Marcus Aurelius: Congress Cuts DoD Spies in Half — CIA Continues to Run Amok — + Clandestine/Analytic Meta-RECAP

0Shares

Congress Smashes Pentagon’s New Den of Spies

By Noah Shachtman
WIRED Danger Room
05.21.13
7:29 PM

If the Pentagon’s not careful, it’s going to find its new network of spies rolled up by Congress.

The Defense Clandestine Service was supposed to be the Defense Department’s new squad for conducting “human intelligence” — classic, informant-based spying. The idea was to place up to 1,600 undercover operatives and military attachés around the world, collecting tips on emergent battlefields. The problem was that the U.S. already had a human intelligence crew: the CIA. Almost immediately after the Defense Clandestine Service was introduced, an array of outside observers began to loudly question its value.

Add the House Armed Services Committee’s intelligence panel to that list of skeptics. In its revision of next year’s Pentagon budget (.pdf), released Tuesday, the representatives said they would withhold half of the DCS’ funding until the Pentagon proves that the service “provide[s] unique capabilities to the intelligence community.”

The Defense Intelligence Agency, which runs the DCS, is trying to cast the move as a positive one for the service. “We appreciate the HASC’s support in allowing us to proceed in meeting [our] mission, and we welcome the HASC’s language that will allow us an opportunity to demonstrate further that we are proceeding smartly and as good stewards of taxpayers’ money,” Lt. Col. Thomas Veale, a Defense Intelligence Agency spokesman, tells Danger Room in an e-mail.

“From the very beginning, we have been continuously engaged with our oversight committees to reassure Congress that our efforts are within the scope of our unique defense intelligence mission,” he adds. ”We have also been coordinating closely with our IC [intelligence community] partners to ensure that Defense HUMINT [human intelligence] capabilities remain complementary and not duplicative of other agencies’ capabilities.”

But despite the pleasant words, it’s clear that the Congressional cut is the latest jab in a decades-long knife fight between the Pentagon and Langley (and their backers) for control of America’s spies.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, which is traditionally tasked with figuring out the number and type of hardware America’s military adversaries have. Think Syrian missiles, Russian tanks, or North Korean artillery. But in recent years, the Defense Intelligence Agency has assigned to itself a new role: less analytical, and more operational. While the CIA has turned more and more to hunting terrorists in the hottest warzones, the thinking went, the DCS could develop sources in the places where the next fight might go down: China and Iran, for sure. But also countries like Yemen, where unemployment is high, and so are the number of criminal gangs looking to recruit. “That’s a fundamentally different kind of enemy to understand,” said Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who inherited the DCS program from his predecessor but quickly embraced it in public. “Somebody who feels no hope is different [from] someone who puts on a uniform and decides he’s going to be your enemy… We have to have a different mindset to deal with it. We have to be able to go into these environments … with a much different level of preparation.”

To get the job done, the Defense Intelligence Agency reportedly called in 2012 for an increase its number of “collectors” from about 500 to more than 1,600. Proponents billed it as a way for the Defense Intelligence Agency to better integrate with the CIA and the rest of America’s intel services.

The logic would be a little easier to accept, if the Pentagon and the CIA hadn’t merged some of their human intelligence (“HUMINT”) forces just six years earlier. In May of 2006, the Defense HUMINT Service was dissolved,and many of its spies were sent over to the CIA, which combined the new personnel with its old Directorate of Operations to form the new National Clandestine Service. Brig. Gen. Michael E. Ennis, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s HUMINT chief, was named the No. 2 at the service. ”And a senior Marine general always serves as the NCS’ deputy director to ensure that the NCS stays focused on military targets of interest,” notes intelligence historian Matthew Aid.

It’s one of the reasons why Aid says he “still does not understand the need for the Defense Clandestine Service. It duplicates what NCS is supposed to provide.”

Congress appears equally confused. Last December, they barred DCS from hiring any new spies. In a brutal report, the Senate Armed Services Committee listed the Pentagon’s long-standing human intelligence issues, including “inefficient utilization of personnel trained at significant expense to conduct clandestine HUMINT; poor or non-existent career management for trained HUMINT personnel; cover challenges; and unproductive deployment locations.”

“Multiple studies since the end of the Cold War document these deficiencies, and they led … to [the] recommend[ation of] transferring to the Central Intelligence Agency all responsibilities for the clandestine recruitment of human sources.”

