The Culture of Elitism in the American Intelligence Community and the Transnationalization of Jihad

Abstract

A motive force behind our waging war on Iraq is the events of September 11th, 2001. Following back the threads of those events leads us to examine the fitness of those agencies charged with producing intelligence to ensure the national security of the United States. And, what we find is that the quality of intelligence analysis and operations, and therefore analysts and operatives, is a function of intelligence community organizational cultures and recruitment practices that go back to the early histories of the CIA and FBI. The events of September 11th showed that a lot of useful intelligence had been missed and could continue to go missing for a long time to come. That is because we are experiencing the consequences of a “lost generation of human intelligence.” We are talking about intelligence collection at the human interface. This is opposed to technical intelligence, like imagery from spy satellites or information gained from gadgetry. Prior to just a few years ago, the recruitment practices of the American intelligence community favored the sons of well-off white men. Language requirements were also permitted to deteriorate. As a result, there is presently no substantial diversity of ethnicities, language and other skills, ages, gender, etc. in the American intelligence community. Because of the pedigree and socioeconomic fabric of the intelligence corps, in terms of analysts and operatives, what we had on hand in the years before September 11th, 2001 was an Army of unexpendable soldiers. What good is an Army of soldiers not willing to risk their lives behind the lines? A culture of elitism was in force among our intelligence resources on September 11th, 2001. Elitism extended to and was evident in the organizational cultures that had evolved within agencies like the CIA and FBI, creating rifts between those agencies and others.

One sociological viewpoint looks at social phenomena over a span of time and in the large frame (as opposed to a few “snapshots” of what a group of just a few people are doing). If we take this point-of-view, what can we see looking down on the events that have been cultivated in this culture of elitism? What are the larger consequences of this elitist stance? What do we see ahead? We are afraid we see a continued course of missteps that will galvanize a bloc of allies among those groups of people and societies throughout the world that are now only loosely connected by various forms of Islam.

The American intelligence community can benefit from hiring people from diverse backgrounds who can look at national security problems from different perspectives and produce more robust analyses than rich white boys who got their jobs from their daddies. Jihad is a transnational phenomenon by its very nature. If we don’t mitigate the forces of elitism and exclusivity in our intelligence community, then we can bet the Yankee dollar that jihad will transnationalize further and institutionalize, becoming a permanent feature in the global balance of power.

What are needed to offset that eventuality are a robust analytical function, the construction of a human intelligence collection capacity practically from the ground up, that can be interwoven with our technical intelligence collection capacity, and a clear understanding of the process of transnationalization among terror and marginal groups. All of this will require a rethinking of elitism and organizational cultures among those charged with national security.

In many ways, the United States helped create the situation that sees us trying to counteract a worldwide network of terror and that has led us to wage war in the Middle East and in Southwest Asia. We are interested in aspects of what some writers have called the un-intelligence of the intelligence community and foreign policy makers.

Before September 11th, there were at least 15 warnings about potential terrorist threats. A Federal Aviation Administration warning dated the 18th of April, 2001 cautioned airlines that Middle Eastern terrorists might try to hijack or blow up an American plane. The rationale we have heard about how well or how badly airlines and the Bush administration heeded those warnings is that the threats were too general, too ambiguous. Well, there is a reason threats come to the intelligence community in general and vague language. For example, terrorists often must use cell phones like everybody else. However, they are aware that intelligence agencies monitor electronic traffic, looking for signals in the ambient noise. Terrorists purposely use vague language to avoid creating a signal in the global buzz. Prior to September 11th, when terrorists were talking about having dreams about soccer matches, the metaphor was just passed over by those charged with picking the signal from the noise. Even when signals were distinguished from the noise, they were not analyzed as such until too late. Now, American counterterrorism experts say that communication intercepts, while vaguely worded, are more apt to be highly credible threat warnings, and the very detailed and specific threats passed on by individual informants are often far less reliable.

