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Michael Tanji sums up his views on the recent DNI OSINT conference that he and other blogfriends attended in Washington, DC.

Official DNI OSINT blog can also be consulted ( hat tip to Suki Fuller)

Lexington Green sent me this PARAMETERS review essay by Colonel Arthur C. Winn – on the five volume series on Strategic Intelligence [Five Volumes] (Intelligence and the Quest for Security) , edited by Dr. Loch K. Johnson and issued by Praeger Security International.

The five volumes present empirical inquiries, historical views, theoretical frameworks, memoirs, case studies, interviews, legal analyses, comparative essays, and ethical assessments. The authors come fromvarying backgrounds, including academia, intelligence agencies, think tanks, Congress, the State Department, the National Security Council, the legal field, and from seven countries. Each author has different personal experiences andwrites fromhis or her own perspective. The books provide an excellent reference for students of the military, political affairs, foreign policy, or strategic planning. The supporting notes at the end of each chapter are especially helpful and should not be overlooked by the reader.

Lex kidded me about putting this on my Christmas List but it looks to be a “must read” or at least a “must have reference” set for scholars of intelligence, IR, diplomatic or military history. Very DIME oriented format. I’m impressed as this is exactly what I was looking for years ago when I shifted outside of diplomatic and economic history to delve into intelligence and strategic studies.

Maybe a corporate card or institutional account order is a good idea with this one ($ 360 – Ouch!).

Blogfriend Michael Tanji weighs in on my “Orientalism” post with the bureaucratic facts of life:

Don’t misconstrue what HUMINT is about though. This is not the FBI and the goal is not to turn Bob Smith into the Islamic Donnie Brasco; the goal is to become the guy who meets, befriends, and manages the Donnie Brascos. Regardless, as tough as some say it is to get into the mix, clearly it does not take a degree in rocket science to make the grade; mostly it is about a willingness to put up with life in the third world.

….A day in the life of an analyst, functionally speaking, is not unlike that of many other cube-dwelling, research/writer-oriented jobs in the world. For a collector though it is in many ways unparalleled in both hazards as well as drudgery. The hazards are fairly obvious, since intelligence work is more or less illegal everywhere; drudgery because for every 30-minute meeting one has there are hours if not days of preparation necessary to help avoid the hazards. Use a car? Gotta document why and where to. Spend money? Gotta document why and who to and how much. Everything requires documentation, which is standard procedure for a bureaucracy, but extremely inconvenient if you are running around the hinterlands with a bunch of guys who would get more than a little suspicious if you started asking for receipts after every meal.

….Setting aside the very real psychological and physical issues involved in such a strategy, consider the equally real bureaucratic issues. This person(s) have to be recruited (creates a file); hired (admin shuffle and more papers to the file); trained far away from N. VA (more expense, admin and paper); and paid (more admin and paper). Now he’s an employee, he’s got all sorts of fun stuff like equal opportunity and ethnic sensitivity training to take, performance evaluations, etc., etc. The system isn’t designed for people or missions like this, so it’s either develop a series of waivers (more admin and paper) or do things off the books (dangerous and, depending on your point of view, more stuff-of-movies).

(In case you were wondering, the references to ‘admin and paper’ allude to both the level of effort involved, the fact that more and more people would know what was going on, and the fact that such a situation invites leaks.)

Read the rest here.

Abu Muqawama pointed to a LA Times article on the difficulties the CIA is having in getting clandestine officers near actual, real, live Islamists. Not Islamists in Waziristan, Mogadishu or Gaza but near Islamists whose mosque might be down the street from a Starbucks in Rotterdam.

But after spending hundreds of millions of dollars setting up as many as 12 of the companies, the agency shut down all but two after concluding they were ill-conceived and poorly positioned for gathering intelligence on the CIA’s principal targets: terrorist groups and unconventional weapons proliferation networks.  The closures were a blow to two of the CIA’s most pressing priorities after the 2001 terrorist attacks: expanding its overseas presence and changing the way it deploys spies.The companies were the centerpiece of an ambitious plan to increase the number of case officers sent overseas under what is known as “nonofficial cover,” meaning they would pose as employees of investment banks, consulting firms or other fictitious enterprises with no apparent ties to the U.S. government.

But the plan became the source of significant dispute within the agency and was plagued with problems, officials said. The bogus companies were located far from Muslim enclaves in Europe and other targets. Their size raised concerns that one mistake would blow the cover of many agents. And because business travelers don’t ordinarily come into contact with Al Qaeda or other high-priority adversaries, officials said, the cover didn’t work.

Summing up what many considered the fatal flaw of the program, one former high-ranking CIA official said, “They were built on the theory of the ‘Field of Dreams’: Build them and the targets will come.”

