Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (33 page)

MILITARY-INTELLIGENCE FAILURES

In recent years, the U.S. has shown more vulnerability than ever to old-fashioned military-intelligence failures. The public remains mostly uninformed as to how such things have happened and whether the leaks have been plugged.

In the old days, again, the individual human element was key: A mole would take microfilm photos of secret drawings and pass them on to a Soviet Embassy contact, who would smuggle them abroad.
These days, computer hacking can do this work via the Internet or through “trapdoors” inside computer parts largely manufactured in China. Hackers tend to have loose national loyalties, and computer experts can hail from different countries and move around the world.

The United States remains the highest-value target of such thieves, as we are the player with the greatest investments in high-tech, the most advanced equipment, the heaviest defense expenditures—and, alas, the biggest vulnerability to theft. Recent years have provided several alarming examples. As we discussed in our “Cyber Wars” chapter, the leaking of technological information about American stealth technology and specifically about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—the centerpiece of the Air Force and Navy’s collaborative air arm—may well have given Beijing the know-how they needed to produce, years ahead of schedule, China’s first stealth fighter. But that is not the only troubling incidence of recent years. Such lapses are occurring with greater frequency.

Iran and the Lost Drones

In December 2011, a CIA-operated drone landed in Iran and was recovered by the Revolutionary Guard. Using its sophisticated stealth technology to avoid radar detection, the drone, a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel, was spying on Iranian nuclear facilities. American satellites have been spying on Iranian nuclear sites for years, but the RQ-170 captured an unprecedented degree of detail, using continuous video feeds and radioactive isotope-detection sensors, among other surveillance technologies. Up until the crash, the RQ-170’s role in the spy program was undisclosed.
²²

A photograph quickly appeared on the Internet showing Iranian security forces inspecting the drone, a large white plane with bat-shaped wings. In December 2012, the Iranian government claimed that it had
successfully hacked into the drone’s computer system, commandeered it, and decoded all the data stored on its system.
²³

An Iranian engineer involved in the process of reverse-engineering the captured drone said that Iran used a series of sophisticated computer attacks to bring it down. Iranian engineers cut off communications between the drone and its remote pilot and then switched in a fake signal, which allowed them to take control of the plane. This signal tricked the onboard GPS system into thinking that its landing site in Iran was its base in Kandahar, Afghanistan. “The GPS navigation is the weakest point,” the engineer later boasted. “By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain.”
²⁴

The U.S. insisted that the drone had been brought down by a mechanical failure, not by anything the Iranians did. American officials claimed that the drone had broken into pieces upon landing and that the Iranians had reassembled them to make it look as though the drone had landed on its own power. The RQ-170 was painted gray, they said, but the Iranian video showed a white craft, indicating that it had been repainted, possibly to conceal damage.
²⁵

It is worth noting the legitimate doubts that some observers have raised about Iranian claims. “The weak point in the Iranian argument is how they detected the drone in the first place, which I find implausible given the existing quality of their air-defense system, which is not sufficiently sophisticated to detect it,” said Dennis Gomley, a University of Pittsburgh expert on unmanned air systems. “Their air defenses are of a type that doesn’t have the ability to detect a low-cross-section vehicle like the RQ-170.”
²⁶
Several other American and international experts have voiced similar doubts. They point out that Iran would have had to outperform U.S. estimations of Iranian capacity in several key areas at the same time. Their air defenses would have been hard-pressed to detect the American drone in the first place. Had they done
so, jamming the GPS signal—at 50,000 feet—and substituting their own codes would have presented further challenges.
²⁷

So, with all of these obstacles, how could one truly believe that the Iranians were behind the downing of the drone?

Perhaps they had help—from the Russians or the Chinese.

From its experience in the Balkan Wars, Russia has some knowledge of the challenge of hijacking GPS systems. The Russians may have helped spot encryption vulnerabilities that allowed them to break into the control systems. It’s commonly known that Russia spies on the U.S. Defense Department; the Russians may have learned about some of the planes’ weak spots. There is also the matter of Russia’s track record of helping the Iranians, particularly with Iran’s nuclear program. Electronic warfare is a logical extension of that mission, and capturing technological information about the RQ-170 would be a feather in the Russians’ cap.
²⁸

In December 2012, Iran claimed to have captured yet another American drone, this time a Boeing ScanEagle, using a similar GPS-related tactic, known as “spoofing.” Iranian television displayed a picture of the ScanEagle in front of a map of the Persian Gulf, with a banner reading “We Will Trample on the United States.”
²⁹
Iranian sources again claimed that they had “extracted the drone’s information.”

Again, the U.S. denied that the drone had been captured. “The U.S. Navy has fully accounted for all unmanned air vehicles operating in the Middle East region,” a Navy spokesman said. “Our operations in the gulf are confined to internationally recognized water and airspace. We have no record that we have lost any ScanEagles recently.” The Navy suggested that the Iranians might be exhibiting a drone that had been lost at sea long before the incident, or that the drone might belong to another country.
³⁰

In the second drone case, the Iranian claims do seem weak. The first case is much more plausible, though not definitive. But taken
together, and especially when considering the huge data thefts from the American stealth and Joint Strike Fighter systems, it is clear that the U.S. military is a primary target in the intelligence wars—and that it is not merely an aspirational target, either. While the costs of our losses remain undetermined, so far, it’s clear that the attackers are getting through. This fact alone should arouse profound concern in Washington.

CIA FAILURES

“In spite of the deteriorating security situation in Benghazi and ample strategic warnings, the United States government simply did not do enough to prevent these attacks and ensure the safety of those serving in Benghazi,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. With those words, Chambliss blamed the State Department, the FBI, and the CIA for the terrorist attack that killed four Americans at our consulate in Benghazi.
³¹
The Senate report was the latest black eye for the American intelligence community, whose failures—especially the CIA’s—have become all too commonplace.

