Strategic Intelligence

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Loch K. Johnson. Strategic Intelligence - 2. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, . http://www.praeger.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE INTELLIGENCE CYCLE? Arthur S. Hulnick

NO CONCEPT IS MORE DEEPLY ENSHRINED IN the literature than that of the “intelligence cycle.” Readers can see this clearly from the other chapters in this volume. I studied the intelligence cycle as an undergraduate in Sherman Kent's book on strategic intelligence and then later when I attended the U.S. Air Force Intelligence School in 1957. In 1965, in the training courses required by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), I studied it yet again. When it came time to start writing about intelligence, a practice I began in my later years in the CIA, I realized that there were serious problems with the intelligence cycle. It is really not a very good description of the ways in which the intelligence process works. Additionally, it ignores two main parts of intelligence work, counterintelligence and covert action. There is an alternative view.

The First Step

The intelligence cycle is so nicely described in other chapters that there seems no need to go over it here. So, let us start at the beginning and look at what is wrong. The notion that policy makers, or intelligence consumers, as they are sometimes called, provide guidance to intelligence managers to begin the intelligence process is incorrect. Policy consumers do sometimes indicate their main concerns to intelligence managers, but often they assume that the intelligence system will alert them to problems, or provide judgments about the future. Consumers will sometimes tell intelligence managers what they are worried about, or the direction in which they intend to take policy—but not always.

Still, it is usually not too difficult for intelligence managers to learn what policy makers are up to, but the managers often have to take the initiative to obtain the information. If intelligence managers at various levels are in touch with their policy counterparts, this sharing of information may work quite well. Over the years, intelligence managers have tried to systematize this process by asking policy officials to provide specifics on their concerns. In the Carter administration, for example, a system of National Intelligence Topics (NITs) was created as a way of soliciting guidance for intelligence. Later, they were called Key Intelligence Questions (KIQs). In some cases, when policy consumers failed to submit NITs or KIQs, managers had to resort to sending policy officials a list of topics, asking them to cross out the ones they thought were not necessary, or adding those they wanted to add to the list. Even then, the lists were sometimes ignored.

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In the end, intelligence managers have to make decisions about the subjects that ought to be covered. Often, this is driven by world events. But, none of this provides guidance for intelligence collection. The guidance comes from within the system. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the George W. Bush administration, is reported to have once said that “we don't know what we don't know,” but that is usually not the case. Intelligence managers often know what gaps exist in the intelligence data base, derived from intelligence collectors, and analysts. Filling the gaps is what drives the intelligence collection process, not guidance from policy makers. Thus, the first step in the intelligence cycle is incorrect in reality.

The Second Step

The second step is equally incorrect. Collection managers cannot wait for guidance in regard to gaps in the intelligence data base to begin the collection process. The gaps will be filled once the collection process is under way. For example, in running espionage operations, commonly called HUMINT (for human intelligence), it may take months or years to find a person who has access to the information needed and is willing to be recruited as a spy. The same may be true for technical collection sensors. Satellites in space, which make up many of the sensor platforms, are not nearly as flexible as managers would wish. Thus, anticipating the intended targets cannot be overlooked. For example, during the British confrontation with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, the United States could not help the British with space imagery because the satellite, programmed to observe the Soviet Union at that time, only passed over the Falklands at night.

Of course, with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, imagery collection has become more easily refocused on targets of opportunity, but the unmanned aircraft may still not be in the right place when they are needed. Even open source intelligence (OSINT), which has been given new life in recent years because of the proliferation of information on the Internet, requires planning to ensure access to needed material. Intelligence managers need sophisticated software to mine the data because there is so much of it.

The Real Drivers

For all these reasons, intelligence managers, and not policy officials, are the real drivers of the intelligence collection process. Clearly, intelligence moves from collection to analysis, as the intelligence cycle holds, but analysts do not always need new intelligence material to understand world events. The data base is already so large that a competent analyst could write about most events without any more than open sources to spur the process. The incremental addition of new intelligence from human sources or technical sensors may modify the analytic process but rarely drives it.

The job of the analyst is, in part, to evaluate raw material and put it in perspective. The analyst receives intelligence material from a variety of sources, including media reports, official reports from other government agencies, as well as reports from the intelligence collection process. In my experience as a

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practicing analyst in the military and in the CIA, raw reports from human sources or technical sensors are sometimes fragmentary, biased, contradictory, or just plain wrong. In order to analyze the data, the analyst compares the new material with the existing data base and previous analysis. Hanging a finished product—whether it is current reporting or a longer range estimate—on one source usually does not work well. This is apparently what happened in the case of the estimate on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq that helped trigger the invasion of that country. The estimate was based, in part, on the reporting of one rather poor and unreliable source. The estimate turned out to be quite wrong, as we now know.

Operating in Parallel

A better way of looking at the relationship of intelligence collection and intelligence analysis is to think of the two processes as operating in parallel rather than sequentially. The two processes are co-equal in terms of utility. It is important to note as well that raw reporting from the collection process, set up into standardized formats, usually goes to policy officials as well as to analysts at about the same time. Though this may not always be true in other intelligence systems, it is certainly true in the United States. Whereas senior policy officials may not see a great deal of the raw reporting, there are usually watch centers at the various policy agencies that screen the raw reporting and send forward the most interesting ones.

