GuaranteedGrades - Strategic Intel Collection

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 1 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg/…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

J. Ransom Clark. Intelligence and National Security. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, . http://www.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/.

HOW DO WE GET INTELLIGENCE? Deciding What to Get

There is a tendency among Americans to equate intelligence with spies in much the same way as thriller writers do. This is because spying has an air of excitement that all the hard work of a team of cryptanalysts intent on breaking a hostile country’s code cannot duplicate. Spy-versus-spy is “sexy,” while the photo interpreter seated in a windowless room and pouring over the image of what might be a new nuclear-weapons production facility sounds dull. That is a mistake, not in terms of what makes enthralling fiction but in terms of describing the true nature of intelligence.

The multiple components of the U.S. Intelligence Community collect, process, analyze, and disseminate their products in many different ways for many different consumers. In doing so, however, they seek to be responsive to the needs of the users of their products. In the intelligence business, needs are expressed in terms of requirements and priorities. Priorities are necessary because, despite an Intelligence Community budget that is estimated at some $44 billion, neither the money nor the people are available to respond to all requests for information from every interested government or military official on every possible subject.

The interests of top-level policymakers can play a significant role in what resources are available to the intelligence agencies and how those resources are distributed and used. In the late 1970s, for example, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s emphasis on the importance of the Soviet constituent republics and nationalities, particularly those in the southern tier, led to an infusion of additional resources and a realignment of existing dollars to increase coverage of those areas. Given the breakup of the Soviet Union ten years later, such a reprioritization of requirements appears foresighted. But Brzezinski did not task individual agencies with collecting and analyzing specific pieces of intelligence; rather, the agencies presented their ideas of how they might respond to the requirement for more and better intelligence on the target area. Congress, then, appropriated new money for selected programs, not for specific items of information. However, the requirements process is rarely this simple.

There are, of course, many levels of requirements. The military services with their well-established chains of command handle the communication of intelligence needs upward and downward with greater facility than their civilian counterparts, especially at the tactical and operational levels. Because of the complexity of the national-level intelligence process, with each collection and production agency seeking a monopoly of its individual discipline, requirements

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 2 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg/…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

serve the purpose of trying to get everyone on the same page. The tendency of agencies to want to control their process and product through the whole intelligence cycle has led to the main producers in the Intelligence Community being labeled “stovepipes.” The image is appropriate. Nonetheless, the importance of requirements should not be underestimated, as they set the stage for the collection and analysis that will follow.

Michael Turner sees the main issues on the national security agenda as being established through “an interactive bargaining process among three environments: the policy world, the bureaucratic dynamics of the intelligence community, and the intelligence collectors and analysts.” Certainly, policymakers will on occasion step into the process and seek to redirect the focus of the intelligence agencies toward an area not in the headlines, as with Brzezinski and the Soviet nationalities issue. But the really big issues are usually clear to everyone in the needs-response chain. That the United States is deeply interested in the countries that may be seeking to acquire nuclear weapons and the capability to deliver them should not be a surprise. Policymakers make such top-level needs evident through speeches, press briefings, and other actions designed to alert the public more than the intelligence agencies to an area of concern. They can also take a more direct approach to aid in establishing priorities for the direction and division of resources. One example is Presidential Decision Directive 35 (PDD-35) on “Intelligence Requirements,” signed by President Bill Clinton in 1995. As the President’s press spokesman noted at the time, “How you structure the priorities of the intelligence community to reflect the new threats that are more urgent in the post-Cold War world is part of what…this directive [is] all about.”

One of the more controversial aspects of PDD-35 was the assigning of one of the highest priorities to support for military operations (usually referred to as SMO, but sometimes given a slightly different twist and called “support to the warfighter”). It is difficult to argue against getting the right information into the hands of deployed military personnel. However, concern was expressed at the time that such a reprioritization could lead to an overemphasis on military tactical requirements in the tasking of national systems. In a constrained resource environment, this would mean less support for users who were focused on more strategic issues, such as nuclear nonproliferation. This concern resurfaced after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The INTs

HUMINT—Human Intelligence can be derived by covert means (classical spying or espionage), semiopen observations (such as, by a military attaché), or completely overt activities (discussion with a foreign official). IMINT—Imagery Intelligence comes from images made either from overhead (balloons, airplanes, or satellites) or on the ground. Since photography is today only one among several methods of imaging, use of the term IMINT has largely replaced the older term PHOTINT or photographic intelligence. MASINT—Measurement and Signature Intelligence involves technical intelligence data other than imagery and signal intelligence. It uses

1

2

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 3 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg/…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

nuclear, optical, radio frequency, acoustics, seismic, and materials sciences to locate, identify, or describe distinctive characteristics of targets. OSINT—Open-Source Intelligence deals with information that is publicly available, such as newspapers, radio and television broadcasts, journals, the Internet, or commercial databases. It also includes videos, graphics and drawings, as well as other unclassified information that has limited public access or distribution (that is, you must ask for it). SIGINT—Signals Intelligence is derived from either intercepted communications (COMINT), including the handling of written communications, such as letters written in invisible ink or that contain some form of encryption; or electromagnetic emanations (ELINT) that are not communications and are not from atomic detonations or a radioactive source, including emanations from radar systems, navigational radio beacons, and the signals (telemetry) sent by a test missile while in flight.

The Intelligence Community has tried a number of techniques for converting the broad guidance that comes from the top of the consumer chain into more specific directions. Whatever their name at any given time (such as, “Key Intelligence Topics/Questions,” or “National Intelligence Topics”), the formal requirements documents are a product of an interagency process. The goal of that process is to identify and prioritize the central problems—and the elements within those problems—on which the agencies should focus their attention. However, the formal requirements also have been used to help an agency justify certain of its activities and budget.

At times, collectors and analysts are more on their own than the existence of policy guidance and a formal requirements system would suggest. Things happen that have not been—and perhaps could not have been—anticipated. Coordinated, formal requirements documents are simply more static than real life. Collectors of all types—whether human or technical—suddenly can be confronted with opportunities to acquire information that may be meaningful but appears on no list. They will rarely elect to pass up such chance moments. Similarly, analysts are expected to be the experts in their fields, and they must be prepared to ask and explore questions that have not been formalized by the requirements process. For a deployed soldier, the issue is sometimes even more current. An alert from a squad in the field that “we are taking fire” usually means that intelligence is needed now, and all available collectors need to be brought to bear to aid in a solution of the problem.

In many ways, formal requirements are like the kickoff to a football game: They help to get things started, they provide some structure to the game, but they rarely decide the contest. The players must play the game.

