Oxford handbook on national security intelligence

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All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice. Oxford Handbooks Online. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Spy machines are costly, while human agents are inexpensive to hire and sustain on an annual stipend.

One of the ironies of American intelligence is that while the vast percentage of its annual budget goes into expensive intelligence hardware, especially satellites, the value of these machines is questionable in helping the United States understand such contemporary global concerns as terrorism or China's burgeoning economic might.

Cameras on satellites or airplanes are unable to peer inside the canvas tents, roofed mud huts, or mountain caves in Afghanistan or Pakistan, where terrorists gather to plan their deadly operations, or into the deep underground caverns where North Koreans have constructed atomic weapons. Further, many of the best contributions from spy machines come not so much from pricey satellites as from the far less expensive UAVs.

On occasion, though, sigint satellites do capture revealing telephone communications, say, between international drug lords. Moreover, the photography that imint satellites produce on such matters as Russian and Chinese missile sites, North Korean troop deployments, Hamas rocket emplacements in Gaza, or the secretive construction of nuclear reactors in Iran, are of obvious importance. In the case of terrorism, though, one would prefer to have a human agent well situated inside the Qaeda organization.

For America's security, such an asset could be worth a dozen billion-dollar satellites. Yet, humint has its distinct limitations, too. It is worth stressing that inside closed societies like Iraq in , or North Korea and Iran today, local spies are difficult to recruit—especially since Americans have focused for decades on the communist world and largely ignored the study of languages, history, and culture necessary to recruit and operate spies in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

How many Americans speak Pashto, Arabic, and Farsi well? How many can comprehend the nuances of slang and various dialects in those regions of the world? The answers are: very few. And how many are willing to serve as operational officers for government pay in perilous locations, trying to recruit local assets? Again, few. Moreover, even if successfully recruited, indigenous assets can be untrustworthy. They are neither Boy Scouts nor nuns, but often the dregs of society, driven by greed and absent any moral compass.

Foreign assets sometimes fabricate reports, sell information to the highest bidder, and scheme as false defectors or double-agents. Now and then, however, a humint asset can provide extraordinarily helpful information, as did the Soviet military intelligence officer Oleg Penkovsky during the Cold War. Information from him helped the United States identify the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba in With the occasional successes like Penkosky in mind, the United States and most other countries persevere in their quest for reliable and productive espionage agents, even though the cost-benefit ratio will be poor in most years.

Synergy is important, as well, for effective intelligence collection. These capabilities, ideally, dovetail with one another. A controversial form of intelligence collection is the use of harsh interrogation techniques against captured terrorist suspects. Although the CIA has occasionally resorted to such collection methods itself for example, using the technique of waterboarding, a form of torture that simulates drowning , this kind of tradecraft has been widely discredited.

In the third stage of the cycle, the intelligence that has been collected—perhaps intercepted telephone conversations in Farsi or stolen Syrian government documents—must be converted into usable information, that is, translated into English, decoded if necessary, and put into a form that the president and other officials can readily comprehend. Intelligence pours into the U. He had become exasperated by all the information rushing into his agency from sigint satellites, huge listening antennae located around the globe, and thousands of small eavesdropping devices planted by CIA and NSA teams in various countries.

Each day, hundreds of satellite photographs arrive at the NGA; and about four million telephone, fax, and email intercepts, often in difficult codes that must be deciphered, flood the NSA. The volume is unlikely to dissipate. For example, every minute a thousand people around the world sign up for a new cell phone.

Moreover, the United States is always short on translators, photo-interpreters, and codebreaking mathematicians.

In response to a query about the major problems facing U. Whether a more rapid translation might have led to a tightening of U. The point, though, is that as things stand today the vast majority of information gathered by America's intelligence agencies is never examined; it gathers dust in warehouses—the fate of an estimated 90 percent of what the intelligence community collects, and as much as 99 percent of the telephone intercepts swept in by the NSA Millis ; Bamford Here is a supreme challenge for the government's information-technology specialists: improving the nation's capacity to sift rapidly through collected intelligence data, separating out the signals from the noise.

At the heart and soul of the intelligence cycle is the next phase: analysis. If the intelligence community is unable to provide reliable insights into what all the collected information means, each of the preceding stages in the intelligence cycle is for naught.

