Foreign Policy Blogs

GailForce: The Media and the Intelligence Community

It’s been a tough few days for the U.S. Intelligence community.  Last week the Washington Post ran a series called “Top Secret America” and this week the media is filled with stories of 92,000 classified documents released by some web site.  The documents cover events in Afghanistan from 2004 – 2009.  I’ve blogged before about the lack of understanding of how the intelligence community works by both the media and many government officials.  This is just the latest example.

 

The reports are all well researched and well written; but these latest reports seem aimed more to titillate rather than educate the public.  Take one of the New York Times article on the classified documents titled:  View is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html).  Here’s the opening paragraph:  A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal”.  My first thought when I read it is “Oh no, here’s another Pentagon Papers thing”.   Then you go down a few paragraphs and you see:  Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military made misleading public statements — attributing the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special Operations commandos”.

I hold no security clearances and only have access to information provided by the media, official government statements and congressional testimony.  I so far have not been surprised by any of the content gleaned from the classified documents.  I think there is also the question of terminology.  I consider a hand held surface to air missile and its launcher a conventional weapon.  In terms of threats and how can the enemy hurt you these weapons are always mentioned in studies and reports I’ve read.  The fact that we have not had a large number of aircraft, particularly helicopters shot down tells me the bad guys don’t have a lot of these weapons.

The Washington Post series of articles last week had a lot of interesting facts but the data was not put into context.  Of course the size of the intelligence community has grown.  We are a nation at war and not just with the terrorists.  As mentioned in earlier blogs we are also under cyber attack.  Part of the community build up is in response to that threat.  At a recent conference Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn stated the following:  “DoD has a large IT footprint.  We operate more than 15,000 networks within the .mil domain.  We have seven million computing devices…The threat to our computer networks is substantial.  They are scanned millions of times a day.  They are probed thousands of times a day.  And we have not always been successful in stopping intrusions.  In fact, over the past several years, we have experienced damaging penetrations”. (http://www.stratcom.mil/speeches/38/2010_Cyberspace_Symposium_Keynote__DoD_Perspective)  Terrorism and cyber represent just two of many threats the intelligence community has to keep track of.

The Washington Post article also goes on and on about the large number of people who have security clearances.  They say it’s an estimated 854,000.  I don’t question the numbers but they really don’t explain why.  If you’re going to work with the intelligence community you have to have security clearances.  If you don’t have clearances you don’t have access to much of the available information.  In many instances without clearances you can’t even get into the intelligence buildings for meetings and such. Because of the war you needed to ensure as many people as needed had clearances so they could have access to the information.  You cannot provide solutions if you can’t look at all of the data.  All of these new people can’t fit into existing facilities so you have to find new work spaces for them.  In the intelligence communities they’re called SCIFs.  The article gave the impression that more SCIFs than needed were being built and they were worthless symbols of importance or something.

The Post article also talks about the large amount of data and redundancy of reporting.  Let’s look first at the data.  I’ve blogged about this before.  One of the major criticisms of the intelligence community is lack of coordination and sharing of data.  One of the major reasons for the information overload is caused because the various intelligence communities are sharing information and have been long before 9/11.  Ironically sharing of data is part of the problem.  In a 2007 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, the Director of National Intelligence said every 24 hours the intelligence community collected one billion pieces of information.  I’m sure that amount has increased.

The intelligence community is putting a lot of time and effort into solving this problem.  Maryann Lawlor has written an excellent article called Googlizing Intelligence in the June issue of Signal Magazine (http://online.qmags.com/SGNL0710/). 

There is redundancy of reporting but not in the way the article suggests.  Each major command and/or organization has an intelligence staff that provides daily reports of key events in their area much like newspaper and TV media news reports.  The reports are tailored for their audience.  A military commander of a major geographic region has different information requirements from a young man or woman operating in a combat zone.   These various reports are made available to the other intelligence and military commands for purposes of sharing and collaboration.

All of this is not to say there are not problems within the intelligence community.  There are many and they have been very open about this.  They have even held conferences and reached out to industry and academia for help but these events get very little play in the media.  Guess these efforts aren’t publicized because they don’t fall in the “if it bleeds, its leads” category the media seems to love these days.

Well that’s it for me.  As always my views are my own.  Think I’ll go for a bike ride.

 

  

 

Author

Gail Harris

Gail Harris’ 28 year career in intelligence included hands-on leadership during every major conflict from the Cold War to El Salvador to Desert Storm to Kosovo and at the forefront of one of the Department of Defense’s newest challenges, Cyber Warfare. A Senior Fellow for The Truman National Security Project, her memoir, A Woman’s War, published by Scarecrow Press is available on Amazon.com.