Intel Officials Make Their Case
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Senior officials are making their case that the two Mikes--McConnell and Hayden--should stay at the helm of the intelligence community.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Senior officials are making their case that the two Mikes--McConnell and Hayden--should stay at the helm of the intelligence community.
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence, Management, Politics, Transition
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Intelligence memo details transition process
Thursday, November 06, 2008
National Journal has obtained a letter from intelligence director Mike McConnell, offering some new details on how the transition of the intelligence services will proceed. It looks like officials will be working more closely with team Obama than past incoming administrations. And until recently, it appears that the Vice President Elect, Joe Biden, opted not to receive any classified intelligence briefings from the current administration.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
National Journal has obtained a letter from intelligence director Mike McConnell, offering some new details on how the transition of the intelligence services will proceed. It looks like officials will be working more closely with team Obama than past incoming administrations. And until recently, it appears that the Vice President Elect, Joe Biden, opted not to receive any classified intelligence briefings from the current administration.
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Management, Politics, Transition
Full Article
Toxic Information
Friday, October 17, 2008
U.S. intelligence officials are increasingly worried that hackers could wreak havoc on the financial system. Read the story here in National Journal.
Not that we need it, but here's yet another reason to worry about havoc in financial markets: U.S. intelligence officials increasingly fear that computer hackers could wreck banks and large financial institutions, or send stock markets into one more panicked frenzy, by covertly manipulating data and spreading false information.
In interviews and speeches over the past few months, senior counterintelligence and security officials laid out some dire scenarios. They're all predicated on a determined individual or small group fabricating information in such a way that the public sees a different picture of financial health than exists, either at a particular company or in broad markets.
For example, imagine a large brokerage finds itself suddenly saddled with huge losses because a disgruntled employee falsified information in the company's accounting systems, thus ensuring that billions of dollars in losses never show up on the books. Or think about the tumult that would ensue if someone hacked into a stock exchange and changed individual share prices, unleashing a flood of buy and sell orders.
These kinds of nightmare events shape the thinking of the senior Bush administration officials in charge of protecting the nation's computer infrastructure. They're concerned that financial institutions, while aware of the risks posed by lax information security, haven't taken bold enough steps to tighten up their own defenses and thus are imperiling a global system that is utterly dependent on accurate information.
The current crisis in mortgage-backed securities underscores the consequences of inaccurate information. Analysts often labeled those investments safe because they relied on outdated mortgage-default rates to assess the loans' riskiness. Their flawed calculus was presumably unintentional.
But imagine the damage that intentionally feeding the market bad information could cause. "Let's say instead of bringing down the systems at the New York Stock Exchange, you were able to corrupt the data in the exchange's system," Joel Brenner, the government's top counterintelligence officer, posited in an interview with National Journal in May. "If that happened, the market would lose confidence in the prices. 'Gee, I thought I bought a million shares at X, not X plus 10 cents.' What would happen to trading? The clearing mechanism would grind to a halt at the end of the day."
It may sound improbable, and Brenner stressed that the security on stock exchanges is "very, very good." But he and other senior officials say that the financial system as a whole is not sufficiently protected. The economic damages from massive fraud, they note, could exceed those caused by an act of terrorism. And at a time when the global financial system is teetering on collapse, financial networks are becoming more interlinked and hackers are perfecting their techniques.
Officials don't base their hypotheses on unfounded fears. Indeed, the world has already seen that one person, with a reasonable level of technical skill, can make whole economies shudder.
In January, Societe Generale, one of France's largest financial services companies, discovered that a midlevel trader had made a series of complex and bogus futures transactions by hacking into the bank's security and trading systems. Jerome Kerviel disabled an automatic-alert mechanism that should have flagged his reckless transactions. And he stole passwords that gave him access to accounting records, which he falsified to cover his tracks. He even constructed fake e-mails about fictitious trades to make his activities seem real. When the trader's managers discovered Kerviel's fraud, they spent a weekend trying to reconcile the trades in the open market. The bank's losses totaled more than $7 billion.
"The unwinding of such a massive position put immense pressure on the futures market," according to Eben Esterhuizen, an investment analyst who covered the story for The Panelist, a financial news blog. "Other traders saw the plunge in futures amid massive and mysterious selling ... and they started selling everything else."
U.S. markets were closed the following Monday, on January 21, for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. But world stock markets dipped dramatically. Kerviel's fraudulent transactions had not yet been publicly revealed, so no one could point to a specific cause for the drop. To fend off a spreading panic, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke cut the interest rate that the Fed charges banks for overnight loans by 0.75 percent. It was the Fed's biggest ever emergency cut, and it was precipitated in large part by Kerviel's massive disinformation campaign.
Rogue traders like Kerviel have caused big losses before, but never this big. In 1995, trader Nick Leeson brought down Britain's Barings Bank by causing approximately $1 billion in losses. Leeson, however, worked in the area of the company that also oversaw his activities. Kerviel, on the other hand, was a back-office employee and technophile who learned how to circumvent Societe Generale's computer systems.
The Kerviel case got the attention of senior security officials in the Bush administration. In a public address in September, Melissa Hathaway, who manages the cyber-security portfolio for the director of national intelligence, described it as a prime example of how an insider hacker can, with relative ease, shake the global economy.
Hathaway said that the case is one of several hacking incidents that have informed the policy behind the Bush White House's national cyber-security initiative, an ambitious and largely classified plan that officials are rolling out in the administration's final months. The insider threat ranked "first and foremost" among the so-called attack vectors that officials have reviewed, she said. The cyber-plan is aimed primarily at government networks, but Hathaway, like Brenner and other experts in government, has spent much of her time discussing unaddressed risks to private networks, particularly in the financial sector.
To get a sense of just how susceptible financial markets are to disinformation, consider how wildly stock prices fluctuate because of a rumor. Earlier this month, Apple's share price tumbled by more than 10 percent moments after a post on a CNN website claimed that paramedics had rushed Steve Jobs, the company's CEO, from his home after an apparent heart attack. The site solicits "user-generated content," but CNN does not verify it. The poster claimed that an anonymous source with firsthand information had supplied the tip about Jobs, and the report seemed real enough to spark a panic. (Jobs had pancreatic cancer, and his health has been a constant source of worry for investors.)
The company quickly denied the report, and Apple's stock rebounded, but not before dipping under $100 a share for the first time in nearly a year and a half. CNN removed the fake report from its site.
This wasn't the first time that bad information has shaken the markets. In January 2006, an error in NASDAQ's reporting system prompted several websites and online brokers to display incorrect price shifts on various stocks. The prices were correct, but the scale of price changes was not. Some stocks seemed to be up when they were really down, and some seemed to be falling when their share price was actually on the rise. In Japan, trading was halted, and investors found themselves unable to sell losing stocks or to buy up new ones at a discount.
"When you have this kind of problem, it calls into question the entire system," Yakov Amihud, a finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, told the Associated Press at the time. "As an investor, you question whether the liquidity in that market is there, whether you can buy or sell exactly when you want to. And maybe you decide to sell off your stocks if you don't trust the system."
These mishaps were also inadvertent. But for financial institutions, officials say, the lesson is clear: Companies must address the safety and soundness of their information systems in the face of all kinds of potential threats. "This is not happening. And this needs to happen," says Tom Kellermann, who was the senior data-risk management specialist at the financial division of the World Bank Group and who now sits on a bipartisan commission writing a comprehensive cyber-security assessment for the next U.S. administration. The threat to financial networks has been a key area of concern for the commission.
"The reality is, we've been building our vaults out of wood in cyberspace for too long," Kellermann says.
Friday, October 17, 2008
U.S. intelligence officials are increasingly worried that hackers could wreak havoc on the financial system. Read the story here in National Journal.
Not that we need it, but here's yet another reason to worry about havoc in financial markets: U.S. intelligence officials increasingly fear that computer hackers could wreck banks and large financial institutions, or send stock markets into one more panicked frenzy, by covertly manipulating data and spreading false information.
In interviews and speeches over the past few months, senior counterintelligence and security officials laid out some dire scenarios. They're all predicated on a determined individual or small group fabricating information in such a way that the public sees a different picture of financial health than exists, either at a particular company or in broad markets.
For example, imagine a large brokerage finds itself suddenly saddled with huge losses because a disgruntled employee falsified information in the company's accounting systems, thus ensuring that billions of dollars in losses never show up on the books. Or think about the tumult that would ensue if someone hacked into a stock exchange and changed individual share prices, unleashing a flood of buy and sell orders.
These kinds of nightmare events shape the thinking of the senior Bush administration officials in charge of protecting the nation's computer infrastructure. They're concerned that financial institutions, while aware of the risks posed by lax information security, haven't taken bold enough steps to tighten up their own defenses and thus are imperiling a global system that is utterly dependent on accurate information.
The current crisis in mortgage-backed securities underscores the consequences of inaccurate information. Analysts often labeled those investments safe because they relied on outdated mortgage-default rates to assess the loans' riskiness. Their flawed calculus was presumably unintentional.
But imagine the damage that intentionally feeding the market bad information could cause. "Let's say instead of bringing down the systems at the New York Stock Exchange, you were able to corrupt the data in the exchange's system," Joel Brenner, the government's top counterintelligence officer, posited in an interview with National Journal in May. "If that happened, the market would lose confidence in the prices. 'Gee, I thought I bought a million shares at X, not X plus 10 cents.' What would happen to trading? The clearing mechanism would grind to a halt at the end of the day."
It may sound improbable, and Brenner stressed that the security on stock exchanges is "very, very good." But he and other senior officials say that the financial system as a whole is not sufficiently protected. The economic damages from massive fraud, they note, could exceed those caused by an act of terrorism. And at a time when the global financial system is teetering on collapse, financial networks are becoming more interlinked and hackers are perfecting their techniques.
Officials don't base their hypotheses on unfounded fears. Indeed, the world has already seen that one person, with a reasonable level of technical skill, can make whole economies shudder.
In January, Societe Generale, one of France's largest financial services companies, discovered that a midlevel trader had made a series of complex and bogus futures transactions by hacking into the bank's security and trading systems. Jerome Kerviel disabled an automatic-alert mechanism that should have flagged his reckless transactions. And he stole passwords that gave him access to accounting records, which he falsified to cover his tracks. He even constructed fake e-mails about fictitious trades to make his activities seem real. When the trader's managers discovered Kerviel's fraud, they spent a weekend trying to reconcile the trades in the open market. The bank's losses totaled more than $7 billion.
"The unwinding of such a massive position put immense pressure on the futures market," according to Eben Esterhuizen, an investment analyst who covered the story for The Panelist, a financial news blog. "Other traders saw the plunge in futures amid massive and mysterious selling ... and they started selling everything else."
U.S. markets were closed the following Monday, on January 21, for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. But world stock markets dipped dramatically. Kerviel's fraudulent transactions had not yet been publicly revealed, so no one could point to a specific cause for the drop. To fend off a spreading panic, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke cut the interest rate that the Fed charges banks for overnight loans by 0.75 percent. It was the Fed's biggest ever emergency cut, and it was precipitated in large part by Kerviel's massive disinformation campaign.
Rogue traders like Kerviel have caused big losses before, but never this big. In 1995, trader Nick Leeson brought down Britain's Barings Bank by causing approximately $1 billion in losses. Leeson, however, worked in the area of the company that also oversaw his activities. Kerviel, on the other hand, was a back-office employee and technophile who learned how to circumvent Societe Generale's computer systems.
The Kerviel case got the attention of senior security officials in the Bush administration. In a public address in September, Melissa Hathaway, who manages the cyber-security portfolio for the director of national intelligence, described it as a prime example of how an insider hacker can, with relative ease, shake the global economy.
Hathaway said that the case is one of several hacking incidents that have informed the policy behind the Bush White House's national cyber-security initiative, an ambitious and largely classified plan that officials are rolling out in the administration's final months. The insider threat ranked "first and foremost" among the so-called attack vectors that officials have reviewed, she said. The cyber-plan is aimed primarily at government networks, but Hathaway, like Brenner and other experts in government, has spent much of her time discussing unaddressed risks to private networks, particularly in the financial sector.
To get a sense of just how susceptible financial markets are to disinformation, consider how wildly stock prices fluctuate because of a rumor. Earlier this month, Apple's share price tumbled by more than 10 percent moments after a post on a CNN website claimed that paramedics had rushed Steve Jobs, the company's CEO, from his home after an apparent heart attack. The site solicits "user-generated content," but CNN does not verify it. The poster claimed that an anonymous source with firsthand information had supplied the tip about Jobs, and the report seemed real enough to spark a panic. (Jobs had pancreatic cancer, and his health has been a constant source of worry for investors.)
The company quickly denied the report, and Apple's stock rebounded, but not before dipping under $100 a share for the first time in nearly a year and a half. CNN removed the fake report from its site.
This wasn't the first time that bad information has shaken the markets. In January 2006, an error in NASDAQ's reporting system prompted several websites and online brokers to display incorrect price shifts on various stocks. The prices were correct, but the scale of price changes was not. Some stocks seemed to be up when they were really down, and some seemed to be falling when their share price was actually on the rise. In Japan, trading was halted, and investors found themselves unable to sell losing stocks or to buy up new ones at a discount.
"When you have this kind of problem, it calls into question the entire system," Yakov Amihud, a finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, told the Associated Press at the time. "As an investor, you question whether the liquidity in that market is there, whether you can buy or sell exactly when you want to. And maybe you decide to sell off your stocks if you don't trust the system."
These mishaps were also inadvertent. But for financial institutions, officials say, the lesson is clear: Companies must address the safety and soundness of their information systems in the face of all kinds of potential threats. "This is not happening. And this needs to happen," says Tom Kellermann, who was the senior data-risk management specialist at the financial division of the World Bank Group and who now sits on a bipartisan commission writing a comprehensive cyber-security assessment for the next U.S. administration. The threat to financial networks has been a key area of concern for the commission.
"The reality is, we've been building our vaults out of wood in cyberspace for too long," Kellermann says.
Labels: Cyber War, Director of National Intelligence, Economy, Financial Crisis, Homeland Security, Technology
Full Article
Iran Estimate: Debate Persists
Friday, February 22, 2008
On December 3, 2007, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell declassified a set of key judgments from a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's efforts to build a nuclear weapon. The judgments may have contained some good news -- namely, "that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" -- but few in the upper ranks of the Bush administration warmly embraced this declaration.
Indeed, in the month after the release, McConnell and President Bush publicly distanced themselves from the NIE's dramatic headline. Key American allies went further: The French defense minister and the head of Israeli intelligence declared the NIE wrong, contending that Iran's weapons work continues.
