The Future of Intelligence

Mark M. Lowenthal

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509520329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Intelligence & Espionage
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Intelligence is, by definition, a shadowy business. Yet many aspects of this secret world are now more openly analyzed and discussed, a trend which has inevitably prompted lively debate about intelligence gathering and analysis: what should be allowed? What boundaries, if any, should be drawn? And what changes and challenges lie ahead for intelligence activities and agencies?

In this compelling book, leading intelligence scholar Mark Lowenthal explores the future of intelligence. There are, he argues, three broad areas – information technology and intelligence collection; analysis; and governance – that indicate the potential for rather dramatic change in the world of intelligence. But whether these important vectors for change will improve how intelligence works or make it more difficult remains to be seen. The only certainty is that intelligence will remain an essential feature of statecraft in our increasingly dangerous world.

Drawing on the author's forty years' experience in U.S. intelligence, The Future of Intelligence offers a broad and authoritative starting point for the ongoing debate about what intelligence could be and how it may function in the years ahead.

1
What this Book is About

Intelligence – initially defined here somewhat narrowly as the effort to obtain and to analyze information required by national leaders – has a long past. Intelligence is one of the oldest organized human activities, often referred to somewhat archly as “the second oldest profession.” The recorded reigns of rulers and the chronicles of their wars are older. But the oldest reference to intelligence in Western literature is the story in the Book of Numbers, about the spies sent into Canaan by Moses shortly after the Hebrews' exodus from Egypt. Believed to have been written in the sixth century bce, Numbers describes events that occurred perhaps some 900 to 1000 years before. In the east, Sun Tzu, whose life is believed to be roughly contemporaneous with the compilation of Numbers, drew on many centuries of Chinese military experience when he wrote The Art of War, which includes much useful advice on the importance of intelligence. It is striking that these two civilizations – the Jews and the Chinese – thousands of miles apart and with no likely knowledge of one another, should both describe the use of intelligence in fairly contemporaneous periods.

Intelligence has a long past. What sort of future does it have? There is irony here, as intelligence is supposed to be about the future – although more on that later – and yet most intelligence analysts understand how difficult it is to achieve this future vision with any clarity. Two twentieth-century icons – Nobel physicist Niels Bohr and American baseball player Yogi Berra – are both credited with observing that: “It is very difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

And, so, here I am trying to prognosticate about the future of a profession whose function is to prognosticate about the future. This can appear to be either rather circular or self-absorbed.

My goal is not to predict specific outcomes for the future of intelligence or even which international security issues will be paramount, neither of which is possible. Policy makers and intelligence officers can forecast some specific events with a certain degree of accuracy but foretelling major trends – either in policy or in intelligence – is much more difficult. For example, it was self-evident that several Arab state leaders – Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia – were old and nearing the end of their tenures. However, the outbreak of the much more widespread Arab Spring protests after the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit seller could not have been foreseen.

Determining ongoing intelligence requirements is sometimes confused with forecasting the next series of events that will need to be addressed. These are different activities. Properly done, an intelligence requirements system should be a reflection of the current priorities of the policy makers, the people whom intelligence serves and supports. This was the view we had in mind when I led the effort to implement the National Intelligence Priorities Framework (NIPF) in 2003, and then managed for its first two years. Our goal in creating the NIPF, and the continuing goal fourteen years after its adoption, is to get a firm understanding of the ongoing priorities of the President and his senior national security appointees and advisers in terms of both the issues on which to focus and the relative rank importance to be given to each. However, as I always warned my staff as we managed the NIPF, we had to expect that issues would arise that had either originally been given a low priority and were now deemed more important, or were not given any priority at all. This is the reality of conducting intelligence: you have your list of issues and the world has its own. This very necessary requirements activity is far different from forecasting the next important event in international politics.

Also, a realistic intelligence priorities system, will, of necessity, focus on current or near-term issues. These issues are uppermost in policy makers' minds and agendas. Few policy makers have the time to focus for prolonged periods on issues that seem far off or even possibilities as opposed to likely certainties. When I managed the NIPF we actually tried to create what we called a “shadow NIPF,” looking ahead two or three years. This was not a success. Most analysts said their issue would look “pretty much” as it did now. Again, this was understandable, as it is difficult to foresee major unsettling change. To quote Yogi Berra again: “The future will be like the past, only different.”

