from the information at hand into a meaningful analytic product, inevitably involves venturing

from the known into the uncertain. Almost by deﬁnition, intelligence analysis involves con-

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JOHN HOLLISTER HEDLEY

fronting uncertainty and using one’s judgment and subject-matter expertise in an eﬀort to

transcend its limits.

Information abundance

The intelligence analyst’s work environment has changed dramatically from the early decades

of the US Intelligence Community’s existence. During the Cold War that dominated the

second half of the twentieth century, the analytic challenge was often one of having too little

data. The Soviet Union and its allies were closed societies going to great lengths to deny

information. They denied travel, controlled the press, and jammed radio broadcasts. E-mail and

cell phones did not exist. US intelligence agencies had a virtual monopoly on the information

that was collected, essentially secret information obtained by agents, communication intercepts,

or overhead photography, and there never seemed to be enough of it.

In the twenty-ﬁrst century, a principal analytic challenge lies in the sheer volume of infor-

mation available. Although especially hard targets such as terrorist cells are no less diﬃcult to

penetrate, the explosion of open-source information from news services and the Worldwide

Web makes the speed and volume of reporting more diﬃcult to sift through. Advances in

information technology both help and hinder, as analysts strive to cope with the “noise,” the

chaﬀ they must winnow away. Data multiply with dizzying speed. Whereas collecting solid

intelligence information was the overriding problem of the past, selecting and validating it

loom ever larger as problems for analysts today.

Still another challenge in the era of information abundance is that analysts must dig deeper

to serve increasingly more knowledgeable policymakers who will be the recipients of their

product. Modern communication technologies provide many more ways for policymakers to

stay informed on current developments. Recipients of intelligence analysis who have news-

papers and press summaries on their desk and CNN on the air have a high level of awareness.

Many of them also read raw intelligence reports on a regular basis – sometimes before the

reports reach the analyst. Today’s policymakers are more sophisticated subscribers to intelli-

gence products.

The deputy director of intelligence analysis at CIA, Carmen Medina, has observed that her

directorate has probably always underestimated the extent to which policymakers serve as their

own analysts. “Arguably,” she has written, “policymakers have never needed [us] to tell them

that riots undermine governments or that currency crises shake investor conﬁdence.”

What

they do need is unique insights into relatively well-understood problems. So, in eﬀect, the bar is

set higher for the analysts. They must provide added value to policymakers who probably

already have both a good sense of what is going on in their area of concern and a good feel for

the signiﬁcance and consequences of events that take place.

To a degree perhaps surprising to someone new to the inner sanctum of a Washington

intelligence organization, the working climate that does not change is that which walls oﬀ the

workplace from the bluster of partisan politics. Analysts must check their personal political

views at the door. Objectivity is the analyst’s byword, intellectual honesty the core value. The

policymaking customers that analysts seek to inform – all the way to intelligence customer

number one – need to get the straight scoop, unvarnished and politically neutral.

The author has been directly involved in producing intelligence for eight Presidents – ﬁve

Republicans and three Democrats. Whatever the partisan rhetoric or the legislative agenda,

without exception they all have been serious and conscientious about their role in foreign

policy and as commander in chief, and they take seriously the intelligence that can inform their

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ANALYSIS FOR STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE

eﬀorts. They have the best of intentions, and although they obviously diﬀer in style, approach,

and eﬀectiveness, they want and need the best intelligence they can get. (So, for that matter, does

the Congress. And the Congressional oversight committees – the Senate Select Committee on

Intelligence, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence – by and large score

well on bipartisanship, especially behind closed doors and apart from public rhetoric.)

Accordingly, an analyst is much the wiser and more eﬀective by not taking sides on the job.

No matter how much one might personally wish to see domestic policies that would expand

healthcare on the one hand or cut taxes on the other (or both!), when it comes to helping the

government better understand what is going on in the world beyond America’s borders,

the only rule to follow is to be scrupulously objective. As the umpire advised, “call ’em as you

see ’em.” There is no room in intelligence analysis for partisan advocacy or opposition

when providing actionable intelligence and identifying options. In short, you don’t craft

assessments the way you’d like things to be. This will always come to light, and the cost will be

in credibility.

The primacy of writing

The most basic skill required of the intelligence analyst is the ability to think and write clearly.

Oral brieﬁngs are valued and often called for. But ultimately, writing is what the analyst’s work

is about – writing based on organizing material, conceptualizing, and thinking critically about

it. Writing is always done with the audience, the reader, in mind. And the writing analysts do is

diﬀerent from that learned and practiced in the professorial ranks of graduate school, even

though there are many similarities between the intelligence ﬁeld and academia.

Like academicians, intelligence analysts attach the highest importance to knowledge and

understanding, to objectivity in the search for truth, and to accuracy in the sources they use.

Academics and analysts are interested in clear descriptions and explanations, though academics

usually are describing past events and making sense of what had happened, while analysts are

addressing what an event means and projecting what might happen next. They tend to diﬀer

when it comes to the material they work with, and their likely audience. Academic authors

organize their data, make it as comprehensive as possible, reﬂect on it, develop a theoretical

construct, and perhaps formulate methodologies. For the analyst – especially one writing

current intelligence – this approach is likely to be an impossible luxury. As Douglas MacEachin,

a former head of analysis at CIA, has put it, “one group gets to promote its reputations in

journals, while the other works in a closed environment in which the main readers are

members of the world’s most challenging audience – the policymaking community.”

The

analyst may need to write for the next morning’s publication, or contribute to this afternoon’s

situation report, on fast-breaking developments for which data is sorely lacking. There is not

enough data to work into a meaningful methodology, and there is no waiting for more: the

deadline must be met with whatever can be said.

Whereas academics usually write – particularly in the case of journal articles – for other

scholars with a shared expertise, analysts usually write for non-experts who do not share their

expertise and who do not have time for in-depth study or to follow an issue day in and day out

to the degree the analyst does. Analysts therefore are called upon to bridge the gap between the

specialist and the generalist. Getting the attention of senior oﬃcials – from the President to an

Under Secretary – who, by the breadth of their responsibility, are forced to be generalists may

mean the analyst has one page, or two or three minutes, in which to make sense of a develop-

ment. No matter that, ideally, putting this development into historical perspective and into its

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JOHN HOLLISTER HEDLEY

international context should require considerable background reading and careful study and

reﬂection. There is no such option. However much the generalist reader might beneﬁt from a

scholarly tutorial, he or she simply will not sit still for one. Even if you write the kind of paper

you would like the policymaker to have in order to get a more comprehensive exposition of

what is at issue, it probably will not be read at the highest level. So to reach the reader at that

level, the analyst must take the opportunity that is available: one page or nothing, three minutes

or none.

Diﬀerent audiences dictate a diﬀerent style. And the ﬁrst rule of persuasive writing is to

know your audience. For busy readers, shorter is usually better. The analyst’s policymaker

audience is unbelievably pressed for time, which may or may not be the case for the scholar

reading the academic’s work. The analyst’s audience determines the writing style, and the one

that is most eﬀective for the generalist reader – whether the President, Chairman of the Joint

Chiefs, or a cabinet oﬃcer – is simple, crisp, readable prose. Good journalistic writing is a good

example. What is written must be easy to grasp in a quick reading. Editors, as a surrogate ﬁrst

reader, can provide indispensable help. No one could state the analyst’s objective any better than

the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson when he said, “Don’t write merely to be under-

stood. Write so you cannot possibly be misunderstood.”

And although such writing should be

concise, writing clearly and concisely does not necessarily require extreme brevity.

Here is an illustrative example from a declassiﬁed January 1964 memorandum entitled

“Soviet Economic Problems Multiply,” a research paper analyzing what is happening at the

time:

In the past few years, Moscow’s aggressive foreign policy has been accompanied by boasts of

overtaking and surpassing US production by 1970, thus, in Khrushchev’s words, defeating

capitalism without war. However, an analytical review of recent Soviet economic performance

compared with that of the US supports just the opposite conclusion – namely, that the Soviet

Union is falling behind in the economic race.

. . . the Kremlin leadership for several years has been

trying to do too much with too few resources. This living on borrowed capital, improvising cheap

but temporary solutions to basic problems such as agriculture, and chronically neglecting balanced

development to push ahead spectacularly on a narrow range of goals has ﬁnally caught up with the

Soviet Union. A nearly disastrous crop failure in 1963 was not the root cause of Moscow’s current

economic diﬃculties; what it did was to bring to a head the many underlying problems of the

Soviet economy....

Still another sample exempliﬁes estimative language – looking ahead. It is taken from a

National Intelligence Estimate produced in 1978:

As the USSR begins its 11th Five-Year Plan, economic prospects are gloomier than at any time

since Stalin’s death, and there is a strong possibility the economic situation will get progressively

worse in the second half of the decade. Annual increments to national output even in the early

1980s will be insuﬃcient to avoid having to make choices among the competing demands for

investment, consumption, the cost of empire, and continued growth in defense spending. As Soviet

leaders survey what they regard as a hostile external environment, however, foreign policy and

military requirements are likely to dominate their policy calculations. They will therefore try to

maintain high defense spending, promote higher productivity and assure domestic control by

appeals to a more extreme patriotism, and, if social instability arising from consumer dissatisfaction

or ethnic tensions makes it necessary, by resorting to repressive measures.

Sometimes, of course, ﬁnished intelligence must be done on the run and oﬀ the cuﬀ. And it

can work well that way. A friend who was an analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of

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ANALYSIS FOR STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE

Intelligence and Research remarked that the bureau’s most eﬀective analytic “product” often

was a one- or two-sentence comment on a report in the Secretary of State’s morning brieﬁng,

perhaps followed by one or two short paragraphs the next day. The President’s Daily Brieﬁng

keeps items to a single page, sometimes less, with a lot of white space. Always, intelligence

writing puts a premium on being able to state key points quickly, succinctly, and with clarity.

Restrictions on time and space require an economy of words.

Rising expectations

Demands on the intelligence analyst – and the expectations – are increasing. Everyone is

overwhelmed by information. Policymakers are looking to intelligence to help them know

what they should be worrying about, what they should be addressing, what their options

are, and the likely consequences. They value the ability of the intelligence analyst to integrate

data with no axe to grind. Policymakers have insuﬃcient time to read or to contemplate,

so helping them cope with the ﬂood of information has become a major service analysts

provide.

All the while, the analyst’s customers grow, in number and awareness. And no one ever wants

less intelligence, in terms of products, brieﬁngs, or coverage – only more and better. Congress

has an insatiable appetite for intelligence, as do the military services. Executive branch cus-

tomers abound in the Departments of the Treasury, Energy, Justice, Homeland Security,

Commerce, and Agriculture.

What the analyst writes must compete for attention with multiple sources of information

including other intelligence producers. The trick is not to cheapen the currency by inundating

the reader but to be timely, relevant, and – to emphasize it once again – to provide added value,

even when addressing a much-reported issue of the day. Relevance requires contributing

uniquely, going beyond what’s in the news media. And of course it is worthless if it doesn’t

arrive when it can be used.

The neutrality question

The desire on the part of the users of intelligence is for analysis that is opportunity-oriented, or

actionable – in other words, intelligence they can apply and actually use. Analysis has become an

integral part of planning and implementing policy, and of intelligence operations. This is a far

cry from what might be termed the traditional, or “old school,” conception of analysis which

held that to earn and maintain credibility, analysts must be more than policy neutral, they must

literally keep their distance from those who were making the policy decisions. Traditional

thinking also held that analysis should – again, to earn and maintain credibility – be done

independently of those who collect it.

For a number of years, the trend has led away from this traditional view for a variety of

practical reasons. Working in isolation only increased the guess-work involved in discerning

what policymakers needed to know and thus what collectors needed to collect. In contrast,

working collaboratively enables analysts to get an invaluable “feel” for what information the

policymaker is missing. Learning at ﬁrst hand the information needs and priorities of the day

helps analysts guide what the collectors must target. Collectors can have a real-time sense of

what to collect and analysts have a sharper awareness of what they have to work with and of the

illumination and insights they must try to provide.

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JOHN HOLLISTER HEDLEY

Today, intelligence analysts are at hand when the making and implementing of policy is on

the table. The Director of National Intelligence or his deputy, usually with a substantive expert

along, is there to provide an intelligence update and perspective – side by side with the National

Security Adviser and representatives of State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, Energy, and the Joint

Chiefs of Staﬀ at the principal or deputy level, and involving the President at National Security

Council meetings. Analysts and policymakers meet together frequently in deputies’ committee

and principals’ committee meetings and in various gatherings at the working level. At

CIA, analysts sit side by side with humint collectors in the operations directorate, now known

as the National Clandestine Service. They do so as well at the various centers where analysts

and collectors can better focus and share their combined eﬀorts – such as the National

Counterterrorism Center, the National Counterproliferation Center, and the International

Crime and Narcotics Center.

How analysis informs policy might be answered with “very carefully.” It has been said that

for analysts to collaborate with policymakers in the interest of relevance while remaining

absolutely policy-neutral is like trying to swim without getting wet. Analysts must walk a ﬁne

line if their analysis is not to be prescriptive. Somehow they must illuminate alternatives with-

out suggesting which one to take. Clearly their collaboration with policymakers and collectors

increases the risk of politicizing intelligence and, accordingly, raises the pressure on analysts to

resist it. Tailoring intelligence by no means involves slanting its content to curry favor with its

recipient; it means making it as relevant as possible by addressing as precisely as possible the

policymaker’s particular information needs. The analysts’ highest calling is to speak truth to

power. They must convey assessments that the policymakers surely will not want to hear.

Carmen Medina contends that this can and must be done, but that it does not require

disengagement. Asserting that being completely neutral and independent may only gain

irrelevance, she has argued that integrity and neutrality are not the same thing:

Neutrality implies distance . . . and some near mystical ability to parse the truth completely free

from bias or prejudice. Integrity, on the other hand, rests on professional standards . . . and if forced

to choose between analytic detachment and impact on policymaking, the 21

century analyst must

choose the latter.

Fulton Armstrong, a former member of the National Intelligence Council – the Intelligence

Community’s center for strategic analysis and the production of national estimates – sees it as a

matter of focusing on national interests rather than policy or political interests, while noting that

this is not easily done. Deﬁning and prioritizing national interests are at once more urgent and

more diﬃcult than ever, and analysts have to do a lot of the deﬁning for themselves. Armstrong

advocates steering clear of value judgments and value-laden labels that assume a certain inter-

pretation of US national interests. The American people elected the policymaker (or his or her

boss) to make the value judgments. For their part, analysts should provide a realistic assessment

that reﬂects a range of legitimate interpretations of events and their implications. Then, using a

reference to the medical profession, Armstrong recommends that the analyst be a radiologist:

take the picture and read the spots on it to the best of your ability, but leave the diagnosis and

cure to the doctors.

A former long-time analyst and manager of analysts at CIA advises analysts to be aware that

policymakers always have an agenda, and it is one in which domestic political equations are of

primary importance. Analysts not only ought not try to tell policymakers what to do, they

should recognize that analysis is not going to tell policymakers what to do. Policymakers know

what they want to do. Intelligence may be the rationale, but not the reason. (There are never

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ANALYSIS FOR STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE

policy failures, only policy successes and intelligence failures!

) Even though no one should be

surprised that policymakers, for their part, “cherry pick” from the intelligence they receive,

analysts must resist the temptation to “cherry pick” intelligence items to provide. Policymakers

may point publicly to that which seems to support their policy and disregard that which does

not. But woe unto the analyst who would cherry pick intelligence likely to please the policy

recipient and suppress that which would not. Such a practice would cost the analyst’s

credibility, and credibility remains the currency of the analyst’s realm.

Bias may happen, but nobody instructs you to change your interpretation. This author

can honestly say that, as an analyst at CIA, as a manager of analysts, as managing editor of

the National Intelligence Daily, and in editing the President’s Daily Brief, he personally never

experienced pressure from any higher-ranking oﬃcer to alter any analytic judgment to suit a

policy line. He has, however, seen an instance or two in which analysts, convinced that their

viewpoint was the embodiment of truth, became knee-jerk apologists or advocates for a

position or outlook – to an extent that they were no longer seen as objective and open-minded

– and whose analytic careers eﬀectively ended as a result.

Walking the tightrope is trickier than ever. It is up to the analysts to negotiate it. Somehow

they must maintain an invisible ﬁrewall separating the informing of policy from prescribing it,

even as they work hand in glove both with policymakers and collectors in order to more

eﬀectively identify knowledge gaps and strive to ﬁll them.

Reforms and realities

The shocking attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York and the

Pentagon in Washington underscored the growing challenges to intelligence in an era of

international terrorism in which small groups of individuals can inﬂict destruction once

wielded only by nation-states. The bureaucratic dust still is settling following the hasty,

election-year enactment of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004,

which was an outgrowth of those attacks. That legislation created the position of Director of

National Intelligence as an institutional corrective for the failure of the vast US national

intelligence apparatus to somehow prevent the terrible events of 9/11. The reorganization

followed the completion of various inquiries and studies into what went wrong.

The general,

overriding conclusion of these inquiries with respect to intelligence analysis (leaving aside the

alleged operational and structural failings) was that there had been a failure of imagination.

According to a professional staﬀ member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks

upon the United States, popularly known as the 9/11 Commission, there were several critical

aspects to this, among them:

•“Relentless emphasis on current intelligence” had shifted the Intelligence Community’s

focus from the long term to the issue of the moment.

• The analytic community failed to recognize the attraction of politicized religion as the

next big “ism.”

• Bin Laden’s proclamations were taken to be more of the same empty rhetoric typical of

Middle East fondness for hyperbole unmatched by deeds.

• Hints of Sunni–Shia cooperation were dismissed as an alliance that would never occur,

and Arab links with Malay and Indonesian extremists were unrecognized – in part

because the Intelligence Community, organized regionally, had little ability to match

events in one region with those in another.

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JOHN HOLLISTER HEDLEY

A consensus of criticism concluded that analysis had become risk averse, more concerned

with avoiding mistakes than with imagining surprises, and that there was insuﬃcient integra-

tion of analytic eﬀorts across the US Intelligence Community. The Oﬃce of the National

Director of Intelligence now is at pains to emphasize consultation and collaboration in intelli-

gence analysis on the part of the now sixteen members of the Intelligence Community. The

Oﬃce of the DNI is providing central direction aimed at rising above the bureaucratic ﬁefdoms

that for years formed barriers to the sharing of sources and analytic perspectives.

Mental roadblocks to more imaginative analysis, however, are persistent challenges.

The post-9/11 studies also emphasized anew what analysts have grappled with for years: the

fact that as human beings we all have cognitive bias or preconceived notions that we must

acknowledge and beware of lest they color our perceptions and our judgment. We all are

culture-bound in our outlook and must consciously strive to recognize this fact and rise above

it.

Some of the particular pitfalls the analyst must constantly strive to avoid include:

• “Clientitis,” or the tendency to fall in love with your “client,” the country you may be

assigned to cover, is a sophomoric sin, but one that is not unknown. Developing expertise

obviously means knowing a great deal about a country, usually involving extensive travel

and often some time in residence. Analysis involves discerning and explaining the motives

and point of view of its leaders. But admiration for its language, customs, and culture must

not lead the analyst to become the advocate and defender of its leaders and their policies.

Objectivity must reign supreme.

• Mirror-imaging is the assumption that others would think just the way you do – that, being

confronted with the facts of a certain situation, they would calculate the pros and cons and

decide their course of action with the same reasoning, and thus reach the same con-

clusion. (Anthropologist Rob Johnston points out that this term actually is a misnomer,

inasmuch as a mirror image is a reverse image. He uses “ethnocentrism” to describe the

concept that we tend to perceive foreigners – friends or adversaries alike – as thinking the

same way as Americans. He also notes that “trying to think like them” often results in

applying the logic of one’s own culture and experience to try to understand the actions of

others, without knowing that one is using the logic of one’s own culture.

)

• Mindset is the tendency to evaluate newly acquired information through an existing

hypothesis, rather than using new information to reassess the premises of the hypothesis

itself. Douglas MacEachin, former head of analysis at CIA, explains how this happened to

analysts trying to determine if or when the Soviet Union would invade Afghanistan in

early 1979. Once having judged what the Soviets would require for an invasion force, and

thus what military indicators would presage an invasion, analysts disregarded indicators

that did not ﬁt that judgment.

• Groupthink is the inclination to have one’s interpretation reinforced by others coming to

the same conclusion. As other analysts arrive independently at the same hypothesis, or

simply accept and thereby endorse yours, the analyst is tempted to consider the assessment

conﬁrmed. Groupthink thus helps form or reinforces mindset. It also can lead to

overconﬁdence.

• Linear analysis presumes a straight-line, sequential projection in which one development

appears to ﬂow logically from that which preceded it. An oversimpliﬁed illustration is that

if we know, for example, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, we know

that he tried in several ways to obtain more of them, and that he is successfully concealing

what he has done subsequently, linear analysis would lead one to conclude that what he

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ANALYSIS FOR STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE

has done subsequently is acquire more weapons of mass destruction. Linear analysis does

not allow for the unexpected outcome. As Princeton professor Robert L. Hutchings –

former chairman of the National Intelligence Council – put it, “Linear analysis will get

you a much-changed caterpillar, but it won’t get you a butterﬂy. For that you need a leap

of imagination.”

An old example is still one of the best examples of mirror-imaging. The most dangerous

superpower confrontation of the Cold War posed the analytic question of whether or not the

Soviet Union would send oﬀensive missiles to Cuba. The judgment of analysts across the US

Intelligence Community was that a rational actor would not do this, that Soviet leader Nikita

Khrushchev would know better than to run such a risk. Yet he sent the missiles on their way.

Ironically, the US analysts ultimately were right and Khrushchev was wrong. Sending the

missiles was a major error. His humiliating withdrawal of them contributed to his ouster. But

the analysts’ misjudgment points up the need to be skeptical of a “rational actor” model. The

Soviet leader did not see the risk equation in the same way. In the end, it was our insuﬃcient

understanding of his psychology and world view that led us to believe the act of sending the

missiles would be an irrational option.

Analysts have on a number of occasions been surprised by what seemed from the US

perspective to be irrational decisions by foreign leaders. Soviet tanks crushed the reformist

government in Czechoslovakia in 1968 when it did not seem in Moscow’s interest to do so. In

1973, US (and Israeli) intelligence analysts concluded that it made little sense for Egypt and

Syria to attack Israel, given the military inferiority of the Arab side as demonstrated in the 1967

war. It seemed irrational for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1990, and for India to

explode a nuclear bomb in 1998. But the decision-maker who counted did not see these

actions as irrational. (Who knows but what Saddam’s analysts concluded in 2003 that the US

was only bluﬃng and would not actually invade Iraq!) Getting out of one’s “Western” mindset

is always diﬃcult, but it is critical if we are to assess correctly the motives and policies of foreign

leaders.

The controversial analytic estimate in September 2002 concerning Saddam Hussein’s

weapons of mass destruction contained a “perfect storm” of analytic pitfalls. Virtually all of

them – mindset, groupthink, and linear analysis – were in evidence to some degree, resulting

in a warning for the ages to be wary and to question the conventional wisdom. As a British

scholar describes it, the group-think consensus that Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass

destruction was formed

[D]espite the intelligence community’s own agreed assessments that the evidence didn’t indicate

that he was, or, for that matter, that he wasn’t, since the information was too fragmentary to know

with certainty and Saddam too mercurial to predict with conﬁdence. The consensus at work had its

roots not in raw intelligence or other substantive evidence but in unanswered questions and

political assumptions....

Recognizing patterns

Analysis in the ﬁrst instance is about recognizing patterns. There appears to be a pattern in the

concern about how current intelligence analysis draws emphasis away from in-depth, long-

term analysis. Although policymakers – especially when a new administration takes oﬃce –

insist that they want long-term projections that will help them anticipate events and plan wise

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JOHN HOLLISTER HEDLEY

policies, their attention invariably becomes riveted on the here and now. This has happened

time and again, and it should not come as a surprise. It is the here and now that must be

addressed, which has to be dealt with. At the very least, the ever-present media will expect a

reaction, which the media will spotlight and telecast, broadcast, and reproduce around the

world for impact in the farthest corners of the globe. The fact that developments world wide

are reported in real time contributes to an atmosphere of perpetual crisis, of needing to respond

instantly to anything and everything – an atmosphere in which current intelligence carries

the day.

The fact is, decision-makers want and need both long-range and current analysis. It is not an

either-or proposition, but the balance probably had tipped away from the in-depth research that

is critical to developing expertise. The chorus of conventional wisdom in which post-9/11

inquiries decried an over-emphasis on current intelligence is being heard and acted upon.

The National Intelligence Council, for example, already a center of strategic analysis which

produces national intelligence estimates and leads Intelligence Community projects, is placing

increased emphasis on peer review and the use of outside experts. And the National Intelli-

gence Council has created a new Long-Range Analysis Unit, walled oﬀ from any current

intelligence demands, to help lead interagency analysis on long-term and under-examined

strategic issues.

Occupational hazard

It is easy, of course, to cite instances in which US intelligence assessments missed the mark. The

news media do so rather gleefully. It is the nature of their business, just as missing the mark is in

the nature of the intelligence business. It is the analyst’s daily occupational hazard. More than

twenty-ﬁve years ago, Columbia University scholar Richard Betts asserted that intelligence

failures are not only inevitable, they are natural.

They still are, and will continue to be, because

to do their job well, intelligence analysts must be willing to take risks. No matter how

incomplete, inadequate, uncertain, or contradictory the information on which a judgment must

be made, the judgment is nevertheless expected and must be made. And making it necessarily

entails a recognition of the risk that the judgment can miss the mark.

Sherman Kent, a former professor of European history who in a thirty-year career in intelli-

gence earned a reputation as perhaps America’s foremost practitioner of the analytic craft, was

directly involved in the classic misjudgment at the outset of the Cuban missile crisis. Reﬂecting

on it later, Kent asked rhetorically how it could have happened. “The short answer,” he wrote,

“is that, lacking direct evidence, we went to the next best thing, namely information which

might indicate the true course of developments.”

The reader should mentally underline

“might.” As Kent put it, if a national intelligence estimate “could be conﬁned to statements of

indisputable fact, the task would be safe and easy. Of course the result could not then be called

an estimate.”

There is no bureaucratic reorganization that can solve once and for all the problem of

preventing intelligence misjudgments, because uncertainty itself is the problem. The

inevitability of intelligence failures – if this means not predicting exactly when and how

something might catch the US by surprise – virtually has the certainty of a law of physics.

No one can predict the future, and no one person or organization can be right on all subjects

at all times. Allegations of intelligence failure therefore are inevitable, in large part because, in

intelligence, failures are inevitable. And failures are trumpeted while successes often are publicly

unknown. Analysts have to accept this as the cost of doing business. But rest assured that

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ANALYSIS FOR STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE

intelligence often is on target. Presidents would not insist upon it as a daily diet and Congress

would not demand and fund it if it were not of value. Much of the value is incremental, and

does not come in dramatic, bolt-from-the-blue revelations, but the value is there. And it is a safe

bet that it is best produced by analysts who park their preconceptions at the door, constantly

review indicators from all sources, question conventional wisdom and their own assumptions

(especially if analytical consensus emerges quickly) and weigh alternative explanations.

Human nature being what it is, the various pitfalls discussed above will surely continue to

challenge an objective perception and explanation of events. It seems a safe prediction that one

or more of these pitfalls will derail an analyst, even if not in a cyclical pattern, in some future

instance, notwithstanding any reorganization, training program, or degree of on-the-job

emphasis. But new eﬀorts are under way to improve the odds, and renewed eﬀorts always are

worth making. At CIA, for example, home of the Intelligence Community’s largest analytic

component, the creation by the year 2000 of the Sherman Kent School of Intelligence Analysis

testiﬁed to an intensive eﬀort to teach the tradecraft of intelligence analysis. It is unlikely that

anyone will walk into any organization in the US Intelligence Community without having to

learn and practice the tradecraft. So, at CIA, experienced intelligence oﬃcers with extensive

analytic experience run a Career Analyst Program for new analysts, who now spend their ﬁrst

ﬁve months with the agency developing the specialized thinking, writing, and brieﬁng skills

of intelligence analysis. Interim assignments enable them to apply themselves in various jobs

throughout the agency and elsewhere in the Intelligence Community.

On-the-job training continues throughout an analyst’s career. Supervisors provide men-

toring. Editorial reviews help ensure that analysts communicate their message clearly. Peer

review helps shape their research eﬀort and critique their preliminary ﬁndings. The profes-

sionalizing of today’s analysts emphasizes the use of multiple hypotheses and various alternative

interpretations of trends and indications. The Oﬃce of the Director of National Intelligence

promotes critical discussion among analysts throughout the Intelligence Community in

addressing analytical challenges.

Personality and temperament also factor into what makes an eﬀective analyst. Those who

would work in current intelligence assignments, especially, must be able to work with short

deadlines. Structure and predictability may be in short supply. What is guaranteed is a diet of

long hours under pressure, and a need to be responsive and ﬂexible. In-depth research requires

sifting through mounds of data, and conceptualizing from that data calls for persistent, hard

study, developing and bringing substantive knowledge to bear, and doing deep thinking for

long stretches. But what also is guaranteed is an unparalleled opportunity to know more about

what is happening around the globe. Excitement may not be constant, but a sense of satisfaction

characteristically accompanies the work.

Intelligence analysis opens a unique window on world aﬀairs. It oﬀers the prospect that one

person’s contribution can make a diﬀerence in American foreign policy. It oﬀers the thrill of

the hunt, the adrenalin that pumps when deadline looms. Analysts who write an item that

runs in the President’s Daily Brieﬁng know that their judgment is appearing in the publication

with the smallest and most inﬂuential subscription list in the world. Joining forces throughout

the US Intelligence Community, analysts illuminate complex issues, detect patterns, identify

targets, and increase the US Government’s understanding of far-ﬂung developments. Together

they contribute signiﬁcantly to national security in a fascinating profession.

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JOHN HOLLISTER HEDLEY

Notes

1 Ronald D. Garst and Max L. Gross, “On Becoming An Intelligence Analyst,” in Learning With

Professionals: Selected Works from the Joint Military Intelligence College (Washington, DC: Joint Military

Intelligence College, 2005), p. 39.

2 Foreword to The Unknown CIA, by Russell Jack Smith (Washington, DC: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1989)

pp. ix, x.

3 William F. Brei, “Getting Intelligence Right: The Power of Logical Procedure,” in Learning With

Professionals (Washington, DC: Joint Military Intelligence College, 2005), p. 55.

4 Ibid., p. 50.

5 Chiefs of State and Cabinet Oﬃcers and the World Factbook are published both in classiﬁed and

unclassiﬁed versions, the latter for public use and available on CIA’s Website.

6 Carmen A. Medina, “The Coming Revolution in Intelligence Analysis: What To Do When

Traditional Models Fail,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 46, No. 3, 2002, pp. 24–26.

7 Foreword to Richards J. Heuer, Jr., Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (Washington DC: Center for the

Study of Intelligence, 1999) p. xi.

8 Quoted by James S. Major in “The Basic Tools of Writing With Intelligence,” Learning With

Professionals, p. 9.

9 Central Intelligence Agency, “Soviet Economic Problems Multiply,” January 9, 1964, released by

the CIA Historical-Review Program and quoted in Fifty Years of Informing Policy (Washington, DC:

Directorate of Intelligence, 2002), p. 42.

10 Ibid., p 45.

11 NIE 11–4–78, “Soviet Goals and Expectations in the Global Power Arena,” released by the CIA

Historical-Review Program and quoted in Donald P. Steury (ed.), Intentions and Capabilities: Estimates

on Soviet Strategic Forces, 1950–1983 (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1996),

p. 474.

12 Medina, op. cit., p. 28.

13 Fulton T. Armstrong, “Ways To Make Analysis Relevant but Not Prescriptive,” Studies in Intelligence,

Vol. 46, No. 3, 2002, pp. 37, 42–43.

14 Martin C. Petersen, Science Applications International Corporation, unpublished remarks at

Conference on Intelligence Studies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, February 3,

2006.

15 See, for example, 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks

upon the United States (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), and Report of the Commission on the

Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (Washington, DC: US

Government Printing Oﬃce, 2005). Recommended as the best single assessment of the 9/11 Report

and the consequent rapid congressional and White House response manifest in the Intelligence

Reform Act is Richard Posner, Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11

(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleﬁeld Publishers, Inc., 2005).

16 Thomas Dowling, “Failures of Imagination: Thoughts on the 9/11 Commission Report,” Learning

With Professionals, pp. 133, 135.

17 Rob Johnston, Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community (Washington, DC: Center for the

Study of Intelligence, 2005), pp. 75–76.

18 Douglas J. MacEachin, Predicting the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: The Intelligence Community’s Record,

monograph published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2002.

19 Robert F. Hutchings in the Preface to Mapping the Global Future (Washington, DC: National Intelli-

gence Council, 2004), p. 1.

20 Philip H.J. Davies, “Intelligence Culture and Intelligence Failure in Britain and the United States,”

Cambridge Review of International Aﬀairs, Vol. 17, No. 3, October 2004, p. 517.

21 Creation of the Long-Range Analysis Unit was announced publicly on March 23, 2006, at the annual

meeting of the International Studies Association in San Diego, CA.

22 Richard K. Betts, “Analysis, War and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable,” World

Politics, Vol. 31, No. 1, October 1978, reprinted with permission in Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 23, No. 3,

Fall 1979, p. 54.

23 John Hollister Hedley, “Learning from Intelligence Failures,” International Journal of Intelligence and

Counterintelligence, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall 2005, p. 437.

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ANALYSIS FOR STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE

24 Sherman Kent, “A Crucial Estimate Relived,” originally appearing in the classiﬁed Spring 1964 issue

of CIA’s internal journal, Studies in Intelligence, republished in Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 35, No. 4,

Winter 1991, p. 67.

25 Ibid., p. 65

26 John Hollister Hedley, “The DI: A History of Service,” in Fifty Years of Informing Policy, Washington,

DC: Directorate of Intelligence, 2002, p. 17.

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JOHN HOLLISTER HEDLEY

Part 5

Counterintelligence and covert action

Cold War intelligence defectors

Nigel West

The objective of every counter-intelligence organization is to identify, penetrate and then

control or neutralize its adversary, and during the Cold War the opportunities aﬀorded by

intelligence defectors provided the principal protagonists with the most eﬀective means of

achieving their goals.

By way of deﬁnition, a defector is an individual who is either an intelligence oﬃcer, or has

worked as a cooptee for an intelligence agency, or has suﬃcient knowledge of intelligence

signiﬁcance to be a valued asset and merit political asylum. Thus Arkadi Shevchenko, although

a regular diplomat at the United Nations, should be counted as a defector, partly because he had

acted as a spy for the CIA for several months prior to his defection, but also because his

knowledge included information concerning the KGB’s rezidentura in New York, and its

operations. Equally, the Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko qualiﬁes for inclusion as his MiG-25,

which he ﬂew to Japan, amounted to an impressive technical intelligence coup. Similarly,

George Blake and Edward Lee Howard, who were not intelligence oﬃcers at the time of their

defections, deserve the description, even if their settlement in Moscow was as a consequence of

a fear of imminent arrest.

The physical act of seeking political asylum in an adversary’s country is known as defection,

and the perpetrators may have been motivated by self-preservation, ideology, resentment, a

personal or professional crisis, or some other psychological factor. Defectors to Moscow were

invariably driven by the need to escape the imminent consequences of their espionage, and this

category includes Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Glen Souther and Ed Howard. Defectors to

the United States were more numerous and most were prompted by a fear of recall to Moscow

(Igor Gouzenko, Piotr Deriabin, Yuri Rastvorov, Vladimir Petrov, Anatoli Golitsyn, Vladimir

Kuzichkin, Sergei Bokhan, Arkadi Shevchenko), or by the need to terminate a period of

active espionage (Michael Goleniewski, Oleg Lyalin, Oleg Gordievsky). Although almost all

subsequently espoused political or ideological motivations for the defections, their personal

circumstances were invariably complicated by adverse personal, family or professional factors

which could be remedied or improved by the lure of exchanging valuable information for

resettlement.

Defectors have been proved to be an exceptionally important source of information and also

act as good indicators of the integrity of a particular counter-intelligence agency. The statistics

229

demonstrate that few spies are caught as a result of the “vigilance of colleagues” or routine

security screening. Overwhelmingly, they are arrested because they have been identiﬁed to

molehunters, either by an active source or, most likely, by a defector.

While the Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Cuban, East German and Polish services proved

resilient to penetration by western agencies, they all suﬀered from very damaging defections. In

contrast neither the FBI, CIA, MI5, DST, DGSE nor SIS ever endured the loss of a serving

oﬃcer to physical defection, although the BND and BfV experienced long-term penetration

and frequent defections throughout the Cold War.

Defectors have changed the course of history, and the way history has been interpreted.

The defection of Igor Gouzenko in September 1945 may be taken as a useful starting-point

for the Cold War, but his decision to switch sides predated similar choices taken by Louis

Budenz, Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, all of whom supplied valuable infor-

mation about Soviet espionage in the United States. Bentley, though widely disparaged in the

media at the time, was responsible for initiating over a hundred investigations conducted by

the FBI.

The defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951 certainly changed British

culture. Hitherto the concept of the mole, the agent farmed for a long-term return on

investment, was almost completely unknown, although subsequent reexamination of the claims

made by the prewar defector Walter Kritivsky suggested that when interviewed by MI5 in 1940

he had been the ﬁrst to provide information about spies who would later turn out to be Donald

Maclean, Kim Philby and John Cairncross. Similarly, the defection of Vladimir and Evdokia

Petrov in Canberra in April 1954 was the ﬁrst example of a rezident switching sides. For a

variety of reasons 1954 was deﬁnitely the year of the defector, with Piotr Deriabin and Nikolai

Khokhlov also line-crossing, all within two months of each other, and the drama played out in

Australia.

The Cold War defectors earned their resettlement through a “meal-ticket”, being the

information they can trade for a new life, and were regarded highly by counter-intelligence

agencies because they generally arrived well equipped, fully aware of the need to provide

a meal-ticket of value. Very few, if any, made spontaneous decisions, and most took a long

period agonizing over their choice and acquiring information that would guarantee them a

good reception. This material falls into six distinct categories: knowledge of future plans;

current operations; past events; order-of-battle data; canteen or corridor gossip; and the

recommendations of other candidates for recruitment. All could prove to be of exceptional

importance.

By the nature of their work defectors tended to be better informed than most of their

contemporaries in their restricted societies, perhaps more politically aware, and generally well

educated with experience of foreign travel and a grasp of other languages. However, their

relative sophistication raised the specter of the despatched defector, as espoused by Anatoli

Golitsyn, a phenomenon the existence of which has never been proved. The concept of

sending a staﬀ oﬃcer to an adversary is a high-stakes game, and there are few purported

examples, although Yuri Nosenko received hostile treatment, including lengthy incarceration,

because it was suspected he was just such an individual. The best-publicized example is that

of Oleg Tumanov, but there is evidence to suggest that his version of events, as described

in his autobiography, is a fabrication designed to conceal the truth, that he was a genuine

defector who was found by the KGB and persuaded to spy after he had been resettled

in Munich. His redefection occurred because he had been warned of his imminent betrayal

by another defector, Viktor Gundarev, who knew the details of his cooperation with the

KGB.

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NIGEL WEST

What makes the Tumanov case so piquant is that he gave evidence on the defection

phenomenon to Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in October 1987, along

with Stanislas Levchenko and Viktor Belenko.

In David Wise’s The Spy Who Got Away Donald Jameson, a legendary CIA case oﬃcer (and

later vice president of the Jamestown Foundation), recalled a false defector in Manila, a trade

mission oﬃcial who was debriefed in Munich in 1983, apparently for the purpose of testing the

relationship between the CIA and the Philippine security apparatus. Precisely what happened

thereafter is unknown.

There are three other examples. In Montreal Anatoli Maximov, codenamed GOLDMINE,

appeared to succumb to a pitch from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) but seems

to have declared at least a partial part of the recruitment to his rezident who authorized a

continuing contact. This was a bold and dangerous strategy, but there were compelling reasons

at the time to allow the relationship to continue. The KGB wanted to test its own mole already

inside the RCMP, whose existence was unknown to Maximov, and believed it had control over

the operational game. This was an extraordinarily exceptional case, requiring a sanction from

the very top of the KGB, but it is an illustration of the very controlled environment in which

such enterprises could be contemplated.

In one case, a contact was established with a high-value oﬃcer in Moscow (codenamed

PROLOGUE) who expressed a desire to defect. The skeptics in the CIA were not surprised

when, as the moment came for his exﬁltration, PROLOGUE made a feeble excuse to break oﬀ

the contact. Forensic analysis suggests the entire exercise had been undertaken to peddle certain

disinformation designed to protect a mole inside the CIA, Aldrich Ames. The acid test had

been PROLOGUE’s willingness to take the crucial step and place himself entirely in the hands

of the CIA, and when the moment came the KGB understandably backed away.

The overwhelming need to provide the CIA molehunters with alternative explanations for

obvious leaks and to distract them from their quarry prompted the KGB to take some desperate

measures, As well as PROLOGUE, a source in Germany supplied some authentic information

about the case oﬃcer handling an agent with the codename GT/FITNESS. The source

asserted that the leaks had come from the CIA communications center at Warrenton, Virginia.

A lengthy investigation suggested the source was a KGB-controlled double agent, but not

before the molehunters, then closing in on Aldrich Ames, were temporarily distracted.

The fear of the false defector essentially handicapped, if not paralysed, American counter-

intelligence eﬀorts to attract Soviet defectors between 1964, when Nosenko was denounced as

a plant, and 1975 when the COURTSHIP project was initiated to reverse the policy. Another

hazard was that of redefection, surely the ultimate rejection, and maybe a sign of failure on

the part of the putative asylum host. Vitali Yurchenko, who returned to Moscow in 1985 is

probably the best known, but is by no means a unique example. Others include: J.D. Tasoev and

Oleg Bitov from London; Andrei Remenchuk from Montreal; Nikolai Petrov from Jakarta;

Artush Hovanesian from Turkey; Evgenni Sorokin from Vientiane. Redefection may occur for

a combination of reasons but it is an occupational hazard in all free countries where someone

granted asylum is quite free to return home. Indeed, to prevent them would be a breach of the

law in most circumstances. Nevertheless, redefection may oﬀer the opportunity of a propaganda

coup, and both Bitov and Yurchenko were paraded at press conferences despite the KGB’s

knowledge that neither had been the victim of an abduction, as alleged. Their separate stories,

of being held against their will and being administered sedatives and other drugs, were

never believed by the KGB, although political expediency ensured both men received a very

sympathetic, if cosmetic, welcome. Yurchenko’s change of heart, apparently spontaneous and

unrehearsed, took place while he had been dining alone in Georgetown with an inexperienced

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COLD WAR INTELLIGENCE DEFECTORS

young security oﬃcer, but it prompted an intense debate about the possibility that he was

indeed a rare example of a despatched defector. On the one hand it appeared his information,

about Ed Howard and Ronald Pelton, had been authentic, but might there have been an

underlying subplot, perhaps an eﬀort to discard unproductive agents so as to protect a more

valuable spy? This interpretation would surface again when Aldrich Ames was arrested, and yet

again when, following the exposure of Robert Hanssen, there was speculation about another,

hitherto undetected supermole.

Ultimately, the counter-intelligence analysts concluded that Yurchenko had been a genuine

defector, albeit one troubled by the belief that he was suﬀering from the terminal stomach

cancer that had killed his mother. A series of disappointments followed during his resettlement,

including rejection by his former lover, and an unsuccessful tour of the country, intended as a

vacation, which sent him into a depression, apparently caused by the realization that he would

ﬁnd life on his own in the United States too great a challenge.

So what possesses an intelligence oﬃcer, presumably a member of his society’s well-educated

and urbane elite, to abandon the system he has grown up in and beneﬁted from, for an alien

culture? Can defectors be relied upon to tell the truth? Human nature suggests they may

have sought to impress their hosts by pretending to have undergone a political conversion, in

preference to revealing aspects of their own frailty which may not necessarily reﬂect well upon

them. Under close examination, few defectors really seem to have really changed their political

creed, but more likely have experienced professional, personal or family crises that have acted as

a catalyst. Igor Gouzenko and Vladimir Kuzichkin, for example, feared the consequences of

being disciplined for professional lapses. Oleg Gordievsky and Oleg Lyalin had experienced

marital problems and found solutions that might have disadvantaged their careers.

A senior French intelligence oﬃcer, the Comte de Marenches, is credited with the observa-

tion that defector information is like wine: the ﬁrst pressing is best, and subsequent growths are

generally inferior. The implication is that some defectors are pathological attention-seekers

who succumb to embroidery to retain contact with their new professional colleagues, and

this accusation has been leveled at both Igor Gouzenko and Anatoli Golitsyn. Both proved

exceptionally temperamental, and later complained that some of their initial information had

been ignored, misinterpreted or deliberately overlooked, casting a pall over the standard of their

resettlement handling.

Sensitive post-defection treatment is vital if others are to be encouraged to follow an indi-

vidual’s example, and litigation claiming breach of promise or other complaints are an

anathema. Unfortunately, very few intelligence defectors can be found suitable work in their

ﬁeld, so retraining is invariably necessary, with mixed results. Occasionally a defector can be

retained as a consultant, as happened with Anatoli Golitsyn, Yuri Nosenko and Nikolai

Artamonov, but very few experience Piotr Deriabin’s total absorption into the intelligence

community, or ﬁnd that their associated professional skills are as highly prized as those of the

computer genius Viktor Sheymov. A large number become authors, intending to capitalize on

their experiences, but very few go on to write more books, although Igor Gouzenko, Grigori

Tokaev and Vladimir Rezun (alias Victor Suvorov) are notable exceptions.

Aside from the immediate and obvious value of a defector, whose meal-ticket can be

exploited, defectors represent something of a yardstick by which the intelligence agencies of

their host countries can be assessed. For example, Yuri Rastvorov originally intended to

defect to the British, not the Americans, but changed his mind when he suspected the Secret

Intelligence Service had been penetrated. Indeed, between the defections of Grigori Tokaty in

1946 and Oleg Lyalin in 1971, no British intelligence agency received any Soviet Bloc defector,

whereas many opted for the CIA, a strong indication that potential candidates considered the

232

NIGEL WEST

security environment in England too dangerous because of high-level penetration. However,

the safe receipt and resettlement of a defector can represent an opportunity to undertake a

“dog-and-pony show,” an international tour of allied intelligence agencies so other liaison

services can meet and talk to an authentic defector. Such prestige events allow agencies to

recover lost reputations and, in the case of Oleg Gordievsky’s dramatic exﬁltration from

Moscow in August 1985, prove that a long-term source could be run successfully over a period

of years, in his case eleven, and then be rescued from hostile territory should the need arise.

Such achievements demonstrate eloquently that an agency’s integrity remains intact.

Accordingly, defectors during the Cold War fulﬁlled many functions, far beyond their

obvious utility as sources of reliable intelligence. Inevitably, of course, myths have been created

around them, perhaps the most widely circulated being the danger of assassination. In fact,

although the KGB is known to have traced Igor Gouzenko, Vladimir Petrov, Alexander Orlov

and made considerable eﬀorts to ﬁnd Oleg Lyalin, the only intelligence defectors to have been

the victims of a deliberate attempt on their lives were Nikolai Khokhlov and the Bulgarian

defector Vladimir Kostov, and both survived the experience. Thus the phenomenon of

Cold War defection can be viewed as having been not entirely risk-free, but was certainly an

inﬁnitely valuable source of counter-intelligence data.

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Akhmedov, Ismail, In and Out of Stalin’s GRU. London: Arms & Armour; 1984.

Andrew, Christopher and Gordievsky, Oleg, KGB: The Inside Story. London: Hodder; 1990.

Bailey, Geoﬀrey, The Conspirators. New York: Harper Bros; 1960.

—— , KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents. Hodder; 1974.

Barron, John, KGB Today: The Hidden Hand. New York: Reader’s Digest; 1983.

Bentley, Elizabeth, Out of Bondage. New York: Ivy Books; 1988.

Bernikow, Louise, Abel. New York: Trident; 1970.

Brook-Shepherd, Gordon, The Storm Birds. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 1988.

Carr, Barbara, Loginov: Spy in the Sun. New York: Howard Timmins; 1969.

Chambers, Whittaker, Witness. London: Random House; 1952.

Corson, William and Crowley, Robert, The New KGB. New York: Morrow; 1985.

Corson, William, Trento, Susan, and Trento, Joseph, Widows. New York: Crown; 1989.

Dallin, David, Soviet Espionage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 1955.

Deriabin, Peter, and Bagley, T.H., The KGB: Masters of the Soviet Union. New York: Hippocrene; 1990.

Deriabin, Peter and Gibney, Frank, The Secret World. New York: Doubleday; 1959.

Donovan, James, Strangers on a Bridge. New York: Atheneum; 1964.

Dzhirkvelov, Ilya, Secret Servant. London: Collins; 1987.

Dziak, John, Chekisty. New York: Lexington Books; 1988.

Epstein, Edward Jay, Deception. New York: Simon & Schuster; 1989.

Foote, Alexander, Handbook for Spies. London: Museum Press; 1964.

Golitsyn, Anatoli, New Lies for Old. London: Bodley Head; 1984.

Gouzenko, Igor, The Iron Curtain. New York: Dutton; 1948.

Hood, William, Mole. New York: W.W. Norton; 1982.

Hurt, Henry, Shadrin: The Spy Who Never Came Back. New York: McGraw Hill; 1981.

Kessler, Ronald, Spy vs Spy. New York: Scribner’s; 1988.

Khokhlov, Nikolai, In the Name of Conscience. New York: McKay; 1959.

Krivitsky, Walter, In Stalin’s Secret Service. New York: Harper Bros; 1939.

Kuzichkin, Vladimir, Inside the KGB. London: Andre Deutsch; 1990.

Levchenko, Stanislav, On the Wrong Side. Washington DC: Pergamon-Brassey; 1988.

Mangold, Tom, Cold Warrior. New York: Simon & Schuster; 1991.

Manne, Robert, The Petrov Aﬀair. Sydney: Pergamon; 1987.

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COLD WAR INTELLIGENCE DEFECTORS

Martin, David C., Wilderness of Mirrors. New York: Harper & Row; 1980.

