Intelligence in the 21st Century

Published July 5, 2007

Thanks for the chance to come down and talk a little bit about both of my lives: my life as an Air Force officer and my life as an intelligence officer. And what I've proposed to do in my remarks--and we'll leave some time for questions at the end--is to try to describe how those two lives have intersected and intertwined with regard to the craft of intelligence, but particularly the craft of intelligence as it relates to an Airman and to the Air Force. So, I'm not speaking just as CIA Director, but as a career Airman as well.

To begin, it's no exaggeration, I think, to say that intelligence is at the nexus of every major security challenge facing our nation today. You're talking about the global threat from al Qaeda, the influence of Iran and the Middle East, the growing economic strength of China, the growing influence of India, the intentions of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. In every one of those instances, the need for timely, accurate, comprehensive information is almost unprecedented. This shift, this rising demand for intelligence, corresponds to some changing landscape in the world as we know it.

Now, it goes as a truism, you know the Cold War's over, we've got to change Cold War paradigms and so on, but sometimes those phrases, those labels, they're substitutes for thought rather than deep, drilling-down thinking. So, bear with me a minute, and I don't want you to tune out when I say the Cold War's over, but I want you to bear with me as I discuss some of the implications of that very fact.

In the Cold War, the target of American intelligence was the Soviet Union, the nation state, conventional interests, territory to defend. When we assess the dangers that the Soviets posed, my community, both the Air Force and the intelligence community, we tracked troop movements, fighter wings, ICBMs, big stuff. That's the way I would characterize all of those. In that "find, fix, finish" thing, which anybody in the profession of arms has to master, the enemy was easy to find. He was just hard to finish. Intelligence was important, make no mistake, we were fully employed back there in the 1970s and 1980s. It was important, but it was overshadowed by the need for firepower. In the war on terrorism, that equation is reversed. Our enemy is easy to finish, he's just very, very hard to find.

Today, we're looking for individuals or small groups: groups planning suicide bombings; running violent jihadist Web sites; sending foreign fighters into Iraq; acting as conduits between al Qaeda and potential nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons experts. We can see why the drive for intelligence is paramount in this post-9/11 world. Our mission as intelligence officers is to locate the threat, identify precisely who it is and what their intentions are so that we can bring the full resources and capabilities of our nation to bear before the enemy strikes.

Let me underscore this: this is the fundamental shift in how we go about ensuring the nation's security, in this "find, fix, finish" thing. For most of, certainly, my professional life, most of our work was out there on fix and finish. Find was important, but the really hard job was finishing. The world has turned upside down. It's all about "find." The finishing is relatively easy. This has infinite numbers of ramifications. Now, I'll just give you one: when we talk about classified information getting into the public domain it upsets many of us. But the argument usually given is that, look, we'd never do anything that would put American forces at risk. We're not revealing troop movements or operational plans. Do you see where that's trapped in to Cold War thinking?

Back in the Cold War it was the troop movements and operational plans that were the hardest-to-do function. In this world it's the finding that's the hardest-to-do function, it's the intelligence thing. And we now have to treat those sources and methods with the same almost sacred respect we treated the secrecy of troops movements and operational plans in the '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s, because it's those things at the front-end, the fine point, that have become the critical piece of that "find, fix, finish" equation.

There's another important plot line to consider as we talk about intelligence in this new century. It runs parallel to some of the trends I've already mentioned and it has to do with the way the Air Force views intelligence. As I said, I've grown up in Air Force intelligence; as I said, I consider myself an Airman first, but because of my assignments at NSA, and at the DNI, and now at CIA, I think I've got a unique vantage point. I've seen an important shift in how we as an Air Force think about intelligence. It comes down to this: intelligence is not a support activity. Intelligence is inherently operational. And it's not just because of that "find, fix, and finish" equation I just gave you.

