OSS.

Net
OSS.Net, Inc. Information
costs
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Intelligence
makes
money.

ARNOLD 14 October 2003

Mr. Philip Zelikow, Executive Director

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
301 7th Street, SW, Room 5125
Washington, D.C. 20407
Dear Mr. Zelikow,
It may or may not be your intent, but I wish you to know that I have not received any questions via email
to begin the process of supporting your efforts, first with specific reference to what Open Source
Intelligence (OSINT) could have done to prevent 9-11, and then more broadly, as to the totality of the
integrated intelligence reforms that are required.
I am concerned by two aspects of the Commission's publicly-visible process. First, you seem to be
emphasizing testimony with the very people who created and nurtured these problems, i.e. former
Directors of Central Intelligence, while neglecting the iconoclasts and reforms who broke ranks in order
to press for reform. Second, you seem to be limiting your reform objectives to the pedestrian ones that
have been brought up before, and not attempting to strive for a holistic "Goldwater-Nichols" legislative
mandate that achieves all twenty of the reform objectives that you will find listed on pages 16-21 of the
attached white paper, recently posted to my web site.
In my view, your Commission should spend less time trying to defeat White House stone-walling, and
more time creating a constituency within Congresss for multi-jurisdictional reform legislation that
restores active intelligence analytic capabilities within every department of govenment (including
Agriculture and Interior); that resolves the contradictions in the procurement of information and
information technology for secret versus not secret applications; that establishes public standards for both
third part software inter-operability and global multi-lingual multi-media data templating; and that
rationalizes the U.S. intelligence community by, at a minimum, creating agency-level focal points for
collection, processing, analysis, and counter-intelligence.
There are limits to what I can know about your direction and your progress. I worry that you will not
break out of the box, and will be simply one more useless Commission. The "center of gravity" for your
success is not in the past, but in the future—if you can get Appropriations, Armed Services, Commerce,
Foreign Affairs, Government Operations, and Judiciary to "buy in" to a National Security Act of 2005
such as I proposed in my first book, but refined to include your findings and of course the new national
counterintelligence agency, then you will go down in history as the father of 21st Century intelligence.
I ask that you share this letter and the attached paper with the Members of your Commission. It is my
hope that you did so with the earlier briefing materials that I sent you.

lobert David Steele

Chief Executive Officer
Post Office Box 369, Oakton, Virginia 22124-0369
Voice: (703) 242-1700 - Facsimile: (703) 242-1711
<oss@oss.net> - <www.oss.net>
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ON INTELLIGENCE
Robert David Steele

11 October 2003

Table of Contents

What Is Intelligence and Why Does It Matter? 1

Four Threats, Four Quadrants 3
9-11: What Went Wrong and Why? 5
Iraq: What Went Wrong and Why? 8
America As Others See Us 9
Historical Endeavors to Reform U.S. Intelligence 13
Fixing Intelligence—National Security Act of 2005 16
New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence 19
The Emerging Intelligence Renaissance 20
Prognosis: Power to the People Through Public Intelligence 22
Bibliography 23
About the Author 25

What Is Intelligence and Why Does It Matter?

America as both a government and a people is confused and uncertain about the
definition of intelligence.1 At a higher level, there is a tendency to confuse spies,
satellites, and secrecy with intelligence—this causes the existing $35 billion a year
national intelligence shotgun to completely discount and ignore the 90% of the relevant
international information that is not online, not in English, and not secret. Absent a good
grip on open sources of information, the U.S. government can be said to be operating on
perhaps 2% of the available relevant national security information, in part because it has
not mastered the 29 foreign languages that are a minimalist starting point for
comprehensive global coverage.2

' There is no definition in the National Security Act of 1947. For a useful overview of the
conventional thinking on the definition of intelligence, see Michael Warner, "Understanding Our
Craft, Wanted: A Definition of "Intelligence", Studies in Intelligence (CIA, Vol. 46, No. 3).
2 As a matter of course, I will not refer back to my previous writings. ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies
and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000), with a Foreword by Senator David Boren, today
the President of the University of Oklahoma, and THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE;
Personal, Public, & Political (OSS, 2002), with a Foreword by Senator Pat Roberts, today
Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, are the basic references. I am pleased
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At a lower level, there is a tendency to believe that only national governments "do"
intelligence. While this is somewhat true in that the private sector (including non-
governmental agencies with extraordinary access to ground-truth through direct
observation) are generally not skilled at applying the proven process of intelligence to
their decision-support needs, this has the effect of shutting out the bulk of the global
knowledge available within our borders, or from experts resident in other countries. The
fastest way to improve national intelligence is not necessarily by reorganizing the secret
bits, but perhaps, instead, by expanding the definition and making networked and truly
national intelligence possible—we must harness the distributed intelligence of the Whole
Earth, beginning with all of our experts here at home.

Here is my definition of intelligence: Intelligence is decision-support, where a proven

process—requirements definition, collection management, source discovery and
validation, multi-source fusion, compelling and timely presentation—relies
predominantly on open sources of information, burden-sharing among both tribes and
nations, and a focus on creating public intelligence that can drive sensible public policy.

A process that does not integrate the seven tribes3, that does not do multilateral burden-
sharing for global coverage, and that does not operate routinely and daily in 29
languages, is by contrasting definition, not intelligence.

Now, we must ask, why does intelligence matter? Intelligence matters because, as
decision-support, it could and should (but often does not) play a vital role in how elected
and appointed official decide such important issues as whether or not to go to war, how to
appropriate and allocate public funds against diverse priorities, and what kind of military
to build—at $500 billion a year, America's national security budget is not only the largest
in the world (larger than the next twenty nations combined), but it also represents the one
part of the national budget that is "disposable", i.e. that is not tied in entitlements and
other mandates accounts.

Here is a simple and rough example: $100 million can buy a small Navy ship of war, or it
can buy a complete Army battalion with tanks and artillery in support, or it can buy 1000
diplomats, or 10,000 Peace Corps volunteers, or a water desalination plant installed in the
Middle East can capable of delivering 100 million cubic meters of water to this parched
area; or it can buy one day of Middle East war about water. These are called "trade-
offs." When a Republic falls victim to a tyranny of the minority, as Alexander Hamilton

also to have made possible the publication of an edited work by Ben de Jong, Wies Platje, and
myself, PEACEKEEPING INTELLIGENCE: Emerging Concepts for the Future (OSS, 2003), and
have a third personal book in progress, NATIONAL SECURITY INTELLIGENCE: A Grand
Strategy for Coping with Asymmetric Challenges (OSS 2004). I recommend all of the books by
others as listed at the end of this article.
3 National, military, law enforcement, business, academic, NGO-media, religious-clan-citizen.
Version 1.7 3

warned, and political demagogery instead of informed decision-making, becomes the

basis for allocating resources and going to war, then the public trust has been betrayed.

Put simply, a government that does not fully integrate objective intelligence into its
global decision process is in effect betraying the public trust. Objective intelligence is
part of the democratic process in that it can and should provide a non-partisan basis for
informed public policy debates.4

Four Threats, Four Quadrants

A major flaw with national intelligence occurs as a result of obsession with one specific
kind of threat—the traditional nation-state with organized armed forces. The obsession
further corrupts intelligence when attention is narrowly focused on what are called "hard
targets", those seven states considered to be a strategic nuclear threat or conventional
state-sponsored communist or terrorist threat: Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Libya,
Iraq (more of a threat today than before we invaded), and Pakistan.

