The new spies, p.45
The New Spies, page 45
The end of the Cold War also brought with it calls for cutbacks in both the military and intelligence communities. The elimination of the main threat, it was argued, meant that a ‘peace dividend’ could be extracted from both areas. As a result, every intelligence agency has suffered budget cuts in the past four years — but some less than others. In 1993, for example, SIS reduced its staff by only fifty out of around 1,900 while the Security Service maintained its existing staff. The American and Russian intelligence agencies were not so fortunate. While the ‘dividend’ may have proved elusive, the cuts were justified. Indeed, they might have been much deeper had the intelligence services been subject to more outside scrutiny. As it is, the intelligence community has devised its own role for the future and decided how the requirements should be met.
It was Bob Gates as DCI who charged the American intelligence community with bringing the new world into view, examining the potential threats, consulting with consumers in the American government and presenting a list of what the community can do for the money available. The FBI designed its National Security Threat List, the SVR produced theirs, SIS organized something similar and so did the British Security Service. It was hardly surprising that the lists were all remarkably similar. Indeed the language used by the heads of agencies in America, Russia and Britain could be spoken from the same script. Military threats to the state, proliferation, counter-espionage, drugs, terrorism and international financial crime are the new priorities. The new world order is so unstable that each of these areas requires additional resources if the challenges are to be met effectively.
The collapse of the retaining structure of the superpower confrontation and the authoritarian control of communist states over their people has freed ethnic tensions that go back hundreds of years and are only now finding expression. In the early part of this century, many of these ethnic tensions were limited in their influence because of a lack of technology or weaponry. Now modern weapons are readily available. It is certain that there will be a proliferation of small wars in the future; witness Bosnia and Somalia. When the problem appears relatively ‘easy’ (Somalia) the international community can agree a common policy. Where it is more complex (Bosnia) it is virtually impossible to have a common policy adopted and acted upon. Even in such apparently ‘simple’ situations as Somalia, it is clear that international consensus can swiftly fragment under the pressures of the realities of low intensity conflict on the ground. What governments are swiftly learning is that there are no simple problems. They are all difficult, and all will involve unique challenges for the intelligence community to generate reliable information for the commanders and policy makers to act upon.
This is going to be a recurring problem and the role of the intelligence community will be to provide sufficient early warning and sound analysis that will allow policy makers to respond before the crisis gets out of hand. This will require the intelligence community to be more forthright in its analysis than it has been in the past. The more ambiguous the intelligence presentations, the more room the policy makers have to take the option of minimum pain, and the more likely a crisis is to get out of hand.
In terms of terrorism, arms control and drugs, the evolution of the problems now poses unique challenges to the intelligence community. Each is a concern and a threat to national security in the same way that a nuclear exchange was during the Cold War. By the end of this century, a number of Middle Eastern countries are likely to have ballistic missiles which can carry chemical or nuclear warheads and will have the range to reach most of Western Europe. As the intelligence failures in Iraq demonstrated, unless there is a determined effort to gather the information and act upon it, the proliferation has become a fact by which time it may well be too late to act.
Drugs and terrorism are more insidious, but their impact can be enormous. The cost of fighting the drug war in America is currently over $13 billion a year and rising, without a commensurate reduction either in the amount of drug use or the profits made by the drug barons. The new patterns of trafficking that are emerging out of the former communist countries mean that Western Europe, the new democracies in Eastern Europe and the US can all expect new sources of supply and an increased number of illegal drugs reaching a new range of buyers. To date, the combating of the drug problem only plays into the hands of the traffickers.
In theory, the reorganization of the international intelligence effort should improve this situation but there is little sign that the changes already in place or the much vaunted new effort by the intelligence agencies in this area are actually going to alter anything.
In terrorism, too, the reforms have not produced new thinking, merely additional resources. The nature of the problem is evolving rapidly, in part through the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, which has produced a new brand of terror. There is no grand conspiracy to replace the illusion of a grand conspiracy of the Marxist-Leninist terrorists of the 1970s. Then it was convenient to think of Moscow as the architect of the bombings and the killings, the single hand controlling the explosion of revolutionary fervour that erupted almost simultaneously all over the world.
Today the focus has shifted to Tehran as the source of everything from the civil war in Algeria to the bombing of the World Trade Center. Iran may be a convenient culprit, but the evidence does not support the concept of some kind of worldwide Iranian-sponsored terrorist conspiracy. Iran has supplied cash, arms and training to terrorist groups and continues to do so. But this seems to be on an ad hoc basis and Tehran appears to exercise little control over most of the cells now entrenched in many developed countries. That being the case, it is important that a new strategy be developed.