Massing, Hede, This Deception. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce; 1951.

Petrov, Vladimir and Evdokia, Empire of Fear. London: Frederick Praeger; 1956.

Philby, Kim, My Silent War. London: McGibbon & Kee; 1968.

Pincher, Chapman, Their Trade is Treachery. London: Sidgwick & Jackson; 1981.

—— , Too Secret Too Long. London: Sidgwick & Jackson; 1984.

Richelson, Jeﬀrey T., Sword and Shield. New York: Ballinger; 1986.

Romerstein, Herbert and Levchenko, Stanislav, The KGB against the “Main Enemy”. New York:

Lexington; 1989.

Rositske, Harry, The KGB: The Eyes of Russia. New York: Doubleday; 1981.

Sakharov, Vladimir, High Treason. New York: Putnam’s; 1980.

Sigl, Rupert, In the Claws of the KGB. New York: Dorrance; 1978.

Suvurov, Viktor, Inside Soviet Military Intelligence. London: Hamish Hamilton; 1984.

Werner, Ruth, Sonya’s Report. London: Chatto & Windus; 1991.

Wise, David, Molehunt. New York: Random House; 1992.

Appendix I. US defectors to the Soviet Union

Appendix II. Soviet intelligence defectors

Name Agency Date of defection Conclusion

Barr, Joel Contractor 1950 Died 1998

Carney, Jeﬀrey M. Air Force 1985 38 years prison

Cohen, Lona 1950 Died 1993

Cohen, Morris Army 1950 Died 1995

Field, Noel State 1949 Died

Hamilton, Victor NSA 1963 Found in Russia 1992

Howard, Edward Lee CIA 1985 Accidental death 2000

Martin, William H. NSA 1960 Now Sokolovsky

Mitchell, Bernon F. NSA 1960 Return denied in 1979

Peri, Michael A. Army 1989 30 years prison

Rohrer, Glen R. Army 1965

Sarant, Alfred Contractor 1950 Died 1979

Souther, Glenn M. Navy 1986 Suicide, June 1989

Name Agency Location Conclusion

Gouzenko, Igor GRU Canada, September 1945

Granovsky, Anatoli NKVD Stockholm, September 1946

Bakhlanov, Boris NKVD Vienna, July 1947

Borodin, Nikolai GRU London, August 1948

Tasoev, J.D. NKVD Berlin, 1948 Redefected

Tokaev, Grigori GRU Berlin, 1948

Rastvorov, Yuri KGB Tokyo, January 1954

Burlutsky, Grigori KGB Berlin, June 1954

Deriabin, Piotr KGB Vienna, February 1954

Khokhlov, Nikolai KGB Frankfurt, February 1954

Petrov, Vladimir KGB Canberra, April 1954

Petrova, Evdokia KGB Darwin, April 1954

Hayhanen, Reino KGB Paris, May 1957

Tuomi, Kaarlo KGB Milwaukee, March 1959

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NIGEL WEST

Name Agency Location Conclusion

Kaznacheev, Alexander KGB Rangoon, June 1959

Goleniewski, Michal UB Berlin, December 1960

Stashinski, Bogdan KGB Berlin, December 1961

Golitsyn, Anatoli KGB Helsinki, December 1961

Krotkov, Yuri KGB London, September 1963

Nosenko, Yuri KGB Geneva, February 1964

Framakovsky, Olga KGB Beirut, October 1966

Runge, Evgeni KGB Berlin, October 1967

Sigl, Rupert KGB Berlin, April 1969

Kiselnikova, Raya KGB Mexico City, February 1970

Sakharov, Vladimir KGB Kuwait, July 1971

Lyalin, Oleg KGB London, August 1971

Chebotarev, Anatoli GRU Brussels, October 1971 Redefected

Sabotka, Anton KGB Montreal, March 1972

Petrov, Nikolai GRU Jakarta, June 1972 Redefected

Hovanesian, Artush KGB Turkey, July 1972 Redefected

Sorokin, Evgeni GRU Vientiane, September 1972 Redefected

Myagkov, Aleksei KGB Berlin, February 1974

Nadirashvili, Konstantin KGB Vienna, June 1975

Belenko, Viktor Red Air Force Hakodake, September 1976

Zemenek, Ludek KGB New York, May 1977

Rezun, Vladimir GRU Geneva, June 1978

Levchenko, Stanislav KGB Tokyo, October 1979

Dzurkvelov, Ilya GRU Geneva, March 1978

Bogaty, Anatoli KGB Morocco, September 1982

Kuzichkin, Vladimir KGB Tehran, October 1982

Unidentiﬁed Manila, May 1983

Fen, Chang KGB New York, December 1983

Gezha, Igor KGB Delhi, March 1985

Bokhan, Sergei GRU Athens, May 1985

Yurchenko, Vitali KGB Rome, August 1985

Gordievsky, Oleg KGB London, August 1985

Gundarev, Viktor KGB Athens, February 1986

Agranyants, Andrei KGB May, July 1986

Remenchuk, Andrei GRU Montreal, December 1987 Redefected

Smurov, Yuri GRU Montreal, May 1988

Ignaste, Vladimir KGB

Papushin, Sergei KGB 1989

Baranov, Vyacheslav GRU 1991 Served 4 years

Gayduk, Anatoli KGB Canada, 1991

Lunev, Stanislav GRU Washington, 1991

Mitrokhin, Vasili KGB Riga, September 1992

Dzheikya, Rollan MFA New York, 1996

Tretyanov, Sergei KGB New York, 2001

Zaphorovsky, Vladimir KGB New York, 2002

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COLD WAR INTELLIGENCE DEFECTORS

Appendix III. Soviet Bloc intelligence defectors

Name Service Location Conclusion

Shainberg, Maurice Polish Army Tel Aviv, March 1957 Breaking from the KGB

Tisler, Frantisek StB New York, 1958

Monat, Pawel UB Vienna, June 1959 Double Eagle

Goleniewski, Michal UB Berlin, December 1960

Szabo, Laszlo AVB London, 1965

Lombard, Florentino DGI June 1967

Bittman, Ladislav StB Vienna, 1968

Sejna, Jan Czech Army Trieste, February 1968 We Will Bury You

August, Frantisek StB London, 1969

Frolik, Jozef StB London, 1969

Iacobescu, Ion DIE Paris, 1969

Hidalgo, Orlando DGI March 1970 A Spy for Fidel

Svreddlev, Stefan DS 1971

Dumitrachescu, Constantin DIE Tel Aviv, 1972

Rauta, Constantin DIE 1973

Tipanut, Virgil DIE Copenhagen, June 1975

Kostov, Vladimir DS June 1977

Marcu, Ion DIE Tehran, 1977 Canada

Pacepa, Ion DIE Bonn, July 1978 Red Horizons

Mantarov, Iordan DS Paris, 1981

Svec, Milan StB Washington, 1985

Winkler, Martin HVA Buenos Aires 1985

Dombrovski, Siegfried HVA 1985

del Pino, Raphael DGI May 1987

236

NIGEL WEST

Counterintelligence failures in

the United States

Stan A. Taylor

Introduction

As the name suggests, counterintelligence is the process of countering the hostile intelligence

activities of other states or foreign entities. The Counterintelligence Enhancement Act of 2002

requires counterintelligence to identify, assess, prioritize, and counter intelligence threats to the

United States. The US Intelligence Community (IC) is made up of sixteen somewhat

independent intelligence agencies, many with semi-autonomous sub-agencies, each of which is

responsible for its own counterintelligence.

A National Counterintelligence Executive

(NCIX) exists within the IC, but its function, according to its oﬃcial web site is to “improve

the performance of the counterintelligence (CI) community in identifying, assessing, prioritiz-

ing and countering intelligence threats to the United States; to ensure CI community eﬃciency

and eﬀectiveness, and to provide for the integration of the CI activities of the US Govern-

ment.” Exactly how NCIX does this is not made clear, but it appears up to now that its primary

power is hortatory.

Day-to-day actual counterintelligence work, however, is very fragmented and decentralized.

The very nature of counterintelligence requires that it must be performed within each IC

agency, within each of the IC sub-agencies and inter-IC oﬃces, and by every private contractor

or other entity that deals with sensitive information and activities. In other words, every entity

that deals with classiﬁed information must keep its own house clean, neither the NCIX, the

FBI, nor any other agency can do it for them. Proposals for a new super counterintelligence

agency miss this point. Counterintelligence must be decentralized.

Measuring counterintelligence failures

Measuring counterintelligence failures is not easy. Counterintelligence failures, like morning

cereal, come in many sizes, shapes, and varieties (and some are worse for you than others). Some

failures are merely mischievous while others are malicious. The most signiﬁcant may go

undetected for long periods of time, some may be detected even before they occur, and some,

though detected, may never be revealed. Nor is it possible to measure something that does not

237

happen. Nevertheless, a failure occurs anytime some counterintelligence task or function is not

carried out. Anytime a foreign nation or group gains access to US classiﬁed information,

sensitive proprietary information, or technology, counterintelligence, to one degree or another,

has failed. Anytime opportunities are missed to use the agents of hostile nations or groups to

enhance your own security, counterintelligence has failed. In a general sense, anytime a hostile

intelligence service has succeeded in diminishing US national security and placing American

citizens at greater risk, some aspect of counterintelligence work has been inadequate.

No one really knows how much sensitive information ends up in the hands of those who

wish to harm America. But estimates do exist of how many groups are seeking sensitive

information. In a report to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border

Security and Claims in 2004, then National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX) Michelle

Van Cleve claimed that “[n]early 140 nations and some 35 known and suspected terrorist

organizations currently target the United States for intelligence collection through human

espionage and by other means.” Many of these attempts involve sensitive economic or pro-

prietary information and fall within the purview of economic espionage, but others may

result in compromising American defenses. Often the information obtained is of little import,

sometimes it is actually misleading, but occasionally it is very damaging to US national interests.

Critical foreign policy or national security initiatives may be compromised, sensitive tech-

nology or information may be lost, and the economic advantage or gain that even seemingly

insigniﬁcant proprietary information might bring to the nation may never be realized if

counterintelligence fails.

The most glaring, often the most damaging, and always the ones that garner the most public

and media attention are those failures in which US citizens who are in positions of trust and are

charged to protect classiﬁed information reveal that information to others in violation of that

trust. What follows is a list of the primary tasks or practices of counterintelligence followed

by examples of failures to perform that particular task.

However, while this list focuses on

individuals who have betrayed their country, it is important to keep in mind that many other

kinds of failures occur that do not involve treason.

The analysis below draws from information about American traitors collected by either

the Defense Personnel Security Research Center (PERSEREC) or the updated data base

collected from open sources by Taylor and Snow.

According to the PERSEREC data base, 153

Americans have committed treason between 1947 and 2004. The Taylor and Snow data base

consists of 186 traitors from 1941 to 2005.

Counterintelligence tasks and failures

Pre-employment background checks

All IC employees, as well as all people who handle classiﬁed information, are given background

checks before they can gain access to that information. These background checks begin with

biographical data but usually require interviews with people who have known the applicants.

Ideally, questions will be asked that will reveal character ﬂaws, divided loyalties, personality

disorders, and other characteristics that might disqualify them from dealing with sensitive

national security information. For many IC agencies, this background check may also involve

polygraph or lie detector tests. While many scholars doubt the utility and validity of the

polygraph, few doubt that the fear of “being put on the box” acts as a deterrent. While the CIA,

the National Reconnaissance Oﬃce (NRO), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the

National Security Agency (NSA) have used the polygraph for many years, the Federal Bureau

238

STAN A. TAYLOR

of Investigation (FBI) only began to polygraph employees after the disastrous Robert Hanssen

case.

Inadequate background checking or vetting, as it is often called, can be a source of counter-

intelligence failures. Failure to detect character ﬂaws, indications of disloyalty, or other attributes

that may reveal a reasonable possibility of treason at this stage of the employment process will

result in dubious employees being placed throughout various intelligence agencies and in other

positions of trust where classiﬁed or sensitive information is handled.

Unfortunately, pre-employment vetting does not work very well for two reasons; ﬁrst,

strictly speaking, it is not intended to detect treason but rather to check the suitability of new

employees to handle classiﬁed information. According to Herbig and Wiskoﬀ:

The vetting procedures for security clearance focus on the applicant’s background, past activities,

and experiences, to generate information that serves as the basis of an educated judgment on the

likelihood the person will be trustworthy and reliable. These procedures are not designed to

identify spies, and when put to the test they have not done so. At least six individuals in the

espionage database were screened and granted or retained security clearances while they were

actively engaged in espionage.

Second, not very many individuals enter intelligence professions in order to become traitors.

Even those who later betray their country for ideological or other reasons may not have

sought to gain access to classiﬁed material primarily to commit treason. Of the 186 traitors in

the Taylor and Snow data base, possibly only ﬁve may have sought professions where they

would deal with classiﬁed information for the primary purpose of providing that information

to a foreign government. And even with these ﬁve, the open source information is not entirely

clear.

Larry Wu-tai Chin may have been such a penetration agent. He joined the Communist Party

in China while he was a college student in the 1940s. He was later recruited by the US Army to

work in China during the war. After the war he became a naturalized US citizen and gained

employment with the CIA in 1952. He delivered classiﬁed information to the Chinese People’s

Republic for 33 years before he was identiﬁed by a Chinese intelligence agent who defected to

the United States.

Jonathan Pollard may also have entered work involving classiﬁed material primarily so he

could provide information to Israel. An employee of the US Navy, Pollard supplied classiﬁed

information to Israeli intelligence for nine years. His loyalty to Israel appears to have been

greater than his loyalty to his own country long before he began working for the Navy. As

Pollard and his wife grew accustomed to the monthly retainer the Israelis were paying them,

their motivation for treason gradually changed from ideology to ﬁnancial gain. At the time of

their arrest, they even had a large collection of classiﬁed information they were apparently

trying to sell to China. But it appears Pollard sought work with classiﬁed information so he

could deliver it to Israel, a fact that should have been picked in his pre-employment vetting.

Ana Belen Montes may also ﬁt into this category. She was a US citizen of Puerto Rican

descent who worked in the Justice Department. Public sources suggest she may have sought

employment with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) under instructions from Cuban

intelligence in order to have access to information desired by Cuba. She also refused advance-

ment opportunities that might have reduced her access to classiﬁed information so she could

continue to provide information to Cuba.

A more recent case involving a naturalized American of Chinese birth and his permanent

resident alien brother, Chi Mak and Tai Wang Mak, may also illustrate a vetting failure.

239

COUNTER INTELLIGENCE FAILURES IN THE USA

Although this case has not yet been tried as of this writing, it appears they sought work with

sensitive national security information primarily so they could provide that information to

China.

These may be the only cases in which people sought employment with national security

related agencies primarily to betray their country. If so, only ﬁve out of 153 traitors might

have been detected during pre-employment vetting. It does not appear that many future traitors

seek work with classiﬁed information so they can then commit treason. Nevertheless, Chin, the

Pollards, Montes, and the Mak brothers were all vetted before they were given access to

classiﬁed information and should have been stopped at that stage. Clearly, most traitors enter

the path of treason once they are into their careers. This does not prevent pre-employment

vetting from detecting character ﬂaws, but it does make it much more diﬃcult to do so.

No statistics have been made public by the government as to how many applicants for

clearances are denied access because of something detected at this stage. Obviously, those who

enter this work in order to betray their country can disguise their motives and avoid detection

during pre-employment vetting.

In-service security monitoring

Each agency also monitors its own employees during their careers. Many require periodic

polygraph tests during which the employees are asked questions about their lifestyles as well as

questions about foreign contacts and about classiﬁed material they have handled. New and

younger employees tend to be somewhat intimidated by these periodic lie detector tests. Older

ones know that “most of the devices now available, like the polygraph, detect not the lie but

anxiety about the lie.”

Moreover, the results of polygraph tests are no better than the training,

experience, and quality of the person who administers them. Other aspects of employee

lifestyles – dramatic changes in ﬁnancial worth, changes in spending habits, aberrant sexual

practices, etc. – are also observed independently and may provide questions for future polygraph

sessions as well as act as warning signs to counterintelligence oﬃcers.

When in-service monitoring is not successful, national security is weakened. A discussion

of failures to detect treason while it was being committed should not detract from the many

cases where it was detected and stopped. Open source information does not always reveal

the extent to which professional counterintelligence techniques and hard work resulted in the

capture of a traitor, often before the information was ever revealed.

A quarter of the 153 individuals in the PERSEREC data base were caught before informa-

tion was transmitted and only 20 percent of them spied longer than ﬁve years. These facts attest

to either successful counterintelligence or to poor tradecraft on the part of the traitors –

probably a little of both. Taylor and Snow expressed amazement at “the poor level of tradecraft,

even abject stupidity, displayed in many cases” of traitors appearing in their database.

Younger

spies, enlisted military personnel, and others with no training in intelligence tradecraft were the

most likely to make foolish mistakes that led to their capture.

But even those with intelligence

tradecraft training (Walker, Ames, and Hanssen, for example) made serious errors while com-

mitting treason, often brought on by overconﬁdence after long years of successful betrayal.

Nevertheless, the record of practicing traitors being overlooked during in-service monitor-

ing is one of the most discouraging aspects of counterintelligence. The failure of in-service

monitoring can be illustrated in any of a number of cases, but nowhere more dramatically than

in the case of one of the most famous and most damaging spies in American history – Aldrich

Ames. Because of his father’s long employment with the CIA, Ames began working as a

document clerk for the agency while still a college student in Washington, DC in 1967. He

240

STAN A. TAYLOR

continued with the agency through diﬀerent positions and began his nine-year career of spying

for the Soviet Union in 1985 and continued working for Russia after the Soviet regime

collapsed.

Ames’s behavior over those years should have alerted the CIA’s counterintelligence oﬃcers

and his colleagues to his treason. He openly violated agency rules many times. While stationed

in Rome he either failed to report his meetings with Soviet intelligence oﬃcers or reported

them but claimed he was trying to recruit them. Once back in the US, he openly displayed

his new wealth by paying cash for a $540,000 home, ﬂaunting his new red Jaguar automobile in

the CIA parking area, and receiving expensive cosmetic surgery for his deteriorating teeth – all

on a $64,000 annual salary. He oﬀered no better explanation for this than that his foreign-born

wife had inherited a lot of money. He apparently had few anxieties about his treason since he

passed at least two polygraph tests while an active traitor.

In-service vetting has not proven as eﬀective as one would expect it to be. Perhaps when

more sophisticated lie detection devices are available, it will be more successful.

Herbig and

Wiskoﬀ point out that at least “six Americans were screened [that is they received in-service

vetting] and then maintained their security clearances during periods when they were also

committing espionage.”

Maintaining employee job satisfaction

Many US intelligence oﬃcers, particularly over the last 30 years, have taken a ﬁrst step towards

treason when they have become dissatisﬁed or disgruntled because of career developments.

Proactive counterintelligence must examine how various intelligence agencies are treating

their employees. The secretive nature of intelligence work prevents many new employees from

gaining a full understanding of their future careers before they actually get on the job. Surely it

cannot be expected that every person hired will be successful in intelligence work. For a variety

of reasons, attrition occurs throughout the employment period in every line of work. But when

intelligence oﬃcers begin to ﬁnd out they are neither “Q” nor Jack Ryan nor most certainly

James Bond, or when poor performance evaluations start to roll in, when advancement slows

down, or even when employees sense that neither they nor their work is fully appreciated, job

dissatisfaction begins. Intelligence oﬃcers who are unhappy in their careers may turn to treason

for revenge or excitement. Or they may become prime targets for foreign recruitment. But

whether the record shows that they betrayed their country for money, for ideological reasons,

or for any of the other usually listed reasons, the earliest thoughts of treason are often justiﬁed

by job dissatisfaction.

When employees with access to national security secrets become disgruntled with their

work, they start to search for ways to “get even” with their employers. Over the years, treason

has been built on the twin foundations of ideology and money with money gradually, but

clearly, becoming the most prevalent motive.

But people who are satisﬁed with their careers

tend to be loyal to their employers and loyal people do not commit treason. And when one

“considers those who, though not completely disgruntled, were not entirely ‘gruntled’ (to

borrow from Oscar Wilde), then disgruntlement becomes a more prevalent motive” for trea-

son.

Neither sympathy for a foreign cause nor a desire for more money will cause satisﬁed

employees to betray a trust. Even dissatisﬁed employees will not commit treason as long as they

believe they can resolve problems through a fair and open personnel system.

In fact, maintaining satisﬁed employees may become one of the better defenses against

treason. In the future, the most signiﬁcant counterintelligence eﬀorts may well be made, not by

the counterintelligence icons of fact or ﬁction (James Jesus Angleton or George Smiley, for

241

COUNTER INTELLIGENCE FAILURES IN THE USA

example), but by the human resource staﬀs in each intelligence agency. Perhaps Andrew

Roberts saw only the tip of the iceberg when he wrote in 1997, “Tomorrow’s traitors are more

likely to be driven to betray not from ideological convictions but from whining complaints

about poor pension provisions or underfunded performance-related pay.”

When those who

handle secrets grudgingly plod through their daily tasks, they not only become targets for

foreign recruitment, but they often see treason as a source of revenge against their employers. It

is often only then that excitement, greater appreciation, and money become secondary motives.

Interviews with scores of former IC employees suggest that enlightened and responsive

leadership and management practices, collegial work conditions, the absence of “cronyism” in

salary and advancement decisions, fair rewards for quality service, work equality, and getting

employees to “buy” into the mission of the agency for whom they work may be the best and

most enduring counterintelligence practices. Some who have left intelligence work have

reported that even an occasional verbal expression of appreciation would have made a

diﬀerence in their feelings about their careers.

Stella Rimington, a former director of MI5, the British internal security agency, appears

to appreciate the importance of making employees feel wanted. In her novel about a ﬁctional

MI5 employee, she has the woman’s supervisor say to her, “Liz, your work is highly valued”

and “Yo u ’ve done exceedingly well.”

Few intelligence oﬃcers can claim to have heard

these words. A former Director of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center states this need very

succinctly: “Honor Thy Professionals.”

Human resource personnel may also be able to ease employees through personal life crises

that are related to stressful work conditions. As Herbig and Wiskoﬀ have noted, “one-quarter of

known American spies experienced a personal life crisis in the months before they attempted

to commit espionage.”

Many crises occur quite independent of work – parents, spouses,

and children die, illness strikes, and so on. But one wonders how many of those crises were

either work-related (divorce, illness, and psychological problems) or, though unrelated to work,

nevertheless spilled over into the work environment.

William Kampiles is an example of an employee whose treason might have been prevented

by more eﬀective personnel practices. Kampiles joined the CIA’s Directorate of Operations in

1977 and was assigned as a Watch Oﬃcer in the cable room. With his childhood dream of

wanting to work for the CIA now fulﬁlled, he looked forward to an exciting career. But

after failing to become a case oﬃcer, he resigned from the agency and concocted a plan to

demonstrate to his superiors that he had what it took to become a spy. Taking a technical

manual he had stolen from the Watch Room, Kampiles ﬂed to Greece and sold the document

to the Soviet intelligence oﬃcers for $3,000. It happened to be a manual for the highly

classiﬁed and latest real-time overhead satellite – code-named KH-11. Kampiles was obviously

unaware of the value of the document since the Soviets would undoubtedly have paid ten times

that amount for it.

On his return to the US, Kampiles contacted someone at CIA by letter and told them he had

conned the Russians out of some money and placed himself in a position to become a double

agent for the CIA. Whether his treason could have been prevented through better personnel

practices will never be known, but after failing to become a case oﬃcer, Kampiles would have

been a perfect candidate for some sort of career counseling by a human resource oﬃce. Since he

sold the manual, Kampiles is usually classiﬁed as having committed treason for ﬁnancial gain.

But disgruntlement over his failure to get into the clandestine service was his ﬁrst step and it is a

step that better career counseling might have prevented.

Kampiles also illustrates the eﬀect of fantasy in some espionage. In fact, the number of traitors

who wanted to play out a fantasy with espionage is surprising. PERSEREC lists 18 of their 153

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STAN A. TAYLOR

traitors who were fulﬁlling some sort of fantasy. Taylor and Snow call this motive the “James

Mitty” syndrome because it “combines the allure of a James Bond life style with a Walter Mitty

sense of fantasy.”

Brian Patrick Regan’s treason also illustrates the impact of disgruntlement. He worked for

both the US Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Oﬃce (NRO) for 20 years, yet was

arrested for attempting to sell national security secrets to China and Iraq in 2003. Regan

complained to fellow workers many times that his small pension was an insuﬃcient reward for

his eﬀorts. He complained about his job and about his treatment but was given no career

counseling.

Herbig and Wiskoﬀ point out that disgruntlement was a motive in 41 of their 153 cases and

then write that “among individuals with access to highly classiﬁed information in a workplace,

realizing that volunteering to spy is a potential outlet for people who are demoralized or

resentful, management should redouble eﬀorts to maintain a cohesive work environment.”

This is especially the case for the 38 spies in the PERSEREC data base who were not recruited

by a foreign intelligence service but who sought out foreign governments to whom they could

sell their secrets. Disgruntlement and its closely related sentiment, revenge, are also the primary

motives for the unauthorized disclosure of classiﬁed information – usually referred to as leaking

– that will be discussed below.

Facility security

Successful counterintelligence is impossible if facilities where secrets are produced and stored

are not secure. Every IC agency as well as every government oﬃce, institute, business, or

contractor that deals with classiﬁed information is responsible for its own facility security.

Thus, facility security varies widely from location to location with some of America’s worst

security breaches occurring at defense contractor facilities. It is the responsibility of IC counter-

intelligence oﬃcers to monitor security at all of these sites and to take actions when that security

is lax.

Some of the most sensitive defense and intelligence information within the US government

is actually in the hands of private contractors. Fourteen of the 153 traitors in the PERSEREC

data base were aﬃliated with these kinds of contractors. Others had limited experiences with

defense or intelligence contractors. Failure to maintain careful security at these facilities has

resulted in very damaging security leaks.

Perhaps the most illustrative case is the one of Christopher J. Boyce who was a young

employee at TRW, a major California defense contractor. He worked as a communication

specialist in a vault used to secure highly classiﬁed information but where security practices

were very lax. Along with his friend from high school days, Andrew D. Lee, Boyce stole or

photocopied classiﬁed information that they sold to Soviet intelligence oﬃcers at the Soviet

Embassy in Mexico City. The information compromised the Rhyolite intelligence satellite,

one of America’s most sophisticated satellite systems. Reportedly, it was the Rhyolite satellite

that, among other things, was picking up Soviet Politburo communications from car phones

until the system was compromised by Boyce and Lee.

A second example of this kind of failure is the case of Randy M. Jeﬀries who was a messenger

for a private Washington, DC ﬁrm that recorded and made transcripts of classiﬁed hearings

before the House Armed Services Committee. He was observed entering the Soviet Military

Oﬃce in Washington, DC and later arrested as he attempted to sell documents to an FBI agent

posing as a Soviet oﬃcial. Jeﬀries had a checkered employment record. He worked as a support

employee of the FBI for two years and, after losing that job, was arrested for heroin possession.

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COUNTER INTELLIGENCE FAILURES IN THE USA

Nevertheless, he obtained work at a company that dealt with a broad range of highly classiﬁed

military information. When pre-employment vetting failed to alert the company to his back-

ground, sound security practices on the part of the contractor should have prevented this

treason. The judge before whom this case was tried even commented during the trial that poor

security practices in the contracting ﬁrm contributed to the problem.

Communications security

The NSA is responsible for overall communications security. They provide, maintain, and

verify secure communications equipment at most IC agencies and other oﬃces that handle

classiﬁed information. However, each agency also carries out some communications security

functions within its own facilities.

How much information has been lost through a failure to communicate over secure lines or

a failure to use sophisticated encryption equipment is not known. Obviously, foreign agencies

are not in the habit of issuing reports on how much information they obtained through

overheard conversations. Nevertheless, it is a counterintelligence failure when it occurs if only

because it is an intelligence success to the foreign service that collects it.

But few areas of training for those who work with classiﬁed information are more important

than communication security. All too often individuals who are likely targets for foreign

surveillance will discuss classiﬁed information on open communication lines or in public

settings merely with the false reassurance created by circumlocution rather than from secure

communication practices. The security awareness posters used during World War II pictured

employees who had access to classiﬁed information having a casual conversation outside of

the oﬃce with a Nazi spy discreetly straining to overhear. The message printed on the poster

was “Loose lips sink ships.” With the spread of cell phones, text messaging, and other forms of

wireless communication, the problem goes beyond “loose lips” today.

Classiﬁcation and compartmentation

Information that might reveal sensitive national security secrets is classiﬁed by the government.

This process is meant to prevent the information from falling into the wrong hands. Informa-

tion may be classiﬁed both vertically and horizontally. There are three horizontal levels of

classiﬁed information – CONFIDENTIAL (used with decreasing frequency), SECRET, and

TOP SECRET. TOP SECRET information may be divided into vertical divisions called

codeword compartments. The information in each compartment usually comes from a unique

and speciﬁc intelligence collection source. That is, information derived from a particular

human source or through a secret technical process will be classiﬁed as TOP SECRET and

given a unique codeword. For example, intelligence derived from intercepted and decoded

communications between Soviet military and diplomatic oﬃces in the US and Moscow in the

1940s and 1950s was classiﬁed as TOP SECRET/VENONA.

Issues of classiﬁcation and compartmentation are continual thorns in the side of democratic

governments. Virtually no one believes they protect classiﬁed information as they should, but

virtually everyone agrees that governments have a legitimate right to keep sensitive national

security information secret and that a failure to do so can put security at risk.

The damage created when classiﬁed information falls into foreign hands may range from

slight to very serious. However, those who steal and reveal that information usually do not

know into which category it falls. They usually believe the seemingly insigniﬁcant bit of

information they reveal is of little or no value to anyone. Or they may believe that it should

244

STAN A. TAYLOR

not have been classiﬁed in the ﬁrst place. But even though a single piece of a large puzzle may

appear to be of little signiﬁcance to the person who reveals it, it may be the last piece needed

by the person who receives it in order to gain a clearer picture of some major plan, policy, or

equipment of critical importance to the government. Some traitors sought and revealed

information they knew to be of great signiﬁcance, but others claimed their information was

not particularly helpful to the foreign state, even though it may have compromised a signiﬁcant

human or technical source. Neither William Kampiles nor Christopher Boyce was aware of the

damage done by their treason. The treason of Ames and Hanssen even resulted in the deaths of

many individuals.

The same is usually true of those who leak classiﬁed information. A leak is an unauthorized

disclosure of classiﬁed information and those who leak information may not be aware of its

signiﬁcance. The journalist, for example, who published a story in 1958 that US intelligence

was able to monitor Soviet missile tests had no idea of the consequences of his revelation.

American monitoring was possible because of the eight-hour advance warning the Soviets gave

for their tests. This gave American intelligence time to place monitoring platforms in place.

When the Soviets learned the Americans were monitoring their tests, they cut the advance

warning time in half – an action that forced major changes in US monitoring practices and

ultimately cost millions of taxpayer dollars.

The information may have been an insigniﬁcant

piece of a puzzle to the reporter, but it revealed a clear picture to the Soviets.

In 1970, the US began a satellite surveillance program that allowed American intelligence to

listen in on car telephone conversations of Soviet Politiburo members. Much of this informa-

tion was extremely valuable but it was also compromised when an American reporter revealed

US capabilities in a newspaper column.

Many similar stories could be told, but one of particular interest since 9/11 is the story ﬁrst

related in 2002 by US presidential spokesperson, Ari Fleischer, that

as a result of an inappropriate leak of NSA information, it was revealed about [sic] NSA being able

to listen to Osama Bin Ladin on his satellite phone. As a result of the disclosure, he stopped using it.

As a result of the public disclosure, the United States was denied the opportunity to monitor and

gain information that could have been very valuable for protecting our country.

The problem has been around for a long time. A 1985 law review article argued that lax

enforcement of ambiguous laws has created a climate in which “persons who leak [classiﬁed]

information . . . may do so with impunity.”

It is obviously not an easy problem to solve for

at least three reasons. To begin with, the First Amendment to the US Constitution protects

freedom of speech. On more than one occasion, the publication of classiﬁed information

focused public attention on dubious, or even illegal, government activities and the leakers

were seen as heros. But at other times, this practice has compromised important government

programs and weakened national security. Freedom of speech has never been interpreted as

without limits. A citizen does not have the right to falsely shout “ﬁre” in a crowded venue,

is the oft-cited example of one limitation. But whether or not leaking classiﬁed information

is akin to shouting “ﬁre” depends on many things which need greater legislative

clariﬁcation.

Second, the First Amendment also protects freedom of the press which has been interpreted

to mean that journalists cannot be forced to reveal their sources. So leakers cannot be pros-

ecuted because journalists do not have to reveal their names. America recently went through an

agonizingly slow, and (as of this writing) unsettled, episode trying to determine who leaked

the name of an undercover CIA case oﬃcer to a reporter. This case has called attention to this

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COUNTER INTELLIGENCE FAILURES IN THE USA

problem, but has not resolved it. This case also illustrates a fundamental axiom in dealing with

leaks – the diﬃculty of prosecution rises with the political level of the leaker.

Third, the problem of leaks is complicated by the ubiquity and utility of them. Most leaking

is done to either favor or hinder legislation or competing policies. The White House leaks the

most, the Defense Department ranks next, and Congress trails in third place. As long as leaking

appears to have no consequences and is seen as a useful policy tool, it will continue.

Intercepting and decoding foreign communications

For counterintelligence purposes, foreign communications must ﬁrst be intercepted and then, if

it is a coded communication, it must be decoded. If this can be done successfully, then foreign

intelligence agents, or Americans reporting to them, can be identiﬁed and stopped or used as a

source for disinformation. For example, what was given the codename VENONA (mentioned

above) in the 1960s began in 1941 as a communications interception program run by the Army

Security Agency and taken over by the NSA when it was created in 1952. The names of

many well-known American and British traitors – Klaus Fuchs, Kim Philby, Alger Hiss, the

Rosenbergs, just to name a few – were conﬁrmed through VENONA, even though it took

until several years after the treason was committed for all messages to be decoded.

Because of its extremely sensitive nature, very little is known about the government’s con-

temporary codebreaking capabilities. Such information is, obviously, very highly classiﬁed and

protected. Historically, however, we know that intercepted and decoded communications

have made signiﬁcant contributions to national security. The true intentions about German

ambitions in 1917 were revealed in the famous Zimmerman telegraph – a codebreaking success

of the British, not the Americans. The role of codebreaking in World War II is also well known.

The ability to decipher intercepted German Enigma codes played a signiﬁcant role in defeating

German forces and in deceiving Germany as to the true location of the D-Day invasion in

1944.

Successful codebreaking contributed to several major victories in the Paciﬁc theater as

well.

Also, the American ability to read Soviet diplomatic and military communications

emanating from the US (the VENONA eﬀort) ultimately revealed the extent of Soviet

penetration into the highest policy-making corridors of Washington, DC during the last years

of World War II and into the Cold War.

However, today, freely available and sophisticated software programs can be downloaded

from the internet that can make anyone’s communications very secure. These programs turn

plain text into code and are of great concern to counterintelligence oﬃcers. These encryption

devices were formerly available only to NSA but now are available to all. The computer of

more than one captured terrorist has contained coded communications, and such material now

requires extensive time and eﬀort to decode. Ramzi Yousef, often identiﬁed as the mastermind

of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, stored information about his terrorist activities on a

personal laptop computer. He felt secure in doing so because he encrypted his information

using encryption freeware. While living in Manila in order to conduct bombings against the

Philippine government, Yousef had to rush out of his apartment when chemicals with which he

was working caught ﬁre. The encrypted information on the laptop he left behind was of great

value to counterintelligence oﬃcers from many countries. Unfortunately, not all of the ﬁles

could be decrypted.

While little is known about the government’s ability to decode foreign communications, quite

a bit is known about the scope of its ability to collect vast amounts of foreign communications.

The NSA collects foreign communications in its attempt to enhance American security, but is

forbidden by law to collect communication involving US persons without a “warrant-like”

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STAN A. TAYLOR

document from the FISA Court, a special court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveil-

lance Act (FISA) of 1978. According to classiﬁed information leaked to the press in late 2005,

the NSA may have violated these rules by intercepting the conversations of some Americans.

It appears that in late 2001, as part of the post-9/11 war on terrorism, the Bush Administra-

tion authorized NSA to eavesdrop on communications between identiﬁed terrorists and their

contacts in the US. It did this without permission from the FISA Court. In late 2005, the

program was leaked to the media and the administration became involved in a national furor

over the legality of the operation. The Bush Administration claimed that the urgency of the

war on terrorism justiﬁed by-passing the FISA Court but civil libertarians claimed that the

government was violating the fundamental right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution. As

of this writing, neither the scope of the program nor the value of any information received

through it is known for certain; however, it became a highly politicized matter and illustrates

well the delicate balance between security and privacy.

Prosecuting traitors

Anti-espionage laws are not eﬀective unless penalties exist for revealing or stealing secret

information. Foreign agents in the US who are caught stealing secrets or receiving classiﬁed

information will be expelled from the country if they are under oﬃcial cover – that is, if they

are employees of a foreign government. If they are not under an oﬃcial passport, if they are

ostensible employees of private businesses or in the country illegally, they may be arrested,

prosecuted, and jailed. US citizens or US persons who are caught revealing classiﬁed informa-

tion are subject to federal prosecution under a variety of anti-espionage Acts of Congress.

As with all crimes, some potential traitors may be deterred by fear of punishment and if there

is no public perception of successful prosecution, the deterrent eﬀect is vitiated. From 1945 to

1978, the prosecution of traitors (as opposed to leakers, who form a separate category) was

complicated by the unwillingness of federal courts to accept presidential authorization for

electronic surveillance as meeting constitutional standards. Similar surveillance for domestic

crimes was carried out under court-issued warrants which met the “probable cause” and

reasonable “search and seizure” requirements of the Fourth Amendment. In the absence of

legislative authorization to conduct similar electronic surveillance for national security

purposes, however, evidence presented to courts gathered under warrantless presidential

authorization was usually not accepted. This made prosecution almost impossible.

Counterintelligence oﬃcers also were reluctant to take traitors to court for two reasons. First,

to do so might conﬁrm to a foreign state that the information it had received was, indeed,

important and accurate. Secret information is always viewed suspiciously by the purchasing

party for fear it might be phony information made up by the seller just to earn some money. Or,

even worse, it might be disinformation designed to deceive the receiving state. Second, to reveal

enough information to obtain a regular criminal warrant might compromise the sources and

methods by which that information was obtained.

FISA changed all of that. It created a special court (usually called the “FISA Court”) with

unique procedures that are “consistent with the ‘reasonable search’ requirement of the Fourth

Amendment.”

While releasing the Department of Justice from the traditional Fourth

Amendment “probable cause” requirement, FISA still required speciﬁed procedures that

protected civil liberties and banned electronic surveillance of Americans merely on the order

of a government oﬃcial under vague “national security” justiﬁcations. FISA was supported by

the IC and by various civil libertarian organizations and has been upheld in series of court cases

since 1978.

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COUNTER INTELLIGENCE FAILURES IN THE USA

At least until the furor created by the Bush administration’s use of surveillance without FISA

Court orders beginning in 2002, the FISA court and its procedures have been quite widely

supported and the more frequent and successful prosecution of traitors is usually attributed to

them (see Table 18.1).

Counterintelligence cooperation

While catching foreign agents or their American assets is a complicated task, primarily under

the direction of the FBI, successful counterintelligence eﬀorts require thorough cooperation

between every intelligence agency. This is particularly true of the FBI and the CIA, but it is also

true of the entire IC. But the success of counterintelligence in America rises or falls with the

level of cooperation between the FBI and the CIA. The story of their competition and lack of

cooperation is well known and of legendary proportions.

Community-wide cooperation is necessary, but the absence of cooperation between the

CIA and the FBI, particularly, is a serious problem. The 9/11 Commission reported that it was

a signiﬁcant factor in the IC’s failure to prevent the terrorist attacks in 2001. Since 9/11, both

legislation and executive directives have mandated greater cooperation and collaboration.

However, senior IC oﬃcials, intelligence scholars, and journalists have questioned whether an

adequate level has been achieved.

Table 18.1 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance

Act Court Surveillance Orders issued annually

Year Orders issued

1979 (partial year) 207

1980 319

1981 431

1982 475

1983 583

1984 635

1985 587

1986 573

1987 512

1988 534

1989 546

1990 598

1991 593

1992 484

1993 511

1994 575

1995 697

1996 839

1997 748

1998 796

1999 886

2000 1,012

2001 934

2002 1,228

2003 1,721 (4 rejected)

2004 1,758

Sources: US Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence

and the Administrative Oﬃce of the US Court System.

248

STAN A. TAYLOR

Whether this competitive relationship results from some sort of a culture clash or is merely

a good old-fashioned turf war is unclear. One of the lasting legacies of long-time FBI director,

J. Edgar Hoover, was an unwillingness to cooperate with other IC agencies. And that attitude

is not unique to the FBI. It is not uncommon in Washington, DC for agencies to compete

for scarce resources by withholding information from other agencies in order to get more

credit and, hopefully, more money in their budgets. In most cases, this may be unseemly,

but it may not harm national security interests. However, when this kind of competition

occurs within the IC, it is more than unseemly and can seriously weaken counterintelligence

eﬀorts.

This lack of cooperation goes back much earlier than 2001. Even before the CIA was created,

its predecessor, the Oﬃce of Strategic Services (OSS) was prevented from placing personnel in

Latin America because Hoover convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the FBI could

take care of that geographic area. After World War II, the FBI was limited to domestic jurisdic-

tion and the CIA was limited to foreign jurisdiction. But even that fundamental distinction

between the two agencies has gradually eroded with the CIA’s domestic operations gradually

growing and the FBI’s international operations growing like Topsy. The FBI, which only a few

years ago would station a few FBI “legal attachés” (legats) in a few critical US embassies around

the world, now have a very large presence in embassies all over the world. Originally, legats

were used to liaise with foreign police groups and extra-national groups like Interpol. The war

on terrorism is now used to justify their presence in many more embassies where they are even

allowed to recruit and run their own agents.

Some have argued that the problem between the CIA and the FBI is some sort of culture

clash or a result of diﬀerent operational codes. Siobhan Gorman has even argued that the FBI

“is from Mars” and the CIA “from Venus,” drawing on a popular book from several years ago.

It is true that the FBI measures success by its number of arrests and successful prosecutions

while the CIA does so by the value of the information it provides to decision-makers. This has

obviously and understandably created two diﬀerent operational codes, but it should be used as

an excuse for competitive behavior that damages counterintelligence. It was this very type of

competition between these two agencies that delayed the detection and capture of Aldrich

Ames for several months.

The absence of adequate cooperation within the IC led to the creation of the Director of

National Intelligence (DNI) oﬃce in 2004. The DNI was supposed to be given the necessary

personnel and budget authority to enforce greater cooperation. While cooperation is greater

in some areas of the IC than it was earlier, the failure to include many of the Department of

Defense (DoD) intelligence operations under the authority of the new DNI is widely seen as a

weakness of the 2004 reorganization. Intelligence scholar Loch Johnson uses the metaphor of

an “800-pound gorilla” – that is, a muscular secretary of defense unwilling to and strong

enough to resist, ceding his authority over military intelligence – to highlight the absence of a

motive for the DoD to cooperate as much as it should in the IC.

The intelligence activities of

the DoD have grown dramatically since 2001, most recently by its placement of Military

Liaison Elements (a euphemism for military special forces teams) in more than a dozen

embassies around the world.

One of the ironies of the lack of cooperation within the IC is that eﬀorts to ﬁx the problem

often make it worse. Virtually every time an “intelligence failure” occurs, a new agency is

created to prevent a future failure. The new agency, however, often merely stakes out its own

turf and the problem created by the proliferation of too many intelligence agencies is com-

pounded by the new agency. The OSS and its successor, the CIA, were created to ﬁx the

problem created by the lack of cooperation between various military intelligence units prior to

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COUNTER INTELLIGENCE FAILURES IN THE USA

the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. And literally scores of agencies and sub-agencies created since

then have been justiﬁed as a way to ﬁx subsequent failures but have, in eﬀect merely added to

the problem.

Conclusion

The counterintelligence techniques and practices listed above constitute an arsenal of no

small signiﬁcance. Nevertheless, the record of treason in the United States suggests it could be

much better. Every task or procedure must be performed exactly. Many American traitors have

been detected, not through the CI techniques listed above, but through self-confessions, from

captured foreign intelligence service records, by foreign intelligence oﬃces who have defected,

or through willing or unwilling partners in treason who have contacted US counterintelligence

oﬃcers. As William Webster, former director of both the FBI and the CIA, stated before US

Senate Hearings in 2002, “Almost every spy that we have found both in the CIA and the FBI,

has been found with the aid of recruited sources of our own in other hostile intelligence

agencies.”

Surely the very existence of these sources within a foreign intelligence should be

counted as a counterintelligence success. However, nearly all of them volunteered and were not

recruited by US agencies.

In spite of having the most expensive and extensive intelligence services in the world, the US

has suﬀered from many counterintelligence failures. The tools and techniques are all in place,

but various weaknesses; negligence, gaps, failures to cooperate, the need to protect civil liberties,

poor personnel management, and other factors discussed above have diminished America’s

counterintelligence shield.

Some developments are favorable, however. FISA procedures, when followed, have made the

detection and prosecution of traitors easier. Clearly, the 1978 Act was not meant to stand as

drafted forever. Although FISA originally allowed only electronic surveillance, it has sub-

sequently been amended to allow physical searches and the post-9/11 USA PATRIOT Act

made additional and controversial changes to the Act as well. As the techniques to elude

detection improve, techniques to facilitate detection must also be reviewed and, if found to

meet constitutional standards, adopted.

And, with the exception of DoD participation, intelligence cooperation between IC

agencies has increased marginally. Nevertheless, to bring about greater cooperation in the two

agencies that have resisted it for many years has not been an easy task. And the “go it alone”

attitude of DoD remains a major problem.

In response to terrorist attacks in the 1980s, then Director of Central Intelligence (DCI)

William Casey, under the direction of President George H. W. Bush created a CIA Counterin-

telligence Center (CIC) involving both FBI and CIA oﬃcers. (Moreover, NCIX, without

much operational authority, is making progress in promoting counterintelligence awareness

and cross-agency needs.) But, in response to the Ames case, President Clinton reorganized the

National Counterintelligence Center in 1994 through Presidential Decision Directive (PDD)

24. It was now called the National Counterintelligence Center (NACIC). The Center was to

be directed by a senior FBI oﬃcial but was to be staﬀed by senior counterintelligence oﬃcials

from both the FBI and the CIA. President Clinton’s Decision Directive required an “exchange

of senior managers between the CIA and the FBI to ensure timely and close coordination

between the intelligence and law enforcement communities.”

This “interagency forum” was

meant to bring about the cooperation and collaboration needed in counterintelligence work

and included representatives from virtually every agency in the IC.

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STAN A. TAYLOR

Subsequent “intelligence failures,” particularly 9/11, have suggested that the earlier re-

organizations were not eﬀective and on 21 March 2005, President George W. Bush announced

a new reorganization for US counterintelligence capabilities. His new strategy called for a more

pro-active eﬀort, particularly in the area of recruiting assets from terrorist groups. Even that

reorganization did not seem to have the desired eﬀect and on 27 January 2006 President Bush

appointed one of the Deputy Directors of the Oﬃce of the Director of National Intelligence

to also act as the Acting National Counterintelligence Executive. Few intelligence functions

have been reorganized as many times as the counterintelligence function. The latest plan should

make budget and personnel easier to manage.

But a new strategy and a new Oﬃce of Counterintelligence Excutive (ONCIX) alone will

not do the job unless budget and personnel authorities are really exercised by the DNI. The

disjointed and fragmented counterintelligence eﬀort of the US has seldom had more important

tasks to accomplish. The giant poisonous snake America faced during the Cold War has

disappeared, but in its place are hundreds of smaller poisonous snakes more diﬃcult both

to detect and deter. Every counterintelligence function has become even more critical. As

former DCI Richard Helms wrote in his autobiography, “No intelligence service can be more

eﬀective than its counterintelligence component for very long.”

Notes

1 The number of agencies making up the US Intelligence Community varies, depending on what is

counted. The oﬃcial web page for the Director of National Intelligence contains the emblems of

sixteen agencies. See <http.www//dni.gov>.

2 The best available list of all counterintelligence techniques is found in Frederick L. Wettering,

“Counterintelligence: The Broken Triad,” Intelligence and National Security 13 (2000): 265–300.

3 Stan A. Taylor and Daniel Snow, “Cold War Spies: Why They Spied and How They Got Caught,”

Intelligence and National Security 12 (1997).

4 Katherine L. Herbig and Martin Wiskoﬀ, Espionage Against the United States by American Citizens

1947–2001 (Monterey, CA: Defense Personnel Security Research Center, 2002), 78.

5 Robin Marantz Henig, “Looking for the Lie,” New York Times Magazine, February 5, 2006, 47. Henig

reviews much of the latest scientiﬁc research about lie detection.

6 Taylor and Snow, “Cold War Spies,” 118.

7 One can only view with astonishment the would-be traitor who while drinking at a bar conﬁded

in the man on the adjacent stool that he wanted to sell secrets. The unknown drinking buddy was

an oﬀ-duty undercover police oﬃcer who contacted Naval Intelligence Service oﬃcers. Nor should

we forget another would-be traitor who, after failing to gain entrance to the Soviet embassy in

Washington, DC, wrapped his secrets in a bundle with his name and phone number inside and threw

them over the embassy wall. Embassy guards, suspecting it was a bomb, called local ﬁre oﬃcials who

retrieved the classiﬁed information and turned it over to the FBI. See Taylor and Snow, “Cold War

Spies,” 118.

8 The entire Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the Ames case can be found at

<http:// www.loyola.edu/dept/politics/intel/sab4.html>.

9 See Henig, “Looking for the Lie,” 47.

10 Herbig and Wiskoﬀ, Espionage Against the United States, xiii.

11 See Taylor and Snow, “Cold War Spies,” 103. The best open-source work on treason is done by

PERSEREC in Monterey, California. See, for example, Susan Wood and Martin F. Wiskoﬀ, Americans

Who Spied Against their Country Since World War II (Monterey, CA: Defense Personnel Security

Research Center, 1994), Herbig and Wiskoﬀ, Espionage Against the United States, and Lynn F.