The game of intelligence collection is a multidisciplinary endeavor. There are many different kinds of information needed (or wanted), and there are quite a number of ways of trying to get at that information. The processes and techniques of gathering intelligence—the disciplines of intelligence collection (sometimes referred to as “The INTs,” see sidebar)—include the identification, translation, and other processing of openly available information; old-fashioned spying; overhead imaging technology; the interception and processing of

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 4 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg/…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

communications and other electronic emissions; and some exotic uses of technology to locate and identify objects by their distinctive emanations. Each of the disciplines can be more effective than the others depending on the type of information that is needed and where and how it is held.

There for the Taking, But You Have to Find It

Much of the information that represents input into the intelligence cycle comes from sources that are freely available, if you know where they are and have the resources to find, acquire, and process them. The handling of such information constitutes the intelligence discipline of open-source intelligence or OSINT. The terms open-source and intelligence may seem as though they do not belong together or that one contradicts the other. Certainly, Abram Shulsky in his classic work Silent Warfare defines intelligence in terms of discovering and protecting secrets. But he, too, accepts a role for open-source information, one of providing the “means to get around the barriers that obstruct direct access to the information being sought.” No matter how they are defined, open sources have been an integral part of intelligence collection since World War II (and sporadically even earlier, as in efforts by the Confederate Secret Service to acquire newspapers from the Union States). Whether open sources have received the respect that they are due is another matter. Although the importance of open-source collection to the U.S. intelligence effort has been given lip service over the years, its true significance often has been underestimated. Similarly, the complexity of collecting, handling, and disseminating open-source intelligence has not been fully appreciated by those more attuned to the secret side of intelligence.

OSINT collection consists of the acquisition and processing (that is, the review of the acquisitions for relevant materials and, as necessary, their translation) of publicly available information. Open sources cover a wide spectrum of potential data on political, military, economic, and scientific affairs. They include radio and television broadcasts, newspapers, technical and scholarly journals, popular and specialized magazines, published reports from governmental and nongovernmental entities, publications from and handouts at conferences, books, publicly accessible databases (either unrestricted or by subscription), and the Internet. In open societies, the flow of information can offer insights into a range of issues of relevance to U.S. policymakers. These might include the ascendance of a particular figure in a political party, a parliamentary debate about trade policy, a farmers’ union protesting the import of foreign produce, a movement to declare a country’s ports nuclear-free zones, or independent scientific advances.

In closed societies, such as the former Soviet bloc, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, or China, there are varying but often substantial amounts of information that may be extracted from an informed perusal of legally accessible media and documents. This is true even where all such materials present some level of regime propaganda and are tightly censored. For instance, when a dictatorship decides to change direction on a matter such as land use in the countryside, it needs to get the word out; and the media make it possible to do so in a manner that everyone hears the same thing. The leadership may not state precisely that

3

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 5 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg/…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

there is a change, but their rhetoric—echoed over and over by those further down the hierarchy—is one way of getting everyone saying and eventually doing the same thing. Regional and local newspapers can provide a view into the effects on local conditions of national policy decisions. Scientific and technical journals from the former USSR were scrutinized carefully for hints of the kind of work being done at research institutions and the state of Soviet knowledge in particular fields. During the Cold War years, “[m]ost of the information on the USSR provided to policy officers by the intelligence community…came from open sources…. Once the open pieces [of the puzzle] were in place, finding the hidden ones was a task that fell to the clandestine collectors.”

Throughout the Cold War, one of the major players in the open-source business was the Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division (FTD). The organization is now part of the Air Intelligence Agency’s National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC). FTD/NASIC’s roots date back to 1917 when the Army Signal Corps established an aviation engineering and testing center in Dayton, Ohio. In World War I, the organization focused on acquiring aviation-related technical data by translating articles from European publications. FTD/NASIC’s predecessor organizations translated and cataloged captured German and Japanese technical documents during World War II. From the late-1940s, the organization’s attention swung to the technological threat posed by the Russians. In 1959, the Air Force delegated responsibility for collection of open-source intelligence to FTD; this involved primarily translations from commercial foreign-language publications. Then, in the late-1960s the Defense Department made FTD the executive agent for the military’s entire program for collection and processing of science and technology literature. The end of the Cold War brought downsizing, reorganization, and a blending of the FTD mission with the general military intelligence program. Today, NASIC’s large database, consisting heavily of open-source materials, is used to support a range of field-oriented activities. FTD had also been a leader in the development of machine translation, growing the capability of its system from word-for-word to sentence-by-sentence. The current translation branch uses human and machine capabilities to collect intelligence on and evaluate evolving technologies around the world.

The Army’s Asian Studies Detachment (ASD) has been engaged in the exploitation of open sources since 1947. Although it has been through a number of name changes and organizational affiliations (as is typical of many long-term military units), ASD today is located at Camp Zama, about twenty-five miles west of Tokyo, and is an element of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command’s (INSCOM) 500th Military Intelligence Brigade. The core work of reading, analyzing, and reporting on hundreds of publications received in paper or digital form and in dozens of languages is handled by Japanese nationals, who work for the U.S. Army under a contract with the Japanese government. ASD’s primary mission is to support the tactical intelligence needs of U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC); however, its products are disseminated widely, including to all military services, joint commands, DOD intelligence agencies, other non-DOD customers, and some nongovernmental strategic think tanks.

When the CIA was formed in 1947, it was joined by an already existing organization—the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). Begun by the

4

5

6

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 6 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg/…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

Federal Communications Commission in 1941, the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (as it was originally called) was responsible for recording, translating, and analyzing Japanese and German short-wave propaganda broadcasts. At the end of World War II, FBIS was transferred briefly to the War Department, then to the short-lived Central Intelligence Group, and finally to the newly formed CIA. Under the CIA, FBIS was a “service of common concern,” covering foreign broadcasts for the whole of the Intelligence Community. During the Cold War years, the requirements for the open-source product, essentially translations of foreign radio and press agency transmissions from around the world, increased significantly. Its mission was further expanded in 1967 when it merged with the Foreign Documents Division, which had the charter for foreign press exploitation. Thus, FBIS became responsible for all the foreign mass media, both broadcast and print. In more recent times, new media dissemination technologies necessitated increased coverage of television and satellite broadcasts, government and commercial databases, “gray” literature (such as, symposia proceedings and academic studies), and the Internet.

FBIS has been a unique intelligence organization in several ways. First of all, its primary product—the FBIS Daily Reports—was available for sale to the public for over twenty years (1974–1996) through the Commerce Department’s National Technical Information Service (NTIS). In 1997, dissemination to the public (largely, academics and journalists) of the FBIS materials was converted into an NTIS-run, online subscription service called “World News Connection.” Second, for most of its existence, FBIS has been an openly declared intelligence organization. At its peak, it had at least nineteen field collection sites worldwide. Those field activities were staffed by a combination of American and foreign national personnel. The host governments were fully aware of FBIS’ status and had approved the organization’s presence in their countries. Third, while much of the long-standing U.S.-British intelligence sharing agreement remains secret, FBIS maintains an openly acknowledged partnership with the Monitoring Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The two services have divided the world into radio and television monitoring areas with each responsible for a portion. And, fourth, FBIS engaged in outsourcing long before the term became a catchword for Washington-area consultants. Large volumes of foreign- language material from the print media are farmed out to independent contract translators all over the country.

