Dr. James B. Bruce. Estados Unidos

Defense Intelligence Journal; 15-2 (2006), 13-27

Author Biography: James Bruce served 10 years with the DCI Foreign D&D Committee, his last five as Vice Chairman.  In his nearly 24 years at CIA before retiring in 2005, he also served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Science and Technology in the National Intelligence Council and held management positions in both Directorates of Intelligence and Operations.  He was a senior staff member at the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the U.S. WMD (the Silberman-Robb WMD Commission).  A Navy veteran, Dr. Bruce was formerly Professor of National Security Policy at the National War College and is currently an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University where he teaches intelligence.  He is also a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation.

This article is a revised and updated version of a keynote address delivered to the NATO Research and Technology Organization Symposium, Brussels, Belgium, 19 April 2004.   It was formally declassified February 2006 (EO-2006-00108) by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and was also approved for public release by the Agency’s Publications Review Board.  The views expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of the CIA or the National Intelligence Council where the author served when the address was given or the RAND Corporation where the author is presently employed.

Due to mandates in the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA), the rate of change in U.S. intelligence has accelerated faster than at any time since its establishment with the National Security Act of 1947.  But the pace may not be fast enough.  This comprehensive reform law, inspired by the failure of the Intelligence Community (IC) to warn of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, has mandated changes to an IC that Senator Shelby described a year after the attacks as still “hard wired” to fight the Cold War that ended with the Soviet collapse a decade earlier.1  The undisputed failure of U.S. intelligence to adapt to a rapidly changing security environment has revealed an institutional rigidity that could shake public confidence in the ability of the IC to safeguard its citizens. 

Perhaps the central issue facing U.S. intelligence in the first decade of the 21st century is whether it can develop the needed capacity for adaptation to avert similar failures.2  A more recent U.S. intelligence failure than 9/11, the erroneous intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), provides another illustration of the community’s inability to adapt.  Notably, equally faulty assessments of Iraqi WMD were arrived at by other Western nations whose intelligence effectiveness did not differ much from the United States on the key attributes of Saddam Hussein’s programs.3  If a design flaw in U.S. intelligence that impaired adaptive change facilitated or even caused these erroneous assessments, as is argued here, then that same design flaw may have been an equally important factor among the affected intelligence services as surely as the faulty assessments.  The services of Western and other nations who also share the basic ideals, values, and security policies with the United States may have good reasons to examine their own capacity for intelligence adaptation.  The effectiveness of Western intelligence capabilities, individually and collectively, depends on it.

INTELLIGENCE AND ADAPTATION 

The purpose of intelligence is to provide vital information—the enemy’s secrets—to national security policymakers and to military commanders that will help them make better decisions.  Of course, intelligence should also provide them with information that they cannot get elsewhere.  Successful intelligence is the collection of secret information by secret means; therefore, conducting intelligence is easier against ignorant or unwitting adversaries.  Facing smart adversaries makes it much harder.  Today, the hardest targets for Western intelligence4 are smart—and getting smarter—about evading or fooling the intelligence systems that target them.  We should understand how they got smart and how this affects the way we conduct business.

Adaptation is a key concept in modern biology.  Charles Darwin showed how species that survived the longest are not necessarily the toughest or the strongest, but rather the most adaptable to changing conditions.5  Modern biology recognizes adaptation as the critical survival trait of species.  This theoretical insight is both simple and profound.  Unlike biology, the discipline of intelligence seems to have no Charles Darwin, but success or failure in adaptation presents a similar dynamic for intelligence.   Darwin spoke of “the extinction of less-improved forms;” intelligence methods that do not adapt to the changing conditions imposed by smart adversaries may also join the ranks of failed species.  This principle applies to collection sensors, platforms, systems, and even to architectures.  Beyond intelligence collection, it applies to analytical methods as well.  If adversaries are better at adaptation than the intelligence capabilities that target them, they will outsmart intelligence.  And defeat it.

