INTEL WARS
The secret history of the fight against terror.
By Matthew M Aid, Bloomsbury Press, 262pp
Reviewed: 31 March 2012
If intelligence is the trump card of modern warfare, the United States ought to prevail in every conflict. This book describes the disconnect between America’s vast and pervasive intelligence resources and its failure to translate that investment into effective strategic decision-making.
The Intel Wars is not just about the mobilisation of intelligence for counter-terrorism programs. It’s also about the wars among the sixteen major US government intelligence agencies and hundreds of smaller specialized units, who employ well over 200,000 military, civilians and contractors and cost American taxpayers $75billion per year.
Matthew Aid is a Washington-based writer and commentator on the US intelligence establishment, with many first-hand sources ready to inform him on the weaknesses of their present or former employers, but especially on the weaknesses of agencies that are rivals to their own. The kiss-and-tell sources are heavily reinforced by published reports and by classified material exposed through Wikileaks.
The author is no lefty – he does not question America’s right to engineer regime change in uncongenial foreign countries, but he is highly critical of its inefficiency in pursuing those objectives. He is most critical of the political messes made and bequeathed by the Bush administration, but is also disappointed that the Obama administration has fallen into similar bad habits of suppressing unwelcome intelligence that does not suit the public management of short-term politics.
“War on Terror” rhetoric is blessedly absent from this account, but the folly of that absurd political narrative is implicit on almost every page. Foreign regimes in Yemen, Sudan, Afghanistan and elsewhere invoke the word terrorism to call in massive American resources for local political purposes. Within the USA, a national counter-terrorism program included the funding of dozens of state and city-level “intelligence fusion centres” to coordinate information on potential terrorist threats. Most are manned by local police with no analytical training, and a definition of “terrorism” to suit their local flavour of law and order. One such centre issued a bulletin noting the death (from old age) of Dodi the performing elephant, on the basis that a possible demonstration by animal rights activists could threaten state security. Many divert their funds to tracking illegal immigrants.
The Department of Homeland Security, supposed to provide national coordination of all intelligence bodies, had an inauspicious start under the Bush administration. It was led by unqualified political appointees, and the FBI openly refused to acknowledge its authority while other agencies just dug in their heels and declined to cooperate. It funds campaigns against Mexican drug cartels, and takes action to enforce the copyright interests of Hollywood film studios, while the FBI carries on with more than 10,000 staff full time monitoring Muslim citizens of the USA.
Unlike several other nations subject to terrorist threats, the USA has taken no steps to control the sale of ammonium nitrate – the main component of car bombs including the bomb discovered by a traffic policeman after it failed to detonate in New York’s Times Square in 2009. Information that could have alerted the FBI to that genuine bomb plot had simply not been collated because the bomber, a previously blameless Pakistani-American, was not one of the tens of thousands of dozens of un-connected watch-list databases held by numerous agencies. After all these years and $500billion of counter-terrorism funding, Aim says nothing can guarantee protection against the actions of a lone “cleanskin”.
In the popular imagination, all covert action for American interests is “CIA”. In fact, the agencies with secret intelligence and executive functions are too many to list here. Aim has previously written on the National Security Agency (NSA) that is increasingly central to US intelligence. Its role is to monitor global electronic communications, from cellular phones to email to military satellite signals, and its resources are vast. NSA at 35,000 employs more people than the FBI (34,000) and far more than the CIA (25,000), with hundreds of stations and operations across the globe, including the Pine Gap station at Alice Springs.
NSA also epitomizes the main problem faced by US intelligence services – how to sip useful information from a firehose of raw data collected in hundreds of languages, encryptions, and modes of transmission. Thousands of computer hackers work for NSA on both defensive and aggressive “cyberwarfare”, and thousands in other countries, notably China, work against them. But once the harvested information is assembled in some degree of organization, who is to analyze its significance in remote and unfamiliar contexts and pass the important fraction up the chain of command? Then, how do you persuade a political staffer or military commander to believe anything they don’t want or expect to hear?
Global challenges to US political interests are diverse, but radical Islam remains the principal source of potential terrorist action. The failure of the American-led project to remake Afghan culture is daily more evident. This book describes how intelligence effort is shaped to immediate combat goals rather than to strategic understanding of the enemy and his motivations. The military tradition is to dehumanize the person you may need to kill, but that has proven to be the Achilles’ heel of western military might in a theatre such as Afghanistan. Mostly, those directing the action have no idea of the real effect of what they are doing.
Aim writes that deep research into the forces that generate guerilla resistance abroad and terrorist sympathies at home has been repeatedly devalued and defunded, while vast resources go to projects that promise victory by overwhelming force. Military and political elites seem unwilling to learn from defeats in Vietnam, Soviet Afghanistan, and numerous smaller theatres within living memory.
The text was finalized several months ago, but Aid mentions, almost as an aside, that US agencies have been funding dissident groups in Syria to oppose the Assad regime. Are you surprised?
This book should interest not only intelligence and strategy buffs, but anyone hoping to understand a bit more about why global affairs do not turn out as we had been led to expect.
Richard Thwaites, a former journalist and communications policy adviser, is still pondering those unknown unknowns.