Intel Wars Page 8
The U.S. Army and Marine Corps fly a much larger number of smaller drones that were designed specifically for the intelligence needs of battalion and company commanders on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. One such drone is the Raven, which is so small that it resembles the balsa-wood toy aircraft that children across America used to fly when they were growing up. Soldiers can carry the four-pound Raven, equipped with a tiny gas-powered engine and an even smaller digital video camera, into the field in a backpack and launch it by just turning on its motor and chucking it into the air like a football.
As important as they have been on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, the drones have proven to be difficult to fly and very expensive to operate. According to intelligence officials, by the end of 2009 the unmanned drone program had become the single most expensive component of the U.S. military’s intelligence budget. Today there are more than 20,000 military personnel and civilian contractors operating and maintaining drones around the world, accounting for 20 percent of all military personnel engaged in intelligence work; and it requires roughly $5 billion annually both to operate the drones currently in service and build the new systems just coming off the drawing boards.
One of the reasons the drones are so expensive is that they require a huge number of pilots to fly them remotely, and an even larger number of maintenance people to keep them operational. According to a June 2010 U.S. Air Force briefing paper, it takes 174 pilots, sensor operators, analysts, and maintenance and support personnel to fly a single Predator drone mission, far more than what is needed to fly a comparable mission by a U-2 spy plane. The air force alone has 1,100 airmen in the Middle East and South Asia maintaining the drones that fly daily strike and reconnaissance missions over Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, plus another 5,000 pilots and support personnel back at Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas, Nevada, who actually fly the drones by remote control via satellite.
But the biggest problem with the drone program was that the military was building drones faster than it could process the materials the crafts were producing. The amount of raw video footage and SIGINT data that each drone mission generates is so massive that the air force’s swamped intelligence analysts have coined a phrase to describe it—“data crush.”
According to a current-serving U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, the unmanned drone programs are a classic case of “bureaucracy run amok.” According to the officer, the air force “pushed into operation a sexy new piece of high-tech spy gear without giving much thought to the human dimension … how much data these new machines were going to produce and how many people were going to be needed to process and analyze the data … We put the cart before the horse once again.”
Whatever one may think about the profession of spying, one has to admit that the men and women who serve in the intelligence community are, and have always been, a very talented and dedicated group of people.
The late General William E. Odom, the director of the NSA from 1985 to 1988, liked to tell the story of bringing a group of visitors down to the basement of the NSA headquarters building at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, to see the agency’s massive complex of computers. As they were passing through the area that contained a number of glass-enclosed Cray supercomputers, the general noticed a partially clothed man fast asleep on top of one of the cooling coils that surrounded the computer. According to the general, the man, who was one of NSA’s “computer nerds” responsible for keeping the enormously expensive Crays up and running, had been babysitting the computer all night because it had been malfunctioning the day before. Rather than go home at the end of his shift, the technician had decided to camp out inside the computer’s glass enclosure so that he could be there in case the system malfunctioned during the night. General Odom was so impressed that he gave the man a cash reward for his dedication to duty, as well as a fierce dressing-down for embarrassing him in front of the visiting dignitaries.
The list of famous personalities who have at one time or another served in the intelligence community is long and distinguished. Three former U.S. Supreme Court justices were spies during World War II. Justice John Paul Stevens was a Navy codebreaker. Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. analyzed German ULTRA radio intercepts. And Justice Byron “Whizzer” White was a naval intelligence officer in the Pacific who wrote the report on the sinking of PT-109, whose captain was future president Lieutenant John F. Kennedy. Country music star Johnny Cash was a Morse intercept operator in the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s. Comedian David Brenner served as a cryptologist in the U.S. Army in Germany in the 1960s. Former television talk show host Montel Williams was a linguist and cryptologic officer in the U.S. Navy who conducted a number of top secret submarine reconnaissance missions off the Soviet coastline during the 1980s. Wanda Sykes worked as a procurement officer at NSA headquarters from 1986 to 1992 before leaving the agency to work full-time as a stand-up comic.
There are literally thousands of equally talented and dedicated men and women who work today for the U.S. intelligence community. One U.S. Army Pashto linguist interviewed for this book was in civilian life a computer software designer who studied languages as a form of recreation. He enlisted in the Texas Army National Guard and served a tour of duty in Afghanistan because, as he put it, “someone has to do it. It might as well be me.”
There is no fast and firm rule for what a typical American spy looks like. Generally speaking, they tend to be young (according to statistics provided by the DNI’s office, half of all the employees of the intelligence community—100,000 people—have been hired since 9/11), computer literate, and well educated (the number of individuals holding advanced university degrees is higher in the intelligence community than in just about any other branch of the U.S. government). Most have traveled or studied abroad, the majority of the operations officers and analysts speak at least one foreign language, and they have all passed some of the most rigorous psychological tests (a stable personality is of paramount importance) and background investigations ever devised before being allowed to handle classified information.
