The Black Art of Spying : Time to get smart about intelligence
Petera, Ralph
"The Black Art of Spying BY RALPH PETERA with the Atlantic Ocean separating us, my extended family's generations slipped out of synchronization.Thus, it was my cousin who served in World War II on...
...These things are true...
...As Shakespeare put it four centuries ago, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy...
...A maturation process is always required,even for a Mozart (of course, his talent was fairly mature by age 6 so we have to be flexible...
...Yet, we assume that anyone with a moderately high IQ can be trained in a few months to grasp an enemy's mentality, character, fears, intentions, hopes, beliefs, vulnerabilities and individuality, without even speaking his language...
...But are they relevant to anything...
...Contrary to the wisdom of Washington and the academic world, human beings are not rational creatures...
...And unlike the mechanical and electronic things of which we are so fond, human beings are not fully predictable or understandable, even to themselves...
...After all the calls are intercepted and the missiles counted, the bank accounts monitored and the nerve gas canisters located, we still need to look inside the minds, hearts and souls of other human beings...
...Well, it was and it wasn't...
...I offer these bits of family lore, first as a delayed JULY/AUGUST 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 43 answer to all those who, over the years, have asked me, "But how do you know that...
...Of course, when things go wrong we immediately hear cries from Congress and the pundits for intelligence reform...
...We tried to deal with the torrid world of flesh and blood as if it were made of fitted nuts and bolts...
...I am convinced that talent matters profoundly.We never would pretend that we could take people with no gift for music, no matter how great their raw intelligence, and turn them into fine pianists...
...Second, especially in the military, supervisors need to recognize that the most-talented young people tend to make more mistakes...
...Were we a weaker power, we would pay far more attention to intelligence since it is a great equalizer...
...D uring my bleak Washington years as an intelligence officer, no one dared to speak of the forces of love or hatred, or of any other emotion...
...they're often priggishly self-righteous and some-times obsessive:Arcane in their interests, they are, as the English used to put it, "not the club-able sort...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2002 Understanding, understanding, under-standing...
...they could do research, but they could not understand that sometimes the Excerpted from Beyond Terror...
...Get at the human beings, and the rest falls into line...
...But an effective intelligence system must learn to deal with the ineffable and dauntingly complex...
...This brief essay is concerned with the art of intelligence analysis, a field in which we insist that our product dare not be offensive to other religions, cultures, minorities or to either political party, just in case a White House staffer leaks it...
...I have always been skeptical of those prescribed by-the-numbers process-es taught in our intelligence schools...
...That, too, is anathema to a bureaucracy and to a military that still has an industrial-age, draft-era mentality within its personnel system...
...A tactical reconnaissance NCO, or AJklaerer—one of the most dangerous jobs in any army—he fought on the East-ern Front throughout the war, yet never was captured or seriously wounded.When we met at last, in the early 1980s, I encountered a vigorous, sinewy, skeptical Hessian farmer...
...Nor will we ever have an intelligence community composed solely of virtuosos—not everyone should be expected to be a soloist or even the first violin...
...It was especially laughable when a general or senior executive would say, "Now, I want you to think out of the box on this" What he meant was that he wanted to hear fresh justifications for his existing beliefs...
...Boldness, no matter its quality, was not wanted...
...How might we best go about building a better cadre of intelligence analysts and related personnel...
...Past a certain point, they only blind us...
...The last clarinetist in a quality orchestra has to have a dependable level of competence, or the sound of the entire orchestra suffers...
...In our technologically advanced culture, the power of systems easily seduces the multitude to believe that machines are, or soon will be, omnipotent—an enduring myth...
...We could have bombed Afghanistan for a year and had less effect than that produced by a few weeks of bombing guided by skilled human beings on the ground...
...Henry Ford did wonders for the American economy of his day, but his model of the workplace has done terrible and enduring damage to the American government and especially to our military...
...In the rest of the intelligence community, it means respect, but frankly it also means money...
