From: Ralph McGehee Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 07:37 ========================================================================== A Prize-Winning Intelligence Operation The December 9, 1997 issue of the Washington Post reported on an unusually effective intelligence operation. Many of the techniques of this type of operation, with appropriate adjustments, could and should have wide application in the Intelligence Community's efforts to counter terrorism, to counter proliferation, to counter narcotics and to counter intelligence. Unfortunately the success of this operation challenges established bureaucratic procedures and fiefdoms -- that ensure the continuation of an endless string of intelligence failures -- and probably will never be used again. When the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo sent a handful of employees into radical Serb territory to monitor municipal elections, the embassy used a unique intelligence team to track them and ensure their safety. Working inside a trailer the team was able at a moment's notice to call up satellite photographs, top-secret military intelligence reports and sensitive material about possible civil disturbances derived from extensive U.S. and allied eavesdropping in the region. The team's skilled monitoring helped it earn one of the spy world's top prizes. The prize sent a bureaucratic warning. Until the team's deployment to Bosnia in the spring of 1996, only the military had access to such immense databases. The budget for military operations vastly exceeds the budget for diplomatic efforts. The Bosnia unit -- composed of analysts from the CIA, DIA, NSA, and State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research -- is the first field trial of a novel concept that the State Department calls Support to Diplomatic Operations (SDO). This is different from the lavishly funded and rival task described by the CIA and the DIA as Support to Military Operations (SMO). Until now, "If a CINC [commander in chief of regional military forces] calls in intelligence support, then everything happens." Teams of highly trained specialists with state-of-the-art communications are instantly dispatched wherever military crises are developing. State Department officials, worked for months to overcome resistance to the SDO idea at the Defense Department and the CIA. The State Department asked recently for $6 million for more teams, but was turned down by the OMB. I have nightmares about the CIA and other elements of the Intelligence Community's large Washington-based staffs. Recently the CIA added another 100 people to its Nonproliferation Center -- this is only one of about some forty similarly targeted government entities. In my nightmare, the CIA's Headquarters-based 200-person Nonproliferation staff sits around a large circular table, reading classified documents before passing them on to the next person and then the next. Those at the head of the table write comments and the cycle is repeated. All in the circle chant mantras, and worship politicization, as they manipulate intelligence and forge operational plans. This unreal scene repeats itself in the other 40 or so entities. In the reference operation, a small team went to the target area, they were (mostly) free from the group mentality, they assiduously focused on the task at hand, they employed available intelligence techniques and they produced real intelligence. Such a success is dangerous -- so OMB killed it. Ralph McGehee CIABASE ------------------------------- end -------------------------------------