Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story (44 page)

As we think about the varying future uses of drones, clear lines of authority should be delineated, based on how and where the unmanned aircraft are used. The authority for deploying and using drones in war zones against enemy forces is different from that needed to oversee and conduct drone operations for surveillance purposes, or strikes against terrorist targets in areas where stealth and deniability are necessary. There are signs that the Obama administration is attempting to streamline these procedures, although unfortunately it appears to be doing so in the opposite direction—namely, putting the majority of drone operations under the auspices of the Defense Department. That does not enable such activities to be carried out below the radar and in ways that preserve some level of plausible deniability. We saw this in the case of the CIA program in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Russians knew the United States was supporting the mujahideen, but because our support involved using surrogates, not U.S. forces, our assistance did not provoke a direct Soviet military response. The drone program has a similar requirement for nonattribution. There are benefits to being able to act without forcing a confrontation by deploying U.S. military assets on another nation’s sovereign territory.

By dividing the responsibilities this way, we can have the best possibility of the military using drones to excel at what they do best, while the CIA can use them to maximum effect in intelligence and covert action missions. One warning with regard to using drones as weapons: intelligence is lost when we kill rather than capture and interrogate suspects. This intelligence is often critical to the capture of additional suspects and/or the thwarting of potential attacks. When possible, as recognized by most intelligence experts, we should always aim to capture rather than kill.

The official who deserves much of the credit for the decision to invest heavily in drone research and development was James Woolsey during his tenure as DCI from 1993 to 1995. Woolsey himself, when interviewed for this book, described the circumstances under which the program began, which is particularly instructive today as we move into leaner fiscal and budgetary times.

“If times had been flush I might have done what the Pentagon wanted to do, which was implement a several-year, multimillion-dollar research program,” he said. “But since I knew we would never get the money, instead we did the research with a very small budget and on an accelerated timeline. So, in a way, the financial problems of the early 1990s were an incentive to move very quickly at very low cost with something that we already had an airframe for.”
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There are important lessons to be drawn from this story, not only in terms of investing in new technologies, but with regard to how organizations—and the intelligence community in particular—innovate and operate in lean times. “We in the intelligence community actually make our best decisions when we are restricted in our intention with regard to what we’re trying to do and as well as in our funding,” said Ken Minihan, who oversaw massive chunks of the intelligence community during the very lean late 1990s. “Many people think we see the most progress when funding increases, but actually we see more developments when it’s not.”
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There is certainly a danger that decreased budgets will lead to important programs being downsized or eliminated, but there is something to be said for the notion that necessity is the mother of invention.

One way we can avoid letting impending budget cuts lead to stagnation and increased risk is to aggressively take advantage of new technologies, including those being generated in the private sector. As we saw with the Arab Awakening, we will be forced to address the impact of social media and social networking. This technology may only be in its infancy, but its impact cannot be denied, and the ability to mobilize people on short notice around important issues is something we must harness to be effective in the future.

Social networks such as Facebook, and even Internet search engines such as Google, have profoundly changed not only the way the CIA does business but also the very meaning of that business. Part of the CIA’s traditional role has been to collect basic facts from the far corners of the globe about all the people, places, and things that matter. Now, however, a great deal of this basic information is being collected for commercial purposes, and that means that what qualifies as “intelligence” worthy of CIA collection is rapidly changing. Randall Forte, who served as assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research from 2006 to 2009, put it this way: “The rise of information searches and data aggregators like Google has led to a world where 90 percent or more of information out there is available from open sources. This dramatically restricts the areas in which clandestinely acquired intelligence is actually value-added and places the intelligence community in competition with open-sourced information. Why spend a billion dollars on a collection program that may deliver the same information as can be had for free on the Internet, only slower and with greater risks?”
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I found during my career at the CIA that my enthusiasm for new technology was not always shared by many of my colleagues. But times have changed, and now the CIA has several very large components that focus on data aggregation, exploitation, and analysis, including finding ways to pull pertinent intelligence out of the immense volume of information collected by our rapidly expanding repertoire of platforms. Of course, this type of collection has come under significant scrutiny since Edward Snowden’s leak of sensitive NSA memos describing various surveillance platforms in the United States and abroad. With regard to collecting telephonic and Internet data abroad, this type of collection is as old as spying itself; while former Secretary of State Henry Stimson may have said that a gentleman doesn’t read another man’s mail, the truth is people have been reading one another’s mail since the beginning of time. In fact, that is a large part of what the spy business is about, and our allies, despite their objections, are well aware of this fact.

I do agree it is a very different matter when it comes to collecting data on U.S. citizens, as I take civil liberties very seriously, whether in matters of privacy or even “targeted killings” of U.S. citizens abroad. And while the type of data collection that Snowden exposed—namely, the collection of origins and end points of phone calls and e-mails (as opposed to content)—is far less invasive than many critics allege, the government needs to be extra careful when collecting it on Americans. The reality is that “big data” is here to stay, and in order to make sure the government has the information it needs to track terrorists, it needs to sweep up a vast amount of data. But if and when the government believes it needs to retain, organize, or act on such data with regard to a U.S. citizen, it must bring the case to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and make its case. A worrisome fact that has emerged from the Snowdwn debacle is that of the thousands of such cases that have been brought to a FISA court in recent years, almost none have been turned down. This should lead us to closely reexamine our procedures for granting warrants to collect information on Americans, including considering some kind of ombudsman role to argue the “counter” side of the government’s case.
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
—“Who will guard the guards?”

