情报的功能

The Role of Intelligence in the United States TodayI was trained as a historian, so I will begin with a little history. Of all the major powers of the last 100 years, the United States has the briefest history of national intelligence. We did not have a permanent intelligence office of any sort until 1882, when the Office of Naval Intelligence was created. And we did not have a permanent and de jure national intelligence office until the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. We must also recognize that there is a constant political tension within the United States over the fact that a very open government includes numerous agencies involved in activities that must be kept a secret. Some of our citizens accept this dichotomy; others do not.You will have noted that this generic description was very carefully hedged. This is not the innate caution of an intelligence analyst. It is an attempt to portray the very real limits involved in intelligence.First, intelligence is, at the end, an intellectual process. Regardless of the means by which intelligence is collected, the ultimate product is the result of smart people pondering what is known, what is unknown and trying to determine what it all means. The Duke of Wellington understood this well when he said, “all the business of life is to endeavor to find out what you don’t know by what you do.” Of course, to this we must add the conundrum that we do not always know what we don’t know. Second, the need to deal with incomplete, insufficient and often conflicting bits and pieces of intelligence is constant. We rarely get that “perfect hit,” that single piece of intelligence that causes you to jump up and yell, “Aha! This is it!” More often than not, it is a question of trying to craft a mosaic from pieces that do not fit well together, several of which are missing, and many of which change size, shape and color over time, even as you work on them. Third, we do not make predictions. Fortune-tellers do; we do not. Rather, we write estimates, attempts to portray one or more possible outcomes based on varying amounts of concrete intelligence. Estimative language has its own logic and grammar; the subtleties are not always apparent to policy makers. And we are responsible for crafting estimates no matter how poor or incomplete the intelligence may be. Policy maker demands for intelligence do not stop just because collection is having difficulty. If new intelligence is not available, we will project forward – along as many lines as seem plausible – from the last known intelligence. Let me turn now to the role of intelligence. Time and time again over the last 14 years I heard somebody say or have read some piece of paper stating, "in the post-Cold War world the role of intelligence has changed." No! Our role has not changed. Our role was, is and will be what I described above, serving policy makers as they deal with difficult issues. We are a service community. We have no meaningful existence without policy makers; and the obverse is not true. So when people assert that briefing a senior official is an act of politicization, this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of our role. That is our purpose.What have changed are the issues with which we must deal. The Intelligence Community was built – in terms of collection and analysis – to produce intelligence on issues occurring in nation states with large and largely discernible political-military infrastructures. Much of what these states did was kept secret, but the larger milieu within which they worked was well known to us over time. Some activities were even routinized. Military establishments, for example, tend to build replicating bases and tend to exercise on a rather strict and predictable calendar. These types of issues remain important for a number of states, but we now spend more and more time dealing with sub-national groups with little or no visible infrastructure. Now, we are tracking individuals, not army corps; individual cell phones rather than nation-wide communications nets. This means we have had to find new ways to collect, to do analysis and to conduct operations, even as we maintain and upgrade the old ways.And we have had many successes. We have helped kill or capture roughly two-thirds of Al Qaeda‘s senior leaders. This includes almost all of the Al Qaeda senior operational commanders and most of the key plotters who supported the September 11 attacks; and many of the regional commanders, from Southeast Asia to Europe, who have worked with Al Qaeda to conduct attacks overseas. Afghanistan is no longer a safe haven; we worked to dismantle Al Qaeda‘s infrastructure in Pakistan; decimate the Al Qaeda leadership in Yemen; and, more recently, unravel the group‘s network in Saudi Arabia. Aside from these major operational initiatives, we have worked with many dozens of nations worldwide, behind the scenes, to capture operatives, seize the assets of their supporters, and to dismantle, piece by piece, the deeply embedded support web that maintains this organization. Minor states that were largely unable to govern themselves could once be ignored. (Churchill once said, “I don’t bother states like Cambodia and they don’t bother me.”) These states might be local problems but they were not global ones. Today, these failed states are the best hideouts for terrorists. There are over 180 nations in the world and any one of them that shows aspects of “failure” has the potential to be a terrorist haven. We