Conference Proceedings 29 September 2005
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JMIC-ODNI CONFERENCE 2005
Managing the Future During a Time of Change: A Conference on Intelligence Reform
The views expressed in these remarks are those of the authors and do not refl ect the offi cial policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government
i Remarks by employees of the Department of Defense have been approved for public release by the Offi ce of Freedom of Information and Security Review, Washington Headquarters Services.
The Joint Military Intelligence College supports and encourages research that distills lessons and improves Intelligence Community capabilities for policy-level and operational consumers.
The editor wishes to thank Sonar Technician Submarine Second Class Jermaine Armstrong, U.S. Navy, former student at the Joint Military Intelligence College, for his profi cient work in transcribing and preliminary editing of these proceedings.
[email protected], Editor Center for Strategic Intelligence Research
ii CONTENTS
Letter of Welcome from Co-Hosts ...... v Seal of the ODNI ...... vi Seal of the JMIC ...... vii JMIC Overview ...... viii Conference Program ...... ix Welcoming Remarks, A. Denis Clift, President, JMIC ...... 1 Opening Address, Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, Director, DIA ...... 5 Morning Keynote Speaker, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, DNI ...... 11 First Panel Discussion ...... 24 Ms. Deborah G. Barger ...... 25 Mr. Christopher A. Kojm ...... 28 Mr. Russell E. Travers ...... 32 Ms. Letitia A. Long ...... 40 Luncheon Speaker, Dr. William M. Nolte, Chancellor, NIUS ...... 56 Afternoon Keynote Speaker, Dr. Steven A. Cambone, USD(I) ...... 67 Second Panel Discussion ...... 80 Mr. Jon A. Wiant ...... 81 Mr. Marion E. “Spike” Bowman ...... 85 Mr. Charles E. Allen ...... 90 Closing Remarks, Dr. Teresa J. Domzal, Provost, JMIC ...... 103
iii
DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY JOINT MILITARY INTELLIGENCE COLLEGE Washington, D.C. 20340-5100
29 September 2005
Dear Conference Attendees:
On behalf of the Offi ce of the Director of National Intelligence and the Joint Military Intelligence College, we take great pleasure in welcoming you to our conference, “Managing the Future During a Time of Change: A Conference on Intelligence Reform.” We hope that the dialogue and exchange of ideas generated over the course of the day will help articulate the challenges of intelligence reform and help chart the way ahead.
It gives us much satisfaction to greet such a diverse audience of academia, industry, defense, media, and intelligence professionals. Your experience, perspectives, and talents demonstrate the strength of American intelligence and give us reason to hope the best for its future.
We encourage you to participate fully in this conference, especially during the question and answer periods following each address and panel discussion. Please take advantage of the day’s opportunities to meet and talk with the panelists and your fellow attendees; as at many conferences, much of the “real business” before us will surely get done during the breaks. Again, welcome.
Deborah G. Barger A. Denis Clift Assistant Deputy Director President of National Intelligence for Joint Military Intelligence College Strategy, Plans, and Policy
v The Seal of the Offi ce of the Director for National Intelligence (ODNI)
The ODNI seal represents the DNI’s charge to oversee and coordinate the foreign and domestic activities of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Prominently positioned in the center of the seal is the American bald eagle. Derived from this nation’s Great Seal, the eagle represents the sovereignty of the United States. The shield, or escutcheon, in front of the eagle is composed of 13 red and white stripes. The colors of the seal on the eagle’s chest are those used in the fl ag of the United States of America (white, signifying purity and innocence; red, hardiness and valor). The motto, E Pluribus Unum (one out of many), alludes to the new offi ce uniting the many intelligence agencies. The olive branch and 13 arrows denote the power of peace and war.
Watermarked on the back of the seal, in dark blue (blue signifying vigilance, perseverance, and justice), is a globe of the world. The depiction of the globe symbolizes the constant and ongoing worldwide intelligence efforts of the ODNI and our nation’s intelligence organizations to keep America safe. The 50 white stars encircling the globe and the eagle represent each state of the Union and the vast array of intelligence organizations that fall within the purview of the ODNI’s mission. Encircling the 50 stars and between two gold mullets is a dark blue fi eld with inscribed gold lettering, “Offi ce of the Director of National Intelligence” at the top and “United States of America” below. The gold represents integrity and the highest ideals and goals.
vi The Crest of the Joint Military Intelligence College (JMIC)
The crest symbolizes the JMIC’s mission. The arrows represent the Armed Services’ participation in joint intelligence education. The armillary sphere signifi es the worldwide land, sea, and air scope of intelligence. The lamp indicates the teaching and research missions of the College, while the scroll symbolizes continual learning. The oak leaves depict thoroughness and tenacity of purpose and success in accomplishment. The three colors of the crest are blue for the Department of Defense, and gold and black for intelligence.
vii The Joint Military Intelligence College
The Joint Military Intelligence College was chartered by the Department of Defense in 1962, with the dual mission to educate military and civilian intelligence professionals and those seeking to become intelligence professionals, and to conduct and disseminate intelligence-related research. The College’s Bachelor of Science in Intelligence degree and Master of Science of Strategic Intelligence degree are both authorized in law by the Congress. The College is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and is a member of the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area. Among the nation’s federally chartered colleges and universities, the College has the distinction of annually awarding both graduate and undergraduate degrees.
The College is educating and guiding research in an era where the formerly dominant challenges of understanding force-on-force foreign military capabilities and intentions have been subsumed in a far broader spectrum of intelligence challenges and requirements. While it remains essential to have expert understanding of each of the world’s nuclear and conventional military forces, we are now in an era where it is essential to know something of intelligence value about every subject, every issue of interest to the nation.
In a cyber- and information-era world marked by failed and failing nation states, religious and cultural confl icts, the proliferation of conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction, and virulent international terrorism, the future intelligence leaders the College is educating must have an appreciation of regional cultures, religions, and politics as well as the smoldering tinder of intentions and the sparks of confl ict. In a strategic environment where U.S. forces with their allied and coalition partners are called upon to provide forward deterrence, produce forward stability, and ward off threats to the U.S. homeland, there is virtually no geography, no political, cultural, ideological, or religious presence anywhere, that is not of relevance to the intelligence professional.
Today’s student and today’s researcher, recognizing the essential requirement for intelligence to provide reliable strategic warning—warning against threats and warning spotlighting opportunity—must understand the exhaustive research involved in developing such warning, the need to discern emerging threats of seemingly low probability, and the need for collection against such threats including the ability to penetrate those who would deny and those who would deceive. Today’s student and today’s researcher work to understand and to develop increasingly agile and fl exible intelligence collection and analysis capabilities that allow swift transformation of data into fused knowledge, with swift delivery of that knowledge to the consumer.
viii Joint Military Intelligence College & Offi ce of the Director of National Intelligence Conference
Thursday, 29 September 2005
Managing the Future During a Time of Change: A Conference on Intelligence Reform
0700-0830 Registration
0830-0845 Introduction Mr. A. Denis Clift, President, Joint Military Intelligence College
0845-0900 Welcoming Address VADM Lowell E. Jacoby, Director, Defense Intelligence Agency
0900-1000 Morning Keynote Ambassador John D. Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence
Introduced by Ms. Deborah G. Barger, Assistant DDNI (Strategy, Plans, & Policy)
1000-1015 Break for refreshments and to view exhibits
1015-1145 Panel 1: Impact of Intelligence Reform Legislation on National Intelligence Structures
Ms. Deborah G. Barger, Assistant DDNI (Strategy, Plans, & Policy), Moderator
Mr. Christopher A. Kojm, President, 9/11 Public Discourse Project (former Deputy Executive Director, 9-11 Commission)
Mr. Russell E. Travers, Deputy Director for Information Sharing and Knowledge Development, National Counterterrorism Center
Ms. Letitia A. Long, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Policy, Requirements, and Resources)
ix 1145-1200 Travel to Bolling AFB Offi cers’ Club (Transportation provided by JMIC)
1200-1330 Luncheon at Bolling AFB Offi cers’ Club
Luncheon Speaker Dr. William M. Nolte, Chancellor, National Intelligence University System
1330-1345 Return to DIAC (Transportation provided by JMIC)
1345-1445 Afternoon Keynote Dr. Stephen A. Cambone, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence
Introduced by Mr. A. Denis Clift, President, Joint Military Intelligence College
1445-1500 Break for refreshments and to view exhibits
1500-1630 Panel 2: Drawing New Lines: Foreign Intelligence and Domestic Security
Professor Jon A. Wiant, Joint Military Intelligence College, Moderator
Mr. Marion E. “Spike” Bowman, Deputy General Counsel, Federal Bureau of Investigation
Mr. Charles E. “Charlie” Allen, Offi ce of the Director of National Intelligence
1630-1640 Closing Remarks Dr. Teresa J. Domzal, Provost, Joint Military Intelligence College
1640-1800 Reception (Bowman Room)
x WELCOMING REMARKS
Managing the Future During a Time of Change: A Conference on Intelligence Reform
A. Denis Clift President, Joint Military Intelligence College In their March 2005 forwarding letter to the President, the Commissioners of the President’s WMD Commission wrote, “There is no more important intelligence mission than understanding the worst weapons that our enemies possess and how they intend to use them against us. So far,” they wrote, “despite some successes, our Intelligence Community has not been agile and innovative enough to provide the information that the nation needs. Other commissions and observers have said the same thing,” the Commissioners wrote. “We should not wait for another Commission or another administration to force widespread change in the Intelligence Community.” A month later, in his fi rst offi cial message as the nation’s fi rst Director of National Intelligence, Ambassador John Negroponte counseled the Intelligence Community workforce that, facing a new order of threats to national security, we know that we have to do our job differently — we have to do it better. Now fi ve months later the Joint Military Intelligence College and the Offi ce of the Director of National Intelligence are pleased to welcome you to today’s exploration and examination of Managing the Future During a Time of Change: A Conference on Intelligence Reform. And it is my distinct pleasure to introduce the morning’s fi rst speaker, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, a distinguished leader in the Intelligence Community President A. Denis Clift, JMIC. and advocate for change.
1 BIOGRAPHY
A. Denis Clift President, Joint Military Intelligence College Denis Clift was appointed President of the Joint Military Intelligence College in 1994. The College, in the Department of Defense, is the nation’s only accredited academic institution awarding the Master of Science of Strategic Intelligence degree and the Bachelor of Science in Intelligence degree. In 1999, in his role as President of the College, Mr. Clift was elected to serve as a Commissioner on the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools for the term 2000-2002. In 2002, he was re-elected for the term 2003-2005. Since 1992, he has also served as a U.S. Commissioner on the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on Prisoners of War/Missing in Action, a commission created by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin with the humanitarian goal of accounting for servicemen still missing from past confl icts. Mr. Clift was born in New York City, New York. He was educated at Friends Seminary, Phillips Exeter Academy (1954), Stanford University (B.A. 1958), and The London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London (M.Sc. 1967). He began a career of public service as a naval offi cer in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations and has served in military and civilian capacities in ten administrations, including 13 successive years in the Executive Offi ce of the President and The White House. During the period 1971-1976, he served on the National Security Council staff. From 1974 to 1976, he was head of President Ford’s National Security Council staff for the Soviet Union and Eastern and Western Europe. From 1977 to 1981, he was Assistant for National Security Affairs to the Vice President of the United States. During the period 1991-1994, he was Chief of Staff, Defense Intelligence Agency, following service as an Assistant Deputy Director and Deputy Director for External Relations of the Agency. He is a veteran of two Antarctic expeditions, including the 1961 Bellingshausen Sea Expedition. From 1963 to 1966, he was Editor, United States Naval Institute Proceedings. His awards and decorations include the President’s Rank of Distinguished Executive, awarded by President George W. Bush in 2001, the President’s Rank of Meritorious
2 Executive, awarded by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Medal, the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Medal, the Secretary of the Navy Commendation for Achievement, the Oceanographer of the Navy’s Superior Achievement Award, and the Director of Central Intelligence’s Sherman Kent Award and Helene L. Boatner Award. He directed the production of the fi lm “Portrait of Antarctica” screened at the Venice Film Festival. His published fi ction and nonfi ction include the novel A Death in Geneva (Ballantine Books of Random House), Our World in Antarctica (Rand McNally), With Presidents to the Summit (George Mason University Press), and Clift Notes: Intelligence and the Nation’s Security (JMIC).
3
OPENING ADDRESS
Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, U.S. Navy Director, Defense Intelligence Agency Good morning and welcome. Thank you, Denis, for your introduction and also for co-sponsoring the conference on Managing the Future During a Time of Change. It’s an honor for me to be here with this distinguished group this morning. This is a group of professionals who are dedicated to making the Intelligence Community and law enforcement agencies stronger than wever. I especially want to thank Ambassador Negroponte and the DNI Staff, Dr. Nolte, and Dr. Cambone, who will be joining us this afternoon, for lending valuable time, insights, and expertise to help make this conference a success. Thanks also to Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, Director, DIA our Panelists: Ms. Deborah Barger, who is with us here this morning and also was the co-sponsor, along with President Clift, of today’s proceedings, and others who have joined us, Ms. Long, Mr. Kojm, Mr. Allen, Mr. Bowman, and Mr. Travers, and they will all participate in what promises to be two very interesting discussions on the Impact of Intelligence Reform Legislation on the National Intelligence Structures and on Drawing New Lines in Foreign Intelligence and Domestic Security. This conference encourages critical thinking about pressing intelligence issues, and provides an unclassifi ed forum where senior-level intelligence offi cials and policymakers can interact with attendees from the private sector, from academia, and from the attaché corps on topics of national interest. The theme of the conference is Managing the Future During a Time of Change, and that is an understatement. The past four years have been challenging for the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Intelligence Community at large, and our nation. We continue to prosecute the Global War on Terrorism. We’re fi ghting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’re working to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and maintain our military presence around the world. Since 9/11, several thousand DIA personal have deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other locations to provide technical and human intelligence collection, collection management, all sorts of analyses, and information technology skills directly to our warfi ghters.
5 At the same time, we are dramatically changing the way we do business. The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, numerous Executive Orders, as well as our own internal lessons learned and studies, have signifi cantly shaped our operations here at DIA. We focus change in three primary environments, those environments being collection, analysis, and information management. To improve our ability to penetrate hard targets, DIA has integrated all-source subject matter experts with human source collectors to improve the focus and accuracy of the intelligence that is collected. When the new building just behind us here is completed and we move in this fall, we will collocate many of our collectors and analysts so that they can interact more freely and move us closer to all-source operations. We’re also expanding the number of Defense Attaché Offi ces in overseas human intelligence operations. We’ve made signifi cant progress in the area of technical intelligence collection in both the development and the fi elding of new sensors. Our National Signature Program has catalogued tens of thousands of signatures that will make our technical sensors more effective and improve our capability to provide knowledge to warfi ghters, military planners, and national security policymakers. We have redirected funds to training and placed top priority on approving analytical tradecraft by incorporating more alternative analysis. I might add, in the area of recruiting the rights kinds of people for today and for our future needs, we are doing exceedingly well, are still in the position to be very selective, and I think that says a lot about the opportunities for the Intelligence Community to tap into people who really want to be part of the change and the progress that needs to be made. No matter how signifi cant the information is that we collect and analyze, it’s useful only if it is broadly available to analysts, warfi ghters, national security policymakers, and law enforcement offi cials when they need it. In information management and technology we have fi elded new commercial systems and IT tools to help analysts do their jobs at discovering information and providing knowledge to those who use our information. I emphasize the word help. Tools are no substitute for knowledge and thinking, but they certainly can be an assist for people working with the large amounts of information that we’re called upon to process today. In particular, we are making great strides in content tagging of our intelligence and all-source fi nished products, making it easier for collectors and analysts to access our databases and share information throughout the Intelligence Community and with law enforcement agencies. Along with improving information access, we recognize that partnerships with both traditional and non-traditional partners, and close interactions with domestic and foreign sources, are essential to the intelligence business of today. Capitalizing on the wealth of expertise inside and outside the Intelligence Community provides opportunities for true analytical depth and alternative viewpoints. At DIA we talk about all-source analysis. We use the Webster’s defi nition of all, which means everything needs to be at our fi ngertips. And it is not just classifi ed information; it is unclassifi ed information, it’s expertise, wherever it resides, that will help us in our tasks of discovering information and developing knowledge to support those who are making very weighty decisions in today’s world.
6 Like many other national intelligence agencies, DIA has made great progress in transforming the way the Agency is doing business. However, much more needs to be done to integrate these collective improvements into a cohesive and immediately responsive whole. We need to become much more aggressive in coordinating intelligence collection across disciplines, and integrating tactical through national capabilities to provide us with persistent surveillance that supports our warfi ghters and national security policymakers in the needs that they have. In analysis we need to do a better job of leveraging the expertise of analysts across the entire Intelligence Community on political, military, economic, and cultural affairs, avoiding duplication, creating depth and breadth of expertise, and building on competitive analysis. We also need to redouble our efforts at reaching out to academia, industry, think tanks, and other domestic and international partners to discover new prospective methodologies to improve our analysis. We need to do a better and faster job of achieving an environment of information access within the intelligence and law enforcement communities. The systems and tools are available to accomplish the task today. What we must realize is that the Intelligence Community and law enforcement agencies are part of a larger unifi ed national security enterprise and that the only way to achieve greater security for our nation is to bring these capabilities together in a complementary and interlocking whole. Again, I welcome the opportunity to hear your thoughts and recommendations as we move through this time of change, and we thank you very much for participating. We hope that you will all enjoy today’s conference.
7 BIOGRAPHY
Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, U.S. Navy Director, Defense Intelligence Agency Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby assumed the duties as the Director, Defense Intelligence Agency, on 17 October 2002. He was commissioned in May 1969 from Aviation Offi cer Candidate School. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland and holds a master’s degree in National Security Affairs from the Naval Postgraduate School, completing all requirements for a subspecialty in strategic planning. His fi rst sea duty tour was as an intelligence offi cer with Fighter Squadron TWENTY-FOUR, fl ying F-8J’s off the USS HANCOCK (CV-19). Following a combat deployment, he served with the Seventh Fleet Detachment in Saigon, Republic of Vietnam. A series of shore and sea duty assignments followed his return from Vietnam. Vice Admiral Jacoby has served as the command’s senior intelligence offi cer in each assignment he has held dating back to October 1985. This included Carrier Group Eight, Second Fleet/JTF 120, Naval Military Personnel Command, and U.S. Pacifi c Fleet. He was the second Commander, Joint Intelligence Center Pacifi c, and Director for Intelligence, U.S. Pacifi c Command. He served as Commander, Offi ce of Naval Intelligence, 57th Director of Naval Intelligence, and Joint Staff J-2 before assuming his present duties. Vice Admiral Jacoby’s personal decorations include two awards of the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service Medal, two awards of the Legion of Merit, and other personal, service, and campaign awards. He has received the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement from the Director of Central Intelligence and the Australian Chief of Defense Force Commendation. Vice Admiral Jacoby is married to the former Celia L. Williams of Arlington, Virginia.
8 OPENING ADDRESS
Ms. Deborah G. Barger Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Management for Strategy, Plans, and Policy Good morning, everybody. Before I introduce our keynote speaker I would like to just borrow a minute from the Ambassador to extend my thanks to President Clift and Admiral Jacoby and express my appreciation for the opportunity to co-sponsor this event. Our partnership with the College is a very important one and will continue to be as we develop a National Intelligence University framework, and as we try to further develop intelligence research and intelligence professionals in the Community. So thank you very much. For those of us who work in the Offi ce of the DNI, the mandate to bring about change within the Intelligence Community is what drives the work that we do every single day. Our work, however, is informed by the best minds both within and outside of the Community, so I look forward to the give and take today. I’m going to be leading the Panel a little later. So I will be interested to hear your questions and the dialogue that ensues. And I think we’ve got a pretty interesting lineup of speakers today. And to that end it is my distinct pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, my boss, Ambassador John D. Negroponte. Ambassador Negroponte was sworn in as the fi rst Director of National Intelligence on April 21, 2005, after a long and distinguished career in the Foreign Service. He served in eight different Foreign Service posts in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, including as the Ambassador to Honduras, Mexico, the Philippines, and Iraq, and as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations. As some would say, four decades of diplomatic work was the necessary prerequisite for becoming the fi rst Director of National Intelligence. And I’m sure those skills have come in handy over the last several months. I believe this morning that he will offer us some insight into his vision as the head of the Intelligence Community under the new Reform Act.
9
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Ambassador John D. Negroponte Director of National Intelligence I want to thank Admiral Jacoby and President Clift for their welcome to the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Joint Military Intelligence College, and for their efforts on behalf of today’s conference. As you may know the Offi ce of the Director of National Intelligence is scheduled to relocate to the DIAC in a few months, prior to establishing permanent headquarters of our own. I am sure that the ODNI Team will enjoy its stay here, Admiral. I want to thank you for your gracious hospitality. This morning I’d like to take a few minutes to talk to you about our strategic vision for national intelligence, a subject to which I and my colleagues in the ODNI, and the Intelligence Community (IC) leadership, have been giving a great deal of thought over the last several months. The Offi ce of the Director of National Intelligence, of course, was established by the Intelligence Reform Act, which represents the most wide-ranging reform of American intelligence in decades, but just as it went into effect the WMD Commission reported its own fi ndings, including a list of seventy-four recommendations to improve United States Ambassador Negroponte addresses the intelligence. These were conference. excellent recommendations and the President agreed with seventy out of seventy-four of them, and then asked our offi ce to carry them out. Now, taken together, the Intelligence Reform Act and the WMD Commission recommendations constitute a powerful force for change in the Intelligence Community. They refl ect the fact that our nation’s overall security strategy shifted as a result of events on September 11, 2001, and that the needs of the Intelligence Community’s principal customers have changed as well. The Secretary of Defense, for example, has a remarkably broad set of requirements and priorities at the onset of the 21st century. The United States military must be equally well prepared to help our coalition partners and the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan to counter insurgencies, to deter aggression against the homeland and United States’ allies by hostile states, and to support relief efforts in places as distant as Indonesia and as close as New Orleans.
11 The Secretary of State shares the Defense Secretary’s concerns about United States’ global interests, but from a diplomatic perspective. The Middle East, North Korea, Iraq, political developments in Central Asia, Africa, and our own hemisphere, are just a few major items on her agenda, each requiring highly focused intelligence support. The Attorney General, by contrast, has a different but just as compelling set of needs. The Department of Justice and the FBI are on the front line against terrorist attacks from whatever source or motivation here in the United States. At the same time, federal law enforcement efforts against most traditional criminals cannot rest, especially when activities that appear to be run-of-the-mill criminality may actually be a front or a stage operation for the next terrorist assault on one or our cities. The Secretary of Homeland Security, to provide one fi nal example, has yet a fourth set of intelligence needs and priorities. The borders and infrastructure of a nation as large and complex as ours requires careful, knowledgeable, and continuous assessment of vulnerability to constantly shifting threats emanating from all corners of the globe. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act demands that our vision for United States national intelligence be broad enough to encompass all of these needs. The United States helped bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion, and in so doing we helped knit the world’s people together through international institutions, travel, communications, and commerce. Nonetheless, the attacks on 9/11 show that it no longer takes a large hostile foreign country to assail our citizens and homeland. Suicidal fanatics have fashioned powerful weapons with which to murder thousands of Americans and they very much want to do that again. The people of Madrid know this, and the people of London know it, too. We all live in a dangerous world because our adversaries are elusive, tenacious, and determined. The worst specter is that of a terrorist obtaining access to real weapons of mass destruction (WMD), not commercial aircraft hitting buildings, or bombs exploding in subways, but chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons whose immediate and post-strike effects would take a terrible toll on our citizens and institutions alike. Our national intelligence has to place a priority on such threats and rise to meet them, keeping in mind that the world is not all threats, nor are all threats in their incipient stages preordained to succeed in doing us harm. As I said earlier, our national security strategy changed after 9/11, emphasizing proactive measures the United States can take to defend itself diplomatically, economically, and militarily. The planning, policies, and activities of the Intelligence Community therefore should be organized to provide accurate and timely intelligence that helps us ward off imminent danger, foresee gathering storms, and detect dynamics of change in the world that could be helpful to us, rather than harmful. Specifi cally, the Intelligence Community must help the United States and its allies defeat terrorists at home and abroad and seize the initiative from global extremists. We must support American diplomats, commanders, and law enforcement authorities in preventing and countering the spread of weapons of mass destruction. We must use our analytic insight to help policymakers bolster the growth of democracy and free markets as a way of sustaining peaceful democratic states. We must develop innovative
12 ways to penetrate and analyze the most diffi cult intelligence targets. And, fi nally, the Intelligence Community must help decision-makers anticipate developments of strategic concern, always remembering that opportunities can be as decisive as vulnerabilities in protecting American lives, values, and interests. Having committed ourselves to these elements of our mission, we must also inquire into what we should do differently to reorient the institutions and the processes of the Intelligence Community at a time when traditional national boundaries mean nothing to those who wish us ill. In our thinking about how the Community must function, it is especially important that we note how fast our enemies adapt to United States policies and actions, and build into our plans a capacity to innovate even faster. This represents a continuous long-term challenge. It will require us to become a learning community ready to deal with contingencies, tradeoffs, and changes. Particular emphasis must be placed on ensuring that domestic law enforcement and homeland security offi cials become aware of potential or emerging foreign threats to the homeland. If our customers need more information or have something they want to share with us, whether those customers are state, local, tribal, or federal, we have to organize ourselves to be responsive to their requests and receptive to their concerns. At the same time we need to build up our overall analytic expertise, rebalance and optimize our collection capabilities, and work hard to attract and unify a diverse, multi-talented workforce, particularly with regard to foreign languages, science, and technology. Some of this has already begun. The Joint Military Intelligence College, for example, is partnering with the new National Intelligence University System, a network The DNI explains his priorities. of IC training and leadership programs that my offi ce recently established. The FBI has created the new National Security Branch. The new Counter-Proliferation Center is building its staff week by week. But there is much more to be done. We need to develop a new paradigm for security that increases our effectiveness while enabling us to counter the intelligence capabilities of our adversaries. We need to take stock of our foreign intelligence relationships and consider the utility of establishing new ones. And we need to aggressively exploit path-breaking scientifi c and research advances that will enable us to maintain and, if possible, extend our intelligence advantages against our adversaries. Doing all of this is going to be demanding. If we are going to fulfi ll the expectations of Congress and the President, we have our work cut out for us in every dimension of intelligence. This requires that we align, integrate, and thereby transform our activities
13 more thoroughly and with more teamwork and imagination than ever before. Can we succeed? I believe that we can. Let us remember that the Department of Defense had to answer a similar call after the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act in the l980s. The resulting transformation of the American military was not quick or painless, but our armed forces today are more unifi ed, more joint, and consequently more effective than ever before. The Intelligence Community can do the same. In my fi ve months as Director of National Intelligence, every single day of those fi ve months I’ve been inspired by the hard work, the dedication, and the sheer skill of the people who make up the Intelligence Community. They care. They are determined to succeed and they are as talented a group of people as you could fi nd in any government or corporation anywhere in the world. That is why I am confi dent that if we set the right goals and systematically plan and execute this transformation we will succeed. That is critical, because over the next fi fteen years we’re likely to see as much change and turmoil in the world as we have seen over the last fi fteen years. The powerful voices and reactions that have been unleashed by the end of the Cold War, and globalization in particular, will continue to startle and sometimes wound us in the decades ahead. Good intelligence, better intelligence, cannot forestall that but it can help us to deal with it. That’s the job at hand. We must give the President, the Congress, our military, our diplomats, and our law enforcement offi cials at all levels insight and foresight, helping them protect American lives, values, and allies while contributing to a more democratic and prosperous world. Thank you very much for your attention and I would be more than pleased to try and answer any questions or to listen to any comments that you might have. Thank you. Q: I think one of the consistent impediments that are discussed across the Community is policies that are in place that are impacting the ability to move forward with information sharing. How do you see that in your charge, what priority do you give that, and what plans can you share with us about that? A: Well, fi rst of all, as you mentioned, it’s a feature of the new legislation. There is an institution called the Information Sharing Executive that was created by separate legislation but that now, by Presidential Decision, has been folded under the umbrella of the DNI offi ce. John Russuck, who was previously the head of intelligence at the Department of Energy, has established this offi ce, and he is getting it up and running. We also will be having a new CIO (Chief Information Offi cer) for the DNI coming on board very shortly. I think the short answer to your question is we’re going to assign it very high priority. I think information sharing and getting through the plethora of different communications methods and networks that we have is one of the big challenges that we face in the IC. Of course, it is one of the issues that came under the sharpest scrutiny in the wake of 9/11—the failure to connect the dots—and the issue of whether information was shared and passed when it should have been.