The National Security Agency, the nation’s eavesdropping giant, is the largest employer of linguists, mathematicians, computer scientists, software designers, and electronic engineers in the U.S. government. As was the case during the Cold War, both NSA and the U.S. military still like to recruit many of their linguists from among the Mormon population in Utah because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints encourages all young men to serve two years as missionaries, giving those who serve abroad invaluable exposure to foreign cultures and language skills that are hard to find in the general U.S. population. The fact that Mormons do not, as a rule, smoke or drink alcohol also makes them easier to clear for access to classified information than many of their fellow Americans.
The Central Intelligence Agency’s intelligence analysis component, the Directorate of Intelligence, likes skeptics and contrarian thinkers hired out of academia, while the agency’s cloak-and-dagger component, the National Clandestine Service, tends to be more eclectic in who it hires. It takes a special sort of person to do this job given that one must lie for a living, be willing to take chances that would get one fired in any other civilian job, and be willing to make deals with individuals so disreputable that one would never invite them home for dinner with the family. During the Cold War era, one of the groups of people the CIA’s clandestine service liked to recruit was former college football players because they were physically and mentally tough and enjoyed a good fight. Since 9/11, the CIA has hired hundreds of former prosecutors and defense lawyers, policemen, and detectives because, as a group, these men and women are mentally tough, can think on their feet, are used to dealing with professional liars, cheats, and thieves, and have a Type A personality willing to take risks and a desire to win, even if it means occasionally bending the truth.
But hidden from view, thousands of these talented individuals are leaving the intelligence community every year. During George W. Bush’s secon
d term in office, the number of employees resigning or taking early retirement exceeded the number of new recruits being brought into the intelligence community. The departure of so many of the intelligence community’s best and brightest people was causing incalculable damage because they took with them their institutional knowledge and unique skills learned during decades of service.
While many of the departing staffers said that they were leaving to seek better economic opportunities in the private sector, many left because they could no longer accept the enormous hardship and sacrifices that the job required. The stress and strain associated with working in the intelligence community, combined with long workdays, poor pay, lack of recognition, frequent overseas deployments, and the depersonalized and secretive nature of the job, took a terrible physical and mental toll on many intelligence officers.
NSA medical studies have shown that the agency’s workforce is prone to a higher occurrence of ulcers, digestive tract problems, and sleeping and eating disorders than civilians who work ordinary nine-to-five jobs. A study of the health of military intercept operators at four NSA listening posts in the mid-1990s revealed that these personnel suffered from a host of maladies and ailments, such as high rates of diarrhea, constipation, gastritis, respiratory problems, back pain, forgetfulness, nervousness, and irritability.
Excessive drinking remains commonplace in the intelligence community; so do fatigue and a host of other stress-related illnesses. The divorce rate among workers in the intelligence community is one of the highest in the nation, and the suicide rate is also well above the national average. Mental disorder and breakdown statistics for intelligence workers are well above virtually any other government job.
One result is that the number of intelligence officers resigning before they reach retirement age because of stress and overwork is increasing. Many have left because they had to make a choice—their families or their country. Nine times out of ten, family won out. In the fall of 2008, I was forced to watch as a friend, a career military intelligence officer, was told in no uncertain terms by his wife to either get out of the service or agree to a divorce. He submitted his retirement papers that same week.
As amply demonstrated by the May 1, 2011, killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy commandos, there have been marked improvements inside the U.S. intelligence community since 9/11. According to interviews with over a dozen senior intelligence officials over the past three years, dramatic strides have been made since 9/11 in knocking down the security firewalls that prevented the sharing of information among the agencies that now make up the intelligence community. There is also better coordination of effort within the intelligence community; the quality of the intelligence analysis that is being produced has improved significantly; and there are signs that the intelligence community’s relations with Congress are on a much better footing than they were during the Bush administration, when the White House deliberately withheld crucial information from the House and Senate oversight committees.
Monumental efforts have been made over the past decade to make the vast amount of information being generated by the intelligence community available to those who need it. The 100,000 intelligence reports, memos, briefs, and cables that the intelligence community produces every month are fed into a new centralized computer database called the Library of National Intelligence, roughly patterned on the massive Library of Congress collection of books and magazines, which all analysts with the appropriate security clearances can access.
However, the intelligence community failed to effectively address the fundamental underlying problem, which was that it was collecting far more data than its analysts and computers could conceivably process. Throughout the Bush administration, U.S. intelligence officials struggled to try to rectify the problem, but with little success as spending on new high-tech collection systems, like unmanned aerial drones, exploded but no new funds were allocated to hire and train the personnel to analyze the data. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it in a declassified memo, the intelligence community was producing “more data than we can translate into useable knowledge.”
