Intel Wars (35 page)

Trying to gather intelligence about all of these subjects inside the paranoid and hypersecretive North Korean police state has always been an extremely difficult proposition. During the Korean War (1950–53), the CIA and the South Korean intelligence services failed miserably in their attempts to insert teams of agents into North Korea to collect intelligence. Former CIA official Samuel Halpern recalled that “
it was tough because North Korea was a denied area
, no one came from there, and no people traveled there. We were not successful in collecting [intelligence] about North Korea. Most people forget this.”

Between 1954 and 1972, the South Korean intelligence services sent thousands of agents into North Korea. Few ever returned.
In 1999, someone within the South Korean intelligence community leaked
to a newspaper in Seoul that 7,726 South Korean agents had been killed or captured or had disappeared while conducting espionage missions in North Korea between 1950 and 1972.

Spying on North Korea has become even more difficult in recent years. Intelligence sources in the United States, Japan, and South Korea confirm that there is today a dearth of reliable intelligence information about what is going on inside North Korea. The U.S. intelligence community and its counterparts in South Korea have virtually no intelligence assets in North Korea. Recruiting North Korean diplomats outside the country is nigh on impossible because they always travel in twos, usually with a security officer in tow. There is the occasional refugee or low-level defector who manages to make it to Manchuria, and from there to South Korea, but the information obtained from these sources is at best anecdotal and not very reliable. Some of the CIA's foreign collaborators recruited aid workers who were allowed into North Korea to bring food and medicine to starving civilians in the 1990s, but most of what these sources reported was no better than what newspapers in the West were reporting.

As a matter of expediency, over the past decade the U.S. intelligence community has had to increasingly depend on Russia and China, North Korea's two remaining allies with any standing, for much of what it thinks it knows about what the Pyongyang regime is doing. But senior U.S. intelligence officials admit that although the Russians and Chinese have large embassies in Pyongyang, their level of access to the North Korean leadership is extremely limited, so the quality of their intelligence on what is going on in the country is dubious.

This means that the United States remains largely dependent on technical sources, such as spy satellites and signals intelligence, for what little intelligence we have about what is going on inside North Korea. These sources have obvious limitations. Spy satellites are the principal source of information available to the U.S. intelligence community about North Korea, with much of the focus being on North Korean nuclear weapons and ballistic missile production facilities and deployment sites. Almost every day one of the U.S. Air Force Global Hawk high-altitude reconnaissance drones based on the island of Guam can be found flying off the North Korean coastline taking pictures of targets deep inside the country that are more detailed than those coming from satellites. SIGINT remains an important source for information about North Korean military activities, but radio intercepts today are producing less intelligence because in the mid-1990s the North Korean government and military began shifting much of their internal communications to fiber-optic cables, which reduced significantly what NSA was able to discern about events taking place north of the Demilitarized Zone.

All this reduces the problem to a simple equation: How do the few American intelligence analysts who specialize in North Korea divine the intentions of the notoriously erratic regime with so little hard information to work with? For example, U.S. intelligence officials admit that the most detailed portrait of North Korea's reclusive and ailing leader, Kim Jong-il, who has ruled the country since 1994, was derived from the debriefing of the North Korean dictator's former Japanese sushi chef who goes by the pen name of Kenji Fujimoto, who returned to Japan in 2003 after having lived in North Korea since 1982, and Hwang Jang-yop, North Korea's former chief ideologue, who defected in Beijing in 1997 and spent his remaining days in South Korea until his death in October 2010 at the age of eighty-seven.

Taken together, these materials are slim indeed. Sometimes, a paucity of raw material spurs insightful work by intelligence analysts, who have to extract every ounce of usable data from what little they have to work with. The CIA psychological profilers used these materials to put together a series of detailed character and personality studies of Kim Jong-il that are considered to be some of the best analytic work produced by the agency since 9/11 and are required reading for analysts within the U.S. intelligence community.

According to a Japanese intelligence official, however, these materials are now badly out of date and do not cover what effect Kim Jong-il's August 2008 stroke had on his health. Also according to the official, virtually nothing is currently known about Kim's son and heir apparent Kim Jong-un, other than some vague impressions passed on by Chinese government officials based on their conversations in 2010 with his father.

The dearth of hard information explains why there are today significant differences of opinion within the U.S. intelligence community as to whether the horrific state of the North Korean economy has reduced the military threat posed by Pyongyang. According to some estimates, more than a million North Korean civilians died of starvation in the 1990s. Everyone agrees that famine remains widespread inside North Korea, and malnutrition is affecting the performance of not only the economy but also the North Korean military, leading some senior U.S. intelligence officials to believe that North Korea no longer poses much of a threat.

