Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

by Jack Devine

  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.

  * * *

  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.”14

  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.”15

  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.16 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.

  Mary Margaret Graham, a twenty-nine-year CIA veteran who served as U.S. deputy director of national intelligence for collection from 2005 to 2008, has also described the effects of the war on how the CIA functions. “War is what it is,” she has stated, “but as we get away from the wars, we have to get back to the fundamentals, of spotting, developing, and recruiting. It will take five to ten years after we’re done in the war zones, if Vietnam is any model, but current leadership is starting to and will reemphasize the basics.”

  It is undeniable that we need a clandestine service that can do more than fight shooting wars. Understanding and manipulating the political and economic environment in foreign countries, a core mission of the CIA, is also one of the most powerful ways to protect American interests abroad. And it need not always be geared toward regime change, as many wrongly believe. For example, the operations we undertook in Latin America while I was there were focused on influencing and monitoring government officials for signs that they were moving toward the Communist camp, rather than on fomenting any kind of active opposition. This type of covert action would be—and I hope is right now—very effective in places such as Egypt and Libya, where, in the aftermath of popular revolutions, a complicated political game is under way. The United States should be using covert influence and action to monitor these situations for signs of trouble as well as to subtly promote the interests of our allies and counter the efforts of our adversaries.

  * * *

  Finally, there is the issue of strategy and how we actually determine what is in our best interest at large. In order to properly direct the CIA as a tool, with covert action as one of its mechanisms, the executive branch needs to be clear-eyed in determining what our country’s strategic vision should be in the face of a new set of threats. For too many years we have looked at operations from a tactical standpoint. But what will be more important is looking at how each discrete tactical operation fits into a larger campaign to achieve a specific set of goals. Policy makers will always be forced to respond to the crisis at hand, but simultaneously taking the time to pull together real strategic analysis based on how we reasonably believe the future will look is also critical to any successful foreign policy and the correlated intelligence business. This will become all the more important in the face of the localized political and economic threat environment I’ve described here.

  This applies in particular, but not only, to our current struggle against Islamic extremism, which has been dominated by a tactical response to terrorist acts. It is reminiscent of my experience fighting the drug epidemic in the 1990s, when we vigorously attacked the supply side (production) of the narcotics trade and destroyed many cartels and “kingpins” throughout Latin America. Despite our best efforts and our great success against those producers, we never really stanched the flow of drugs, because it was fundamentally a demand problem. As long as there remained a high-paying demand for drugs, the market would always find entrepreneurial risk takers who would meet that demand for the right price. This cycle could be changed only by our altering narcotic consumption trends in the United States and by lessening the appeal of certain drugs. It is hard to pinpoint why, but in the late 1990s demand started to decrease, especially for cocaine. If I had to put a finger on it, I would attribute the change to the coverage of the theme by mass media, and specifically television and movies, which portrayed drug use as a less “cool” lifestyle, especially for upper- and middle-class Americans. So, essentially, it was the psychological “war of ideas” that portrayed a desperate lifestyle and made drug use a less appealing endeavor. This, rather than our kinetic efforts against the sources of the drugs, eventually changed the trend. This battle continues today, and unfortunately there has been a resurgence among the young in believing that marijuana and other drug use is “cool” again. This belief, and the subsequent increase in demand for drugs, can be deterred only by images to the contrary.

  The same dynamic applies today in our fight against terrorism. We have become quite successful and adept at using drones and high-grade technology to kill and dismantle terrorist cells. But much like drug traffickers, the terrorists continue to spawn new recruits because the ideological motivation persists for engaging in violence against the West, its allies, and even other Islamic sects. In order to reverse or at least slow down this trend, we have to face up to the driving force behind Islamist terrorism, which has propelled hundreds of young people to become suicide bombers against targets they consider inimical to their belief system. We are confronting a fundamental difference in a worldview underpinned by political and economic factors, and we must meet it head-on, including using the CIA’s covert action capabilities to counter the widely held view that the West is corrupt and bent on destroying Muslims’ religious beliefs and culture.