...But personnel policies would have to be reformed at the same time, and in the absence of additional money for analysts, linguists and HUMINT specialists, personnel system reform becomes even more important...
...Those who insist that all things are knowable and that men and women act rationally have been on one side of the stadium of mankind for centuries, while the opposing bleachers have been filled by those who insist that even the light of reason casts dark shadows and that man's nature is never fully knowable...
...and second, to tease those already convinced that I've long been "off the reservation" Third, and most importantly, this tale-telling makes an extreme case for a proposition I have argued for years: that intelligence analysis, done well, requires not only rigorous training and much practical experience, but innate talent, a predisposition...
...or train about 2,500 more linguists in the nation's best language programs...
...Of course, by the time the overclassified reports and studies are made available to researchers, those who drafted and approved them will be long retired (after many promotions) or dead...
...Certainly, talent isn't everything...
...In the "zero-defects" military our generals and admirals continue to insist doesn't exist—although it shaped their every step—promising young analysts (and other soldiers) see their careers ended for minor infractions by commanders or other bosses afraid that, if unpunished, the incidents might damage their own future prospects...
...Briefings and discussions were as studiously gray as the men and women behind the podium or around the table, and all the human wilderness wherein past civilizations have perished—the furious, wild, destructive, often monstrous power of the human animal itself—was banished as a topic of discussion...
...Matter-of-factly, he told me he just "knew" where the enemy had been and where danger lay...
...As for science, the one thing we have not even tried to do with it is to use it to select potential analysts for their counter-scientific skills, for talents that would augment, even fulfill, the technological array we can bring to bear upon our enemies...
...Thank God, we've been looking for a replacement for Maestro Masur...
...In my own career, I repeatedly was encouraged to take jobs that had nothing to do with intelligence but which were considered the premier Military Intelligence positions...
...Intelligence work became a poor cousin of academic research, with all "new" products relying on the wisdom of that which had been published (safely) in the past...
...The world is too complex and too vast, and humanity too ingenious...
...When trusted, I could deliver to an uncanny degree,whether delineating Soviet war plans in Europe, locating a small special operations unit hiding in a vast area, or when alone in the Caucasus, sensing where I could and could not go...
...But that machinery simply has limits that only human beings can extend...
...Laws, customs and enlightened self-interest may drive men and women to behave predictably some of the time-in daylight, on a peaceful street, but in the dark night of the soul or in the stunning midnight of atrocity, the rational man dissolves into the feral, instinctive, vividly mad descendant of Cain...
...The system was at once superficially prim and intellectually slovenly...
...They're at least trying things out, instead of waiting cautiously for orders...
...Eliot's prematurely old paragon of timidity, "Alfred Prufrock, who asks himself eternally,"Dare I eat a peach...
...We view analysts as parts of the intelligence machine, and interchangeable parts, at that...
...That's a quality that never shows up on report cards...
...A good analyst, enraptured by his work, may actually have a better grasp ofwhat X will do than X does himself...
...They plotted out the templates, scratched their heads and got on a kicked-puppy look when the bad guys failed to behave as the Intelligence School at Fort Huachuca said they must...
...My point is that intelligence personnel, above all, cannot be judged by externals—but that is how our system likes to judge people since it's the easiest way...
...We will spend tens of billions of dollars on a net-work of satellites, then pay the young man or woman analyzing the data a salary far below that of a plumber...
...Intelligence work may sound seductive to a recent college graduate, but to a husband or wife in their mid-thirties with a mortgage on a townhouse in Springfield, Virginia, and two kids who are going to need college money in no time at all, life as a GS-11 with little prospect of serious advancement doesn't look quite so romantic...
...We neglect intelligence, not because it isn't vitally necessary, but because it is very hard to do well (and in the military because it's geek stuff—real men don't think...
...Mark your choice with a No...
...Bril46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002 liant analysts may be a chronic annoyance in the otherwise collegial staff meeting...
...But that is a rare enough quality by itself...
...Perhaps one day satellites will be able to locate every single one of our opponents...
...Published by Stackpole Books...