All of those officials, who play key roles in pressing for further international sanctions against Iran, say that Tehran continues to publicly enrich uranium under the implausible auspices of a civilian energy program, and that it continues to test-fire ballistic missiles. Bush used his State of the Union address to remind the world of these two facts and to assert that Iran remains as much of a threat as it was before December 3.
With the key judgments public, intelligence officials and weapons experts are in a definitional sparring match over what constitutes a nuclear weapons program, whether the NIE should have been released at all, and how the estimate was written. The key judgments acknowledged the points that Bush made in his speech. But the final document emphasized the riveting new information about the halted "nuclear weapons program" rather than Iran's ongoing enrichment and missile activities.
Furthermore, the NIE narrowly defines the program as consisting of weapons "design work," presumably for a warhead that can be put atop a missile, plus some covert enrichment activities. The estimate explicitly states that the weapons program does not include Iran's publicly acknowledged uranium enrichment work, which Tehran says is aimed at low-level enrichment that can be used for civilian nuclear power. Skeptics say that if Iran masters low-level uranium enrichment it can eventually develop the high-level enrichment necessary for a nuclear bomb.
The definition of what exactly constitutes a weapons program is important, but the key judgments relegated it to a footnote. Some former intelligence officials say that the footnoted information could have been stated more boldly, and they speculate whether the key judgments were deliberately written in such a way as to convince readers that Iran's nuclear threat has lessened. Intelligence estimates, by definition, are supposed to state the views of the intelligence community, not to argue policy, these former officials say.
There is little evidence to indicate that intelligence analysts are trying to pre-empt a U.S. invasion of Iran by undercutting the Bush administration's ostensible rationale for such action. But the NIE leaves many of the intelligence community's supporters wondering if its authors grasped how the document would be read -- quickly, incautiously, and through political lenses. If the NIE was meant to clarify matters on Iran, it has arguably failed.
A number of longtime intelligence analysts and weapons experts, including those who have helped draft NIEs in the past and hold no particular allegiance to Bush, criticize the key judgments as poorly written, politically tone-deaf, and betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of what actually constitutes a nuclear weapons program.
Production of fissile material -- highly enriched uranium, or plutonium -- is generally viewed as the long pole in the nuclear tent. Once a country overcomes that hurdle, the path to a finished nuclear weapon is downhill. Iran may have halted some design activities, but how significant is that in light of its continuing low-level uranium enrichment and missile testing? As one former intelligence official with experience in NIEs put it, the intelligence community seemed to go to great lengths to answer the least important question -- the work on a warhead design.
Defenders of the NIE, including the senior officials and analysts who wrote it, counter that the document is the product of new, compelling information and a rigorous, top-to-bottom scrubbing of all the known intelligence about Iranian nuclear issues. One former senior intelligence official close to the NIE's drafters said that journalists had blown the top finding out of proportion. Indeed, the clause immediately following the opening sentence, which declared that the program was halted in 2003, reads, "We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."
The key judgments clearly didn't give the Iranians a "clean bill of health," says Jeffrey Lewis, who directs the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and runs the blog ArmsControlWonk.com. "The press reporting took a badly written NIE and pulled out probably the least important fact, or misidentified what the NIE said," Lewis argues.
Reporters weren't the only ones to run with the headline, however. Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, blasted the key judgments before a Knesset committee earlier this month. The document "pulls the rug out from under" the push for stricter Iran sanctions, he said. The U.S. estimate leaves "Israel to face the threat alone," Dagan added.
A few days earlier, the French defense minister, Herve Morin, said during a visit to Washington, "Coordinated information from a number of intelligence services" had led the French to believe that Iran is "continuing to develop" a nuclear weapon.
Both Dagan and Morin presumably have access to information that was not contained in the declassified judgments. But even the U.S. intelligence community's top man has publicly tried to shift attention away from the NIE's conclusion about Iran's narrowly defined weapons program. McConnell, like Bush, has been far more emphatic about the threat that Iran poses. Eschewing the hedged language of his analysts -- "high confidence," "moderate confidence" -- his assessments are more rigid and more focused on Iran's growing strength. In a lengthy January profile in The New Yorker, McConnell said, "There's no doubt in this observer's mind that Iran is on the path to get a nuclear weapon. It will force an arms race in the region."
Where Iran lies on its road to nuclear status may be up for debate. But on one fact, all sides agree: Without all of the key components -- fissile material, a compact and resilient warhead, and a long-range missile to deliver it -- Iran has no nuclear weapon. Could Iran make a nuclear device that might work? Maybe. Does it have the technological infrastructure to go further? Certainly. But does Iran have a viable, long-range weapon with which to threaten its neighbors? No.
And perhaps that was the intelligence community's point in the NIE. If the Iranian nuclear program were likened to a three-legged stool, then one leg -- the weapons design -- was taken out nearly five years ago. It could be repaired, but in the meantime, the stool is useless.
"I turn the tables on the critics of the NIE," says George Friedman, the head of Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. "Lay out the number of components you need to produce a weapon. If there is one that the Iranians weren't working on, they have no program."
But this assessment may ignore the political realities of Iranian nuclear ambitions. Tehran's possession of even a rudimentary nuclear device could fundamentally upset the regional power balance. "Would you like to have to convince Israel or the Saudis not to worry that these devices are too large and crude to be delivered by missiles?" asks David Kay. He is the former United Nations chief weapons inspector who led the 2003 Iraq Survey Group that found that Saddam Hussein no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction. "Nukes are less about war fighting than about politics by other means," he says.
Kay adds that the intelligence community is apparently conflicted about Iran's capabilities and its intentions. A bullet point within the key judgments states, parenthetically, that because of "intelligence gaps," the Energy Department and the National Intelligence Council "assess with only moderate confidence" that Iran's 2003 halt to the weapons design program represented a stop to the "entire nuclear weapons program."
"That's a direct contradiction of the first sentence," which declared that the program had halted, Kay says, "and yet it doesn't come after the first sentence, which implies that all 16 agencies are in agreement." The Energy Department's less confident view is especially worrisome, Kay says, because DOE oversees the nation's nuclear laboratories and has the most nuclear weapons expertise within the intelligence community.
For his part, McConnell appears to understand that his release of the key judgments has affected not only the political climate but also the future work of his analysts and spies. He told The New Yorker, "I think putting it out was the right thing." But he admitted that the intelligence community continues to need better information to verify if Iran has restarted its weapons design work.
"Our job is to steal the secrets of foreign governments or foreign terrorist organizations, and so the more they know about the effectiveness of our tradecraft the more difficult it's going to be for us," McConnell said. "For the community I represent, I just made our life a lot harder."
Published in National Journal
Friday, February 22, 2008
On December 3, 2007, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell declassified a set of key judgments from a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's efforts to build a nuclear weapon. The judgments may have contained some good news -- namely, "that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" -- but few in the upper ranks of the Bush administration warmly embraced this declaration.
Indeed, in the month after the release, McConnell and President Bush publicly distanced themselves from the NIE's dramatic headline. Key American allies went further: The French defense minister and the head of Israeli intelligence declared the NIE wrong, contending that Iran's weapons work continues.
All of those officials, who play key roles in pressing for further international sanctions against Iran, say that Tehran continues to publicly enrich uranium under the implausible auspices of a civilian energy program, and that it continues to test-fire ballistic missiles. Bush used his State of the Union address to remind the world of these two facts and to assert that Iran remains as much of a threat as it was before December 3.
With the key judgments public, intelligence officials and weapons experts are in a definitional sparring match over what constitutes a nuclear weapons program, whether the NIE should have been released at all, and how the estimate was written. The key judgments acknowledged the points that Bush made in his speech. But the final document emphasized the riveting new information about the halted "nuclear weapons program" rather than Iran's ongoing enrichment and missile activities.
Furthermore, the NIE narrowly defines the program as consisting of weapons "design work," presumably for a warhead that can be put atop a missile, plus some covert enrichment activities. The estimate explicitly states that the weapons program does not include Iran's publicly acknowledged uranium enrichment work, which Tehran says is aimed at low-level enrichment that can be used for civilian nuclear power. Skeptics say that if Iran masters low-level uranium enrichment it can eventually develop the high-level enrichment necessary for a nuclear bomb.
The definition of what exactly constitutes a weapons program is important, but the key judgments relegated it to a footnote. Some former intelligence officials say that the footnoted information could have been stated more boldly, and they speculate whether the key judgments were deliberately written in such a way as to convince readers that Iran's nuclear threat has lessened. Intelligence estimates, by definition, are supposed to state the views of the intelligence community, not to argue policy, these former officials say.
There is little evidence to indicate that intelligence analysts are trying to pre-empt a U.S. invasion of Iran by undercutting the Bush administration's ostensible rationale for such action. But the NIE leaves many of the intelligence community's supporters wondering if its authors grasped how the document would be read -- quickly, incautiously, and through political lenses. If the NIE was meant to clarify matters on Iran, it has arguably failed.
A number of longtime intelligence analysts and weapons experts, including those who have helped draft NIEs in the past and hold no particular allegiance to Bush, criticize the key judgments as poorly written, politically tone-deaf, and betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of what actually constitutes a nuclear weapons program.
Production of fissile material -- highly enriched uranium, or plutonium -- is generally viewed as the long pole in the nuclear tent. Once a country overcomes that hurdle, the path to a finished nuclear weapon is downhill. Iran may have halted some design activities, but how significant is that in light of its continuing low-level uranium enrichment and missile testing? As one former intelligence official with experience in NIEs put it, the intelligence community seemed to go to great lengths to answer the least important question -- the work on a warhead design.
Defenders of the NIE, including the senior officials and analysts who wrote it, counter that the document is the product of new, compelling information and a rigorous, top-to-bottom scrubbing of all the known intelligence about Iranian nuclear issues. One former senior intelligence official close to the NIE's drafters said that journalists had blown the top finding out of proportion. Indeed, the clause immediately following the opening sentence, which declared that the program was halted in 2003, reads, "We also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."
The key judgments clearly didn't give the Iranians a "clean bill of health," says Jeffrey Lewis, who directs the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and runs the blog ArmsControlWonk.com. "The press reporting took a badly written NIE and pulled out probably the least important fact, or misidentified what the NIE said," Lewis argues.
Reporters weren't the only ones to run with the headline, however. Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, blasted the key judgments before a Knesset committee earlier this month. The document "pulls the rug out from under" the push for stricter Iran sanctions, he said. The U.S. estimate leaves "Israel to face the threat alone," Dagan added.
A few days earlier, the French defense minister, Herve Morin, said during a visit to Washington, "Coordinated information from a number of intelligence services" had led the French to believe that Iran is "continuing to develop" a nuclear weapon.
Both Dagan and Morin presumably have access to information that was not contained in the declassified judgments. But even the U.S. intelligence community's top man has publicly tried to shift attention away from the NIE's conclusion about Iran's narrowly defined weapons program. McConnell, like Bush, has been far more emphatic about the threat that Iran poses. Eschewing the hedged language of his analysts -- "high confidence," "moderate confidence" -- his assessments are more rigid and more focused on Iran's growing strength. In a lengthy January profile in The New Yorker, McConnell said, "There's no doubt in this observer's mind that Iran is on the path to get a nuclear weapon. It will force an arms race in the region."
Where Iran lies on its road to nuclear status may be up for debate. But on one fact, all sides agree: Without all of the key components -- fissile material, a compact and resilient warhead, and a long-range missile to deliver it -- Iran has no nuclear weapon. Could Iran make a nuclear device that might work? Maybe. Does it have the technological infrastructure to go further? Certainly. But does Iran have a viable, long-range weapon with which to threaten its neighbors? No.
And perhaps that was the intelligence community's point in the NIE. If the Iranian nuclear program were likened to a three-legged stool, then one leg -- the weapons design -- was taken out nearly five years ago. It could be repaired, but in the meantime, the stool is useless.
"I turn the tables on the critics of the NIE," says George Friedman, the head of Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. "Lay out the number of components you need to produce a weapon. If there is one that the Iranians weren't working on, they have no program."
But this assessment may ignore the political realities of Iranian nuclear ambitions. Tehran's possession of even a rudimentary nuclear device could fundamentally upset the regional power balance. "Would you like to have to convince Israel or the Saudis not to worry that these devices are too large and crude to be delivered by missiles?" asks David Kay. He is the former United Nations chief weapons inspector who led the 2003 Iraq Survey Group that found that Saddam Hussein no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction. "Nukes are less about war fighting than about politics by other means," he says.
Kay adds that the intelligence community is apparently conflicted about Iran's capabilities and its intentions. A bullet point within the key judgments states, parenthetically, that because of "intelligence gaps," the Energy Department and the National Intelligence Council "assess with only moderate confidence" that Iran's 2003 halt to the weapons design program represented a stop to the "entire nuclear weapons program."
"That's a direct contradiction of the first sentence," which declared that the program had halted, Kay says, "and yet it doesn't come after the first sentence, which implies that all 16 agencies are in agreement." The Energy Department's less confident view is especially worrisome, Kay says, because DOE oversees the nation's nuclear laboratories and has the most nuclear weapons expertise within the intelligence community.
For his part, McConnell appears to understand that his release of the key judgments has affected not only the political climate but also the future work of his analysts and spies. He told The New Yorker, "I think putting it out was the right thing." But he admitted that the intelligence community continues to need better information to verify if Iran has restarted its weapons design work.
"Our job is to steal the secrets of foreign governments or foreign terrorist organizations, and so the more they know about the effectiveness of our tradecraft the more difficult it's going to be for us," McConnell said. "For the community I represent, I just made our life a lot harder."
Published in National Journal
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence, Iran
Full Article
The Other About-Face on Iran
Friday, December 14, 2007
In releasing a bombshell about Iran's nuclear program, intelligence director Mike McConnell reversed a vow of secrecy. But he probably had no choice.
"You will be disappointed," Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told a gathering of journalists in Washington on November 13. U.S. spy agencies were putting the finishing touches on a National Intelligence Estimate about Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities, which included new leads that the agencies had been vetting since spring. But departing from recent practice, McConnell said, "I do not intend to release unclassified key judgments" of the NIE, those heavily edited yet potentially telling morsels of analysis that might ultimately show how close the United States is to a war with Iran.
"We have probably done a thousand of these" NIEs, he said. "We have done unclassified key judgments for maybe three. So we created an expectation that we do this, because we did it previously." And that was a bad idea, McConnell said, with some passion.
For starters, even the "sanitized" version of an NIE could compromise vital sources and methods, he said, because the target of the estimate is, of course, going to read the document. Second, "I don't want to have a situation where the young analysts" -- whom McConnell guards with particular devotion because he was once one of them -- "are writing something because they know it's going to be a public debate or political debate. They should be writing it to call it as it is."
