Per the linked MSNBC article below the US spy culture is highly deficient in it’s ability to gather quality intelligence where we need it most in the human intelligence arena.
Is getting quality intelligence assets worth the moral and ethical compromises that would need to be made? We cleaned the intel services house in the 70’s, and now they mainly rely on hardware intel and are risk averse to using human assets. Many say that 9-11 is in some part the price we are paying for neglecting that aspect of intelligence gathering.
Is getting in bed with bad people and helping them do bad things to get the things we want, worth the moral and ethical price we woud pay as a people, whose institutions will reflect out national character, or will we continue to protect our country mainly relying on hardware, satellites etc. and the scraps other countries intelligence services will occasionally toss us?
I think the mentality a decade or two ago is that Human Intelligence was becoming less valuable as Signals Intelligence and other High Tech Intelligence was becoming more powerful. They were wrong. So, now the mentality of this Administration seems to be “why would we need to spy on them when we can just kill them?” They are wrong too. You need old fashioned human intelligence (in the Administration, I mean).
Human intelligence doesn’t only come in forms which are inherently untrustworthy. It blows my mind that U.S. intelligence agencies hire intelligence analysts who are not fluent in the language of the countries they study.
My grad school program in Russian & East European Studies is designed to turn out people who would be excellent for the analysis side of things (if not for spying per se), and there were analogous programs in Middle East Studies and Central Eurasian Studies (which would certainly encompass Afghanistan, among other places).
Grads of these programs are generally U.S. citizens with wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, fluency in at least one area language, and in-country living/working experience, and yet most of them never even apply to agencies like the CIA because they are so turned off by the political atmosphere (which goes in both directions; the CIA hasn’t historically been fond of open-minded linguists who actually have friends in the region, no matter how innocent the friendships). I am a firm believer that one has to have a deep understanding of a people’s language, culture, and history before one can offer useful intelligece perspectives, but that doesn’t necessarily have to come from being born into that culture. This country has few enough foreign language resources, and we ignore or waste the ones we do have out of ideological blindness.
While I share many of the sentiments Eva Luna posted above, I do see the need sometimes for someone who’s a complete specialist in just one of those areas (say, political influence of the landlord class in the history of the world to date) even if that person’s never heard a word of any language spoken in the target (of study!) area.
I also recognize that the CIA and similar outfits have their own culture and that’s yet another drawback from getting something done competently.
I think this shortage has to do with who was the United State’s major enemy during the bulk of the twentieth century. Although it seems that we’ve always relied on “eyes and ears on the ground”, so to speak, the biggest windfalls in 20th century spying came from satellites, electronic bugging, etc. When you need to spy on Russia, satellites and hi-tech listening posts work very well. When you spy on an Islamic fundamentalist living in the desert, human intelligence is far more valuable and avaliable. A shift from using one from to the other en masse isn’t going to be easy for those who have made a career out of hi tech spying.
And I don’t think 9/11 can be chalked up to “the CIA should have seen this coming” because it isn’t so much getting information about the enemy as much as it is understanding the enemy, as Eva Luna stated in the last part of her post.
As for selling our souls to the devil for national security: I think a middle-ground can be reached between the CIA overthrowing governments and America cowering in fear of getting its hands dirty. A compromise must be reached, I feel, because neither extreme option is viable for long-term peace or recommended. Unfortunately, I don’t feel educated enough about the issue to offer a recommendation on what should be done other than to say human intelligence coupled with electronic intelligence gathering is probably the best option.
I remember seeing the footage of that missionary airplane that was shot down by the Peruvian AF while some CIA agents watched from another plane. The CIA guys were trying to figure out if the plane was a drug smuggler or not and finally decided that they were not and tried to communicate this to the Peruvian plane, who had already locked on to the target. The CIA agent was trying to tell them not to fire and was using some horribly bad Spanish, like “El no es el bad-guy-o” or whatever and I thought how pathetic, the CIA can’t find an agent that can fucking speak Spanish?
I think one of the the points Eva Luna was trying to make and one that has been echoed in several articles I have read in various magazines over the years by intelligence insiders (and a few off the record conversation with old friends of the family), is that the US probably has no shortage of eager and trainable spy candidates, but that there is/was an institutional unwillingness on the part of the CIA etc, because of the whipping they took in the 70’s, to look seriously at people with foreign language skills unless they could simultaneously pass the muster of a squeaky clean personal morals test, which included no hetero unmarried living together, frowning on pre-martial sex, and of course no gays etc., and additionally not have too may foreign associations. And this is not old practices, this is as of a few years ago all the way up to 9/11.