are working hard to develop early indicators as to which states might be nearing “failure” for a variety of possible reasons. The war on terrorism requires that we find a means to define better the line between foreign intelligence and domestic security. Of all the western democracies, the United States has always had the strictest line between these two spheres. One of the challenges we have faced is figuring out how we can share material across that line without violating our role or the rights of U.S. citizens. We have established several organizations and processes to accomplish this and we see a much broader sense of working as one community, not a very loose federation of agencies. This is apparent every day when the Director of Central Intelligence sits down for what we call the Small Group, which is devoted to the war on terrorism in all of its aspects. Senior FBI officers are present, just as senior CIA and FBI officers sit in each other’s counter-terrorism centers. Along with everything else, our language requirements have changed. We need people who can speak Dari, Pushtu and other languages once considered exotic but now deemed essential. Here we sometimes run into difficult managerial decisions: how do you free up analysts to learn languages when you also need them to continue working as analysts? It takes an analyst 33 months to become fluent in a non-Roman alphabet language. That is a long time to be “out of the line.” Finally, we have witnessed an ongoing Revolution in Military Affairs. Much of that revolution – the use of “smart weapons” and, above all, the ability to force the tempo of operations to a speed that no enemy can master – depends heavily on good intelligence. As with terrorism, the intelligence-decision making cycle has sped up. The line between what we call national intelligence – versus tactical intelligence – has blurred significantly, as has the line between operations and intelligence. Many of us in the Intelligence community recognize that we need to make parallel changes on our own – a Revolution in Intelligence Affairs, if you will – to keep pace with the Revolution in Military Affairs. Let me also dispel some of the more trite observations about the world in which we operate. One is globalization. It is not new. It is a constant fact of human history. Epidemics have often spread far – the Black Death in the 1300s, influenza in 1918, SARS in 2003. There has always been international trade and international conglomerates that trade – whether it is the Hanseatic League, the British or Dutch East India Companies or today’s multi-nationals. Some people tend to confuse the increased ability to know of events around the globe quickly with the fact that the globe by its very nature is has always been an inter-connected place. What has changed is the time involved in knowing, not the inter-connection itself. The massive changes in information technology have not revolutionized intelligence, nor can they. Information technology is tool within intelligence. Computer technology enables us to do some things differently, sometimes faster, sometimes not. But no technology will ever replace a smart analyst with a good nose for what is really going on beyond the intelligence he or she sees. We must not confuse the ends – producing good intelligence, with the means – of which information technology is but one. The end of the Cold War has not ended the need for secret intelligence. Yes, there is much more open source intelligence available today – and this is not a field in which we always do our best. But the need to collect important intelligence through secret and difficult means has not come to an end. The Internet has not and will not replace the need for intelligence agencies. Finally, and closely related to this last point, we are not in competition with the news media. The news media – especially the 24-hour news broadcasters – have changed viewing habits but they have not replaced the need for intelligence agencies. It is important to remember that not all news or information is intelligence. News is raw material for us, a source. It is not competition. As you all know, intelligence has been much in the news over these last many months. For us, this is usually not a good thing. As John Kennedy noted: our successes often are secret, our failures are trumpeted. But the current multiple debates about and criticism of intelligence touch on several important issues.The first issue is one I have already touched on, the alleged politicization of intelligence. Politicization is one of the most serious things that can happen to the intelligence process. It is an act of intellectual corruption. Politicization comes in two types, what I call "down" and "up." Downward politicization happens when a policy maker tells analysts - subtly or directly - the outcome or conclusion he or she expects to see in their analysis. We in the Intelligence Community understand that policy makers are entitled to their own views and are even entitled to reject our analyses. They are not entitled, however, to force analytical conclusions. Upward politicization happens when analysts trim or hedge their analysis to produce outcomes they assume will be pleasing to policy makers. No matter which way it happens, politicization is wrong. But no one in the current debate has demonstrated that either of these types of politicization - down or up - happened in the weeks or months leading up to the decision to commence Operation Iraqi Freedom. The second