Riding the Red Horse

by Christopher Nuttall

  Since leaving Her Majesty’s service, he has mainly been offering advice to foreign folk on complicated matters and is amazed that they appear to value it. No one else is amazed by it. No one.

  What Harry brings to the table here is “The Limits of Intelligence: Why It’s Nowhere Nearly as Important as the Spooks Would Have You Think”. That, one might think, is an odd claim from someone whose life work has been intelligence. On the other hand, who would be better qualified to make that claim than someone who spent most of his adult life in intelligence?

  If you haven’t guessed it yet, I am a pedantic SOB as a matter of course. Indulge me a bit for the moment. When you read Harry’s essay on intel, I want you to think about these principles of war: Economy of Force, Security, Simplicity, and Surprise—don’t worry, I’ll explain them later—but I want you to think about them in an intelligence context. Those concepts are what he’s talking about in a positive sense. But he’s also talking about another principle of war, Mass, and how very difficult, if not impossible, it is to achieve real mass, real concentration, and real weight of effort in intelligence.

  THE LIMITS OF INTELLIGENCE: WHY IT’S NOWHERE NEAR AS IMPORTANT AS THE SPOOKS WOULD HAVE YOU THINK

  by Harry Kitchener

  In the military and political context, intelligence has been a fetish for years, now. The popular fascination with spies and spying, technical intelligence collection—and recent revelations of the sort of thing nation states get up to—have fuelled an insatiable curiosity about intelligence generally and created some rather exaggerated ideas of what it’s capable of delivering. Fiction, whether TV, movies, or written, only exaggerates the exaggeration. “Non-fiction”, often more than a little fictive itself, seldom helps put things in proper perspective.

  To correct for some of that, for the benefit of the interested reader, this piece will briefly introduce the concept of intelligence, discuss the process which underpins it, and address the significance of both intelligence and its role in the formulation of policy and the execution of operations.

  Let’s start with some definitions. Intelligence, for the purposes of this paper, we will take as meaning: “information, assessed for accuracy of content and reliability of source, interpreted to derive meaning to the customer”. The customer, here, is the organization or individual who has tasked the production of the intelligence.

  All intelligence works in roughly the same way. In the West, we refer to the Intelligence Cycle, which represents the various stages through which the process of tasking and acquiring intelligence works. For the purposes of this paper, let’s use the CIA’s definitions:

  Planning and Direction: the definition by the customer, of his interests and needs. These are often referred to as his Intelligence Requirements (IRs). This stage completed, the intelligence organization tasks its assets to begin:

  Collection: the actual process of acquiring the raw information which matches the IRs. The means vary, but can include open source (i.e. reading newspapers, magazines, websites, watching TV and so on), technical (i.e. intercepting radio, Internet or telephone traffic), human (i.e. obtaining information from spies and agents), imagery (i.e. satellite or other photography, including covert) and a range of other sources. This is the part of the process which is often seen as being the sexiest aspect of the process and often involves field operations. Collection being achieved, the process moves on to:

  Processing: the creation of intelligence spot reports on the individual nuggets of information derived from the material collected. Part of this process involves weighing both accuracy of the intelligence and reliability of the source, so A1 intelligence is known to be truthful from an absolutely reliable source, while F5 is drivel from a known imbecile. These spot reports, together with other reporting from other sources, including from friendly and not so friendly nations and agencies, are used in:

  Analysis and Production: the production of detailed and informative consolidated intelligence reports which set out to answer the classic intelligence question: “so what?” That is, they set the material in context and attempt to tease out what the meaning, import and implications of the intelligence are. These reports go to customers as part of:

  Dissemination: is delivery to the customer of the intelligence report, discussion of the content, confirmation that it is relevant to the customer’s IRs, feedback from the customer and, if necessary, modification of the IRs, before starting the whole process over again with Planning and Direction.

  This is a pretty mature model and it’s known to work well. Some points to bear in mind, however. Intelligence agencies and organisations are generally built around their sources, so the average nation will usually have a foreign intelligence organization such as the CIA in the USA or SIS (also known, incorrectly, as MI6) in the United Kingdom, which largely concentrates on human intelligence, a technical intelligence organization, such as the NSA in the USA or GCHQ in the United Kingdom, which largely concentrates on communications interception, an internal security organization, such as the FBI in the USA or the Security Service (also known, incorrectly, as MI5) in the United Kingdom, which, together with the police, concentrates on human and technical intelligence operations inside the state in question and a military intelligence organization, which provides specialist intelligence support to the armed forces using its own human, technical and other intelligence collection assets.

  What all this means is that the average modern nation has intelligence coming out of its ears. Generally, the people in the intelligence business work very hard and put a huge amount of effort into doing the best job they can and generally they succeed in producing enormous volumes of the stuff.

