Intelligence on the Internet?

Topic

Discussion

The noted science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon once outraged the audience of a science fiction convention by declaring, "Ninety percent of science fiction is crap!" An uncomfortable silence settled upon the crowd after the initial gasp, then Sturgeon continued, "But then, ninety percent of anything is crap."

"Sturgeon’s Law," as it has come to be known among science fiction fans, is not only true of literature, but of information in general. Naturally, the source is an important consideration. Normally, one may presume The New York Times to be a more trusted source than The National Enquirer, for instance; however, The Times recently fired one of its journalists for plagiarism and for fabricating quotations and sources (Burghart 2003).

The problem is even worse on the Internet, which contains everything from the wisdom of philosophers to the ravings of seventeen-year-olds. Quite often the people who have the facility to create websites are people who do not have particularly good research skills. They don’t check their facts, don’t know the difference between primary and secondary sources, and don’t judge the credibility of sources; therefore much of the information on the Internet has the character of rumor. The following section provides a quick case study.

Tom Gangale, Internet(ional) Man of Mystery

I am a very web-visible person. I have created numerous websites during the past six years, I have contributed to others, and in still other cases people have referred to my work on their own websites. Google searches on "Thomas Gangale" and "Tom Gangale" result in a total of 405 hits. About 75% of these hits are on sites of my own authorship or of people with whom I have collaborated, while the remaining 25% are sites originated by others. The former represents a "control group" of data, while the latter is a data set representing the "experimental group." These websites are literally all over the map: Argentina, Australia, Britain, Canada, Hong Kong, Italy, the Netherlands, Niue (my knowledge of geography is pretty good, but I had to look this one up), Poland, Russia, and South Africa. What do people say about Gangale, and how reliable is it?

Even a couple of words can constitute a material misrepresentation. At the at the Second International Convention of the Mars Society, held at the University of Colorado, Boulder, August 12-15, 1999, I presented a paper on animal husbandry for a base on Mars (Gangale 1999). A week later, a report on my presentation appeared on Space.com (Clark 1999). Among the advantages of bringing the domestic rabbit to Mars, the article said it "tastes great." A year later, yet another story appeared on Spacekids.com regarding my presentation (Spacekids.com 2000), and it also said, "tastes great." In fact, my paper, which is available on the Internet for anyone to check, nowhere mentions the human consumption of rabbit, but because of this misrepresentation I have received impassioned email messages from animal welfare activists--dare I say, a rabid rabble of rabbit lovers. What is particularly galling is that I state in the paper, "My wife Gail and I have rescued over 200 abandoned rabbits since 1992, and have placed about 70% of them for adoption in permanent homes." This is hardly the sort of person who would say that rabbit "tastes great."

At the Founding Convention of the Mars Society, held at the University of Colorado, Boulder, August 13-16, 1998, I presented a paper investigating a class of orbits for a communication satellite to maintain contact between Earth and crews on Mars during the one-month outage due to solar conjunction (Gangale 1998). Shortly thereafter, the chairman of the Ohio chapter of the Mars Society reported, "I also attended Tom Gangale’s presentation on a Mars satellite system (MARSSAT) for assured communication with Piloted Missions to Mars. This, too, has received the NASA go-ahead (Czarnik 1998)." This makes it sound as though NASA is currently developing such a satellite system. I wish! It is true that a number of mission ops people from Johnson Space Center were enthusiastic about the concept, but the idea is sitting on the shelf collecting dust, along with the whole idea of sending people to Mars.

A couple of erroneous items on the Internet pertain to the development of a timekeeping system to be used on Mars once a permanent human presence is established there. A May 16, 2002 story by The Space Gazette contains a hyperlink to "The Darian Calendar - I. M. Levitt. (Space Gazette 2002)." I. M. Levitt was director of the Fels Planetarium in Philadelphia. He did indeed develop a Martian calendar, and even designed a mechanical clock/calendar, which a friend of his at the Hamilton Watch Company actually built. The device was demonstrated at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City (New York Times 1954) and was described in Levitt’s article in the May 1954 issue of Sky and Telescope (Levitt 1954).

Another report on the Internet states:

Presently I only know about one planet carrying a complete timing up to a calendar system: Mars. Due to several constraints people at JPL created and used the Darien [sic] calendar. It looks much like Earth’s but with clear differences. For example the day, "sol" is a bit longer than Earth’s. As far as I know the first use of the Darien [sic] calendar was on Viking missions. After that and until Pathfinder’s arrival it was nearly forgotten (Ektanoor 1999).

