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Interorganiza�onal Sharing and Collabora�on

One proven technique to enable effec�ve interorganiza�onal sharing and collabora�on is the use of interagency task forces or joint coordina�on groups. One of the first examples of mul�-agency task forces goes back to the 1970s when the FBI and other agencies working in New York City decided to band together and work as a team to counter-narco�cs instead of bumping into each other. The military has also pioneered some highly effec�ve interagency and mul�-jurisdic�onal teams such as the Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-South). This JIATF more effec�vely counters narco�cs smuggling in the Caribbean Sea with a Coast Guard Admiral in command and a Customs and Border Protec�on (CBP) agency as deputy and naval and air assets of the U.S. and other partner na�ons providing the collec�on and intercep�on forces (Lamb, 2011). This mul�-agency task force approach is slowly making its way into homeland security where the rela�vely independent components of DHS (the field agencies). As an example,

We are doing away with the stove-piped approach to border security. Instead, we are pu�ng to use, in a combined and coordinated way, the assets and personnel of U.S. Customs and Border Protec�on (CBP), U.S. Immigra�on and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Center for Interet Security (CIS), and the Coast Guard, toward the goal of border security. We have established three new Department task forces, each headed by a senior official of this Department, to direct the resources of CBP, ICE, CIS and the Coast Guard in three discrete areas. The first, Joint Task Force-East, will be responsible for our mari�me ports and approaches across the southeast. The second, Joint Task Force-West, will be responsible for our southwest land border and the West coast of California. And the third will be a standing Joint Task Force for Inves�ga�ons to support the work of the other two Task Forces (Johnson, 2015).

This speaks to the challenge facing the Department of Homeland Security which not only has to effec�vely interface with other external federal partners like the FBI and the other agencies of the intelligence community, but it also has to sort out intra-agency informa�on sharing challenges with and among the DHS components – the ac�on arms of the field agencies. The Government Accountability Office con�nues to rate integra�ng the DHS into a cohesive en�ty as high risk and likely to take years to bring to frui�on (GAO, 2015). However, we should also realize it took many wars and literal fratricide to get the Department of Defense the military services to a highly effec�ve level of jointness. Interes�ngly, a DHS Undersecretary for Management recently stated at the �me that a�er 12 years, DHS

is "a teenager, confused and complicated" (Clark, 2015, para. 5). Collabora�on for homeland security intelligence is a very necessary goal and challenging for many of the reasons listed above.

It is important to also address the recent unauthorized disclosures of classified intelligence by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden that made many in the IC ques�on the benefits of extensive informa�on sharing. So these agencies must balance dissemina�on and s�ll maintain safeguards on sensi�ve informa�on. Intelligence and informa�on sharing is a very complex issue with compe�ng requirements, and not a subject with simple solu�ons. The U.S. Government Accountability Office con�nues to rate terrorism informa�on sharing as a high-risk func�on.

Democracy Dies in Darkness

MONKEY CAGE

U.S. counterterrorism is mired in turf wars. We could

learn a lot from the U.K.

By Frank Foley

July 19, 2016 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

Did the FBI work closely enough with other law enforcement agencies when it was investigating Omar Mateen in 2013? Local police in Florida have said

that the FBI should have given them more information about the man who went on to commit mass murder in Orlando last month, claiming his actions

were guided by ISIS.

This issue is likely to be a focus of future congressional inquiries into the events of Orlando — because when America suffers a terrorist attack, members of

Congress tend to criticize the nation’s security agencies for not working together closely enough to prevent it. Just days before the Orlando shooting,

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) was highlighting the “disturbing lack of collaboration” among agencies in the wake of another attack — the San Bernardino

shooting last December.

U.S. counterterrorism professionals, meanwhile, tend to believe that such coordination problems are inevitable and are found among the security agencies

of every democratic state.

Both views are wrong. Congress fails to recognize that its own actions likely contribute to interagency failures, while security officials are misguided to

believe that every country’s intelligence and law enforcement communities battle with turf wars.

�is article was published more than 7 years ago

There’s more to this story than bureaucratic politics

Are turf wars inevitable? A number of scholars of bureaucratic politics suggest that parochial self-interest affects the priorities and performance of

government security agencies. Amy Zegart, for instance, writes that clashes of interest helped create the intelligence failures that led to 9/11. These

interagency conflicts are an intrinsic feature of the national security landscape, she argues.

But is this really the case? My research, published recently in the European Journal of International Security, suggests that the answer is no. I analyzed U.S.

counterterrorism operations in comparison to operations in the United Kingdom, based on numerous interviews with security officials in the two countries.

Security agencies in Britain and the United States most likely have a similar interest in maximizing their spheres of activity. In the post-9/11 era, however,

turf wars have been rare among the British security agencies. I also found that the British agencies have achieved a higher level of operational integration

than their counterparts within the U.S.

To understand these differences, we need to look at two factors — state institutions and the organizational routines of security agencies.

The United States divides institutional power both federally and between the executive and legislative branches. Powerful congressional committees divide

up key missions such as counterterrorism, so that they and the agencies that they oversee are all involved. As a result, there’s a proliferation of individual

agencies with unclear and overlapping jurisdictions, which leads them to step on each other’s toes.

For example, since 9/11, intelligence units of both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Defense (DOD) have stepped into

key areas of the FBI’s domestic intelligence work on terrorism.

In contrast, Britain has a centralized set of state institutions, including a more subservient Parliament, which tends to follow the government’s lead on

security issues. The government has concentrated key counterterrorism responsibilities in a relatively small number of security agencies, each with a clear

and distinct mission.