I had a conversation with Charlie Holland (Retired Air Force General Charles Holland), who at the time was Commander of Special Operations Command, Charlie was a good friend; we were in Capstone (General and Flag Officer Course) together; our trip was through Latin America. He and I jogged through all the capitals of Latin America on that trip. Now, this is after the war started, so probably late 2001 - early 2002. I'm down at Tampa, Charlie was gracious, we didn't have to go out to eat; he'd just invite us over to the house. There were three or four of us there, and by about dessert Charlie was talking to the intelligence guy and getting a little forceful in his gestures and just kind of tapping the table, "Mike, I need actionable intelligence, I need actionable intelligence, I need actionable intelligence." I figured Charlie would never be on a promotion board that I cared about again, and so part of my body, this one, engaged before this one was fully involved and I blurted out, "Charlie, let me give you a new paradigm. You give me a little action, I'll give you a lot more intelligence."

We have, in the War on Terrorism, conducted what we would define as traditional operational activity, with the sole purpose of generating information that we could collect. We've gone kinetic in order to force the enemy to take actions that would enable us to learn about the enemy. That is another reverse of the equation, where the intelligence thing was what you did before you got really mad at somebody. Here, we're using boots on the ground in order to create opportunities for intelligence. In other words, the J3 (operations) is conducting a support activity for the J2 (intelligence).

Another point: as a nation, our warfighting doctrine is all about precision. As a fighting force, our military at large--but especially our Air Force--has essentially given up mass. We try to recreate the effects of mass by using precision. That has the ancillary benefits, and they're very important, of sparing innocent lives, minimizing damage to property and infrastructure, and so on. That's a tremendous advantage.

I know Dave Deptula [Lt. Gen. David Deptula] was one of your earlier speakers here. Dave used to work for me, and Dave had this chart that he used to describe the effects of precision on airpower doctrine. He'd show World War II, Vietnam, and today, and what it would take to have a 90-percent probability that a target about the size of this room wouldn't be here after the strike. Okay? 90-percent PK. According to Dave's chart, we would need about 800 B-17 sorties, all of them targeted on this room, to have a 90-percent probability, tomorrow morning, that you'd have to look for another venue for next month's meeting. In Vietnam, we could get that 90-percent PK, that's .9 PK, with about 75 F-4s. Today, one-half the payload of an F-117, or even a smaller fraction of the payload of a B-2 or B-1, operating with JDAMS (Joint Direct Attack Munitions), to have a higher than .9 PK that this target's destroyed.

But, here's the issue: our weapons are only as precise as the intelligence that guides them. So, in order to get that .9 PK, I've got to know that it's this room, in this building, in this town, that we really want to have destroyed. That puts an awful lot of pressure on intelligence officers, both military and civilian. Since 9/11, the President, Congress, the American people, have actually been very generous to the intelligence community, and they've entrusted us with a sharply increased amount of resources. We've shifted our weight considerably, we continue to grow, we continue to adjust as the threat changes. We have to be more determined, more adaptive, more resilient than al Qaeda and the followers they inspire. We must constantly reassess and recalibrate our assumptions and our tactics.

This is a high-speed war; opportunities appear and disappear rapidly. It puts a high premium, like the Congressman said, on collaboration and flexibility. Under John Negroponte (former Director of National Intelligence, now Deputy Secretary of State), now under Mike McConnell (Retired Navy Vice Admiral John Michael "Mike" McConnell, Director of National Intelligence) we've been working very hard to make the IC, or the intelligence community, a more closely integrated enterprise. Partnerships are the rule, not the exception. The strengths of one agency can be combined with the strengths of another, and we can be training all of that on a target swiftly and effectively. My agency, my current agency, brings to that effort, that overall effort, an unequalled expertise in human intelligence. That's our lane in this intelligence-community road.