  And therein lies the rub. A modern intelligence agency produces huge amounts of information – not intelligence, yet, it hasn’t been assessed, or analysed, and much of it doesn’t get looked at. Assuming that the old truism that “90 percent of everything is dreck” applies, this means that looking for that elusive nugget of insight in a truckload of noise, to mix a cunning metaphor, is incredibly hard to do, especially since technical means of discrimination are difficult and generally not reliable . For example, you can do word searches, or even quite complex Bayesian natural language analysis, on large volumes of intercept data, but one runs the risk of pulling out too many false positives, which is not particularly helpful, or worse, discarding the one genuinely relevant thing.

  Thus we’re stuck with plain old humans in the loop. Now, bear in mind that not everyone is well suited to the wacky world of intelligence analysis and there are a number of usually incompatible skill sets involved in doing this properly, and it rapidly becomes clear that the manpower requirements are huge. “Manpower” here, is taken, of course, to also include “womanpower”, and quite rightly too, as some of the finest analysts are women.

  Not many organisations have the funding and resources to set up analysis shops of sufficient size to deal with what is collected, and those that do often find that many of the folk they employ are not well-suited to their duties, whether from a lack of inclination (they’d rather be operational types, engaged in collection), lack of aptitude (they’re “differently clever”), lack of skill (they’re junior and as soon as they get a promotion they’re away to operational duties, where the guts and glory are), or from a lack of integrity (two words here: “Manning” and “Snowden”).

  Much of the material collected, of course, is going to be in a foreign language or in a visual form which requires extensive specialist training to understand. This is also a bit of a bottleneck, especially with regards to languages. It’s very hard to react quickly to a change in strategic posture, and for example, the British found the switch from Russian to Arabic, Pashto and Farsi as their primary foreign language for intelligence exploitation quite challenging, even though their extant Arabic capability in 1990 or so was actually rather good.

  Specialist training, whether in languages, visual interpretation, intelligence analysis, cryptology, all requires ext
ensive investment in identification, recruitment, security clearing, training and deploying of the analysts, linguists and specialists. It also takes your key personnel, who will be the ones actually delivering the training, off the road. There is no merit in using lesser performers in training roles, you need your best and best-regarded types, who will typically be the only ones who can train new recruits to standard.

  So, even assuming that there is a machine in place which can assess, discriminate and analyse however much of the product they can manage, the problems still aren’t over. What you have is a stack of single-source reports. They may be accurate, they may not. You will have an idea—essentially subjective—of accuracy and reliability, based on a number of metrics, but no real idea of how it all fits together or where any of the ideas which emerge from the reports are connected.

  So, the next step is fusion, the integration of multiply-sourced reporting into a single intelligence picture and assessment of what it all means. This is historically a weakness of intelligence organisations, which tend, understandably enough, to want to protect their sources and methods from everyone else, including other intelligence agencies and even competing departments within the same service. Even the closest and most cordial allies don’t forget that people like Kim Philby have existed and will continue to pop up.

  Fused intelligence, where corroboration of multiply-sourced information is achieved, tends to be pretty good and is useful, provided some interpretation of context is supplied. Generally, customers are busy people and don’t have the time, the skills, or the inclination, to study intelligence reports. It is a truism that most senior customers never read more than three bullet points, or past the executive summary. Writing end product reports on this basis is therefore a very specific skill, and the reporter must walk a tightrope between flat, uninformative recounting of what may seem like unconnected facts, and exercising too much imagination and creative flair and thus skewing the intelligence. He must write and brief very clearly and make it absolutely plain what is known to be a fact, what is strongly suspected (“probably”) and what is merely suspected or uncorroborated (“possibly”). It is also his responsibility to ensure that the customer understands exactly what he means by the use of certain terms and turns of phrase—and he must be unambiguous. The point of the intelligence is to inform the customer, not show off to him, and care should be taken to ensure that material which is interesting but not fully relevant to the IRs is also clearly flagged as such.

  One of the key activities is the collection of feedback from the customer on the intelligence product he has been supplied. The customer must be fully engaged in the process and must understand that, if he is unhappy with the product, it is up to him to deliver this feedback in order to improve it. It is equally important for the delivering agency to hear about it when he is happy with it.

  A customer should look at intelligence in terms of its relevance to his IRs, the format in which it is delivered, the depth of the comments applied to it, the frequency of receipt and the timeliness and accuracy of the content. He should also give feedback concerning what he has heard on the same subject from other sources.

  That's how it generally works. There are, of course, many wrinkles and variations, with Commonwealth nations tending to follow the British model of a Joint Intelligence Committee, which takes in all the product coming from the various agencies and integrates it into a considered, and consensus strategic view. This has historically worked well, although it can skew out of balance, such as in 2003, when, for whatever reason, much dubious support was given by one agency to some political assertions emerging from Downing Street concerning the idea that an attack on Iraq was justified by a direct threat to UK interests. In the interest of avoiding ambiguity, it may be noted that this intelligence proved not to be altogether accurate.

