Is US Intelligence working?

[faroukfarouk]

Accountability for people that refuse to follow basic security protocol needs to come into the equation here, and they pretend it's not a factor. I guess they are all that, and they (russia) shouldn't have even DARED to harm them. That arrogance cost them face. The emails didn't show anything that people didn't already speculate on, and so I can't see it as any factor in the election. It was just confirmation.

This seems common sense, yes.

 

[HannahT]

9/11 was fifteen years ago. Using that to judge what is happening today is silly.

Yep. I forgot to place 'sarcasm' in that post.

 

[RDKirk]

Given the war of words between Trump and the Intelligence community one wonders if they are in for some serious cutbacks.

Is there a case to be made for the US intelligence community or are cuts and reforms long overdue?

Given:

1) the failure to predict 911

That was an FBI procedure failure compounded by the 75 Intelligence Oversight Act that prevents contact between the foreign intelligence community and domestic police operations.

2) false predictions about WMDs

WRONG. In fact, that's a stinking lie that keeps being repeated. The Intelligence agencies said, "We have no reliable information" about WMD. Every report was heavily caveated that there was no reliable information. My own former boss stood before the Senate and said publically, "Senator, we had no reliable information."

Cheney and Rumsfeld chose to believe "Curveball" (who the intelligence community had already branded as "unreliable") and very deliberately kept the actual intelligence agency analyses away from Congress and the president.

3) a failed Middle Eastern policy that has led to a genocide of the Christian church , a magnification of civil strife combined with general religious illiteracy

As far back as 1990, the Intelligence Agencies predicted that minority religious groups would be targeted if Saddam were removed from power. Cheney and Rumsfeld chose to ignore them.

4) the failure to prevent the hacking of the Democrats whoever carried it out

The DNC is a private entity. Intelligence agencies don't have the charter to protect them from hacking.

What do these guys add to American security and by extension to that of of its allies? Has political correctness and politicial interference wrecked American intelligence?

You don't actually have any knowledge of what they do, inasmuch as 99% of it is rightly classified.

However, they did locate Osama bin Laden and continually locate other terrorist leaders to be targeted by "operations." All those drone strikes might cause collateral damage--that's an "operations" problem-- but every one is an intelligence success in locating a dangerous terrorist.

What can be done to turn this around?

There isn't much to be turned around.

 

[bhsmte]

Given the war of words between Trump and the Intelligence community one wonders if they are in for some serious cutbacks.

Is there a case to be made for the US intelligence community or are cuts and reforms long overdue?

Given:

1) the failure to predict 911 2) false predictions about WMDs
3) a failed Middle Eastern policy that has led to a genocide of the Christian church , a magnification of civil strife combined with general religious illiteracy
4) the failure to prevent the hacking of the Democrats whoever carried it out

What do these guys add to American security and by extension to that of of its allies? Has political correctness and politicial interference wrecked American intelligence?

What can be done to turn this around?

Here is the problem. Intelligence agencies have a tendancy to take on a life of their own and dont reveal everthing they do, to even the senate behind closed doors. It has always been this way.

 

[RDKirk]

That's an alluring idea but unfortunately I don't think it's quite that simple. While I'm no supporter of Obama, it looks to me as though they have defied him at times. Indeed, they seem to defy anybody and everybody when it suits their purpose.

What they need is widespread reform. Simply purging Obama's appointments may help in that process but I don't think the effort can stop there considering the extent of the problem.

Well, the Iron Law of Bureaucracy is always in effect, even in the intelligence agencies.

The Iron Law is least effective for and upon the military primarily because political administrations have very little effect on military bureaucrats, but also because the military function has an inherently brutal check on incompetency: You start losing battles.

This creates an inherent difference for an intelligence analyst working for a military commander and one working for a politician. A military commander ultimately wants the truth. He wants--he must--know the unvarnished actuality of the situation. As one boss of mine puts it, "Our job is to tell our commander both the vulnerabilities and the opportunities." He has both a sword and a shield--intelligence gives him the information he needs to use both.

The politician, on the other hand, almost never wants the truth. Or rather, they only want to know the opportunities and deny the vulnerabilities. From the point of view of being military intelligence, I saw this many times, so much that I pitied my CIA colleagues.

There were times that CIA political considerations actually blinded them to some things--for instance, there was a fierce debate in the weeks prior to the Iraq invasion of Kuwait between DIA and CIA. On the DIA side, we saw Iraq clearly preparing to invade either Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.

The Iraqi preparation was absolutely textbook--exactly what we had seen prior to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, exactly what we expected to see in North Korea or East Germany. Textbook (Saddam was using the Soviet textbook).

