[Mb-civic] FW: Terrorism Intelligence Report

[Golsorkhi]

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From: "Kiddie Zafar" <Kiddie at projector.ch>
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 22:15:46 -0000
To: "John HAYES" <john.hayes at corusent.com>, "Khosro ZAFAR"
<kzii at swbell.net>, "Gholam Reza GOLSORKHI" <grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net>, "Keu
Zafar" <kzafar at besthomesintl.com>, "Amir-Teymour GOLSORKHI - hm"
<atgolsorkhi at yahoo.com>
Subject: FW: Terrorism Intelligence Report

Thought you might find this interesting.

 

Terrorism Intelligence Report - October 27, 2005


U.S. Intelligence: Fixing the System, or Fighting It?

By Fred Burton 

It has been nearly a year since we first noted the churn taking place
within the CIA under then-new Director Porter Goss. In the life of any
organization -- let alone a political one -- there is bound to be some
shakeout within the ranks whenever there is a change of leadership,
and doubly so when the outgoing leader has been in place as long as
George Tenet was. But rather than reaching a crescendo early on and
then dissipating, the turnover at Langley has intensified over the
past year, and many of the departures have involved seasoned officials
from the Directorate of Operations (DO).

Considering that the value of an intelligence officer is realized over
the course of decades and entire careers, any churn in the secretive
DO that is sufficiently high-level or widespread to attract the notice
of mainstream news media is cause for concern. Neither intelligence
agents nor senior managers -- such as deputy DO chief Robert Richer,
who resigned in September -- are easily replaced; all require
cultivation and heavy up-front investment.

The causes behind the problem are numerous, and most have been amply
discussed in public venues: personality clashes with Goss or
dissatisfaction over his management style; purges that were deemed
necessary to induce a cultural shift following Tenet's
business-oriented approach  to intelligence collection and analysis;
an overall intelligence community restructuring that created a new
director of national intelligence (DNI) position, now held by John
Negroponte. Though this last issue affects no one but Goss personally
-- it shifts to the new DNI the daily responsibility for briefing the
president -- it contributes to low morale at the Agency, where one of
the perks for those who usually toil in anonymity has been the
reflected glory of having your work reported directly each day to the
president of the United States.

Add to that the castigation to which all of the nation's intelligence
organizations were subjected -- though perhaps none so heavily as the
CIA -- for the  failures  leading to Sept. 11 and unreliable
intelligence about WMD in Iraq, and it is clear that there is a deep
and systemic problem to be solved at Langley.

Goss is now fighting back, with at least some public attempts to
restore the perceived glamour of intelligence work while driving
toward a 50 percent increase in the size of the clandestine service
and analyst staffs. One of the strategies he is pursuing is a campaign
of unilateralism -- an attempt to wean the Agency from any
dependencies on foreign intelligence services, rendering the CIA
increasingly independent while also expanding and dispersing its
agents' presence around the globe. "We are going to be in places
people can't even imagine," he told employees in an all-hands meeting
in late September.

The approach is intriguing on several levels. In terms of resolving
Langley's immediate problems -- first, halting the churn -- it may
indeed be just what is needed. Whether the intelligence such efforts
produce, and the analysis thereof, ultimately helps mend the Agency's
tattered image is a question for the longer term; success on both
fronts is needed if Goss is to succeed in his mission.

That said, the intelligence world is riddled with interdependencies.
National security, particularly on the counterterrorism front,
requires a high level of coordination between the CIA (tasked with
gathering human intelligence overseas), the FBI (tasked with gathering
intelligence within the United States), and the State Department
(which helps in protecting U.S. citizens and assets abroad, as well as
with collecting intelligence), along with foreign intelligence
services and liaisons and the National Security Administration. It is
a complex system, unwieldy under the best of circumstances, and we
would be hard-pressed to frame it as an ideal. Workable alternatives,
however, are difficult to find.

In the post-Sept. 11 era, all of these systems (which have existed for
decades) now come together under the aegis of the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS), which -- on paper, anyway -- is designed to
vet any information about potential terrorist threats and then
disperse credible and timely intelligence to the appropriate state and
local authorities and the public. Now, there are still many kinks in
this system, four years after the Bush administration created the DHS,
but this is how it is intended to work.

   

The problem with a campaign of unilateralism, by the CIA or any other
intelligence organization, is that unless it scores a resounding
success -- and quite rapidly at that (which is unlikely, given the
nature of the work) -- it is more likely to add to national security
problems than resolve them in the near term.

Fragmentation has been a feature of the U.S. intelligence system for
some time, and for numerous reasons. For example, we noted
intelligence from sources in February that John Negroponte -- then the
U.S. ambassador to Iraq -- was setting up his own  intelligence
apparatus  within Iraq because he reportedly did not view intelligence
from the CIA as reliable. The Department of Defense and other branches
of government likewise have established their own intelligence
channels, which are not subject to congressional oversight -- and
which also make holistic intelligence analysis difficult, if not
impossible. This is not a new problem.

