The new American Director of National Intelligence (DNI) vows to get the 14
intelligence agencies to cooperate and produce a better and more effective
product. Based on past experience, this won?t happen. Also based on past
experience, it will be a long time before the public discovers that it didn?t
happen. Intelligence people are good at hiding their secrets, and for many
senior intelligence officers, their careers depend on doing a convincing job of
pretending to cooperate.
The basic problem is that there are several
different types of intel specialist, and each believes their contributions are
more important than everyone else's. You have the geeks (who use satellites and
electronic gear to take photos and collect electronic messages) and the
operators (the people who go into the field, run spies and do the James Bond
stuff). And then there are the analysts, who get ?raw intel? from the geeks and
operators, and try to make sense of it. The geeks see themselves as the
successors of the operators, and over the last four decades, the proportion of
?actionable intelligence? (stuff you can use) that comes from the geeks has gone
to over 80 percent. The operators don?t deny that, but also point out that in
the field, you do things geeks can?t, like capturing Islamic terrorists, and
intercepting couriers carrying messages that the geeks can?t pick up using their
gadgets. The analysts have the most balanced view, and often wish they had more
operators to follow up on murky leads the geeks have come up with. The problem
with the geeks is that even the best satellite photos are not as revealing as an
operator on the ground, right in the middle of the situation. The same with
electronic eavesdropping, which often provides only fragments, while an operator
interrogating a terrorist can provide much more information. The geeks and
operators used to fight about money, but the geeks won that battle decades ago.
But now the operators have a blank check. The only problem is that you can hire
a lot of the needed geeks right away, while it takes years to train a useful
operator. Police detectives and private investigators have many of the skills
used by operators, but recruiting from this community has never been very
successful. Basically, the CIA, and other agencies, have to recruit and train
their own.
This spotlights another problem. While most of the geeks are
in one place; the NSA (National Security Agency), the operators and analysts are
in many other agencies. Each of the armed forces, plus the Department of Defense
itself, has an intelligence agency. Add in the State Department, Homeland
Security, FBI and a few others, and you have a hell of a coordination job. No
one wants to share contacts or information, lest the other agency somehow
pollute the source. That?s easy to do. If the army has a bunch of agents in
Iraq, recruited with great effort, the last thing they want to do is let the CIA
know who these guys are. The Iraqis spying for the army know that if the wrong
people find out what they are doing, they are dead. If they suddenly find out
that another bunch of Americans, from the CIA, are on to them, they may just
quit the spy business while they are still alive. This is a legitimate fear, and
the reason why local police are reluctant to share such information with the FBI
or Homeland Security. Informants are the more important tool operators have, and
these valuable sources of information can disappear.
But it?s more than
mistrust between agencies, often it?s downright dislike. The FBI and CIA have
had a hate/hate relationship for half a century. The various military intel
outfits have always been competitive. The CIA sees the Department of Defense
intelligence operations as wasted effort, while the military intel types see the
CIA as a waste of money.
Changing all this will take more than time, it
will take a few minor miracles.
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