Unfortunately, as I have already noted, some of this raw intelligence may be incomplete, contradictory, or just wrong. Policy officials sometimes take the reporting as having been judged and evaluated. Thus, I have heard officials say that the CIA has reported an event, when in fact what the officials have seen is an unevaluated agent report passed along to them by their watch centers. It is not possible to stop this flow of raw reporting. As Bob Gates, the former Director of the CIA once noted to me, once the spigot is opened, it is not possible to close it, even though allowing consumers to have raw reporting at about the same time as the analysts receive them creates some serious problems for the analysts. Collection managers often take a different view. They believe they are doing a great service to the policy community by providing this raw reporting. If the intelligence cycle really worked, the circulation of raw reports to policy officials would not happen.

A Major Problem

Since intelligence collection and intelligence analysis operate in parallel and should be co-equal, one would expect that there would be a great deal of information sharing between the two. Regrettably, this is not always the case. Because of restrictions of information sharing, psychological barriers, fears of compromising sources, and security concerns, the intelligence collection process and the intelligence analytic process not only operate in parallel, they are sometimes quite independent of each other. This is a major problem.

When I first joined the CIA, I was assigned on a temporary basis to an office in the Directorate of Plans (DDP), later renamed the Directorate of Operations

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(DO), and in 2005, renamed yet again as the National Clandestine Service (NCS). My job was to deal with incoming reports from the field. When an interesting report came in one day, I asked my boss if we should alert the relevant analyst about it. He rejected the idea, saying that our job was to send reports like it to the White House, and not to the Directorate of Intelligence, since analysts were not worth the attention. I was shocked. Later, when I became an analyst, I did my best to establish good relations with my operational colleagues, but there were issues.

Barriers to Communication

In those days there were physical barriers, manned by armed guards, to prevent analysts and operations officers from visiting each other's offices. Later, the physical barriers were removed, but the psychological ones remained. Operations people feared that somehow analysts would mishandle reports from the field and reveal the identity of clandestine sources. Analysts mistrusted operations officers because they were thought to be devious and untrustworthy. This mistrust was kindled in part because analysts in those days tended to be introverts who found the extroverted personality of the typical operations officers to be abrasive. Operations people tended to think that the introverted analysts were “wimps.”

Over the years these stereotypes have largely been overcome, but recent efforts to increase communication between analysts and operators by colocating them have not always been successful. Agency managers have pushed analysts to take tours overseas with field stations, but it is more difficult for an operations officer to serve a tour as an analyst. Similar issues may not arise in other intelligence agencies unless they have co-equal collection and analysis components.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), for example, was immune to this sort of “stovepipe” problem because it was mostly an analytic rather than collection agency. As Defense HUMINT grows, perhaps the same problem will arise. The National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agencies (NGIA) are devoted mostly to collection, but they tend to be tightly compartmentalized, creating a different kind of “stovepipe” problem. In theory, all the intelligence agencies should share raw data and coordinate analysis, but for a variety of reasons they do not always do so. This was one of the main critiques of both the 9/11 Commission and the commission investigating the intelligence failure surrounding the estimate on WMD.

A Mixed Bag

There is a tendency among intelligence agencies to hold back the most sensitive and exciting reports until the agency's leaders have been able to deliver the reports to senior policy officials, thus highlighting the skill and cleverness of their people and “scoring points” with the officials. One effort to spur interagency communications has been the establishment of centers, where all the agencies have representation and where their representatives can easily talk with their counterparts, even informally, to discuss events and incoming

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intelligence. The establishment of these centers has been something of a mixed bag. We know from the 9/11 investigations that the then-existing counterterrorism center (CTC) was not a place where all information was shared.

Now, efforts at intelligence reform have “morphed” the CTC into a National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), controlled by the new Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Will that spur the agencies into more easily sharing their best and most sensitive data? It would be nice to think so, but experience shows that this does not always happen, even at the highest level.

The Final Stages

In the final stages of the intelligence cycle finished intelligence, broken down into a variety of products, emerges from the analytic process. It is supposed to be delivered to policy officials—the literature refers to this delivery as dissemination—and then policy officials either make decisions or create further requirements and the cycle starts over again. This, too, is a distortion of what really happens. Much of this depends on the kind of intelligence product that is being delivered. These products include warning intelligence, in which consumers are alerted to “breaking news,” current intelligence to update consumers on world events on which they already have some knowledge, in- depth studies on particular situations or issues, and forecasts of the future, the estimate. All products are received and used in a different way, but none of them really drive the policy process.

Warning intelligence is supposed to alert policy officials to breaking world situations, especially those for which they may have to take action. Both intelligence managers and policy consumers hate surprise. It is embarrassing for intelligence when the system misses an event about which it should have had information. For example, the CIA failed to detect the fact that the Indian government planned to conduct a nuclear test in 1998. Later investigations revealed that this was both a collection and an analysis failure. The CIA had no assets it could tap in India at that time, and the Indian analyst at the CIA had somehow missed the fact that the Indian prime minister had declared his intention to hold the tests. Despite the fact that there was little the U.S. government could do to stop the tests, policy officials were nonetheless outraged at this failure.

