Intelligence in Homeland Security

1INTELLIGENCE FOR THE HOMELANDSAIS Review vol. XXIV no. 1 (Winter–Spring 2004)

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Intelligence for the Homeland

Bruce Berkowitz

Two years after the September 11th attacks on America, a significant gap remains in our defenses against terrorists and other forms of foreign attack. The problem is that we still lack adequate homeland intelligence. As a result, we are still ill prepared to detect, ana- lyze, and monitor foreign threats inside our borders.

The New Face of War

Prior to September 11 th many people thought that al Qaeda was just a

ragtag band of religious zealots. This was not so. Al Qaeda operated as a sophisticated military organization, and the tactics it used are typical of how any modern army or paramilitary group is likely to fight today.

The al Qaeda terrorists who attacked New York and Washington used a new form of warfare that has developed in parallel with modern informa- tion technology. The terrorists deployed as a global network in which small cells, covertly deployed within our own territory, were able to communi- cate effectively with each other and with their commanders halfway around the world. Using commercially available satellite phones, cellular systems, and the Internet, the cells could keep in contact with their commanders in Afghanistan and Pakistan—and stay under cover—until ready to strike.

We might have expected this, as U.S. forces have been developing their own version of these tactics, under such labels as “network centric warfare.” Our soldier, sailors, and airmen, of course, do not hide their identities or intentionally target civilians as terrorists do. But our forces do operate as networks today, often with clandestine units operating in the midst the enemy. By doing so, these units can direct massive firepower from air, sea, and land forces.

This approach proved effective in U.S. military operations in Afghani- stan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003. As in past wars, our adversaries were watch- ing. They will likely draw lessons from both al Qaeda’s success against the United States and our own success in Afghanistan and Iraq, because these conflicts hint at the future of warfare.

These new tactics make it possible for even small states and terrorist groups to mount a credible threat against great powers like the United States. For proof, one only needs to consider the 291 people killed in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the near-loss

Bruce Berkowitz began his career at the Central Intelligence Agency and is a senior analyst at RAND and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is author of The New Face of War (Free Press, 2003).

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of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, and, of course, more than 3,000 deaths resulting from the September 11th attack. One can imagine how much more devastating such attacks might be if terrorist groups worked in con- cert with rogue states to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD), or if rogue states themselves adopted network warfare to deploy their own WMD within our borders.

The Politics of Intelligence

This new kind of warfare, combined with the fact that modern civilian in- frastructure is so vulnerable, should make intelligence on foreign threats within our borders a top national priority. Unfortunately, the Bush admin- istration and Congress currently disagree over the best solution, and so we are not preparing as effectively as we should.

The White House prefers an incremental approach to homeland in- telligence, building off existing organizations. In January 2003 President Bush proposed a Terrorist Threat Integration Center, or “TTIC.” The TTIC will include personnel from the CIA, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security. It will eventually have its own headquarters. For now, though, it is housed at the CIA, and, even after it is relocated, it will still report to the director of central intelligence.

In contrast, many members of Congress prefer a totally new intelligence organization, created within the Department of Homeland Security. The provisions for this new organization were included in the stature that created DHS, but the Executive Branch has been unwilling to implement these pro- visions and Congress itself has been unable to unite behind a single plan.

The disagreement over whether to create a new intelligence arm within DHS, predictably, reflects two factors that often lead to conflict: money and politics. The Bush administration is concerned about the cost and difficulty of establishing a new intelligence organization, especially when the federal deficit has become a political football in the run-up to the 2004 elections. These deficits have become an even bigger issue for the Bush administra- tion because it has made tax cuts a centerpiece of its strategy to accelerate the economic recovery.

At the same time, some of the legislators supporting a new domestic intelligence organization seem to have more than homeland security on their mind. In the past, they have used homeland security to promote their other political interests, such as increasing federal subsidies for local police forces, and increasing the power of public employee unions. Recall, for example, the controversy in 2001 over airport luggage inspectors. Some legislators (mainly Democrats, who count government employee unions among their strongest supporters) wanted the inspectors to be federal employees. They also wanted to limit the President’s authority to fire these employees at will. Creating a new homeland intelligence organization would raise these issues again.

