Attaining Perfect Intelligence – part 1
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Part I – Mistaken intelligence assessment
In the course of his interview to “60 Minutes” on CBS, President Barack Obama reiterated the NSA (National Security Agency) chief’s statement and admitted the US under-estimated the abilities of ISIS on the one hand, and over-estimated the strength of the Iraqi government and the ability of the Iraqi army on the other, to handle the current threat.
What makes Western intelligence bodies, which are among the biggest and most powerful worldwide, to fail over and over in predicting major world events in recent years? Why has the so-called “Arab Spring”, for all its political, social, military and geopolitical ramifications, escaped all intelligence services? How is it, that the West was surprised by the prevalence of al-Qaeda, ISIS, al Nussra and dozens of other Islamist terror organizations? What’s keeping intelligence organizations worldwide from properly assessing the processes of terror and Islam in Europe? And also… what did Israel’s intelligence community know about one of the most menacing threats to its very security – the tunnels dug right under Israel’s nose?
There is no one answer to all these questions, but the i-HLS newsdesk will set the record straight on the current history of modern intelligence, in three successive parts.
The intelligence “value chain” begins somewhere in the corridors of the various governments, which are tasked with designating – as leaders and decision makers who set each nation’s course and purposes – their adversaries, the intelligence they require on these threats and on the rest of the world, to rate the intelligence needs and prioritize them, to allocate funds, to oversee and, in due course, receive the intelligence output in the form of recommendations, reviews, position papers, draft motions and so on.
The first piece in the “value chain” at any intelligence organization that receives its marching orders from the top political echelon, is to plan the turning of the political order into intelligence, operational and technological action. At this initial stage, the heads of the intelligence organization that answer to the political leadership ‘translate’ the political needs for information into operational activities, into resource allocation, into technology application, into partnering in intelligence coalitions, into placing agents and to activate both foreign spies and local collaborators in the target area or country or in the specific location designated by powers that be.
The “working plan” as set by the planning echelon, the first piece in the intelligence “value chain”, will in fact include the translation into intelligence terms of the needs defined by the top political leadership, allocating the intelligence, technological and human resources, setting the budget, the milestones and the operative phases, the expected output at each and every stage of the working plan, troubleshooting (political, technological and other), as well as assessing the risks and the chances of each stage in the working plan.
The general elements of such a working plan will normally comprise the intelligence gathering tools (such as SIGINT, signals intelligence and OSINT, Open Source Intelligence), putting agents, spies and collaborators into action at the intelligence target and setting up an ad-hoc coalition for operational intelligence cooperation complete with shouldering the intelligence burden in exchange for a fair share of the intelligence output and ‘loot’.
The second part will consist of the intelligence “working plan”. The third, concluding part, will specify the stages of analysis, assessment and presentation before the political chiefs.