In biology species must adapt to changing conditions; however, in intelligence, the adaptation process is a street that goes both ways.  As intelligence improves its capabilities to find and characterize targets, hunted targets then adapt to evade intelligence.  If this interactive cycle stops with successful target adaptation, as seems to have been the case in recent years, then intelligence effectiveness declines.  To succeed, intelligence techniques must be sufficiently adaptable to exploit a target’s vulnerabilities. As targets reciprocate in this interactive process, their adaptation enables them to survive changing intelligence threats.  Adapting to evade the intelligence threat is referred to as denial and deception (D&D).

Successful adaptation means survival. To illustrate, organizations that can adapt to momentous change, like species, may even outlive the environments that gave them birth.  NATO, for example, is a striking tribute to adaptation. When NATO was founded in 1949, no one would have imagined that nearly 60 years later the following would be true.

• Its major threat, the USSR, a dramatic case of failure to adapt to changing conditions, would have disappeared peacefully, somewhat to the surprise of its own Communist leaders.

• Its only uses of military force would not be in defense of a member state as envisioned in the charter, but rather as interventions (in Bosnia and Kosovo) after the Soviet threat had dissolved.

• It would deploy its forces far from its European theater in distant Afghanistan.

• Membership would more than double, adding members from its former organizational foe, the Warsaw Pact, and even some former Soviet republics.

Western intelligence would be wise to demonstrate some of the adaptability that NATO has shown.  The nature of the modern intelligence challenge may be changing perhaps faster, and in more unexpected ways, than was the case during the Cold War.  A principal challenge facing Western intelligence is the growing capabilities of its adversaries, both state and non-state actors, to deny intelligence collection and to deceive collection and analysis.  Unless Western intelligence can demonstrate greater adaptability than it has shown in recent years, it may not be capable of addressing the mounting D&D challenges that it faces now and will surely be facing even more concertedly in the years ahead.    

DENIAL AND DECEPTION 

D&D are highly relevant to national-level policymakers and to warfighters.  In general, D&D can be defined as any undertaking (activity or program) by adversaries, state and non-state actors alike, to influence or deceive policymaking and intelligence communities by reducing collection effectiveness, manipulating information, or otherwise attempting to manage perceptions of intelligence producers and consumers (e.g., policymakers and warfighters).  Those who practice D&D, perhaps a form of asymmetrical warfare, seek to control what intelligence collectors observe and acquire in order to manipulate their perceptions and the content of their products, in an effort to shape the decisions and actions of policymakers and those who can influence them.  Specific definitions of each discipline follow.

Denial refers to activities and programs designed to eliminate, impair, degrade, or neutralize the effectiveness of intelligence collection within and across any or all collection disciplines, human and technical. Deception refers to manipulation of intelligence collection, analysis, or public opinion by introducing false, misleading or, even true but tailored, information into intelligence channels with the intent of influencing judgments made by intelligence producers and the consumers of their products. 

Just as intelligence is not a static process, neither is the D&D process.  Both are dynamic.  But intelligence often seems slower to adapt to needed change, perhaps too slow.  Those who practice D&D sometimes react faster.  If a foreign adversary’s D&D is more adaptable to the intelligence threats it faces, then it will more often succeed in neutralizing intelligence and even misleading it.  Significantly, adaptation is crucial for both but easier for the targets who want to evade the intelligence spotlight.Can we affect this imbalanced adaptation?  Can we turn Darwin’s brilliant principle to our advantage? Western intelligence can do more to make it harder for our adversaries to adapt to intelligence that targets them.  If we adapt smartly, we can regain the advantage.

The history of intelligence can to some degree be characterized as a cyclical struggle between hiders and finders.  When hiders deploy more and better tools to outwit the finders (i.e., intelligence), hiders will prevail.  Alternatively, when finders develop and adapt their methods to foil the hiders, they regain the advantage.  This cycle can be seen in modern technical intelligence where the development of newer techniques has provided the finders with appreciable advantages over hiders.  Such advantages in new sensors or collection systems exploited methods and techniques that hiders did not know about or understand.  Ignorance of intelligence is the hiders’ vulnerability and the finders’ advantage.  The finders’ new techniques work well only as long as they are not known or understood by the hiders.  When hiders comprehend how certain collection techniques really work against them, they can, and almost always do, adapt their behavior in ways to counter the finders’ newfound advantages.  It is precisely this capacity for adaptation that lies at the root of cyclical intelligence successes and failures when failures are the result of D&D, as some important ones are.