It should have been a rule-of-thumb in the American intelligence community before September 11th that the individual informant is likely to be unreliable. Informants try very hard to please their intelligence contacts, be it for reasons of monetary reward or some other gratification. It seems astonishing, however, that the more general warnings and their metaphorical language were not heeded more. However, to realize that would mean that a high-functioning human intelligence (HUMINT) capacity would have had to be in place. Such was not the case prior to 9/11. Until the “first” Gulf War, the agency did not have a single agent in Iraq or any of the Central Asian former Soviet republics. Also, the CIA had experienced a 40% cut in resources between 1989 and 1999 owing to the defrosting of the Cold War. The authors argue that the quality of intelligence analysis and operations, and therefore analysts and operatives, is a function of intelligence community recruitment practices that go back to the early histories of the CIA and FBI and in their organizational cultures. We also argue that those who wish to succeed in performing intelligence operations on them must understand the processes of transnationalized terrorists.

A number of issues are bound up in the example of the FAA warning of April 18th, 2001. First of all, in the United States, there has been a huge gap between the functions of intelligence and in law enforcement. Intelligence operations are supposed to be conducted overseas and often involves breaking the law. The body of law binds up law enforcement. It has established procedures and standards of evidence. Law enforcement must show probable cause; intelligence is not bound by that principle. The FBI and the CIA are the poster children of the American law enforcement and intelligence communities, respectively. Their opposition in their functions flavors their organizational cultures. Both are elitist cultures that guard their sources and methods jealously, not only from each other, but also from other federal agencies. Take, for example, how the FBI treated the Federal Aviation Administration during the investigations of the bombing of Pan Am 103 by Libyan intelligence agents and by the TWA 800 accident off of Long Island. When the FAA went to get FBI intelligence in the Pan Am 103 incident, the FBI would not allow the FAA investigators into the building. Similarly, the FBI blocked the FAA from getting information on TWA 800.

The two cultures, however, also come into direct conflict with one another because the FBI is the only American law enforcement agency that is positioned in the intelligence community. Its forensic techniques and skill in interviewing suspects are crucial. The agency performed in an exemplary fashion in the aftermath of the Nairobi Embassy bombing in rounding up most of those responsible. However, following the bombing of American military personnel in the Khobar Towers incident of 1996, the FBI had trouble getting Saudi Arabia to cooperate in the investigation. This leads us to the fine example of FBI and CIA conflict at their intelligence interface during the Clinton administration.

By the mid-90s, President Clinton realized that terrorism was going to become a real threat to Americans. So, in 1994, a counterterrorism component was started in the FBI. The FBI placed the component in its National Security Office -- its spy-catching function -- where it promptly got lost. The fact that there was bad blood between the Clinton White House and FBI director Louis Freeh did not help the situation along. The supremely conservative Freeh thought the president was a crook owing to the legal and real estate investigations that had haunted Bill Clinton from the first days of his presidency. Freeh refused come to the White House to consult with the president, and when the Clinton Administration’s National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, tried to obtain information about Al-Qaeda from the FBI’s New York field office, he was just blown off. As the Khobar Tower investigations bogged down, Louis Freeh became like Captain Ahab in search of Moby Dick, all the while convinced that the Clinton White House was blocking him from getting the white whale.

A second thing that emerges from the FAA warning of April 18, 2001 is the growth in technical intelligence collection (TECHINT) at the expense of human intelligence collection (HUMINT). It is because of this that we are experiencing a “lost generation of human intelligence.” When we address HUMINT, we are talking about intelligence collection at the human interface. This is opposed to technical intelligence, like imagery from spy satellites or information gained from gadgetry. The economics of the situation tell the tale. For every dollar that has been spent on HUMINT, there have been seven dollars spent on TECHINT. One of the great ironies in the history of TECHINT is that while computer, satellite, cell phone, fiber optics and other technologies were geometrically increasing, the National Security Agency (NSA), this nation’s premier technical intelligence gathering agency, experienced a radical cutback in its listening posts in the world. That had to do with the cessation of the Cold War. Imagine an electronic envelope surrounding the Earth. Prior to 9/11, it was alive with information about the impending terrorist attacks. However, a great many of the electronic “ears” that could have heard information from Central Asia and the surrounding area had been dismantled.

