Intelligence in the National Security Enterprise

An Introduction

Roger Z. George

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781626167445
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Inteligencia y espionaje

This textbook introduces students to the critical role of the US intelligence community within the wider national security decision-making and political process. Intelligence in the National Security Enterprise defines what intelligence is and what intelligence agencies do, but the emphasis is on showing how intelligence serves the policymaker. Roger Z. George draws on his thirty-year CIA career and more than a decade of teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate level to reveal the real world of intelligence. Intelligence support is examined from a variety of perspectives to include providing strategic intelligence, warning, daily tactical support to policy actions as well as covert action. The book includes useful features for students and instructors such as excerpts and links to primary-source documents, suggestions for further reading, and a glossary.

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HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Keep giving me things that make me think.

—Henry Kissinger to CIA director Richard Helms

Intelligence is often an invisible player in presidential formulation and execution of national security policy. New occupants of the Oval Office often are perplexed as well as amazed about how intelligence works and contributes to their policy processes. It is no less challenging to explain the business of intelligence to students just learning about American foreign policymaking. When I joined the intelligence community (IC) in the late 1970s after studying international relations as an undergraduate and in graduate school, I knew virtually nothing myself. For many students of my era, intelligence was simply too secret and arcane to be understood. But with the benefit of working in the IC and interacting with many policy agencies and officials, I believe that the relationship between intelligence and policy can and should be more transparent. Having taught courses on intelligence at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, however, I realize that intelligence is still scarcely and often simplistically presented in most books and courses about the conduct of American foreign and security policy. There are plenty of critiques, memoirs, and studies on specific aspects of intelligence but far fewer that survey the multifaceted role intelligence plays in US statecraft in a more systemic way.

Accordingly, this textbook is intended to inform students about the ways in which intelligence supports the national security decision-making process. It quite consciously does not survey all the wide range of internal intelligence processes that are common in other intelligence textbooks. Many intelligence books and studies concentrate much more attention on the operational side of intelligence collection. For example, they describe how technical collection systems such as satellites and listening stations vacuum up massive amounts of data, or they recount how former spies conducted their espionage against key adversaries. These are, indeed, important topics for understanding the internal organizational cultures, methods, and challenges of the intelligence business. However, such a focus on the inside of the IC can detract from a student’s understanding of what the actual output and value of such collection is and how the finished analysis produced from such exotic, expensive, and risky efforts actually is used in national-level decision-making.

This book captures my understanding of how the IC and the policy community attempt to work together. It is a symbiotic relationship. When it is working well, policy decisions are usually more systematic and better informed; when it is not, policies are often poorly shaped, either because the intelligence was incorrect or simply ignored. Granted, even with a good relationship, there is no guarantee that policies will succeed, but in the author’s view the odds are surely better.

The book takes the approach of illustrating with practical examples how intelligence has played a significant part in national security policymaking. The author’s own experiences as a political-military analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including serving in policy rotations at the State Department and Defense Department in the late 1980s and early 1990s, have shaped the way this book addresses the intersection of policy and intelligence. Most intelligence practitioners have had some good experiences when intelligence was useful as well as bad ones when intelligence was flawed, dismissed, or misused. Indeed, my own opinions are on display in this book, which I might summarize as being convinced that intelligence is a necessary, if never perfect, part of the national security enterprise.

USE AND ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

This book deepens a student’s understanding of how American national security policy is conducted with a more detailed description of how intelligence contributes to the development of such policies. Most textbooks about American foreign policy or national security provide scant attention to the intelligence contribution, but that is a gap that should be filled. This book thus can complement textbooks on American foreign policy by providing concrete examples of how intelligence informs and influences national security deliberations.

For students taking general courses in intelligence, this book can provide two important additions to what is often left out of other intelligence textbooks. First, this volume provides a clear explanation of the expanding US national security enterprise (NSE), in which intelligence operates.¹ The term itself suggests a set of agencies and operations that conduct US national security policies. As the definition of national security has broadened well beyond traditional military and diplomatic concerns to include more transnational and socioeconomic issues, the enterprise and the agencies it comprises has continued to expand. It is often assumed that the student is already familiar with the NSE and its interagency process. In this author’s experience, students taking an introductory intelligence course often are not aware of the details of that decision-making process, so it is hard for them to put the intelligence contribution into proper context.