14 There are some technological issues that have to be dealt with, and I think that’s one of the issues that I would look to General Meyerrose [Air Force Maj Gen Dale Meyerrose, CIO-designate for ODNI] for, who has now been nominated for this position. He currently awaits Senate confi rmation. I’m assured that many of these obstacles are not really technological; they’re cultural. One has to try to instill a culture of sharing rather than a culture of withholding. This must include, of course, due regard for protection of highly sensitive sources and methods. I think that circle can be squared, and it goes to the issues of thinking of ourselves more as a Community rather than as a set of individual agencies, albeit where each has its own particular areas of excellence and strength. So, yes, it will have a lot of priority and I would extend that to the question of sharing intelligence with our foreign intelligence partners as well, particularly Australia, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand. But going beyond that, I think it gets to the question of good risk management. I think sometimes we’ve been a bit too categorical in withholding information from partners and allies who might have been able to put it to good use, but because of some sensitivity over the intelligence we perhaps didn’t take quite as much risk as we perhaps ought to have in order to manage whatever threat it was that we’re facing. So community, risk management, emphasis on sharing, due regard for sources and methods. Thank you. Q: What are your feelings about establishing a truly unifi ed clearance and access process? A: Well, the one nice thing about that is you can always tell who is an intelligence offi cer in our government; he usually carries fi fteen or twenty badges. What can I say? I can either give you a long treatise or just say, “Yes, we’ve got to work on that.” And will we achieve it during my tenure, right down to a single one? I don’t know, but we’re seized with this issue whether it has to do with access or standards for clearances; there are a lot of issues that go to the question of standards. What does a clearance mean in one agency versus another? And so on and so forth. We’ve got people in important positions within the DNI who are focused on these very concepts, thinking and working with their colleagues throughout the Intelligence Community. It’s a challenge and I’m not going to make exaggerated claims for what can be accomplished in a short period of time. But I think it’s again a cultural issue. If we get people thinking about being part of a broader community, I think the individuals within the separate agencies are themselves going to then start fi nding solutions to these issues. They themselves are going to come forward and say, “I know how we can fi x that.” Believe me; I’ve watched this happen too often in my life in other situations. The answer is usually right where the problem is, and people will step forward and tell you how if they end up appreciating why it is we want to fi x it, and what advantages can accrue to them as a result of fi xing it, and to their organization. They themselves will come forward with a solution. I’ll bet you. Q: There is a fair amount of contractor support for the Intelligence Community. What is your view on the quality of the support and the extent of the support? Is it in the places you would like, or would you like to see it in other places?
15 A: It’s a very good question, especially since I’m sure the contractor support numbers in the hundreds, if not thousands, and lots of federal monies. I personally haven’t been in the job long enough to be able to form an opinion or a judgment on that question. I just don’t have enough of a sample of experience of my own. Q: There’s been discussion about open-source information at the National Counter-Proliferation Center, and also some discussion about a National Open Source Center. Can you share with us schedules, plans, or your thoughts and ideas on both of those organizations? A: Let me just back up one step. Both in the legislation and, even more pertinently, in the WMD Commission Report conclusions, they seized upon the idea of creating centers for issues of particular intelligence interests. These centers should be the focal points, if you will, for every aspect of intelligence with respect to that issue — WMD, for example, or nonproliferation. What we’ve settled on for the time being is to try not to create too many of these. My feeling is that it would be disruptive to have a proliferation, if you will, of these intelligence centers. There are a couple of naturals here. The National Counterterrorism Center, and it’s already the mission manager, for counterterrorism within the government, and we decided, because of its importance, to stand up a National Counter-Proliferation Center, which is headed by Ambassador Kenneth Brill, who is formerly our Ambassador to the IAEA. He’s just come on board in that organization, which we expect to have less than a hundred people, but it will be a focal point for coordinating the intelligence work we’re doing on counter-proliferation. Apart from those two centers there’s a Counterintelligence Center already in existence. And then we’ve decided on a couple of other intelligence issues, not to create actual brick and motor centers, if you will, but to have mission managers which will be virtual centers rather than having them all in one location. We’ve decided to establish mission manager positions for Iran and North Korea. All in the spirit of where we think it’s necessary and desirable to really maximize Community effort are these centers or these mission manager concepts going to be applied. Just think of the mission manager concept as being what the DNI himself would be doing if he didn’t have anything else to do. Q: I want to ask about the analysis process. Have you allowed for more competing or dissenting analysis to reach you? Do you allow for analysts to really open up and go beyond the fear that prevents analysts from telling what their reasons are, especially if they differ from the norm? Do you have, within the system, or should we have within the system, a formal dissenting analysis position which will take the position of defending the really bad guy, so that all views will reach the decision-makers? A: Yes, we have. We may not have gone quite as far as you’ve suggested, but I think a lot a steps have been taken to make sure that both differing points of view and alternative analysis are served up to our customers, whether it’s in the form of right in the analytical piece to explain that analysts have different judgments on a particular issue. And that’s done. And it’s done frequently and we encourage it. And there are
16 also these slightly more formal pieces, so-called “red cell exercises,” where you get somebody to really game out an alternative point of view. I think frankly, since 9/11 and even more so since the WMD Commission Report, we’ve been seeing quite a bit of that. My own message to the analytical community is: You shouldn’t drive inextricably toward consensus views on pieces that you do because if you do, if you serve that up, the policymakers are going to have different views anyway and they are going to debate alternative views. That’s the nature of the way policy is made. So that’s on one side. The only caution I would put on the other side is it doesn’t really help policymakers if you present them with a whole scattering of points of view, nor does it help if you have one view offered and then the agency that you’d expect to have the most knowledge on the issue disagrees. Where does that leave you, if you say it’s on a particular item, if it is due to a piece of military technology or something like that? I personally pay quite a bit of attention to whose intelligence agency a particular analytical view is coming from, depending on the subject matter. So I would say that dissent and alternative views have to be presented at least in a somewhat intellectually disciplined fashion. That would be the way I’d put it. Q: Do you believe it is wise policy to impose restrictions on foreign students or universities, given projected shortages in scientists and engineers in the future? Would they be a good source of technical recruits for the intelligence agencies, given 40 percent of all members of the national academies are foreign-born and the need for these kinds of educated professionals for our country? A: I assume you’re referring to visa diffi culties, right? Because I don’t think there’s any policy on the part of either our government or our academic institutions to restrict the fl ow of foreign students. My sense is that most institutions welcome them. I think there is good news and less good news on this subject. We certainly welcome a lot of foreign students to our country. It’s something on the order of half a million students at any given time doing advanced studies in the United States. The last time I looked at the fi gure it was something like 40 or 50 thousand Chinese students, and a similar number of Indians, studying in the United States. Since 9/11, with respect particularly to the Middle East, the processing of visas has been much more diffi cult to the point of, at times, being extremely restrictive. These are issues that have to be worked through. I’m sure that people understand the reasons why many of these precautions have been taken, but it is certainly not with the notion of trying to deny or prevent legitimate academic exchange and study in this country, which, as you rightfully point out, has been a source of tremendous benefi t to our society, and continues to be so. Q: The International Association for College Educators (IACE) requires all students to study Russian, Chinese, or Arabic in order to get a degree in intelligence analysis. You mentioned earlier that you anticipate as many challenges and changes in the next fi fteen years as there were during the prior fi fteen years. My question is: Can you anticipate what the critical needs for languages will be fi ve or ten years from now? Are we training people to have a cadre of intelligence analysts that will not fulfi ll the critical needs fi ve years from now when they graduate? Can you anticipate other things that we should be training students in?
17 A: Well, I certainly think you mentioned some of the key languages. I see that Bill Nolte is going to be speaking to you at lunch and maybe he can elaborate a bit on what the Community as a whole is doing to anticipate these needs. Clearly we’ve fallen behind in this. We need to redouble our efforts, and I know that those efforts are now getting under way. I think Chinese and Arabic are clearly major requirements. I’d be reluctant to start off the top of my head trying to pick for you the other languages that I think might be needed but, again, I think it goes to the issue of generally encouraging students in our society to be interested in foreign cultures and in foreign languages. My sense is that such interest was a bit stronger in my generation than it has been in the last Ambassador Negroponte candidly responds to couple of decades or so. questions from the audience. Hopefully with all that has happened now we can do things to reawaken and encourage an interest in studying foreign languages, foreign cultures, and foreign societies because of the obvious point that our own existence as a country and as a society depends on our ability to understand and get along with the rest of the world. Q: I’ve been to many conferences where, before you were named, I began to feel that the role that you were being envisioned for was almost like the characters in the Wizard of Oz, where everybody had a big problem but they knew this DNI person would solve it all. But in reality you’re a real fl esh-and-blood person. You’ve been plunked into this really borderline impossible job. Everybody wishes the best for you. How is it going? A: Well, you’re right. When I was fi rst asked if I would be interested in taking on this job, the fi rst thing I did was to go fi nd the law. And when I pressed the button on my computer out came 271 pages! And that was just the fi rst section, which dealt with intelligence reform, not with border security and everything else. And it’s a challenging job to say the least. It was a product of a lot of debate and compromise, and different interests were at work, but I think when you take on a job like this you’ve got to try to prioritize. The fi rst thing you do is identify good people to help you carry out the mission. I believe we’ve succeeded in doing that, starting with an outstanding Principal Deputy in the person of General Mike Hayden, who is probably one of the premier military intelligence experts in our government. The next thing you’ve got to do is sit down with that staff and identify areas for priority. We must recognize that this is not something that’s going to be done overnight. We’re talking about a generational kind of a change, a lot of which has to do with culture and everything else. I’ve boiled it down to focusing
18 myself on about three things — analysis, the quality of analysis; building a sense of community; and the stewardship of the resources, the budget of the Intelligence Community. How are we doing? Well, we’re up and running. And I think we’re starting to have an impact but it’s going to take time. And I don’t think we should be impatient about this. Q: Much conversation and discussion preceded your confi rmation on that resource management issue and your stewardship of this. Could you talk a little about how you’ve seen that role evolve and how management of DNI, of the National Intelligence budget, is changing from the old DCI National Foreign Intelligence budget management? A: Well, I don’t think I can elaborate in great detail here. I guess one point I’d make is that I think the genesis of this job — I think the creation of the DNI — stems from two things. One was 9/11 and all the different studies and commissions that came after. Secondly, I think there was a general sense that there weren’t enough hours in the day for the Director of the CIA to deal with both the day-to-day operations of the Central Intelligence Agency and to carry out his Director of Central Intelligence functions with the level of attention that the positions required. With the creation of the DNI, the staff has more time to work on those issues, and I think it’s easier for the staff to get my concentrated attention on those budget issues than it might have been for the Director of the CIA. I’m not there giving instructions to CIA stations around the world, following operations, and managing the day-to-day activity of the CIA analysts the way that’s being done out at the CIA. So I’d say we’ve been able to devote more time to it. And the second thing is, speaking of staff, I’ve picked Ambassador Patrick Kennedy to be my Deputy for Management, and he is one of the most experienced administrative offi cers in the United States government. He was Assistant Secretary for Administration of the State Department for eight years. He helped set up the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. He helped me out there in Baghdad after that and he’s just an extraordinarily talented and versatile individual. So I think that under Mr. Kennedy’s leadership you’re going to see a really good effort by the DNI in the budget area. Q: You’re the fi rst director of foreign and domestic intelligence and these are areas that have been strongly separated over the years — too separated, I think. How do you see them integrating in your new role? A: That’s one of our main challenges, isn’t it, to ensure this kind of seamless movement between foreign, military, and domestic intelligence. Sometimes I think of it in a different way. I’d say international, national, domestic, and local intelligence would be another way of looking at it. I’d say the creation of the National Security Branch of the FBI is an important step in this process. What we’re hoping is that the FBI, as a result, will give more weight and higher priority to the intelligence aspects of its work through such things as creating a better career path for FBI offi cials working in the intelligence area to move away from the culture of the making of the case, where the prosecution is the
19 most important element. And we want to do things that encourage that shift in culture but, of course, with due regard for American civil liberties on the one hand and due regard for the proper law enforcement role of the Attorney General and the FBI on the other. I think an important step in this direction has been the creation of a National Security Branch, in which the Director is a career FBI offi cial, but his across-the- board Deputy is a career CIA offi cial who came from the Counterterrorism Center over at the CIA. So I think that’s going to be a nice emblem, if you will, of the way forward in that area. Q: Would you address the issue of how you see yourself improving intelligence? There are many issues, like a possible pandemic, or agriculture, or even weather, that could impact on the President’s decisions in a lot of areas. How might this cause you to organize your offi ce in order to seek to pass information forward? A: Your question reminds me that I didn’t answer the earlier question about an open source center, which, if I could, just for a minute address. The WMD Commission recommended the creation of an open source center. What we’re looking at is to try and do something within the CIA itself. Whoever runs that center is effectively double- hatted as someone working within the CIA but also wearing a DNI hat. But the details of that arrangement haven’t been fi nalized as of yet. Certainly FBIS is going to be an important component of that no matter what. Your question goes to how we defi ne intelligence, does it not? I think intelligence encompasses a broader defi nition. I think we’re talking about information that’s useful for our decision-makers. Avian fl u is a good example. If there is a particular topic of interest and the best information that you can fi nd on subject X happens to be available from open sources, we shouldn’t hesitate to use it. I think that’s going to be one of the challenges of the open source center, once it gets further along. Sometimes a lot of the best economic analysis is out there somewhere in the journalistic or think-tank world. The government has a better monopoly on good information in the national security area. Q: New technologies are coming to a head in the next three months, six months, or year. However, the research process that integrates these into the federal government is still an archaic process, taking two or more years. Why is it taking so long to merge technologies into the federal government, and what can you do in your position to encourage speed in that process without losing quality? A: We created the kind of institutional framework, if you will, where we should be able to address these kinds of questions. I’m thinking particularly of our Chief Information Offi cer, because in the area of information technology I suspect that’s a signifi cant, if not a preponderant, chunk of what you’re talking about. And, of course, there are science and technology components of virtually all these agencies, and we’ve brought on board an excellent Director of Science and Technology, Eric Hazeltine. So I think between our CIO and our S&T elements, and their corresponding elements throughout the Intelligence Community, we should be able to make some progress in
20 that area. What one has to try and do, I suspect, is narrow the gap. I don’t think you can ever overcome it entirely. But you’ve got to try to narrow it to the extent possible. Q: You mentioned that strength of analysis was a very high priority for you. What would you consider to be a sign of better analysis when it arrives? A: Well, fi rst, a couple of things here. One, I think the gentleman was asking me earlier about alternative analysis and so forth. I think that’s better analysis, if you start incorporating varieties of views and alternative views. I think another important element of analysis is to put forward — more of this is being done now — clear statements about what it is we know and what we don’t know, that is, intelligence gaps. Sometimes the weight of knowledge is to start out by admitting what it is you don’t or can’t know at the moment. I think that’s important. And then I just think quality, quality of writing, quality of thought process. Some analysis you can judge by the intellectual rigor with which it’s presented. So I think you can often identify in a piece how carefully it’s been prepared. Ultimately the proof of the pudding is in the eating. You have the benefi t of, through experience, seeing how good analyses have been or are. And I don’t think of analysis as prediction, necessarily, what’s going to happen. I am not one of those who feel that our analysts have to predict the future. I think what they’ve got to do, when you’re looking at, let’s say, sensitive areas of the world, or country analyses, is identify for the policymakers the really important factors at work in those societies that impinge on the decisions that those governments or those elements are going to make. You don’t have to necessarily forecast exactly what they are going to do. Q: I was wondering about the allocation of resources, what with the continuing war in Iraq, and the natural disasters and other challenges that you are facing from that area as well as in the investment in science and technology, what with Eric Hazeltine on board, and from a budget standpoint? A: I think we’ve got major challenges in Iraq, and probably the most important one is there is no intelligence issue that is more important than understanding the nature of the insurgency in all of its aspects. The insurgency and the enemy that we face are a source, and an issue of constant interest and concern, whether it’s the international terrorist component, the Zarqawi, the al Qaeda component, or the more home-grown and domestic component within Iraq, the former regime elements, and so forth. There is a desire to get as much fi delity about what is happening within the insurgency and a feeling that much more could still be done in terms of fi nding out what the nature of that insurgency is. It’s a very, very diffi cult issue. It’s one that preoccupied me when I was out there as Ambassador, and I think continues to be one of great concern to me in this new position. On the hurricane I don’t profess to know all the different ways in which our intelligence might have contributed to dealing with the natural disaster here, but certainly the NGA deserves real kudos for what it did to provide coverage of that incident. I think those incidences show that our national intelligence assets can really be helpful in these kinds of domestic situations. I don’t think that our international
21 efforts suffered in any signifi cant way, or in any way, as a consequence of our directing attention to those disasters. Q: My question goes back to your comments about the mission managers. What are the responsibilities of the mission manager, and what written authority clearly enables that role? A: Let me say fi rst that the National Counterterrorism Center is an excellent model of the kind of interagency cooperation in information sharing that we really want to achieve in the War on Terror, and I think it can be a useful model for similar efforts in other areas of endeavor. When you go out to the NCTC, you see people working from multiple agencies — FBI, Homeland Security, CIA — I think it’s outstanding. There all the different databases are available for people to work on. The authorities for the NCTC are stipulated in law. A law created it, and then of course there are various Directives of the National Security Council. But basically in my own lay terms without citing any regulatory authority chapter and verse, I see them as a fusion center for intelligence on terrorism and, secondly, they have a mission to do strategic planning on how to conduct the Global War on Terror. Let me just thank you for this opportunity. I was really encouraged most of all this morning by the large number of hands that went up. Obviously you have many, many questions on your mind. I think that’s a sign of real interest and enthusiasm for this conference. So I hope you enjoy your day and fi nd it useful. And thank you for including me in your program.
Mr. Clift thanks Ambassador Negroponte.
22 BIOGRAPHY
Ambassador John D. Negroponte Director of National Intelligence Ambassador John D. Negroponte was sworn in as the fi rst Director of National Intelligence (DNI) on April 21, 2005. Previously, he had been serving as United States Ambassador to Iraq since June 28, 2004. From September 18, 2001, until his appointment to Iraq, Ambassador Negroponte served as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations. From 1997 to 2001, Ambassador Negroponte was employed in the private sector as Executive Vice President for Global Markets of The McGraw-Hill Companies in New York. From 1960 to 1997, Ambassador Negroponte was a member of the Career Foreign Service. He served at eight different Foreign Service posts in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and he also held important positions at the State Department and the White House. Among his assignments, Ambassador Negroponte was Ambassador to Honduras (1981-1985); Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientifi c Affairs (1985-1987); Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (1987-1989); Ambassador to Mexico (1989-1993); and Ambassador to the Philippines (1993-96). Ambassador Negroponte is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Diplomacy. He is a former Chairman of the French-American Foundation. Ambassador Negroponte was born July 21, 1939, in London. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1960. He and his wife Diana have fi ve children.
23 Panel 1: Impact of Intelligence Reform Legislation on National Intelligence Structures
OPENING REMARKS
Larry Hiponia The morning topic panel is the Impact of Intelligence Reform Legislation on National Intelligence Structures. We are privileged to have a distinguished set of panel members today. Ms. Deborah Barger is Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Management for Strategy, Plans, and Policy. In this capacity she serves as a senior offi cial within the Offi ce of the DNI to direct the development of strategy, plans, and policy for the Intelligence Community. In September 2004 she was detailed to the Senate Government Affairs Committee to advise Senator Susan Collins and her staff in the crafting of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. Ms. Barger is the panel’s moderator. Mr. Christopher Kojm is the President of the 9/11 Public Discourse Project and former Deputy Director of the 9/11 Commission. Prior to that he served from 1998 until February 2003 as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelligence Policy and Coordination in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Ms. Letitia A. Long is the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Requirements, and Resources. Previously she was Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, from July 2000 to June 2003, and the Director of Central Intelligence’s Executive Director for Intelligence Community Affairs. Mr. Russell E. Travers is the National Counterterrorism Center’s Deputy Director for Information Sharing and Knowledge Development. In this capacity, Mr. Travers manages the government-wide information-sharing initiative, NCTC’s Red Team, knowledge development efforts, and the maintenance of the U.S. government’s terrorist identities database. Previously Mr. Travers was the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Director for Policy Support.
Morning panel participants.
24 PANEL MODERATOR
Deborah G. Barger Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Management for Strategy, Plans, and Policy Thank you very much, Larry. I’m very fortunate to have with me this morning this distinguished panel of colleagues to talk about the Impact of Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 and its Impact on National Intelligence Structures, Policies, Practices, etc. My plan is to give each of our panel members about 15 to 20 minutes to talk about the impact of the Act on the work that they do and then perhaps have a brief discussion amongst ourselves, and then we’ll open up to the fl oor to questions for the remaining time that we have available to us. As the DNI said this morning, the Reform Act constitutes a powerful force for change and we all felt that, I think, on this panel. It calls for signifi cant change in the way that we address the counter-terrorism mission, particularly the threat from terrorists within the homeland. You heard the DNI speak to that this morning. He talked a little bit about the resulting changes to existing structures, like those within the FBI also within DHS, and in other places within the Intelligence Community. And it also created new structures like the National Counterterrorism Center. The Act also called for signifi cant change in how we manage the Intelligence Community. Again the DNI talked about his mandate for unifying our effort across the intelligence enterprise. It calls for changes in how we manage the intelligence budget and how we share intelligence information. And there were a lot of questions this morning to that effect. How do we conduct intelligence analysis? How do we manage the intelligence workforce? We didn’t get into a whole lot of that this morning but we can talk about that later. There was a question about Goldwater-Nicholas, and lessons learned, and I think that is apropos in terms of our thinking about how we move forward in managing the workforce. And then there are the whole issues concerning civil rights and protections of Americans’ rights and liberties as we move forward into this whole area of dealing with threats to the homeland. As the Assistant DDNI for Strategy, Plans, and Policy my job is to ensure that we have done the strategic thinking and planning to guide the entire intelligence enterprise. And I’ll be happy to speak to that in more detail in the question-answer period, if you would like, but let me just say that we are in the process of completely recasting how we do strategy for the entire Intelligence Community. How we go about planning across functions, across missions, trying to do that in a coherent fashion across the Intelligence Community. At the same time we’re completely revamping and restructuring our approach to developing intelligence policy. We’re trying to do it in a manner far timelier, which addresses some of the issues that have been impediments to unifying the Community in the past. I’ll be happy to talk to those things in more detail. I don’t want to take time away from my colleagues. And so we will start with Chris Kojm as we begin this discussion.
25 Chris was the President of the 9/11 Public Discourse Project and so has some unique insights into the Commission’s thinking and how some of that thinking led to the changes that came about in the Act. Chris, let me turn things over to you.