The last five-and-a-half years have shown us time and time again the best sources of information on terrorists--remember that target: hard to find, down into individuals and small cells, very secretive--the best sources of information on that kind of target is the target themselves. The best source of information on terrorist groups and their plans are terrorists. We in the intelligence community often compare our work to putting together the pieces of a puzzle, the popular metaphor is connecting the dots, but putting the pieces of a puzzle together works very well, too. If you've ever done that--you're on the Outer Banks, you're on the Eastern Shore, it's a rainy day, you go into the closet, the house you're renting has those in there, you pull them out, you dump them down, and you start working. Imagine doing that if they're in a plastic bag and not in the box. Imagine doing that if you've never seen the top of the puzzle box. That's our work. That's what we do.

We're greatly benefited when we can have a chat with someone who has seen the top of the puzzle box. We have to find the terrorist who's seen that picture. He knows the players, the methods, the plans of his co-conspirators. He and others like him give us not just a couple of the missing puzzle pieces; he gives us a view of the overall picture we're trying to recreate. That is, frankly, why the CIA's detention and interrogation program for high-value detainees has been such a magnificent high-payoff program for the security of the United States. Those guys by definition, you don't get into this program unless we are convinced you've seen the top of the box.

Let me underscore a theme I mentioned earlier, the inherently operational nature of intelligence today. Think of where intelligence officers and their sources must now go to get the information our country needs. They have to be on the ground in some of the most dangerous and inhospitable places on earth, outside the safety of the Green Zone and along that lawless frontier that separates Afghanistan and Pakistan. So, when I see the occasional press report about CIA folks hunkered down inside the Green Zone or exhausting their library of DVDs because they're not able to do anything else, don't believe it for a minute. These brave Americans are out there in harm's way. Of course, we serve alongside the other brave Americans in harm's way, our warfighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, but CIA's counterterrorism operations go beyond the clearly-defined war zones.

With crucial help from allies, we find today's recruiters and tomorrow's operatives in storefront mosques, Internet points, and community centers throughout Europe, Southeast Asia, and North Africa. We have to disrupt the routes used by al Qaeda couriers over land, by its financiers over wires, and by its propagandists over the Web. We have to penetrate the networks that smuggle people, smuggle weapons, and smuggle a hateful ideology across international borders. Phone conversations, computer disks, written documents, pocket litter, financial records, family trees, all of these things are collected and exploited for intelligence value.

We have never broken--never is a big word--you hardly ever, I don't know of any examples of when we have broken up a terrorist plot by a single report or a single source. No one person, no captured hard drive, no one intercept tells us everything we need to know about the enemy. You collect those many bits and pieces together, string them together to drive further operations, remember? Operations in order to generate more information, paint a clearer picture of the target, a picture of violent Islamic extremism. That's what we do.

The bottom line is that intelligence operations in the 21st century do more than just inform policy, we create opportunity. When the President announced in September that 14 terrorists had been transferred from our custody oversees into military custody at Guantanamo, he explained--follow this plot line--he explained that Abu Zubayda, a senior al Qaeda operative caught in 2002, led to the capture of 9/11-mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, and his lieutenant Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Information from KSM, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, in turn led to the disruption of a terrorist network led by Hambali in Southeast Asia. The information from KSM refocused our collection and led to very time-sensitive leads that our case officers in the field exploited almost immediately. In some cases, we had only hours to act.

That's the way it works. That's the way it works in this war. And when the window opens, when you have the opportunity, and the information is promising, the partnership between intelligence, the military, and law enforcement becomes critically important. Every fighter ready-room I've been in my Air Force career has a sign somewhere in it that says "speed is life." Well, that applies to this community as well. The operation that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi last year was a good example. He'd been in our crosshairs before, but had narrowly escaped; that's "we" plural, the American security establishment, Joint Special Operations Command, "Big Army," the intelligence community. We learned from experience, we adapted, and about a year ago, solid intelligence led Special Operations Forces to a safe house near Baqubah--in the news this morning, I should remind you. Only a short time later two 500-pound bombs from an Air Force F-16 ended the hunt for the most wanted man in Iraq. Stan McChrystal, who leads JSOC, later sent this short note, thanking the men and women of CIA for their contribution in the Zarqawi operation. He said CIA's expertise in, quote, "analysis, targeting, and geo-location" were absolutely critical in getting AMZ.