Fischer, “Espionage: Why Does It Happen,” at <http:/www.hanford.gov/oci/maindocs/ci_r_docs/

whyhappens.pdf>, accessed 20 December 2005. See also Theodore R. Sabin and others, Citizen

Espionage: Studies in Trust and Betrayal (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994).

12 Taylor and Snow, “Cold War Spies,” 110.

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COUNTER INTELLIGENCE FAILURES IN THE USA

13 The Sunday Times (London), May 25, 1997, as cited in Lathrop, The Literary Spy (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 2004), 398.

14 As a professor of national security aﬀairs for over 40 years, I have had literally hundred of students gain

employment with intelligence agencies. Many of the comments in this section stem from discussions

with them. A minority of them have become dissatisﬁed and left those careers, but even the majority

who have been satisﬁed in their work and remained have called my attention to personnel practices

that cry out for change.

15 Stella Rimington, At Risk (London: Hutchinson, 2004), 52 and 172.

16 James M. Olson, “The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence,” Studies in Intelligence (unclassi-

ﬁed edition), Fall–Winter, No. 11, 2001.

17 Herbig and Wiskoﬀ, Espionage Against the United States, 55.

18 Taylor and Snow, “Cold War Spies,” 118.

19 Herbig and Wiskoﬀ, Espionage Against the United States, B12.

20 See Martin Linsky, How the Press Aﬀects Federal Policymaking: Six Case Studies (New York: W.W.

Norton, 1988).

21 Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only (New York: Harper Perennial Library, 1995) 359.

22 See Loch Johnson. America’s Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Scoeity (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1989), 201.

23 White House Press Conference, 20 June 2002.

24 Eric E. Ballou and Kyle E. McSlarrow, “Plugging the Leak: A Case for Legislative Resolution of the

Conﬂict between Demands of Secrecy and the Need for an Open Government,” Virginia Law Review,

June 1985, 5.

25 Lest one assume that was an easy task, three messages sent on the German Enigma machine in 1942

have remained “uncracked” for over 60 years. These messages were sent using the four-rotor Enigma

and were thought to be unbreakable. However, using what is called distributed open source com-

puting, that is inviting anyone to have a go at the code, one of these messages was broken in

mid-February 2006 using what is called a brute force attack. That is, every possible version of the

message for each of the rotor settings was tried. Three remain enciphered. See Graeme Wearden,

“Distributed Computing Cracks Enigma Code,” New York Times, 6 February 2006.

26 The most enthusiastic review of the contribution of cryptography in World War II is found in Hervie

Hauﬄer, Codebreakers’ Victory: How Cryptographers Won World War II (New York: New American

Library, 2002). A more conservative estimate of the impact of intelligence on war is found in John

Keegan, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda (London: Hutchinson,

2003).

27 According to a former director of NSA, just one major listening post maintained by NSA can collect

2 million pieces of information each hour. See the PBS news broadcast of 20 December 2005 at

<http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/terrorism/july-dec05/nsa_12–20. html>, accessed on 16 March

2006.

28 The quotation is from United States, Senate, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance of 1978, Report

No. 95–701, 95th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, DC), 9. The material is this section is drawn from

Taylor and Snow, Cold War Spies.

29 The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed many of these cases in its Foreign Intelli-

gence Surveillance Act of 1978: The First Five Years, Report 98–660, 98th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington,

DC, 1984), 1.

30 “FBI, CIA Remain Worlds Apart, National Journal, 1 August 2003, accessed at <http://www.govexec-

.com/dailyfed/0803/080103nj1.htm> on 14 March 2006.

31 See Johnson, “The Aspin-Brown Intelligence Inquiry: Behind the Closed Doors of a Blue Ribbon

Commission,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 48, No. 3 (2004).

32 See Stan A. Taylor and Daniel Goldman, “Intelligence Reform: Will More Agencies, Money, and

Personnel Help?” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn 2004).

33 Cited in Lathrop, The Literary Spy, 58.

34 White House, Oﬃce of Press Secretary, 4 May 1994.

35 Richard Helms (with William Hood), A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency

(New York: Random House, 2003), 34 and 35.

252

STAN A. TAYLOR

Émigré intelligence reporting

Sifting fact from ﬁction

Mark Stout

The book Countdown to Terror by Congressman Curt Weldon describes an Iranian expatriate

referred to only as “Ali” who oﬀered the Congressman, and through him the CIA, information

about the situation inside the closed regime in Iran.

“Ali” lived in Paris and reportedly was a

former high-ranking oﬃcial in the Shah’s government whose information derived from

unspeciﬁed sub-sources. His information portrayed an Iran preparing to launch terrorist attacks

against the continental United States, operating in cooperation with al Qaida, and on the verge

of having a nuclear weapon.

However, his intelligence was not all doom and gloom. The secret

apparatus of which “Ali” was a part was, he said, in contact with key clerics who were prepared

to move against the government and establish a liberal democratic regime.

“Ali” did not shy away from putting the hard sell on the United States. In June 2004 he told

Congressman Weldon that Iran was preparing terrorist attacks against oil infrastructure. “If

we get ﬁnancial assistance,” Ali wrote, “we could give exact locations and means for the attack.”

By September 2004, “Ali,” apparently discouraged that he was not getting through to the US

Intelligence Community, had started to scale back his reporting. Of this time Weldon wrote,

“Ali reminded me . . . that the information he is providing is merely a sample of much better,

more signiﬁcant, and detailed, intelligence that could be obtained. His sources expected him to

use their secrets to buy a working relationship with the CIA which has the resources to pay

them ‘real money’.”

For indeed, the CIA did not bite. Aside from matters of interpretation, Weldon’s account

of the CIA’s handling of the “Ali” case is quite similar to that of the former CIA chief in

Paris who later discussed the case in an on-the-record interview with The American Prospect.

According to the Congressman, the CIA dragged its feet before ﬁnally meeting with “Ali” and

then dismissed his information as recycled from open press reporting, a claim that Weldon

disputes. The CIA complained that “Ali” would not name his sub-sources. “Ali’s” objections to

this were that he did not wish to be subservient to the agency nor did he trust it to protect those

sources, but in fact, he “refused to give me any information that would indicate he actually had

access to people in Iran who had access to that information,” the CIA oﬃcer said. Moreover,

“this man never said a single thing that you could look back later and he said it would happen

and it did happen.” Perhaps the greatest concern that the CIA had about “Ali” was his quite

open relationship with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an infamous ﬁgure from Iran-Contra days who

253

had been the subject of a CIA “burn notice” alerting the Community to the agency’s

judgment that he was a fabricator. “Many information [sic] that I have given . . . is coming from

Ghorbanifar,” “Ali” told The American Prospect. “Ghorbanifar used me, in fact, to pass that stuﬀ

because I know he has problems in Washington.”

It is impossible to know for sure whether “Ali” is a charlatan, a sincere source who is

unknowingly conveying bad information, or a sincere source reporting solid intelligence.

The case illustrates, however, a number of tools and procedures which American intelligence

collectors use to help judge whether they should accept proﬀered intelligence and to limit the

damage done when fabricators are identiﬁed. These include eﬀorts to ascertain the identity of

sub-sources and preferably to get direct access to them and the use of “burn notices” or

“fabrication notices” to alert all concerned intelligence personnel across the Community that

fabrication has been detected. Finally, it is important to notice that though the public record is

vague on this point, it appears that the CIA made its call not to trust “Ali” based on operational

considerations, not on the judgment of analysts assessing the substantive “Ali’s” information

itself.

Intelligence collectors also employed these tools while collecting intelligence on Iraq before

the war. However, there were added complications: some sources were controlled by foreign

intelligence services, not by American services. Moreover, the burn notice mechanism turned

out to be ﬂawed and analysts came to play a role in the debate over the validity of human

sources.

An Iraqi codenamed Curveball is probably the most infamous fabricator in American

intelligence history. He was the major source for the allegation that Saddam’s Iraq had mobile

biological weapons laboratories. In purveying this story, however, he was merely telling his

debriefers, oﬃcers of the German BND, what he thought they wanted to hear. Curveball’s

motives are, of course, diﬃcult to determine for certain, and his behavior was rather erratic, but

the desire to obtain a visa to enter Germany seems to have played a role.

Because Curveball

was controlled by the Germans and moreover said that he did not like Americans, the Defense

Intelligence Agency, which reportedly was the German point of entrée into the US Intelli-

gence Community for this case, did not have access to the source and did not investigate his

background and bona ﬁdes, though according to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence John

McLaughlin the CIA made “strenuous and ultimately successful eﬀorts to gain direct access to

Curveball in order to settle the issue.”

At one point during the run-up to the Iraq war, CIA operators, who presumably knew the

most about the source’s operational background, and analysts who were subject-matter experts,

reportedly diﬀered about the value of Curveball’s reporting. One analyst defended the informa-

tion by noting that she had been able to conﬁrm on the Internet much of the information he

had provided. “Exactly! It’s on the Internet! That’s where he got it too,” the cognizant operator

answered in exasperation.

Many problematic human sources also came to the attention of the US government (and US

journalists) thanks to the Iraqi National Congress (INC). Between March 2000 and September

2003 the US State Department funded the Iraqi National Congress Support Foundation

(INCSF) to the tune of nearly $33 million, with much of the money going to the INCSF’s

euphemistically titled “Information Collection Program” (ICP), though the INC’s newspaper

and television station broadcasting into Iraq also received funding.

The ICP’s mission was to

maintain contact with dissidents inside Iraq and use them to collect intelligence on the Saddam

regime’s political, economic, and military activities, including its alleged weapons of mass

destruction program and its links with terrorist groups. The INC apparently accomplished this

through ﬁeld oﬃces in Syria and Iran.

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MARK STOUT

The INCSF valued the ICP because it believed that the intelligence gathered could be used

to provide content for its television broadcasts and its newspaper. Probably more importantly,

however, in the words of a study by the General Accounting Oﬃce, the “INCSF believed

that elements of that data could be used in its diplomatic activities to reinforce views of the

international community that the [Saddam] Hussein government represented a danger to its

neighbors.” In February 2002, just a few months after the United States and its coalition

partners had successfully overthrown the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the INC seemed to

realize that their hour had come; the INCSF sought an expansion of the ICP.

The INCSF’s relationship with the State Department soured during the summer of 2002,

however, over allegations of sloppy bookkeeping at best and impropriety at worst. During

this time the INC put together a memorandum outlining the purpose of the program: to

“collect, analyze, and disseminate” intelligence from Iraq. More speciﬁcally, according to the

memorandum, “defectors, reports, and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed and

the results are reported through the INC newspaper, the Arabic and Western media, and to

appropriate government, non-governmental, and international agencies.” Among the oﬃcials

to whom the INC claimed to be passing its material was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of

Defense and the Vice President’s special assistant for national security. The memorandum also

listed 108 English-language news stories run in many of the most inﬂuential media outlets that

included material collected through the ICP. One news reporter observed that Ahmed Chalabi

had an “endless stable” of defectors available to substantiate any story that reﬂected poorly on

the Saddam regime. In mid-2004, anonymous sources in the Intelligence Community told a

Los Angeles Times reporter that they now suspected that the INC had channeled information to

at least eight foreign intelligence services in an apparent eﬀort to get these agencies to conﬁrm

each others’ reporting and analyses.

Clearly, the ICP thought it was profoundly inﬂuencing

the security debate in the United States and elsewhere, though the CIA later concluded that

those INC sources with which it dealt directly had little or no impact on pre-war analyses.

Wherever the truth of that assertion, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded in late 2003

that virtually all the intelligence received through the ICP before the war was useless.

Congressman Weldon, in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post (a letter that the paper

did not publish) implied that the CIA promulgated the view that they “can be trusted because

of their superior intuition.” For better or worse, however, the agency was not relying on

intuition in rejecting the information from Weldon’s source, “Ali,” or in the way that it tried to

deal with Curveball and the INC. Rather, the CIA relied on long-standing procedures that date

back to the ﬁrst decade of the Cold War.

Cold War fabricators and paper mills

The same drivers that operated in the cases above – desire for visas, greed, the hope that they

could maneuver the United States into carrying out otherwise impossible regime changes,

possibly even self-delusion – existed in some émigrés from Eastern Europe during the early

Cold War era. Moreover, fabricators today use the same techniques that the US became familiar

with 50 years ago: selling slanted information to any US agency that will buy it (and to allied

countries as well), and co-opting the media, the Congress and anyone else who can help them.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, it was even more diﬃcult for the US Intelli-

gence Community to tell the authentic and sincere intelligence sources from the fabricators

than it is today because, at least initially, there were no agreed techniques for managing the

problem.

255

ÉMIGRÉ INTELLIGENCE REPORTING

The case of Bohumil Svoboda illustrates how bad the problem got. Svoboda was a Czech

mining engineer who escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1948 and became an intelligence source,

reporting some dramatic information. First, in August 1950 he had provided the text of a treaty

between the USSR and Czechoslovakia giving the former the rights to the latter’s uranium

deposits for 15 years. Over the next two months a ﬂurry of 76 reports had followed, each more

tantalizing than the last. Svoboda claimed sources in the Czechoslovak Ministries of Internal

Aﬀairs and Industry, the Central Planning Institute in Moscow, the Soviet Atomic Institute,

Marshal Zhukov’s staﬀ, the Soviet Ministry of Internal Aﬀairs, and the Hungarian, Romanian,

and Bulgarian armies. After a time, he was even providing information from China, which now

apparently planned an invasion of Formosa.

Perhaps it was this last report that ﬁnally sparked some skepticism, but for whatever reason,

the authorities were soon grilling Svoboda and in September 1952 the FBI reported that the

Czech had admitted to fabricating these reports. The names in the reports were the names of

people he knew in Czechoslovakia or that he read in the newspaper. He perpetrated this fraud

in order to gain the money that could get him out of a crowded and unpleasant displaced

persons camp.

This was an all too common story during the early Cold War. In the late 1950s, an article

appeared in Studies in Intelligence, the agency’s classiﬁed in-house journal, written under the

name of Arness, saying that “more than half of all the material received on several countries

of greatest intelligence interest” was the product of fabricators or, worse yet in many cases, their

bigger cousins the “paper mills.”

Arness deﬁned “fabricators” as “individuals or groups who,

without genuine agent resources, invent their information or inﬂate it on the basis of overt

news for personal gain or a political purpose.”

Individual fabricators and papers mills diﬀered in scale and sometimes also in their purpose.

The article deﬁned paper mills as

intelligence sources whose chief aim is the maximum dissemination of their product. Their

purpose is usually to promote special émigré-political causes while incidentally ﬁnancing

émigré-political organizations. The information thus conveyed consists of a mixture of valid

information, overt material, propaganda, and fabrication. Its bulk, form, and obscure origin

frequently preclude successful analysis and evaluation.

The genesis of the problem

After World War II the United States faced an enormous intelligence challenge. It had to switch

its primary intelligence focus from Germany and Japan to the USSR and its satellite states in

Eastern Europe. Unfortunately America’s clandestine services were mostly new and still in the

steep part of their learning curves. Worse yet, the Soviet Union and its satellites were denied

areas, extremely diﬃcult targets for even the best espionage agencies. Though the security

services in the Eastern European satellites states were new, the Soviet services had been in

the business since the founding of the Bolshevik state decades before. They were long on

experience and ruthlessly eﬀective at counterintelligence.

Fortunately, or so it seemed, World War II and the subsequent communist takeovers in

Eastern Europe had caused many people to ﬂee westward. Some of these people came out with

useful intelligence information in their head. Others said they were in contact with friends and

associates still behind the Iron Curtain who themselves had access to sensitive information.

Finally, former senior intelligence oﬃcers from the fascist regimes that had been Hitler’s minor

256

MARK STOUT

allies or from the short-lived post-war democratic regimes came West and oﬀered their services

and their existing agent networks, much as the German Reinhard Gehlen had done. For the

entrepreneurs’ contacts behind the Iron Curtain, working for Western intelligence seemed a

moral imperative. Paul v. Gorka, a minor player in a British-run network in Hungary who

served a prison term for his ultimately inconsequential intelligence eﬀorts, was probably typical

in this regard. “In contrast to the activities of the moles in the West,” he wrote years later after

escaping to the United Kingdom, “the people who risked their lives and their freedom behind

the Iron Curtain were motivated by a deep sense of patriotism and a desire for national freedom

and human liberties.”

Western intelligence agencies swarmed all over these émigrés, seeing in them opportunities

to rapidly establish a ﬂow of intelligence from behind the Iron Curtain that was otherwise

impossible to obtain. Many of the émigrés, like Bohumil Svoboda, were fabricators from the

very beginning, seeing this business as their ticket out of the desperate conditions that prevailed

in post-war Europe. Some émigré or exile groups, however, had real assets behind the Iron

Curtain. Unfortunately, because these groups lacked the technical infrastructure and know-

how to run such operations, the communist security services were able to make short work of

them. As Arness put it:

[H]asty, uncoordinated, and totally insecure operational use of these assets by both émigré groups

and Free World intelligence agencies permitted the Communist security services to identify and

destroy or to use them. Initial failure in the West to recognize the ruthlessness and eﬃcacy of the

Soviet-type police state contributed to this process which, generally speaking, was completed by

1950.

Such catastrophes notwithstanding, these émigré organizations generally stayed in business.

In some cases, the émigré groups themselves may not have known the true state of their

networks in the home country and that their assets had been turned or were being used to

direct disinformation back to the West. Certainly, post-war intelligence history is replete with

examples of apparently trustworthy individuals having been turned by the communist security

services.

Whether or not they really knew what was going on back home, the exile groups still had

mouths to feed and, in some cases, leaders who had grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle.

These factors alone served as a strong motive to fabricate juicy intelligence and sell it to

whoever was willing to buy, long after eﬀective contact had been lost with agents in the East.

Their customers kept buying their reports at generous prices. The Americans were ignoring

the fact that the needs of their intelligence services for accurate information were secondary, in

the minds of the émigré leaders, to political considerations.

For indeed, the motives of the émigrés often were not merely economic. The intelligence

production of the émigré was, it seemed to Arness, a “weapon” which was “inevitably used to

inﬂuence US policy in the direction of hostility to the Soviet Bloc and to satisfy the ambitions

of political pressure groups,” the leaders of which “knew that they could not return to power in

their homelands except in the wake of war and Western victory.”

Not only did these groups endeavor to embroil the United States and the Western allies in a

new war, but simply chasing these phantoms in the ﬁeld and processing the haul from the paper

mills and individual fabricators was a serious resource sink. According to Richard Helms, later

head of the CIA’s Clandestine Service and Director of Central Intelligence, as late as 1951 a

third of the CIA’s operational eﬀort in Austria went to dealing with fabricators. This, of course,

was in addition to the time devoted to the problem by the other US intelligence services, and in

257

ÉMIGRÉ INTELLIGENCE REPORTING

addition to the eﬀort devoted by the British and French services (possibly among others).

Helms judged that all this furious activity “took our attention away from developing the

techniques that in the future were to produce signiﬁcant results.”

Moreover, disagreements over paper mills sometimes led to nasty interagency disputes. Peter

Sichel, the agency’s Chief of Base in Berlin at the time, recalls a major battle with the US Army

in the late 1940s or early 1950s. The CIA became aware that the Army was purchasing bogus

intelligence from a “fabrication network” and forced the Army to shut it down. The Army

intelligence chief in Berlin was so incensed that he went to the FBI and reported his suspicions

that Sichel was a Soviet agent. A fruitless investigation ensued but “they never did ﬁnd my

Soviet handler,” Sichel recalls, laughing ironically.

The Association of Hungarian Veterans

No group better exempliﬁes the paper mill problem than the MHBK (Magyar Harcosok Bajtársi

Közössége) or Association of Hungarian Veterans. The MHBK had its genesis in the last months

of World War II in Europe when General András Zákó, the last wartime head of Hungarian

military intelligence, and his assistant, Captain Miklos Korponay, formed an organization of

members of the Arrow Cross party and paratroopers called Kopjas (Pikemen). Kopjas num-

bered about 1,500–2,000 oﬃcers and warrant oﬃcers pledged to resist the Soviet invaders by

conducting sabotage and collecting intelligence. However, the war came to such a quick end

that the group quickly became a stay-behind network.

Accounts vary as to what happened to Zákó and Korponay after the war. According to one,

Zákó went straight to Tyrol in Soviet-occupied Austria. There he met up with Korponay,

gathered Hungarian soldiers about himself and planned for the future. Soon deciding that he

needed further information about the situation in Hungary he went back into his home

country disguised as a priest, probably in late 1946. Perhaps because Hungary was not yet fully

under communist control, he was able to spend 15 months there laying the groundwork for

resistance and intelligence work and reactivating Kopjas.

Another version of the story is that Zákó was interned by the US Army and later extradited

to Hungary as a war criminal. As he was being transported to Hungary, he escaped and went to

the Soviet zone of Austria where he worked under an assumed name as an agricultural worker

until 1947 when he went to Innsbruck.

According to that same story, Korponay during this

time was the head of a group of about 25 Hungarians which remained inactive until the spring

of 1946 when Sandor Lang, a naturalized British citizen from a Hungarian family, approached

them. Lang was associated with British intelligence and seeking men to go back into Hungary

and report from there. Korponay put a man who had connections to Kopjas at Lang’s disposal

and they set to work creating an intelligence network in Hungary.

Korponay was pleased

with this connection with the British and was soon inspired to approach the French service, as

well. The French were amenable to working with him and placed three men at his disposal,

including the talented Attila Kovacs.

In any event, Zákó came to Innsbruck in 1947 and linked up with Korponay. Soon thereafter

they approached the US Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) oﬃce in Hallein to oﬀer

their services. They neglected to mention that they were already providing intelligence to the

British and French. Ignorant of this fact, the CIC accepted their oﬀer. Zákó and Korponay

appointed Lieutenant Colonel Georgy Kollenyi, a former Hungarian army intelligence oﬃcer,

as their liaison to the Americans and soon intelligence started ﬂowing to the CIC.

Unfortunately for Zákó and Korponay, CIC personnel frequently talked with their British

258

MARK STOUT

colleagues. It soon became clear that the two services were buying the same material. After a

little inquiry, it was found that the French were also buying the same product. An investigation

ensued and CIC and the British soon dropped Kollenyi. (Some time later he started working

for the Gehlen Organization, forerunner of Germany’s BND, in Pullach, near Munich where

his work consisted primarily of passing reports from refugees).

Korponay protested to the

CIC that his highest goal was defeating the communists and that it should not matter to which

free powers he sold intelligence.

In 1948 the MHBK, with its only serious customer now the French, approached a Baron

Waldorf who, it was whispered, was the intelligence representative in Innsbruck of the

Polish government in exile in London and who also, purportedly, worked for MI6. Waldorf

soon was paying $1,000 a month in exchange for military intelligence from Hungary. The

MHBK also approached an “American intelligence agency in Frankfurt, Germany,” possibly

the CIA. It is not clear what the response of the “American agency” was on this occasion.

However, as Helms’s memoirs make clear, at some time in the late 1940s the MHBK did

establish a relationship with the CIA.

The nascent military émigré organization helped

identify communist inﬁltrators in the Western zones of Germany and in France, at one point

complaining to the French that their group had not received the public credit it was due for

two recent arrests.

Zákó was not only making connections with Western intelligence agencies, but also trying

to draw as much of the exiled Hungarian military community to himself as possible.

He successfully struck an agreement with Lieutenant General József v. Vasváry who had con-

nections to the French government and with Gendarmerie General Pál Hódosy living in

Munich.

In the spring of 1948, General Antal Radnóczy and General Staﬀ Captain György v.

Hegedüs urged the Hungarian oﬃcer community to formally accept Zákó as their leader.

Radnóczy recalled that “from three countries, 100 general staﬀ oﬃcers agreed to the plan, with

only two who abstained.” With these results in hand from the lower-ranking oﬃcers, Zákó

sought the support of all the Hungarian generals he could ﬁnd and they too accepted his

leadership. Field Marshal Archduke Joseph, Hungary’s most revered Habsburg, agreed that

Zákó would be a good leader.

Zákó also met with Archduke Otto von Habsburg, the

Habsburg pretender in Paris in August 1948 and according to one account gained his support,

as well.

(Two years later Otto would arrange with Francisco Franco that in case of war in

Europe the members of MHBK could take refuge in Spain.

) On 18 June 1948 Zákó even

sought the support of Admiral Horthy, the wartime Regent of Hungary. Horthy, by now an

old man of 80, wanted nothing to do with politics, but he, too, oﬀered his tacit support.

Seeking to create a political arm for Kopjas, Zákó merged his group with the Anti-Bolshevik

Hungarian Liberation Movement (AHLM) headed by General Ferenc Farkas. The AHLM was

an attractive partner because it had contacts with the French military and with Ukrainian,

Croatian, Bulgarian, and Slovak oﬃcers.

On the other hand, Zákó tried to portray himself as

distant from Farkas himself who was controversial because of his fascist background. Certainly

the French pressured him to do this. In September 1948 a “Colonel Mondaine” told Zákó that

previously agreed cooperation with the MHBK “could be realized more rapidly” if “General

Farkas would in the future not occupy himself with politics, only with military aﬀairs.” Farkas

was willing to agree and so too, of course, was Zákó.

Nonetheless, Zákó’s ecumenical approach to membership in the MHBK soon generated

concern in the CIA. “General Zákó is somewhat less implicated as a former fascist than others

of his staﬀ,” the CIA reported to the FBI in June 1950, “but is still so far to the right politically

that none of the recognized and responsible Hungarian groups or politicians have supported or

encouraged him or the MHBK.”

Some Hungarian émigrés were also concerned about the

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ÉMIGRÉ INTELLIGENCE REPORTING

political ﬂavor of the MHBK. One émigré who was asked to join and declined told the FBI that

“when the names of the [MHBK’s] leaders began to appear, many people were ﬁlled with

mixed emotions because these leaders were not the ones who had been trustworthy in the

past.” The FBI source particularly singled out Miklos Korponay for scorn saying that in 1945

Korponay “exchanged his Hungarian uniform for a German SS uniform.”

MHBK’s activities

Aside from providing social support to its members, the MHBK’s most important work, of

course, was the sale of intelligence from inside Hungary. The headquarters for these activities

was in Innsbruck under General Zákó, who sometimes went by the alias of “István Kovacs,” as

generic a Hungarian name as exists.

After a restructuring approved at a “mass meeting”

attended by about 60 people in July 1950, the MHBK was organized with a Presidium

presiding over four main sections. These were the “Strategic Section” which did operational

planning and registered refugees; a “Press and Propaganda Section” under Miklos Korponay,

who also posed as head of the MHBK intelligence sections to divert hostile attention from the

real leaders of those sections; the “Oﬀensive Intelligence Service,” which collected intelligence

and recruited and trained resistance units and radio operators should they be needed in war-

time; and the “Defensive Intelligence Service.”

The MHBK claimed some intelligence successes. For example, Imre Horvath, a former

Hungarian army oﬃcer who serving as a courier between the MHBK in the West and

supposed resistance cells in Hungary claimed to have recruited two generals in the military

police.

Beyond such penetrations as they thought they had in the Hungarian government, the

MHBK also debriefed émigrés and refugees and hunted communists in émigré communities.

The MHBK also included a small signals intelligence (SIGINT) eﬀort in Graz in the British

zone of Austria. Little information is available about this operation but it included former

Hungarian army Sigint personnel and reported on deportations and political trials. One oﬃcer

recalled of this group,

their work was world class, and we were more informed than some of the leading communist

organizations which were engaged in power struggles at the time. We had a clear view about the

conditions at home, and the communist agents were hunting for the decipherers for years, but

could never ﬁnd them.

Ironically, while this may have been among the most reliable information that the MHBK

passed on to its customers, it was hardly top-ﬂight intelligence; the techniques of communist

oppression were well known and sadly unstoppable.

It is hard to know for certain the nature of the intelligence that the MHBK sold to its patrons.

However, copies of the English-language Hungarian Veteran, a supplement to the group’s

ﬂagship Hungarian-language newspaper Hadak Utján, may provide a clue. Three issues of this

newspaper from early 1953 portray a Hungary ruthlessly oppressed by the secret police and

being driven into economic ruin by the communists. They also contain tantalizing bits of

military information, such as the article entitled “More subterranean armaments faktories

[sic]” which reported that one factory was slated to produce “light military vehicles, hand

grenades, and tommy guns,” and another was known for cover purposes as the “chocolate

factory.”

Throughout, the paper also portrays a Hungary that is ripe for the retaking, if only the

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MARK STOUT

western powers would invade. Some members of the AVH (Hungarian security), it reported,

“have become so corrupted by the unrestrained exercise of power that they are now ready to

serve anybody who is willing to pay them. If the rule of the Muscovite satellites is only slightly

endangered, these creatures would be the ﬁrst to turn their weapons against their former

masters.” Similarly, “The Hungarian Communists place little conﬁdence in the so-called

‘People’s Army,’ . . . They realize that the majority of the soldiers would desert to the Western

camp in case of war.” A Hungarian oﬃcer was suspected of writing graﬃti reading “Aj lájk

Ajk!” (“I like Ike!”).

The paper also maintained the melancholy delusion that the MHBK could play a military

role in the liberation of the homeland. The February 1953 issue of Hungarian Veteran contained

an announcement from Zákó that 250 young émigrés in Bavaria had recently signed statements

indicating their readiness to serve in “a Hungarian anti-bolshevik volunteer army, should such

be established.”

Similar delusions led to a remarkable proposal to the Spanish military sometime before the

1956 Hungarian uprising. Zákó suggested the creation of an Eastern European force including

5,000-each Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechs, Sudeten Germans, Romanians and Bulgarians. This

force would enter Eastern Europe in the wake of a US-ﬁnanced uprising in Bohemia. Zákó

even held open the possibility that the ensuing war would include a nuclear attack on the Soviet

Union. The Spanish military showed some preliminary interest, but, unsurprisingly, nothing

ever came of the project.

By October 1950 CIA, already concerned about the MHBK’s politics, was unenthused

about the quality of the MHBK’s reporting and its far-ﬂung relationships with European

intelligence services. “The MHBK maintains liaison with and disseminates reports to most of

the Allied intelligence services in Western Europe,” the agency reported. “A number of reports

on Hungarian matters received from these services have been traced to the MHBK and,

on occasion, have been duplicated by reports disseminated to this Agency by other services.

Evaluations of this material, based on content rather than on source, have been uniformly

low.”

The CIA’s information about the MHBK’s widespread clientele appears to have been true.

Available – and probably incomplete – information indicates that at one time or another the

MHBK provided its product to the CIA, the US Army’s CIC, the US Air Force, the French, the

Austrian police, the British, the Polish government in exile, Spain (though the scant available

evidence indicates the MHBK never had a formal relationship with the Spanish) and probably

the Gehlen Organization.

The MHBK’s closest relationship remained with the French. It gave intelligence to the

French and organized border crossings into Hungary for unilateral French assets. In return, the

French provided means of communication, false documents, deconﬂiction with other allied

intelligence operations, name traces, and ﬁnancial support.

In November 1949, for example,

Zákó brought back from Paris 3 million francs (approximately $6–7 million in 2003 dollars) for

intelligence operations.

MHBK’s security problem

Though the MHBK had no hesitation selling intelligence, from its earliest days it had severe

diﬃculties actually acquiring this intelligence. In October 1947 Korponay admitted to the CIC

that he had lost contact with the members of Kopjas or the “K Organization,” as it was also

261

ÉMIGRÉ INTELLIGENCE REPORTING

known, but he felt sure that with proper funding, contact could be re-established.

A year later

Zákó wrote to a French oﬃcer:

Permit me, Monsieur le Colonel, to draw your attention to the circumstance that work against the

east becomes more diﬃcult each day, because the [communist security regime] strengthens itself in

such a fashion that if we do not complete certain works one can foresee a time when all contacts

will be impossible with the territories behind the Iron Curtain.

In 1949 there came tangible evidence that these concerns were well-founded and that

the heyday of MHBK’s intelligence collection was rapidly coming to a close: Imre Horvath, the

MHBK courier and case oﬃcer, was arrested along with the two generals he had recruited

in the military police. The two generals were executed and Horvath got life in prison.

Also in

1949 several MHBK intelligence personnel and staﬀ members in Austria and Germany were

found to be working for the Hungarian communist regime.

The Hungarian services were not above strong-arm tactics. In January 1950 Attila Kovacs,

the head of the MHBK spy network, who apparently ran the entire network out of his

head without writing anything down, was murdered by agents of the Hungarian govern-

ment. Kovacs’s murder, combined with the disasters of 1949, dealt a severe blow to MHBK’s

collection of intelligence in Hungary. In fact, as of October 1950 the CIA had information that

until the past few months the “Kopjas”/MHBK maintained channels of communications to resist-

ance groups within Hungary but it is believed that, by early 1950, the mother groups were virtually

extinct due to the compromise, arrest or escape into exile of its members . . . and [due] to the

scarcity of funds which were necessary to keep alive its channels with the West.

The French were particularly annoyed about the Kovacs murder. One of his murderers was a

man named Miklos Bognar about whom French intelligence had issued a warning just a few

days before. Though informed that Bognar was a communist penetration agent, the MHBK did

not act and Kovacs died as a result. The French were disgusted and scaled back their relations

with the MHBK.

The Hungarian secret police – essentially an arm of the experienced Soviet security services

– was certainly ruthlessly eﬀective, but poor tradecraft by the MHBK probably contributed

to the problem. Michael Gaydacs, the FBI source who had declined an invitation to join the

MHBK, remembered telling his would-be recruiter during a meeting in a cafe:

If you want to bring into being an underground anti-Communist military organization, then you

must really go underground and work in secret, but if you place your printed plans on the café

tables then the Communist and Bolshevik agents will know of your activities, and consequently

your organization will not be an underground movement, but one of treason instead. Betrayal of

those here and those at home . . . It seems you are not aware of the past underhand activities of the

Bolsheviks.

The Hungarian service continued to ﬁnd many people willing to double-cross the MHBK

in one way or another. A set of documents on the MHBK obtained by the British in 1951 and

shared with the Americans provides a long list of such people. One Jeges Kornel, a former

Hungarian policeman who organized border crossing point “103” for the MHBK, had been in

contact with the AVH. The French had told the MHBK that one Vilmos Kratky was a “driver

for Americans” and also passed information to a man thought to be “in contact with eastern

organizations.” Laszlo Ivanyi who “was in touch with MHBK until summer 1950,” was

262

MARK STOUT

discovered “to have been engaged in document falsiﬁcation and spying for two sides.” A

courier known as “S-31” who also “answers to the name Dodo” had disappeared from Vienna

in the spring of 1950 and his fate was unknown, but he had often been seen in the company of a

man thought to be in the employ of the Hungarian secret police.

Then there was the case of Aladar Dajka who was involved in smuggling people out of

Hungary and who also had a relationship with French intelligence and some knowledge

of the MHBK. Arrested by the Hungarian police for his smuggling activities, he told them what

he knew of an MHBK oﬃcial based in Vienna known as “06” who was planning to enter

Hungary soon in order to bring out his wife. Dajka reportedly also betrayed at least two other

men, one of whom was working for the French and became the target of a heavy-handed

approach from Soviet intelligence.

In August 1951, Hungarian security arrested the wife of an MHBK oﬃcial named Laszlo

Sarvary who was in Vienna. (It is not clear where his wife was.) The AVH then approached

Sarvary and attempted to blackmail him into spying for them. Sarvary played along before

reporting the incident to his MHBK superiors. The MHBK leadership in Innsbruck decided

not to tell their French sponsors, but also to play along, feeding the communists harmless or

false information until Sarvary’s wife was free.

The French did ﬁnd out, however, and recriminations ensued between them and the

MHBK. Investigation of the whole muddle revealed the fact that an MHBK courier had

recently gone over to the AVH and that the MHBK had potentially serious security problems,

caused in part by sloppiness such as the fact that couriers always used the same routes and the

same recognition signs. The fate of Sarvary’s wife is not recorded, but Sarvary himself was later

the target of an unsuccessful kidnapping attempt in October 1951.

As if this were not enough, in 1951 sixteen members of the MHBK were arrested in

Hungary. All were convicted, of course. One of them was executed and the other ﬁfteen were

sentenced to a total of 241 years in prison.

The US Intelligence Community responds

By 1951 the MHBK was operationally gutted. During the same period, the CIA was wising up

to the problem of paper mills. In the late 1940s, a CIA oﬃcer named Walter Jessel had begun

to track the problem. He found that some émigré groups were selling slightly diﬀerent

versions of the same report to multiple diﬀerent American intelligence services, each of which

used it to maximum eﬀect with their respective policy customers. “Given the proprietary

interests of some of the American agencies involved, this was a sensitive bit of business,”

Richard Helms remembered later. “The impressive political backgrounds of some of the

leading exile political ﬁgures gave them access to – and a measure of inﬂuence on – prominent

businessmen, members of Congress, and others with ties to ethnic communities in the United

States.”

Having laid the groundwork, Jessel now did a study focusing speciﬁcally on the MHBK. This

was diﬃcult to do because some senior US intelligence oﬃcials were heavily invested in the

group and its product and when the study was ﬁnally completed the results were ugly. Jessel

concluded that much of the MHBK’s product was fabricated. He and Helms brought these

results to the attention of DCI Walter Bedell Smith who directed that the study be briefed to

the United States Intelligence Board, composed of the intelligence chiefs of the various service

and agencies. The brieﬁng, which took place on August 1951, was an eye-opener. “Who in the

Air Force could be buying this crap?” the Air Force intelligence chief asked. Jessel noted that

263

ÉMIGRÉ INTELLIGENCE REPORTING

the Air Force was far from alone in being clients of Zákó’s MHBK. The MHBK would not be

selling any more intelligence to the United States.

However, the covert operators at Frank Wisner’s Oﬃce of Policy Coordination (OPC,

initially a de facto later a de jure component of CIA, charged with covert action rather than

espionage) had its own relationship with the group. In 1950 and 1951 the OPC formed a Free

Hungary Committee, essentially a government in exile, and the OPC’s Carmel Oﬃe named

Zákó its “Defense Minister.” During the Hungarian crisis of 1956, Zákó still apparently held

that position. He and his staﬀ in Vienna busily composed bulletins that Radio Liberty broadcast,

telling the hapless Hungarian people that “the Western world’s material aid is on its way to

you.”

(They also provided information at least to the Spanish government, and probably

others, about the course of the uprising.

)

After the disaster of 1956, Zákó hoped that another uprising could be engineered for the

following spring and to that end tried to keep contact with the surviving insurrectionists, but

his hopes were in vain.

One tantalizing FBI memorandum suggests that Zákó’s contacts with

French intelligence may have continued into the late 1950s. In early 1959, a recent Hungarian

immigrant to the United States told the FBI that in the spring of 1958 a group of French

generals approached Zákó, urging him to mount another uprising in Hungary. They oﬀered

him ﬁnancial support, weapons, and even hinted at the possibility of help from a few French

oﬃcers. Zákó’s response is not known but the FBI source reported having heard from Zákó

associates that the US government had gotten wind of the plan and told Zákó that he could not

expect any support from them if he were to do such a foolhardy thing.

After absorbing Jessel’s bombshell study on the MHBK, the CIA started looking at other

paper mills. A study presented to the Intelligence Advisory Committee in February 1952

looked at 18 cases with such names as “Orekhov,” “London Polish,” “Croat-Slovene,” and

“Scattolini.”

These included six paper mills, six cases of fabricators, and ﬁve hybrid cases. It

also considered an additional case that appeared to “involve planned Soviet provocation.”

The study found that despite the fact that only one case of Soviet deception was under

consideration, the lack of coordination among the intelligence collection agencies gave the

Soviets tremendous opportunities for “planting deception and provocation material in US

intelligence channels at the moment of its choice.” Moreover, the poor security of many of the

paper mills meant that the Soviets probably had access to the same information that was being

passed to US intelligence. This, of course, might allow them to design deception operations that

would play to American preconceived notions. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the

study bore out “the total experience of [the CIA] that the only method by which fabrication

and multiple false conﬁrmation can be detected is . . . operational investigation of the source

and transmission channels, combined with reports analysis.”

The study recommended a whole series of measures for dealing with the problem. Many of

them related to controlling and limiting the payments made to intelligence sources. Others

involved laying down the law to those who sold intelligence to American intelligence agencies,

letting them know that they would no longer be allowed to keep secret the identities of their

sources no matter what the reason. Furthermore, the report said that the feeling, common

among American intelligence agencies, that fellow American intelligence agencies could not

be trusted with the identities of clandestine sources must be eradicated. Such concerns

bred a jealousy among intelligence oﬃcers of various government agencies which has prevented a

long overdue exchange of information . . . As a result, an excessive amount of professional

manpower had to be devoted to costly overseas investigation where simple headquarters co-

ordination . . . would have revealed duplication or fraud.

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MARK STOUT

This led to the most important recommendation, that eﬀorts be made to establish “source

control.”

There were two elements to this. The ﬁrst was undertaken by CIA operators in

the ﬁeld. (It is not clear whether the humint collectors of the armed services and FBI

undertook analogous measures.) They would buy a few reports from a suspected fabricator or

paper mill. If the information seemed promising the agency would try to establish the bona

ﬁdes of the middleman. This would entail the full range of investigative techniques, name traces,

telephone taps, surveillance, and “an unconscionable amount of time,” Richard Helms wrote.

But the technique was eﬀective. As Peter Sichel put it, “the more you get into that, the more

you ﬁnd out what exists and what doesn’t exist.”

The second component of source control was undertaken in Washington where a com-

prehensive registry of sources was to be created. The Community promptly approved a general

plan for doing this, but it took them ﬁve years to agree on the details of how the new

procedures would actually work. Finally, on May 14, 1957 the Community ﬁnally approved and

established the “Interagency Source Register” or ISR in order to “provide a centralized ﬁle

of clandestine sources in order to preclude multiple recruitment of sources and to facilitate the

elimination of Paper Mills and Fabricators.” Apparently the FBI had balked because though

“all . . . agencies may avail themselves of ISR facilities,” the formal participants in the ISR were

the CIA and the intelligence components of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and State Department.

The CIA was responsible for the running the ISR and agencies were to provide data on their

clandestine sources to it. Agencies would also inform the ISR when they dropped a

source for whatever reason. The reasons for dropping a source included “Paper Mill and

Fabricator,” “Security,” “Compromise,” “Ineptitude,” “Blackmarketing, smuggling, or other

violation of law,” “Without prejudice,” and “Deceased.” When a source was found to be a

fabricator or a paper mill this would be noted in the ISR and if the source seemed likely to

continue selling his “spurious product,” the CIA would in coordination with other agencies

“disseminate a report ‘burning’ (denouncing) the source to United States Government

agencies and to friendly foreign intelligence services as a given case may require.”

Lessons (re) learned?

The same motives for fabricating intelligence and selling it to American and allied intelligence

agencies that once existed among émigrés from countries oppressed by communism may now

exist among émigrés from other areas denied to US intelligence. Fortunately, the prophylactic

measures and remedies that worked adequately during the 1950s remain in place. In the “Ali”

case it appears, though it is always impossible to tell for certain, that they saved the CIA from

potential future embarrassment.

In the cases of the Iraqi sources and the INC, these measures were not enough to prevent

an intelligence and policy debacle. There are many reasons for this failure. Certainly, the

Bush administration was leaning toward war with Iraq anyway (unlike the Truman and

Eisenhower administration’s policies toward Eastern Europe) and a forward-leaning policy

line means that even small intelligence errors are likely to have big implications in terms

of policy outputs. Moreover, in the particular case of Curveball careful examination was

made diﬃcult because the BND jealously guarded its access to the source, as intelligence

agencies all over the world are wont to do. With regard to the INC sources, even when “burn

notices” were issued, they were not clearly linked to the reporting that had already been

disseminated from the source. Unfortunately, the analysts who helped Secretary of State

Powell prepare his famous speech to the United States did not know that key pieces of

265

ÉMIGRÉ INTELLIGENCE REPORTING

information that the Secretary intended to highlight were known by other components of

the Community to be bad.

The WMD Commission reported in early 2005 that the Director of the CIA was working

on a system that would link “original [human intelligence] reports, fabrication notices, and any

subsequent recalls and corrections.” DIA has already taken similar steps for the reporting which

it originates.

These are, indeed, important developments for it seems certain that as long as

there are émigrés from closed regimes the major intelligence agencies of the free world will face

the problem of fabricators and paper mills.

Notes

I would like to thank David Alvarez, Karl Lowe, Tom Quiggin, John Schindler, Peter Sichel, Pamela Stout,

Michael Warner, and Harry Yeide for their assistance.

1 Curt Weldon, Countdown to Terror (Washington, DC: Regnery 2005).

2 Weldon, pp. 4–6.

3 Weldon, pp. 31–35, 41.

4 Weldon, p. 147.

5 Weldon, p. 151.

6 Weldon, pp. 8–12. Laura Rozen, “Curt Weldon’s Deep Throat,” The American Prospect, June 10, 2005,

online edition, www.prospect.org.

7 Bob Drogin and John Goetz, “How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of ‘Curveball’,” Los Angeles Times,

November 20, 2005, p. 1.

8 Drogin and Goetz, “Statement of John E. McLaughlin, Former Deputy Director of Central Intelli-

gence, April 1, 2005,” shttp://www.fas.org/irp/oﬀdocs/wmd_mclaughlin.html.

9 Drogin and Goetz.

10 United States General Accounting Oﬃce (GAO), State Department: Issues Aﬀecting Funding of Iraqi

National Congress Support Foundation (Washington: General Accounting Oﬃce April 2004), summary

(np).

11 GAO, pp. 3–4.

12 GAO, pp. 1, 3, 10, 11.

13 Douglas McCollam, “How Chalabi Played the Press,” Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2004,

online edition, http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp.

14 The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass

Destruction (WMD Commission), Report to the President of the United States, March 31 2005 (Washing-

ton, DC: GPO, 2005), pp. 108 and 225fn.

15 McCollam.

16 Accuracy in Media, “AIM Report: Media Attack Whistleblower Weldon,” August 4, 2005,

http://www.aim.org/aim_report/3913_0_4_0_C/.

17 FBI Memo, Los Angeles Field Oﬃce, “Bohumil V. Svoboda,” 4 September 1952, National Archives

and Records Administration (NARA), RG 319, Entry 47, Box 15, Folder “201 Choinski, Walter F.

(Col.) 201 Svoboda, Bohumil V. 1952.”

18 Stephen M. Arness, “Paper Mills and Fabrication”, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 2 (Winter 1958), p. 95,

NARA, RG 263, Entry 27, Box 15, Folder 2.

19 Arness, p. 95.

20 Paul v. Gorka, Budapest Betrayed (Wembley, UK: Oak-Tree Books 1986), p. 150.

21 Arness, pp. 96–97.

22 See Igor Lukes, “The Rudolf Slansky Aﬀair: New Evidence”, Slavic Review, Vol. 58, No. 1, (Spring,

1999), pp. 160–187, for an interesting example from a Czechoslovak émigré intelligence service and

a high-stakes operation that it mounted but which was betrayed from within.

23 Richard Helms, with William Hood, A Look Over My Shoulder (New York: Random House 2003) H,

97. Arness, pp. 96–97.

24 Arness, pp. 96–97.

25 Helms, p. 97.

266

MARK STOUT

26 Author’s telephone interview with Peter M. F. Sichel, 14 February, 2005.

27 General Antal Radnócy (Magda Sasvári, trans.), “The Hungarian Veterans’ Association,”

www.members.shaw.ca/czink/mhbk/mhbk.htm. Memo HQ US Forces in Austria (Rear), G-2 to

G-2, General Staﬀ, US Army Washington, DC, Subject “Collegial Society of Hungarian War

Veterans,” 11 October 1950, NARA, RG 65, Entry A1–136X, Box 1, File 97–2994. Unless otherwise

noted, all material from NARA pertaining to the MHBK is from this FBI ﬁle. CIA Information

Report, “Magyar Harcosok Bajtarai Kozosege (League of Hungarian Veterans),” 11 October 1950,

NARA. Memo CIA to FBI, “League of Hungarian Veterans,” 21 June 1950, NARA.

28 Radnócy. CIA Information Report, “Magyar Harcosok Bajtarai Kozosege (League of Hungarian

Veterans),” 11 October 1950, NARA.

29 Memo HQ US Forces in Austria (Rear), G-2 to G-2, General Staﬀ, US Army Washington, DC,

“Collegial Society of Hungarian War Veterans,” 11 October 1950, NARA.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid. Heinz Hohne and Hermann Zolling, The General Was a Spy (New York: Bantam 1972), p. 170.

The US forces in Austria (USFA) memo says merely that Kollenyi later went to work for a

“US intelligence organization in Germany.” Hohne and Zolling specify that this was the Gehlen

Organization. Hohne and Zolling cite Die graue Hand, by “Julius Mader,” a pseudonym used by East

German intelligence in certain propaganda operations. “Mader,” of course, is a somewhat problematic

source, but he and the USFA source agree on Kollenyi’s name and rank and, of course, the Gehlen

Organization was, formally speaking, a US intelligence organization until the establishment of the

BND several years later.

34 HQ US Forces in Austria (Rear), G-2 to G-2, General Staﬀ, US Army Washington, DC, “Collegial

Society of Hungarian War Veterans,” 11 October 1950, NARA.

35 Ibid.

36 Radnócy. “Aide Memoire,” 1947 or 1948?, Library and Archives Canada, (LAC), Ottawa Rakoczi

Foundation Papers, MG 28, V162, Vol. 19, File 6. The Rakoczi Foundation papers include several

thick folders of papers relating to the MHBK’s intelligence activities. Almost of this material is in

Hungarian. This article exploits the small amounts of relevant French and German language materials

in the collection. A scholar of intelligence history who reads Hungarian could certainly write a

fascinating and much more insightful article on the MHBK.

37 Radnócy.

38 Radnócy.

39 Zákó to “Monsieur le Colonel,” Innsbruck, 11 August, 1948, LAC, Rakoczi Foundation Papers, MG

28, V162, Vol. 18, File 6. Also “Pages ‘A’ to ‘E’” (part of an 18-page report, most probably written by N.