The Viking missions landed on Mars in 1976. Had Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) mission controllers and scientists used the Darian calendar as the timekeeping system for Mars, they would also have had to create the type of a time machine originally suggested by H. G. Wells. They would have had to travel forward in time ten years to 1986, when I published my first article on the Darian calendar in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (Gangale 1986). I named my invention in honor of my son Darius, who was born in 1981... five years after the Viking landings on Mars. Again, these facts are available on the Web for anyone to check.

The above case study shows how screwed up the "Martian chronicles" are, at least on the Internet.

Requested Information

This is not to say that the Internet is not a powerful research tool, only that information should be cross-checked with multiple sources whenever possible. Regarding the information requested for the topic of this essay, the following was obtained on the Web:

What was Operation Rosewood?

Operation Rosewood was a CIA operation to acquire the microfilm "war reserve" copy of the complete files of the DDR’s foreign intelligence service, the the Hauptverwaltung Aufklaerung (HVA), part of the Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit (MfS or Stasi). It was essentially a "walk-in job" by a group of Stasi generals who knew that there were three complete copies of Stasi files. The primary set of files was located at Stasi Normanenstrasse headquarters in Berlin, and a second set of paper files was stored at KGB headquarters in Moscow. The primary files were partially destroyed during a public demonstration that broke into Stasi headquarters during the collapse of the communist East German regime. However, an enterprising young US Naval Intelligence officer, who had established contact with Stasi officers, quickly arranged for a heist of the Normanenstrasse files that amounted to four truckloads of material. Operation Rosewood later acquired a complete microfilm set of Stasi records stored for safekeeping in a third Eastern European country. In case of war and the necessity to destroy the Normanenstrasse set of files, Stasi could recover this "war reserve," and would not be dependent on the KGB for access to its set of paper files stored in Moscow. The group of Stasi generals "walked in" and proposed to sell the "war reserve" to US intelligence. This was probably arranged through the Naval Intelligence contact. The CIA and the Stasi generals negotiated a deal valued at $1 million. In January 1999, the German government announced that the CIA would return the Operation Rosewood files (Schmidt 1999, Wolf 2000).

What is the name of the Angolan intelligence service?

In addition to the Directorate of Intelligence and Security (Direção de Informação e Segurança de Angola, or DISA), there are eight other Angolan agencies with intelligence functions (Moss 1977, CI-CE-CT.com 2003, 1upinfo.com 1989, Carnelian International n.d., Pacheco 1999). See Table 1.

What are the names of the State Department desk officers for Bulgaria, Georgia, and Peru? What are their office and home telephone numbers?

The Department of State website does not list desk officers for Bulgaria, Georgia, and Peru by name, but does give the following mail codes and telephone numbers (Department of State 2000):

Bulgaria (Sofia) EUR/SCE 647-0310
Georgia (Tblisi) EUR/CASA 647-6795
Peru (Lima) WHA/AND 647-3360

Elsewhere on the Department of State website (Department of State n.d.) are listed the directors and deputy director for the Office of Southeastern European Affairs (see Table 2), the Office of Caucasus and Central Asian Affairs (see Table 3), and the Office of Andean Affairs (see Table 4).

Alvin Rutledge is listed as the Bulgaria desk officer by two sources (Factbook.net 2001, Department of Commerce 2001):

U.S. Department of State
Bulgaria Desk Officer: Alvin Rutledge
Office of South Central European Affairs
Phone: (202) 647-0310
Fax: (202) 647-0555

Mark Asquino is listed as the desk officer for Georgia by one source (America-Georgia Business Council 2002). However, he is also listed as the U.S. Information Service’s public affairs officer for Uzbekistan by another source (Department of Commerce 2001a):

Mark Asquino, Public Affairs Officer
U.S. Information Service (USIS)
41 Buyuk Turon St., 2nd floor
Tashkent, Uzbekistan 700000
Tel: 998-71 133-70-96; Fax: 998-71 120-62-24

Richard Miles is listed as desk officer for Peru by one source (Department of Commerce 2001b):

U.S Department of State (Washington, D.C.)
2201 C Street N.W., Room 5906
Washington, D.C. 20520
Richard Miles, Peru Desk Officer
Tel: (202) 647-4177 Fax: (202) 647-2628

In no case is the home telephone number listed for a desk officer. However, searching for these names in the Washington, DC area (including Maryland and Virginia) using various search engines produced the results listed in Table 5. There is only one address listed for Mark Asquino. In the case of Alvin Rutledge, there are two possibilities; however, one address appears on only one search engine, while the other appears on four, making the latter more credible. The name Richard Miles produced eight addresses. Richard A Miles, CPA, can probably be eliminated as a possible State Department desk officer. Of the remaining possibilities, two addresses appear on five search engines, while the other five show up on no more than two search engines.

