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How to Cover Secret Government Technology and Capabilities in Intelligence Studies Courses Journal of Strategic Security Volume 6 Number 5 Volume 6, No. 3, Fall 2013 Supplement: Ninth Annual IAFIE Article 21 Conference: Expanding the Frontiers of Intelligence Education Teaching about ‘Area 51’? How to Cover Secret Government Technology and Capabilities in Intelligence Studies Courses Armin Krishnan The University of Texas at El Paso Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss pp. 187-196 Recommended Citation Krishnan, Armin. "Teaching about ‘Area 51’? How to Cover Secret Government Technology and Capabilities in Intelligence Studies Courses." Journal of Strategic Security 6, no. 3 Suppl. (2013): 187-196. This Papers is brought to you for free and open access by the Open Access Journals at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Strategic Security by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Teaching about ‘Area 51’? How to Cover Secret Government Technology and Capabilities in Intelligence Studies Courses This papers is available in Journal of Strategic Security: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol6/iss5/ 21 Krishnan: Teaching about ‘Area 51’? Teaching about ‘Area 51’? How to Cover Secret Government Technology and Capabilities in Intelligence Studies Courses Armin Krishnan Introduction While there is a wealth of excellent standard literature available specializing on intelligence analysis and how intelligence feeds into foreign policy, which has helped to turn intelligence studies from a fringe subject into a legitimate and serious academic discipline, there are still aspects of intelligence that are notoriously difficult to cover in public university courses, but which are also of enormous importance for understanding intelligence. One problem is presented in the discussion of covert action and its current role in U.S. foreign policy, as covert action is always controversial and not without good reason subjected to a lot of secrecy, which always invites a lot of criticism and speculation. Similar is the situation with respect to secret government technology and certain methods used for the collection and analysis of intelligence. Although there is some good knowledge in the public domain about many aspects of Technical Intelligence (TECHINT) from earlier decades, there is great scarcity with respect to official information on current capabilities for technical collection and analysis. Even excellent primers on U.S. intelligence such as Jeffrey Richelson’s The US Intelligence Community are very sketchy with respect to collection systems that are currently in use by the U.S. government.1 The problem is that the U.S. Government does not – in some cases – even acknowledge the existence of certain collection systems and methods. Nothing epitomizes the extreme secrecy in the field of secret weapons and secret intelligence capabilities more than the Nevada Test Site, known to the public as Area-51 or Dreamland, where some revolutionary intelligence platforms have been developed. In almost sixty years of secret testing and operations conducted on the Nevada Test Site there has not been a single whistleblower revealing current activities, whose credentials can be verified. The super-secret Area 51 may be ironically just the tip of the iceberg of a whole clandestine world of secret government technology development. Several journalists, researchers, and scholars have pointed to existence of a ‘black world’ of secret sites, secret projects, secret programs, and secret technology development that has been mushrooming at a constant pace since the 1950s and which has come to consume at least ten percent of the U.S. defense budget.2 Some estimates are substantially higher.3 It is no longer possible to simply ignore the ‘black world’ of secret U.S. government technology development and usage without arriving at a very incomplete understanding of U.S. intelligence capabilities. Nevertheless, one has to ask the question: is it even possible to teach about Area 51 without drifting too much into ‘X-Files’ territory? 1 Richelson, Jeffrey, The US Intelligence Community (Boulder: Westview Press, 2011). 2 Paglen, Trevor, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: New American Library, 2010), 182. 3 According to a report by the DoD Inspector General, an audit of the Pentagon’s budget for Fiscal Year 1999 indicated that $2.3 trillion dollars in accounting items out of an overall of $6.9 trillion “were not supported by adequate audit trails or sufficient evidence to determine their validity.” Even if most of the $2.3 trillion can be written off due to waste, corruption, and poor accounting practices, one has to wonder how much of the money was used for funding highly classified technology development projects or ‘black’ operations. ‘Audit Report: Report Number D-2000-091’, U.S. Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General (25 February 2000), 8. 187 Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2013 Journal of Strategic Security, Vol. 6, No. 5 It is the contention of this paper that it is indeed possible to teach about secret government technology in a serious manner and that a serious discussion of a phenomenon such as Area 51 is indeed stimulating and beneficial for students of U.S. intelligence. Since there is not much readily available literature on current capabilities and sometimes deliberate deception on part of the government, one has to be creative in terms of finding relevant information from a wide range of open sources and in terms of putting the material together in a way that makes sure some inevitable speculations have at least a firm grounding in known facts and are based on good analysis. It is also crucial to always communicate to students how reliable the information is and where it comes from. In other words, researching and teaching about secret technology requires a mindset and methodologies based on open source intelligence analysis. The Government Couldn’t Keep a Secret, Right? There is the misperception, which is continuously reinforced and perpetuated by politicians and the media, that nothing leaks as badly as Washington and that there are no real secrets. The government is believed to be generally incompetent to protect its greatest secrets and that all secrets eventually reach the public because of leakers, whistle-blowers, and investigative journalists busying themselves with undermining the very elaborate and very expensive machinery of government secrecy.4 This might be true in the sense that a lot of classified information gets eventually leaked, mostly for political purposes and often by the sitting administration itself, but it is definitely not true when it comes to development and operation of secret technical intelligence collection systems and methods. These are classified ‘above’ Top Secret and are subjected to only minimal Congressional oversight. People are given access to this information only on a need-to-know basis and only after they have been carefully vetted. They have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and would face up to thirty years in prison if they would make unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information. It is no surprise that leaks to the public about highly classified current technical collection systems, operations, and other sensitive intelligence information are extremely rare. Secret government technology development programs are typically so-called Special Access Programs (SAPs) that employ special security measures and have substantially reduced oversight mechanisms.5 The Commission on government secrecy headed by Senator Patrick Moynihan revealed: “Special access programs can concern research, development, and acquisition activities; intelligence (including covert action); or military operations.”6 The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) calls their ‘deep black’ programs Controlled Access Programs (CAPs). Any information related to sources and methods is classified Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information with a codename that identifies the particular compartment (TS SCI codename). Very few people within the U.S. Government and the military-industrial complex, called ‘Super-Users,’ have access to all information on a compartmentalized program. The government will usually not comment on SAPs, although their existence might be known to the 4 The U.S. government spent $11.36 billion dollars on the proper classification, handling, and protection of government secrets in 2011. ‘2011 Cost Report,’ Information Security Oversight Office (20 June 2012): 2, available at: http://www.archives.gov/isoo/reports/2011-cost-report.pdf. 5 Sweetman, Bill, Lockheed Stealth (St. Paul: Zenith Press, 2004), 29. 6 ‘Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy’ (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Congress, 1997), p. XXVIII. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol6/iss5/21 188 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.6.3S.19 Krishnan: Teaching about ‘Area 51’? public, as they are identified by their program names in official budgets. However, few specifics about these programs would be released other than their name and general purpose. In addition, there are ‘black’ programs that are not identified in official budgets and which are hidden in other budget items. Based on the discrepancies in the overall Department of Defense (DoD) budget it has been calculated that there was $56 billion dollar black budget in 2011, which financed highly sensitive weapons development programs, as well as intelligence programs.7 These
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