26 BIOGRAPHY
Deborah G. Barger Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Management for Strategy, Plans, and Policy Ms. Barger serves as the senior offi cial within the Offi ce of the DNI who directs the development of strategy, plans, and policy for the Intelligence Community. Ms. Barger has 26 years of experience in the national security arena, including 19 years in intelligence. In 2002, she was selected to be the fi rst Intelligence Community Fellow at RAND. Upon completing her fellowship in September 2003, she was asked by the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management to build upon that research and establish a new offi ce to examine global issues with strategic implications for intelligence, and provide senior IC leadership with alternatives to the current management, policy, procedural, technological, operational and organizational practices. In September 2004, she was detailed to the Senate Government Affairs Committee to advise Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and the SGAC staff in the crafting of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. Ms. Barger has served on the Intelligence Community Management Staff since October 1995. She was the project manager for the Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review (QUICR) in 2001. From 1986 to 1995, Ms. Barger worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency. She served as Special Assistant to the Deputy Director for External Relations, as speechwriter for two former DIA Directors, and as an editor for Soviet Military Power. In 1990, she was selected to participate in the American Political Science Association’s Congressional Fellowship program and worked for Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Representative John Spratt (D-SC). Following her tour on Capitol Hill, Ms. Barger became DIA’s senior Congressional Liaison Offi cer representing the General Defense Intelligence Program. Ms. Barger was the managing editor of the Armed Forces Journal International. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from Buffalo State College and a Master’s in Public Administration from American University.
27 PANELIST
Christopher A. Kojm President, 9/11 Discourse Project Okay, thank you very much, Deborah. First of all, it’s a real pleasure and an honor to be here on this panel with three colleagues with whom I’ve worked very closely during my time in the Intelligence Community. The Commission wrote that there are very good people who work very hard in the Community, and that they need structures that help them get the job done and not stand in the way. That’s what the Commission and its recommendations were all about. At the end of the 9/11 Commission last summer, the ten soon-to-be former Commissioners decided that they wanted to form a non-profi t for the purpose of public education about the recommendations of the Commission. They did not want to be another commission that made a nice report, had headlines for a day, and then went away. The book doesn’t matter. What matters are the recommendations, and the results that follow from them. So they set up a non-profi t. And in the course of the Public Discourse Project’s work, Commissioners, staff, and former staff have spoken in over four hundred venues all across the country in 35 states. Venues from local elites and world affairs councils, all the way to high schools, and drive-time radio — I’ve done it — you get great questions. There’s very great interest in all things related to 9/11 and hence very great interest in the Intelligence Community. That is a relatively rare event in public life that put you at the center of public discussion. And I think it’s had productive results. Why the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission? There were many other topics other than intelligence orders, transportation, emergency preparedness, and response. I’ll not speak to those; I’ll just speak to those relating to intelligence. One is the authorities of the DNI and information sharing. First to the authorities of the DNI: for the Commission, a very important look into the past was on December 4, 1998, when the Director of Central Intelligence sent around a memorandum that we are at war with al Qaeda. He sent it to leaders within the CIA. He sent it to the then-Deputy Director for Community Management who shared it more broadly within the Community. And the effect of this memo was — well, not very much. Resources didn’t move. Priorities didn’t change. The DCI, who by all accounts was personally very dedicated and motivated on the question of addressing terrorism, and al Qaeda in particular, did not have the institutional tools to change, shape, and redirect the Community on behalf of what he saw as a very high priority. So the Commission recommended the creation of a Director of National Intelligence. It was not done lightly. The ten Commissioners had all been around Washington many times. They’d seen commissions come and go. They’d seen this recommendation come and go many, many times. And so they were reluctant to recommend something that also would become a dust collector on the shelf. But they were persuaded by the fact
28 and circumstances of the 9/11 story that it was essential for the security of the United States to create a powerful Director of National Intelligence. Let me speak to the second point, the sharing of information. That, too, is a theme that is rife in the 9/11 story. And it almost always plays out the same way. We’re good people doing excellent work. The CIA did superb work in tracing future 9/11 hijackers from the Gulf to Kuala Lumpur and we had some knowledge about Nawaf al Havmi and Khalid Mihdhar. The trail was lost because information was not shared. And they came into the United States once and, in the case of Mihdhar, twice, without any interruption. The FBI, which has been a bit of a whipping boy with respect to 9/11 — I think it is important to note that the FBI fi eld offi ce in Minneapolis did superlative work in the case of Moussaoui, quite rapidly fi guring out who was this young man who wanted to learn how to fl y planes as an ego-boosting thing. Not to take off and land, but just to fl y. The Minneapolis offi ce fi gured out his story but couldn’t convince Headquarters. Information was not well shared within the FBI. It was not put together with the Phoenix memo, another indicator. And it never arose as a problem to prominence before 9/11. Why does this matter? Well, we know from the interrogations of detainees that Ramzi Binlshibh said that, had Khalid Shaikh Mohammed known that Moussaoui was arrested, he would have cancelled the attack. Now we don’t know if that is a fact, but that’s a pretty powerful statement. We know, of course, that the plotters were very concerned with operational security. And so there is some merit to the remark. Let me just say a few things about information sharing that the Commission thought important. First of all, the statute created a program manager appointed by the President for information sharing. This is a very, very important function. John Russuck holds this job. He needs the people and resources to get this done. Not just within the Community, but across the government. Why across the government? Again, because those on the front line are not just those in uniform but those in the front line are border inspectors, consular offi cers, and airline customer service representatives. What we need is an information-sharing system where passenger information is not scrutinized by the airlines but which the airlines immediately can pass to the terrorist screening center or other appropriate entity and get near-real-time results on passenger identities. That’s the kind of information system that we as a government need. Everyone in this room understands the importance of need-to-know and protecting sources and methods. It’s a credo we all sign up to and swear to and live by. It’s important. But just as important is the creative sharing of information in a timely manner. And we need to create incentives within everyone’s daily work routine and performance evaluations for information sharing. I’ve been in the hot seat, and if you’re the classifying offi cial it’s the easiest thing in the world to mark classifi ed. It’s not very easy to push something down the chain on classifi cation or even to get it declassifi ed. It’s very hard to do. It’s very hard to share as well. As a government we’re starting to make changes and that’s important. Surely all my bosses, the former Commissioners, commend that, but it’s not yet enough.
29 There is plenty of work to be done related to this uniformity of security clearances. We’ve got a vulcanized system, still, within the U.S. government of those who do clearances and the passing of clearances is straight out of Kafka. And that has to change. Why? Because we lost three thousand lives on September 11th, which could have been prevented. We don’t know it would have been prevented, but could have been prevented, had information sharing been pursued better within the U.S. government. I was going to talk about the Counterterrorism Center but I’m just going to stop and have a word from Russ. Thank you for your time and attention and I look forward to my colleagues’ and your own questions and comments.
30 BIOGRAPHY
Christopher Kojm President, 9/11 Discourse Project Chris Kojm is the President of the 9/11 Public Discourse Project and former Deputy Director of the 9/11 Commission. Prior to that, he served from 1998 until February 2003 as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelligence Policy and Coordination in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He served previously in the Congress on the staff of the House International Relations Committee, under Ranking Member Lee Hamilton as Deputy Director of the Democratic Staff (1997-98), as Coordinator for Regional Issues (1993-1997) and under Chairman Hamilton on the Europe and Middle East Subcommittee Staff (1984-92). From 1979 to 1984, he was a writer and editor with the Foreign Policy Association in New York City. He has a Master’s in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University (1979) and an A.B. from Harvard College (1977). The 9/11 Public Discourse Project is a 501(c)(3) organization formed by the 10 members of the 9/11 Commission. The organization’s goal is to fulfi ll the 9/11 Commission’s original mandate of guarding against future terrorist attacks, while strictly adhering to the same bipartisan and independent principles that have guided it over the last 20 months.
31 PANELIST
Russell E. Travers Deputy Director for Information Sharing and Knowledge Development National Counterterrorism Center It’s my pleasure to be here. I’m a DIA person, and so it’s kind of nice to be back home. Deborah indicated that the challenge here was to look at the impact of legislation and then I will harken back to a question that was asked of de Gaulle 25 years ago. “What was the impact of the French Revolution on France?” He said it was too soon to tell. I’m of that mind here as well. It’s clearly not going to take two hundred years, but it is going to take a while. In hopes of stimulating a little thought I’m going to give you some personal observations from my particular vantage point as one of the Deputies in NCTC. I’d like you to assume that it’s the day after the next intelligence failure. And for the government employees in the audience I would ask you to consider hearing what I think about what your agency’s bureaucracies are doing. Are we going to be able to say that collectively we have done everything possible to avoid intelligence failure when it comes to intelligence reform? Give that some thought and maybe we’ll come back to it in the discussion. I’m going to talk two broad issues. First, intelligence reform from the context of the problems that I think we’re trying to address. I still think we’re missing the trick here a little bit on what the fundamental problems are. Secondly, I’m going to talk about terrorism in the context of the IRTPA. I’m going to start with two test questions. First, you will get commentators that will point to a whole series of alleged intelligence failures that have occurred since the early 1990s. Failure to predict the fall of the Soviet Union, the mistaken attack on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the North Korean failed TD-1, the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, 9/11, and so forth. What do they all have in common? Answer: Almost nothing. And that’s an important point when we start thinking about what we have to do to fi x this Community. We saw mismatches between resources and tasking. We saw a lack of technical capabilities. We saw a lack of HUMINT. We saw a lack of validation of sources. We saw a failure to integrate analysis. We saw analytic art that was abysmal. We saw some policy issues, for sure. We certainly, as Chris Kojm suggested, saw information-sharing challenges. It really gets to the heart of everything we do, I would argue. What does intelligence reform as we now know it do to fi x those problems? I would say it is way, way too soon to tell. We have a very long way ahead of us. Inside and outside the Community, reform is a bit of a cottage industry. We’ve got a ton of ideas, some good, some bad. They’re kind of interspersed with one another and it becomes diffi cult to tell which is which. You can explain virtually all the failures, which are
32 really symptoms of the problem, if you refer back to the much larger intelligence cycle. I’m going to run you through how I see the thing set up and then we go from there. First, planning a direction. We come out of the World War and Cold War indisputably number one, but we have a whole lot of trouble identifying interests and identifying how we’re going to defend those interests. Similarly, the Intelligence Community has a challenge trying to react to a very uncertain world. With a lack of an overarching vision, DOD, in a very structured manner, comes in and identifi es a whole series of things that are needed to fi x support to operations. That largely generates the claim on Intelligence Community resources for the next ten or fi fteen years. It has huge impacts on collection. If you combine that ad hoc nature of national security policy with the military claim on resources, what do you get? In terms of near-term operations what you get is a huge surge that the Intelligence Community has to adapt to, and I think we actually did it very well. Some disciplines surged better than others, but at the very least it was a massive cost associated with that in terms of database maintenance and target development and so forth. And that gets you exactly to the Chinese Embassy problem. In terms of long-term collection, because National Military Strategy was in essence a proxy for National Security Strategy, we were going to do two major theaters of war and JV (Joint Vision) 2010 and 2020 and so forth, and that generated extraordinary key performance parameters with very expensive satellite constellations. Collectors had, in all honesty, been licensed to steal. They could point back to the National Military Strategy and identify those requirements on the books, and therefore they needed to build this, do that, and that’s what got us the imbalance between collection and analysis. I fi nd that most aggravating because that’s what I’ve been involved in for the most part for the last twenty years. The old adage is that form should follow function. We did exactly the opposite. We kept the structures in place and tried to divide up analysis into component parts; we would parcel out military and economic and political and so forth to different agencies. But we’re also not training analysts very well. We’re focused on the near term. We were kind of pushing out mediocre analysts around the globe. Those that were focused on getting us off-the-shelf solutions and away from proprietary things did great things for this country. The problem is that we are now throwing information out to everybody and their brother. Relatively raw information going to the most senior policymakers, and if they’ve got a policy bed or they are just not able to distinguish between good sources and bad sources, they glom onto something and that tends to generate a whole lot of activity within the Community. I think that’s also not good. If you start going into detail on each of the individual “intelligence failures” that we’ve been suffering, I think you can fi nd the lineage in almost the tyranny of logic of the intelligence cycle from beginning to end. If that’s true, or even close to true, how do we proceed? Unfortunately, I do think that, from the outside looking in, this is just such a complicated business in which we fi nd people wanting to gravitate toward relatively simple solutions that are going to fi x things.
33 I want to talk about two other issues because they are kind of particularly near and dear to my heart. One is information sharing. I agree with Chris Kojm entirely that it is extraordinarily important and that we need to do a better job. I will argue that, in terms of the kind of interagency problems we had with 9/11, I think we are doing much, much better. To go back to all of those other intelligence failures I talked about, they had nothing to do with information sharing. Nothing. We’re talking about information sharing that generally works at the data end of the spectrum, not the knowledge end. And most of the intelligence failures of the 1990s were at the knowledge end of the spectrum. So we need to be careful about assuming that as kind of a panacea. I’m very in tune to the issue, sources and methods, and that thing. NCTC has access to these 26 networks and I’ve never had that kind of access before. And it has really opened my eyes, I think, a little bit in terms of the sensitivities. We’ve also got the privacy issue. We’ve got liaison. There are operational issues and so on. So there are a lot of things that are perfectly reasonable delimiters on information sharing. I agree with Mr. Kojm that we do need to do a better job. When it comes to terrorism information, however, the noise to signal ratio is extraordinary. The amount of information, of terrorism intelligence, that is coming across these endless desks is exorbitant. The vast majority of it is erroneous, circular, unmitigated nonsense, virtual walk-ins, and has got problems up and down. Yet that information is going around the globe on a real-time basis, and frankly we are running the JTTS into the ground to try to track down a lot of this stuff that ought not to make it to their desks. My argument is that if we don’t get the business process right about how we’re going to do analysis generally, and terrorism specifi cally, and done properly, I think we stand a very good chance of just being wrong faster. Second issue, alternative analysis. Here, too, I disagree with the conventional wisdom. You look across this Community and you can easily come up with a couple dozen fusion centers that are out there. It seems like now everyone wants to have his own alternative analysis shops and now you’re up to 50 or 60 views on any given subject. And they are going out all over the place and without any kind of delineation about who the good analysts are and who the bad analysts are — anybody in this Community can publish. I will tell you I’ve seen any number of cases, of products, that ought not to have gone anywhere, ought not to get to the highest levels of this government, because it goes out in a slick power point projection, and it was not good analysis. Well, if those are the answers, what should we be doing? The issue is fi guring out how we structure and posture a Community that can deal with globalization. Huge benefi ts can come from globalization. My own view is that it’s a great hope of mankind. We’re looking at billions of people out of poverty and ultimately we, in the Intelligence Community, can help with the opportunities associated with the up side of globalization, but it is the down side that we ought to be most worried about. How do we track the nuclear network suppliers that are across many, many countries, dozens of individuals from various places, and they’re making ring magnets
34 in one place and centrifuges someplace else, and storing them all over the place. It’s a command and control challenge for the Community to deal with. In my case, how we track very amorphous terrorist networks that live in the ungoverned territories that used to be Afghanistan, or maybe a refugee camp in Lebanon, or in an apartment house in central Europe. These groups are communicating via the Internet. They have access to toxin recipes on the net. They are starting this week publishing their own newscasts on the Internet. How do we, as a country, and, more specifi cally, within the Intelligence Community deal with those? I don’t think it’s just the transnational problems. Regional problems now aren’t regional anymore. You look at the way China is growing and increasing its military capability; that’s not self-contained. It’s not like the Soviet Union was by any stretch of the imagination. So with such an environment, how do we focus on integration, which is clearly the watchword from all of our perspectives, and why is it so hard? What I believe is going on here is, that in the same way that globalization is challenging traditional norms of sovereignty, it’s having the very same impact on our federal structures. It implicates departmental and agency sovereignty. Responsibilities get blurred. We see departments and agencies kind of bumping up against one another. It’s playing out in the press all the time in terms of mission space, and who should do what. To fi gure out those roles and responsibilities is going to be tough. Similarly, as Letitia Long alluded to, the foreign-domestic divide is largely gone. That’s such a huge implication for our constitutional structures, and where we are as a country. So I think there’s a little bit of a crisis governance thing going on here not unique to our country. It’s going on around the world as countries try to evolve in response to globalization. In terms of terrorism, the U.S. government’s fi rst foray into dealing with the problem was really the NCTC stand-up in May of ’03 in response to the President’s State of the Union Speech in early ’03, and headed by John Brennan. It was an interagency joint venture that was supposed to bring together departments and agencies and intelligence components so that we could, as an exercise of common concern, do terrorism analysis for the United States government. It had its ups and downs. Certainly for any of you who heard me speak over the last couple of years, I believe it was largely proxy for re-looking at the National Security Act. It was that fundamental in terms of what we were trying to accomplish. I believe that the IRTPA (International Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004) got it about right in terms of NCTC and what its mission, role, and responsibilities should be. We were supposed to be a shared knowledge base on terrorism information. That rings true to me. For instance, in response to some of the problems that Chris Kojm and his colleagues came up with in the aftermath of 9/11, we’re pulling together all terrorist identity databases and making one to include FBI international terrorism suspects. We have a single database that feeds the terrorist screening center as opposed to the four or fi ve databases that existed before. And now we have something like 300,000 individuals who are made available to the entire terrorism analytical community, roughly four thousand people around the globe, and all the Defense, intelligence, Homeland Security, and law enforcement organizations.
35 Secondly, we are to ensure that organizations have access to and receive intelligence necessary to accomplish their mission. A little bit harder here. I think what we’ve tried to do over the last couple of years is something called NCTC On-Line. We make that information available as almost a data-mart for the community of terrorism analysts around the globe. That’s been really quite a large success. It’s certainly got some technical bumps, but we’re working those. We’ve got something like four million documents, so that the organization NORTHCOM (Northern Command) will, every morning, post its morning briefi ng. FBI will post. And all of that information is available to everybody — some kind of data-mart to make that information available. We’re also working policy issues, and have worked things like the Third Agency Rule and No Double Standard, and some of these bureaucratic complexities that have impeded the free fl ow of information around the Counterterrorism Intelligence Community. Where we slipped up a little bit there are a couple of phrases in the IRTPA that some believe it is NCTC’s responsibility to provide all information to anyone who has a terrorism analytical mission. I’ve got to tell you this one is wrapped up with the lawyers right now because there are those who believe that we at NCTC should be providing raw JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) traffi c to the Community or raw CIA operational traffi c or international terrorism case fi les from the Bureau (FBI). Personally I believe that is a horrible idea, but there are some reasonable people that are interpreting legislation in that regard. This is going to be an important one to watch. Now it starts to get much harder. The third mission for NCTC is that we are to be the “primary organization in the USG (United States Government) for analyzing and integrating all intelligence pertaining to terrorism.” There is absolutely no question what the Hill meant by that. Senators Collins (R-ME) and Lieberman (D-CT) staged a fl oor debate where they discussed precisely that issue and it is unmistakable — they were talking about things like the best analyst and critical mass, and this was going to be the place where analysis would be done for the country. Not the only place, but the primary organization. I think that we are a long way from that right now. We are still, as a country, playing 7-year-old soccer. We’ve got a lot of different organizations that are out there chasing the latest NSA (National Security Agency) hit, and I think I saw yesterday my sixth analysis of the London bombings from six separate organizations. Are we really doing this in the best interest of the country? I just don’t think so. We’ve even had one suggestion that NCTC ought to be a glorifi ed executive secretariat. That all we ought to do is task our analysts and have none ourselves and that strikes me as completely inane. The fourth responsibility we’ve been given in the IRTPA has to do with conducting strategic operational planning. Now those words don’t go together very well for any of the military folks here, but we’ve kind of worked out what we believe we should be doing. It’s certainly the newest component, so Major General Jeff Schlosser is still getting his legs as we try to fi gure out precisely how we interrelate to the rest of the organizations that do strategic operational planning.
36 You fi nd out that at a theoretical level all departments and agencies agree that we need to orchestrate levers of state power and in the nation’s best interest. When you start goring individual departments or agencies, when it comes to specifi c mission space, then it gets a little bit more testy. This gets back to the issue of departmental and agency sovereignty, and we’ve got some work to do as a country on that. So, in closing, I don’t mean to be overly pessimistic because, as Chris Kojm suggested, we would all believe there are many brilliant people doing extraordinary work. We also have to be a bit philosophical about this. We haven’t seen this much fl ux in the system in 60-some years so it was always going to take a good bit of time to get the work through. We are fi fteen years past the end of the Cold War, and I’m not entirely sure we’ve addressed the problem entirely correctly. There is a good bit of cognitive dissidence in the IRTPA. Look at the description of NCTC relative to NCPC. NCTC was given a pretty robust mission in terms of analysis and operational planning. NCPC was not at all. It’s going to be very small. It’s going to try to matrix-manage the Community with very little intelligence expertise. You’ve got two very different models in terms of how we’re going to proceed. Whatever the right answer is, they are very diffi cult issues that we’re all going to have to grapple with and it’s going to take some time to work out. There are, of course, many departmental and agency inequities that have got to be worked through here. This is going to take a few years and then we have some time to work all of this stuff out. I’m a little less optimistic now than I used to be. There is obviously a limited amount of oxygen in this town and there are massive issues that the government as a whole is trying to deal with — everything from our place in the world to the basic social contract. I think there may be a little intelligence reform fatigue. I wonder a little bit about the forward momentum. I also think money is going to be a problem. The Katrina effect, with bills on the scale of Iraq, are going to be quite the little challenge, I suspect, for us. The longer that we go without an attack on the homeland we are going to see an increasing call to reallocate resources away from traditional national security. Then we’ll see what will happen, but I think that’s going to have an impact on us. So I take you back to that hypothetical intelligence failure that I mentioned before and wonder about a few years down the road whether we’re going to be able to look the American people in the eye and convince them that we really did do everything that we needed to do in intelligence reform.
37
BIOGRAPHY
Russell E. Travers Deputy Director for Information Sharing and Knowledge Development National Counterterrorism Center Mr. Russell E. Travers has been the National Counterterrorism Center’s (NCTC) Deputy Director for Information Sharing and Knowledge Development since 2003. In this capacity, Mr. Travers manages the government-wide information-sharing initiative, NCTC’s “Red Team” and knowledge development efforts, and the maintenance of the U.S. government’s terrorist identities database. He is also responsible for NCTC’s interaction with DOD analytic efforts focused on terrorism. From 2001 to 2003, Mr. Travers was the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Director for Policy Support. He was responsible for intelligence support to the Offi ce of the Secretary of Defense, managed the activities of Defense Intelligence Offi cers and overseas liaison offi ces, coordinated National Intelligence Estimates, administered special access programs, organized Agency support to homeland defense, and oversaw foreign disclosure and exchange programs. Previously, Mr. Travers was Chief, Defense Intelligence Liaison, London, from 1999 to 2001, where he was attached to the Chief of Defense Intelligence, British Ministry of Defense, and managed defense intelligence coordination between the U.S. and UK. From 1996 to 1999, he was assigned as Special Assistant to the Director for Intelligence, J2, Joint Chiefs of Staff, supporting the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and combatant commands. Prior to that assignment, Mr. Travers was DIA’s Defense Intelligence Offi cer for General Purpose Forces from 1991 to 1996. He was the senior substantive advisor to the Director of DIA, focusing on long-term regional and transnational threats to U.S. national security. From 1989 to 1991, Mr. Travers was assigned to the CIA as Assistant National Intelligence Offi cer responsible for the production of National Intelligence Estimates on military and other security issues ranging from Iraq and North Korea to the Soviet Union. Previously, he was at DIA as a Soviet analyst focused on Soviet military doctrine, developing Soviet threat perceptions, and the conditions leading to the collapse of the USSR from 1982 to 1989. Mr. Travers was commissioned in the U.S. Army in 1978 and served three years as an intelligence offi cer at Ft Lee, VA. In 1986, Mr. Travers received his JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University, and passed the Virginia Bar. He holds an MBA from Chapman College in Orange, California, and two Bachelor of Arts degrees, in Government and Economics, from the College of William and Mary. Mr. Travers has received the Presidential Rank Award of Meritorious Executive and the DCI National Medal of Achievement. He is married to Carol Lynn MacCurdy, a Foreign Service Offi cer with the U.S. State Department. They have two young children, Victoria and Eric.
