At this very moment analysts at the National Security Agency some 30 miles north of the White House are monitoring countless flashpoints of data — cellphone calls to “hot” numbers, an e-mail message on a suspicious server, an oddly worded tweet — as they carom around the globe like pinballs in cyberspace.
The snippets of information could conceivably lead them to Anwar al-Awlaki, a fugitive cleric in Yemen whose fiery sermons have inspired violent jihadists. Or to the next would-be underwear bomber. Or, much more likely in the needle-in-a-haystack world of cyber detection, it might lead to nothing at all — at least nothing of any consequence in determining Al Qaeda’s next target.
This is the world of modern eavesdropping, or signals intelligence, as its adherents call it, and for many years it operated in the shadows. “The Puzzle Palace,” the 1983 best seller by James Bamford that remains the benchmark study of the N.S.A., first pulled back the curtain to provide a glint of unwanted sunlight on the place. And the years after the Sept. 11 attacks — a period in which the surveillance agencies’ muscular new role would lead to secret wiretapping programs inside the United States, expansive data-mining operations and more — gave rise to public scrutiny that made the place a veritable greenhouse of exposure.
In a 1 February 2010 article adapted from the his forthcoming book, ‘Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage,' Eamon Javers wrote:
Full Story Online
“In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.”
“The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.”
“But sources familiar with the CIA’s moonlighting policy defend it as a vital tool to prevent brain-drain at Langley, which has seen an exodus of highly trained, badly needed intelligence officers to the private sector, where they can easily double or even triple their government salaries. The policy gives agents a chance to earn more while still staying on the government payroll.”
This is not a book the Administration (regardless of which party happens to be in control on any given day) because the Administration is totally out of touch with reality, totally partisan, and largely not interested in the welfare of average Americans because Wall Street money is personal, our tax payments are not–they go to the highest bidder.
Indeed, the decisions that the Administration makes every day not only make our citizens less safe, they cost our earnest honest businesses billions of dollars as imposed costs from government errors of understanding and policy and regulation. See my article in Homeland Security Today on “America's Cyber-Scam,” and separately, my update on the massive looting of Haiti that is about to take place as American contractors rush to swindle everyone, joining the Red Cross in the 50% overhead scam–only in the case of US contractors paying Haitians a dollar a day, it will be more like 80% scam.
What the author has done that no one else has done to date, is actually “walk” the ground across America looking for obvious vulnerabilities that terrorists armed with silencers and willing to die could exploit.
Each chapter covers a different vulnerability, and the value of this book is easily seen in the fact that this is almost “real-time” intelligence on specific vulnerabilities, the author has been “up close and personal” with each one, and the bottom line is clear: The US Government and state and local government have no idea how to protect America internally, we are living on grace, not preparedness (just as CIA offices under official cover overseas are not really operating under cover, just tacit immunity from local liaison which has them all pegged).
This might have been a four because despite the gifted genius of the author–I use the term with admiration–the book is out of touch with two thirds or more of the relevant literature and all the non-elite movements that are doing precisely what she advocates but DISPLACING governments.
HOWEVER, the recurring theme of multinational information-sharing and information-driven harmonization grabbed me by the throat. A handful of quoted phrases, generally citing others properly end-noted:
+ European agencies “are best described as ‘information agencies.' Their job is to collect, coordination, and disseminate information needed by policymakers.
+ “Modes of regulation based on information and persuasion…”
+ “Debousee also sees the European information agencies as network creators and coordinators.”
+ “In short, the ability to provide credible information and an accompanying reputation for credibility become sources of soft power.” She acknowledged here that non-governmental organization networks are doing this now, and that government networks need to do more of this. Continue reading “Review: A New World Order”
The details of how to implement a tribal strategy and work with the Afghan tribes are unique to that country, but the overall strategy of working with tribes is not new at all.
Where has it been done? Maj. Gant mentions what Army Special Forces did with the mountain tribes of Vietnam (known by the French term “montagnards”). Another even more appropriate example is what the CIA’s Bill Lair did with the Hmong of northern Laos and what other CIA officers did with the Ta’oi and other Lao Theung tribes of southern Laos.
There were no American fighting units in Laos at all. The only American military assigned to Laos were the handful of U.S. Air Force forward air controllers, known as Ravens, but they coordinated a very powerful force multiplier, the close air support of Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps aircraft assigned to work for Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). The tribal strategy in northern Laos was a very few CIA officers working with entirely Lao tribal surrogates. These tribal surrogates fought on our side and helped implement the strategy of keeping the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) occupied in Laos and away from South Vietnam. They also defended the ancient invasion corridor leading from Hanoi to the Lao capital and on into Thailand.
