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Authors: Mark M. Lowenthal

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Finally, one must give some intelligence attention to one’s allies and friends. Will NATO remain engaged in Afghanistan? How will the European Union (EU) behave as an economic rival even as its members remain military allies? Again, we are looking more at intentions than at capabilities.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the nation state issues that policy makers and intelligence officers face. It does suggest several problems for intelligence. First, there is no longer any ability or rationale for focusing on a single state as the United States did during the cold war. This means that priorities must be more finely drawn and that more difficult allocations of collection and analytical resources must be made. It also means that a more diverse workforce must be recruited, with broader regional knowledge, including languages. Again, the massive focus on the Soviet issue is a long dead model. It is also important to look more critically at the levers of power that each state has. Some of these, such as the economic lever, have built-in dependencies, as was noted above, that serve to limit their use. It is also important to be alert to opportunities for influence and for change as well as to sudden shifts in alignments. As Lord Palmerston (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1855-1858: 1859-1865) noted, “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.”
KEY TERMS
 
bean counting
capabilities versus intentions
containment
failed state
maskirovka
Potemkin villages
Reagan Doctrine
self-reveal
worst-case analysis
FURTHER READINGS
 
As might be expected, the literature on U.S. intelligence regarding the Soviet Union is rich. The readings listed here include some older pieces that are of historical value.
 
Berkowitz, Bruce D., and Jeffrey T. Richelson. “The CIA Vindicated: The Soviet Collapse Was Predicted.
” National Interest
41 (fall 1995): 36-47.
Burton, Donald F. “Estimating Soviet Defense Spending.”
Problems of Communism 3
2 (March-April 1983): 85-93.
Central Intelligence Agency, History Staff.
At Cold War’s
End:
U.S
.
Intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. 1989-1991.
Washington. D.C.: CIA, 1999.
Firth, Noel E.
Soviet Defense Spending: A History of CIA Estimates. 1950-1990.
College Station: Texas A&M University Press. 1998.
Freedman, Lawrence. “The CIA and the Soviet Threat: The Politicization of Estimates. 1966-1977.”
Intelligence and National Security
12 January 1997): 122-142.
______
. U.S. Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic Threat.
Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1977.
Koch, Scott A., ed.
Selected Estimates on the, Soviet Union. 1950-1959.
Washington, D.C.: History Staff, CIA. 1993.
Lee. William T.
Understanding the Soviet Military Threat.
New York: National Strategy Information Center, 1977.
Lowenthal, Mark M. “Intelligence Epistemology: Dealing with the Unbelievable.”
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence
6(1993):319-325.
MacEachin, Douglas J.
CIA Assessments of the Soviet Union: The Record vs. the Charges.
Langley. Va.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA, 1996.
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick.
Secrecy: The American Experience.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Pipes. Richard. “Team B: The Reality behind the Myth.”
Commentary
82 (October 1986): 25-40.
Prados, John.
The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Intelligence and Russian Military Strength.
New York: Dial Press, 1982.
Reich, Robert C. “Re-examining the Team A-Team B Exercise.”
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 3
(fall 1989): 387-403.
Steury, Donald P., ed.
CIA
’s
Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1991.
Washington, D.C.: History Staff, CIA, 2001.
———. Intentions and Capabilities: Estimates on Soviet Strategic Forces, 1950-1983.
Washington, D.C.: History Staff, CIA, 1996.
U.S. Senate. Select Committee on Intelligence.
The National Intelligence Estimate A-B Team Episode Concerning Soviet Strategic Capability and Objectives.
95th Cong., 2d sess., 1978.
U.S. General Accounting Office
. Soviet Economy: Assessment of How Well the CIA Has Estimated the Size of the Economy.
GAO/NSIAD-91-0274. Washington, D.C.: U.S. GAO, September 1991.
U.S. National Intelligence Council.
Tracking the Dragon: National Intelligence
Estimates
on
China during the Era of Mao, 1948-1976.
Washington, D.C.: NIC, 2004.
CHAPTER 12
 
THE INTELLIGENCE AGENDA: TRANSNATIONAL ISSUES
 
A
S NOTED IN chapter 11, the division between nation state issues and transnational issues is artificial if for no other reason than that the transnational issues all have major centers of activity in nation states. Nonetheless, these transnational issues tend to be addressed in somewhat different ways and raise additional issues for intelligence services.
U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY AND INTELLIGENCE AFTER THE COLD WAR
 