Korponay in the early 1950s, in German, LAC, Rakoczi Foundation Papers, MG 28, V162, Vol. 8, File

21).

40 CIA Information Report, “Magyar Harcosok Bajtarai Kozosege (League of Hungarian Veterans),”

11 October 1950, NARA.

41 Radnócy.

42 CIA Information Report, “Magyar Harcosok Bajtarai Kozosege (League of Hungarian Veterans),”

11 October 1950, FBI File 97–2994.

43 Zákó to “Monsieur le Colonel,” 2 November 1948. LAC, Rakoczi Foundation Papers, MG 28, V162,

Vol. 19, File 6.

44 Memo CIA to FBI, “League of Hungarian Veterans,” 21 June 1950, NARA.

45 Memorandum Michael Gaydacs to Federal Bureau of Investigation, 24 September 1951, NARA.

46 FBI New York Field Oﬃce, “Collegial Society of Hungary Veterans,” June 22 1950, NARA.

47 CIA Information Report, “Magyar Harcosok Bajtarai Kozosege (League of Hungarian Veterans),”

11 October 1950, NARA. Memo HQ US Forces in Austria (Rear), G-2 to G-2, General Staﬀ,

US Army Washington, DC, “Collegial Society of Hungarian War Veterans,” 11 October 1950,

NARA, RG 65.

48 Gorka, p. 136.

49 CIA Information Report, “Magyar Harcosok Bajtarai Kozosege (League of Hungarian Veterans),”

11 October 1950, NARA.

50 “Pages ‘A’ to ‘E’ ...,” Rakoczi Foundation Papers. Radnócy.

51 January, February, and March 1953 issues of Hungarian Veteran, NARA.

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ÉMIGRÉ INTELLIGENCE REPORTING

52 February 1953 issue of Hungarian Veteran, NARA.

53 Maria Dolores Ferrero Blanco, “Franco y la Revolución Húngara de 1956: La Contribución de España

en la Resistencia Frente a la URSS,” Papeles del Este, No. 7 (2003), pp. 28–29.

54 CIA Information Report, “Magyar Harcosok Bajtarai Kozosege (League of Hungarian Veterans),”

NARA.

55 CIA and USFA: Helms, pp. 98–99. CIC: Memo CIA to FBI, “League of Hungarian Veterans,” 21 June

1950, NARA. Austrian Police: CIA Information Report, “Magyar Harcosok Bajtarai Kozosege

(League of Hungarian Veterans),” 11 October 1950, NARA. Spain: Ferrero Blanco, p. 25.

56 Memo FBI Salzburg Austria Liaison Oﬃce to Director FBI, “Hungarian Warriors Comradeship

Society,” 20 August 1953, NARA.

57 Memo HQ US Forces in Austria (Rear), G-2 to G-2, General Staﬀ, US Army Washington, DC,

“Collegial Society of Hungarian War Veterans,” 11 October 1950, NARA.

58 Ibid. “Aide Memoire,” 1947 or 1948?, LAC, Rakoczi Foundation Papers.

59 Zákó to “Monsieur le Colonel,” 2 November 1948, LAC, Rakoczi Foundation Papers.

60 Gorka, p. 137.

61 CIA Information Report, “Magyar Harcosok Bajtarai Kozosege (League of Hungarian Veterans),”

11 October 1950, NARA.

62 Ibid. Memo CIA to FBI, “League of Hungarian Veterans,” 21 June 1950, NARA, also mentions the

murder of Kovacs.

63 Memo HQ US Forces in Austria (Rear), G-2 to G-2, General Staﬀ, US Army Washington, DC,

“Collegial Society of Hungarian War Veterans,” 11 October 1950, NARA.

64 Memorandum Michael Gaydacs to Federal Bureau of Investigation, 24 September 1951, NARA.

65 Memo FBI Salzburg Austria Liaison Oﬃce to Director FBI, 20 August 20 1953, “Hungarian Warriors

Comradeship Society,” NARA.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

69 Gorka, p. 152.

70 Helms, p. 98.

71 Helms, pp. 98–99. Central Intelligence Agency, “Paper Mills and Fabrication,” IA–6, February 1952,

obtained from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act.

72 Burton Hersh, The Old Boys, (St Petersburg, FL: Tree Farm Books 1992), pp. 360–361. Bill Lomax,

Hungary 1956 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1976), p. 128.

73 Ferrero Blanco, p. 25.

74 Ferrero Blanco, p. 28.

75 FBI New York Field Oﬃce memo, “Josef Patakfalvi-Pinke,” 15 January 1959, NARA.

76 “Scattolini” is presumably Virgilio Scattolini who from 1944 to August 1945 sold bogus information

allegedly from inside the Vatican – a rather diﬀerent government from those in Eastern Europe,

but arguably a closed regime nonetheless – through middlemen to two diﬀerent components of the

OSS. Much of this information went straight to the President. See Timothy Naftali, “ARTIFICE:

James Angleton and X–2 Operations in Italy,” in George C. Chalou (ed.), The Secrets War: The Oﬃce of

Strategic Services in World War II (Washington: NARA, 1992), pp. 230–233.

77 Central Intelligence Agency, “Paper Mills and Fabrication.”

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid.

80 Helms, p. 97.

81 Sichel interview.

82 Intelligence Advisory Committee document IAC-D–54/3, 30 April 1957, found in the “CIA

Records Search Tool,” NARA under the serial number “CIA-RDP85S00362R000400090001–7”.

83 WMD Commission report, pp. 108–110.

84 WMD Commission report, p. 109.

268

MARK STOUT

Linus Pauling

A case study in counterintelligence run amok

Kathryn S. Olmsted

During the Cold War, the United States fought a political, cultural, and technological struggle

with the Soviet Union to prove its superiority and win the allegiance of citizens in non-aligned

nations. The US government touted America’s abundance of consumer goods, its artistic

achievements, its democratic freedoms, and its scientiﬁc discoveries.

Yet at the height of this global competition, the Federal Bureau of Investigation

attempted to impede the research of one of America’s most distinguished scientists, Linus

Pauling. The FBI and other government agencies tried to prevent the world-renowned chemist

from speaking out publicly, traveling, and even conducting research that could advance the

frontiers of American science. His crime? FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover suspected that Pauling had

once been a supporter of the Communist Party.

Counterintelligence is an essential function of the US government, but security oﬃcials can

sometimes overstep their bounds and abuse their authority. Instead of protecting national

security, overzealous oﬃcials can waste valuable resources, endanger some of the nation’s most

cherished values, and harm its international image. Moreover, oﬃcials’ use of intrusive, abusive

counterintelligence methods against loyal dissidents like Pauling can erode public trust in

government and cause some citizens to believe that secret government agents are guilty

of conspiring against the republic. The FBI’s surveillance and harassment of Pauling provides a

case study in counterintelligence out of control.

The FBI ﬁrst gained authorization to spy on “subversive” Americans during the New

Deal. On August 24, 1936, as war clouds gathered in Europe and Asia, FBI chief J. Edgar

Hoover and President Franklin Roosevelt met privately to discuss the Communist and fascist

threats to American internal security. Hoover quickly briefed the president on native fascists,

but American Communism was his main concern. On orders from Moscow, he said, the

Communists might try to paralyze the nation’s industry, communications, and transportation

through their control of powerful unions. The Reds were also boring within the government

by placing comrades in key agencies. According to Hoover, Roosevelt responded with a strong

– and highly conﬁdential – order to dramatically expand FBI surveillance of subversives in the

United States. The president made this decision unilaterally and secretly. Indeed, as Hoover

explained in a memo two years later, it was “imperative” to keep the program secret – not to

thwart foreign spies, who undoubtedly knew they were being followed, but “to avoid criticism

269

or objections which might be raised to such an expansion by either ill-informed persons or

individuals having some ulterior motive.”

In other words, he wanted to keep it secret from the

democratically elected representatives in Congress.

Roosevelt had good reasons for authorizing the creation and expansion of American internal

security services. The world was a dangerous place in the 1930s, and fascists and Communists

were trying to undermine the American government. But his decision to avoid messy

democratic discussion of the expansion meant that Hoover was able to create his surveillance

state in total secrecy. Moreover, Roosevelt’s failure to deﬁne “subversive” laid the groundwork,

as a US Senate committee later noted, for “excessive intelligence gathering about Americans.”

Once the Second World War began in Europe in 1939, Roosevelt and Hoover shared an

obsession with identifying potential enemies in America. “It is known,” Hoover told Congress

ﬁve days after the war started, “that many foreign agents roam at will in a nation which loves

peace and hates war. At this moment lecherous enemies of American society are seeking to

pollute our atmosphere of freedom and liberty.”

He asked for, and received, more money from

Congress to ﬁght these enemies.

The president saw many potential beneﬁts in increasing Hoover’s budget and authority. In

1940, as the war raged in Europe and the “Great Debate” over intervention raged at home,

Roosevelt expanded the deﬁnition of “subversive activities” to include Americans who sent

him hostile telegrams after one of his ﬁreside chats. “As the telegrams all were more or less in

opposition to national defense,” his press secretary, Steve Early, wrote to Hoover, “the President

thought you might like to look them over, noting the names and addresses of the senders.”

Hoover obliged, and Roosevelt thanked him for the “interesting and valuable” reports.

The

president also ordered the FBI to tap the phones of people who might later engage in subversive

activities.

Congress had explicitly prohibited wiretapping, but Roosevelt’s attorney general

at the time nevertheless approved the FBI’s wiretap program. The law, he said, made it illegal to

“intercept and divulge” communications, but the government had no intention of divulging the

information – except, of course, to other parts of the government.

Roosevelt ordered Hoover to wiretap, bug, and physically spy on his anti-interventionist

opponents during the Lend-Lease debate of early 1941.

He suspected that his political enemies

were getting money from the nation’s enemies. Hoover complied with reports on leadings

isolationists such as Senator Gerald Nye, Senator Burton Wheeler, aviator Charles Lindbergh,

and the anti-interventionist America First Committee, among others.

The FBI’s reports on

the anti-interventionists were ﬁlled with gossip about the president’s political opponents, but

contained no evidence of crimes or foreign connections.

During the war, FBI agents also opened mail, planted bugs, and conducted break-ins. Some-

times the president or attorney general authorized these intrusive surveillance techniques;

sometimes the bureau had no authorization; and sometimes Hoover directly disobeyed the

orders of his superiors. For example, in 1943, Attorney General Francis Biddle told Hoover to

abolish his Custodial Detention List – a list of Americans to be detained in case of a national

emergency – because it was “impractical, unwise, and dangerous.”

But Hoover did not abolish

the list. He simply renamed it the Security Index and directed his ﬁeld agents to keep the list

“strictly conﬁdential” from oﬃcials at the Justice Department.

During the Cold War, the FBI expanded its surveillance operations and even began to

conduct covert action programs against American dissidents. The FBI established its ﬁrst

COINTELPRO, or counterintelligence program, in 1956. Initially, COINTELPRO targeted

the Communist Party, which Hoover viewed as a foreign-directed organization ﬁlled with

“masters of deceit,” as he called American Communists.

But soon COINTELPRO expanded

to include inﬁltration and monitoring of the civil rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan, Black

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KATHRYN S. OLMSTED

Nationalist organizations, and New Left groups. FBI informants would inﬁltrate these organiza-

tions, report on their movements, disrupt their plans, and often attempt to discredit the groups’

members – even, in some cases, to the point of encouraging them to kill one another or leave

their spouses.

The most egregious example of the FBI’s abuse of its counterintelligence authority was its

harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Not only did the bureau bug and wiretap the civil rights

leader, it also tried to take him “oﬀ his pedestal and to reduce him completely in inﬂuence.”

The FBI warned congressmen, university oﬃcials, and even the pope, of King’s allegedly

dangerous and immoral tendencies. The low point of the bureau’s harassment program came

thirty-four days before King was to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. King received an

anonymous audiotape in the mail that purportedly recorded his extramarital aﬀairs. The letter

that accompanied the tape – written by assistant FBI director William Sullivan himself, it

was later revealed – concluded with this suggestion: “King, there is only one thing left for

you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it.”

King took this to be

a suggestion to commit suicide.

In addition to inﬁltrating and disrupting dissident groups with the COINTELPROs, the

FBI also spied on hundreds of thousands of individual Americans in the early Cold War

who were suspected of subversive activity. By 1960, the bureau maintained 432,000 ﬁles at

its headquarters on “subversive” groups and individuals, and FBI ﬁeld oﬃces around the

country collected an even larger number.

The agents moved far beyond Communist Party

members to monitor law-abiding citizens who espoused – in the view of the FBI – vaguely

deﬁned Communist sympathies. Even manifestly non-revolutionary groups like the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were included in this

category.

To be sure, the US government needed a rigorous loyalty-security program for government

workers during the early Cold War. Recent research has proved that some Americans did

spy for the Soviet Union, and a handful of these spies even attained important positions in the

federal government, especially during the US–Soviet wartime alliance. But the FBI’s counter-

intelligence programs went beyond security checks on government workers to the surveillance

and harassment of non-Communist dissidents with no access to sensitive documents. Moreover,

many of these FBI counterintelligence operations were based on information from dubious

sources, carried out with excessive zeal, and subject to little or no oversight by Congress or the

Justice Department.

The counterintelligence programs of Hoover’s FBI targeted thousands of law-abiding

Americans, including teachers, actors, housewives, and ministers. As a Senate inquiry later

concluded, many of these investigations used “dangerous and degrading tactics which are

abhorrent in a free and decent society.”

There were many individual victims of these abuses:

the priest whose bishop received an anonymous letter after he allowed the Black Panthers to

use his church for free breakfasts, or the teacher who lost his job for Communist “associations.”

But in Linus Pauling’s case, the FBI did more than disrupt an innocent individual’s life and

undermine the First Amendment. By impeding a great American scientist’s research, it also

arguably harmed the national security it professed to protect.

Pauling’s early life contained few clues that he would later become a controversial political

ﬁgure. The son of a druggist, Pauling showed signs of brilliance as soon as he arrived at Oregon

Agricultural College (now Oregon State University) in 1917 at age sixteen. He started teaching

chemistry at the college while he was still an undergraduate there. He married one of his

students, Ava Helen Miller, an idealistic young woman with a strong sense of social justice. The

Paulings would go on to have four children and enjoy a long and happy partnership together.

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LINUS PAULING

The “boy professor” attended graduate school at the California Institute of Technology,

where he joined the faculty in 1927. Using the relatively new technology of X-ray crystal-

lography, he studied photographic images of molecules and analyzed their structure and

the ways that they bonded with one another. After publishing numerous groundbreaking

articles on atomic structure, his interests turned from physics to living systems and bio-

chemistry. He quickly established a reputation as one of the most innovative minds in

American science, prompting revolutions in quantum chemistry and molecular biology. His

seminal work, The Nature of the Chemical Bond (1939), transformed the ﬁeld of chemistry.

Its clear prose, detailed illustrations, and accessible analysis helped to make it one of the

most widely cited scientiﬁc works of the century. During the Second World War, he put his

research talents at the service of the US government. He invented an oxygen meter that

tested the air in submarines, and for this achievement he earned the Presidential Medal

of Merit, the highest award given to US civilians. After the war, Pauling, now at the peak of

his productive career, published General Chemistry, a hugely popular undergraduate text that

made him famous with generations of students and also helped him to become independently

wealthy.

In the early years of his career, Pauling devoted all of his time and energy to his research and

his family. He had no time for politics. “Until I was forty,” he later said, “I didn’t take much

interest in social concerns. I swallowed the argument that people in power use to suppress

scientists – a scientist knows a great deal about his ﬁeld but nothing whatsoever about war and

peace.”

By the mid-1940s, though, he had established his reputation as the one of the world’s most

respected scientists. Once he was secure in his income and his academic achievements, Ava

Helen urged him to read widely and speak out on politics. Beginning in 1946, he began to

associate himself “in a smaller or larger way with every peace movement that has come to my

attention,” he later admitted proudly.

He condemned American racism, joined numerous

progressive groups, and defended the Hollywood Ten. As Senator Joe McCarthy denounced

“Commiecrats” and parlor pinks, Pauling continued his work with leftist groups, including the

campaign to free the Rosenbergs, the National Committee to Repeal the McCarran Acts, and

“Everybody’s Committee to Outlaw War.” He not only defended Communists, he also refused

to say initially whether he had been a Communist himself.

Denying Party membership, he

believed, just played into the hands of the witch hunters.

The FBI saw Pauling’s vocal progressivism as potential evidence of subversive tendencies,

and started keeping a ﬁle on him in 1947. Three years later, it received “proof” of Pauling’s

disloyalty from a professional ex-Communist named Louis Budenz. Budenz, who made his

living by writing books about the evils of American Communism, named Pauling as one of the

400 “men without faces” who were secretly under Party discipline and preparing the country

for a Communist takeover.

The “Budenz 400” included prominent artists, intellectuals, and

scientists like Pauling who had denounced the Red Scare. Scholars have thoroughly discredited

Budenz’s list.

A charitable interpretation would be that his memory had faded during the ﬁve

years since his defection from the Party leadership. A less charitable interpretation would be

that he made up the list to sell more books, and then justiﬁed his lies out of a deep belief that

liberals were as treasonous as Communists.

The FBI was never able to ﬁnd another witness to conﬁrm Budenz’s secondhand accusa-

tions. Pauling’s colleagues at the California Institute of Technology insisted that he was

simply an “exhibitionist” rather than a Communist, and years of FBI interviews of Southern

California Communists and informants never produced a single person who could remember

seeing Pauling or his wife at a Party meeting.

The evidence for Budenz’s identiﬁcation of

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KATHRYN S. OLMSTED

Pauling as a secret Red remained so ﬂimsy after two years of investigation that the special agent

in charge of the Los Angeles FBI oﬃce suggested closing the case.

Yet J. Edgar Hoover sternly insisted that the LA agents must pursue their man. When Pauling

ultimately denied Party membership under oath, Hoover responded by suggesting that the

Justice Department prosecute him for perjury.

Because of his leftist politics, the US State

Department’s passport division prohibited him from attending a scientiﬁc meeting held in his

honor in England in 1952.

Pauling was sure that the government was not really worried about

his loyalty, but “instead the denial of a passport to me is an eﬀort by the Government to

force me to change my political ideas or give up my activities.”

He refused to pull back, and

some scholars have speculated that he suﬀered his greatest scientiﬁc disappointment as a result.

At the time he was at the forefront of a group of scientists racing to describe the structure of

DNA. Had he been allowed to attend the conference, he might have seen the X-ray images

of DNA taken by British scientists, and he, rather than James Watson and Francis Crick, might

have solved the riddle of the double helix.

Pauling did win a Nobel Prize in 1954 for his numerous contributions to chemistry. But

several government oﬃcials opposed allowing him to travel to Sweden to accept the prize.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles overruled them and gave Pauling his passport. Pauling’s

receipt of the Prize only convinced the FBI chief to work harder to prove his subversive

tendencies. “You should continue to remain alert for any additional subversive information

concerning Pauling and forward this to the Bureau by the most expeditious means,” he wrote

to his agents soon after the announcement of the Prize.

Not all American government

oﬃcials shared Hoover’s belief that Pauling was a danger to his country. An embassy oﬃcial

in Stockholm wrote that the peace activist was “deﬁnitely the most popular of the American

Nobel Prize winners” in 1954 and that “far from injuring American interests or prestige, his

visit substantially enhanced them.”

But such voices of reason were rare in the US government in the 1950s. The most famous

American chemist of the century, Pauling was denied a grant from the US Public Health

Service because he was “suspected of disloyalty to the country.”

An FBI agent noted

laconically that the health service “also turned down Pauling’s request for forty thousand

dollars to ﬁnance two investigations of blood and protein chemistry, a ﬁeld in which he is world

famous.”

The US government, in short, did its best to ruin his career because of its conspiracy

theory of his role as a Communist subversive. At a time when the US was engaged in a bitter

political and scientiﬁc competition with a Communist country, government oﬃcials

obstructed the work of an American scientist who could help to showcase the superiority of

capitalism.

Pauling’s career suﬀered in other ways as well. Disturbed by controversy over his alleged Red

links, American universities rescinded invitations to have him speak at their campuses, the

California Institute of Technology launched an internal investigation of his politics, and private

corporations pulled their funding from Pauling’s lab. Meanwhile, Pauling’s alleged Communist

sympathies did not win him fans in the Soviet Union. The Soviets considered Pauling’s work

on chemical bonds to be “un-Marxian,” bourgeois, and anti-materialistic, and Soviets chemists

denounced his research.

But Pauling refused to end his peace campaigns. He knew that he could lose his job, he later

explained, but “I kept on in order to retain the respect of my wife.”

By the late 1950s, he

had become a leader in the anti-nuclear movement. In 1958, he published No More War, an

early jeremiad on the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war. “I believe,” he wrote, “that

the development of these terrible weapons forces us to move into a new period in the history of

the world, a period of peace and reason, when world problems are not solved by war or by force,

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LINUS PAULING

but are solved by the application of man’s power of reason.”

He and thirteen other scientists

sued the Defense Department to stop nuclear tests, and he spearheaded a drive by 11,000

scientists to ask the United Nations to stop the tests in all nations. He was particularly worried

that fallout from nuclear tests would lead to millions of miscarriages and birth defects around

the world. The statements of a respected member of the US Atomic Energy Commission,

chemist Willard Libby, especially outraged Pauling. Libby insisted that fallout was relatively

harmless, which Pauling believed was a lie. “This is premeditated murder of millions of people,”

Pauling said after the Soviets ended a series of 50 tests. “It compares with the consignment of

Jews to the gas chambers.”

As Pauling intensiﬁed his anti-nuclear activism, the FBI continued its fruitless investigation.

“We have contacted every source we could ﬁnd who might have useful information,” one

FBI oﬃcial explained in 1958. “None has identiﬁed Pauling as a Communist Party member.”

Still, the bureau continued to monitor Pauling’s mail and track his movements.

Pauling despised the FBI and the presidents who controlled it throughout the 1950s. When a

new generation took charge of the White House in 1961, Pauling did not initially see much of

a diﬀerence between the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Like his predecessor, John

Kennedy failed to understand the dangers of nuclear testing and nuclear war, Pauling believed.

As he clipped and ﬁled accounts of Kennedy’s speeches, he annotated them with angry com-

ments about the disastrous consequences of his policies. Next to a newspaper article quoting

Kennedy’s determination to prepare “in the ﬁnal extreme to ﬁght for our country and to mean

it,” Pauling wrote: “SUCH A POLICY WILL MEAN THE END OF CIVILIZATION.”

In 1962, Pauling brieﬂy panicked the Secret Service when he and Ava Helen picketed the

White House on the day before they were scheduled to attend a presidential dinner for Nobel

laureates.

Kennedy’s staﬀ decided to allow the Paulings to attend the dinner anyway, and

the two peace activists had their ﬁrst personal encounter with the young president and his

glamorous wife. Pauling could not help being charmed by the Kennedys. “I’m pleased to see

you,” the president said to the man who had picketed his residence. “I understand you’ve been

around the White House a couple of days already.” Jackie Kennedy said that Caroline Kennedy

was perplexed by the picketing. “[S]he asked, ‘Mummy, what has Daddy done now?’”

Pauling and his wife joined in the laughter and went on to enjoy a glittering evening with more

than a hundred of the nation’s top intellectuals.

Pauling was reluctant to associate this witty, urbane chief executive with the oppressive

government that had set out to ruin him. After the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962,

Pauling wondered angrily why Kennedy had undertaken “this immoral act of risking our lives.”

He concluded that the president was manipulated by powers beyond his control. The president

was not forced to blockade the island by the Soviets, Pauling noted; instead, he “was forced by

the militarists, the military-industrial complex.”

The next year, Kennedy redeemed himself in Pauling’s view when he signed the Nuclear

Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union and Great Britain, which ended the above-ground tests

that had poisoned the atmosphere. The agreement, Pauling wrote to the president, “will go

down in history as one of the greatest events in the history of the world.”

Pauling also

admired Kennedy’s American University address in June 1963. In that speech, which some

historians see as a sign of Kennedy’s intention to ease the tensions of the Cold War, the

president urged accommodation with the Soviet Union. “For, in the ﬁnal analysis, our most

basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all

cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Pauling clipped and ﬁled the text of the

American University speech.

The president, he believed, seemed to be freeing himself from

the control of the military-industrial complex.

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KATHRYN S. OLMSTED

Pauling’s work for nuclear disarmament was vindicated in October 1963, when the Nobel

committee awarded him his second Prize, this time for Peace. He was recognized for his role in

bringing about the Test Ban Treaty. Pauling valued the Peace Prize even more than his earlier

Prize for chemistry. “[T]he Nobel Prize in Chemistry pleased me immensely,” he said later,

“but . . . it was given to me for enjoying myself – for carrying out researches in chemistry that

I enjoyed carrying out. On the other hand, I felt that the Nobel Peace Prize was an indication

to me that I had done my duty as a human being.”

This time, the US government did not

attempt to stop him from traveling to accept his prize.

Still, Pauling’s FBI ﬁle continued to grow. He attracted bureau attention again in 1962

when he publicly supported the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a group opposing US eﬀorts

to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Hoover had denounced the organization as a threat to

US security and a vehicle for Communist propaganda.

Pauling did not cross paths with many of the six thousand national members of Fair Play for

Cuba. He did not know, for example, the founder of the one-man chapter in New Orleans, an

American Communist named Lee Harvey Oswald. Along with the rest of the nation, he would

learn of Oswald on November 22, 1963. And like many Americans whose views had been

labeled “subversive” in the McCarthy era, Pauling would soon become very suspicious of the

government’s oﬃcial explanation of the events of that day.

Pauling immediately questioned the conclusion of the Warren Commission – the group

appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the Kennedy assassination – that a

Communist had killed the president on his own. Like several other early Warren Report critics,

Pauling was skeptical of the government’s attempt to blame a Communist. He knew from

experience that the government had a habit of demonizing leftists.

Given his hatred for the FBI and his growing admiration for the president he saw as a force

for peace, Pauling soon formed dark suspicions about the role of the “military-industrial

complex” in the Kennedy assassination. He corresponded with prominent conspiracy theorists;

he subscribed to conspiracy newsletters; he studied photographs of the assassination and tried to

identify shadowy ﬁgures in the bushes.

In 1975, after more than a decade of reading books,

articles, and newsletters on the assassination, he joined Mark Lane’s Citizens’ Commission of

Inquiry, which demanded a congressional investigation of the US government’s potential

complicity in the murder.

The government’s conspiracy theories about him prompted

Pauling to develop conspiracy theories about the government.

Throughout his career, Pauling was an intuitive, innovative, and daring thinker. He found the

answers to some of the twentieth century’s most vexing scientiﬁc questions by glimpsing

connections that previous investigators had missed. At the end of his career, he was viliﬁed for

his advocacy of massive doses of vitamin C to prevent and ﬁght cancer, but by the 1990s the

medical establishment had accepted his underlying assumption that antioxidants were impor-

tant cancer ﬁghters. He was always ready to disregard what other people told him he should

think. His willingness to leap from the proven to the theoretical made him a brilliant scientist. It

also made him a natural conspiracy theorist.

His experiences as a victim of FBI repression also made him a natural critic of the US

government’s oﬃcial version of Kennedy’s assassination. Pauling was the prototypical innocent

victim of McCarthyism – an activist who had never joined the Communist Party, yet who was

harassed and spied upon by his government because of his public denunciations of the Red

Scare. He knew the FBI to be a vengeful, vindictive agency; the extreme anti-Communists, he

said repeatedly, were the real un-Americans.

Like Pauling, other individuals who suﬀered from the repressive eﬀects of McCarthyism in

the 1950s began to develop conspiracy theories about the real “masters of deceit” within the

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LINUS PAULING

American government in the 1960s. Pauling corresponded extensively with Sylvia Meagher, a

researcher for the World Health Organization (WHO), who helped to organize the ﬁrst group

of Kennedy “assassination researchers,” as they called themselves, and who published the ﬁrst

subject index of the Warren Report. Meagher had almost lost her job at the WHO during

a long loyalty investigation in 1953.

Harold Weisberg, one of Meagher’s close friends and a

fellow assassination researcher, had been dismissed from the State Department for suspected

Communist sympathies in 1947.

Weisberg self-published the ﬁrst critical book on the Warren

Report, and went on to publish a total of nine Kennedy assassination conspiracy books.

For his part, Pauling could not understand why the US government had pursued the self-

defeating policy of trying to destroy him, despite his stature as one of America’s greatest

scientists. The answer, he decided, was that the anti-Communist conspiracy theorists were

themselves part of a great American conspiracy. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the “military-

industrial complex” were conspiring to silence progressive voices in America. They would

stop at nothing – even a coup – to attain their reactionary goals. Some progressives, including

former Vice President Henry Wallace and former ambassador Joseph Davies, feared in the

1950s that the Reds-in-government conspiracists were dangerous extremists who were plotting

an anti-government coup.

In the 1960s, Pauling came to believe that those extremists had

succeeded in their coup.

In the 1970s, the US Senate investigated the scandalous practices of the FBI and CIA.

A committee headed by Frank Church of Idaho recommended several reforms to ensure

democratic oversight of intelligence agencies and prevent such abuses from occurring again.

The most important law to come out of the Church investigation was the Foreign Intelligence

Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which required the National Security Agency to obtain

warrants before it eavesdropped on the conversations of American citizens. FISA set up a

special, top-secret court with responsibility for reviewing and approving warrant requests. In

addition, Congress ultimately reorganized intelligence oversight and formed two permanent

committees – the Intelligence Committees of the House and the Senate – with responsibility

for looking over the shoulders of intelligence and counterintelligence agencies. With these

reforms, Congress hoped to avoid the abuses of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign at the FBI and similar

abuses at the CIA. Future Hoovers would need to justify surveillance of loyal dissenters like

Pauling.

Yet there are signs that the administration of George W. Bush has not learned the lessons of

the past. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush ordered the National

Security Agency to disregard FISA and to monitor Americans’ international phone calls,

emails, faxes, and instant messages without obtaining warrants.

According to James Bamford,

the number of Americans monitored by the NSA has grown from about a dozen each year to as

many as ﬁve thousand since 2002.

Once again, as at the peak of the Cold War, no overseers

watch government counterintelligence agents; these agents need not show probable cause

before they spy on American citizens. This total secrecy could allow abuses like the Pauling case

to happen again. As Senator Church said in the midst of his famous investigation, “We ’ve

learned enough, I should think, to at least rephrase Lord Acton’s famous admonition. I think

that it could be said that ‘All secrecy corrupts. Absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely.’”

Notes

1 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence

Activities (hereafter Church Committee), Final Report (94th Cong., 2nd sess., 1976), Book II, 25, 28.

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KATHRYN S. OLMSTED

Athan G. Theoharis argues that Roosevelt gave Hoover a somewhat narrow and vague directive,

which the FBI chief then misrepresented and expanded. See Theoharis, “The FBI’s Stretching of

Presidential Directives, 1936–1953,” Political Science Quarterly 91:4 (Winter, 1976–1977): 652–55.

2 Church Committee Report, Book II, 24. See also Church Committee Report, Book III, 393–97. For a

detailed analysis of Roosevelt’s expansion of the FBI, see Kenneth O’Reilly, “A New Deal for the FBI:

The Roosevelt Administration, Crime Control, and National Security,” Journal of American History

69:3 (December 1982): 638–58.

3 Quoted in Frank Donner, “Hoover’s Legacy,” Nation, June 1, 1974, 679.

4 Church Committee Report, Book II, 33.

5 Quoted in Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: Plume, 1992), 226.

6 See Richard W. Steele, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Foreign Policy Critics,” Political Science Quar-

terly 94:1 (Spring 1979): 15–32. For other discussions of the Roosevelt administration’s attempts to

monitor and discredit its enemies, see Leo P. Ribuﬀo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right

from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia, PA: Temple, 1983), chapter 5; Geoﬀrey S. Smith,

To Save a Nation: American “Extremism,” the New Deal, and the Coming of World War II (Chicago, IL: Ivan

R. Dee, 1973, rev. ed. 1992), epilogue; and Douglas M. Charles, “Informing FDR: FBI Political

Surveillance and the Isolationist-Interventionist Foreign Policy Debate,” Diplomatic History 24:2

(Spring 2000): 211–32.

7 Church Committee Report, Book II, 36.

8O’Reilly, “New Deal for the FBI,” 648.

9 Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists: 1932–1945 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press,

1983), 531–33.

10 Church Committee Report, Book II, 35.

11 Ibid., 36.

12 J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (New York:

Holt, 1958).

13 See, for example, Church Committee hearings, Federal Bureau of Investigation (Volume 6), November

18, 1975, 26.

14 Ibid., 31.

15 Ibid., 33. For the most complete examination of the FBI’s harassment of King, see David Garrow, The

FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Penguin Books, 1981).

16 Church Committee Report, Book II, 47.

17 Ibid., 46–47.

18 Ibid., 211.

19 On Pauling, see Thomas Hager, Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling (New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1995); Thomas Hager and Cliﬀord Mead, eds., Linus Pauling: Scientist and Peacemaker

(Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2001), David E. Newton, Linus Pauling: Scientist and

Advocate (New York: Instructional Horizons, 1994); and Ted Goertzel and Ben Goertzel, Linus Pauling:

A Life in Science and Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

20 Hager, Force of Nature, 217–18, 249–52, 290–91.

21 Quoted in Newton, Linus Pauling, 56.

22 Quoted in report, “Linus Carl Pauling,” October 21, 1952, FBI ﬁle 100–353404–27, box 2.025, folder

25.1, Pauling papers, Oregon State University.

23 See memo, SAC Los Angeles to director, November 21, 1950, FBI ﬁle 100–353404–10, box 2.025,

folder 25.1, Pauling papers.

24 Memo, SAC New York to director, August 8, 1950, FBI ﬁle 100–353404–7, box 2.025, folder 25.1,

Pauling papers. See also Budenz, Men without Faces: The Communist Conspiracy in the U.S.A. (New York:

Harper, 1950). Budenz did not name the four hundred individuals in his book, but he named them

later to the FBI.

25 See Robert M. Lichtman, “Louis Budenz, the FBI, and the ‘List of 400 Concealed Communists’: An

Extended Tale of McCarthy-Era Informing,” in American Communist History 3:1 (June 2004): 25–54.

For an early, critical assessment of Budenz’s truthfulness, see Herbert Packer, Ex-Communist Witnesses:

Four Studies in Fact Finding (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), chapter 4.

26 Report, “Linus Carl Pauling,” October 21, 1952, 100–353404–27, box 2.025, folder 25.1, Pauling

papers.

27 Memo, SAC Los Angeles to director, October 21, 1952, FBI ﬁle 100–353404–27, box 2.025, folder

25.1, Pauling papers.

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LINUS PAULING

28 Memo, FBI director to attorney general, December 9, 1953, FBI ﬁle 100–353404–37, box 2.025,

folder 25.1, Pauling papers.

29 Report, “Linus Carl Pauling,” October 21,1952.

30 Quoted in Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold

War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 275.

31 Stanley Kutler, The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang,

1982), 90–91; Hager, Force of Nature, 414; Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: The

Makers of the Revolution in Biology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 132.

32 Hager, Force of Nature, 454.

33 Director to SAC Los Angeles, November 29, 1954, FBI ﬁle 100–353404–54, box 2.025, folder 25.2,

Pauling papers.

34 Foreign Service Despatch, American Embassy, Stockholm, to Department of State, Washington, 26

March 1956, 32685-D, box 2.030, folder 30.2, Pauling papers.

35 “Disloyal Scientists?” Newsweek, May 10, 1954, 57.

36 Report, “Linus Carl Pauling,” December 2, 1954, FBI ﬁle 100–353404–162, box 2.025, folder 25.2,

Pauling papers.

37 “Statement by Linus Pauling,” April 22, 1951, box 2.025, folder 25.1, Pauling papers. See also Hager,

Force of Nature, 383.

38 Lee Dye, “The Deeply Personal War of Linus Pauling,” Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1985, section VI,

p. 1. Quoted in Hager, Force of Nature, 360.

39 Linus Pauling, No More War (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1983, ﬁrst published 1958), 3.

40 Quoted in Hager, Force of Nature, 532.

41 Memo, A.H. Belmont to L.V. Boardman, April 10, 1958, FBI ﬁle 100–353404–148, box 2.026, folder

26.1, Pauling papers.

42 The FBI was still investigating Pauling in the Nixon administration. See summary, April 25, 1973, FBI

ﬁle 100–353404–424, box 2.029, folder 29.2, Pauling papers.

43 See “The President’s Address at Arlington,” in box 198, folder 198.3, Pauling papers.

44 C.L. McGowan to Mr Rosen, April 28, 1962, FBI ﬁle 100–353404–295, box 2.027, folder 27.2,

Pauling papers.

45 Quoted in Hager, Force of Nature, 537–38.

46 See the handwritten notes, undated, in box 198, folder 198.3, Pauling papers.

47 Pauling to Kennedy, August 1, 1963, box 198, folder 198.3, Pauling papers.

48 See box 198, folder 198.3, Pauling papers.

49 Quoted in Mead and Hager, eds., Linus Pauling: Scientist and Peacemaker, 194.

50 “Caribbean Export,” Newsweek, 23 October 1961, 22–23.

51 See sketch and letters in box 198, folder 198.4, in the Pauling papers.

52 Letter, Kathy Kinsella to Linus Pauling, May 8, 1975, box 198, folder 198.4, Pauling papers.

53 Hager, Force of Nature, 524.

54 See the documents in “Loyalty Case (1953–54),” box 10, Sylvia Meagher papers, Hood College,

Frederick, Maryland.

55 Report to director, November 8, 1966, FBI ﬁle 62–109060–4250, JFK collection, National Archives

and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

56 Harold Weisberg, Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report (Hyattstown, MD: 1965).

57 Richard M. Fried, “The Idea of ‘Conspiracy’ in McCarthy-Era Politics,” Prologue 34:1 (2002), 43–44.

58 James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets US Spy on Callers Without Courts,” New York Times,

December 16, 2005.

59 James Bamford, “Big Brother Is Listening,” Atlantic Monthly, April 2006, 66.

60 Frank Church speech, July 8, 1975, in series 7.9, box 4, folder 1, Frank Church Collection, Boise State

University Library.

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KATHRYN S. OLMSTED

The role of covert action

William J. Daugherty

Overview

Covert action operations, essentially absent from public view since the large operations of

the 1980s in Afghanistan and Central America, again began generating news early in the

twenty-ﬁrst century as the Central Intelligence Agency quickly assumed a major responsibility

for prosecuting America’s war against terrorism. By the end of 2005 news media were

reporting on numerous CIA activities, including identifying, capturing, and interrogating

(or sometimes killing) members of Al-Qaeda and other terrorist elements threatening US

interests worldwide. Once again, an American president had turned to covert action to further

American national security objectives through programs intended to remain hidden from

public view. In doing so, President George W. Bush followed precedents set by chief executives

going back to George Washington and the origins of our nation. Yet, as always, legitimate

disputes over the appropriateness and legality of covert action programs are complicated by a

lack of knowledge about covert action in general and its role in supporting American foreign

policy.

Perhaps the most important point to understand about covert action is that is it not a routine

mission of the CIA, such as foreign intelligence collection or counterintelligence operations.

Rather, covert action is very much an element of American presidential statecraft, joining

the more familiar components of American foreign policy such as diplomacy, military force,

economic assistance or sanctions, trade enhancements or restrictions, foreign aid, military

training and assistance, ﬁnancial credits or loans, government-sponsored information activities

(e.g. Voice of America), and agricultural aid. But there are several crucial aspects that separate

covert action from these other foreign policy tools.

Of primary import, covert action is a capability that, by the nature of the work and by

presidential Executive Order (indirectly bolstered by the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1991),

is provided solely by the CIA but employed only at the explicit direction of the President of

the United States. Indeed, since 1974 federal law requires the president to notify the Congress

that he has authorized these programs and that he “ﬁnds” the programs to be necessary for the

national security of the United States. (The document the president signs is known, not

surprisingly, as a “Finding”; there are now so many laws and rules governing the initiation and

279

conduct of covert action programs that all elements of every Finding are routinely scrutinized

by lawyers in the CIA, the Congress, and at the National Security Council.) Also, unlike overt,

or visible, foreign policy measures, covert action operations are conducted by the CIA utilizing

clandestine methodologies for most or all phases of an operation save the ﬁnal results, which

may be highly visible. There is a two-fold purpose in this.

First, the purpose of any covert action program – that is, what the president and the CIA

intend to accomplish – is generally to inﬂuence a foreign audience to do something, or refrain

from doing something, in furtherance of US policy goals. That “audience” might be a

nation’s government or senior leadership, a nation’s population, a segment of that population,

or supranational groups such as a terrorist organization or a drug cartel. Programs directed

against governments might be focused on inﬂuencing that government to change its policies

on an issue or towards a geographic region in a manner that will parallel, vice oppose,

American policies. Covert action operations against a population might be intended to gener-

ate pro-American support and, subsequently, to bring pressure on their government for a

corresponding change. Programs to counter supranational organizations might seek to

undermine their operations, capture members, induce defections, or disrupt their ﬁnancial

networks.

The results of covert action – i.e. inﬂuence – operations must be visible, at least to a part of

the target population, since the idea is to create a change of behavior; and it is manifestly

impossible for actions that are completely hidden from view to have that eﬀect. While the

recruitment and direction (“handling”) of foreign citizens as agents to participate in these

programs is done clandestinely, as in intelligence collection operations, for the security pur-

poses, what those agents ultimately “produce” will be usually be readily apparent. For example,

a labor leader in a foreign country might be recruited secretly to push his organization to

support trade policies that favor United States interests but which his government opposes. This

laborite might, at some point, be tasked to organize a nation-wide strike as a way to pressure his

government to change direction, at least partially. Obviously, this labor action would not only

be readily apparent to the government and citizens, but might also receive media coverage

regionally or even internationally. While one event alone is rarely suﬃcient to being about the

desired result, that labor leader might, over time and when aggregated with other covert action

programs targeted against that government, achieve some positive eﬀect in line with overall US

policy objectives.

The second purpose behind employing covert action programs to achieve selected goals,

vice reliance on traditional overt measures such as diplomacy, trade and military force, is that for

the activities undertaken by the recruited agents to be viewed as “legitimate” by the intended

audience, the sponsorship of the United States government must remain hidden. An editorial

placed in the newspaper of a foreign capital that is openly written by the American ambassador

to that country will have little-to-no eﬀect (i.e. inﬂuence) if that population or government is

anti-American, at least on that particular issue. However, if a highly respected public ﬁgure who

is a citizen of that nation writes, or putatively writes, that same editorial, it may carry much

more weight with the readership. Especially if the newspaper is regularly perused by that

country’s policy elites.

This “secret but not secret” characteristic of covert action is attractive and extremely

advantageous to presidents in that it yields them a policy option situated between purely overt

diplomatic and/or economic measures (which against certain regimes or organizations may be

of limited use) and resort to open employment of military force (which might redound to the

detriment of the US). Covert action allows the president to execute measures of varying and

increasing pressure on regimes but without that regime realizing that the source of those

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WILLIAM J. DAUGHERTY

pressures is the United States government. Or, if the hostile regime or entity does believe or

conclude that the US government is behind damaging actions, it will be unable to prove it to

the world, thus limiting its ability (and, perhaps, willingness) to respond. Covert action was

relied upon by all Cold War presidents as a means by which the United States could create

diﬃculties for the Soviet Union by applying pressure incrementally, thereby reducing the risk

of war that an overt use of military force would have entailed.

Understanding now that covert action programs are authorized by the president for the

purpose of inﬂuencing some foreign audience, the obvious question is, What exactly are these

inﬂuence operations? Covert action is an “intelligence discipline,” just as intelligence collec-

tion/analysis and counterintelligence are disciplines, within the overall responsibilities of the

CIA or any other large intelligence agency. (The former Soviet intelligence service, the KGB,

utilized covert action extensively, calling it “Active Measures.”) Covert action is characterized

by four “sub-disciplines”: propaganda, political action, paramilitary, and information warfare

operations. The individual inﬂuence operations subtended by these categories range across the

spectrum from the nearly invisible to the spectacularly public; from the almost benign to

the highly provocative; from a subtle appeal to the intellect to the violent taking of lives; from

the amazingly cheap to the enormously expensive; from an event lasting but a few minutes to a

years-long campaign.

A covert action operation may be as simple as a college boy’s practical joke (printing fake

and misleading campaign posters) or highly technical and deadly. Many activities are almost

routine “tools-of-the-trade” and employed by authorities since biblical times, while others

involve applications of emerging futuristic technologies limited only by human ingenuity. The

ultimate value of covert action, perhaps, is that it yields to the president a vast array of means to

aid in the achievement of his policy objectives.

Covert action sub-disciplines

Propaganda

Propaganda – which we may deﬁne as merely the dissemination of information by various

media for the purpose of inﬂuencing opinions – is perhaps the methodology most frequently

relied upon by the president and the CIA, for it is frequently subtle, disarming, ﬂexible, and low

in cost. In any case, it is rare for propaganda programs to attain desired results in the near or even

intermediate term, much less overnight. The intent of propaganda is to inﬂuence – to bolster or

to change – what a person or group believes. Individuals who believe strongly in one point of

view simply do not change their minds on the basis of one article, one editorial, one poster, or

one pamphlet. While one item may impel an audience to begin thinking about alternative

perspectives, the fact of the matter is that it takes time for people, individually or collectively, to

absorb a new concept and still longer to adopt it in place of a previous position.

Similarly, it is diﬃcult for the managing case oﬃcers to evaluate the results of a propaganda

operation, at least not until the justiﬁcation for it has long vanished, because (as a former senior

CIA oﬃcer with responsibility for a large number of these programs would say) it is impossible

to measure the eﬀect of ideas on a person’s mind. Hence, for those executing many propaganda

programs, it is necessary to them to have faith that they are making a diﬀerence, even though

they might never receive positive conﬁrmation of those results.

Propaganda may be employed alone but is likewise a facile and eﬀective tool to buttress overt

policy measures, such as diplomacy and economic assistance. The best use of propaganda is

simply to tell the truth. During the Cold War, the United States didn’t need to lionize the

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America ideal or the values of democracy to the citizens of the Soviet Union, nor did it need to

tell the oppressed how awful and repressive their own government was, for they knew all of this.

As such, many of the US propaganda eﬀorts against the USSR (both covert measures from the

CIA and overt measures originating in the State Department’s United States Information

Service) merely involved airing truthful accounts of events to counter the falsehoods about

international and internal actions the Soviet government fed its own citizenry, to help keep

alive the histories of the ethnic minorities persecuted by the Communist system, and to provide

the population with desirable materials banned by Moscow (e.g. Bibles and other religious

items, and Russian literary works such as those of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn).

Propaganda that is truthful in nature and for which the source is accurately identiﬁed, such as

a government agency’s public information service, like USIS or Voice of America, whether

objective or slanted (subtly or otherwise), is referred to as “white” propaganda. Similar propa-

ganda disseminated with the source of that information disguised is “gray” propaganda. For

example, an article published by a foreign scholar, under his real name in an academic journal

read by his country’s policy elites, that advocated a pro-American perspective, but done so at

the secret behest of the CIA, would be gray propaganda. Gray propaganda can be as eﬀective as

white, in the right circumstances. In the 1960s the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, had an

agent who was a reporter write a story that appeared in an Italian newspaper claiming that

the CIA was behind John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Nearly ﬁfty years later, there are still many

people (even in the United States) who believe this.

Finally, there’s “black” propaganda, which in plain terms is forgery, something created out of

whole cloth to inﬂuence individuals or aﬀect an event, but which is totally false. The Soviet

Union also attempted to use black propaganda during the Cold War, primarily to generate

negative feelings against the United States among Third World inhabitants. An allegedly oﬃcial

document under State Department letterhead “acknowledging” that the AIDS virus was pro-

duced American labs for the deliberation introduction into African societies turned up in a

number of foreign countries and, like the Kennedy story, is still given credence by millions

today despite the blatant crudeness of the forgery.

Political action

The second sub-discipline of covert action is political action, a broad term covering operations

that are not only political in nature but may or may not have an economic component. Funds

given secretly to aid a preferred political candidate or party to win an election in a foreign

country is a simple, basic form of political action. A labor strike that brings a nation’s workforce

to a halt is both political and economic, creating or exacerbating economic stress among the

population that possesses in turn the ability to generate political heat on the government

leadership. A more serious operation might be the introduction of counterfeit currency into a

country’s money supply, wreaking severe economic damage to the country and undermining

the legitimacy of that country’s leadership. In the 1990s, highly accurate counterfeit US$50

bills – a favorite source of payment utilized throughout the Middle East – were printed in

that region, to the great consternation of the American government and Department of the

Treasury for most of a decade. Planting the fake currency of a nation already in serious

economic straits could be nothing less than ruinous for that country’s leadership. Obviously,

political action is more provocative than propaganda because it is more visible and requires

actual physical activity, as opposed to merely impacting ideas or attitudes.

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WILLIAM J. DAUGHERTY

Paramilitary activities

The third sub-discipline of covert action is the application of paramilitary operations, which are

usually (but not always) found only in long-running programs with or against a hostile entity.

They are, of course, the most provocative of all covert action operations because they may

include acts involving destruction and even death. For this reason, paramilitary operations may

also be the hardest programs to justify to the American public. In the 1980s, much of the world

was at least aware of, if not following, America’s “covert” wars being waged in Central America

and Afghanistan; post-2001, activities of the CIA in the war against terrorism are routinely

reported (accurately or not) in our major newspapers. While CIA elements may be involved in

actual combat operations in these large paramilitary programs, they are more likely to be

supporting and training indigenous forces (government or insurgents) than they are in ﬁghting.

In view of the openness of these “covert” programs, the question often raised is whether its

appropriate for an espionage agency like the CIA to be the responsible organization or whether

it would be better to give the Department of Defense (using American military personnel)

the responsibility. This somewhat perennial issue was addressed in 2004 by a joint CIA-DoD

panel and again it was determined that not only was the CIA paramilitary capability

essential, but that the CIA’s and DoD’s special operations missions were both compatible and

complementary.