A second feature of this book is its focus on distinguishing among a range of intelligence functions that contribute to the NSE. Other intelligence textbooks will typically address intelligence support to policy in a single chapter, perhaps accompanied by a chapter on analysis. Instead, this volume examines the varied forms of intelligence support to policymakers, ranging from strategic intelligence and warning analysis to more actionable daily intelligence support and covert action.

Accordingly, this book’s chapters are organized around the kinds of decisions that policymakers often confront. At times their intelligence questions revolve more around mysteries than secrets—to use Joseph Nye’s characterization of the different sets of problems facing a senior policymaker or commander.² Will China’s economic model collapse? This is a mystery about which the IC can speculate and develop alternative scenarios to help national decision-makers prepare strategies and options for dealing with different circumstances. However, other questions might be how potent China’s military modernization effort is likely to become and how it might impact the South China Sea maritime rivalry. Here there are specific facts and trends that the IC can bring into the discussion in order for policymakers to assess the risks the United States and its allies face in challenging Chinese territorial claims. Sometimes policymakers are simply asking how to “think about” a problem—whether it is the geopolitics of climate change or how Vladimir Putin views the world—while others might be seeking specific facts about the size and location of Syria’s chemical weapons stocks or the nature of Russia’s new “hybrid warfare.”

The wide range of questions posed to the IC lends itself to characterizing a range of functions that are being performed constantly. The book’s chapters are organized around those key functions. Chapter 2 first defines what intelligence is and its various dimensions in general terms. Students will learn about intelligence-collection methods, including technical, human, and open sources, and the contributions they make to analysis. This foundation will then enable students to focus more on intelligence “outputs” than “inputs” in order to highlight the value of intelligence to the policymaking process.

Chapter 3 will outline the current structure and decision-making processes of the NSE. It highlights the policy agencies and interagency mechanisms that are used to develop and implement national security strategies. Students can then appreciate the complexity of the decision-making process and the role that particular senior policymakers play in running the process or shaping its outcomes. Importantly, the chapter also will illustrate how intelligence fits into the formal interagency process for national security decision-making.

Chapter 4 will outline the current structure of the IC and identify some of the key agencies that participate regularly in the NSE. Attention will be focused principally on the national and departmental intelligence provided to National Security Council (NSC) members as well as senior departmental decision-makers, who are principal customers for the IC. This chapter will also introduce students to some of the continuing challenges leaders face in managing this huge intelligence enterprise.

Chapter 5 lays out a framework for how to think about the distinct and diverse roles that intelligence plays in the national security process. It describes the “intelligence cycle” concept and moves to the practical discussion of more-specific missions that support the decision-making process. Thereafter, chapters 6 through 10 will examine each of those missions in more detail, providing examples of how intelligence has contributed to major policy decisions.

To start, chapter 6 will describe “strategic intelligence” and its use for developing long-term strategies and policies. Students will gain an understanding of what kinds of strategic intelligence, as opposed to tactical intelligence, are available to policymakers. This discussion will explore the role of National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) and how they are produced. It will identify the actors and processes that produce NIEs, using recent examples such as the deeply flawed 2002 NIE on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) as well as the rising importance of the Global Trends documents aimed at each incoming president.

Chapter 7 will describe the IC’s enduring responsibility to provide warning of threats to the United States and its interests abroad. Students will be introduced to the concept of warning, including how it is conducted and organized. A brief examination of some of the famous warning events—beginning with Pearl Harbor and including the 9/11 attacks—will help students to identify lessons to be learned from past warning cases. The chapter will conclude with an examination of how the warning function has been organized in the past and how recent practices are shifting the burden of warning from specialized warning staffs to every analyst.