What were the specific implications of the secret terrorist rendezvous for America's security? This information was never acquired and analyzed.

Here's the bad news: intelligence analysts will always be taken by surprise from time to time, because of human limitations on the accurate forecasting of events Betts This brings us back to the dilemma of incomplete information and the uncertain light of the future.

There is good news, too, however. This brings in a torrent of information, some of which is quite useful. Further, the federal government has been able to attract into the intelligence agencies many good minds to interpret the findings. The secret agencies are expert, as well, in packaging and delivering their best judgments to the right people in government in a timely manner. Yet, despite all this intelligence sophistication, things still go wrong. Many of the essays in this book shed light on why such failures occur before, during, and after the analytic phase of the intelligence cycle and what might be done to limit them.

Finally, intelligence reports must be distributed to those who make decisions on behalf of the United States. This may seem easy enough, but even this stage of the cycle is rife with possibilities for mistakes. The President's Daily Brief is the most prestigious report on current world events and is distributed to only the President and a few other top policymakers in the government of the United States. The National Intelligence Estimate is a longer, more in-depth study of a topic—say, the future leadership succession in China.

It has a wider dissemination, but is still limited to top officials. Intelligence must have several essential characteristics for it to be helpful to policymakers. Ideally, it will be relevant, timely, accurate, complete, and unbiased. Relevance is essential. If the president wants to know about the activities of insurgents in Baghdad, but the CIA analyst is concentrating on the subject of his Ph. The president and other officials are driven by fires in their in-boxes; they want answers to these immediate problems.

If intelligence fails to know about these fires and address them, it will be ignored. Timeliness is equally vital. That year, the President authorized the firing of cruise missiles from American warships in the Red Sea to take out the Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, who was according to local intelligence assets p. Unfortunately, Bin Laden departed the terrorist enclave of tents just a few hours before the missiles came streaking low across the Paktia Province headed for the encampment.

Accuracy, too, is indispensable. Several Chinese diplomats and journalists on the premise were killed. Truman's objectives was to eliminate the separate piles of intelligence reports from different agencies that accumulated each morning on his desk in the Oval Office. Unbiased intelligence is also high on the list of desirable intelligence qualities—the highest of all, according to most experts. Here the goal is to keep information free of political spin.

Analysts are expected to assess facts and their possible meanings in a neutral, dispassionate manner, just like scholars and journalists. On the flip side, policymakers in high office ideally will have the courage to hear the truth, rather than brush it aside as President Lyndon B.

Johnson did with intelligence reports that brought him bad news about the war in Vietnam during the s Hughes Of course, a vague warning if reliable is better than no warning at all and can alert Americans to hunker down; but infinitely better is to know when, where, and how terrorists are going to strike. If this degree of specificity can be achieved, the intelligence agencies will have scored a home run with bases loaded in the ninth inning of a tied game.

An information coup of this magnitude will be a rarity; but it remains the goal, and one that is sometimes achieved. These qualities of intelligence reporting add up to a tall order and indicate why errors occur throughout the intelligence cycle.

In an effort to reduce the number of mistakes, the lion's share of the annual intelligence budget has gone toward p. The ultimate irony of intelligence is that, even when secret reports achieve a high level of perfection, policymakers may reject or twist them because they fail to fit into their hopes and preconceptions. While intelligence as information, the end product of the intelligence cycle, is the most important mission for a nation's secret agencies, covert action and counterintelligence are prominent, too.

Neither of these latter two missions were mentioned specifically in the National Security Act of that founded the modern U. Now and then, covert action has attracted more support than the phases of the intelligence cycle, becoming the tail that wagged the dog. Although out of favor with some administrations, others have spent enormous sums of money on covert action.

For proponents of this hidden and aggressive approach to American foreign policy, the s were a Golden Age—the historical high point of spending on, and high-level attention to, secret intervention abroad Johnson Covert action is tricky in more than one sense of the word. Its outcome can be highly unpredictable; history is known to push back.

In , this approach—chiefly p. Then, the very next year, the CIA managed—again mainly through the use of propaganda operations—to frighten the leader of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, out of office after he threatened to nationalize the United Fruit Company, an American banana-importing corporation.

