Organization
Below the level of cabinet members and presidential advisors is the next component of the national security
FIGURE 8.2
apparatus: the intelligence community. The intelligence community consists of executive branch agencies and units conducting a variety of intelligence activities in furtherance of national security.
The National Security Act of 1947 established the CIA and made the DCI an advisor to the NSC. The DCI directs not just the CIA but the intelligence community as a whole. Members of the intelligence community related to the DOD include the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and intelligence agencies of the various branches of the military. Non-DOD agencies include the CIA, State Department, Energy Department, Treasury Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Coast Guard. The CIA, DIA, NSA, NRO, and National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) are solely tasked with intelligence responsibilities, while the others are primarily concerned with other duties (such as law enforcement, border security, and the like) but deal with intelligence as a part of their mandate.
Information as Intelligence
What makes information intelligence? Intelligence is information that has a strategic value—information whose collection is instrumental in making important national security decisions by the president, the DOD, or others in government. What also makes information intelligence is that it has been gathered at a more or less central location, where it can be integrated with other data, including secret data, and carefully analyzed.
TECHNICAL INTELLIGENCE. The intelligence community refers to the collection of technical data on opposing forces' weapons systems, personnel capabilities, and other technical information as "techint." A surprising amount of relevant techint comes from open (unclassified) sources, such as foreign and domestic newspapers, magazines, government reports, technical and professional journals, news media, academic studies, and popular literature. A much smaller amount of relevant techint comes from obscure, classified, and secret sources, such as lost or stolen weapons systems and government documents, stolen classified documents, stolen weapons or classified facility blueprints, and classified maps.
HUMAN INTELLIGENCE. Intelligence starts with spying, which was certainly the most common method of intelligence gathering prior to World War II (1939–45). In general, the community refers to the cultivation of human sources, whether open or secret, as "humint," short for human intelligence. Often, humint is the best (or only) way for U.S. defense planners to find out what another country's leadership thinks of its own capabilities. It is likely that humint will become more and more useful against threats like rogue states, transnational actors, terrorists, and organized crime, whose assets are smaller and thus less susceptible than sovereign states' forces to observation or surveillance via satellite imaging from space or by other processes.
CIA field agents are one source of humint. They collect information from open sources such as the media and recruit foreign citizens, either "defectors in place" (who volunteer their services) or "turned" informants (who are bribed or blackmailed into service). The latter can include foreign government officials or businesspeople, paid informants in terrorist cells, and members of organized crime groups, among others. Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, for example, contributed invaluable data on his country's missile systems during the 1950s.
Once CIA field agents have collected information, they turn it over to their superiors, the station chiefs, who send it to CIA headquarters. Unlike their counterparts in the State and Defense Departments, CIA agents in the field and analysts in the home offices do not rotate their focus on foreign areas. Rather, they are given long-term assignments to allow them to focus on specific areas.
SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE. Signals intelligence consists of the interception and processing of electronic signals—for example, missile and satellite telemetry, shortwave radio transmissions, and cell-phone exchanges intercepted via ground-, air-, or space-based eavesdropping or monitoring equipment. The government devotes large sums of money to this activity. Most estimates put the budget of the NSA, the agency mainly responsible for this function, in the billions of dollars.
The federal government also funds In-Q-Tel, a notfor-profit venture-capital project allied with the CIA, which, among other endeavors, has pursued technology to facilitate monitoring of the World Wide Web through custom information retrieval and multiple-language and anonymous search services.
IMAGERY INTELLIGENCE. Imagery intelligence is collected using photography from reconnaissance satellites and aircraft, as well as other types of photographic and image-producing processes. The satellites and aircraft used are known as "overhead platforms," one famous example of which was the U-2, a high-altitude plane with sophisticated cameras that was promoted by CIA Director Allen Dulles in the 1950s. The U-2 was used extensively to monitor military and missile sites in the Soviet Union.
Intelligence provided by U-2 photo reconnaissance proved indispensable in defusing and managing the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, during which the Soviet Union threatened the safety of the United States by placing ballistic missiles in Cuba which were capable of striking major American cities. The administration of President John F. Kennedy had to decide how to respond to this threat. The reconnaissance images gave Kennedy an idea of the precise nature and extent of the new missile batteries, which he used in fashioning an appropriately measured U.S. military response. After a tense standoff involving a U.S. naval blockade of Cuba, the Soviets eventually withdrew their missiles.
MEASUREMENT AND SIGNATURE INTELLIGENCE. Measurement and signature intelligence (often called "masint") is produced by collecting, storing, and analyzing atmospheric and environmental emissions, including radar, infrared, chemical, acoustic, and seismic data, usually as detected by specialized sensors. The CIA Science and Technology Directorate, for instance, employs seismic sensors to keep tabs on global military activity and has researched methods of detecting poisonous gases. Masint, according to specialists, came into being as the result of the SCUD missile hunts of the Persian Gulf War of 1991.
Covert Action
Only the president can direct the CIA to undertake a covert action. Such actions are usually based on recommendations from the NSC. U.S. foreign policy objectives may not be fully realized by normal diplomatic means, but military action would be too extreme. In these cases, the president may direct the CIA to conduct a special activity abroad in support of foreign policy in which the role of the U.S. government is neither readily apparent nor publicly acknowledged. However, once ordered to undertake the activity, the DCI must notify congressional oversight committees.
In the past few decades, covert actions have often taken the form of assistance (money, equipment, and/or advice) to operatives in foreign lands, as those forces attempt to resolve situations in ways that are favorable to the interests of the United States. Most of these operations, being low level and involving only a few people, have remained secret. Others, being larger scale and involving many more participants, have found their way into the news.
Paramilitary operations are an extreme form of covert action. In these cases, CIA operatives go beyond giving advice to opposition groups and other elements and may actually lead the charge and direct them. Such activities can be very controversial because they fall within a gray area. Even though they do not involve uniformed U.S. military personnel, and so do not come under the presidential restrictions on war making of the War Powers Act, many people think such actions amount to undeclared war.
Among the more controversial covert actions under-taken by the CIA since the 1960s have been the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Phoenix Program. In the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion the CIA sent a force of 1,500 men to Cuba where, denied air support by President Kennedy, they were decisively defeated. DCI Allen Dulles resigned after the disaster. The Phoenix Program, which started in 1968, was designed to lessen support for the Communist Viet Cong in South Vietnam but resulted in the deaths of at least twenty thousand noncombatants.
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