For Your Eyes Only

NATIONAL SECURITY

For Your Eyes Only

Now the intelligence agencies can help federal executives get the information they need.

hen we hear the words "intelligence agencies," most of us think about overthrowing unfriendly governments and garroting somebody in the dark of night. What we don't think about is how intelligence agencies can help federal executives do their jobs.

The James Bond stuff is a minor part of intelligence. In fact, covert action is not even intelligence, although most countries tuck their covert action operatives into their intelligence agencies since both share a passion for secrecy. Intelligence is simply a system by which governments gather and package information others don't want them to have. Almost every government agency can use intelligence-not just the military and embassies. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, the United States devoted great effort to gathering intelligence on Soviet grain production for Agriculture officials because its wild fluctuations had so much impact on the grain markets.

During the Cold War, the overwhelming intelligence priority was the Soviet Union. But in the 1970s, intelligence officials began to notice that the Red Menace was not the only foreign challenge the United States faced. First, oil sheiks made us wait in line at gas stations. Then, the Japanese began gobbling up markets we had taken for granted. Next, it was terrorism coming out of the Third World, followed by drugs, not to mention pollution and nuclear proliferation and economic challenges from surging Asian countries. Now that the Cold War is over, the intelligence community has spare capacity to meet those challenges. It also wants to protect itself and its budget from legislative assault by trying to serve more agencies, who will then put in a good word for the intelligence folks with the OMB and Congress. So today's CIA buzzword is "outreach."

There are two common responses when the intelligence community offers its services. The first is, "You can't possibly be of any help to me. Yeah, I sometimes deal with foreigners, but I'm involved in labor or environmental or agricultural or trade or (fill in the blank) issues." The other common response is, "Hey, great, you can tell me how the International Civil Aviation Organization is going to vote on my issue, or what the price of rubber will be in Malaysia next spring, or when the troublesome head of the labor federation in Vanuatu will die." Few understand what intelligence can and cannot do for them.

What Intel Can Do

There are some simple things intelligence can help federal executives accomplish. For example, the CIA has tons of biographical information. If the transport minister from Majnoonistan is coming to talk railroads with you, the CIA might be able to provide some biographical data on this fellow, plus a memo on what's happening with Majnoonistani railroads. And, if you get your request in early, the agency can provide some intel on what this Minister wants out of the United States, how he negotiates, what his political goals are.

Even the simplest half-page bio can tell you a lot about your opposite number's education, hobbies and political disposition. It's best, however, not to telegraph that you've been checking on him by saying, "Have a seat. I hear your wife graduated top in her class from Southern Idaho U. in 1942 with a major in trigonometry."

What Intel Cannot Do

Biographical data lacks the pizzazz of something "Q" invented for James Bond. But it's real. Unfortunately, many intelligence consumers lose touch with reality in the realm of spydom. Prior to becoming director of central intelligence in 1950, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith said, "America's people expect you to be on a communing level with God and Joe Stalin. . . . They expect you to be able to say that a war will start next Tuesday at 5:32 p.m." Nothing's changed. In the decade it took Leonid Brezhnev to expire, the CIA was perpetually asked, "When will Brezhnev die?" In the early 1980s, a key issue was whether the Soviets would invade Poland as it had Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Reams of paper were devoted to analyses explaining the pressures and counter-pressures on the Politburo. But some people just wanted a yes or no answer when there was none: The Politburo was keeping its options open.

There is a tendency to confuse the complexity of a foreign society with the simplicity of a Hollywood script, and to ask why the CIA has failed to filch the script. But there is no script. Real life is filled with too many variables to make predictions an exact science. One way to grasp this is to reverse the process and look at foreigners analyzing the United States. Any number of other countries' intelligence officers stationed in Washington may well be fired this November if their projected presidential victor fails to win the November election. Do not expect the CIA to be able to tell you something about a foreign society that only a Ouija board could tell you about American society.

The Four Building Blocks

Intelligence is divided into four major activities: dissemination, protection, collection and analysis.

Dissemination is the art of getting information to people who need it to do their jobs. While it sounds mundane and lacks the drama of collection, speedy dissemination has been critical since Dec. 7, 1941. That day a warning to prepare for an attack was sent by commercial telegraph and delivered by bicycle messenger to the commander of Pearl Harbor as he viewed the smoking ruins of his command. Dissemination, however, flies in the face of secrecy. The intel world does not distribute fliers or junk mail touting its services. It classically deals with a narrow world of consumers. In the post-Cold War era, it is now ready-and eager-to broaden that world. The CIA has even produced a pamphlet and a Web page providing information about the agency's services.