An irritant on the world stage? Send in the CIA—far less noisy than deploying the Marines and quicker than diplomacy. Similar efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro of Cuba in demonstrated, though, that this philosophy of foreign policy by CIA paramilitary operations was less simple than it was simpleminded; covert action as a panacea for America's foreign policy woes crashed at the Bay of Pigs in Wyden The two major Reagan Administration covert actions, in Nicaragua and in Afghanistan, further underscored the unpredictability of this modus operandi.

This action by lawmakers drove the Reagan Administration underground; it decided to pursue paramilitary methods against the Nicaraguan regime by means other than the CIA, despite the legal ban. Against the Soviets in Afghanistan, however, PM ops properly authorized by the President and the Congress proved remarkably successful, in large part as a result of stinger missiles supplied by the CIA to the anti-communist mujahideen forces in Afghanistan.

These weapons gave the Afghan fighters many of whom would later become members of Al Qaeda the capacity to shoot down Soviet military aircraft and led Moscow to have second thoughts about continuing the war Coll ; Crill Often there are long-range unanticipated consequences of covert action. In the Guatemalan coup of , for example, the United Fruit Company was no doubt pleased at the outcome; but the impoverished citizens of that nation have lived under repressive regimes ever since this CIA intervention.

Even the celebrated ousting of the Soviets from Afghanistan during the s had a down side. Moreover, the stinger missiles shoulder-held rockets that could bring down not just Soviet warplanes but any nation's commercial airlines were never returned to the CIA, remaining in the hands of Qaeda terrorists, Taliban extremists, and Iranians who purchased them on the open market from mujahideen warriors after the Soviets fled Afghanistan.

Kennedy's national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy , once cautioned. Although they never succeeded, the CIA's assassination plots against foreign heads of state Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of Congo, among others eventually became known to the world and portrayed the United States as a global Godfather Church Committee a.

This was hardly the image most Americans desired in a Cold War contest with the Communist nations to win the allegiance of other nations toward the United States and its presumably more benevolent form of government Church Of course, one person's perception of long-term negative effects may be countered by another's joy over short-term gains.

Twenty-five years is no small thing. A third mission, counterintelligence, entails the protection of America's secrets against theft by foreign intelligence services Barron ; Johnson and Wirtz , pt. These secrets include such items as the names of CIA assets overseas, the specifications and orbits of NRO sigint and imint satellites, the capabilities of U-2s and reconnaissance drones, and the timing p.

Defined more formally Commission on Government Security , 48—49 , counterintelligence is the. Counterintelligence specialists wage nothing less than a secret war against antagonistic intelligence services and terrorist organizations the latter struggle a subsidiary of counterintelligence known as counterterrorism.

One side's intelligence success is the other side's counterintelligence failures. Counterintelligence consists of two matching halves: counterespionage and security. Counterespionage is the offensive or aggressive side of counterintelligence; it involves identifying specific adversaries and developing detailed knowledge about their operations against the United States.

Security is the passive or defensive side of counterintelligence. It entails putting in place static defenses against all hostile and covert operations aimed against the United States. Security defenses include the screening and clearance of personnel, as well as the establishment of programs to safeguard sensitive intelligence information; in short, the administration of controls to shield against the theft of information inside America's government.

The goal is to defend the personnel, installations, and operations of America's intelligence agencies and other components of the government against infiltration by enemy intelligence services and terrorist organizations. Additional methods of physical security include the night lighting of sensitive areas, concrete Jersey barriers, and fences with concertina wire, along with the use of alarms, badges, passes, checkpoints, and restricted zones.

Grim-faced guards, accompanied by German shepherd dogs, patrol p. Inside their headquarters buildings, polygraph experts administer tests of loyalty to all new recruits and, periodically, to seasoned intelligence officers, probing to determine if they have had suspicious contacts with foreigners. Polygraphs have hardly been foolproof.

Several traitors have fooled the machines, among them the Soviet mole inside the CIA, Aldrich Hazen Ames, finally discovered in after he had spied for the Kremlin for a decade. On occasion, though, the polygraph has uncovered treason or other inappropriate behavior, including a confession from a nervous would-be CIA employee who had murdered his wife and buried her body in their suburban backyard Johnson The best counterintelligence and counterterrorism officers have the scholarly attributes of a Talmudic scholar, sifting patiently through dusty field reports and other records to find out who on the outside might be trying to burrow, mole-like, into the CIA or one of its companion agencies; or who already on the inside might be a traitor working for a foreign nation or terrorist group.