Even greater outrage was directed at the entire intelligence community for its failure to detect the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States. This has been exhaustively examined and has led to the restructuring of the intelligence system. Yet, there is considerable evidence that there was little that might have been done to avert the disaster. But, it illustrates the point that policy officials expect the intelligence system to be all-knowing, all-seeing, and always correct. As Richard Betts pointed out many years ago, intelligence failure is probably inevitable.

Warning of crisis should come early enough so that policy officials can have time to develop some kind of considered response. Unfortunately, the warning may

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come so late that it is really an alert that the crisis has already begun. Using a system that is composed of warning centers at major military commands, tied in to warning centers at all the intelligence agencies and in policy departments in Washington, and taking advantage of the proliferation of twenty-four-hour TV and Internet outlets, the warning network rarely misses the start of a crisis, and it is then able to reach out to decision makers quite rapidly. When the decision makers ask intelligence officers how they should respond to the crisis, typically intelligence officers decline to provide advice, thus staying clear of the policy process.

The Most Useful Product

Current or daily intelligence is the most ubiquitous of all types of intelligence products, delivered at all levels and usually first thing in the morning. It is designed to supplement the media, based on the assumption that policy officials have already gotten their media inputs from newspapers or television news. It is the most popular of all intelligence products because current intelligence is an “easy read,” short, and to the point. For those policy officials who only have ten or fifteen minutes a day to absorb intelligence products—and consumer surveys consistently show that this is about all the time policy officials have for such things—current intelligence is rated as the most useful product from the intelligence community. The idea of this product is to summarize events, explain how they fit into some context, and suggest what might happen next. It is a very journalistic methodology.

Unlike warning intelligence that may lead to policy action, as the intelligence cycle suggests, current intelligence hardly ever leads to policy decisions—and it is not meant to do so. Instead, it gives generalists at senior levels a chance to find out about events outside their main areas of responsibility. Specialists often complain that the daily intelligence flow does not provide the level of detail they would need to make policy, but the current intelligence products are not designed for specialists. In fact, it would be quite likely that specialists would have seen a great deal of the raw intelligence data that lay behind the current intelligence product anyway.

During the 9/11 investigation, much was made of the fact that one daily publication, the President's Daily Brief (PDB), had on August 6, 2001, reported the possibility that terrorists might use commercial aircraft as cruise missiles to attack commercial or government buildings within the United States. Critics of the president took this to have been a warning the president and his senior staff had missed, but normally the PDB would not have been the kind of intelligence product used for warning. The warning would have been delivered in a much more specific document devoted entirely to the subject. Intelligence managers have never expected the PDB or similar publications to be more than educational in nature. Certainly, these publications do not drive the intelligence process.

In-Depth Studies

The same might be said for the myriad in-depth intelligence studies churned out

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by the analytic components. These studies have proliferated in recent years, although they were rarely attempted at the beginning of the Cold War. These studies are designed to provide in-depth analysis on specific subjects and are meant more for policy officials at working levels rather than senior decision makers, who rarely have the time to read them. These studies help in forcing analysts to come to grips with a specific subject, provide useful information to consumers within the intelligence system, and support policy makers as they design policy initiatives.

The production of these studies grew over the years as a way of giving analysts a vehicle for attacking a problem in more depth than was possible in a daily or weekly publication, and without the fuss and bureaucracy involved in producing the more formal national estimate. Policy officials sometimes request these in- depth studies, along the lines suggested by some versions of the intelligence cycle, but in many cases, the studies are produced because analysts are directed by intelligence managers to write them, or analysts themselves believe they should be written. When Robert M. Gates took over the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) at the CIA during the early days of the Reagan administration, he decreed that analysts should produce at least two of these in-depth studies every year. Gates was fond of pointing out that the DI produced about 5,000 of these studies one year. It was not clear, however, how many of them were actually read.

In recent years, these studies have been more carefully tailored to the needs of policy officials. The same might be said for the Defense Intelligence Agency products, which are geared to military needs, or those coming from the State Department's intelligence and research unit, which has always focused its analysis on foreign policy issues. The fourth category of product, the estimate, is the one most likely to drive the policy process, at least in theory. But the reality is often different.

The Reality of Estimates

The estimate is a creature of the Cold War, it but has its roots in World War II. It is supposed to be a forecast of the future that decision makers can use to build policy, just as the intelligence cycle proposes. The estimate is supposed to be drawn by analysts from all the producing agencies, coordinated by the analysts among themselves to reach an agreed forecast, with dissenting views included. Then, it is blessed by the agency leaders; is signed off at the top; is sent to the president, the National Security Council, and staffs; and serves as the basis for policy discussions. There are actually cases where this has happened, where decision makers have waited for the intelligence community's views as embodied in the estimate, but these cases are rare.