But wartime isn’t the only time CIA paramilitary units are employed. The training of

friendly foreign militaries and other entities of allied governments, such as VIP protection

services, are part and parcel of missions for the CIA’s paramilitary personnel. And at times

resources normally devoted to paramilitary operations might be used for other missions, such

as the clandestine exﬁltration of an agent from hostile territory. While some of the missions

carried out by the CIA’s paramilitary units are classic covert action operations, others are not.

But all are denominated as “special activities” (vice routine intelligence measures) and so most

require the president to sign a Finding and notify Congress, just as he does for the more

standard covert action programs.

Information warfare

The last sub-discipline is a fairly new addition to the covert action inventory, and that is

information warfare. In general, an intelligence program aimed at surreptitiously invading,

either remotely or on-site, a computer or data banks with the intent of altering or destroying

the hardware, software, or information in the computer, is considered to be covert action.

(Secret intrusions into computer data banks simply to learn what that information is, without

altering or damaging that data, is manifestly an intelligence collection operation and, while

highly sensitive, does not require the special presidential Finding that must accompany all covert

action activities.)

As the proliferation of computers grows around the globe, with governments, military forces,

government-connected business enterprises, and even terrorist and narcotics organizations

relying more and more on computers, the opportunity to exploit computer systems and data

banks increases as well. What twenty years ago was a ﬂedgling oﬀ-shoot of the intelligence

collection business is now realizing its enormous potential as a component of covert action

programs.

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THE ROLE OF COVERT ACTION

Policy considerations and consequences

The inclusion of covert action programs with other overt policy measures does not by any

means guarantee the success either of that speciﬁc program or of the president’s overall foreign

policy objectives. Moreover, covert action is not itself a substitute in the absence of a coherent

national policy. Covert action works only if it is a component subordinated to and coordinated

with the overt activities of the other policy-implementing agencies, and employed in a uniﬁed

campaign to achieve a broad, openly acknowledged United States policy. Ultimately, whether

or not covert action should be added to a foreign policy scheme is up to the president and his

national security advisors. This means that evaluating the utility and risk of a covert action

element is a matter of judgment on their part.

While it is the president’s ultimate decision whether to conduct a covert action program, it

would seem reasonable to assume that the White House oﬃcials base their opinions to some

degree upon the assessments of the operational professionals at the CIA. However, this is not

always the case, and has resulted in ﬁascos. The CIA strongly advised President Richard M.

Nixon three times not to run a program in the early 1970s involving Iraq, Iran, and the Kurds, a

program that led to the deaths of thousands of Kurds at which point President Gerald R. Ford

and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger abruptly cancelled the program. Also in the Nixon

years, the CIA was adamantly against a covert action program to depose Chilean president

Salvador Allende, which Nixon demanded be conducted regardless. And in a genuine aberra-

tion, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Casey knew full well that the great majority of

agency oﬃcers would neither participate in nor support the activities that became known as the

Iran-Contra disgrace. And so realizing that the disaﬀected would be tempted to leak the

operations either to Congress or the media, Casey deliberately excluded the agency as in

institution from involvement in that aﬀair.

While a number of factors must be thoughtfully considered in deciding to include a

covert action component in a particular foreign policy scheme, perhaps the most signiﬁcant is

deciding on the objectives to be achieved and then carefully balancing those goals against the

attendant costs and risks. Expensive, high-risk program proposals that are apt to achieve little

should, as a matter of course, be avoided. As the balance shifts to the less costly, less risky, and

more eﬀective, the greater the odds that a president and his advisors will accept it. Obviously,

the ideal programs are low risk, low cost, and highly eﬀective. As improbable as it may seem,

during the forty years of the Cold War the CIA in fact ran hundreds, if not thousands, of

individual covert action operations within dozens of umbrella programs of this nature – pro-

grams that never came to the public’s attention, yet over time contributed much to a peaceful

end to that struggle.

Some covert action programs fail simply because they are, by their very nature, intelligence

operations, endeavors fraught with perils and conducted with absolutely no guarantee of ultim-

ate success irrespective of the assessed risk level. (Murphy’s Law – anything that can go wrong

will go wrong, and do so at the worst possible time – applies perfectly to covert action.) And

some programs will collapse or be found wanting either because mistakes are made on the part

of CIA personnel or its recruited foreign assets, and/or because the operation is discovered by

foreign security services. When a covert action program or operation does prematurely become

public, there will almost always be meaningful negative consequences, the extent of which

depends on the target and objectives of the program, whether it was run unilaterally by the CIA

or done with allies, and the cause of the exposure.

Domestically, a compromised covert action program will, if nothing else, embarrass the

president, who is likely to have previously denied rumors that such a program existed or

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WILLIAM J. DAUGHERTY

ascribed earlier visible results of the operation to the actions of elements unassociated with the

US government. The embarrassment will be more acute if the surfacing of the program is, or is

perceived by the American people to be, the result of ineptness. This circumstance may lower a

president’s standings in political polls assessing his general popularity or, more speciﬁcally, how

well he is doing his job – potentially disastrous to a ﬁrst-term president facing re-election. If the

compromised covert action program is one that most Americans believe necessary or justiﬁable,

the fallout might be neither intense nor long lasting. However, when the operations are con-

trary to goals acceptable to American public values or opinions, or are conducted in such a way

that the public is angered or disgusted, then the repercussions to a president and his historical

legacy may be permanently harmed.

Beyond the public’s reaction, and potentially more harmful to a president’s agenda, is

the eﬀect a compromised program will have on a president’s relations with Congress. The

opposing political party on the Hill is not likely to resist, in today’s highly partisan atmosphere,

ﬁguratively taking the president to the woodshed over what they will portray, fairly or unfairly,

as a “débâcle.” And if the situation is bad enough, the president may even be deserted by

members of his own party – particularly if his popularity polls are down.

America’s allies overseas may also have unfavorable reactions to a compromised program,

aﬀecting their embrace of a particular foreign policy. Likewise, a president’s relationship

with individual foreign leaders suﬀer serious and lasting harm. The crux of this issue is that

historically the great majority of the CIA’s covert action programs have been instigated in times

of peace, and so the essential determinant if often whether the targeted nation/government

is an ally, a neutral, or a hostile. A secondary element is whether the participation of the

intelligence or military services of allied countries was involved and/or whether an allied

government suﬀered embarrassment.

The exposure of a covert action program against the Soviet Union during the Cold War

might have angered the Soviet leaders, but it would usually result only in a temporary set

back to overall US–USSR relations. This was so if for no other reason than that the Soviets

were doing much the same, if not more, against the West, and such was expected by both

governments. In this instance, America’s allies would perhaps be disappointed, but not

necessarily irate, to learn that a CIA operation against the common enemy had become open

knowledge. However, it would certainly be a diﬀerent case if an ally’s participation, or alleged

participation, was part of that exposure. In that case, the repercussions to the United States’

bilateral relations with that ally could be severe.

The implementation of a covert action program is most critical when it is conducted against

an allied country and intended to inﬂuence secretly the policies of that country’s government

(which might well be a democracy). While this is rarely done, should such a program come to

light it inevitably generates anger against the United States within that nation’s leadership

as well as among the citizenry. The trust that exists between the two democracies might

be temporarily breached, to the detriment of the United States and the president’s policy

objectives. The British dared to run a covert action program against the United States govern-

ment in 1939–1940, aimed at inﬂuencing the American public and isolationist government

oﬃcials to support it with war materials, and to enter voluntarily the war on the side of the

British. Had the program been exposed in 1940 or 1941, potentially negative American public

opinion could have forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to withdraw or withhold the

assistance he had already been giving the British (e.g. naval escorts to convoys headed to

Britain and the “sale” of 50 obsolete destroyers to the Royal Navy), or, worse, give priority to

the war in the Paciﬁc. Either way, it is probable that America’s strategy for prosecuting the war

would have been altered and history changed for all time.

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THE ROLE OF COVERT ACTION

Finally, whether deserved or not, a covert action that prematurely becomes public know-

ledge might, at least temporarily, sour relations between the CIA, on the one hand, and sister

agencies in the US national security community on the other hand. Such a dispute might

also become personalized between the Director of the CIA and a particular cabinet secretary,

with harmful consequences. Director of Central Intelligence (as the post was known until

the reforms of 2005) William J. Casey’s actions and decisions in the Central American programs

of the 1980s and in the Iran-Contra scandal so angered Secretary of State George P. Schultz

that by the time Casey died, the two were barely speaking, to the detriment of cordial and

cooperative relations in the lower ranks.

But a covert action program that somehow becomes public knowledge (whether through

failure or other causes) doesn’t necessarily have to be harmful to the president or to the CIA.

A reader scanning media headlines from the mid-1990s would have found prominent play

given, at least initially, to a covert action program conducted against the Iraqi regime, with the

objective of eventually leading to an overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The program

collapsed amid a plethora of newspaper and television stories, with serious repercussions for

many of the participating Iraqis. Contrary to past program failures that had been seized on by

Congress for use as a political bludgeon on the CIA or the president, this program did not meet

that fate.

One very signiﬁcant reason that the Iraqi program did not suﬀer the same general condem-

nation as, for example, the overthrow of Iranian government in 1953 or the Central American

programs of the 1980s, is that the risks attendant in the Iraqi eﬀort were neither hid nor

discounted. The president and his advisors, in considering the program’s potential, were made

thoroughly and continually aware of the program’s elevated perils, which were substantial

and unable to be ameliorated operationally. The CIA, as well, insured that the congressional

intelligence committees were fully and frequently briefed on the program.

After extensive debate, the president and his national security team believed that the

opportunity, however limited, for program success outweighed the risks and costs, and the

president signed a Finding authorizing it. When the bottom dropped out, few in Washington

could or did say that they were either surprised or that the end result was because of operational

ineptitude. (The corollary lesson here is that the better Congress is informed, the more apt it

will be to understand and accept problems that develop in covert action programs.) Today’s war

against international terrorism may also be viewed as a case in which at least some of the

individual subordinate operations of what is said to be a massive covert program (in addition,

of course, to the military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan) might be high risk. But, when

reviewing the very real dangers that Al-Qaeda and its brethren pose to American citizens and

interests worldwide, these endeavors (should or when they become public) are very likely to be

supported by a majority of American citizens.

Whether a covert action program ultimately succeeds, fails, or lands somewhere, in between,

is often rooted in the degree to which a president and his advisor understand the limits and

capabilities of what a covert action program might be able to attain. These sorts of operations

have the ability to be highly eﬀective in supporting an established United States foreign policy,

if it is applied against the right target and with the appropriate methodologies. But no matter

how eﬀective a program’s potential might be assessed, it is absolutely imperative that it must be

within the conﬁnes of the United States Constitution, federal statutes passed by Congress,

executive orders issued by the president, and the CIA’s internal regulations. Yoked to these legal

requirements is the need for Congress to be fully informed of each operation, including an

honest evaluation of the risks and costs.

There are, additionally, what might be called “political” or “managerial” imperatives that

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WILLIAM J. DAUGHERTY

the professional intelligence oﬃcer and the knowledgeable policy advisor should consider in

deciding whether or how to employ covert action. The ﬁrst has already been noted: covert

action is not a substitute for an established national policy. When a president and his advisors

either cannot agree on an overall policy, or simply have no idea how to solve a foreign

policy issue, tasking the CIA to produce a “Chinese restaurant menu” of possible operational

capabilities from which they will then pick and choose, almost randomly, those that appear the

most promising, the president is simultaneously asking to waste money, assume unnecessary

risks, accomplish little, and all at signiﬁcant risk.

And needless to say, covert action is likewise unsuitable for use as a “last resort” option,

turned to simply because there seem to be no viable overt policy. Still more important, covert

action is not a solution to rescue other policy programs that are failing or have so done,

particularly if it’s a policy that the White House should never have attempted in the ﬁrst place.

Second, given that the whole concept of covert action is to aﬀect people’s minds (either

change them or reinforce currently held positions), it should not be surprising that the great

majority of covert action programs will require time to evince results. Thus, covert action is not

and should not be employed for the resolution of crises, in which time is of the essence. There

are also speciﬁc operational reasons why a covert action program cannot be hastily thrown

together with the expectation of producing swift results: requisite detailed planning, developing

the necessary support infrastructure, recruiting and vetting the foreign nationals who will

execute the program operations, and even working out budget priorities, may take months or

years. This is especially so when there is not a “stable” of agents already recruited for other

purposes who could redirected to the new program.

Third, as implied above, not only for success but also for productive harmony with cooperat-

ing agencies, covert action programs must be fully coordinated with the other participating

members of national security community, and seamlessly integrated into the larger policy

schematic.

It should go without saying that the objectives for which a covert action program is

implemented must be clearly stated and attendant risks understood. But, surprisingly, this is not

always the case, especially with policymakers who lack a comprehension of covert action’s

limits and hazards.

Finally, but certainly not least in importance, it is highly desirable that the objectives sought

by the president in approving any covert action program be compatible with American

values and with openly stated policies. Should the program be compromised, the public (and

Congress) will be much more understanding – and much more prone to forgive – if, upon

examination of the program details and goals, Americans are able to say, “We ’re sorry (or

angered, or disappointed) that the program failed, but we can see that the goals were worthy and

that the president was trying to do the right thing.” In 1986 President Reagan was in serious

diﬃculty vis-à-vis the public’s reaction after the Iran-Contra disgrace broke in the media,

particularly in light of the revelation that the activities involved were in complete contradiction

to the long-established United States policy of not negotiating with terrorists or trading goods

for hostages.

But when the president held a press conference at which he acknowledged that “mistakes

were made,” and explained the motivations and thought processes that underlay his decisions,

the public forgave him. (It also helped that he ﬁred those on the White House staﬀ who were

responsible and constituted a special team of respected ﬁgures to investigate the causes and

recommend remedial actions.) Similarly, President John F. Kennedy enjoyed augmented

popularity polls after publicly assuming responsibility for the Bay of Pigs ﬁasco and providing

an overview of the reasons behind it.

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THE ROLE OF COVERT ACTION

In summation, then, covert action is but one tool of presidential statecraft, albeit a very

sensitive tool requiring great care in its implementation and equally meticulous heed for the

legalities surrounding these operations. George Washington employed covert action while

commander-in-chief during the Revolution, Thomas Jeﬀerson used covert action, in the

nature of bribery through a third party, to gain access to Indian tribal lands for government

purposes and to aid in the prosecution of the war against the Barbary pirates. James Madison

used measures that we would today label covert action to acquire West Florida from the

Spanish. Chester A. Arthur, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower used covert action to

overthrow hostile or potentially hostile regimes. And in 2001, President George W. Bush made

covert action a staple of his war on terrorism and the war against Iraqi insurgents. President

always have, and always will, turn to covert action when it suits their policy purposes. But

whether they do it successfully is another matter entirely.

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WILLIAM J. DAUGHERTY

The future of covert action

John Prados

There are observers who think the post-9/11 era oﬀers the possibility for a new golden age of

covert operations. With the Bush administration having unleashed an open-ended war on

terrorism and the clear need to meet Al Qaeda and aﬃliated groups on their own level, the

potential for covert action seems clear, its utility obvious. The steady buildup of military special

operations forces and reinvigoration of the CIA’s Special Activities Division have provided

fresh capability in this ﬁeld. There are many possible locales for action. Certainly the Depart-

ment of Defense under Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been pressing at the bit for the role,

while the CIA declared war on terror as long ago as 1998 when George J. Tenet still headed the

agency. So it seems foreordained that we can expect a vigorous covert campaign and the further

expansion of the envelope.

But it would be premature to conclude that these will be halcyon days for secret warriors.

There are reasons to suspect not only that covert operations will be less eﬀective than

advertised, but that the technique may come under the kinds of attack that beset the Central

Intelligence Agency during its darkest season of inquiry of the 1970s. This is so due to the

match between United States capabilities and goals given existing international relations,

structural weaknesses, and persistent management problems. Any one of these factors taken by

itself might potentially derail the United States covert action agenda. In combination the

totality of diﬃculties poses a substantial obstacle to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)

in leading the eﬀort and the US intelligence community in executing it. The following analysis

seeks to identify some of these diﬃculties and reﬂect upon their tractability.

The world and the secret warriors

The time has come for a serious assessment of the degree of permissiveness for covert action in

the international environment. This is a very diﬀerent question from the willingness of US

leaders to approve and make use of the method. During the years of the Cold War – and

certainly in World War II – when covert action techniques were perfected and ﬁrst widely

employed, operational necessity predominated. In addition, the Manichean struggle against

totalitarianism and then between the West and communism provided relatively easy criteria for

289

choice. One could enlist to ﬁght a well-deﬁned enemy, and local groups could allow themselves

to be recruited for solid patriotic ends. Private agendas always lurked below the surface but

the target remained state power. Moreover, the world held a generally favorable position toward

the United States, and American democracy was an admired political form to be emulated.

This can be categorized as a permissive environment. Even under those relatively favorable

conditions the United States encountered considerable international criticism when covert

action went bad. The disaster at the Bay of Pigs and the political black eye that resulted from the

Nicaraguan operation are but two examples among many.

But America had political capital to

squander, as it were, making covert action embarrassments survivable even if painful.

The climate of international relations is diﬀerent in the post-Cold War, post-Iraq invasion

world. Now there is much less tolerance for American activity, covert or otherwise. In Chitral,

Pakistan, for example, Americans said to be on the hunt for terrorist ringleader Osama bin

Laden rented a house in the fall of 2005 but made no attempt to occupy it until May 2006. The

mere appearance of the ﬁrst American at the house triggered a street protest led by a local

politician.

Pakistan is an American ally. Similarly, CIA relations with Italy have been soured by

the fallout over an agency kidnapping of a Muslim cleric on the streets of Milan, several

Western European countries have shown concern regarding overﬂights by CIA aircraft engaged

in rendition operations, and Canada and Germany are embroiled over speciﬁc rendition cases

involving their citizens who were sequestered by American authorities directly or reportedly

at the hands of the CIA. These are other allies, indeed America’s closest, whose cooperation in

the war against terror has been the most fruitful. Indeed, public opinion in the United States is

itself already shaky on the subject of erosions of civil liberties in the terror war, and if leaders in

the US cannot marshal their own people in support of covert action, there is little reason to

suspect that foreign politicians can do any better.

It is not suﬃcient to argue that friendly relations with other intelligence services make public

opinion in those countries irrelevant, or that the irritating cases are passing issues. Intelligence

services are creatures of their societies and political systems, and pressures on those systems will

at some point aﬀect links between them and the CIA or DNI. In Germany a parliamentary

investigation of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) is already underway that will in part focus

on the degree of BND collaboration with the CIA in the rendition case and other matters. In

Italy, similarly, the Italian military intelligence service SISMI is vulnerable to a parallel inquiry

by a new parliamentary government due to claims that it cooperated in the Milan incident.

There is also little hope in the idea that the cases will disappear. No doubt they will – but

today’s crop of irritants will be succeeded by fresh controversies because it is in the nature of

the present secret war on terror. This proceeds by means of large numbers of operations at the

margins of legality directed at individuals or small groups of persons throughout the world.

It is also the case that opinion is generally more brittle today than in the past. Consider the

recent riots in more than a dozen countries after a Danish newspaper published cartoons held

to ridicule the Prophet Mohammed. Or – in Pakistan again – the rioting that took place in

early 2006 following a strike on a remote village by missiles from Predator drones seeking to kill

Al Qaeda commanders. It is precisely in Pakistan and countries like it that secret warriors most

need to operate, but their work balances on a knife edge of public volatility. That is what it

means to have an environment not permissive toward covert action.

This point is sharper because – again in contrast to the Cold War era – a wide array of

the publics in many lands now hold a negative view of the United States. In some places the

percentages who admire America are tiny compared to those who consider the United States

the greatest threat to world peace. And this is not just true for Middle Eastern or Muslim states.

Australians, long our allies, do not put America even within their top ten favorite foreign

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JOHN PRADOS

countries.

At some level the poor image of the United States must contribute to the volatility

of the public in the lands where secret warriors ply their trade.

To the judgment that the international environment is less permissive for covert action

must be added the realization that US capabilities are also less well-adapted to the mission than

they were during earlier periods. The CIA is far from the supple “Cold War agency” it was in

those days. Langley’s assets today are concentrated in a Special Activities Division within the

Directorate of Operations (DO). Capabilities were reduced during the 1990s in the immediate

aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, when the DO as a whole was signiﬁcantly

cut back. Undoubtedly, the clandestine service chose to limit losses to its espionage assets

by cutting deeper among the secret warriors. Late in the decade DCI George J. Tenet began to

resuscitate the Special Activities Division (SAD), but at today’s prices and resource levels, the

CIA is no longer a full-spectrum covert operations agency.

In addition the rise of new entities, especially the DCI Counterterrorism Center (CTC),

drew oﬀ additional experienced oﬃcers. Available accounts show that signiﬁcant covert actions

of the 1990s, including those in Iraq against Saddam Hussein and in Afghanistan against Al

Qaeda, were undertaken by CTC, with SAD assistance, not by a DO area division or other

entity.

There has also been a major shift in CIA covert action tactics. Where during the Cold War

the agency frequently created paramilitary armies and supported them with maritime and air

assets to attain speciﬁed goals, the more recent pattern has been for agency oﬃcers to use CIA

cash to buy the services of existing armed tribal groups or other factions. This was the case, for

example, in the US invasions of both Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Indeed in the Iraqi

case when the agency attempted to create a unit along more traditional lines it called the

“Scorpions,” assorted diﬃculties in implementation yielded a smaller-then-planned force that

was not available for action until the invasion was over.

The CIA role as comprador is clearly

dependent upon the environment of permissibility for covert operations.

An additional dimension of CIA ﬁeld experience is the increased centrality of “support to

military operations” (SMO), which have absorbed an increasing proportion of such CIA

capabilities as do exist, at least since the Gulf War of 1991. In Somalia, in Bosnia, in Afghanistan,

and now in Iraq, the SMO function has tended to monopolize covert capabilities. Agency team

leader Gary Berntsen’s experience in Afghanistan is representative of this kind of activity.

The

CIA in Afghanistan worked in conjunction with military special operations forces, sometimes

in the leading role, sometimes subordinate. There is as yet no coherent account of CIA covert

operations in the Iraq occupation, but the work of journalist James Risen suggests a similar

pattern.

At his May 2006 conﬁrmation hearing for director of the CIA, General Michael V.

Hayden remarked that CIA oﬃcers now ﬁnd themselves increasingly preoccupied by SMO

activities, especially for tactical intelligence in Iraq, and oﬀered this observation in support

of military forces expansion of their own espionage activities, which could relieve some of the

burden on the CIA.

In the war against terrorism more generally there is a requirement for small-scale, highly

targeted operations aimed at individuals and small groups. These depend on CIA alliances with

friendly security services, further extending a pattern of growing dependence on intelligence

liaison relationships that has characterized agency operations since at least the 1980s. Again the

environment for covert action can be expected to assume key importance.

On the military side there exists a diﬀerent set of constraints that yield similar results. Under

the United States Special Operations Command (USSOC), the commander-in-chief for these

forces, and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the headquarters that leads in

counterterror operations, special forces have exercised a growing role in covert operations.

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THE FUTURE OF COVERT ACTION

Directives from Bush administration secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld have sought to

widen that role even further. For example, the ﬁscal 2005 Intelligence Appropriation Act

contained authorization for special forces to spend money to hire local groups for covert

operations in the same fashion as the CIA, taking away another of Langley’s few areas of

exclusivity. These roles and missions remain in contention between Rumsfeld and John

Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, who exercises theoretical control over all

US intelligence operations, but at this writing Rumsfeld seems to have the upper hand.

In contrast to the CIA the military special forces do oﬀer a full spectrum of capability. They

are also available in unprecedented numbers: at 26,000 today, Army Special Forces are more

than twice as numerous as at their Vietnam war peak, and form only one element of an all-

service force that currently totals 44,000 men and women.

The Defense Department’s most

recent posture review nevertheless mandates a further increase of 15 percent in these forces

along with new technology and additional spending. The Rumsfeld operational scheme would

allow these forces to work covertly in espionage missions as well as to undertake a wider array

of counterterror activities.

Though the special forces have substantial capability they have never carried out a full-scale

secret war. Laos and Afghanistan (both wars there) were CIA enterprises in which detached

military oﬃcers served (the ﬁrst case), or Special Forces detachments worked in tandem with

the agency (in the second Afghan war) with shared operational control. In Bosnia and the

occupation of Iraq the special forces have worked as elite strike teams, and in Afghanistan’s

occupation in that role as well as in Vietnam-style paciﬁcation missions.

There are training

missions underway as well in Colombia, Africa, and the Philippines. The court is out on how

USSOC might perform in a full scale paramilitary operation.

Beyond the strike team role, special operations forces and CIA covert operators have

exhibited a marked predilection for stand-oﬀ operations. These have featured use of the

Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) armed with precision guided missiles. First intro-

duced as a surveillance system over Bosnia in the 1990s, a version of this UAV armed with the

Hellﬁre missile was developed by the CIA and the Air Force in 2000–01.

The ﬁrst armed

Predator mission took place on October 7, 2001. It has since been used in its combat role, as far

as is known at this writing, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen. At present the Air Force is

creating a dedicated UAV special operations squadron. Stand-oﬀ operations obviously reduce

the vulnerability of US personnel but they have important rigidities, not being in actual

physical proximity to targets, not being recallable, not being deniable (and thus not truly covert)

since only the United States possesses this capability, and eroding the distinction between

covert and conventional military operations. In at least one case so far a Predator strike has

triggered large anti-US demonstrations in the target country.

In summary, the international environment is presently increasingly hostile to continued

covert operations. For diﬀerent reasons the CIA and military special operations forces have

covert capabilities that are limited and in some respects mismatched to operational needs, while

stand-oﬀ strike systems, presently being touted as a panacea, have their own rigidities. These are

cautionary elements when considering the future of covert operations.

Classic conundrums of covert action

The covert operations most often cited as successes are the political action in Italy (1948), the

CIA coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), and the paramilitary action in Afghanistan

(1979–1989). In terms of number, these amount to only a tiny fraction of the inventory of

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JOHN PRADOS

covert operations carried out since World War II. Further analysis shows that each of these

operations was not exactly as advertised. Political action in Italy trapped the United States into

open-ended intervention in Italian politics which Washington had a diﬃcult time halting and

which endured at least into the late 1960s, with a further burst in 1972. Charges of American

meddling had a cost to US foreign policy globally which equaled if they did not surpass those

beneﬁts of the Italian operation itself. The coups the CIA carried out in Iran and Guatemala, far

from being unalloyed successes, both skirted failure before reaching a tipping point, and both

resulted in only short-term beneﬁts. The Iranian operation contributed to the rise of an Islamic

fundamentalism that has been a headache for every US president since Jimmy Carter, and that

brought Ronald Reagan close to impeachment. Guatemala extinguished a democracy and

empowered oligarchic and military rulers who eventually made war on their own people. The

Afghan operation introduced into hostile hands US military technology that was highly threat-

ening to American security interests and played a direct role in mobilizing the cadres of

terrorism who threaten the United States today. Had the Afghan action not occurred there

is a fair argument that the rise of fundamentalism would have been slowed, at least suﬃciently

to come to grips with the problem before the travesty of the 9/11 attack. The resulting

subterranean terror war is now being fought out in ways with which the US is far less

well-equipped to deal, a strategic equivalent of electing to ﬁght on ground of the enemy’s

choosing.

Beyond the “successes” are a wide array of failures. These are not worth substantive treat-

ment here, except to say that the record shows successes to be few, failures far more numerous,

and wartime-type actions to have been the most successful. The entire body of experience

contributes to the taxonomy of problems mentioned below. First, covert operations, especially

when successful, usually lead to long-term United States economic and military assistance to

governments that, absent such aid, would not endure. But decisions on covert operations are

uniformly based upon short-term cost/beneﬁt analysis rather than expenditures over the long

haul. The real costs of these activities often dwarf those of the covert operations themselves.

Even on the short-term costs, in addition, real expenses are typically underestimated. This is

true for every covert operation for which we have actual cost data, including Iran, Guatemala,

the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, Laos, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This is

an endemic problem.

Second is the question of political allies. The United States has usually sought “third force”

movements. In Cold War days those were non-communist, or preferably anti-communist

ones. Today they would be Muslim democratic forces. In European countries these tended

to be politically moderate or center-left, causing a certain discomfort for more conservative

American secret warriors. In Third World lands, however, such movements have been associ-

ated with established oligarchies or tribes, usually disadvantaged minorities. Using such groups

often does little to satisfy societal aspirations and frequently leads only to further upheavals, as in

the Guatemalan case. Where organized political movements exist the choice is frequently

limited. Too often Washington lands on the wrong side of these choices. Where there is no

third force the standard practice is to resort to political action to create one. Such artiﬁcial

groupings have limited popular appeal and are locally perceived as agents of US power, as was

the case in Laos, Nicaragua, and the Congo. While Washington assumes that using third force

tactics will generate wide support, such artiﬁcial movements sow few grass roots – because they

know the US cannot back away short of abandoning its covert action goals.

One special problem of acting through local proxies – today the preferred form of CIA

covert action – is exposure to political liability as a remit of acts by the local allies. Drug-dealing,

“disappearances,” and dastardly deeds have to be swallowed in service of the covert action goals,

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THE FUTURE OF COVERT ACTION

and the United States is tarred as a result. In debates over CIA regulations in the 1990s much

was made of the necessity to be able to recruit the bad guys because they were the ones who

had the assented information, or the capability to act on US instructions. But there is no

avoiding private agendas. In an international environment that is not permissive for covert

operations this problem is even sharper because that will restrict the available local allies to even

more marginal groups.

In Tibet, Afghanistan, and the Indochinese war a proportion of CIA assistance was soaked up

by its own allies while still in the pipeline. Such problems not only reduce eﬀectiveness, they are

unavoidable given the requirement for local proxies, often in countries whose own intelligence

services are allied with the United States. The phenomenon has become characteristic of secret

wars, even more so today when Langley’s role has become that of banker, traveling the world

handing out cash. A concomitant diﬃculty is the worry that local proxies – or allied services –

will stay “bought.” The most obvious recent example is the careenings of the Iraqi National

Congress organization run since the 1990s by Ahmad Chalabi, which seems to have been on

several sides of events in Iraq.

A hidden cost is the long-term US liability to the people who enlist in its covert

legions. Today’s partisan ﬁghter can become tomorrow’s litigant for veteran’s beneﬁts or other

recognition. Bay of Pigs ﬁghters and South Vietnamese commandos in the pay of the CIA or

US. Special Forces have conducted such suits. Laotian tribesmen have sued for citizenship. Not

only is there “ﬂap potential” in such suits, there is real money at stake, win or lose.

Political, as opposed to paramilitary, action represents a wild card. Operators purchase victory

for local leaders who may not be the people Washington thinks they are – Chalabi again comes

to mind. Activities begun for stipulated purposes can stimulate quite unanticipated events.

The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 is a clear example from the old days. Today we have the menu

of covert political actions undoubtedly going on to promote Muslim democracy and staunch

the rise of Jihad. Washington has already been disturbed when elections in Palestine brought

to power the most extreme group, Hamas. What if the push for Muslim democracy was

completely successful, but resulted in a Middle East wholly dominated by fundamentalist

governments?

Failed political action contains an inherent temptation to escalate, as tragically shown in

Chile during the Nixon years. In many crisis situations, presidents can choose to intervene or

resist doing so. But in a failed political action the threshold of intervention has already been

passed, at a clandestine and relatively cheap level that obscures the gravity of the decisions made.

With the United States already committed, going to the next rung of the ladder can seem

preferable to accepting the humiliation of defeat. Political action should be viewed not as the

simple act of seeking inﬂuence often portrayed, but as conveying escalatory danger. It should be

placed in an overall perspective that frames decisions in terms of suitability at successive levels

of involvement, not merely at the entry point.

These kinds of actions exist within a shifting local and global context, yet they are conceived

for a speciﬁc purpose at a given moment in time. Evolving diﬃculties demand corresponding

countermeasures, making the political action a tar baby from which it is hard to escape. In

addition, positive control is almost always vitiated since CIA (or US) tactics must respond to the

changing situation, not work from a simple menu of options. Thus Italy from 1949 to 1968 – or

Chile from 1962 to 1973. Given a non-permissive international environment, problems of this

sort can be expected to become more numerous.

Political action is also irretrievable. Presidents who approve a commando mission or a

paramilitary operation can conceivably recall the operators up to the point of contact with no

one the wiser. In political action the ﬁrst bag of cash handed to a foreign national, the ﬁrst

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JOHN PRADOS

article planted in a newspaper – the ﬁrst act, in other words – contains the seeds of compromise.

Even if the action is called oﬀ the evidence of US intervention remains, and is immersed in a

foreign society not subject to American control. Since successful political action requires

sustained activity with a broad range of foreign institutions, the evidence multiplies and deepens

in a way that increases the likelihood of eventual revelation. In addition the pattern of widely

dispersed evidence makes it highly likely that surfacing one piece, with attendant controversy,

will lead to wider exposure.

Even if a covert action – political or paramilitary – is executed completely successfully, with

no leaks to the world at large, it is not a secret to victims. Even successful actions can become

embarrassments in retrospect owing to changing international relations, as with the relative

success of CIA paramilitary endeavors in Tibet in the 1950s and 1960s in the context of the

Nixon opening to the People’s Republic of China. The covert actions suddenly become

obstacles to better relations or to peoples’ friendship – and thus the international environment.

Finally, the United States itself has not emerged unscathed. The term “blowback” has been

coined to refer to the potential for actions to recoil upon the instigator. Beyond possible

international and diplomatic consequences, covert actions have had a signiﬁcant impact on

American politics. The controversy over the Bay of Pigs forced John Kennedy into oﬃcial

acknowledgement and investigation, as that over CIA funding of the National Student Associ-

ation did for Lyndon Johnson. Revelations of meddling in Chile signiﬁcantly increased Richard

Nixon’s political diﬃculties during the Watergate aﬀair. The linkage of the Iran coup with the

Hostage Crisis contributed to Jimmy Carter’s defeat in the election of 1980. The Iran–Contra

Aﬀair eﬀectively drained Ronald Reagan’s political capital. These were real costs, not to be

pretended away. Blowback in turn has forced secret warriors to terminate operations to the

peril of their assets in the ﬁeld. In sum there are a variety of structural and inherent problems

with the conduct of covert operations.

Problems of management and control

The system for proposing, coordinating, and approval of covert action remains largely identical

to the Clinton era. The ultimate authority is still the Deputies Committee of the National

Security Council. But the ongoing transformation of the US intelligence community is

creating pressures that may be expected to generate cross-cutting interests and fresh demands

for change. One source of the new dynamic is the existence of the Oﬃce of the Director

of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the director himself. The other is the continuing growth

of the Pentagon’s role in intelligence activity in general and covert action in particular.

Under existing protocols the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DCIA), long

known as the Director of Central Intelligence, had the primary responsibility for proposing

and developing covert actions. Suggestions could come from sources throughout government,

including the Pentagon, but also the State Department, the NSC staﬀ, or working levels at the

CIA. The Directorate of Operations would ﬂesh out suggestions and give project proposals a

ﬁrst scrubbing. These would then be forwarded to the director, whose own staﬀ subjected them

to more intensive review. Only projects which pass the director’s muster reach the Deputies

Committee, which may then return them for revision, reject them, or approve them and order

implementation. With occasional tweaks and cosmetic changes this set of management

arrangements has been in place since at least the time of the Carter administration.

But today the DCIA occupies an anomalous position within the reformed US intelligence

community. The Director of Central Intelligence, his predecessor, held formal control over

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the entire community where the DCIA is responsible only for the Central Intelligence Agency.

The oﬃcial with global authority is now the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), currently

Ambassador John Negroponte. As a result of changes made by the 2004 reforms in the US,

the DNI now exercises control over community-wide activity on key intelligence questions

through a series of single-issue managers who are supposed to direct all aspects of work on

those matters.

This system does not apply to covert action, though it could. The DCIA no longer

occupies the central position of the DNI. One can anticipate a point when the Director of

National Intelligence asks himself why covert action decisions are being made below his level,

particularly since the CIA director at Langley cannot any longer automatically summon the

services of other units – especially the Pentagon – in pursuit of the covert action goal. It is also

not practical over the long run to make the CIA director the issue manager for covert action

because other oﬃcials (like the secretary of defense) may object to not being given equivalent

authorities. Such a solution might work for a certain combination of individuals with the right

body chemistry, but not forever, and particularly not as the Pentagon’s inventory of covert

action resources eclipses that of the CIA. The most recent Pentagon policy review appears to

have recommended not attempting to supplant the CIA in the covert action milieu, but does

not track with the department’s continued force-building measures.

Meanwhile there are indications elsewhere that the DNI is already asserting his primacy over

the CIA director. Agency station chiefs around the world have been told to install dual-channel

reporting, going to Langley on strictly CIA matters and to the ODNI for community

ones. This awkward arrangement cannot endure. Consider a hypothetical covert action: is the

addition of an asset judged necessary to tip the balance a CIA matter or one for the DNI?

Failure would certainly aﬀect the entire US intelligence community. What if the asset were

“owned” by Langley? Conversely, on the CIA channel, what if the asset belongs to the

Department of Defense, how is it to be mobilized except through the DNI?

The speciﬁc subject of the Department of Defense requires separate comment. During 2005

the DCIA and secretary of defense negotiated a working agreement covering their relationship

in our reformed intelligence world. This memorandum of understanding is classiﬁed but pro-

vides for a committee dominated by the CIA to approve Pentagon espionage or other covert

activities, with the agency director as the ﬁnal court of appeal, as a means of “deconﬂicting”

military and CIA activities. According to General Hayden at his nomination hearing, the

agreement has so far worked well. On the other hand, so far there has not been a whole lot to

regulate. Pentagon clandestine activities to this point have been closely tied to ongoing military

operations. There have not been autonomous Department of Defense covert actions that we

know of, and if General Hayden’s view is any guide, the CIA appreciates the Pentagon moving

into the ﬁeld of tactical military espionage and freeing up its own resources.

There are also legal complications. As came up at least twice during the Hayden con-

ﬁrmation hearing, Department of Defense activities are governed by Title 10 of the US. Code

and CIA ones by Title 50. The Pentagon has legal requirements to follow US and international

law, the CIA does not. Covert actions frequently involve violations of both international law –

Nicaragua in the 1980s is a good example – and of domestic laws in the nations where they are

carried out. Shifting the locus of covert action capability into the Pentagon not only creates a

necessity for new statutory changes but it may threaten the legal status of US conventional

military forces. In an international environment not permissive for covert action this problem

acquires even greater importance.

A diﬀerent but also important set of points needs to be made regarding congressional

oversight of covert action activities. First, the CIA and the US military report to diﬀerent

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JOHN PRADOS

sets of congressional committees. This not only complicates eﬀective oversight but opens up

possibilities for disguising activities by juggling roles and missions between the civilian agency

and the military forces. Further, the changing distribution of covert action resources between

the CIA and the military will complicate this problem, as well as blur reporting requirements

attached to covert action, which are located within statutes that apply to the intelligence

agencies. Second, given the propensity of the current administration to avoid such requirements

by invoking ultra-high levels of secrecy and restricting knowledge to a very small circle of

legislators, the ability of Congress to play a role as a check and balance against overambitious

operational schemes will be greatly reduced.

No one – not Michael Hayden, not John Negroponte or Donald H. Rumsfeld, not Stephen

Cambone or Stephen Hadley; certainly not George W. Bush or his successor – has ever lived in

an era of full-spectrum Pentagon covert action capability where the CIA is the relatively

disadvantaged agency. When the United States Special Operations Command attains the size

of a full army corps, and Langley’s Special Activities Division is a fraction of that, it may be the

CIA furnishing technical services to the military’s covert operators and not the other way

around. Secretary Rumsfeld expects to reach that level of force within the current defense

budget plan. Under those conditions a working agreement that ensures CIA primacy in

covert action may not be acceptable to the military. This viewpoint is already in evidence –

oﬃcers arguing on the basis of experience in the 2001–2002 Afghan opening campaign and

sequel maintain that CIA oﬃcers ﬁghting alongside the military should be under Pentagon

control.

Apart from anything else the US intelligence reforms have created a new set of lacunae

for covert operations, issues that will have to be worked through even while the war on terror

is going on. It is probably right to say there is never a “good time” for reform, but George W.

Bush seems to have chosen an especially awkward moment.

This brings the discussion full circle. Driven by the war on terror there will be new covert

actions, managed by a system with its kinks yet to be fully worked out. Langley’s secret warriors,

hampered by a non-permissive international environment, will have trouble recruiting third

force groups, and they will need help from military operators who may be doing this stuﬀ for

the ﬁrst time. Alternatively, the military will engage in a covert action that goes beyond its

traditional commando raids, say a “Bay of Goats,” as the pundits styled one scheme to oust

Saddam Hussein, triggering an uprising against him by means of landing a force of dissidents in

Iraq. Again, such a large-scale covert action will be a ﬁrst-time experience for the US military.

Due to a variety of structural weaknesses in the nature of covert action the odds will be against

success, odds further diminished by management problems and operational inadequacies. The

hand of the United States will almost inevitably be revealed. Further negative impact on the

international environment is predictable.

These methods have been oversold. Covert action is also under-engineered in the sense that

problems inherent in the use of the technique have never been solved. The result is a set of

policymakers seduced by visions of golden bullet solutions who are likely to face signiﬁcant

disasters instead. The consequences of those are indeterminate but problematical. The future

for American covert action is cloudy, not bright.

Notes

1 For a detailed history of CIA covert operations see John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the

CIA. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2006.

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THE FUTURE OF COVERT ACTION

2 Carlotta Gall, “Remote Pakistan Town Believes Rumors of Bin Laden’s Arrival Are Greatly Exagger-

ated,” New York Times, May 16, 2006, p. A6.

3 Raymond Bonner, “US Image Sags in Australian Poll,” New York Times, March 29, 2005, p. A8.

4 See Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism. New

York: Crown Publishers, 2002; and also National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United

States, The 9/11 Commission Report. New York: W. W. Norton, no date [2004].

5 On Afghanistan see Gary Schoen, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on

Terror in Afghanistan. New York: Ballantine Books, 2005; and Gary Berntsen’s Jawbreaker: The Attack on

Bin Laden and Al Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander. New York: Crown

Publishers, 2005. For Iraq see Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

6 Gary Berntsen, Jawbreaker, op. cit.

7 James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. New York: Free

Press, 2006.

8 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Hearing: Nomination of General Michael V. Hayden as Director of

the Central Intelligence Agency, May 18, 2006. Transcript.

9 Andrew Feickert, “US Special Operations Forces (SOF): Background and Issues for Congress,”

Congressional Research Service Report RS21048, April 17, 2006.

10 For a good analysis of Special Operations Forces in these conﬂicts see Armando J. Ramirez, From

Bosnia to Baghdad: The Evolution of US Army Special Forces From 1995–2004. Thesis, Naval Postgraduate

School, Monterey, California, September 2004.

11 George J. Tenet, “Written Statement for the Record of the Director of Central Intelligence Before the

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,” March 24, 2004, pp. 11–12.

12 This section draws from my work in Safe for Democracy, which exhaustively re-examines the whole

range of US covert operations, including the four mentioned here. The analysis follows the book’s

penultimate chapter.

13 Ann Scott Tyson, “Study Urges CIA Not to Cede Paramilitary Functions to Pentagon,” Washington

Post, February 5, 2005, p. A8.

14 Colonel Kathryn Stone, “‘All Necessary Means’: Employing CIA Operatives in a Warﬁghting Role

Alongside Special Operations Forces,” US. Army War College Strategy Research Paper, April 7, 2003,

pp. 8–10, 14–18.

15 Colonel Kathryn Stone, “‘All Necessary Means,’” pp. 18–21.

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JOHN PRADOS

Part 6

Intelligence accountability

Intelligence oversight in the UK

The case of Iraq

Mark Phythian

Oversight of intelligence in the UK has developed considerably since the late 1980s. Indeed,

the government did not even admit to the peacetime existence of its principal internal security

and external intelligence organisations – the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence

Service (MI6) – until 1989 and 1992 respectively, even though both could trace their origins

back to 1909. While select committees of the House of Commons secured only very limited

co-operation from the executive branch in attempting to oversee the intelligence and security

agencies, in 1994 the government established the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), a

committee of parliamentarians but not of Parliament, speciﬁcally to undertake this task.

However, the ISC’s performance has raised a number of questions about the nature and

eﬀectiveness of intelligence oversight in the UK, particularly in respect of its 2003 inquiry into

pre-war intelligence on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Indeed, investigations

relating to Iraq in the period since 1992 provide a useful prism through which to assess the

state of intelligence oversight in the UK, and the relative eﬀectiveness of the various bodies that

have attempted to undertake it – in this case a range of select committees, ISC, judicial and

other inquiries beginning with the Trade and Industry Select Committee’s (TISC) 1992

investigation of the supergun aﬀair and concluding with the 2003–04 post-mortems conducted

by the Foreign Aﬀairs Committee (FAC), ISC, and Hutton and Butler Inquiries into the Blair

government’s case for war in Iraq and role of intelligence in this.

Oversight of the supergun affair

The ﬁrst time that controversy over intelligence relating to Iraq formed a back-drop to an

oﬃcial inquiry was during the TISC’s 1991–1992 investigation into the supergun aﬀair. This

was an inquiry into government policy on exports to Iraq in the context of the Iran–Iraq war,

post-war tension with Iraq, the seemingly fortuitous dockside seizure of the last batch of

supergun parts in April 1990, and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait just over three months later.

While the investigation secured a high degree of co-operation from businessmen and engineers

involved in the often quite subterranean defence-related trade with Iraq, it failed to secure

the co-operation of three key players. First of these was a backbench Conservative MP, Sir

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Hal Miller, who had contacted the Ministry of Defence and what he termed “another agency”

after being alerted by the managing director of a company in his constituency to the fact that it

was fulﬁlling an unusual export order for Iraq – in fact, a prototype supergun subsequently

assembled and tested in Iraq. He repeatedly declined to appear before the Committee and

give evidence on this. Secondly, witnesses from Customs and Excise and the Department of

Trade and Industry (DTI) consistently refused to provide information that might relate to the

intelligence services. For example, when asked by a Committee member whether the DTI had

known about the supergun contract and been requested by the intelligence services to allow

it to proceed until the last minute “for the sake of surveillance”, a DTI oﬃcial replied that: “It

is not the place of a government department to discuss matters of the intelligence service in

public.”

While a Customs oﬃcial conﬁrmed that Customs became aware of the supergun

project just a week prior to its seizure as a result of a tip-oﬀ from within the “inter-

departmental machinery”, he declined to locate the source of the tip-oﬀ any more precisely,

explaining that he was, “constrained in going any further in identifying certain parts of

government”.

As the Committee explained in its report, Customs’ limited co-operation had

a signiﬁcant impact on their ability to investigate the issue: “As a consequence of Customs’

unwillingness to reveal the circumstances in which they ﬁrst commenced and then later

dropped criminal proceedings, the Committee has no means of deciding whether either

decision was justiﬁed.”

The role of intelligence was writ large in this case, and governmental unwillingness to

provide evidence relating to it was a ﬁnal insurmountable barrier to the TISC’s attempts

to fully investigate the aﬀair. Those businessmen and engineers who gave evidence presented a

picture of close intelligence – defence industry liaison on Iraq and Iran, both during and after

the war between them in the 1980s. However, their evidence was not always consistent and

raised a series of questions that the TISC could not answer without input from the agencies. It

observed that: “The Committee has not had access to intelligence sources and several witnesses

have made it clear that such access cannot be permitted. We believe the long range gun aﬀair

raises serious and important questions about the accountability of the intelligence services both

to Ministers and to Parliament.”

Pressure for parliamentary oversight

The experience of the supergun inquiry was to be one of several sources of pressure for

government to act to introduce a degree of intelligence accountability. By this time there was

also an increasing momentum for greater accountability resulting from a series of scandals and

exposés during the 1970s and 1980s. The November 1979 exposure of Sir Anthony Blunt,

Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and pillar of the establishment, as a former Soviet spy, had

been quickly followed by the Prime and Bettaney spy cases, which provided fertile ground for

Peter Wright’s 1987 Spycatcher claim that former MI5 Director-General Sir Roger Hollis had

also been a Soviet spy. Moreover, Wright alleged that elements in MI5 had conspired to

undermine the Labour government of Harold Wilson, seemingly conﬁrming fears on the

Labour Left that MI5 saw itself as operating beyond the law and viewed its primary allegiance

as being to the Crown rather than the government of the day. By the time of Paul Foot’s 1989

book, Who Framed Colin Wallace? – an account of the “cowboy” era of military intelligence in

Northern Ireland in the early 1970s – it seemed as if there was a reservoir of security and

intelligence intrigue and scandal in little danger of running dry.

While such scandals created considerable public momentum for greater accountability, the

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MARK PHYTHIAN

most pressing impetus from the perspective of the British government (although it did

not concede this at the time) arose from the impact of European law on the British polity,

in particular the European Convention on Human Rights. The government had already

fallen foul of this in the 1984 Malone v. UK case, leading it to enact the Interception of

Communications Act the following year. Then, former MI5 oﬃcer Cathy Massiter revealed

that two oﬃcials of the National Council for Civil Liberties, at the time classed as a subversive

organisation by MI5, had been placed under MI5 surveillance. The two – both future Labour

government ministers – prepared to take their case to Europe and the clear prospect of further

adverse rulings led directly to the 1989 Security Service Act.

This put MI5 on a statutory footing and conﬁrmed its function: the protection of national

security, in particular “against threats from espionage, terrorism and sabotage, from the activities

of agents of foreign powers and from actions intended to overthrow or undermine parlia-

mentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means”, together with safeguarding the

economic well-being of the UK from foreign threats. It also created a situation which could

not be sustained indeﬁnitely, whereby the existence of MI5 was avowed but that of MI6 was

not. Hence, in mid-1992 Prime Minister John Major admitted to the existence of MI6

and undertook to put it on a statutory footing. While brieﬁngs to journalists suggested that

parliamentary scrutiny of the agencies was unlikely to be a feature of this opening, when the

Intelligence Services Bill was ﬁnally introduced in 1993 it included provision for a form of

intelligence oversight by parliamentarians.