Where we are now seeing it play out -- often with incredible
inconvenience for everyday Americans (and follow-on credibility
problems for all the intelligence agencies involved) -- is in
terrorism scares, such as the recent "threat" to Baltimore's Harbor
Tunnel or to the New York subway system, that turn out to be based on
bogus intel. The difficulty in these cases was not that someone
uncovered rumors of a threat, or that those rumors were passed down
the chain to local authorities who took action, or even that the daily
commutes of thousands of people were interrupted, with resulting costs
to the community -- all of these are preferable to failing to report a
real threat that is ultimately carried out. Rather, the problem lies
in the inability to supply  timely  and  relevant  intelligence all
the way through the chain, consistently. There are simply too many
potential points of failure.

The threat to the Harbor Tunnel is a perfect example of the system's
increasing fragmentation, and bears close examination.

We have noted that it is the responsibility of the CIA to gather
intelligence overseas, but the Agency is hardly alone in that
endeavor. Either the FBI or the Department of State, through its
embassies, might also be present in any given country, and quite often
all three can be found together -- collecting and transmitting
intelligence, jointly or independently, back to their home offices at
Langley, Foggy Bottom or the Hoover Building in Washington.

This system appears to have been fully in play with the Harbor Tunnel
scare, which originated with a foreign source who was questioned by
Dutch intelligence, which then passed the information on to its U.S.
counterparts. (This, by the way, is the sort of liaison dependency
that Goss envisions weaning the CIA from.) The "in-country" teams
would huddle and send the information back to headquarters in D.C.,
launching a flurry of back-and-forth communications: Do you think the
source is credible? Can you get more information? What about specific
targets? This part of the process is not necessarily always smooth,
but it does work fairly well and is common sense.

The difficulties -- at least for homeland security purposes -- usually
begin in Washington, where dozens of agencies by now have been made
aware of the intelligence and are individually assessing what, if
anything, to do with it. The State Department alone has a system that
allows it to transmit intelligence to more than 50 government agencies
simultaneously, so that all the pertinent officials are reading from
the same page. In the Harbor Tunnel example, this might be a quite
detailed report in some respects -- explaining how Dutch intelligence
picked up the human source, who he is believed to be, what specifics
he gave during interrogation, and so forth. This report might conclude
with what is called a "tear line" -- literally, a point at which the
page could be torn and a slip of paper with a homogenized message
passed on by the DHS to state or local authorities and the general
public. It would look something like this:

 
Begin Tear Line 
 
On Nov. 1, 2005, a source of unknown reliability in a foreign country
advised a foreign intelligence service that a terrorist attack will
take place inside the United States before Thanksgiving.
 

At that point, local officials would face the decision on whether or
not to act in the face of what, for all they know, might be an
imminent attack in their city. In the Harbor Tunnel case, roads in and
out of Baltimore were shut down for about two hours before someone
relayed the latest information, which had been known to intelligence
agencies in the Netherlands for some time amid all the flurry: The
human source was telling tales, and there was no threat to the
tunnels.

   

There are several take-aways from this discussion. First, as we have
just noted, tear-line information often is so watered down as to be
nearly useless by local authorities. This is a complicated issue in
itself. On the one hand, it is a symptom of all intelligence
organizations' need and desire to protect their sources and methods
and, at times, to compartmentalize sensitive information. On the other
hand, it can be almost impossible to interpret and act upon such
vagueness -- and all of this is assuming that the original source in
Foreign Country A was providing bona fide threat information to begin
with, which frequently is not the case. The entire system is rooted in
the reliability of the sourcing -- a problem that Stratfor faces as
well. 

All of these practical difficulties have added to the cacophony of
questions about the reliability of the U.S. intelligence system and
fueled impulses by some agencies and local police departments to, like
Goss, go it alone and collect their own intel. Increasingly,
metropolitan police departments  and other security agencies have
taken to deploying their own agents abroad -- without the diplomatic
cover afforded to official intelligence agents -- due to perceived
need and distrust of the existing system.

We are not unsympathetic to the problem. It is human nature to prefer
one's own sources to another agency's intelligence -- which is often
second-hand by the time it is translated into English. Acting on
information from their own human sources, the NYPD, State Department,
FBI or other agencies are better able to judge its reliability: They
would at least have an idea of the source's identity, something about
his possible connections to terrorist groups, whether he was coerced
during interrogation or developed a nervous tic when discussing the
reported "threat." Everyone feels more comfortable assessing and
acting on the intelligence when they've had a hand in collecting it.

   
 
But, ultimately, this "pile-on" effect stands only to increase the
level of kludge in the existing intelligence system -- and it is
questionable whether it actually serves the public, as opposed to the
intelligence agencies. Because they bypass what ideally should be the
firewall imposed by the DHS to shield the public from questionable
intelligence, these outriders can lead to more, rather than fewer,
needless panics if the local groups' threat information is not
well-vetted or protected. And such scares, in turn, tend to reinforce
questions and concerns about the reliability of the entire
intelligence community -- not just the CIA -- in the minds of the
public.

Identifying the problems in a system with so many moving parts is,
while not easy, still much easier than proposing solutions -- and, as
we noted above, finding viable alternatives to the existing system,
imperfect though it may be, is challenging. The missing ingredient is
trust, which is not endemic to the intelligence community. The task
has now fallen to Goss to find ways of generating that trust in the
still-tumultuous CIA, and to Negroponte -- who, we note, was only
months ago contributing to the fragmentation in the system -- to
streamline it instead.


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