...It told you a bit about things, but not enough...
...Army infantry battalion, I asked my cousin how he had managed to survive on a battleground that consumed millions...
...To many, this will sound impossible...
...And insight had to be backed up with hard data, proven beyond a doubt, which is impossible in serious intelligence work...
...They may occasionally look like model soldiers or fashionistas (not hard, by Washington standards), but they also may look like they need help dressing themselves...
...No matter how much innate talent he or she might possess, a musician needs training, practice, experience and time to develop to his or her full potential...
...We understood nothing that mattered...
...JULY/AUGUST 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 47...
...Copyright 2002...
...But good analysts—the truly good ones—are rare and sometimes irreplaceable...
...Pretending that intelligence analysis is, if not fully quantifiable, at least subject to methodical processes has left us skilled at predicting the arrival time of a tank within range of our weapons, but helpless at seeing into the mind, heart and soul of the enemy leader who commands, perhaps, 5,000 tanks or 5,000 terrorists...
...It startled me, because I already had my own catalog of peculiar experiences, from exercises to real-world analysis, in which I, too, just seemed to know—beyond the logic of intelligence reports and indicators—what was going to happen...
...What will X do tomorrow...
...Nor could they say anything profound about religion or culture.The sexual devils that haunt entire civilizations, as the fear of female sexuality cripples the Islamic world, were beyond the pale of"serious" discussions...
...For those logic lovers out there, does it make sense for our premier intelligence organizations to have lower standards than a third-rate orchestra somewhere in the Midwest...
...But for now, the required steps are easy to list, but much harder to implement...
...Yet, I've known plenty of well-educated, knowledgeable, dedicated, brutally hard-working intelligence officers who were worthless when it came to serious intelligence analysis.They could make the office look good in a bureaucratic environment...
...The recent conflict in Afghanistan made this abundantly clear...
...In the military, this means appropriate promotions,yet in the Army's Military Intelligence branch, the quickest way to the top is to avoid actual intelligence jobs and build a career in management (disingenuously called "leader-ship...
...Despite my best efforts, guess which one the Army promoted and which one was passed over and forced out of uniform...
...Traits do run in families, from physical robustness, to mental acumen, to artistic talent...
...The intelligence produced was not bad, only mediocre...
...Without such understanding, we are reduced to the retaliatory exercise of power and expressions of regret for preventable losses...
...And perhaps all that I have written about the need for special abilities is nonsense...
...No one is ever fired for showing the boss satellite photos, but it is a rare man or woman who will back a subordinate based on the analyst's personal experience of foreign people and parts.Trust the machine and you will prosper, even as your country's needs go unsatisfied...
...But we need to try to understand that a good analyst's mind is wired a bit differently—he or she need not go into a trance and speak in tongues but had bet-ter have a richer, cannier vision of the world than that possessed by the average Washingtonian bureaucrat...
...Rare was the man or woman who even cared...
...My own form of cowardice was to avoid the NIC sessions whenever I could, while writing what I believed to be true in unclassified journals...
...If the government wants superior analysts and agents who speak multiple foreign languages and are willing to work overseas for years in particularly unpleasant circumstances, or to serve in that Heart of Darkness known as the Greater Washington Area, they should be paid at least as well as accountants by mid-career...
...The desired result was to make certain that we could, when faced with catastrophe, all point at one another as having agreed in the errant assessment: "This is what the entire intelligence community believed, based on the best information available...
...Today, I stand by all that I wrote 10 years ago, but do not believe our intelligence community could say the same of a fraction of the drivel it produced...
...The truth is that X himself does not know for certain...
...But the similarity of experience between my cousin, who survived the cruelest front of the worst war in history, and my own chocolate-soldier peacetime adventures still strikes me as more than coincidence...
...And we play the same tune over and over again...
...No intelligence structure will ever be perfect, at least not in our life-times...
...Nor do I underestimate the technological wonders at our disposal, for I have seen what these near-miraculous machines can do...