What are the major US military bases in Utah and where are they located?

Past and present military facilities in Utah are listed in Table 6 (the numerous sources listed in the table are not repeated in the "References" section of this paper). Figure 1 is a map of the area.

What was the real name of the spy code-named "Lucy?"

"Lucy" was the code name for Rudolf Roessler, based in Lucerne, Switzerland, who used his contacts in German intelligence (Abwehr) to provide the Soviet Union with information on Hitler’s invasion plan, Operation Barbarossa. Stalin ignored Roessler’s intelligence, with rather unfortunate results (Dworan 1995, Richelson 1995, 128).

Conclusion

Does the information collected in the previous section constitute intelligence in the formal sense? Lowenthal in part defines intelligence as "the process by which specific types of information important to national security are requested, collected, analyzed, and provided to policymakers (Lowenthal 2003, 8)." Some of the above information could be important to some nation’s security, and it was requested, collected, analyzed, and is being provided to the requester who, for the purpose of this exercise, qualifies as a policymaker (it is my sincere hope that one of the policy outcomes will be a grade of "A"). Some of the intelligence collected, however, is single-source (therefore unverified) and time-critical, to wit, the identities of the current desk officers for the three countries requested. For instance, is Mark Asquino currently the Georgia desk officer for the State Department or is he the USIS public affairs officer in Uzbekistan? Is he currently living in Washington, DC or in Tashkent? Further effort, possibly including surveillance, would be required to determine the residence of the Richard Miles who is (or was) the Peru desk officer. Regarding the intelligence provided on the military installations in Utah, is it precise enough for the policymaker? Should the target list be restricted to active bases? Should latitude-longitude coordinates be provided?

In addition to information on the Internet sometimes being of doubtful authenticity and sometimes being outdated, a final point is that what is on the Internet and elsewhere in the open source world is usually information that either no one has ever tried or is no longer trying to protect. While such information, once it has been determined to be accurate, can be valuable as background material, and can be used to put non-open source information in context as well as to judge its credibility, open source information cannot be a substitute for the specific types of information that are only available by covert means: the information that someone doesn’t want you to know, when you need to know it. For instance, in the same vein as the questions asked for this topic, the answers to the following are unlikely to be found in the open source world:

1. How were the code words Damon, Willow, and Yield related?

2. What is the exact nature of the Combined Services Support Program?

3. What is Osama bin Laden’s current home address and telephone number?

4. What are the major Iraqi biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons facilities and where are they located?

5. What were Ursala, Raquel, and Lori?

Senator Moynihan’s contention that 90-95% of what the US government needs to know to make intelligent policy choices is readily available from open sources is probably true, but is a simplistic, even fatuous statement. It is also true that 90-95% of what I need to know to obtain a Master’s degree is readily available without ever having studied for one: learning to speak one human language, becoming literate in it, learning how to do research, acquiring critical thinking skills, et cetera. Ninety to ninety-five percent of any task involves first having acquired a basic skill or information set. But all information is not created equal. Obtaining that last five or ten percent can increase the value of the first 90-95% many times. In determining the value of the total information set, one must assess how relevant, accurate, complete, and timely it is with regard to the objective at hand.

Tables and Figures

Table 1: Angolan Intelligence Community

Table 2: Office of Southeastern European Affairs

Table 3: Office of Caucasus and Central Asian Affairs

Table 4: Office of Andean Affairs

Table 5: Possible Home Addresses and Phone Numbers for Desk Officers

Table 6: US Military Facilities in Utah

References

1upinto.com. 1989. Angola: Internal security forces and organization. Internet. Available from http://www.1upinfo.com/country-guide-study/angola/angola186.html; accessed 12 May 2003.

America-Georgia Business Council. 2002. Fifth Annual Conference: Building economic security for Georgia, October 10-11, Tbilisi. Internet. Available from http://www.agbdc.com/listofparticipants.doc; accessed 12 May 2003.

Burghart, Tara. 2003. New York Times sorry for reporter’s ‘fraud.’ The Associated Press. Internet. Available from http://www.sltrib.com/2003/May/05112003/nation_w/55870.asp; accessed 11 May 2003.

Carnelian International. n.d. Angola: Internal security. Internet. Available from http://www.carnelian-international.com/angola/internal_security.htm; accessed 12 May 2003.

CI-CE-CT.com. 2003. Internet. Available from http://www.ci-ce-ct.com/intel_A-B.htm; accessed 11 May 2003.

