Peacekeeping Intelligence Leadership Digest 1.0[i]
Robert David Steele
Ben de Jong, Wies Platje, and Robert David Steele, PEACEKEEPING INTELLIGENCE: Emerging Concepts for the Future (OSS International Press, 2003), pp. 201-225.
Executive Summary
The Brahimi Report, in combination with documented field experience from numerous UN peacekeeping missions, and the memoirs and published statements of recent secretaries-general, make it clear that the time has come to establish strategic, operational, and tactical intelligence concepts, doctrine, and tables of organisation & equipment (TO&E) for intelligence support to UN decisions at every level. This Peacekeeping Intelligence (PKI) Leadership Digest 1.0 integrates key expert insights, and represents a first step in the long-overdue establishment of UN competency in the craft of intelligence.
Introduction
Possibilities for Failure
Purpose and Structure of the PKI Leadership Digest 1.0
Figure 1: Overview of the PKI Leadership Digest 1.0
Strategic Intelligence
Strategic Collection
Strategic Processing
Strategic Analysis
Strategic Security
Notional Strategic Organisation
Figure 2: Strategic Intelligence Secretariat, United Nations
Operational Intelligence
Operational Collection
Figure 3. Information-Gathering Spectrum from Permitted to Prohibited
Operational Processing
Operational Analysis
Operational Security
Tactical Intelligence
Tactical Collection
Tactical Processing
Tactical Analysis
Tactical Security
Concluding Observations
Endnotes
Full Text Online for Ease of Automated Translation
Introduction
Peacekeeping Intelligence (PKI) is substantially different from combat intelligence, which the military is accustomed to, or law enforcement intelligence, which some but not all police forces understand. It requires, above all, a different mind-set on the part of the commander and his staff, as well as all personnel, both officer and enlisted. Indeed, it introduces civilian personnel, and non-governmental personnel, into the actual day-to-day collection, processing, and analysis of raw information from multiple sources. It relies very heavily on open sources of information as well as substantially more direct observation and elicitation from varied indigenous sources and largely by non-intelligence personnel, military police and normal infantry patrols, inter alia.
Peacekeeping intelligence is different from national intelligence in one other important way. As Hugh Smith has stated so eloquently:
The concept of ‘UN intelligence’ promises to turn traditional principles of intelligence on their heads. Intelligence will have to be based on information that is collected primarily by overt means, that is, by methods that do not threaten the target state or group and do not compromise the integrity or impartiality of the UN. It will have to be intelligence that is by definition shared among a number of nations and that in most cases will become widely known in the short and medium term. And it will have to be intelligence that is directed towards the purposes of the international community.[ii]
Fortunately, in the 40 years since the first Military Information Branch sought to protect UN peacekeepers at risk in the Congo, there have been dramatic changes in the international information and intelligence environments. The Internet, beginning in the mid-1990’s and exploding into global prominence at the beginning of the 21st Century, has made rapid access to vast volumes of information possible from literally anywhere. The implosion of the Soviet Empire, and the emergence of Russia as an interested party in the stabilisation of the Muslim crescent along Russian Southwest border, has had one extraordinary benefit for UN peacekeepers: the release into the public domain of Russian military combat charts, all with cultural features and contour lines, at the 1:50.000 scale, and for ports and capital cities, at the 1:10.000 level. Coincident with the release of the Russian military maps there has been a great leap forward in commercial imagery, with French 10-metre, Indian 5-metre, Russian 2-metre, and American 1-metre satellite imagery now being easily available and even better, easily directed toward any particular target at any particular time.[iii]
Partly as a result of the dramatic changes in information technology and the availability of what is now called open source information (OSIF), there has occurred a Revolution in Intelligence Affairs (RIA), and an independent discipline, Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) has emerged, both to meet the needs of organisations that are either nor permitted to, or that voluntary eschew resort to, clandestine and covert means of acquiring information, and to enhance the understanding of nations, the Member States of the UN, that have relied on spies and secrecy for so long that they have in many cases lost touch with the real world.[iv] The real world is a world in which tribes rather than armies—criminal gangs rather than political parties—environmental conditions rather than treaties—are the dominant forces that determine whether an areas is stable or unstable, governable or ungovernable. For many national intelligence organisations, the instability of the Third World has been of little concern, and they have no established covert collection assets that can really be brought to bear. Hence, OSINT emerges as a very viable foundation for peacekeeping intelligence.[v]
OSINT is so viable that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), seeking a solution for the challenge of establishing a common appreciation of threats of common concern to NATO and to the Partnership for Peace (PfP) countries, made a commitment to test and develop OSINT as a standard means of meeting NATO requirements. Many do not realise that NATO is actually similar to the UN in that is does not have its own dedicated intelligence capabilities, but has been forced in the past to rely on whatever intelligence the allied powers might wish to share. OSINT represents independence.