Protection runs the gamut from counterin-telligence (looking for the other guy's spies in your agency) to clearances, polygraphs, safeguards of classified material. It is a pain when your neighbors are asked during background investigations about your bad habits, or when you have to take a nerve-wracking polygraph, or when you forget to lock up the classified material one night and have to climb out of bed and race back to your office hoping your error hasn't been discovered. And the pain increases as you pass from a Confidential clearance up to Secret, Top Secret and on to Special Compartmented Intelligence or Code Word Intelligence, where the names of the code words that give one access to intelligence are themselves classified Top Secret.

What's being protected is rarely the information, but sources of it and the methods used to gather it. When it comes to sources and methods, "don't ask, don't tell" has been the policy for centuries. There is no worse crime than to stand up in public and say, "The CIA has given me a report that shows I'm right and you're wrong." The CIA will descend upon the offender like the plague.

Collection is the gathering of data. It may be humint (human intelligence), such as a report from a spy on a meeting he attended. It may come from listening in on telephone calls or, nowadays, fax transmissions and electronic payment transfers. It may be an infrared image taken by a satellite showing crops infested by disease. It may be a telephone book from a Health Ministry showing they have only a small division dealing with AIDS while their biggest division deals with radiology, although the government claims to have no nuclear program and asserts it is devoting vast sums to AIDS detection.

Collection can involve unsavory sources. The CIA has repeatedly been condemned for paying such characters as torturers in Guatemala for information. Police informers generally have criminal records. Therefore, the CIA will learn more about governments who pollute, torture and proliferate by talking to people who pollute, torture and proliferate than it will by talking to saints.

The inherent difficulty with collection is that the intelligence community collects what it can, not necessarily what this country needs. The constant challenge is to get what is essential. Whether needed or not, the product of collection is called "raw" intelligence.

After collecting all those telephone books, photographs and transcripts, the next task is to make some sense out of that horde. Raw intelligence is cooked. But since that sounds like cooking the books, it is called "finished" intelligence. The analytical people mix the classified material in a bowl with even larger quantities of publicly available data, stir in a few cups of scholarly knowledge, add a soupçon of intuition and, voila, you have what everyone hopes is a useful product.

Analysis falls into three major categories: basic or static, current or dynamic, and estimative or predictive.

Basic or static intelligence works like an encyclopedia. It once consisted of filing cabinets filled with information. Now it consists of computer disks containing maps that pinpoint Iraqi chemical sites suitable for bombing; demographic data on foreign societies showing where disaffected minorities dwell; and biographies. In World War II, basic intelligence was used to find out whether the beaches U.S. troops would land on could support their equipment. Analysts used magnifying glasses to study photos of kids building sand castles on beaches in North Africa, the Pacific islands and Normandy.

With today's information explosion, the challenge is more often how to whittle down 1,000 pages of newspaper clippings, technical publications and communications intercepts to a two-page memo focused on a policy-maker's particular need. But the old order is not completely dead. Before Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf could launch his famous "left hook" in the Iraqi desert, several Army intelligence officers spent days at the Library of Congress trying to determine the location of soft sands that would halt tank movements. They poured over yellowed journals written by archaeologists who traveled the area by camel early in this century. Basic intelligence ranges from lists of the members of the Palestine National Congress to technical analyses of the Saudi economy.

Current or dynamic intelligence resembles a daily newspaper. In fact, its primary delivery mechanism for decades has been the National Intelligence Digest (NID), a daily magazine with a circulation of only a few hundred copies. Every page of each copy bears the reader's assigned number printed in 4-inch light gray numerals over the text to discourage the reader from making photocopies. Current intelligence is call dynamic because it changes with every passing hour. To get in tune with the 20th century, the intelligence community has started a CNN-type television system. Current intel is generally used by national security wonks.

Estimative or predictive information is the intelligence world's crystal ball for predicting the future. The chief vehicle is the National Intelligence Estimate, a report issued when needed on a single topic. It is the corporate wisdom of analysts from the intelligence community: the CIA; Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); National Security Agency (NSA); State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR); and other small, specialized intel shops (e.g., Energy Department, Treasury). Do all these analysts agree? No. Sometimes the reports include footnotes such as, "DIA dissents from this judgment. It believes too much emphasis is being placed on data supplied by a single and unproven source."

Estimative intelligence is commonly misunderstood. Its usefulness is not in declaring that the ruler of Majnoonistan will be overthrown next Monday, but that the ruler of Majnoonistan is likely to be replaced in the next few months by either X or Y. And what we know of X indicates he would change policies that interest us while Y would probably change another set of policies. American policy-makers then have a document that enables them to plan, not just stumble through an ad hoc response because newly installed President Y has surprised them.