Stop and think for minute how many real world US college grad students who may have an expertise in foreign languages would pass these tests even if the were willing to become spies. These stringent criteria (according to some) are mainly responsible for the significant increase of Mormons and other missionary evangelicals as intelligence officers, since they are among the few demographic cohorts that would reguarly pass the bar on all these tests, and also have foreign language skills as part of their missionary training and service. In this context Mormons and evangelicals tend to overwhelming recruit … well more Mormons and evangelicals, who may be fine intelligence officers, but are unlikely to be able to don a burnoose and gain entry into an Al-Queda tent or weave themselves into the background.
If we don’t have quality intelligence we’re screwed at some point as there are too many points of attack even for low tech terrorists if they are determined to hit us. The problem seems to be that to get this quality intelligence you’ve got to go deep and essentially get in bed with these people which becomes an instituional decision that refelcts on us as a nation. Where is that point on the slippery slope?
I disagree. People don’t go for an M.A. in Russian & East European Studies, and certainly not an M.A. in Central Eurasian Studies, because they want to make scads of money. Who goes out and learns Uzbek, or Georgian, or Pashto, or Bulgarian to find fame and fortune? If I’d wanted fame and fortune, I would have gotten an MBA. When I started studying Russian in college, my mom the hippie thought I’d lost my mind; even she thought I should study Japanese.
Area studies is generally something one does for love of the subject, or as an adjunct to a Ph.D. in another field (history or political science, or less commonly sociology or anthropology; occasionally religious studies, musicology, or art history). Right after I finished my degree, my school added joint degree programs with the Master’s in Public Policy, Master’s in Environmental Studies, and the MBA; I think since then, they’ve even added a joint M.A./J.D. program. And there is a Graduate Certificate Program, which can be combined with any other grad program, as long as you can convince the department chair that your focus is coherent and relevant. Again, the only combos above that might conceivably be calculated to make degree holders scads of cash are the MA/MBA and possibly the MA/JD, and even those types often go into NGO management and such, which certainly aren’t the best-paying subfields of law and management.
As for HumInt: I am quite admittedly no expert, but it seems to me that understanding of other societies and languages would come in handy for the non-icky side of intelligence work: economic and political analysis, news gathering, and such. Not to mention diplomacy: when I was in the U.S. Consulate in Leningrad in 1989, the Russian spoken by the consular section staff was embarrassing to me as an American. We all spoke better Russian after 3 years of college study with no in-country experience whatsoever. And I could tell you absolute horror stories of classmates of mine and the type of invasive and stupid grilling they underwent when applying for the most mundane of government jobs upon return, not to mention the ludicrousness of my own government security clearance.
(Oh, and Publius, I’m not exactly working in my area now; I work for an immigration law firm. The knowledge does come in handy every once in a while, though, and I still do volunteer stuff to use my grad degree.)
They most certainly do hire translators and analysts. However, the difference between men in the field and the people back in Washington is extreme - and it may be the requirements for the one disallow the other.
Not that the CIA couldn’t improve or anything, just saying its not so easy.
If the people with the necessary training to be spies are working in other industries instead, then we need to give them some incentive to become spies:[ul][li]Give the prospective spies a penthouse apartment and a dazzling wardrobe. They can hide their espionage activities by pretending to be wealthy playboys.[/li][li]Give them deadly high tech toys, such as exploding pens, laser wristwatches, camera lapel pins, and sportscars with machine guns and smokescreen generators. Make sure the person handing out these gadgets has a catchy, one-letter name.[/li][li]Give them code names of their own, preferably as three-digit numbers like “Agent 009.”[/li][li]Ensure that on every assignment, they get to seduce at least two stunningly beautiful women in bikinis. Plant these women in the path of the prospective spies deliberately, if necessary.[/li][li]Give their enemies memorable code names, like “Dr. Yes” or “Silverfinger.”[/li][li]If no suitable enemies are available, arrange to have one of your other operatives dress up as a villain and place the prospective spies in a deathtrap with a difficult (but obvious) means of escape. Ensure that your villains do not stick around to ensure that said deathtrap succeeds.[/li][li]If their assignments involve the disarming of well-placed timed explosives – particularly nuclear explosives – encourage the prospective spies to let the countdown go to 00:01 before disarming said explosives.[/li]Above all, do not tell them about the enemy’s interrogation table with the laser that will sever the victim’s private parts.[/ul]That should be enough to attract more people into the espionage business than the CIA will be able to shake a stick at.
