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3 US espionage enters the
'un-Rumsfeld' era By Tim
Shorrock
As the George W Bush
administration winds up nearly seven years of
intelligence fiascoes, a quiet revolution has been
going on at the Pentagon, which controls more than
80% of America's US$60 billion intelligence
budget. Since taking over from Donald Rumsfeld as
secretary of defense in the winter of 2006, Robert
Gates has greatly scaled down the Pentagon's
footprint on national security policy and
intelligence.
Working closely with
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Michael
McConnell, he has slowly begun to assert civilian control
over
the key spy agencies funded by the defense budget
and halted the Pentagon's efforts to create its
own intelligence apparatus independent of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The
recent intelligence assessment of Iran's nuclear
ambitions, in contradicting early administration
assertions, is perhaps the most significant sign
of this newly won independence.
Those are
significant actions. Under Rumsfeld, the Pentagon
had become the dominant force in US intelligence,
with vast new powers in human intelligence and
counter-terrorism, both at home and abroad. By
2005, it was deploying secret commando units on
clandestine missions in countries as far afield as
the Philippines and Ecuador, sometimes without
consulting with the local US ambassadors and CIA
station chiefs.
At some point, President
George W Bush and his national security team
apparently decided that the genie had to be put in
the bottle, and sent Gates - a former CIA director
who had worked closely with Vice President Dick
Cheney during the first Bush administration - to
put the kibosh on Rumsfeld's private intelligence
army.
But these efforts by Gates and
McConnell to demilitarize US Intelligence will
never succeed until Congress, with the support of
the next administration, removes the three
national collection agencies - the National
Security Agency (NSA), the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the
National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) - from the
Pentagon's command-and-control system and places
them directly, like the CIA, under the control of
the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence (ODNI).
That consolidation
was one of the key recommendations made by the
9-11 Commission that investigated the role of US
spying agencies prior to the terrorist attacks of
2001. This consolidation was supposed to happen
under the 2004 intelligence reform bill that grew
out of the commission's deliberations. At the last
minute, however, pro-military lawmakers supported
by Rumsfeld stripped the language that would have
done the trick out of the bill. Until Congress
restores that provision, the bulk of intelligence
spending - and therefore the critical decisions
about how to deploy spying assets - will remain
under military control.
Three national
collection agencies The NSA, the NGA and
the NRO are the crown jewels of America's vast
intelligence system and make up the most powerful
surveillance and eavesdropping system on the
planet. Together, the three agencies are
responsible for about half of the $42 billion the
government spends every year on its National
Intelligence Program, which also includes the CIA
and the much smaller intelligence units within the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the
Departments of State, Treasury, Homeland Security
and Energy. The rest of the intelligence budget
goes to tactical intelligence units within the
Pentagon and the armed services.
The NSA,
as most American readers are increasingly aware,
monitors billions of phone calls, e-mails and
Internet messages flowing through the global
telecommunications system from listening posts
throughout the world, and then analyzes them for
possible clues to threats to the nation. It is led
by Army Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, who
has at his command a hugely expensive army of
contractors providing cutting-edge technology in
cryptology, data-mining, social network analysis
and super-computing, all of which are used to
search telephone and Internet traffic for
information about foreign leaders, military
commanders, and trade negotiators, in addition to
picking up chatter about terrorist organization
and potential plots.
Anyone who watched
former then-secretary of state Colin Powell's
disastrous 2003 appearance before the UN Security
Council should remember his display of three NSA
intercepts of cell phone calls made by Iraqi
military commanders - examples of the agency's
incredible ability to listen in on communications
thousands of miles away.
The NGA was
formally inaugurated as a combat support agency of
the Pentagon in 2003, and is therefore less known
to the American public. It supplies imagery and
mapping products to the military and national
leaders that are beamed to earth from
photo-reconnaissance planes, commercial and
military satellites, and unmanned aerial vehicles.
Geospatial intelligence is used in
everything from climate studies and human rights
reporting to the tracking of enemy soldiers and
insurgents in Iraq. The NRO, meanwhile, builds and
maintains the spy satellites that feed the NSA and
NGA and operates ground stations, both at home and
abroad, where imagery and signals data is
translated, analyzed, and sometimes combined.
These three agencies probably supply about
75% of the information that appears every morning
in the presidential daily brief, which
intelligence officials say has evolved into a
multi-media presentation in which NSA phone
intercepts compete with NGA imagery and live video
streams for the president's attention. Since 2004,
the NSA and the NGA have also been collaborating
closely - using the NGA's "eyes" and the NSA's
"ears" - to create hybrid intelligence tools that
are used primarily by the military.
By
combining intercepts of cell phone calls with
overhead imagery gathered by unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs), intelligence analysts can track
suspected terrorists or insurgents in Iraq in real
time. As these tools become available for use by
domestic policing agencies, a possibility created
by a new intelligence institution known as the
National Applications Office, the power of the
military to conduct both foreign and domestic
intelligence will increase.
No
debate For most of their existence, the
Pentagon has controlled the NSA, NGA and NRO,
appointed their directors and maintained ultimate
authority over the information they collect and
how it is used. These agencies, then, are
essentially military assets, to be used as
directed by the secretary of defense.
But
there has been no public debate about this issue.
Within the intelligence community, officials and
contractors at the CIA and the NSA generally
support the idea of a strong ODNI with authority
over their budgets. But officials and contractors
directly involved in defense intelligence -
including the expensive communications and
networking apparatus that supports the
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