Intelligence is designed to give a policymaker, in particular the president,
an edge, to give him information that isn't available anywhere else that will
help inform policy decisions. There is human intelligence, which is basically
running agents, finding people who can tell you what you need to know.
There's signals intelligence, which is designed to intercept conversations.
Another key type of intelligence is satellite imagery, or geospatial.
Intelligence operations are clandestine activities designed to gain access to something
that someone else wants to keep hidden. It can be organizing an operation to
infiltrate a facility, perhaps a military installation, or it could be to
infiltrate a group. Or it could be to recruit a human asset.
There are basically two different levels of intelligence, tactical and strategic.
Tactical is, what's going to happen, when is it going to happen,
how can the U.S. government take action?
Strategic is more trying to put something into the broader context.
On the 9/11 case, the intelligence community largely got the strategic warning correct.
But they didn't get the tactical, the how and the when of the attack.
The intelligence cycle starts with requirements.
You're trying to figure out, what do you need to know.
The second stage would be collection: which potential source is likely to bring the best information available?
In most cases, it's going to be more than one source. The next step is prioritization and exploitation.
Far more intelligence is usually collected than can be processed.
What piece do you want to exploit for further examination?
Then it goes to analysis, and that's where you're trying to figure out,
what does this mean, why did this happen.
And then finally it gets disseminated to a policymaker.
Intelligence officers are not policymakers. They collect this information, they analyze it.
They then give it to policymakers and the policymakers make the decisions.
Intelligence in the United States goes back to George Washington,
one of the country's best spymasters. The modern intelligence community
has its roots in World War II and the Office of Strategic Services. They did amazing things during the war,
but they had many enemies in Washington, and two months after World War II ended,
the OSS was disbanded.
If you fast-forward to 1947, you had a
growing Soviet threat, Churchill warning of an iron curtain descending in Europe,
the partition in India, you had a civil war in China, and President Truman signed
the National Security Act, which established the National Security Council,
the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
The National Security Act of 1947 basically provided the structure for the
intelligence community through the Cold War period. It wasn't until 9/11, when the 9/11 Commission
made its recommendations to establish an Office of National Intelligence that
there was significant structural change inside of the community.
The reform act of 2004 established the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence.
The DNI was designed to focus on integrating seventeen different agencies
that make up the United States intelligence community, and in particular
on information sharing.
The intelligence community is always evolving and always faces new challenges.
I think that one of the biggest challenges is digitalization.
It makes the amount of information available to an analyst much broader.
The key question is, how do you find the right bit of information in that mass
amount of data? How do you prioritize and evaluate information provided by social media?
Another key challenge is going to be cyber. Which countries are engaged in this?
Which groups are engaged in this? What groups pose the greatest threat
to not only the U.S. government but to our critical infrastructure?
The biggest successes of the intelligence community really are in its ability
to protect U.S. citizens on a daily basis, to thwart and disrupt plots designed to
attack U.S. citizens or U.S. interests. Most of those wind up remaining secret
because they have to. The failures of the intelligence community
usually become public. And they should. They're examined; you look for
lessons learned, trying to make sure that you are in the best position
to protect the nation's security.