In the 1980's I conceptualized the below illustration of four threat classes, each of which
requires co-equal intelligence resources and intelligence leadership.5

PHVsirai NATURAL
GUERRILLA
STEALTH, HIGH TECH WAR LOW TECH STEALTH,
PRECISION BRU BRUTES RANDOM
TARGETING (BIG WAR) (GANGS) TARGETING
MONEY-RUTHLESSNES s

ECONOMIC
POWER BASE TERRORISM
WAR

HIGH TECH KNOWLEDGE-IDEOLOC Y LOW'TECH

CYBER - IDEO-
SEERS ERS
STEALTH. CULTURAL STEALTH.
(HOME
UUAD (K JOR)
DATABASE
TARGETING TARGETING

Four Different Threat Classes

Require Four Different Intelligence Approaches
Require Four Different National Security Strategies & Structures

4 The failure of the media to fulfill its own role as a means of informing citizens makes national
intelligence qua public intelligence all the more vital at the dawn of the 21st Century.
5 The Director of Central Intelligence (DC1) understands that Global Coverage of the lower tier
countries and issues can be done largely by open sources of information at a cost of $ 10 million
per country per year or $1.5 billion per year. In 1997 he made a deliberate decision to stick to
secrets about hard targets, and forewent the opportunity to radically enhance U.S. intelligence.
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There is another way to look at the global intelligence challenge. Taking our lead from
the above, and thinking in policy terms now, i.e. what should intelligence be able to
support, I conceptualize four quadrants where America must devise consistent, holistic,
sustainable foreign affairs and global security policy.

Global Government Stability Global Law Enforcement

• Legitimate Governments • Counter-Terrorism
• Democratic Governments • Counter-Crime
• Popular Governments • Counter-Corruption

Homeland Security Global Sustainment

• Educated Engaged Public • Moral Capitalism
• Public Health Assurance • Environmental Integrity
• Critical Infrastructure • Human Rights

Four Quadrants of National Security Responsibility

It's not about heavy metal anymore—it's about moral legitimacy.

In brief, invading another country and winning a military war with a heavy-metal force
structure is not only a last resort in terms of policy, it is also the least likely to result in
the desired outcome. National security today is about moral legitimacy, moral
capitalism, moral democracy, environmental integrity, and the sustainment of our own
homeland in terms of education, public health, and critical infrastructure. The longer we
allow our political and corporate and media leaders to lie to us, the longer we fail to
revitalize the democratic process by demonstrating that votes can still count for more
than money, the less likely we are to assure the security and prosperity of our children
and what the Native Americans call "the seventh generation"—this is the generation
whose needs should drive all major policy decisions.6

6 As I have reviewed over 410 books relevant to national security at Amazon.com, I am reluctant
to burden the reader here with a list of books. I will mention just four that have especially
impressed me in recent months: Max Manwaring (Contributing Editor^), The Search for Security:
A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century (Praeger, 2003); Clyde Prestowitz, ROGUE
NATION: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (Basic, 2003); William
Greider, The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy (Simon & Schuster, 2003);
and Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
(Metropolitan, 2003). Joe Nye Jr., Charles Kupchan and others are reviewed at Amazon.
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In summary, intelligence is decision-support and to the extent that intelligence is

balanced, informative, and timely, it can help both the policy-makers and the public to
arrive at intelligent conclusions about both the real world and domestic vulnerabilities to
attack and subversion. If intelligence is not balanced, i.e. if it neglects three of the four
threat classes; if intelligence is not informative, i.e. it fails to penetrate terrorist groups or
read foreign language documents in 29+ languages; if intelligence is not timely, i.e. it
reaches the public as well as the policy-makers before we go to war, not after, then
intelligence is not making the contributions the tax-paying public has a right to expect,
and intelligence must be fixed.

What can intelligence, properly managed, do for the national security and national
prosperity of the American Republic? I will mention just four possible accomplishments
as a means of emphasizing the potential benefits of an enlightened intelligence program.

First, intelligence can cut Pentagon waste and ineffectiveness in half. It may not
completely eliminate it, but if we cross-walk the real-world requirements for specific
kinds of armed force capabilities, we very quickly realize that we have too few "big"
systems that are too expensive and largely irrelvant to the challenges that face us. Most
compellingly, intelligence has help us redirect the savings into three other national
security arenas outlined below—we cannot cut the budget, but we can spend more
wisely.

Second, intelligence can help us become effective in the global environment that is
characterized by sub-state instability. This is an environment that requires both the
ability to deliver humanitarian assistance under combat conditions, and the ability to hunt
down and kill or contain individual warlords and criminal king-pins.

Third, intelligence can help us forecast both the threat and the future cost of dealing with
the threat, from global depredations that stem from our own misbehavior and inattention.
Water scacity, disease, starvation, and the instability that stems from unfettered
uneducated populations in the Third World are examples of threats to America's future.

Fourth, intelligence can overcome decades worth of inattention and neglect on the home
front. The most obvious American vulnerability to day is that of critical infrastructure,
all of which is above ground and not designed to account for malicious "acts of man."
Over the next 20 years, most of this infrastructure needs to be moved underground and
made redundant. More subtly, American policy-makers have lost sight of the connection
between public education and public health, and national security. We have neglected
these two areas, and must again make them our first priority for long-term security.

Our challenge in the 21st Century is to transfer the proven process of intelligence to all
aspects of national life, and to create a "Smart Nation" in which every citizen is an
intelligence minuteman, and every tax dollar is spent wisely, in the public interest.
Version 1.7 ft

9-11: What Went Wrong and Why?

9-11 was both an intelligence failure and a policy failure. It continues to trouble me that
in the two years prior to 9-11, capping decades of Presidential and Congressional
commissions on intelligence reform, no fewer than fifteen books on intelligence
deficiencies and intelligence reform were published. All were ignored. Unfortunately, 9-
11 and the tragic deaths of over 3,000 Americans, including a number in that previously
impregnable bastion, the Pentagon, have failed to inspire mature reflection and the
necessary redirection of intelligence and policy. Absent the election of an
unconventional and open-minded President, I predict that America will suffer another
5,000 dead in the next five years, both here at home and through devastating attacks
against hotels, office buildings, tunnels, and mass commercial transportation.

With respect to intelligence failures, 9-11 happened because the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) is incompetent at clandestine operations (my former career), incompetent
at open source information collection and exploitation in foreign languages (my current
career), and incompetent at processing multi-media information such that the dots can be
detected and connected (my avocation). The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is
incompetent at counter-terrorism, inattentive with respect to immigration matters, and
still in the 1970's with respect to archaic information technology systems.