For two thousand years, codemakers have fought to preserve secrets while codebreakers have tried their best to reveal them.  It has always been a neck-and-neck race, with codebreakers battling back when codemakers seemed to be in command, and codemakers inventing new and stronger forms of encryption when previous methods had been compromised.6  

Some simple examples from technical collection illustrate the point. In signals intelligence (SIGINT), communicators try all kinds of methods to protect their communications with varying degrees of success (often temporary).  When encryption techniques such as the ENIGMA machine used by the Nazis in World War II were developed by hiders to conceal their valuable communications, Allied intelligence was stymied for a while.  Then it countered with successful decryption techniques, in this case, aided by espionage and pioneered by Polish and later British mathematicians of extraordinary talents.  And because Hitler’s counterintelligence was kept unaware of the Allies’ new capability, the new techniques were successful.  This encryption-decryption cycle has spiraled to unimagined heights, and today, according to one writer, the commercial availability of newer encryption systems on the Internet has offered additional methods to communications hiders in the latest round of this key D&D adaptation technique.7

In imagery, while the hand-held camera still has its role, its intelligence utility was greatly enhanced through airborne photography, most notably in the American U-2 and SR-71 aircraft, and then again, not much later in its adaptation to spacecraft such as the CORONA system launched in 1960.8  But, in due course, when hiders learned of this new intelligence capability, they began to counter with their own adaptive techniques.  Such D&D countermeasures to this revolutionary collection concept were enabled by whatever they could learn about this new kind of collection capability. 

When the Soviets first secretly deployed nuclear-capable SS-4 and SS-5 offensive ballistic missiles in Cuba, they probably did not give much thought to what these systems might look like to a high-altitude camera.  The U-2 photographs that discovered them became world famous after their international debut in UN discussions during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.  Even after the missiles were publicly revealed on 22 October in overhead photography, the Soviets tried—too late—to camouflage them with tarpaulins, nets, and painted or mud-spattered canvas.9  Today, adversary nations that build and deploy medium- and long-range missile systems, such as China, are not so careless.  Many nations, and even some terrorist groups, have come to appreciate how activity that is effectively concealed at ground level can be detected by airborne or satellite photography.  A simple adaptation to the finders’ new techniques can mitigate their value if the right kind of knowledge is carefully applied as countermeasures to the new techniques.

The fragility of collection sources and methods is a key concept to specialists in D&D, because smart adversaries make it their business—and for some, a very high priority business—to learn how U.S. and Western intelligence works.  We know this from many sources:  human and technical, open and clandestine.  Terrorists understand the value of open-source information about U.S. intelligence that helps them counter it.  There can no longer be any doubt that publicly available information about U.S. intelligence is highly prized by adversaries who are targets of U.S. intelligence operations.  And the more detailed the better it is.  The value of this kind of information to adversaries—namely, classified intelligence that has been compromised in unauthorized press disclosures—is that it may facilitate countermeasures to sensitive sources and methods whose very effectiveness depends on secrecy and our success in protecting them. 

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION SHELL GAME 

A comprehensive explanation of Iraq’s D&D programs surrounding the period before Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF) has yet to be written.  With the perspective of hindsight, it is clear that it wreaked major distortions on U.S. and Western intelligence assessments about Iraqi WMD.  The effects resulted in poor collection and faulty analysis and even unintended consequences for a wily dictator playing a dangerous game. 