But the CIA was convinced that the politics went the other way--Saddam had been "our boy" in the war against Iran. So what we were calling "invasion preparation" could not be anything more than a military exercise. So we debated until the very last minute, because nothing could go to the president except through the CIA.

What has been unfortunate since the Iraq Invasion (which was particularly notable in the extent that politicians ignored both the intelligence agencies and the generals) is that the Iron Law has taken particular hold of the CIA in particular and the Intelligence Community in general. In the past, nobody would have ever known of a disagreement between civilian political leaders and the Intelligence Community.

Prior to the Iraq Invasion, the IC did let some issues leak (such as the fact that DIA did not support Rumsfeld's WMD contentions)--which everyone ignored. So these days, the IC agencies pronounce disagreements in official statements.

That is a bad thing, IMO, and that began in my career with Clinton and ramped up tremendously with Cheney and Rumsfeld. The best president we had in that respect (during my career) had been the elder Bush. Certainly the facts that he had formerly been CIA director himself--as well as a military commander--gave him more confidence to heed the IC.

Trump...geez, I don't know what Trump is doing. But I do know the Iron Law is in effect, and I'm very aware of how the permanent bureaucracy closed ranks to protect itself from Carter. They are not going to let a White House short-timer ruin their lives and careers.

This could get ugly in passive-aggressive ways people outside the Beltway will never see: Carter wasn't personally that bad and Reagan wasn't personally that good...the willingness of the permanent bureaucracy to ensure White House success makes the difference.

 

[RDKirk]

I watched part of the hearings this morning about the hackings. One thing Clapper said is the hardest part of the job? Speculating about the motive of - in this case Russia. How they are always asked that part, and I can understand why that would be the hard part. Another gentleman at the hearing - I can't remember his name, but he had a military uniform on - mentioned that they give intel to the higher ups, and at times they rebuff the findings. If they don't like what they see? They basically blow them off.

I recall in the middle 90s--when the US was heavily pushing trade with China--we discovered that the Chinese were transferring US-forbidden ballistic missiles to Pakistan. Every agency was in agreement--it was confirmed. It even leaked to the press (which is why I mention it now).

But...by law, that fact required the US to cut economic relations with both China and Pakistan, which the Clinton administration had no intention of doing.

But instead of the White House saying, "We hear you, but we're doing something else," they said, "You're wrong! Those are just dummy missiles! You don't really know if they're real until they actually launch one!"

My grumbling response to that was, "It's a good thing the White House didn't have that 'You don't really know until they actually launch one' mentality in 1963."

 

[RDKirk]

The profiling you reference was not deemed necessary in an age when the biggest threat involving civilian airliners was hijacking. No one ever imagined airliners would be used as missiles.

More troubling was the fact that the 9-11 terrorist were already known to US security and intelligence agencies....but they failed to cross-communicate, coordinate and successfully connect the dots...

The Oversight Acts prevents an FBI agent from phoning someone in the CIA to ask, "Do you have anything on a guy named Mohammad Atta?" There is an extremely complex process required by law to transfer information between foreign and domestic intelligence agencies...and that "wall" has even been reproduced within Homeland Security--different parts of Homeland Security can't even talk directly to one another.

To some extent, that's a matter of legal CYA--the Iron Law of Bureaucracy asserting itself, senior bureaucrats taking the least legally risky route of operation. But then again, the Snowden affair proves that the least legally risky route is what they'd better take.

 

[RDKirk]

"Connect the dots."

I hate that analogy of intelligence analysis. It's not at all accurate.

"Connect the dots" implies that there is a coherent picture that can be seen merely by counting from one to two to three and so on until you see the picture.

No.

Intelligence analysis is more like this:

Buy a thousand of those thousand-piece picture puzzles.

Throw away the boxes and thoroughly mix those 1,000,000 pieces together to form a thoroughly random pile of puzzle pieces.

Now throw away 800,000 pieces.

Divide the remaining 200,000 pieces among fifteen people and tell each one to put the pictures together.

Don't even tell them how many pictures there might be.

That is what intelligence analysis is like.

 

[RDKirk]

Fair point and it is not our call here on the Internet to make a final judgment on the effectiveness or otherwise of the intelligence services in the USA or its Western allies. But we can come to a considered opinion based on what we do know. There have been some obvious intelligence failures.

But you (that is, the general public) don't actually know the difference between an intelligence failure and an operations failure. Do you remember reading in the press back in the 90s about the failed attempt to drop a Tomahawk on Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan?

The intel was dead on: We knew exactly when he'd be in that training camp--even which tent he'd be in, and what time he'd be there. It was totally a political decision to wait until the following day to launch the missile.