The reality is that policy officials often know what they want to do even before they receive the estimate and hope that this product will confirm in some way the wisdom of the path they have already chosen. When the estimate conflicts with their views, policy consumers may dismiss it as uninformed, useless, or even obstructionist. When it agrees with what they think they already know, then they may see it as confirming, irrelevant, or again useless. Although one

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would think that policy makers would want to know when they were heading in the wrong direction, this is not usually the case. Policy consumers do not welcome intelligence that is nonconfirming, perhaps because the large egos that brought them into positions of power do not permit admissions of ignorance.

The WMD Case

There is no better example of what can go wrong in the estimates process than the recent experience with the problems related to Iraq and Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. We now know how the intelligence system politicized the estimate to meet the needs of the George W. Bush administration. The estimate on WMD was flawed from the beginning. It was based on the reporting of only a few unreliable sources. Then, analysts made several faulty assumptions about the weapons Saddam Hussein had had or used before the first Gulf War. Finally, policy officials used the estimate to convince both Americans and other nations that Saddam was about to develop nuclear weapons. All of this was wrong.

According to James Risen, intelligence officials in both the collection and analysis arms of the CIA, as well as those in other agencies, knew the sources were poor and the conclusions wrong, but they could not fight senior managers who wanted to satisfy the political needs of the White House. Even more corrupting, it appears that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, fearing that the estimate would not support the already planned invasion of Iraq, sent his own officials, neither of them intelligence officers, to find the “correct” information. All these steps were perversions of the estimates process. One can only hope that such antics will not take place in the future.

For all the reasons cited, it seems clear to me that trying to learn how intelligence works by using the intelligence cycle model will lead to misunderstandings about what really happens in the intelligence world. Collection and analysis are really parallel processes. The key to their effective functioning lies in the extent to which there is good communication between the two processes. There needs to be, as well, good communication between intelligence managers and policy consumers throughout the intelligence process. At the same time, however, intelligence managers must stand up to policy officials when they seek to make the intelligence judgments conform to political needs.

Intelligence and Policy

In the early days of the Cold War, the founders of the CIA debated the extent to which intelligence should be close to policy. Sherman Kent, a Yale professor who went on to establish the national estimates system in the CIA, and one of the early thinkers about the intelligence process, believed as did “Wild Bill” Donovan and others, that if intelligence became enmeshed in the policy process, it would lose its value. Kent argued that the best way to avoid politicization of intelligence was to remain distant and aloof. Later, Roger Hilsman, one of the intelligence chiefs at the State Department, took a different view. Hilsman thought that intelligence had to be close to policy to remain

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relevant. The experiences of the Bush era suggest that Kent may have been right all along.

Nonetheless, other studies have shown that there must be good communication between policy consumers and intelligence managers if intelligence is to be on target and meet the needs of decision makers. At the same time, intelligence managers have to stand up to efforts by policy officials to skew intelligence judgments when the conclusions are at variance with the political proclivities of partisan officials. No one said this would be easy. It is a constant challenge to provide “truth to power.” Intelligence must deliver the unvarnished bottom line. Policy officials can go elsewhere for politicized information if they wish, but at their own peril.

Looking at Counterintelligence

Leaving aside the collection and analysis processes in intelligence, one cannot understand the entire intelligence system without looking at counterintelligence. Counterintelligence is largely defensive in nature, and it is not part of the traditional intelligence cycle—although some writers have tried to adapt the cycle into a counterintelligence model. In my view, counterintelligence follows an entirely different and unique path, with a model of its own. It is certainly worth studying because counterintelligence is a major function of intelligence, consists of both active and passive components, and has become as controversial as any aspect of the intelligence function in government.

In its earliest forms, counterintelligence usually meant counterespionage, stopping enemy, adversary, or even friendly spies from stealing a country's own secrets. Of course, the target country might very well be carrying out espionage against the enemies, adversaries, or friends at the same time as it tries to defend against similar sorts of spying. Thus, stealing secrets for one's country is good and necessary; having one's secrets stolen is dangerous and despicable. U.S. intelligence officers, for example, are rewarded for their successes in gathering information from their targets, even though some of what they do may be illegal in the countries they target. At the same time, other U.S. intelligence officers are heralded for their ability to root out foreign spies and are castigated when they fail to do so. After all, espionage is illegal in the United States and must be stopped.

More Diverse

Today, counterintelligence has become much more diverse than just stopping spies. It now means countering terrorism, narcotics flows, global organized crime, and subversion. Whatever the threat, however, the patterns of intelligence activity in fighting all of them are similar. It has nothing to do with the intelligence cycle. Instead, there is a counterintelligence methodology that is unique.

First, in countering national security threats, counterintelligence units must identify and locate the evil-doers. This might be foreign intelligence operatives working for a hostile intelligence service, a terrorist cell, a unit of a crime

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“army,” or a group of narcotics pushers. There are several proven intelligence methods for identifying the “bad guys,” including the use of: penetrations, or “moles,” to get on the inside of the groups or services; surveillance, either physical or technical; informants; and intelligence derived from captured or detained individuals. All have both positive and negative aspects.