For the first forty-five years of the existence of the intelligence community, one issue dominated its work—the Soviet Union. Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Robert Gates (1991-1993) estimated that 50 percent of the intelligence budget went to the Soviet target—meaning the Soviet Union itself; its Warsaw Pact satellites; other states closely aligned to the Soviet Union, such as Cuba; and Soviet activities worldwide. Other issues or regional crises arose from time to time, but the Soviet issue, as defined in chapter 11, remained the primary focus of U.S. intelligence. Also, given the global nature of the cold war, many of the other crises also had salience because they played a role in the bipolar rivalry.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, U.S. national security policy entered into a period of uncertainty in terms of focus and priorities. Several circumstances were salient. First, there was a yearning within the United States for a “peace dividend.” meaning a re-allocation of resources with less going to national security and more to domestic needs. (Cold war spending on defense as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) actually peaked in 1953 at 14.2 percent. During the so-called Reagan build-up, defense spending never went higher than 6.2 percent of GDP. For 1991, the last year of the Soviet Union’s existence, U.S. defense spending was at 4.6 percent of GDP.) Second, there was a widely held belief that the remaining issues that might challenge U.S. national security were of a much lower order than the nuclear-armed Soviet Union had been. Third, there were a few ultimately futile attempts to create a grand theme (much like containment) under which U.S. national security could be organized. The first Bush administration tried “New World Order.” The Clinton administration briefly tried “Preventive Diplomacy” and later the concepts of engagement and enlargement. These concepts failed because they were too vague, they did not seem to be tied to any specific national security issues, and the United States was content not to be faced with major foreign policy challenges after half a century of world war and then cold war, which included several smaller “hot wars.” There was also an interesting intellectual discussion, prompted primarily by the work of political scientist Francis Fukuyama in
The End of History and the Last Man
(1992), who argued that the end of the cold war marked the end of ideological conflict and the triumph of western democratic liberalism. At the same time, some assumed that there would be a new “-ism” to confront the United States and other nations with shared values, but no one could define what it might be.
An oft-repeated but misguided question about intelligence was whether the role of intelligence had changed. The question betrayed a certain lack of understanding about intelligence, implying that its role was somehow bound up directly with the fact of the cold war. However, the role of intelligence—to collect and analyze information that policy makers need and to carry out covert actions as lawful authorities direct—did not and does not change. This mission is—or should be—independent of any particular target, relationship, or crisis. It is the reason for having an intelligence community and should not be subject to the vagaries of international politics. U.S. intelligence targets and priorities have changed, but the community’s mission has not.
This interregnum lasted for a decade, ending decisively with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. (As discussed later, there had already been a series of terrorist attacks, beginning with the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York in February 1993.) During this intervening decade the intelligence community’s responsibilities neither changed nor receded, but the leadership of the community found it more difficult to focus or to prioritize. They also received little help from the Clinton administration, which did not get actively involved in setting intelligence priorities other than one time in the middle of its eight years in office. The priority tier system introduced in the mid-1990s showed some initial promise but broke down as the priorities were never updated and revised and as policy makers and intelligence officers figured out how to manipulate the system to claim higher priorities for their favored issues.
The post-cold war interregnum created several strains for the intelligence community. The main one was budgetary. On a percentage basis, the intelligence community, rather than the much larger defense budget, bore the brunt of calls for a peace dividend. This had costs not only in real terms but also as an impediment to making a transition away from a cold war-based work force, work force skills, and the unexpected advent of the computer revolution. For example, some agencies found themselves with too many Soviet experts or Russian speakers, many of whom were rather senior. Was it worthwhile to invest in retraining them, knowing that their ongoing service would be short? It might seem wiser to let them go and invest in younger people with new skills and longer career prospects. But the more senior staff could not be fired and many did not want to retire, thus creating a situation where there was insufficient funding for new slots to bring on new people. DCI George Tenet has stated that during the 1990s the intelligence community lost the equivalent of 23,000 positions—meaning either people never hired or positions actually lost.
The cost of this was twofold. First, there was a draining away of veteran talent and a resultant smaller workforce to handle a more complex and diverse set of policy issues. Second, as the intelligence workforce began to increase dramatically after 2001, it meant that the number of experienced analysts dropped steadily as a percentage of the workforce, until by 2008 more than one third of the analysts had no more than three years of experience.
Therefore, in the first decade of the twenty-first century we find an intelligence community that is in the midst of a period of rebuilding, with a workforce that is perhaps less experienced than at any time in its history, and facing a series of issues that are much more difficult, more interconnected, and among which there is no clear priority.
INTELLIGENCE AND THE NEW PRIORITIES
 
An examination of several issues that have risen in priority in the post-cold war period reveals some of the difficulties that the intelligence community faces. A major problem is the fact that many of these issues are closely related to one another. Terrorism, for example. has a direct connection to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as it is widely assumed that terrorist groups would like to have access to these weapons. Terrorism is also related to narcotics, which serves to fund many terrorist activities, as do some other international criminal transactions. For example, the Taliban, which suppressed narcotics traffic when it ruled Afghanistan, now uses that same traffic to finance its operations against NATO. Many of these issues are related to the problem of failed states, which provide safe havens for such activities. Thus. just as it is somewhat artificial to separate nation states and transnational issues, it is also somewhat artificial to discuss each of those issues in isolation when that is not how they occur. However, there is no coherent way to discuss them as a single entity. Therefore, they will be discussed individually and, where appropriate, their relationship to other issues will be acknowledged.
This difficulty is reflected in the question of intelligence priorities. How does one make resource allocations among issues that have interdependencies but may not have the same priority individually? It is important to make some distinctions or one is left in the situation where there are, in effect, no priorities. When everything is important, nothing is important. For example, terrorism is a very high-priority issue. Should narcotics be given an equally high priority because of its relationship to terrorism, or can it be dealt with at a lower level and not lose the importance of the connection? This problem recurs across the spectrum of transnational issues.

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