Generic intelligence failures included

• a failure in intelligence collection caused by a continuing obsession with satellite-

based technical collection (we process less than 10% of our images, fewer than 6%
of our Russian signals, fewer than 3% of our European signals, and fewer than 1% of
all signals);

• a failure in intelligence data entry—notably a CIA failure to report a warning from

the Taliban foreign minister and two separate FBI failures to take walk-ins—one in
Newark and one in Orlando—seriously;

• a failure in intelligence translation, both CIA incompetence and inattention to Farsi,

Urdu, Arabic, Pashto, and Dari over-all, and FBI refusal to fund the translation of all
the Arabic documents captured after the first World Trade Center (car) bombing and
in the Philippine arrests;

• a failure in intelligence processing, in that there is no one place in the entire U.S.
government where all known information comes together, in part because of out-
dated "codeword" restrictions, in part because 80% of what the CIA and FBI know
is still not in digital form;
Version 1.7 7

• a failure in intelligence analysis, in that insufficient resources were applied to the

terrorist target (even after the DCI "declared war" on Al Qaeda); and finally

• a failure in intelligence liaison, in that we permitted Saudi Arabia and Pakistan,

among many others, to sponsor terrorism while giving us chicken feed, at the same
time that we eschewed serious clandestine penetrations of both "friendly"
governments exporting radicalized Islamic terrorists, and the internal opposition
groups themselves.7

On the policy side, and here I will be brief, there were five failures: first, in the
aftermath of the World Trade Center (car) bombing, a deliberate decision was made to
treat the matter as a law enforcement issue, with no recognition of the true meaning of
the event as a direct attack on America; second, in the aftermath of the various attacks
and loss of life in two Embassy bombings, the US military barracks bombing in Saudi
Arabia, and the attack on the USS Cole, the Clinton Administration—and Tony Burger
and Madeline Albright specifically, down-played the threat and refused to "alarm" the
American people*; third, after a lucky break in intercepting a terrorist arriving from
Canada to execute a millenium bombing, no substantive changes were made in border or
immigration control, and state troopers continued to lack access to any sort of terrorist
watchlist (two 9-11 terrorist were stopped prior to 9-11 for traffic violations, and not
noticed as a result); fourth, despite years of warning from terrorism experts, and a
commendable job on this specific pointyi by Senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, the
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) yielded to industry pressure and failed to
demand substantive improvements to airport security screening or cockpit defenses; and
fifth, for lack of the kind of warning that Albright and Berger prevented, Americans
failed to recognize the terrorists as they integrated themselves into flight training
programs and safehouses—and even when a flight school reported anomalous behavior
(i.e. no interest in learning how to land, just how to redirect in mid-air), the FBI ignored
the warnings because terrorism was not a national priority.

There is in my opinion one secret of the Bush Administration remaining to be exposed:

the assignment to Vice President Dick Cheney, immediately following inauguration, of
the terrorism portfolio. In my judgement, it was Dick Cheney's refusal to listen to DCI
George Tenet, and his obsession with catering to his energy pals in the early months of
the Bush Administration, that actually allowed the 9-11 terrorist conspiracy to come to its
tragic fulfillment.

7 There are many good books on intelligence shortfalls and the reasons for them, but specifically
relevant to 9-11 are those of Robert Baer, not only a career clandestine case officer specializing in
terrorism, but a highly decorated and much-admired officer as well. SEE NO EVIL: The True
Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA 's War on Terrorism (Crown, 2002), and SLEEPING WITH
THE DEVIL: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude (Crown, 2003). The latter book
specifically examines what could have been known from open sources alone, and the policy
decisions as well as the intelligence leadership mind-sets that blinded us to Arab realities.
Version 1.7
8

Iraq: What Went Wrong and Why?

Iraq is a much greater tragedy than 9-11, for it is we ourselves who have chosen to
destroy the U.S. Army in the sands of Iraq, to destroy decades worth of multi-lateral
relationships and institutions, and to incur what will eventually be thousands of casualties
from depleted uranium, residual petro-chemical toxicity, and random guerilla attacks.
The harm to our economy is equally devastating—we have now to deal with a self-
inflicted wound, a $250 billion unplanned budget deficit on top of our $7 trillion budget
deficit.

In my view, and here we need to wait for more detailed investigations, but the
preliminary results are in, Iraq also was both an intelligence and a policy failure.

Iraq was an intelligence failure because the U.S. intelligence community simply did not
know what it needed to know in order to provide both the Executive and the Congress
with essential information. We know from open sources of information that Saddam
Hussein distributed most of his experts on weapons of mass destruction in the early
1990's, and I find the report of his defecting program manager, to wit, that he destroyed
the stocks but kept the cookbooks, quite credible. I also believe that some of his
capabilities—modest but potent—are in concealed storage in Russia,, Syria, and Algeria,
with the active complicity of those governments.

Iraq was a policy failure in two parts: on the one hand, the Administration was captured
by a small band of neo-conservative under the leadership of Dick Cheney and with the
operational force being provided by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz—this group
decided that 9-11 was the perfect pretext for executing their life-long ambition, the
capture of the Iraqi oil fields and the eradication of radical regimes in Arabia by force.
As General Wesley Clark tells the story publicly, on 9-11, as Americans were jumping to
their deaths to escape being burned alive, the White House called him and told him to
"pin it on Iraq." The White House had no proof then, when General Clark asked for it,
and they did not develop any substantive proof in the months leading up to the war. On
the contrary, the White House and its Pentagon leadership chose to tell the American
Congress, the American people, the United Nations, and the other national leaderships no
fewer than sixty-two (62) documented lies. This is surely a betrayal of the public trust
that merits impeachment, but Republican control of the two chambers of Gemmerce
and the naivete of the American public in continuing to believe White House propaganda Q
that would make the Nazi's proud, make impeachment a moot issue as we approach the
November 2004 elections. For its part, Congress, with the exception of Senator Robert
Byrd from West Virginia, failed America. Congress proved gutless, inattentive, and all
too willing to be led by specious politicized and fabricated "intelligence" that was
Version 1.7 g

concocted by a special unit in the Pentagon, based largely on fabrications fed to them by
Chalabi and others with their own agenda.8

America As Others See Us

Thomas Jefferson said it first: "A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry." James
Madison contributed his views with respect to the importance of an informed citizenry in
a democracy that means to be governed by the citizens themselves. More recently,
alarmed by the stupendous ignorance of both Congress and the public with respect to the
real world and foreign threats to domestic prosperity and security, both Senator David
Boren and David Broder have called for the "internationalization of education."9 Their
concern can be summed up in a South African quoted by Mark Hertsgaard in Eagle's
Shadow: "...we know everything about you, and you know nothing about us."

In this one section, rather than articulating my own thoughts, I want to highlight several
books and one map—in addition to those already noted—whose authors represent the
very best insights available to all Americans. These books are but a small sample of what
can be known, but is now ignored, at the policy level and by the media. Indeed, surveys
of the American people about such issues are now so watered down, according to
Matthew Miller, author of The 2% Solution, that the actual scale of problems has been
deleted from most survey questions because—heavens—if folks realized just how bad
these problems are, they might insist that we do something about them! National
intelligence must serve the public, for only by serving the public can we ensure that
policy makers, both elected and appointed, are held accountable for dealing with global
realities that impact on domestic prosperity and security.