Based on the Cold War experience, we know that it is possible to recruit officials of a foreign intelligence service to turn coat and betray some of the activities of their operatives. There are several known cases where the United States was able to place a mole inside a foreign service, and there were a number of U.S. intelligence officers—such as Aldrich Ames, John Walker, and Robert Hanssen— who gave away U.S. secrets to the Soviets. The FBI seemed quite capable of recruiting penetrations of crime groups such as the Sicilian Mafia. Penetrating a terrorist cell is far more difficult and dangerous. Terrorist cells are usually made up of a handful of people, all of whom may be bonded by family or religious ties. Even if a terrorist cell member wanted to become a “double agent,” the first hint of disloyalty to the cell could result in death.

Physical or electronic surveillance is another proven method of identifying counterintelligence targets. Overseas, this kind of surveillance can be mounted against potential targets as a result of decisions by intelligence managers. In the United States, however, the rules are more strict. Counterintelligence officials would, in most circumstances, be required to go through a legal process and obtain a warrant before employing surveillance against a U.S. citizen, a resident alien, or a U.S. person. This issue became frontpage news early in 2006 when the New York Times revealed that President George W. Bush had authorized surveillance of communications without warrant, arguing that Congress had given the president the authority to do so. The issue may not be resolved until a court case is brought, or new legislation is passed defining the parameters of surveillance use domestically.

Using Informants

Informants can be very useful in identifying counterintelligence targets. Informants are not recruited agents, but rather people who see something amiss and report their suspicions to authorities. In hostage situations, informants may be able to point out where unusual activity is taking place. For example, prior to 9/11, flight school managers reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) their concerns about Middle Eastern men seeking flight training only to steer aircraft, rather than learn to take off and land. Unfortunately, FBI senior officials refused to grant field agents permission to interview the informants, claiming that there was no probable cause to do so.

Informants can also cause a lot of wasted effort. During the sniper crisis in Washington, DC, in 2002, in which two men were able to terrorize the area by random attacks on innocent targets, requests for information resulted in more than 100,000 inputs, of which 40,000 were worth investigating. People who have experience in fielding informant reports note that often the reports are used to denounce spouses, parents, or unpleasant neighbors, and provide no useful intelligence. Nonetheless, informants can prove to be helpful in

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identifying bad guys.

Intelligence From Interrogation

After 9/11 a good deal of controversy arose over the use of intelligence gained from the interrogation of detainees, either overseas or here at home. In the wake of 9/11 some men of Middle Eastern Muslim extraction, who were not U.S. citizens, were required to register with the federal government. Some of these people had irregularities in their visas, had overstayed their stay in the United States, or were in the United States illegally. They were detained in somewhat harsh conditions and in some cases, badly mistreated. It did not appear, however, that much effort was made to find out if any of them had ties to terrorism.

At the same time, as the United States geared up to take down the Taliban government in Afghanistan, some Taliban fighters or people associated with Al Qaeda were captured, turned in by informants, or sold to the United States, by Afghan warlords. These people, dubbed “enemy combatants” by the Bush administration, were shipped to the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, where U.S. authorities said U.S. legal rules did not apply to them. These people were interrogated using what some described as harsh methods, or even torture, according to press reports.

After the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, more detainees were captured on the battlefield. These fighters were imprisoned in Iraq at some of Saddam Hussein's former prisons, including the infamous one at Abu Ghraib. It was at this location that the worst abuses took place. Apparently, unschooled, unscreened, untrained guards were turned loose to abuse the prisoners in the mistaken belief that this would “soften them up” for interrogation. All of these situations involving detainees were handled badly.

Long experience has taught that there are effective ways to interrogate prisoners, using methods that do no harm to the subjects while producing useful intelligence. Unfortunately, those lessons were not applied effectively in the post-9/11 situations. The literature on interrogation methods, on training interrogators, on handling subjects should have been readily available to anyone involved in trying to extract intelligence from detainees. Anyone who has been involved in intelligence style interrogations knows that torture is ineffective and counterproductive, as well as abhorrent and illegal. Since those experiences, the rules have been changed to exclude such behavior by U.S. officials.

A good interrogation may yield only bits and pieces of information, but if intelligence collectors are careful, they may be able to piece together a broader picture from a series of subjects. The main aim, of course, is to try to learn something about the cells, or units, that the subjects have come from, especially about their plans for future operations.

Stopping the Bad Guys

After the “bad guys” have been identified, then a decision has to be made about

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the kinds of operations that will be mounted to stop whatever kind of plan or activity might be under way against U.S. interests. This creates a dilemma. Usually, intelligence officers will press to extend or broaden the collection effort to make sure that all the bad guys have been identified and located. At the same time, law enforcement officials are eager to bring the bad guys to justice. This creates a serious problem, often described as the “cops and spies” dilemma.

The divisions between law enforcement and intelligence in the United States have deep roots. Unlike many other industrialized countries, the United States does not have a domestic intelligence service, such as the MI-5 in Great Britain, or the DST in France. Instead, the United States has relied for many years on the FBI—which is really a law enforcement organization—to gather counterintelligence and then act to bring lawbreakers to justice. In other countries, the domestic intelligence services collect and analyze counterintelligence in parallel with counterpart foreign intelligence organizations, which work beyond the country's borders. When suspected criminal behavior is uncovered, the domestic intelligence services may turn to national police organizations to carry out law enforcement operations against the suspects.