issue is that of a reasonable standard for assessing intelligence. How good should intelligence be? Clearly, we would all like it to be as good as possible. But what does that mean in real terms? I think we all recognize that we are not going to know everything. That is not the nature of our business or of the world in which we live. Other nations spend large amounts of time and treasure for the explicit purpose of denying us access to things we deem important to our security. We would all like intelligence to be as clear and as unambiguous as possible. We would like to know of every plot long before it reaches fruition.We recognize that these are laudable goals but not likely outcomes. We are not going to achieve perfect knowledge or perfect operations. Unlike the fictional world of intelligence, we do not wrap up our issues in the course of a 60-minute show or 2 hour movie. So a reasonable standard for intelligence is something less than batting 1.000. Is it .500? In the majors that is amazing, but in intelligence we aspire to do much better than that. .750? .800? The actual number is both unknowable and irrelevant. The point to keep in mind is that perfection in intelligence is not achievable. By its very nature it is an imperfect process. But when critics focus on individual issues or questions some people come away incredulous that the Intelligence Community did not know this or that. What is lost in these microscopic examinations is the larger atmosphere within which all intelligence takes place – multiple issues, which develop and change almost daily, competing for constrained resources, trying to gain intelligence from states or people who actively work to keep it from us. If we had the luxury of concentrating on one issue at a time we would likely do better on that issue, but the other several dozen issues would all go begging and quickly get out of hand. We cannot judge intelligence fairly unless we take that into account. It is also important to remember the admonition of a former senior analyst: our job is to learn secrets, not to solve mysteries. We should be held accountable for ability to the former – learning secrets – not the latter – solving mysteries.We operate under an intelligence priority system signed by President Bush that gives us guidance on the issues of greatest importance to our national security goals. Those of us who manage the Intelligence Community then play daily triage trying to match resources to the highest priority issues, then the next highest and so on. Inevitably, some issues go begging. And some issues are not foreseen or foreseeable until they break. Remember, we are not in the business of either prediction or omniscience. It is also important to understand that the Intelligence Community is some 25% smaller than it was ten years ago. We have lost years and billions of dollars in opportunity costs – actual disinvestments – from which we have yet to recover and from which we may never wholly recover. Through years of flat or declining budgets we cannibalized our own resources just to survive. We made distressing choices about where we would operate and which issues we cover more fully. The good news is that we did survive and that we are growing again. One of the most heart-warming aspects of my job is meeting the new analysts who join our ranks every month. We are recruiting bright, dedicated people from all walks of life and many varied backgrounds. Many are first generation Americans. Many come to us after working in private sector jobs that would pay them much more. Indeed, Fortune Magazine has reported that, in an annual survey of MBA candidates asked to identify the 50 most desirable employers, CIA was the only government organization to make the list. CIA ranked 30th, ahead of many corporations well-known to you all. One of the most frequent phrases used to describe the role of intelligence is to say that we “Tell truth to power.” I’ve never liked that formulation for two reasons. First, it is inaccurate. If we know something to be true, we do not need intelligence agencies to work on it. We live in the world of “maybe” rather than “black or white.” Second, telling truth to power was the role of the court jester. He could speak his mind and get away with it because no one took him seriously. We aspire to something more.The role of intelligence remains today what it always has been: providing the best intelligence we possibly can to policy makers in order to bound the uncertainties within which they must make decisions. The issues have changed and will change, but our role does not. We are the first line of defense in national security. We are responsible for doing this every day, all day. We are doing it today in a deadly struggle against a shadowy and most callous enemy. Although we have no precise standard against which to work, our self-imposed standards are demanding. We are not above self-examination or self-criticism and we have a good sense of when we do well and when we do not. And we understand that the consequences of not doing well are so serious that we need to do better every day.Happily, we love our work. For those of us in the Intelligence Community – and I have been in and out and in again – there is no more rewarding calling that we could imagine. We consider ourselves both fortunate and privileged to be U.S. intelligence officers.Thank you.Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and ProductionAt the IC ColloquiumNew Mexico State University15 September 2003