Today, as the UN considers how best to implement the recommendations of the Brahimi Report[vi], there are three distinct courses of action for any UN leader or Force Commander desiring to substantially improve the possibilities of success for existing and future UN missions addressing complex emergencies:
1) Structure. The Brahimi Report is brilliantly on point when it emphasises the urgency of creating a permanent decision-support structure at the strategic level, while also stressing the importance of being able to mobilise the appropriate mix of experts in advance of mandates being defined, for operational peacekeeping missions. With 75.000 UN peacekeepers deployed around the world, there should be established organic intelligence units for every mission at the operational level, and no fewer than 250 intelligence professionals at the strategic level (UN Headquarters).[vii]
2) Training. There is an urgent need to establish a complete intelligence training curriculum at all three levels of peacekeeping: strategic, operational, and tactical. Such a curriculum must be able to teach the proven process of intelligence[viii], along with a deep understanding of the many open as well as national sources that can be drawn upon to prepare for and guide peacekeeping operations under varying conditions of risk.[ix]
3) Open Sources. As NATO has done so well at defining OSINT possibilities for coalition operations[x] we will not emphasise the utility nor the details of OSINT, but rather the cost. The heart of OSINT is that it connects the proven process of intelligence with the purchase of legally and ethically available open sources, among which the most important are Russian military combat charts with contour lines at the 1:50.000 level, commercial imagery, tribal orders of battle and anthropological studies, business intelligence on incoming small arms, mercenary hires, and so on. If the UN is to devise a global architecture for proper but legal and ethical intelligence support to strategic decisions about United Nations policies, negotiations and accommodations with Member States, engagements with varied complex emergencies, and subsequent support to missions at the operational and tactical level, then the UN must, quite simply, recognise that there is no element of its budget more important than that which is set aside for the procurement of legal, ethical, open sources of information.
In combination—open sources, training in the proven process of intelligence, and dedicated structure loyal to the UN leadership and responsive to the needs of the UN—these three new capabilities will not only resolve the existing intelligence deficiencies that have been allowed to accumulate, but they will substantially enhance the ability of UN leaders to be effective in their relations with Member States, their crafting of mission mandates, and their oversight of ongoing peacekeeping missions.[xi] Once fully implemented, a UN intelligence structure may possibly enable preventive diplomacy, long a cherished objective of this most important universal organisation.[xii]
Possibilities for Failure
PKI will often fail at the strategic level, either by a failure to perceive deteriorating conditions that will require intervention, such as was the case with the Belgian failure to prepare for the transition in the Congo[xiii], or, if an intervention is known to be needed, well before the Commander reaches the scene, from a failure of the United Nations and the Member States to arrive at a correct estimate of the situation, in turn resulting in an inadequate or erroneous mandate. A more subtle failure is one of over-extension or irrelevance unrecognised. As one contributor noted, the three main UN missions in the Middle East are routinely ratified each year, with little debate (nor strategic evaluation) of their utility. When such forces disintegrate or deteriorate to the point that they are concerned only with guarding their own security, the UN mission has failed.[xiv]
PKI may fail next at the operational level, where a lack of understanding of the differences between normal military intelligence and PKI will result in poor decisions about what to load and what to ‘leave on the pier’. Digital cameras not normally included in Tables of Equipment (ToE), ‘mall radios’ and cellular telephones in quantity, unclassified computers that can be used to establish a wide-area network (WAN) that includes the varied local authorities and many non-governmental organisations, are but a few examples of what could be and should be introduced into PKI planning by the Commander before departing home base. The other major failure that will occur at the operational level is one of historical or contextual misunderstanding of the belligerents, the issues, or the key personalities.