Intelligence Versus Law Enforcement

In the United States, however, where no domestic intelligence service has existed, there have been both legal and procedural barriers between the national intelligence services, whose focus has been almost exclusively abroad, and the FBI, which has always had a role in domestic counterintelligence. Traditionally, counterintelligence collected abroad was passed to the FBI, which then determined, usually in consultation with the Justice Department, whether there was probable cause to open a criminal investigation. This would be used to gather evidence that could be brought if a court case arose. This was different from the gathering and analysis of intelligence data, which traditionally was not treated or handled as evidence.

Because of cover considerations and the need to protect the identity of intelligence officers, intelligence managers did not want their people to have to appear in court, and wanted as well to protect the sources and methods used to collect intelligence. The FBI was under no such strictures, but the evidence they gathered had to be backed by appropriate warrants and protected according to legal standards. The Aldrich Ames case is a perfect example of how this system used to work.

A joint CIA and FBI team was able to track down Ames and identify him as a Soviet mole in the CIA. Then, the FBI obtained a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to be certain that they had the right target. Once that was done, a second FBI team, with a criminal warrant, took over the investigation and gathered evidence that might be used to prosecute Ames. In the end, Ames agreed to a plea bargain and the case never came to court, but it illustrates how a firewall was in place to separate the counterintelligence investigation from the criminal one.

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Taking Down Barriers

Since 9/11 some of the barriers between intelligence and law enforcement have been weakened, but the cops and spies dilemma still exists. Under the new rules, the FBI may levy requirements on the U.S. intelligence services to collect information specific to their domestic needs. It is not yet clear if such intelligence would be used as evidence in court cases. More likely, the FBI would ask that intelligence be gathered to support its newly created National Security Branch, which combines the FBI's older counterterrorism and counterintelligence units with its newer intelligence bureau, created after 9/11.

At the same time, the CIA and the FBI have drawn more closely together with a strong push from Congress. FBI agents have been assigned to the CIA for counterintelligence purposes for many years, and more recently, to fight terrorism. CIA officers are reportedly working closely with FBI field offices where antiterrorism task forces have been created. While this may break down traditional barriers between the two agencies, there is still some resentment among CIA officers about the growing role of FBI attachés serving abroad, and FBI concerns about the reluctance of CIA officers to share information.

The Counterintelligence Model

So, when one looks at the pattern of counterintelligence functions, it does not look at all like the intelligence cycle. Instead, it may be seen as follows:

IDENTIFICATION

PENETRATION

EXPLOITATION

INTERDICTION

CLAIM SUCCESS

In this pattern, exploitation is the process of learning as much as possible about the bad guys before moving against them. Interdiction means either arresting the law breakers or pre-empting their operations. Though political leaders often talk about bringing the enemy to justice, suggesting that they would be arrested and taken to trial, convicted, and punished in the fight against terrorism, pre-emption may be the preferred course of action, especially overseas. In one case, for example, a U.S. Predator with a missile on board was reportedly used to strike a terrorist leader in Yemen, killing him and his associates while they were driving in the desert. One might argue that this was punishment before trial, or alternatively, that this was necessary to prevent the terrorist from leading a strike against the United States.

The downside of pre-emption is that sometimes innocent victims are slain along with the intended targets. That was apparently what happened when the Bush administration launched a missile from a drone aircraft against Ayman al- Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, early in 2006. The missile killed 17 people, according to press reports, but not the intended target, who later broadcast an attack on Mr. Bush, equating him with Adolf Hitler. Despite the failure to kill Zawahiri, the Bush administration later said that the attack had indeed killed an

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important terrorist leader and was worth the cost.

Exploitation Before Interdiction

In the counterintelligence model, exploitation comes before interdiction, meaning that as much intelligence should be gathered before the case or operation is turned over to law enforcement. Of course, in cases in which there is pressure to stop the enemy or adversary, exploitation may come before the intelligence is fully gathered. For example, in the case of the “Lackawanna Six,” exploitation was cut short because of the need for political leaders to show that they were cracking down on terrorism. The Six were Yemeni immigrants living outside Buffalo, New York, who went to Afghanistan before 9/11 in the misguided belief that training with the Talilban fighters was going to be something of a lark.

When they discovered that the Taliban were really training terrorists, the Yemeni immigrants returned to the United States. After 9/11, they turned themselves in to authorities to explain what they had done. They were quickly arrested, and eventually jailed. No one at the time seemed to realize that at least one or two of them might have been sent back to Afghanistan as double agents to penetrate Al Qaeda. Even an effort to learn more about their experiences was cut short by the pressure to achieve quick convictions to show that the government was moving swiftly against terrorism.

Claiming Success

Finally, in the last step of the counterintelligence process, authorities often make public claims of success, a rare step in intelligence work. Normally, intelligence managers try very hard to keep successes secret so that they might be repeated. An oft-quoted CIA saying is, “The secret of our success is the secret of our success.” In cases in which intelligence has been gathered successfully, it is critical to protect sources and methods. In counterintelligence, however, the claim of success, made when the case has ended, could be used to convince the public that the government is ever watchful and actually doing something with the billions of dollars spent on intelligence. During his tenure as FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover made a fine art out of going public with counterintelligence success. His senior agents all received training in public relations and the FBI was made to look good, even when serious mistakes had been made.

