The Coming Rule Set Reset on Intelligence

Bifurcation of DoD model

As soon as 9/11 happened, I predicted the smoking memos would be found, the bipartisan investigation would blame the CIA and FBI primarily, and there would be an inevitable reorganization of the intelligence community.

Reference: "Bush Sees a Need For Reorganizing U.S. Intelligence: No Specific Plan Offered: His Remarks Come as 9/11 Panel Turns Attention to C.I.A. and F.B.I.," by David Johnston, New York Times, 13 Apr, p. A1.

None of these predictions were prescient or even extraordinary: this routine happens every time we suffer some stunning military defeatówhich 9/11 was even though the Pentagon feels it had nothing to do with it whatsoever.

Here's my new prediction: Louis Freeh and John Ashcroft collectively will be the favored scapegoats, and the result will be a new, special terrorism something or other that combines all these fabulous assets from a variety of agencies in this new special form/building/code/whatever. That new thing will invariably be isolated over time from the agencies from which those assets were originally drawn, as the mistrust and lack of cooperation among them resurfaces within months and all returns basically to what it was before (this scenario has already played out in one small form since 9/11, so this redux will simply be bigger and more public).

Keeping to my bifurcation of DoD model, here it what I believe should really happen: the clandestine and agent-oriented parts of CIA should move into a new and expanded Defense Intelligence Agency, along with the classified overhead (i.e., satellite) and listening (eavesdropping) agencies. All together, this still-classified organization should remain focused on warfighting issues (where we may fight), potential state-based threats (classic threats to include a hedging effort on China), and hunting down and killing terrorists and other dangerous non-state actors within the Gap (leaving the counter-terrorist stuff across the Core to law enforcement agencies like FBIówhich is wonderfully networked across the Core but completely absent from the Gap).

The analytical parts of CIA and the National Intelligence Council should be made completely unclassified in operation, greatly expanded and given more funding, and become the intell support agency to the emerging Sys Admin force, which is itself an unclassified force that moves progressively toward civilian law and under the purview of the International Criminal Court (unlike the Leviathan force).

That's my prescription: we make an unclassified version of CIA to support the Sys Admin force and we collect all the classified intelligence community assets and put them to work for the Leviathan force. That way we have an intelligence community that devoted to waging war and especially the global war on terrorism, but we also have an intelligence community that's devoted to waging peace.

And yes, I would keep a Chinese Wall (no pun intended) between the two communities, and I would enforce that firewall by making everything the Sys Admin-supporting intelligence agency does completely transparent, so all who interacted with it would know that if any info was passed onto the Leviathan intell community, everyone could be aware of that fact.