  What is required to do this is a robust multiagency program to promote moderate nonviolent leaders, opinion makers, and media outlets in the Muslim world. This should be coupled with an equally robust clandestine program directed by the CIA, drawing on its age-old covert action and influence skills. During the Cold War, the United States and its allies waged a relentless ideological war against the Communists. It was above all a “war of ideas,” where selling Western ideas and values played a central and, I would argue, decisive role in the outcome. While the economic failure of the Soviet empire and its retreat from Afghanistan contributed greatly to the Soviet Union’s collapse, what inevitably did it in was its failure to win the ideological battle between democratic, free-market economic thought and its authoritative, state-driven economic planning. People across the world were convinced—both through compelling evidence and years of concerted messaging by the West—that communism was a failed system, and they rejected it. With the subsequent loss of zeal and the inability to win over converts to its beliefs, the air was slowly but surely sucked out of the system until it collapsed under its own weight.

  Ideas do matter in international struggles as much today as they have in the past. The better ideology almost always prevails, and, to be sure, we hold the stronger ideological hand in dealing with Islamic extremism. It remains my belief, having lived and traveled extensively around the world, that there is an almost universal drive toward freedom, civil liberties, and economic independence. This sentiment flies in the face of today’s extremists, who have little regard for any of these values. Their worldview is bankrupt and grossly distorts Islam, one of the world’s great religions, which at its core has deeply held tenets about the well-being of families and social structure. It is not a belief system that promotes mindless bloodshed. We should capitalize on this sentiment to the maximum extent possible and push it within the Muslim cultural and religious context using all the tools at our disposal, including covert action.

  Some rightfully will point to existing U.S. government programs to promote moderation—the Department of State’s International Information and Public Diplomacy programs, Voice of America, USAID funding of foreign media, and even the Department of Defense’s strategic communications efforts—to suggest that we are already waging this battle. But even a cursory look will show that it is a very modest effort, and is neither a central element of our strategy to confront terrorism nor even an integrated effort, with different departments promoting different agendas at different times. The funding for these programs is also woefully inadequate. Our strategy instead continues to rest almost exclusively on physically destroying terrorists—a worthwhile goal, to be sure, but not one that will effectively stop the spread of Islamic extremism.

  The CIA clandestine mission in this regard should be tasked to “hunt” for and provide support to individuals, groups, social mechanisms, and media outlets that can promote moderate Islamic thought much in the style we did with communism during the Cold War. In that struggle, we promoted many diverse groups who shared a common cause to block communism but who were not expected to sign up to our Bill of Rights or the “American way.” Similarly, this effort sh
ould target a big tent that incorporates diverse groups with the common goal of neutralizing radical Islam. This program should not and cannot look as though it has a U.S. stamp on it or be made to coincide completely with our belief system; this is precisely why the CIA is the right organization to implement it. It is only on the battlefield of ideas that we will truly be able to reduce the terrorist threat, in turn enhancing our national security and protecting the homeland in the long term.

  While I do believe tactical operations have been overemphasized in recent years, it is actually in this very environment, where ideas are supported by subtle, under-the-radar acts, that special operations in the military and the CIA’s covert action are really going to come into their own. “While there are some structural things reinforcing a defense strategy based on conventional forces, principally the inertia of having large and highly institutionalized conventional forces,” says John Hillen, former assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, “there is a great attraction to the use of smaller, unconventional forces because of their unique capabilities, and that will likely see an increased reliance on them in the near future.” This is no less the case with the CIA and the many options it grants to policy makers. Years ago Ray Warren astutely opined that the strength of the Agency is that “it plants the flag everywhere in the world.” I’ve shared that view unwaveringly for many years, even as its popularity among policy makers has ebbed and flowed. I do believe, though, that we are seeing the beginning of a new period of ascendancy for this approach.