• Ziauddin Sardar and Merry Wyn Davies, WHY DO PEOPLE HATE AMERICA?
(Icon, 2002)

8 Rather than clutter this article with extensive footnotes, I refer the reader to www.oss.net. where
I have posted over 1,000 news stories about intelligence and policy, with many covering the lies
and the politicization of intelligence in relation to Iraq. Just search for Iraq using site engine. The
62 documented lies can be found at www.bushwars.org. where Steven Perry harnessed the
distributed intelligence of the Nation to identify, screen, and validate the lies. I also recommend
the book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION: The Uses
of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq (Tarcher, 2003), and the more satirical but still valuable
book by Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the
Right (Dutton, 2003). Paul Krugman, in The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New
Century (Norton, 2003) specifically accuses the extreme right of choosing to ignore and subvert
the established democratic process in America, while Mark Hertsgaard, in his book The Eagle's
Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World (Picador, 2002), dramatically catalogs
the ignorance and hypocrisy of existing unilateralist policies that are increasing rather than
decreasing the prospects of terrorist attacks. Schell, supra note 6 is also relevant.
9 David L. Boren and Edward J. Perkins (Contributing Editors), Preparing America's Foreign
Policy for the 21s" Century (University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).
Version 1.7 1Q

Opening with a quote from Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1775, to wit, that "Patriotism is the
last refuge of the scoundrel," the authors are helpful in documenting how most good-
hearted Americans simply have no idea how big the gap is between our perception of our
goodness and the rest of the world's perception of our badness. According to the authors,
a language dies every two weeks. Although there are differing figures on how many
languages are still active today (between 3,000 and 5,500), the point is vital. If language
is the ultimate representation of a distinct and unique culture that is ideally suited to the
environment in which it has flourished over the past millenium, then the triple strikes of
English displacing the language, the American "hamburger virus" and city planning
displacing all else, and American policy instruments—inclusive of the World Trade
Organization and the International Monetary Fund—eliminating any choices before the
Third World or even the European policy makers, then America can be said to have been
invasive, predatory, and repressive. At multiple levels, from "hate" by Islamic
fundamentalists, to "fear and disdain" by French purists, to "annoyance" by Asians to
"infatuation" by teenagers, the Americans are seen as way too big for their britches-
Americans are the proverbial bull in the china shop, and their leaders lack morals—the
failure of America to ratify treaties that honor the right of children to food and health, the
failure of America to respect international conventions—the average of two military
interventions a year since the Cold War (not to mention two countries invaded but not
rescued), all add up to "blowback." The authors stress the urgency of improving public
understanding of the world and how the world sees America. They say: "And the power
of the American media, as we repeatedly argue, works to keep American people closed to
experience and ideas from the rest of the world and thereby increases the insularity, self-
absorption, and ignorance that is the overriding problem the rest of the world has with
American."

• Derek Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War
Victory (Little Brown, 2002)
This is an extraordinary book, in part because it forces us to confront the "hangover"
effects of the Cold War as we begin an uncertain path into the post 9-11 future. It begins
by emphasizing that the Cold War glorified certain types of institutions, personalities, and
attitudes, and ends by pointing out that we paid a very heavy cost—much as General and
President Eisenhower tried to warn us—in permitting our society to be bound by
weaponry, ideology, and secrecy. The author sums up the costs as follows: "For the
United States, the price of victory goes far beyond the dollars spend on warheads, foreign
aid, soldiers, propaganda, and intelligence. It includes, for instance, time wasted, talent
misdirected, secrecy imposed, and confidence impaired. Particular costs were imposed
on industry, science, and the universities. Trade was distorted and growth impeded." He
notes, toward the end of the book: "So much failure could have been avoided if CIA had
done more careful homework during the 1950s in the run-up to Sputnik; during the
1960s, when Soviet marshals were openly publishing their thoughts on nuclear strategy;
or during the 1970s and 1980s, when stagnation could be chronicled in the unclassified
gray pages of Soviet print. Most expensively, the CIA hardly ever learned anything from
Version 1.7 JJ

its mistakes, largely because it would not admit them." (pages 567-568) and also: "CIA
world-order men whose intrigues more often than not started at the incompetent and went
down from there, White House claims of 'national security' to conceal deceit, and the
creation of huge special interests in archaic spending all too easily occurred because most
Americans were not preoccupied with the struggle." (page 643)

• Robert McNamara and James Blight, WILSON's GHOST: Reducing the Risk of
Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century (Public Affairs, 2001)
What most Americans do not understand, what this book makes brilliantly clear, is that
two-thirds of the rest of the world is glad [9-11] happened. I quote from page 52: "...at
least two-thirds of the world's people—Chinese, Russians, Indians, Arabs, Muslims, and
Africans—see the United States as the single greatest threat to their societies. They do not
regard America as a military threat but as a menace to their integrity, autonomy,
prosperity and freedom of action." Whether one agrees with their depiction of two-thirds
or not (or whether they see the Attack as a well-deserved bloody nose or an atrocity
beyond the pale), the fact is that the authors paint a compelling picture of billions—not
millions but billions—of impoverished dispossessed people suffering from failed states,
crime, slavery, starvation, water shortages—and an abundance of media as well as
propaganda showing the US fat and happy and living the consumer society dream on the
backs of these billions.

• William Shawcross, DELIVER US FROM EVIL: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a

World of Endless Conflict (Simon & Schuster, 2001)
By the book's own rendering, "good will without strength can make things worse." Most
compellingly, the author demonstrates both the nuances and the complexities of "peace
operations", and the fact that they require at least as much forethought, commitment, and
sustainment as combat operations. Food scarcity and dangerous public health are the root
symptoms, not the core issues. The most dangerous element is not the competing sides,
but the criminal gangs that emerge to "stoke the fires of nationalism and ethnicity in order
to create an environment of fear and vulnerability" (and great profit). At the same time,
humanitarianism has become a big part of the problem-we have not yet learned how to
distinguish between those conflicts where intervention is warranted (e.g. massive
genocide campaigns) and those where internal conflicts need to be settled internally. In
feeding the competing parties, we are both prolonging the conflict, and giving rise to
criminal organizations that learn to leverage both the on-going conflict and the incoming
relief supplies. Perhaps more troubling, there appears to be a clear double-standard—
whether deliberate or circumstantial—between attempts to bring order to the white
western or Arab fringe countries and what appears to be callous indifference to black
African and distant Asian turmoil that includes hundreds of thousands victim to genocide
and tens of thousands victim to living amputation, mutilation, and rape. When all is said
and done, and these are my conclusions from reading this excellent work, 1) there is no
international intelligence system in place suitable to providing both the global coverage
Version 1.7 J2

and public education needed to mobilize and sustain multi-national peacekeeping

coalitions; 2) the United Nations (UN) is not structured, funded, nor capable of carrying
out disciplined effective peacekeeping operations, while the contributing nations are
unreliable in how and when they will provide incremental assistance; and 3) we still have
a long way to go in devising new concepts, doctrines, and technologies and programs for
effectively integrating and applying preventive diplomacy, transformed defense,
transnational law enforcement, and public services (water, food, health and education) in
a manner that furthers regionally-based peace and prosperity instead of feeding the fires
of local unrest.

