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Thursday, December 2, 2004

It's column time, but I have some thoughts on the intelligence bill which I'll try to put forth after my morning walk.

The Intelligence Business

It helps if you've ever been in the intelligence business, but even a few minute's thought will convince you it's a complex game, and that centralizing everything under a czar who controls all the budgets is a bad idea.

There are many aspects to intelligence. This ought to be self-evident, but it doesn't appear to be so: reading Nancy Pelosi's thoughts on the subject after years of being on the Intelligence Committee is not much of an education in understanding the intelligence business. (www.speaker**pelosi**.com/**pelosi**/ ; http://www.house.gov/pelosi/flFundingIntelAgencies072402.htm ) Of course politicians on duty seldom say much that is interesting to anyone who knows an iota about the subject of the politician's attention. Mr. Sensenbrunner, meanwhile, has held up the President's Intelligence Czar bill for other reasons, including the very practical matter of insisting that we enforce some of the immigration laws as a first step toward making the country more secure. He has been pilloried by the bloggers -- I find articles about how this rather smart man is "chief whacko" and such -- but then most bloggers know nothing about the subject on which they wax eloquently; most politicians are more informative than most bloggers. Pity, but there it is. Just because someone can afford to maintain a web site doesn't guarantee they know much about their subjects.

So why am I qualified to write on this? Well, for one thing, I was for thirty years the prot�g� of Stefan Possony, one of the best intelligence officers this nation ever employed. For another, I have several times been employed as intelligence analyst for many major projects including restructuring the USAF Strategic Offensive Forces. I have read a very great deal on this subject. There are other reasons, but those will do.

As practiced in the United States the intelligence business consists of gathering data, interpreting it, using the analysis to allocate resources for acquisition of more data, and conducting overseas operations to disrupt potential enemy operations. Much of what is needed now is not classical intelligence at all, but counterintelligence: disrupting operations against us. Within the US -- and, importantly, in the Caribbean -- the FBI has been responsible for counterintelligence including disruptive operations. The Bureau ceded jurisdiction to the Agency for the Bay of Pigs operation; the results didn't help the Agency in the turf wars. In fact the Bay of Pigs was a pretty well planned operation that might have succeeded had the President not, at the very last minute, called off the air support operations including pre-emptive bombing by WW II era medium bombers flown out of Nicaragua. The original plan had air strikes to completely disable the Cuban Air Force, so that the landing at the Bay of Pigs would be unopposed. The beach area was quite defensible against ground assault, and in fact that is why it was chosen. But given that the Cuban Air Force was unopposed other than by Agency heroes -- no weaker word will do -- flying B-25's as interceptors because they weren't allowed to bomb the Cuban air fields, the disaster was assured.

Leave that. The important point is that in the US, counterintelligence operations including penetration of enemy organizations belongs to the Bureau, and since Hoover the bureau has become more and more dominated by legalistic concerns, and, at least until recently, saw itself as an arm of the Department of Justice, charged with arresting criminals after a criminal act, and prosecuting them in Constitutional Courts in which all the rules had to be followed. This effectively crippled US counterintelligence, and the success of the 911 attacks was assured. Whether the CIA, given a share of the counterintelligence mission, might have penetrated the 911 operation and prevented it isn't known; but it would certainly have had a better shot at it than the Bureau, and almost certainly would have investigated some of the reports of Arabs at pilot schools acting as if they were in their last year on earth. Given that most of those people were aliens who do not necessarily enjoy the privileges and immunities of citizens; and that the mission of the CIA would be to prevent something like 911, not build evidence for use in Constitutional courts; one can argue that they might well have been successful. Perhaps not, but it would have been worth a shot.

And that itself leads us to wonder if we want an intelligence Czar who controls all the budgets. We don't want to take away the Bureau's surveillance operations and its building of cases for trial; we want to add to the counterintelligence capabilities of the United States, which is to say, we want multiple lines of attack. We want operations sufficiently independent and suspicious of each other than compromise of one, say in the FBI, doesn't finish off all the others. We don't want such centralization that a Kim Philby can in a stroke destroy every intelligence operation we have. Even the USSR, which was pretty good at the spy business whatever other failings it had, did not organize intelligence in the silly way the President's intelligence bill proposes. The USSR had the KGB (or MVD or NKVD depending on your era) but it also had the GRU (military intelligence) and both operated spy networks; and the GRU brought off some of the USSR's best intelligence coup operations.

Before the fall of the USSR we used to say there are three huge organizations organized the same way: the Soviet system of agriculture, NASA, and the American system of education; and all are equally successful, which is to sat all are disasters with a few bright spots.

The proposed Intelligence Bill will create yet another centralized monstrosity with little chance of success. Yes: intelligence is best handled by putting a highly competent monomaniac in charge of a lot of resources and get out of his way. But finding the right monomaniac is never easy, and the job tends to burn people out. Better to have a number of organizations swimming in the soup. Navy operations will gather information of interest to the Navy, State has its own agenda as does Commerce, the Army and Air Force have their particular interests, and the CIA has several competing agendas within its bureaucracy. Gathering data is a bit of an art, and the CIA long ago lost it (we have few language schools and the case officer system hasn't worked in a long time); letting the other Departments try to do some spying doesn't hurt and often helps.

At the coordination level it pays to centralize, and have some central evaluation, which is what the DCI is supposed to do. Our present system was invented in theory to prevent another Pearl Harbor: prior to Pearl, we had Army, Navy, and State Department all in the intelligence business. Even Commerce got in the act. In fact that worked pretty well, but many of the signs that might have warned us of Pearl Harbor were lost because no one had all the facts at hand. No one, that is, but the President and his immediate advisors like Harry Hopkins. Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, had all the information including the Japanese diplomatic coded messages translated into English not very long after the Japanese Embassy received and decoded them. We can speculate for a long time on whether having a National Security Advisor in the White House might have prevented Pearl Harbor since all the threads would have run into that office: but in the United States no one can force the President to pay attention to anything if he doesn't want to hear the messages. I leave it at that.

If we want to create some competing intelligence analysis shops, and give each of them access to what is known, and let them fight it out and present reports to the National Security Advisor and the President, that will work; but creating a czar who controls all the intelligence budgets is an act of national insanity.

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