Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, and Thugs

Intelligence and America's Quest for Security

Loch K. Johnson

• Editore: NYU Press
• Anno: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780814738900
• Argomento: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoria: Sicurezza nazionale

Recent years have seen numerous books about the looming threat posed to Western society by biological and chemical terrorism, by narcoterrorists, and by the unpredictable leaders of rogue nations. Some of these works have been alarmist. Some have been sensible and measured. But none has been by Loch Johnson.

Johnson, author of the acclaimed Secret Agencies and "an experienced overseer of intelligence" ( Foreign Affairs ), here examines the present state and future challenges of American strategic intelligence. Written in his trademark style--dubbed "highly readable" by Publishers Weekly --and drawing on dozens of personal interviews and contacts, Johnson takes advantage of his insider access to explore how America today aspires to achieve nothing less than "global transparency," ferreting out information on potential dangers in every corner of the world.

And yet the American security establishment, for all its formidable resources, technology, and networks, currently remains a loose federation of individual fortresses, rather than a well integrated "community" of agencies working together to provide the President with accurate information on foreign threats and opportunities. Intelligence failure, like the misidentified Chinese embassy in Belgrade accidentally bombed by a NATO pilot, is the inevitable outcome when the nation's thirteen secret agencies steadfastly resist the need for central coordination.

Ranging widely and boldly over such controversial topics as the intelligence role of the United Nations (which Johnson believes should be expanded) and whether assassination should be a part of America's foreign policy (an option he rejects for fear that the U.S. would then be cast not only as global policeman but also as global godfather), Loch K. Johnson here maps out a critical and prescriptive vision of the future of American intelligence.

PART I
An Intelligence Agenda for a New World

ONE
A Planet Bristling with Bombs and Missiles

I believe the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction presents the greatest threat that the world has ever known . . . perhaps the greatest threat that any of us will face in the coming years.

—Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, Confirmation Hearings, U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, 1997

The More Things Change . . .

When the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so did the central concern of U.S. intelligence. Throughout the cold war, most of America’s intelligence resources were focused on the USSR and its activities at home or abroad. The primary goal of U.S. foreign policy was to curb the spread of Communism.¹ Now, in the new order of things, the CIA and its companion agencies have had to reshuffle their missions and targets and, skeptics warned, perhaps even invent some new ones to justify the continuing existence of a large bureaucracy with an annual budget in excess of $27 billion.

According to a former DCI, Robert M. Gates, the demise of world Communism ushered in “a set of tasks assigned to the Agency [that] are both more complex and more numerous than during the cold war.”² Debate over the proper objectives of a refashioned intelligence agenda heated up during the Clinton administration as it attempted to navigate the uncertainties of a new age without the reliable compass of the containment doctrine.

Observers of American foreign policy wondered whether life after the omnipresent Communist threat would produce a dramatically different approach to international affairs in Washington, D.C., as befitting the radical change in global politics. Within the secret confines of the National Security Council (NSC), the Pentagon, and the intelligence community, planners drew up fresh lists of enemies—real and potential—now arrayed against the United States. The White House and Congress created a special panel of inquiry, “The Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community” (the Aspin-Brown commission), viewed widely as an opportunity to revamp the nation’s secret agencies for a different kind of threat environment. Public officials and media pundits claimed that economics would now replace the nation’s more traditional concerns about military security.

The intelligence community adapted fairly quickly to the changed environment, contrary to the expectation that the secret agencies (in the caricature of bureaucracies) would prove sluggish and resistant to change. By 1994, the CIA had extensively reoriented its global operations, dedicating only about 15 percent of its assets to Russian intelligence collection and analysis. Gates, the first post–cold war DCI (1991–93), referred to this new orientation as a “massive reallocation of resources.”³ The former Soviet empire, once hidden behind an “iron curtain,” was now on view to outsiders. Russia alone had hundreds of neophyte independent newspapers, magazines, and other media outlets, as well as a handful of competitive political parties. Secrets were fewer, so the need for espionage by the CIA was less.

This impressive reshuffling of duties notwithstanding, America’s foreign policy goals remained relatively static in the post-Communist world. To be sure, the list of adversaries had changed, with “rogue nations” like North Korea and Iraq moving to the forefront to take the place of the Soviet Union. Attention to economic globalism fell short, however, of what the hoopla over the creation of a new National Economic Council seemed to foreshadow early in the Clinton administration. Moreover, the Aspin-Brown commission was able to make only modest adjustments to, rather than a sweeping reform of, the fifty-year-old CIA and the rest of the intelligence community. In the highest councils of government, military security continued to hold sway over other agenda items, and the military intelligence agencies still received the lion’s share (85 percent) of the annual budget for espionage.