• Robert Oakley, Michael Dziedzic, and Eliot Goldberg (Contributing Editors),

POLICING THE NEW WORLD DISORDER: Peace Operations and Public Security
(National Defense University, 1998)
If the Cold War era might be said to have revolved around early perceptions of a "missile
gap", the 21 st Century with its Operations Other Than War (OOTW) could reasonably be
said to have two issues—natural conditions such as depleted water resources, which is
not the book's focus, and the "globo-cop gap", which is—the book documents in a very
compelling manner the fact that there is a major capabilities (and intelligence) chasm
between preventive diplomacy on the one side, and armed military forces on the other,
and that closure of this gap is essential if we are to improve our prospects for rescuing
and maintaining public order around the world. All the contributors agree that this
[globo-cop gap] is a "force structure" issue that no government and certainly not the
United Nations, has mastered, but most give due credit to UN civilian police operations
for being the best available model upon which to build a future capability. The summary
of conclusions by Ambassador Oakley and Colonel Professor Dziedzic are alone worth
the price of the book.

• Berto Jongman, World Conflict & Human Rights Map 2001/2002 (Goals for
Americas Foundation, 2002)
This extraordinary map is an annual or bi-annual production by a single Dutch researcher
with support from the Goals for Americas Foundation. It integrates, in map form on one
side and in fine print on the other, the annual reports of the top peace research institutes.
We learn from this map that in 2002 there were 28 low-intensity conflicts killing over
1000 people a year; 79 low-intensity conflicts killing fewer than 1000 people a year, and
175 violent internal political conflicts killings tens of thousands. We learn from this map
that there are 32 countries that can be considered failed states as defined by UN "complex
emergencies; that there are millions of refugees and displaced persons across 66
countries; that millions are starving across 33 countries; that corruption is common in 80
countries, and censorship is very high in 62 countries....and many other things. What the
map does not tell us, which we have learned from other references, is that there are
modern plagues and epidemics in 59 countries and rising; that there are 18 active
genocides today, including two in Russia and three in Indonesia; and that water scarcity
Version 1.7 13
and ethnic conflict coincide along the Sino-Slavic borders, the Slavic-Islam borders
(Central Asia is Muslim), and the Palestinian-Israeli "borders".10

There is no lack of wisdom, knowledge, and open source information about the basic
problems that confront both America and all other nations and populations. What we
have right now is a disconnect between reality, intelligence, and policy. The problem
•with spies is they only know secrets—the problem -with policy makers is they don't want
to listen to anyone who disagrees with their pre-set agenda and ideological disposition.

It is my view that only a global public intelligence network, relying on open sources of
information, can break down the barriers to reform of both secret and open intelligence.

Historical Endeavors to Reform U.S. Intelligence

Intelligence reform studies have taken place since the inception of the U.S. Intelligence
Community. Here are a few historical endeavors, with short summaries.11
1949 First Hoover Commission
• Adversarial relationships between CIA, State, and the military
7955 Second Hoover Commission
• Counterintelligence & linguistic training deficiencies
• CIA to replace State in procurement of foreign publications

1961 Taylor Commission

• Failure in communication, coordination, and overall planning
• No single authority short of the President capable of coordinating
7977 Schlesinger Report
• "rise in...size and cost [with the] apparent inability to achieve a commensurate
improvement in the scope and overall quality..."
• "unproductively duplicative" collection systems and a failure in forward planning to
coordinate the allocation of resources

10 On disease see Laurie Garrett, BETRAYAL OF TRUST: The Collapse of Global Public Health
(Hyperion, 2000), Andrew Price-Smith, THE HEALTH OF NATIONS: Infectious Disease,
Environmental Change, and Their Effects on National Security and Development (MIT, 2001),
and Michael Kodron & Ronald Segal, THE NEW STATE OF THE WORLD ATLAS (Touchstone,
1991 and later editions). On water see Marq de Villiers, WATER: The Fate of Our Most Precious
Resource (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), and on genocide, NEW CRAFT and Dr. Greg Stanton,
Genocide Watch, at www.genocidewatch.org.
1 ' I have selected what I consider to be the key points from a larger and superb historical review
by Richard A. Best, Jr. and Herbert Andrew Boestling of the Congressional Research Service,
"Proposals for Intelligence Reorganization, 1949-1996," dated 28 February 1996, and included as
an appendix to the IC21 Report.
Version 1.7 J4

1976 Church Committee

• DCI should have program authority and monies for national intelligence should be
appropriated to the DCI rather than the individual agencies
• Recommended second DDCI for Community Management
• State must improve overt collection of economic and political data
• Raised issue of separating clandestine operations from analysis

7992 Boren-McCurdy (Joint Senate and House Intelligence Legislation (Not Passed)
• National Security Act of 1992 (not adopted because Defense opposed12)
• DNI, two DDNIs, consolidate DIA and INR analysts with CIA13

None of these substantive efforts to achieve reform has the desired effect, in part because
intelligence does not have a domestic political constituency. The public does not care.

In 1996 two extraordinary—and quite well-managed—endeavors were completed. The

first, a Commission chartered jointly by Congress and the President, known as the Aspin-
Brown Commission (Col), carried out two full years of investigation and produced what
is arguably the most important and sensible list of necessary reforms relevant to
preventing 9-11 and other strategic surprises. Simultaneously, under the leadership of
Representative Porter Goss, then Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence (HPSCI), a report was prepared by the HPSCI staff, on the intelligence
community in the 21st Century (IC21).14 Their findings are largely in agreement and

12 The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), and Senator John Warner in particular, have
consistently opposed the transfer of the national intelligence agencies previously hidden and now
overtly assigned within the defense budget, i.e. the National Security Agency (NSA), the National
Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA). In my
view, intelligence reform will never succeed unless the SASC, and especially Senator Warner, can
be offered a Memorandum of Agreement that commits 50% of all national intelligence resources
in peacetime, 85% in wartime, to defense needs; and a commitment can be made by a serving or
prospective DCI that all reforms will be job and revenue neutral for the various States.
13 DNI: Director of National Intelligence; DDNI: Deputy Director of National Intelligence; DIA:
Defense Intelligence Agency; INR: Intelligence and Research Bureau within the Department of
State.
14 Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community,
Preparing for the 21s' Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence (1 March 1996); IC21:
Intelligence Community on Intelligence (HPSCI, 104th Congress, 4 March 1996). Dr. Mark
Lowenthal, today acting Associate Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis &
Production (ADDCI/A&P), was the Staff Director for the HPSCI and the HPSCI study. Mr. Britt
Snider, Staff Director of the Aspin-Brown Commission, in now in retirement but available to help
implement these reforms. Mr. Kevin Scheid, an Office of Management and Budget professional
who served on the Aspin-Brown Commission, is now a member of the staff of the 9-11
Commission, which continues to be stone-walled by the White House and the Executive Branch.
Version 1.7 J5

must be the starting point for any future legislative effort to reform national
intelligence.15

• Role of Intelligence
Col: Support diplomacy, military operations, defense planning
IC21: Too ad hoc today, lacks coherence, can be self-serving
• Policy/Requirements Process
Col: State and Defense dominate guidance, consumers group needed
IC21: Declining intelligence base and lost focus on the future, system-driven
• Global Crime/Law Enforcement
Col: Need more coordination of operations overseas, more sharing of information
IC21: Need more information sharing and training, global operational coordination
• Organization
Col: Need to increase DCI authority, have DDCI/CIA and DDCI/CM16
IC21: Need three ADDCIs for functions of collection, production, infrastructure
• CIA Itself
Col: Needs better management at all levels
IC21: Must move Centers to DCI level, improve quality of personnel
• Budget, Structure, Process
Col: Substantial realignment needed aggregate functions, DCI does not have staff,
tools, or procedures for performing budget management.
IC21: Collection stove-pipes dominate resources rather than analysts or end-users;
CMS17 should have withholding authority and evaluation ability
• Intelligence Analysis
Col: Must improve focus on consumers, on open sources
IC21: CIA's core function; assumes departmental capabilities okay
• "Right-Size " and Rebuild
Col: Consolidate senior executive service, liberal force reduction
IC21: Rationalize NFIP, JMIP, and TIARA18, guide by function.
• Military Intelligence, Support to Department of Defense (DoD)
Col: DoD needs a single staff focal point for managing intelligence support

15 1have selected key points from a review of the both reports.