Of course partisan politics is inevitable even on vital issues affecting the nation’s defense. But we need to consider the case for a new intelligence organization devoted to homeland security on its own merits, if only to better understand what an ideal solution would be. An objective analysis

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suggests that the best way to meet the requirements for dealing with the new threat is to start from scratch with a new organization. It is likely that no other approach will provide the new technical skills and culture that this mission requires.

Organization and Tradecraft

The basic concept behind the TTIC should seem familiar, because it is es- sentially the same rationale that led to the establishment of the CIA’s cur- rent Counterterrorist Center (CTC) nearly twenty years ago. The idea was to fuse staff from several CIA components into a single organization, and add representatives from other intelligence agencies and the FBI. The main difference between the CTC and the TTIC seems to be that the new center will eventually be housed in a separate building, away from CIA headquar- ters. (For now, it is located on the Langley campus.)

While this strategy may have succeeded with the CTC, the problem with the current approach is that it does not address the unique needs of homeland security. Also, it does not solve the inherent limitations that cur- rently prevent existing organizations like the CIA and FBI from meeting these needs effectively.

Intelligence for homeland security requires a new set of skills and or- ganizational culture—or, as intelligence professionals refer to it, “tradecraft.” Tradecraft is to an agency in the intelligence community as a business model is to a company in the private sector. Just as every com- pany develops its own business model over time, every intelligence organi- zation develops its own tradecraft.

Alas, the tradecraft that makes an intelligence organization superb for one kind of job often makes it utterly incapable of doing others. For ex- ample, the “business model” for the CIA goes something like this: “Collect information other countries and terrorist organizations don’t want us to have. Deal with unsavory characters and organizations that Americans know about, but don’t want to acknowledge. And we keep all of this a tightly guarded secret so we can keep at it as long as possible.”

Tradecraft gets built into the people, procedures, and mindset of an intelligence orga- nization. One of the reasons in- telligence organizations have failed in the past is that they have been asked to perform mis- sions they were never designed to do. For example, if you make CIA analysts support military mis- sion planning—a job neither the organization nor the personnel were de- signed to do—then you might mistakenly put a bomb into a Chinese em- bassy. This is exactly what happened in the 1999 war in Serbia.

Intelligence for homeland security requires tradecraft that is often a diametric opposite from the CIA model. The business model for a home-

Intelligence for homeland security requires tradecraft that is often a diametric opposite from the CIA model.

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land intelligence agency (if we had one) would sound something like: “Col- lect as much information from as many sources as possible, respect the civil liberties of Americans, and get the product to hundreds of thousands of local officials, public safety officers, and first responders so they can an- ticipate threats and respond effectively.”

Similarly, although some have proposed expanding the mission of the FBI to support homeland security, this would not provide the required ca- pabilities, either. The FBI has its counterpart to CIA tradecraft—namely, the culture, technical skills, training, and methods of law enforcement—which are also ill suited for homeland security.

FBI special agents are trained to run down criminals, collect evidence, and put the bad guys in the slammer. Their culture—and the incentives for promotion within the Bureau—reinforces this training. Law enforcement is by design reactive, and its personnel are trained to take the aggressive, adversarial approach that is appropriate for pursuing a person who has met the legal threshold required to be a suspect of a crime.

Basic principles of civil rights and rule of law dictate that these thresh- olds should be high. Otherwise we would mistakenly subject innocent people to the scrutiny of law enforcement. This is why law enforcement agencies operate under tight guidelines—e.g., rules of evidence, Miranda rights, protection against self-incrimination, and so on. These guidelines are too restrictive for an agency responsible for detecting foreign threats. The thresholds for triggering the attention of a domestic intelligence organi- zation can—and must—be lower than those for a law enforcement agency, and its powers to pursue and arrest must be more tightly controlled, too.