Heh. In fairness, the Allen Dulles model of spymastery has its uses. You set up shop somewhere, loudly hint you might have important connections with American intelligence and wait for a variety of shady and desperate characters to walk in your door. This is what Dulles did in Switzerland during WWII and he reaped many a major intelligence coup by getting on to the radar screen of the Abwehr ‘s high-placed cabal of anti-Nazi dissidents. It’s what good CIA station chiefs or their senior staff did regularly and the KGB and GRU did it too. While the embassy staff had to sift through a sea of crackpots, walk-ins nevertheless provided the biggest HUMINT gains for either side during the Cold War

Unfortunately, that tactic only works at a certain level of play. When Ike wanted to work with the French Resistance, Dulles was of little help. The OSS had to get it’s hands dirty and infiltrate agents behind German lines in high risk operations  run by William Casey, another future DCI, using personnel who could blend in with the target population, speak the languages, generally operate without a net. And in so doing, FDR,  Stimson, Marshall and Eisenhower accepted that, every so often, some OSS operations were just going to blow up in our faces (trying to beat Hitler provided a lot of political wiggle room and the media and this nation’s Boomer elite today have attitudes toward covert ops that are 180 degrees different from the GI Generation). Today we are not recruiting, retaining or training enough people with the characteristics that General William Donovan and the OSS once eagerly sought out.

Abu Muqawama used the all-American Matt Damon’s face as a metaphor for the problem. It’s very  true, we need to revise our legacy policies on recruiting children of native speakers and those with extensive overseas experience ( the kind that yields authentic local knowledge, dialectical inflection and street credibility). But take a look at the pasty complexion of  John Walker Lindh, who wandered around Yemen and militant areas of Pakistan prior to joining the Taliban as a mujahid. An American goof with no particular skills except an ingratiating sincerity and mediocre Arabic ended up in the proximity of the world’s most sought after terrorist leader.

Then there is the even more improbable case of Adam Yahiye Gadahn or “Azzam the American”, as he likes to style himself. A partly Jewish son of California Hippie parentage, who once cranked an air guitar to heavy metal tunes, is now al Qaida’s youtube equivalent of Lord HawHaw. At some point, we might want to consider that the Islamist movement and even al Qaida itself are not really “hard targets” in quite the same sense as is North Korea. I have trouble seeing a clueless California teen-ager in 1949 getting to break bread with Josef Stalin at his dacha on the basis of being a Communist and speaking some broken Russian. We are limited here by our own systemic cultural-linguistic ignorance of the rest of the world and our cherished bureaucratic paradigms.

We need to face facts that the USG and it’s IC needs people who speak three or four languages well and can pick up new ones on the fly, if need be. Who are intuitive anthropologists. Who empathize -but do not self-identify with – the cultures in which they immerse themselves. Who have cognitive maps that can integrate different or alien worldviews and profit from them analytically without being transformed by them. We need 21st century “Orientalists” in the mode of Sir Richard Francis Burton, who spoke perhaps thirty languages and knew the cultures from the Nile to the Indus. Impossible ? A friend of mine, trained as a linguist, speaks seven languages, which is very impressive until he relates that his late mentor spoke forty(!), including several dead ones.

The human mind has not changed much since Burton’s day, just our culture and the incentives offered.

Kudos to the “Imperating Kents“ for their pointing to the digital archive of the private papers of Allen Dulles, the OSS spymaster and seminal DCI whose tenure was responsible for much of the CIA’s later cultural mystique. KI had it right when they declared:

It is thus with great interest we note that Princeton University has opened a digital archive of the private papers belonging to former DCI Allen Dulles. The variety and volume of materials is simply extraordinary, and although it is organized by librarians (rather than intelligence professionals or modern search engine experts) it is well worth the time to explore these virtual stacks. Given that the gentleman’s 1963 text The Craft of Intelligence, is still reprinted for use as a basic text at many university level programs, these further materials are both substantively illuminating and historically invaluable. Of particular interest are the French and German language items, which may never have been previously referenced in depth during intelligence studies research on the matter.

Eisenhower’s role as a decisive voice in IC operations during his administration has been frequently underestimated by historians, with the consequent inflating of the role played by Allen Dulles. In reality, Dulles was deeply influential, given Ike’s high level of interest in intelligence matters and his brother John Foster Dulles as SecState and sister Eleanor also in several consequential bureaucratic position at Foggy Bottom, including a stint in State’s intelligence bureau, creating a formidible familial troika. But Dulles was not a free-lance operator in any sense of the word. That was something a hot-tempered President Eisenhower would never have tolerated for an instant, despite cultivating a public image of genial, grandfatherly, disconnection; nor was it in Dulles’ character to personally micromanage operations to the extent that being a “rogue” DCI would require.

Dulles might have been America’s master spy but as DCI he carried out the orders of his political masters – to both great success and global scandal.