16 CM: Community Management
17 CMS: Community Management Staff
18 NFIP: National Foreign Intelligence Program; JMIP: Joint Military Intelligence Program;
TIARA: Tactical Exploitation of Intelligence and Related Activities (the latter is controlled by
operators rather than intelligence professionals in the Army, Navy, and Air Force).
Version 1.7 j^

IC21: D/DIA should be Director of Military Intelligence

• Technical Collection
Col: Endorsed NIMA, need more coordination between intelligence and defense
IC21: Eliminate NRO, create Technical Collection Agency and Technical
Development Office

• Clandestine Service
Col: Merge DoD Human Intelligence (HUMINT) into CIA HUMINT
IC21: Separate entity reporting directly to DCI, CIA feeds it (administrative only)
• International Cooperation
Col: Burden-sharing needed in space operations
IC21: Not addressed, but notes need to buy more open source imagery
• Cost of Intelligence
Col: Cost reductions are possible but need better process to find; states that 96% of
the total U.S. intelligence program is within DoD budget
IC21: States that DoD controls 86% of the total national resources, DCI lacks
authority to be effective

Fixing Intelligence—National Security Act of 2005

In the absence of public outrage and demands for substantive intelligence reform, I do not
believe that any candidate for the Presidency, with the possible exception of Howard
Dean, would be disposed toward substantive intelligence reform. They just do not get it.
Having said that, below is the program that I believe Congress must enact.

1. Special Committee. Retaining the existing Congressional committees on Intelligence

for day-to-day oversight of classified intelligence matters, each Committee of the
Senate should establish majority and minority Member focal points for intelligence
comprising a Special Committee as the steering group for drafting and enacting a
National Security Act of 2005, in essence a "Goldwater-Nichols Act" for
intelligence. This Act will fully integrate and revitalize intelligence qua decision-
support within every element of the U.S. Government and within state and local
governments, while legislatively mandate the following national initiatives.
2. Consolidated NFIP. Apart from moving NRO, NSA, and NIMA into the
consolidated NFIP, there should also be established a separate Homeland Defense
Intelligence Program and a National Security Education Program.
3. Homeland Defense Intelligence Program. Create a central homeland defense
intelligence center with 24/7 watch teams, and single Community Intelligence
Centers, also 24/7, in each state and major city, each under the sovereign authority of
 Version 1.7 17
the Governor or Mayor. Enhance National Guard role. Federally fund state-based
intelligence and counterintelligence forces, and State Intelligence Officers (SIOs).
4. National Security Education Program. "A Nation's best defense in an educated
citizenry." Program will fund science, technology, foreign area, & foreign language
experts. Government foreign area experts will serve in that capacity for a full career,
and not in the Reserve or as an additional duty as is now the case.
5. Director-General for National Intelligence. Placement of new DGNI on President's
Staff, with oversight over Director of Classified Intelligence (DCI), Chairman of the
elevated NIC, and a new Global Knowledge Foundation.
6. Director of Classified Intelligence. Rename and separate DCI position from that of
agency head positions for each element outlined below. Consolidate management of
personnel, security, training, and general infrastructure functions under
DDCI/Administration. Allocate all funds to the DCI, not to the agencies.
7. National Intelligence Council. Expand to 120, with 5-person teams dedicated to
defense, foreign affairs, finance & commerce, law enforcement, environment &
culture; elevate to Executive Office of the President.

8. Global Knowledge Foundation. $1.5B a year fund for open source intelligence
(OSINT) needs of both 1C and all government departments, includes $500M a year
for procurement of commercial imagery source material for defense, OSINT
procurement by Country Teams, and new multinational regional intelligence centers
that share indigenous expertise at foreign language data capture, translation, and
exploitation.19
9. Technical Collection Agency. Upgrade NRO to manage all technical programs.
10. Clandestine Service Agency. Separate from existing CIA, relying exclusively on
non-official cover and no longer responsible for routine declared liaison.
11. National Analysis Agency. Upgrade CIA to National Analysis Agency with restored
imagery, signals, measurements, and open source offices and funds for analytic tools;
200 multi-lingual mid-career analyst hires, 1000 adjunct reserve analysts.

19 This program will also nurture a national public intelligence network that enables citizens to
type in a zip code and be immediately informed about the history, current status, near-term, and
long-term nature of any issue area of concern to them, at the local, state, national, and global
levels. This one change will spark a global "revolution in intelligence affairs" that will restore the
connection between intelligence, democracy, moral capitalism, and global peace and prosperity by
completely wiping out the distorted propaganda and lies that now comprise the basis for most
falsely-derived consensus (or apathy) with respect to the most pressing domestic policy issues.

1
Version 1.7 18
12. National Processing Agency. Upgrade NSA to National Processing Agency, both
SIGINT & all-source processing including clandestine HUMINT and open source
information, ensuring that all field station reports from all agencies including FBI are
readily exploitable with advanced software and languages where NSA excels.
13. National Geospatial Agency. Combine NIMA with the U.S. Geological Service
(USGS) and elements of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA).
14. Coalition Intelligence Program. Create a coalition intelligence center that combines
the new initiatives of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the new
Partnership for Peace (PfP) nations, with those of the Joint Forces Command
(JFCOM), 24/7 watch, multi-lingual excellence.
15. Covert Action Transfer. CIA/Special Operations Group should be transferred to the
U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), with a large new clandestine
station to be co-located with USSOCOM Headquarters.
16. Counterintelligence Program. Restore FBI focus on national crime, create a new
counterintelligence and counterterrorism agency with divisions for critical
infrastructure protection, economic espionage, counter-terrorism, and counter-
intelligence at the federal level. This program will interact with but not control the
state-based counterintelligence programs to be federally-funded.
17. Regional Ground Truth Battalions. Each theater (regional) commanding general to
have a foreign area officer battalion with language-qualified companies for
intelligence, civil affairs, public affairs, legal, police, and logistics/engineering.
18. Information Peacekeeping Program. Establish pegs between defense "hard power"
spending and Program 150 "soft power" investments in information aid. A Digital
Marshall Plan could usefully "open up" areas of the world now "dark".
19. Standards-Based Information Sharing. Sponsor a Technical Advisory Group for
Intelligence (TAG-I) within the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and
urge every national leader to create a similar body within their national member body
of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Migrate the proven
process of intelligence to every knowledge-based organization, and set the stage for
harnessing the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth through standards and
sharing.
20. Publish Predominantly Unclassified Intelligence. Most intelligence is not and need
not be secret. We will always need some spies and some secrets, but in a globalized
environment where the future of life is actually at risk20, coherent sustainable

20 Among the books I recommend with respect to the over-arching issue of global security qua
future of life, are J. F. Rischard, HIGH NOON: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
(Basic, 2002); Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (Knoph, 2002); and Max Manwaring
Version 1.7 19
programs for global, national, and local security demand that most intelligence be
unclassified and understandable at the neighborhood level. Presidents can no longer
take Nations to war based on manipulated and inadequate secrets—our public can no
longer tolerate decisions "in our name" that cannot stand the test of public scrutiny.

