Twenty-First Century Intelligence

Wesley K. Wark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415463805
• eBook ISBN: 9781135175474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Twenty-First Century Intelligence collects the thinking of some of the foremost experts on the future of intelligence in our new century. The essays contained in this volume are set against the backdrop of the transforming events of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Intelligence plays a central and highly visible role in the global war on terror, and in new doctrines of global pre-emption of threats. Yet the challenges for intelligence services are great as the twenty-first century unfolds.

This collection will inform and stimulate new thinking about the current strengths and weaknesses of intelligence services, and about the future paths that they may follow. Behind the controversies of the present over intelligence performance, lie critical questions about how the past and future of an often mysterious but critical arm of the state are linked.

This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal Intelligence and National Security.

All Glory is Fleeting: Sigint and the Fight Against International Terrorism

MATTHEW M. AID

The impact of terrorism is currently far more limited by the failure or unwillingness of terrorists to exploit new technologies and complex vulnerabilities than by the inherent difficulty in conducting much more lethal attacks. The problem is not a lack of credible means to an end, but rather the lack of a real-world Doctor No or Professor Moriarty.

Anthony Cordesman

The surest guarantee of disappointment is an unrealistic expectation.

Thomas Patrick Carroll

Despite the passage of time since the deadly terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it remains extremely difficult to objectively discuss the important role that Signals Intelligence (Sigint) has played, and must necessarily continue to play, in the war against terrorism. Naturally, the single largest impediment to an educated discussion of the subject is the secrecy that surrounds virtually all aspects of contemporary Sigint operations. The US government and its partners have released virtually no primary documentation about the role played by intelligence in the events leading up to the bombings in New York City and Washington, DC, and the congressional public hearings on the performance of the US intelligence community prior to September 11 left much unsaid because of security considerations.

This essay seeks to set out what is known or can be reasonably established about the role that Sigint played in the events leading up to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It focuses on the performance of America's Sigint organization, the National Security Agency (NSA), and also discusses the potential future role of Sigint in the war on terrorism.

SIGINT AND THE CHANGING WAR ON TERRORISM IN THE 1990S

In order to understand the role that Sigint played in the war against international terrorism in the 1990s, and more specifically NSA's intelligence collection operations against Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda organization, it is essential to understand the global context within which Sigint had to operate in the early 1990s.

The Cold War, which had shaped world politics for more than 40 years, came to an abrupt end with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989–90, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. With the end of the Cold War, virtually all Western intelligence services, including virtually every agency making up the US intelligence community, were pared down to ‘peacetime levels’. Between 1991 and 1998, congressionally-ordered budget cuts forced the US intelligence community to reduce its size by 22.5 per cent, meaning that more than 20,500 men and women lost their jobs; and the US intelligence budget was slashed from about $34bn to $27bn. NSA, the single largest and most expensive component of the US intelligence community, lost one third of its staff between 1991 and 1996, and its budget was slashed by 35 per cent from $5.2bn to less than $3.5bn.¹ We now know that these cuts, especially the loss of so many of the agency's most talented managers, had a devastating impact on NSA's ability to perform its mission. According to a declassified congressional study: ‘One of the side effects of NSA's downsizing, outsourcing and transformation has been the loss of critical program management expertise, systems engineering, and requirements definition skills.’²

NSA was not the only Sigint service feeling the pinch. The British Sigint organization, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), was also forced to pare down its operations and reorganize itself in the early 1990s in order to deal with the new geostrategic threats and changes in global telecommunications technology.³ In 1992, GCHQ Director Sir John Adye informed his staff that he had ordered a three-year study into a ‘redirection of effort’ for the agency, which led to the closure of several GCHQ stations; GCHQ's civilian staff of 7,000 was cut by about ten per cent.⁴ Another study completed in 1995 revealed that GCHQ was still overmanned, inefficient and cost more than it was producing in the way of hard intelligence.⁵ This study resulted in further substantial cuts in the size and budget of GCHQ. Between 1995 and 2000, GCHQ's staff was cut from 5,500 to only 4,600 civilian and military personnel.⁶