Finished intelligence comes in four forms: indications and warning, technical, actionable and informational.

Indications and warning, the most sensitive type of finished intelligence, is the art of divining whether someone is about to launch a war. Our intelligence system did forecast Saddam Hussein's attack on Kuwait. But it didn't make much difference. For one thing, the warning came close to the actual attack and we had no time to deploy military power. Equally important, none of the Arab countries in the region believed Saddam would attack and were unwilling to accept American military deployment as a deterrent. So, our intelligence product was simultaneously brilliant and useless. Today, significant resources are devoted every hour to watching more than 100 indicators of North Korea's military action. Virtually all American and Korean policy-makers believe Pyongyang is capable of attack, so, in this case, those who monitor indications and warning know they will be heard if they ever ring the alarm.

Technical intelligence mostly involves analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of foreign military equipment.

Actionable intelligence, the most rapidly growing form, is data that indicates a firm in Germany is about to sell chemical weapons components to Iran, or a bank in Italy is about to receive a major deposit of laundered money from a criminal syndicate. With this information, diplomats in those countries can ask the foreign ministry to intervene. In wartime, it could be a list of buildings of the kind we saw flickering on our TV screen in January 1991 just before a precision guided bomb made ruins of it during the Persian Gulf war. The real meat of the intelligence business today, actionable data is driven by the three great "counters" that have replaced the Red Menace: counter-terrorism; counter-crime (mostly drugs and international criminal syndicates); and counter-proliferation (halting the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and the missiles used to deliver them).

Informational intelligence comprises more than 90 percent of everything the CIA produces-the bios, the analytical booklets and the daily NID-to help decision-makers make informed decisions.

Getting What One Needs

Agencies outside the national security arena rarely need the daily NID and its current intelligence. But basic and estimative intelligence can be very useful. The problem is getting what you want and need. If you wish to order up a fast bio of the French Prime Minister, it's in the files. But not so for the person who was just named Minister of Supplies in Fiji last month and who is coming to talk to the General Services Administration next month. That bio would require tasking.

Tasking is simply a matter of telling the collection people to collect what you need and getting the analysts to package it in a useful way. You think Burma is pumping pollutants into one of its rivers? Maybe there's a photo in the files, but if not you'll have to put in your request and wait in line for the satellite to pass over the target. A new consumer will usually be put in contact with an analyst. The analyst's first task is to understand what the consumer needs. The analyst can then work with the collectors to try to gather the required information. What's desired may be too expensive or impractical, but it pays to ask. Caution: Even in these days when the CIA is marketing its wares, the analyst will determine what requested data the consumer "must have" versus what the consumer "can use." Many agencies have a CIA liaison office on the premises and listed in the agency phone book. If no CIA liaison office is available, consumers can call the CIA Public Communications Office at (703) 482-0624.

The product you get could be very impressive. The CIA's graphs, tables and maps are among the best in the government and are more user-friendly than those found in many news magazines. Many believe only CIA cartographers can excel at taking an oil company map, a satellite photo, a list of addresses and synthesizing them into a useful map without a lot of clutter.

That Cloak and Dagger Business

Covert action, such as restoring the Shah of Iran to his throne in 1953 and overthrowing the Guatemalan government in 1954, made the CIA a household name. In its first 15 years, the CIA concentrated much of its activity on covert operations. But even during this heyday of covert action, many in the agency frowned upon it. Critics argued that the job of a clandestine service was to collect information, and the multitude of schemes to defeat communism-many of which weren't publicized since they didn't work-were a distraction.

The No. 2 man in the clandestine shop in 1962 was Richard Helms, who so despised the agency's focus on covert actions that he was shut out of the Bay of Pigs. Lucky for him. After that failure, Helms and his ilk gained influence. Most popular literature asserts that the conflict in the CIA is between the analysts and the clandestine operatives. History points out that most central intelligence directors, including Helms, come from the clandestine side. In reality, the greater friction of the CIA's early decades was between proponents of covert action and proponents of clandestine collection as the CIA's main mission.

Most CIA analysts are akin to academics. They work with pen and paper, not cloak and dagger. To be most effective, they need contact with scholars. The macho image the CIA has carved out for itself makes it hard for CIA experts on, say, Latin American economics to talk with their counterparts in academia. Hardly a week goes by that some academic approached by a CIA analyst doesn't slam down the phone and refuse to have contact with a CIA "killer."

The CIA is not a refuge for killers. Even when it last considered assassinations in the 1960s, it failed, looking more like the Keystone Kops than the KGB. The CIA is a national resource for federal officials who need to know what is going on in the world.