The alleged Russian spy ring is a pleasant summer distraction (Anna Chapman — call your agent!) and a wonderful opportunity to use the phrase femme fatale. But if you want to ponder a 21st-century intelligence puzzle this July 4 weekend, turn your attention to cyber-espionage — where our adversaries can steal in a few seconds what it took an old-fashioned spy network years to collect.
First, though, let's think about what the Russian “illegals” were up to in their suburban spy nests. U.S. intelligence officials think it's partly that the Russians just love running illegal networks. This has been part of their tradecraft since the 1920s, and it enabled many of their most brilliant operations, from Rudolf Abel to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The FBI finds it hard to break its cultural habits, and so does Russia's intelligence service, the SVR.
1. The “fact of” PDB distribution is well known; Administrations influence who is on the distro list.
2. Of the principals showcased here, some are (at least sort of) competent patriotic and some…well…
3. This article is, perhaps unknowingly, deceptive in that it creates an impression that USG is postured to continue mission 24/7 from wherever necessary. Not necessarily so. There is a long established and openly acknowledged “Continuity of Operations” (COOP) program and a related personnel program, “telework,” that are essentially broken — misunderstood and pitifully under-resourced. At least within DoD, the COOP programs are inextricably trapped in Cold War mentalities where the principal threat was nuclear strikes on key command and control nodes. The concept was that a very small and elite segment of the workforce evacuated to predesignated facilities to sustain a very small set of “mission essential functions” for a relatively short period (say less than 30 days) after which the survivors emerge from their smoking holes and restart the world. That mindset endures. COOP and the people running it have not been able to transition to the idea that contingencies now exist that require USG to sustain a much greater fraction (say; 90%) of normal day to day functions for much longer periods (say 270 cumulative days over an 18-24 month period) and do it from distributed locations in order to intentionally avoid concentrating the workforce. Inflexible security policies retard achievement of that standard as does misconstruction of “telework,” which is cast as a personnel benefit program, intended as a reward for a picked set of supposed high performing employees, and hampered by traditional information security strictures, computer security strictures, and pervasive management concerns about how to intensively manage and supervise teleworkers in order to ensure that they do not defraud the government. Some of the policy documents governing telework are mind-boggling garbage. Further, the overriding intent is that the teleworking employee financially support telework, particularly internet access back to the employing agency and in many cases basic hardware and software.)
Headlights approach on an empty road. A government agent steps out of an armored SUV, carrying a locked, black satchel.
“Here's the bag,” the agent says, to the intelligence official. “Here's the key.”
The key turns, and out slides a brown leather binder, gold-stamped TOP SECRET. The President's Daily Brief, perhaps the most secret book on Earth.
The PDB handoff happens in the dead of every night. The book distills the nation's greatest threats, intelligence trends and concerns, and is written by a team at CIA headquarters.
Phi Beta Iota: The President's Daily Brief (PDB) costs $75 billion a year to produce, and provides the President and senior commanders with “at best” 4% of what he needs to know. The US Intelligence Community lacks a strategic analytic model and does nothing of consequence for Cabinet Secretaries, regional and functional Assistant Secretaries, or individual action officers (e.g. the one deep Energy officer responsible for proliferation). Madeline Albright it right when she described herself and others as “gerbils on a wheel.”
Attached is somewhat dated; you may or may not have seen. But the basic message almost certainly remains valid. For LTG Hughes' part, he was certainly part of the problem. At the time he retired out of DIA, 15 months or so before 9/11, one of the key operational support elements of his in-house HUMINT organization was commanded by an O-6 who was totally unqualified by temperament and background. This unfortunate situation was the product of an accommodation arrangement with one of the military Services which was short of O-6 command slots for, shall we say, an asshole geek
Phi Beta Iota: We don't have leaders. We have pandering clerks. What especially irritates us is how they get all holier than thou after retirement. There isn't a spine connected to a brain in the whole bunch. Intelligence is a mess–so is the political process, and the policy process simple does not exist, it has never recovered from Dick Cheney.
It is amazing how little commentary there has been on the key issue raised by the McChrystal Affair: Should U.S. war policy be made by Rolling Stone? The very fact that it took a magazine article for President Barack Obama to remove Gen. Stanley McChrystal provides the strongest possible reason for allowing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban.
One point must be understood above all: McChrystal was not fired because he disrespected civilian authority, despised his administration colleagues and was running a dysfunctional operation. He was ousted because he allowed the public to find out—the one unforgivable sin for a U.S. executive branch long accustomed to operating its wars with little public or congressional knowledge or accountability, behind a PR curtain maintaining the myth that U.S. foreign and military policy is conducted democratically.
If the Rolling Stone piece had not appeared, McChrystal would still be running the war in Afghanistan, still ignoring e-mail messages from Richard “Wounded Beast” Holbrooke, still feeling betrayed by Karl “Traitor” Eikenberry, still blowing off Joe “Bite Me” Biden and James “Clown” Jones, and still disparaging Barack “Disengaged” Obama.