...But with an intelligence budget above 30 billion dollars a year, we certainly can do better than we are doing now A little more money just a tiny fraction of the budget lavished on technology—redirected to Human Intelligence operatives, to analysts and to linguists, could make an enormous difference...
...Foreign language ability is another human skill in chronically short supply in our intelligence community, and, personally, I believe analysts should speak the language or languages of their target region...
...In a capitalist society, you don't always get what you pay for, but you rarely get what you don't pay for...
...Now let me tell you what intelligence reform means to the JULY/AUGUST 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45 Hill: more money for the contractors who build the systems whose data we lack the man-power to analyze.There is always a constituency to buy expensive hardware, but there is no enduring constituency for the skilled human beings we sorely lack...
...We Americans pride ourselves on our individualism...
...In the same organization, I had an officer who looked more than a little rough around the edges, who couldn't keep a smirk off his face when the leadership came around barking platitudes, and who had a gut instinct for battlefields, psycholog, and plain old human nastiness that no training course could ever instill...
...But diplomas alone do not make musicians, and they do not make intelligence analysts.At present, we pretend that anyone with a college degree can play in the intelligence world (in the military, the degree is not even required).Try that at the NewYork Philharmonic: "Oh, you just graduated from Julliard...
...I also enjoyed the lack of a good education, which put me well ahead of officers whose vision of the world and humankind had been distorted by fine universities...
...These were good, often brave men whom the intelligence system had failed, earlier in their careers in Vietnam and continually in the Cold War...
...The frightened cling to the tangible, and the worried demand simple answers...
...There was great pressure on all participants and their organizations not to make a fuss...
...We lack a natural sense of pitch, of human harmonies and discords...
...world refuses to behave as they were taught it should behave...
...Analysis was the bottom rung, an entry-level job, and even the best analysts saw their work so neutered as it filtered up through the bureaucracy that the insights of greatest value often disappeared long before the paper or study reached the National Command Authority...
...I could no more explain my ability to read a situation than could my cousin...
...Sometimes, in the phantasmagoria of human hatred and violence, two and two not only make five, but ultimately add up to 27...
...And they should be defended, not hung out to dry, when they do get things wrong...
...But our habit of stamping high classifications on low-quality work to dignify it is yet another subject...
...Was it relevant that my paternal grandmother could "read" certain illness-es and cure them by the laying on of hands, while repeating incantations from the Scriptures...
...He was the one I would have relied on in wartime...
...First, analysts need to be valued, with the most talented identified, protected and groomed...
...Now, much of this was simply common sense, that least valued quality in armies and governments...
...We want to do intelligence cleanly, without embarrassment...
...Reprinted with permission...
...There is no lack of bravery in the ranks of our armed forces, but bureaucratic cowardice rules in our intelligence establishment (as well as at the highest levels of military command...
...I do not think weneed a horde of mystics and cabalists in Pentagon cubicles or gathering in covens in the cafeteria at the Defense Intelligence Agency...
...One of the problems we have with our intelligence services, by the way, is that they are run by minor con men, mere bookies...
...It's no accident that the one thing we're good at in intelligence is "reading externals," milking the value from surface data, whether targeting information or communications webs...
...or to be more accurate, to tell us what the few pertinent drops in the vast flood of information mean...
...The business of protecting our nation with the best possible intelligence cannot be done with faceless workers who function as interchangeable parts, no matter the cur-rent management fad inflicted upon them...
...We are always readier to embrace the individual who commits himself slavishly to the system as it exists than the one who devotes himself to improving the system, with the inevitable pain change brings...
...Perhaps we might inscribe that on the graves of our fellow citizens who died because of our inadequacy...
...Friends at the National Security Agency or Central Intelligence Agency routinely found themselves required to leave the analytical fields in which they were skilled and go into management in order to gain the promotions they needed to care for growing families...
...But at the most elementary, unshakable level, we have barely begun to under-stand the complexities, motivations and pat-terns of human behavior...
...More than any other figure, we all resembled T.S...
...Talented people are difficult, from start to finish.They require special care and feeding, not consistently, but often unexpectedly...