"If you know you don't have enough facts for a valid conclusion, don't come to one unless you must." is an old intel rule. Unfortunately, for a military analyst in combat that "must" is every day.

But another rule applies: "Tell the commander what you know. Then tell him what you think. But make darned sure he understands the difference."

Unfortunately even then, Condolezza Rice has admitted, "We never read the caveats."

 

[RDKirk]

Given the sensitivity and political significance of such conferences I am slightly confused why the US Government does not offer a firewalled and neutral framework for these. In the case of the DNC they had no reason to fear political bias in a state apparatus ruled by a Democratic president.

There are several hundred political parties in the US.

 

[essentialsaltes]

Former CIA chief Woolsey quits the Trump transition team.

 

[Winken]

"Connect the dots."

I hate that analogy of intelligence analysis. It's not at all accurate.

"Connect the dots" implies that there is a coherent picture that can be seen merely by counting from one to two to three and so on until you see the picture.

No.

Intelligence analysis is more like this:

Buy a thousand of those thousand-piece picture puzzles.

Throw away the boxes and thoroughly mix those 1,000,000 pieces together to form a thoroughly random pile of puzzle pieces.

Now throw away 800,000 pieces.

Divide the remaining 200,000 pieces among fifteen people and tell each one to put the pictures together.

Don't even tell them how many pictures there might be.

That is what intelligence analysis is like.

SPOT ON !!!!

 

[mindlight]

That was an FBI procedure failure compounded by the 75 Intelligence Oversight Act that prevents contact between the foreign intelligence community and domestic police operations.

That fits the fact that America was warned but did nothing about it.

WRONG.

In fact, that's a stinking lie that keeps being repeated. The Intelligence agencies said, "We have no reliable information" about WMD. Every report was heavily caveated that there was no reliable information. My own former boss stood before the Senate and said publically, "Senator, we had no reliable information."

Cheney and Rumsfeld chose to believe "Curveball" (who the intelligence community had already branded as "unreliable") and very deliberately kept the actual intelligence agency analyses away from Congress and the president.

As stated previously It seems that the ways in which data came up the chain of command seems to have resulted in a warping of said data until it matched what the decision makers wanted to hear. Sadam probably told his own inner circle he still had WMDs. It might have even been believed by some of them given their previous experience of his usage of chemical weopans.

As far back as 1990, the Intelligence Agencies predicted that minority religious groups would be targeted if Saddam were removed from power. Cheney and Rumsfeld chose to ignore them.

The neoCon view was that Iraqis would welcome liberation. But as you suggest the impacts of said liberation were more in line with the intelligence analysis than the ways in which the decision makers chose to filter and understand that.

You don't actually have any knowledge of what they do, inasmuch as 99% of it is rightly classified.

With wikileaks , RT today and politicians eager to brag or cast blame that % might be a little lower than 99%.

However, they did locate Osama bin Laden and continually locate other terrorist leaders to be targeted by "operations." All those drone strikes might cause collateral damage--that's an "operations" problem-- but every one is an intelligence success in locating a dangerous terrorist.

True

There isn't much to be turned around.

What?! Is this you defending colleagues or an objective appraisal. From your own words the integration of foreign and domestic intelligence requires work. Also the extent to which ideology and political agendas can currently overrule facts.

 

[Calvinist Dark Lord]

Boots on the ground may be a part of the solution but is that any cheaper. Also it requires a very long term view of intelligence as people need to be planted in contexts years before they are used and familiar to an intimate extent with these cultures.

That would i imagine depend on whether the US government wants short term information that may well be inaccurate, or long term information that was developed with a level of confidence.

It never comes cheap, but reaps benefits in its dependability.

Of course one could always rely on the present method that attempts to turn Ukrainian malware that is commercially available into a dogma such as "The Russians hacked our election!"

 

[faroukfarouk]

But you (that is, the general public) don't actually know the difference between an intelligence failure and an operations failure. Do you remember reading in the press back in the 90s about the failed attempt to drop a Tomahawk on Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan?

The intel was dead on: We knew exactly when he'd be in that training camp--even which tent he'd be in, and what time he'd be there. It was totally a political decision to wait until the following day to launch the missile.

"If you know you don't have enough facts for a valid conclusion, don't come to one unless you must." is an old intel rule. Unfortunately, for a military analyst in combat that "must" is every day.

But another rule applies: "Tell the commander what you know. Then tell him what you think. But make darned sure he understands the difference."

Unfortunately even then, Condolezza Rice has admitted, "We never read the caveats."

Do politicians even understand the difference?

It seems that so many painstakingly derived overseas facts and analyses are then filtered through domestic political imaginings and assumptions.