Chapter 8 will shine a light on the usually invisible mission of direct policy support provided to virtually every major national security agency in the US government. Students as well as scholars sometimes misunderstand the term to imply that the IC openly supports an administration’s policy agenda. That is not the meaning or intent of this term. Rather, the chapter will illustrate how intelligence supports policymakers with information and analysis relevant to their decisions, without intending to favor or oppose them. Students will gain an understanding of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) and the process behind it. It also describes other unique forms of intelligence support to policymakers engaged in ongoing international negotiations, crisis management, and counterterrorism efforts.

Chapter 9 focuses on the special and controversial intelligence mission of “covert action.” Students will gain an appreciation for how covert actions are authorized and monitored by both the executive and legislative branches. It will review some successes and failures of covert action, using historical as well as more recent (acknowledged) operations to illustrate the benefits, costs, and risks of such activities. Students will be able to appreciate how national security policy and intelligence are even more intertwined and less distinct than usual, which raises additional ethical and analytical challenges.

Chapter 10 is designed to bring the discussion back to the critical and often fractious relationship between intelligence and the policymaking process. Students will learn how the IC is sometimes placed in a position of evaluating the effectiveness of US policies. If the intelligence judgments are largely pessimistic, an administration’s opponents—in Congress or in other political arenas—can attack those policies. Hence, this chapter will expose students to the risks of “politicization” of intelligence. Classic cases can be found in analysis conducted during the Vietnam War as well as during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq during the presidency of George W. Bush, even though the forms of politicization in these two cases were very different. Students can then analyze various forms of politicization and also consider how it can be minimized if not entirely eliminated.

Chapter 11 concludes with an examination of how intelligence can best operate within American democracy while safeguarding both civil liberties and national security. It highlights the ethical and legal challenges to conducting secret intelligence gathering and covert action while remaining within the bounds of the US Constitution and accountable to senior policymakers, Congress, and ultimately the American public. Students will become familiar with the mix of executive branch and congressional oversight mechanisms that are in place to guarantee accountability. It raises the question of whether those oversight mechanisms have been sufficient to deal with the kinds of complex and intrusive intelligence operations conducted in a post-9/11 environment. The chapter concludes with a recommendation that American intelligence become as transparent as possible so that it is not only more easily understood by students and scholars but also finds more public support for its essential role in the policymaking process.

As students work their way through this introduction to intelligence, they will be confronted with a variety of terms involving intelligence processes, organizations, and concepts. This arcane vocabulary is often difficult to comprehend. Therefore, to provide a study aid, the author has set in boldface these terms that have a special meaning or significance. Short definitions of these highlighted items are located in the extensive glossary found at the back of the book. For instructors and students interested in going further into any of the topics covered in each chapter, there is also a short list of key readings at the end of each chapter, which the author considers excellent sources on a wide range of intelligence and national security topics. Last, at the end of the chapters where relevant there are sections variously titled Useful Documents, Useful Websites, and Further Reading with links to additional intelligence studies, declassified intelligence products, and related materials. With these additional aids, the author hopes to make a student’s introduction to intelligence more accessible and comprehensive.

NOTES

Epigraph: As cited in Charles Lathrop, The Literary Spy: The Ultimate Source of Quotations on Espionage and Intelligence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 10.

1. See Roger George and Harvey Rishikof, eds., The National Security Enterprise: Navigating the Labyrinth, 2nd ed. (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2017). This book outlines the many government agencies involved in national security decision-making along with descriptions of other key actors, such as Congress, the courts, think tanks, and the media. It provides students with an overview of the interagency processes and challenges that the NSE faces and is likely to face for the foreseeable future.

2. Joseph Nye, “Peering into the Future,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1994, 82–93.

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WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?

It is not enough, of course, to simply collect information. Thoughtful analysis is vital to sound decision-making.

—President Ronald Reagan, 1981

Our country’s safety and prosperity depend on the quality of the intelligence we collect and the analysis we produce, our ability to evaluate and share this information in a timely manner and our ability to counter intelligence threats.

—2010 US National Security Strategy

The Intelligence Community exists to provide political and military leaders with the greatest possible decision advantage. We understand, now more than ever, that the best possible way to accomplish our goal is through integration of all national intelligence capabilities.

—James Clapper, director of national intelligence, 2014

US national security decision-making relies on intelligence. Although the relationship between policy action and informa...