Now, I'm sure he sent several notes, because this was really a team effort that enabled us to do this. When the different disciplines come together, when analysts and operators are indistinguishable, our chances for success increase dramatically. Last fall, CIA paramilitary officers and JSOC forces worked together in Konar Province, Afghanistan, to capture a Taliban insurgent who had been involved in an attack that killed 11 Navy SEALs and 8 Army aviators in June of 2005. Completely joint, from command and control to the action elements, to security around the target, driven by a mix of both human and technical intelligence... those are just two stories, the one in Konar... the one with AMZ, from the front line of the war on terror. They give you a sense of how things work when they work. These victories are crucial to our success on the battlefield and to our safety here at home.

Tactical counts, these operational things, are absolutely necessary, and very satisfying I might add, but there's also a strategic side to this fight, and I need to talk to you for a few minutes about that as well. So, before I get to your questions, bear with me just a few more minutes to get beyond kind of the daily operational, impactful things and talk about this longer-term strategic view.

The War on Terrorism is, at its most fundamental level, a war of ideas. We cannot let ourselves lose sight of that, or lose sight of the reality that even the best intelligence and the smartest weapons, all those things I've just spent 15 minutes talking about, by themselves don't win this war. Today's most urgent and deadly threat stems from an extremist ideology that advocates indiscriminant violence in pursuit of social and political change. The Cold War, too, was an ideological struggle. But, in many ways, this one's tougher.

When you think back to the Cold War, communism, after all, was a Western philosophy written by a German writing in London. And, as much as we may be offended by the tenets of communism, we know its ideological roots; and since it was Western, had a certain degree of legitimacy saying it was wrong. Today is more challenging, because it has to do with the debate occurring inside one of the world's great religions. As a Western nation, our ability to affect that discussion is quite limited.

One key aspect of that debate is about the United States and its role, and make no mistake, our long-term security rests on defeating that world view I've just described--that world view responsible for creating terrorists who hate us more than they love life. Despite that challenge, this is taking place largely within a religion and a culture that is not our own. Despite that challenge, we still have to focus our nation's strength and influence on halting the spread of this deadly ideology using every tool we have: not only military, law enforcement, and intelligence, but diplomacy, economic development, education.

In this struggle, our allies in the Muslim world are absolutely essential if we're going to win this war of ideas. I spent a lot of my time working to strengthen the relationship CIA has to foreign intelligence and security services. They are absolutely vital partners in our success at the tactical level and when it comes to the strategic level, when it comes to fighting al Qaeda's extremist ideology, the partnership is even more important. Efforts to counter violent Islamic extremism are most effective when we are not the messenger.

The truth is we simply cannot be the sole face of a countervailing philosophy. Now again, American intelligence, and CIA in particular, has a crucial role. We've got analysts very hard at work to understand, deeply and comprehensively, al Qaeda's deadly worldview and the methods they use to radicalize young people. We've come up with ways to counter their messages, to disrupt their recruiting. We're working across agencies, we're working across governments, we've given those ideas wide distribution. We're taking action in ways that carry the best chances of success.

Still, there's much more to be done. This part of the fight has a tremendously long time-horizon. And frankly, success is going to require skills that remain in very, very short supply in our country. We've been at war now for about six years. Think back to that last one, the Cold War, pick a date when it started--let's pick 1949 or 1950-- Korean War, Paul Nitze, NSC 68, the Grand Strategy, a year or two earlier, George Kennan, the X-Article, right around 1950. Now fast-forward your TiVo six years there and you get to 1956 and look at American society and how American society had mobilized for this war, for the Cold War, think of the Soviet-studies programs at American universities, think of the Russian-language programs that existed on American universities.