So for example, the fact that Israel does not want a strong hostile neighbour on its borders is understood widely.

Then the fact that Syria is relatively strong and claiming the Golan Heights which Mr Assad Senior used to control as defence minister in the 60s is viewed by the Israeli military - as a matter of necessity - as a permanent threat.

And so anything to do with the Golan Heights / Gebel al Sheikh is portrayed in the US media as matter of Israel resisting Syrian aggression.

The fact that Begin annexed Golan is either dutifully overlooked in the media and by policymakers, or else the mindset of Syrians, given the history of having had Golan annexed by Begin, is basically ignored.

And for the media and for policymakers Golan basically implies Syrian aggression, with little or no nuance.

And by extension, for the media and for policymakers Golan also means Lebanese aggression (yes really!)

The reason is that, because the southern border between Lebanon and Syria is ill defined, the Sheba Farms area of Golan, whether defined as Lebanese or Syrian, is inherently regarded by the Israeli military as a source of aggression.

And so this finds its way to the thinking of the US media and policymakers.

The fact of Israeli official thinking is understood and its underpinnings are assumed.

While what the matter might mean for the Lebanese and for a sense of their territorial integrity is ignored, however much this may actually and clearly affect Lebanese thinking and likely behaviour as regards sympathy for Lebanese Hezbollah as a result. For the media or for policymakers, it's totally a matter of Lebanese aggression. Or, if not, it's totally a matter of Syrian aggression. (It's rather like having a US listening post on Golan - such as the waterborne USS Liberty put out of action in 1967) and then the media and the policymakers steadfastly refusing to listen to any information coming from that listening post, however good and accurate it may be.

Oh yes, Syria has played diplomatic hardball in using the territorial integrity prerogatives of the Lebanese (being deliberately vague about its own border with Lebanon) in order to encourage pressure from Hezbollah against Israel.

But Israeli pressure against Syria - military presence in the Sheba Farms area of Golan - is either ignored by the media and policymakers - or else always portrayed as defensive.

What Israel and Syria do in the Sheba Farms area to put pressure on each other, using the Lebanese in different ways, is actually quite similar.

But no amount of analysis and information which might point to likely moves by Syria and Lebanon is internalized by policymakers and the media other than to take the Israeli view (maybe at some level understandable) that it constitutes aggression from Lebanon and Syria.

So again with many aspects of the Syrian situation.

The media and policymakers have already decided that Assad is uniquely a dictator.(Remember also how as well as saying Bashar Assad was a dictator, they used to say he was not in charge; not a line they have felt able to take in recent years.) Therefore any action by any group - or so goes the media and policymaker assumption - taken to destabilize Syria must supposedly be inherently good.

From an Israeli point of view, weakening a relatively strong Syria might make military sense although one may guess that the whirlwind that outside interference in Syria has now reaped is probably now viewed by some Israeli military and strategic analysts as a miscalculation, not worth its while in the long term.

But the US media and policymakers pursue their assumptions about Syria, never mind how much the facts on the ground supplied not inaccurately by the intelligence agencies point in other directions.

It's as if US policymakers are saying: We are going to fund our contemporary intelligence listening posts like USS Liberty was. But then we are not going to listen to any information and analysis that does not accord with our politically and media driven assumptions.

This is what I meant when I suggested that the policymakers sometimes can't even tell the difference between failure and success.

 

[JGG]

No. We should do as President-Elect Trump does, and rely on the National Enquirer for intelligence.

 

[Calvinist Dark Lord]

No. We should do as President-Elect Trump does, and rely on the National Enquirer for intelligence.

Seems to be working better than whatever 'Tea Leaves' the US government is reading.

 

[RDKirk]

As stated previously It seems that the ways in which data came up the chain of command seems to have resulted in a warping of said data until it matched what the decision makers wanted to hear. Sadam probably told his own inner circle he still had WMDs. It might have even been believed by some of them given their previous experience of his usage of chemical weopans.

I think Saddam turned to his weapons people and said, "We have WMDs, right?" and they said, "Yes, sir!"

The neoCon view was that Iraqis would welcome liberation. But as you suggest the impacts of said liberation were more in line with the intelligence analysis than the ways in which the decision makers chose to filter and understand that.

Nobody welcomes foreign armies, even as liberators. Remember the old WWII images of Parisians throwing roses at Americans liberating Paris? Well, what the generals actually did was put de Gaulle and the French army at the head of that parade...the Americans followed him.

That's why the Army Chief of Staff and the Marine Commandant steadfastly declared that invading Iraq would require 250,000-350,000 troops while Rumsfelt was saying 70,000.

