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.

Review of "Soviet Leaders and Intelligence"

Raymond L. Garthoff

Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary During the Cold War

Georgetown University Press

2015

ISBN:978-1-62616-229-7

160 Pages

$26.95

Books on intelligence history often get bogged down in details.  Books on history, and especially on historical leaders, are often ignorant of the details of intelligence that could add depth to their analyses.  Soviet Leaders and Intelligence is a book that avoids both of these problems.  This slim volume eschews pages of details about intelligence minutia and instead focuses on the issue of leader assessment of the US within the context of intelligence collection and analysis. While it is a slim book, it has within it a great deal to offer to scholars of not only intelligence, but of Cold War History, foreign policy, and diplomacy.  It is also a book that will be of interest to general audiences who are interested in the Cold War, Soviet history, and US-Soviet relations.

Garthoff’s study of the way that Soviet leaders view intelligence is situated squarely within the context of the Cold War.  Garthoff does this in two ways. First he outlines the geopolitical causes of the Cold War between the two states.  Second, he outlines the way that ideology on the part of the Soviet leaders both exacerbated tensions and shaded their perceptions of the United States, its intentions, and its actions.  This primary context of the book is the thread that ties together each of the chapter vignettes.  The book itself is arranged so that each Soviet leader – from Stalin through Gorbachev has his own chapter (with the exception of Andropov and Chernenko, whose short tenures were such that they are simply appended to Brezhnev and Gorbachev respectively).

One of the key insights of this book is the individual insights into the worldview of each of the Soviet leaders. Stalin, for instance, relied on personal relationships and his own analysis of the world, eschewing the analysis of intelligence and diplomatic personnel.  In the case of Stalin, his own isolation led to misconceptions and a belligerence toward the west, western media, and western leaders (Garthoff 2015, 3). Like Stalin, Khrushchev’s view of the United States was not affected by the intelligence provided to him (Garthoff 2015, 25), but he was also able to learn from early mistakes and bluffs against Kennedy.  Khrushchev was affected by his own experiences visiting America and his meetings with two presidents.  He credited President Kennedy for bringing more caution to the tone which the United States used in describing the Soviet Union (Garthoff 2015, 34).

The lesson that comes across throughout the book, however, is just how little the leaders of the Soviet Union heeded intelligence estimates.  Garthoff (2015, 75) describes how Gorbachev’s own worldview evolved:

As had occurred with his predecessors, personal contact and communication with a literally personified ‘adversary’ brought about changed perceptions and new policies.

The shifting attitudes of Gorbachev are contrasted with the continued negative view of US actions by the KGB and GRU led to what Garthoff (2015, 84) characterizes as an “intelligence war” between the US and Soviet intelligence services.  This intelligence war did not affect Gorbachev, and in fact his “…early interest in intelligence reports quickly declined” (Garthoff 2015, 85).

The politicization of intelligence, and intelligence skewed by a heavy ideological bias diminished the utility of that intelligence to the state leaders.  In the case of Stalin, the bias came from the top, by the time that Gorbachev had taken power, it had moved to the intelligence services.  The end result was that intelligence lost its consumers, the intelligence services lost their taskings, was cut out of the feedback loop, and ultimately lost its relationships with the Central Committee and its staffs (Garthoff 2015, 87).

These descriptions of the troubled relationship between intelligence services and the leaders that they are meant to represent touch on issues that are relevant to scholars and policy-makers today. The possible lessons from these vignettes are manifold, but I focus on two central themes that are of particular import.  The first is on the importance of leaders and leadership perceptions.

A great deal of scholarship in foreign policy analysis is focused on the assessment of state leaders. This scholarship began in the intelligence analysis community and moved into more general scholarship later.  The work of Leites (1953) was the first to really delve into issues of leader perception.  Later work on the operational code has yielded interesting insights into the worldviews of state leaders (Walker, Schafer, and Young 1999; George 1969; Schafer and Walker 2006).  While Garthoff focuses on historical figures and accounts of their perceptions, other scholars have attempted to ascertain the operational code of current Russian leader, Vladimir Putin (Dyson 2001).