Other officials, principally low- and mid-level intelligence analysts who have followed North Korea for years, are not so sure. They believe that the massive 1.2-million-man North Korean military, the fourth largest in the world, is probably a bigger threat today than it was at the height of the Cold War, and they point to the November 2010 North Korean artillery attack on South Korea's Yeonpyeong Island as proof that the Pyongyang regime remains as dangerous as ever.

These analysts argue that despite the disastrous state of the North Korean economy, the Pyongyang regime has continued to direct whatever money it has to the military, even at the expense of feeding its own people. The North Koreans have not let up in their efforts to upgrade and modernize their armed forces. As far as the analysts at DNI headquarters at Liberty Crossing in Virginia can ascertain, the North Korean government's top spending priorities continue to be to build up the size of its small arsenal of nuclear weapons and increase the already considerable number of ballistic missiles in its inventory.

Regardless of which side of the debate people come down on, what worries everyone in the U.S. intelligence community is that the threat of war with North Korea is just as high today as it was at the height of the Cold War. Only this time, North Korea has nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to targets throughout the Pacific.

Latin America, a backwater of American diplomacy for more than half a century, may currently pose the most complex set of problems for America's spies. The U.S. intelligence community continues to enjoy excellent relations with its counterparts in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile. The relationship between Washington and Bogotá remains close because of the U.S. intelligence community's continuing support of the Colombian government's efforts to subdue two Marxist guerrilla groups, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the Ejército Liberación Nacional (ELN), which have been trying to overthrow the Colombian government for more than forty years.

Despite long-standing efforts to crush them, the FARC and ELN insurgencies continue.
The CIA station in Bogotá, the U.S. military intelligence services, and the DEA continue to provide
substantial financial and technical support to the Colombian government's six military and civilian intelligence services. The U.S. Army is still secretly deploying small teams of SIGINT and HUMINT personnel to help the Colombian military destroy remaining elements of the FARC. Utilizing specialized airborne reconnaissance aircraft and Predator unmanned drones based at Apiay Air Base southeast of Bogotá, U.S. Army intelligence personnel provide realtime intelligence information to Colombian special forces in order to neutralize FARC insurgents and narcotics traffickers.

There are serious problems elsewhere in Latin America. The president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. government since he was elected in December 2006.
Ecuador is suspected by the U.S. intelligence community
of giving sanctuary to FARC guerrillas from neighboring Colombia. Ecuador severed diplomatic relations with Colombia in March 2008 after Colombian forces attacked a camp inside Ecuador, killing the leader of FARC, whose nom de guerre was Raul Reyes, and twenty-five other guerrillas. In February 2009, the Ecuadorian government expelled the CIA Quito station chief, Mark Sullivan, for what it termed “unacceptable meddling” in Ecuadorian internal affairs. Washington was hoping that Correa would keep the expulsion under wraps. Instead, he went on television and publicly announced, “Let's be clear, Sullivan was the director of the CIA in Ecuador.”

President Evo Morales of Bolivia has also delighted in taunting the CIA, repeatedly accusing the agency of interfering in the internal affairs of his country. He has fired a number of Bolivian army and police officers who he alleged were on the CIA payroll, and in March 2009 he declared persona non grata the CIA station chief in La Paz, Francisco Martinez, for “activities not in consonance with his diplomatic functions.”

But it is Venezuela and its mercurial president, Hugo Chávez, that most frustrate U.S. government officials. Elected in a landslide in 1998, Chávez was reviled by the Bush administration because he moved his country away from the United States toward countries generally deemed to be antagonistic to Washington, particularly Cuba, Russia, Belarus, China, Syria, Iran, and Vietnam. Diplomatic relations with Venezuela began deteriorating immediately after an abortive military coup d'état in April 2002, wherein the Bush administration recognized the short-lived government of the coup leader, Pedro Carmona. Once back in power, Chávez made it abundantly clear that he would never forgive Washington for what he deemed to be a naked attempt to unseat him from power. It has been all downhill ever since.