McConnell, whom a longtime colleague describes as having "not a political or manipulative bone in his body," also stated he would "make every effort" to prosecute anyone who leaked the NIE. Then, he vowed (twice) to resign if the intelligence was "cherry-picked in an inappropriate way" by government officials.
Things changed dramatically in the three weeks after McConnell's public denunciation of leaks and declassification. On December 3, McConnell and his aides reversed that decision and released the unclassified key judgments of the NIE on Iran. Try as McConnell might to keep the lid on the new estimate, his lieutenants were influenced by the political realities of intelligence these days.
"They thought it would leak and be distorted, and they thought they'd get ahead of that," said one former senior intelligence official close to the deliberations. "They decided it was better to put out a clean set of key judgments." Vice President Cheney went so far as to say that officials expected to lose control of some classified material. "There was a general belief -- that we all shared -- that it was important to put it out, that it was not likely to stay classified for long, anyway," Cheney told The Politico on December 5. "Everything leaks."
The leak-prevention strategy was a stark departure from the guidelines that McConnell had set out, both in November and a month earlier, when he issued this official policy: "The possibility that the [key judgments] or other positions of an estimate will be leaked is not a sufficient reason for preparing unclassified [key judgments]." In a briefing with reporters after the NIE was released, a senior intelligence official acknowledged that declassification "obviously represents a departure from [McConnell's] guidance."
The banner headline of the key judgments -- "that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" -- put the intelligence community precisely where McConnell didn't want it to be: in the middle of a ferocious political and policy debate in which sources and methods of the intelligence on Iran, as well as the analysis, are being openly discussed, exposed, debated, and, yes, cherry-picked to suit a range of agendas. Indeed, even though the NIE does not say that Iran poses no nuclear threat, the key judgments on areas besides the weapons program have had to compete with the dramatic top-line assessment.
Because the new estimate upends its predecessor, made in 2005, and has undercut any nuclear-related pretext for a U.S. bombing of Iran, the political and ideological dispositions of the analysts who wrote the NIE are, predictably, under scrutiny. Within days of the key judgments' release, former Bush administration officials and neoconservative icons mounted a full-scale attack on McConnell's lieutenants, some of whom had long careers in the State Department and have, the critics contend, historically underestimated Iran.
These critics characterized the NIE as the lieutenants' way of cutting off Cheney and the president on their presumed path to war with Iran -- a contention that wasn't refuted by senior intelligence officials' repeated assertions that Iran's decision to stop its program in 2003 and to keep it shuttered resulted directly from international pressures and sanctions. Indeed, intelligence officials have been careful not to assert that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the key motivator for Iran's change of plans. Whether McConnell's aides meant to pre-empt the White House or not, the conclusion is undeniable: The intelligence community is at odds with President Bush's forceful rhetoric on Iran.
Since the NIE was released, McConnell has been notably absent from the public fracas. His deputy, Donald Kerr, a veteran nuclear weapons expert, has given the intelligence community's only two on-the-record statements about the estimate. McConnell was out of the country when the key judgments were released.
Around Washington, rumors persist that McConnell threatened to resign over the issue. It's not clear, however, whether he staked his tenure on the NIE being released or withheld, or whether he saw any cherry-picking by the White House, but the gossip is one more measure of just how political the release of this document has become. Observers point out that in the month preceding the NIE, Bush warned that Iran's nuclear ambitions could lead to "World War III," and Cheney, four days later, gave a bellicose speech reminiscent of the run-up to war with Iraq over its weapons programs. The White House already knew by then, at a minimum, that the intelligence community was vetting potentially groundbreaking intelligence on Iran that could change the NIE.
Perhaps under pressure to back up their bold new claims on Iran, senior officials have gone further, giving on-background press interviews in which they catalog the streams of intelligence that led the analysts to change their nuclear conclusions -- purloined laptop computers loaded with weapons diagrams; notebooks and intercepted phone calls from high-ranking officials; and, as reported by the Los Angeles Times this week, a clandestine operation called "Brain Drain," in which the CIA helped mid- and top-level Iranian nuclear experts flee the country.
Unless officials are trying to affect the Iranian government's actions through a massive disinformation campaign, it would seem that the intelligence community has set aside McConnell's concerns about sources and methods. "I'm shocked by the level of public discussion," said a former senior intelligence official who worked on Iranian issues for many years, adding, "I don't see much good that comes from releasing NIEs."
Kerr has said that the release "was coordinated in discussion with senior policy makers," but that the intelligence community "took responsibility for what portions ... were to be declassified." Officials weighed "the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security" against protecting sources and methods, he said, and "felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available."
Still, only a dramatic turn of events would have led McConnell to abandon his policy of not making NIEs public, several former officials who know him said. One former high-ranking official involved in clandestine operations said that in more than 30 years in the intelligence business, he had never seen a key judgment change so dramatically so fast -- indicating that the new intelligence that officials picked up amounted to a veritable "smoking gun."
"Keep in mind, this thing had been built up, which is somewhat unusual for an NIE," said another former senior official, who has also worked on Capitol Hill. The document was months behind schedule, widely anticipated, and focused on one of the top foreign-policy issues of the moment. "I think this was an extraordinary circumstance," the former official said.
Expressing concern over the public airing of sources, a Senate staffer said that the NIE "has certainly been sucked into a political debate," and that McConnell is clearly concerned about the effect that the fallout might have on analysts. "For that, we will have to wait and see," the aide said. "I still think that he simply had no choice. There was no way this would stay secret, and he didn't want to be accused of trying to bury it. I think he held his nose and let it go."
Many intelligence professionals concur. And in the NIE's release, they see signs not of an outright insurrection against the Bush administration but of a reassertion by the intelligence community of its ability to influence policy -- public or otherwise. McConnell's team is hardly backing down in the face of the neocon onslaught. Last Saturday, Kerr shot back at the NIE's critics in an unusual and terse public statement. Labeled "In response to those questioning the analytic work and integrity of the United States intelligence community," Kerr's statement said that the agencies' "task ... is to produce objective, ground-truth analysis. We feel confident in our analytic tradecraft and resulting analysis in this estimate."
So there.
Published in National Journal.
Friday, December 14, 2007
In releasing a bombshell about Iran's nuclear program, intelligence director Mike McConnell reversed a vow of secrecy. But he probably had no choice.
"You will be disappointed," Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told a gathering of journalists in Washington on November 13. U.S. spy agencies were putting the finishing touches on a National Intelligence Estimate about Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities, which included new leads that the agencies had been vetting since spring. But departing from recent practice, McConnell said, "I do not intend to release unclassified key judgments" of the NIE, those heavily edited yet potentially telling morsels of analysis that might ultimately show how close the United States is to a war with Iran.
"We have probably done a thousand of these" NIEs, he said. "We have done unclassified key judgments for maybe three. So we created an expectation that we do this, because we did it previously." And that was a bad idea, McConnell said, with some passion.
For starters, even the "sanitized" version of an NIE could compromise vital sources and methods, he said, because the target of the estimate is, of course, going to read the document. Second, "I don't want to have a situation where the young analysts" -- whom McConnell guards with particular devotion because he was once one of them -- "are writing something because they know it's going to be a public debate or political debate. They should be writing it to call it as it is."
McConnell, whom a longtime colleague describes as having "not a political or manipulative bone in his body," also stated he would "make every effort" to prosecute anyone who leaked the NIE. Then, he vowed (twice) to resign if the intelligence was "cherry-picked in an inappropriate way" by government officials.
Things changed dramatically in the three weeks after McConnell's public denunciation of leaks and declassification. On December 3, McConnell and his aides reversed that decision and released the unclassified key judgments of the NIE on Iran. Try as McConnell might to keep the lid on the new estimate, his lieutenants were influenced by the political realities of intelligence these days.
"They thought it would leak and be distorted, and they thought they'd get ahead of that," said one former senior intelligence official close to the deliberations. "They decided it was better to put out a clean set of key judgments." Vice President Cheney went so far as to say that officials expected to lose control of some classified material. "There was a general belief -- that we all shared -- that it was important to put it out, that it was not likely to stay classified for long, anyway," Cheney told The Politico on December 5. "Everything leaks."
The leak-prevention strategy was a stark departure from the guidelines that McConnell had set out, both in November and a month earlier, when he issued this official policy: "The possibility that the [key judgments] or other positions of an estimate will be leaked is not a sufficient reason for preparing unclassified [key judgments]." In a briefing with reporters after the NIE was released, a senior intelligence official acknowledged that declassification "obviously represents a departure from [McConnell's] guidance."
The banner headline of the key judgments -- "that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" -- put the intelligence community precisely where McConnell didn't want it to be: in the middle of a ferocious political and policy debate in which sources and methods of the intelligence on Iran, as well as the analysis, are being openly discussed, exposed, debated, and, yes, cherry-picked to suit a range of agendas. Indeed, even though the NIE does not say that Iran poses no nuclear threat, the key judgments on areas besides the weapons program have had to compete with the dramatic top-line assessment.
Because the new estimate upends its predecessor, made in 2005, and has undercut any nuclear-related pretext for a U.S. bombing of Iran, the political and ideological dispositions of the analysts who wrote the NIE are, predictably, under scrutiny. Within days of the key judgments' release, former Bush administration officials and neoconservative icons mounted a full-scale attack on McConnell's lieutenants, some of whom had long careers in the State Department and have, the critics contend, historically underestimated Iran.
These critics characterized the NIE as the lieutenants' way of cutting off Cheney and the president on their presumed path to war with Iran -- a contention that wasn't refuted by senior intelligence officials' repeated assertions that Iran's decision to stop its program in 2003 and to keep it shuttered resulted directly from international pressures and sanctions. Indeed, intelligence officials have been careful not to assert that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the key motivator for Iran's change of plans. Whether McConnell's aides meant to pre-empt the White House or not, the conclusion is undeniable: The intelligence community is at odds with President Bush's forceful rhetoric on Iran.
Since the NIE was released, McConnell has been notably absent from the public fracas. His deputy, Donald Kerr, a veteran nuclear weapons expert, has given the intelligence community's only two on-the-record statements about the estimate. McConnell was out of the country when the key judgments were released.
Around Washington, rumors persist that McConnell threatened to resign over the issue. It's not clear, however, whether he staked his tenure on the NIE being released or withheld, or whether he saw any cherry-picking by the White House, but the gossip is one more measure of just how political the release of this document has become. Observers point out that in the month preceding the NIE, Bush warned that Iran's nuclear ambitions could lead to "World War III," and Cheney, four days later, gave a bellicose speech reminiscent of the run-up to war with Iraq over its weapons programs. The White House already knew by then, at a minimum, that the intelligence community was vetting potentially groundbreaking intelligence on Iran that could change the NIE.
Perhaps under pressure to back up their bold new claims on Iran, senior officials have gone further, giving on-background press interviews in which they catalog the streams of intelligence that led the analysts to change their nuclear conclusions -- purloined laptop computers loaded with weapons diagrams; notebooks and intercepted phone calls from high-ranking officials; and, as reported by the Los Angeles Times this week, a clandestine operation called "Brain Drain," in which the CIA helped mid- and top-level Iranian nuclear experts flee the country.
Unless officials are trying to affect the Iranian government's actions through a massive disinformation campaign, it would seem that the intelligence community has set aside McConnell's concerns about sources and methods. "I'm shocked by the level of public discussion," said a former senior intelligence official who worked on Iranian issues for many years, adding, "I don't see much good that comes from releasing NIEs."
Kerr has said that the release "was coordinated in discussion with senior policy makers," but that the intelligence community "took responsibility for what portions ... were to be declassified." Officials weighed "the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security" against protecting sources and methods, he said, and "felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available."
Still, only a dramatic turn of events would have led McConnell to abandon his policy of not making NIEs public, several former officials who know him said. One former high-ranking official involved in clandestine operations said that in more than 30 years in the intelligence business, he had never seen a key judgment change so dramatically so fast -- indicating that the new intelligence that officials picked up amounted to a veritable "smoking gun."
"Keep in mind, this thing had been built up, which is somewhat unusual for an NIE," said another former senior official, who has also worked on Capitol Hill. The document was months behind schedule, widely anticipated, and focused on one of the top foreign-policy issues of the moment. "I think this was an extraordinary circumstance," the former official said.
Expressing concern over the public airing of sources, a Senate staffer said that the NIE "has certainly been sucked into a political debate," and that McConnell is clearly concerned about the effect that the fallout might have on analysts. "For that, we will have to wait and see," the aide said. "I still think that he simply had no choice. There was no way this would stay secret, and he didn't want to be accused of trying to bury it. I think he held his nose and let it go."
Many intelligence professionals concur. And in the NIE's release, they see signs not of an outright insurrection against the Bush administration but of a reassertion by the intelligence community of its ability to influence policy -- public or otherwise. McConnell's team is hardly backing down in the face of the neocon onslaught. Last Saturday, Kerr shot back at the NIE's critics in an unusual and terse public statement. Labeled "In response to those questioning the analytic work and integrity of the United States intelligence community," Kerr's statement said that the agencies' "task ... is to produce objective, ground-truth analysis. We feel confident in our analytic tradecraft and resulting analysis in this estimate."
So there.
Published in National Journal.
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence, Iran, Management, Politics
Full Article
A Court at the Crossroads
Friday, October 19, 2007
As Democrats and Republicans debate legislation that would alter 30-year-old limits on intrusive electronic and physical searches by the government, the secretive 11-member court that oversees surveillance of foreign-intelligence targets in the United States finds itself in the middle of a very public power struggle.
Regardless of where law and policy makers fall on the question, now being debated, about which governmental branch should hold the most sway over intelligence operations, and which political party has the more effective and fair solution, they all agree on this much: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court should play referee, and the government should receive some kind of authorization for a still-secret set of spying activities that many agree are essential to the war on terrorism. If that oversight results in warrants that violate the Constitution, as some scholars fear would occur if pending legislation is enacted, most Republicans and Democrats don't appear concerned about such a prospect or even cognizant of it. Such is the court's brave new world.
It is an odd, but perhaps not unwelcome, reality that the intelligence judges now play a decisive role in this controversy. Odd because for most of American history, the judiciary has ruled itself least qualified among the branches of government to manage intelligence activities. But not unwelcome because this court has waded into these waters before, and it believes it has been an indispensable buffer against government excess.
The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the court's animating law, was a grand political compromise. After years of unchecked surveillance by the FBI and intelligence agencies of prominent Americans and political dissidents both before and during the Nixon presidency, the FISA court became the arbiter of when and how the executive branch can spy on suspected foreign agents and terrorists inside the country. Especially after the 9/11 attacks, the judges have included more experts in national security law, court-watchers say, and the court's former chief judge has proudly proclaimed that the court turns down almost no surveillance requests because the government has learned to play within FISA's boundaries.
