Warnings

Richard A. Clarke, R.P. Eddy

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062488046
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Seguridad nacional

From President Bill Clinton's recommended reading list

Publishers Weekly Bestseller

Warnings is the story of the future of national security, threatening technologies, the U.S. economy, and possibly the fate of civilization.

In Greek mythology Cassandra foresaw calamities, but was cursed by the gods to be ignored. Modern-day Cassandras clearly predicted the disasters of Katrina, Fukushima, the Great Recession, the rise of ISIS, the spread of viruses and many more. Like the mythological Cassandra, they were ignored. There are others right now warning of impending disasters—from cyber attacks to pandemics—but how do we know which warnings are likely to be right?

Through riveting explorations in a variety of fields, the authors—both accomplished CEOs and White House National Security Council veterans—discover a method to separate the accurate Cassandras from the crazy doomsayers. They then investigate the experts who today are warning of future disasters: the threats from artificial intelligence, bio-hacking, malware attacks, and more, and whose calls are not being heeded. Clarke's and Eddy's penetrating insights are essential for any person, any business, or any government that doesn't want to be a blind victim of tomorrow's catastrophe.

CHAPTER 1

Cassandra: From Myth to Reality

There are people among us who can see the future.

Often they clamor for our attention, and just as often they are ignored. We are right to discount most soothsayers, but horrible things happen when accurate warnings of specific disasters go unheeded. People die because we fail to distinguish the prophet from the charlatan.

This book tries to find those rare people who see the future, who have accurate visions of looming disasters.

Cassandra was a beautiful princess of Troy, cursed by the god Apollo. He gave her the ability to see impending doom, but the inability to persuade anyone to believe her. Her ability to pierce the barriers of space and time to see the future showed her the fiery fall of her beloved city, but the people of Troy ridiculed and disregarded her. She descended into madness and ultimately became one of the victims of the tragedy she foretold.

Are there Cassandras among us today, warning of ticking disasters, whose predictions fall on deaf ears? Is it possible to figure out who these seers are? Can we cut through the false warnings to tune in to the correct visions, saving millions of lives and billions of dollars? That question is not about Greek mythology. It is about our ability today, as a nation, as an international community, to detect impending disaster and act in time to avoid it, or at least to mitigate the damage.

Buried in billions of pages of blog posts and tweets, academic research, and government reports, Cassandra figuratively calls to us, warning of calamity. Often she is unheeded, sometimes unheard. Frequently she is given only a token response or dismissed as a fool or a fraud. Her stories are so improbable, so unprecedented, that we cannot process them or believe them, much less act upon them.

The problem is, of course, that Cassandra was right, and those who ignored her may have done so at the cost of their own lives and that of their state.

Not just the ancient Greeks had a tale of a seer tragically ignored. The Bible tells the story of the Hebrew prophet Daniel, who was able to read mysterious words that appeared on the wall of the Babylonian king Belshazzar’s banquet hall during a rowdy feast. The words mene, mene, tekel, upharsin (“numbered, numbered, weighed, divided” in Aramaic) were unintelligible to all but Daniel, who warned the king that they foretold the fall of his kingdom. According to the story, Belshazzar was killed in a coup only hours later. Daniel had seen the “writing on the wall.”

Today when someone is labeled a Cassandra, it’s commonly understood that they simply worry too much and are fatalistic, overly pessimistic, or focus too much on the improbable downside, a Chicken Little rather than a prophet. If we refer to the original Greek myth, a Cassandra should be someone whom we value, whose warnings we accept and act upon. We seldom do, however. We rarely believe those whose predictions differ from the usual, who see things that have never been, whose vision of the future differs from our own, whose prescription would force us to act now, perhaps changing the things we do in drastic and costly ways.

What the ancient Greeks called Cassandra behavior today’s social scientists sometimes refer to as sentinel intelligence or sentinel behavior, the ability to detect danger from warning signs before others see it. The behavior is observed in a variety of animals, including, we believe, in humans. Those with sentinel intelligence see with great clarity through the fog of indicators, and they warn the pack. In other animals, the pack seems genetically disposed to respond quickly to the warnings of their sentinels. In humans, that ability is less well developed.