In Tuesday’s markup of the defense budget bill, the House Armed Services panel wasn’t quite so harsh. But they did withhold half of DCS’ proposed budget for next year. And they required the Pentagon to do more than just promise that things would be better this time. If the subcommittee’s version of the bill becomes law, the Defense Secretary will have to “design metrics that will be used to ensure that the Defense Clandestine Service is employed in the manner certified” and provide every 90 days “briefings on deployments and collection activities.”

The Secretary of Defense has responsibility and authority by statute and Executive Order to conduct intelligence collection and to ensure it has the capability to satisfy the overall intelligence needs of the Department of Defense. DCS is focused primarily on the unique strategic HUMINT needs of the Secretary of Defense, the Combatant Commanders, and the Service Chiefs.

Defense News’ John Bennett argues the restrictions are relatively mild, and therefore indicate House Republican support for the DCS. (It’s a counterintuitive suggestion, given that no other program was so restrained by the intelligence panel.)

The chairman of that subcommittee, Rep. Mac Thornberry, tells Breaking Defense that the Pentagon will not add any new people or new money for its new human intelligence mission. But on its website — perhaps as a hedge against attrition — the Defense Intelligence Agency is still openly recruiting for case officers in the Defense Clandestine Service, specifically ones who can speak “Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, Dari, Hindi, Turkish, Tajik, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese.” It won’t be easy to do, if DCS’ budget is slashed in half.

Phi Beta Iota: “Intelligence” is decision-support. It is also the entirety of those assets ostensibly devoted to collecting, processing, and analyzing all-source information in order to produce “intelligence.” The raw fact is that the US secret intelligence community, under its present leadership, has zero interest in actually producing decision-support. It is all about inputs — keep the money moving. This is both unaffordable and a betrayal of the public trust. As the EU and NATO both move toward some form of organic intelligence capability, as the BRICS consider options beyond an alternative development bank; and as the regional associations — the African Union, the Asia Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States, and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, also excluding the USA (and Canada) — begin to recognize that they can exclude unilateral militarism, virtual colonialism, and predatory capitalism simply by getting a grip on the truth in all its forms — we see an OPPORTUNITY. Open Source Everything (OSE) is the only affordable, scalable, infinitely inclusive means of creating the world brain, global game, coherent regional policies and investment, smart nations, and empowered publics. M4IS2 that places the indigenous countries at the head of the table, not an afterthought as is the case today, is the method we can use to restore diplomacy as the premier attribute of relations among nations, to cut the 40-60% waste that characterizes the UN, most NGOs, and most US Cabinet Departments, and to create a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all. A world that works for all is NOT what the druids in Switzerland and their Central Bank partners around the world want, so we draw the line here and now. We the people, of every nation, can create a public intelligence network that is devoted to the public interest, or we can roll over and continue to play dead while being exploited into extinction. How the USA “does” intelligence is going to determine the future of the USA. How the EU and NATO “do” intelligence is going to determine whether they live or die. How the regional associations “do” intelligence is going to determine whether they prosper as regions or in the case of Africa and Latin America, continue to be genocidal and economic hunting grounds.

Berto Jongman: Brennan Set Petraeus and CIA Up in Benghazi, CIA 7th Floor Also Betrayed Him, Dual Chain of Command in Africa + Brennan/Drone RECAP

Berto Jongman: Call for US Torture Investigation and Eradication + Torture RECAP

Berto Jongman: ICSR Report – As American As Apple Pie – How Anwar al-Awlaki Became the Face of Western Jihad + US Government Assassination RECAP

Berto Jongman: NATO Gladio B, Ayman al-Zawahiri as Asset, Destabilizing Russian Border Countries….NSA Barred from Monitoring Azerbaijan, Turkey, Belgium, and UK + GLADIO/False Flag Meta-RECAP

Berto Jongman: SSCI Pre-Hearing Q&A — Superb Questions, Cloudy Answers — Robert Steele Answers 6 of 40 Questions Honestly + IC/CIA Health RECAP

Chuck Spinney: Bin Laden, Perpetual War, Total Cost + Perpetual War RECAP

Chuck Spinney: Drones — Of Idiots, By Idiots, For Idiots + Meta-RECAP

Chuck Spinney: From Algeria to Libya –Lessons Not Learned + USG CIA Web of Deceit in Arabia RECAP

Chuck Spinney: Hardware Über Alles in the Spendagon — Paneta Pumps Corporate Profits While Veterans Commit Suicide + Meta-RECAP

Dr. Russell Ackoff on IC and DoD + Design RECAP

G.I. Wilson: Killer Drones, Moral Disengagement, + War Crimes RECAP

Howard Rheingold: Infotention Skills + Citizen Intel RECAP