Moreover, according to intelligence insiders, the intelligence community still lacked the technical tools to sift and search through this data in a timely fashion so that analysts can spot potential threats. According to a congressional source, the available data was proliferating faster than the search tools needed to analyze what was in the databases. According to the source, “It was as if someone was paid to paint a picture and they never painted the picture but continued to argue that they had made gallant efforts to buy as much paint as they possibly could … Paint is still paint … it ain’t a picture.”
Beyond the data avalanche, interagency turf battles over access to information were still taking place. According to Colonel Barry Harris, who commanded a U.S. Army intelligence unit in Iraq, the U.S. Air Force refused to allow reconnaissance data from their unmanned drones to be given to his unit because they would not countenance army personnel controlling one of their intelligence assets. “This is parochialism at its worst,” Harris said, “and it deprived soldiers … of intelligence that could have given them a significant advantage.”
The quality of the analysis coming out of the intelligence community has also improved since 9/11, thanks in part to the efforts of former deputy director of national intelligence for analysis Dr. Thomas Fingar, who now teaches at Stanford University in California. Still, some of the intelligence community’s consumers remain highly critical of the quality of the intelligence reporting. According to a senior State Department intelligence official, much of the intelligence reporting he saw coming out of DNI headquarters resembled “the fast food my kids eat at McDonald’s.”
This is an age-old problem that has never been fixed to anyone’s satisfaction. Forty years earlier at the height of the Vietnam War, Henry A. Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s sometimes acerbic national security adviser, famously compared the authors of what he was reading coming out of the intelligence community to “a hysterical group of Talmudic scholars doing an exegesis of abstruse passages.” In plain English, Kissinger was saying that America’s spies were, in his opinion, producing a lot of incomprehensible and irrelevant crap.
The intelligence community has also done a commendable job in recent years of pushing pertinent information to military field commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan as far down the chain of command as battalion and company level. Today, lowly intelligence analysts in Baghdad and Kabul can look at the same agent reports, satellite imagery, and SIGINT intercepts on their laptop computers that are being shown that same day to President Obama and the National Security Council (NSC) in Washington.
For example, in 2007 NSA deployed to Iraq an electronic system called Real-Time Regional Gateway (RT-RG), which for the first time gave field commanders access to the agency’s SIGINT databases. Now deployed in southern Afghanistan, RT-RG has revolutionized the ability of intelligence analysts at isolated firebases far from major military installations to instantaneously access SIGINT about what is going on in their “neck of the woods.” It has also dramatically speeded up the ability of the analysts to process the raw intelligence. According to a restricted-access Pentagon briefing, thanks to RT-RG, “analysis that used to take 16 hours or more now can be done in less than one minute.”
While everyone celebrates the fact that Washington is now pumping vast amounts of intelligence information to the field, the result has been that the material is drowning the intelligence analysts in Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2009, the situation had become so acute that the head of the Kandahar Intelligence Fusion Center in southern Afghanistan wrote in a memo, “Information is like confetti; it is everywhere, but no one will turn off the fan!”
While it is certainly true that things have changed for the better within the U.S. intelligence community since 9/11, many of the most serious problems that had directly contributed to the 9/11 and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction intelligence failures remain
ed unfixed. Many of the fundamental intelligence-community reforms and structural changes that the 9/11 Commission had recommended in its final report in 2004 were never acted upon by the Bush administration, like the recommendation calling for the creation of a domestic intelligence and security agency roughly comparable to Great Britain’s MI5. And as we shall see, some of the changes that were made actually made the situation worse rather than better, according to intelligence officials. The result was that when Barack Obama entered the White House, the intelligence community remained “fundamentally unreformed,” according to Patrick C. Neary, who was the DNI’s chief planner from 2005 to 2010.
The problems started at the top with Blair’s own position as head of the intelligence community. In its July 2004 final report, the 9/11 Commission had strongly urged the Bush administration to create a new position called the director of national intelligence to provide strong and effective leadership for the fractious and strife-ridden U.S. intelligence community. The fervent hope of the commissioners was that by creating the position, the intelligence community would finally get a real leader, America’s first true “intelligence czar,” who would bring order out of the chaos and make the gigantic American intelligence apparatus work the way it should.
But the commission’s findings, while immensely popular with the American public and the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, were treated by the U.S. government like “a flaming bag of dog poo,” according to a retired CIA official. No one in Washington wanted intelligence reform. Not the Bush White House, nor the Pentagon, Congress, or the leadership of the intelligence community. The fiercest opposition to intelligence reform came from the Pentagon. On September 11, 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote a memo to President Bush strongly opposing intelligence reform, telling the president that “there is a risk that legislation could be drafted in a way that is damaging to our intelligence capabilities.” In particular, Rumsfeld opposed a proposal to give the director of national intelligence control over the budgets of all the agencies comprising the intelligence community, warning the president that to do so would “be a train wreck.”