Rumors, Lies, Innuendo, Fear, Uncertainty, and Despair

“This was a screw-up that could have been disastrous. We dodged a bullet, but just barely. It was averted by brave individuals, not because the system worked, and that is not acceptable.”

“The bottom line is this: The US government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas day attack but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots.”

Barack Obama

Mr. Obama doesn’t know much about intelligence or the intelligence community. Yes, the intelligence community failed to identify Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before he boarded a US-bound airplane with more than skid marks in his underwear.

Abdulmutallab's Panty Bomb - courtesy ABC News

But, as intelligence failures go, this is small-time stuff. Here are a few intelligence failures generally regarded as big-time:

1941 – Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
1950 – One million Chinese troops invade Korea
1968 – Viet Nam Tet offensive
1974 – India nuclear bomb detonation
1989 – Collapse of Soviet Union
2001 – 9/11 attacks

In each of the above cases, indignation was expressed, hearings were held, fingers were pointed, blame was apportioned, and it was determined after the fact that we did have enough intelligence in hand to have predicted each of these events quite accurately but we failed because, to use Obama’s words, someone didn’t “connect the dots.”

Why not? Well, it has a lot to do with the way the intelligence business operates and, believe it or not, there are good reasons why the info about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab wasn’t being flashed from one security node to another with lightning dispatch.

Competition

At the federal level alone, we have literally dozens of intelligence agencies competing for a limited amount of dollars; FBI, NRO, NSA, DIA, ATF, CIA, TSA, DEA, ASA…The list goes on and on. We can spend a finite amount of money on intelligence of all kinds and what one agency gets usually comes out of another agency’s budget. Capitalists like to refer to this kind of rationing of resources as competition. Whatever group is the most successful, the most efficient, with the resources given them will be rewarded next year, perhaps with more money, certainly with more prestige.

Because they are competing for dollars and status, intelligence agencies are loathe to share hard-earned secrets with their “competitors.” Thus, a CIA analyst is not going to jump up and say, “Gosh, we gotta let the boys down at The Bureau know about this right away!” Good intelligence is a valuable commodity, not something you want to give away even to “friends in the business,” unless you think there will be a payback later on.

Credibility

Like gold coming out of a mine, intelligence begins life as a benign-looking mixture of mud, gravel, stones, sand, water, dirt, and a little gold. Part of the work of an intelligence agency is finding the mine, extracting the ore, then separating the gold from the dross. It isn’t easy because, just as in gold mining, for every ounce of ‘color’ you get tons of trash.

It takes time to separate the gold from the trash—the intelligence from the noise. Not internally nor with other agencies does anyone want to circulate information that is false, inaccurate, outdated, or useless. It is an embarrassment to all and the reputation of an agency that broadcasts intelligence of questionable quality deteriorates quickly.

Competence

Even after most of the noise has been removed from raw intelligence, it takes genuine competence and subject-matter expertise to determine what a piece of data might mean and how it might fit with other information that is being gathered. This leads to the next problem:

Compartmentalization

In the intelligence business, security clearances are just the beginning. Top Secret is really just an entry-level clearance that ranks below many specialized, compartmentalized, clearances. The first rule is “need to know.” Just because you have the necessary clearance level to be given certain information doesn’t mean you need it. Your need to know about this particular item has to be established on a case by case basis. You and the guy in the office next to you may be working on similar intelligence issues but, unless you have been authorized to collaborate, chatting or comparing notes about your work can put you in jail.

Security information is compartmentalized because the dangers presented by someone who knows too much about too many things are extraordinary. Aldrich Ames, a CIA agent who had “need to know” access to (what is, in retrospect) too much information, did enormous damage when he began collaborating with the Russians. Information handed over to the Russians by Ames led to the assassination of at least ten CIA agents.

Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who had broad access to FBI information and surveillance on Russian targets did incomprehensible damage to our country and to our intelligence gathering when he turned volumes of highly sensitive information over to the Russians.

Again, Hanssen was particularly dangerous because he knew too much about too many things.

Publishing

Once a piece of intelligence is developed, who gets it, and in what form, is another sensitive issue. Case in point: The National Security Agency (NSA) monitors electronic communications of all kinds. (Despite their charter, the law, and the Constitution they probably have recordings of your last chat with Grandma or your bookie). NSA has recordings of conversations between al Qaeda leaders and field agents but NSA refuses to release verbatim transcripts of these recordings to Arabic-speaking analysts in the FBI and CIA. Why? Because the verbatim transcripts would reveal exactly how NSA was able to gather the information and they don’t want anyone to know where it came from. So they release a summary transcript. The problem with a summary transcript is that it does not repeat the exact words of the original conversation. Two plotters can be talking about bomb parts using code words to make it sound like a grocery list. To an NSA transcriber, they’re stocking the larder for Faisal’s birthday party; to a CIA translator, the repeated use of the word ‘milk’ is an obvious reference to something sinister.

“Ultimately the buck stops with me.”

In a recent speech, Obama symbolically fell on his sword in a press conference, using the above words. But he then immediately backed away from his mea culpa: “The intelligence community did not aggressively follow up on and prioritize particular streams of intelligence related to a possible attack against the homeland.”

Bottom Line

The Obama administration will make no serious attempts to re-organize our intelligence-gathering activities. There will be showcase activities, but most of these will occur in the TSA lines at the airports where citizens can choose to be either irritated or comforted by the additional layers of “security theater.” The real business of intelligence will change hardly a whit.

There will be more attempts to do damage to US interests both in this country and around the world. Some will succeed and a few will be pretty horrifying. Revamping our intelligence community won’t prevent them as the potential dangers are too many and too fluid for us to hope ever to eliminate every one. Probably the most productive change we could make right now is to begin ‘profiling.’ We’ll talk about that in another column after the howls of protest from the ACLU and Common Cause die down.