Trying to design an agency that can do all these jobs—foreign intelli- gence, law enforcement, and domestic intelligence—is like asking the New York Mets to play in the Super Bowl, or the San Francisco Forty-Niners to win the World Series. The individual players may all be great athletes and have similar talents, but the specific skills learned over a career are too dif- ferent, and the playbooks the teams use to prepare for a game are ineffec- tive when they are applied to another sport.

Practical Considerations for Homeland Security

When the TTIC was unveiled, Deputy Secretary of Homeland, Security Gordon England said he did not want the new center in his department because it lacked the expertise to analyze terrorist threats. “I certainly don’t feel that we could manage that operation,” he said. Unfortunately, no one else can, either. Homeland security officials are the ones in the best posi- tion to understand the information local police, public health agencies, and other emergency responders require, and are best suited to get this infor- mation to the specific users who need it.

Also, deservedly or not, the CIA and FBI both come with histories that hinder their ability to carry out aggressive intelligence operations within U.S. borders. Americans have always been wary of having a foreign intelligence service either collect information or conduct analysis against targets within the United States. They have been especially concerned about the possibil-

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ity of using the CIA against U.S. citizens, and do not want the FBI collect- ing information and maintaining files on people presumed to be innocent.

Even many intelligence and law enforcement officials are wary of as- signing the CIA and FBI to these tasks, because it is precisely these kinds of issues that led to the controversies that ensnared the CIA and FBI thirty years ago. These officials, more than anyone, recall the damage the two or- ganizations suffered during the 1970s when their domestic surveillance ac- tivities became known.

Do we really want an organization reporting to the director of cen- tral intelligence to be responsible for keeping, say, a database containing the names of foreign-born U.S. citizens? For the identities of Americans who travel to the Middle East? Similarly, do we really want the FBI to routinely keep files on Americans who have not committed crimes—or who have not even been accused of a crime? There are times when the CIA and FBI might need access to such information. But it’s not the kind of data we want a foreign intelligence and law enforcement organizations keeping routinely.

Effective homeland intelligence depends on analysts who can find blueprints of factories in Michigan, electric plants and transmission grids in California, and communications lines in Kansas, and match them with visa records. It requires analysts who understand the links between inven- tory data of fertilizer (as Oklahoma City showed, an excellent explosive) and medical specimens (which might be used for biological warfare). Giving the FBI access to such information raises all kinds of civil liberties issues, and most of today’s CIA analysts are foreign specialists who don’t know how to get this information and are not trained on how to use it. Similarly, most CIA analysts are not accustomed to dealing with agencies outside the na- tional security community.

Indeed, the CIA lacks the technical means to deal effectively with most of these agencies. Because the CIA was designed mainly to support top-level policy makers, its computer networks operate under very strict security rules because of the extraordinarily sensitive information they often carry. One cannot access the system without an in-depth background investigation, and even officials with the highest government security clearances are often banned if they come from a different agency. Downloading any information from the network is equally restricted, and an equally cumbersome process.

So, if TTIC is a CIA-run operation, it will likely use a CIA informa- tion network and no information will be released unless a CIA official agrees to let it out of the system. Everyone will depend on the judgment of CIA officials about whether anyone else has a “need to know” about a ter- rorist threat—again, this is the kind of problem the new Department of Homeland Security was supposed to solve.

A homeland security intelligence organization needs an information system that can reach most American communities with a reasonable level of security, but with much fewer restrictions. Local fire chiefs ought to be able to talk directly to an analyst without submitting to a year-long, in- depth background investigation. Even more important, they need someone at the other end of the line knowledgeable about their problems and pre- pared to deal with them effectively.

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Finally, there is the problem of whether the CIA has analysts to spare for this new mission. People often treat intelligence organizations like a bottomless resource, but they are not. There are only so many CIA analysts

to go around, and they are already stretched supporting the global war on terrorism abroad, U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq and Af- ghanistan, crises in the Levant, and simmering threats in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere.

All of this is why we need a new organization. Starting with a blank slate is hard, but it is the only way to avoid these obstacles. Otherwise, we will never have the training culture, and tradecraft required for homeland security.

Local fire chiefs ought to be able to talk directly to an analyst without submitting to a year-long, in-depth background investigation.

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