This system, however, was upended after the 9/11 attacks, when President Bush issued orders that allowed him to bypass the court when tracking domestic terrorism suspects. The orders seemed to reflect a long-held, simmering animosity toward the body by some senior administration officials, particularly Vice President Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, who reportedly told a colleague after 9/11 that "we're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court."
Now, though, the court is regaining some of the authority it had lost. And if the president signs a new Democratic proposal to further amend FISA, the court would play a central and untested role in overseeing surveillance. It may welcome the chance.
Former Chief FISA Court Judge Royce Lamberth has described a panel of jurists confident in its interpretation of surveillance law, equipped to issue warrants quickly, and flexible enough to write new procedures during wartime. In remarks at the annual conference of the American Library Association in June, Lamberth, who left his post in 2002, said he hadn't found a better way of controlling government surveillance. But, the former judge added, there was a "worse way," and that was "what the president did with the National Security Agency": Bush's post-9/11 orders allowed the government's eavesdroppers to intercept communications inside the United States without the court's approval.
The NSA program, begun just after 9/11 and dubbed "the terrorist surveillance program" by Bush, continued without judicial check for more than five years, until January 2007, when the administration placed it under FISA court review. The exact contours of the court's initial orders about the program, which were to last for 90 days, are secret.
For that first 90-day period, the NSA program proceeded unimpeded, intelligence officials say. But, according to Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, in spring 2007 a different FISA judge said that the government needed a warrant to capture electronic communications between parties in foreign countries as those communications pass through routing equipment in the United States. "We found ourselves in a position of actually losing ground," McConnell told the El Paso Times in August. The government would have to apply for a warrant for each phone number it monitored in this way, and it takes about "200 man-hours" to fill out the necessary paperwork, McConnell said. FISA experts and lawmakers note, however, that the law contains emergency provisions that allow monitoring to begin before a court order.
The ruling on the U.S.-routed calls was a rare push-back from a court that, by Lamberth's count, has approved 99 percent of the government's warrant applications. The Bush administration then launched a massive lobbying effort to amend FISA; in August, Congress passed the Protect America Act. It effectively reversed the court's normal procedures (these require a warrant before surveillance) and gave judges an after-the-fact-review power for surveillance procedures, which inevitably pick up domestic communications when foreign targets call or e-mail people located in this country. The law was panned for its hasty and imprecise language, and some observers thought it even authorized warrantless physical searches of people's possessions and premises.
This brings the court to its current crossroads. To correct the law's deficiencies, as they see them, Democratic Reps. Silvestre Reyes of Texas and John Conyers of Michigan, the respective chairmen of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, have introduced the RESTORE Act, short for Responsible Surveillance That is Overseen, Reviewed, and Effective. The Democrats have said that the bill would "protect innocent Americans from warrantless eavesdropping." Republicans have blasted it as a roadblock in the executive's path, and the bill was suddenly pulled from the House floor on October 17. But as Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution scholar and an expert on the FISA court, writes in The New Republic Online this week, Protect America and RESTORE are actually quite similar. They do, however, hold significant implications for the court.
"Under either approach, the [NSA] will have the legal authority to listen to your calls without first going to the [FISA] court to get a warrant," as long as the targets are people overseas calling people in the United States, Wittes writes. Under the Protect America Act, which the administration favors, the FISA court plays "only a tiny retroactive role in approving procedures for overseas surveillance." But under RESTORE, the court "would play a slightly-less-tiny role in rubber-stamping [surveillance] programs," Wittes maintains. The court, under RESTORE, is given additional powers to review and modify "minimization procedures," which are secret, are written by the government, and are supposed to ensure that information about "U.S. persons" (defined as U.S. citizens or legal residents) is scrubbed from intelligence reports.
Under the RESTORE Act, the court would also have a new, controversial power: granting programmatic or "blanket" warrants for whole classes of individuals overseas who are not U.S. persons. Historically, courts have ruled that such orders violate the Fourth Amendment, which requires that warrants be issued against specific individuals and locations. And although the foreign targets of surveillance don't enjoy constitutional protections, the U.S. persons whom they might call do.
Wittes argues that the RESTORE Act's "approach is a little like asking the courts to approve the reasonableness of police arrest policies prospectively instead of reviewing individual arrests. It's not the way we traditionally do things in the American constitutional system -- and it creates a potentially serious set of constitutional problems with the bill." But the law would require the administration to submit to the court "the procedures it uses to determine which surveillance is exempt from FISA -- and the court has the ability to send them back if they're unreasonable," he adds.
Under the previous version of FISA, the judges found ways to discipline the government. They could reject an application for a warrant; in one case, Lamberth barred a senior FBI official from appearing before the court, because he said that the official had presented false information. The RESTORE Act wouldn't really take these powers away.
Still, some see the recent amendments to FISA as a further weakening of constitutional protections. "There are significant problems that existed with FISA before the Protect America Act," says Jameel Jaffer, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project, who is leading a legal effort to have the court release its written opinions on the NSA's surveillance program.
The court "was created to circumvent the Fourth Amendment," says Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University Law School and one of the few lawyers ever to go inside the court's secure room. With the Protect America and RESTORE acts, Turley says, "Democrats and Republicans are amending the Constitution by default."
For their part, the FISA court judges are unlikely to weigh in directly on the constitutional debate. But using history as a guide, it seems unlikely that they'll do anything more or less than apply the statute as directed by Congress. Presumably, they'll also steer clear of deciding how valid the statute actually is.
Friday, October 19, 2007
As Democrats and Republicans debate legislation that would alter 30-year-old limits on intrusive electronic and physical searches by the government, the secretive 11-member court that oversees surveillance of foreign-intelligence targets in the United States finds itself in the middle of a very public power struggle.
Regardless of where law and policy makers fall on the question, now being debated, about which governmental branch should hold the most sway over intelligence operations, and which political party has the more effective and fair solution, they all agree on this much: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court should play referee, and the government should receive some kind of authorization for a still-secret set of spying activities that many agree are essential to the war on terrorism. If that oversight results in warrants that violate the Constitution, as some scholars fear would occur if pending legislation is enacted, most Republicans and Democrats don't appear concerned about such a prospect or even cognizant of it. Such is the court's brave new world.
It is an odd, but perhaps not unwelcome, reality that the intelligence judges now play a decisive role in this controversy. Odd because for most of American history, the judiciary has ruled itself least qualified among the branches of government to manage intelligence activities. But not unwelcome because this court has waded into these waters before, and it believes it has been an indispensable buffer against government excess.
The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the court's animating law, was a grand political compromise. After years of unchecked surveillance by the FBI and intelligence agencies of prominent Americans and political dissidents both before and during the Nixon presidency, the FISA court became the arbiter of when and how the executive branch can spy on suspected foreign agents and terrorists inside the country. Especially after the 9/11 attacks, the judges have included more experts in national security law, court-watchers say, and the court's former chief judge has proudly proclaimed that the court turns down almost no surveillance requests because the government has learned to play within FISA's boundaries.
This system, however, was upended after the 9/11 attacks, when President Bush issued orders that allowed him to bypass the court when tracking domestic terrorism suspects. The orders seemed to reflect a long-held, simmering animosity toward the body by some senior administration officials, particularly Vice President Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, who reportedly told a colleague after 9/11 that "we're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court."
Now, though, the court is regaining some of the authority it had lost. And if the president signs a new Democratic proposal to further amend FISA, the court would play a central and untested role in overseeing surveillance. It may welcome the chance.
Former Chief FISA Court Judge Royce Lamberth has described a panel of jurists confident in its interpretation of surveillance law, equipped to issue warrants quickly, and flexible enough to write new procedures during wartime. In remarks at the annual conference of the American Library Association in June, Lamberth, who left his post in 2002, said he hadn't found a better way of controlling government surveillance. But, the former judge added, there was a "worse way," and that was "what the president did with the National Security Agency": Bush's post-9/11 orders allowed the government's eavesdroppers to intercept communications inside the United States without the court's approval.
The NSA program, begun just after 9/11 and dubbed "the terrorist surveillance program" by Bush, continued without judicial check for more than five years, until January 2007, when the administration placed it under FISA court review. The exact contours of the court's initial orders about the program, which were to last for 90 days, are secret.
For that first 90-day period, the NSA program proceeded unimpeded, intelligence officials say. But, according to Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, in spring 2007 a different FISA judge said that the government needed a warrant to capture electronic communications between parties in foreign countries as those communications pass through routing equipment in the United States. "We found ourselves in a position of actually losing ground," McConnell told the El Paso Times in August. The government would have to apply for a warrant for each phone number it monitored in this way, and it takes about "200 man-hours" to fill out the necessary paperwork, McConnell said. FISA experts and lawmakers note, however, that the law contains emergency provisions that allow monitoring to begin before a court order.
The ruling on the U.S.-routed calls was a rare push-back from a court that, by Lamberth's count, has approved 99 percent of the government's warrant applications. The Bush administration then launched a massive lobbying effort to amend FISA; in August, Congress passed the Protect America Act. It effectively reversed the court's normal procedures (these require a warrant before surveillance) and gave judges an after-the-fact-review power for surveillance procedures, which inevitably pick up domestic communications when foreign targets call or e-mail people located in this country. The law was panned for its hasty and imprecise language, and some observers thought it even authorized warrantless physical searches of people's possessions and premises.
This brings the court to its current crossroads. To correct the law's deficiencies, as they see them, Democratic Reps. Silvestre Reyes of Texas and John Conyers of Michigan, the respective chairmen of the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, have introduced the RESTORE Act, short for Responsible Surveillance That is Overseen, Reviewed, and Effective. The Democrats have said that the bill would "protect innocent Americans from warrantless eavesdropping." Republicans have blasted it as a roadblock in the executive's path, and the bill was suddenly pulled from the House floor on October 17. But as Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution scholar and an expert on the FISA court, writes in The New Republic Online this week, Protect America and RESTORE are actually quite similar. They do, however, hold significant implications for the court.
"Under either approach, the [NSA] will have the legal authority to listen to your calls without first going to the [FISA] court to get a warrant," as long as the targets are people overseas calling people in the United States, Wittes writes. Under the Protect America Act, which the administration favors, the FISA court plays "only a tiny retroactive role in approving procedures for overseas surveillance." But under RESTORE, the court "would play a slightly-less-tiny role in rubber-stamping [surveillance] programs," Wittes maintains. The court, under RESTORE, is given additional powers to review and modify "minimization procedures," which are secret, are written by the government, and are supposed to ensure that information about "U.S. persons" (defined as U.S. citizens or legal residents) is scrubbed from intelligence reports.
Under the RESTORE Act, the court would also have a new, controversial power: granting programmatic or "blanket" warrants for whole classes of individuals overseas who are not U.S. persons. Historically, courts have ruled that such orders violate the Fourth Amendment, which requires that warrants be issued against specific individuals and locations. And although the foreign targets of surveillance don't enjoy constitutional protections, the U.S. persons whom they might call do.
Wittes argues that the RESTORE Act's "approach is a little like asking the courts to approve the reasonableness of police arrest policies prospectively instead of reviewing individual arrests. It's not the way we traditionally do things in the American constitutional system -- and it creates a potentially serious set of constitutional problems with the bill." But the law would require the administration to submit to the court "the procedures it uses to determine which surveillance is exempt from FISA -- and the court has the ability to send them back if they're unreasonable," he adds.
Under the previous version of FISA, the judges found ways to discipline the government. They could reject an application for a warrant; in one case, Lamberth barred a senior FBI official from appearing before the court, because he said that the official had presented false information. The RESTORE Act wouldn't really take these powers away.
Still, some see the recent amendments to FISA as a further weakening of constitutional protections. "There are significant problems that existed with FISA before the Protect America Act," says Jameel Jaffer, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project, who is leading a legal effort to have the court release its written opinions on the NSA's surveillance program.
The court "was created to circumvent the Fourth Amendment," says Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University Law School and one of the few lawyers ever to go inside the court's secure room. With the Protect America and RESTORE acts, Turley says, "Democrats and Republicans are amending the Constitution by default."
For their part, the FISA court judges are unlikely to weigh in directly on the constitutional debate. But using history as a guide, it seems unlikely that they'll do anything more or less than apply the statute as directed by Congress. Presumably, they'll also steer clear of deciding how valid the statute actually is.
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Intelligence, National Security Agency, Politics, Terrorism
Full Article
The Liberator
Friday, September 21, 2007
Mike Wertheimer may be the most dangerous man in U.S. intelligence. You would probably never guess it, judging from his lengthy and opaque title -- assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic transformation and technology. A perfect testament to the well-worn bureaucratic tradition of offering little insight by tossing around a lot of words.
Wertheimer's squishy and unassuming title only hints at some vague, general notion of what he actually does for a living. Particularly for the uninitiated, the moniker buries a sense of authority beneath a pair of prefixes (assistant deputy) and offers an unsatisfying buzzword descriptor (transformation), whose etymology points to some consultant's pocket glossary. The title screams "middle management" and thus reassures, "This guy is not a threat."
That message is especially ironic, because to thousands of powerful career employees in the American intelligence community, Wertheimer is, in fact, very threatening. He threatens to upend their world, to change the way they work, and to foist on them the values of a younger generation of spies, who happen to outnumber them. He also threatens to change the way that policy makers use intelligence to reach decisions, and so to "transform" the intelligence agencies' role in the government. All of this makes Mike Wertheimer very dangerous to people who oppose his basic assumptions. And he knows that. He also knows that, to many thousands more in the intelligence field, he is something of a savior.
To understand the origins and purpose of Wertheimer's office, of which he is the first occupant, it helps to refer to a document that also bears a lengthy title, the report by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Better known as the WMD commission report, it provides a painstaking explanation of how 15 intelligence agencies collectively failed to discover that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction.
The contrary assertion that he did have those weapons -- and thus was a threat to the Middle East and a potential benefactor for terrorists -- was, of course, the Bush administration's chief casus belli for the Iraq war. The claim was backed up at the highest levels of the intelligence community in a National Intelligence Estimate released to Congress in October 2002. The WMD commission, which published its findings in 2005, echoed the sentiments of many intelligence professionals, including some who had participated in and blessed the flawed prewar analysis, by pronouncing the episode "one of the most public -- and most damaging -- intelligence failures in recent American history."