Strongly Recommended by BGen McMaster in Talk at ODNI
January 20, 2010
Paul Rexton Kan
This is one of two books strongly recommended, with deep admiration, by BGen McMaster, USA (Ret) speaking to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on 19 January. The four page trip report on his remarks about improving intelligence in support of the multinational mission in Afghanistan has been posted to Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.
I have bought this book and will review it within two weeks. CIA got its start in drug running and money laundering in Viet-Nam, and has at best facilitated the expansion of the drug zone and at worst financed it–at least half of the billion dollars a year that were channeled into Afghanistan by CIA via the Pakistani Intelligence Service are assumed (by me) to have been stolen, and today Pakistan is the primary site for the processing of Afghan opium into #4 heroin for onward shipment to Europe and elsewhere.
General McMaster also recommended Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond. In my own review of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 From that review pending my doing a complete proper review of this book:
The most important point in the book is not one the author intended to make. He inadvertently but most helpfully points to the fact that at no time did the U.S. government, in lacking a policy on Afghanistan across several Administrations, think about the strategic implications of “big money movements.” I refer to Saudi Oil, Afghan Drugs, and CIA Cash.
The greatest failure of the CIA comes across throughout early in the book: the CIA missed the radicalization of Islam and its implications for global destabilization. It did so for three reasons: 1) CIA obsession with hard targets to the detriment of global coverage; 2) CIA obsession with technical secrets rather than human overt and covert information; and 3) CIA laziness and political naiveté in relying on foreign liaison, and especially on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
My bottom line: the $75 billion a year for secret intelligence is not producing intelligence, only waste and profit. We are killing our troops in the field by being incompetent at intelligence. That breaks my heart.
On 16 January 2010, Herbert Meyer, who served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council, wrote the following:
“No one among us is perfect, or even close to perfect. In the real world, intelligence failures will happen from time to time no matter how honorable, hardworking, or talented the men and women are on whom we rely to keep us safe. But after so many intelligence
Full Meyer Op-Ed
failures in such a short time, we have got to stop making the same mistake over and over again. This week's Washington cliché is that our system failed. No. Systems don't fail; people fail. Put the right people in charge, and the “system” will fail much, much less frequently.”
I couldn't agree more with Mr. Meyer.
The final chapter of my book, Cash on Delivery: CIA Special Operations During the Secret War in Laos, is titled “Speaking Truth to Power – Lessons Learned”. In it I wrote, “It probably is wonderful that so many politicians, wide variety of pundits and family members of victims of terrorist attacks have taken such an interest in the organization of the CIA and other intelligence community agencies. I see no reason why they should not criticize what they see and understand about what the CIA has or has not done. However, they do not know the full story and they ought to know they do not know it. Yet, they proceed to suggest just how the CIA should be re-organized, without any experience in the collection, analysis and dissemination of intelligence and without all the details of how any particular intelligence, and certainly not how all of it, was collected, analyzed and disseminated. Most often, the solution they suggest boils down to rearranging the lines and boxes on organization charts. People populate the boxes on organization charts. How can it be that the perceived failures they are correcting were merely the result of the boxes not being connected properly among the lines? If the failures were the fault of the people, why don’t they ask that all those people be fired or demoted? Would that do any good? You cannot just go out and hire experienced intelligence professionals from a vast pool that just happens not to be working for the CIA at the time. Intelligence professionals must be grown from seed; they cannot be transplanted from mature plants. Yet, reorganizations are always proposed as changes of the alignment of lines and boxes or the creation of more lines and boxes added to the top of the whole structure, e.g. the National Counterterrorism Center or the Director of National Intelligence. Just how does adding more people to boxes and placing them on top of a bureaucratic structure make it better? Where do the people come from? If they are experienced intelligence professionals, how did anyone figure out how to identify the ones who were not part of the problem? If they are not experienced intelligence professionals why does anyone believe they will have what it takes to lead such a complex undertaking that has no valid lateral experience other than to mature within the intelligence structure?”
Reorganizations look good on paper and play well in the media, but they don't solve the true problem of a lack of first class leadership. When there is a failure to “connect the dots” you need to determine why the people you have did not or could not make the connections. Then you must take remedial actions to lead those people to better performance and to inspire them to, in the words of the U.S. Army, be all they can be.
Intelligence organizations like the CIA will still fail to connect all the dots and will still lose officers killed in action, no system can be perfect and the fight against terrorism will not be without casualties, but when we have failures or casualties we must be able to figure out whether there was nothing we could have done, or whether the leaders we have failed in their duties. Then we replace those leaders and do our best to give them the remedial training they need to become better, if and when they lead again. If we have the best leaders we can get, they will determine how the lines and boxes should be connected and we should expect they will be correct.
Final Review: Ground-Level View of Obvious Vulnerabilities and a General Failure to Protect