PKI will often fail at the tactical level, because neither military nor law enforcement nor national intelligence forces as normally trained, equipped, and organised, are sufficient or appropriate for dealing with what William Shawcross calls ‘a world of endless conflict’, where humanitarian assistance—meant to stabilise a society—actually creates and perpetuates black markets that empower warlords and criminals.[xv] PKI requires an ability to establish orders of battle (OOB) for non-state actors; an ability to cast a much wider human intelligence network with much greater indigenous language capabilities than is the norm; and an ability to share sensitive information with a wide variety of coalition and non-governmental counter-parts who are ineligible for any sort of ‘clearance’ in the traditional sense of the word.
PKI will frequently fail at the technical level, in part because traditional military equipment, including intelligence collection equipment, is not suited for operation in urban areas; for distribution down to the squad level; or for focusing on targets that do not ‘emit,’ do not wear uniforms or even carry visible arms, and do not ride in conventional military vehicles with clear markings and known characteristics. Conventional militaries are not trained, equipped, nor organised for being effective in ‘small wars’.[xvi]
PKI is, in short, a vastly more challenging endeavour than most military, law enforcement, or national intelligence professional could possibly imagine.
Purpose and Structure of the PKI Leadership Digest 1.0
The purpose of this ‘PKI Leadership Digest 1.0’ is to provide an orientation for any UN leader, either civilian or military, by distilling the book into 35 pages (47 with notes). The Digest’s organisation is shown below.[xvii]
| Collection | Processing | Analysis | Security | |
| Strategic | ||||
| Operational | ||||
| Tactical |
Figure 1: Overview of the PKI Leadership Digest 1.0
Strategic Intelligence
At the strategic level, there are three co-equal objectives: first, to discern early warning of potentially catastrophic conflicts, both internal and regional, such as would warrant preventive peacekeeping[xviii]; second, to inform the leadership of the UN on a day-to-day basis and during special encounters such as have been common with respect to the efficacy of the sanctions on Iraq; and third, to prepare the SRSG and the Force Commander and their staffs for deployment on a peacekeeping mission.[xix] The preparation is in turn divided into two parts: the exclusively strategic part requires that the Security Council devise and approve a mandate for the mission. The appropriateness of this mandate, the soundness of the strategic appreciation that underlies this mandate, will determine, before a single Blue Beret is deployed, the possibilities of mission success or failure.[xx] The second part, what one might call the strategic-operational transition, brings together and devises intelligence in support of two groups: the operational command element, which must begin to define its concept of operations and requisite force structure, logistics, and recommended rules of engagement[xxi]; and the Security Council and supporting Departmental elements (e.g. for peacekeeping or humanitarian affairs), who must ultimately approve the operational plan by confirming the specific forces and rules of engagement proposed by the Force Commander and concurred in by the SRSG.
It is at this time and this level that the SRSG and Force Commander should make a strong personal commitment to championing the inclusion of organic intelligence capabilities within all assigned forces.[xxii]
At the same time, at this strategic level, the SRSG and the Force Commander should be obtaining the preliminary mandate and operational funded needed to acquire the basic geospatial information needed to both plan the strategic aspects of the deployment, and to support the operational and tactical needs of the mission once in-country. Generally this means the acquisition of at least one full set of the 1:50.000 Russian military combat charts with contour lines for the entire operational area as well as the 1:10.000 Russian charts for ports and capital cities. These are generally also available in digital form for direct integration into aviation and artillery mission support software systems. Ideally the SRSG and Force Commander should also open negotiations with both SPOT Image (FR) and Space Imaging (US) regarding the availability of lower cost archival imagery (generally less than three years old) as well as directed imagery. The US National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) can be of assistance in this regard.[xxiii] Attention should be given at this stage not only to fulfilling the immediate strategic planning needs, but to ensuring that the Force Commander will have continuing access to commercial imagery and such other geospatial services (e.g. commercial imagery post-processing and target analysis to be done by the provider, with the finished products then digitally transmitted to the operational intelligence staff).[xxiv]
The UN peacekeeping mission is much more likely to succeed if strategic intelligence is available in quality and quantity, and if the forces and rules of engagement are proposed upwards rather than downwards. It merits emphasis that one reason the UN must have its own strategic intelligence structure is because the larger troop contributing nations generally have not had intelligence assets focused on the ‘lower tier’ countries where complex emergencies develop, while the smaller troop contributing nations tend not to be able to afford structured intelligence collection, even in areas of immediate interest.[xxv]
In the course of devising the strategic mandate, both the Security Council and the SRSG/Force Commander must consider the reality that the military peacekeeping endeavour is only the security umbrella for a much more complex mix of civilian actors.[xxvi] Therefore, both parties should ensure that the mandate clearly addresses the desired chain of command and relationships among the various UN parties, and that a strategy is devised that provides for intelligence support to all UN elements and for integrated operational planning across civil-military lines once the mission is underway.