There is a separate issue related to Snowden that harkens back to my experience with the traitor Aldrich Ames, which is the need to prosecute and punish those who commit acts of espionage to the fullest extent of the law. Whatever Snowden’s feelings about the legality or morality of the NSA programs, it is absolutely outside the bounds of our government system to take it upon oneself to publicly expose classified information. Our system is built upon the contracts its employees sign in which they agree to respect the legal bounds by which they are hired, including their duty to protect our nation’s secrets. If Snowden felt strongly that he was working on programs with which he disagreed, he had every right, perhaps obligation, to stand up and be heard within his organization, or to resign in protest. But each government employee cannot on his or her own determine whether the information to which he or she is exposed deserves to be made public knowledge or we will face persistent governmental crises.

Snowden’s disclosures have done a vast disservice to our government’s ability to detect terrorist threats abroad and to collect foreign intelligence on critical national security issues. For this he should be duly punished. Unfortunately, at the moment he is in a jurisdiction in which this is not possible. Should he remain outside the United States, we should take all prudent and available steps to ensure his return so he is adequately addressed by a U.S. civilian court. Not only would this allow the U.S. government to set an example for other employees with access to classified data, but it would also allow the programs that Snowden exposed to be assessed in an organized, and ideally apolitical, space, as opposed to in the media, where the realities of the operational data lost appear to be largely overshadowed by partisanship and obscured by misinformation.

Snowden aside, from manned and unmanned aerial vehicles to new ways of collecting electronic and telephonic data, it is an enormous challenge simply to glean what is usable from what we collect. Some may argue that Forte’s point about the amount of available open-source information does not change the nuts and bolts of their work that much. The lesson here, however, is not that the CIA will be replaced by Google but that the CIA needs to be, and is becoming, smarter about how it does its business so it can continue to provide policy makers with information and insights that no one else can produce. This means embracing technology and evolving with the times so that it can remain a relevant element of U.S. national security in the years to come.

Another critical way to do this is to invest heavily in newly developing high-tech intelligence collection capabilities, including through initiatives such as the CIA’s own nonprofit, In-Q-Tel. Essentially a government-funded venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel seeks to harness the innovative power of private start-ups by investing in companies that will bring benefits to the intelligence community. These companies are constantly seeking new ways to leverage technology to the advantage of our operations. Their initiatives are critical to bridging the gap between the rapidly accelerating world of private-sector technology and the needs of the public sector. Incidentally, this type of initiative is not actually new to the Agency. Throughout my career, the CIA was involved in the development and deployment of a great number of technological advancements, including GPS, that have since gone out into the commercial world and impacted all our lives. The difference now, however, is that where once the CIA was five or ten years ahead of commercial capabilities, today it has to contend with an ever-accelerating commercial sector specializing in technological advancement.

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Another impact of impending budget cuts and leaner times ahead is that the government will be forced to operate through less resource-intensive tools. For example, rather than using large-scale military assets to implement policy decisions, we will turn to diplomacy and covert action to protect our interests. Ambassador Wisner described this as a perhaps unintended consequence of a reduced military budget. “As we pull back from direct military engagements and reduce funding for DOD and maintain some degree of diplomatic and intelligence funding, the ship is going to come more into balance,” he said. “Not so much by design, but that’s the effect.”
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The recent military focus of U.S. foreign policy to which he refers has had an osmotic effect on the rest of our institutions, including the CIA. Specifically the impact of the two recent wars, and more broadly the war on terror, has been to increasingly construe covert action as paramilitary operations alone. This trend needs to be examined and, hopefully, reset. As previously mentioned, covert action encompasses much more than paramilitary activity and counterterrorism. Political and economic influence was once at the core of what the CIA did, and as this period of active conflict concludes, we should bring our focus back to these critical tools. As former director Hayden has put it, “We need a concerted effort to get back to black,” namely, a return to traditional espionage and covert action.

Hayden tells an interesting story about his last meeting with David Petraeus before Petraeus took over as CIA director. As he and Petraeus walked out of Hayden’s home, Hayden pulled Petraeus aside and said, “Dave, we are so consumed by the counterterrorism mission, that unless you struggle on any given day, you will do nothing but counterterrorism. CIA has never looked more like OSS than we do right now. And that’s great, but we’re not OSS. We’re the nation’s global espionage service, and we really need to pay attention to that.” It is good advice as long as the community does not turn its back on the immensely important role of covert action. Hayden added one other observation, which I’ve seen borne out in my interactions with the new generation of case officers. “You can see the traditional tradecraft skills kind of aging off,” he said, “because you start sending case officers out to the war zones, they get that adrenaline rush, and then you try to get them back to a desk at Langley and they want to know where their weapons are.”
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Again, the CIA’s necessary focus on paramilitary activity and its shift away from political and economic influence have largely been the result of ten years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wars are all-consuming. This decade of war has created a drift toward militarization of CIA personnel that may make it challenging to get everyone back to the traditional core mission as I have described it. “The increasing emphasis on performing what are essentially military missions may lead to a change in the fundamental ethos of the CIA,” said Paul Pillar, a CIA veteran who served as chief of analysis in the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center and national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia.
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The CIA has always had an esprit de corps that thrived on innovation, flexibility, and creativity in ambiguous circumstances. It is this ethos that needs to be preserved so that policy makers can use covert action and intelligence as alternatives to outright military intervention or simple diplomacy, rather than merely an echo of one or the other.