Generally Speaking (10 page)
Fort Huachuca itself was hardly an accommodating location in those days. Once we turned south off Interstate 10 just east of Tucson and the narrow highway wound into the dry mountains, the landscape took on an almost lunar aspect. The Advance Course orientation had warned about the hazards of car breakdowns in the baking desert heat and the danger when wandering off the road that rattlesnakes and getting lost posed. I wasn't concerned about snakes, but it was clear that the post was about as isolated as any could be and still remain within the continental United States. In fact, the post and the nearby little garrison town of Sierra Vista were only a few miles from the Mexican border and an equally desolate range of high desert mountains.
It was an old post, having been established as a provisional cavalry camp in 1877 to cut off the escape route into Mexico of the Apache leader Geronimo. The black troops of the 10th Cavalry, the “Buffalo Soldiers,” were stationed there before World War I. And it was a training post for Infantry units during World War II and the Korean War. The U.S. Army Strategic Communications Command made Fort Huachuca its headquarters in 1967. Four years later, the Army established the Intelligence Center and School on the post.
When I drove into town that first day, I found the main street, Fry Boulevard, paved only the seven blocks from the post entrance to Seventh Avenue. After that, the roads were hard, rutted dirt and some gravel. Conditions on post were slightly better. As a married Advance Course student, I was assigned what was officially known as “substandard” housing, a unit that badly needed renovation, but which would not receive it until more money was one day made available for repairs to family housing.
This has long been a troublesome issue for the Army: There is always a greater need for housing repair than there is money available. Today, we keep track of this funding shortfall in a category called Real Property Maintenance (RPM) Backlog, a figure that totals $17.8 billion to bring all our facilities up to “green” status. This is an elusive figure, however. The dollar amount of the shortfall exists; the dollars themselves do not. Although the Army has the accounting category, it is empty. In other words, the reason the Army still continues to have substandard housing is because it is forced to spend its very limited budget on other priorities, such as soldiers and weapons.
One of the more notable features of our little 1950s-era bungalow was that we could see daylight around all four sides of the splayed entrance door. When we had guests, one of my first tasks was to sweep the sand out of the little hallway and living room before they arrived. There was a chugging swamp cooler evaporation air conditioner on the roof.
My initial apprehension that the men in the class might be unreceptive to the women proved completely unfounded. They couldn't have been more welcoming. Unlike many officers who had served only with men, most of my classmates happened to have spent their early careers in the Defense Investigative Service, an assignment in Counterintelligence. They were used to working alongside women. And since we were all low-paid captains stuck out there on the far side of the moon, our social life occurred at one another's quarters. Pot luck dinners and barbecues that our two social chairmen, Steve Conrad and Jerry De-Money, organized became the focus of our weekends. Steve and Jerry were very creative in presenting “awards” such as the Rip Van Winkle award (Third Oak Leaf Cluster) for Ben Elley, who had fallen asleep yet again during a particularly scintillating lecture on land navigation. He certainly wasn't the only one to fall asleep. Bob Murfin and Lynn Silvious suffered their share of SIFLs (Self-Inflicted Frontal Lobotomy). No school I have attended since then has been so much fun, either during duty hours or off-duty social life. This was probably because in the Advance Course we were all in our twenties and livelier, most were raising young families, and all of us had no money, so we had to provide our own entertainment.
Duty time was devoted to the classroom. I intended to do my best, both to learn my new career of Intelligence and because I wanted to be a credit to women in the Army. But the first few weeks were hectic and confusing, trying to familiarize myself with the broad dimensions and multiple subdisciplines of my new branch and its elusive jargon, all the while keeping up with classwork.
Because I retired from the Army as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (DCSINT), a position that involves access to some of the nation's most highly classified information, I am legally prohibited from discussing many details of my work. As with other organizations in the U.S. Intelligence community, current and former members of Army intelligence do not reveal the sources, methods, procedures, or targets of their operations. So any description of my work as an Army intelligence officer is based on unclassified sources. The basics I learned about Military Intelligence at Fort Huachuca have certainly evolved in the last twenty-five years, but have retained many of their past features.
The elements of Military Intelligence I studied in the Advance Course initially seemed rather complex, but I soon learned them thoroughly. Military Intelligence is a highly structured discipline, not to be confused with the romanticized cloak-and-dagger view of civilian espionage made popular in spy novels. As I told Sandra McElwaine when she interviewed me for
USA Today Magazine,
“I am no Mata Hari.”
The major formal disciplines of the branch are Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), Human Intelligence (HUMINT), Counterintelligence (CI), Imagery Intelligence (IMINT), and Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT). The combat arms also rely on Long-range Surveillance and Scouts and Calvary units for battlefield reconnaissance. Electronic Warfare (EW) and Information Operations (IO) are not Intelligence disciplines, but are often supported by MI operations.
My specialty was cryptology or Signals Intelligence. SIGINT is information we derive from monitoring and locating enemy communications and noncommunications electronic systems. Radios and radars are the most common examples. We call intelligence derived from monitoring enemy communications— such as voice transmissions, Morse code, teletypewriter, or digital data—“communications intelligence.” The information we obtain from monitoring enemy noncommunications emitters, including radars, transponders, and radio beacons, is called “electronic intelligence.” Since the modern battlefield is a virtual electromagnetic blizzard, with units from the squad level up emitting all manner of signals across the spectrum, SIGINT becomes an extremely important asset for the war-fighting commander in identifying the enemy forces arrayed against him.
The subspecialty of signal security is an invaluable tool in protecting friendly forces from equally effective electronic surveillance by the enemy. (In the Army of the future, which is currently under development, every soldier on the battlefield will be equipped to send and receive information about themselves and the enemy across this electronic spectrum.) The demanding, often arcane, but vital military specialty of SIGINT would occupy much of my professional life.