First, Iraq’s countermeasures to intelligence collection operations greatly reduced their effectiveness.  The second of roughly a dozen key judgments from the flawed National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraqi WMD published in October 2002 reads in its declassified form as follows:

We judge that we are seeing only a portion of Iraq’s WMD efforts, owing to Baghdad’s vigorous denial and deception efforts.  Revelations after the Gulf war starkly demonstrate the extensive efforts undertaken by Iraq to deny information.  We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD programs.10   

This key point is often lost on readers who do not work in intelligence and especially on those who do not fully grasp the implications of successful D&D.  When the NIE stipulates “we lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD programs,” it means that thelack of intelligence did not happen by accident, but rather on purpose.  It specifically acknowledges Iraqi D&D—in this case, denial—as one of the important causes of incomplete intelligence on this significant international security issue.  The Silberman-Robb WMD Commission, established by the President to examine the reasons for the intelligence failures on the missing weapons, concluded that Iraqi D&D programs had successfully hampered U.S. intelligence in both human and technical collection and in analysis.11

The effectiveness of Iraqi D&D had been fairly well understood in the West for a long time.  Former Iraq nuclear weapons inspector and first DCI Special Adviser to the post-war Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, wrote of the importance of Iraq’s D&D programs in the mid-1990s.12  As late as 1999, UNSCOM Senior Adviser Tim Trevan also highlighted the Saddam Hussein regime’s extensive program and capabilities to conceal evidence of WMD from UN inspectors.13  And more recently, George Tenet, then Director of Central Intelligence during the run-up to OIF, in a post-OIF speech at Georgetown University, specifically cited reporting from a sensitive Iraqi source who had direct access to Saddam Hussein and his inner circle.  The source explained that Iraq knew the inspectors’ weak points and knew how to take advantage of such weaknesses in the inspection process.  He further explained that Iraq had an elaborate plan to deceive the inspectors and ensure that prohibited items would never be found.14  Iraq’s far-ranging D&D capabilities were aimed squarely at neutralizing human and technical intelligence and did much to blunt both the UN inspection process and the effectiveness of U.S. and other intelligence services as well. 

Second, the effects on analysis were every bit as corrupting as they were on collection.  In the absence of information, analysts can draw different conclusions.  In this case, while acknowledging, as the key judgment cited previously does, that collection was poor and key information was missing, it remains for analysts to interpret what that means.  U.S. analysts concluded that the dearth of collection on WMD meant that Iraq must have had the weapons even if we were not seeing them.  In fact, not seeing them seemed to provide evidence that Iraq had them!  The logic was impeccable.  We know that Saddam Hussein had them in the past; he is a lying and evil-intentioned dictator; and his D&D efforts in all WMD-related areas are pervasive.  Iraq’s effective D&D, therefore, is evidence for a weapons program, not against it.15 

Finally, with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that Saddam Hussein’s extensive D&D program did not conceal WMD after the early 1990s as none was there to hide.  But neither was it intended—even if it had these effects—to fool the West into thinking that he had them when he did not.  Rather, continuing the major D&D effort after the weapons had been destroyed seems to have been a policy of calculated ambiguity designed (perhaps poorly conceived, given its ultimate failure) to purvey contradictory messages to multiple audiences.  In fact, he had told the UN and the West repeatedly that he had destroyed all his weapons.  We now know that was true.16  But he also wanted to sow doubt, especially among his internal threats (the Kurds and the Shiites) and to his external threats (Israel and Iran) by feeding their suspicions that he still retained them.  The D&D program that had successfully enfeebled UN inspections and Western intelligence was a necessary pillar for his edifice of calculated ambiguity that helped sustain his power against enemies at home and abroad for the turbulent decade that followed his abortive invasion of Kuwait.  He implied the continuing existence of WMD through a D&D program that in actuality had successfully concealed their destruction.  This profound irony that came at the West’s expense also undid the dictator who fooled them, as he fooled himself.  His sophisticated D&D capabilities first delayed—then hastened—his demise with the launching of OIF largely under a WMD justification.   

DEFEATING DENIAL AND DECEPTION 

The U.S. and Western intelligence failures in Iraq drive home the point that the effectiveness of intelligence depends heavily on its ability to defeat an adversary’s D&Dprograms.  Iraq’s D&D programs ranked among the world’s best in 2003.  The D&D challenges posed today by such countries as China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia are at least as difficult as Iraq’s, or more so.  They have shown in varying degrees an adaptive capacity to evade or mislead a range of intelligence collection techniques and activities that they should not know about and that require in some cases a fairly sophisticated level of understanding to counter.  Improved intelligence effectiveness against such adversaries will require a new level of Western adaptation to defeat their evolving D&D capabilities.

