Intelligence collection and covert action: time for a divorce?

• Author: Smith, Havliland
• Position: Report

Editor's Note: A retired CIA station chief examines they marriage between human intelligence collection and covert action that came about in the early years of the Cold War and its detrimental effects on the Agency's ability to produce useful and timely intelligence on U.S. enemies. If we cannot eliminate covert action entirely, he concludes, it should at least be separated from the intelligence collection function.--Ed.

America has lived with its "Intelligence Community"--the CIA, NSA, DIA and all the other lesser intelligence organizations--for decades. Depending on your viewpoint, they have been somewhere between successful and unsuccessful in providing our government both with the organizational structure and with the intelligence needed to protect our country and advance its international interests.

Whatever your take, there is one immutable involved in intelligence work: It is an aggressive, risk-taking business that withers when bureaucratic inertia and caution settle in.

The issue today is whether the post-9/11 reorganization of the intelligence community has made sense or has improved the ability of the organizations within it to carry out their jobs. The omission of the FBI, our national law enforcement organization, in the "intelligence community" list does not obviate the need for the creation of a functioning internal intelligence organization to deal with domestic issues. We still need such a service--one without the power of arrest.

At its highest level, it is the purpose of any intelligence organization to produce finished intelligence analyses of information on the capabilities and intentions of their country's enemies. Much of the raw intelligence behind such analyses is collected through highly technical means and thus, in America, is the province of the National Security Agency or the National Reconnaissance Office. Nevertheless, even acknowledging that technical operations can see and hear, they are still not able to read peoples' minds, and those minds often hold the key to intelligence on the capabilities and intentions of our enemies.

A new weapons system is vulnerable to technical collection when it is first test fired. However, to deal effectively with it we need to know of its development years before that firing. Similarly, intentions, if not ascertained well in advance, are only observable when the planes hit the Twin Towers and Pentagon, missiles are unleashed, or enemy troops begin to mass for an attack.

HUMINT Operations

Like technical collection, it is also the function of human intelligence (HUMINT) operations to produce intelligence on the capabilities, specifically including military research and development, and the intentions of our enemies. The difference is that HUMINT operations seek to find human beings with access to critical information who will talk frankly with us. Where intentions and critical military research and development activities are not normally or broadly vulnerable to technical collection operations, they often can be sniffed out through the recruitment of well-placed spies.

The Central Intelligence...