We, the authors, are Dick Clarke and R.P. Eddy. We have known and worked with each other for over twenty years, in and out of government, on topics including the rise of al Qaeda and then ISIS, nuclear and biological weapons proliferation and the emergence of deadly viruses like Ebola and HIV, the introduction of the cyber threat, and wars from Iraq to Bosnia to Afghanistan. We are neither pessimists nor obsessed with doom. Indeed, we are optimists who believe we are on the cusp of great technological advances that should make human life vastly better. For much of the time we have known each other, however, the news has been dominated by a series of disasters that could have been avoided or mitigated. Among them are 9/11, the Great Recession, Katrina, the Second Iraq War, and the rise of ISIS. We worked directly on many of these topics, and were personally affected by some. They have loomed large in our conversations with each other, often over a good single malt, with one question regularly recurring: how could we have avoided or better prepared for that?

What we noticed was that almost all of these events were followed by investigations and recriminations, seeking to lay blame for the catastrophe or responsibility for failures that made the situations worse. In many instances, however, it seemed that an expert or expert group, a Cassandra, had accurately predicted what would happen. They were often ignored, their warnings denigrated, disregarded, or given only inadequate, token responses.

We began to wonder whether there was some pattern of prescient but overlooked warnings. Could there possibly be a way to identify these accurate but unheeded warnings before disaster struck? If there really was a frequent phenomenon of unheeded alarms that later proved to be accurate, finding a way to detect and validate those warnings in advance could save lives, avoid suffering, and reduce financial losses.

We discovered that at any given time there is a plethora of predictions of doom. Most are ignored because they should be. They are created by cranks and have no empirical underpinnings or basis in reality. Some warnings are heeded, but then events prove the alarm to be false. Often, however, true experts in a field do their job and sound the warning in time, only to be ignored or given only an inadequate, token response. We began calling such episodes Cassandra Events. That led us to ask whether there was something about past Cassandra Events that can help us identify contemporary alarmists whose warnings will turn out to be right. We asked friends, colleagues, associates, and world-leading experts what they thought about this Cassandra phenomenon.

The Cassandra problem is not only one of hearing the likely accurate predictions through the noise, but of processing them properly once they are identified. We began to realize that to successfully navigate a Cassandra Event, an organization or society must move through several stages. First we must hear the forecast, then believe it, and finally act upon it.¹ In practice, these steps are each individually challenging. Moreover, executing all three sequentially is often immensely difficult. In particular, the ability to get it right is exceedingly rare when the prediction varies substantially from the norm, from the past, from our experience, or from our deeply held beliefs about the way the future should unfold. Add a significant financial cost as a requirement of acting on such a warning, and the probability for action often approaches zero. If, however, we ignore a true Cassandra, the cost of not acting is usually far higher than the cost of dealing with the problem earlier.

Thus, this book will seek to answer these questions: How can we detect a real Cassandra among the myriad of pundits? What methods, if any, can be employed to better identify and listen to these prophetic warnings? Is there perhaps a way to distill the direst predictions from the surrounding noise and focus our attention on them? Or will Cassandra forever be condemned to weep as she watches her beloved city of Troy burn?

To answer those questions, we begin with short case studies of real human beings in current times who had a Cassandra-like ability concerning some important issue, and who, like the mythological princess, were ignored. This book will not attempt to be the definitive case study of any of the disasters we review. Instead, we will focus on the Cassandras themselves and their stories. We will try to determine how they knew when others did not, why they were dismissed, and how circumstances could have been changed so that their warnings would have been heeded.

While our case studies focus on individuals, many are also stories about organizations created to be sentinels. Governments and some industries and professions have long realized the value of having lookouts, scouts, and sentinels to give warnings. Among our case studies are stories involving parts of the U.S. government: the intelligence community’s “warning staff,” the agency created to watch for potential mine disasters, the national disaster management organization, and the financial regulators who exist to look for fraud and potential systemic economic instability.

We begin our examination of past Cassandra Events by looking at Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, an event that gave rise to a series of disasters that continue today. Next, we examine what happened in Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina. We examine the concurrent calamities of a tsunami and multiple nuclear reactor meltdowns in Japan. Back in the United States, we go underground in West Virginia to take a look at the recurrent nature of mining disasters. The Middle East intrudes again with the rise of Daesh (ISIS). Then we shift to economic and financial Cassandra Events, examining the case of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, as well as the Great Recession of 2008.

As we proceeded through these Cassandra Event case studies in a variety of different fields, we began to notice common threads: characteristics of the Cassandras, of their audiences, and of the issues that, when applied to a modern controversial prediction of disaster, might suggest that we are seeing someone warning of a future Cassandra Event. By identifying those common elements and synthesizing them into a methodology, we create what we call our Cassandra Coefficient, a score that suggests to us the likelihood that an individual is indeed a Cassandra whose warning is likely accurate, but is at risk of being ignored.