Old Wine in New Bottles

Military Security

The needs of human beings follow a certain priority, from basic survival to enlightened self-actualization.⁴ Nations, likewise, set priorities according to their needs. “Our first and most important foreign policy priority is peace—for ourselves and for others,” stated the director of the Policy Planning Staff in the Carter administration.⁵ In a bipartisan echo, the Reagan administration’s State Department emphasized the importance of “seeking to protect the security of our nation and its institutions, as well as those of our allies and friends.”⁶ Above all during the cold war, America would keep up its military guard, carry a big stick, and—if necessary—use it.

But with the demise of the Soviet Union, it seemed for a moment that military matters might be less pressing. A series of arms accords adopted near the end of and soon after the cold war on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF), strategic arms reduction talks (START I and START II), and chemical weapons appeared to foreshadow a decline in military confrontations in the world. And in fact, around the globe, democracy took root in once inhospitable soil. Juntas fell in Latin America, and liberated citizens cast aside Communist regimes in Central Europe. For the first time in history, a majority of nations were experimenting with some form of representative government.

But even though the U.S.-Soviet standoff had ended, many nations (and ethnic and tribal factions) continued to regard the use of force as an attractive option in pursuit of their objectives. Indeed, much of the world looked just as it had during the cold war: India and Pakistan exploded nuclear devices underground in 1998, and North Korea fired a test missile over Japan’s home islands in 1999, and in 1999, too, the American people learned that China had evidently engaged in widespread espionage activities inside the United States.

Some nations ventured further. Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, and as the century’s last decade ended, savage internecine warfare broke out in Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, the Balkans, and East Timor. Reports of mass rape and genocide in Central Africa, Bosnia, and Kosovo became part of the evening news throughout 1998 and 1999. Despite the end of the cold war, the world remained a hostile place.

Nations become not what they may wish to be but what they must be. Accordingly, in light of the enduring military threats in the world after the cold war, the United States was forced to set aside thoughts of a peace dividend, particularly since the country had been thrust into a new leadership position. Less by aspiration than by fait accompli, the United States had become the world’s foremost power. Reinforced by the dynamics of the military-industrial complex (alive and well even without the Soviet threat), Washington officials maintained U.S. defense and intelligence budgets at near cold war levels—indeed, using the excuse of the Kosovo crisis in 1999, GOP legislators sought and obtained large spending increases for national security.

If America now was the world’s leading power, it also had to have a credible military capability to intervene when necessary—or so the nation’s leaders seemed to think. The intelligence community would have to monitor potential military threats around the globe, from tracking the proliferation of major weapons systems and anticipating chemical and biological terrorist attacks against the United States to gathering information vital to American military operations whenever they might take place.

Political Security

As Clausewitz pointed out, war is the pursuit of politics by other means. The United States must understand the political machinations of other nations as well as the location and capabilities of their war machines. The twenty-first century has not changed the concentration by America’s intelligence agencies on both military and political concerns, what is often referred to as “strategic” interests in contrast to economic and humanitarian considerations.⁷ Does North Korea intend to start a war against South Korea or Japan? Do the leaders of China have imperialist intentions in Asia, perhaps beginning with an invasion of Taiwan? Has Iraq resumed its quest for nuclear weapons? How friendly will the new president of Russia be toward the United States?

Economic Security

Because of the United States’ abiding interest in the military and political dimensions of international affairs, its goal of economic prosperity has usually been relegated to second position in the list of America’s leading foreign policy (and, therefore, intelligence) objectives.⁸ At the beginning of the Clinton years, however, it seemed as though issues of international economics were about to displace America’s long-standing central interest in military and political security. With the cold war now in the hands of the historians, the new administration decided that it could afford to concentrate more on domestic policy considerations. “The Clinton administration has given priority to ‘commercial diplomacy,’ making the promotion of American exports a primary foreign policy objective,” observed a foreign policy expert in 1997.⁹ Or as President Clinton’s U.S. trade representative put it in the early months of the administration, “The days when we could afford to subordinate our economic interests to foreign policy or defense concerns are long past.”¹⁰

The president’s first DCI, R. James Woolsey, reinforced these sentiments. “The days are gone,” he said, “when international economics could be labeled low politics to separate it from the higher, loftier plane of political-military issues.”¹¹ President Clinton’s undersecretary of state for political affairs further stressed that “our economic interests are paramount,”¹² and the director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, added, “We’ve entered a phase and a century where our economic independence and security and strength [are] really identical to our national security.”¹³ Throughout his presidential honeymoon, Bill Clinton appeared determined to focus on rebuilding the American economy. His administration believed, according to a trade expert, that “international issues (other than commercial ones) could be for the most part marginalized.”¹⁴