...We make far too much of loyalty and far too little of integrity, despite our wanton use of the latter word...
...This is surprisingly tough, since most of the managers in our intelligence system are bureaucrats who truly cannot tell the difference between compiled information and valuable intelligence-and all managers, in uniform or not, tend to promote in their own image...
...Statistics were preferred, whether dependable or not, and intercepts of satellite imagery were quite the thing...
...The point, you see, was not to get things right, but to avoid getting them demonstrably wrong, a critical distinction...
...Third, analysts have to be rewarded...
...When young, the smartest people often do the dumbest things...
...they could brief...
...But it is only impossible for those who rely upon technology to cope with humanity...
...Clandestine and covert intelligence work, if it is to be successful, often has to engage in practices unthinkable within America's borders...
...Certainly, what I frequently was able to do had no place in the careful processes devised to train intelligence analysts and officers, although formal techniques have their value, nor did I ever make an issue of how I "knew" things...
...Instead, we rely on strength and wealth to get us through...
...Did it matter that my anthracite-mining father, in his prime, could walk into a valley and say, "There's coal over there," and coal would be found where he pointed...
...But I doubt that they will ever be able to see into the human interior to tell us what our nemeses intend or hope or fear...
...We may diagram bunkers, bombs and entire armies, but we falter at under-standing the human soul...
...I believe so...
...As I have written, to the point of whining, it is a paradox of the 21st century that in this age of technological wonders the threats to our lives, wealth and order are fundamentally, crudely human...
...The mindset may protect careers but does little for our country...
...Perhaps all that is required is the willingness to see things as they truly are...
...The most wrongheaded words a manager in the intelligence world can mouth are, "You can't say that" We live in a world where every unpleasant truth must be spoken before it becomes far more unpleasant...
...My greatest challenge was convincing superiors who wanted proof that two and two made five...
...We must find ways to attract, identify, develop and retain analysts who have special potential...
...I offer no formula for analysis itself, beyond hard work, open eyes and dedication, without which even a great talent is meaningless...
...Nor will the human heart fit into our templates...
...Intelligence products were tailored to the available information, when we should have been demanding information to support our genuine intelligence needs...
...This is hardly a new tug-of-war...
...BLACK THARTOF B Y R A L P H P E T E R S W ith the Atlantic Ocean separating us, my extended family's generations slipped out of synchronization.Thus, it was my cousin who served in World War II on the German side...
...Q ur intelligence machinery does produce wonders upon occasion...
...It is always safer, bureaucratically, to rely on what the machine tells you, whether or not it is appropriate, than on the fallible human being who begs you to believe him...
...2 pencil and erase any errors completely...
...One need not have a mystical bent to accept that all men (and women) are not created equal when it comes to the ability to do intelligence work.We accept readily enough that specific talents are required to play major league sports, for a successful career in the arts, or even to become a great con man...
...Whenever my turn came up to represent the Army Staff at the National Intelligence Council, or NIC, whose meetings were held in the CIA's dull and spotless head-quarters, representatives of all the intelligence players would sit around a table, show off their knowledge of trivia, then agree, by the end of the session, on a lowest-common-denominator position...
...but I know too well that my country-men overestimate those same seductive devices...
...But the talent has to be there to begin with, whether we speak of artists or of analysts, and talent is as little understood as love or hope or the aching for God, or the indelible will to violence...
...In far too many intelligence organizations, someone becomes a specialist simply by virtue of assignment or duty position (Brazilian navy desk last week, terrorism expert today...
...Good instincts...
...Strategy in a Changing World, from which this article is excerpted...
...Machines may decipher a world of technical data, but only a gifted analyst can read the heart and soul of another human being...
...Is it such a stretch to imagine that an art form whose ultimate task it is to intuit the deep secrets of an enemy's mind, or soul, as I prefer to put it, might also require special talent...
...In one tactical assignment, I had a sub-ordinate officer who was superb in every respect that mattered to the institutional Army, but his instincts actually tipped into the negative column and he got even simple analytical calls whoppingly wrong...