Intelligence, like all other human endeavors, has both revolutionary and evolutionary aspects. There are issues that arise and seem significant, only to turn out to be ephemeral, just as there are issues that seem small in importance and turn out to be very important. Sorting these out as they occur is difficult enough. Forecasting them in the future is even more daunting.

With those cautionary observations made, what is it we are talking about when we talk about intelligence?

At a somewhat abstract but basic level, we are talking about the ability to determine needs for certain types or categories of information that are not readily available to us, the ability to collect that information and then to analyze and put it into some form or format so that the person who needs the now-assessed intelligence can access it and consider it. More concretely, we are talking about the ability of the state to conduct these collection and analytic activities, as well as to carry out certain operations that are different from both diplomacy and military operations.

At this level, prognostication is relatively simple. Policy makers will always have a need for information that is not readily available. The types of information will vary – depending on current circumstances and issues and the preferences of the policy makers – but the core need for intelligence will continue. That said, intelligence appears to have reached a turning point. The convergence of several factors and issues – rapidly changing technology, greater public availability of information, increased streams of information from certain sources, more threatening transnational issues, and changing tolerance among governments and people for what types of intelligence collection and operations should be conducted in their names – all pose challenges for the future of intelligence. Many of these factors can be either positive or negative, depending on how they develop or how policy makers and intelligence officers react to them. These issues form the core of this book. But the essential view here is that intelligence is a normal state function conducted at various levels by different governments, and that it will continue to exist, albeit with possibly changed means and perhaps ends.

Another framing note: this book focuses primarily on the future of intelligence in democratic states. Within that group of states, much of this book will also be written from the perspective of the United States. Of all the democracies, the United States has the largest and most capable intelligence establishment. It therefore tends to serve as a leader by sheer dint of size and capability. We further assume that most – if not all – democracies, largely follow the procedural intelligence model of the United States, Britain, et al.: intelligence works for and is subordinated to policy but intelligence has no meaningful existence beyond that relationship. For the Five Eyes partners (US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) this also means that intelligence officers do not make policy recommendations. That is the exclusive sphere of elected officials and their appointees in the policy departments. These rules are crucial assumptions for assessing the future of intelligence because if they were no longer in force then any further prognostications would be fanciful at best and more likely meaningless. In other words, intelligence works best when confined to its proper sphere and relationship to policy.

Intelligence is a difficult function to conduct under any form of government, although the constraints are very different under authoritarian versus democratic governments. Authoritarian governments by definition exhibit different degrees of control and repression over their population. Parts of their intelligence apparatus will serve some of these domestic policing functions in addition to their foreign ones. In many authoritarian countries a key attribute is that their security service serves both an internal and external function. This was the case for the Soviet Union, and now for China, and may again be the case for Russia as Vladimir Putin reassembles the KGB, which was largely an internal service with one directorate that was assigned foreign intelligence responsibilities. This leads to an interesting conundrum for these intelligence services. The authoritarian intelligence service does not want dissent to get out of hand. Therefore, true dissent or political disinterest may be under-reported to avoid having the intelligence services appear incompetent. The KGB apparently had no real insight into the degree of public disinterest in the future of the Soviet state per se as the Soviet Union came to an end. At the same time, the authoritarian intelligence service cannot claim to have totally stifled dissent lest the government question why the service is still required or still required at that level of activity or why some level of dissent is still evident despite these claims. In other words, a low level of dissent – real or imagined – is most useful for both the authoritarian rulers – hence the need for their extensive powers – and for their intelligence services.

Another constraint for intelligence in authoritarian states is the likely limit on being able to report “bad news,” or intelligence that conflicts with the official line. This runs counter to one of the basic premises of most authoritarian states, the superior wisdom of the rulers, which justifies their continuation in power. Indeed, running an intelligence service in an authoritarian state is risky at a personal level. The intelligence leadership can too easily be seen as a possible threat or rival by the political leaders. The intelligence officers know too many intimate secrets. Of the four heads of Soviet intelligence under Josef Stalin, only one, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, died of natural causes. Similarly, Chinese President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption drive against “tigers and flies” (meaning both high- and low-ranking officials), has convicted several senior intelligence officials, including Zhou Yongkang, a former Minister of Public Security.