Having established this process for developing a Cassandra Coefficient based on past Cassandra Events, we next listen for today’s Cassandras. Who now among us may be accurately warning us of something we are ignoring, perhaps at our own peril? We look at contemporary individuals and their predictions, and examine the ongoing public reaction to them. Our cases here include artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, sea level rise, pandemic disease, a new risk of nuclear winter, the Internet of Things, and asteroid impacts. Finally, we end this volume with some thoughts about how society and government might reduce the frequency of ignoring Cassandras when it comes to some of the major issues of our time.

While we will not endorse the predictions of the possible contemporary Cassandras (we leave it to the reader to decide), we will apply our framework to their cases, evaluating each element—the individual, the receiver of the warning, and the threat itself—to determine the Cassandra Coefficient. If you find value in our methodology, perhaps we would do well as a society to turn our attention to those scenarios with the highest scores: the future high-impact events we are ignoring.

If this seems like an ambitious undertaking, we don’t think so. It’s actually quite easy to put the pieces together. The hard part may be to first realize these invisible people exist.

Until Warnings, no author has explored how to sift through the noise to identify the actual Cassandras. This is the first effort to help people judge which warnings deserve a closer listen, and thereby perhaps stop these disasters before they happen.

A FEW PEOPLE THOUGHT WE WERE INTERESTED IN THIS TOPIC BECAUSE of Dick’s role in the September 11 tragedy. “So, are you interested in Cassandras because you, Dick Clarke, were the Cassandra about al Qaeda and 9/11?” The short answer to that question is no. Both authors have an interest in the phenomenon of Cassandras because of our fascination with leadership decision making and its role in significant historical events and trends. Inevitably, however, people want to talk about al Qaeda and the attacks of September 11, 2001. Dick addressed this issue in detail many years ago in his book Against All Enemies, and neither of us has any desire to replow much of that ground again here, so let’s just get it out of the way. Here is what Dick thinks about warnings and 9/11:

A lot of other people were also warning about the al Qaeda threat by 1999 and certainly by 2001. Chief among them were FBI Special Agent John P. O’Neill, CIA Director George Tenet, and most of the leadership of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center. Regrettably none of us was able to predict the time, place, or method of the September 11 attacks. We had achieved what military intelligence people call strategic warning—identifying intent—but not tactical warning—identifying the when, where, and how. Why we failed to achieve tactical warning is a controversial subject centering on the repeated, conscious decision of senior CIA personnel to prevent the FBI and White House leadership from knowing that the 9/11 hijackers were already in the U.S. (A much more detailed discussion of the topic can be found in another of Dick’s previously published books, Your Government Failed You.)

The Bush administration’s response to the warnings leading up to 9/11 mirrors the bungled responses we will discuss further in the Cassandra Event case studies presented in this book. Officials heard the warnings but didn’t fully believe them and certainly didn’t act on them. Most of the leadership had been out of government since the previous Bush administration eight years prior. Their biases were a decade old. They couldn’t believe that the world had changed so much. The number-one threat to the United States was not a nation-state but a stateless terrorist group? Much less could they believe that the threat would manifest as a plan to attack the country from within. Simply put, it had never happened before, so they couldn’t really believe that it would.

Unfortunately, even when recognized experts and institutions explicitly and loudly sound the alarm, they do not always succeed in effectively conveying a message or eliciting a meaningful response from the appropriate authorities. Decision makers don’t typically welcome predictions of impending disaster. Rather than acting as comprehensively as possible to prevent or mitigate the effects of the coming catastrophe, they often go into an implicit state of denial. They may not dispute the evidence and reject the warning, but they don’t act as though they actually believe it to be true. So it was with the al Qaeda threat, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Bush administration. Now let’s move on.

IN OUR PRELIMINARY DISCUSSIONS WITH FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES, we were directed to a couple of famous examples of Cassandras in recent history. The most common figure people repeatedly brought up was the historic giant Sir Winston S. Churchill. Thick volumes on Churchill’s public and private life abound, some written by the man himself. Indeed, the former British prime minister was a prolific historian. Few public figures have documented and explained their lives and careers at greater length than Churchill. It is likely that no others have been the subject of so much scholarly research and writing, excepting perhaps U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. Consequently, we know a lot about Churchill’s life, including those events that might qualify him as a Cassandra. We also have a rich body of work describing the man’s disposition, intellect, and character.

Unlike some Cassandras whom we will meet later in this book, Churchill was far from an obscure, unknown individual when he began his warnings in the 1930s. He had been elected to Parliament in 1900 at age twenty-six and became a Cabinet...