By now, few Americans would tell pollsters that they have strong confidence in the Central Intelligence Agency, the nation’s leading intelligence-gathering arm. Although the agency still enjoys a romantic image in movies and novels, its recent history has been dominated by calamitous intelligence failures. A brief consideration of its track record makes clear that the U.S. faces serious performance issues in the crucial area of intelligence gathering.

In the ashes of 9/11, the question everyone in America wanted answered was: How did the CIA miss this? How did the CIA and other well-funded intelligence agencies, which together Harry Truman called a kind of “secret newspaper,” fail to identify such a mortal threat?
Those were good questions, but they were applicable years before 9/11, because the CIA had also failed to predict the most significant global development of the second half of the 20th century: the collapse of the Soviet Union and its breakup into multiple states.

A few years after the Soviet Union’s fall, Russ Travers of the Defense Intelligence Agency authored an insightful essay, “The Coming Intelligence Failure,” which in effect predicted the disasters of the next decade and a half. What Travers saw was that the nation’s intelligence apparatus had become “sufficiently dysfunctional that intelligence failure is guaranteed.” In a chillingly prescient passage, he forecast the CIA’s many failures:

       
Failure may be of the traditional variety: We fail to predict the fall of a friendly government; we do not provide sufficient warning of a surprise attack against one of our allies or interests; we are completely surprised by a state-sponsored terrorist attack; or we fail to detect an unexpected country acquiring a weapon of mass destruction. Or it may take a more nontraditional form: We overstate numerous threats leading to tens of billions of dollars of unnecessary expenditures; database errors lead to a politically unacceptable number of casualties in a peace-enforcement operation; or an operation does not go well because the IC is not able to provide the incredibly specific data necessary to support a new generation of weapons.
³²

Americans have seen most of these scenarios come to pass since Travers wrote.

The CIA and other intelligence agencies defend themselves by suggesting that major historical events—Black Swans, as the writer Nasim Talib calls them—are generally beyond the predictive capacity of intelligence work. One might be more sympathetic to this argument about the caprices of history and human nature if the CIA were better
at the job that it supposedly
can
do well: providing reliable and consistent assessment of the military and technological capabilities of its subjects. Yet in May 1998, the CIA and American policymakers were blindsided by India’s first successful test of a nuclear weapon.
³³
Even if the CIA can’t predict a
political
atom bomb such as the end of the Cold War, surely it should be able to report on the detonation of an
actual
atom bomb. Between the Soviet collapse and the Indian nuke, the CIA proved in the 1990s that it was capable of total failure in a diverse array of high-profile and consequential intelligence-gathering operations.

In the wake of 9/11, the agency and other elements of the federal intelligence bureaucracy faced calls for reform. The national intelligence apparatus had devolved into a web of self-interested bureaucracies advancing their own agendas. “The agency, fearful above all else of dismemberment by politicians outraged by its appalling track record, has lied with pathological consistency to presidents and Congresses about its failed missions,” wrote a reporter in
The Nation
.
³⁴
Somehow, policymakers decided that the solution to the problem was even more bureaucracy: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of National Intelligence.

It hasn’t helped. By now, the CIA’s utterly worthless intelligence on Iraqi WMDs is part of American political lore. Certainly the political leadership deserves some blame here: The influence of the Pentagon and White House inside the CIA peaked during the early- and mid-2000s, compromising the agency’s ability to objectively present materials to the president and others. But had the intelligence community presented a unified and authoritative view of the situation in Iraq, such distortion would have been impossible.
³⁵
One reason the intelligence community was so easily overcome by the political arm was that the extensive turf battles between the CIA and the NSA prevented the agencies from sharing the intelligence each had collected on the same
targets. The agency heads tended to put protecting their bureaucratic brethren ahead of national security, so much so that the CIA inspector general’s office finally accused the agency of “systemic failure.”
³⁶

More recently, the CIA has been busy as the drone-directing wing of the American military, focusing increasingly on its counterterror operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In this capacity, the agency has seen many successes, especially the killing of al-Qaeda leadership through drone strikes. As its focus narrowed, though, the likelihood of another major intelligence failure increased. That failure came in early 2011, when the CIA was once again caught off guard by major global developments: the wave of unrest in the Middle East that would eventually become the Arab Spring.
³⁷
Once again, echoing its excuses for failing to forecast the Soviet collapse, the CIA claimed that it was nearly impossible to predict the “triggering mechanism” that leads to unrest. Not everyone bought it.

“Was someone looking at what was going on, on the Internet?” Senate Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein asked contemptuously during hearings on the matter. Some suggested that the agency’s fixation on bin Laden and al-Qaeda had compromised its ability to conduct “long-term strategic analysis and prediction”—but just when was it that the agency excelled at such things, anyway?
³⁸

The CIA has been of almost no help with North Korea, either—admittedly a tough part of the world about which to get information. But the United States remained completely unaware that Syria was building a nuclear plant in North Korea until Mossad chief Meir Dagan “visited President George W. Bush’s national-security adviser and dropped photographs of the reactor on his coffee table.” The Israelis destroyed the plant in a 2007 air strike, but American satellite monitoring would later fail to detect the construction of uranium-enrichment facilities at the Yongbyon complex, North Korea’s flagship nuclear installation. In 2012, Kim Jong Il’s sudden death went completely
undetected for 51 hours. Only when North Korean media announced the news did stunned Americans and South Koreans learn of it.
³⁹