The discovery of Ames Wise and, soon after, another Soviet spy, Robert Hanssen in the FBI Wise ; Weiner, Johnston, and Lewis , changed that perception; the importance of counterintelligence suddenly needed no further explanation, at least for a while.

While this handbook concentrates chiefly on the four meanings of national security intelligence discussed above, the question of supervising secret agencies is of interest to national security scholars, too. If power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton famously warned, secret power can be the ultimate danger to freedom in a democracy.

In , investigators in the Congress and the White House discovered that the American intelligence agencies had violated the public trust Johnson ; Schwarz The CIA had spied on Vietnam War protesters inside the United States; the FBI had launched a secret war of espionage and harassment against not only Vietnam War protesters, but against civil rights activists and in a warped sense of balance members of the Ku Klux Klan as well—anyone who failed to fit into the p. Edgar Hoover.

The NSA improperly read every international cable sent abroad or received by an American citizen. Military intelligence units spied within the United States. All the good work these agencies had carried out during the Cold War was stained by these excesses, which demanded tighter control by legislative, judicial, and executive intelligence overseers.

The era of new and more serious oversight had begun and continues today. An ongoing search was underway, in the United States and several other countries, for the proper balance between the close supervision of intelligence under the law, on the one hand, and sufficient executive discretion to permit the effective conduct of the intelligence missions, on the other hand. Fortunately, from the point of view of democratic openness as well as the canons of scholarly inquiry, many of these veils have fallen in the past three decades, as a result of government inquiries into intelligence failures and wrongdoing, accompanied by a more determined effort by researchers to probe the hidden side of government.

The essays in this volume are a testament to the insights about national security that can accrue from a steady probing of intelligence organizations and their activities. Much remains to be done and national security imperatives, quite properly, will never permit full transparency in this sensitive domain.

In a democracy, however, the people must have at least a basic understanding of all their government agencies, even the shadowy world of intelligence. The Cold War was essentially a struggle between Western and Communist spy organizations, demonstrating the importance of intelligence Aldrich , 5. Sometimes these secret agencies have been the source of great embarrassment to the government, as with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the CIA assassination attempts carried out during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the domestic spy scandals of the mids, and the Iran- contra scandal a decade later.

Intelligence errors can have enormous consequences, too, as when the United States invaded Iraq in based in part on a faulty intelligence assessment that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, was developing WMDs that could soon strike the United States and the United Kingdom.

Further, intelligence organizations and operations are costly. For all of these reasons, the study of intelligence deserves the public's attention and closer study by the scholarly community. The editor and the contributors to this handbook hope the essays that follow will help the public understand intelligence better, as well as stimulate more research into this neglected and difficult—but vital—subject.

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Barrett, D. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Barron, J. Breaking the Ring. Betts, R. New York: Columbia University Press. Bronner, M. When the War Ends, Start to Worry. New York Times August 16 : A Born, H. Johnson, and I. Leigh, eds. Who's Watching the Spies? Establishing Intelligence Service Accountability.

Bundy, M. Athens, Ga. October 6. Burrows, W. New York: Random House. CBS News. Central Intelligence Agency. Author : Loch K. Edited by Loch Johnson, one of the world's leading authorities on the subject, the handbook examines the topic in full, beginning with an examination of the major theories of intelligence.

It then shifts its focus to how intelligence agencies operate, how they collect information from around the world, the problems that come with transforming "raw" information into credible analysis, and the difficulties in disseminating intelligence to policymakers.

It also considers the balance between secrecy and public accountability, and the ethical dilemmas that covert and counterintelligence operations routinely present to intelligence agencies.

Throughout, contributors factor in broader historical and political contexts that are integral to understanding how intelligence agencies function in our information-dominated age. The book is organized into the following sections: theories and methods of intelligence studies; historical background; the collection and processing of intelligence; the analysis and production of intelligence; the challenges of intelligence dissemination; counterintelligence and counterterrorism; covert action; intelligence and accountability; and strategic intelligence in other nations.

Only Cram is Textbook Specific. Accompanies: Accompanys: Author : Derek S. Johnson, ed.