Human Intelligence is probably most familiar to people outside the military. HUMINT involves the interrogation of enemy prisoners of war, civilian detainees, and refugees, as well as translating captured documents, to learn the composition of enemy forces, their intentions and morale. The discipline requires some to be skillful linguists with an excellent sense of the adversary's culture.
Counterintelligence protects American forces by evaluating the enemy's total intelligence-gathering capabilities. CI detects, evaluates, and prevents enemy intelligence collection and sabotage. When needed, CI specialists can mount effective deception programs to mask our military operations.
As the name implies, Imagery Intelligence acquires and exploits visual representations of the battlefield that reveal the deployment of forces, aids weapons targeting, and produces more effective battle damage assessment so that targets that are already destroyed are not shelled or bombed unnecessarily. Modern IMINT systems cut across the spectrum and include infrared and radar imagery.
The newest MI discipline, Measurement and Signature Intelligence, is a response to the effectiveness of technical counter-measures to traditional intelligence-gathering techniques that have evolved over the years. MASINT involves the use of sensors to sample air, soil, and water for telltale evidence of biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.
The raw information that is gathered using these collection disciplines is converted into intelligence. The process by which information becomes intelligence is called the intelligence cycle, which has multiple steps: collection, processing, analysis, distribution, presentation (reporting), evaluation, and collection management. In general, the higher up the chain of command, the more intelligence the war-fighting commander requires for decision-making. For example, a company commander might only need to know that enemy tanks approaching his unit would most likely be bogged down in a marsh before reaching his defensive perimeter. This information could be obtained from a traditional reconnaissance patrol. But it is essential that the division commander, four echelons (levels of authority) higher, understand that this armor probe is only a diversion and that the real attack will come in another sector. That type of intelligence can be derived most readily from “all source” collection that includes all the major disciplines.
The echelons that intelligence supports are called “tactical” for division and below, “operational” for regional commands, such as the Central Command that fought Operation Desert Storm, and “strategic,” which is at the national level and supports the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the President.
The targets of intelligence are military, economic, and political. The armed services, individually and collectively through the Defense Intelligence Agency, are responsible for military targets. Economic and political targets are the responsibility of the Central Intelligence Agency. The National Security Agency supports all of these efforts.
When people hear that I am an intelligence officer I am sometimes asked for “inside” information about UFOs. Recently, one newly introduced acquaintance at a college football game was just certain that I had the real scoop on the phenomenon. None of my denials that UFOs existed or protests that Army intelligence had
any
information (much less secret information) could dispel her impression that I was just following orders to keep the lid on the true UFO story, and thus furthering the suspicion of a juicy conspiracy. But, for the record, I know nothing of UFOs and suggest that anyone with questions about spaceships and aliens should call the U.S. Air Force and not the Army.
Another common misperception about my work in Intelligence was that I “had files” on people and knew “the gossip” about their personal lives—possibly through the use of listening devices planted in their homes. Army intelligence is absolutely prohibited by law from ever targeting U.S. entities (persons, businesses, or groups). And such information would not serve to meet any Army intelligence requirement. During the tense years of the Vietnam War, however, the Johnson administration pressured Army intelligence to conduct questionable surveillance of antiwar protesters, an unwarranted diversion of Army resources and a threat to civil rights. Our resources are scarce and thinly spread over many competing needs. So we are careful to use these limited resources efficiently and we never act outside the law. It is fundamental to Army culture that we support and defend the U.S. Constitution, and further, as powerful a tool as intelligence is, it is even more important to act within all legal and ethical restraints.
As I entered the new world of Military Intelligence, I certainly felt more like a part of the Army and felt that many more career options were open to women. And the fact that my classmates accepted my women colleagues and me as equal was especially heartening. All the women were serious about the course, I guess because we needed to catch up on the profession of intelligence. Many of the men in the class needed to study as hard as the women, because they had been exclusively in counterintelligence and had not served in tactical assignments. We were all motivated to learn the course content. But a few were a bit too intense: One captain became famous in our class for writing down every fact our instructors presented on Rolodex cards and spending hours each night alone in the room off his carport, flipping the cards as he memorized the facts for the next test. That was hardly necessary. In tried-and-true Army fashion, the instructors stamped or slammed their desk with their fist for emphasis to drive home each point they were going to include on that week's test.
It didn't matter that the instructors made no effort to bring the former WACs up to speed. You would have had to be asleep to fail the course. And none of us were dull. I did learn a lot about MI by listening to the nonstructured give-and-take of informal classroom discussions that many instructors encouraged. Since our colleagues had served in so many different units as young officers, they brought a wealth of experience to the practical problems presented in tactical exercises. And they weren't afraid to state their opinion. “In the 25th Division we did it this way …” “When I was stationed in Germany, we always did it like this …” Over the weeks, my notebook pages filled with concrete solutions to problems that I would never find in field manuals. I later realized MI was trying to evolve a new doctrine, a method of operations and procedures that best fulfilled its role within the Army, and to do so, the Intelligence School was willing to listen to its most innovative young officers. In effect, the Army school system provides a place where ideas that are developed in the field can be refined and standardized throughout the Army. This was especially important since Military Intelligence had only existed as a formal branch of the regular Army since 1962 and was still establishing its credibility.
But there were other irritants that constantly reminded me we were still women serving in a man's Army. One woman in the class, who was single and very attractive, quickly drew the attention of the bachelors in the course. But she wisely decided to forgo dating among her classmates at this isolated outpost, so a couple of the jilted suitors started spreading rumors about her. She ignored them, but this situation was unfair to her and unworthy of those involved.