Over the years, FBIS’ collection activities not only supplied large volumes of background and reference material on most countries of the world but also served to alert the Intelligence Community and American leaders to major developing events. In this, it was part of the country’s early warning system. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the first word on the Russians’ decision to remove their missiles came in an FBIS report from Radio Moscow about Premier Khrushchev’s message to President Kennedy. The President responded immediately, even before the official text was delivered by the Soviets. In the 1956 Hungarian uprising and again in the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, radio broadcasts were for some time the only source of information about what was happening in those countries. In fact, monitoring the broadcasts from local, low-power radio transmitters was the timeliest way to follow the progress of the Russians’ advance into Czechoslovakia. Many of the

7

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 7 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg/…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

Czech broadcasters stayed at their microphones until Soviet soldiers broke down their doors. In August 1991, FBIS monitored a report from the Soviet news agency TASS that Mikhail Gorbachev had been replaced by Gennadiy Yanayev. The report was, of course, incorrect, but it was the first indication of the failed coup attempt.

The 1990s were not kind to FBIS and open-source intelligence. Despite FBIS’ responsibility as a service of common concern, in-house processing of open- source information had proliferated throughout other components of the Intelligence Community. In 1992, the DCI appointed an Open Source Coordinator with the goal of establishing interconnectivity to promote sharing open sources across the Community. That approach fizzled out when it was followed almost immediately by substantial budget cuts. By 1996, there was a growing fear among academics and freedom-of-information advocates (and, perhaps, by intelligence analysts as well) that FBIS was going to be abolished. The argument was that it was irrelevant in an era of twenty-four-hour cable news. The Federation of American Scientists was particularly active in trying to mount opposition to the elimination of the FBIS product. Editorials appeared in major newspapers decrying proposed reductions in FBIS activities. Concern was expressed in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about what was called the FBIS “re-engineering” plan. The worries even reached the British press with the Sunday Telegraph(London) of November 24, 1996, running a story under the headline: “CIA Threatens to Pull Plug on World Service.” FBIS survived at the time; but by 2001, it had been stripped of some 60 percent of its personnel.

Interest in open sources as an integral part of the intelligence process revived sufficiently after 9/11 that Congress, in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, encouraged the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to establish an Intelligence Community center to coordinate the collection, analysis, production, and dissemination of open-source intelligence. That step was taken on November 8, 2005, when DNI John D. Negroponte announced the creation of the DNI Open Source Center (OSC). The OSC will be based at CIA and will be built around what was formerly FBIS. Whether this move will result in strengthening the status of OSINT within the Intelligence Community remains to be seen. In any event, the need for paying attention to the open-source environment will continue. For example, there are reportedly some 5,000 Internet sites worldwide run by terrorists hostile to the United States. Some 1,500 of these are monitored regularly, and between twenty-five and a hundred are tracked daily by U.S. analysts. Despite these efforts, some terrorism experts see the United States falling even further behind in keeping up with the use of the Internet by radical jihadists.

Old-Fashioned Spying

Michael Shaara opens his Civil War novel, The Killer Angels, with the Confederate spy “Harrison” discovering in June 1863 that the Union Army of the Potomac was marching northward. That information is conveyed, first, to Gen. James Longstreet and, then, to Gen. Robert E. Lee. Based on Harrison’s intelligence, Lee turns the Confederate army East across the mountains toward

8

9

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 8 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg/…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

the small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. The novelist brings drama to what could have been a rather prosaic scene: Longstreet’s spy delivering his report. But the report really happened; and Lee did act on that intelligence, given that he had lost contact with his primary source for intelligence on the location of the Union army, Gen. Jeb Stuart’s cavalry. In a book not otherwise concerned with intelligence, the novelist has made a number of points about the nature of intelligence in general and, particularly, human intelligence (HUMINT) or spying. The generals’ tone of distrust and even contempt for their spy is likely portrayed accurately. At a minimum, they found the whole process—and their dependence on it—distasteful. Such a reaction is not unusual. Americans both public and private have long been ambivalent about many aspects of the activities that fall under the heading of spying (“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”). Nonetheless, Lee made a decision based on the intelligence then available to him—a situation often forced upon decision makers.

For a time in the 1980s and 1990s, it was possible for some writers on intelligence to argue that the application of modern technology to the collection of intelligence was beginning to make human spies less important. What they probably meant was that technical collection systems are less messy (they are things that can be programed, not people who have a tendency to do dumb things) and less prone to embarrass the government. There are certain kinds of secrets, however, that technical systems simply cannot provide.

Throughout much of the Cold War, a large number of Russian military and intelligence officers provided the United States and its allies with critical information from deep within the closed Soviet system. From 1953 until his arrest in 1959, Pyotr Popov, a lieutenant colonel in the GRU (Soviet military intelligence), supplied a steady stream of intelligence, ranging from information on GRU personnel and operations to important Soviet military documents. GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky spied for the United States and Britain from April 1961 until his arrest in October 1962. In that brief period, he provided an enormous quantity of intelligence on a wide range of subjects, including Soviet missile developments, nuclear planning, military structure and plans, and designs against Berlin. Penkovsky’s information is credited with allowing President Kennedy to act with confidence when he had to face Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s threats about Berlin and to deal with the discovery of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba. Both Popov and Penkovskiy paid for their actions with their lives, as did most of the American agents betrayed from the mid- 1980s by the traitorous activities of CIA officer Aldrich Ames (arrested in 1994) and FBI officer Robert Hanssen (arrested in 2001). However, not all the stories of America’s spies behind the Iron Curtain end without the individuals being able to experience the results of their work. From 1972 to 1981, Polish patriot and spy, Lt. Col. Ryszard Kuklinski, passed his CIA contacts “tens of thousands of pages of classified Soviet and Warsaw Pact documents. They included the Soviet war plans for Europe, information on new weapons systems, hidden Soviet wartime bunkers, and Soviet preparations to invade Poland.” Kuklinski and his family were exfiltrated from his homeland in 1981, and he lived to set foot (and spirit) back in a Poland freed from the oppression of both Soviet and Polish communists. Modern technical collection systems can accomplish amazing

10

11

12

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 9 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg/…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

things, but they have inherent physical limitations (an imaging satellite cannot see inside a vault) and cannot deliver the kinds of detailed and authoritative materials represented by the mountain of documents and other intelligence supplied by the likes of Popov, Penkovsky, and Kuklinski. Access is what is required, and that comes through human intervention.