This is not to suggest that policy makers in democracies never have the urge to “shoot the messenger” – at least metaphorically if not bureaucratically. They do, but the risks are professional and political but not personal. In democracies all senior positions are inherently political. Of the twenty-one individuals who have been US Directors of Central Intelligence or Directors of National Intelligence, six were fired by Presidents (Dulles, Helms, Colby, Deutch, Goss, Blair); three lost their jobs as a result of a partisan change in control of the Presidency (Bush, Turner, Gates); and two quit in frustration over their lack of access to the President (McCone, Woolsey).

The constraints for intelligence services in democracy are quite different. The concepts of civil liberties and the rule of law place immediate bounds on what intelligence can or cannot do. Various types of intelligence collection against either domestic or foreign targets require authorization from elected officials or their confirmed designees or from various types of legal overseers. Funding invariably comes from elected legislatures, which gives the legislatures both insights and degrees of control as well. Courts are available for redress if individuals believe intelligence services have contravened their charters. The concept of secrecy, upon which all intelligence services rely regardless of the government they serve, conflicts with the democratic concept of open governments.

But the point remains that intelligence in democracies is substantially different from intelligence in authoritarian states and the focus in this book is on intelligence as practiced in democracies. Some of the issues discussed, particularly in technology, are more generic in nature. But many of the other issues, particularly the conduct of and possible limits on collection and operations and the broader issue of governance are very different and more meaningful in democratic states. Even here one can find fairly broad variance: Israel tolerates operational intelligence activities that the United States does not; Canada tolerates very few at all. Still, the fundamental concept of governments subject to the rule of law and to popular will are broad enough to allow some level of generalization.

Why write this book now? Intelligence agencies in democracies have not previously operated with the degrees of both publicity and scrutiny that are now expected and actually experienced on a recurring basis. Several factors account for this change.

The first factor has been the great increase in the role of legislative oversight of intelligence, primarily in the United States but in Britain, Australia, and France as well. In the United States this change was driven by the unraveling of the Cold War consensus because of the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975, and then by a series of leaks and revelations about US intelligence activities in 1974–6. One of the conclusions of the revelations and the subsequent investigations by a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and then by Senate and House select committees, was that congressional oversight had been both trusting and lax. Both chambers then created permanent committees dedicated specifically to intelligence oversight. The investigations also changed how journalists viewed intelligence, going from a topic about which little was said and little written to one that was seen as fair game for revelations. The previous period of gentlemanly journalistic respect for secrecy was now over. Intelligence has never been able to retreat to its former largely undiscussed status.

The second and more important, more recent factor has been the effect of the ongoing war against terrorists or, rather, their war against us. Terrorists' ability to reach into various nations to carry out attacks – either directly or through self-avowed supporters – has increased the public's concern about the quality of their respective intelligence services. In the mid-1990s, I was the staff director of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The chairman, Larry Combest, a Republican from Texas, said to me early in our relationship: “Do you know what the American people want from intelligence? They want to know that when they go to bed at night they will wake up in the same country in the morning.” If Combest's formulation is correct, then we lost that sense of security on the morning of September 11, 2001. By mid-morning, we were in a different country – or, as L. P. Hartley wrote in The Go-Between (1953): “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” There was a substantial difference between the pre- and post-September 11 United States.

The long Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union and periods after 1945 when we have had forces actively engaged in combat all required good intelligence support but were at the same time somewhat remote form the everyday lives of citizens. The advent of terror attacks on the homeland, as we now call it, changed that. Intelligence was not just a foreign policy issue; it became a public safety issue.

An investigation into what went wrong on September 11 was inevitable. In fact, there were two investigations, one by the Joint Inquiry of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and then one by the 9/11 Commission (formally, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States). (By contrast, there were eight investigations of the Pearl Harbor attack between 1941 and 1946.) The goal of the 9/11 Commission staff from the outset was to reorganize US intelligence. The unstated premise of the Commission was that there had to have been some way that the 9/11 attack could have been prevented. This was an understandable desire, as to believe otherwise is to accept the fact of a rather discomforting vulnerability. The commission found various flaws in policy and intelligence but they never found the one or two or more things that, had they been done correctly, would have led to the intelligence necessary to stop those four airplanes on that September morning.

Hard on the heels of the 9/11 attack and its aftermath came the national intelligence estimate (NIE) on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. British and Australian intelligence also produced assessments on this issue. Three important points need to be made about the Iraq WMD NIE. First, yes, the estimate was largely (not enti...