As the Brahimi Report points out, policy-makers tend to assume best-case conditions when dealing with worst-case behaviour, and this is most dangerous. Both in Ireland and in Bosnia, for example, best-case conditions were assumed, there was no significant intelligence investment authorised, and as a result, the force commanders were severely disadvantaged and opportunities for containing or improving the situation were over-looked, for lack of proper strategic and operational intelligence resources.[xxvii] Speaking of Bosnia, General Sir Roderick Cordy-Simpson has stated quite clearly, ‘…we did not understand the conflict when we deployed’.[xxviii]
In addition to providing for proper operational conditions, the UN headquarters must plan for a prolonged strategic intelligence endeavour, both in relation to negotiations at the strategic level, including sustained monitoring of embargoes and sanction enforcement by the various Member States, and in relation to strategic-level calculations intended to stabilise ‘highly factionalised situations’.[xxix]
There are several forms such a strategic intelligence activity might take. Among the competing models are those of a ‘think tank’, a ‘joint intelligence centre’ that actually processes and analyses information directly, and a ‘joint intelligence committee’ along the lines of the British model, with the authority to task the various Member States, and to pass judgement on the varied products received in response to its taskings, but without a large specialist staff of its own.[xxx]
A combination of a modest strategic ‘co-ordination’ activity at UN headquarters, with standing regional intelligence centres staffed by the Member States in those regions, with a UN liaison presence, offers another alternative for nurturing a non-intrusive but affordable global intelligence network that relies predominantly on open sources of information and shared multi-cultural analysis.[xxxi]
In the long term, the strategic intelligence competency of the UN is going to depend on whether or not the total culture, and especially the culture of the New York bureaucracy, can be modified to fully integrate intelligence qua tailored knowledge discovery, discrimination, distillation, and decision-support into the ‘art’ of UN diplomacy, negotiation, and operations.[xxxii] More than one observer, but General Cammaert especially, has emphasised the urgent need for the establishment of specialised UN intelligence training centres and specific intelligence courses in support of each of the core UN missions and their key personnel.[xxxiii] Such training is not only required for operational forces, but for the bureaucrats in the various UN headquarters and agencies. It will take fully twenty years to grow a new culture at the UN, one that is both committed to individual competence, and respectful of intelligence as a legal ethical foundation for information decision-making. A regular training program for entry-level, mid-career, and senior executives is vital if this transition from one culture to another is to succeed.[xxxiv]
It merits comment that the lower levels of UN intelligence competency will not be as effective if they are not appreciated at the strategic level. As General Cammaert notes, had the UN in New York understood that the intelligence on the planned genocide in Rwanda was reliable, the outcome may have been considerably more positive.[xxxv]
Finally, at all levels, intelligence may be considered a form of ‘remedial education’ for policy-makers, commanders, staffs, and belligerents.[xxxvi] The proven process of intelligence, drawing primarily on expert open sources both within and external to the mission Area of Responsibility (AOR), can craft ‘learning modules’ for use within negotiations and between parties. At a higher level, overt intelligence analysis can be channelled through the Department of Public Information and to the public, ensuring that UN concerns and perceptions, based on very sound, objective, and non-partisan intelligence, constitute the foundation for the international dialog about the complex emergency being addressed on behalf of all Member States.
