| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Jennifer Sims Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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Intelligence, the work of government, the use of intelligence in government, is not scientific inquiry. The word "intelligence" is bandied around, and it makes the listener or the reader think that, in fact, there's a formula, there's one piece of information that would reveal the world to us and how we should act. Help us understand that a little. When we're bandying this word around, what should we understand intelligence to mean?
The definition of intelligence that I use is the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information tailored to the needs of the national security decision-makers. The words "tailored to the needs of," are very, very important, because intelligence is not just a stack of newspapers on somebody's desk. It's the provision of information specific to the decisions that are being taken by the government to secure the nation. This also means that a stack of newspapers can be turned into intelligence. Intelligence doesn't have to be just about secrets.
It's interesting because one of the greatest coups in the history of intelligence for the U.S. was the Battle of Midway during World War II. We had broken the Japanese naval codes, but the Japanese didn't know that we had broken those codes. The fact that we not only broke those codes, but manipulated what the Japanese understood we were doing during Midway as a result of knowing what their codes were, all of that was revealed in the Chicago Tribune. The fact that we had broken the Japanese code, once it was out in the open literature, could have seriously undermined our naval strategy after Midway.
It appeared in the paper at the time.
Yes, the Chicago Tribune published the fact that we had broken the Japanese code, and breaking the codes was why we had such a terrific coup at Midway. From our perspective, that was a horrific leak, and everybody was terribly worried about it at the time. If the Japanese had been reading open-source information, if they thought of newspapers as intelligence, or potential intelligence, they might had learned that we had broken their code. But they weren't reading the Chicago Tribune, so they didn't know. The point of this is that leaks are important, of course. But from the other side, leaks are open-source information that's available to you. Therefore, an intelligence community that ignores open-source information is putting itself in peril and putting the government it serves in peril.
So intelligence in terms of secrets, yes, that's important, secrets are important to intelligence. But in the world of the Internet and this information revolution that is under way, some of the most important information we need from a national security perspective may be open-source information buried in rafts and rafts of material. Therefore, open-source information processing is a critically important aspect of the modern intelligence service.
What is it that a coordinator of intelligence does? What role did you play at the State Department? What is it you need to grapple with this avalanche of information? Is it a theory about the world that's helpful in this regard, a sense of who our adversaries are? Is it a sense of the political priorities of the president?
The Clinton administration grappled with this. In fact, the National Security Council decided to set up a set of requirements for the intelligence community, a set of tiers, with the most important intelligence requirements for the national security policy community starting at the highest tier going down to the lowest tier. [They] provided that to the intelligence community, and told the intelligence community that these requirements at the highest level would be revised on occasion. This was quite different than the way we did requirements during the Cold War, which was a very bureaucratic process and very static. The idea here was it would come from the White House down, and that it would be, if not an annual thing, then regularly revised.
Unfortunately, there was so much fighting over intelligence requirements, because everybody understood that they were going to get intelligence resources applied to their particular problem, depending on how forcefully they talked about the priority of their particular problem, whether it was worldwide famine, the environment, weapons proliferation, or counter-terrorism, everybody was competing, all the policymakers were competing now for intelligence resources, and wanting to fight to get into the highest tiers. After all those fights were done, nobody wanted to reopen the question. So those tiers stayed pretty static right through the Clinton administration.
Of course, apart from the White House requirements to the intelligence community, there's the day-to-day interaction with the intelligence community that, as a practical matter, is much more important as policy evolves and the day-to-day agenda of the national security community in Washington evolves. The interaction at the mid-level between intelligence community analysts and policymakers makes it clear what's most important on a day-in/day-out basis, and a dialogue takes place.
Unfortunately, one of the problems with the modern intelligence structure from my perspective is that the cutbacks in human intelligence, together with and the lack of perceived great threat after the collapse of the Soviet Union, led to a real curtailment of our ability to do opportunistic intelligence overseas. It became defensive intelligence. We tied the hands of our human intelligence collectors and told them, "You can only go get the information that we've told you the policymakers require. If you sniff something out, or come up with a good idea or good source that might tell you something new, something over the horizon that policymakers haven't thought of yet, you don't have any resources to pursue it." This is a terrible problem. An intelligence community can't solely work on the basis of articulated requirements from policymakers. An intelligence community must also be able to feel what's coming, and provide warning about what policymakers don't know will be on their agenda in the next few days or the next months or years. I think we became a little bit weak and hesitant and tentative, particularly in the human intelligence area, and not particularly because of the fault of the CIA, but more because of the mindset we were in post-Cold War.
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