The tie between Putin’s own intelligence career and subsequent rise to the top of Russian politics is even more interesting when considered in tandem with the insights made by Garthoff. Yuri Andropov was also a career KGB officer.  His own use of intelligence and the coloring of his worldview based on his intelligence training was a key component of his views of the United States. Two important points are raised in connection to Andropov’s own intelligence services worldview. The first of these is in connection with the downing of KAL 007 in August 1983. After Reagan strongly condemned the Soviets, Andropov responded by describing the incident as a provocation organized by US intelligence services (Garthoff 2015, 66–67). He connected the US aggressive tactics as a conscientious attempt to provoke the Soviets into shooting down the civilian airliner. This tendency to view the world in terms of information and misinformation, of plots, purpose, and of propaganda makes cooperation very difficult.

The second point that is raised concerning the tenure of Andropov is the increased cooperation between security services during his tenure.  The “Gavrilov channel” was opened to create a telephone hotline to arrange meetings between the intelligence services of both states during periods of tension.  The channel allowed both sides, during a period of intense hostility, to meet secretly “without political posturing” to seek clarifications and dispel misperceptions (Garthoff 2015, 70).

Doctored Intelligence and ISIS, is this a Crisis?

Why don’t political scientists study intelligence as part of other issues? That is a longer post for a different day and the subject of a paper that I currently have under review at a journal. For today, though, I am interested in the potential for politicization of intelligence processes.

This is in the news again.  A few months ago a news story caught my eye about the fact that intelligence analysts at CENTCOM were being asked to change their assessments about ISIS (A good recap of the controversy is here).  The story is in the news again after the Paris attacks and the new conflagration that is occurring in Syria presently.

Analysts assert that they were asked to tone down assessments that the Islamic State was growing in strength despite the coalition actions against them.

Among the complaints is that after the U.S. air campaign started in August 2014, the metrics to measure progress changed. They were modified to use measures such as the number of sorties and body counts -- a metric not used since the Vietnam War -- to paint a more positive picture. 

Critics say this "activity-based approach" to tracking the effectiveness of strikes does not paint a comprehensive picture of whether ISIS is being degraded and contained.

President Obama has responded to the allegations and said that he doesn't think that the White House has been kept in the dark about the nature of ISIS, and that the administration didn't want intelligence "shaded by politics."

Whether or not President Obama was directly involved in ordering intelligence to be "softened politically" is not the question.  The question is how any president can expect to get unvarnished intelligence when the incentives are built into the system to give information to the boss that things are going well.

In a recent book, Garthoff (2015)[1] explores the relationship between Soviet Leaders and Intelligence.  One of the key points of his book is that Soviet leaders relied on their own conceptions of the main adversary (the US) in evaluating intelligence.  Even if a system exists to funnel "pure intelligence" to a leader, his or her particular lens on the world will always affect the interpretation, and subsequent decisions based on that intelligence.  One of the fundamental questions about foreign policy is whether or not states behave as rational actors.  This depends on whether or not individuals act rationally. Theories of satisficing, of using heuristics to make decisions rather than carefully exploring all options helps us to understand behavior quite well.  If we truly want to understand how intelligence works, we need to understand not only the processes by which it is produced, but the processes by which it is consumed.

In the case of the CENTCOM reports, if the President was given access to the raw intelligence, it is unlikely that the doctored reports made that much difference in national-level decision making.  However, having reports that show success may change the calculus at the operational level, leading to poor strategic outcomes.

One of the other lessons from Garthoff was that Soviet leaders could not rely on intelligence assessment from the KGB and GRU precisely because those organizations were expressly ideological and their assessments were not objective enough to provide clear guidance for decision-making. If the US Intelligence Community (IC) becomes similarly politicized it will lead to marginalization of that government function.

From a bureaucratic survival perspective, then, it is is probably in the best interest of the IC to be (or at least appear to be) politically neutral and ideology free.  The short-term gains in political favor will lead to long-term decline in the political power of the institution.

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[1] Garthoff, Raymond. 2015. Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary during the Cold War. Georgetown University Press.

Iraq's new Civil War - Why Detention Matters.