Whereas intelligence is usually carefully hidden (except for the counterintelligence cases), intelligence failure quickly becomes public. This is a serious problem for intelligence managers. In the early days of the CIA there was no public affairs function even to deal with the public or the media. When Admiral Turner became director, however, he instituted a Public Affairs Office, much to the chagrin of many old-timers. Since then, the CIA has had to wrestle with the appropriate response when media queries arise. This is especially true when a spy case, such as the capture of Aldrich Ames, becomes public knowledge, or when a covert action surfaces.

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More forthcoming CIA directors, such as George Tenet, have had the Public Affairs Office respond generously to media questions. Under the successor regime of Porter Goss as CIA director, however, the CIA seemed to return to a more conservative approach. In such cases, it would not be uncommon for the media to receive the standard answer to questions about intelligence. This says that the CIA “can neither confirm nor deny allegations of intelligence activity,” which is little more forthcoming than “no comment.” Nonetheless, enterprising reporters, such as Bill Gertz of the Washington Times and James Risen of the New York Times, seem to be quite successful in learning about inside stories at the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Defensive Counter Intelligence

There are defensive measures in counterintelligence that do not fit into either the traditional intelligence cycle or the model just described. These measures are often lumped together as various aspects of security. They include careful background checks on prospective employees, including the use of polygraph interviews to verify the information candidates submit on their applications, and continuing monitoring of employees throughout their careers. Facilities used for intelligence and other governmental functions are extensively guarded and patrolled, monitored with alarm and surveillance devices, and protected by barrier entry devices to keep out unwanted visitors.

Some facilities have protective systems in roadways and parking areas that can be activated to stop suicidal vehicle bombers. Buildings may be shielded electronically to prevent an adversary's use of listening devices or electronic surveillance to intercept and steal secrets. Most important, employees are trained in security awareness, so that they can report anything that seems to be a threat. They are taught to protect the secrets with which they have been entrusted, and this responsibility lasts even after they leave their employment.

For example, those of us who were once inside the system and signed secrecy agreements are obligated to submit their published materials, including this chapter, to their agencies for review before they are given to their editors and publishers. This is not censorship, but rather a system to ensure that no secret information is inadvertently released. Some CIA authors have taken advantage of this system to include blacked-out passages in their books, demonstrating that they really were prepared to release sensitive information but were stopped by the review process. This tends to sell more books and can be a clever marketing ploy.

The Covert Action Function

The last function of intelligence—and again one not included in the intelligence cycle—is that of covert action, or special operations. This activity is not really intelligence in its traditional role of gathering and analyzing information, but rather the use of intelligence resources to carry out the national security policy of the state using surreptitious methods. Intelligence agencies around the globe carry out such operations because they have the necessary secret facilities and personnel. All through the Cold War, it was covert action that drew most of the

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attention and most of the criticism of American intelligence.

General Jimmy Doolittle, one of the notable heroes of World War II, after taking a hard look at intelligence in the immediate postwar period, concluded that the United States would have to be more clever, more tricky, and more devious than our Communist adversaries if we were to overcome their bid for world domination. He stated that Americans would just have to accept this “repugnant” policy. When the CIA became involved in trying to overthrow governments in Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, and Cuba, and was severely criticized in some quarters for having done so, it became clear that there were limits to what the American people were prepared to accept.

Much has been written about the nature and limits of covert action, and there seems no need to repeat that here. Though covert action does not fit into the intelligence cycle, there is a pattern to this function worth outlining. This pattern is similar to other aspects of policy development and implementation, except that covert action is supposed to be secret and to disguise the role of the United States.

Policy Formulation

The pattern of policy formulation looks a bit like the intelligence cycle, but in reality it is quite different. In the first step of the policy process policy officials within the national security bureaucracy recognize and identify a problem they must address. Theoretically, the identification of the problem comes from intelligence, but in reality policy officials often see this at about the same time as intelligence officials because both receive the incoming data at about the same time, as explained earlier.

In the next step policy officials begin to seek options for dealing with the problem, assuming some role for the United States is necessary. At this point, one of the options might well be a covert action. We know from long experience with covert action that it only makes sense as an adjunct to policy and should not be the policy itself. Thus, the choice of using covert action remains with decision makers and is not chosen by intelligence. The conventional wisdom in some circles during the Cold War was that intelligence managers decided to mount covert actions independent of policy officials. (This notion that the CIA was a “rogue elephant” running amok was debunked during the famous investigations of intelligence held by Senator Frank Church in the 1970s. Church learned that all CIA covert actions had been directed in some way by the White House and funded in secret by members of Congress. )

Finally, decision makers at the top choose the option they desire and direct its implementation. In the case of covert action, this requires that the president issue a written finding that the covert action is needed. Then the appropriate intelligence official must brief the Intelligence Oversight Committees of Congress, in secret, about the policy “on a timely basis.” Congress has often pressed presidents to issue the findings before the option is implemented, but presidents have usually chosen to ignore this, claiming that it infringes on their freedom of action.

