Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy (60 page)

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Authors: Mark M. Lowenthal

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In short, intelligence can bring important assets to bear on WMD proliferation, but it will always be a shadowy area and one liable to analytic missteps. By the beginning of 2008, the memory of the Iraq estimate and concerns about Bush administration policy vis-à-vis Iran made it increasingly difficult for the intelligence community to produce analysis on proliferation without it being received in a highly politicized manner. This is the sort of distraction that analysts are taught to rise above or to ignore but this makes it increasingly difficult to write objectively on proliferation.
NARCOTICS
 
Narcotics policy is a difficult area in which to work. The main goal is to prevent individuals. by a variety of means, from using drugs that the government deems addictive and harmful. Almost everyone who has ever worked on narcotics policy has said that it is a domestic issue, not a foreign policy issue. Also, given the fact that individuals use drugs for numerous reasons, preventing their use is a difficult goal to attain. For both practical and political reasons, narcotics has become, in part, a foreign policy problem, because the United States attempts to reduce the overseas production of illegal drugs and to intercept them before or just as they arrive in the country.
The intelligence community is capable of collecting and analyzing intelligence related to the illicit trade in narcotics. The plants from which certain narcotics are derived can be grown in large quantities only in certain parts of the world. Coca is produced in the Andean region of South America. Poppies, from which heroin is made, are grown predominantly in two parts of southern Asia, centering roughly on Afghanistan and Myanmar (formerly Burma). Areas where these plants are processed into narcotics are also fairly well known, as are the routes customarily used to ship the finished products to customer areas.
The real problem lies in converting this intelligence into successful policy. Efforts at crop eradication and substitution stumble on the simple economic choices facing local farmers. Narcotics crops pay more than food crops do. Processing facilities, although U.S. intelligence can locate them, tend to be small and numerous. Drugs are so profitable that small amounts, which are easily shipped, are economically attractive. Shippers can use any number of routes, which they can change in response to pressure and efforts at interdiction. Finally, narcotics activities yield money in sufficient amounts to subvert the local authorities—civil, military, and police.
All experienced policy makers point to the importance of a domestic answer. If people do not have an interest in using illegal drugs, then everything else—growth, processing, shipping, and even price—becomes irrelevant. The drugs become valueless commodities. But the elusiveness of a successful domestic response leads policy makers back to foreign policy. (Legalizing drugs might not have the same effect on production and distribution as eliminating demand, because a black market might arise to compete with government-approved providers.)
The conjunction of the narcotics trade with international crime and with terrorism adds an additional dimension to the intelligence-gathering and policy-making problem. The profits from sales of narcotics, instead of being an end in themselves, now become the means to fund a different end. Also, new and more difficult demands are put on intelligence, because terrorists and criminals operate clandestinely. The United States must be able to establish intelligence about networks, contacts, relationships among individuals and groups, flows of capital, and so forth. For example, guerrilla and right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia have used cocaine to finance their operations. Finally, narcotics crosses the line established in the United States between foreign and domestic intelligence and between intelligence and law enforcement. The point at which an issue is handed from one agency to another is not always clear but is important, raising both practical and legal questions, some of which can impede prosecution. The status of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is an interesting bellwether. Formally part of the Justice Department, the DEA has moved in and out of the intelligence community. The DEA was considered to be part of the intelligence community in the late-1970s and early-1980s but then reverted to its former position as a law enforcement agency. In 2006, however, the DEA’s Office of National Security Intelligence was formally made part of the intelligence community specifically because of the link between drugs and terrorism.
ECONOMICS
 
Economics can be subdivided into several issues: U.S. economic competitiveness overseas, U.S. trading relations,
foreign economic espionage
and possible countermeasures, and the intelligence community’s ability to forecast major international economic shifts that may have serious consequences for the U.S. economy.
During the late 1980s some people maintained that several of these issues (overseas competitiveness, trading relations, foreign economic espionage,
industrial espionage
undertaken by businesses, and possible countermeasures) could be addressed, in part, through a closer connection between intelligence and U.S. businesses. Few advocates of closer intelligence-business collaboration, however, had substantial answers for some of the more compelling questions that it raised (which is one reason that this approach was quickly rejected).
• If the intelligence community were to share intelligence with businesses, how would they safeguard the sources and methods used in obtaining the information? If the underlying sources and methods could not be shared, would businesses accept the intelligence?
• With whom would the intelligence be shared, or, in other words, what constitutes a “U.S. company”? In an age of multinational corporations, the concept is not easy to define.
• Given that every business sector has many competitive businesses, which ones would the community provide with intelligence? What would be the basis for selecting recipients and nonrecipients of the intelligence?
• Would providing intelligence be part of an implicit
quid pro quo
on the part of the government—that some action should or should not be taken by industry in exchange for access to intelligence?
 