Wertheimer's job is to prevent any more such failures and to make sure that the intelligence agencies can accurately predict a host of catastrophic events, including terrorist attacks and disease outbreaks. The commission laid much of the blame for the bad call on Iraq at the feet of analysts, whom it called "the voice of the intelligence community." Although the problems begin with the failure to collect the right information in the first place, the commission particularly faulted the analysts' inability to make sense of intelligence, and to present their judgments to decision makers. During his time in government, Colin Powell was widely regarded among professionals as a decision maker who understood this inherently murky process. He would say to his intelligence officers, "Tell me what you know, tell me what you don't know, and then tell me what you think is most likely to happen." When that analysis breaks down, as it did with Iraq, "the consequences can be grave," the commission wrote.
To be sure, many career analysts object to the "flaws" the commission cited in their tradecraft, regarding both Iraq and another notorious intelligence failure: the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But very few argue with the substance, or the roots, of these breakdowns. The "intelligence community," as the agencies are collectively known, hardly operates as one, and this lack of coordination and -- especially -- collaboration among analysts means that agency leaders and their clients often don't know what the analysts don't know. The disconnect also means that contrary analysis -- of which there was a significant amount in the run-up to the Iraq war -- may find no quarter in analysts' final judgments. It is a disastrous situation for policy makers, who are increasingly turning to nongovernment experts and the news media for rapid, cogent analysis that the intelligence agencies can't always provide.
The WMD commission identified the fix: "Integrate the community of analysts." That's easier said than done, of course, but Wertheimer and others who understand how very un-integrated the analysts are today know that it is prescriptive advice that they can't afford to reject.
The Threat Within
"Post-9/11, we coined a term, the 'asymmetric threat,' " Wertheimer says. "That's a fancy way of describing a future in which the targets for intelligence, the things that we will focus on, are built, designed, and operate completely differently than the way we do." Transformation, that fuzzy word in his title, means "removing that asymmetry."
Before the attacks, the intelligence community was "like a power builder -- very muscular but not very fast," Wertheimer says. Today, the agencies need to be swift. They need to analyze more information faster. But analysts also need new ways to connect to one another, to benefit from one another's knowledge. If a specialist on sub-Saharan Africa at the Defense Intelligence Agency is studying terrorist inroads into tribal communities, shouldn't a CIA expert in Africa studies know that? Might she have something useful to contribute to the inquiry?
Collaboration isn't an especially novel concept, and the WMD commission wasn't the first to suggest that analysts do more of it. But Wertheimer is the first official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence -- the "czar" of the community -- to make collaboration a full-time job. Gen. Michael Hayden, the former principal deputy director of national intelligence who is now the CIA director, created the position after talking with Wertheimer two years ago about how to change the way the community operates. The new intelligence director, Mike McConnell, has forcefully backed the transformational efforts, as has his deputy in charge of analysis, Tom Fingar, a career analyst who used to run intelligence at the State Department. Fingar, who is essentially the only official layer between Wertheimer and McConnell, is the political muscle in this endeavor. Wertheimer is the idea man, "my philosopher of transformation," as Fingar recently put it.
Transformation has less to do with changing procedures than with changing people. A key pillar is a suite of new information-sharing and collaborative technologies that look and feel a lot like Google, Wikipedia, and MySpace, the networking and search tools that younger analysts grew up using at home and in their dorm rooms. These newcomers have been baffled to find that these 21st-century staples aren't widely used within the intelligence community.
The first of the new intelligence tools came online recently. Analysts can now log on to Intellipedia, a collaborative knowledge base that they can use to swap leads and examine one another's work. (Officials say that Intellipedia helped one group of analysts create a helpful report on Iraqi insurgents' use of chlorine gas to increase the lethality of improvised explosive devices.) Later this year, Wertheimer's team will launch A-Space ("A" for analyst), modeled after MySpace and the popular website Facebook. Officials hope the new site will help analysts create social networks outside established channels.
In addition to the new tools, Wertheimer and his colleagues have created unusual training programs. One sends analysts to a monthlong retreat at a classified location where they work alongside private-sector experts to investigate complex intelligence topics. Another takes young analysts out of their assigned jobs for two years and puts them through an intensive training program where they learn the tradecraft but also such on-the-ground spy skills as defensive driving and weapons handling. Agencies will ultimately deploy these analysts to global hot spots to support spies in the field.
It's no accident that Wertheimer and his team are aiming these new tools and programs at the younger crowd. Sixty percent of U.S. intelligence analysts have five years of experience or less on the job. In the larger intelligence community of about 100,000 employees, which includes clandestine operatives and support staff, those young workers are about 40 percent of the rolls. America's spies are decidedly green, and they're not comfortable -- or particularly useful -- working in bureaucratic silos without Internet browsers, instant messaging, and social networking sites on their desktops.
In his quest for transformation, Wertheimer is playing to this youthful workforce that finds collaboration neither newfangled nor threatening. For these analysts, networking is just the way information moves. But to the intelligence establishment, information is power, and relinquishing it means losing that power, as the WMD commission and many other critics have repeatedly lamented. It seems illogical to the generation of electronic socializers, but when information moves around, and becomes known to people who don't have the "need to know," veteran members of the community view it as no longer special because it's no longer secret. Too much collaboration also threatens to reveal the sources and methods by which agencies obtain information -- secrets they must zealously guard lest those sources dry up or get killed.
Sharing and secrecy are opposing forces. So this is Wertheimer's task: Transform the massive intelligence bureaucracy into a collaborative network, in which loose lips are, in a way, encouraged; introduce technologies that many seasoned analysts neither understand nor trust; and build a cadre of young, ambitious rookies, who just can't believe they're not allowed to check their personal e-mail at work, into the future of the business.
The opposition is fierce. When The New York Times wrote about A-Space recently, analysts commented about the piece, and about Wertheimer, on a private intelligence community blog. Some recorded their dramatic dissent. "I guarantee," one intelligence employee wrote, "Mike Wertheimer will cause people to get killed over this."
"I am threatening the status quo," Wertheimer says. "And that's a hard pill to swallow for anybody."
Taking the Blame
Wertheimer, 50, is a mathematician who earned his master's and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He spent 21 years as a cryptologist at the National Security Agency, and rose to become the agency's most senior technical leader. On paper, he fits the stereotype captured in an old joke among NSA hands: "How can you tell an extroverted analyst? He's the one who looks at your shoes when he's talking."
But Wertheimer defies typecasting. When he speaks, he looks people in the eye, but often from above -- he is 6 feet, 1 inch tall. He has arching eyebrows that signal when he's listening but also serve as a warning for when he's about to descend with an impassioned argument or an analogy that he thinks perfectly captures what he's up against. (In a recent conversation, Wertheimer compared the government's attempts at collaboration to the Borg, the supremely villainous race of cyber-aliens on Star Trek: The Next Generation who "assimilate" whole societies by stripping people of individual character traits and turn them into one giant collective.) If you spotted Wertheimer in a room, or even better, watched him work a room, you might wonder why he hasn't sought his fortune on the motivational speaking circuit.
When he speaks, you get the feeling that he's talking to you. He reveals a lot about himself, which might be unsettling if he weren't so earnest about connecting his flaws and fears to his intelligence work. At a recent conference on analytic transformation in Chicago, Wertheimer confessed to a crowd of more than 400 people that after the 9/11 attacks he felt personally responsible for not anticipating Al Qaeda's strike. He became depressed, he said, and was inconsolable until his father snapped him out of it. "I don't blame you for this," Wertheimer's dad told him, and then warned, "You're scaring your kids," who thought that whenever their father had to rush back to the office, something very bad was about to happen. Wertheimer briefly left government in 2003 to work as a technology consultant but returned two years later.
Wertheimer is like a number of other veteran intelligence officials who were involved in the global hunt for terrorists before 9/11. They feel that their own actions -- more precisely, their inactions -- allowed the disaster. Wertheimer says he blames himself and his colleagues. He thinks he personally failed and, accepting his part in a broken system, he seems to have no qualms about tearing it down and rebuilding.
"It is something that he can appreciate as being absolutely critical to the future of this country and the protection of the country, and when you hear him speak, you get caught up in that emotion," says Tim Sample, a former analyst and staff director of the House Select Committee on Intelligence who knows Wertheimer well. Sample is president of the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance, which co-hosted the Chicago conference with the intelligence director's office.
In large measure, Wertheimer's charisma comes from his willingness to defy tradition. "We are going to share more," he said in his Chicago speech. "We are going to take risks." Directing his remarks at those who would rather preserve the status quo, he said, "For the first time, the challenge is not why we can't do it; it's how you're going to find a way to secure this." Rather than appeasing members of the intelligence community who blanch at collaboration and its attendant security risks, Wertheimer lays the burden on their shoulders and tells them that if collaboration doesn't happen, they'll take the blame.
But if Wertheimer succeeds, it probably won't be by convincing his intransigent opponents. Rather, he will work with that younger generation at whom transformation is aimed. By and large, these newer members of the community are optimistic and, like him, believe that the intelligence community is dangerously broken.
"It's Huge"
Sean Wohltman, a 25-year-old counter-terrorism analyst with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, embodies the kind of optimistic disillusionment that Wertheimer wants to harness. Two years after defending his master's thesis in geographic information science at Virginia Tech University, Wohltman joined the government "following a call for patriotism," he said. He encountered "disappointment and disillusionment" in his first three months on the job, however.
As Wohltman explained to the Chicago conference, "When I first logged on to what I expected to be a terminal from 24's [counter-terrorist unit] command center, I was instead driven to my agency's home page, which flashed information about an upcoming picnic and links to fill out my health insurance. And not only that, it launched in Netscape." Those in the audience who laughed understood that Netscape is an obsolete Internet browser.
Later, Wohltman explained why it mattered to him that the intelligence agencies were so far behind the technological curve. In 1999, when the popular and controversial music file-sharing system Napster debuted, he pointed out, Ricky Martin's "Livin' la Vida Loca" and other corporately manufactured pop hits topped the Billboard charts. Only artists from big record labels got mass recognition, and listeners were cut off from the bounty of independent and innovative artists who excelled in a variety of musical styles. But that year, Napster's collaborative technology allowed fans of lesser-known artists to share songs, which in turn boosted their recognition, fanned their popularity, and led to greater awareness of the wider music scene. It also fueled the market for independent music and challenged the record companies' dominance of the industry.
Taking Wohltman's analogy, Wertheimer says that the intelligence agencies could be compared to the record companies. Information is filtered through a hierarchical process that culminates in senior executives choosing what intelligence to disseminate to customers. Similar to Napster, tools such as Intellipedia and A-Space -- known as "disruptive technologies" -- bypass this process and get more information out to a wider audience.
But will collaboration guarantee better analysis? Did Napster improve music quality? Did it benefit the industry as a whole? Recording artists and companies sued Napster for copyright infringement, and the network shut down in 2001, eventually to be reborn as a pay-for-service system.
Napster did pave the way for other innovative technologies, which adapted to customers' demands to buy music a la carte, rather than having to pay for an entire album. Today, Apple's iTunes sells songs for 99 cents and threatens the record companies' control of their own products. Collaboration, in a sense, won out, and customers' demand for more music, delivered in new ways, has opened the market to more artists. "Will this lead to better music?" Wertheimer asks. "I can't believe that it will not."
Wertheimer and other transformation proponents often point to iTunes, and the hugely successful iPod music player, to support their theory that collaboration can fundamentally change and improve people's lives. And they reason that A-Space, Intellipedia, and other innovative services will create demand in the intelligence community and overwhelm the transformation naysayers.
Wertheimer channels the enthusiasm of Apple's CEO and co-founder, Steve Jobs, whose rousing keynote speeches, known as "Stevenotes," command more press coverage and world attention than speeches by most members of Congress. But as with Jobs, some skeptics question both the substance and the goal behind Wertheimer's zeal.
Early in Jobs's career, a co-worker coined the term "reality distortion field" to describe the aura that the Apple prophet cast over his spellbound audiences. The term could easily apply to Wertheimer's enthusiastic showmanship. Wikipedia describes RDF as "the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, exaggeration, and marketing. RDF is said to distort an audience's sense of proportion or scale. Small advances are applauded as breakthroughs. Interesting developments become turning points, or huge leaps forward." (The phenomenon has been applied to other leaders, as well.)
Wertheimer does, in fact, applaud certain advances as breakthroughs that others -- particularly those outside of government -- might find underwhelming. For instance, one planned transformation program, the Library of National Intelligence, would be a repository of all the documents produced by all of the agencies. Eventually, Wertheimer hopes, analysts will search the library for key terms, and an automated system will help to judge who should have access to classified materials. He calls this program "huge."
Why is it huge? Some observers would have a hard time believing that the agencies didn't already have such a resource, the kind that most large organizations take for granted. LexisNexis, for example, contains copies of every article published in most of the country's periodicals. Following basic business practices, most companies compile and retain their internal documents for research and for legal purposes.
Wertheimer is careful to put things in perspective. "It's big," he says of the library. But then he quickly follows up: "For us, it's huge." And he's right. Much to the consternation of the WMD commission and others, this is a giant leap for the intelligence community, a kind of moon-landing moment.
But do collaborative libraries -- and wikis, blogs, networking websites, and special training -- make transformation worthwhile?
Change Without End
Mark Lowenthal retired in 2005 as the assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production. Among seasoned intelligence officials, he is considered one of the most knowledgeable authorities on analysis, the agencies' shortcomings in that regard, and the education of young analysts in the ways of the tradecraft. So in Chicago, when Lowenthal stood up to question why Wertheimer and the DNI's office are expending so much energy on transformation, people listened intently.
"You are urging this transformation for an end that I do not understand," he told Wertheimer. "Collaboration is not an end in itself, to my mind. You want to do this, I think, ... to make analysis better. What does that mean? It means it would be faster? It would be more comprehensible? It would be more accurate more often? I don't think you have a way of knowing at the end of the day when you get there."
Lowenthal doesn't dismiss collaboration out of hand, and he has spent a sizable part of his career trying to create a true intelligence community. But his remarks reflected a palpable skepticism among those who think that it is impossible to know whether Wertheimer's ideas will actually fix intelligence. Lowenthal told him, "I think, unfortunately, a lot of this is pandering to a bunch of commissions that have no understanding of what we do for a living, or the nature of our work, and to a workforce. And I don't think that's a sufficient ground for a transformation. And so I'm left here wondering, what's the end state? For what reason?"
Wertheimer responded that he didn't have a satisfactory answer. The best he could offer, he said, were anecdotes. He has spent the past two years talking to analysts and trying to figure out what those who achieved real breakthroughs -- overcoming "hard problems," he said -- had in common.