What?! Is this you defending colleagues or an objective appraisal. From your own words the integration of foreign and domestic intelligence requires work. Also the extent to which ideology and political agendas can currently overrule facts.

I think practically all needed changes are Congressional.

1. Poke some holes in the legal "wall" between foreign and domestic intelligence--at least on the analysis side, not the operational side. Right now, a request for intelligence must go from, say, an FBI agent at the working level though arduous validations to the senior officials of the FBI, then to the senior officials at the CIA and down though more validations to an analyst in a cubical who might have the answer. Then his answer has to go back up and across and down again. If the FBI has any further questions or needs clarification...it starts all over again. And there is plenty of CYA all the way up and down both chains. Most often, either question or response doesn't make the journey.

They can make that a lot simpler, quicker and easier...just maintain a tight audit of the communication.

2. Bring back "competitive analysis" as justified and permitted again. Prior to the end of the Cold War, intelligence agencies were authorized to "check each other's work." If one agency was first with an item, another agency tried at least to be more complete or more accurate.

But after the Cold War ended, everyone wanted a piece of the "Cold War Dividend," and part of that was cutting the heck out of intelligence capability. Lots of pink slips went around. And "competitive analysis" was seen as "expensive redundancy." Each agency got its "lane in the road" which no other agency could ride in.

A problem there, however, is that especially within the beltway, there might be only one analyst handling an entire area of concern...or an old senior analyst who made sure every report out of his section was in accord with his own theories. With "competitive analysis," there was someone somewhere else who might call his bunk.

An example of failure was the accidental US Air Force bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Bosnian war. A lot of CYA finger-pointing went on after that, but we know exactly what happened. That location had been a Yugoslavian military building several years prior, and that's how it was still identified in the database--as such, it was a valid target. During the Bosnian bombing campaing, a specific CIA analyst had the job of validating whether or not it was still valid--it was in their "lane of the road."

However since its last report (done a few years earlier by the Air Force), the location had been sold to the Chinese, who razed the old structures and built their embassy.

Under the old "competitive analysis" regime, the Air Force would have been making regular reports of every potential targets--even low-priority structures like an obscure Yugoslavian military building would have been at least a training task for some young airman. He would have looked for a particularly described building, found something different, and gone to his sergeant, who would have told him to make a change in the database.

As it was, that particular CIA analyst (yes, we found out his name) was supposed to have actually sent someone to eyeball the building from street level. He failed to do that, and entered his report as NAC--No Apparent Change. And that's how that error happened. No "competitive analysis."

After that, I know several Air Force and Navy organizations started doing under-the-table competitive analysis out of their own budgets, not trusting the CIA with anything they needed for actual warfighting.

3. Give the DIA a seat at the table in the Situation Room. Right now, the CIA is the arbiter of intelligence that reaches the President. The Rules of Good Staffwork dictate that good staffers always reach agreement before meeting the Boss--they should never argue in front of the Boss. But giving the DIA a seat at the table would keep CIA honest, 'cause sometimes you have to break that rule.

4. Open an intelligence feed to the select intelligence committees in Congress that does not go through White House approval. The Congress needs more than the annual Worldwide Threat Assessment, which is frankly really just a vehicle for validating the Intelligence Community budget.

 

[RDKirk]

That would i imagine depend on whether the US government wants short term information that may well be inaccurate, or long term information that was developed with a level of confidence.

It never comes cheap, but reaps benefits in its dependability.

Of course one could always rely on the present method that attempts to turn Ukrainian malware that is commercially available into a dogma such as "The Russians hacked our election!"

By "boots on the ground," you're talking about HUMINT--human intelligence. All of the various "-INTs" (SIGINT, COMINT, IMINT, MASINT, ACCOUSINT, ad naseum) brings its own piece of the puzzle to the table, and not one is superior to the other. Each is just a piece, and one piece helps validate another.

Some places you just can't penetrate with a human being...nobody who really knows is going to tell you. Or someone may tell you, but you need something to corroborate...HUMINT has an extremely high level of unreliability.

 

[wing2000]

The Oversight Acts prevents an FBI agent from phoning someone in the CIA to ask, "Do you have anything on a guy named Mohammad Atta?" There is an extremely complex process required by law to transfer information between foreign and domestic intelligence agencies...and that "wall" has even been reproduced within Homeland Security--different parts of Homeland Security can't even talk directly to one another.

To some extent, that's a matter of legal CYA--the Iron Law of Bureaucracy asserting itself, senior bureaucrats taking the least legally risky route of operation. But then again, the Snowden affair proves that the least legally risky route is what they'd better take.

Yes, thank you for noting the legal constraints that were in place at the time.