In August 2005, Venezuela accused the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration of conducting espionage inside Venezuela and terminated all joint counternarcotics efforts. In November 2007, the Venezuelan security service leaked to the press the name of the CIA station chief in Caracas, as well as copies of what U.S. intelligence officials vehemently claim are forged documents about an alleged CIA plan called “Operation Pliers” to subvert the Venezuelan government.
In September 2008, the U.S. Treasury Department froze the assets
of the heads of Venezuela's two intelligence services, Hugo Carvajal Barrios and Henry de Jesus Rangel Silva, and former Venezuelan interior minister Ramón Rodriguez Chacin for “materially assisting the narcotics trafficking activities of the [Colombian terrorist group] FARC.” In retaliation, on September 11, 2008, Chávez ordered the expulsion of the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela.

Despite the ups and mostly downs in U.S.-Venezuelan diplomatic relations, the U.S. intelligence community has never viewed Chávez or Venezuela as a very serious threat.
Randall Fort, a former head of the State Department's
intelligence staff, described Chávez in a leaked cable from October 2008 as “an annoyance with limited political influence within the region.”

Still, Latin America watchers inside the U.S. intelligence community, and there are not many of them, counseled that whatever one's views of Chávez, he deserves careful scrutiny and even a certain degree of respect. A leaked 2007 State Department cable warned that “
notwithstanding his tirades and antics
, it would be a mistake to dismiss Hugo Chávez as just a clown or old school caudillo. He has a vision, however distorted, and he is taking calculated measures to advance it. To effectively counter the threat he represents, we need to know better his objectives and how he intends to pursue them. This requires better intelligence.”

Since entering office in 2009, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have quietly tried to patch up the strained diplomatic relations with Venezuela, but progress has been slow because the Venezuelan economy has been in free fall since the global economic downturn of 2009. Today, Venezuela has the dubious distinction of being the only Latin American country whose economy is shrinking rather than growing.

Venezuela's expanding relations with Cuba remain a cause for concern in Washington, particularly the increasingly intimate relationship between the Cuban and Venezuelan intelligence services. According to a leaked 2006 State Department cable, “
Sensitive reports indicate Cuban and Venezuelan intelligence ties
are so advanced that the two countries' agencies appear to be competing with each other for the [Venezuelan government's] attention. Cuban intelligence officers have direct access to Chavez and frequently provide him with intelligence reporting unvetted by Venezuelan officers … Cuban intelligence officers train Venezuelans both in Cuba and in Venezuela, providing both political indoctrination and operational instruction.”

Conclusion: The Past Is Prologue

The Lessons for U.S. Intelligence from Today's Battlefields

Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others' experience.

—OTTO VON BISMARCK

So, is the U.S. intelligence community working the way it should ten years after the tragedy of 9/11? The answer is: not yet. A number of important changes for the better have taken place since 9/11, but it is abundantly clear that the intelligence community still has a very long way to go. As revealed in this book, not only have many of the structural and procedural problems that afflicted the intelligence community prior to 9/11 not been fixed, but a host of new problems have arisen that are challenging the ability of America's spies to perform their mission. New high-tech intelligence collection systems, such as the much-heralded unmanned drone, produce so much raw data that they are drowning the intelligence analysts. Hundreds of new computer databases have been created to store the vast amount of data that the community's collection sensors vacuum up every day, but analysts still cannot freely access much of this data because many of these databases cannot communicate with one another.

As this book shows, strong leadership of the U.S. intelligence community remains conspicuously lacking, which means that unity of command, cohesiveness, and a clear direction for the intelligence community still have not been achieved a decade after 9/11. Attempts by DNI Admiral Dennis Blair during the first sixteen months of the Obama administration to assert his authority and make the CIA responsive to the DNI's commands were an unmitigated failure. Not only was Blair defeated at every turn by his opponents within the Obama administration and the U.S. intelligence community, but he ultimately lost his job for his efforts.
It remains to be seen
if the new director of the CIA, General David Petraeus, will be more responsive than his predecessor, Leon Panetta.

Despite the passage of time, weak leadership at the top has meant that the intelligence community has not become any easier to govern. Although important changes for the better have taken place, all evidence indicates that the office of the DNI still has not been able to effectively integrate the vast number of appendages comprising the U.S. intelligence community into a cohesive organization that performs its mission in an efficient and efficacious manner. In fact, the intelligence empire has become so large and unwieldy, and the number of classified intelligence programs so numerous and opaque, that the intelligence community has become, in some important respects, more unmanageable than it was before 9/11.