The few successes were not enough to prove a theory, he admitted. But the one trait these breakthrough-makers shared was -- perhaps not surprisingly -- collaboration. These were analysts who challenged old assumptions, re-examined evidence that had been set aside as useless, and shared information beyond normal channels. They also, Wertheimer said, ignored their bosses' admonitions that such inquiries -- going back to ground that had been plowed unproductively before -- were "career killers." Bucking authority is another of Wertheimer's recurring themes. He says that a colleague once told him, "You will have succeeded when you become really hard to manage."
Wertheimer, however, plays down the notion of analysts as revolutionaries. "I don't like the thought that transformation is changing something from the past to something new," he says. Rather, transformation is about "creating an environment in which more things could happen than could happen in the past. It's liberating. Let's call it 'analytic liberation.' "
Wertheimer seems perfectly comfortable working in this gray area, where there is no obvious way to know whether his ideas are working and where concepts change on the fly (transformation becomes liberation) and the end goal isn't defined at the outset. Were it not for the DNI's backing, such a nebulous, high-risk approach to preventing another intelligence disaster might never take flight. Wertheimer might still go down in flames, but taking that risk appears to suit him just fine. "We can't afford the kinds of mistakes that we're making based on the way we're doing business today. It's just the bottom line," he said. Riffing off the intelligence blogger's comments, he added, "If I'm the first one to get killed, so be it."
The Hard Sell
Bravado may obscure Wertheimer's pragmatic streak. He is provocative and excitable, and sometimes brash. But those who know him well say that he is also humble and self-deprecating.
He frets that he will become too personally associated with his cause. "I'm a little worried about this being too personality-driven," he says. "This has got to be about ideas. We have to sell people on the ideas."
Wertheimer knows that the reason his pitch isn't resonating with enough people his own age is because he has failed to demonstrate how middle managers and veteran analysts -- the people who are feeling most threatened -- can take part in this grand enterprise, how they can be "liberated." Wertheimer, the realist, has promised to find a place for them. But he does not apologize for embracing young analysts and for assaulting the culture that reared him. "We don't allow our people to reach their full potential," he told the audience in Chicago. "This is a society, this is a community, that tamps down potential."
"We treat [analysis] like a guild," Wertheimer said later, a society of apprentices who study at the feet of masters. "This is like making a fine violin or studying opera. That [approach] makes a lot of sense at the scale that you build violins or have opera singers. But we're talking about massive [numbers] of young people coming in.... They learn on their own. They don't read the rule book. They don't read the owner's manual," he said. "They click buttons and investigate, and if they get bored, they do something else."
If the two sides of this generational divide are irreconcilable, Wertheimer doesn't seem worried, because the rookies have the clear majority. "It's simply a matter of time," he said. "Now, the question we all have in our minds is, how much time can we afford? We can't afford another day."
Several younger colleagues once asked Wertheimer to name his greatest career achievement at the National Security Agency. At one time, he said, he was the world's leading expert on a certain cryptographic technology, the smartest man alive on that one subject. But "that's not what makes me so accomplished," he said. "It's that I'm no longer the No. 1 expert, and that the experts are in this room, because I taught them. And they exceeded everything I could have done on my own."
That's one way Wertheimer judges success: Someone comes along and does it better. It doesn't quite answer his critics' concerns that his ideas might be flawed to begin with. But Wertheimer is a strong believer in the "wisdom of crowds." He and his bosses are betting that collaboration is the way to fix what's broken with intelligence and, by extension, to keep people from dying. If they are right that transformation, in all its forms, is the key to stopping another terrorist attack, or to avoiding another catastrophic intelligence failure, then it seems a decent bet that the next generation of analysts will follow Wertheimer's lead.
"If I can just start something for which a handful of folks better and smarter than me take over," he said, "if you could put that in my epitaph, I would die a happy man."
Published in National Journal
Friday, September 21, 2007
Mike Wertheimer may be the most dangerous man in U.S. intelligence. You would probably never guess it, judging from his lengthy and opaque title -- assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic transformation and technology. A perfect testament to the well-worn bureaucratic tradition of offering little insight by tossing around a lot of words.
Wertheimer's squishy and unassuming title only hints at some vague, general notion of what he actually does for a living. Particularly for the uninitiated, the moniker buries a sense of authority beneath a pair of prefixes (assistant deputy) and offers an unsatisfying buzzword descriptor (transformation), whose etymology points to some consultant's pocket glossary. The title screams "middle management" and thus reassures, "This guy is not a threat."
That message is especially ironic, because to thousands of powerful career employees in the American intelligence community, Wertheimer is, in fact, very threatening. He threatens to upend their world, to change the way they work, and to foist on them the values of a younger generation of spies, who happen to outnumber them. He also threatens to change the way that policy makers use intelligence to reach decisions, and so to "transform" the intelligence agencies' role in the government. All of this makes Mike Wertheimer very dangerous to people who oppose his basic assumptions. And he knows that. He also knows that, to many thousands more in the intelligence field, he is something of a savior.
To understand the origins and purpose of Wertheimer's office, of which he is the first occupant, it helps to refer to a document that also bears a lengthy title, the report by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Better known as the WMD commission report, it provides a painstaking explanation of how 15 intelligence agencies collectively failed to discover that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction.
The contrary assertion that he did have those weapons -- and thus was a threat to the Middle East and a potential benefactor for terrorists -- was, of course, the Bush administration's chief casus belli for the Iraq war. The claim was backed up at the highest levels of the intelligence community in a National Intelligence Estimate released to Congress in October 2002. The WMD commission, which published its findings in 2005, echoed the sentiments of many intelligence professionals, including some who had participated in and blessed the flawed prewar analysis, by pronouncing the episode "one of the most public -- and most damaging -- intelligence failures in recent American history."
Wertheimer's job is to prevent any more such failures and to make sure that the intelligence agencies can accurately predict a host of catastrophic events, including terrorist attacks and disease outbreaks. The commission laid much of the blame for the bad call on Iraq at the feet of analysts, whom it called "the voice of the intelligence community." Although the problems begin with the failure to collect the right information in the first place, the commission particularly faulted the analysts' inability to make sense of intelligence, and to present their judgments to decision makers. During his time in government, Colin Powell was widely regarded among professionals as a decision maker who understood this inherently murky process. He would say to his intelligence officers, "Tell me what you know, tell me what you don't know, and then tell me what you think is most likely to happen." When that analysis breaks down, as it did with Iraq, "the consequences can be grave," the commission wrote.
To be sure, many career analysts object to the "flaws" the commission cited in their tradecraft, regarding both Iraq and another notorious intelligence failure: the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But very few argue with the substance, or the roots, of these breakdowns. The "intelligence community," as the agencies are collectively known, hardly operates as one, and this lack of coordination and -- especially -- collaboration among analysts means that agency leaders and their clients often don't know what the analysts don't know. The disconnect also means that contrary analysis -- of which there was a significant amount in the run-up to the Iraq war -- may find no quarter in analysts' final judgments. It is a disastrous situation for policy makers, who are increasingly turning to nongovernment experts and the news media for rapid, cogent analysis that the intelligence agencies can't always provide.
The WMD commission identified the fix: "Integrate the community of analysts." That's easier said than done, of course, but Wertheimer and others who understand how very un-integrated the analysts are today know that it is prescriptive advice that they can't afford to reject.
The Threat Within
"Post-9/11, we coined a term, the 'asymmetric threat,' " Wertheimer says. "That's a fancy way of describing a future in which the targets for intelligence, the things that we will focus on, are built, designed, and operate completely differently than the way we do." Transformation, that fuzzy word in his title, means "removing that asymmetry."
Before the attacks, the intelligence community was "like a power builder -- very muscular but not very fast," Wertheimer says. Today, the agencies need to be swift. They need to analyze more information faster. But analysts also need new ways to connect to one another, to benefit from one another's knowledge. If a specialist on sub-Saharan Africa at the Defense Intelligence Agency is studying terrorist inroads into tribal communities, shouldn't a CIA expert in Africa studies know that? Might she have something useful to contribute to the inquiry?
Collaboration isn't an especially novel concept, and the WMD commission wasn't the first to suggest that analysts do more of it. But Wertheimer is the first official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence -- the "czar" of the community -- to make collaboration a full-time job. Gen. Michael Hayden, the former principal deputy director of national intelligence who is now the CIA director, created the position after talking with Wertheimer two years ago about how to change the way the community operates. The new intelligence director, Mike McConnell, has forcefully backed the transformational efforts, as has his deputy in charge of analysis, Tom Fingar, a career analyst who used to run intelligence at the State Department. Fingar, who is essentially the only official layer between Wertheimer and McConnell, is the political muscle in this endeavor. Wertheimer is the idea man, "my philosopher of transformation," as Fingar recently put it.
Transformation has less to do with changing procedures than with changing people. A key pillar is a suite of new information-sharing and collaborative technologies that look and feel a lot like Google, Wikipedia, and MySpace, the networking and search tools that younger analysts grew up using at home and in their dorm rooms. These newcomers have been baffled to find that these 21st-century staples aren't widely used within the intelligence community.
The first of the new intelligence tools came online recently. Analysts can now log on to Intellipedia, a collaborative knowledge base that they can use to swap leads and examine one another's work. (Officials say that Intellipedia helped one group of analysts create a helpful report on Iraqi insurgents' use of chlorine gas to increase the lethality of improvised explosive devices.) Later this year, Wertheimer's team will launch A-Space ("A" for analyst), modeled after MySpace and the popular website Facebook. Officials hope the new site will help analysts create social networks outside established channels.
In addition to the new tools, Wertheimer and his colleagues have created unusual training programs. One sends analysts to a monthlong retreat at a classified location where they work alongside private-sector experts to investigate complex intelligence topics. Another takes young analysts out of their assigned jobs for two years and puts them through an intensive training program where they learn the tradecraft but also such on-the-ground spy skills as defensive driving and weapons handling. Agencies will ultimately deploy these analysts to global hot spots to support spies in the field.
It's no accident that Wertheimer and his team are aiming these new tools and programs at the younger crowd. Sixty percent of U.S. intelligence analysts have five years of experience or less on the job. In the larger intelligence community of about 100,000 employees, which includes clandestine operatives and support staff, those young workers are about 40 percent of the rolls. America's spies are decidedly green, and they're not comfortable -- or particularly useful -- working in bureaucratic silos without Internet browsers, instant messaging, and social networking sites on their desktops.
In his quest for transformation, Wertheimer is playing to this youthful workforce that finds collaboration neither newfangled nor threatening. For these analysts, networking is just the way information moves. But to the intelligence establishment, information is power, and relinquishing it means losing that power, as the WMD commission and many other critics have repeatedly lamented. It seems illogical to the generation of electronic socializers, but when information moves around, and becomes known to people who don't have the "need to know," veteran members of the community view it as no longer special because it's no longer secret. Too much collaboration also threatens to reveal the sources and methods by which agencies obtain information -- secrets they must zealously guard lest those sources dry up or get killed.
Sharing and secrecy are opposing forces. So this is Wertheimer's task: Transform the massive intelligence bureaucracy into a collaborative network, in which loose lips are, in a way, encouraged; introduce technologies that many seasoned analysts neither understand nor trust; and build a cadre of young, ambitious rookies, who just can't believe they're not allowed to check their personal e-mail at work, into the future of the business.
The opposition is fierce. When The New York Times wrote about A-Space recently, analysts commented about the piece, and about Wertheimer, on a private intelligence community blog. Some recorded their dramatic dissent. "I guarantee," one intelligence employee wrote, "Mike Wertheimer will cause people to get killed over this."
"I am threatening the status quo," Wertheimer says. "And that's a hard pill to swallow for anybody."
Taking the Blame
Wertheimer, 50, is a mathematician who earned his master's and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He spent 21 years as a cryptologist at the National Security Agency, and rose to become the agency's most senior technical leader. On paper, he fits the stereotype captured in an old joke among NSA hands: "How can you tell an extroverted analyst? He's the one who looks at your shoes when he's talking."
But Wertheimer defies typecasting. When he speaks, he looks people in the eye, but often from above -- he is 6 feet, 1 inch tall. He has arching eyebrows that signal when he's listening but also serve as a warning for when he's about to descend with an impassioned argument or an analogy that he thinks perfectly captures what he's up against. (In a recent conversation, Wertheimer compared the government's attempts at collaboration to the Borg, the supremely villainous race of cyber-aliens on Star Trek: The Next Generation who "assimilate" whole societies by stripping people of individual character traits and turn them into one giant collective.) If you spotted Wertheimer in a room, or even better, watched him work a room, you might wonder why he hasn't sought his fortune on the motivational speaking circuit.
When he speaks, you get the feeling that he's talking to you. He reveals a lot about himself, which might be unsettling if he weren't so earnest about connecting his flaws and fears to his intelligence work. At a recent conference on analytic transformation in Chicago, Wertheimer confessed to a crowd of more than 400 people that after the 9/11 attacks he felt personally responsible for not anticipating Al Qaeda's strike. He became depressed, he said, and was inconsolable until his father snapped him out of it. "I don't blame you for this," Wertheimer's dad told him, and then warned, "You're scaring your kids," who thought that whenever their father had to rush back to the office, something very bad was about to happen. Wertheimer briefly left government in 2003 to work as a technology consultant but returned two years later.
Wertheimer is like a number of other veteran intelligence officials who were involved in the global hunt for terrorists before 9/11. They feel that their own actions -- more precisely, their inactions -- allowed the disaster. Wertheimer says he blames himself and his colleagues. He thinks he personally failed and, accepting his part in a broken system, he seems to have no qualms about tearing it down and rebuilding.
"It is something that he can appreciate as being absolutely critical to the future of this country and the protection of the country, and when you hear him speak, you get caught up in that emotion," says Tim Sample, a former analyst and staff director of the House Select Committee on Intelligence who knows Wertheimer well. Sample is president of the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance, which co-hosted the Chicago conference with the intelligence director's office.
In large measure, Wertheimer's charisma comes from his willingness to defy tradition. "We are going to share more," he said in his Chicago speech. "We are going to take risks." Directing his remarks at those who would rather preserve the status quo, he said, "For the first time, the challenge is not why we can't do it; it's how you're going to find a way to secure this." Rather than appeasing members of the intelligence community who blanch at collaboration and its attendant security risks, Wertheimer lays the burden on their shoulders and tells them that if collaboration doesn't happen, they'll take the blame.
But if Wertheimer succeeds, it probably won't be by convincing his intransigent opponents. Rather, he will work with that younger generation at whom transformation is aimed. By and large, these newer members of the community are optimistic and, like him, believe that the intelligence community is dangerously broken.