...His new book is Beyond Terror...
...Ralph Peters retired from the US.Army as a lieutenant colonel to pursue a writing career...
...The status quo is perverse...
...Much has been made of September 11, 2001, as an intelligence failure...
...We have tried clumsily, if earnestly, to make intelligence into a science, when it is an art...
...Ultimately, intelligence work comes down to dealing with humanity...
...A dissenter might "take a footnote," but the practice was discouraged...
...Recognition of the indispensable contribution of talented individuals to our intelligence system is long overdue...
...Love, fear and hatred, not machines, are the stuff of which wars are made, whether we speak of terrorist jihads, campaigns of ethnic cleansing or conventional offensives (and do not underestimate the deadly power of love, whether felt toward a god, a people, a clan, a flag or an individual...
...Strategy in a Changing World by Ralph Peters...
...As a result, we have a network of intelligence services that can count bomb craters with great accuracy, but upon which we cannot count to warn us of "illogical" dangers, such as the brilliant, if ultimately counterproductive, strikes of September 11, 2001...
...Someone has to raise the curtain, turn the pages and work on the acoustics in the hall, but in the world of intelligence the stage-hands have taken over the performance...
...In the military sphere, the cost of one F-22 fighter, an utterly unnecessary, irrelevant system, could fund about 2,000 more analysts for five years...
...Understanding your enemy is the most effective weapon of all, but a weapon we rarely wield...
...In the long term, we might be able to develop sophisticated testing to identify certain deep traits...
...Theoretically, we petty creatures who came together to discuss the strategic future were the best and the brightest...
...Words to live by for the Director of Central Intelligence...
...The only innovations the system valued were those that saved money on office supplies...
...If only shiny boots indicated intellect, we would have the most brilliant military in history...
...Similarly, the literally immeasurable amounts of data generated by our technical systems have little meaning, or can actually deceive us, if we do not have skilled analysts with good instincts honed by experience to help us understand what it all means...
...We still hear that someone is a "born leader" as we wonder at his or her inexplicable charisma and quick grasp of necessary matters...
...That's another losing proposition...
...But, in the end, it is the internals that matter...
...But that, of course, would lie in the future, well beyond the numbing tests the military and government now use to guarantee the standardization of mediocrity...
...Certainly, science plays a mighty role within the larger boundaries of the art, from those fabulous collection systems, to communications, to computer analysis of technical data...
...Fortunately, this was in peacetime, at Fort Hood, where nothing much matters...
...Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of intelligence surveillance equipment available to us, our bombing remained largely ineffectual until special operations teams hit the ground, drew information from the local combatants, spotted targets with their own eyes and directed the airstrikes...
...But that is yet another issue that wants discussion at another time...
...Serving at the time as the intelligence officer in a U.S...
...The deed yet undone contains myriad alternatives...
...Most don't make it past the first cut...
...No one in the management chain wanted to risk being asked a question by his boss for which there was no documented answer...
...or to col-lapsed skyscrapers...
...But poor intelligence forces even a superpower to be reactive, when it should be leading, preventing and shaping...
...Of course, we will never have an intelligence system composed purely of virtuoso analysts and linguistic geniuses...
...Once within the system, the basic question is simple to articulate, if difficult to answer: How can we exploit the gifted, instead of rewarding the conformist...
...But we can do a great deal better than we have done up to now...
...Some survive by luck within organizations (almost invariably because of a far-sighted superior...
...And they don't play golf...
...But then, our intelligence community is, above all, a massive bureaucracy, and bureaucracies discourage risk-taking or excellence that does not match the models of the past.The motto of our vast intelligence establishment is "Play it safe...
...in fact, we were dreary bureaucrats, far less than the sum of our parts...
...Not even the finest intelligence organization, with highly developed cadres not only in the analytical field but in the other vital, difficult field of Human Intelligence, would be able to predict and prevent every event...
Vol. 35 • July 2002 • No. 4