Access is, of course, the central issue in U.S. efforts to blunt the outbreak of radical Islamic terrorism exemplified by al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The terrorists’ cell phones or their coded messages on the Internet can certainly be intercepted. And they just as easily can switch communications strategies, especially when such matters as whether throwaways can be traced becomes a public discussion item. To get at and stop a planned attack by individuals who accept that they will die in accomplishing their goal requires inside information. Yet, the terrorists are organized in small, self-contained cells, rather than in a top-down bureaucratic structure. Multiple attacks at multiple points by multiple groups possibly unaware of other participants would necessitate having someone in each of the execution cells. HUMINT collection requires either individuals who are willing to betray their group or an intelligence agency’s ability to place a spy under its control in or near the group. The former remains a possibility, given the terminal nature of many terrorist acts—cold feet can bring on a change of heart. The latter is very difficult, if not impossible, in the short run.

Finding, evaluating, recruiting, and managing individuals who are willing to undertake the risk of spying on their own governments or organizations is a time-intensive, detail-oriented endeavor. It is often filled with frustration and dead-ends, and the potential for embarrassment to the American government is always present. For the United States, the primary collectors of foreign intelligence from human sources are the CIA’s National Clandestine Service (NCS—formerly the Directorate of Operations), the Defense HUMINT Service (DHS), and, increasingly since 9/11, the FBI. These organizations have personnel stationed in countries around the world for the express purpose of conducting intelligence collection activities, including the recruitment of non- Americans to engage in espionage. In addition, the military services are active in seeking out all levels of intelligence in those areas where they are actively engaged or have forces stationed. To troops on the ground in hot spots, the gathering of intelligence has the immediacy of potentially life and death consequences.

Classic human intelligence operations involve the recruiting and handling of agents, and are managed by American citizens. In the intelligence profession, an agent is a non-American citizen—a foreign national—who has been recruited to commit treason and spy on his or her own country or group. Popular usage will also give the term “agent” to American citizens who are career employees of the U.S. government, as in “so-and-so was identified as a CIA agent.” This is most often incorrect terminology. The American intelligence personnel about whom they are usually commenting are properly called operations officers or, specifically for CIA personnel, “case officers.” While this is a more awkward formulation than agent, intelligence professionals tend to have little regard for commentators and other journalists who are either too lazy or unknowledgeable

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 10 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

to use the correct language.

U.S. intelligence operations in foreign countries are normally conducted under some form of “cover.” The term cover can be applied to an individual, organization, or installation. It refers to a publicly acknowledged occupation or identity meant to separate the person, organization, or place from its actual activities or sponsorship. An American facility based in another country might have a sign at the gate proclaiming it to be the “U.S. Atmospheric Research Center”; in fact, it could be a communications intelligence site downlinking data from reconnaissance satellites. This is “official cover”; there is no effort to hide that it is U.S. government installation, just what it is actually doing. Thus, an FBI officer collecting intelligence about Nazi plots in La Paz, Bolivia, before and during World War II might have held an officially acknowledged position as the legal attaché and worked out of an office in the U.S. Embassy. On the other hand, someone under “deep cover” or “nonofficial cover” in the same place might have worked ostensibly as a salesman for a farm equipment company or for a securities firm while collecting intelligence against the same target groups. The big difference in “official” and “nonofficial” cover is that the personnel under the former are protected against arrest and imprisonment in the host country, while the latter are not. In addition, nonofficial cover officers (NOCs) require different means of secure communications (which are readily available to officers stationed at U.S. facilities) and for secure storage of the incidentals of life and work that could identify them as working for an intelligence agency.

The officers in the Defense Attaché system also engage in HUMINT operations. Depending on the circumstances in the host country, attachés may undertake a range of direct and indirect collection activities. They will, for example, seek to identify and establish contact with foreign military officers who might be potential sources of information or who could become future leaders of the country. They personally observe and report on such events as military demonstrations and parades. For years, the Soviet May Day parade brought out almost the entire foreign military attaché corps in Moscow to see what new hardware would be on display. Attachés may also try to travel around the countryside of their host country (to the extent that travel restrictions allow) and observe and photograph installations or other military-associated activities.

Defectors are another important source of HUMINT. During the Cold War, defectors from the intelligence and security services of the communist countries were particularly prized. They could provide new or updated information on intelligence and counterintelligence operations and on the structure and leadership of the opposition services. Defector information can be particularly useful if it involves the identities of agents working for their previous service. When KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the British in 1992, he brought with him a treasure trove of notes and transcripts he had made from thousands of documents that had passed through his hands. A book based on Mitrokhin’s materials, published by intelligence historian Christopher Andrew in 1999, created quite a stir when it named a number of British citizens as having spied for the Russian service. (What would be really interesting to know is what was in the files that were not given to Andrew.) Even defectors who are not intelligence officers can still supply much useful information on the policies and

13

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 11 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

leadership of the government components for which they were working.

One of the biggest problems faced with defectors is their bona fides, that is, their credentials or their reliability. In essence, are they real? It is especially difficult when one defector’s story conflicts with information coming from another. The debate over the bona fides of Anatoli Golitsin and Yuri Nosenko in the early 1960s tied the CIA’s Soviet and counterintelligence components in knots for years. And what do you do about the information supplied by a defector who three months later redefects to his home country? That is what happened with KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko in 1985. Was Yurchenko in fact a defector who changed his mind or was he a plant sent over by the KGB to provide enough real information that some other piece might appear true? There remains no clear answer to this question.

Liaison arrangements with foreign intelligence services also play an important role in the collection of human and other forms of intelligence. The intelligence relationships forged in World War II with the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada (until the 1980s, New Zealand was an integral part of the arrangement) have proved to be durable. This is particularly true regarding signals intelligence, where there are formal agreements on sharing both the work and the product (the UKUSA agreement of 1946); but the relationships extend to cooperation in HUMINT collection as well. Exchanges of intelligence with Israel date back at least to the 1960s. Bilateral relationships for intelligence cooperation in specific areas have also existed with a wide range of other countries. These include signals interception and nuclear detection stations in Norway; telemetry-monitoring sites in the People’s Republic of China; Pakistan’s close involvement with U.S. support to the Afghanistan mujahideen in the 1980s; and the ongoing effort in the war on terrorism to forge cooperative relationships with a wide range of countries and intelligence agencies, some of which were not too long ago regarded as unsuitable for such relations. One area in which the United States has at times been less forthcoming in some of its liaison relationships concerns imagery intelligence, where the tendency has been not to release widely the latest and best imagery available.