The intelligence community has the resources to gather the raw data on the different groups and movements, to direct law enforcement to catch the perpetrators and to direct the policy makers to the issues that can be tackled to undermine the terrorists’ power base within the community.
The reforms that have taken place as a result of various studies have changed the way intelligence is conducted, not least because the focus has shifted from the previous emphasis on East-West confrontation. There has also been a general recognition that there needs to be a greater emphasis on human sources, an area which has fallen into disfavour in the United States in recent years. Only eyes on the ground can bring back intelligence on terrorists, on underground arms networks, on the release of nuclear materials onto the black market. The illegal operators, be they terrorists or arms dealers, now understand the capabilities of the technical means of gathering intelligence, and have developed methods of combating them. Terrorists no longer talk on the telephone (unless they are amateurs like those who blew up the World Trade Center); drug dealers don’t communicate by fax, or arms merchants through a single front company via telex.
It is clear that no nation should have to rely entirely on open sources for its national security needs. Satellites, signals intelligence and human sources can all play their part in dealing with proliferation and terrorism as well as potential military threats. The major objection to an intelligence service working in a democratic society is that the right to operate in secrecy can bring with it abuses of power and freedoms which can be hidden from the public and the government. There have been enough examples of this in recent years — from Iran-Contra to the operation of psychiatric units for dissidents in the Soviet Union — for this to be a legitimate fear. But in recent years steps have been taken to address these issues, particularly in the major Western agencies. Oversight is now more effective than it has ever been; the all-pervasive influence of lawyers within agencies has grown even stronger; above all, the culture of the cowboy has all but vanished. Of course there will still be abuses because the system is run by people and people make mistakes. But overall, that is a small price to pay if the general effect is to produce greater stability in the world.
Despite all these changes and the certainty that the intelligence community does have a role in the new world, there is ample reason to believe that the reforms implemented so far do not go far enough. The changes in the United States have been ones of emphasis rather than substance. There are new targets and each agency has faithfully switched targets to deliver a different product to cope with the identified threats. There is no argument about the nature of the threats, but the raw information gathered is only as good as the people and the methods used to process it. Despite the reforms, every single American intelligence organization has survived the end of the Cold War. By the end of this decade, the US intelligence budget will have fallen by around 25% in real terms, a massive reduction which the bureaucracy has absorbed not through radical change but by an overall cut, a salami-slicing of the capability of individual agencies.
During the Cold War, every intelligence professional was aware of the unnecessary duplication that existed between intelligence agencies — for example, the CIA, DIA, NRG, NSA, INR and all four armed services were gathering information on terrorists. Competitive analysis and the rivalries between agencies were divisive, costly and inefficient. Yet nothing has been done to change the basic methods used to process intelligence and to ensure a timely and accurate product. Bob Gates did what he could to improve the analytical process (NIEs tend to be shorter, sharper and more timely) and Woolsey has continued that process by trying to break down some of the barriers between the DO and DI in the CIA. But these are superficial changes.
The climate of secrecy that has saturated every aspect of the intelligence world for the past forty years should have changed forever. Espionage threats are posed by Russia and China, which still retain a major intelligence gathering capability and could pose a military threat to the US. But the other areas that now are seen as threats to national security — proliferation, drugs and terrorism — are not in the same class. No drug baron operates the kind of intelligence apparatus that is going to try and recruit sources inside the NSA and such an attempt would be unlikely to succeed. No terrorist organization in the world runs an aggressive spying effort and certainly none tries, on a regular basis, to gather secrets (as opposed to carrying out active reconnaissance missions) in foreign countries. So whole areas that used to be regarded as secret are hidden no longer and information once jealously guarded can be freed from the restrictions that kept it from the public gaze.
But there has been no real relaxation of the old secrecy rules. Instead, the intelligence agencies continue to guard the information they gather jealously and hold equally close the analytical process by which judgements for policy makers are made. This is not a freedom of information issue. There should be secrets that protect both sources and methods, but within that constraint a great deal more can be done. There is no logical reason why the intelligence community holds to itself the vast majority of the information it gathers. Most of it comes from open sources (the press, government publications, etc.) or from overt human sources (government officials, the press, lobbying groups). Only a very small percentage of information is gathered by technical means (satellites, listening posts) or by agents (spies).
In the United States there has been a long and healthy tradition of employing outside consultants such as the Rand Corporation to produce reports on specific projects for government departments. Those who work on such projects are generally given security clearances that allow them to see classified material. The reports have additional value because they are produced by outside contractors who operate free of the politics and bureaucracy of the department which hires them. That system, which seems to be unique to the US, is rarely used by the intelligence community. They rely on their own people to do their analysis, which is frequently duplicated not once but several times, creating not just a huge and inefficient bureaucracy but a product that is often the result of endless argument and compromise, and so full of caveats as to be of little value to the policy maker.