It is worth considering why the Major government moved to introduce this degree of

oversight at this time. Clearly, the end of the Cold War created a political space that made this

possible. It also aﬀected the agencies’ own views as to the desirability of a degree of account-

ability. In part this was a response to the likely budgetary pressures the agencies could expect to

face in a post-Cold War environment – their share of the “peace dividend”. In this context,

there was a sense that agreement to some form of scrutiny was essential to retaining public

conﬁdence, limiting the impact of any post-Cold War downsizing and protecting an intelli-

gence budget worth £185 million in 1992. In this context, the more perceptive managers

may have appreciated that overseers could also become advocates. There was also the prospect

of a future Labour government seeking to introduce the more far-reaching reforms outlined

in the party’s 1983 election manifesto, which had spoken in terms of the “now widespread

concern about our security services” and committed a future Labour government to intro-

ducing legislation to provide for oversight by a select committee.

Moreover, in searching for a post-Cold War raison d’être, MI5 had assumed the lead role in

combating terrorism in Northern Ireland, a role previously occupied by the Metropolitan

Police Special Branch, and as such were under some pressure to make themselves accountable

for their part in this just as the police had been. Finally, in the post-Cold War context, with

both agencies keen to justify their roles, allegations continued to emerge that strengthened the

case for oversight – for example, those emanating from the Scott Inquiry into the arms-to-Iraq

aﬀair (discussed below) and concerning the alleged role of MI5 during the 1984–85 miners’

strike. It should also be noted that MI6 reportedly took a more relaxed view of the prospect

of oversight than MI5, on the basis that its operations abroad were less likely to be of concern to

MPs than those of MI5 domestically, which carried greater implications for civil liberties.

Nevertheless, legislating from a position of relative strength, rather than being driven by some

scandal, allowed the government and agencies to control the agenda. A key dimension of this

was the idea, to quote Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, that “the past is another country”.

This was also a time of greater select committee assertiveness – or, at least, restiveness – in

respect to intelligence matters. The TISC’s supergun report had outlined the need for

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improved oversight and its chairman had written to the Prime Minister to complain at the

failure of the intelligence services to give evidence, thereby limiting the Committee’s investiga-

tion. The Home Aﬀairs Select Committee (HAC), which considered MI5 to fall under its remit

given that its director-general reported to the Home Secretary, was also increasingly vocal in its

discontent with existing arrangements. It had been rebuﬀed in its request that MI5 Director-

General Stella Rimington – by this time named, photographed, and heading an organisation

that operated on a statutory basis – give evidence before it. Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke

told the Committee that Mrs Rimington was not accountable to Parliament. When it was

pointed out that this was unreasonable given Mrs Rimington’s willingness to take lunch with

national newspaper editors, Clarke agreed that the Committee could also take lunch with her.

In 1993 the HAC came out ﬁrmly in favour of parliamentary scrutiny, which it oﬀered to

perform, arguing that this would “meet an important public interest and help to protect against

any possible abuse of power”. With reference to MI5’s assumption of new post-Cold

War roles, it argued that “vital areas” should not be removed from parliamentary scrutiny,

“simply as a result of administrative decisions that former policing matters should become

matters for the security service”.

While Clarke’s argument that parliamentary convention

dictated that MPs did not ask questions relating to MI5 had previously been a standard line of

defence in deﬂecting calls for oversight, it was unsustainable in the more open environment

of the 1990s.

While the government rejected the HAC’s oﬀer to provide oversight, its report, coming in

the wake of the supergun aﬀair and during the early stages of the Scott Inquiry, was a further

milestone in moving towards some form of parliamentary oversight. The next signiﬁcant step

came in November 1993, when the Intelligence Services Bill was included in the Queen’s

Speech. As well as placing MI6 and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) on

a comparable statutory basis to MI5, this proposed the creation of a committee of six parlia-

mentarians (but not of Parliament) – the ISC. Its members would be appointed by the Prime

Minister, would meet in closed session and produce reports for the Prime Minister, who would

lay them before Parliament after removing material considered prejudicial to the activities of

the agencies. By the time the Act was passed in 1994, the only change to the draft Bill had been

to extend the Committee’s membership from six to nine.

The Scott Inquiry and BMARC investigation

The Scott Inquiry had been established towards the end of this period, and its proceedings

added to the growing pressure for intelligence oversight. The issues at its core were, in a number

of respects, an extension of those considered by the TISC supergun inquiry. Scott examined

export policy towards Iraq during its war with Iran and after, and, in particular, the decision to

prosecute three executives of machine tool manufacturer Matrix Churchill despite the fact

that its managing director and export sales manager had supplied intelligence to MI6 and

MI5 on Iraqi procurement and weapons development, something they were only able to do as a

consequence of the access their trade allowed.

Scott provided a rare window on the intelligence services, especially in light of the very

limited state of openness at the time. His inquiry heard evidence from 13 members of the

intelligence and security services in closed session, and received or heard evidence which

referred to even more. The role of intelligence emerged as key and led Scott to make a number

of intelligence-related observations in his 1996 report that suggested areas of intelligence

failure, one of which remained secret “in the national interest”. He highlighted areas where

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MARK PHYTHIAN

intelligence reports did not get to all appropriate readers, recommended that systems should be

put in place that would enable access to relevant historical intelligence information so as to

avoid relying on memory and thereby ensure the adequacy of hand-over brieﬁngs, that

each departmental customer should regularly review its declared intelligence requirements and

question whether it was receiving all relevant reports, and that it should not be possible for

submissions to ministers to attribute to an intelligence agency views or opinions which that

agency did not hold and might repudiate.

In its 1996 annual report, the ISC would report

that the agencies and their Whitehall customers had accepted the shortcomings identiﬁed by

Scott and had outlined the steps they had taken to rectify them.

Hence, by 1995 the situation regarding intelligence accountability had advanced somewhat

from that which existed just three years earlier. The Scott Inquiry had taken oral evidence from

agency personnel and had been granted access to intelligence material, the ISC existed and

had produced its ﬁrst report, and even the HAC had been allowed to meet with the director-

general of MI5, although low executive trust in members of Parliament remained a barrier

to select committees being granted greater access to intelligence personnel or papers. This

was the context in which, in 1995, the TISC returned, albeit reluctantly, to the theme of

defence exports to Iraq and Iran, essentially two sides of the same coin during the period of the

1980–88 Iran–Iraq war. In that year the President of the Board of Trade, Michael Heseltine,

revealed his concern that naval cannon notionally intended for Singapore, a well-known

conduit, might well have actually been destined for Iran, just as the chairman of the exporting

company, Gerald James of BMARC, had consistently claimed. Heseltine invited the TISC to

investigate the matter. However, the TISC was reluctant to do so in light of its supergun

experience. Hence, it sought assurances about access to information before agreeing to take

on the inquiry. On receiving these, it accepted the government’s invitation. As it noted in its

report:

We have not had diﬃculty in obtaining from the Government the witnesses or documents we

wanted, with the exception of intelligence material. We received a summary of the intelligence

reports, but requests that we be allowed to inspect the intelligence reports, in the form circulated to

the Department, under the “Crown jewels procedure”, and subsequently that one member of the

Committee (a Privy Councillor and former Foreign Oﬃce Minister) be allowed to inspect that

material, were turned down. While we regret this, we do not believe that it signiﬁcantly hindered

our inquiry, except in several speciﬁc areas...

It argued that the “Crown jewels” procedure should be employed more widely where intelli-

gence material was directly relevant to select committee investigations. This procedure related

to the FAC’s 1984–85 inquiry into the sinking of the General Belgrano during the 1982

Falklands war. Here committee members and staﬀ were allowed to consult intelligence material

(the “Crown jewels”), but not permitted to take away any notes. However, the government

subsequently argued that this was “always seen as a one-oﬀ exception”, because “the intelli-

gence was at the heart of the matter . . . It was all about the precise intelligence available at that

moment.”

However, this was also the case here, just as it had been with the earlier supergun

inquiry. The Report recorded the Committee’s “regret that the Government was not willing

to allow the Committee, or even a single member of the Committee . . . to inspect the original

intelligence reports”.

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Foreign Affairs Committee: the decision to go to war in Iraq, July 2003

Iraq would again provide the context for debate about the adequacy of intelligence oversight

in the period following the 2003 war. By this time the ISC had matured as an oversight body

over a decade, and undertook an inquiry into pre-war intelligence on Iraqi WMD and its

presentation by the government, alongside the FAC’s inquiry into the decision to go to war, a

judicial inquiry resulting from the suicide of an eminent government scientist, and an inquiry

by a group of Privy Counsellors into WMD intelligence led by former Cabinet Secretary Lord

Butler.

The FAC inquiry into the decision to go to war in Iraq represented another textbook

illustration of the weaknesses inherent in parliamentary eﬀorts to call the executive to account

in relation to intelligence matters. Following the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and the rapid

advance on Baghdad, concern arose over the failure to uncover the stocks of WMD whose

existence had constituted the oﬃcial rationale for the war. Controversy grew throughout May

and then erupted into the war between Downing Street and the BBC over Andrew Gilligan’s

radio broadcast alleging that the government had exaggerated claims relating to Iraqi WMD in

a September 2002 dossier published by Downing Street and containing intelligence material

approved by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). Within a few days, the FAC announced

that it would examine whether the government had “presented accurate and complete infor-

mation to Parliament in the period leading up to military action in Iraq, particularly in respect

of weapons of mass destruction”.

One problem facing the FAC was the familiar one that it could gain access only to those

people and papers that the government allowed. While it did interview the Foreign Secretary

in closed session it was denied access to the agency heads and John Scarlett, the Chair of the

JIC. Its investigation was conducted rapidly, in not much more than a month, and concluded

while that ministers had not misled Parliament, there were a number of concerns over its

presentation of the case for war, including: the certainty of the assertion that Iraq had sought

uranium from Niger; that the “45 minute” claim – that Iraq could deliver WMD within 45

minutes of an order to do so – did not warrant the prominence given to it in the dossier; and

that the language used in the dossier was more assertive than traditionally used in intelligence

documents.

In this case the FAC’s task was particularly diﬃcult for several reasons. Firstly, the case related

to a divisive war. Secondly, the government enjoyed a large parliamentary majority. Thirdly,

the main Opposition party had supported the case for war. Fourthly, in relation to such a

potentially damaging inquiry, the government declined to oﬀer the same degree of support

it had oﬀered earlier FAC inquiries into similarly grave and controversial questions. Denial

of access to intelligence material and personnel meant that the FAC was potentially easy to

mislead, its report could never be regarded as deﬁnitive, and its conclusions were therefore

easier to dismiss. Finally, the existence of the ISC provided the government with cover for

this course of action by allowing it to claim that oversight of the intelligence agencies was

now being provided elsewhere, a situation of considerable constitutional signiﬁcance and a

source of considerable irritation to the FAC. When the ISC was created in 1994, Foreign

Secretary Douglas Hurd had assured the House that it would not “truncate in any way the

existing responsibilities of existing committees”.

In practice, however, governments had

repeatedly refused to allow select committees access to intelligence material or personnel,

thereby eliminating any associated risk of political embarrassment or damage, on the

grounds that parliamentary scrutiny of these was now the job of the ISC. The FAC

lamented how:

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We have attempted, so far in vain, to explain to Ministers that for the FAC to discharge eﬀectively

its role of scrutinising the policies of the [Foreign Oﬃce], it will on occasion require access to

intelligence material and, on rare occasions, to the agencies themselves. The present inquiry is a case

in point. Ministers base their refusal to grant such access on the existence of the ISC, suggesting – in

our view wholly wrongly – that Lord Hurd’s undertaking has been honoured, because there was

no such access before 1994.

One particular grievance was the lack of “symmetry”. For example, the ISC was able to

undertake an investigation into intelligence and warnings relating to the October 2002 Bali

bombings, a substantial part of which commented on matters relating to the Foreign Oﬃce and

was based on evidence taken from it. However, following the government’s own logic, it should

have applied its policy of avoiding “competing jurisdictions” and denied the ISC such access, as

this involved trespassing on FAC territory. The FAC regarded the government’s “refusal to

grant us access to evidence essential to our inquiries as a failure of accountability to Parliament,

the more so as it does not accord entirely with precedent”.

Indeed, this refusal could be interpreted as a retrograde step given that the FAC had been

granted access to the “Crown Jewels” papers after the Falklands War, and enjoyed some limited

success in obtaining copies of classiﬁed telegrams in the course of its inquiry into Sierra Leone.

Moreover, in both cases, parallel inquiries were under way (the Franks and Legg inquiries

respectively).

At the same time, however, during its Sierra Leone inquiry the FAC had asked

to interview the head of MI6 only for the Foreign Secretary to refuse on the grounds that the

ISC was the appropriate committee to conduct such an interview. Similarly, when the FAC

came to conduct its inquiry into the Kosovo campaign it was not allowed access to the JIC or

the Chief of Defence Intelligence, being informed once more that the ISC was the appropriate

vehicle. However, the ISC’s coverage of Kosovo was so heavily redacted as to render it meaning-

less to the reader, raising questions about the impact of the ISC on Parliament’s ability to police

the executive in any area with an intelligence dimension, extending to fundamental issues of

war and peace.

Partly as a consequence of this state of aﬀairs, the FAC recommended that the ISC be recast

as a select committee. In this it was eﬀectively joining forces with the HAC, a long-time

proponent of such a shift. This option would, it argued, oﬀer a number of advantages, including

the possibility of joint hearings, inquiries and reports, established structures for the management

of overlap, and a more open way of working. Another key advantage of such a shift was held to

be that select committees had the power to send for persons, papers and records to assist them in

their work. While they could not summon members of either House (Commons or Lords) to

appear before them, oﬃcials had a duty to attend when requested.

A signiﬁcant minority

of ISC members themselves favoured such a shift. In the ﬁrst parliamentary debate on the ISC’s

annual reports, ISC member Allan Rogers had referred to the Committee’s “strong debates

on the possible adoption of a Select Committee style for our proceedings”. Fellow member

Dale Campbell-Savours was clearer still:

I do not believe that oversight is fully credible while the Committee remains a creature of the

Executive – and that is what it is. The problem at the moment is that the Committee considers its

relationship with the Prime Minister more important to its operation than its relationship with

Parliament. I strongly dissent from that view and ﬁnd the arguments in favour of Select Committee

status utterly overwhelming.

In 1999 the HAC added its voice to this call. While recognising the “signiﬁcant step forward

over previous arrangments” that the ISC represented, it restated its 1993 view that oversight

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should be undertaken by a select committee, although not now by an existing departmental

committee:

In our view, it is inevitable that the intelligence services will one day become accountable to

Parliament. That is the logical outcome of the process of reform embarked upon by the previous

Government . . . the accountability of the security and intelligence services to Parliament ought to

be a fundamental principle in a modern democracy.

Not surprisingly, the government rejected this conclusion.

However, and signiﬁcantly for

some, in doing so it said that it was, “not convinced that there is a strong case for change in

the fundamental structure of these arrangements now”, opening up the possibility of a future

progression.

The FAC concluded its report into the decision to go to war in Iraq by stating that, the

“continued refusal by Ministers to allow this committee access to intelligence papers and

personnel, on this inquiry and more generally, is hampering it in the work which Parliament

has asked it to carry out”, and recommended that:

the Government accept the principle that it should be prepared to accede to requests from the

Foreign Aﬀairs Committee for access to intelligence, when the Committee can demonstrate that it

is of key importance to a speciﬁc inquiry it is conducting and unless there are genuine concerns for

national security. We further recommend that, in cases where access is refused, full reasons should

be given.

The ISC Report: Iraqi WMD – intelligence and assessments

Given that the government had been able to justify the limited nature of its co-operation with

the FAC by reference to the fact that the ISC was to investigate the issue, there was an additional

weight of expectation on the ISC. This also represented the kind of controversial issue that

for some observers would represent a litmus test of the ISC’s ability to hold the agencies to

account and demonstrate its independence from the executive that appointed it and to which it

reported.

The ISC sought “to examine whether the available intelligence, which informed the decision

to invade Iraq, was adequate and properly assessed and whether it was accurately reﬂected in

Government publications”.

It did not consider the decision to go to war per se. It reported

four months later that, based on the intelligence it had seen, “there was convincing intelligence

that Iraq had active chemical, biological and nuclear programmes and the capability to produce

chemical and biological weapons.”

As noted earlier, at the heart of the controversy over pre-

war intelligence on Iraq was the September 2002 Downing Street dossier. In its 2002–03 annual

report, the ISC had commented on this, saying that it supported the “responsible use of

intelligence and material collected by the Agencies to inform the public on matters such as

these”.

The question here was how far this represented a responsible use of intelligence

material. However, the ISC did not rise to the challenge, failing to probe, oﬀering no com-

mentary on evidence that the political case was in advance of the intelligence case for war,

and exposing its highly limited investigatory capacity.

For example, in a draft version of Tony Blair’s Foreword to the dossier, it was acknowledged

that there was no threat of nuclear attack on the UK, but this fact was cut from the published

version. This denied the public available reassurance and passed up an opportunity to bring

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some context to bear. In a tame criticism the ISC contented itself with observing that: “It was

unfortunate that this point was removed from the published version of the foreword and

not highlighted elsewhere.”

While clearly recognising that the presentation of the case was

misleading, the ISC’s criticisms were mildly expressed, as with regard to the emphasis given to

the “45 minute” claim. Here, the ISC concluded:

The dossier was for public consumption and not for experienced readers of intelligence material.

The 45 minutes claim, included four times, was always likely to attract attention because it was

arresting detail that the public had not seen before. As the 45 minutes claim was new to its readers,

the context of the intelligence and any assessment needed to be explained. The fact that it was

assessed to refer to battleﬁeld chemical and biological munitions and their movement on the

battleﬁeld, not to any other form of chemical or biological attack, should have been highlighted in

the dossier. The omission of the context and assessment allowed speculation as to its exact meaning.

This was unhelpful to an understanding of this issue.

It was more than just “unhelpful”. It was misleading, but the ISC was not prepared to say so

unequivocally, instead taking refuge in a form of language that blunted the impact of any

criticism. It was the language of mild reproach over minor misdemeanour.

The ISC also reported that the JIC had not been subjected to political pressures, its

independence and impartiality uncompromised. It was assured by the Ministry of Defence and

the Defence Secretary that no one in the Defence Intelligence Staﬀ (DIS) had expressed serious

concerns about the drafting of the dossier, only to ﬁnd out subsequently that two members of

DIS had written to their line managers to express their concern at the language being used in

the dossier, “which was not in their view supported by the intelligence available to them”.

The ISC called this failure of disclosure “unhelpful and potentially misleading”.

The government’s response to the ISC’s report represented a further stage in the presen-

tational game that had begun in earnest with the September 2002 dossier. It emphasised those

aspects of the ISC report that appeared to support its conduct over the production of the

dossier, and rejected its criticisms. With regard to the charge that the dossier was ’unbalanced’,

its response was that:

[T]he dossier did present a balanced view of Iraq’s CBW capability based on the intelligence

available. The dossier made clear (paragraph 14, page 16) that the withdrawal of the United Nations

Special Commission (UNSCOM) had greatly diminished the ability of the international com-

munity to monitor and assess Iraq’s continued eﬀorts to reconstitute its programmes. It also noted

(paragraph 13, page 16) that UNSCOM was unable to account for signiﬁcant quantities of agents,

precursors and munitions.

But the government cannot have it both ways. Either – as this and the objective record both

suggest – the intelligence picture on Iraq in 2002 was characterised by a signiﬁcant degree of

uncertainty, or, as Tony Blair wrote in his Foreword to the dossier, it was known that Iraq

represented a “current and serious threat to the UK national interest”.

The ISC was itself dissatisﬁed with the government’s response which, “emphasised only four

key conclusions while either rejecting or failing to address fully many of our other conclusions

and recommendations. We regard this as extremely unsatisfactory . . . Our dissatisfaction was

increased by the Government’s decision to allow such little time for parliamentary debate” on

its Iraq and annual reports.

While the government response to the ISC’s 2003–04 annual

report began a practice of responding to each ISC conclusion individually it never directly

addressed the core issues raised here, simply stating that it regretted that the Committee found

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INTELLIGENCE OVERSIGHT IN THE UK

its response unsatisfactory. This did not amount to eﬀective oversight. Key questions had gone

unanswered and the ISC had eﬀectively run out of the options in the face of the government’s

refusal to engage with it. The government’s response suggested a high degree of discomfort

with the ISC and aﬀected parliamentary perceptions of its eﬀectiveness.

Moreover, it emerged that, although the ISC thought it had seen all JIC assessments on Iraq

produced between August 1990 and September 2002, and the eight produced in the period

October 2002 to March 2003, in fact eight had been withheld – ﬁve from the former period,

three from the latter. While the Committee was “satisﬁed that knowledge of them would not

have led us to change the conclusions, including those that were critical, in our Report”,

earlier access would have allowed it to include further material, and its conclusions would have

been more securely rooted in a fuller picture.

The subsequent withdrawal of intelligence that had underpinned key claims made in the

September dossier led the ISC to become “concerned at the amount of intelligence on Iraqi

WMD that has now had to be withdrawn by the SIS”.

It should have been, because it

undermined certain of the conclusions the ISC reached in its report and suggested grounds for

re-visiting the question of whether political pressure had been applied. Following the Iraq

Survey Group report, it was clear that the July 2002 JIC conclusion that “Iraq is pursuing

a nuclear weapons programme” was wrong. The 2002 JIC judgement that Iraq “retains up to

20 missiles over 1000 km” was wrong. The judgement that “Iraq could produce signiﬁcant

quantities of mustard [gas] within weeks, signiﬁcant quantities of Sarin and VX within months

and in the case of VX may already have done so” was speculative and not supported by

post-war investigation. The 2002 JIC judgement that “Iraq currently has available, either from

pre-Gulf War, or more recent production, a number of biological agents . . . Iraq could produce

more of these biological agents within days”, overstated the case. Essentially, in each area of

CBW concern – nuclear, chemical, biological and missile development – intelligence was wide

of the mark. While the ISC adopted a defensive position on behalf of the agencies, citing

Saddam’s intention to resume production in a post-sanctions environment, it was clear that the

intelligence base had been ﬂawed. Whether this base had been crucial to the case for war was

a diﬀerent question, and one which the Butler Inquiry was able to illuminate to a far greater

degree than the ISC.

The Hutton and Butler inquiries

The Butler Report was not the ﬁrst inquiry the government had been itself obliged to set up

into matters relating to the case for war in Iraq. Following the suicide of Ministry of Defence

biological weapons specialist Dr David Kelly (revealed as the source of Andrew Gilligan’s May

2003 story that the government had exaggerated claims about Iraqi WMD in its September

2002 dossier) shortly after giving evidence to the FAC, Blair had felt obliged to set up an

inquiry headed by Lord Hutton into the circumstances surrounding his death. The public

hearings conducted by the Hutton Inquiry and evidence available to it (notably internal

Downing Street email traﬃc concerning the production of the dossier, about which the ISC

had seemed unaware) suggested a critical outcome. However, when the report ﬁnally appeared

in January 2004, it exonerated the government of any bad faith in relation to the creation of the

dossier and focused its criticisms instead on the collective failures of BBC management that had

allowed the allegations to be broadcast in the ﬁrst place.

However, on the same day that the Hutton Report was published, arms expert David Kay,

charged with leading the post-war hunt for Iraq’s WMD, was admitting to the Senate Armed

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Services Committee that “we were all wrong” and that Saddam had destroyed such weapons,

possibly as early as 1991. The intelligence that Blair had consistently cited was thus called into

question. Pressure quickly built for a further inquiry, which Blair felt obliged to announce, to

be chaired by former Cabinet Secretary Sir Robin Butler. Any assessment of the eﬀectiveness

of the ISC has to take account of the fact that, had it not been for Kelly’s suicide and Kay’s

Senate testimony, the ISC report would have marked the end of UK inquiries into pre-war

intelligence. Given the information that the Hutton and Butler inquiries revealed to the public,

would such a situation have represented eﬀective or adequate oversight?

In giving evidence to the earlier Hutton Inquiry, Blair had explained the case for war in

terms of the strength of intelligence on Iraqi WMD:

What changed was really two things which came together. First of all, there was a tremendous

amount of information and evidence coming across my desk as to the weapons of mass destruction

and the programmes associated with it that Saddam had . . . There was also a renewed sense of

urgency, again, in the way that this was being publicly debated . . . Why did we say it was a big

problem? Because of the intelligence . . . We were saying this issue had to be returned to by the

international community and dealt with. Why were we saying this? Because of the intelligence.

The Butler Inquiry had access to all of the intelligence reports Blair alluded to when giving

evidence to the Hutton Inquiry. Its report, published in July 2004, concluded that: “The

Government’s conclusion in the spring of 2002 that stronger action (although not necessarily

military action) needed to be taken to enforce Iraqi disarmament was not based on any new

development in the current intelligence picture on Iraq.” In his evidence to the Butler Inquiry,

Blair endorsed the view that “what had changed was not the pace of Iraq’s prohibited weapons

programmes . . . but tolerance of them following the attacks of 11 September 2001”. This was

not entirely consistent with his answers to the Hutton Inquiry. However, the Butler Inquiry’s

access to intelligence documents meant that Blair had little option but to retreat from his earlier

emphasis on the intelligence picture. The Butler Inquiry concluded that “there was no recent

intelligence that would itself have given rise to a conclusion that Iraq was of more immediate

concern than the activities of some other countries”.

However, both in the Foreword to the

September 2002 dossier and in presentations to Parliament as Blair moved the country closer to

war, the intelligence, which his audience could not access for themselves, was used to justify the

urgency of the case for war. As former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook argued, “Downing

Street did not worry that the intelligence was thin and inferential or that the sources were

second-hand and unreliable, because intelligence did not play a big part in the real reason why

we went to war.”

The Butler Report suggested the possibility that one failure in the lead-up to war was that

the “ultimate users of intelligence” – by virtue of his modus operandi essentially the Prime

Minister and a small group of Downing Street advisers – did not fully understand some of the

limitations inherent in intelligence. This may not be a far-fetched idea in relation to a Prime

Minister who had not previously held an oﬃce where he would come into contact with it and

was said to be somewhat in thrall to the world of espionage and intelligence. On the other hand,

the need for an informed customer for intelligence would be of less importance if intelligence

was not driving policy, but seized upon to provide a publicly defensible raison d’être.

As late as the eve of the Butler Report’s publication, Blair was unwilling to publicly accept

that the intelligence was ﬂawed. However, he and his Cabinet colleagues were ultimately

content to let the intelligence “failure” take the blame. When, under pressure to make some

form of apology for his depiction of a case for war that the September 2004 publication of the

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INTELLIGENCE OVERSIGHT IN THE UK

Iraq Survey Group Report conﬁrmed to have no grounding in reality, Blair told the Labour

Party Conference: “the problem is, I can apologise for the information that turned out to be

wrong, but I can’t, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam.” Trade and Industry

Secretary Patricia Hewitt repeated this formula, telling a television audience: “All of us who

were involved in making an incredibly diﬃcult decision are very sorry and do apologise for the

fact that that information was wrong.”

The conclusion that the decision to go to war was not driven by the intelligence picture

gained further credence through the leaking of governmental documents from early-mid

2002 which indicated that Tony Blair had already committed the UK to support the Bush

Administration’s policy of regime change in Iraq by that summer. One of these was a summary

of a meeting with Condoleezza Rice from David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser,

which reported back that: “Bush is grateful for your support and has registered that you are

getting ﬂak. I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to

manage a press, a parliament and a public opinion that was very diﬀerent from anything in the

States.” The clearest evidence of all is contained in a minute of a meeting of Blair’s inner circle

held in July 2002. Here, the Head of MI6 reported on his recent visit to Washington, where

“military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military

action, justiﬁed by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were

being ﬁxed around the policy.”

Conclusions

The case of Iraq, then, both allows us to monitor the progress made in intelligence oversight

over the last decade or so, and alerts us to the limitations of the current arrangements and

the ease with which they allow the executive branch to control the process, the more so in the

absence of a suﬃciently assertive ISC. As we have seen, the FAC was unable to hold the

executive to account in this case. Judicial and other enquiries have represented a valuable means

by which information can be placed on the public record, but these have not been without

their problems and can only ever represent a “ﬁreﬁghting” rather than “police-patrolling”

model of oversight. One of the reasons for the FAC’s limited eﬀectiveness was the govern-

ment’s use of the ISC’s existence as an argument to deny it access to intelligence that would

have informed and perhaps even shaped its conclusions. As we have also seen, the ISC’s

performance over Iraq raises a number of questions and has brought back into sharp focus a

question that has been keenly debated ever since its creation – namely, whether the ISC should

be reconstituted as a select committee. An implicit related question is whether the obvious

limitations of the ISC are a consequence of its structures or personnel.

Ironically, perhaps, the conduct of the FAC in relation to Iraq has greatly reduced the

likelihood of this happening in the foreseeable future. The treatment of Dr David Kelly at the

hands of the FAC horriﬁed and angered staﬀ in the agencies in equal measure. Kelly liaised

closely with both DIS and MI6 over Iraqi WMD, and his questioning and subsequent

suicide represented a cautionary tale as to what could happen to any of them if exposed

to parliamentary questioning on a controversial topic (as questions of intelligence almost

invariably are), with the protective arm of the executive removed. Any agency enthusiasm for a

select committee approach to oversight was extinguished at this point.

The key question is whether the eﬀorts to oversee the behaviour of the executive in making

the case for war in Iraq, and its use of intelligence in this, have been adequate. The conclusion

would have to be that they have not. The most thorough appraisal was provided by the Butler

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Inquiry, which might never have existed but for particular circumstances. Since the ISC

considered the intelligence base, signiﬁcant pieces of intelligence have been withdrawn. Its

remit did not extend to considering the political aspects of the case for war, more properly

the business of the FAC. However, the FAC was denied access to intelligence because of the

existence of the ISC. The leaking of memoranda of meetings from 2002 expose both as being

inadequate. In light of this fresh evidence, should the ISC now re-investigate the extent to

which intelligence was “ﬁxed” around a policy and the obvious corollary of this – that

Parliament and public were misled? Is it capable of identifying policy as well as intelligence

failure? Does it have the political will to do so?

Arguably, the only prospect of Parliament holding the executive to account in this case

would have been via the co-operation of the FAC and ISC as select committees, undertaking

joint or overlapping inquiries. This is especially so given that the failure over Iraq was clearly

one involving mutually reinforcing intelligence and policy failure. In this case, the very

existence of the ISC in its current form may have aided the executive in limiting the impact of

legislative oversight. In short, the British public discovered more about the reality of the case for

war in Iraq from leaked documents than from oﬃcial oversight bodies, despite over a decade of

dedicated parliamentary oversight. This must be a cause for concern.

Notes

1 Mark Phythian, “Britain and the Supergun”, Crime, Law and Social Change, Vol. 19 1993, p. 368.

2 Ibid.

3 Trade and Industry Select Committee, Exports to Iraq: Project Babylon and Long Range Guns, Cm. 86,

London, HMSO, 1992.

4 Ibid., para. 149.

5 As in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (Act IV Scene i):

Barnadine: Thou hast committed –

Barabus: Fornication? But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

6 Home Aﬀairs Committee, Accountability of the Security Service, HC 265, London, HMSO, 1993.

7 Sir Richard Scott: Report of the Inquiry into the Export of Defence Equipment and Dual-Use Goods to Iraq

and Related Prosecutions, HC-115, London, HMSO, 1996, K7.7.

8 Trade and Industry Select Committee, Export Licensing and BMARC, HC 87-I, London, HMSO, 1996,

para. 6.

9 Ibid., para. 168.

10 Ibid.

11 Foreign Aﬀairs Committee, The Decision to go to War in Iraq, HC813-I, London, The Stationery Oﬃce,

2003, para. 4.

12 Hansard, 22 Feb. 1994, col. 164.

13 FAC, The Decision to go to War, para. 161.

14 Ibid., para. 163.

15 Foreign Aﬀairs Committee, Events Surrounding the Weekend of 1–2 May 1982, HC 11, London, HMSO,

1985; Foreign Aﬀairs Committee, Sierra Leone, HC 116-I, London, HMSO, 1999.

16 This was conﬁrmed by Sir Robin Butler in 1990. See, Treasury and Civil Service Committee, Civil

Service Pay and Conditions, HC 260, London, HMSO, 1990, Q.75–76

17 Hansard, 2 Nov. 1998. cols. 596, 618.

18 Home Aﬀairs Committee, Accountability of the Security Service, HC 291, London, HMSO, 1999, para. 48.

19 Government Reply to the Third Report from the Home Aﬀairs Committee, Accountability of the

Security Service, Cm. 4588, London, HMSO, 2000.

20 Ibid., my emphasis. ISC member Dale Campbell-Savours subsequently revealed that, “the word ‘now’

in the Government’s response was fought over and it indicates the way in which we are going.”

Hansard, 22 June 2000, col. 512.

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21 FAC, The Decision to go to War, paras. 168–9.

22 Intelligence and Security Committee, Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction – Intelligence and Assessments,

Cm. 5972, London, HMSO, 2003, para. 11.

23 Ibid., para. 66.

24 Intelligence and Security Committee, Annual Report 2002–03, Cm. 5837, London, HMSO, 2003,

para. 81.

25 ISC, Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, para. 83.

26 Ibid., para. 86.

27 Ibid., para. 101.

28 Ibid., para. 104.

29 Government Response to the Intelligence and Security Committee Report on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction

– Intelligence and Assessments, Cm. 6118, London, HMSO, 2004, para. 13.

30 ISC Annual Report 2003–04, Cm. 6240, London, HMSO, 2004, para. 87.

31 Ibid., para. 146.

32 ISC, Annual Report 2004–05, Cm. 6510, London, HMSO, 2005, para. 63.

33 See Mark Phythian, “Hutton and Scott: A Tale of Two Inquiries”, Parliamentary Aﬀairs, Vol. 58 No. 1

Jan. 2005, pp. 128–9.

34 Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, HC 898, London, The Stationery Oﬃce, 2004,

para. 427.

35 Robin Cook, “The Die Was Cast: The Dossiers Were Irrelevant”, The Independent on Sunday, 18 July

2004.

36 Alan Doig and Mark Phythian, “The National Interest and Politics of Threat Exaggeration: The Blair

Government’s Case for War against Iraq”, The Political Quarterly, Vol. 76 No. 3 2005, pp. 374–5.

37 My emphasis. The documents are available at www.downingstreetmemo.com/

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Intelligence accountability

Challenges for parliaments and

intelligence services

Hans Born and Thorsten Wetzling

Today’s western derivates of the world’s second oldest profession

share the paradoxical task

of operating in secret in order to defend an open society. Recent intelligence scandals have

illustrated that democracies are not immune from the politicization of intelligence services by

members of the executive or from illegal practices by members of the intelligence services.

One can point to the British and US governments’ selective usage of intelligence assessments in

the months before the Iraq war in 2003. The infamous “dodgy dossier” springs to mind, a UK

government publication that inserted plagiarized excerpts from an academic source in an

attempt to make the case for an imminent threat to international peace and security posed by

Baghdad. The British intelligence community, the UK government claimed on numerous

occasions, had fully endorsed the estimation that “Iraqi military are able to deploy chemical and

biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so”.

In a similar fashion, Colin Powell,

former US Secretary of State, addressed the UN Security Council in March 2003 by saying:

“[T]hese are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid

intelligence”. It was noted that, “at the very least, the case for the continued and threatening

existence of WMD in Iraq was presented at a level of certainty quite unheard of in intelligence

assessment”.

Surely, instances of abuse of intelligence services by the executives are not limited to cases

when intelligence is being “processed” so as to ﬁt a government’s political agenda

but include

also instances when politicians use the intelligence services for domestic political purposes, for

instance by spying on political opponents

or when the intelligence services’ assets have been

used by the executive for commercial interests.

As for the illicit practices by the intelligence

community, one can allude to the recent example of rendition practices of CIA agents in the

US-led war against terrorism.

In the wake of 9/11, various countries have started special or parliamentary inquiries into the

functioning of intelligence services. Exemples are the Hutton Inquiry in the United Kingdom

and the congressionally appointed Kean Commission in the United States. In Canada one can

point to the Arar Commission. Also, the German Bundestag decided in March 2006 to establish

a parliamentary investigation mandated to shed light on the amount of German involvement/

cognizance of illicit CIA rendition and detention practices in Europe.

Moreover, the

heightened public attention on questions concerning the control over intelligence cooperation

315

practices is not only conﬁned to national settings as both the Parliamentary Assembly of the

Council of Europe (PACE) and the European Parliament are currently pursuing independent

investigations on these matters, too.

Against the backdrop of these latest and ongoing judicial and parliamentary investigations

on national intelligence services and the way political leaders have handled intelligence, this

chapter is based on the premise that contemporary governance and control of intelligence

services in liberal democracies is confronted with a range of speciﬁc challenges. We conﬁned

ourselves to shedding light on three speciﬁc challenges that relate to the satisfactory pursuit

of parliamentary intelligence oversight and the internal direction and control of intelligence

agencies.

These are (a) to maintain parliamentary ownership over intelligence oversight procedures

(b) to establish “embedded” human rights in intelligence aﬀairs; (c) to safeguard the political neutrality

of intelligence services.

We then conducted a comparative research of national intelligence legislation in democratic

countries with a view to ﬁnd good examples of how national intelligence control systems can

master these challenges. While the text also discusses poor examples, i.e. national regulations

that do not bode well for success in mastering the challenge, we have concentrated on examples

than can be used as reference material for students of intelligence legislation and law-makers

alike. These good examples are then listed in the three tables.

We used the following criteria for selecting national intelligence legislation and national

intelligence oversight legislation into our sample: First, we considered only legislation from

democratic countries. Second, we aimed at including a representative sample which embraces

diﬀerent constitutional models (presidential, parliamentary and Westminster-style demo-

cracies), diﬀerent regions, and examples from “old” and “new” democracies. Third, we only

considered those countries whose national intelligence laws are available in English.

Intelligence accountability – why bother?

Before discussing the more detailed ﬁndings of our study, a few words seem in order to

introduce the notion of democratic intelligence control. Most western democracies proclaim

that their intelligence services are being held accountable.

But what level of scrutiny suﬃces

for the democratic control of intelligence, who should be involved, and why bother?

Surely, the stakes are very high when politicians rely on intelligence service information:

misuse of intelligence can lead to foreign and domestic policy decisions that can harm the

security and the general social fabric of societies. The general danger exists that a nation

is not confronted with a ﬁne balance between security and civil liberties but enjoys less of

each.

To prevent this, the control of intelligence services becomes an absolute necessity:

if done in adherence with standard principles of democratic rule, it further assures the

legitimacy, legality and even the eﬃciency of intelligence agencies. More concretely, it can

prevent ex ante the occurrence of human rights abuses, the infringement of civil liberties, the

mismanagement or inadequate approbation of public funds, the exercise of plausible deniability

and other forms of ministerial abuse that have traditionally beset the governance of intelligence

aﬀairs.

While some concerns about intelligence services are ill-founded,

it is worth pointing

out that intelligence and security services can hardly be described as ordinary government

institutions either. “In most nations, intelligence agencies are treated as exceptions from the rest

of government.”

Yet such exceptional treatment, however motivated, is oblivious to the fact

that intelligence agencies are nothing but government institutions. If government derives

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its power from the people, all government institutions ought to act on behalf of the people, too.

Furthermore, in a democracy, no single area of government activity can be a “no-go” zone for

parliamentarians, including the intelligence and security services. If this appears as a rather solid

rationale for the necessity of parliamentary intelligence oversight, how can one then account

for Johnson’s observation on intelligence agencies’ practice in most countries: “They are

cloaked in secrecy, allowed privileged access to policy-makers, and given leeway to get the job

done – even if that means breaking laws overseas and engaging in unsavoury activities that

would be deemed inappropriate for other government agencies.”

If an agency is cloaked

in secrecy, this means that either virtually no independent overseers are being admitted to the

“ring of secrecy” or that those overseers admitted are kept on a very tight leash by the govern-

ment. Either way, the result is that the public has little say on what information is being held or

circulated among the agencies and the executive.

Obviously, the importance of intelligence on national security issues raises diﬃcult

questions, such as how much knowledge (operational and non-operational) should be disclosed

so as to inform the interested public whilst not simultaneously jeopardizing national security.

The pursuit of a just and practicable balance between civil liberties and security is very diﬃcult

to achieve and has long occupied the minds of both practitioners and scholars alike. As with

most complex balancing dilemmas, there exists no single blueprint adopted by all democracies

for achieving this end. National intelligence laws, i.e. the embodiments of diﬀerent national

democratic wills, have proﬀered diﬀerent ways to attain such a balance. Irrespective of the

legitimate variety of such balancing eﬀorts, all measures ought to be predetermined by the

principles of democratic rule. Amongst these principles, the doctrine of the separation of

powers and the rule of law are pertinent. The application of these doctrines to the governance

of intelligence challenges any forms by which parliament would be excluded or insuﬃciently

involved in intelligence aﬀairs and requires that intelligence services are bound by fundamental

human rights standards.

Comprehensive intelligence accountability

In line with these principles, the exercise of democratic intelligence control may be said to rest

on ﬁve layers of accountability. These are: internal intelligence control by the services, strong

executive control, parliamentary oversight, judicial review and external review by independent

civil society organizations.

Each layer has a central task in the overall aim to avoid intelligence

abuse. The intelligence services restrain themselves by means of internal control (whistleblower

regulations, training of employees in accordance with a legislated code of conduct), the

executive performs executive control, i.e. giving direction to intelligence services, including

tasking, prioritizing and making resources available. The parliament oversees the services by

passing intelligence laws (that deﬁne and regulate the services and their control), by adopting

the corresponding budgetary appropriations and by questioning decision-makers in special

hearings. In addition, the judiciary is tasked to monitor the use of the agencies’ special powers

(such as surveillance and interrogation practices) and to adjudicate wrong-doings. Last but not

least, civil society organizations may curtail the functioning of intelligence services by giving an

alternative view (think tanks), disclosing scandals and crises (media), or by raising complaints

concerning wrong-doing (citizens).

The path towards the successful implementation of the general objective behind each of the

ﬁve layers remains beset by complex organizational and legal challenges. To illustrate this,

consider the summary of what the “Making Intelligence Accountable” research project’s

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INTELLIGENCE ACCOUNTABILITY

country studies have revealed vis-à-vis the implementation of parliamentary intelligence

oversight: Oversight was hindered by a mixture of the following factors: (1) insuﬃcient co-

operation from the executive and the intelligence agencies; (2) scant and vague mandates

of oversight committees; (3) lack of resources; (4) insuﬃcient motivation of parliamentarians

to engage in pro-active oversight; (5) lack of access to classiﬁed information by overseers in

parliament.

These factors can be illustrated by material we have found in various countries. For example,

the analysis of Poland’s intelligence oversight practices revealed that the parliamentarians’ access

to classiﬁed information remains very much dependent on the discretion of the services.

The

Canadian case study exposed that

in every instance their [the intelligence overseers’] purview is limited to a single intelligence

organization, a signiﬁcant weakness given the cross-departmental nature of security and intelli-

gence. [The Canadian parliamentary oversight body] has a pro-active capacity to conduct routine

checks on the eﬃcacy and propriety of CSIS, but no mandate to go further aﬁeld.

The Norwegian case concluded that “the limited staﬀ resources clearly restrict the committee’s

ability to conduct more extensive inquiries and investigations as well as its ability to be pro-

active”.

Lastly, while Loch Johnson acknowledges the robust nature of the US intelligence

oversight system, he still deplores the insuﬃcient motivation of parliamentarians to engage in

pro-active oversight.

Ownership over parliamentary intelligence oversight procedures

If spying is the second oldest profession in the world, democratic intelligence oversight is one

of the more recent political phenomenon, starting only in the mid 1970s; it should, moreover,

be pointed out while acknowledging that it took the next three decades to be incorporated by

most western liberal democracies.

Similarly, while the belief that the security sector cannot

remain the preserve of the executive alone without inviting potential abuse has been widely

respected as intelligence oversight’s rationale for the last four decades, the assertion that it takes

an active participation by the people’s elected representatives took longer to take root.

Even

today, one must, of course, caution that intelligence oversight laws can only “go so far” to

ensure the democratic control of intelligence services. Adopting comprehensive intelligence

laws does, in other words, not resolve the many practical challenges that intelligence overseers

are confronted with.

This said, the comparative review of intelligence oversight legislation can produce meaning-

ful insight with respect to the democratic legitimacy of intelligence oversight. We turn to the

notion of parliamentary ownership to illustrate this further. This notion emerged in our project as

a decisive condition for the overall success of intelligence control. Ownership denotes the

independence of parliamentary intelligence oversight committees from the executive and the

services in all aspects related to the pursuit of their mandates. It enhances their position vis-à-vis

the other institutions involved in intelligence governance. By studying the mandate and

the composition of parliamentary oversight bodies, the vetting and clearance procedures, the

parliamentary powers to obtain information, the reporting to parliament and budget control

provisions, we have identiﬁed accountability mechanisms and related practices which contrib-

ute to parliament having full power over the way it wants to oversee the intelligence com-

munity, including the role and policy of the executive (see Figure 24.1).

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HANS BORN AND THORSTEN WETZLING

Figure 24.1 gives an overview of some of the accountability mechanisms which can lead to

independent and eﬀective oversight by parliament. The mechanisms 1 to 4 guarantee owner-

ship by parliament over the appointment of the members and the chair of the parliamentary

intelligence oversight committee. It is a safeguard against executive interference with the over-

sight process. That this is not self-evident illustrates the practice in the United Kingdom, where

all members of the Intelligence and Security Committee, including the chair, are appointed by

the Prime Minister rather than by members of parliament. The accountability mechanisms 5

Figure 24.1 Best practice to ensure ownership over parliamentary intelligence oversight

procedures.

Source: Born and Leigh 2005.

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INTELLIGENCE ACCOUNTABILITY

and 6 of Figure 24.1 give parliament access to classiﬁed information and seem to be adequate

procedures to keep classiﬁed information secret. Mechanism 7 and 8 contribute to the owner-

ship of the parliamentary intelligence oversight committee over its reports to parliament and

the wider public. It signiﬁes that parliament is sovereign in how it wants to render account

to the public. Mechanisms 9 and 10 give parliament a substantive role in overseeing and

approving the intelligence budget. It is precisely because taxpayers’ money is involved that

budget control over government spending is at the heart of parliamentary control in general,

and intelligence agencies are not exempt from this.

If it is not to be merely a veneer of democratic legitimacy, and to be eﬀective truly, parlia-

mentary intelligence oversight stands and falls with the pro-active, non-glamorous routine

work that its members must engage in. Yet the parliamentarians’ devotion to oversight tasks

is often diﬃcult to maintain – parliamentarians cannot speak openly to their constituencies on

these matters, yet openness is important to attract people’s votes so as to stay in oﬃce. A related

danger shall be brieﬂy alluded to, i.e. the danger that the intelligence services are drawn into

political controversy. This can be the result of an immature approach by parliamentarians that

allows unsubstantiated accusations and conspiracy theories being introduced into the public

realm.

Should an intelligence oversight committee take on a sensationalist approach, this

general public is likely to form an inaccurate picture and may discourage intelligence oﬃcials

and executives from being benign supporters of the parliament’s important oversight task. This

can be avoided by introducing precautionary measures such as promoting only experienced

parliamentarians to intelligence oversight committees and by extending regulations for the

handling of documents to the committees’ secretariat.

Embedded human rights in intelligence affairs

Some activities that intelligence services engage in can be gravely at odds with fundamental

human rights. Depending on whether the remit of intelligence agencies includes the direct

countering or disruption of threats to security, some activities risk the violation of non-

derogable human rights

whilst others risk the violation of human rights permissible only in

exceptional circumstances.

In this section, we refer to embedded human rights in respect of the internal organization

of national intelligence structures. Ideally, it ought to be designed in such a way as to function as

the ﬁrst ﬁrewall against potential human rights abuses. To implement such a ﬁrewall requires

adequate whistleblower protection, ample internal complaints mechanisms as well as the regular

training of intelligence staﬀers to a codiﬁed code of intelligence ethics.

Such purposeful design of internal intelligence control relates to the entire forum of

intelligence activity – yet for the purposes of this chapter we focus on two hard cases: the

authorization of special powers and the international cooperation of national intelligence

services.

With regard to the former, special powers come into play with direct surveillance missions,

body and house searches, the monitoring of conversations and the use of special interrogation

techniques. To ensure human rights protection it is vitally important that the use of special

powers is based on the law and in proportion to the security threat. Speciﬁc legal authority is

necessary and for this the pertinent legislation should be clear as to the grounds for using special

powers, the persons who may be targeted, the exact means that may be employed, and the

period for which they may be used. Hence, if the law covers only some of the available

techniques of information-gathering there will be an in-built temptation for an agency to

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HANS BORN AND THORSTEN WETZLING

resort to less regulated methods. The regulatory system that foresees the granting of special

powers must also provide for the possibility of challenging the use of special powers before a

court. The accountability mechanisms in Figure 24.2 (points 1 to 3) refer to the legal basis and

the supervision as well as the proportionate use of the special powers, based on examples from

the Netherlands, the UK and Germany. Concerning supervision of the use of special powers, in

many countries this is done by a person outside the agency, e.g. a judge (in Bosnia and

Herzegovina and Canada), a court (in the Netherlands and the US) or a minister (in the UK). In

Germany, a minister approves the use of special powers, who reports them to the parliamentary

intelligence oversight committee.

To provide an additional safeguard against abuse, the person

who supervises the use of special powers must not be part of the same branch of government

that prioritizes the services. This is in keeping with the balance of powers doctrine, whereby

each of the three functions of government (legislation, execution and adjudication) is entrusted

to a separate branch of government (legislature, executive and the judiciary, respectively).

Its purpose is to fragment power in such a way as to defend liberty and keep tyranny at bay.

Therefore, the ﬁrst two examples are preferable to the later two examples.

Given the growth international cooperation among national intelligence services, one needs

to caution against the risks that such activities may entail for basic human rights protection.

How can the danger be averted that national intelligence policy-makers utilize cooperative

arrangements to circumvent national human rights standards, for instance, those that govern the

legality of practices applied to obtain information on suspected terrorists? Tentative solutions to

this problem can be oﬀered by extending the provisions that regulate the domestic conduct

of intelligence services to the countries with which national intelligence services cooperate.