FOREIGN ECONOMIC ESPIONAGE. The collection of foreign economic intelligence by other nations was also controversial. An aggressive collection policy was central to those proposing greater intelligence support to business. Supporters of the policy cited cases in which supposed friends of the United States, such as France, were caught engaging in such activity. Advocates saw similar activity by the United States as fighting fire with fire. Critics argued that to do so would justify the initial hostile action. They also raised some of the arguments about the limits on how such information might be used. But DCI Robert M. Gates (1991-1993) put it best when he said that no U.S. intelligence officer was “willing to die for General Motors.”
Allegations of U.S. economic espionage arose in the late 1990s concerning a government program called
ECHELON.
In simplest terms, ECHELON searches through collected SIGINT, using key words via a computer. Key-word searching allows more material to be processed and exploited. Some European officials claimed that ECHELON was being used to steal advanced technology secrets, which were then being passed to U.S. firms to enhance their competitiveness. Former DCI R. James Woolsey (1993-1995), in a stinging article in 2000, held that ECHELON was used to detect attempts by European firms to bribe foreign officials to make sales and to uncover the illicit transfer of dual-use technologies—technologies that have both commercial and WMD applications, such as supercomputers and some chemicals.
U.S. policy makers viewed foreign economic counterintelligence as largely noncontroversial. Most of them considered it a proper response to foreign economic intelligence, although questions were raised about the extent of the problem. Press accounts of the issue often cited the same shopworn cases, creating echo—the impression of a larger problem through repetition. But the problem may be underreported, given that many businesses do not want to admit that they have been the victims of successful foreign intelligence operations. Some people also argue that foreign economic counterintelligence, although necessary, treats the symptom but not the cause. They acknowledge that blunting attempts at economic intelligence collection may be important but contend that the issue should be addressed at a political level—perhaps by negotiations that offer nations the choice of cessation or countermeasures.
Legislation passed during the 105th Congress (1997-1999) extended the role of FBI counterintelligence in the business information area, which has been controversial. The legislation reflects a continuing expansion of FBI authority in the gray areas between foreign and domestic intelligence and between intelligence and law enforcement.
 
FORECASTING MAJOR ECONOMIC SHIFTS. Beyond the counterintelligence aspects of economics is the day-to-day tracking of trends and events. At least three serious currency-related crises have occurred since the end of the cold war. In 1995 Mexico experienced a peso meltdown, which the intelligence community apparently handled well, giving policy makers significant advance warning. In 1998 the two-year Thai economic crisis turned into a full Asian economic debacle, encompassing Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea. Little has been said about intelligence performance in this crisis. The 2000-2001 Argentine financial collapse was long evident. The likelihood that other such crises will occur in years to come underscores the importance of economic intelligence in this area, especially given the greater interrelatedness of the global financial market.
 
COMPETITION FOR MATERIALS. Trends in international trade are of obvious national interest. There is a growing international competition for raw materials, primarily between China and India, but involving other nations as well. This competition includes oil, iron ore, and other minerals. The China-India rivalry is important, because it affects world commodity prices and it has political ramifications. For example, China has been reluctant to press Sudan’s government to allow foreign peace keepers into the Darfur region, where the Sudanese government has conducted a genocidal ethnic war against local tribes, in part because Sudan is an increasingly important source of oil for China. This competition also reveals a dependency in terms of China, in particular, sustaining its economic growth. which can become useful in developing opportunity analysis. Oil and natural gas are also important economic intelligence issues for several reasons. The most obvious is their effect on the domestic economy.
In addition, the high international energy prices of the last several years are important factors in the re-emergence of a more powerful Russia and in the less compelling power of problematic states like Venezuela and Iran. There is also another nexus to terrorism, as the Saudi oil fields are both a target for terrorists as a means of disrupting western economies, one of al Qaeda’s stated goals and an economic opportunity, should they succeed in taking over the Saudi kingdom.
HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT
 
Health and environmental issues are relatively new to the intelligence agenda. They have sometimes been treated as one issue but are now more often treated separately. The health issue gained increasing prominence because of the AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) pandemic and smaller outbreaks of deadly diseases such as the ebola virus and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in East Asia. The intelligence task with respect to health is largely one of tracking patterns of infection, but a large gap exists between intelligence and policy. Take AIDS as an example. The causes, means of infection, and results of AIDS are well known. Although the disease strikes people worldwide, some areas, notably eastern and central Africa, have extremely high concentrations of AIDS cases. The intelligence community’s ability to track rates of infection and mortality has little effect on any useful international policy. Many of the African governments that face the highest rates of AIDS infection have chosen, for a variety of reasons, to ignore or even to deny their health crisis. The same had been true of the government of China, although it now admits the seriousness of the AIDS problem. In the case of Africa, local culture is a major factor in the spread of AIDS: toleration of polygamous relationships; low literacy rates, thus making even minimal efforts at education about prevention more difficult; and minimal use of prophylactics. Nor is it clear what these nations or the international community should be doing in the absence of any cure for the disease. Outsiders’ attempts to change the cultural factors that facilitate the spread of AIDS would not only be difficult to make but also would probably be resisted as interference.
A major issue surrounding health-related crises is tracking official foreign government statements against other intelligence to determine both the extent of the health problem and the openness of the government involved. This has been a point of contention with China over SARS. For the United States, two issues are involved. One is the duty to warn, as in terrorism, that is, to alert U.S. citizens and others about potential health risks overseas. The other is an insight into the behavior of another government. Tracking an issue of this sort is a combination of covert intelligence (such as SIGINT between foreign officials) and open sources (such as reports by travelers, hospital admissions, larger than normal requests for drugs, and so on).

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