Intelligence in a Trump Presidency

The election of Donald Trump has generated plenty of interesting talking points for pundits, political scientists, and everyday people. I am mostly fascinated by the interpretation of his actions by the media.  It is an interesting time to be a social scientist.

One recent area that has received a lot of attention lately is the apparent feud between the President-Elect and the intelligence community.  This issue has come to a head because of the Russian hacking accusation and scandal. In a recent article in Politico, there is a discussion of the issue in which Trump accuses the intelligence community of playing politics because the Top Secret briefing he is supposed to receive has already been leaked to the media.

"How did NBC get 'an exclusive look into the top secret report he (Obama) was presented?'" Trump tweeted Thursday. "Who gave them this report and why? Politics!" 

The network says a senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed leaked details of the report first published in the Washington Post, which states that U.S. intercepts captured Russian officials congratulating themselves on Trump's election win, citing U.S. officials. The overall report makes the case that Russia intervened in the election, NBC News reported. 

The president-elect is set to meet with intelligence officials on Friday, when he is expected to be briefed on evidence uncovered by the Russian hacking probe. Trump has repeatedly questioned intelligence agencies' conclusions that Russian operatives were behind several cyberattacks during the 2016 presidential race.

The accusation that intelligence is politicized is not a new one. Remember the ink that was spilled about the Bush Administration pressuring the CIA to provide evidence of Iraqi non-compliance with WMD? Goodman (2003, 62) attributes the failure of strategic intelligence to a politicization of intelligence at the CIA under Director Casey in the 1990s, and which he noted continued under Robert Gates:

Casey and Gates were directly responsible for the CIA’s poor analytical record in dealing with Soviet issues throughout the 1980s, from the failure to foresee the Soviet collapse to the revelation that CIA clandestine officer Aldrich Ames had been a Soviet spy for nearly a decade, altogether the greatest intelligence failure in the history of the agency until the terrorist attacks in 2001. In an unguarded moment in March 1995, Gates admitted that he had watched Casey on ‘issue after issue sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued’. There has never been a better definition of politicization by a former director of central intelligence.

Loch Johnson (2003, 659), the father of modern intelligence studies, also weighed in on the issue of politicization of intelligence in a piece about theories of strategic intelligence had this to say:

Beyond these basics, a theory will have to take into account the most significant inadequacies of intelligence, including its periodic irrelevance and lack of timeliness, the frequent unwillingness of policymakers to accept reliable information (often a function of pathologies in the relationship between the producers and the consumers of intelligence), and the risks posed to democracy by the politicization of information.

His definition of politicization comes at the information presentation stage of the intelligence process.  The larger issue, and one which seems to be more frequently applicable today, is the leaking of intelligence information (which may be politicized in the Johnson context first) to the media.

News that Trump wants to shake up the intelligence community may cause them to lash out, but NPR has a great story about how the CIA has lost these battles in the past.

This particular agency battle will be one that should be interesting to watch unfold over the coming months and years.
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 Goodman, Melvin A. 2003. "9/11: The Failure of Strategic Intelligence." Intelligence and National Security, 18(4): 59-71.

Johnson, Loch K. 2003. "Preface to a Theory of Strategic Intelligence" International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 16(4): 638-663.

MH17 And Ukraine - Obfuscation and Domestic Audiences

One theory that about Russia's involvement in the conflict in Eastern Ukraine is that its involvement got heavier after the downing of Malaysian flight 17 by the rebels.  Russia's increased involvement was not due to wanting more territory, but out of fear of what the rebels that they had released and enabled would do to Russia's reputation if left unchecked.  After the bloodless coup and takeover of Crimea, the events in Eastern Ukraine got very bad very quickly.  The downing of the flight was a PR nightmare.

The Dutch issued a report on the event this week that identifies the missile that took down the plane as a BUK missile.  The report is thorough and took a year to compile because of the many technical difficulties in obtaining the plane, and analyzing the data.  RFE/RL has some great articles on how this report has been obfuscated, ignored, and fought by the Russian propaganda machine at every turn.

A great aspect of the reporting is the step-by-step account of how the Dutch investigators rebuffed Russian efforts to soften language (LINK):

Appendices published (here and here) with the Dutch Safety Board’s report show that Russia attempted to convince investigators to invoke "other scenarios," such as the possibility that Flight MH17 was struck by an air-to-air missile. 

Critics have accused Moscow of floating the air-to-air-missile and other theories in order to deflect attention from substantial evidence indicating the Boeing 777 was downed by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile system known as a Buk, fired from an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. 

But the documents released with the report show that, behind the scenes, the Dutch Safety Board also rejected alternative scenarios proposed by Russia as essentially baseless before concluding that a Buk missile exploded next to the Boeing 777 and sent it crashing to the ground, killing all 298 people on board. 

With arcane discussions of physics, telemetry, and military technology, the conclusions of the 15-month investigation largely match up with theories put forth by Ukraine, the United States, and other nations.

Read the full article with the full outline of the charges and counter-charges.

Another interesting development is that the Buk manufacturer immediately put out their own report denying the Dutch version (LINK):

The Russian company that manufactures the Buk ground-to-air missile system plans to issue a report on the July 2014 downing of a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet over eastern Ukraine on October 13, the same day the Dutch Safety Board plans to issue the results of its investigation into the incident. 

Almaz-Antei said in a press release on October 8 that it had carried out the detonation of a Buk missile under a decommissioned Boeing passenger jet in a "life-scale, real-time" experiment as part of its investigation into the disaster. 

The company said that preliminary results from the experiment support the conclusions that the firm presented in June -- namely, that the plane was shot down by a Buk missile fired from territory controlled by the Ukrainian military. 

This has now become a he-said, she-said battle over telemetry and math.  The upshot is that with the competing claims, Russia can still deny its involvement in the incident, even if other evidence points to that very involvement (LINK LINK).

If Moscow is really hoping only to keep its own citizens convinced that it is not operating in Ukraine - it seems to be working.  Follow this link to see responses to the BUK report by Muscovites.

Humor - More F-35s and Photoshop!

US Air Force photo.

Pentagon Requests 500 Gold-Plated F-35s

Read more: http://www.duffelblog.com/2015/09/pentagon-requests-500-gold-plated-f-35s/#ixzz3o2uHjFdN

This added to the Red Baron (LINK) post from a few weeks ago made my day!



The barrage of photoshop memes in response to REN-TV in Russia photoshopping the US Ambassador onto a Kremlin protest is hilarious.