Pictures from on High

Visual observation from a high point has been a basic part of intelligence gathering from the first scout who, perched on a mountain ridge, watched the enemy army file through the pass below. The march of time brought new inventions for viewing and imaging: the telescope, binoculars, and the camera. Man also learned how to improve on his vantage point in relation to the ground, with balloons, airplanes, and satellites. And he developed better and faster ways to communicate, first, his observations and, later, the images themselves. Signal flags gave way to telegraph and telephone lines, then came the wireless radio, and today pictures transmitted as data streams. State-of-the-art imagery intelligence (IMINT) brings all three of these strands of human technological development together—clear views from high above available in the hands of the user virtually instantaneously.

World War I saw the marriage of the airplane and the camera for

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 12 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

reconnaissance purposes. The union was somewhat awkward given the cumbersome nature of the photographic technology of the day; but it was a marriage that has lasted up to the present. By World War II, commanders had available photographic reconnaissance intelligence from both high-altitude bombers (B-17s and B-24s reconfigured for target identification and bomb- damage assessment) and high-speed interceptor aircraft (tactical intelligence support to ground forces). When the dropping of the “Iron Curtain” cut off direct access to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the U.S. Air Force began flying photographic and electronic intelligence reconnaissance missions along the Soviet and East European periphery. The target was Soviet order-of-battle information. However, the cameras in the airplanes could only look into Soviet territory for a limited number of miles.

When the Korean War started in 1950, President Truman began to authorize reconnaissance overflights of communist territory. Photographic missions were carried out over the Korean peninsula, Soviet territory around Vladivostok, and parts of Manchuria. President Eisenhower continued to approve overflights of Soviet territory after he took office in 1953. In May 1954, an RB-47 photographed Soviet Long Range Air Force airfields on a flight path that took it over Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. And between March and May 1956, 156 overflights mapped the entire Soviet northern frontier. These overflights and peripheral probings were, however, a dangerous business; and losses of lives occurred from planes being shot down.

By the mid-1950s, the technology of cameras and film had advanced beyond the ceiling of existing aircraft. What was needed was something that could fly high enough to be well above the maximum altitude attainable by Soviet interceptor jets and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). That airplane was the U-2, developed for the CIA by Lockheed Aircraft Company’s Clarence (“Kelly”) Johnson. It carried two cameras, “one a special long-focal length spotting camera able to resolve objects two to three feet across” from an altitude of 70,000 feet, and “the other a tracking camera that would produce a continuous strip of film of the whole flight path.” The U-2’s first mission over the USSR was on July 1, 1956, and the last of over twenty missions was on May 1, 1960, when Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk. During that time, the U-2 provided significant strategic photographic intelligence, including on the Soviet Union’s bomber force (the “bomber gap” was a myth), missile forces, atomic energy programs, and air defense systems.

The loss of the U-2 and the capture of its pilot (Powers was exchanged for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in 1962) brought manned overflights of the USSR to an end. But that ended neither the collection of strategic photographic intelligence on the Soviet Union nor the use of the U-2 for intelligence gathering purposes. Flown by Taiwanese pilots, the U-2 was used for overflights of Chinese territory. The airplane played a crucial role in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, bringing back photographs clearly showing that the Russians had indeed begun building strategic missile sites in Cuba. Over the years, the U-2 has continued to be used for both peripheral and overflight missions in other areas of the world. For much of its history, the U-2 was seen as primarily a “strategic” overhead platform. However, during the 1991 Gulf War and later in operations in the Balkans, it

14

15

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 13 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

was credited with providing a substantial percentage of the imagery available for tactical ground surveillance and targeting. On the other hand, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been an increasing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for some of the imaging functions previously handled by the U- 2. The U.S. military’s use of the U-2 is scheduled to be phased out by 2011.

Aware that Soviet countermeasures would eventually catch up with the slow- flying U-2, CIA management began working with Kelly Johnson on a whole new type of reconnaissance aircraft. The OXCART program resulted in the A-12, which could fly at extremely high speed (over 2,000 miles per hour) and at great altitude (over 90,000 feet) and which incorporated the best radar- absorbing (stealth) technology of the day. The OXCART had its first operational use in 1967, when the increased deployment of surface-to-air missiles around Hanoi led to the decision to substitute A-12s for the U-2s that were being used for photographic reconnaissance over North Vietnam. In addition to flying over North Vietnam, A-12 missions out of Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa targeted North Korea following the seizure of the USS Pueblo in January 1968. By mid- 1968, the SR-71—the Air Force’s two-seated version of the A-12—had arrived in Okinawa, and the OXCART had flown its last operational mission. The cost of two similar programs and the Air Force’s desire to control its own reconnaissance assets doomed the A-12.

In addition to their service during the Vietnam War and continuing coverage of North Korea, SR-71s would be flown over the succeeding years to photograph “hot spots” around the globe. When tensions mounted somewhere in the world and quick photographic intelligence was needed, the SR-71s were used. They photographed the battlefields during the Yom Kippur War, overflew Cuba to monitor the presence of Soviet aircraft and troops, checked on the type of cargo being delivered to Nicaraguan ports, monitored the Iran-Iraq war, and provided bomb damage assessment after the U.S. air attack on Libya. In 1990, over the objections of many in Congress, the SR-71 was retired by the Air Force. It was returned to duty and used briefly during the conflict in the Balkans in the mid- 1990s, but was permanently retired in 1998 after several years of debate about funding.

Stopped in May 1960 with the loss of the U-2, strategic photographic reconnaissance of the USSR resumed in mid-August with the first successful launch of an operational CORONA satellite. In February 1958, President Eisenhower had authorized the CIA to develop a satellite that would record its images on film and return the film to earth for analysis. The procedure developed had a film capsule being ejected from the spacecraft, de-orbited into the atmosphere, then parachuted, and caught in midair by an airplane equipped with a special device to snag the descending capsule. The backup was direct recovery from the ocean. The first pictures were not as good as those from the U-2, but they improved. The CORONA program would last fourteen years and change the face of America’s strategic understanding of the Soviet Union. Beyond resolving concerns about a “missile gap,” CORONA “located all Soviet ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missile] sites, all intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) sites, all antiballistic missile (ABM) sites, and all warship bases, submarine bases, and previously unknown military and industrial complexes.”

16

17

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 14 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

From an early ground resolution (that is, the smallest object that can be identified in an image) of perhaps thirty-five feet, the resolution on some succeeding imaging satellites would be measured in inches. Commercial satellite imagery is now available with a resolution of less than twenty inches. However, not all reconnaissance satellites are designed to do the same thing. The CORONA satellites produced “wide-area” coverage; but by 1964, the United States was also receiving pictures from a “close-look” satellite, codenamed GAMBIT. The latter was not a replacement for the former, since each type was needed depending on whether the requirement was for coverage of a broad area or for more detailed imagery of a much smaller target. For example, CORONA could survey whole regions of the Soviet Union looking for areas where ICBM sites might be under construction. GAMBIT could then be targeted to produce high-resolution photographs of suspected missile fields.