Strategic Collection
As a general rule, all of the raw information needed to make sound strategic decisions can be found through open sources. Open sources have been found by the most sophisticated Member States to provide at much as 80% of the inputs to ‘all-source’ intelligence on genocide, terrorism, and proliferation, three topics not normally assumed to be ‘open’. The key for the UN is to combine a planned and adroitly managed mix of purchased commercial services including academic studies, legal traveller observations, and commercial imagery, with a deliberate collection plan that identifies specific information needs and then mandates appropriate legal and ethical collection efforts to satisfy those needs.
It is important to avoid confusing planned direct collection that is legal, with covert collection that is intrusive. The activities of private military contractors (PMC) are a case in point. Deliberate overt collection efforts can be devised, both in the home country of the PMC and in the country receiving their training, to carefully calibrate the degree and nature of the support being provided. The point is that such information does not get delivered to the UN by Member States who are sponsoring the covert support, nor does it appear in the newspaper. A professional intelligence organisation within the UN must structure and manage the process of collection.
At this level, with an independent collection capability that relies exclusively on open sources of information[xxxvii] the UN will find itself liberated from both dependence on such intelligence as the Member States might choose to provide, and from the indecision that attends those who lack sufficient information to make a decision with confidence that they have at least a reasonable appreciation of the complex matter at hand. It is especially important in the early years that UN strategic collection emphasise both commercial imagery and local photography (both air-breather and hand-held). A picture really is worth 10.000 words, and proper pictures will go a long way toward overcoming the inherent attitude in the New York offices of the UN that all intelligence is inherently manipulative and often wrong.[xxxviii]
By the same token, little appears to have been done to turn the vast global presence of the UN into a coherent decision-support network. More than one observer has noted the extraordinary reach and inherent expertise of the many UN agencies, most of which seem to feel that they are autonomous entities that do not need to respond to direction or inquires from New York. A common training course on intelligence, and a global electronic database of UN employees and their subject matter as well as their cultural and foreign area knowledge could over time become a very powerful tool for legal direct collection.[xxxix]
‘A force commander needs planning information on roads, terrain negotiability, infrastructure, hazards such as minefields and of course tactical positions and strengths of belligerents.'[xl] If the strategic element does not put this together before the mandate is devised, the Force Commander will be at a severe disadvantage from day 1.
At the strategic or UN headquarters level, the military information structure should be planned for worst-case scenarios, and include human intelligence and counterintelligence specialists, foreign area specialists, access to satellite imagery and national databases, and all necessary funds and equipment for both obtaining and exploiting (processing and analysing) geospatial information from many sources.[xli]
Language skills for the mission area are a special concern. Although some nations such as Norway and Sweden have made a strategic commitment to maintain personnel fluent in key languages (for instance, Swahili, which made a real difference in the Congo operation)[xlii], most nations do not take foreign languages as seriously as they should. It would be worthwhile, at this point in the process, to have a single staff officer designated as the Language Liaison Officer (LLO), with the specific responsibility of immediately identifying four groups of language-qualified professionals:
1) Intelligence specialists
2) Non-intelligence specialists
3) Private sector parties available for in-country posting
4) Individuals in any capacity who could be contracted to provide either voice or document translation services via remote means (i.e. ‘on call’).
An on-going aspect of strategic intelligence, one requiring every bit of diplomatic skill and persistence, is that of constantly negotiating and monitoring and nurturing inter-agency information exchanges within individual Member States, and among Member States.[xliii] In essence, as the sole party with over-arching responsibility for a particular peacekeeping mission, it falls to the UN in New York, and its liaison officers to the capital cities of individual troop contributing and adjacent Member States, to play the role of ‘nanny’ in gently but persistently ascertaining if there is information to be shared, and then facilitating the sharing both at the strategic level, and downwards to the Force Commander. If the UN chooses to establish a ‘world-class’ strategic intelligence cadre, these individuals will bring with them a form of global access and global credibility with the various individual national intelligence agencies that may in many instances overcome obstacles to intelligence sharing that emanate from the policy level with its domestic political calculations rather than the needs of the UN, always foremost.
