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3 US espionage enters the
'un-Rumsfeld' era By Tim
Shorrock
computerized,
network-centric warfare of precision bombing
practiced in Iraq - prefer working for the
Pentagon. Any debate these two groups have,
however, is held in secret and behind the closed
doors of the intelligence-industrial complex.
One of the only voices to press the case
for civilianized intelligence is Melvin Goodman, a
former CIA officer at the Center for International
Policy. Goodman resigned from the CIA over what
he
perceived as the politicization of Soviet analysis
during the 1980s. In op-eds going back over a
decade he has argued consistently for placing the
three national agencies under control of a
director of national intelligence. "The collection
of strategic intelligence is being given short
shrift because of the military's emphasis on
tactical intelligence and support for the
warfighter," Goodman told me in an interview.
While the nation can't deny intelligence support
to warfighters in places like Iraq, "if you don't
get the job of strategic intelligence done
correctly, you will blunder in your larger
national security policies," he says.
The
penultimate example of such a blunder occurred in
1998, when US intelligence failed to detect the
Indian government's planning for its first test of
a nuclear weapon - a failure that led in part to
the collapse of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
"I blame that in part on the collection
requirements of the military dominating" the
intelligence bureaucracy "and not being interested
in arms control or the Indian subcontinent",
Goodman told me.
Essentially, he said, the
weapons test wasn't picked up because US spy
satellites had not been programmed to tip toward
India in the crucial weeks leading up to the test.
Intelligence leaders "have a list of priorities,
and the satellite collection corresponds to one,
two, and three priorities, and arms control wasn't
one of them," he said. And because the Pentagon
wasn't particularly interested in arms control,
what was happening on the Indian subcontinent
merited little attention.
That incident
underscores that decisions about how and what
intelligence is collected at any given time are
deeply political, and should be carried out by
elected national officials whose interests go
beyond immediate military goals. Consider the NGA
and its considerable abilities to provide overhead
imagery and mapping tools. During the 1990s, when
the NGA was known as the National Imagery and
Mapping Agency (NIMA), an analyst assigned to
monitor satellite imagery from the Balkans began
to compare what he was seeing on the ground in
Bosnia to past photographs of the area.
Working on his own time late at night, he
noticed that certain towns in Bosnia showed
unmistakable signs of ethnic cleansing, including
destroyed mosques and what looked very much like
mass graves. The analyst brought his findings to
the CIA's National Intelligence Council, which
realized their importance and showed them to
senior officials from the State Department and the
National Security Council. Using that evidence,
the Clinton administration charged the government
of Serbia with crimes against humanity - an event
that led directly to the NATO bombing campaign.
Whether one agrees or not with the NATO response,
the imagery became a powerful tool for the Clinton
administration.
This link between
intelligence-gathering and administration action
happened because Clinton's government - and that
individual analyst - was deeply concerned about
the Balkans. The same tools in the hands of
officials concerned about the plight of indigenous
people in, say, Guatemala, could have turned up
similar evidence of crimes by the Guatemalan
military against its people, in numbers far
greater than those in the Balkans. Similarly,
human rights groups are today using unclassified
commercial imagery to track ethnic cleansing in
Darfur and Myanmar.
Because the NGA is a
combat agency of the Pentagon, however, its tools
- which include both unclassified imagery
purchased from commercial satellite vendors and
classified imagery supplied by US spy satellites -
are at the command of military leaders, who make
the ultimate decisions about where to aim their
cameras. That is the legacy of military control
over the national agencies, a process that
deepened during the first six years of the Bush
administration.
Rumsfeld's
consolidation Donald Rumsfeld came to
office in 2001 determined to restore the power of
the intelligence community after what he
considered the benign neglect of the Clinton
administration. During the 1990s, as chairman of a
national commission examining the proliferation of
ballistic missiles, Rumsfeld had become skeptical
of the CIA's analyses and came away convinced that
the CIA was underestimating the threat of nuclear
weapons from North Korea, Iran, and other
so-called "rogue" nations. "Rumsfeld's view was
that the CIA was frequently too rigid or too timid
- or maybe both," Michael Isikoff and David Corn
wrote in Hubris, their book about the
administration's misuse of intelligence. In a 2001
meeting with Republican lobbyists described in the
book, Rumsfeld "used the occasion to rail at the
CIA" and declared: "I'm going to create my own
intelligence agency."
Rumsfeld's first
move in that direction was the creation of a new
office within the Pentagon: under secretary for
intelligence. Created by an act of Congress in
2002, the position was taken by Stephen Cambone, a
neo-conservative who had worked closely with
Rumsfeld during the 1990s as staff director of the
Rumsfeld commission on ballistic missiles. The new
position gave enormous powers to Cambone.
Under the new law, the Pentagon's
intelligence chief exercises the secretary of
defense's "authority, direction and control" over
all DOD intelligence, counterintelligence and
security policy, plans and programs, and serves as
the Pentagon's representative to the DNI. That
specifically meant control over the NGA, NSA and
NRO. The new assistant secretary was also
responsible for finding candidates to direct those
agencies.
Before Rumsfeld and Cambone
could consolidate their intelligence empire,
however, they had to confront the growing public
demands for the establishment of a director of
national intelligence with budgetary authority
over the entire intel community, from the CIA to
the NSA, who would have power to shift resources
and personnel at quick notice. The issue came to a
head in 2004 with the final report of the 9-11
commission, which argued strongly against the
consolidation of intelligence within the Pentagon
and recommended the transfer of the three national
agencies to the DNI.
Under its proposal,
budgetary authority over the three "nationals"
would be passed to the DNI, while control over
tactical intelligence by the four armed services
would remain under the domain of the Department of
Defense. Those proposals were folded into the
intelligence reform legislation backed by Bush.
Both houses of Congress passed the bills. When the
bills went into conference, however, they ran into
a storm of opposition from pro-military lawmakers.
Led by Representative Duncan Hunter
(Republican-California), the chairman of the House
Armed Services Committee, they argued
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