New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence

I conclude NEW CRAFT with a discussion of the twenty-six "new rules for the new craft
of intelligence", and I will not repeat that work here.2' I do, however, want to list the
rules, for they, together with the "seven standards for seven tribes"22, are in my opinion a
most promising basis for changing, completely, our definition of national intelligence,
and hence the benefits we might derive from intelligence-driven policy. The rules are:

1) Decision-support is the raison d'etre; 2) Value-added comes from analysis, not

secrets; 3) Global coverage matters more; 4) Non-traditional threats are of paramount
importance; 5) Intelligence without translation is ignorant; 6) Source balance matters
more; 7) Intelligence must go "two levels down" (sub-state); 8) Processing matters more,
becomes core competency; 9) Cultural intelligence is fundamental; 10) Geospatial and
time-tagging is vital; 11) Global open source benchmarking is fundamental; 12)
Counterintelligence matters more; 13) Cross-fertilization matters more; 14) Decentralized
intelligence matters more; 15) Collaborative work and informal communications rise; 16)
New value is in content + context + speed; 17) Collection must be based on gaps, not
priorities; 18) Collection doctrine must grow in sophistication23; 19) Citizen "intelligence
minuteman" are vital; 20) Production should be based on needs, not capabilities; 21)
Strategic intelligence matters more; 22) Budget intelligence is mandatory 4; 23) Public
intelligence drives public policy; 24) Analysts are managers of experts, sources, money,

(Contributing Editor), Environmental Security and Global Stability: Problems and Responses
(Lexington, 2002).
21 This chapter of NEW CRAFT is available free at www.oss.net, together with a number of
intelligence reform references and related works by others.
22 The seven standards address global open source collection, analytic tools, analytic tradecraft,
defensive security and Counterintelligence, leadership, training, and culture. The seven tribes are
national (spies), military, law enforcement, business, academia, non-government and media, and
religions inclusive of clans and citizens.
23 Today ICMAP and other similar collection management functions ask the question "which
classified system should we task?" Three other questions must be (but are not) asked first: 1) Do
we already know this and can we FIND it in our archives? 2) If we do not, can we GET this from
an ally or other affiliated organization at no cost? 3) If not, can we BUY this from a commercial
source at low cost, in quick time, without security impediments?
24 "It isn't policy until it's in the budget" is a truth taught to me by Mr. Don Gessaman, former
Deputy Associate Director for National Security until his retirement in 1995. Ergo, if there is a
disconnect between intelligence about imminent threats, and the federal budget, intelligence is
clearly failing to communicate with policy, and the disconnect must be made public.
Version 1.7 20
and consumer needs; 25) New measures of merit are needed across the board; 26) Multi-
lateral burden-sharing is vital.
The new craft of intelligence will be characterized by two conceptual figures, each
illustrated below.

National Tribe
History in all
languages—
Focus the
spies very
^f ^^
Military Tribe Police Tribe
digitized! narrowly
III 1
Academic Tribe Business Tribe
Harness all Share the
experts in the Global % Jll
Nation Coverage NGO-Media Tribe Religion Tribe

Quadrant 1: Intelligence Perspectives Circle 1: Who Does Intelligence?

The Emerging Intelligence Renaissance

Alvin Toffler was the first to get it, with his book PowerShift as a capstone on his earlier
works. Howard Rheingold followed soon after, with books on virtual community and
just this past year, on Smart Mobs. Many others have contributed to our understanding of
the information revolution that is in progress, among them Paul Strassmann with
Information PayOff, Harlan Cleveland with The Knowledge Executive, Kevin Kelly with
OUT OF CONTROL: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization. Most recently, Thomas
Stewart has offered up THE WEALTH OF KNOWLEDGE: Intellectual Capital and the
Twenty-First Century Organization, in which he points out that the industrial era metrics
and management protocols are counter-productive in this new era.

Others have sounded alarms. Clifford Stoll in Silicon Valley Snake Oil, Lawrence Lessig
in The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, Anne
Branscomb in Who Owns Information? There are many issues yet to be dealt with,
among them the misbehavior of corporations seeking to abuse copyright laws and the
misbehavior of Microsoft, which is, as more than one authority has stated, a threat to
national security.25

25
Microsoft's buggy software and broad adoption subject the nation to a "dutch elm disease" sort
of cascading melt-down, at the same time that Microsoft's refusal to have stable transparent
Application Program Interfaces (API) precludes normal advances in plug and play third party
Version 1.7 21
Throughout all this, the U.S. Intelligence Community has slept, passively watching the
revolution pass it by. As John Perry Barlow quotes a CIA employee in his recent Forbes
ASAP article, "There has been an information revolution, and we missed it."26 The NRO
continues to build gold-plated systems that transfer wealth to contractors, NSA is still
stuck in the 1970's, CIA still cannot get a grip on either clandestine or open source
information, and both DIA and INR are so far gone we might as well close them down.
The FBI leadership is mediocre in the extreme, punishing those Special Agents who try/
to actually implement reforms.

There is, however, good news. Around the world, within the most secretive government
intelligence enterprises, there are pockets of reform. Virtually every agency of note,
including CIA and NSA and the US theater commanders—and especially the U.S.
Special Operations Command—has open source intelligence action officers, or cells, in_
some cases even branches. Overseas, from Norway and Sweden to "old Europe" and
down to South Africa, across to Australia and Singapore, there are Open Source
Intelligence (OSINT) centers, often several—Australia has three—one for defense, one
for law enforcement, and one for foreign affairs and trade. —

At the same time, despite some desperate times for foreign area academic studies (in the
basement and not yet recovered from the "quantitative analysis" movement),
investigative journalism (steal from the stringers, make up the rest), and business
intelligence (slashed budgets, poor management buy-in), I am seeing a resurgence of
interest in foreign affairs and national security. I routinely get emails fromlniddle-aged"
citizens across the country who, in the aftermath of 9-11, tell me, "If they're that mad at
us, I want to know why." I see MeetUp.com beginning to have a huge effect in bringing
together people who are linked by theirlntelligence needs, not by their organizational
role. I see Google destroying conventional information paradigms (and their profit
models). I see foreign intelligence officers meeting annually at my Global Information
Forum, and over time "coming clean" with one another on what they do and where they
are going.