Development of new photographic reconnaissance satellites brought continuing improvements to the quality of the output—at ever increasing cost. After nearly getting cut for budgetary reasons in 1969, the first unit of the HEXAGON program blasted off in June 1971. The HEXAGON satellite is also referred as the KH-9, or the ninth in the KEYHOLE camera series. The press eventually started calling the satellite “Big Bird.” The satellite’s camera system doubled the previous wide-area swath to 80 by 360 miles and had a resolution of two feet compared to the existing close-look satellite’s resolution of eighteen inches. The KH-9 carried four film capsules instead of two, giving it a longer useful life and more flexibility in choosing when to return film. And its sheer size (over 30,000 pounds) allowed it to carry other, nonphotographic sensors, such as antennae for collecting signals intelligence or for relaying covert communications to and from U.S. agents.

The next big technological breakthrough in imaging from space came with the launch of the KENNAN or KH-11 satellite in December 1976. Film-return satellites simply could not supply intelligence on fast-breaking situations. Logistics and weather meant that it took days and sometimes weeks for the film capsules to get from the orbiting spacecraft to the desks of the photointerpreters. An event of relatively brief duration could be over before the images depicting it were available for review. The KH-11’s camera system converts visible light into electrical charges that, in turn, are transmitted as data to ground stations where they are transformed into pictures. The result is near- real-time imagery from space. (It is not real-time imagery because of the delays in transmission brought about by moving substantial volumes of data from the satellite to a data-relay satellite and on to the ground.) Because the images are digital, they can be further enhanced by additional processing after they are received.

A stream of digital images, even if for only parts of each day (the KH-11 cameras are not on and transmitting continuously), was as revolutionary to the photointerpreters as the satellite was technologically. From 1961 to 1996, the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), a “service of common concern” managed by the CIA and staffed with personnel from the CIA, DIA, and military intelligence units, was the focus of national-level interpretation activities. Although their former tools of the light table and magnification

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 15 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

equipment were not discarded, the computer became a critical element in the work of photointerpreters. When the KH-11 came on line, NPIC’s computers would “scan the stream of incoming imagery and store the billions of bits of information…for comparison with fresh intelligence. The torrent of digital imagery that began coming…would have been unmanageable” without the computers and their databases. Today, the computers can recognize a vast range of standard items and also can compare previous images with new ones and alert an interpreter if a known item of interest or something new turns up in a fresh piece of imagery.

The capabilities of IMINT from satellites, planes, and UAVs have progressed well beyond simple photographs. Standard photography requires daylight to produce a picture and cannot show what is below heavy cloud cover. Additional imaging systems are deployed to compensate for these problems. Infrared sensors define objects by their differing temperatures and, therefore, can produce images even at night. Radar is used to provide yet another kind of image. Since it sends out radio waves that are bounced back to the emitter, radar can “see” both at night and through cloud cover. Other radar systems can detect underground sources of radiation and identify differences in density or composition.

The handling of the array of images produced by overhead reconnaissance platforms underwent significant change in 1996 with the reorganization of the U.S. IMINT community. Imagery exploitation was consolidated in a completely new organization within the Department of Defense—the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), renamed in 2003 the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). NIMA/NGA combines the Defense Mapping Agency, CIA’s NPIC, the Defense Department’s Central Imagery Office, and parts of several other defense agencies. NGA is in the process of building a new “INT”—GEOINT or geospatial intelligence—through the merger of imagery, maps, charts, and environmental data.

A Big Ear or a Vacuum Cleaner?

David Kahn, generally recognized as the great historian of cryptography, traces the use of enciphered messages by the military back to the Spartans somewhere around the fifth century B.C. Over the centuries, political and military leaders have regularly sought to communicate within their own community without outsiders having access to what was being said. That was true of handwritten letters, of telegrams sent by wire, of messages over radio links, and of today’s multiple forms of communication. Secure communication is rightly seen as important to the success of many different kinds of ventures. The solution was codes and ciphers, and the countersolution was to break those codes and ciphers—to read the plain text that was being concealed.

The value of signals intelligence (SIGINT) to national security is etched in collective memory by the successes of the American MAGIC and the British ULTRA in World War II. More recently, the VENONA program, with its decrypted KGB messages confirming the high level of Soviet espionage in the United States during the 1940s, was made public in 1995. These successes are

18

19

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 16 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

associated with an important part of SIGINT—communications intelligence (COMINT) and specifically the breaking of codes. But the intelligence discipline of SIGINT includes a much wider range of activities. Before work can begin on what might be an important encrypted message, that message must be intercepted and identified as potentially significant from the midst of millions of other pieces of information. Even if the message has been sent without encryption, it still must be found, identified, either transcribed (if in English) or translated (if in a non-English language), and put into context, as few communications are so unambiguous as to have instant meaning by themselves.

In the United States, the National Security Agency (NSA) has primary responsibility for collecting and processing SIGINT. However, other agencies may at times engage in some specialized forms of SIGINT collection that are specific to their missions. For example, the CIA may monitor local police radio bands when a surveillance team is on the street in a hostile country. In addition, deployed military units often have with them the capability to monitor an enemy’s radio communications. Nonetheless, it is NSA’s job to eavesdrop on the diplomatic and military communications of the countries of the world and to try to find in a sea of words those that belong to terrorists who mean harm to the United States.

NSA was created by Executive Order in 1952 and placed in the Defense Department under the Secretary of Defense. Over the years, several attempts have been made to find a visual image that might succinctly describe NSA. One image is of a big ear, hearing everything. Another is of a vacuum cleaner, sucking in all the words around it. Either of these will do in a pinch, but neither is really accurate nor does full justice to NSA’s contribution to U.S. national security. As an organization, NSA brought together the SIGINT and communications security (COMSEC—now most often referred to as information security or INFOSEC) activities of the armed services within a single agency outside the direct line of military command. The goal was to a provide unified management of two vital and highly sensitive functions and, thereby, eliminate the kind of interservice competition and bickering that had flourished since before World War II.

The two main components of NSA’s signals intelligence mission are communications intelligence (COMINT) and electronic intelligence (ELINT). The intelligence produced by the interception of Japanese and German encrypted messages—and the breaking of the encryption systems through which those communications were sent—is classic COMINT. As the name makes clear, COMINT involves the interception, processing, and analysis of the communications of foreign governments or other groups, such as terrorists or narcotics traffickers. On the other hand, ELINT focuses on electromagnetic emanations that are not communications but are not from atomic detonations or a radioactive source. Radar systems of potentially hostile countries are a prime target of ELINT collection. By identifying radar locations and collecting such specifications as frequencies, pulse lengths and rates, and signal strengths, plans can be made to circumvent or neutralize these systems.