Since the beginnings of the American intelligence community following the Second World War, there has been a constant battle for funding between intelligence collection and intelligence analysis functions. The intelligence collectors have traditionally had the upper hand, therefore the community has always had more capability to collect data than to analyze what it collects. In the decade between the end of the Cold War and September 11th, 2001, as intelligence funding in general declined, the analysis side of the house suffered disproportionately. The analytical resources that could have picked the “signal from the noise” just weren’t there. Phone calls between the Al-Qaeda in the MidEast and here in the United States were not examined. The condition of the intelligence community’s linguistic capacity was appalling as well. On 9/11, the NSA had one million untranslated Arabic documents and the CIA could count the number of employees who spoke Arabic on the fingers of one hand.

However, such lapses are not just a matter of a lost generation of practitioners of HUMINT or an excellent line-up of TECHINT that has been severely downmoded after the Cold War. Intelligence analysis suffers from the lack of combining TECHINT collection with HUMINT collection. A good example is the satellite image of an aircraft hanger. The image can’t tell you what’s in the hanger. Optimally, you need a human source who has been in the hangar to tell you what is in it. As social and behavioral scientists know, human intelligence collection and analysis are basically just good old-fashioned quantitative and qualitative research methods (and that includes field research). And, recognizing metaphor as code is just good old-fashioned content analysis. Prior to 9/11, what was needed was a robust combined human intelligence capacity interwoven with a technical intelligence capacity operating at its best. But, we did not have that in place. What good is a fabulous array of intelligence-gathering technology if it cannot be used to its fullest? The authors have often used the following example to show what we mean. When we use our American Express card in for an unusual purchase, Amex immediately contacts us. Yet, on September 11th, 2001, 19 guys in bunches of four to five guys apiece, all sitting in business and first class, on four different domestic flights, traveling about the same time on the same day, all with Middle Eastern names, some being looked for by federal agencies, some even traveling under their own names, were able to make airline reservations for those seats and times. This should have produced a big signature in cyberspace. However, the signature would not have been seen if the kind of Amex or Citibank algorithms were not applied to airline ticketing databases. It is an irony that corporations we owe money to have better technology for spotting things in cyberspace than federal agencies trying to find the bad guys.

A third thing that is illustrated by the FAA warning of April 18th, 2001 is the lack of concern in the scenario that airplanes would be used as weapons or that terrorists had any interest in harming Americans on the domestic front. As far back as the 1990s, the intelligence community had heard that terrorists might use airplanes as weapons. And, following that FAA warning, several incidents in May, June, and July of 2001 led analysts to believe there was going to be an attack, but they thought it would happen overseas. So what if a few American diplomats might die overseas in a terrorist attack? Anyway, in the history of organized terror, most terror groups never targeted Americans. In the opinion of some in the American Foreign Service community, as far as our government was concerned, the level of casualties would be acceptable.

Let us now turn our attention to those charged with gathering and analyzing intelligence. Prior to a few years ago, the recruitment practices of the intelligence community, the CIA especially, favored the sons of well-off white men. Among other things, this contributed to an underdeveloped linguistic capability. As a result, there is presently no substantial diversity of ethnicities, language and other skills, ages, gender, etc. in the American intelligence community. Certain upper-class university campuses were targeted as recruitment sites, like the University of Maryland-College Park and Yale. Because of the pedigree and socioeconomic fabric of the corps, in terms of analysts and operatives, what we had on hand in the years before September 11th, 2001 was an Army of unexpendable soldiers. What good is an Army of soldiers not willing to risk their lives behind the lines, in fact not usable beyond overhearing chitchat at cocktail parties? The long and short of it was that the CIA had become risk averse. Intelligence bureaucrats wanted to stay in Washington, D.C. and get promoted.

To its credit, the CIA, a few years before September 11th did mount a recruitment campaign to attract a more diverse population of analysts and operatives. However, it is more likely that it was being forced to as a matter of being politically correct than from the practical concerns relating to transnationalized terrorism.

The organizational entropy in the CIA’s mission may be the kind of thing that can explain the entropy of other organizations that were asleep at the switch on 9/11. This is most likely the explanation for the Immigration and Naturalization Service providing a confirmation notice to a Florida flight school, six months after September 11th, that two of the suicide hijackers had been approved for student visas. This is probably also the case with the airline industry requirement that should have prohibited passengers from taking box cutters aboard airplanes. This may be the reason for the slow-to-scramble fighter jets that might have interdicted the four doomed planes that strayed from their flight paths.