In brief, a new global intelligence community is emerging. It is not going to be

controlled by governments, but governments will be the most structured and influential
members of that community, if they act wisely by coordinating generic standards and
overt investments. This new intelligence community is using the Internet, and
commercial security measures including steganography, Federal Express, and face to face

analytic toolkits. Microsoft's "blue screen of death" is in my opinion responsible for a 20% drop
in knowledge worker productivity against what would be possible if everyone were using LINUX
and Open Office while creating shared generic analytic tool-kits and distributed secure data bases.
26 Why Spy?; We have the tattletale tech to find out almost everything. What we don't have is a
way to know what we know. John Perry Barlow 3,931 words 7 October 2002 Forbes ASAP 42
Volume 170; Issue 07. Review at http://www.oss.net/extra/news/7module instance= I &id= 182.
Version 1.7 22

meetings, to share the burden of data capture, data processing, and data evaluation. This
new community is based on individual expertise, and it is thriving among the very ,
individuals who are most anti-thetical to the bloated bureaucracies that now render most *
national intelligence agencies largely ineffective: the people with open minds, willing to
do outreach, risk showing their ignorance, reaping in turn an enormous out-pouring of
largely free and certainly very low-cost information, knowledge, intelligence, and
wisdom—in 29 languages, 24/7,27

Prognosis: Power to the People Through Public Intelligence

I'm betting on the people. I'm betting that between now and November 2004 there will
be an awakening of political consciousness and civic duty such as this nation has not seen
since the first American revolution. I'm betting that Ted Halstead and Michael Lind have
it right in The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics. I'm betting that Paul
J?av_arjd Sherry Ruth Anderson are correct when they predict the return to politics of 50
million people who call themselves The Cultural Creatives. I'm betting that Marianne
.Williamson and her co-authors have an achievable vision in IMAGINE: WhaTAmenca
Could be in the 21st Century. We can do this. Intelligence is part of the solution, but
only if it places itself in the service of the people, by the people, for the people.

27 Not to rub it in, but in an exercise for the Aspin-Brown Commission I beat the U.S. Intelligence
Community with six phone calls. The target was Burundi. On an overnight basis, I obtained the
following: from LEXIS-NEXIS, the top ten journalists in the world on that country; from the
Institute of Scientific Information, the top ten academics in the world based on citation analysis;
from Oxford Analytica, twenty two-page prime ministerial level summaries of the situation; from
East View Cartographic, all Russian military maps available at the 1:50,000 level; from Jane's
Information Group, one-page orders of battle for each tribe, and summaries of every article they
had ever written on Burundi and Rwanda; and belatedly—I met them two weeks later—from
SPOT Image, 100% of Burundi imaged at the 1:50,000 resolution level, cloud-free and less than
three years old. CIA had a regional economic survey and one of those cute little maps—no one /
else responded. Little has improved since then—the Directorate of Analysis at CIA does the best v
it can, and does some very good open source out-sourcing, but until the DCI gets serious about
centralizing community open source management, putting real money into it, and locking the
security gremlins in the closet, the U.S. government, and CIA in particular, will continue to
operate on less than 2% of the foreign information relevant to our national security needs.
Version 1.7 23

Bibliography

There are numerous books on the history of intelligence that have lessons for today's
needed forms, as well as numerous personal memoirs, evaluations of specific aspects of
intelligence, and so on. I have reviewed many of these books at Amazon.com, and
provide lengthy annotated bibliographies of both intelligence and intelligence-relevant
(e.g. information society, emerging threats) books in all of my books. For the purposes
of this concise overview of intelligence, I am listing below what I regard as the "bare
bones" list for competency in understanding the intelligence challenge—if you read these
books, you will be well-prepared for a serious debate about the future of intelligence.

• George Allen, NONE SO BLIND: A Personal Account of Intelligence Failure in

Vietnam (Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 296 pages.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1566633877/ossnet-20
• Robert Baer, SEE NO EVIL: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on ^
Terrorism (Crown, 2002), 284 pages.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASrN/0609609874/ossnet-20

• Bruce Berkowitz and Allen Goodman, BEST TRUTH: Intelligence in the Information /
Age, (Yale, 2000), 224 pages.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300080115/ossnet-20
• John Fialka, WAR BY OTHER MEANS: Economic Espionage in America (Norton,
1999), 242 pp.
www. amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASrN/03933182l4/ossnet-20
• Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents
and How They Won the Cold War (Simon & Schuster, 1996), 608 pages
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASrN/0684810816/ossnet-20
• Roy Godson, Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards: U.S. Covert Action &
Counterintelligence (Transaction Press, 2001), 338 pages.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASrN/0765806991/ossnet-20

• Stuart Herrington, Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catchers World (Presidio,
1999), 3 84 pages.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0891416773/ossnet-20

• Arthur Hulnick, Fixing the Spy Machine: Preparing American Intelligence for the
21st Century (Praeger Publishing, 2000), 248 pages.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASrN/0275966534/ossnet-20
Version 1.7 24
Loch Johnson, Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, and Thugs: Intelligence and America's Quest for >/
Security, (New York University Press, 2000), 288 pages.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0814742521/ossnet-2Q

Jong, Ben de, Wies Platje, and Robert David Steele, PEACEKEEPING J
INTELLIGENCE: Emerging Concepts for the Future (OSS, 2003), 532 pp.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASrN/0971566127/ossnet-20
Michael Levine, DEEP COVER: The Inside Story of How DEA Infighting,
Incompetence and Subterfuge Lost Us the Biggest Battle of the Drug War (Delacorte,
1990)
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0595092640/ossnet-20
William E. Odom, FIXING INTELLIGENCE For a More Secure America (Yale, V
2003), 230 pages
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300099762/ossnet-20
Mark Riebling, WEDGE: The Secret War Between the FBI and the CIA (Knoph,
1994), 563 pages.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067941471 l/ossnet-20
Robert D. Steele, ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (OSS
International Press, 2000), 495 pages.
wvvw.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASrN/09715661 QO/ossnet-20
Robert D. Steele, THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, & "
Political (OSS International Press, 2002), 438 pages.
wvvw.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0971566119/ossnet-20
Gregory D. Treverton, Reshaping National Intelligence for an Age of Information, I
(Cambridge University Press, 2001), 282 pages.
wvvw.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/052158096X/ossnet-20
Notra Trulock, Code Name KINDRED SPIRIT: Inside the Chinese Nuclear
Espionage Scandal (Encounter Books, 2003),
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/l 89355451 l/ossnet-20
Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992 - 1995 (Lit Verlag London,
2003), 463 pp.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASlN/9053527427/ossnet-2Q
Amy Zegart, Flawed by Design: the Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford ,/
University Press, 2000), 342 pages.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/08047413 1 X/ossnet-20
Version 1.7 25
About the Author

Robert David Steele is the Chief Executive Officer of OSS.Net, a public intelligence and
public service web site and training company that serves as the hub for a multi-company
Global Intelligence Partnership. He has been a Marine Corps infantry officer, a
clandestine operations case officer (one of the first to be assigned the terrorist target), and
a senior civilian in Marine Corps intelligence, where he was responsible for designing
and creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Command, our Nation's newest national
intelligence production facility. Since 1992 he has been the foremost proponent for Open
Source Intelligence (OSENT), training over 6,000 professional intelligence officers from
over 40 countries. He is the author of NATO Open Source Intelligence Handbook, which
can be found on his web site, and the author of two books on intelligence reform. He has
edited and published the first book on peacekeeping intelligence, and commissioned new
books (forthcoming) on commercial intelligence and on law enforcement intelligence.
His current work in progress, on national security intelligence, will make two points: that
intelligence is not impacting on the U.S. budget, and needs to; and that national security
is about much more than a heavy-metal military that is irrelevant and ineffective against
90% of the threats that America must face in the 21st Century.