Intelligence – Respond

HOW DO WE GET INTELLIGENCE? Deciding What to Get

There is a tendency among Americans to equate intelligence with spies in much the same way as thriller writers do. This is because spying has an air of excitement that all the hard work of a team of cryptanalysts intent on breaking a hostile country’s code cannot duplicate. Spy-versus-spy is “sexy,” while the photo interpreter seated in a windowless room and pouring over the image of what might be a new nuclear-weapons production facility sounds dull. That is a mistake, not in terms of what makes enthralling fiction but in terms of describing the true nature of intelligence.

The multiple components of the U.S. Intelligence Community collect, process, analyze, and disseminate their products in many different ways for many different consumers. In doing so, however, they seek to be responsive to the needs of the users of their products. In the intelligence business, needs are expressed in terms of requirements and priorities. Priorities are necessary because, despite an Intelligence Community budget that is estimated at some $44 billion, neither the money nor the people are available to respond to all requests for information from every interested government or military official on every possible subject.

The interests of top-level policymakers can play a significant role in what resources are available to the intelligence agencies and how those resources are distributed and used. In the late 1970s, for example, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s emphasis on the importance of the Soviet constituent republics and nationalities, particularly those in the southern tier, led to an infusion of additional resources and a realignment of existing dollars to increase coverage of those areas. Given the breakup of the Soviet Union ten years later, such a reprioritization of requirements appears foresighted. But Brzezinski did not task individual agencies with collecting and analyzing specific pieces of intelligence; rather, the agencies presented their ideas of how they might respond to the requirement for more and better intelligence on the target area. Congress, then, appropriated new money for selected programs, not for specific items of information. However, the requirements process is rarely this simple.

There are, of course, many levels of requirements. The military services with their well-established chains of command handle the communication of intelligence needs upward and downward with greater facility than their civilian counterparts, especially at the tactical and operational levels. Because of the complexity of the national-level intelligence process, with each collection and production agency seeking a monopoly of its individual discipline, requirements

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serve the purpose of trying to get everyone on the same page. The tendency of agencies to want to control their process and product through the whole intelligence cycle has led to the main producers in the Intelligence Community being labeled “stovepipes.” The image is appropriate. Nonetheless, the importance of requirements should not be underestimated, as they set the stage for the collection and analysis that will follow.

Michael Turner sees the main issues on the national security agenda as being established through “an interactive bargaining process among three environments: the policy world, the bureaucratic dynamics of the intelligence community, and the intelligence collectors and analysts.” Certainly, policymakers will on occasion step into the process and seek to redirect the focus of the intelligence agencies toward an area not in the headlines, as with Brzezinski and the Soviet nationalities issue. But the really big issues are usually clear to everyone in the needs-response chain. That the United States is deeply interested in the countries that may be seeking to acquire nuclear weapons and the capability to deliver them should not be a surprise. Policymakers make such top-level needs evident through speeches, press briefings, and other actions designed to alert the public more than the intelligence agencies to an area of concern. They can also take a more direct approach to aid in establishing priorities for the direction and division of resources. One example is Presidential Decision Directive 35 (PDD-35) on “Intelligence Requirements,” signed by President Bill Clinton in 1995. As the President’s press spokesman noted at the time, “How you structure the priorities of the intelligence community to reflect the new threats that are more urgent in the post-Cold War world is part of what…this directive [is] all about.”

One of the more controversial aspects of PDD-35 was the assigning of one of the highest priorities to support for military operations (usually referred to as SMO, but sometimes given a slightly different twist and called “support to the warfighter”). It is difficult to argue against getting the right information into the hands of deployed military personnel. However, concern was expressed at the time that such a reprioritization could lead to an overemphasis on military tactical requirements in the tasking of national systems. In a constrained resource environment, this would mean less support for users who were focused on more strategic issues, such as nuclear nonproliferation. This concern resurfaced after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The INTs

HUMINT—Human Intelligence can be derived by covert means (classical spying or espionage), semiopen observations (such as, by a military attaché), or completely overt activities (discussion with a foreign official). IMINT—Imagery Intelligence comes from images made either from overhead (balloons, airplanes, or satellites) or on the ground. Since photography is today only one among several methods of imaging, use of the term IMINT has largely replaced the older term PHOTINT or photographic intelligence. MASINT—Measurement and Signature Intelligence involves technical intelligence data other than imagery and signal intelligence. It uses