39 PANELIST
Letitia A. Long Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Requirements, and Resources Good morning. Thank you for including me on this panel. I’m delighted to be here to talk about the impact set that the IC Reform legislation has already begun to have on the Department of Defense. Dr. Cambone will actually speak later today and probably address the operational side of things. I’m going to mostly stick to my domain, if you will, within the USDI because I think he will cover the rest of the organization and what’s going on in the Department at large. Much of what he will address was borne out of an initiative that we call Remodeling Defense Intelligence, or RDI. This was an initiative that Dr. Cambone undertook right after he was confi rmed, so that was before the 9/11 Commission started and the IC Reform Act. He and his Secretary recognized that we need to have some reorganization, or remodeling, of defense intelligence. They recognized that we weren’t necessarily organized the right way; that we weren’t necessarily focused on the right things. Secretary Cambone’s confi rmation testimony said that when the Secretary of Defense was asked what are the things that keep him up at night, he responded, “Intelligence,” which was really one of the great reasons why we have an Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence now. Something that Dr. Cambone also recognized early on, and talked to, in his confi rmation testimony, was bringing collection and analysis closer together, actually having analysis drive collection. Understanding and getting the point across within the Department that intelligence is not only a supporting function of operations. Sometimes intelligence professionals are operations in and of themselves. It’s with that mindset that we embarked upon the remodeling of defense intelligence to look at everything across the board on how we could improve, what we were doing as an enterprise, not only for the Department, but then in support of the DCI today, and support of the DNI in the future. So he’ll talk to you a bit about what we’ve done and where we’re headed on the operational side. What we’ve also needed, at the same time, to enable that to happen, is to look at our policy and process apparatus within the Department, and that has fallen largely on my plate. So that’s what I’ll spend some time talking about. We have updated or discarded over a hundred policy documents just within the defense intelligence arena. Some of those dated back to the l950s, 1960s, and had references to things we don’t do anymore, places that don’t exist anymore, but also more importantly, and Chris talked about this, had some roadblocks in place. We had things that, when they were started, were necessary to ensure that things were done properly, such as collection on U.S. citizens, or even in a construct that might have existed in a former administration, just didn’t make sense today. It’s one to say, “Oh, we’ve updated and have gotten all of the organizational names right.” It’s more important to say we’ve done things like gotten approval for cover for an operation
40 within 72 hours, instead of 72 days. That’s the kind of thing that we’ve been focused on, trying to enable the operations to be timelier and more agile within the Department. Those have spanned the spectrum of what we are responsible for within USD(I). It is from cover to defense civilian intelligence personnel to counterintelligence to foreign materiel— it really is the gambit of things that we are responsible for. And we are looking at them very methodically. We’re taking it down to the lowest level as far as fi nding out what the issues are; the problems are trying to work through those policies to break down what to many who have to live with them are seen as just barriers. In addition to policy, we have looked at our processes within the Department. A large part of what resides in the National Intelligence Community also resides in the Department of Defense. And while sometimes it’s good to speak with many voices and for the DNI to hear from all of the individuals within the Intelligence Community, it’s also good for him to know what the Secretary of Defense thinks. We have put in place some counsels, if you will, processes, to enable us to get information out to the defense intelligence components and, more importantly, hear their views back. That may sound trivial to you but, believe me, when you go to a meeting and you’re sitting there with seven other initiates from Defense and they all have a different point of view, it’s confusing not only to me, it’s really confusing to the DNI and his staff. In order for the Secretary to render his position he needs to hear from his components. One of the biggest things that we’ve put in place is something called the ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) Integration Council. That Council was mandated by the Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year ’04. We’ve taken what wasn’t our idea but turned it into what, I think, is a very effective construct. Dr. Cambone shares that opinion. The Defense Intelligence Agency leadership has a seat at the table. We also include initiates across the Department — some of the combatant commands and the DNI’s offi ce. We discuss things from operations through policy, through program and budget. When Dr. Cambone needs to be informed of what are the various views from across the enterprise we convene a session. We often have video teleconferences and hook in the combatant commanders and hash through the issues and then formulate, through an advisory body to Dr. Cambone, those decisions so that we can present that then to the Secretary (of Defense). Things that we have used it for range from our view on the positioning of satellites in a current constellation to the imagery way ahead. I imagine many of you in this audience know that we have just gone through some very diffi cult reviews and decisions of our next imagery constellation, and we use that venue to inform Dr. Cambone, so that he can work with the Secretary to then render our departmental view to the Director of National Intelligence. We use it quite often. It wasn’t our idea, but we have adopted it, and really I think made it an effective forum. I wasn’t here for the Ambassador’s points this morning, but Deborah mentioned, and I certainly know, that one of his goals is to unify the Intelligence Community while we’re trying to unify the Defense Intelligence Community so that we can help the Ambassador achieve that goal.
41 The appointment of the DNI Offi ce has actually been a very positive action for the Department of Defense. It’s made us take a hard look at ourselves. Some of that was underway just with the advent of having a new offi ce, the Offi ce of the USD(I), but working through the legislation made us certainly stop and think what our priorities are, what were our requirements, and how can we be a better customer of the DNI. While we have organic assets, while we have requirements that we certainly take care of on our own within the Department, we are one of the larger, if not the largest, customers of the IC and if we don’t know what we have at our disposal and we don’t know what we’re capable of it’s pretty hard for us to ask for or inform the DNI what we think we need from him. And so a lot of this has been really very good for us to organize ourselves. We have worked through a new process that we call Intelligence Campaign Planning, in which we work with each of the combatant commanders and ask them what they need to operate, what they need to actually go forth and carry our their operational plans from the vantage point of intelligence. That simple of a question, if it had been asked in the past, has not been articulated by each of the combatant commanders. We are now very methodically walking through nine operational plans within the Department. We are working with the combatant commanders on what their intelligence needs are so that we’re not waiting until we’re actually ready to move troops to look around and say, “Gosh, we probably need a hundred imagery analysts on this. What’s their counterintelligence posture?” So we’re trying to plan up front, fi gure out what it is we have organic to the Department. The DNI takes part in this process and he therefore is informed on what he may need to provide the Department if the President or the country calls upon the Department to execute one of these plans. It’s really been an eye-opener for us in taking a hard look at ourselves and what we’re able to do for ourselves, but also in support of the DNI. We are a large customer and we’re also a large part of the Intelligence Community. Probably two of the larger things we’ve done in both the policy and process arena have been working through of the Defense Civilian Intelligence Personnel System, or the DCIPS, and the Military Intelligence Program, or the MIP. DCIPS is a Title 10 personnel system that allows us to more fl exibly manage our defense intelligence personnel. We live within the Department of Defense, but we are separate from the rest of the Department when it comes to personnel. We enjoy some more authorities and some more fl exibility than the rest of the Department even though they will be under the new National Security Personnel System (NSPS). We are working closely with the Department in that we will stay as close to them as we can within NSPS but enjoy some additional authorities that help us compete with the rest of the Intelligence Community and, quite honestly, with industry. We’re all competing for the same human capital. So we are trying to be as fl exible and as forward-leaning as we can. We’re working very closely with Dr. Sanders, the DNI’s chief human capital offi cer. We have offered DCIPS to actually be the base for some of the things he may wish to do within the larger Intelligence Community. After all, we have upwards of 75% of the personnel in the Intelligence Community that are resident within the Department. So it makes sense for us to join arms and that’s exactly what we have done and we are moving out very smartly.
42 Contrary to what some may have heard, the Military Intelligence Program is not an effort to hide resources from the DNI. It is actually an effort to better organize our resources so that the Department — my offi ce, Dr. Cambone’s offi ce, and the Secretary — has better insight into the resources and the intelligence within the Department. Then, if you take that one step further, this will allow us to better present those resources to the DNI, to OMB (White House Offi ce of Management and Budget), and to Congress. We have worked the stand-up of the Military Intelligence Program. The Deputy signed off on a policy memo a couple of weeks ago. We’ve worked it from the beginning with the DNI’s offi ce with great support from the DNI. It’s another area where we are really, I think, in lock step. And so it’s kind of interesting to watch the machinations within the press on what is it they’re doing now. How are they trying to undermine the DNI now? It really is exactly the opposite. It’s a better way of organizing ourselves and allowing us to do more analysis on what it is we have, and therefore what we don’t have within our kit bag, if you will.
43
BIOGRAPHY
Ms. Letitia A. Long Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Requirements, and Resources Ms. Letitia A. Long became the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Requirements, and Resources in June 2003. Previously, she was the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence from July 2000 to June 2003 and the Director of Central Intelligence’s (DCI) Executive Director for Intelligence Community Affairs, responsible for Community-wide policy formulation, resource planning, and program assessment and evaluation between January 1998 and June 2000. From September to December 1997, she served as the Associate Executive Director for Intelligence Community Affairs at Langley. Ms. Long entered federal service with the Navy in 1978 as a Project Engineer in training with the David Taylor Research Center. Upon completion of a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering degree in 1982, she continued with the David Taylor Research Center for six years working on various submarine acoustic sensor programs. In 1988, Ms. Long joined the staff of the Director of Naval Intelligence, where she managed intelligence research and development programs. Ms. Long was selected into the Senior Intelligence Executive Service in July 1994 and was dual-hatted as the Director, Requirements, Plans, Policy, and Programs for the Navy N2 staff as well as the Director of Resource Management for the Offi ce of Naval Intelligence (ONI). From 1994 to 1996, Ms. Long was on rotational assignment from ONI to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) as Director of Military Intelligence (DMI) staff. In 1996 Ms. Long joined DIA as the Deputy Director for Information Systems and Services where she directed DIA’s worldwide information technology and communications programs. Ms. Long was also DIA’s fi rst Chief Information Offi cer. Ms. Long earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech and an MS in Mechanical Engineering from the Catholic University of America. She is the recipient of the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal. Ms. Long is married to Mr. John Skibinski. They reside in Arlington, Virginia.
45 PANEL DISCUSSION
DEBORAH G. BARGER, MODERATOR Thank you, all of you. I’m going to now exercise my prerogative as the moderator and ask the fi rst question of all three of my panelists. I think that the DNI this morning spoke to the fact that change of the magnitude called for in the Reform Act is not going to happen overnight, and I think all of my panelists would agree with that. However, as Russell Travers said, we need to see some forward momentum and we can’t wait for years to see that. So my question for all of you is: What do you believe is the most important thing that the DNI needs to accomplish in his fi rst year on the job?
LETITIA A. LONG The most important thing I think he needs to accomplish is to continue the good work that Russell said the NCTC has enjoyed in the area of information sharing. It was one of Chris’s points. We have come a long way but we’re not there. The analysts across the enterprise do not have access to all of the data they need to have access to. I believe that we really need to move away from data ownership to data stewardship. We’ve been talking about that for a while and we’ve been talking about access to data at the earliest point of consumption. We’ve go to do more than just talk about it. We really need to make that happen. We are making it happen in many places, in many venues, for many folks. But it’s not universal; it’s not across the board and I do believe it is going to take the DNI to make it happen.
CHRISTOPHER A. KOJM This is real easy for me because I just listened to what Ms. Long has said. I would just add a few things. The DNI, unlike any of his predecessors, has to think more broadly. He’s got customers, many more customers than any DCI ever did. And the people that I alluded to before who do borders, and transportation, that is state and local people as well. They ask what you have that can help with my mission here in X county or Y state. In turn, they need guidance as to what information they need to write up and send up the line to feed into the Community. The structures of information sharing, I would agree, and getting it right are very important. Having listened to the DNI, I also agree with his three priorities, and the last one in particular, about stewardship of resources. He has to, and I know he’s working on it, has to get his hands around the budget and the resources. He and his people have to understand it forward and backward because you can’t make information sharing happen or anything else happen unless you control the budget. And, in the old adage, when you have them by their budgets their hearts and minds will follow.
46 RUSSELL E. TRAVERS I guess this will come across as very parochial. As someone who has got a reserve seat before the next 9/11 Commission, if we believe that terrorism is the number one problem in this government, I think we need to give voice to the IRTPA when it comes to what exactly does it mean to be primary. If we are primary, then give me the resources and my analytical colleagues resources in NCTC to allow them to do that mission and to fi gure out the strategic operational planning function. These are not easy issues. They go to the heart of the intra-federal structures and who has what responsibility. I think that should be the fi rst thing that we focus on if we think that terrorism is the number one problem in the country.
DEBORAH G. BARGER, MODERATOR Thank you. For my perspective, I’ll just add my own two cents on this. I think one of the most important things that the DNI needs to do this year is to get his leadership team pulling in the same direction. We are developing a new National Intelligence Strategy within the Intelligence Community working with our customers, etc. That strategy will only be as good as the people who support it. And that means that everyone needs to be on board if we’re going to get the Community, as he says, to be a unifi ed enterprise. This means everything from making budget decisions to putting talented personnel in the right places, to working with customers, to changing processes, to changing policies. He’s got to get the leadership team pulling in the same direction. So with that let me open up the fl oor to questions.
Morning panel participants respond to questions from the audience.
Q: One of the hardest things I think we’re told as analysts is to get our brain around how to do distributive analysis with state and local governments on terrorism. Do you have direct links into JTTFs (Joint Terrorism Task Forces) and FIGs (Field Intelligence Groups), or do you go through FBI and other law enforcement to not just push information, push knowledge, but actually to do distributive analysis?
47 RUSSELL E. TRAVERS We, I guess as a matter of courtesy, are not reaching out and touching JTTFs in the same way we don’t reach out and touch military commands without going back through DOD. Too much anarchy would be a bad thing. We certainly have access to FIG, Field Intelligence Group, the FBI analytical elements, and JTTF analysis at NCTC. I have personal access to every international terrorism 315 case that the FBI has going. And we make sure that all those individuals are watch-listed. More importantly, my analysts do. They are able to interact. I’ve got a bunch of FBI people that work for me and so there are a lot of tentacles out to the Bureau. State and local government is a harder issue. When TTIC (Terrorism Threat Integration Center) was fi rst stood up there was actually some discussion that TTIC should include state and local individuals at the headquarters. And that eventually became just a bridge too far. And so what we do is work through DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and the Bureau (FBI) to their respective partners in the state and local environment. That too is an extraordinarily complicated issue. It gets back to information sharing, because it’s rarely clean down there, and in many cases you fi nd that a National Guard offi cer might be the Homeland Security Advisor. That person has JWICS access; he’s got everything that I’ve got at the disseminated traffi c level. In other cases, it’s a police offi cer who has no clearance. So our ability to do that kind of interactive analysis has got a long ways to go. Q: A comment was made on the amount of reporting on terrorism cascading down on analysts and others. Isn’t there a way that could probably be alleviated utilizing computer technology to make the initial cut at what is plausible and what isn’t? This could be based on just an initial cut that separates out the things that person has to look at right away and the others could wait a few hours or a few days and there could be other categories, too, I suppose . . . things that would have big impact but small likelihood. Isn’t this true? Is there some way that modern technology could help with this problem, which has been a problem forever? But the way you described it, it is much worse now because of the consequences of terrorism and the emphasis on WMD.
RUSSELL E. TRAVERS If that is directed to me from practical specs, we’re looking at many thousands of cables that will come in on a daily basis plus virtual walk-ins and all that kind of stuff that’s out there. There have certainly been efforts at triage to identify source lines, and we’re increasingly specifi c on that. What you fi nd is that the analysts want access to everything because they believe they are a better fi lter on what’s believable because they may theoretically have some nugget that will show that this allegedly unreliable source really is reliable and might have a critical piece of information. I think that your point is generally right, that it would be in all of our interests to standardize source reporting, by-lines, and so that you can do some degree of triage. I get very worried about suspicious activity reports right now. People are using those to
48 allocate money when it’s the ubiquitous 15 Middle Eastern Arabs that are around the Milwaukee plant. This stuff is nonsense but it’s being used in real ways because it’s the only thing that we’ve got in many cases.
LETITIA A. LONG I have a little bit different slant on that. You took the question from the analytical perspective. I’ll just take it from the customer perspective. Mr. Travers talked about this a little bit and I guess this might be my number two thing for the DNI. It is the government’s structure, if you will, for all of the analysis that’s ongoing out there. As a customer, if I need an answer to something, I can have my DIA person go track it down for me. I also go on-line to look a lot. I’ve read those six different reports and they are different. I’m not sure which one is right. That’s not a technology thing; that’s a policy and governance point and I’ll just add that to my list for the DNI. Q: Prior to 9/11 we’d come up with a conclusion that there is a need for incentives to share. But from what I saw on our Task Force that’s long gone as an issue. This Task Force covers one-third of the entire U.S.-Mexican boarder. Every one of us went to work scared every day; I can guarantee you that. The incentive to share is not the problem today, in my opinion; it’s resources. We don’t have enough people in Task Forces and we don’t have enough money. When I say money I’m talking about things like Mr. Travers was talking about. The Sheriff of Del Rio needs to be able to communicate better with the FBI in Dallas or Houston. He should be able to punch into his black and white (patrol car) computer information that everybody else is going to get. The State of Texas is working on that. Anything you could do from the resource point of view to pump that up, and to provide more people, I think is the issue today, at the local level. The intelligence is being shared; there are no walls, I guarantee you. Did we sometime stretch sources and methods? You bet. Why? Because we don’t want somebody coming across the border and killing Americans. And if we have a lead, we’re going to make sure the Border Patrol gets it. Find some way to get that out there. I just point this out that anything you all can do, any comments you have to make on the need for resources on these JTTFs, would be much appreciated. Thank you very much.
LETITIA A. LONG I could not agree more. It is about using the resources that we have smartly, which is why in my opening remarks I talked about the fact that we are trying to organize ourselves and break down what barriers we have so that we can be more effi cient within the Department. It is a much harder job today with all of the information that is out there. Former DCI George Tenet and Secretary Rumsfeld recognized that and went to the
49 President several years ago and asked for a top-line increase for U.S. intelligence. That was done. It equated to upwards of eight or nine thousand people added to the U.S. Intelligence Community. So that was across the board for all of the various agencies and organizations. That was started in this fi scal year ’05, through ’09, and that was on top of some increases we received right after 9/11. That doesn’t get down to the state and local level and solve that problem, but we certainly recognized within the Intelligence Community that we couldn’t continue on with the resources that we had. We constantly take a hard look at what we have and try to get better effi ciency out of it, but there is only so much you can do. I am concerned, as Russell Travers mentioned with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, that the focus on natural disasters today is as it should be. We are also looking at ways in which the Intelligence Community can help out with those kinds of natural disasters. But again, lots of people go to work every day, including you all here in the audience, to try and prevent something happening here in the United States — the longer we go the less focus there will be. And it’s not incumbent upon us sitting here at the table, but all of you out there also, to sound that drum for the additional resources.
DEBORAH G. BARGER, MODERATOR I think you raise a very legitimate concern about resources. The way that we see the picture evolving, it’s probably going to get worse. Resources will be tighter before they get better, and as the DNI talked about this morning, we don’t have the luxury of focusing only on one threat or one problem. We have to have some little bit of effort across the globe. We have to fi gure out how to do that and how to use the resources that we’re going to have at our disposal more smartly. I think of a couple of encouraging things; the DNI now has the responsibility, according to the law, to not only manage and direct the National Intelligence Program, but also the responsibility for being cognizant of, and guiding, the Military Intelligence Program. So he has now the authority in developing ability to look across a much broader swath of potential capabilities and to rationalize those capabilities. Working in partnership, we can make much better use of those different sets of resources to put against these problems. We have another one right here. Q: I want to suggest that the problem is really with the defi nition of intelligence failure. If something happened tomorrow in the Midwest we can always go back to yesterday, look at the dots that exist in our databases or open sources, and try to connect the dots and fi nd that there are things that we should have known. Then we stop pointing the fi nger at people and griping about another intelligence failure. We will always be running after the wave. There is no way that we will solve this problem and then rest on it. An example of this is there must be 100,000 kids in the Middle East who are 10 years old. Six years from now these kids are going to be 16 years old and maybe 10% of them are going to be potential terrorists. How are we going to end this problem? The best example was given one year ago in the Washington Post. There was a father and a mother on the front page of the Washington Post, and a doctor had committed suicide on the day before. And to say, “Oh, all the indications were there. We should have seen it. We
50 should have expected it. And we could have saved her life.” Well the indications were not there because, if you took those indications for this guy that committed suicide, the next day you would fi nd that there are a thousand other persons that have the same indications. It is not resources. We do the best with the resources we have and the resources will always be needed; more resources will be needed. But the point is, with the defi nition of intelligence failure, we can always go back and connect the dots, and if you think of 9/11, and of the Phoenix FBI memo that was sent, well, I wonder how many memos were sent to FBI that day with the Phoenix situation. So was it a dot to be considered?
RUSSELL E.TRAVERS I agree that in many cases there certainly was, in the 9/11 case, a national security failure as well as an intelligence failure, but the fact that terrorists had planned to use airplanes and the fact of the two guys that didn’t get watch-listed — we should be doing a lot better, irrespective of the resources, on those kinds of problems, and that’s what I think NCTC was tagged to create.
CHRISTOPHER A. KOJM A national tragedy happens. Congress says it wants a commission to make recommendations on how to make the government work better. The Commission responds; the Congress acts. I just think you can expect it after an event like 9/11. There won’t be a serious pre-evaluation of national security institutions. That’s just the way it happened. I think it was helpful in the sense that it brought long-needed change in the Community. This tragedy was a catalyst to help make change come about. Are these changes all perfect? Far from it. As Russell Travers says, it will take a long time to implement them, and reform is ongoing, and has to be. Q: There is at the present time a shortage of really good analysts compared to the surplus of really hard problems. Can the new structures be used to do a better job of allocating analysts across problems, allocating analysts between in-depth research and current intelligence?
DEBORAH G. BARGER, MODERATOR I’ll just start there with a comment. That’s one of the primary challenges for the new DDNI for Analysis, Tom Fingar. He’s trying to fi gure out what are the best allocations of the scarce, really expert analytical resources that we have against various problems. He’s really trying to go through, in a very systematic way, to come to an understanding of where the talent lies. It really had not been done before. Where we had an ability to understand, where we had expertise, in what agencies, doing what? Sometimes you knew they were doing a particular job but you had no real insight into what other skills those particular analysts might have — language skills, other background that could be drawn upon and pulled out on Task Forces or other things and put against specifi c diffi cult problems. I wish Mr. Fingar were here. I think he would talk to you about the
51 fact that he’s made some headway, even though he’s only a few months into the job. But that certainly is a top priority for him in his new job as the head of the analytical component for the DNI.
LETITIA A. LONG Admiral Jacoby is implementing what is called the Defense Intelligence Analysis Program to try and get at that within the General Defense Intelligence Program, for which he is responsible. He is trying to organize analysts at DIA, the service intelligence centers, and the combatant commands in such a way through what he calls master, measure, monitor. This is a way of trying to allocate the resources against the toughest problems while not having too many resources on those problems that are deemed lower priority. We all know also that anything can happen at any time and all of a sudden we need analysts in an area that we hadn’t been counting upon. But he has been focused on that for the better part of the last year and has just implemented a new program within Defense Intelligence. Q: Mr. Travers, I believe, spoke a little bit, very briefl y, about the role of the National Guard in some states and the fact that the National Guard organizations often have more access at the classifi ed level because they have clearances and what not. Would there be a benefi t by trying to standardize nationwide and have the National Guard take a more domestic/border defense perspective and become a major player in domestic national interface for intelligence?
RUSSELL E. TRAVERS I really am not qualifi ed to answer that question. Post-9/11 recognized the need to address things like that. We stood up the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense. So Secretary McHale looks at those kinds of things. I’ll certainly take your question back to him. Q: I’m following up on the comment about talent and the number of analysts to work on projects, on analysis. This goes to Mr. Travers at NCTC. What is the status of reaching out to networks of trusted individuals, both within the U.S. and abroad, that have deep knowledge in issues like bio-threats and terrorism? A lot of the expertise is in foreign countries or on the Internet. I know that you tap these groups. Lots of people go into the agencies and speak to the analysts, but what about a comprehensive plan to go to centers of excellence outside where you have these groups of individuals who are cultural anthropologists, journalists, and others who really understand the context in which the terrorism is taking place?
RUSSELL E. TRAVERS As you say, there is a tremendous amount of that, and it has been on the growth curve for the last ten years. We have both a stable of individuals that we deal with from academia, and from think tanks, both here and abroad. We’ve sponsored any number
52 of conferences. When we have hard questions, we bring people in and let them kick it around and then we report out. That invariably falls into the internal alternative analysis, where we may do a government paper and then we’ll also coordinate with outsiders, to try to fully recognize that we don’t have any kind of authority approaching monopoly on wisdom in this. So what we’re trying to do is reach out to those individuals that do.
DEBORAH G. BARGER, MODERATOR The DNI spoke this morning to his anticipation of the new Open Source Center taking a leadership role and organizing these activities. It is a very high priority for the DNI. We understand that we’re never going to have all of the expertise that we’re going to need resident within the Intelligence Community. We have to make use of these trusted outsiders, but in some cases it means establishing relationships with people that we haven’t had traditional relationships with and working with them in a way that’s both meaningful to them as well as us. In some cases in the past there has been a lot of take from these experts with no quid pro quo. One of the challenges that we have is how to make this a two-way relationship so that the experts that we draw upon get something out of the bargain and will continue to work with us. Q: Since 9/11, we’ve had an accretion of agencies, technology, and personnel, and obviously signifi cant increase in product. How is DNI trying to confi gure that product so that it’s both understandable and actionable for the various levels of political decision-makers?
DEBORAH G. BARGER, MODERATOR You may know that we have a new DDNI for Customer Outcomes, [Lieutenant] General Ron Burgess. His primary responsibility is to ensure that whatever products or services the Intelligence Community develops, produces, refi nes, or disseminates meet the needs of our customers. He’s just a few months into the job, but he is looking at the kinds of products that we are developing. He’s looking for ways to consolidate some of those so that we don’t have a proliferation of products going to the same customers so that they have to sort through and try to fi gure out which person or product to believe in. That is one of his primary responsibilities in the new job, to make sure that the kinds of questions that need to be answered are what the products and services focus upon, as well as to ensure that our analysts are being used in the best possible way, so we don’t have, as someone mentioned earlier, all of the analysts crowding around a hot issue while other issues go untouched. And so part of General Burgess’ responsibility is working again with Tom Fingar, our DDNI for Analysis, to make sure that we’ve got effi ciency in terms of the way that we approach these intelligence problems. Thank you. Q: I was wondering, as an analyst, it’s always interesting to me when I read something in the paper that was just briefed to me at the TS level. As a Community are we looking at some methodology where we can reduce the giving away or the dissemination of closely held sources and methods in open, unclassifi ed publications? Are we moving forward with alleviating that problem?
53 DEBORAH G. BARGER, MODERATOR Obviously this is a very disturbing trend that is not only of concern within the Intelligence Community but also in the Congress, and others are concerned as well. I believe there were recent (Congressional) hearings that tried to take a look into what is the genesis of this problem. Why is it happening? Is there a way to get ahead of it? The answer is it is a diffi cult problem. You can’t always control it. If we’re going to be a Community that is responsive to our customers, that tries to get information out there when they need it, as soon as they need it, there is always going to be the danger that there is somebody who leaks that information for personal reasons or for reasons that are contrary to the intent of the information. I’m not sure that I can sit here and tell you that we have made a whole lot of progress in terms of being able to stem the tide. What I will tell you is that we are mindful of it. We are trying to fi gure out how we maintain this balance between the protection of sources and methods and the sharing of information. We can’t do one at the complete expense of the other. And so it really is a question of balance and the question of using judgment in terms of what is shared and how widely it is disseminated. Tough problems. Q: The IRTPA requires, within 365 days of the legislation, an ISE [Information Sharing Executive] implementation plan. Will the DNI make that deadline?
