The Western Herald - Changing dissemination of our intelligence wrong direction for focus

Changing dissemination of our intelligence wrong direction for focus

A Western Herald Editorial
October 13, 2004


After the 9/11 Commission Report indicated that intelligence gathering by the United States needs to be fixed, Congress has taken up the challenge and created a bill that is designed to reform the intelligence community at the top levels, by both creating a National Intelligence Director and to give that individual “full budget authority” over the nation’s intelligence budget.

Unfortunately for the state of U.S. intelligence, the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations are not even addressing the real problems inherent in our intelligence community. If the recommendations were taken to heart and made law, the problems that occurred on 9/11 would probably occur again. The reason is that the 9/11 Commission focused on the wrong problem. Granted, oversight to the national level is important, but fixing that is like coming up with new drugs to alleviate symptoms of an illness without ever actually addressing what causes the illness itself.

Until the early 1980s, the U.S. intelligence services focused specifically on human intelligence (HUMINT). This is the kind of intelligence made famous by Hollywood with the glorified James Bond activities. Imagine the same individual, without sexy Russian spies, secret gadgets and expensive cars that shoot laser beams, and add a lot of paperwork, and you get the idea of what HUMINT used to consist of. In the 1980s, there was a move to signal (SIGINT) and communications (COMINT) intelligence because it was both safer on ground agents and believed to be more reliable. Field officers became less important as we moved into the satellite technology that presented new opportunities for intelligence gathering. By 2000, much of the focus of U.S. intelligence is from SIGINT and COMINT. So, when Colin Powell went to the United Nations with his satellite photographs, there was no one around to indicate that perhaps the evidence was flawed. In the past, when one HUMINT source reported information, it was not valid without a second source. With satellite intelligence, the only way to really verify the information without someone active on the ground is through other satellite sources, meaning you look at the same thing twice through different lenses and come up with the same conclusion. So, it should not come as any surprise that we thought there were WMDs in Iraq. Our verification was the same source that first reported the information.

By changing our intelligence-gathering efforts, we have fewer people as experts on the ground. It was recently reported that we have tons of tapped information we cannot translate, an indication that our intelligence agencies lack a HUMINT focus capable of translation.

Now that Congress is arguing over how to best create a national czar of intelligence, the problems inherent in the system are still active. As long as we rely on technology rather than people, especially in an area where we have little prior knowledge, we are going to be doomed to continue to make the same errors over and over again.

U.S. intelligence needs to change its entire focus on intelligence gathering methods rather than on what to do with the information we are already receiving. Armed with great SIGINT and COMINT, it is time to return to a HUMINT emphasis of the 1970s and earlier. Then, and only then, will we truly be able to be prepared to intercept something on the level of a new 9/11.

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