Now go forward with your TiVo and run it forward from September 2001 to June 2007 and bring into your field of view the number of Islamic-studies programs, the number of Arabic-studies programs, the number of universities where you can get a good education in Urdu, Farsi, Pashtu, and you'll see a difference. We need experts the same way we needed experts 60 years ago. We need experts in Islamic studies, Middle Eastern history, the politics, religions, and cultures of North Africa and South Asia. It's a tall order and it's going to take our country, as a country, a while to grow and adjust in ways that help us understand and ultimately counter the root-causes of terrorism.

Let me take that broad strategic view for just a minute or two more, put it into context in my other life, put it in the context of the Air Force. As I said earlier, we started to recognize that intelligence is inherently operational. That recognition involves moving away, a bit, and here I'm a little critical but since I'm an airman and have grown up in this I get a little more room to run here, so bear with me. Move back from a mathematical approach that has been a powerful element of Air Force intelligence culture since AWPD 1, the air plan that defeated Hitler. Think of that plan--pure math. What does a modern economy look like? What are the key nodes in a modern economy? Do those key nodes, if destroyed, bring that economy to its knees? How many of the nodes exist in Germany? How many bombs are needed to destroy those key nodes? What's the circular-error probability of those bombs? What's the survival rate of aircraft getting in to drop those bombs? I've worked my way back now to the production-rate for B-17s and B-24s.

We still have a tendency to think that way. We still talk, and I know we do it as a metaphor, but we still talk about the end-product of intelligence being cursor-on-target. Back when I was at J2 in EUCOM (U.S. European Command), the worry there was the Bosnian thing; and it seemed like every Friday afternoon at about 4:00 the phone would ring and the J3 would come running in and say to me, "Mike, I just got a call from the Joint Staff, the Serbs are..." fill in the blank "...over-running Bihac, threatening Sarajevo, they got a UN convoy stopped somewhere near Mostar." And then the next sentence out of the J3's mouth was, "Give me a target list."

We need to move away from that mindset, to somehow guard against it more, because the success of Air Force intelligence, in fact the success of American intelligence as a whole, is going to be more dependent on our ability to comprehend the full dimension of the target, the full dimension of the situation. That means relying a bit more on the social sciences, as much as we have historically relied on the natural sciences.

And as a keeper of all sorts of intelligence, [CIA tends to a broad view], but I think that wide perspective needs to be more consistently practiced in more places so that military men and women, when they get that ring from the J3, "Hey, give me that list," can go up to the J3 or go up to the commander and say, "You know, I've been thinking, a JDAM dropping in Waziristan will have these physical and nonphysical effects as opposed to a JDAM dropping across the border in Paktika Province, Afghanistan." And, to do that well, we need military and intelligence officers with a deep and comprehensive understanding of cultures and societies very different from our own and very different from those we've had to study and understand from the past.

After all these years in the Air Force and intelligence, I can tell you we are an Air Force moving in the right direction. Remember effects-based targeting? Important shifts are occurring; changes that are making the Air Force and the nation smarter, stronger, and more effective. Today's war is unlike any this nation has ever fought and it requires us to apply our talents in ways perhaps we haven't even imagined yet. It also requires us to apply our laws and values, our ethics and judgment, in new and very difficult circumstances.
American intelligence officers must always play in fair territory, but let me share with you a conversation I had with one of our Senate overseers during my last confirmation hearing when he pressed me about obeying the law. I've got the stock answer to that: "Sure." And then we went to the next question and I said, "No, wait, I have to say more," and I came back to the Senator that asked me and I said "Senator, I need to fill in a bit more here. We're always going to play in fair territory, but we're going to be right up on the foul line and there's going to be chalk dust on our cleats, because that's the best way to protect America; if I'm playing back from that line, I'm not protecting America, I'm just protecting me." Thanks very much. I'd be happy to take your questions.