DEBORAH G. BARGER, MODERATOR As the DNI mentioned this morning, John Russuck has been charged with meeting that deadline. I know John is very, very seriously engaged in doing whatever he can to try to meet that deadline. He is a man on a mission. If you’ve ever talked to him, he is extremely intent on meeting the deadline. He knows the importance of making this work, and he feels a great sense of urgency. I know that he is working with a number of you out in the audience to try to solve this problem. He has some good ideas — probably doesn’t have all the resources that he needs yet. But this is a priority for the DNI. He spoke to it this morning — information sharing is probably the number one thing that we know we need to do, that we need to make some inroads in getting over some of these impediments, and I think that we have. If you talk to Bill Dawson and some of the folks who have worked on the information-sharing working groups, they will tell you that, although it is not glamorous, some of the things that we have been able to do have really helped the fl ow of information within the Community and with our customers. I think Letitia and Russell both will agree that some strides have been made. We intend to make the deadline. [End of Morning Presentations]
54 CONFERENCE LUNCHEON AT BOLLING AIR FORCE BASE OFFICERS’ CLUB
INTRODUCTION
Teresa Domzal Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished Conference guests. My name is Terry Domzal, and I’m Provost at the Joint Military Intelligence College. This afternoon I have the pleasure to introduce our Luncheon Speaker, Dr. William Nolte. As Chancellor of the National Intelligence University System, Dr. Nolte coordinates on behalf of the Director of National Intelligence the education, training, and related research programs of the United States Intelligence Community. He concurrently serves as Assistant Deputy Director of the National Intelligence Offi ce of the DNI directing the Community’s Offi ce of Education and Training. Formerly the Deputy Assistant DCI for Analysis and Production, Dr. Nolte is a career National Security Agency offi cer who served at NSA in such positions as Director of Education and Training and Director of Congressional Relations. He has also served two tours on the National Intelligence Council as Deputy National Intelligence Offi cer for the Near East and South Asia and as Director of Outreach and Strategic Plans. Dr. Nolte is a member of the Editorial Board of Studies in Intelligence and directs, on behalf of the Intelligence Community, the Intelligence Fellows program. He is an adjunct member of the faculty of the Joint Military Intelligence College. Dr. Nolte received his undergraduate degree from LaSalle University and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, both in history.
55 LUNCHEON SPEAKER
Dr. William M. Nolte Chancellor, National Intelligence University System Thank you. It really is a pleasure to be here and an honor to speak to this group. I’m going to be retiring relatively soon, and I take with me most of the pleasant associations of 30 years in the intelligence business. One of the most pleasant of which is a long association with the Joint Military Intelligence College, and especially with my good friend, [President of the College] Denis Clift. We have talked a lot over the last year about education, training, and research as the agenda that we are going to develop for the intelligence profession, and we would not be where we are in discussing this without the work Denis has done over many years. From time to time I still encounter people who ask me if we are doing more than simply training in the National Intelligence University. Why does our mission encompass those other things like education and research? The easy answer to why we should pursue a process of training and educating, and doing research within our profession, is that is what professions do. We could look at the military, with clearly defi ned training schools, but also with the service academies, the war colleges, and the research institutes associated with each of the war colleges. We could look at the medical profession, where its schools provide education in core medical sciences, but they also supply applied training. How do you learn to use all of those neat tools? And, of course, there is research. Why should we be different? My job in making this case has been made much easier because of the success of the Joint Military Intelligence College. This is not in any way an effort to diminish the role of the other schools in the National Intelligence University System when I describe the JMIC as our fl agship school. So people get a little bit concerned about that. But I am a former Commandant of the National Cryptologic School and I’m very proud of that. I direct the Intelligence Fellows Program on behalf of the Leadership Academy of CIA University, and I’m very proud of that association. And when I ask you to think for a second on what the National Intelligence University System is going to be, or what it should look like, it’s very easy. Think of your average ordinary American multi-campus state university system: multiple campuses, with their own specializations, their own resources, but with a central offi ce that provides standards, assesses performance, and
56 adjudicates the occasional, and I hope very occasional, dispute. It basically offers very little in terms of training on its own. If we were to go north of here to the University of Maryland, you would fi nd the University of Maryland College Park, 1,700 acres, 25,000 students, 4-5,000 faculty, and about a half mile to the north the central offi ce of the University System of Maryland, a 3-story offi ce building, no faculty, no students, but coordinating now eleven campuses throughout the University System. So our system starts with the schools organic to the U.S. Intelligence Community. CIA University, the Geospatial School, the Cryptologic School, and many, many others scattered around the country. And that is our fi rst tier of schools. The second tier is the other degree granting schools within the United States government with which we are seeking active partnerships. I’ve already been in touch with General Dunn, Mike Dunn over at NDU (National Defense University), and my guess is that the fi rst tangible partnership between the NIU (National Intelligence University) and the NDU will be in 2006 with the creation of a joint center on charter, leadership, and ethics. We’ve already started dealing with the service war colleges. And we’re going to go beyond that, to the open university system. I was at an Intelligence Science Board meeting last week, and one of the members raised some concerns that this was going to get very incestuous. We were going to be teaching intelligence offi cers only within our own schools, and nothing could be farther from my vision for that. I will be at the University of Kansas next week dealing with the occasional faculty member who believes that something we are trying to do like the Pat Roberts Scholarship Program is an attempt by the Intelligence Community to infect the academic community. And one of my favorite comments in this dispute came in the Chronicle of Higher Education where a member of the faculty out there said, “Oh, my God, if we have students receiving scholarships from the Intelligence Community, we could have, in effect, CIA employees in our classes and that would have a terrible, terrible chilling effect.” I wrote Bob Hemingway, the Chancellor at the University of Kansas, and said, “Bob, this guy can’t stay in Kansas anymore. Bring him back on sabbatical, let him teach at Georgetown or AU or George Washington and see if he can fi nd a class in national security studies that doesn’t have CIA, NSA, or DIA students in it. I mentioned this to Robert Gallucci, the Dean of the Foreign Service School at Georgetown, and he said, “Bill, you don’t even begin to describe the problem. I teach classes where I have CIA employees and students who I think are Chinese service employees, Israeli service employees, Ethiopian service employees, and Peruvian service employees.” So we’ll get our friend back from Kansas, and we’ll try to show him what life is like in the academic community in the Greater Washington area. We will be working over the next several years to integrate several levels of delivery and what we call local, common, joint education and training. We don’t think we’re going to do many advanced crypto-mathematic courses at CIA University. That will be a local responsibility for NSA. I really don’t think there are many of my NSA colleagues who need to do advanced HUMINT training—scary thought. I once talked to Tom Clancy
57 about this, and I mentioned to him that he had one of his books where there was actually an NSA guy as the hero. This is before Jack Ryan became the big deal. And I said, “My God, Mr. Clancy, you have an NSA offi cer carrying a gun. The thought is enough to frighten the Republic.” But I can say that because I work still for NSA and, as Tony Kornheiser likes to say, “To tease is to love.” We are going to do this local/common/joint process with accrediting bodies, a term that my staff hates, across a series of professions—collection, analysis, language, science and technology, leadership and development, and mission support skills. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act gives the DNI the authority to establish standards, training, and education across the community. And what I have told every professional group in the community, “If you default and let my offi ce set those standards, you will live to regret it.” You the analyst need to set the standards. You the collectors need to set the standards, and so on and so forth. And then the last thing we’re going to do as part of the University is build what I hope will be one of the most important of our achievements, and that is a mature lessons-learned process for the Intelligence Community. I really do believe this is one of our most important objectives. Anyone who looks at how the United States Army rebuilt itself after Vietnam understands the importance of the Center for Army Lessons Learned. For agencies claiming to bring truth to power, and which believe truth and integrity are central to our very being, we must begin with a sense of professional ethics that permits us, requires us, to come to face the truth about our performance. In analysis, in collection, in every other area of our mission, future intelligence professionals must establish for all to see that we let outside observers and critics be the fi rst, the most demanding, and the most scrupulous of our judges. With that said, let me offer a few thoughts on some major themes associated with our topic for today, Managing the Future During a Time of Change. We’ve been through a turbulent decade and a half in American intelligence adjusting to the end of the Cold War in a period of budgetary austerity and trying to plan for future, in which the best apparently anyone could do for over a decade was described as the post-Cold War era. And that failure of imagination to use a phrase that we’ve heard from the 9/11 Commission was not just an intelligence failure. No one in 1955 referred to the environment they were operating in as the “post-World War II era.” The Cold War metaphor had come to dominate our strategic thinking in ways that allowed us to operate and plan against a specifi c adversary. The nation suffered through the period before September 11, 2001, in its inability to come up with an overarching image for national security environments. 9/11 brought an end to the budgetary austerity and gave us the image of the Global War on Terrorism as a national security model. Many in the academic community and some in government will argue that that is an imperfect model for dealing with the world in which we now live. My point is that no model is going to exist to replace the Cold War in its scope. We’re not going to have the 40-year adversary. And, as I was saying to someone else this morning, even when we had to shift in the Cold War we very often had to shift our resources and our
58 attention from the Soviet Union to a Soviet client state, armed with Soviet equipment, Soviet technology, Soviet doctrine, and Soviet organizational structure. We’re not going to have that stability in the next 20 or 30 years. Over the last few years I’ve had fun with classes here at the College and at other places around the Community asking questions like, “What if fi ve years from now terrorism remains a problem but has been supplanted by international security priorities such as naturally occurring pandemic disease? What then is the role of intelligence?” The other question I’ve enjoyed asking over the last year is, “Was Conference attendees networking during the the Sunni an intelligence luncheon. issue?” And I have to tell you that earlier this year I got a lot of resistance on the idea that the Sunni was an intelligence issue. To put it far too casually, the Sunni did not excite our sensor panels, at least many of those panels, in a way to lead us to think it was truly an intelligence issue. And I think one can argue that in the DCI era the Sunni was not fundamentally an intelligence issue. I think it’s wrong to argue that, but I think you can make the argument. My replacement questions for the 2005-2006 academic year, and Denis, if there are students here, they are honor-bound not to be smart alecks when I come into class this year, will be: “Was Hurricane Katrina an intelligence issue?” And, “If we encounter an infl uenza pandemic, will that be an intelligence issue?” On these points I will tolerate only one answer. These are both unarguably intelligence issues within the framework of the revised defi nition of National Intelligence in the Intelligence Reform Act. Now this audience knows that the defi nition of intelligence is in Title 1, Section 10-12, of the Act. And I’m sure each of you devoutly recites it each night. Well, maybe not before going to bed. For those who didn’t get around to it, allow me to review it with you. National Intelligence, and intelligence related to national security, refers to all intelligence, regardless of the source from which it is derived, and including information gathered within or outside the United States that pertains, as determined consistent with any guidance issued by the President, to more than one United States Government agency. As I read that, the failure of a cotton crop on public lands in Arkansas involving the Agriculture Department and the Interior Department could be an intelligence issue, but I digress. And that involves threats to the United States, its people, property, or interests, the development proliferation, use of weapons of mass destruction, or
59 any other matter — any other matter. My God! I didn’t know Congress could write loopholes this big. Ah, there is the Tax Code. Wait a second, that’s not my purview. One or two things to note about this language: First, could you get any broader? Is there anything that can’t be fi tted into this? Second, note what I believe is the emphasis on information regardless of source. I worried a little bit today when General Williams asked Ambassador Negroponte, “Do you see yourself as the purveyor of information or the owner of secrets?” Because I thought, man, if he answers the wrong way on this one, I’ve got twenty minutes to kill today. That’s going to be really painful. But the Ambassador — and I’ve asked him this question, I’ve asked General Hayden — they both understand that this is about information. This reinforces a message that I’ve been boring audiences with for at least the last fi ve years. And that is that 20th century intelligence was largely a matter of secrets. Intelligence in the 21st century, on the other hand, is going to be about information, with secret information being an important part of that overall environment. The larger emphasis must be on information without bias toward collection source. To put it bluntly, we need to get past the “not collected here” syndrome. Ambassador Negroponte and General Hayden will face many questions from Congress this fall, and allow me to suggest that, when you strip off all the variations, the only question they are going to be asked that counts is, “What’s different?” One key area of difference must be a willingness to understand that we are in the information business, with the secrets business forming as a partner of specialization and competitive advantage within that larger framework. This may seem like a pedantic distinction, but it is not. If we look at the studies that have been done on intelligence, not just since 9/11 but since the end of the Cold War, several recurring issues present themselves. One reason they recur is obviously that we have not solved them. Among these are information sharing, our use of open-source information and expertise, and our ability to develop warning, or emerging issues/capabilities that fi t our future environment. Now let me just spend a few minutes talking about these. No problem that we have faced in the last twenty years had proven more vexing to us than information sharing. And the point needs to be made, and I’m sure people will make it, because they always do, that we share more information than we ever have. And I am willing to stipulate that point. But that is both good news and bad news. It is good news because it is worth putting on the record that we have made some progress on this. It is bad news because it becomes one of those issues that allow us to fall back on what I call internal metrics to justify our performance in addressing a diffi cult issue. The problem is not that we share more than we used to, or that we’re doing better, or in the end horribly inadequate assessment statements. Every year my Intelligence Fellows class spends a day or two on homeland security. We’ve done it in Baltimore. We’ve done it in New York. I suspect we could do it almost anyplace and the dialogue is the same. The federal offi cials we invite in speak to how much better we’re doing providing information to state and local government offi cials. And then the local offi cials respond that: (a) they are getting a lot more information; (b) it is not always the right information; and (c) it rarely meets their timelines.
60 Most of all they complain about the arrogance of the federal government in not accepting information from them, up the chain. The sense that we in Washington know better than a street cop in New York what is out of character with some new resident in a building in mid-town Manhattan is just astonishing to see when you get the federal and local people together. If someone wants to ask later — and I’ll spare you the asking — doesn’t this diffi culty in information sharing just refl ect the problems we have with secrets and sensitive information and things of that sort? I have two words for you: Hurricane Katrina. If one assumes that all the information in this case, federal or local in origin, was unclassifi ed, one can then argue that information sharing and the information- sharing problem in American government has nothing to do with secrets but it goes far, far beyond that issue. One of the issues we need to face — and Katrina is going to be a marvelous case study on this that will be studied for years and years to come — is whether we continue to operate organizational structures so out-of-touch with the emerging information environment that failure is more than an option. Failure at some point becomes a likelihood. One of the thoughts I’ve entertained as I contemplate Dr. Nolte addresses the luncheon attendees. retirement is offering myself as a professional committee staffer or commission staffer — going from one investigation to another. And one pattern that I think would emerge in almost any national or international security disaster is that at some point in the immediate aftermath of disaster some senior offi cial or aide will emerge in a press conference expressing surprise. Who could have predicted that would happen? Or how could he have known about this? And then I, as the professional commissioner staffer armed only with Google and send key, would determine that any number of people have predicted it, whatever it is. I want to be clear about this. I’m not pointing a fi nger at people who failed. Accountability may be an issue here, but it’s not my issue. And let me also note that for every researcher pointing at the risk of people fl ying aircraft into buildings, or levies failing in New Orleans, there are dozens more who pointed to other disasters that have not yet happened and may never happen. Pulling studies and warnings out after the fact and declaring ‘Aha!’ may at times be instructive. It may be cathartic, but it can also deteriorate into cheap hindsight analysis. Leaving that aside, my concern is that, beyond the skill or attention or focus of any set of offi cials, lies a potentially severe imbalance between the way we organize
61 work in both the public and private sectors and the way we organize information. Is it at least possible that our organizational structures — late 19th and early 20th century in origin — and the emerging information structures are so out of sync that we put at risk the higher levels of leadership in any organization? We are putting higher organization at risk of being not the most information-enriched part of the organization but, in critical ways, the most information-challenged. I’m not sure that an imbalance exists but I think it’s worth doing some research on. It is at least possible in the short run that leaders in the public and private sectors alike, who rely on their corporate organic information support structures, run enormous personal risks. The risks are so great that we need to reject the idea that we’re doing better on information sharing as unacceptable assessment of where we are. “We’ve done the best we can,” it should be noted, can be an honorable assessment of the outcome, in which requirements and resources are totally out of balance — what I refer to as the Jonathan Wainwright principle. There is nothing Wainwright could have done to save Bataan. “We’re doing better” is often an excuse for a bureaucracy that prefers, for obvious but unacceptable reasons, to measure process rather than outcome. In most areas of life that count, internal metrics are inadequate. I have no doubt that in l939 the French Army Inspector General assessed that the French Army of l939 was the best Army France had ever had, that France was doing better. And that did not help them at all from getting their clocks cleaned in the spring of 1940. And, as has been mentioned today, John Russuck is now leading our information-sharing effort, and I have pledged to John every resource that the National Intelligence University and its component schools have to help him in that effort. Let me turn quickly to open source. In the l950s and l960s, most R&D expenditure in this country originated in the private sector. When I joined NSA in l976 I was told more than once that there would not have been an American computer industry without NSA. But the balance of R&D investment began to shift by the l970s, and for the last 30 years we have been on tidal fl ow in which private and 3rd sector investment has dwarfed that of the federal government. By the l990s you could have an NSA Director who would look at the computers and say, “I think it’s now become my job to dumb down 18-year-olds.” Adding to an environment in which much of America’s information advantages in the private sector involve more than information technology, it involves, among other things that have already been noted today, linguistic and cultural skills. One of my concerns is that I could go to any second-tier American university and fi nd assistant professors in regional studies departments who are more likely to have language skills in their region of choice, more likely to have continuing contacts with other experts in the region, and have more recently traveled to that region than I would fi nd in the analytical components of the U.S. Intelligence Community. In some ways we have made it harder to hire people with those skills because the fact that they have lived or worked overseas makes it harder for them to get the necessary clearance. We’re doing important work on this. We are fi lling the gap. David Chu and his folks in the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel offi ce have done a marvelous job alerting the country, and I think to the national language and cultural awareness problem, but we have a long way to go.
62 We have to change the way we deal with analysts. Ambassador Negroponte said improving analysis was one of his goals. Improving analysts has to be one of our goals. We have to stop treating our analysts like production workers, and start developing and treating them as experts. Much of their time is being spent on developing and maintaining their expertise, and they are required to maintain contacts with the leading experts in their fi eld outside the Intelligence Community. If we do this, we can expect them to become more autonomous and more diffi cult to work with. That’s what experts are like. And that’s what they demand. But we need to do it. Other professions make this work. Hospital administrators and medical staffs no doubt argue all the time about what’s going to happen in Georgetown Hospital. But no hospital administrator is going to tell a surgeon how many incisions to make when performing a certain procedure. It simply would not be professionally acceptable. We have taken steps to deal with our open-source issues. We need to take steps to deal with our analytic development issues. But in this area we have a convergence. Until we stop systematically devaluing open-source information and expertise on the grounds that we didn’t collect it, we don’t own it, and we don’t love it, we’re going to fall short in dealing with the open-source issue. That’s a very serious issue for the education and training community to get its analysts to stop thinking like marketing reps for their collectors. And that is going to be a huge transition. The information environment we created in the l950s, when American intelligence operated largely apart from the open information environment, but ahead of it, was a survivable environment. If we try to go forward into the 21st century operating apart from and behind the open information environment, we’re going to fail as a national service. The intersection of our ability to deal with information sharing and the open- source information expertise problem comes ultimately in our ability to do warning and emerging issues work on behalf of the nation. This is where I think the rubber really meets the road. We are not talking about warning here in the Cold War sense of missiles fl ying over the Pole or troops coming through the Fulda Gap. I’ve been through two briefi ngs recently on infectious disease, most of which would have kept you from eating the chicken today, I suspect. Our warning skills are not what they should be. And I have to tell you that most of my colleagues seemed to take the greatest interest when we stopped talking about naturally occurring pandemic disease and started putting the disease in the hands of some bad actor as part of a BW (Biological Warfare) program. The pulse rate really started to go up on that one. It doesn’t make any difference. If you die of the fl u, you die of the fl u. And let me suggest that this is a more compacted issue even than that. Naturally occurring and biological warfare programs are not mutually exclusive. We can assume that if pandemic infl uenza strikes the world there will be countries out there propagandizing that the United States either created the fl u, is systematically working to deny medical supplies to Third World countries, or is conducting other active campaigns to turn this into a different form of biological warfare. I think we need to get really aggressive on the issue of how we defi ne emerging issues analysis
63 in the coming years. Someone mentioned earlier today a quality that I think we will need in the American intelligence system in the future, and that is agility. Boy! Agile bureaucracy?! Let me contemplate that one for a moment. But I hope the National Intelligence University System can be at the center of this more agile profession, one in which we link career development and education. One that has fully learned what it means to operate in a homeland security environment. A profession in which positions of leadership take on as much of an educational responsibility as a managerial role. One in which lessons learned honestly apply to and become part of our professional ethic. And one in which we value expertise over production and hierarchy. And then I think it’s possible that we will begin to make progress toward what Ruth David described a decade ago as the agile intelligence enterprise. Thank you all very much. [Luncheon ended; return to Tighe Auditorium for afternoon session of Conference.]
64 BIOGRAPHY
William M. Nolte Chancellor, National Intelligence University System As Chancellor of the National Intelligence University System, Dr. Nolte coordinates on behalf of the Director of National Intelligence the education, training, and related research programs of the United States Intelligence Community. He concurrently serves as an Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence in the Offi ce of the DNI, directing the Community’s Offi ce of Education and Training. Formerly the Deputy Assistant DCI for Analysis and Production, Dr. Nolte is a career National Security Agency offi cer who served at NSA in such positions as Director of Education and Training and Director of Congressional Relations. He has also served two tours at the National Intelligence Council, as Deputy National Intelligence Offi cer for the Near East and South Asia, and as Director of Outreach and Strategic Plans. Dr. Nolte is a member of the editorial board of Studies in Intelligence, directs on behalf of the Intelligence Community the Intelligence Fellows Program, and is an adjunct member of the faculty at the Joint Military Intelligence College. Dr. Nolte received his undergraduate degree from LaSalle University and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, both in history.
65 AFTERNOON SESSION OF JMIC CONFERENCE
INTRODUCTION OF KEYNOTE SPEAKER A. Denis Clift, President Welcome back to Managing the Future During a Time of Change: A Conference on Intelligence Reform. It is my great privilege to introduce this afternoon’s Keynote Speaker, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Dr. Stephen A. Cambone. Dr. Cambone was confi rmed as Under Secretary by the U.S. Senate in March 2003. A year later, in testimony before the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the Senate Arms Services Committee, he advised, “If the Department’s intelligence components are to be successful, their roles in the coming decades both as a part of the Intelligence Community and in their roles in support of the Joint Force we must modernize and transform that capability.” As Under Secretary he is guiding and shaping that modernization and transformation. Dr. Cambone served from 2001 to 2003 as Special Assistant to the Assistant to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense as principal Deputy Under Secretary for Policy and as Director of Program, Analysis, and Evaluation in the Offi ce of the Secretary of Defense. From July 2000 to January 2001 he was Staff Director for the Commission to Assess United States Space Management and Organization. Earlier in his career he was Director of Research at the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and Staff Director for the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Treat to the United States. He is a graduate of Catholic University with master’s and doctoral degrees in political science from the Claremont Graduate School. Please join me in welcoming the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Dr. Cambone.