This structural inertia has hardly been addressed by the reforms, in part because the problem is so large that it would involve an extremely aggressive approach to a system that would oppose any change. Yet it is logical that in a time of budget constraints money should be saved on the tail (the analytical process) and devoted to the teeth (the information gatherers). It is generally acknowledged that the British process of analysis is both more effective and more efficient than the American version. It is a fraction of the size — twenty people compared with thousands.
Instead of the present massive duplication and waste, the analytical process could be gathered into one Central Analytical Agency which would be responsible only for producing the classified studies that involve highly sensitive sources and methods. Other studies would be put out to competitive tender in the same way that consultants work for other departments. The intelligence community would argue that such a system would compromise sources and methods, but this need not necessarily be so. An analysis on, say, the political situation in Bolivia, could be prepared using open sources which could be made available by the intelligence community and others. Then, when the paper is delivered to the Central Analytical Agency, additional information could be added if it materially affected the judgements that had been made. Already any intelligence professional would readily acknowledge that the majority of assessments produced by the intelligence community are affected only marginally by the addition of top secret information. In any event, when such assessments are made, the analytical process that currently exists ensures that different agencies are forced to justify their judgements, which leads to some seepage of sources and methods.
As part of this different approach, the community should make available most of the economic data assembled for political and economic analyses of countries and trading relationships. This is a national resource which, in for example Japan, is treated as such, and made available to industry and business leaders as a matter of course. Once again, the counter argument would be that such a process would compromise sources and methods, but a Central Analytical Agency could sift through the information to make sure that top secret data was not released. A second counter argument would suggest that the released database would benefit our trading competitors. However as countries like Japan, China, Russia and France routinely steal such information anyway, it makes sense to allow the American business community to have the same opportunities as the competition abroad.
It is difficult to gauge just how much money this concept would save as there is no detailed breakdown of the intelligence community’s budget available for examination. But a more competitive (in the business sense) system would save money and allow resources to be devoted to the gathering of intelligence rather than the analysis. At the same time, a valuable national resource which has been hidden behind veils of secrecy can be opened to a wider audience.
As the KGB fell apart after the second Russian revolution, a new era began which divided the old monolith into a number of parts, all subject to a form of parliamentary oversight. The old First Chief Directorate, which was responsible for foreign spying, became the SVR, with altered responsibilities. According to Yevgeni Primakov, the head of the SVR, in future there will be no spying for political rather than national security purposes. Attempts to subvert foreign governments through covert support of terrorist organizations, opposition groups or even agents in place will not be tolerated. This new pragmatism is driven in part by changing political circumstances, but also because the SVR simply does not have the cash to pay for such extravagance.
Amidst these changes, Primakov has tried to open a door between the SVR and Western intelligence agencies. Bob Gates visited Moscow in 1992 and Primakov came to Washington to talk with Jim Woolsey in June 1993. These visits stressed the common ground that now exists between the former enemies. Primakov would like to see greater sharing of intelligence on such matters as drugs, organized crime and proliferation, In principle this makes good sense. To emphasize how different their world has become, the KGB archives have been opened to allow publication in the West of books and articles based on previously classified documents. The former KGB now has an efficient public relations office which answers questions from the media and has become adept at leaking stories which place the organization in a good light. These are changes for the good and set the KGB ahead of the game, when compared with the SIS or the DGSE. But it is not simply altruism or a Damascus-like conversion that has prompted this new openness. All the information released so far has contributed to an image of the former KGB as a successful organization that frequently managed to defeat the West. The message is that it was the KGB that provided the intelligence that kept the Soviet Union strong. By implication, the KGB should be retained to keep Russia strong in the new world.
The same cannot be said for the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Russian military. There has been little reduction in their activities. They continue to try and steal Western scientific and technological secrets to help the struggling Russian industrial base. They are also active in trying to recruit spies in the major industrial countries. A number of attempts have been made to persuade Boris Yeltsin to curb their activities but he has been unwilling or, more likely, unable to do anything. Clearly, the military is too powerful in the new Russia for Yeltsin to rein in the GRU. While that remains the case, there is little hope for a new relationship between Russia and the West. A serious new relationship would mean that one country does not spy on the other.
Also, the Russians have refused to provide any intelligence they may have about terrorist organizations or clandestine arms procurement networks in countries like Iraq and Libya. There is little reason for such reticence if the Russians are in earnest about combating the problems they share with other countries. If they actually began to share some intelligence, this might convince the sceptics that they were not simply paying lip service to cooperation as a way of winning plaudits at home.