America's spies have so much money that they are suffering from an embarrassment of riches. In May 2011, Congress passed a new intelligence spending bill that increased the amount of money for America's spies to over $85 billion, this coming at a time when politicians on Capitol Hill were talking about making deep cuts in Medicaid and Medicare spending for the elderly and infirm. More money has not necessarily made things better. The Tom Drake case described in chapter 2 shows that the intelligence community still has problems managing big-budget classified equipment procurement programs, in large part because the internal checks and balances that existed a decade ago to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse were swept away in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and have not been put back into place. Intensifying all of these problems is the fact that, in the opinion of many intelligence insiders, congressional oversight of the intelligence community has deteriorated over the past decade as partisan rancor and bickering have taken over what used to be a collegial and bipartisan endeavor.

Despite its outstanding performance in the events leading up to the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the intelligence community still has a long way to go before we can declare that all of the problems identified in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraqi WMD scandals have been fixed. Even with the change in administrations, the intelligence community is still experiencing problems getting its views heard, much less appreciated, in the upper reaches of the U.S. government, especially when the community's assessments differ from those of the White House and the Pentagon, as in the recent cases of Afghanistan and Pakistan. As shown in chapter 7, in recent years the Obama White House has, like the Bush administration before it, been making public statements about the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan that did not conform with what the intelligence community was reporting. Witness the example of the December 2010 NIEs on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and how they conflicted with President Obama's status report on these wars; later events were to prove that the intelligence community assessments were correct, and the statements originating from the White House exaggerated the successes being experienced in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

One of the biggest problems that the U.S. intelligence community still faces is the same conundrum it faced throughout the Cold War—it is collecting far more data than it can process, analyze, and report to its consumers. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it in a declassified memo, the intelligence community produces “more data than we can translate into usable knowledge.” Sources agree that less than 1 percent of the data collected every day gets reported to intelligence consumers in Washington and overseas, meaning that 99 percent of what gets collected ends up on the cutting room floor and is never used. And it has been suggested by intelligence insiders that rather than improving, the situation is getting worse because new high-tech collection sensors, such as the unmanned drones, produce so much raw video imagery and such vast amounts of signals intercepts that they literally are drowning the intelligence analysts in what is commonly referred to within the community as “data crush.”

The quality of the analysis coming out of the intelligence community still leaves something to be desired. Despite the vast amount of raw data pouring into Washington every day from NSA's listening posts and the 170-plus CIA stations around the world, many senior U.S. intelligence officials worry that more than a decade after 9/11, we still don't know who our enemies are. Seven years ago, in December 2004, the commander of U.S. Central Command, General John Abizaid, wrote a classified memo to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld arguing that “we remain largely ignorant of who fights us, why they fight and what their weaknesses are.” The result is that we are still playing catch-up in our efforts to understand the enemies we face today.

For example, ten years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, we still know far too little about the Taliban guerrillas that U.S. and NATO soldiers are up against. Despite outnumbering the Taliban by more than four to one, coalition forces are still unable to beat the ragtag Taliban guerrillas, in large part because of a poor intelligence appreciation of the fighting power and resiliency of the enemy we face. We do not even know much about the leaders of the Taliban insurgency. In 2010, an impostor was able to pretend for several weeks to be a high-level Taliban official sent to Kabul to negotiate a peace agreement with the Karzai government before being discovered. Beyond Afghanistan, we know very little about who actually rules Iran and whether they intend to build a nuclear weapon or not, and the dearth of knowledge about North Korea is so pronounced that much of what we know about the enigmatic leader of the country comes from his former sushi chef.

So what is the current state-of-play on the global intelligence battlefield? The challenges facing the intelligence community today are just as vast as they were in the days after 9/11. America's spies have achieved some commendable, albeit unheralded, successes in their efforts. Thanks to vast investments in new signals intelligence equipment and human intelligence resources, coverage of China has improved dramatically over the past decade, and there have been some unheralded operational successes in Russia and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia since 9/11. But high hurdles still remain.

In Afghanistan, the intelligence community has been playing catch-up since the Obama administration took office in 2009. There have been some improvements in our understanding of the Taliban's strategy and tactics, but our overall appreciation of the enemy we face is still nowhere near what it should be.

And there are signs that U.S. intelligence in Afghanistan has over the past year reverted to the bad habits that were the norm before Obama became president. Major General Mike Flynn, the director of intelligence in Afghanistan from June 2009 to 2010, returned to the United States and was replaced by Brigadier General Stephen G. Fogarty, who immediately reversed many of the changes made by his predecessor. For example, Fogarty ordered that the ISAF intelligence staff in Kabul reduce the amount of resources that General Flynn had dedicated to trying to understand the political, economic, and social dynamics of the Afghan battlefield, and instead return to the former emphasis on locating Taliban commanders so that they could be killed by commando raids by U.S. and NATO special forces.