As was the case with all of the U.S. intelligence agencies, the three top target

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 17 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

areas of NSA’s activities from 1952 until the early 1990s were the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries, and China. In keeping with its vacuum cleaner image, however, there was also plenty of intercept activities targeted on the diplomatic and military communications of other countries. Occasionally, specific areas would be raised to the top of the requirements list during times of upheaval, such as wars in the Middle East, the Vietnam War, or the hostage crisis in Iran. Nevertheless, much of NSA’s network of multiple collection capabilities was keyed to watching the Soviet Union.

Over the years, NSA has used every natural medium for intelligence collection— air, sea, land, and space. During the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. airborne fleet for ELINT collection included the RB-47. Loaded with specialized antennas and an array of monitoring equipment, it flew what was known as ferret missions. The same program under which U.S. overflights photographed much of northern Russia in 1956 also had an ELINT collection component focused on Soviet radars, air bases, and missile installations. Other flights along the USSR’s periphery constantly probed the Soviet air-defense radar system. The idea was to get the Russians to react by turning on their tracking equipment, the signals from which could then be intercepted and analyzed. The dangers of these activities were quite real, both in terms of the potential repercussions if the Soviets mistook a probe for an attack and of the loss of life that came when aircraft were shot down. On September 2, 1997, a National Vigilance Park was established at Ft. George G. Meade, Maryland, to honor “those ‘silent warriors’ who risked, and often lost, their lives performing airborne signals intelligence missions during the Cold War.”

That the United States continues to fly ELINT missions and that danger is still associated with this activity is illustrated by the collision between a Navy EP-3e and a trailing Chinese fighter jet on April 1, 2001. The EP-3e is used for maritime surveillance and can also intercept electronic signals from military units on land. The damaged Navy plane was forced to land on China’s Hainan Island, and the crew was held for ten days until the United States said it was sorry for the loss of the Chinese pilot and for intruding into Chinese airspace. The disassembled plane was returned to the United States in July. U.S. reconnaissance flights off the coast of China had resumed in May, when an Air Force RC-135 from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa flew a mission in international airspace off China’s northeastern coast and returned to base without interference from Chinese interceptors.

In the early 1960s, NSA began converting some old World War II ships into floating intercept facilities. The idea was that ships could go to places too far away for regular airborne reconnaissance and where land-based stations could not be built. Such ships are loaded with antennas, racks of receivers and tape recorders, and teletype machines. COMINT collection operators work alongside ELINT specialists who are searching for radar emissions. Positioned correctly, a ship also can loiter and pick up the narrow, straight-line emissions of microwave transmitters, which are difficult for airborne ferret flights to intercept since they fly through the beam too quickly. The operators are usually Navy personnel, but NSA civilians will spend time on board during crisis times or for special assignments.

20

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 18 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

As with ferret flights, intelligence collection from ships is also hazardous duty. In 1967, in the midst of the Six-Day War, Israeli fighter planes and torpedo boats attacked the SIGINT ship USS Liberty. The toll was 34 dead and 171 wounded. The blame for the attack—whether it was deliberate or an accident— continues to be debated to this day. Then, in January 1968, the Navy SIGINT ship USS Pueblo was attacked and captured by the North Koreans. The crew (one sailor died in the attack) was held in North Korea for eleven months. The Pueblo remains in North Korea, serving as a tourist attraction and a propaganda piece.

During the Cold War, the Navy and NSA also had intercept operators on submarines. They watched Soviet nuclear tests from as close to the sites as they could get. The operators in the submarines would also record shore-based transmitters and collect Soviet fleet communications. In 1975, a covert submarine operation codenamed “IVY BELLS” succeeded in tapping a Russian communications cable running from the Kamchatka Peninsula to Vladivostok in the Sea of Okhotsk. The submarine eventually attached a pod with monitoring equipment, from which it could periodically pick up the recorded communications rather than have to sit on the sea bottom and record them directly. The operation lasted until a former NSA employee compromised it around 1980. It is likely that similar activities continue today. For example, the submarine USS Memphis was eavesdropping on a naval exercise in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000, when the Russian submarine Kursk suffered a fatal internal explosion and sank, killing all aboard. The disaster was electronically recorded by the Memphis. The use of submarines as platforms for electronic and other spying missions continues. The Seawolf-class submarine USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23), commissioned in January 2005, is designed as a multimission vessel, with unique reconnaissance and special warfare capabilities.

By the late 1980s, NSA and its service affiliates also had established permanent listening posts literally all over the world, including stations about as far North as you can go. Jeffrey T. Richelson identified some sixty stations in twenty countries, but noted that there were also forty-five joint NSA-CIA special collection activities in various U.S. embassies and consulates. Some of the permanent facilities are large, manned stations and others are unmanned locations from which the collected signals are remoted to other sites and back to NSA headquarters. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of stations located on U.S. military facilities fell victim to the budget cutting that accompanied the collective sigh of relief at the end of the Cold War. These included such stations as Adak in Alaska and Vint Hill Farms in Virginia, which were closed in 1997, and Bad Aibling in Germany, which closed in 2002. It was reported that substantial numbers of the NSA staff at Bad Aibling transferred to the NSA facility on the Royal Air Force base at Menwith Hill in the United Kingdom.

SIGINT collection was part of the dawn of America’s space age. Throughout the 1960s, the United States deployed low-earth orbiting satellites targeted on radar emissions. The satellites retransmitted the intercepted signals to ground stations from where they were dispatched on tape back to the United States for analysis. By the early 1970s, a much more sophisticated SIGINT satellite,

21

22

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 19 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

initially codenamed RHYOLITE, was flying in geosynchronous (“stationary” above the equator) orbit at 22,300 miles above the earth. From that vantage point, a constellation of satellites can intercept microwave transmissions, telemetry from rocket launches, and telephone communications over the VHF and UHF frequency bands. For areas that cannot be monitored from geosynchronous orbit, other satellites (originally launched under the codename of JUMPSEAT) are placed in highly elliptical orbits designed to give them more sustained periods of time over their primary areas of interest. The follow-on system to RHYOLITE—codenamed MAGNUM—was first launched in 1985. In recent years, design of the next generation of SIGINT satellites has been delayed (perhaps for as much as a decade) by disagreements over what these expensive pieces of technology need to be doing in the modern world of communications.