The creation of the CIA was supposed to centralize intelligence so that we would not see again the kinds of mistakes made among agencies and within agencies that contributed to Pearl Harbor. However, the same kinds of mistakes were being made on 9/11. Instead of functioning like a central clearinghouse for intelligence, the agency became something more akin to an elite club (as did the FBI). One of the authors knows from personal experience that to get information relating to alleged CIA-connected drug trafficking to the North Slope of Alaska during the start-up of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, that the FBI and the DEA had to spy on CIA associates to get what they wanted. This goes back to what we were saying about the differences in organization cultures and the jealousies over sources and methods among those agencies mandated to provide national security. In fact, the problem is as “intra-agency” as it is “inter-agency.” Before 9/11, FBI field offices were like little fiefdoms. They did not communicate with each other or even talk to headquarters in Washington, D.C. very often. This explains the treatment of the FBI’s Minneapolis field office’s work that might have prevented the events of September 11th, the subject of FBI Agent Coleen Rowley’s whistleblower testimony to Congress. This explains the treatment of Joe O’Neill, the FBI agent from the New York City field office who had connected Osama bin Laden to various incidents that stretched in a chain of events from the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center to incidents in Yemen and the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. If Louis Freeh couldn’t get his white whale, he wasn’t going to let Agent Joe O’Neill get his, either. O’Neill was removed from investigating the bombing of the USS Cole and then driven to retire by a series of trivial demonizing complaints against him. Eight days after he began a new job as director of security at the World Trade Center, the terrorists he had been pursuing struck. He died rushing back in to rescue others.

There is a phrase that is used by government executives that describes this overt and inadvertent non-sharing of information: barking up different stovepipes, that is to say, reporting up through different supervisory chains. Such stovepiping led to the withholding from law enforcement officials of the CIA videotape that caught two of the soon-to-be 9/11 hijackers at an Al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia. Similarly, French intelligence officials warned about Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, who never made his flight because he was in FBI detention. Moussaoui had come on the FBI’s radar screen because, as a student in an American flight school, his instructors had warned authorities about his only wanting to learn how to fly a plane, not to take off and land. In the Moussaoui case, U.S. Attorney-General John Ashcroft’s regard for the Fourth Amendment dealing with searches and seizures came into conflict with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The Minneapolis field office of the FBI wanted a FISA warrant to search Moussaoui’s computer mid-August of 2001. Now, in the entire history of the FISA, a request for such a warrant had never been turned down. However, Ashcroft responded by saying there were no ties between Moussaoui and foreign networks to justify searching his computer and asked for the development of other information to meet the standard to establish the ties. Likely, John Ashcroft, certainly not a civil libertarian, felt that the FISA court might deny a warrant in this case due to insufficient evidence. One might say that in the case of the FBI’s Minneapolis field office, it barked up the right stovepipe, but “its bark was worse than its bite” as things turned out. Moussaoui’s computer was finally searched on September 12th, 2001. Had the FBI included the warning from French intelligence, it might have had a strong enough case to obtain a search warrant from the FISA court. Failure to share information is directly connected to the elitist cultures that developed among FBI field offices, FBI Headquarters, and the CIA. Ignoring and not sharing information from other organizations are direct consequences of a “not my job” attitude.

Such a culture of elitism and exclusivity still prevails in our intelligence community and among our policy makers, these armies of still mostly well-to-do white boys with rich daddies. This culture of elitism also leads people of advantage to believe that they can manipulate people and things in the external world and wonderful things will come of it. They have the resources and wherewithal to do things that the average person cannot do alone. And, they do so without a real understanding of how human societies actually interrelate on a global basis over time. They pull a string at Point A and expect something to happen at Point B. But, all too often, something happens at some other point altogether and on a scale totally unexpected, that has cascading ramifications for the next several generations. The intelligence community has a term for this. It is called blowback. In imposing a cowboy diplomatic solution to a small problem, we create much larger problems for the United States. Chalmers Johnson, in writing about the phenomenon of blowback, in a book by this name, wrote that world politics “in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century”, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the American decision to keep up a Cold War posture, an imperialistic posture, in a post-Cold War world. The authors’ training in macrosociological and international relations principles lead us to agree with this outlook.