According to senior U.S. and NATO intelligence officials, the reason for the dramatic shift in emphasis was that in the fall of 2010, senior Obama administration officials became convinced that the war in Afghanistan could not be won militarily, despite the fact that coalition forces had just made some noteworthy gains in the Taliban strongholds of Helmand and Kandahar provinces. These officials concluded that these gains were temporary at best, because the Obama administration was committed to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan in July 2011, and the weak and corrupt Afghan government forces had proven that they were incapable of holding the ground once the U.S. and NATO forces pulled out.

So in the fall of 2010, the emphasis secretly shifted to trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the Afghan conflict with the Taliban, while at the same time keeping up the military pressure on the Taliban through an intensified campaign of commando raids that targeted senior insurgent field commanders. The expectation was that these commando raids would induce the Taliban leadership in Pakistan to come to the negotiating table.

It remains to be seen if the Obama administration's new Afghan war strategy will ultimately succeed. But a number of intelligence officials in the United States and Europe point out that the fundamental problem with this risky strategy is that it has not worked in the past. They point to what happened in Vietnam between 1965 and 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson had hoped that massive B-52 air strikes on targets in North Vietnam would drive the Hanoi regime to the negotiating table. But CIA reporting revealed that the air strikes were causing little, if any, real damage to the North Vietnamese war effort, and had not altered in any meaningful way Hanoi's will to continue the war. The intelligence officials worry that the Obama administration may be making the same mistake that Johnson and his advisers made more than forty years ago.

The collapse of intelligence cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistan in early 2011 is a very serious development that has long-term implications for the U.S. intelligence community. American intelligence officials are now concerned that Pakistan will “unleash” its Afghan Taliban proxies, ramping up the tempo of fighting inside Afghanistan. The collapse of intelligence cooperation also bodes ill for the future of the intelligence community's campaign to destroy what is left of al Qaeda and the host of other terrorist groups that are still hiding in the northern part of the country. A number of joint intelligence collection and analysis projects have been terminated, and unmanned drone strike operations over northern Pakistan have been severely restricted since January 2011.

And just when officials in Washington and Islamabad thought that relations couldn't get any worse, they did. In June 2011, CIA officials alleged that someone in the Pakistani government or ISI had leaked to the Pakistani Taliban that the United States intended to launch drone strikes on one of the Taliban's two bomb factories in northern Pakistan. This led to yet another round of bitter recriminations between the U.S. and Pakistani governments and intelligence officials. Senior CIA officials in Washington told congressional officials that, in their opinion, Pakistan could no longer be trusted with any sensitive classified information.

Then there is the war on terror. Senior U.S. and European intelligence officials do not know if we are winning the war given the dramatic changes now taking place around the world. Even though Osama bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda in Pakistan has been whittled down to a small rump organization, new terrorist groups are taking shape around the world that are just as committed to killing Americans as bin Laden ever was. The intelligence community's decade-long counterterrorism operations against the al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Somalia are stalled, with no discernible progress to report in almost two years, and new al Qaeda–affiliated terrorist groups have sprung up in recent years across Africa. The U.S. government still cannot get the full cooperation of a number of its key Middle East allies, including Saudi Arabia, to cut off the flow of funds to the Taliban and other terrorist groups around the world. And the terrorist threat at home is rapidly evolving in new and potentially more lethal directions, to the point that U.S. intelligence officials are unsure who they should be looking for anymore.

Recent events in the Middle East and North Africa clearly show just how dangerous the world is, and how great the challenges facing the intelligence community are going to be in the future as threats to U.S. national security continuously evolve. The U.S. intelligence community did not foresee the sudden collapse of the pro-U.S. regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, the eruption of a civil war in Libya, and the escalating wave of street protests across the Middle East. Then again, no one else in the U.S. government or among our allies abroad did either.

If pundits in Washington are to believed, the next big threat to the security of the United States is something the experts call “cyber war,” the new global battle being fought every minute of every day on the ethereal plane of the Internet. In its infancy during the 1980s and 1990s, cyber war was the exclusive domain of teenage hackers and cyber criminals, some of whom were backed by organized crime groups in Russia and elsewhere, who tried to steal passwords, bank account numbers, and other personal information so that they could loot bank accounts and cause other forms of criminal mischief.