66 KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Dr. Stephen A. Cambone Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Good afternoon, everyone. I wanted to spend a little time with you today talking about some of the things that we are trying with the Director of the DIA, Admiral Jacoby (now LTG Maples). I’d like to take you through some of the changes we’re making and contemplating. Let’s set the stage fi rst. We are facing an uncertain world, populated by a number of highly adaptive adversaries. We only have to follow the course of the confl ict in Iraq to understand just how adaptive those adversaries can be. It’s a world where terrorist networks are in place, where largely ungoverned areas serve as sanctuary for those and future terrorists, and where threats and the potential use of weapons of mass destruction and disruption by state and non-state actors threaten our national security and that of our allies. For these and other reasons it is diffi cult to predict with confi dence precisely what threats the United States will face in the future. One thing is certain: that in an environment of this sort the U.S. will be heavily reliant on intelligence to anticipate the operations of our enemies and to enable military commanders and the leaders of other security-related agencies — police and FBI at home, and security services abroad — to prevent and respond to attack. Intelligence is also essential in assisting other governments to extend their sovereign control over ungoverned spaces and to satisfy the legitimate needs of their peoples. The Department will continue efforts to transform and strengthen that portion of the intelligence burden that falls to the Department, and will adapt those capabilities to meet the challenges we see in the future. Within-the-Department efforts to transform Defense Intelligence were given priority by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from his very fi rst day in offi ce. That’s because he chaired two commissions prior to coming into offi ce where the magnitude of the problem faced by the Intelligence Community was brought home to him. The fi rst was the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission in l998, and then the National Space Commission in 2000. In both cases he spent a great deal of time with then-DCI Director George Tenet and the people at CIA, DIA, NSA and the other intelligence agencies trying to understand the nature of the problem that the country would confront in the coming years. One couldn’t help but walk away from those commissions with the impression that the analysts and collectors were aware of the magnitude of the problem we faced, how much we didn’t know, and how little we knew of what it was they didn’t or couldn’t know, and, of that which we knew, how much of that was probably not right. One developed a healthy respect for the nearly intractable problem that our intelligence operatives and analysts face in developing their assessments and operations. And it was for that reason, when asked during his confi rmation hearings, “Mr. Secretary,
67 what do you think is going to keep you up at night?” he answered with a single word, “intelligence.” That was in January of 2001. The creation by Congress of the offi ce of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in early 2003 is only a part, therefore, of the efforts that the Secretary has made in concert with the DCI and now the DNI to help to transform the Department’s capabilities in the world of intelligence. Before going further it is important to note that USD(I) was not created to do intelligence. I do not head any intelligence organization or apparatus in the sense of its production or collection. It’s not what we do. The offi ce was created to ensure the policies and resources are in place and responsive to both the DNI and the Secretary of Defense; to improve the Department’s intelligence capabilities to support the warfi ghters, fi rst and foremost; and that the Department’s counterintelligence and security activities are fi rst rate; and that the proper investments in people, technology, and facilities are being made. Now toward those ends we have undertaken within the Offi ce, within the Pentagon as a whole, and more broadly with our colleagues in the Intelligence Community, organizational and procedural initiatives with respect to three things. What do we focus our work on every day? Where ought our attention be? What capacity are we going to need within Defense Intelligence? And what kinds of capability are we going to require? I though it would be helpful for you to get some sense of the scope of the activity that it takes to move this enterprise in the direction we think is necessary. First, a word on the Defense Intelligence Analysis Program, or the DIAP. The Director of the DIA, Admiral Jacoby, has implemented an initiative that is designed to address one of the major challenges we face. That challenge is in the area of analysis, and in particular the lack of depth we have for covering the wide range of subjects that need to be covered, coupled at the same time with what most would agree are unnecessary duplications of analytical effort among the CIA, DIA, NSA, NGA, and so forth, whether devoted to tactical operations, the Dr. Cambone addresses the conference. operational level of warfare, or to national and/or strategic intelligence. On the one hand we have a lack of depth in some areas and subjects of importance to us, and on the other hand we have duplication that we could probably eliminate and move the resulting resources into areas that might be better served. In this case the admiral has come up with a reasonable approach. He calls this approach his 3 Ms: master, measure, and monitor. I think it’s going to be a useful way of getting us to where we want to go. So what did he put in the master
68 category? Well those are these subjects where it is absolutely essential that we gain, gain, and let me underscore gain, because for most things of importance to us we have not gained enough knowledge. So we are able to say that we also need to maintain — both gain and maintain — our comprehensive knowledge of any and all relevant national security issues for a select group of countries or traditional transnational issues. There’s a bucket of them for which we need to know everything there is of importance. For his measure category the question is, “Are there specifi c things we want to know as opposed to having — in the case of China, for example — a top to bottom knowledge in the master category?” Are there some countries or some activities for which it’s enough to know very specifi c things? For the rest we would leave that as circumstances warranted for further development. The monitor category is designed to allow us to maintain global situational awareness to warn of a potential crisis and provide a baseline of support for day-to-day activities and operations. Whereas in the fi rst two categories — master and measure — the DIA and the services work in concert with CIA and the other national agencies would take the lead, I think it’s his [Admiral Jacoby’s] intent that in the monitor category you would see for the most part the commands through their JICs (Joint Intelligence Centers, soon to be Joint Intelligence and Operations Centers) being responsible for those things, and quite reasonably so. The JICs are in the Commands where attention can be provided on a daily basis. The DIAP is designed to reduce duplication and focus combatant commanders in their joint intelligence centers on the commander’s priorities, and then get focus here at DIA and the services to the extent that support is needed, from the DNI, to cover those other subjects in which a great deal of depth is required. The overarching goal was to organize our activities, particularly in the analytic and collection environment, to meet an uncertain world in such a way that we know enough about everything all of the time, with the aim of reducing as much as we can the likelihood of being surprised. Now I didn’t say eliminate; I just said reduce as far as possible the likelihood that we would be surprised. Because for all of this effort, let’s face it, we’re going to be surprised. Just hope it’s not something catastrophic. Now there are a number of other issues that are underway in terms of capacity that are worth bringing to your attention. One is the important efforts underway within the Army, fi rst under the very able guidance of Lieutenant General Keith Alexander (USA), who is now the DIRNSA (Director, National Security Agency), and now Lieutenant General John Kimmons (USA). The Army is going to increase its Intelligence capabilities by 5,000 billets over the next three or four years. With this increase in personnel the Army will signifi cantly improve intelligence support at lower echelons within its restructured fi eld force, putting more of it in the brigades and below. You can appreciate what that means when you push intelligence assets down to the operating forces by considering the Stryker Brigades. The cycle times in the Stryker Brigade in northern Iraq — gathering intelligence, conducting operations, exploiting the target, and moving on to the next operation — is just phenomenal. Not only will the Army, with these additional 5,000 people, support itself, at lower
69 command levels, but due to the changes that are going to take place in the command and control systems, changes we’ve made with respect to fusion centers, changes we’ve made, or are making, with respect to headquarters, there will be a fl ow of information now up the chain to the joint commander, as well as to the others above the joint commander interested in that data. Another area of activity which has been designed to improve capacity again comes back here to DIA. We have been working to adjust the defense-wide human intelligence capability of the Department. One of the steps we have taken is to create what is called the Defense HUMINT Management Offi ce. It was created to contend with the problems presented in today’s operating environment, and will reinforce the role of the Director of DIA as the Defense HUMINT Manager. That means for all Defense HUMINT, not just what’s in DIA but also the service components as well. DHMO will provide a single point of focus and emphasis for satisfying both combatant commander and DNI tasking of those HUMINT assets that are within the Department of Defense. The Defense HUMINT Management Offi ce will be staffed by service and DIA personnel, undoubtedly with an added mixture of some small numbers of people from sister agencies throughout the Intelligence Community as a way of maintaining and sustaining horizontal integration. In addition, DIA is hiring more linguists to assist collection and embedding scientifi c experts at fi eld collection elements. They are creating a cadre of interrogation supervisors, a very important development for us given the diffi culties we have had with interrogation. And it has completed realigning the Defense Attaché System. This is something that would go unnoticed, but has resulted in a signifi cant shift in the number of billets and grades of people in those billets in various embassies around the world. All this was designed to put people, attaches, in the right numbers, with the right skill sets, in the right places, to be able to have the right people able to do those tasks. Nearly all of the changes underway at DIA not only are being taken in the open, but they’re also being done in coordination and collaboration with the DNI’s offi ce, because the money to pay for much of this belongs to the DNI. So the collaboration that takes place between the Department and the DNI’s offi ce to accomplish these kinds of things is necessary, it’s real, it functions on a day-to-day basis. It is resulting, we all think, in a much better capability here at DIA. But not all of the changes are inside the National Intelligence Program. The changes the Army is making are for the most part coming out of the Army budget. That is about a brigade equivalent of people that are being dedicated by the Army, out of its own resources, to support its intelligence needs and those of the joint commander, and by extension any national requirements that may be levied. Another area of emphasis of reform has been counterintelligence. That discipline has had mixed attention in the past within the Department. We’ve gone a long way in bringing more attention to our counterintelligence activities. That attention is centered in CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity), and it’s related to the subordinate units here at DIA. We’re trying to get more counterintelligence capability into the fi eld — it’s nice to have it in Washington — but the work is in the fi eld, and Carol Haave (DUSD
70 for Counterintelligence and Security) has gone a long way toward getting assets into the fi eld where they are needed. She and the leadership at CIFA are also working closely with the National Counterintelligence Executive to develop and orchestrate DOD counterintelligence activities is such a way that we can systematically identify, degrade, disrupt, and exploit foreign intelligence and security services that are targeting DOD interests as well as terrorist threats directed at those interests. We’re doing so in response not only to combatant commander tasking, but again to that of the DNI, and embassy chiefs of mission and security offi cers as well. To better enable its mission, CIFA now has the authority to task across counterintelligence units within the Department, to include the services. Third, let me talk a little bit about capabilities that we’re trying to improve, and innovation that we have brought to intelligence in the Defense Department in asking the combatant commanders to develop what we call our intelligence campaign plans (ICPs). Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin, who is the Deputy Under Secretary for Intelligence and Warfi ghter Support, has been working very closely with the combatant commands, with the various intelligence agencies, to put in place the intelligence campaign plan which is designed to support planning that is done by the combatant commander. The concept is that we have to close the seam between operations and intelligence in planning. This includes planning not just in peacetime, but planning in crisis, and planning for confl ict, and planning for post-confl ict situations. Intelligence has to go from being a staff function to being one that is closely aligned with the line activities of the operating units. But in order to align intelligence capabilities, intelligence offi cers need to have an idea of what their commanders want their intelligence organization to do for them; the intelligence offi cers need to know what activities or operations the force either may wish to undertake with intelligence that’s provided to them, or identify on behalf of intelligence those operations that might be undertaken in order to generate more intelligence. I think actionable intelligence gives me action, and so there’s got to be a much tighter coupling between the two. But if you’re going to have that coupling, you have to have thought about what you’re going to need as the commander executes your large war plan or your contingency operation. You will have to have thought about what it is you want in the way of intelligence support. And that support, nearly by defi nition, will have to move in the planning cycle well to the left, because the time it takes to develop a target, or to develop operations, in the many places of the world where we may be asked to operate is taking longer, and longer, and longer. To support the linkage of the intelligence-gathering process, that analysis process, to operations requires advance planning. The campaign plans will address collection and production requirements; identify the intelligence support that may be needed either from organic theater assets, that is those that are under the control of the commander or can be supplied to him out of that pool of assets under the direct control of the Department, or that might need to be fi lled by national assets in one form or another — and that’s not just technical means of collection but human collection or analytic ability as well. So it’s intended the ICP is a vehicle for the combatant commander to present his intelligence requirements and to identify the extent to which assets organic to the
71 command or the Department can meet that need, and then identify intelligence gaps in capability or knowledge, or both, which can be addressed by national systems. Therefore the ICP will bring us to what I believe is a fi rst for the Department of Defense. That is a regularized process by which we can present to the DNI some sense of what our needs are going to be in terms of his support. But secondly, to present to him a list of the capabilities and operations which we think might be supportive of his needs. That’s never happened before. It’s all been catch as catch can to date. We want to regularize this process. We have got to become more effective and effi cient in the way that we apply those assets. Moreover, by this process the Department becomes both a better partner and a better customer of the DNI. We can tell him where we can bring knowledge or capabilities to support him and the commander in the fi eld, and ask of him what it is we are going to need to support operations in the fi eld. We’ve also suggested a change in some of the organizational structures at the commands, a proposal called the Joint Intelligence Operations Command (JIOC). This is a proposal to develop within the commands more operational agility and fl exibility by combining intelligence campaign plans on the one hand, and the execution of operations by the combatant commanders’ component forces on the other, and to do it in an environment in which the gathering and provisioning of all-source and all- discipline intelligence is made easier. To put it another way, the JIOC is designed to align under one chain of command collection, analysis, information management, and ISR operations with force operations, thereby enabling intelligence support that the commander is going to need in today’s complex operating environment. Now those of you who may have been familiar with the Iraq Survey Group will recognize what we’re trying to do here. That’s the way they had themselves organized. Those of you who are familiar with JSOC operations will recognize it. What we’re trying to do is to get into one place all of the people who matter in the development of information and knowledge for the commanders, associate them with the operators, and close the cycle time — from when I know something and when I can act on that information on the one hand, and secondly be able to have the intelligence personnel defi ne for the operators things that the intelligence people would like to see done in order to generate more intelligence. It’s a novel concept. Many of the commands will start initial operating capability with these JIOCs in the spring. We’ve had some of them funded in a supplemental; there are some funded in the ’06 budget and there will be more funded in ‘07. In addition, we are going to place a JIOC here at DIA to provide overarching collection management of DOD’s strategic resources and then synchronize information demands from across the various commands, and for the Intelligence Community. And in the end the JIOC here at DIA will provide a reach-back capability as well, for the commands. Another interesting organizational change is from the new commander of STRATCOM, General James Cartwright (USMC). He thought about his component command relationships as the Commander of Strategic Command, and tried to think about organizing along functional lines against his UCP (Unifi ed Command Plan)
72 missions. Instead of having simply an Army-Navy-Air Force component, he has instead organized himself around functional components. One of the functional components he has created is one for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance or JFCCISR. It’s going to be here at DIA. There is a two-star Air Force offi cer, Major General Mark Welsh (USAF), who is taking that command. He is going to have responsibility for the operational/tactical-level planning, force executions, and day-to-day management of ISR capabilities. It is being designed from the ground up as a partnership between the Department and the other elements in the Intelligence Community, and will have within it not only people from STRATCOM and DIA, but also representatives from NGA, NSA, NRO, and Joint Forces Command. In the end we will have a liaison out of CIA as well, as a way of trying to tie together all of what can broadly be called ISR, and as a way of giving the combatant commanders one place to go to when in their ICP it says, “I need to run these kinds of ISR operations.” He’ll have someplace to go to get that need fulfi lled, and then there’s a proponent through STRATCOM for those force capabilities that are needed in order to provide the required intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance. In order to redefi ne and transform defense intelligence operations, we’re also transforming some of the infrastructure that supports what we do in the Department. I’ll mention just two things. One is in an administrative effort; those of you who are civilians who are members of what we in the Department like to call combat support agencies actually work for me! That is, the DCIPS program, the personnel system for DOD civilian intelligence personnel, is under the authority of OUSD(I). The more interesting and important point is that DCIPS gives us the fl exibility within the Community to do things that otherwise are a lot harder to do inside of the Title 5 arrangements of the Department, because the DCIPS is in Title 10, not 5, and therefore gives us a certain amount of fl exibility in hiring people, setting standards, and the like. I think it’s attractive enough that the DNI’s offi ce, which is responsible for human resource management, is taking a look to see if DCSIPS is a model that can be adapted more broadly for use in the Intelligence Community. The second thing we’ve done, of which I’m most proud, is take two programs, the JMIP (Joint Military Intelligence Program) and TIARA (Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities), and put them into one thing. We have combined them into a single program called the Military Intelligence Program, under my direction. This will allow us to manage those resources in a way that makes much more sense than has been the case in the past. That’s a consolidation that was discussed extensively with the DNI’s offi ce for two reasons. One, under current legislation, under the Reform Act, the DNI “participates” in the building of those budgets, which means he needs the transparency and insight into the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), and for good reason. He needs to know what the Department has organically in order to have some idea of how much additional support the Department either warrants or should have. In addition we’re working with the DNI’s offi ce to get the National Intelligence Program and the Military Intelligence Program, more seamless, that is, more closely aligning resources and capabilities between the two programs.
73 Now, of course, much has been started; I just touched on a number of topics here, and of course much more is going to need to be done to bring those initiatives to completion. Quite honestly, the more we learn about this, the more we’re likely to adjust to it as we go forward. The JIOCs are new; and in two years they will have matured and evolved. The Military Intelligence Program undoubtedly will be different than we envision today, but I think that’s all for the better. In these and other cases, it means that we’re willing to be fl exible, to fi nd the right way to do the job and not stubbornly insist there is only one way to get this job done. Moreover, I think we have an opportunity to make these and other changes now at a time when the DNI’s offi ce is especially interested in seeing these kinds of initiatives being taken in order to satisfy the direction that has been given to Ambassador Negroponte by the President. We, the Department, have a very heavy obligation to ensure that this reform works. To be quite blunt, the Department depends on it. The Intelligence Community depends on it. The President depends on it. The country depends on it. So it’s to be made to work, and we will do everything we can to ensure that it does. So, let me just sum up and then take a question or two. What is it that we set out to do? I remember being told that there were only two things in life when you talked about intelligence and operations, and that was, there are only intelligence failures and operational successes. I thought about that for a long time and, though it’s kind of clever, it’s just bologna. There’s no such thing. One depends on the other. And if one fails they both fail. And, if each succeeds, both can succeed. And so it seems to me that if you take away one thought, it is that in the future we’re not going to talk about intelligence failures and operational successes, but what we want to talk about is a joint effort between the analyst and operator, the collector and the commander, to ensure that there is a joint success. Q: How are strategic and long-range intelligence going these days given that the tactical and immediate tends to crowd out the long-range thinking? For example, the CIA has put out a 10- or 15-year forecast to help us academics deal with long- range issues. I don’t know if the Pentagon is still doing that. Now there’s been all this turmoil, but you’re involved in several wars right now. I’m just wondering if you’re able to do long-range forecasting with all the urgent requirements? A: It takes attention, as your question suggests, to keep analysts focused on the longer term, when indeed there is so much to be done every day. What we’ve done is try to put together a series of roundtable discussions to get people’s minds focused on what some of those longer-term issues might be. There is a process by which the National Security Council lays out its intelligence priorities for the sake of guidance to the DNI. That is the venue in which we’re going to try to reinvigorate that longer look. It’s clearly the case that attention is a little more closely focused on a number of issues. People are beginning to get back to, if you will, the basics. To get back to those subjects which, if we don’t pay attention to them, we’re going to regret in a few years time. So I think the balance is beginning to move in the other direction. I wouldn’t call it an avalanche, but I think there’s a balance beginning to be felt.
74 Q: I have a broad question on operations. I think it relates to what you said toward the end of your remarks. It seems to me that in the last 50 years or so the pendulum has swung between the political establishment and the U.S. supporting a very active CIA, and on the other hand wanting a very restricted CIA when the pendulum swung the other way. How do you keep an agency viable when you’ve got to keep a cadre that’s constantly well-prepared, and yet there aren’t that many things to undertake because the emphasis is on doing only those things that are really important? You do that through training and development, and training oneself, and training of others, and that sort of thing. And when the pendulum swings the other way the question is, is it viable to argue, for example, that with a stronger clandestine capability or whatever, we could have perhaps made some overt U.S. military operations, or policies — Iraq I’m thinking, of course — less necessary? Could we have done it through other means? A: Yours may be one of a handful of really important questions rolled into one. In my personal opinion, they are issues the country needs to grapple with. Your comment about the interest in the clandestine service and its operations waxing and waning is brought home with great force if you read [Richard] Helms’ memoirs “Looking Over My Shoulder.” If you read about the late ’50s and the early ’60s, you’d think you were living today. Then you read about the period in the ’70s and the ’80s just in his book and you get the sense of how that interest in the clandestine service waned. Now one of the questions that is worth asking ourselves Dr. Cambone responds to questions from the is, “Even if we are inclined audience. to have a robust clandestine service, what’s the mission?” Is the mission to do the kind of sneaky-peek stealing of secrets, surreptitious entry, that kind of thing? Or do you want it focused more on more paramilitary operations, whether that’s arming people to overthrow the Cuban government in l960 or operations in Afghanistan or northern Iraq? Or is it a combination? Those are very interesting and important questions because the skill sets are not the same. And they are aimed at different policy purposes and objectives. So it is really what policy are you trying to accomplish, and what is there in the clandestine service
75 or covert action that you are trying to accomplish in support of that policy. That is a terribly important question, in order that we can lend some stability to the clandestine service. That’s all I’ll say on that subject. On the issue of how to maintain an edge, the military lives with that all the time. Our job is not to go to war. Our job is to put ourselves out of business. Our job is to wake up every morning and not have anything to do. Except, of course, we spend every day getting ready in the event that we are given something to do. It’s an amazing amount of training, and an enormous amount of money is needed — facilities, equipment, etc. Hence, another question for the country is how much of its treasury does it wish to devote to a clandestine service which is more oriented toward paramilitary operations in a time when such operations may not be required? I think it’s one of the more important questions that we ought to be debating as a matter of national policy because it’s important. Q: The President decided on one of the 9/11 recommendations not to consolidate CIA paramilitary operations with the Special Operations Command. Was it primarily one of the traditional issues of plausible deniability, or about the possibility of the issue that CIA paramilitary operations are more agile, and that oversight is different than it is for a special operations command? A: It actually turned on the question about policy instruments and how many instruments ought a President have at his disposal. It was that simple. For the President of the United States to have but one seemed to no one who looked at this to be a sensible thing. So all of the stories you read — that’s what I’m talking about, the newspapers, it’s a wonderful thing to read the newspapers — all of that other stuff is just not the case; that’s not what it was about. Q: My question is related to your building the future of the Intelligence Community. We’re looking at the technology transfer and technology dominance that we used to own. What are your thoughts on how to fi t that within the purview of what you’re doing, or what Ambassador Negroponte is doing, or within DIA? Where does a system to watch technology fi t? A: I think you’ve got a responsibility in both places for slightly different reasons. The Department worries about those things for the kinds of reasons I am sure you did, right? You don’t want to fi nd yourself in a dark alley one day with somebody having better equipment than you do. So we need to make sure that our science and technology, our research development and acquisition community, is apprised of where the state of the art is so that we can push our capability beyond the state of the art in order to give ourselves those advantages. Those are strategic in their import but operational and tactical in their immediate application. From the DNI’s point of view, he’s as worried about night vision goggles as he may be about some of the technologies which would offset capability in the world, make it impossible for us to confi dently operate spacecraft, or secure our computer networks. You go through a long list of those things which would take away in an instant the capabilities that provide this country with an indisputable advantage over its adversaries, and which if lost would not only advantage the adversary, but severely disadvantage us. Those are the kind of concerns where I would expect they would be looking.
76 Q: The JIOC and ICP are things we’ve got to move forward and it represents a signifi cant cultural change operationally as well as our intelligence business practices. The challenge with JIOC is each theater has its own vision and we’ve got to bring this together. Is it a capability problem, or command? Most people argue it has to be command. Do you have an opinion on should it be a command, and are you prepared for the Department to enforce it across the COCOMs? A: I’m partly responsible for that discussion, because I didn’t want it to harden too soon. I talked with General Peter Pace (USMC) about this, our incoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he said pretty much what you just said. His view is that we’ve got to get this standardized. My reply was that I agree but let’s leave the margins fl exible because EUCOM is not PACOM, and CENTCOM is certainly not SOUTHCOM. There are some differences, but what we can’t have is a command- unique arrangement. We’ve got to have people in that part of the Intelligence Community that’s in the Department of Defense able to move easily and freely between and among the various levels and activities and venues in which intelligence is done. We’ve got to have at least a common language, a common set of approaches, and so we get that kind of cross-training that’s necessary for us to succeed. Not just uniformed personnel, but civilians as well. I don’t mean just those who are within the Services, but also those who are in the combat support agencies. And not even just them, because in the end we’re also going have to look for the folks from FBI, and Treasury, and CIA, and all the others who are going to have to be nested in some way, shape, or form inside one of those JIOCs. Now we have an existing organization not unlike JIOCs in the JIATF (Joint Interagency Task Force) running the drug campaign down south; it works pretty well. What it lacks is what we’re trying to bring with the JIOC, and that is real directive authority to have things done. JIATFs are collaborative environments. It means that whenever you get tired of playing with everybody else you can go home and there’s no penalty paid. We can’t have that. We’ve got to get people in a chain of command where there is accountability to one another and do it in a way that we balance the demand function across nine commands, maybe eight, because we’re not sure we’ll put one in Homeland Security. But eight commands at least, and then balance all of that against what the DNI is going to need on the “national mission.” We’ve got these two things; we’ve got to fi gure out how to balance them out. It’s going to have to be more uniform in its procedures and its language, in its direction, in its activities, and the way it’s commanded in order for it to succeed in the end. Q: We’re very good at rapid threat response, as a country. Maybe we’re too good. We have kind of an attention defi cit disorder, nationally. And, post-9/11, we started repositioning everything to deal with the terrorist threat. To use a Hollywood expression, is it going to have legs, or are we ignoring, in terms of looking at the future and the century ahead of us, the elephant in the living room, China? A: Your question is well-put. I don’t know if it’s attention defi cit disorder, but it is true that, to use a different analogy, for a country that grew up playing baseball
77 we have an awful lot of soccer players who tend to run to the ball every time it gets kicked. And there is a tendency to do that even in the case of the current terrorist threat environment. Before going on, I’m not sure that it’s all bad, because this is serious. This is not the l970s and the l980s where individual acts took place in different countries. This is serious, and the terrorists who are at war with us intend to do us very serious harm. I don’t begrudge the attention that’s being paid to terrorism. However, is there more out there to worry about? The answer to that is yes. China is China. It’s going to be what it is. It’s a big country. There are a lot of people. They are very energetic. They are a smart people. For all my education, I’m not a great historian of China, but adventurism, and adventurists, don’t usually go in the same vein with the Chinese, right? That’s not the way they approach the world. An old Soviet maxim: size and quantity has a quality all of its own. There are a billion and a third people in China, and it is the second largest economy. It is pulling down natural resources in very large quantities. It has its own share of diffi culties. It is bounded by the Russians on the one side, all of the Central Asian diffi culties on the other. They’ve got the Indians and so forth in South Asia. It has enough to worry about that it doesn’t need to go picking a fi ght with the United States. That said, that’s probably how people felt about Germany and about Japan prior to World War II. So do you have to be conscious of these things? Yes. And the more conscious you are the more serious and attentive you are, and therefore the less likely it is that we’re going to stumble into a confl ict with the Chinese. Africa is a huge continent, enormously rich. And it breaks your heart to think about the troubles it faces. Now from that place can come an awful lot of bad things for this country. Do we need to pay attention to it? Yes. South America in its parts or as a whole is collectively one of the largest trading blocs we have. I think someone once told me that Kellogg sells something on the order of 50% or 60% of its products in South America. That’s not an accident. It is a place that is enormously important to us, and we pay precious little attention to it. We go on about the importance of India. We spend a lot of time worrying about it as it relates to things that we are concerned about; we don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it in terms of things that it worries about. That is a problem. So that gets us back to where Admiral Jacoby was. How do I balance against that which is immediate and urgent those things that I have to take care of over the longer term? I get back to what I said about the intelligence priorities effort out of the National Security Council: What are those things 18 months from now you’re going to be worried about that nobody is paying attention to now? That’s why I created an offi ce within USDI for preparation and warning. Where do you need to invest in order to be able to deal with the kinds of issues that would arise in places where you don’t have ready access? It’s why we’re putting so much money into language training. It’s not all going into Urdu and Pashtun and so forth. There are all those Southeast Asian languages that need attention as well. So I think people are conscious of the fact that it is not just the War on Terror
78 that we need to be concerned about. But getting sustained attention on those other issues is the key, and the key to that sustained attention is for the people who are policymakers to demand it of the Community. Because the Community will deliver what’s asked of it. I’ve learned that over the last three or four years. You ask; they’ll deliver. But if you don’t ask, they’re not going to know what to give you. Thank you very much for your time and attention. Good luck. BIOGRAPHY
DR. STEPHEN A. CAMBONE Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone was confi rmed by the U.S. Senate as the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence on 7 March 2003. Prior to 7 March, he was the Director, Program Analysis and Evaluation, Offi ce of the Secretary of Defense, a position which he held from 1 July 2002. On 19 July 2001, he was confi rmed by the U.S. Senate as the Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Prior to that, he served as the Special Assistant to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense from January to July 2001. Dr. Cambone was the Staff Director for the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization from July 2000 to January 2001. He was the Director of Research at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University (INSS/NDU), from August 1998 to July 2000. Before that he was the Staff Director for the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States from January 1998 to July 1998; a Senior Fellow in Political-Military Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) from 1993 to 1998; the Director for Strategic Defense Policy in the Offi ce of the Secretary of Defense from 1990 to 1993; the Deputy Director, Strategic Analysis, SRS Technologies (Washington Operations) from 1986 to 1990; and a staff member in the Offi ce of the Director, Los Alamos National Laboratory, from 1982 to 1986. Dr. Cambone graduated from Catholic University in 1973 with a B.A. degree in Political Science, from the Claremont Graduate School in 1977 with an M.A. degree in Political Science, and from the Claremont Graduate School in 1982 with a Ph.D. in Political Science. His numerous awards include the Secretary of Defense Award for Outstanding Service in 1993 and the Employee of the Year Award with SRS Technologies (Washington Operations) in 1988.