Within these different institutional contexts, security agencies in the two countries have developed quite different routines for ground-level inter-agency

work.

The United States has an ad hoc approach

In the United States, security agencies negotiate over their overlapping mission space, often on an ad hoc basis. Relations between entire agencies can

hinge on personal relations between individuals. While there are formal mechanisms for information sharing, informal ties are crucial for interagency

counterterrorism in the United States. Such informal arrangements can work well at times — but they have a tendency to break down.

Take the case of Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who was under FBI investigation in 2008-2009 for his emails to a known inciter of terrorism, Anwar al-Awlaki.

The FBI at that time tended to share information informally with DOD about investigations into DOD employees. In the Hasan case, however, the FBI did

not communicate with DOD counterintelligence officials.

This was a significant error because DOD counterintelligence was better placed to evaluate the threat posed by its service member — and would likely have

mounted a deeper probe into Hasan. Hasan slipped through the cracks and went on to kill 13 DOD employees at Fort Hood in Texas in November 2009.

While the FBI and the Pentagon have since taken steps to improve their information-exchange procedures, the U.S. system has broader problems. The lack

of clarity concerning mission space gives the FBI, DOD, DHS and other agencies free rein to make incursions into each other’s areas of responsibility.

As one FBI officer told me some years ago: “[DHS intelligence] were trying to get their oars in the water in a way that I think … actually hurt the mission,

because people were spending time away from actually doing things to now having to coordinate with somebody who really had nothing, no value added.”

Britain takes a more formal approach

British police officers have also been known to bad-mouth other U.K. security agencies — but they rarely are in conflict with each other. The reason? The

government gives each agency a clear and distinct mission, which encourages the development of more collaborative routines.

MI5 is responsible for domestic intelligence, while MI6 handles foreign intelligence. The London Metropolitan Police has the mandate to lead law

enforcement investigations into terrorism anywhere in the United Kingdom. Unlike the Pentagon, the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense is not heavily involved in

domestic counterterrorism. There’s little confusion over the agencies’ respective roles — and less likelihood of conflict over who has jurisdiction.

In Britain, interagency collaboration is also more formal and regularized, in contrast to the U.S. process. For example, MI5 desk officers have a mandate to

task operatives from both their own agency and from the police. MI5 and the police work together even on sensitive tasks like the recruitment or handling

of informants. When a particular case reaches a critical point, an Executive Liaison Group of MI5 and police investigators is formed to decide whether the

suspects should be arrested or not.

Good interpersonal relationships are helpful in these contexts, but the formalized collaboration structure means they are not so crucial in the U.K. for

coordination between entire agencies as they are in the United States.

Are there lessons to learn?

It is important to remember that the United States has strengths in counterterrorism that Britain cannot match. The immense capabilities of its individual

intelligence agencies enable the United States to be effective in many cases. So coordination is not the only thing that determines the effectiveness of

counterterrorism — but it plays a significant role, and it is an area where the United States can do better.

The formal routines and clear missions of Britain’s security agencies do offer some lessons for the United States. Indeed, the creation of the National

Counterterrorism Center in 2004 introduced some useful formal mechanisms for threat analysis and information-sharing among U.S. agencies. However,

the center is not an entity that can stamp out turf wars — nor has it changed the agencies’ general reliance on informal routines and interpersonal

relationships.

In fact, these ways of working are unlikely to undergo significant change. Organization theory tells us that long-established routines largely go

unquestioned in their particular contexts and are reproduced through the power of habit. The institutional conditions that led to these routines — for

example, in Congress — are also unlikely to change.

The deficiencies in the coordination of U.S. counterterrorism have deep roots. Rather than simply blaming the agencies, members of Congress would do

well to acknowledge the complex origins of the problem and their own role in helping to create it.

Frank Foley is a lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, and author of the book Countering Terrorism in Britain and France. This article draws from his recently published “Why inter-agency operations break down: US counterterrorism in comparative perspective” in

the European Journal of International Security.

Collabora�on for HSINT

This week we turn to the topic of interagency and intergovernmental collabora�on for HSINT. There are a great many different types of collabora�on and informa�on sharing among the many different agencies required to effec�vely protect this na�on from threats. This lack of effec�ve sharing and collabora�on contributed to the tragedy of 9/11, and was the subject of many reforms. However, this remains a work in progress both among the federal agencies and down to the cri�cal partners at the state and local levels.

One example of the required collabora�on for homeland security intelligence is the need for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together. However, there are significant differences in the roles and cultures of each type of agency, which makes collabora�on and effec�ve sharing a challenge. While the Uni�ng and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001 removed the figura�ve” wall” between them, it cannot legislate corresponding change a�tudes and percep�ons of officials in each type of agency who determine what is shared with whom and how much is shared (Davisson, 2004).

Another example of the required collabora�on for effec�ve homeland security intelligence is sharing between the different levels of government. Our trifurcated government system has overlapping security responsibili�es for federal, state and local authori�es, State and local governments have a key role to play in internal security and our Cons�tu�on and the 10th Amendment leaves with states police powers; o�en delegated to local authori�es (Gardner, 2017). As Foley (2016) wrote in his ar�cle about counter-terrorism turf wars, “there’s a prolifera�on of individual agencies with unclear and overlapping jurisdic�ons, which leads them to step on each other’s toes” (para. 8). This means countering the threats of today clearly calls for cohesion and sharing between and among agencies at all three levels of government to prevent future a�acks. As the reading on Homeland Security 4.0 described, interagency effec�veness is also unlikely to stem from over-centraliza�on in Washington.