The interconnectedness and ease of communication in the world in which we live can be both a blessing and a curse. At a minimum, such communications have immeasurably complicated the job of trying to intercept and understand the communications of the “bad guys.” The Internet, circuit encryption, fiber optics, and digital cellular telephones are all part of the accelerated pace of change in public and private communications. In particular, a shift away from microwave and satellite communications to buried fiber optic cable presents significant challenges in the continued collection of COMINT.

Under the UKUSA Communications Intelligence Agreement of 1946, much of the SIGINT collection effort is shared among NSA, the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE), and Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate (DSD). (The role of New Zealand in the partnership has been clouded ever since the country declared itself a nuclearfree zone.) The partnership has endured for a long time, and has been useful to all parties, as the sharing of responsibilities has helped reduce the pressure on any one country. However, its importance was reemphasized on January 24, 2000, when NSA’s computers crashed. Collection was not affected, but processing intercepts had to be shifted to GCHQ for the better part of four days.

NSA’s ability to break into and read the enciphered message traffic that flows freely around the world is not a subject about which there is much known publicly. That is, of course, as it should be. If you tell someone you are reading their codes, they will change those codes and seek better ones. That NSA regards the current encryption environment as challenging is documented in the agency’s prolonged effort through the 1990s to outlaw the export from the United States of powerful encryption software. The futility of that attempt—and the penalty it exacted from American companies—eventually was recognized, and the effort has been virtually abandoned.

As the SIGINT world continues to face difficulties in adjusting to twenty-first century communications challenges, some have raised the question of its continuing relevance. The simple answer is that interception and processing (including breaking and reading encrypted materials) of the communications and other electronic emissions of such nation-based threats as North Korea and Iran is likely to remain a high-priority item. Tactical interception of an enemy’s

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 20 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

communications in the field will certainly continue to be necessary. However, there may be targets—such as the communications of the terrorist network of al Qaeda—that remain a puzzle for which at any given moment there are too few pieces available to create a workable picture.

Measuring the Unseeable

There are some rather exotic and highly classified technical collection activities that have been drawn together and given the lengthy name of measurement and signature intelligence or MASINT. It is a relatively new addition to the INTs. Official recognition by the Intelligence Community came in 1986. A MASINT office was established in the Department of Defense in 1992 and upgraded in 1999 to a DIA directorate. Earlier, the Central MASINT Organization and, now, the Directorate for MASINT and Technical Collection coordinates MASINT activities across the other intelligence disciplines. Although MASINT has some independent collection systems, including at the tactical level, coordination is needed because much data comes from sensors associated with signals and imagery intelligence. Primary responsibility for exploitation of collected data rests with the Air Force’s National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC).

As an intelligence collection discipline, MASINT utilizes a range of technologies to detect, locate, identify, and describe objects through their basic physical properties. Measuring the physical characteristics of objects allows the creation of unique “signatures” for potential targets. The types of measurements used include size, shape, sound, heat, vibration, unintentional radiation, density, and chemical and biological composition. For example, spectral sensors measure the way objects reflect and emit electro-optical energy. This allows identification through an object’s surface composition (ranging from type of metal to the nature of vegetation). Spectral analysis, thus, can readily distinguish the use of camouflage. Seismic and acoustic sensors measure the sound or vibration created by moving objects (a tank or a submarine). MASINT infrared sensors on satellites have been used to identify rocket launches for decades. And today’s “smart weapons” use MASINT signatures for the internal guidance systems that direct them to their targets. Computerized databases containing many thousands of “signatures” allow measurements and signatures to be compared with known data for rapid identification of a newly detected object. Insuring the operationally timely processing and transmission of this intelligence to the point where it is needed is the real challenge for the future of MASINT.

Notes

1. Michael A. Turner, Why Secret Intelligence Fails (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005), 73. 2. The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Press Briefing,” March 10, 1995,

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd35.htm. 3. Abram N. Shulsky, Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence (New York:

Brassey’s, 1991), 175. [Footnote omitted] 4. Loch K. Johnson, Secret Agencies: U.S. Intelligence in a Hostile World (New Haven, CT:

Yale University Press, 1996), 193. 5. Air Force Historical Studies Office, “A Brief History of Air Force Scientific and Technical

23

12/2/12 9:48 PMPSI

Page 21 of 21http://psi.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/print.aspx?d=/books/gpg…%26d%3d%2fbooks%2fgpg%2fC9298%2fC9298-305.xml%26i%3d0&print=true

Intelligence,” https://www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/PopTopics/histechintel.htm. 6. David A. Reese, “50 Years of Excellence: ASD Forges Ahead As the Army’s Premier OSINT

Unit in the Pacific,” Military Intelligence 31(4) (October-December, 2005): 27–29. 7. At http://wnc.fedworld.gov/. 8. U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Public Affairs Staff, “DNI and D/CIA Announce

Establishment of the DNI Open Source Center,” November 8, 2005, https://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/press_release/2005/pr11082005.html.

9. “White House Week: Measuring Hatred, One Site at a Time,” U.S. News & World Report (May 15, 2006): 18.

10. Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (New York: Crown, 1974), 3–15. 11. On Popov, see William Hood, Mole (New York: Norton, 1982). On Popov and Penkovskiy,

see Clarence Ashley, CIA SpyMaster (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 2004), 81–234; and John Limond Hart, The CIA’s Russians (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003), 18–127. On Penkovsky, see Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War (New York: Scribner’s, 1992).

12. Benjamin Weiser, A Secret Life: The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, and the Price He Paid to Save His Country (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004), ix.

13. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

14. Larry Tart and Robert Keefe, The Price of Vigilance: Attacks on American Surveillance Flights (New York: Ballantine, 2001), 130–137.

15. Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos, Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1994), 126.

16. Thomas P. McIninch, “The OXCART Story: Record of a Pioneering Achievement,” Studies in Intelligence 15(1) (Winter 1971): 1–34, https://www.cia.gov/csi/kent_csi/docs/v15i1a01p_0001.htm.

17. Dwayne A. Day, John M. Logsdon, and Brian Latell, eds., Eye in the Sky: The Story of the Corona Spy Satellites (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 7.

18. William E. Burrows, Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security (London: Bantam Press, 1988), 218.

19. David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet, rev. ed. (New York: Scribner, 1996), 82.

20. “National Vigilance Park,” http://www.nsa.gov/vigilance/index.cfm. 21. James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency

from the Cold War through the Dawn of a New Century (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 173–174.

22. Jeffrey T. Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence Community, 2nd ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 181, 187.

23. See John Macartney, “‘John, How Should We Explain MASINT?’” Intelligencer 12(1) (Summer 2001): 28–34; John L. Morris, “The Nature and Applications of Measurement and Signature Intelligence,” American Intelligence Journal 19(3 & 4) (1999–2000): 81– 84; and “The MASINT Association,” http://www.masint.org/index.htm.