Where do adversaries acquire information about Western intelligence?  One important source, of course, is espionage.  Major spies have passed sensitive and classified information to hostile countries such as Russia that have certainly helped them develop countermeasures to intelligence collection activities.  Espionage emphasizes the point that effective intelligence is highly dependent on effective counterintelligence (CI), and that good CI is a vital weapon in the counter-D&D arsenal. 

Many nations and non-state actors such as terrorists have also developed impressive D&D capabilities to blunt secret intelligence collection that may be based on information that did not come from spies.  Key adversaries increasingly exploit a whole range of information sources that provide them with assorted facts, clues, and insights about how secret intelligence works.  Equally important as espionage are intelligence disclosures that also reveal information which facilitates D&D.  Such disclosures are categorized as unauthorized and authorized.17 

Unauthorized disclosures typically refer to “leaks” of intelligence information that frequently appear in the open press.  The most damaging leaks are those that compromise intelligence sources and methods or specific collection operations.  We know that key adversaries treat the open press as a potentially vital source of information about intelligence, including how intelligence works (or does not work) against them.  Oftentimes, information from press leaks can be sufficiently detailed to be of D&D value to adversaries.18 

Authorized disclosures can also result in unanticipated leaking of information from legitimate classified briefings for a variety of national and international audiences that expose sensitive sources and methods to intelligence targets not authorized to have such information.  This disclosure results from sloppy handling of sources and methods information or from an inadequate realization of just how fragile or sensitive some sources and methods really are.  Nations that want better intelligence, that is, intelligence techniques that will defeat an adversary’s D&D capabilities, need to do a better job of stemming the flow of harmful disclosures that damage sensitive sources and methods.  

IMPLICATIONS 

How can Western intelligence do better in adapting to the substantial and growing D&D capabilities of our adversaries?  The key adaptation imperatives can be grouped into intelligence collection and analysis. 

Collection

Intelligence collectors must give significant new emphasis to protecting their sources and methods, to designing better agility into collection techniques, to validating clandestinely acquired information, and to closing denial-induced collection gaps.

Intelligence services must do better to protect their sensitive sources and methods from harmful authorized and unauthorized disclosures.  D&D programs of our adversaries feed on this kind of information.  Intelligence techniques that suffer compromises may become useless, at least against those adversaries who have learned how to counter them.  In a word, fragile collection techniques are also perishable.   If exposed, they can perish.  The sine qua non for countering adversarial D&D is sound protection of sources and methods. 

Intelligence collection techniques require more agility and nimbleness than ever before.  As adversaries learn about, then adapt to, intelligence collection in this information age, more rapid intelligence recovery is required.  If a proposed sensor or intelligence collection technique cannot demonstrate some capacity for agility and cannot survive some level of unwanted exposure, its longer-term utility is limited.  It may even be counterproductive.  A senior U.S. defense official has emphasized the necessity of pursuing technological breakthroughs in sensor and platform development.19  Such techniques will require strict protection from unwanted or damaging disclosures or compromises.   

Sources of intelligence information require better vetting than ever before.  The need to apply more rigorous scrutiny to both human and technical sources is a key requirement for better intelligence adaptability to D&D.  Of course, no intelligence service ever takes information at face value from any source.  But sophisticated adversary D&D techniques can be subtle and insidious, and Western intelligence services require even better counter-D&D techniques that are fully embedded in the intelligence vetting process of all their collection activities.20

The effectiveness of denial techniques of our adversaries is often better than it seems.  As we come to appreciate the impact of key gaps in our information that result from effective denial, both collectors and analysts need a better understanding of unproductive or unsuccessful collection operations in all disciplines and the reasons why they are not productive.  Overcoming key intelligence gaps produced by adversaries’ denial activities requires much more effective counter-denial collection approaches if they are to succeed.  