Background

The past week has been interesting for me, sitting on the sideline and reading about detainees in Iraq.  The leader of the ISIS group that took over Mosul was released from Bucca in 2009.  The stories that are coming out about him now are primarily about how no one knows much about him.  The latest revelation is that he made a remark to the US soldiers releasing him to the effect that he would "See them in New York." That is a bit ominous given the stature of his group.  He is now the prime target of US forces. (See the following story for more background.)

My interest in this story comes from many sources. First, the news that Mosul had fallen deeply saddened me.  I was in Mosul from April to October 2003. I was stationed at the airfield there and worked as the leader of a Tactical Human Intelligence Team gathering information on threats to US forces and Iraqis in the area.  Mosul was very stable and pleasant during my time there. Mosul was the success that General Petraeus would capitalize on in his meteoric rise over the next decade.

Second, my next tour to Iraq in 2007-08 was to Camp Bucca.  Camp Bucca during the height of the surge was a contradiction.  It was an overcrowded mess (more than 25,000 detainees) of a camp that was simultaneously growing with the influx of detainees and working to reform the system to release them.  We hit a period of growth, and then the releases started.  The camp was run using doctrines from U.S. military incarceration, US Prisoner of War procedures, and a smattering of counterinsurgency.  The counterinsurgency aspects were taking root as we arrived.

Third, I have written on the subject of detention academically - and am one of the few political science scholars to do so. It is an area that has lacked attention in the past, but which now may become more obvious as a key aspect of conflict resolution, policy-making, and strategy.

Flawed System

One of the first papers I wrote as a graduate student dealt with the issue of releasing prisoners from detention centers.  The logic of the paper was simple. If detainees are properly classified using intelligence, the release of less dangerous detainees is sound policy.  However, the less certain we become about the classification of detainees, the more dangerous detainees will be released back into the fight.  This is a fairly obvious point, but it was made with my own personal experience in trying to classify detainees at Camp Bucca.  The fact is that we were not good at initially identifying dangerous detainees or updating our files through continued intelligence activities.

That is why I was unsurprised by the quotes of the commanding officer who was in charge of the facility when Baghdadi was released.  He says of the ISIS leader: 

"He didn't rack up to be one of the worst of the worst," said Col. Ken King, who oversaw Camp Bucca in 2008 and 2009. 

Baghdadi may have tried to manipulate other detainees or instigate reactions from the guards, but he knew the rules well enough not to get in serious trouble. 

"The best term I can give him is savvy," said King, who first spoke to the Daily Beast. 

The colonel recalled that when Baghdadi was turned over to the Iraqi authorities in 2009, he remarked, "I'll see you guys in New York," an apparent reference to the hometown of many of the guards. 

"But it wasn't menacing. It was like, 'I'll be out of custody in no time,'" King said.

The description of the detainee is one who knew that the Americans were easily manipulated by those who played lip service to the rules of the camp.  His probing and manipulation are skills that he certainly honed while in custody.  Camp Bucca was described at one point as a training ground for Jihadists.  The half-measures taken by US forces in 2007-08 were not enough to really identify the smartest of the hard-core jihadists.  We essentially created a Darwinian system where those with enough savvy to avoid detection could increase their skills.

The time to solve the crisis in Iraq has passed.  Bucca is closed, the US doesn't have troops on the ground. However, we do have the ability to patch some of these flaws before our exit in Afghanistan, and to learn from them for our next wars.

Naked Self Promotion

One place to start is by committing more intelligence resources to detention facilities. This needs to be coupled with a change in the way that we collect and analyze intelligence from such facilities. I made this recommendation in an article last year.

Willardson, Spencer. “Strategic Intelligence During Coin Detention Operations – Relational Data and Understanding Latent Terror Networks.” Defense & Security Analysis 29, no. 1 (2013): 42–53.

I also have a working paper about the Surge in Iraq that details why the process of detention was important in separating the Sunnis and Shiites and ending the first Civil war.  If you are interested in the latest version of this paper, please email me. 

Finally, I have a database with detainee stats from Iraq from early 2003 through the beginning of 2009. These data come from some Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that I made.  A description of the data can be found on my website. LINK.