Phi Beta Iota: Since 1988 the official US Government position on “the truth” and those that speak “the truth” has been to label both the truth and those that speak the truth “lunatic.” It is high time the public took its Republic back, to include a demand for Electoral Reform in time for 2010 and 2010; the wholesale firing of BOTH Democratic AND Republican Members of the Senate and of Congress, and the creation of a Sunshine Cabinet led by Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, and Jackie Salit, with strategy support and intelligence support from across America, harnessing the distributed minds of our great Republic in being (simply being held prisoner in Washington, D.C. and New York City).
You gotta love it when the War Party reveals its desperation to come up with yet another soundbyte to justify continuing the long Afghan War — a war becoming known to cynics in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac as the Great Afghan Cash Cow, because it is a golden cornucopia for so many, including, inter alia, the Pentagon, defense contractors, USAID, NGOs, Warlords, the family Karzai, and even the Taliban, which is helping to fund its anti-US operations by running a protection racket paid for by the US-funded trucking companies running supplies to the US forces in Afghanistan.
To wit: The Pentagon just entertained the booboisie with recycled old Russian reports of Afghanistan's supposed mineral wealth (the Saudi Arabia of lithium, for example), which the New York Times and Fox dutifully amplified as new news. Now, if the attached essay by Steve Levine is correct, we are about to be subjected to another recycling as well as a grand synthesis of old theories about turning Afghanistan in a “superhighway of roads, railroads, electricity lines, and energy pipelines for the entire Eurasian landmass.” And lying in echelon behind this assault on our senses is the romantic magnetism of a new Great Game, perhaps devolving ultimately into a never-ending competition between the US and Russia on the high ground of Eurasian Continent.
It is easy to poke fun at such grand strategic nonsense, and Levine does a good job of dissing the latest. But when these delusions are coupled with domestic politics, like …
the hysterical hype surrounding the FBI's allegations of a keystone-cops spy scandal where incompetent sleepers infiltrated the PTA meetings that fewer and fewer parents attend,
the now likely scuppering by Congress of a new nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia,
the likely torpedoing of the Obama-Medvedev rapprochement,
the increasing possibility of a congressional election debacle for the Democrats in 2010,
… it begins to look like the building blocks are falling into place for a return to political-economic normalcy in the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex — a normalcy taking the form of a permanent new Cold War with Russia.
Blaming Obama for losing the un-winnable Afghan war and for either ineffectually attacking or being afraid to attack Iran should ice the cake in 2012, thus paving the way for a new burst of defense spending in the second decade of the 21st Century, accompanied by its handmaiden, the politics of fear, and funded by greater debt as well as a renewed assault on Social Security and Medicare.
So, don't be surprised by the sound champagne corks popping in the Hall of Mirrors.
The U.S. military is studying a plan to solve Afghanistan's problems by turning it into a superhighway of roads, railroads, electricity lines and energy pipelines connected to the entire Eurasian landmass. According to a piece in the National Journal by Sydney Freedberg, the proposal has the ear of Gen. David Petraeus, whose confirmation hearings to be the new U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan start today in the Senate Armed Services Committee.
South Korea – North Korea: Special comment. On the sidelines of the G-20 meeting, President Obama agreed to a formal request by South Korean President Lee to delay the transfer of wartime operational control of Allied forces in Korea. The transfer had been in preparation for since 2007 and was set to occur in 2012. The wisdom and merits of this important warfighting shift have been hotly debated. The transfer will now occur in 2015.
On balance, the North's sinking of the patrol Ship Cheonan in March proved decisive in persuading the government in Seoul to request a delay in any new wartime command and control arrangements for Allied forces. This delay means that in getting revenge for a North Korean boat sunk last November, the North has strengthened the Alliance in ways that never would have happened absent a violent provocation.
A tactical provocation mushroomed into a monumental backfire. The only thing missing is the slogan “remember the Cheonan.” From the perspective of North Korea's stated national goals, specifically removing US forces, the sinking of the Cheonan is the worst strategic blunder in Kim Chong-il's mistake-prone and misguided tenure as North Korea's leader.
The Kim dynasty has long outlived the time when it had any ideas of value for the long suffering North Korean population. It should and could have been tossed into the dustbin of history, joining the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, by the year 2000 had the Allies, China and Russia had the moral courage and wisdom to bring it down through economic pressure. [PBI emphasis added.]
Phi Beta Iota: Moral courage and wisdom, so very lacking in the US Government as now comprised, is precisely what we must bring to bear. This is not rocket science, just Integrity 101. Below are four of tens of thousands of examples of normal people who get it.
BY HUGH GUSTERSON, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1 JULY 2010
It says something about American politics that Gen. Stanley McChrystal was not fired because U.S. casualties in Afghanistan are running at record levels, because the much vaunted Marja initiative has failed, or because the Kandahar offensive is already in trouble during its preliminary rollout. No, he was fired because he and his team embarrassed the White House with carelessly frank talk to a journalist. “This is a change in personnel, but not a change in policy,” said President Barack Obama in announcing General McChrystal's dismissal. Or, in the words of Rep. James McGovern, we have the “same menu, different waiter.”
But you could put Mother Teresa in charge of Afghanistan and, with flows of resources of that magnitude, she would be unable to prevent the kind of corruption we see in Afghanistan today.
