NIS

National Intelligence Strategy:

The new National Intelligence Strategy is out. It's the first major product by the new "National Intelligence Director" (NID), currently James Negroponte. I was always opposed to the creation of an "intel czar," and now I remember why.

This thirty-two page document is one of those corporate creations that Dilbert founded its success on mocking. You can tell that every word was negotiated at length in committee. And what did all that negotiation produce?

Our Vision -- What we will become:

A unified enterprise of innovative intelligence professionals whose common purpose in defending American lives and interests, and advancing American values, draws strength from our democratic institutions, diversity, and intellectual and technological prowess.

Most of this is a corp-speak description of what an intel agency does. However, deciphering the corporate code, we find that there are three pieces of information contained there which show what will be changing, and what will not:

1) From "unified enterprise" and "common purpose": The NID actually intends to unify the intel services. Since that was his job, this is not surprising.

2) From the specific inclusion of "diversity": Stripping away the political correctness that has bedeviled these organizations will not be a priority. It's too hard, and too deeply set.

3) From "advancing American values" and "draws strength from our democratic institutions" -- Negropont is doing just what Bush sent him to do, which is to snap the intel services to heel from an ideological standpoint. The CIA in particular has been an ideological enemy of the President and his policies. This signals that all "intelligence professionals" will be required to share "American values," including the promotion of democracy as a core concern.

Point three is, I gather, the main purpose of this document. It is job one under "Our Mission," with the relevant codewords highlighted:

Collect, analyze, and disseminate accurate, timely, and objective intelligence, independent of political considerations, to the President and all who make and implement US national security policy, fight our wars, protect our nation, and enforce our laws.

The first few words there, again, are a description of what an intel service does. Yet then there is the mention of "political considerations," which must not be allowed to influence intelligence; and the mention of 'the President and those who make our policy,' to remind the intel services that they don't get to do that.

Reviewing the recent history of CIA leaks, particularly of pessimistic or negative intelligence estimates, and particularly during last year's election cycle, I can see why the President thinks this is a desirable thing to do.

Enforcing ideological conformity among intelligence officers, however, is not a good idea. It is an idea with a history, and the history is not pretty.

Jimmy Carter put Admiral Stansfield Turner in charge of the CIA during his tenure. Turner had an ideological thing against covert and clandestine operations. He felt like a lot of human intelligence operations were immoral (which is absolutely true), and that the United States of America should never do anything that was plainly immoral (which, sadly, can't be true in the area of intelligence). As a result, he essentially scrapped the CIA's capability to carry out these ops, and focused on signals intelligence instead.

Didn't work out too well, did it? But we were in luck: Turner was only in charge of the CIA. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) retained a lot of capabilities that the CIA lost. We still lost a lot: intel networks take years, sometimes even decades to bring to full fruition. When one is cut off and withers, it cannot be replaced right away. Clandestine service intelligence professionals (i.e., spies), though they are at best amoral and often immoral, possess a lifetime of valuable knowledge of the lay of a political landscape, the important figures within it, and personal connections that let them penetrate that landscape and learn where pressure ought to be applied to get results. They are a necessary evil, and one that takes years to develop.

What happens if we get a bad NID now? DIA is going to be forced to conform just like CIA will. If there's another Stansfield Turner down the road, we could wreck our whole intelligence apparatus at a blow -- and the tool for doing it, the precedent that allows the NID to insist on ideological conformity, is now forged.

In addition the danger to covert and clandestine networks, the analysis part of intelligence work above all requires genuine intellectual diversity. That, as we know from education, is the one type of diversity that is not meant when the word "diversity" is included in a document of this type. You need people with a fully developed opinion counter to yours, even if you're right and they are wrong, to keep you honest and keep you from getting lazy. You need the challenge.

Consider this debate at Winds of Change, on the subject of whether democracy promotion will in fact reduce terrorism. That's a healthy debate. I side with the pro-democracy argument, but it is clear that an argument is still required, and evidence is yet to be gathered that will inform the argument.

The NIS short-circuits the argument entirely. Democracy promotion is the #3 "strategic objective." If an analyst wants to argue that, in a particular country for particular reasons, it may not be wise to back an apparently democratic movement (e.g., as it turned out not to be wise to back Castro in Cuba), he will now face a substantial risk to his career. He may, in fact, leave "the company" altogether. While he may be wrong most of the time, he may be right on this one occasion. Even if he isn't right, his presence makes the other analysts work harder getting their facts and getting them straight. He's the mark of a healthy intel service, even if he hates the President's guts and is utterly opposed to the policies being put forward -- whoever the President might be.

Again, I can understand why this particular President feels like this is a necessary step. Nevertheless, I think both the NID concept, and this NIS, are extremely unwise.

Two final, unrelated points:

1) The focus of the NIS on asymmetrical threats ignores real symmetrical threats, which could easily be as or more dangerous than any terrorist organization.

Job #1 is counter-terrorism. Job #2 is anti-WMD. Job #3 is democracy promotion. Yet isn't one of the biggest intel threats and challenges China? China isn't a terrorist nation or a terror-supporter; they're happy to prevent the spread of WMD (having foremost in their minds the examples of Taiwan and Japan); and democracy promotion in China, though a worthwhile goal, doesn't really get at the particular nature of the threat posed by China. The place where we need to be building intel assets in China isn't inside its democracy movements, but inside the navy. That's where we will get any forewarning of an invasion of Taiwan.

2) It's good that "the protection of privacy and civil liberties" is mentioned in the strategy. But absent, so far as I can see, is any call for a robust declassification process for information that no longer needs to be secret. The best defense against intelligence services' capability to do evil is sunshine. Of course, sunshine makes it impossible for them to do good as well, so it has to be applied judiciously. When we can, however, we who are citizens of the Republic ought to know what our government has been doing with its secret forces. That is a critical need for the long-term health of the Republic in my opinion, and it deserves more attention.