Clark, Greg. 1999. Move over, rover. Space.com, 23 August. Internet. Available from http://www.space.com/news/rabbits_mars.html; accessed 11 May 2003.

Czarnik, Tamarak R. 1998. Ohio Chapter Mars Society newsletters. Internet. Available from http://mars.complete-isp.com/chapter.htm; accessed 11 May 2003.

Department of Commerce. 2001. Bulgaria country commercial guide FY 2002. Internet. Available from http://www.usatrade.gov/Website/CCG.nsf/CCGurl/CCG-BULGARIA2002-CH-11:-005CD8B1; accessed 12 May 2003.

Department of Commerce. 2001a. Uzbekistan country commercial guide FY 2002. Internet. Available from http://www.usatrade.gov/Website/CCG.nsf/CCGurl/CCG-UZBEKISTAN2002-CH-11:-005B3C2D; accessed 12 May 2003.

Department of Commerce. 2001b. Peru country commercial guide FY 2002. Internet. Available from http://www.usatrade.gov/Website/CCG.nsf/CCGurl/CCG-PERU2002-CH-11:-0071C00F; accessed 12 May 2003.

Department of State. n.d. Organizational directory. Internet. Available from http://foia.state.gov/mms/OrgDirectory/print_allorg.asp; accessed 11 May 2003.

Department of State. 2000. Department of State Country Offices. Internet. Available from http://www.state.gov/www/regions/country_offices.html; accessed 12 May 2003.

Dworan, Shale. 1995. Serving the KGB. The New York review of books. Volume 42, Number 4, 2 March. Internet. Available from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973; accessed 11 May 2003.

Ektanoor. 1999. What time zone? Internet. Available from http://www.slashdot.org/articles/99/10/27/155240.shtml; accessed 11 May 2003.

Factbook.net. 2001. Bulgaria country commercial guide FY2001: US and country contacts. Internet. Available from http://www.factbook.net/countryreports/bu/Bu_Contacts.htm; accessed 11 May 2003.

Gangale, Thomas. 1986. Martian standard time. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, June. Internet. Available from http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/5192/mst.html; accessed 11 May 2003.

Gangale, Thomas. 1998. MARSSAT: Assured communication with Mars, MAR 98-051, Proceedings of the founding convention of the Mars Society. San Diego, California. Univelt, Incorporated. Internet. Available from http://www.ops-alaska.com/marssat/index.htm; accessed 11 May 2003.

Gangale, Thomas. 1999. Rabbits on Mars: One giant leap. Presented at the Second International Convention of the Mars Society, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, August 12-15. Internet. Available from http://www.ops-alaska.com/lepus/index.htm; accessed 11 May 2003.

Levitt, I. M. 1954. Mars clock and calendar, Sky and telescope, May. Internet. Available from http://www.martiana.org/ms/other/levitt_frm.htm; accessed 11 May 2003.

Lowenthal, Mark M. 2003. Intelligence: From secrets to policy. Washington, DC. CQ Press.

Moss, Robert. 1977. Moscow’s next target in Africa. Sunday telegraph, 20 February. Internet. Available from http://home.wanadoo.nl/rhodesia/moss4.htm; accessed 12 May 2003.

New York Times. 1954. Mars clock in debut, 15 February. Internet. Available from http://www.martiana.org/ms/other/debut_frm.htm; accessed 11 May 2003.

Pacheco, Carlos. 1999. O caso de Angola: a omissão diante das violações aos direitos humanos. Jornal da tarde, 31 July. Internet. Available from http://www.jt.estadao.com.br/noticias/99/07/31/sa1.htm; accessed 12 May 2003.

Richelson, Jeffrey T. 1995. A century of spies: Intelligence in the twentieth century. New York, New York. Oxford University Press.

Schmidt, Olivier. 1999. Stasi files still "active" ... politically. Intelligence, N. 92, 25 January, p. 17. Internet. Available from http://www.blythe.org/Intelligence/readme/92sum; accessed 11 May 2003.

Space Gazette. 2002. The time of your life on Mars. 16 May. Internet. Available from http://www.hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archive/News/2002/News-2002-05-16.html; accessed 11 May 2003.

Spacekids.com. 2000. Woof, meow or ?? 23 October. Internet. Available from http://www.spacekids.com/spacenews/pets_mars_991123.html; accessed 11 May 2003.

Wolf, Markus. 2000. Ten years of German unification. National security and the future. Internet. Available from http://www.nsf-journal.hr/issues/v1_n2/wolf.htm; accessed 12 May 2003.