79 Panel 2: Drawing New Lines: Foreign Intelligence and Domestic Security
OPENING REMARKS
Larry Hiponia Our afternoon panel is dealing with the blurring lines between foreign and domestic intelligence. This afternoon’s panel is a distinguished set of panelists. Let me start off with Mr. Charles Allen. Mr. Allen was appointed Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis and Chief Intelligence Offi cer, Department of Homeland Mr. Hiponia introduces the afternoon panel. Security, in August 2005. In this capacity he is responsible for intelligence support to the DHS leadership as well as to the Director of National Intelligence. Prior to his current appointment, Mr. Allen was the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Collection. Mr. Spike Bowman is a specialist in national security affairs. He currently serves in the Senior Executive Service as Chief, Intelligence Issues Group, Directorate of Intelligence, Federal Bureau of Investigation. In this position he is responsible for intelligence policy and information sharing. Previously he served as Senior Counsel, National Security Law Branch. Our panel moderator is Mr. Jon Wiant, who is a faculty member of the Joint Military Intelligence College. He retired from the U.S. Department of State in September 2004. He was a member of the Department of State’s Senior Executive Service from l987 and joined the faculty of JMIC in September 2001. He teaches in the areas of national security and intelligence as well as intelligence history and special operations. Mr. Wiant, I’ll turn the fl oor over to you.
80 PANEL MODERATOR
Jon A. Wiant Faculty, Joint Military Intelligence College When we were setting up the Conference we were looking at the key issues, and somebody suggested that our world has changed in fundamental ways since 2001. And I think we all agreed that a key way was that the line that separated foreign intelligence from domestic security or law enforcement was blurred, if not eliminated. So we titled this session Drawing New Lines, and that presumed that we had old lines to worry about. In setting the stage for this I wanted to remind us a little of how sacred that wall was that separated foreign intelligence from domestic security and how it shaped a generation. I was fi rst subpoenaed by the Ervin Committee in 1971 for domestic spying and subpoenaed again by the Church Committee. In both of those I came out relatively well. I think the greatest damage was being referred to, in one newspaper article, as a blend of Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers, which is better than, as Senator Ervin asked me, “When did you set yourself up to be an enemy of the Constitution?” For a generation of us this has been a sacred wall. Some of the ways in which that wall was dismantled are going to cause us concerns, and that’s one of the things we will be addressing on the Panel. The second is to realize that, despite all of the talk in the 9/11 Commission and other studies here about the absence of conversation between or among the Intelligence Community and law enforcement, we have a porous wall with lots of conversation. It’s instructive to remember that the fi rst major CIA commitments in law enforcement activities came during the Nixon war on heroine in l970 and ’71 when fi ve senior CIA offi cers were sent to the White House to coordinate with the then BNDD, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. They are also, incidentally, the fi ve principles that you fi nd involved in Watergate. Also instructive. But since that time we’ve had a lot of collaboration in the narcotics area. I think that is one that has profi tably suggested ways in which we can do our business in sharing information and working collaboratively on certain criminal issues. And from international narcotics we did money laundering, and we positioned ourselves to work issues like alien smuggling, and even our responsibilities under the Convention on Endangered Species. Those all provided positive things. So we have some foundation along this wall, or this porous wall, for collaboration. A couple of very good theses have been written here at the College about looking at how a model like the JIATF which Steve Cambone mentioned could be just the kind
81 of way to bring law enforcement and intelligence together in the CT world. Our new thing was to think about what has been with us since the comments of Ambassador Negroponte this morning, that have gone like a light motif right through our luncheon speaker and our afternoon speaker, and that is to think about what our responsibilities are when the trouble comes in the form of a natural disaster? When I was at CIA we had begun working in 1992 to set up some intelligence activity for reception of relief in Somalia. And we thought nothing of that; we thought nothing of the intelligence challenges and meeting the needs of Transportation Command with its cyclone relief in Bangladesh. So why should it strike us as such a challenging thing to do here at home? And I’m glad to see that we’ve stepped up to it. My last note here was just passed to me by a friend; it’s an informal after-action report from the amphibious ship USS Iwo Jima (serving in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort off the coast of Louisiana), from its executive offi cer — recounting what they have done, and each section gets some mention. Our intel folks have become the providers of the information to the command centers, National Guard, FEMA, and city. Every day our handful of intelligence specialists download imagery, produce information and assessments, prepare the fi nish products, and then distribute their goods to the various agencies and organizations. That’s stepping up to one of the new lines here. So without anything more I will turn to our new Assistant Secretary in the Department of Homeland Security, where it does come together in the way that we often talked about.
82 BIOGRAPHY
Jon A. Wiant Joint Military Intelligence College Mr. Wiant is a faculty member of the Joint Military Intelligence College. Mr. Wiant retired from the U.S. Department of State in September 2004. He was a member of the Department of State’s Senior Executive Service from 1987 and joined the faculty of the Joint Military Intelligence College in September 2001 as Department of State Chair and Visiting Professor. He teaches in the areas of national security and intelligence as well as intelligence history and special operations. Mr. Wiant entered the Department of State in 1975 as an INR analyst on Southeast Asian affairs. In 1979, he formed INR’s Global Issues Staff that focused on international narcotics traffi cking and terrorism. In January 1981, the DCI selected Mr. Wiant as the State Department’s fi rst recipient of the Exceptional Intelligence Analyst award. Mr. Wiant was assigned to INR’s Directorate for Intelligence Coordination in 1982, where he was the Special Assistant for Special Activities, Deputy Director for Intelligence Liaison, and Director for Intelligence Coordination. In February 1985, Mr. Wiant was awarded the National Intelligence Medal for his work in intelligence policy coordination. He is also the recipient of the Defense Intelligence Agency Director’s Award, the CIA’s Seal Medallion, and the Department of State Meritorious Honor Awards as well as numerous Senior Executive Service performance awards. Upon his retirement from the Department of State in September 2004, Mr. Wiant received the Secretary’s Career Achievement Award from Secretary of State Colin Powell. In January 2005 he was decorated with the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal by DCI Porter Goss. Mr. Wiant was born in 1943. He graduated from Otero Junior College in La Junta, Colorado, and received a Bachelor of Arts with honors from the University of Colorado. He was a Danforth Fellow at Cornell University where he did his graduate work on Burmese politics; his dissertation, Lanzin: Tradition in the Service of Revolution, examined the ways in which Burmese political culture shaped its revolutionary socialist experience.
83 During the period 1962-68, Mr. Wiant served in military intelligence positions both in the U.S. and overseas. He was in Vietnam in 1966-67, where he was decorated with the Bronze Star, the Army Commendation Medal, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. He is married to Catherine Wiant, a Falls Church, Virginia, public school teacher. He has two children, Meg and Teddy.
84 PANELIST
Marion E. “Spike” Bowman Director, Intelligence Issues Group Federal Bureau of Investigation I want to address the issue about the confl uence of domestic and foreign intelligence, and the issues that come out of that in the United States. Here the threats that we see today, from terrorism through organized crime, raise a really vexing confl uence of issues that mix up First, Fourth, and sometimes Fifth Amendment rights. And it makes things a little bit more diffi cult to work with in a lot of different ways. But there’s another aspect that we really need to focus very heavily on, and that is technology. Because if history is any kind of a bellwether in the United States, then it’s fairly clear that advances in technology bring the space between privacy and collected security closer and closer. That’s not a novel idea but it’s not one that was ever picked up very much. Back in 1889 a young Harvard Law student named Louis Brandeis wrote a law review article that argued that technology was the one thing that would start invading the privacy of individual lives in the United States. And that argument didn’t gain a lot of currency for a very long time. Four decades later, when Brandeis was sitting on the Supreme Court, he issued a dissenting opinion which said, “The makers of our Constitution sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, and they conferred against the government the right to be let alone, to protect that right against every unjustifi able intrusion by the government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.” Justice Brandeis lost that argument. That was the case called Olmstead vs. The United States. And interestingly enough, the case was about a wiretap. Now fast- forward to modern days. Can you imagine that a wiretap does not require a warrant in the United States? Obviously it does, and it requires a warrant even if we’re using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act against agents of foreign powers or foreign powers themselves. I bring this up because I want to show that there has been an evolution in the way we have done things and thought about some of these issues in the United States. I would like to use one example to show how the technology issues may present themselves in a way that we’ve seen once before. Some of us will remember an operation that NSA had many years ago called Shamrock. Now Shamrock was an interesting thing; it had developed out of the successes of cryptanalysis during World
85 War II, and after the war the Army Security Agency, which later became NSA, wanted to maintain the skill-set that it had developed during the war. So it asked the FBI to go to the major cable companies and bring to it copies of cables that were being sent overseas to certain places. And so the FBI would go to three major cable companies and pick up copies. This was a paper copy. In those days, to send a cable, you had to have four-ply paper. One was used to send the cable. One was the customer’s copy. One was the copy for the cable company. And the fourth on went on the fl oor. It was literally a throwaway copy. So that’s the one the FBI picked up and took to the Army Security Agency, and later the NSA. Fast-forward a few years, and technology comes along and we can get quicker. Now, we had what we would think to be very crude computers, but which could use magnetic tape. And the cable companies no longer had to use all of this clumsy four- ply paper; they could then just use magnetic tape. They would send it out on the tape and all that the FBI had to do then was go get a copy of that tape. When you take that to NSA, that also means you no longer had to have a single set of eyes looking at a whole bunch of pieces of paper trying to make sense out of all of those paper-contained words. They could put in the word watch-list. And this became easier and easier to use. Now fast-forward to the Kennedy Administration and Robert Kennedy becomes the Attorney General. He looks at this and he thinks this is the greatest thing since sliced bread and says, “Well, if that’s so good for foreign intelligence why don’t we use it against the Mafi a?” And so we turned it against the Mafi a. And within a very short period of time he got so comfortable with the idea that he could do this he also ordered wiretaps on individuals including Martin Luther King, all without going to a court. So the reason that I mention this is because technology is the one thing that we really, really have to invest in today. We have to because of the nature of threats; we have to look at trying to collate more information than we ever have before. And it’s going to be foreign information and it’s going to be domestic information and every time, just about every week, you’re going to pick up a paper and somebody is writing about how the government is going to be too intrusive, and we don’t want to give it too many powers, and we don’t want to do x, y and z. It was mentioned in the Intelligence Reform Bill. Congress, in that bill, in the language of the statutes, says, “In conducting the war on terrorism the Federal government may need additional power, and may need to enhance the use of its existing powers.” I honestly never thought I’d see Congress come out with words like that. But it’s absolutely true. The bottom line to this is we have to use technology in a way that we’ve never had to use it before. Or maybe, to put it a better way, it is the way we’ve used it before, but we’re going to use it for a great many more things. We’re going to be able to collect more information, and in the process of doing that we’re going to fi nd out more and more about U.S. persons. And the real issue here is, what do you do about that? The concern that I have is that our ability to do all of this may outstrip our ability to protect all this if we don’t try to develop all of this on parallel planes. Another case in this whole area was United States vs. United States District Court, better known as the Keith Case, and this is a case most people will be familiar with. It was a case in which some anarchists blew up a CIA inner offi ce in Ann Arbor,
86 Michigan. A wiretap authorized by the Attorney General, and when the case eventually went to criminal court the defense was that it was an illegal wiretap and the government argued, “No, this was a national security case, because they were attacking the CIA.” Justice Powell was the writer for the Supreme Court when it got to that level. Justice Powell, you may recall, was an intelligence offi cer himself in World War II, and probably one of the keenest minds on the Court at the time that he served. He denied the government’s motion, and the case was eventually dismissed because he determined it was an illegal wiretap. His rationale was that national security is one thing, and the President and the national security executive branch of government are well suited to understand what the foreign problems are, what the foreign powers may do. He said the Court was not at all addressing what may happen with a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power in the United States. Here you had U.S. persons who were doing criminal acts in the United States, and Powell said for the purpose of the domestic threat here the courts are well-suited to determine what is right and what is wrong. He said, “Unless government safeguards its own capacity to function and to preserve the security of its people, society itself could become so disordered that all rights and liberties would be endangered.” So what Justice Powell was saying was, “Look, if you’ve got something that’s purely criminal we’re going to take care of it in the criminal process.” That’s a sitting Court; there will be warrants that will do everything that you were used to. If you have a foreign agency or a foreign power that is your threat, Powell says, “I’m not talking about that, I’m leaving that where it is.” One of the results of that was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which provided a process by which those Attorney General authorizations for wiretap and physical searches had been approved in the past. But the bottom line here is, as Justice Powell said, we have to preserve society. The threats that we have today are of a higher magnitude and are more technologically advanced than any that we have seen before, and we have to be able to use the same technology to defeat them. The real trick here is to do it in a way that does not offend either the Constitution or the social sensibilities of the populace. And there is no doubt that the national security of the United States includes, to a large extent, the social mores of the people of the United States. So these are things that we need to take into account. I have no doubt in my mind that we can do it. Afternoon panel participants share their views. I just hope that we do it at a time and in a way that preserves our right to do the things that are necessary at this point. I will end by saying that, after 37 years in government, I have learned one thing.
87 I have learned that the courts and the Congress and the people of the United States are willing to put up with a great deal of government intrusion into their lives as long as they know it is regulated, as long as they can see that there are safeguards. And I think that’s where we are at this point in time. We need to make sure that those safeguards are put in place while we defend the country.
BIOGRAPHY
Marion E. (Spike) Bowman Director, Intelligence Issues Group Federal Bureau of Investigation Mr. Bowman is a specialist in national security affairs. He currently serves in the Senior Executive Service as Chief, Intelligence Issues Group, Directorate of Intelligence, Federal Bureau of Investigation. In this position he is responsible for intelligence policy and information sharing. Previously he served as Senior Counsel, National Security Law Branch. Mr. Bowman is a graduate of Willamette University (B.A.), the University of Wisconsin (M.A.), the University of Idaho (J.D., Cum Laude) and the George Washington University (LL.M., International and Comparative Law, With Highest Honors). Commissioned a naval line offi cer in 1969, Mr. Bowman converted to intelligence and fi ve years later was selected for the fi rst class of the fully-funded Law Education Program. After graduation, he was assigned to the Naval Legal Service Offi ce, Treasure Island, where he served as senior defense counsel, senior trial counsel, and head of military justice before being short-toured to assume duties at the National Security Agency (NSA), where he was responsible for litigation involving classifi ed information. At NSA, Mr. Bowman litigated national security cases, restructured the Agency’s Freedom of Information and Privacy Act programs, represented NSA on the Defense Privacy Board, and was military legal counsel to the Director. Upon completion of this assignment, he was ordered back to school in International and Comparative Law. After graduate school, Mr. Bowman organized a Navy legal offi ce specializing in national security law. There he managed intelligence oversight programs; advised special operations, unconventional warfare, and intelligence personnel; and supervised national security prosecutions. He represented the Secretaries of Defense and Navy during the major espionage prosecutions of the 1980s, including the Walkers, Whitworth, and Pollard. During 1987-1988, Mr. Bowman was the Force Judge Advocate for Naval Logistics Command, Pacifi c, before reporting to the Naval War College in August 1988. As Head of International Law, he taught courses in national security law, international
88 law, Law of the Sea, law of armed confl ict, and rules of engagement (ROE). He was promoted to Captain while serving at the Naval War College. From 1991 to 1994 Mr. Bowman was Offi cer-in-Charge, United States Sending State Offi ce for Italy; EUCOM legal representative for Italy; ad hoc legal advisor to the ambassador; U.S. country representative for taxation, labor policy, claims, and foreign criminal jurisdiction; and legal and diplomatic representative for DOD in Italy. From 1994 to 1995 Mr. Bowman served as Deputy Assistant Judge Advocate General of the Navy (Litigation). He retired from the Navy in 1995.
89 PANELIST
Charles E. Allen Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security I am Secretary (of Homeland Security, Michael) Chertoff’s Chief Intelligence Offi cer, and it gives me some oversight over the intelligence elements and the various components that comprise DHS, like TSA (Transportation Security Administration), ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and CBP (Customs and Border Protection). This is a remarkable change in where we were just before Secretary Chertoff came. I do believe that my offi ce, which is going to be the Offi ce of Intelligence and Analysis — we now call it the Offi ce of Information Analysis — but when we get a new bill from the Congress we’re going to change that, performs a valuable role. I think we are, as Mr. Wiant said, a blending of law enforcement, foreign intelligence, public, and private sector information. We engage in current and strategic operations. We engage in protection of infrastructure and prevention of damage to that infrastructure. We try to assess the vulnerability of our infrastructure and assess the threat. It puts us right in the middle of trying to combine what I would call foreign intelligence, or even domestic intelligence and law enforcement operations, which I know Spike (Bowman) will have a great deal to say about. Sometimes this means that some Department of Homeland Security components are deporting individuals, sometimes arresting them. I think it’s important to recall that terrorists are not the same as spies, and counterintelligence techniques can only go so far when we’re talking about terrorists, because law enforcement personnel, which Mr. Bowman represented in previous days, arrest or actually neutralize a terrorist before he can set off a bomb, say on a New York subway. It’s very interesting how we defi ne intelligence. It is interesting that the National Security Act of l947 defi nes intelligence as only foreign intelligence and counterintelligence. It says noting beyond that. I think we have to expand the playing fi eld to the global arena and then assign the players the functional roles and responsibilities that aren’t limited by geography. Foreign and domestic, in my view, should not be the limitations. I think the limitations get to the nexus between U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons. Believe me, there’s great sensitivity when it comes to information on U.S. persons. Let’s go back and look at what was mandated in the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the Offi ce of Information Analysis. I think the mission is remarkably broad. In the Homeland Security Act of 2002 we are to access, receive, and analyze law enforcement information, intelligence, and other information from the agencies of the Federal government, state and local governments, law enforcement agencies, and the private sector, and integrate that information to identify and assess the nature and scope of terrorist threats to the homeland. We detect and identify threats of terrorism
90 against the United States, and we need to understand these threats in light of actual and potential vulnerabilities of the homeland. The Homeland Security Act levied no requirement that the information be or not be of any particular origin. It didn’t say it had to have a foreign connection. Information which is domestic in every sense, both in terms of subject and in terms of locus of collection, are entirely appropriate for the work of Homeland Security. Given the broad scope of information and the primary mission of the Department to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, my offi ce is taking the position that what matters about the information is what it says, what it reveals, and how it relates to other information, not where it comes from or what label it may have on it, such as a handling caveat which may be classifi cation-derived, law enforcement sensitive, or U.S. person information. There are legal restraints on what we can do and must do in the handling of this information, and those limitations generally have an impact on dissemination of the original source of the information and from the creation of an unclassifi ed or a tear- line product. Of primary concern to any agencies in the Intelligence Community is use of U.S. person information, and on this I think we’ve taken advantage of the statutory mission in crafting the implementation for Executive Order 12333. Categories are identifi ed that refl ect DHS missions and types of information needed to accomplish the missions. For example, consistent with my offi ce’s mission, information about any U.S. person may be collected, retained, and disseminated when it falls into very specifi c categories — information obviously obtained with consent, obviously public information — not open-source information, terrorism information. Terrorism information includes all information relating to the existence, the organization, capabilities, plans, intentions, vulnerabilities, means of fi nance, material support, or activities of foreign and transnational groups or individuals, domestic groups or individuals, involved in terrorism. That’s a very, very good defi nition. And also vulnerabilities information — we can collect that which includes all U.S. person information required for the assessment of the vulnerabilities of the key resources and the critical infrastructure for the United States, international narcotics activities, and border security information. Now we have a lot of challenges in carrying out this responsibility. There is a reasonably permissive legal framework under which Homeland Security and its intelligence aspects have been formed. But there are obviously institutional as well as cultural barriers. I think these primarily relate to the effective access and utilization of certain types of information. They will largely be surmountable by careful review of their legal and historical underpinnings as opposed to current interpretation. For example, we just heard about what do you do when there’s a hurricane like Katrina. Domestic imagery has been available for some time for civil applications such as disaster response and the planning of national security event planning. Second, the challenge is even when, in cases of no apparent formal barrier to information sharing and utilization, law enforcement agencies are still protective of their cases. Quite rightly so. They fear, and I think legitimately, that another agency
91 with concurrent jurisdiction may benefi t or utilize the information to the originating agency’s detriment. The law enforcement administration will refuse to make the information available to others when the protection of a confi dential source is no less sensitive to law enforcement than to an intelligence operator. So that’s where we are. We’re obviously changing and bringing new focus to intelligence. It’s not so important as to the origin of the information as to how the information is originally obtained; in that we respect the privacy of U.S. citizens. At the same time, if the information relates to vulnerabilities of our infrastructure, international narcotics activities, illegal border activity and, above all, terrorism infi ltration into this country or terrorism threats, both foreign and domestic, we have the responsibility to deal with that information; to analyze it; to defuse the situation; to make certain that the Secretary and any other offi cial of the government that needs it can receive it and can act on it.
SEGUE — JON A. WIANT One of the most signifi cant changes that have come up in the last six months is the transformational issue for the FBI and, in the wake of an argument that has been going on for a number of years, whether or not we needed a separate counterintelligence/ CT organization like the British Security Service (MI-5). Now the solution has come up to have a national security branch within the FBI to look at how all of this has begun to affect the FBI, which has been beaten up quite a bit. For many of us who grew up sometimes thinking that FBI stood for “Fights By Itself,” it too is put in the position here by the nature of the structural change in sharing powers that were once its own and taking the lead for agencies that are inexperienced working in this area.
92 PANEL DISCUSSION
JON A. WIANT, MODERATOR First, an observation, and then I’ll use my prerogative to put a question to all of you. The observation is that a lot of these things that have come to trouble us start with the best of intentions. Domestic spying had two routes in the 1960s — the sabotage of the train line into the Oakland Army Depot under the Delimitation Agreement in 1949. Army Counterintelligence had responsibility for that investigation. That led it initially into looking at student groups. Somewhere along the line that became a much more ambitious program. On the civil disturbances side it started with a commitment of Federal troops into Watts in June of l965. I remember the brigade commander asking for the intelligence brief on the hostile forces and all we had was a regional offi ce of then-Army Intelligence Command. The lieutenant colonel came forward and said, “I don’t have a clue.” And he was relieved. And the word, within 24 hours, throughout the domestic or CONUS CI infrastructure was, “If you have a problem or the likelihood of a problem in your region you’d better know the order of battle.” So these two things propelled themselves into what, retrospectively, looks like a completely uncoordinated massive assault on the Fourth Amendment in this country. And did it awaken the conscience of the country, did it raise the threshold of the Congressional inquiry to say, “Why did this happen?” None of us who were involved thought of ourselves as enemies of the Constitution but, looking back on it, the key thing is the challenge that we have today. Who is making the investigative decision, and where is that going to be made? And do you court the possibility, certainly suggested by the 9/11 Commission, that you become too cautious, too timid, too bound by your interpretations of the restrictions imposed on you that are far less restrictive than any of your people really know about? So each of our panelists has talked about Charlie as, I would say, the key customer for all of this information. My other two colleagues talked about in one sense protecting the Fourth Amendment, and in another understanding that we still, at the end of the day, have a need for retaining some sensitivity to our sources and collection methods. So the question I put to you is: Where can these decisions be made productively? Who will make the screening decision that says we need to cover this U.S. person? And where can that decision be made so that intelligence developed by the clandestine service may be of such compelling need that somebody else other than the DO (CIA’s Directorate of Operations) might argue that we have a right to trump your sources and methods consideration?
93 CHARLES E. ALLEN I think I like what Spike said about technology outstripping our ability to protect our individual freedoms because that potential is there. Perhaps Judge Brandeis was extraordinarily wise a century ago. On the investigative side I particularly want Spike to speak to that, but the processes that we have in place today are, I think, remarkably good when it comes to the need for a warrant, as was pointed out. That’s still there. We may have a more timely exercise of getting that warrant because of what we live in; it’s not like the Soviet days, where you can think about it and have a lot of time to respond to a Soviet initiative in many cases, where it was a more static environment. Today it’s highly dynamic. So the warrants can be obtained fairly quickly, but it has to have, of course, reasonable cause to do that. A judge has to make a decision on that. That’s a very good process. Having been at Homeland Security a few days I can say that we have a lot of issues that we’ll work and have been working with the Bureau, but the FBI really does protect law enforcement information, sensitive law enforcement information, and does it extraordinarily well. What we want out of it is if there is a threat, if a group, a cell, in this country, wants to damage a U.S. person or facility, we want to make sure that we’ve assessed the vulnerability, say, of that particular target and that we have protective measures in place. Usually this works out extraordinarily well. But when it comes to foreign intelligence, and sometimes it can come in with usually the data picked up or fairly generic, some group is on its way to bomb something in the Midwest. That’s not very helpful. But we frequently get very specifi c threat information which we not only have to work with the clandestine service, the Director of Operations, to ensure that we protect it. We have to get that information out at a classifi ed level, certainly, to the governor, or if it involves a major facility in a state, to the Intelligence Division, which Dave Cohen runs, which was just written up in the New Yorker. This is a remarkable model for us to look at and follow. Or to get it out (the information) to the private sector, where it gets real dicey. We don’t want to — if a highly specifi c target is in place and it deals with the private sector, there are ways that we can actually provide the information down to that level — between the Bureau and Homeland Security. And we’re doing this today. We’re particularly concerned about the security of this country and its infrastructure while we’re focused on recovering from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Never have I seen more cooperation and more interaction and more sensitivity to the protection of the sources of the information.