"It's Huge"
Sean Wohltman, a 25-year-old counter-terrorism analyst with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, embodies the kind of optimistic disillusionment that Wertheimer wants to harness. Two years after defending his master's thesis in geographic information science at Virginia Tech University, Wohltman joined the government "following a call for patriotism," he said. He encountered "disappointment and disillusionment" in his first three months on the job, however.
As Wohltman explained to the Chicago conference, "When I first logged on to what I expected to be a terminal from 24's [counter-terrorist unit] command center, I was instead driven to my agency's home page, which flashed information about an upcoming picnic and links to fill out my health insurance. And not only that, it launched in Netscape." Those in the audience who laughed understood that Netscape is an obsolete Internet browser.
Later, Wohltman explained why it mattered to him that the intelligence agencies were so far behind the technological curve. In 1999, when the popular and controversial music file-sharing system Napster debuted, he pointed out, Ricky Martin's "Livin' la Vida Loca" and other corporately manufactured pop hits topped the Billboard charts. Only artists from big record labels got mass recognition, and listeners were cut off from the bounty of independent and innovative artists who excelled in a variety of musical styles. But that year, Napster's collaborative technology allowed fans of lesser-known artists to share songs, which in turn boosted their recognition, fanned their popularity, and led to greater awareness of the wider music scene. It also fueled the market for independent music and challenged the record companies' dominance of the industry.
Taking Wohltman's analogy, Wertheimer says that the intelligence agencies could be compared to the record companies. Information is filtered through a hierarchical process that culminates in senior executives choosing what intelligence to disseminate to customers. Similar to Napster, tools such as Intellipedia and A-Space -- known as "disruptive technologies" -- bypass this process and get more information out to a wider audience.
But will collaboration guarantee better analysis? Did Napster improve music quality? Did it benefit the industry as a whole? Recording artists and companies sued Napster for copyright infringement, and the network shut down in 2001, eventually to be reborn as a pay-for-service system.
Napster did pave the way for other innovative technologies, which adapted to customers' demands to buy music a la carte, rather than having to pay for an entire album. Today, Apple's iTunes sells songs for 99 cents and threatens the record companies' control of their own products. Collaboration, in a sense, won out, and customers' demand for more music, delivered in new ways, has opened the market to more artists. "Will this lead to better music?" Wertheimer asks. "I can't believe that it will not."
Wertheimer and other transformation proponents often point to iTunes, and the hugely successful iPod music player, to support their theory that collaboration can fundamentally change and improve people's lives. And they reason that A-Space, Intellipedia, and other innovative services will create demand in the intelligence community and overwhelm the transformation naysayers.
Wertheimer channels the enthusiasm of Apple's CEO and co-founder, Steve Jobs, whose rousing keynote speeches, known as "Stevenotes," command more press coverage and world attention than speeches by most members of Congress. But as with Jobs, some skeptics question both the substance and the goal behind Wertheimer's zeal.
Early in Jobs's career, a co-worker coined the term "reality distortion field" to describe the aura that the Apple prophet cast over his spellbound audiences. The term could easily apply to Wertheimer's enthusiastic showmanship. Wikipedia describes RDF as "the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, exaggeration, and marketing. RDF is said to distort an audience's sense of proportion or scale. Small advances are applauded as breakthroughs. Interesting developments become turning points, or huge leaps forward." (The phenomenon has been applied to other leaders, as well.)
Wertheimer does, in fact, applaud certain advances as breakthroughs that others -- particularly those outside of government -- might find underwhelming. For instance, one planned transformation program, the Library of National Intelligence, would be a repository of all the documents produced by all of the agencies. Eventually, Wertheimer hopes, analysts will search the library for key terms, and an automated system will help to judge who should have access to classified materials. He calls this program "huge."
Why is it huge? Some observers would have a hard time believing that the agencies didn't already have such a resource, the kind that most large organizations take for granted. LexisNexis, for example, contains copies of every article published in most of the country's periodicals. Following basic business practices, most companies compile and retain their internal documents for research and for legal purposes.
Wertheimer is careful to put things in perspective. "It's big," he says of the library. But then he quickly follows up: "For us, it's huge." And he's right. Much to the consternation of the WMD commission and others, this is a giant leap for the intelligence community, a kind of moon-landing moment.
But do collaborative libraries -- and wikis, blogs, networking websites, and special training -- make transformation worthwhile?
Change Without End
Mark Lowenthal retired in 2005 as the assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production. Among seasoned intelligence officials, he is considered one of the most knowledgeable authorities on analysis, the agencies' shortcomings in that regard, and the education of young analysts in the ways of the tradecraft. So in Chicago, when Lowenthal stood up to question why Wertheimer and the DNI's office are expending so much energy on transformation, people listened intently.
"You are urging this transformation for an end that I do not understand," he told Wertheimer. "Collaboration is not an end in itself, to my mind. You want to do this, I think, ... to make analysis better. What does that mean? It means it would be faster? It would be more comprehensible? It would be more accurate more often? I don't think you have a way of knowing at the end of the day when you get there."
Lowenthal doesn't dismiss collaboration out of hand, and he has spent a sizable part of his career trying to create a true intelligence community. But his remarks reflected a palpable skepticism among those who think that it is impossible to know whether Wertheimer's ideas will actually fix intelligence. Lowenthal told him, "I think, unfortunately, a lot of this is pandering to a bunch of commissions that have no understanding of what we do for a living, or the nature of our work, and to a workforce. And I don't think that's a sufficient ground for a transformation. And so I'm left here wondering, what's the end state? For what reason?"
Wertheimer responded that he didn't have a satisfactory answer. The best he could offer, he said, were anecdotes. He has spent the past two years talking to analysts and trying to figure out what those who achieved real breakthroughs -- overcoming "hard problems," he said -- had in common.
The few successes were not enough to prove a theory, he admitted. But the one trait these breakthrough-makers shared was -- perhaps not surprisingly -- collaboration. These were analysts who challenged old assumptions, re-examined evidence that had been set aside as useless, and shared information beyond normal channels. They also, Wertheimer said, ignored their bosses' admonitions that such inquiries -- going back to ground that had been plowed unproductively before -- were "career killers." Bucking authority is another of Wertheimer's recurring themes. He says that a colleague once told him, "You will have succeeded when you become really hard to manage."
Wertheimer, however, plays down the notion of analysts as revolutionaries. "I don't like the thought that transformation is changing something from the past to something new," he says. Rather, transformation is about "creating an environment in which more things could happen than could happen in the past. It's liberating. Let's call it 'analytic liberation.' "
Wertheimer seems perfectly comfortable working in this gray area, where there is no obvious way to know whether his ideas are working and where concepts change on the fly (transformation becomes liberation) and the end goal isn't defined at the outset. Were it not for the DNI's backing, such a nebulous, high-risk approach to preventing another intelligence disaster might never take flight. Wertheimer might still go down in flames, but taking that risk appears to suit him just fine. "We can't afford the kinds of mistakes that we're making based on the way we're doing business today. It's just the bottom line," he said. Riffing off the intelligence blogger's comments, he added, "If I'm the first one to get killed, so be it."
The Hard Sell
Bravado may obscure Wertheimer's pragmatic streak. He is provocative and excitable, and sometimes brash. But those who know him well say that he is also humble and self-deprecating.
He frets that he will become too personally associated with his cause. "I'm a little worried about this being too personality-driven," he says. "This has got to be about ideas. We have to sell people on the ideas."
Wertheimer knows that the reason his pitch isn't resonating with enough people his own age is because he has failed to demonstrate how middle managers and veteran analysts -- the people who are feeling most threatened -- can take part in this grand enterprise, how they can be "liberated." Wertheimer, the realist, has promised to find a place for them. But he does not apologize for embracing young analysts and for assaulting the culture that reared him. "We don't allow our people to reach their full potential," he told the audience in Chicago. "This is a society, this is a community, that tamps down potential."
"We treat [analysis] like a guild," Wertheimer said later, a society of apprentices who study at the feet of masters. "This is like making a fine violin or studying opera. That [approach] makes a lot of sense at the scale that you build violins or have opera singers. But we're talking about massive [numbers] of young people coming in.... They learn on their own. They don't read the rule book. They don't read the owner's manual," he said. "They click buttons and investigate, and if they get bored, they do something else."
If the two sides of this generational divide are irreconcilable, Wertheimer doesn't seem worried, because the rookies have the clear majority. "It's simply a matter of time," he said. "Now, the question we all have in our minds is, how much time can we afford? We can't afford another day."
Several younger colleagues once asked Wertheimer to name his greatest career achievement at the National Security Agency. At one time, he said, he was the world's leading expert on a certain cryptographic technology, the smartest man alive on that one subject. But "that's not what makes me so accomplished," he said. "It's that I'm no longer the No. 1 expert, and that the experts are in this room, because I taught them. And they exceeded everything I could have done on my own."
That's one way Wertheimer judges success: Someone comes along and does it better. It doesn't quite answer his critics' concerns that his ideas might be flawed to begin with. But Wertheimer is a strong believer in the "wisdom of crowds." He and his bosses are betting that collaboration is the way to fix what's broken with intelligence and, by extension, to keep people from dying. If they are right that transformation, in all its forms, is the key to stopping another terrorist attack, or to avoiding another catastrophic intelligence failure, then it seems a decent bet that the next generation of analysts will follow Wertheimer's lead.
"If I can just start something for which a handful of folks better and smarter than me take over," he said, "if you could put that in my epitaph, I would die a happy man."
Published in National Journal
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Human Capital, Intelligence, Management, Technology, Terrorism
Full Article
Intelligence Innovation Lags
Friday, August 03, 2007
America's declining influence over scientific and technological innovation has had "an enormous impact" on U.S. intelligence agencies, and "makes it more likely that our adversaries can employ the very same -- or perhaps even more advanced" -- science and technology than that available to the United States. That's the assessment from the Intelligence Science Board, which advises senior intelligence leaders.
In a report issued in November, parts of which were recently obtained by National Journal, the board warned that although the United States remains the world leader in some fields of science and engineering, that position is slipping -- and the slide imperils the intelligence community's ability to adapt to a dramatically changing technological landscape that terrorists are increasingly exploiting.
Terrorists have used the Internet, which has enabled a "worldwide diffusion" of knowledge, to gather and transmit scientific and technological know-how, leading to "incredible capabilities that our adversaries have exploited and used to further the goals of radical Islam," the report states. The assessment doesn't specify the capabilities, but terrorists are widely known to use the Internet to communicate with each other, disseminate propaganda, and publish information on building bombs and designing attacks.
The report, which is marked "For Official Use Only," was prepared for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; National Journal obtained portions of it from a source outside that office. It casts the U.S. decline in overall research and development as an enormous challenge to the intelligence agencies' ability to collect information about new adversaries. The board calls for "an entirely new approach to increasing the contribution of" science and technology to intelligence capabilities, but it offers a bleak assessment of the progress made on that front. "Neither the intelligence community nor the S&T establishment," the report states, "has put forth viable strategies for accomplishing this change."
Against this backdrop, the DNI is launching a research-and-development effort to provide "breakthrough" technologies for the intelligence agencies, including sensors and communications devices that can help human spies collect more-detailed information. This research extends beyond the traditional realm of satellite imagery and eavesdropping to include an emphasis on devices that spies can use to narrowly target individuals and groups, and to anticipate their movements.
Beginning next year, R&D efforts that have application for many, or all, of the intelligence agencies will be centralized in a single outfit called the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity and dubbed iARPA. Modeled after the Defense Department's hugely successful DARPA, which developed stealth aircraft and paved the way for the Internet, iARPA will pull together research funds from across the agencies to increase the chances of fielding new, better technologies, according to Steve Nixon, director of science and technology for the DNI.
The research agency will officially open its doors in October 2008. Its goal is to ensure that new technologies don't take the intelligence agencies by surprise, Nixon said. But it will also look for tools to surprise America's adversaries and to collect information about them in ways they haven't anticipated or don't understand. "We really need to pursue surprise in the intelligence community more than we have before," Nixon said.
During the Cold War, the United States deployed fleets of spy satellites to track Soviet military movements. But terrorists operate in a fundamentally different way than do nation states -- their network "resembles a metastasized cancer that has spread through the world body," according to the intelligence board. Terrorists are, by their very nature, harder to track and anticipate. For that reason, "precisely targeted intelligence represents the best way to combat spreading terrorism," and the intelligence community must do a better job of developing the tools to do that, the report states.
According to Nixon, iARPA will focus on improving intelligence collection and analysis. "We think we can do more to help analysts deal with information," he said. Today, much of the most valuable information about terrorism resides in the world of open sources -- the Internet, the media, and academia. The intelligence agencies have spent millions of dollars on efforts to keep this multiplicity of sources and huge volume of information from overwhelming their analysts.
The Intelligence Science Board emphasized that U.S. spies need to keep pace with the increasingly rapid development and deployment of new technologies but found that, in large measure, the government is in the dark about new R&D and unable to direct it.
The report starkly states: "The government now has far less control than before over the problems addressed, the selection of personnel to perform the work, and the locations where the work is carried out, and less knowledge than ever before of what work is actually being done." Decades ago, the federal government, and particularly military and space programs, were the primary drivers of American R&D. Over time, that balance shifted, and today the private sector directs almost all new research.
The new research unit will absorb research funds from three other agencies: the Disruptive Technology Office, once overseen by the National Security Agency and now under the DNI, which designs and vets computer programs that help analysts cope with large sets of data; a CIA research unit called the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center; and the National Technology Alliance, which focuses on a range of issues, including biological, chemical, and nuclear countermeasures. The alliance is housed at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which produces imagery and detailed maps for military and homeland-security operations.
Some intelligence officials are hopeful about iARPA's potential. "It could be a good thing," said Mark Reardon, director of the National Technology Alliance. Founded in 1987, the NTI encourages small businesses, especially those not accustomed to working with the government, to bring new technologies to the intelligence community.
The CIA "has made a serious commitment of resources -- people and dollars -- to strengthen technology programs" at the community-wide level, meaning those that apply to more than one intelligence agency, said Paul Gimigliano, an agency spokesman. "Those resources would be at the heart of iARPA. But we still need, and will still have, a strong focus on research and innovation within the CIA itself," he said. The agency has a "full range of technical issues intrinsic to the agency's specialty, clandestine operations," he added.
Nixon said that the agencies whose funds iARPA is subsuming had worked on projects with outside applications but were all under pressure to meet their own needs. He emphasized that iARPA is not taking over all of the other agencies' research budgets. "We're talking about money that was only set aside for future community research."
The Intelligence Science Board urged caution when combining all research programs under one umbrella, arguing that doing so could stymie innovation and "maximize the probability of failure, not success" if the new efforts were inadequately funded. "That legacy would have agonizing consequences," the report stated.