Then the pressure of security problems began to crowd in on the president’s economic aspirations: Iraq, Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, North Korea, Bosnia, the terrorist Osama bin Laden (hiding in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban regime), mainland China’s threats against Taiwan, Israeli-Palestinian flare-ups, tensions between India and Pakistan, and the war in Kosovo that threatened to embarrass—some said unravel—NATO, America’s second oldest defense alliance (signed in 1949, two years after the Rio Treaty provided for regional security in the Western Hemisphere). International economics no longer enjoyed the front seat in the bus.

“Most of the threats to global stability—and ultimately to the security and integrity of American civilization—have had less to do with the intricacies of “geoeconomics,” wrote a foreign policy specialist, “than with a primal fact of international politics, namely, states and peoples intimidating one another by force of arms.”¹⁵ While some authorities continued to argue that American foreign policy had become largely a battle over international economic supremacy,¹⁶ by 1996 the Clinton administration knew better. It was up to its ears in problems that chiefly involved the Pentagon and the Department of State, not the Departments of Commerce and Treasury or the U.S. trade representative.

This is not to say, of course, that trade no longer matters. It has always mattered, from the days of Thomas Jefferson’s naval duels with the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean (an early use of military force to protect economic interests) to contemporary diplomatic struggles with Japan and China over worrisome trade imbalances. Today, as a New York Times foreign affairs columnist writes, “Economic crises can spread rapidly from one continent to another.”¹⁷ Although America cannot afford to ignore the ramifications of an increasingly global economy, the Clinton administration’s initial euphoria for things commercial gave way to a greater concern for military and political affairs.¹⁸ Intelligence has mirrored these policy interests, focusing more on economic intelligence from 1993 to 1997, after which intelligence support for military operations gained ascendancy when the Iraqis again got out of control and President Slobodan Milosevic started his policy of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo.

The Security of a Quality Life with Human Dignity

The United States’ foreign policy goals extend beyond the military, political, and economic. Though generally less well supported by the American people,¹⁹ a cluster of lifestyle issues that threaten humanity attract the sympathies of many citizens, issues such as adequate health care, quality housing and education, clean air and water, protected woods and streams, defense against drug dealers and other international criminals, and freedom from the biggest killer of all, infectious diseases.²⁰

Many Americans care, too, about global injustice, particularly the violation of human rights in other lands. A major impetus for U.S. military involvement in Africa and the Balkans since the end of the cold war was a heartfelt concern for the suffering of the people in those regions, whether they were victims of hunger or armed conflict. Americans also hope to see the benefits of democracy spread worldwide, a dominant theme in the Clinton administration, with its goal of democratic “enlargement” taking the place of Communist containment as the centerpiece of American foreign policy.

Expressions of cold war nostalgia are commonplace among intelligence officers and other members of the national security establishment in the United States. “During the cold war, life was simpler for intelligence agencies,” reminisced a senior intelligence officer. “There was a reasonably clear consensus about who the bad guys were, about what countries were legitimate targets for intelligence collection. Today, the situation is much more complicated.”²¹ This complication arises from the host of claimants for the intelligence dollar that was once dedicated almost exclusively to anti-Communist activities. With Communism now largely in ruins, policy officials have turned to other threats facing the nation. While most of these perils are military, political, or economic (like the wars in the Persian Gulf and Kosovo, the byzantine political maneuvering in Moscow, and the recent Asian financial crisis), some are more novel and have stimulated debate over the so-called New Intelligence Agenda, characterized by a greater awareness of how intelligence might be used to improve the quality of life for Americans and to make the world more humane.

In 1994, the director of the DCI’s National Intelligence Council (NIC) created a new position: a national intelligence officer, or NIO, for global affairs. This analyst’s portfolio gave special attention to “soft power,” the director’s label for issues of human rights, international ethics, and other cultural and ideological influences related to the quality of life and human dignity around the world, as distinguished from the “hard power” of traditional military, political, and economic might.²² This large basket of responsibilities contains everything from global ecology issues and the danger of infectious diseases to world hunger and violations of basic human rights. While the NIC global affairs position is new, the concern for such matters is not. In preparing his speech to announce the Marshall Plan in 1947, General George C. Marshall crossed out a reference in an early draft to “the Communist threat.” Inst...