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The pattern looks like this:

PROBLEM RECOGNITION OPTION CREATION OPTION SELECTION IMPLEMENTATION

Intelligence analysis should feed into the process at all stages, but we know that the options that policy officials choose are driven by many things. Intelligence is not always at the top of the list.

Consequences of Covert Action

Covert action has both short- and long-term consequences. This is true of all kinds of policy choices, but because covert action is kept secret, the normal debate about policy choices takes place among a relatively small group of people. The result is that short-term solutions, which may seem attractive at the time they are chosen, may prove to have unintended consequences in the long run. There are too many examples to cover here, and the literature on covert action is voluminous. It is sufficient to say that U.S. governments rarely think about the long-term consequences of policy choices and, in that regard, covert action is no different from more open kinds of policies.

There is a long tradition in intelligence that intelligence officers do not offer policy recommendations to decision makers. Though this may be true for the delivery of finished intelligence products, it is not so in regard to covert action. As Dr. James Steiner, a former CIA officer, has pointed out, in covert action, especially in the war on terrorism, the attempt to be policy-neutral does not apply. For many years, a senior CIA officer has been assigned to the White House staff to help work out the details of covert action when policy makers decide to have such operations.

This officer's role is to make sure that requested covert actions are feasible and supportable. Thus, the officer is as much a policy maker as an intelligence official.

It is argued elsewhere in this chapter that one way to address the short-term versus the long-term consequences of covert action is to set up a center, much like the other interagency centers in U.S. intelligence. This center, however, should include both intelligence and policy officials. Its goal would be to analyze how a covert action might work and what its impact would be. The intelligence officers assigned to such a center should come from both the analytic and the operational units of the CIA. Traditionally, covert action has been kept compartmentalized within operations units, without the benefit of analytic inputs.

It seems pretty clear that presidents will always want to have the option of using some form of covert action against enemies and adversaries. No presidents in living memory, even those who were suspicious of covert action, have ever said that they would not use it. Therefore, the intelligence agencies that might be involved in such operations—primarily the CIA in the present U.S.

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intelligence community—must be prepared to be tasked to carry out covert action, and must maintain the capability to do so.

A Flawed Vision

I suspect that, despite my preaching about alternatives to the traditional intelligence cycle, it will continue to be taught both inside government and elsewhere. Nonetheless, it would be encouraging to think that those so deeply wedded to the flawed concept of the intelligence cycle would, in the course of studying this volume, realize that there is an alternative to the traditional view of how intelligence works. Perhaps they might even consider it for discussion. Yet we know that people tend to look for confirming rather than disconfirming data. They will seek to defend the intelligence cycle, rather than consider the alternatives. Nonetheless, the intelligence cycle is a flawed vision, and thus poor theory. One need only ask those who have toiled in the fields of intelligence.

Notes

1. Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). I studied an earlier version published in 1948.

2. See, for example, Arthur S. Hulnick, “The Intelligence Producer-Policy Consumer Linkage: A Theoretical Approach,” Intelligence and National Security 1 (May 1986).

3. James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006).

4. The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), pp. 339–60. 5. Arthur S. Hulnick, Fixing the Spy Machine: Preparing American Intelligence

for the 21st Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), p. 59. 6. Richard K. Betts, “Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures

Are Inevitable,” World Politics 31 (1978). 7. Arthur S. Hulnick, Keeping Us Safe: Secret Intelligence and Homeland

Security (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), p. 16. 8. Risen, State of War. 9. Hulnick, Keeping Us Safe, pp. 85–86. 10. Roger Hilsman, Strategic Intelligence and National Decision (Glencoe, IL:

Free Press, 1956). 11. “CSIS and the Security Intelligence Cycle,” available at http://www.csis-

scrs.gc.ca (accessed 1 April 2004). 12. Risen, State of War, pp. 39–60. 13. 9/11 Report. 14. Arthur S. Hulnick, “Indications and Warning for Homeland Security:

Seeking a New Paradigm,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 18 (Winter 2005–6).

15. Hulnick, Keeping Us Safe, pp. 103–18. 16. See, for example, Pete Earley, Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of

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Aldrich Ames (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1997). 17. Hulnick, Keeping Us Safe, p. 72. 18. Craig Whitlock and Walter Pincus, “Qaeda Deputy Mocks Bush,” Washington

Post, 31 January 2006. 19. Hulnick, Keeping Us Safe, pp. 126–27. 20. Hulnick, Fixing the Spy Machine, p. 81. 21. Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (New York: St.

Martin's Press, 2002). 22. Harold M. Greenberg, “The Doolittle Commission of 1954,” Intelligence and

National Security 20 (December 2005), pp. 687–94. 23. See, for example, Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, Silent Warfare

(Washington, DC: Brassey's, 2002). 24. James E. Steiner, “Restoring the Red Line Between Intelligence and Policy

on Covert Action.” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 19 (Spring, 2006), pp. 156–65.

25. See, for example, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

26. Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only (New York: Harper Collins, 1995).

27. Steiner, op. cit. 28. Hulnick, Fixing the Spy Machine, pp. 82–83.