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February 1, 2005

Tinker, Tailor, Green Beret, Spy

Two stories today highlight a "market inefficiency" within the national security apparatus: there is a lack of good human intelligence. The first is by Reuel Marc Gerecht, of the American Enterprise Institute, who writes about the CIA in the Washington Post, here: The Wrong Changes for the CIA. Gerecht doubts that Porter Goss is making any needed changes, despite his publicized house-cleaning at the CIA:

So far, all signs show that his CIA will be the CIA of his predecessor: bureaucratically moribund at headquarters and operationally ineffectual in the field. If this were not the case, we would see Goss and the White House announcing plans first to fire, not hire, hundreds of operatives who do not advance the agency's primary counterterrorism mission.

Gerecht believes the use of "Non-official cover" operatives is a necessity for success:

This is especially true for the operatives in the Near East division and the counterterrorism center, the two parts of the CIA most responsible for running operations against Islamic extremists. "Inside" officers simply cannot maneuver outside in an effective way. An officially covered case officer posted to Yemen trying to fish in fundamentalist circles would be immediately spotted by the internal security service, to say nothing of fundamentalists. And security concerns since Sept. 11 often seriously restrict the activities of CIA officers based in official U.S. facilities abroad.

Meanwhile, nonofficial cover officers working in the Middle East are, according to active-duty case officers, still mostly doing short-term work, flying in and out on brief assignments. Like their NOC colleagues elsewhere in the world, they are usually trapped by business cover that has little relevance to high-priority, dangerous targets.

The agency desperately needs to develop the culture and capacity to mimic the Islamic activist organizations that attract young male militants. Creating such useful counterterrorist front organizations -- Islamic charities and educational foundations -- isn't labor-intensive, but it does take time. A dozen operatives, based at headquarters and as NOCs abroad, would be sufficient. But the clandestine service as currently structured and led would resist designing such a program, let alone trying to attract the people with the right backgrounds to accomplish the task. To go after the Islamic terrorist target in this way -- to wean the CIA from its ever-growing dependence on Middle Eastern intelligence services and stations full of "inside" officers -- would cause a revolt at Langley.

Gerecht's stated number of a mere dozen NOCs for the Middle East is surprising because he believes so few are needed, and scary, because it means there aren't even a dozen now. Gerecht rightly asks if any sort of long-term after-action analysis of the CIA's past efforts has ever been undertaken:

To my knowledge, there has never been a single study of the efficacy of CIA officers deployed against any target during the Cold War. The agency never once sat down and reviewed how and why case officers were stationed abroad. Certain targets would suddenly grow in importance -- Cuba, Iran or Iraq -- and large operational desks would become even larger task forces, all fueled by the assumption that bigger is better. According to active-duty officers, no serious evaluation has so far been done on the world of Islamic extremists, even though the number of officers assigned to this target has grown exponentially.

The CIA, in other words, has no metric for judging its own intelligence performance.

Given this weakness on the CIA's part, the Pentagon is making up the difference. The International Herald Tribune notes that the Pentagon now gets to pay informers:

Congress has given the Pentagon important new authority to fight terrorism by authorizing Special Operations forces for the first time to spend money to pay informers and recruit foreign paramilitary soldiers.

A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said the new authority was necessary to avoid a repetition of problems encountered in the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. During that conflict, Special Operations troops had to wait for the CIA to pay informers and could not always count on timely support, the Pentagon concluded.

***

Defense Department officials did not call attention to the program even at a briefing last week in which they confirmed news reports about other steps to broaden the military's involvement in intelligence operations. Those include the formation of a new clandestine unit within the Defense Intelligence Agency to work more closely with Special Operations forces in supporting battlefield missions, including counterterrorism operations.

Given the division of labor that these differences in collection presuppose, it seems that the CIA will continue to concentrate on strategic level information, whereas the role of the Pentagon in gathering intelligence will be more tactically or operationally based.

The difference between the two could constitue a seam in information-sharing. How well will each integrate the other's information when formulating analyses or predictions (actually, that's laughable -- the CIA predicts nothing, though any good intelligence analyst is also a futurist by disposition)? Wouldn't much of the small-scale, tactical data that the Special Forces will gather be useful to building a bigger picture at the CIA?

And if the CIA abdicates any role for smaller-scale info gathering -- like cultivating relationships at lower levels in other countries -- the Pentagon cannot cover all the bases. Consider China, a state about whom it is wise to hold a healthy paranoia. There is no Special Forces Group that learns Chinese. And deploying Special Forces in China is, well, rather unlikely. Perhaps this is beyond the scope of the Pentagon program. But who will deploy low-level information gatherers in China? If the current Pentagon program does not contemplate such concerns, one of two things will happen. Either the Pentagon program will grow, or the CIA will take over that task after it has reformed itself.

Does it really matter who is doing the gathering, so long as it does get done, and is shared effectively?

Posted by Chester at February 1, 2005 10:19 PM

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