The intelligence struggle against international terrorism also changed dramatically with the end of the Cold War. In the fall of 1991, Yasser Arafat and the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) agreed to participate for the first time in political dialog with Israel. This dialog, which was brokered by the Norwegian government, led to the signing of the so-called Oslo Accord on the front lawn of the White House on 13 September 1993. With the creation in 1995 of an autonomous Palestinian governing entity, the Palestinian Authority (PA), on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, acts of international terrorism by Palestinian terrorists fell dramatically in the early 1990s. With the support of virtually all frontline Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, the PLO ceased its sponsorship of terrorist activities and recognized the State of Israel. The Oslo Accord also effectively emasculated the more radical Palestinian organizations that opposed reconciliation with Israel, such as those led by George Habash and Abu Nidal, who fell into disfavor with the countries which had previously supported them. As a result, their terrorist activities came to an almost complete standstill.

Given the dramatic decline in Middle Eastern terrorism, the scale of intelligence resources dedicated to monitoring worldwide terrorist activities by the US and other Western intelligence agencies, especially in the area of Sigint, fell precipitously in the first half of the 1990s as more pressing intelligence targets ate up a higher percentage of the available collection resources.⁷ NSA and other Western Sigint services continued to monitor terrorist activities, albeit with significantly fewer resources than before.⁸

Western intelligence services had to adapt and readjust the nature and extent of their collection activities to deal with the changing and more diffuse global terrorist threat. For example, NSA's counter-terrorist Sigint mission in the early to mid-1990s was complicated by the wide geographic dispersion and disparate nature of the new terrorist targets that it was being asked to cover. There was the continued threat posed by state-sponsored terrorism, especially from Iran. For instance, Sigint intercepts of Iranian government message traffic between Tehran and the Iranian embassies in Paris, France and Berne, Switzerland, confirmed that Iranian secret agents operating from the Iranian embassy in Berne had murdered former Iranian prime minister Shahpour Bakhtiar on 8 August 1991 in Paris.⁹ According to press reports, NSA Sigint intercepts, together with Human Intelligence (Humint) provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station in Khartoum, led to the 14 August 1994 arrest in the Sudan of the Venezuelan-born terrorist Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as ‘Carlos’ or ‘The Jackal’, and his subsequent extradition to France to stand trial for murder. In 1997, ‘Carlos’ was sentenced to life imprisonment by a French court for the 1975 killing of two French security officers and a Lebanese national.¹⁰

Then NSA had to devote Sigint collection resources to monitoring the activities of the new generation of smaller but more violent terrorist organizations, including the Iranian-backed Shi'ite organization Hizballah (Party of God) based in Lebanon, the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas, the Shining Path in Peru, Abu Saayef in the Philippines, and the tiny 50-man ‘November 17’ organization in Greece. Probably the most important terrorist target for the US intelligence community, including NSA, during the early and mid-1990s was Hizballah because of its previous attacks on American targets in Lebanon during the 1980s and its close ties to the Iranian government.¹¹NSA Sigint intercepts dating as far back as 1983 revealed that the Iranian ambassador in Damascus, Muhammad Mohtashami-Pur, managed and financed a significant portion of the terrorist activities of Hizballah.¹²

On 17 June 1987, an American journalist with ABC News named Charles Glass, the son of the Lebanese Defense Minister, Ali Osserian, and their Lebanese driver, were kidnapped by members of Hizballah on the road between Sidon and Beirut in southern Lebanon. After pressure was brought to bear on the kidnappers by the Syrian government, the two Lebanese men were released, but Glass was not let go until two months later. According to press reports, GCHQ's listening post at Ayios Nikolaos on Cyprus intercepted the communications traffic between the Iranian ambassador in Damascus and the Iranian Foreign Ministry in Tehran as they debated what to do with Glass, strongly suggesting that th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contens
• Introduction: ‘Learning to Live With Intelligence’
• Intelligence for the Twenty-First Century
• Counter-Terrorism, Information Technology and Intelligence Change
• 9/11: The Failure of Strategic Intelligence
• All Glory is Fleeting: Sigint and the Fight Against International Terrorism
• Terrorism, Intelligence and Law Enforcement: Learning the Right Lessons
• Bombing at the Speed of Thought: Intelligence in the Coming Age of Cyberwar
• A New American Way of War? C4ISR and Information Operations in Operation ‘Iraqi Freedom’: A Provisional Assessment
• Deep Probe: The Evolution of Network Intelligence
• Index