  [Editor’s Note: “Not altogether accurate appears to be code for, “Oh, my Gawd, what the Hell were they thinking?”]

  This brings us rather neatly to another problem with intelligence. It can be massively tempting for an intelligence service or agency to provide its customer with what it wants, not just material on the IRs, but material which directly supports whichever policy or interest the IRs are developed to support. At its most vicious, this temptation can lead an agency to behave like the KGB in the 1980s, when, in response to Politburo suspicions, the agency actively sought to promote the view that the West was contemplating a first strike against the USSR and its allies. This sort of thing leads to circular reporting, where intelligence reporting and confirmation of internal prejudices drives the IRs further from reality, which then turns up the wick on the reporting and it is both unprofessional and dangerous. Every nation has suffered from this at one time or another. It can also lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, where the skewed reporting leads to unwise and inappropriate actions, which themselves drive the opponent to do precisely what is feared.

  Another major elephant trap for an intelligence agency or service is maintaining its credibility. Schooled by popular culture and often star struck by proximity to all the cool stuff, new political customers often place inordinate faith in the product they are given by their intelligence services and are massively disappointed when, as is often the case, intelligence subsequently proves to be wrong, or at least not fully right. This often leads a customer to discount, automatically, future service from that source, or to prefer more attractive service from another source. Here, a strength of the JIC system is that the end customer is isolated from the source and hears only the collegiate view, which is fine, of coruse, as long as the collegiate view is broadly accurate.

  The customer gets a vote as well. He is generally a senior political or military figure and these tend not to be people who are unsure in their opinions, and moroever, who often have significant experience in their fields. They will have faith in their judgement and, if faced with a direct contradiction between their thinking and the intelligence they receive, will not usually prefer the intelligence over their own interpretations. Incidentally, this is part of the reason why it is a really bad idea for any agency to give its customers raw product, as they will usually subject it to personal analysis, not necessarily fully informed, and will draw conclusions which are both subjective and immediate.

  If the customer has come to have less-than-complete faith in his intelligence provider, he will also tend to ‘aim off’, which is to say he will assume a lack of accuracy or reliability and insert his own, potentially even less accurate, narrative that differs from that developed in the intelligence. That’s his privilege, of course, and it is often the case that senior political and military figures do actually know more, have better judgement, or even their own sources, which can lead them to superior assessments.

  Ultimately, of course, it comes down to judgement. A lot of time and effort goes into the collection, processing, analysis and dissemination of intelligence, and generally it’s a process which works well. However, the product, unless it’s absolutely unique and incredibly surprising—which is very rare indeed in the real world—is of most value when it supports or illuminates the ground truth, which is often the simple and obvious explanation. There are few successful conspiracies, and human behavior is far better explained through incompetence, cowardice and inefficiency than through the suspicion of devilish plans.

  This last point leads directly on to the big elephant trap for any intelligence agency – the temptation to focus on the counter-intelligence struggle against the opposing intelligence agency – the struggle at the heart of millions of words of novels and films about the epic East-West confrontation between the KGB and its allied services and the West. With double agents, moles, defectors, all the trappings of spy fiction, this is an epic, romantic, and ultimately futile story. There were tactical successes on both sides. The KGB managed to plant Kim Philby on the British, the British managed to recruit a number of high-ranking Soviet officers, the CIA had successes against the KGB and vice versa, and strategically, none o
f this it made any particular difference.

  Of course, it is possible to view this sort of service-service rivalry and conflict as a means of communication and mutual reassurance, and it was certainly used as such during the Cold War, when the stakes were terrifyingly high and both sides had an enormous vested interest in not allowing unplanned or unintended events to lead to an abrupt interruption in the human gene pool on a global scale. There were a number of mechanisms used for generating this sort of mutual assurance, such as permission for the four military missions in Germany—SOXMIS in the Federal Republic, BRIXMIS, the US Military Liaison Mission and the French Military Liaison Mission in the Democratic Republic—to operate in uniform in enemy territory, or the quiet toleration of Sigint overflights by both sides to make current defence postures explicit, but the actual benefits of these activities, together with other, less publicised undertakings, were almost exclusively diplomatic rather than intelligence-related.

  Intelligence agencies also engage, from time to time, in what the Russians term dezinformatsiya, the passage of fake or flawed intelligence to an opposing agency. This has many manifestations, from Operation Mincemeat during World War II (a rather appealingly naïve operation which saw a Welsh tramp’s corpse dressed in Royal Marine officer’s uniform, equipped with utterly fake despatches and allowed to fall into German-friendly hands), to the frankly bizarre KGB attempts to poison defector intelligence by releasing a steady stream of follow-up defectors with contradictory intelligence. This actually appeared to work, to the extent that one famous internal security figure at the CIA became convinced that everything was fake and that both the CIA and SIS had been thoroughly penetrated by the Russians.