September 11 and the Imperative of Reform in the U.S. Intelligence Community – Additional Views of Senator Richard C. Shelby : When the findings and recommendations of the congressional joint inquiry into September 11 were published last year, Senator Shelby (R-AL) independantly released a lengthy document detailing his “additional views”. Its interesting and more readable than most such discussions, and Shelby proposes some fairly radical concepts:

Intelligence collectors – whose status and bureaucratic influence depends to no small extent upon the monopolization of “their” information-stream – often fail to recognize the importance of providing analysts with “deep” access to data. The whole point of intelligence analysis against transnational targets is to draw patterns out of a mass of seemingly unrelated information, and it is crucial that the analysis of such patterns not be restricted only to personnel from a single agency. As Acting DIA Director Lowell Jacoby observed in his written testimony before the Joint Inquiry, “information considered irrelevant noise by one set of analysts may provide critical clues or reveal significant relationships when subjected to analytic scrutiny by another.”

This suggests that the fundamental intellectual assumptions that have guided our Intelligence Community’s approach to managing national security information for half a century may be in some respects crucially flawed, in that it may not be true that information-holders – the traditional arbiters of who can see “their” data – are the entities best placed to determine whether outsiders have any “need to know” data in their possession. Analysts who seek access to information, it turns out, may well be the participants best equipped to determine what their particular expertise and contextual understanding can bring to the analysis of certain types of data.

Also notable is his assertion that hard wiring our intelligence community to deal with the terrorist threat is “precisely the wrong answer, because such an approach would surely leave us unprepared for the next major threat, whatever it turns out to be.” Rather, “we need an Intelligence Community agile enough to evolve as threats evolve, on a continuing basis.” [via FAS’s excellent Secrecy News]

Democracies and Their Spies by Bruce Berkowitz : The other day, I was discussing some of the evidence presented by Colin Powell at the UN, and, as is readily apparent, the presentation did not warrant a conclusion that an invasion of Iraq is necessary. By its very nature, intelligence requires secrecy. Public knowledge places everyone on a level playing field, but intelligence, by its scarcity and exclusivity, tilts the field to your advantage. Thus, what can be released at any given time must be limited to that which does not nullify whatever advantage said intelligence provides. At this point, however, you are faced with a difficult question:

Now the challenge of operating an intelligence organization in a democracy becomes clear: Voting is essential for democracy; freedom of information is essential for voting; but free-flowing information defeats the functions of intelligence. Or, to put it another way, information is the engine that makes democracy work, whereas the effectiveness of intelligence depends on restricting the flow of information.

Berkowitz seeks to answer this challenge by examining how much secrecy usually exists in a democracy. As it turns out, secrecy in a democratic government is actually a common, and sometimes even necessary, occurrence:

Democracies are not strangers to secrets. Protecting secrets when appropriate, disclosing secrets when proper, and managing secrecy are all normal parts of the democratic process. The same principles that are used to strike a balance among competing interests in a democracy can be used to oversee intelligence secrets as well.

The article is well written and organized, and it provides at least a partial answer to the burning questions that intelligence faces. I say “partial” because Horowitz’s answer is strategic in nature, meaning that it’s looking at the long term effects of keeping and releasing intelligence. In the short term, though, it sure would be nice to know what our government knows about Iraq.

The Kaiser Sows Destruction by Michael Warner : In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, American intelligence agencies are sure to respond in ways that are likely to be profound. Though it is impossible to predict the long-term impact of the 9/11 attacks on intelligence agencies, history suggests that we are following in the steps of our predecessors.

On a summer night in New York City in 1916, a pier laden with a thousand tons of munitions destined for Britain, France, and Russia in their war against Imperial Germany suddenly caught fire and exploded with a force that scarred the Statue of Liberty with shrapnel, shattered windows in Times Square, rocked the Brooklyn Bridge, and woke sleepers as far away as Maryland. Within days, local authorities had concluded that the blasts at “Black Tom” pier were the work of German saboteurs seeking to destroy supplies headed from neutral America to Germany’s enemies.

Black Tom was but one of many incidents in the two-year German sabotage campaign in America before and during WWI, but it made a deep impression, and the parallels between the American response then and now are striking. The effects of the German sabotage campaign on American intelligence took at least three decades to work themselves out, and it is likely that the 9/11 attacks will also exert significant pressures for change in the American intelligence community for a long time to come.

Which is why the appointment of Henry Kissinger to head an official inquiry into national security problems, and his subsequent stepping down, to are ultimately pointless. As Fritz Schranck notes:

“…the creation and appointment of �official commissions� is a time-honored way to create a record on which political campaigns can be run. More often than not, these commissions exist to create the illusion of substantive action, while focused on the reality of political chit-building. Reviewing the facts and current laws and devising a non-partisan set of recommendations on the commission�s subject matter is a distant second in priority. (By the way, the official commission technique is used at all levels of government.)”

Official commissions run by politicians have their uses, but the real progress will be made by the agencies themselves, whose leaders must also play the political game to get the necessary resources to institute the necessary reforms. As history showed us during the German sabotage campaign and our response, this can be an incredibly slow process, taking decades to iron out the details. The intelligence community has a thankless job. The war they fight is only visable when they fail and their best hope is to fight to a stalemate.