The board also wrote that its members "enthusiastically support the iARPA concept" but asserted that existing research programs "lack adequate staffing and finances." (The intelligence research budgets are classified.) The board urged the director of national intelligence to use his authority to reallocate agency budgets and to fund iARPA "at a minimum of double the level of the existing organizations." A funding increase, the board argued, was needed to free up more money for new ideas and longer-term projects, "and avert poaching on programs already under way."
One former intelligence official, who asked not to be identified because Congress has yet to pass next year's intelligence budget, worried that Congress hasn't sufficiently funded iARPA, and questioned whether administration officials had pushed hard enough for more money. The official also described significant resistance at the individual agencies to giving up any resources, and cautioned that iARPA could stymie innovation if it "stovepipes" research and development all in one place.
Nixon, while not addressing the specifics of the report, said that iARPA will centrally manage contracts and projects but that outside researchers and other agencies will handle much of the work. He also said that, following the DARPA model, the new agency would limit the tenure of its managers as a way of ensuring a constant flow of new talent and ideas.
Published in National Journal
Friday, August 03, 2007
America's declining influence over scientific and technological innovation has had "an enormous impact" on U.S. intelligence agencies, and "makes it more likely that our adversaries can employ the very same -- or perhaps even more advanced" -- science and technology than that available to the United States. That's the assessment from the Intelligence Science Board, which advises senior intelligence leaders.
In a report issued in November, parts of which were recently obtained by National Journal, the board warned that although the United States remains the world leader in some fields of science and engineering, that position is slipping -- and the slide imperils the intelligence community's ability to adapt to a dramatically changing technological landscape that terrorists are increasingly exploiting.
Terrorists have used the Internet, which has enabled a "worldwide diffusion" of knowledge, to gather and transmit scientific and technological know-how, leading to "incredible capabilities that our adversaries have exploited and used to further the goals of radical Islam," the report states. The assessment doesn't specify the capabilities, but terrorists are widely known to use the Internet to communicate with each other, disseminate propaganda, and publish information on building bombs and designing attacks.
The report, which is marked "For Official Use Only," was prepared for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; National Journal obtained portions of it from a source outside that office. It casts the U.S. decline in overall research and development as an enormous challenge to the intelligence agencies' ability to collect information about new adversaries. The board calls for "an entirely new approach to increasing the contribution of" science and technology to intelligence capabilities, but it offers a bleak assessment of the progress made on that front. "Neither the intelligence community nor the S&T establishment," the report states, "has put forth viable strategies for accomplishing this change."
Against this backdrop, the DNI is launching a research-and-development effort to provide "breakthrough" technologies for the intelligence agencies, including sensors and communications devices that can help human spies collect more-detailed information. This research extends beyond the traditional realm of satellite imagery and eavesdropping to include an emphasis on devices that spies can use to narrowly target individuals and groups, and to anticipate their movements.
Beginning next year, R&D efforts that have application for many, or all, of the intelligence agencies will be centralized in a single outfit called the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity and dubbed iARPA. Modeled after the Defense Department's hugely successful DARPA, which developed stealth aircraft and paved the way for the Internet, iARPA will pull together research funds from across the agencies to increase the chances of fielding new, better technologies, according to Steve Nixon, director of science and technology for the DNI.
The research agency will officially open its doors in October 2008. Its goal is to ensure that new technologies don't take the intelligence agencies by surprise, Nixon said. But it will also look for tools to surprise America's adversaries and to collect information about them in ways they haven't anticipated or don't understand. "We really need to pursue surprise in the intelligence community more than we have before," Nixon said.
During the Cold War, the United States deployed fleets of spy satellites to track Soviet military movements. But terrorists operate in a fundamentally different way than do nation states -- their network "resembles a metastasized cancer that has spread through the world body," according to the intelligence board. Terrorists are, by their very nature, harder to track and anticipate. For that reason, "precisely targeted intelligence represents the best way to combat spreading terrorism," and the intelligence community must do a better job of developing the tools to do that, the report states.
According to Nixon, iARPA will focus on improving intelligence collection and analysis. "We think we can do more to help analysts deal with information," he said. Today, much of the most valuable information about terrorism resides in the world of open sources -- the Internet, the media, and academia. The intelligence agencies have spent millions of dollars on efforts to keep this multiplicity of sources and huge volume of information from overwhelming their analysts.
The Intelligence Science Board emphasized that U.S. spies need to keep pace with the increasingly rapid development and deployment of new technologies but found that, in large measure, the government is in the dark about new R&D and unable to direct it.
The report starkly states: "The government now has far less control than before over the problems addressed, the selection of personnel to perform the work, and the locations where the work is carried out, and less knowledge than ever before of what work is actually being done." Decades ago, the federal government, and particularly military and space programs, were the primary drivers of American R&D. Over time, that balance shifted, and today the private sector directs almost all new research.
The new research unit will absorb research funds from three other agencies: the Disruptive Technology Office, once overseen by the National Security Agency and now under the DNI, which designs and vets computer programs that help analysts cope with large sets of data; a CIA research unit called the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center; and the National Technology Alliance, which focuses on a range of issues, including biological, chemical, and nuclear countermeasures. The alliance is housed at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which produces imagery and detailed maps for military and homeland-security operations.
Some intelligence officials are hopeful about iARPA's potential. "It could be a good thing," said Mark Reardon, director of the National Technology Alliance. Founded in 1987, the NTI encourages small businesses, especially those not accustomed to working with the government, to bring new technologies to the intelligence community.
The CIA "has made a serious commitment of resources -- people and dollars -- to strengthen technology programs" at the community-wide level, meaning those that apply to more than one intelligence agency, said Paul Gimigliano, an agency spokesman. "Those resources would be at the heart of iARPA. But we still need, and will still have, a strong focus on research and innovation within the CIA itself," he said. The agency has a "full range of technical issues intrinsic to the agency's specialty, clandestine operations," he added.
Nixon said that the agencies whose funds iARPA is subsuming had worked on projects with outside applications but were all under pressure to meet their own needs. He emphasized that iARPA is not taking over all of the other agencies' research budgets. "We're talking about money that was only set aside for future community research."
The Intelligence Science Board urged caution when combining all research programs under one umbrella, arguing that doing so could stymie innovation and "maximize the probability of failure, not success" if the new efforts were inadequately funded. "That legacy would have agonizing consequences," the report stated.
The board also wrote that its members "enthusiastically support the iARPA concept" but asserted that existing research programs "lack adequate staffing and finances." (The intelligence research budgets are classified.) The board urged the director of national intelligence to use his authority to reallocate agency budgets and to fund iARPA "at a minimum of double the level of the existing organizations." A funding increase, the board argued, was needed to free up more money for new ideas and longer-term projects, "and avert poaching on programs already under way."
One former intelligence official, who asked not to be identified because Congress has yet to pass next year's intelligence budget, worried that Congress hasn't sufficiently funded iARPA, and questioned whether administration officials had pushed hard enough for more money. The official also described significant resistance at the individual agencies to giving up any resources, and cautioned that iARPA could stymie innovation if it "stovepipes" research and development all in one place.
Nixon, while not addressing the specifics of the report, said that iARPA will centrally manage contracts and projects but that outside researchers and other agencies will handle much of the work. He also said that, following the DARPA model, the new agency would limit the tenure of its managers as a way of ensuring a constant flow of new talent and ideas.
Published in National Journal
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence, Technology, Terrorism
Full Article
The Return of the Grown-Ups
Saturday, January 13, 2007
The graybeards of spycraft are smiling: After two years of turnover and uncertainty in the top ranks of the U.S. intelligence establishment, which saw such outsiders as a former congressman and a career ambassador elevated to high posts, four of their own are now in control or soon will be.
Full Article
Saturday, January 13, 2007
The graybeards of spycraft are smiling: After two years of turnover and uncertainty in the top ranks of the U.S. intelligence establishment, which saw such outsiders as a former congressman and a career ambassador elevated to high posts, four of their own are now in control or soon will be.
In what one former official called "the closest thing to an intelligence coup d'etat," a set of old hands has been designated to lead at the principal military and civilian agencies. Career intelligence officials seemed to breathe a sigh of relief this past week and were hopeful that new management would help stabilize the spy agencies, which have been hurt by flawed analyses on Iraq, bureaucratic infighting, and a lack of experienced senior leadership.
In this new intelligence constellation, there are four key players, each of whom has led a major agency at least once. On January 5, President Bush nominated retired Navy Vice Adm. Mike McConnell, a former director of the National Security Agency, to be the second director of national intelligence. It falls to him as DNI to continue post-9/11 intelligence reforms and to act as a chief operating officer for the government's 16 intelligence agencies.
Next is new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has his hands on 80 percent of the intelligence budget and so has the most muscle to flex. A former CIA director, Gates will bring a keen understanding of civilian intelligence operations to his job.
Days before McConnell's nomination was announced, Gates asked retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, a deeply experienced uniformed intelligence officer, to take over the top spy job in the Pentagon, the undersecretary for intelligence. Clapper will replace a controversial civilian political appointee, Stephen Cambone, who was a close ally of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and had little career intelligence experience.
Clapper has held two top jobs, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes satellite and aerial imagery and data.
McConnell, Gates, and Clapper also have a friend in recently installed CIA Director Michael Hayden, a retired Air Force general who rounds out the new team. Hayden, who has been busy beefing up the CIA's human spying efforts, appointed a career clandestine officer as his No. 2. Hayden is professionally close to McConnell and Gates, and several former officials said that he and Clapper are "old friends."
"Here you have very trusted players who have been around each other for a long period of time," said Fred Burton, a former special agent for counter-terrorism in the State Department who's now the vice president of counter-terrorism and corporate security for Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. Those relationships, perhaps more than anything else, bode well for their chances of success, Burton said.
While McConnell was leading the NSA in the early 1990s, Clapper was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Gates was head of the CIA. Hayden held key positions on the National Security Council and in military intelligence, and he took over the NSA in 1999. Also, when McConnell was the military official in charge of intelligence for Operation Desert Storm, Clapper was the assistant chief of staff for Air Force intelligence and played a leading role in coordinating the air war.
It is unclear precisely who was behind the return of so many veterans. Vice President Cheney, who was Defense secretary during Desert Storm and worked with McConnell, is reported to have personally asked the retired admiral to leave a lucrative position at Booz Allen Hamilton, a major intelligence contractor, to return to government. Some have speculated that Cheney has recruited McConnell to back the administration's Iraq and Iran policies on Capitol Hill.
But others described McConnell as a nonpolitical professional, and said that Gates's hand is more evident in the recent shake-up. He is known to have a good working relationship with McConnell, with whom he'll have to craft the next intelligence budget.
In choosing Clapper as his undersecretary for intelligence, Gates picked a military officer who ran counter to Rumsfeld and Cambone when he recommended putting the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency under the DNI's control. Now Clapper is coming back in Cambone's old job.
Assessing that move, as well as McConnell's return and Hayden's efforts, many intelligence veterans see an about-face by the administration. "This is the revenge of the intelligence professionals, to take the job of running the intelligence community away from the ideologues and to put it back in the hands of those who probably are best suited to run the place," said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian.
The new power structure comes at a time when the intelligence community needs steady hands, observers said. Outgoing DNI John Negroponte, a career ambassador who is returning to his roots at the State Department as Condoleezza Rice's deputy, never seemed comfortable in his role as intelligence czar.
Several former officials noted that Negroponte had a powerful title but showed little inclination to challenge the entrenched forces of the CIA director or the Defense secretary. The DNI's chief job, in addition to briefing the president every morning, is largely managerial and takes an enormous amount of time and personal energy.
Negroponte rarely showed himself to be interested in or suited to such tasks, observers said, and he was often spotted at Washington's University Club on workday afternoons, swimming laps in the pool or getting a massage.
But to his credit, some said, Negroponte has assembled a staff of more than 1,500 people who have made progress on intelligence reforms. The DNI's office has developed new personnel and training requirements, and is tackling standards for information-sharing and new technology projects.
"There is a structure that Ambassador Negroponte has put together that can be used" to continue reforms, said Tim Sample, president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a contractors association, and a former staff director of the House Intelligence Committee.
Sample said that McConnell "really does understand the complexities of the community" and will embrace the managerial aspects.
McConnell has seen the intelligence world from two important sides -- the government's and a contractor's. The intelligence community's use of -- and in some cases, dependence on -- outside help is growing fast. Booz Allen has been a principal beneficiary of increased intelligence and security spending since 9/11. Among senior intelligence officials, McConnell has a rare depth of public- and private-sector experience that could be useful now.
But Aid, the intelligence historian, cautioned that McConnell's 10-year-long absence from government is not necessarily a plus. He left the NSA as the agency was searching for a post-Cold War mission. Under McConnell's watch, the NSA "got fat, bloated, bureaucratic, failed to adapt to the challenges," Aid said.
McConnell was loath to oppose budget cuts and didn't push to intercept communications on the Internet and through other emerging technologies, Aid added. Still, others are hopeful that if McConnell can now take up less sexy, but necessary, management tasks, it will free the others to focus on pure intelligence work.
Both Hayden and Clapper have experience taking over agencies in turbulent times. Under Hayden's watch, the NSA began the painful transition from a Cold War eavesdropping organization capturing signals from satellites to one that monitors fiber-optic networks, cellphones, and the Internet. The results have been decidedly mixed, but Hayden was praised for his foresight.
For his part, Clapper took over the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency when it was struggling to keep pace with technological advancements in satellite photography and mapping, and to stay relevant and useful in wartime. Under his guidance, the agency began buying satellite imagery from the commercial sector and moved into a new homeland-security role, providing support for special events like the Super Bowl and political conventions.
"He came in at a very critical point to really establish the agency as a credible force in military intelligence and geospatial intelligence," said a former senior defense official who worked with Clapper.
The personal affinity between Hayden and Clapper may help repair relations between the CIA and the Pentagon, which were severely strained in the run-up to the Iraq war when Rumsfeld set up an intelligence unit to challenge the CIA's assessments of Iraq's suspected weapons programs.
Some have questioned how much this new intelligence team can accomplish in the Bush administration's final two years. It's not much time to make major reforms, and the Democratic Congress is likely to keep officials busy with oversight hearings and investigations into prewar intelligence.
Experience is by no means a guarantee of success, and there will be plenty of opportunities for strong personalities to clash. One retired national security official who knows McConnell said, "He is not a particularly good team player unless he is in charge."
But as the agencies recover from high-level turnover and a series of miscast leaders, many said they're taking comfort in the familiar. As a former CIA official put it, echoing the sentiments of colleagues, "This is the intelligence professionals retaking the ground."
Published in National JournalFull Article