MARION E. BOWMAN The question of who decides what person we’re going to focus on is going to be some Grade 12 or 13 special agent in the fi eld along with his unit supervisor. The real question is, “What do you do with the information that you get when you’re investigating this person?” Because when an SA, a special agent, goes out and
94 investigates somebody they are collecting all the information they can fi nd about this person. Not just where does he live, and what car does he drive, and where was he born, and what does he do on Wednesday night. Who’s his girlfriend? Or how many girlfriends? Or is he married, and have a girlfriend on the side? We collect all this kind of information for a number of different reasons. The real question then is, what can you do with all of this information? As I said, the real problem is trying to collate a bunch of disparate information that may be important. Take, for example, the time-honored paradigm here of the 19 hijackers. They came into the United States on airplanes. There are tickets, airplane records, that can be looked at. They stayed in hotels. They had charge cards. They opened bank accounts. They traveled all around the country. There’s a lot of information that you can pick up about people. The real question is what are you allowed to do with it, and that’s where the hard spot is coming in today. That’s the issue of collating all this information, because we have the capability today to take all of this disparate information and run it through all of these big computers, and come out with information that no human can get. That’s where the fundamental resistance comes in, not just from the ACLU, but that’s where Admiral Poindexter got shot down on TIA [Total Information Awareness]. If anybody knows what his proposal was for privacy purposes you’d be very impressed with the safeguards that he built in but was never allowed to talk about, because he didn’t get that far. That’s the issue.
JON A. WIANT, MODERATOR The defi nition of a U.S. person includes those who hold green cards, and with the green card they’re still a citizen of their native country and don’t have to spend that much time in the United States except coming in so many months to maintain that green card. Why do we extend the same privileges or protections to that defi nition of a U.S. person who holds the green card, as far as collection goes?
MARION E. BOWMAN Well, I suppose, not having been part of the decision-making process for that back when President Reagan was considering it, I suppose the short answer is that the person who holds a green card is presumed to be heading toward citizenship and is being accorded the right to live in the United States and therefore should be afforded the rights of normal citizens in the United States as far as the intrusions of government go. It was a policy decision at a point in time, and it’s a decision which has, I think, been approved all the way through. I think if you were to look at the numbers of green card holders versus the numbers of green card holders who have turned out to be bad people, you would have a great disparity in the numbers there. So I suppose that probably this is a policy decision that will hold at least on those grounds. Does the other lawyer want to say anything? Q: My question is about the cyber arena, where there’s a question of American or domestic involvement. How would you address the rules of evidence and jurisdiction for that case?
95 MARION E. BOWMAN Okay, you raise a problem that is almost unsolvable. Under our system of jurisprudence we have to decide when we have a threat. We have to decide whether it is a criminal threat or whether it is a foreign threat. And with a cyber attack there is no way to know what that is. So the default position is that we will operate under criminal authorities until we determine that they are not a domestic threat. It’s an awkward way of doing things, but the cyber environment simply presents a challenge that strains legal authorities for either criminal or foreign intelligence purposes. Our laws do not readily address all the nuances of the cyber world threat. The real issue is what we can do properly, not only within our own borders, and our own laws, but for international purposes as well in trying to determine where the threat is coming from and what it is. We have the technology to chase those electrons back across the ether as long as they’re active, but when you do that you are crossing borders. That is a decision that has to be made, whether or not it is important enough to do, and we do not have a national policy on that as such. Q: Let me take a real case and ask you to comment on it, since it really drives home the point to me about drawing new lines and makes a whole hash of the concept of lines. And that’s Ali al Timimi. Ali al Timimi was just arrested and convicted in Alexandria a couple of months ago. In the papers he was described as an Islamic scholar, fl uent in several languages, very well-traveled and, certainly, that he was. But that’s not how he came to my attention. He came to my attention because he has his bachelor’s degree in pre-med and biology from George Washington University; he has his master’s degree in computer science from the University of Maryland; and he has his Ph.D. in bio-informatics and computational biology from George Mason University. He did his Ph.D. on the analysis of micro-array data warehouses in meta-static cancer. That raises all sorts of fundamental questions. From my mind, you’re talking about these issues as if the game is over when the individual in question is either arrested, incarcerated, let go, or killed. That’s not where I come in. I’m the father of the unconventional pathogen countermeasures at DARPA. And I guess the question for me is, it’s very important to know when these kinds of individuals — he is a U.S. citizen — have had any contact say with Al-Zwahiri, whose father and uncle created the pharmaceutical industry in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Very important to know if he’s had any contact with Afternoon panel participants. Acue Kahn, who is Khalid
96 Sheik Mohammed’s landlord. Where am I going to get that kind of information? The case is closed. There’s no intelligence requirement. Who do you want to develop countermeasures if he’s done something in a laboratory somewhere or trained other people to do it? How do you want to handle these kinds of issues?
CHARLES E. ALLEN I’ve been on the job a whole eight days, now . . . I will say that this is based on the National Counterterrorism Center, based on the work of CIA as a point man overseas. And for the Bureau, particularly working here, the whole emphasis fi rst in the DCI and now with the DNI and from the President is that we are to look for those patterns, those trends and patterns. And there’s a lot of information you can collect and do link analysis on, and it’s very interesting what we develop as far as people who are working in those arenas. But he had foreign connections; that certainly showed up. Mr. Bowman is very familiar with the case. But we’re in a preventive mode and whether it’s external or internal. It gets back to not where the information comes from but it has to do with the persons, as you point out, and their activities. There’s a whole culture that’s changing — it’s changing in the Bureau; it certainly changed dramatically even after August 1998 within the Intelligence Community, and particular at CIA. And we continue to work on the whole issue of looking for particular problems and — whether it’s Customs and Border Patrol, whether it’s ICE, whether it’s TSA we’re looking for — we get information every day of suspicious behavior and incidences, all of which we look at or the Bureau looks at. And it’s a look — or we have Border Patrol give us information — more deeply operationally at the issue. We are in a preventive, disruptive mode. We’re not waiting for an event to happen and then work on it, then do lessons learned from having people blown up or transit systems attacked. I see a whole changing culture between law enforcement and intelligence, foreign and domestic.
MARION E. BOWMAN Let me just add to that. Ali al Timimi was a case that we looked at in the Bureau for quite a long period of time, and with a lot of assistance from a lot of different agencies. We developed a lot of information about him and the goal today is prevention and disruption. When you do something to disrupt, or when you prosecute to prevent, is a decision that is not made just by a prosecutor or by an FBI agent and prosecutor; it’s made by the U.S. Government with a determination that we have all that we’re going to get on this guy and that now it is the time to do something. Q: Right now we have agencies whose leaders have been hired primarily for criminal investigation. So you have a culture that’s bound around criminal prosecution. How do you educate those managers as to the value of intelligence and how important it is for them to use it properly?
97 CHARLES E. ALLEN We’re well into the process of the education. I just came from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence where that very question was raised. How can you start to change the culture faster and quicker because within Homeland Security we have some very highly respected legacy agencies that work on operations and that have not strengthened and put the resources as we know over time in intelligence. I think that’s where Secretary Chertoff is coming down, in the sense that it’s very important that we strengthen the intelligence capabilities of the various elements, or components, as we call them. There are about ten components within Homeland Security that are involved in data collection. In the past they worked principally in operations, and working on specifi c subjects rather than getting into working strategically at collection. We’ve got to get more information out of those agencies. They don’t report enough. They don’t set the thresholds for reporting. They don’t have the information management systems that fl ow easily among those agencies and with Homeland Security headquarters. So we have a huge job ahead of us. We have some extraordinarily forward-looking people that are now heading components. You’ve got Kip Pauley over at TSA; he was just sworn in this July. He has remarkable ideas, and he believes that his intelligence arm in TSA has to be further strengthened. He and I had an enormously rich conversation the other day. I’ll let Mr. Bowman speak to the Bureau, and where it’s going, but I think you’re right. It is a challenge, and no one can deny that. We’re going to work at it very hard, but I’m optimistic that this country’s going to change and that the various, as you say, old-line managers are being replaced by managers who really give strong emphasis to getting back to Paul’s statement on disruption-prevention — that should be our goal. We shouldn’t wait to be struck and then have another commission investigate what the hell we did wrong.
MARION E. BOWMAN Culture is one of the things that we always have to look at. Before 9/11 the FBI had a national security division, and within that division there was a CI element, there was a CT element, there was security; there were a whole bunch of different things, but it comprised less than a third of the Bureau. The Bureau’s bread and butter — no question about it — was criminal law up until 9/11. Since then the priority has changed dramatically, and there are those who say the FBI will never change. But if you look at the Bureau today there is about fi fty percent that has seven or eight years of experience. And if you ask about the leadership, I think there are exactly four Senior Executive Service members in the Bureau who were there on 9/11, and two of those are lawyers. I think Director Mueller has changed the direction. And I don’t think, at this point, there’s any going back. What’s happened with law enforcement is that they have not seen good intelligence products. Most law enforcement agencies have never seen a strategic intelligence product. And I fi rmly believe that law enforcement leaders, when they are educated toward intelligence, and shown good intelligence products, will realize that they help
98 them do their mission, and they will accept intelligence as a necessary tool to meet their mission. Q: Going further on the idea of cultural differences and how to operate as a Community, last fall the Department of Homeland Security coordinated, promulgated, and had signed a memorandum of agreement (MOA) on intelligence sharing to protect U.S. interests both at home and abroad. The vast majority of attacks against the United States in the last 25 years clearly have been abroad. Going back to the Red Brigade, Middle Eastern terrorists — the bulk of them have been overseas. Interestingly enough, this memorandum of agreement was signed by the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Attorney General on behalf of the FBI, and the Director of Central Intelligence. Glaring by its absence was any participation by DOD. And yet a large portion of our interests abroad are DOD, which also happens to have a very large, very robust component to do force protection issues. What was the reason that the MOA didn’t include DOD, and what efforts are being made to try and incorporate those parts of DOD force protection, and, if you will, tactical intelligence, that don’t fall under the IC umbrella?
CHARLES E. ALLEN I think, and I’m speaking just as Charlie Allen, that was an omission. I know there are issues that their perspective is for force protection, protecting our military forces and facilities worldwide, and they should fall into a cooperative for information sharing. I was focused on a lot of other things then — I’m familiar only in a general sense with the MOA — but I think you’re absolutely right. There has to be — as we have our new information efforts which are under way under John Russuck, and he has to look at information sharing across all agencies, civil and non-civil, national security and non-national security — a really big effort which is now under way. I think that this is something that’s going to have to be addressed. I see Steve Cambone next week and we’re going to have some serious discussions about Defense HUMINT. We have tactical elements down at S-2 and so forth collecting intelligence every day. For example, they arrest and seize a lot of detainees, thousands of them. They interrogate them and get information; from many of whom we sometimes get linkages to people elsewhere in the world, in the Middle East, in Europe, or here even in this country. There is a strong effort on the part of DOD to get that information out, to report it as IIRs [Intelligence Information Reports]. I think the military is doing a good job of it. At the same time, there is not a focus on the target — particularly the terrorist threat directed at the homeland — which I would like to see. I think we’re going to have to work this whole area really hard. I think that’s one of my responsibilities, given to me by Secretary Chertoff, but at some point that MOA needs to be revisited because DOD has a huge input because they have counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and they look at facilities here in this country as well as all facilities in our territories and overseas.
99 We hadn’t matured enough in our thinking at that time. When you speak to Steve Cambone, and he talks about the gravity of the threat to our homeland, he’s deadly serious. When I was the Assistant DCI of Collection we met once a week to discuss worldwide collection, including a lot of effort put toward counterterrorism. So I think this is something that needs to be further addressed. I think you put forth something that is an omission, that in the long term has to be righted.
JON A. WIANT, MODERATOR Let me intervene here as the Panel Chair and take the option to throw out one last question to the group, because it was rattling around in my mind and provoked here by this one from Russ Travers making the observation, and we haven’t really touched on the other line here. And that is our integration with state and local and how that information will come to us, and how it will go to them, as being perhaps one of the most critical pieces today.
CHARLES E. ALLEN This is one of the areas, in my eight days that I’ve had, in which I’ve begun to read and think a great deal about, and talked to people who work for me, and working with Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson, who is Chertoff’s Deputy. This is an area where we are going to invest a lot of effort. I think DHS is already doing a good deal. It’s not been necessarily publicized, but infrastructure protection work has gone on since 2002 — I think there has been an effort, but it’s not nearly enough. We do not work with state and local, with the cities, at the level and intensity that’s required. We do have Homeland Security advisors and units with all the fi fty governors. We also are thinking of establishing an initiative, which Secretary Chertoff is dealing with, so that if the states want to do so, they can set up fusion centers where we can funnel information down to them. The state governments, and state police, have an enormous amount of data. Getting back to Secretary Chertoff, he is always saying we need to collect on trends and patterns. It needs to fl ow both ways — the channels need to be open, and to say nothing of the private sector. We’re certainly doing a lot of triage, but this is an area that requires sustained, intensifi ed efforts both by Homeland Security and other elements of the government. The FBI works those kinds of issues as well, and they have strong relationships with the state FBIs. So you’ve put your fi nger on someplace where Homeland Security not only has to get more data out of the components in the intelligence elements and make sure that that’s put into report format and disseminated broadly within the Federal government, but if there are threats involved we get it in useful form to state and locals. They don’t need a generic threat saying, “Watch out!” They need something a lot more specifi c. That’s when we get in tugs-of-war trying to clear communications lines with the Bureau or with the clandestine service. I would say 99% of the time we fi nd a way to get that information down. But our efforts right now are too limited, and we have not put together the program that is
100 required. I would say Bob Steffi n of DHS, who heads the Infrastructure Protection side, is really working closely with me on this issue. I have twenty of my offi cers, and it’s going to grow in his Infrastructure Protection Offi ce, where we’re looking at threats to the infrastructure, vulnerabilities — and what my people do is look at the threat and the capacities of the terrorists wanting to execute that threat. What he looks at, of course, is just technically what are the vulnerabilities? What unique ways might you attack that particular infrastructure? So we’ve got that partnership. Bob [Steffi n] and I have got to reach down to the fi fty states and to the big cities, in particular Los Angeles, Boston, and New York, and the District [of Columbia]. There’s a lot of work that’s under way. A lot more needs to be done. And we’re at risk; there’s no question of that — we’re at risk.
MARION E. BOWMAN There is an awful lot of work yet to be done, which is interesting because there’s an awful lot of work already being done. Both DHS and FBI are already out there doing an awful lot, and have been for years, but it is not nearly at the point where we want it to be, or where it must be, for the type of threats that we face today. One of the things that are happening across the country, as a consequence of this, is that state and local police authorities and tribal (American Indian) authorities are beginning to aggregate their information in regions out there. And there are right now about 40 regional data exchanges out there that are run by locals. They have there own rules. They set up what the conditions are — we’ll put all of our information in and you’ll abide by these rules or you’re out of the game. We at the Department of Justice are beginning to sponsor some activity along with them, which means that they are agreeing to comply with federal privacy rules in order to get federal involvement. And we’ve got several of these that we’re working with right now. We also have a larger plan to try and nationally connect all of these regional data exchanges. I emphasize that we’re not funding these things. These are things that are being set up by the state and local [authorities] themselves. All we’re trying to do is help them fi gure out how to share the information, and eventually how to link the information. At some point, DHS and FBI are going to have to pull it together. Another part of this is that law enforcement especially has a tendency to confuse state and locals because Customs, INS, and FBI all use the terms “law enforcement sensitive.” Well, what the heck does that mean? It means something a little bit different to each of these law enforcement agencies, so the state and locals get confused. Right now I’m working with another part of DHS trying to get DHS and FBI to agree on what some of this terminology means, because we think that if we agree everybody else will too. But this is a huge, huge area to get into because there are 650,000 state and local police out there. We’re up to 14,000 special agents in the FBI, so there’s a huge disparity. The people who are going go see something on the ground out there are state and local. So we have to make this happen and happen right.
101 JON A. WIANT, MODERATOR Dual lines, many of them; big issues, big challenges. We’ve made a good step today in exploration of these issues from a multitude of perspectives. This was a good panel because I still see hands that are raised for questions here. When you end while there’s still an appetite for more, that’s a good meal. I would like to thank you, on behalf of the College and the JMIC Foundation, for making time for this panel. Our fi nal speaker for today with closing remarks is Dr. Teresa Domzal, Provost, Joint Military Intelligence College.
102 Dr. Teresa J. Domzal
Provost, Joint Military Intelligence College I’m delighted to be here to make some closing remarks. I have been on the job for 29 days at the Joint Military Intelligence College, but I did spend a few years at the Central Intelligence Agency. I left academia and industry after a career of twenty years, and the psychiatrist sat next to me on the bus on the way to lunch. But I was asked to make some closing comments, recap the day, and talk about the way forward. We did start out by saying “Managing in a Time of Change.” Have we ever been in a time where nothing was changing? I couldn’t think of anything. So I tried to anticipate what would transpire during the day, and I wrote some comments, and then as the panels and speakers spoke I thought that I could wait for gaps and see where I might add some value to the Conference. The opening comments this morning from President Clift and Admiral Jacoby focused on “Changing the Way We Do Business.” And we hear that a lot. We heard it in business, and hear it in government. And we need to know what that really means. We must take it upon ourselves as a Community to bring about change by ourselves. And, as President Clift mentioned, not wait for another Commission to tell us what to do. Admiral Jacoby gave a defi nition of “all” as in all-source. What does the defi nition of “reform” sound like? Reform, from the dictionary, is to put into a new and improved form or condition; to restore it to a former good state; to bring from bad to good; to change from worse to better; to mend, to correct, as to reform corrupt manners or morals. As Dr. Nolte pointed out at our lunch today, getting better is not good enough. While reform sounds harsh, it isn’t enough. Continuous improvement is the necessary condition, to be an agile organization and an agile community. Not simply reform. It is eternal vigilance on all horizons. Ambassador Negroponte noted that globalization, travel, and communications are pushing change, and that we have to take this on board as a new vision for the Intelligence Community. And as the Community we need to learn to anticipate contingencies, tradeoffs, and change. And we need more teamwork. The Ambassador got the question, “Have you considered looking at lessons learned from Goldwater- Nichols on Defense Reform?” And he said he hadn’t thought of that. And one of the things I wrote in anticipation of change is we have to get new ideas and have new ways of thinking. So perhaps he even walked away today with a new idea.
103 The panels, both of them, were comprised of a very prestigious group of intelligence professionals. They spoke about the impact of reform on legislation of our structures, on the intelligence structure. The Conference touched on topics such as remodeling defense intelligence and discarding policies for things we no longer do with countries that no longer exist. That’s a good start. And will we never have enough resources? The National Counterterrorism Center is tackling the same issues — information sharing, analysis, and dealing with globalization. The issues discussed reminded me of some underlying similarities faced by multinational companies during the unprecedented time of change amplifi ed by globalization in the l980s. I spent a good portion of my career helping large multinationals cope with the challenges of globalization and helping them launch successful business operations around the world, while providing advice on how to adapt business practices in a foreign land. The most diffi cult part of that job was convincing market leaders that they had to change or they wouldn’t survive. The driver was globalization, and their failure was not taking even the smallest competitor as a serious threat especially in a global marketplace. There are no threats to a market leader, they would say. We are number one. After losing 20 market share points in an international market, one of the managing directors would say, “I don’t understand it. We’re doing everything we always did.” So what was the fi rst thing they did? They reorganized. In time of organizational distress, “reform” and “transformation” are often words that offer up a commitment of do something but be careful. Sometimes restructuring is only an illusion of a solution. It seldom fi xes deeper problems of an organizational culture, outdated processes, old technology or, worse, the inability to recognize the need to change. For large multinationals the rules had changed. A bunch of start-up brands were unseating the traditional market leaders in category after category. Competitors knew that the leaders were big. They knew that they were corporate. And they knew that they could not react with agility or the appropriate competitive response. The new upstarts were smaller, more fl exible, networked, not stacked in the hierarchical structure. We call them niche brands. Two percent of the market couldn’t be much of a threat to a large corporation. They took big calculated risks. In the words of one very large corporation, after it was all over they said, “We were too big; we never saw them coming. We were caught off guard.” I heard it again and again, and why didn’t they see it coming? Two things. The most diffi cult thing to do in any reformation endeavor is developing a new way of thinking and moving beyond talking, reorganizing, and policy, and implementing meaningful change. Now that means not only the leadership but the whole organization has to have the courage to change. While I’m on the topic of a new way of thinking, we almost touched on the new workforce, but we didn’t quite get there, so I’m going to do it here. After all, at the College we have the next generation of intelligence offi cers. They are the leaders in the making. Let new ideas into your organizations. Those new ideas are in the form of new people. I know that we are hiring at an unprecedented rate in history. We’re hiring a new generation. And in some cases it is two generations behind the leadership. We shouldn’t need a WMD report to tell us that we need to adapt. Adapting is a more continuous process. There is an organization that continually monitors the coming horizon and evolves continually. That’s agility.
104 Change is often a one-time deal, and almost always follows a crisis. And we can’t expect to make meaningful strides without the infusion of new people and new ideas. And that can’t be met with; that’s not the way we do it here. Globalization, nuclear arsenal, biological threats, religious extremism, bureaucracies, world markets — these are problems, and they’re big ones. We are in the Intelligence Community; we must be as adaptive as our enemy is. There are many uncertainties associated with reform. If we want to succeed in transforming, reforming, retooling, or rebooting our intelligence system, we need to look to the new generation. What Douglas Rushcoff, author of Plain Future and Children of Chaos, describes as “our evolutionary future.” The new workforce is younger, and less experienced. Sure they are, but they are also in less danger of becoming obsolete. They are the latest model of human beings. They come equipped with new features. Our role is changing rapidly and we can hardly track differences, much less master them. Author and journalist Tom Friedman, in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, described the world order during the Cold War as two Sumo wrestlers. Lots of power, not a lot of movement. After the Cold War, he described it as a marathon runner. You have to keep running, and you have to keep reenergizing. Every once in a while we need to suspend our being grown-ups and function as role models and educators rather than focusing on how we should shape the future of the Intelligence Community. Let’s also appreciate the natural adaptive skills demonstrated by the next generation and look to them for some of the answers. New intelligence officers are the next generation, and they are our advanced scouts. They are all ready for the one thing that we must become — adaptive. Because they are less entrenched, they are less committed to business-as-usual. Young people are much more willing to accept change as a natural evolutionary process. From their perspective, promotion should be based on performance, not on longevity. They have loyalty to the team, not necessarily to the organization. They challenge authority when appropriate. And they believe that respect is mutual and must be earned. All organizations and communities must stay relevant, and so if we want to accomplish this reformation we must stay relevant. And that means thinking differently. It is part of our mission at the Joint Military Intelligence College, even we must adapt and be brave in subtle ways to serve the Intelligence Community’s educational needs. It’s a shameful plug for the College, but education changes the way people think. Sitting in Master of Science of Strategic Intelligence classes here, we have students from every branch of the military and almost every intelligence agency. These are our customers and these are our benefi ciaries. They come here, they mix with their counterparts from other parts of the Intelligence Community, and they go back out there to the workforce with different ways of thinking, different solutions. Professor Wiant shared with you briefl y an e-mail from one of our students who has been deployed due to Katrina and I had the same e-mail that I want to share with you because he was talking about how he understands intelligence on the outside. And
105 NGA was there with a requirements guy, and he had analysts in tents, and they all worked together and fi gured it out. They said it wasn’t a real big deal, but it worked. And that is how you get change at the viral level. In marketing we would call it viral marketing where you have one small success and you repeat and repeat and repeat it. And you get that from the new workforce. The organizational structure is rarely a result of a methodical plan. More often it’s the result of small adaptations over time to micro events — a problem here, a process failure there, and so the structure slowly morphs as a result of reactions to events that come and go. But the structure ends up staying the same and the legacy structure is inherited by a subsequent rotation of managers who come in presuming that the people before them knew what they were doing and organized to get the job done. We have to always question, does the form follow function? Is the organization right for what we need to accomplish? And so, if we do that, if we think about are we organized to get the job done, we then become agile. What we’re trying to do here in the College is to make sure we stay relevant. We have to look at new technologies in the way that teaches, but we also have to look at the infusion of new technology and how it is going to be used in the Intelligence Community. We look at different ways of doing collection and analysis and have struggled with and tacked in these kinds of forms the same questions of how to go forward and how to make things better. And so I have shared with you my view — reform — and I guess I would leave you with keep an open mind, let new people in, and let new ideas in. On behalf of the Offi ce of the Director of National Intelligence, the Joint Military Intelligence College, and the JMIC Foundation, I want to thank you for spending your day with us and I hope to see you again at our next event. I would also like to offer a special thanks to the JMIC Foundation and to two people in the JMIC College without whom this Conference would not have come off, Larry Hiponia and his able assistant Katie Kolowich. And now I realize that I’m the only thing standing between you and drinks. I would like to invite you to the reception in the Bowman Room where there will be drinks and nosh. Thank you again. [End of Afternoon Presentations]
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