For instance, the direct or indirect usage of information obtained as a result of torture ought to

be outlawed and adherence to this principle regularly monitored. Thus, to install a system of

embedded human rights protection that extends to such practices, cooperation with foreign

agencies should only take place in accordance with arrangements approved by democratically

accountable politicians. What is more, when information is received from a foreign or inter-

national agency, it should be held subject both to the controls applicable in the country of

origin and those standards which apply under domestic law. Hence, information should only be

disclosed to foreign security and intelligence agencies or to an international agency if they

undertake to hold and use it subject to the same controls that apply in domestic law to the

agency which is disclosing it (e.g. in Germany, see Figure 24.2, point 4). Furthermore, inter-

national cooperation could also place a duty on national intelligence services to cooperate with

an international tribunal (e.g. Bosnia Herzegovina, see Figure 24.2, point ﬁve).

Admittedly, these and other requirements are demanding obligations for the services to fulﬁll

without hampering their important contributions to a nation’s security. Yet “embedded

human rights” protection is also advantageous for the services as it avoids rendering the intelli-

gence services toothless in the face of overwhelming international human rights obligations.

This is because obligations arising from human rights standards can be said to have a much less

distracting eﬀect on the work of the services if they have been integrated into the design of an

intelligence system. In this way the individual intelligence agent is much more familiar with the

range of permissible action and can therefore make more eﬃcient use of resources and tools

available to him or her. Having said this, the adherence to a speciﬁc catalogue of intelligence

norms also increases the professionalism and integrity of the services as well as its reputation

among the general populace. A noteworthy initiative has been launched by the Council of

Europe (CoE) which has adopted a European Code of Police Ethics based on the conviction

that “public conﬁdence in the police is closely related to their attitude and behavior towards the

public, in particular their respect for human dignity and fundamental rights and freedoms of

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INTELLIGENCE ACCOUNTABILITY

the individual”.

Similar to this initiative, some countries have devised a professional code

of intelligence ethics and have written this into their national intelligence laws (e.g. in South

Africa, see Figure 24.2, point 8).

It is common practice for many professional groups where high risks and interests are at stake

to turn to the creation of behavioral rules deemed necessary to perform the respective jobs in a

just and morally satisfactory manner. Once such a code of intelligence ethics has been devised,

it is equally important to oﬀer regular training courses on intelligence ethics for intelligence

staﬀers (e.g. in the US, see Figure 24.2, point 9). This is a useful way of setting, communicating

Figure 24.2 Best practice aimed at creating “embedded human rights.”

Source: Based on Born and Leigh 2005.

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HANS BORN AND THORSTEN WETZLING

and maintaining a minimum level of shared practices among intelligence employees. The

adherence to a professional ethos makes a valuable contribution to the internal administration

of intelligence services. It ensures that discretionary decisions are taken in a structured and

consistent fashion across the intelligence agency.

The political neutrality of intelligence services

The involvement, if not the outright politicization, of intelligence services before and during

the war in Iraq in 2003 has rightly received much critical attention. In order to protect the

services from being politically manipulated on the one hand, and in order to render the work of

intelligence services more acceptable to national citizens on the other hand, some national

intelligence systems have made very signiﬁcant eﬀorts to promote the professionalism and the

political neutrality of the intelligence services. Indeed, this requires the acknowledgment of

the inherent right of the services to fully brief government ministers on matters of extreme

sensitivity. It is important that ministers have an open-door policy towards the agencies. In the

same vein, the minister directing the intelligence services should be legally responsible for

the formulation of a coherent policy on security and intelligence matters and the services have

the corresponding duty to implement governmental policy. This entails a duty by the services

to report to the ministers at regular intervals as well as to seek approval of sensitive matters

(e.g. in Canada, see Figure 24.3, points 1 and 2).

To safeguard the political neutrality of the national intelligence services in various countries,

their mandate is limited to such national security threats as are speciﬁcally accounted

for in detail in the respective laws. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Law on the Intelligence and

Security Agency provides a clear and comprehensive account of national security and threats to

it (see Figure 24.3, point 3). A useful tool to ensure the political neutrality of the services is to

include in the respective intelligence law institutional and legal safeguards to prevent the use

of services by government oﬃcials against political opponents as well as to prevent them from

exerting inﬂuence on the political institutions and media (e.g. in Argentina, see Figure 24.3,

point 4).

Another means to ensure greater political neutrality of the services is the opening up to

scrutiny of the process of appointing the agency head. Within the executive it would be

preferable to have more than one cabinet member involved in the appointment process (e.g. in

Hungary, see Figure 24.3, point 8). Outside the executive, legislation should regulate how to

seek parliamentary approval for appointment proposals or how parliament can block the

appointment by a formal vote. Of course constitutional traditions and political cultures have

produced diﬀerent practices in this regard, yet the underlying objective ought to be attainable

in all intelligence systems. Additional measures such as the requirement that opposition in

parliament should be involved in appointing the director of intelligence services and that the

relevant legislation should contain safeguards against improper pressure being applied on the

director can further ensure the political neutrality of the services (e.g. in Australia, see Figure

24.2, point 7). We have also found practices that were detrimental to the political neutrality of

the services. For example, in the US, President Bush appointed in 2004 Porter Goss, member

of Congress of his own Republican party, as Director of the CIA. In France the prime minister

allegedly politicized the military intelligence service in the so-called “Clearstream” corruption

aﬀair.

In addition, many countries have established safeguards against ministerial abuse of the

intelligence services. One example is Hungary’s and Australia’s intelligence legislation

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INTELLIGENCE ACCOUNTABILITY

inasmuch as it stipulates that all directions and guidelines by the ministers to the agency should

be in writing (see Figure 24.3, point 9), and copied to the Inspector-General (see Figure 24.3,

point 10). Moreover, members of the executive should be required to brief the leader of the

opposition, as a bipartisan approach to security and intelligence is more likely to be maintained

if leading politicians of the opposition do not feel that they have been wholly excluded from

the “ring of secrecy” (see Figure 24.3, point 7).

Figure 24.3 Best practice to ensure the political neutrality of the services.

Source: Born and Leigh 2005.

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HANS BORN AND THORSTEN WETZLING

Conclusion

The development of national intelligence control systems is a relatively recent phenomenon. In

many democracies intelligence control has long been considered an executive prerogative, as

demonstrated by the fact that early intelligence control mechanisms were based on decrees

instead of laws enacted by parliament. In the United Kingdom, intelligence services operated

on executive decrees until the end of the 1980s, whereas French intelligence services are to this

day not based on an act of parliament. Although the deepening and widening of democratic

oversight of intelligence services has generally much progressed in recent decades, one can also

point to new challenges and diﬀerent levels of precision and aptitude in national oversight laws.

There could scarcely be a more appropriate time to address new challenges to the oversight

of intelligence services. In the wake of 9/11 and the now re-named “long war” against terror,

national parliaments, governments (inter alia in the US, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and

Canada) as well as the parliamentary assemblies of regional international organizations (e.g. the

European Parliament and the Council of Europe) have started to investigate the functioning

of intelligence services and the use of intelligence by national governments. Other countries,

such as France, have launched legislative initiatives to strengthen parliament’s role in national

intelligence control.

Drawing on research into national oversight legislation in liberal democracies, this chapter

highlights intelligence accountability mechanisms that address well the challenges for the

contemporary control of intelligence. We have conﬁned our analysis to aspects that touch on

(1) parliamentary ownership, (2) embedded human rights protection, and (3) political neutrality

of the services.

Bearing in mind that most intelligence oversight systems are relatively young, the underlying

question is to what extent they are strong enough to confront the new challenges in the current

war against terror. Among the most prominent challenges are the higher level of international

intelligence cooperation and the danger of politicization of the services. Concerning the

former, the increase in bilateral and multilateral cooperation between the services begs

the question whether national oversight systems have suﬃcient statutory powers and the

capacity to oversee international cooperation activities. A second challenge is the danger of

politicization of the services, i.e. the use of intelligence services for personal or political party

purposes, something that is common in both new and old democracies. Interestingly, the

danger of politicization of the intelligence services can be regarded as a downside of the

increasing democratization of intelligence oversight. On the one hand, introduction of more

transparency and public accountability leads to a better system of checks and balances on the

services. On the other hand, the services and their activities are becoming part of the normal

political debate, which leads to the danger that the actors in that political debate will use the

services and their work for their own beneﬁt.

Notes

1 Philip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the 20th Century (New York:

W.W. Norton, 1988).

2 Peter Gill, “The Politicization of Intelligence: Lessons from the Invasion of Iraq”, in: Hans Born, Loch

K. Johnson and Ian Leigh (eds), Who’s Watching the Spies? Establishing Intelligence Service Accountability

(Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005).

3 Peter Gill, op. cit., p. 20. L. Britt Snider puts it somewhat more mildly: “The intelligence judgments

that had ostensibly prompted President Bush to wage war on Iraq . . . which Bush in turn had used to

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persuade Congress and the American public to support the war, turned out to be wrong.” L. Britt

Snider, “Congressional Oversight of Intelligence after September 11”, in: Jennifer E. Sims and Burton

Gerber (eds.), Transforming U.S. Intelligence (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005),

p. 242.

4 For further insights into the aspect of intelligence politicization, see: Joseph Cirincione et al., WMD

in Iraq: Evidence and Implications (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,

2004); Seymour M. Hersh, “The Stovepipe: How Conﬂicts between the Bush Administration and the

Intelligence Community Marred the Reporting on Iraq’s weapons”, The New Yorker, 27 October

2003; Harry Howe Ransom, “The Politicization of Intelligence”, in: Stephen J. Cimbala (ed.),

Intelligence and Intelligence Policy in a Democratic Society (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Transnational Press, 1987).

5 Le Monde, “L’Elysée accuse les services secrets d’avoir enquêté sur M. Chirac sous le gouvernement de

M. Jospin”, 22 June 2002.

6 Hans Born and Ian Leigh, Making Intelligence Accountable: Legal Standards and Best Practices for Oversight of

Intelligence Services (Oslo: Publishing House of the Norwegian Parliament, 2005), p. 68.

7 Bundestag, Drucksache 16/990.

8 “Secretary General’s report under Article 52 ECHR on the question of secret detention and transport

of detainees suspected of terrorist acts, notably by or at the instigation of foreign agencies”, Council of

Europe, SG/Inf (2006) 5, Strasbourg, 28 February 2006, point 101. Available at <http://www.coe.int/

T/E/Com/Files/Events/2006-cia/>. The European Parliament has established a temporary com-

mittee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of

prisoners. The committee’s ﬁrst draft interim report was released on 24 April 2006 and is available

online at: <http://www.europarl.eu.int/comparl/tempcom/tdip/interim_report_en.pdf>.

9 In a previous publication we accounted in greater detail for challenges with respect to the internal

control at the level of the agency, executive control, parliamentary oversight and oversight by

independent oversight bodies. See Hans Born and Ian Leigh, op. cit.

10 We mention recommended accountability mechanisms from intelligence legislation in North and

South America, Europe, Africa and Asia and Oceania. Our sample includes “new” (Poland, Hungary)

and “old” (United Kingdom, The Netherlands) as well as examples from diﬀerent constitutional

models (US, Germany, the United Kingdom, respectively).

11 With the notable exception of France and Turkey, which have yet to fully incorporate parliamentary

intelligence oversight into domestic practice. On the French experience with intelligence governance,

see Hans Born and Thorsten Wetzling “Checks and Imbalances? Intelligence Governance in

contemporary France” in: Hans Born and Marina Caparini (eds), Democratic Control of Intelligence

Services (London: Ashgate Publishing, forthcoming). At last (in 2006), France seems ready to

remedy this democratic deﬁcit: Prime Minister de Villepin has introduced a “projet de loi” to the

National Assembly which pertains to creating the country’s ﬁrst parliamentary intelligence oversight

committee. Assemblée Nationale, Projet de loi No. 2941, 08 March 2006.

12 Ben Hayes, “There is no Balance between Security and Civil Liberties – Just Less of Both”, Essays for

Civil Liberties and Democracy in Europe, Number 12. Available online at: http://www.statewatch.org/

news/2005/oct/ecln/essay–12.pdf.

13 Modern intelligence agencies serving democratic nations are providing an important service to their

people by identifying and assessing new security threats. What is more, they are not comparable –

neither with respect to the means nor with respect to the command structure – to the likes of the

Gestapo or the KPG.

14 Loch K. Johnson “Governing in the Absence of Angels: On the Practice of Intelligence Accountability

in the United States”, in Hans Born, Ian Leigh and Loch K. Johnson (eds), op. cit., p. 102.

15 Ibid.

16 In this regard, one can also point to the connections between diﬀerent layers: deﬁciencies at one level

can aﬀect other levels. For instance, parliamentarians can eﬀectively scrutinize the performance of

ministers only if the parliament possesses suﬃcient powers to control the executive, including spending

and investigative authorities.

17 Andrzej Zybertowicz, “An Unresolved Game. The Role of the Intelligence Services in the Nascent

Polish Democracy”, in: Hans Born, Loch K. Johnson and Ian Leigh (eds), A similar observation with

respect to German practice in intelligence oversight is documented in a recent article in the German

weekly, Die Zeit. The author cites insuﬃcient cooperation from the Bundesnachrichtendienst as the

main cause of a series of resignations of parliamentary overseers from oﬃce. Martin Klingst, “Der Frust

der Kontrolleure”, in: Die Zeit, Nr. 4/2006, p. 3.

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18 Stuart Farson, “Canada’s Long Road from Model Law to Eﬀective Oversight”, in: Hans Born, Loch K.

Johnson and Ian Leigh (eds), op. cit., p. 115.

19 Fredrik Sejersted “Intelligence and Accountability in a State without Enemies: The Case of Norway”,

in: Hans Born, Loch K. Johnson and Ian Leigh (eds), op. cit., p. 127.

20 Loch K. Johnson, op. cit., pp. 57–78. L. Britt Snider further criticizes the fact that bipartisanship in

congressional intelligence oversight in the US has strongly increased in the aftermath of September 11.

“One could only marvel at the degree to which partisanship had come to infect the work of the two

committees. Once held up as models of how congressional committees should work, they now seemed

no diﬀerent from the rest”, L. Britt Snider, op. cit., p. 245.

21 Though The Netherlands and Germany started earlier with parliamentary oversight of the services,

i.e. 1953 and 1956 respectively.

22 A comprehensive overview of the reluctance of American legislators to adopt a pro-active stance

towards the pursuit of intelligence oversight mandates is inter alia provided by Loch Johnson (Johnson

2005, 2005a).

23 See § 4 PKGrG.

24 See Section 15(1).

25 See Section 14(6).

26 See Title VIII and the Committees Internal Rules of Procedure.

27 See Art. 18.

28 Section 6.

29 Section 8.2.

30 Section 12.

31 See Section 2e (2).

32 See Section 102.

33 In this regard, one can point to L. Britt Snider’s convincing account of the increasing partisanship

between members of the two US oversight committees and its impact on the quality of intelligence

control in the aftermath of 9/11. Brit L. Snider, op. cit.

34 See Section 9 of the Norwegian Act relating to the Monitoring of Intelligence, Surveillance and

Security Services of 1995.

35 Recent allegations on secret detention, unlawful interrogation practices and rendition of suspected

terrorists raise numerous questions on their compatibility with the right to life and the right not to be

subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. These basic entitle-

ments amount to fundamental human rights established inter alia by the International Covenant on

Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966 and which entered

into force in 1976.

36 For our purposes, the focus turns to surveillance and data-ﬁling practices which are often incompatible

with the right to private and family life (Art. 8.1, European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)).

Public authorities may in exceptional circumstances interfere with this right providing such inter-

vention is “in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of

national security” (Art. 8.2 ECHR). For a comprehensive analysis, see Iain Cameron, National Security

and the European Convention on Human Rights (Uppsala/Dordrecht: Iustus/Kluwer, 2000).

37 An example would be the UN Code of Conduct on Law Enforcement, UN General Assembly

Resolution 34/169.

38 Born and Leigh, Making Intelligence Accountable, op. cit., p. 42.

39 The Council of Europe, 2001, The European Code of Police Ethics, Recommendation (2001) 10.

40 See Arts 47 and 51.

41 See § 9(3)2.

42 See Art. 19(3).

43 See Art. 6.

44 See Section 27.

45 See Section 15(4).

46 See Art. 27(a).

47 See Annex A.

48 See Art. 27.

49 “France speculates on PM’s future”, BBC News, 30 April 2006.

50 See Section 6.

51 Ibid.

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52 See Art. 5.

53 See Art. 4.

54 See Art. 16.

55 See Part 3, Section 17(3).

56 See ibid.

57 See Section 11.2.

58 See Section 11.

59 See Section 32B(2).

328

HANS BORN AND THORSTEN WETZLING

Intelligence and the rise of judicial intervention

Fred F. Manget

Perhaps the best way to give you a conception of our power and emplacement here is to note the

state and national laws that we are ready to bend, break, violate, and/or ignore. False information is

given out routinely on Florida papers of incorporation; tax returns fudge the real source of invest-

ment in our proprietaries; false ﬂight plans are ﬁled daily with the FAA; and we truck weapons and

explosives over Florida highways, thereby violating the Munitions Act and the Firearms Act, not to

speak of what we do to our friends Customs, Immigration, Treasury, and the Neutrality Act . . . As

I write, I can feel your outrage. It is not that they are doing all that – perhaps it is necessary, you will

say – but why . . . are you all this excited about it?

(Norman Mailer, Harlot’s Ghost)

Introduction

If only it were such an exercise in glorious outlawry as all that! It is widely believed that the

intelligence agencies of the US government are not subject to laws and the authority of judges

to apply them. No television cop show, adventure movie, or conspiracy book in two decades has

left out characters that are sinister intelligence oﬃcials beyond the reach of the law.

The reality, however, is that the federal judiciary now examines a wide range of intelligence

activities under a number of laws, including the Constitution. In order to decide particular

issues under the law, federal judges and their cleared clerks and other staﬀ are shown

material classiﬁed at the highest levels. There is no requirement that federal judges be granted

security clearances – their access to classiﬁed information is an automatic aspect of their

status. Their supporting staﬀs must be vetted, but court employees are usually granted all

clearances necessary for them to eﬀectively assist the judiciary in resolving legal issues before

the courts.

Judges currently interpret the laws that aﬀect national security to reach compromises

necessary to reconcile the open world of American jurisprudence and the closed world of

intelligence operations. They have now been doing it long enough to enable practitioners in

the ﬁeld to reach a number of conclusions. This chapter proposes that judicial review of issues

touching on intelligence matters has developed into a system of oversight.

The term “oversight” describes a system of accountability in which those vested with the

329

executive authority in an organization have their actions reviewed, sometimes in advance, by an

independent group that has the power to check those actions. In corporations, the board of

directors exercises oversight. In democratic governments, the classic model of oversight is that

of the legislative branches, conducted through the use of committee subpoena powers and the

authority to appropriate funds for the executive branches. Legislative oversight has very few

limits, by contrast with the model of judicial oversight described here, which is signiﬁcantly

limited. Legislative oversight is policy-related, as opposed to judicial oversight, which is con-

cerned with legal questions. Legislative oversight tends toward micromanagement of executive

decisions, where judicial oversight is more deferential. But a rule of thumb for a simple country

lawyer is that when you have to go and explain to someone important what you have been

doing and why, that is oversight, regardless of its source. Today intelligence community lawyers

often do just that. But it has not always been that way.

Until the mid-1970s, judges had very little to say about intelligence.

Since intelligence

activities are almost always related to foreign aﬀairs, skittish judges avoided jurisdiction

over most intelligence controversies under the political question doctrine, which allocates the

resolution of national security disputes to the two political branches of the government, not the

judiciary.

This doctrine was buttressed by the need to have a concrete case or controversy

before judges, rather than an abstract foreign policy debate, because of the limited jurisdiction

of federal courts.

Justice Scalia (as a federal appellate court judge) further developed the

doctrine, opining that courts should exercise considerable restraint in granting any petitions for

equitable relief in foreign aﬀairs controversies.

In addition, American intelligence organizations historically have had limited internal

security functions, if any. Prior to the creation of the CIA, the military departments conducted

most intelligence activities.

In 1947, the National Security Act expressly declined to give the

CIA any law enforcement authority: “. . . the Agency shall have no police, subpoena, or law

enforcement powers or internal security functions;” a prohibition that exists in the same form

today.

Without the immediate and direct impact that police activity has on citizens, there were

few instances where intelligence activities became issues in federal cases.

There is even an argument that to the extent that intelligence activities are concerned with

the security of the state, they are inherent to any sovereign’s authority under a higher law of

self-preservation and not subject to normal judicial review. Justice Sutherland found powers

inherent in sovereignty to be extra-constitutional in the 1936 Curtiss-Wright case.

Even that

good democrat Thomas Jeﬀerson wrote:

A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it

is not the highest [emphasis in original]. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our

country, by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty,

property and all those who are enjoying them with us: thus absurdly sacriﬁcing the end to the

means....

The debate continues today over the President’s constitutional ability to authorize the

National Security Agency to intercept international communications into and out of the US

of persons linked to certain terrorist organizations without using procedures established by the

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

This sense that somehow secret intelligence activities were governed by a higher law of

self-preservation no doubt added to the federal judiciary’s reluctance to exert its limited

jurisdiction in such areas.

In the 1970s this reluctance began to dwindle, driven by a number of causes. After the

Watergate Aﬀair, the activities of the executive branch came under a growing and skeptical

330

FRED F. MANGET

scrutiny by the press, the public, and Congress. This scrutiny blossomed into the Church and

Pike Committee investigations of the CIA, as well as the Rockefeller Commission report on

CIA activities.

The federal judiciary was following right behind, in part due to a natural

extension of the judicial activism that began in the 1960s. The expansion of due process

rights of criminal defendants meant that judges would examine in ever-increasing detail the

actions of the government in prosecutions.

The American tendency to treat international

problems as subject to cure by legal process became even more pronounced, and the intelli-

gence community found itself increasingly involved in the counterterrorism, counternarcotics,

and non-proliferation activities of the law enforcement agencies of the US government.

The other cause was simply the increasing number of statutes that Congress passed dealing

with the Agency and the intelligence community. The more statutes there are on a particular

subject, the more judicial review of the subject there will be. For example, in the late 1970s,

Congress began to pass annual authorization bills for the intelligence community that generally

contained permanent statutory provisions, a practice that continues today.

Congressional inroads on all types of executive branch foreign aﬀairs powers also increased

in the 1970s. The constitutional foreign aﬀairs powers shared by the executive and legislative

branches wax and wane, but it seems clear that Congress began to reassert its role in

international relations at that time. The War Powers Resolution and the series of Boland

Amendments restricting aid to the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s were statutory attempts by

Congress to force policy positions on a reluctant executive branch. The Hughes-Ryan

Amendment required notiﬁcation of oversight committees about covert actions.

When

Congress passes laws to prevail in disagreements in foreign aﬀairs, more judicial review will

occur. De Tocqueville was right – all disputes in the US inevitably end up in court.

The result is the current system of judicial oversight of intelligence. By 1980, then-Attorney

General Benjamin Civiletti could write that, “Although there may continue to be some

confusion about how the law applies to a particular matter, there is no longer any doubt

that intelligence activities are subject to deﬁnable legal standards.”

It is not nearly so com-

prehensive as legislative oversight, because federal courts still have jurisdiction limited by

statute and the Constitution. But it does exist in eﬀective and powerful ways that go far beyond

the conventional wisdom that national security is a cloak hiding intelligence activities from the

federal judiciary.

Criminal law

Federal judges are required to examine the conduct of the government when it becomes a

litigated issue in a criminal prosecution, and almost every case involves at least one such issue.

Intelligence activities are no exception. What makes those activities so diﬀerent is that they

almost always require secrecy to be eﬀective and to maintain their value to US policy-makers.

The need for secrecy clashes directly with conventional trial procedures in which most of the

eﬀorts on both sides of a case go into developing the pre-trial phase called “discovery.” As a

result, federal judges review and decide a number of issues that regularly arise in areas where

democratic societies would instinctively say that governmental secrecy creates problems. The

pattern has developed that judges review intelligence information when protection of its

secrecy could aﬀect traditional notions of a fair trial.

For example, it would be manifestly unfair if the government could, without sanctions,

withhold secret intelligence information from defendants that would otherwise be disclosed

under rules of criminal procedure. In fact, under both Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 16

331

INTELLIGENCE AND JUDICIAL INTERVENTION

relating to discovery and the decisions in the Brady and Giglio cases, federal prosecutors are

required to turn over certain materials to the defense regardless of their secrecy.

For a number

of years, judges fashioned their own procedures to balance competing interests. In the Kampiles

case, the defendant was charged with selling to the Russians a manual about the operation of

the KH-11 spy satellite. The trial court did not allow classiﬁed information to be introduced

at trial. The court issued a protective order after closed proceedings in which the government

presented evidence of the sensitive document that was passed to the Soviet Union, and of the

FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the document’s disappearance. The court of

appeals upheld the espionage conviction based upon the defendant’s confession that he had met

with and sold a classiﬁed document to a Soviet intelligence oﬃcer and upon suﬃcient other

evidence to corroborate the reliability of the defendant’s confession.

Classiﬁed Information Procedures Act

The Classiﬁed Information Procedures Act (CIPA) was passed in 1980 to avoid ad hoc treatment

of the issues and to establish detailed procedures for handling such classiﬁed information

in criminal trials.

It was a response to the problem of “greymail,” in which defendants

threatened to reveal classiﬁed information unless prosecutions were dropped or curtailed.

Prior to passage of CIPA, the government had to guess the extent of possible damage from such

disclosures, because there were no methods by which classiﬁed information could be evaluated

in advance of public discovery and evidentiary rulings by the courts. Under CIPA, classiﬁed

information can be reviewed under the regular criminal procedures for discovery and admissi-

bility of evidence before the information is publicly disclosed. Judges are allowed to determine

issues presented to them both in camera (meaning non-publicly, in chambers) and ex parte

(meaning presented by one side alone without the presence of the other party).

Under CIPA, the defendant is allowed to discover classiﬁed information and to oﬀer it in

evidence to the extent it is necessary to a fair trial and allowed by normal criminal procedures.

The government is allowed to minimize the classiﬁed information at risk of public disclosure

by oﬀering unclassiﬁed summaries or substitutions for the sensitive materials. Judges are called

upon to balance the need of the government to protect intelligence information and the rights

of a defendant to a fair trial.

This is an area in which democratic societies would want judicial

scrutiny of governmental assertions of national security equities, in order to preserve con-

stitutional due process guarantees. Prosecutions are in fact dropped or severely curtailed after

judicial review of information under CIPA because the defendant cannot get a fair trial without

publicly revealing information damaging to US intelligence eﬀorts.

Surveillance

Judges also scrutinize intelligence activities involving surveillance. Because of the Fourth

Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures, intelligence collection is also

reviewed under standards applied to search warrants. The federal judiciary has been reviewing

surveillance in the context of suppression of evidence hearings for many years. For example, the

issue of electronic surveillance was considered in 1928 in the Supreme Court case of Olmstead,

which held that the government could conduct such surveillance without a criminal search

warrant.

In 1967 the Supreme Court overturned Olmstead,

and the government began to

follow specially tailored search warrant procedures for electronic procedures.

332

FRED F. MANGET

FISA

In 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was passed to establish a secure forum

in which the government could obtain what is essentially a search warrant to conduct

electronic surveillance within the United States of persons who are agents of foreign powers.

The FISA requires that applications for such orders approving electronic surveillance include

detailed information about the targets, and the means of conducting the surveillance. Applica-

tions are heard and either denied or granted by a special court composed of federal district

court judges designated by the Chief Justice of the United States. There is a three-member

court of review to hear appeals of denials of applications.

Thus judges conduct extensive review of foreign intelligence-related electronic surveillance

operations prior to their inception. Intrusive collection techniques make this area especially

sensitive, and their review by federal judges is very important in reconciling them with Fourth

Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. For example, in the espionage prosecu-

tion of Aldrich and Rosario Ames, published accounts of the investigation revealed that a search

of Ames’s house was made by FBI agents without a search warrant, based upon the authority

of the Attorney General to approve physical searches in foreign counterintelligence investiga-

tions.

If Ames and his wife had not pled guilty, it is highly likely that the search would have

been fully litigated in light of United States v. Truong, an espionage prosecution brought in

the same federal district some twenty years earlier. In Truong, the FBI had tapped conversations

of a State Department employee who was furnishing classiﬁed information to the North

Vietnamese. The trial court heard arguments from both sides and held that when an investiga-

tion’s primary purpose becomes prosecution (rather than counterintelligence), a criminal

search warrant then becomes required for further intrusive electronic surveillance.

This primary purpose test was used for a number of years by the Department of Justice in

reviewing FISA surveillance and maintaining a so-called “wall” between national security and

counterintelligence activities and law enforcement activities. In May of 2002, the FISA Court

issued an opinion imposing certain requirements and limitations accompanying an order

authorizing electronic surveillance of a particular “agent of a foreign power” as deﬁned in

FISA. Those restrictions imposed a level of separation between intelligence and law enforce-

ment activities that was unacceptable to the US government, which appealed the order to the

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review for the ﬁrst time since passage of FISA. The

Court of Review extensively examined the law and practice of FISA surveillance, and issued a

detailed opinion dismantling the wall as something not required by FISA or the Constitution.

The Court of Review heard from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for

Democracy and Technology, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers,

among others, who all ﬁled friend-of-the-court briefs. The opinion (which included some

deleted pages containing classiﬁed information) demonstrated without any doubt that a sig-

niﬁcant number of government attorneys did a large amount of explaining to federal judges

what their clients were doing. That is full-ﬂedged judicial review of the government’s actions

under federal statutes and the Fourth Amendment.

Explaining continues. In January 2006, the Department of Justice held a classiﬁed brieﬁng

for a number of FISA Court judges in response to concerns about the President’s authorization

for the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance in certain counter-

terrorism operations without FISA Court approval. The New York Times noted with probable

understatement that, “At Monday’s brieﬁng, judges were expected to question Justice

Department oﬃcials intensely about the legal underpinnings of the program, . . .”.

333

INTELLIGENCE AND JUDICIAL INTERVENTION

Armed conﬂict

After the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the ensuing global war on terrorism became a

fertile ground for legal issues. On the one hand, unfettered and rapid action by the executive

branch became essential to prevention of further terrorist attacks. On the other hand, the

federal judiciary was asked to decide what are the legal boundaries to such executive action. As

terrorists were captured on battleﬁelds and in foreign venues around the world, federal courts

stepped into the fray. Interrogation of captured combatants is a highly important intelligence

method, especially when directed towards future threats of armed attack. The treatment of

individuals incarcerated by the US government is a highly important aspect of constitutional

due process rights. Federal courts are in the middle of addressing the issues that occur when

these two principles meet.

In the Hamdi case,

the Supreme Court was asked to consider the legality of the gov-

ernment’s detention of an American citizen on American soil as an enemy combatant and

to address the process that the Constitution requires for challenging that status. The federal

Appeals Court held that Hamdi’s detention was legally authorized and that he was entitled

to no further opportunity to challenge his enemy-combatant classiﬁcation. The Supreme

Court vacated the appeals decision and remanded the case, holding that while Hamdi

could be detained, due process requires that a US citizen held in the United States as an

enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that

detention before a neutral decision-maker. That neutral decision maker would be a federal

judge.

In a second case, United States v. Moussaoui, the defendant was charged with conspiracy related

to the 9/11 attacks. The prosecutors and defense counsel fought a running discovery battle that

resulted in the District Court issuing a series of rulings granting Moussaoui access to certain

enemy combatant witnesses in US custody for the purpose of deposing them. When the rulings

were challenged by the government on appeal, the Court of Appeals issued an opinion that

stated, “We are presented with questions of grave signiﬁcance – questions that test the com-

mitment of this nation to an independent judiciary, to the constitutional guarantee of a fair trial

even to one accused of the most heinous of crimes, and to the protection of our citizens against

additional terrorist attacks. These questions do not admit of easy answers.”

The appellate

opinion went on to hold that enemy combatant witnesses who were foreign nationals in

military custody outside the boundaries of the United States were not beyond the process

power of federal district courts. It also held that ordering production of enemy combatant

witnesses did not infringe on the Executive Branch’s warmaking authority, in violation of

separation of powers principles.

A third case involved Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was arrested as an enemy

combatant upon returning to the United States from Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he

allegedly was “recruited, trained, funded, and equipped by al Qaeda leaders to continue prose-

cution of the war in the United States by blowing up apartment buildings in this country.”

The issue before the Appeals Court was whether the President possesses the authority to detain

militarily an American citizen who was closely associated with a hostile terrorist group engaged

in armed attacks against the United States and who traveled to the United States to further

prosecute the armed conﬂict against American citizens and targets. The District Court said no,

but the Appeals Court reversed and said yes, based upon information collected and provided by

the government.

These and other terrorism cases continue to create issues that are currently being litigated.

One matter that seems to have been ﬁrmly decided, however, is that attorneys for the United

334

FRED F. MANGET

States will continue to explain to federal judges signiﬁcant clandestine activities of the US

intelligence and national security communities for many years to come.

Government authorization

In yet another area, judges review secret intelligence activities in the context of whether

defendants were authorized by an intelligence agency to do the very actions on which the

criminal charges are based. Under the rules of criminal procedure, defendants are required to

notify the government if they intend to raise a defense of government authorization.

The

government is required to respond to such assertions, either admitting or denying them. Should

there be any merit to the defense, the defendant is allowed to put on evidence and to have the

judge decide issues that arise in litigating the defense. This satisﬁes the notion that it would be

unfair to defendants who could have been authorized to carry out some clandestine activity if

they could not bring such secret information before the court.

For example, in the case of United States v. Rewald, the defendant was convicted of numerous

counts of bilking investors in a Ponzi scheme. Rewald vociferously maintained that the CIA

had told him to extravagantly spend the money of investors in order to cultivate relationships

with foreign potentates and wealthy businessmen who would be useful intelligence sources.

The opinion of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel that reviewed the convictions

characterized Rewald’s argument as his principal defense in the case, and in fact Rewald

did have some minor contact with local CIA personnel, volunteering information from his

international business travels and providing light backstopping cover for a few CIA employees.

Rewald sought the production of hundreds of classiﬁed CIA documents and propounded

over 1,700 interrogatories, but after reviewing responsive records and answers the trial court

excluded most of the classiﬁed information as simply not relevant under evidentiary standards.

The Ninth Circuit panel noted that, “This court has examined each and every classiﬁed

document ﬁled by Rewald in this appeal.”

It subsequently upheld the District Court’s

exclusion of the classiﬁed information at issue.

The signiﬁcance is not that the defendants lost their arguments, but that they had the

opportunity to fully litigate them before a federal judge. The Department of Justice does

not prosecute defendants while the intelligence community denies them the information they

need to have a fair trial. Who decides what a fair trial requires? An independent federal judge,

appointed for life, who reviews the secrets. Judges generally defer to intelligence experts on

intelligence judgments – e.g. whether information is classiﬁed. But the question of what a fair

trial may require belongs to the judge alone.

Civil law

Although criminal law has the most direct and dramatic impact on individual citizens, civil

law also requires judicial intervention in numerous cases where intelligence activities, and the

secrecy surrounding them, become issues. Private civil litigants may demand that the govern-

ment produce intelligence information under the laws requiring disclosure of Agency records

unless they are speciﬁcally exempted. Individual civil plaintiﬀs may bring tort actions against

the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act based on allegations that secret intelligence

activities caused compensable damages. Private litigants may sue each other for any of the

myriad civil causes of action that exist in litigious America, and demand from the government

information relating to intelligence activities in order to support their cases. In all those

335

INTELLIGENCE AND JUDICIAL INTERVENTION

instances, federal judges act as the arbiters of government assertions of special equities relating

to intelligence that aﬀect the litigation. Private civil litigants may not win their arguments that

such equities should be discounted in their favor, but they can make their arguments to a federal

judge.

FOIA

For example, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)

and the Privacy Act,

there

are exceptions to the mandatory disclosure provisions that allow classiﬁed information and

intelligence sources and methods to be kept secret. Courts defer extensively to the executive

branch on what information falls within those exceptions,

but there is still a rigorous review

of such material. The CIA prepares public indexes (called “Vaughn indexes” after the case

endorsing them

) describing records withheld under the sensitive information exceptions that

are reviewed by the courts. If those public indexes are not suﬃcient for a judge to decide

whether an exception applies, classiﬁed Vaughn indexes are shown to the judge ex parte and

in camera. If a classiﬁed index is still not suﬃcient, then the withheld materials themselves can be

shown to the judge.

The Knight case illustrates this extensive process.

The plaintiﬀ ﬁled a Freedom of Informa-

tion Act request for all information in CIA’s possession relating to the 1980s sinking of the

Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in the harbor in Auckland, New Zealand, by the French

external intelligence service. The CIA declined to produce any such records, and plaintiﬀ ﬁled

a suit to force disclosure. Both public and classiﬁed indexes were prepared by the Agency, and

when they were deemed by the court to be insuﬃcient for a decision in the case, all responsive

documents were shown in unredacted form to the trial judge in her chambers. Her decision

was in favor of the government, and it was aﬃrmed on appeal.

Historian Alan Fitzgibbon litigated another FOIA request to the CIA and the FBI for

materials on the disappearance of Jesus de Galindez, a Basque exile, from outside a New York

City subway station in 1956. The case was litigated from 1979 to 1990, and during the

process the District Court conducted extensive in camera reviews of the material at issue.

That

pattern has been repeated in numerous other cases.

Thus in areas where federal laws mandate

disclosure of US government information, federal judges review claims of exemptions based on

sensitive intelligence equities.

State secrets privilege

Federal courts also have jurisdiction over civil cases ranging from negligence claims against the

government to disputes between persons domiciled in diﬀerent states. In such cases, litigants

often subpoena or otherwise demand discovery of sensitive intelligence-related information.

The government resists such demands by asserting the state secrets privilege under the

authority of United States v. Reynolds, a Supreme Court case that allowed the government to

deny disclosure of national security secrets.

Other statutory privileges also protect intelligence

sources and methods.

Judicial review of US government aﬃdavits that assert the state secrets

privilege is regularly used to resolve disputed issues of privilege.

In Halkin v. Helms, former Vietnam War protestors sued oﬃcials of various federal

intelligence agencies alleging violation of constitutional and statutory rights. Speciﬁcally, the

plaintiﬀs alleged that the National Security Agency (NSA) conducted warrantless interceptions

of their international wire, cable, and telephone communications at the request of other

federal defendants. The government asserted the state secrets privilege to prevent disclosure of

336

FRED F. MANGET

whether the international communications of the plaintiﬀs were in fact acquired by NSA and

disseminated to other federal agencies.

The trial court considered three in camera aﬃdavits and

the in camera testimony of the Deputy Director of NSA, and the case was ultimately dismissed

at the appellate level based on the assertion of the privilege. The plaintiﬀs lost the case, but they

had the full attention of both trial and appellate federal court judges on the assertion of

governmental secrecy.

Allegations of abuse

Federal courts also adjudicate the substance of legal claims brought by private citizens alleging

abusive governmental actions. For example, in Birnbaum v. United States, a suit was brought

under the Federal Tort Claims Act by individuals whose letters to and from the Soviet Union

were opened and photocopied by the CIA in the HTLINGUAL mail-opening program that

operated between 1953 and 1973. Plaintiﬀs were awarded $1000 each in damages, and the

award was upheld on appeal.

Even suits against intelligence agencies by their own employees have given aggrieved indi-

viduals at least a half-day in court. In Doe v. Gates a CIA employee litigated the issue of alleged

discrimination against him based on his homosexuality. Doe raised two constitutional claims –

whether his ﬁring violated the Fifth Amendment equal protection or deprivation of property

without compensation clauses. He was heard at every federal court level, including the US

Supreme Court. The judicial review even included limited evidentiary review pursuant to

cross-motions for summary judgment.

The Supreme Court noted that section 102(c) of the

National Security Act of 1947 could not be read to exclude judicial review of Doe’s consti-

tutional claims. The court went on to note that a serious constitutional question would arise if a

federal statute were construed to deny any judicial forum for a colorable constitutional claim.

It is a rare event when the Supreme Court scrutinizes intelligence activities. Nevertheless,

that does occur in precisely the areas in which a wary citizenry would want it. For example,

two recent cases explored the boundaries of claims against the United States government for

wrongful actions against individuals.

In one case, a husband and wife ﬁled suit against the United States and CIA, asserting

estoppel and due process claims for CIA’s alleged failure to provide them with the assistance it

had promised in return for their espionage services.

Using the pseudonyms “John and Jane

Doe”, they claimed to be former citizens of a “foreign country” that at the time was considered

to be an enemy of the United States, and John Doe was a diplomat for the country. After they

expressed interest in defecting to the United States, CIA oﬃcers allegedly persuaded them to

remain at their posts and conduct espionage for the United States for a speciﬁed period of time,

promising in return that the United States would provide them ﬁnancial and personal security

for life. The Does alleged that after a number of years working in the United States, John

Doe was laid oﬀ in a corporate merger and contacted CIA for a renewal of ﬁnancial assistance.

The request was denied, and the Does then sued, alleging CIA violated their procedural and

substantive due process rights by denying them support and refusing to provide them with a fair

internal process for reviewing their claims for assistance.

The government moved to dismiss the Does’ complaint based upon a Civil War-era case,

Totten v. United States.

In that case, the administrator of the estate of William A. Lloyd sued the

United States for compensation for services that Lloyd allegedly conducted as a spy during the

Civil War. Lloyd’s administrator claimed that Lloyd had entered into a contract with President

Lincoln in 1861 to spy behind Confederate lines, for which he was to receive $200 a month.

The Supreme Court dismissed the claim and stated that the very essence of the alleged contract

337

INTELLIGENCE AND JUDICIAL INTERVENTION

between Lloyd and the United States was that it was secret and had to remain secret. Since

the nature of the contract was secrecy, it was incompatible for the courts to allow a former spy

to sue to enforce it.

This defense ﬁnally prevailed when the Does’ case reached the Supreme Court (in a

unanimous decision). But the Does achieved an extensive review of their claims in three

separate federal courts. Both the District Court and the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

accepted the Does’ argument that Totten did not bar some of their claims, including those

related to the government’s failure to allow them due process (a constitutional claim).

Both of

those courts allowed the case to proceed.

The Supreme Court also heard the case of a widow of a Guatemalan rebel leader who

vanished in his country in 1992.

She alleged that US government oﬃcials intentionally

deceived her by concealing information that he had been detained, tortured, and executed by

Guatemalan army oﬃcers paid by CIA, and that this deception denied her access to the courts

by leaving her without information with which she could have brought a lawsuit that might

have saved her husband’s life. She sued a number of US government oﬃcials and departments,

alleging common law and international law tort claims and constitutional tort claims.

The

legal theories she advanced to support her claims were unusual (the District Court described

her various requests for relief as “nearly unintelligible”

). Yet she was able to convince the

District Court and the Court of Appeals that at least some of her claims should survive the

government’s challenge. She did not prevail in the end, but there is no question that the federal

judiciary gave her every chance to bring a legal claim against the government for what were

allegedly covert intelligence activities conducted in a foreign country.

The same can be said of the case brought in federal court by survivors of General Rene

Schneider, the Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army, who died of wounds suﬀered in

a failed kidnapping attempt in 1970.

The plaintiﬀs brought suit against the United States and

former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, alleging that General Schneider died as a result of

covert actions directed by high-level United States oﬃcials and CIA in connection with an

attempted coup in Chile. The United States moved to dismiss the case for failure to state a legal

claim. In such cases, the court is required to accept as true all of a plaintiﬀ’s factual allegations

and draw all reasonable inferences in favor of the plaintiﬀ. In spite of that, the court held that the

political question doctrine rendered the claim non-justiciable. The political question doctrine

is a powerful defense against claims relating to sovereign actions of United States overseas, but at

least a federal judge examined the plaintiﬀs’ claims, assumed the facts pled by the plaintiﬀs were

true, and measured them against the doctrine. A federal judge – not the Executive or Legislative

Branches – made that call.

First Amendment

Federal judges also look at First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and the press as

they relate to intelligence. One context is the contract for non-disclosure of classiﬁed informa-

tion that employees, contractors, and others sign when they are granted access to sensitive

information by agencies of the intelligence community. The contract requires pre-publication

review of non-oﬃcial writings by the government in order to protect sensitive information.

Two separate lawsuits by former CIA employees Victor Marchetti and Frank Snepp challenged

the contract as a forbidden prior restraint on publication. After extensive appellate review,

the contract restrictions on freedom of speech were held reasonable and constitutional.

It is

clear that federal courts will entertain claims of First Amendment violations from intelligence

community employees, and will examine the claims closely.

338

FRED F. MANGET

For example, in 1981 a former CIA oﬃcer named Ralph McGehee submitted an article to

CIA for pre-publication review pursuant to a secrecy agreement he had signed in 1952 when

he joined the Agency. The article asserted that the CIA had mounted a campaign of deceit to

convince the world that the “revolt of the poor natives against a ruthless US-backed oligarchy”

in El Salvador was really “a Soviet/Cuban/Bulgarian/Vietnamese/PLO/Ethiopian/

Nicaraguan/International Terrorism challenge to the United States.”

McGehee oﬀered a

few examples of CIA operations to support his assertion, and some were deemed classiﬁed by

the Agency and permission to publish those portions of the article were denied.

McGehee sued, seeking a declaratory judgment that the CIA pre-publication and classiﬁca-

tion procedures violated the First Amendment. He lost, but the federal Appeals Court stated:

We must accordingly establish a standard for judicial review of the CIA classiﬁcation decision that

aﬀords proper respect to the individual rights at stake while recognizing the CIA’s technical

expertise and practical familiarity with the ramiﬁcations of sensitive information. We conclude that

reviewing courts should conduct a de novo review of the classiﬁcation decision, while giving

deference to reasoned and detailed CIA explanations of that classiﬁcation decision.

When individual rights are aﬀected, federal courts have not been reluctant to assert oversight

and require intelligence community agencies to visit the courthouse and explain what they are

doing.

The second context involving the First Amendment is government attempts to restrain

publication of intelligence information by the press. When the Pentagon Papers were leaked to

the news media in 1971, the attempt to enjoin publication resulted in the Supreme Court case

of New York Times v. US

Because of the number of individual opinions in the case, the holding

is somewhat confusing. Nonetheless, it seems clear that an injunction against press publication

of intelligence information will not only be very diﬃcult to obtain but will subject any petition

for such relief to very strict scrutiny by the federal courts.

Conclusions

The exposure of federal judges to intelligence activities leads to number of conclusions. One

is that judicial oversight operates to an extent overlooked in the debate over who is watching

the intelligence community. Judicial oversight is limited, in contrast to expansive Congressional

oversight. Judicial oversight deals with legal issues, as opposed to policy issues. Judges are

deferential to the executive branch in intelligence matters, something not often true of

Congress. But judges do act as arbiters of governmental society in a powerful way.

The basic conundrum for intelligence is that is requires secrecy to be eﬀective, but wide-

spread government secrecy in a western liberal democracy is generally undesirable. Government

secrecy can destroy the legitimacy of government institutions. It can cripple accountability of

public servants and politicians. It can hide abuses of fundamental rights of citizens. Excessive

government secrecy can make excessive government activities more likely, because it hides

them from the usual checks and balances.

In the United States, federal judges dampen the tendency toward excess in secret govern-

ment. They counterbalance the swing in that direction. In those areas most important to

particular rights of citizens, they act as arbiters of governmental secrecy. The federal judiciary

ameliorates the problems of government secrecy by providing a secure forum for review of

intelligence activities under a number of laws, as surrogates for the public.

339

INTELLIGENCE AND JUDICIAL INTERVENTION

The developing history of judicial review of intelligence activities shows that it occurs in

those areas where government secrecy and the need for swift executive action conﬂict with

well-established legal principles of individual rights: an accused’s right to a fair criminal trial;

freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; rights of privacy; freedom of speech and the

press. Judges thus get involved where an informed citizenry would instinctively want judicial

review of secret intelligence activities. The involvement of the federal judiciary is limited but

salutary in its eﬀect on executive branch actions. Nothing concentrates the mind and dampens

excess so wonderfully as the imminent prospect of explaining one’s actions to a federal judge.

The Constitution’s great genius in this area is that it provides a system of government that

reconciles the nation’s needs for order and defense from foreign aggression with fundamental

individual rights that are directly aﬀected by intelligence activities. Nations devising statutory

charters and legislative oversight of their foreign intelligence services might well include an

independent judiciary in their blueprints. Federal judges are the essential third part of

the oversight system in the United States, matching requirements of the laws to intelligence

activities and watching the watchers.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reﬂect the oﬃcial

positions or views of the CIA or any other US Government agency. Nothing in the contents should be

construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or Agency endorsement

of the author’s views. This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classiﬁed

information.

Notes

1 For example, Loch Johnson characterizes the ﬁrst phase of modern intelligence in the US (1947–74) as

“the Era of Trust . . . a time when the intelligence agencies were permitted almost complete discretion

to chart their own courses”. Loch K. Johnson, America’s Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 9.

2 Chicago & Southern Air Lines, Inc. v. Waterman Steamship Corp., 333 U.S. 103 (1848); U.S. v. Curtiss-Wright

Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304 (1936).

3 Japan Whaling Assn v. American Cetacean Soc’y, 478 U.S. 221, 230 (1986).

4 Sanchez-Espinosa v. Reagan, 770 F.2d 202 (D.C. Cir. 1985)

5 John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987),

pp. 29, 110; Anne Karalekas, “History of the Central Intelligence Agency,” in William M. Leary ed.,

The Central Intelligence Agency: History and Documents (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press,

1984), p. 13.

6 50 U.S.C.A. Section 403–4a(d)(1) (Westlaw 2006).

7 U.S. v. Curtiss-Wright, at note 3. Justice Sutherland’s observations were dicta, not essential to the

majority’s holding in the case, and his theory has not been accepted by most legal authorities as a basis

for wide executive discretion in foreign aﬀairs. See also The Chinese Exclusion Case, 130 U.S. 581,

603–04 (1889), in which the Supreme Court held that Congress could legislate to exclude aliens

because jurisdiction over its own territory is an incident of every independent nation.

8 Letter to J.B. Colvin, 20 September 1810, cited in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jeﬀerson (New

York: Random House, 1944), pp. 606–7. Lincoln had similar musings: “Was it possible to lose the

nation and yet preserve the Constitution?,” quoted in Johnson, America’s Secret Power, p. 252, n. 4.