Analysis

Intelligence analysts must master counter-D&D understanding and skills, learn to assess the impact of missing information on their analytical judgments, develop significant expertise in the collection disciplines, and adjust for unwarranted dependency on poor information.

Analysts require a much better understanding of adversarial D&D capabilitiesthan they routinely exhibit.  Understanding the extent to which an adversary comprehends and seeks to counter intelligence collection activities is a minimal requirement if analysts are to be expected to adjust for, or to properly take into account, the impact of D&D on intelligence.  If they do not understand an adversary’s D&D capabilities, they cannot be expected to understand how effective their nation’s intelligence will be when working against that adversary.  Analysts who are assigned a specific country or non-state actor account should make it their first priority to learn all they can about the D&D capabilities that their assigned target can mount against the specific collection disciplines that produce intelligence on that target.

Analysts need a much better understanding of the impact of intelligence denialon their analysis.  When denial programs of our key adversaries succeed against the major collection disciplines, the result is that intelligence sought is intelligence denied.  We are left with “missing information.”  But even when we know that certain missing information is the result of effective denial, the impact of that denial on analytical processes and findings is often poorly understood.  No one doubts that intelligence findings about any difficult issue (e.g., in terrorism, WMD, or warning) would be different if more and better information had been collected, but the potential impact on analysis of important information that is not collected can be serious.  The failure with Iraqi WMD demonstrates that convincingly.  Analysts must apply more rigorous techniques (such as Analysis of Competing Hypotheses21) to help them identify the impact that missing information may be having on their analysis in order to improve the reliability of their results. 

Analysts require a far better understanding of their dependency on intelligence collection. Briefly, when collection succeeds, the probability that analysis will also succeed increases significantly.  When collection fails—as it did against al Qaeda before 9/11 and against Iraq before OIF—the probability increases significantly that analysis too will fail.  Analysts who do not fully understand the broad range of intelligence collection capabilities as well as collection limitations, or their enormous dependency on having this special expertise, are impaired.  They thus stand at the low end of a tilted playing field, and their likely success against smart adversaries with good D&D capabilities is greatly diminished.22 

Analysts require a far better understanding of their dependency on only one or a few key pieces of information.  In certain instances, the whole analysis of a complex problem may crumble if a key piece of evidence is removed.  If that key datum is unreliable, fabricated, or tenuous—and the analysts are not fully witting of its tenuousness or of its potentially exaggerated impact—their analysis is likely to be wrong.  Errors in analysis can sometimes be traced to exaggerated dependence on poor evidence.23  As D&D operations are a major source of missing evidence, they can also be source of poor evidence. 

Finally, we should ask whether a feasible adaptation strategy for improved counter-D&D among allies suggests a need for greater discussions about D&D capabilities of common adversaries.  Not all will agree on how to treat this complex issue.  In principle, a common understanding and shared mission to counter adversaries’ D&D capabilities deserves closer consideration among NATO members’ intelligence services and among other like-minded nations.  If we all elevate the importance of better collection and analysis of counter-D&D intelligence, then improved cooperation may contribute to the common goal of defeating adversaries’ D&D.  This adaptation strategy must be done smartly.  Intelligence partners also appreciate—perhaps more than ever before in this environment of greater D&D—why any sensitive collection advantages require all our efforts to protect those advantages and why robust protection of productive sources and methods remains the best guarantee that they will continue to be productive.

Charles Darwin’s fundamental insight about how species survive or go extinct applies well to modern intelligence.  Like species that learn to survive changes that threaten their extinction, successful intelligence will also require successful adaptation to its own changing environment.  As targets of Western intelligence use D&D to assist their own survival, they necessarily alter our intelligence environment.  We must, in turn, adapt our intelligence strategies to better confront the new challenges posed by the growing D&D capabilities of these targets.  In this age-old cycle of competition between hiders and finders, Western finders will improve their prospects for success against such hiders as international terrorists and proliferators of WMD through superior intelligence adaptation strategies.

Notes