Finally, in the area of strategic collection, the UN can, quite literally, break new ground by pursuing the vision of ‘seven standards for seven tribes’. This vision—a logical descendant of the original concept of noosphere by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and then of the ‘world brain’ by H. G. Wells—puts forward the notion that in the age of information, globalisation, and increased inter-dependence, there are actually seven intelligence tribes, not only the one national intelligence tribe generally recognised by every government. The other six intelligence tribes are those associated with the military, law enforcement, business, academia, NGO’s and media, and religions or clans as well as citizens. By establishing an Internet-based means for harnessing the distributed intelligence of the seven tribes, the UN can become, in effect, the ‘hub’ for the global brain, and can devise new means of rapidly identifying, contracting for, and leveraging relevant knowledge on a ‘just enough, just in time basis’. The seven standards, addressing global open source collection, multi-media processing, analytic toolkits, analytic tradecraft, defensive security and counterintelligence, personnel training and certification, and leadership (with culture development implicit in leadership) are consistent with the new push by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) to use standards as a means of facilitating the global information society.[xliv]
Strategic Processing
A major advantage of open sources is that they can be shared with every nationality as well as with non-governmental participants in the planning process for addressing complex emergencies. One positive function that a UN intelligence secretariat could offer is that of a ‘service of common concern’ for digitising, translating, and making available online all available information, including geospatial information, that is relevant to the planned mission.
With the advent of the Internet, standards associated with web-based information entry and access become important. Coding information with Extended Mark-Up Language (XML), and agreeing on standard ways of adding meta-tags for countries, topics, dates, and locations (XML Geo) will considerably facilitate the exploitation of all available information by various parties.
‘…the UN has little competency in analysis, scenario building, and prediction. Desk officers do virtually none of this, being overloaded with simple information gathering and a minimal of organising’.[xlv] If the UN were to consider some innovative processing solutions, perhaps consulting with George Soros, Ted Turner, and, right in New York, David Cohen, the former CIA manager who is now the Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence for the New York Police Department, as well as Goldman Sachs and other major organisations that have taken processing to its highest level, some gains could be achieved in this area, and open sources could be weighted, clustered, sorted, and visualised automatically, freeing up staff to do more human analysis.
Strategic Analysis[xlvi]
It is vital that the analysis prepared on behalf of the Secretary-General be truly independent analysis reflecting the strategic needs of the UN as a whole, rather than the desires of a specific department or a specific Member State whose analyst on secondment has been directed to come to a specific conclusion. As General Frank van Kappen notes, in his experience, the number of reported refugees and the severity of their reported condition often had less to do with reality and more to do with the specific policy being pursued by individual Member States providing the information to the UN.[xlvii]
Although the UN is a universal organisation with global responsibilities, no one appears to expect it to fulfil a strategic intelligence mission of ‘Global Coverage’. Instead, the expectation appears to be that the UN will embrace the concept of intelligence at all levels, will establish a structure for strategic intelligence as the Brahimi Report suggests, and then, on a case by case basis, surge up it capabilities, perhaps by temporarily hiring specialists who have exactly the right foreign area and subject-matter knowledge for a specific contingency.[xlviii]
By the same token, UN analysis may be rejected by Member States. General Cammaert has cited the refusal of the USSR to speak to Dag Hammarskjold regarding the Congo; the efforts of the US to discredit U Thant on Vietnam; the problems Boutros-Ghali encountered in Bosnia and Rwanda.[xlix] While no Member State desires to deal with a UN that assumes supra-national authorities, there is some considerable value in UN analysis, based exclusively on open sources of information, that can be shared with the public and achieve a credibility with the public across the international community. For the UN, insightful analysis that is trusted by the public could become the equivalent of ‘the Pope’s divisions’.[l]
One means of being effective at the strategic level is to make innovative use of modelling and simulation. Emerging analytic techniques and tools that are ‘off the shelf’ and therefore not costly, could provide UN intelligence with an advantage in its dealings with national intelligence bureaucracies that have been resistant to change away from the old industrial and Weberian model of information processing along factory lines.[li]
Strategic Security[lii]
Although the UN is proscribed from engaging in clandestine and covert actions, it has a need to track any such actions that come to its attention, and in some cases to object and ask a Member State to cease such actions. At the same time, as the UN has long known, but discovered with renewed force in March 2003, it is itself the target of covert operations by a Member State, and has over the course of several months been deceived both tactically and strategically by ostensibly validated secret source material. A security function is needed, not just in terms of protecting the integrity of the UN decision-process, but in terms of critically evaluating all that is