9 See Legal Authorities Supporting the Activities of the National Security Agency Described by the President, U.S.

Dept. of Justice White Paper (January 19, 2006); Loch Johnson, “Spy Law Works; Don’t Bypass It,”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 30, 2006, at A14.

10 See Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington, KY: University

of Kentucky Press, 1985).

11 See, for example, Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966); Escobedo v. Illinois, 378 U.S. 478 (1964).

340

FRED F. MANGET

12 See United States v. Yunis, 859 F.2d 953 (D.C. Cir. 1988); G. Gregory Schuetz, “Apprehending Terrorists

Overseas Under United States and International Law: A Case Study of the Fawaz Yunis Arrest,”

Harvard International Law Journal, 29, no. 2 (Spring 1988), pp. 499–531. In the late 1980s and early

1990s, CIA created the Counterterrorist Center, the Nonproliferation Center, and the Counter-

narcotics (now Crime and Narcotics) Center in order to centralize the eﬀorts of the intelligence

community and enhance its support to law enforcement in those areas of “thugs, bugs, and drugs.”

13 See, e.g., Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1990, which established the position of the

CIA inspector General as a presidential appointee (codiﬁed at 50 U.S.C.A. Section 403q (Westlaw

2006)).

14 The Hughes-Ryan Amendment (Section 662 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, 22 U.S.C. Section

2422) was repealed when the National Security Act was amended by the Intelligence Authorization

Act for Fiscal Year 1991 to codify and consolidate oversight provisions in Title V of the National

Security Act.

15 The Oﬃce of General Counsel at CIA has grown from a handful of attorneys in the early 1970s to

more than one hundred, an increase far above the proportional growth of CIA personnel or activity.

16 Benjamin Civiletti, “Intelligence Gathering and the Law,” Studies In Intelligence, 27 (Summer 1983),

pp.13, 15. This article was adapted from the Tenth Annual John F. Sonnett Memorial Lecture delivered

by Mr Civiletti at the Fordham University School of Law on January 15, 1980. Studies In Intelligence is

an oﬃcial publication of the Central Intelligence Agency. Civiletti’s article can also be found in the

Fordham Law Review, 48, no. 6 (May 1980), pp. 883–906.

17 Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963); Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150 (1974). Under these cases, the

government has a constitutional responsibility to search for and produce to a criminal defendant

admissible exculpatory and impeachment material.

18 United States v. Kampiles, 609 F.2d 1233 (7th Cir. 1979).

19 18 U.S.CA. App. III Section 1 et seq. (Westlaw 2006).

20 See Jonathan Fredman, “Intelligence Agencies, Law Enforcement, and the Prosecution Team,” 16 Yale

L. & Pol’y Rev. 331 (1998), for a thorough treatment of CIPA.

21 See, for example, United States v. Smith, 780 F.2d 1102 (4th Cir. 1985).

22 The Iran-Contra cases are examples. See especially United States v. Fernandez, No. CR89–0150-A

(E.D. Va. April 24, 1988); Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, vol. 1,

pp. 283–93.

23 Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928).

24 Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967).

25 Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, 18 U.S.C. Sections 2510, 2521 (Westlaw

2006).

26 FISA is codiﬁed in 50 U.S.C.A. ch. 36 (Westlaw 2006).

27 James Adams, Sellout: Aldrich Ames and the Corruption of the CIA (New York: Viking, 1995), ch. 15. In

the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1995, the issue of Attorney General physical search

authority was overtaken by events when Congress extended the FISA process to include not only

electronic surveillance but physical searches as well. The FISA Court will now provide judicial review

in advance for searches such as that done in the Ames’s house. 50 U.S.C.A. Sections 1821–1829

(Westlaw 2006).

28 629 F.2d 908, 915–16 (4th Cir. 1980).

29 In re Sealed Case No. 02–001, 310 F.3d 717 (Foreign Int. Surv. Ct. Rev. 2002)

30 Eric Lichtblau, “Judges and Justice Dept. Meet Over Eavesdropping Program,” The New York Times,

January 10, 2006, at A14.

31 Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004).

32 United States v. Moussaoui, 382 F.3d 453, 456 (4th Cir. 2004), cert. den., 125 S. Ct. 1670 (Mar. 21, 2005).

33 Padilla v. Hanft, Case No. 05–6396 (4th Cir. Sept. 9, 2005), at 3.

34 See Jerry Markon, “Terror Defendant Seeks Hearing To Find Whether He Was Spied On,” The Washington

Post, January 10, 2006, at B1. (The story relates to a ﬁling in federal District Court by a US citizen, Ali

Al-Timimi, previously convicted on terrorism charges based upon his inciting his Northern Virginia

followers to train for violent jihad against the United States; he claims that he was the target of a

warrantless electronic surveillance program authorized by the President.)

35 Fed. R. Crim. Proc. 12.3.

36 United States v. Rewald, 889 F.2d 836, 838–9 (9th Cir. 1989). Rewald was convicted on 94 (out of 100)

counts of various mail, securities, and tax fraud crimes, as well as perjury.

341

INTELLIGENCE AND JUDICIAL INTERVENTION

37 Ibid., at 852.

38 5 U.S.C. Section 552 (Westlaw 2006).

39 5 U.S.C. Section 552a (Westlaw 2006).

40 CIA v. Sims, 471 U.S. 159 (1985).

41 Vaughn v. Rosen, 484 F.2d 820 (D.C. Cir. 1973), cert. denied, 415 U.S. 977 (1974).

42 See, for example, Knight v. CIA, 872 F.2d 660 (5th Cir. 1989), cert. denied, 494 U.S. 1004 (1990); Phillippi

v. CIA, 546 F.2d 1009 (D.C. Cir. 1976); Miller v. Casey, 730 F.2d 773, (D.C. Cir. 1984). The executive

branch has taken the position that de novo review of the classiﬁcation decision of the executive branch

raises serious constitutional separation of powers issues. This position was strengthened by the case of

Dept. of the Navy v. Egan, 484 U.S. 518, 527 (1988), in which the Supreme Court said that “[The

President’s] authority to classify and control access to information bearing on the national security . . .

ﬂows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart

from any explicit congressional grant.” Nevertheless, executive branch aﬃdavits asserting classiﬁcation

are still required and reviewed by judges.

43 Knight v. CIA, at note 36.

44 Fitzgibbon v. CIA, 911 F.2d 755, 757 (D.C. Cir. 1990). The CIA and FBI prevailed in withholding the

information under FOIA exemptions after extensive District Court review of the records at issue,

which related to intelligence sources and methods.

45 See, for example, Patterson v. FBI, 893 F.2d 595, 599–600 (3d Cir. 1990); Hayden v. NSA/Cent. Sec. Serv.,

608 F.2d 1381, 1385 (D.C. Cir. 1979); Phillippi v. CIA, 546 F.2d 1009, 1013 (D.C. Cir. 1976).

46 345 U.S. 1 (1953).

47 For example, the National Security Act of 1947, as amended, 50 U.S.C.A. Section 403–1(i) (Westlaw

2006), states that the Director of National Intelligence shall “protect intelligence sources and methods

from unauthorized disclosure” (previously a duty imposed on the Director of Central Intelligence

prior to the creation of the position of the Director of National Intelligence). See also Section 6 of the

Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, as amended, 50 U.S.C. Section. 403g (Westlaw 2006).

48 Kerr v. United States District Court, 426 U.S. 394, 405–06 (1976); United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683,

714–15 (1974); Farnsworth-Cannon, Inc. v. Grimes, 635 F.2d 268, 269 (4th Cir. 1980).

49 Halkin v. Helms, 598 F.2d 1, 5 (D.C. Cir. 1978).

50 Ibid., pp. 5–7.

51 Birnbaum v. United States, 588 U.S. 319 (2d Cir. 1978).

52 981 F.2d 1316 (D.C. Cir. 1993). The petitions of the plaintiﬀ for a rehearing by the full Court of

Appeals and for a writ of certiorari from the Supreme Court were denied.

53 Webster v. Doe, 486 U.S. 592, 603 (1988).

54 Tenet v. Doe, 544 U.S. 1 (2005).

55 Totten v. United States, 92 U.S. 105 (1876).

56 99 F. Supp. 2d 1284, 1289–1294 (W.D. Wash. 2000), and 329 F. 3d 1135 (9th Cir. 2003), respectively.

57 Christopher v. Harbury, 536 U.S. 403 (2002).

58 Constitutional torts are called “Bivens” actions, after the Supreme Court case of Bivens v. Six Unknown

Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388 (1971). Such actions are based upon the theory that under the

Constitution itself, without further statutory waiver of sovereign immunity, courts may impose tort-

like liability upon individual US government employees when they egregiously violate protections

guaranteed to individuals by the Constitution. Such actions are rarely successful.

59 Supra, note 4, at 418.

60 Schneider v. Kissinger, 310 F. Supp. 2d 251 (D.D.C. 2004), aﬀ’d, 412 F.3d 190 (D.C.Cir. 2005).

61 U.S. v. Snepp, 444 U.S. 507 (1980); U.S. v. Marchetti, 466 F.2d 1309 (4th Cir. 1972), cert. denied,

93 S.Ct. 553 (1972).

62 McGehee v. Casey, 718 F.2d 1137, 1139 (D.C. Cir. 1983).

63 Ibid., at 1148.

64 403 U.S. 713 (1971).

65 See William R. Corson and Robert T. Crowley, The New KGB: Engine of Soviet Power (New York:

William Morrow, 1985) pp. 21–6, 129–30, 174–5; Harry Rositzke, The KGB: The Eyes of Russia (New

York: Doubleday, 1981) pp. 79–81, 94–5.

342

FRED F. MANGET

A shock theory of congressional

accountability for intelligence

Loch K. Johnson*

Introduction

Scholars who have focused on intelligence accountability by lawmakers have found a system far

less eﬀective than reformers had hoped for when, in the aftermath of a domestic spy scandal,

Congress tried to institute major improvements in 1974–76.

Similarly, a national panel

of inquiry, the Kean Commission, concluded in 2004 that “congressional oversight for

intelligence – and for counterterrorism – is now dysfunctional.”

Prominent members of Congress have conceded current inadequacies in their monitoring

of government’s hidden side. “We really don’t have, still don’t have, meaningful congressional

oversight [of the intelligence agencies],” observed Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) in 2004.

Frustrated by yet another intelligence controversy that took Congress by surprise – this time,

warrantless wiretaps by the National Security Agency (NSA), disclosed in December of 2005 –

the leading Democrat in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (California), proposed

that the House create a bipartisan, bicameral working group to recommend improvements to

the oversight process.

Breaking ranks with her Intelligence Committee chairman (Representa-

tive Peter Hoekstra, R-Michigan), Representative Heather A. Wilson (R-New Mexico) urged

a “painstaking” review of the controversial NSA eavesdropping program. This chapter

examines attempts by lawmakers since 1974 to conduct intelligence oversight, and probes the

questions of why reforms have fallen short and what might be done to strengthen intelligence

accountability in the United States.

Shock as a stimulus for intelligence accountability, 1974–2006

On the general subject of oversight, political scientists McCubbins and Schwartz have oﬀered

a vivid metaphor contrasting “police patrolling” with “ﬁreﬁghting.”

As patrollers, lawmakers

qua overseers regularly review executive branch programs, just as a police oﬃcer might walk

the streets, check the locks on doors, and shine a ﬂashlight into dark corners – all in order to

maintain a vigilance against potential criminal acts. In contrast, ﬁreﬁghters classically respond to

alarms after a ﬁre has broken out. In a similar fashion, lawmakers can carry out routine but

343

careful reviews (“patrols”) of executive branch programs; or they can wait, then rush to the scene

after an alarm sounds that a program has run afoul of the law or other societal expectations.

The research on intelligence oversight on Capitol Hill indicates that eﬀorts of lawmakers to

patrol the secret agencies have been “sporadic, spotty, and essentially uncritical.”

The chief

cause of this inattentiveness derives from the nature of Congress: lawmakers seek re-election

and they usually conclude that passing bills and raising campaign funds is a better use of their

time than the often tedious review of executive programs. This is especially true of intelligence

review. The examination of America’s secret operations must take place, for the most part, in

closed committee sanctuaries, outside of public view. Absent public awareness, credit-claiming

– vital to re-election prospects – becomes diﬃcult.

An analysis of intelligence accountability indicates a pattern in recent decades: a major

intelligence scandal or failure – a shock – converts perfunctory patrolling into a burst of intense

ﬁreﬁghting, which is then followed by a period of dedicated patrolling that yields remedial

legislation or other reforms designed to curb inappropriate intelligence activities in the future.

Sometimes the high-intensity patrolling can last for months and, if the original shock was

particularly strong, producing a media tsunami, even years. Once the ﬁrestorm has subsided and

reforms are in place, however, lawmakers return to a state of relative inattention to intelligence

issues.

This pattern is depicted schematically in Figure 26.1:

* A result of insufﬁcient opportunities for credit-claiming and the enhancement of re-election prospects,

which in turn produce an inattentiveness to oversight duties and a concomitant ripening of conditions for

scandal or failure.

Figure 26.1 The dominant pattern of intelligence oversight by lawmakers, 1975–2006.

344

LOCH K. JOHNSON

To reach an alarm or shock level, an allegation of intelligence wrongdoing or failure would

have to have sustained coverage in leading newspapers, say, several weeks running with at least

a few front-page stories. In 1974, the New York Times had an unusually high run of stories on

the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from June through December: 200. In December, an

unprecedented (at the time) nine stories on the CIA made the front page of the Times. Here was

a steady drumbeat of mainly negative reports about the Agency, setting the stage for a strong

public (and therefore congressional and presidential reaction) to the most explosive news item:

the CIA’s alleged involvement in domestic spying. On the eve of the next major intelligence

scandal and investigation, the Iran-Contra aﬀair, the Times carried eleven front-page stories

about possible intelligence abuses related to the covert war in Nicaragua in both October and

November 1986, jumping to eighteen front-page stories in December and setting the stage for

joint congressional hearings into the scandal in 1987.

Further research will be necessary to determine the more precise relationship between

newspaper coverage and the onset of major scandal on intelligence failure. One thing is

clear, though: as Ransom has put it, “the press, with all of its problems, remains the chief

accountability enforcer.”

Congress has more authority to investigate intelligence operations,

including the power of the subpoena – unique among parliaments around the world when it

comes to intelligence oversight

– but evidently the media has more will.

Intense media coverage may not be enough in itself to sound a major ﬁre alarm. Such

considerations as the personalities of congressional overseers, especially committee chairs, and

the existence of divided government play a role, too.

In early 2006, the media coverage of

possible presidential abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was extensive (though

less than for the 1974 spy domestic spy scandal or the 1987 Iran–Contra scandal). The

Republicans controlled the White House and the two Houses of Congress, however, and GOP

lawmakers resisted Democratic calls for a major investigation into the allegations.

The shocks and alarms

Thirty-one years have passed since Congress began to take intelligence accountability more

seriously in December of 1974, following charges in the New York Times that the CIA had

spied illegally on American citizens.

Since then, lawmakers have devoted about six years of

attention to intensive, retrospective investigations (ﬁreﬁghting) into intelligence controversies.

The remaining twenty-ﬁve years, a little over 80 percent of the total, consisted of periods of

patrolling. The patrolling was characterized by varying degrees of intensity among overseers,

some of it vigorous in the immediate aftermath of “ﬁres”; but mostly the patrolling was of a

perfunctory nature. The period from 1974 to 2006 began with a domestic spy scandal that,

since the creation of the CIA in 1947, was the ﬁrst intelligence alarm of suﬃcient shrillness

to bring about a major congressional response. Several more alarms would sound during the

coming decades, as outlined below.

Alarm No. 1, 1974: A Domestic Spy Scandal. The Senate and House investigative committees

(the Church and Pike panels), established by Congress in the wake of the New York Times

exposés in 1974, discovered extensive spying at home not only by the CIA, but also by the NSA,

the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and various military intelligence units. The ﬁndings

of the committees not only conﬁrmed but went far beyond the allegations leveled by the Times.

The Church Committee issued a voluminous set of reports critical of CIA assassination plots

and a wide range of domestic intelligence operations. At the center of its reform proposals,

the panel recommended the creation of a permanent oversight committee in the Senate. On

345

CONGRESSIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY FOR INTELLIGENCE

the House side, the Pike Committee blasted the poor quality of intelligence assessments

(“analysis”) of worldwide threats over the years.

Alarm No. 2, 1986: The Iran–Contra Scandal. Congress established a combined Senate–House

investigating panel (the Inouye-Hamilton Committee) that revealed unlawful intelligence

activities by the staﬀ of the National Security Council (NSC) and a few oﬃcials of the CIA.

The scandal had two interconnected parts: a secret sale of arms to Iran in hopes of inﬂuencing

the release of US hostages in nearby Lebanon; and covert support by the Reagan administration

for the Contras in Nicaragua, in deﬁance of Congress. The Contras sought regime change in

Nicaragua, to regain power themselves and oust a left-leaning government. The Joint Com-

mittee issued a detailed report on improprieties committed by the intelligence agencies during

the ﬁve-year period in which the scandal unfolded (1982–1986).

Alarm No. 3, 1994: The Ames Counterintelligence Failure. Congress insisted on joining an

executive probe (the Aspin-Brown Commission) into intelligence shortcomings. Lawmakers

were especially concerned about a spy case that revealed how the Soviet Union had been able

to recruit an American agent (Aldrich Hazen Ames) high within the echelons of the CIA’s

headquarters in Langley, Virginia. This national commission published a report calling not

just for improvements in counterintelligence, but for reforms across the board of intelligence

activities.

Alarm No. 4, 2001: The 9/11 Attacks. The failure of the intelligence agencies to warn the

nation about the catastrophic terrorist attacks against the American homeland led Congress to

form another joint committee of inquiry (the Graham-Goss Committee) and, subsequently,

to urge the creation of a presidential investigative panel (the Kean Commission) to further

examine the issue.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which had been

set up in 1977 (a year after its Senate counterpart), also conducted a special probe into the CIA

human intelligence or “humint,” especially in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, producing a

critical internal report on worldwide humint inadequacies.

Alarm No. 5, 2003: Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. In light of an erroneous intelligence

prediction about the likely presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq – a

National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) published in October 2002 – Congress supported the

creation of another presidential commission on intelligence, the Silberman-Robb panel, to

investigate the analytic failure.

Moreover, the Senate intelligence oversight committee under-

took an inquiry of its own into the faulty WMD estimate.

As indicated by the ﬁndings in Table 26.1, Congress produced several key legislative pro-

posals related to intelligence during the time span from 1974 to 2006.

Of the twelve major

initiatives displayed in the ﬁgure, only one occurred outside the context of a major ﬁre alarm

response. That single exception, the Intelligence Identities Act of 1982, was the result of a

conclusion reached by lawmakers (at the urging of the CIA and other US intelligence agencies)

that a law was necessary to provide stiﬀ penalties against anyone who revealed, without

proper authorization, the name of a US intelligence oﬃcer or asset.

The rest of the oversight

initiatives were the result of shocks and resultant alarms going oﬀ, followed by subsequent

inquiries and a stint of aggressive patrolling.

Some of the initiatives took a considerable amount of time for the Congress to craft, such as

the Intelligence Accountability Act of 1980 that required four years to enact. In this example,

some lawmakers originally hoped to pass an “Intelligence Charter” – an omnibus statute over

270 pages long – to provide a broad legal framework for the secret agencies. Their intention

was to write a law that would replace the dated language of the 1947 National Security Act.

This sweeping measure attracted many dissenters, however, especially inside the intelligence

agencies, and the bold charter proposal ultimately collapsed under the weight of eﬀective

346

LOCH K. JOHNSON

lobbying by the senior managers of intelligence. In its place sprouted a two-and-a-half-page bill.

This short law was much stronger, though, than its length would suggest. Among other provi-

sions, it required the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) reports to the Congress in advance

on all important intelligence activities. The president could delay contacting lawmakers only in

“extraordinary circumstances,” and even then was expected to report in a timely manner.

Table 26.1 Type of stimulus and intelligence oversight response by US lawmakers, 1975–2006

Year Stimulus Oversight response Purpose of response

1974 FA (#1) Hughes-Ryan Act Controls over covert action

1976–77 FA (#1) Est. oversight committees; critical

reports

More robust oversight

1978 FA (#1) FISA Warrants for electronic surveillance

1980 FA (#1) Intel. Oversight Act Tighten oversight rules

1982 P Intel. Identities Act Protect intel. oﬃcers/agents

1987 FA (#2) Critical report

Improve intelligence oversight

1989 FA (#2) Inspector General Act Improve internal CIA oversight

1991 FA (#2) Intel. Oversight Act Further tighten oversight rules

1996 FA (#3) Est. DCI assistants; critical reports

IC management improvements;

strengthening CI

2001 FA (#4) Patriot Act; authorization of war

against Al Qaeda and Taliban regime;

increases in counterterrorism

funding

Surveillance of suspected terrorists;

paramilitary counterattacks against Al

Qaeda and Taliban

2004 FA (#4) Critical reports

Improve humint and analysis

2004 FA (#4, #5) Intel. Reform & Terrorism

Prevention Act

Strengthening CT, IC coordination

Abbreviations:

FA = ﬁre alarm (#1 = domestic spying; #2 = Iran-Contra; #3 = Ames; #4 = 9/11; #5 = WMDs in Iraq)

P = patrolling

humint = human intelligence

IC = intelligence community

FISA = Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [P.L. 95–511; 92 Stat. 1783 (Oct. 25, 1978)]

DCI = Director of Central Intelligence

CI, CT = counterintelligence, counterterrorism

Notes

The Church Committee Report [Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to

Intelligence Activities, Final Report, 94th Cong., 2nd Sess., Sen. Rept. No. 94–755, 6 vols. (Washington, DC:

Government Printing Oﬃce, 1976)]; Rockefeller Commission Report [Commission on CIA Activities within the

United States, Report to the President (Washington, DC: Government Printing Oﬃce, June 1975)]; and Pike

Committee Report (“The Report the President Doesn’t Want You to Read: The Pike Papers,” Village Voice,

February 16 and 23, 1976).

The Inouye-Hamilton Report [Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Aﬀair, S. Rept. No.

100–216 and H. Rept. No. 100–433, 100th Cong., 1st Sess., US Senate Select Committee on Secret Military

Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition and US House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate

Covert Arms Transactions with Iran (Washington, DC: Government Printing Oﬃce, November 1987)].

Aspin-Brown Commission Report [Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of US Intelligence, Report of the

Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community (Washington, DC:

Government Printing Oﬃce, March 1, 1996)]; and Staﬀ Study, IC21: Intelligence Community in the 21st Century,

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives, 104th Cong., 2nd Sess. (Washington, DC:

Government Printing Oﬃce, March 1, 1996)].

The Graham-Goss Committees Report [Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist

Attacks of September 11, 2001, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Senate Select Committee on

Intelligence, S. Rept. 107–351, 107th Cong., 2nd Sess. (2002)]; the Goss Committee Report [Intelligence Authorization

Act for Fiscal Year 2005, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, H. Rept. 108th Cong., 2nd Sess. (2004)];

and the Roberts Committee Report [US Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, Senate Select

Committee on Intelligence, S. Rept. 108–301, 108th Cong., 2nd. Sess. (2004)].

347

CONGRESSIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY FOR INTELLIGENCE

The frequency of intense intelligence accountability

The most important intelligence “wake-up call” for congressional overseers in the period

before the formal creation of the CIA and America’s modern intelligence community in 1947

was the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The intelligence portions of

the National Security Act of 1947 were a delayed response to that intelligence failure, coupled

with a growing concern about a new threat to the United States: the rise of the Soviet Union

as a global rival guided by a Marxist philosophy that was anathema to America’s espousal of

market-based liberal democracies.

Following the establishment of the modern intelligence community in 1947, several low-

threshold ﬁre alarms sounded during the early years of the Cold War. Among the most notable

were a result of the CIA’s failure to predict the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula (1950),

the CIA’s Bay of Pigs disaster (1961), the controversy over CIA ties to the National Student

Association and other domestic groups (1966), and an alleged CIA connection to the Watergate

burglars (1973).

None of these alarms was as shattering as the subsequent high-threshold

shocks delivered by the domestic spy scandal, the Iran–Contra aﬀair, the Ames case, the 9/11

attacks, or the mistaken WMD report that helped fuel an American war in Iraq in 2003.

With the possible exception of the Ames case, these latter ﬁre alarms caught the attention of

Americans across the nation, which in turn led lawmakers to focus on the events that caused

the alarms to sound. Whether or not the Ames case attracted broad citizen attention, this act of

treason certainly set oﬀ an alarm among national security oﬃcials and lawmakers inside the DC

Beltway.

Members of Congress may well have reacted sharply to the Iran-Contra scandal even if

the public had not taken an interest, since it amounted to a provocative disregard for the

congressional appropriations process. Prior to the scandal, a Democratic-led Congress rebuﬀed

the eﬀorts of the Reagan administration to fund covert action in Nicaragua; as a result, the NSC

staﬀ resorted to the secret raising of private funds as a means of carrying out these secret

operations in Nicaragua, in deﬁance of laws passed by Congress (the Boland Amendments

)

that strictly prohibited such activities against the incumbent Sandinista regime. Lawmakers

reacted strongly as well to the Ames counterintelligence case, since a Soviet penetration at the

highest levels of the CIA – the worst counterintelligence failure in American history – was

diﬃcult to ignore, striking as it did at the heart of the Agency’s mandate in the 1947 National

Security Act to protect “sources and methods.”

In contrast to these high-threshold alarms, Korea in 1950 and the Bay of Pigs in 1961 – while

obviously disconcerting – dealt with situations that had occurred outside the United States.

The ﬂaps over the CIA’s relationships with students and with the Watergate caper both took

place at home, but the former came across as a fairly narrow issue (chieﬂy involving CIA

support for US students attending international conferences) and the latter proved to have little

substance. One of the men implicated in the Watergate burglary was a former CIA oﬃcer

(E. Howard Hunt) who had requested a wig and other disguise paraphernalia from the

Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology for use in the infamous break-in; but investi-

gations disclosed that the CIA had not realized the purpose of Hunt’s request and had no prior

knowledge of the plot. Indeed, the CIA’s eﬀorts to steer clear of Nixon administration eﬀorts to

draw it into the Watergate conspiracy stand as a high-water mark in the Agency’s history.

An examination of the frequency of alarms, both low- and high-threshold (see Table 26.2),

discloses the periodicity of intelligence scandals and failures in the modern era.

Eliminating

the CIA-Watergate “scandal,” since it was in reality an insigniﬁcant intelligence matter (how-

ever important Watergate was as a political and historical event in the United States), an

348

LOCH K. JOHNSON

intelligence alarm sounded roughly every seven-and-a-half years, on average. The longest

gap – twice the average – occurred between the domestic spying scandal exposed in 1974

and the Iran–Contra aﬀair that came to light in 1987, a total of thirteen years. The domestic

spying scandal and the ensuing investigations were deeply traumatic to the intelligence

agencies; oﬃcers at the CIA still remember 1975 as the “Year of the Intelligence Wars” – annus

horribilis. The investigations established a new standard of ethics and accountability for the

intelligence agencies that may have signiﬁcantly contributed to the reduced incidence of

improper behavior by intelligence oﬃcers over the next decade. This clean record came to an

end as the Reagan administration’s obsession with Nicaragua led NSC staﬀers to misuse

the government’s intelligence agencies, and even develop their own new secret organization

(“The Enterprise”) in an attempt to eliminate the Sandinista regime.

The briefest interlude between alarms occurred from 2001 to 2003, with the Iraqi WMD

ill-judgment coming quickly on the heels of the 9/11 failure – a double blow to the reputation

of the CIA and a primary reason for its dramatic decline in 2004–5 as America’s premier

intelligence agency. Now the CIA is just one of sixteen agencies in the intelligence community,

no longer “central” – an assignment given by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism

Prevention Act of 2004 to a new Director of National Intelligence or DNI. In June 2005, the

White House informed the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (D/CIA) that he

would no longer be a regular attendee at NSC meetings or the lead person to conduct the daily

intelligence briefs for the president.

The conclusions presented here about the periodic inattentiveness of lawmakers as patrollers

should not overshadow the fact that intelligence oversight since 1975 has been vastly more

robust than “in the good old days,” as some mossback intelligence professionals recall the years

from 1947 to 1974 when Congress left the secret agencies largely to their own devices.

Intelligence overseers since 1976–1977 have beneﬁtted greatly from the existence of the two

Table 26.2 The frequency of low- and high-threshold intelligence alarms, 1941–2006 (with

high-threshold in bold)

Year 1941 1950 1961 1966 1973 1974 1987 1994 2001 2003

Alarm F F F SSSSFFF

∧∧∧∧∧∧∧∧∧

Interval (Yrs) 9 11 57113772Av.: 7.6*

The events: Thresholds:

1941 Pearl Harbor attack High

1950 Outbreak of war on Korean Peninsula Low

1961 Bay of Pigs Low

1966 CIA–National Student Association scandal Low

1973 CIA–Watergate “scandal” Low

1974 Domestic spying scandal High

1987 Iran–Contra scandal High

1994 Ames counterintelligence failure High

2001 9/11 attacks High

2003 Faulty WMD analysis (Iraq) High

* excluding the CIA-Watergate case (see text)

Abbreviations:

F = failure of collection and/or analysis

S = scandal or impropriety

WMD = weapons of mass destruction

349

CONGRESSIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY FOR INTELLIGENCE

standing intelligence oversight committees, formerly known as the Senate Select Committee

on Intelligence (SSCI) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI),

each armed with budget and subpoena powers and staﬀed by many intelligence experts. The

authority of these panels extends far beyond that enjoyed by any other legislative chamber in

the world, today or in the past. Moreover, while lawmakers have been less than fully engaged

in patrolling, in the extraordinary circumstances of major scandals or intelligence failures they

have been dedicated – even zealous – ﬁreﬁghters.

Even during the more quotidian years since 1976, the staﬀs of the intelligence committees

(some 50–70 individuals, well educated and experienced) have regularly queried intelligence

professionals about their activities, pored over annual budget requests line-by-line, visited

intelligence installations at home and abroad, and prepared detailed brieﬁng books for the use

of committee members during hearings. Very little of this kind of persistent staﬀ work was

carried out before 1975, underscoring the deep structural changes wrought by the domestic

spying scandal of 1974 and the sixteen-month-long Church and Pike Committee investigations

– the most extensive probes into the operations of the intelligence agencies ever, surpassing

even the Aspin-Brown and the Kean inquiries in 1995 and 2004.

Intelligence failures and scandals

An important feature of the ﬁndings presented here is the contrast between intelligence failures

and scandals. Intelligence failures are frequently inadvertent, resulting from the lack of a well-

placed agent, a surveillance satellite in a helpful orbit, the rapid translation of an intercepted

telephone conversation in Farsi, or an experienced analyst. Of course, less excusably, a CIA

oﬃcer might also be lazy, an agent might be double, or an analyst poorly trained. Whatever

the case, often as not failures are a result of human fallibility and, in that sense, are inevitable.

This condition can be mitigated to some degree by improving a nation’s capacity to gather

reliable information from around the globe, say, by building more sophisticated spy satellites or

reconnaissance airplanes, or by establishing capable spy rings in “hot spots” overseas; but, the

probability of failure can never be eliminated. The future is an unknown place, shrouded in fog.

Through the expenditure of some $44 billion a year on intelligence, the United States

attempts to pierce as much of the fog as possible; nevertheless, the world will never be fully

transparent. The planet is too large and adversaries are too clever at hiding their activities,

whether planning attacks against the United States from remote caves in Afghanistan or

constructing atomic bombs in deep underground caverns in North Korea or Iran. Further,

some things are simply unknowable in advance – “mysteries,” as opposed to “secrets” that

might be stolen from a safe. An example of a mystery is the question of who will follow

Vladimir Putin as the next Russian president. No one can know, until it happens. When

intelligence failures occur, as with the outbreak of war in Korea in 1950 and the absence of

WMDs in Iraq in 2003, the United States takes measures to improve its collection and analysis;

still, new and unexpected threats are bound to rise somewhere in the world.

In contrast to failures, scandals and improprieties are usually intentional. Someone breaks a

law, a regulation, or a standard operating procedure in order to achieve a goal. The violator

hopes to avoid discovery, and may be convinced anyway that the importance of the goal trumps

all other considerations. When called upon to explain why they had broken the law during the

Iran-Contra aﬀair, NSC staﬀers from the Reagan administration said they were responding to a

“higher law” that required them to ﬁght communism in Central America, even if Congress had

foolishly passed the Boland Amendments and made that objective more diﬃcult.

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LOCH K. JOHNSON

In theory at least, intelligence scandals could be eliminated by recruiting only virtuous

people for high oﬃce: men and women who would never succumb to illegal spying on US

citizens, ﬂaunt laws like the Boland Amendments, inﬁltrate and subsidize student groups and

other organizations in American society, provide disguises to former intelligence oﬃcers

without checking on the purpose, or lie to congressional overseers as happened during the

Iran-Contra aﬀair.

Yet, intelligence scandals are as inevitable as collection and analytic failures.

Indeed, the entire rationale for accountability presented by James Madison in Federalist Paper

No. 51 rests on the supposition – conﬁrmed every day – that human beings are not angels. They

will make mistakes and they will sin. So, with respect to failures and scandals within the

intelligence domain (or within any other organization, public or private), one can anticipate

more of both.

At the same time, however, a nation can take steps to decrease the odds of mistakes and

wrongdoing by improving its intelligence collection-and-analysis capabilities, carefully recruit-

ing men and women of high integrity, and steadfastly patrolling the secret agencies in search

of incipient gaps in performance and signs of ﬂaws in the human character (such as Ames’s

abuse of alcohol and luxury spending beyond a CIA oﬃcer’s government salary). That is why

oversight patrolling is so important: ideally, one would like to ﬁnd and correct conditions

that might lead to a ﬁre (whether a failure or a scandal) before the ﬂames ignite. Implicit in

the notion of accountability is the hope that a few more eyes of elected oﬃcials available to

examine policy initiatives – from the vantage point of Capitol Hill, not just from the White

House – might help discover problems before they lead to catastrophes.

Taking the shock out of the shock theory

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, lawmakers lamented their inattention to intelligence oversight

duties. “We didn’t understand.... the need for human intelligence,” admitted SSCI overseer

Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), “we simply did not provide the resources.”

Bob Graham, the SSCI

chairman who co-chaired the Joint Committee investigation into the 9/11 intelligence failure,

has said, “We probably didn’t shake the [intelligence] agencies hard enough after the end of

the Berlin Wall to say: ‘Hey, look, the world is changing and you need to change the way in

which you operate . . . new strategies, new personnel, new culture.’ We should have been more

demanding of these intelligence agencies.”

The HPSCI chair at the time, Porter J. Goss, who

served as the other co-chair of the Joint Committee inquiry, issued a separate report prepared

by HPSCI in 2004 that was scathing in its criticism of CIA human intelligence.

What if these lawmakers and their colleagues had been suﬃciently exercised about such

intelligence deﬁciencies in the years preceding September 11, 2001? The planned attacks might

have been uncovered in advance with better humint, faster translation of communications

intercepts from Al Qaeda plotters, and sharper analysis. Would it have been possible to avoid, or

at least lessen the eﬀects of, the ﬁve major intelligence shocks if lawmakers had been more

dedicated to their patrolling duties in the lead-up to catastrophe? It is worthwhile examining

each of the alarms from this vantage point, although what follows is an impressionist ﬁrst-look

and warrants a closer research eﬀort. The impressions are mindful of how Monday morning

quarterbacks always play better than their real weekend counterparts; still, one remains hopeful

that an examination of past events can yield useful insights for the future.

The 1974 Domestic Spy Scandal. Soon after James R. Schlesinger was appointed DCI in 1973,

he requested from oﬃcials in the CIA a listing of any improprieties of which the Agency might

be guilty. The new DCI wanted to clean house, as well as avoid culpability himself for old sins.

351

CONGRESSIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY FOR INTELLIGENCE

To his surprise, the list (known by insiders as the “family jewels”) proved to be quite extensive,

indeed, 693 pages long.

Some of the items on this list leaked to New York Times reporter

Seymour Hersh, whose investigative reporting in turn spawned the “Year of Intelligence” in

1974.

From the point of view of intelligence accountability, one would like to know why law-

makers had to rely on this stunning leak to realize that many things were awry at the CIA, and

not just Operation Chaos (the CIA’s domestic spying program at the heart of Hersh’s

reporting). Thorough, day-to-day oversight might well have caught wind of at least some of

these “jewels.” The answer, probably, is that the small intelligence oversight subcommittees

that existed on Capitol Hill before 1975 were operating in an era when Congress had a “hands-

oﬀ” attitude toward intelligence activities. Further, with small staﬀs on the subcommittees,

lawmakers were poorly equipped for serious and continuous intelligence program review, even

though these staﬀ personnel were well regarded and did engage in some degree of budget and

program review.

Poring over budget ﬁgures, though important, is unlikely to lead to infor-

mation about a program like Operation Chaos, which was buried and disguised in the funding

for the Oﬃce of Security and the Counterintelligence Staﬀ at the CIA. That kind of discovery

would have taken a larger staﬀ and a focus beyond ﬁnancial spreadsheets.

Even with a larger staﬀ, though, the hands-oﬀ philosophy that dominated the thinking at the

time among lawmakers with intelligence oversight duties would have proscribed intense day-

to-day patrolling. For the Congress rather than DCI Schlesinger to have uncovered the family

jewels, lawmakers would have had to be fully engaged in continual hearings and asked serious

questions about ongoing intelligence agencies; paid visits to the intelligence agencies; had

informal conversations with intelligence oﬃcers at various levels of government; and carried

out all the other approaches used by overseers possessed of serious intent.

Little of this focused

review occurred.

The 1987 Iran–Contra Scandal. This scandal occurred well after Congress had set up its “New

Intelligence Oversight” procedures in 1976–80, yet the safeguards failed to prevent or even

reveal the aﬀair. (A Mideast newspaper disclosed the operations in 1986.) Rumors to the eﬀect

that the Reagan administration remained involved in covert actions in Nicaragua, despite the

Boland Amendments, circulated throughout Washington, DC in 1984–6. Finally, SSCI and

HPSCI leaders decided to meet with two key NSC staﬀ members, the national security adviser

Robert C. MacFarlane and staﬀer Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, to probe the validity of the rumors.

The lawmakers sat across the table from the NSC oﬃcials at the White House and asked them

point-blank whether the Council staﬀ had secretly raised funds to pursue further covert action

in Nicaragua. MacFarlane and North lied, denying any NSC staﬀ involvement.

Almost as bad,

the lawmakers took their disclaimers at face value and dropped the topic. The accountability

lesson: when the charges are particularly grave, overseers must question suspects under oath

on Capitol Hill. They still may lie, but the odds are reduced; penalties rise sharply when one

has committed perjury, perhaps enough to make would-be dissimulators think twice before

misleading Congress.

The 1994 Ames Counterintelligence Failure. Most of the time, counterintelligence (CI) is a

neglected stepchild on the congressional oversight agenda. It is an arcane topic, requiring the

kind of patience that George Smiley exhibited in early Le Carré novels. James J. Angleton, the

legendary CIA Chief of Counterintelligence for twenty years (1954–74), did not refer to his

discipline as a “wilderness of mirrors” for nothing.

Tracking down defectors, false defectors,

dangles, and double-agents requires an intense devotion to archival research and persistent

cross-checking of bona ﬁdes that is unlikely to appeal to members of Congress. Yet surely SSCI

and HPSCI have an important obligation to maintain a close watch over how well the intelli-

352

LOCH K. JOHNSON

gence agencies are protecting their own facilities, operations, and documents – the essence of

counterintelligence.

By showing more interest in the topic and holding more closed hearings than they did,

lawmakers on the Intelligence Committees might have prodded security and counterintel-

ligence oﬃcials toward a keener attention to the matter of whether or not hostile intelligence

services had managed to penetrate America’s secret services. With Congress constantly asking

pointed questions about the state of counterintelligence, perhaps the CIA and the FBI would

have been more sensitive to the lavish lifestyle of Ames and the erratic behavior of FBI traitor

Robert Hanssen. When DCI William E. Colby ﬁred Angleton in 1974, counterintelligence

plunged as a priority interest at the CIA, as Colby shifted responsibility for this mission to

decentralized elements throughout the Agency.

With no one at a high level guiding the

CIA’s counterintelligence defenses, the Agency became more vulnerable to successful penetra-

tions by America’s adversaries. During the 1980s and 1990s, the nation experienced its worst

CI setbacks – Ames, Hanssen, and many more.

The 2001 Terrorist Attacks. In 1995, a top secret memo (now partially declassiﬁed) came from

the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) to the Aspin-Brown Commission. It warned

that “aerial terrorism seems likely at some point – ﬁlling an airplane with explosives and

dive-bombing a target.”

This warning appeared in the President’s Daily Brief, delivered by the

CIA to President Bill Clinton and his top national security advisers; and, as well, the Agency

briefed members of SSCI and HPSCI about this hair-raising possibility.

Yet, six years before

the prediction became a reality, none of these policymakers took signiﬁcant steps to alert US

commercial pilots to the danger, urge the FBI to watch ﬂight training schools, or tighten airport

security.

When George W. Bush replaced Clinton as president, both the White House counter-

terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke and the CTC provided fresh warnings to the new national

security adviser, Condoleezza Rice (as well as, again, to members of SSCI and HPSCI), that Al

Qaeda might resort to aerial terrorism and other methods of attacking the United States. The

Bush administration temporized from January to September of 2001; and the congressional

oversight committees also did little to improve America’s defenses against airplane attacks by

terrorists.

The 9/11 tragedy was an intelligence failure, certainly; but it was a policy failure,

too, in the White House during both Democratic and Republican administrations. Further, it

was a failure of accountability on Capitol Hill. What if SSCI and HPSCI had held extensive,

executive session hearings on the CTC warning, then followed through to see if commercial

pilots, the FBI, and airport security understood the danger and were taking steps to protect the

public?

Moreover, government inquiries have discovered that the intelligence agencies failed to

coordinate and act on the few shards of speciﬁc information they did have regarding the

September 11 terrorists.

For instance, the agencies proved unable to track two of the nineteen

terrorists, despite warnings from the CIA to the FBI about their arrival in San Diego, California.

Moreover, the FBI failed to respond to warnings from its own agents in Phoenix and

Minneapolis about suspicious ﬂight training undertaken by foreigners in those cities; and

the Department of Defense appears to have smothered warnings from the “Able Danger”

group of military intelligence oﬃcers, whose research had apparently come across the presence

of sixty suspected foreign terrorists in the United States almost two years before the 9/11

attacks.

On the list were four of the September 11 hijackers, including their Egyptian-born

leader, Mohamed Atta. While it would have been diﬃcult – but not impossible – for SSCI and

HPSCI to have known about the speciﬁc CIA–FBI liaison snafu in 2001 or the internal Bureau

memos from Phoenix and Minneapolis, the Committees did know about the Able Danger

353

CONGRESSIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY FOR INTELLIGENCE

allegations. What if the Committees had taken them more seriously? And to what extent

were lawmakers and their staﬀs keeping up with the always important question of CIA–FBI

relationships, especially with respect to the sharing of intelligence on high-level threats to the

United States?

At a deeper level, September 11 was an intelligence failure because the CIA had no assets

within Al Qaeda; because the NSA fell far behind on translating relevant signals intelligence

(“sigint”) intercepts involving suspected terrorists; and because all of America’s intelligence

agencies lacked suﬃcient language skills and understanding about nations in the Middle East

and South Asia, or even about the objectives and likely motivations of Saddam Hussein or the

Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. To what extent were SSCI and HPSCI probing these

questions and encouraging better humint recruitment and training?

The 2003 WMD Failure. The intelligence failures regarding Iraqi WMDs were, in some

ways, even more troubling than those that preceded the September 11 attacks. A National

Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 concluded, as did most intelligence agencies and

outside analysts, that unconventional weapons were likely to be present in Iraq. This assessment

was based on several inaccurate sources of information. First, because the intelligence com-

munity had no signiﬁcant human assets in Iraq during the interwar years (1992–2002), analysts

in the United States extrapolated from what they knew when Americans had “boots on the

ground” there as part of the war eﬀort in 1991. During the ﬁrst Iraqi war, the CIA learned that

its prior estimates regarding WMDs were wrong; Saddam’s weapons program had advanced far

beyond what the CIA’s analysts had anticipated. After America’s troops departed Iraq in 1991,

the CIA lacked reliable ground-based sources; thus, in the run-up to the second war in Iraq,

its analysts compensated for their earlier underestimates by, this time, overestimating the

probability of WMDs.

Reports from the German asset “Curveball,” whose reliability was vouched for by the

Germans, also factored into the CIA’s calculations. Only recently have the Germans conceded

that the Iraqi exile was in fact fabricating his reports. Moreover, the confessions of a captured

Al Qaeda member, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, interrogated by the Defense Intelligence Agency

(DIA), proved to be further fabrications.

In addition, the Iraqi National Congress, led

by another Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, claimed solid knowledge of Iraq’s activities. The

INC and Chalabi told US intelligence agencies and the second Bush administration that

Saddam was indeed pursuing nuclear weapons. Chalabi’s reliability has since been called into

question. Critics maintain that his purpose may have been chieﬂy to push for a US invasion,

so that he might advance his personal political agenda: the toppling of Saddam, followed by

his own rise to power in Iraq (where he is currently positioned high in the provisional

government).

Analysts in the Intelligence and Research (INR) arm of the State Department and in

the Department of Energy pointed out that controversial aluminum tubes purchased by the

Hussein regime were probably combustion chambers for conventional rockets, not meant

for use in uranium enrichment chambers. They were also skeptical about Curveball’s reports

on Iraqi mobile biological weapons labs. Further, US Air Force Intelligence disputed the

administration’s assertion that Iraq’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) had a long-range

capability. For the most part, though, these were internal government disputes that took place

outside the hearing of the American public; the dissenting views of the smaller agencies were

largely dismissed by the larger and more powerful agencies.

Had SSCI and HPSCI examined these issues more closely, they would have understood that

the 2002 NIE was anything but a deﬁnitive report on Iraqi WMDs. In reality, the estimate was

a rush job prepared in days, rather than the usual time of several months for an NIE, resulting

354

LOCH K. JOHNSON

in what has been called “one of the most ﬂawed documents in the history of American

intelligence.”

Lawmakers would have learned that additional on-the-ground fact-ﬁnding was

sorely needed; and that many intelligence analysts felt uneasy about the humint reporting

provided by Curveball, al-Libi, and Chalibi. Armed with this understanding, the Congress

could then have contributed signiﬁcantly to the debate on whether war against Iraq was

justiﬁed immediately in March of 2003, or should await further information on the WMD

hypothesis. Instead, lawmakers (as well as New York Times reporters) swallowed whole the

arguments of the White House for war, without any countervailing evidence they might

have developed themselves had they probed into the NIE process and the other sources of

intelligence (INR, the Energy Department, US Air Force Intelligence) that questioned the

White House and Defense Department intelligence arguments for war.

Continuing barriers to effective intelligence oversight

Success in improving intelligence oversight on Capitol Hill will require above all a stronger

motivation among the members and staﬀ of the SSCI and HPSCI. Since the creation of these

committees, their members have already outperformed their marginally engaged predecessors

from 1947 to 1974. And their staﬀs are considerably larger and better prepared. Even so, the

eﬀorts of the two panels fall short of full engagement at the member level, and even the best of

staﬀs cannot compensate for lawmakers who treat their oversight responsibilities as a secondary

concern (although a few lawmakers over the years have been deeply committed to their

oversight responsibilities

). Worse still, since the early 1990s the two Intelligence Committees

have been beset with partisan bickering, overturning the tradition since 1975 on Capitol Hill

of keeping sensitive intelligence issues apart from interparty rivalries.

Neither SSCI nor HPSCI managed to sniﬀ out the Iran–Contra operation; the weakened

counterintelligence posture that allowed the acts of treason by Ames, Hanssen, and others; the

poor humint prior to the 9/11 attacks; or the misleading WMD analysis that provided a

rationale for the war against Iraq in 2003. The venerable saying, “Eternal vigilance is the price

of liberty,” is wise counsel. This is the price, cheap in return for the beneﬁts of freedom, that

SSCI and HPSCI members must pay – or they should be replaced by the congressional

leadership or the voters in their constituencies.

Lawmakers must really want to be eﬀective overseers, or else the constitutional safeguards

extolled by the founders are doomed to failure. Nurturing of this motivation depends upon

building into the congressional culture better incentives to encourage attention to the duties

of intelligence accountability. Incentives could include prestigious awards presented by the

congressional leadership and civic groups to dedicated and accomplished overseers, Capitol

Hill perks dispensed by the leadership based on the devotion of lawmakers to accountability,

and publicity in national and hometown newspapers underscoring admirable oversight

achievements by individual members. Voters must also become more aware of the importance

of accountability, rewarding those lawmakers at the polls who work industriously in order to

make existing laws work better and improve the performance of the federal bureaucracy.

Journalists and educators can contribute much to this task of civic awareness.

Membership motivation is, however, only half of the equation for success. The other half has

to do with executive branch cooperation in the quest for improved intelligence accountability.

A common term of derision among intelligence professionals and White House oﬃcials

toward SSCI and HPSCI members is that they are “micro-managers” – an accusation suggest-

ing that lawmakers and their staﬀs are meddlers apt to harm sensitive intelligence operations.

355

CONGRESSIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY FOR INTELLIGENCE

Former President George H.W. Bush, who served as DCI near the end of the investigations

carried out by the Church and Pike Committees, referred recently to the members and staﬀ

of those panels as “untutored little jerks.”

A spate of Wall Street Journal op-ed pieces in 2003

placed the blame for the 9/11 and WMD intelligence failures on legislative overseers and the

damage they had caused by their probes into the operations of the intelligence agencies. In

2006, the chairman of the Republican National Committee pointed to the reforms of the

Church and Pike Committees as a primary source of America’s intelligence weaknesses on the

eve of the 9/11 attacks.

These critics evidently wish to turn the clock back to the pre-1975

era, when oversight was weak and the intelligence agencies slipped into domestic spying and