It seems to the authors that those charged with national security, though they seem to understand that there exists international network ties among terrorist groups, that they are not grasping the process of transnationalization among terrorist and related groups. Until this is understood, even having a robust and interwoven human intelligence and technical intelligence capability won’t amount to much.

Peter Drucker, who coined the term “transnational organization”, also wrote in the same pages about terrorism and how it would emerge as a salient threat in the 21st century (Drucker 1993). Drucker thought that transnationalization would help fight terrorism and other globe-girdling problems. However, what national security executives and policymakers have substantially missed, we believe, is that transnationalization is not just a process that will benefit those who fight terrorists, but it is a process that has been adopted by terrorists. Drucker’s definition of the transnational organization was one where:

1. In its own sphere, it transcended the nation-state by setting the common interest of the world community ahead of national sentiments and interests;

2. It established a sovereignty of its own, recognized by nation-states, and directly controlling citizens and organizations within nation-states; and

3. It addressed challenges that could not be tackled within the borders of a national state.

Without much imagination, it can be seen that Al-Qaeda has met the criteria of a transnational organization. It has transcended any nation-state by setting the common interest of the world community of Islamic extremists and those in general who despise the United States ahead of any other national sentiments and interests; it has established a kind of sovereignty of its own that was certainly recognized by Afghanistan under the Taliban; and it has addressed challenges to its goals regardless of any national boundaries.

Yet, those charged with national security still focus on terrorism as being state-sponsored and that somehow it can be eradicated by aggressively treating national actors that host terrorists – as in bombing Afghanistan and invading Iraq. Terrorism in the 21st century is comprised of small, tight-knit groups of non-state transnationalized actors that are difficult to penetrate, but that, to the reverse, find national boundaries around the world permeable. They know each other, they are committed to a cause, and there are few disaffected people in their midst. While surreptitiously using traditional structures, such as financial institutions under the cover of fund-raising, they also operate outside of them.

We said at the beginning of this piece that some have made reference to the failures of those agencies and persons charged with national security on 9/11 as the unintelligence of intelligence. “The failure to connect the dots” is another phrase that is used by government officials in reconstructing the stream of events leading up to the attacks. There is a problem inherent to connecting any set of data points. Which data points comprise the pattern and which are background noise? This is a problem that can only be addressed to best effect by rigorous analysis. And, there is a much larger constellation of dots. How do we, the authors, see things from a sociological point-of-view taking into account everything we can glean from events? What are the larger consequences of the elitist cultures of the various organizations charged with national security? What do we see ahead? One thing is certain, a simple reshuffling of agencies, a rearranging of the “stovepipes”, won’t solve the problem of the terrorist threat. Moreover, we are afraid we see a continued course of missteps that will galvanize a bloc of allies among those groups of people and societies throughout the world that are now only loosely connected by various forms of Islam. The geographic boundaries of this shaping bloc can be envisioned by overlaying incidents of Al-Qaeda retaliation since January 2002 on a map. What is needed is the opening of the American intelligence community to the hiring of people from diverse cultures. To use a constellation of stars as an example, various European cultures have perceived Ursa Major as a big bear, a big dipper, a plough, or a wagon. The Chinese grouped the same and surrounding stars into an entirely different pattern than the familiar “Big Dipper.” What we are trying to say is that people from diverse backgrounds can come together and look at national security problems from different perspectives and produce more robust analyses than rich white boys who got their jobs from their daddies. Jihad is a transnational phenomenon by its very nature. If we don’t mitigate the forces of elitism and exclusivity in our intelligence community, then we can bet the Yankee dollar that jihad will transnationalize further and institutionalize, becoming a permanent feature in the global balance of power.

Source: Time, 2002 Oct 28

What are needed to offset that eventuality are a robust analytical function, the construction of a human intelligence collection capacity practically from the ground up, that can be interwoven with our technical intelligence collection capacity, and a clear understanding of the process of transnationalization among terror and marginal groups. All of this will require a rethinking of elitism and organizational cultures among those charged with national security.

Suggested Readings

Drucker, Peter F. 1993. Post-Capitalist Society. New York: HarperBusiness.

Johnson, Chalmers. 2000. Blowback. New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Lowenthal, Mark M. 2003. Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, Second Edition. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.

Richelson, Jeffrey T. 1995. A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

“The Man Who Knew,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/press/2103.html