 Dick
Coffman is an international business and security
consultant and media commentator on intelligence,
homeland security and terrorism. He is managing
Director of Odysseus
Group International, which provides risk
management and security solutions to the transportation,
basic infrastructure and manufacturing industries.
Mr. Coffman specializes in ports and maritime
security and homeland defense. He is founder
and President of Coffman
Global Group, which leverages worldwide
networks for business development and marketing
in high technology, basic materials and capital
construction.
Mr. Coffman has conducted assessments of intelligence
operations for the U.S. Customs Service and
the Office of Naval Intelligence and for a
major defense contractor.
Mr. Coffman served 31 years in the Central
Intelligence Agency where he formed and managed
the Agency's first counterterrorism analytic
organization and served as Chief of Station,
chief of staff to the Director of the Clandestine
Service, coordinator of major worldwide covert
intelligence programs and CIA representative
to the NATO Commander.
He also served four years in the U.S. Marine
Corps, including duty in Vietnam in 1965 and
1966. Mr. Coffman remained in the Marine Corps
Reserves retiring in 1992 at the grade of
Colonel. Mr. Coffman is a student of military
history and an authority on the U.S. Civil
War.
Coffman
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August 5, 2004
Nothing better illustrates the shortfalls of the 9/11 Commission Report and its recommendations on intelligence than the August terrorist threat alert in New York and Washington.
Bluntly put, the intelligence behind the terror alert renders almost meaningless the centerpiece of the Commission's recommendations for centralization of command and control over US intelligence in a cabinet-level National Intelligence Director to be situated in the Executive Office of the President.
It shows the Commission's underlying basis for this recommendation was a fundamental misanalysis of the nature of the 9/11 intelligence failures.
Terror alert intelligence - virtually all of it developed abroad - also undermines the Commission recommendation that a reoriented and reinforced FBI retain responsibility for domestic intelligence collection.
Boiled down to its essentials, the 9/11 Commission's case for this reorganization rests on shortcomings in coordinating, sharing and integrating relevant information prior to 9/11.
While these problems are well documented, and have been plaguing US intelligence for years, they are the symptoms of the problem and not the cause.
Focus on "connecting the dots" and a "lack of imagination" is a profound misanalysis of pre 9/11 intelligence failures.
The real intelligence failure was simply a lack of dots, that is detailed, timely, and relevant intelligence on plans, locations, strengths and activities of terrorist organizations, particularly al Qaeda and its affiliates.
In the absence of such intelligence, analysts were forced to absorb hundreds of scattered bits and pieces of information and laboriously assemble it sequentially and correctly into a mosaic that might or might not have uncovered the 9/11 conspiracies. The odds against this happening then or now are obviously quite long.
Now contrast this to what we now know of the intelligence behind the terror alert in New York and Washington. Through a series of operations in Pakistan, the US has come into possession of remarkably detailed and sophisticated casing and surveillance reports compiled over several years time of potential financial targets in New York and Washington. At the same time, the US has developed contemporaneous intelligence through various sources of terrorist plans to strike targets in these cities within a matter of months if not weeks.
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Like a well-oiled machine, US intelligence rapidly and efficiently processed this intelligence and transmitted it to proper homeland security and law enforcement officials who have taken appropriate protective action. There has been no hint of problems in sharing information, coordinating intelligence and integrating information and actions.
Why is this different than the pre 9/11 period? Because the intelligence is exceedingly detailed, timely and specific leaving little room for ambiguity or uncertainty about corrective actions. In other words, we have meaningful dots and connecting them is a cakewalk.
The lessons for the 9/11 Commission are plain. While a National Intelligence Director arguably might result in better coordination, more focused intelligence operations and economies in resources in the years ahead, whatever positive impact it has will only be apparent years from now.
Given the near-term terrorist threat to the US, immediate action is required to revitalize foreign intelligence collection - both human source and technical.
As I have written in this space, we need immediately to provide substantially more resources to our collection agencies to better compensate those who take risks in targeting terrorists and to upgrade the quality of our operations. We need to give our collection agencies significant flexibility in planning and executing these operations and insulate them from Washington micro-management and nit picking by lawyers and bureaucrats. We need to support these officers when operations go sour understanding that this is an exceedingly difficult and dangerous target in which instant results and operational perfection will be rare and political embarrassment more common.
Most important, we have to wipe out the aversion to risk and lack of daring and boldness that have plagued our terrorist operations for decades, and particularly since the mid-1990's.
These measures, which the 9/11 Commission touched on in a brief, generic paragraph on page 415 of its report, will give us a fighting chance to penetrate terrorist organizations.
Another dimension of our terrorist collection problem is the lack of a domestic collection capability. While the public hearings seemed to hold out hope that the Commission would step up to the plate and support a stand-alone agency to perform this vital function, the Commission left it to the FBI to organize itself and reorient its focus to collect domestic intelligence.
Unfortunately, the FBI has shown itself not up to this task, both by its performance since 9/11 and by its reactive, law enforcement mindset, which is the antithesis of the proactive, premonitory approach fundamental to human source intelligence collection.
Again, the August terror alert is instructive. Not only - as far as we can know - was virtually all the intelligence collected abroad, but the casing and surveillance reports and existence of a communications system stretching from Pakistan to the US make it clear that terrorist operatives were and probably remain active inside the US.
Such highly detailed information on domestic targets can only be developed through painstaking and careful surveillance over an extended period of time. Moreover, those conducting the casing and collection must employ clandestine and sophisticated techniques usually the product of intensive and lengthy training in order to avoid compromise and capture.
If we had a reasonably capable domestic collection capability, presumably all if not most of this intelligence could have been uncovered at its source in the US rather than abroad.
Developing this capability will require substantial and well-trained manpower resources and skilled operational managers schooled not only in intelligence collection but also in the laws, procedures and conventions unique to security operations on US soil. Such personnel are in short supply given extraordinary demands on US intelligence and the waves of departures from our agencies beginning in the 1990's, which were unmatched by recruitments of replacements.
Thus, we will have to develop this capability incrementally drawing initially on manpower from the intelligence and law enforcements communities and leveraging existing local relationships of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Eventually, domestic collection should reside in DHS, the agency authorized and established to assure homeland security. DHS includes several experienced domestic, law enforcement agencies with intelligence collection potential, but DHS is not yet fully matured and not well integrated. Placing this responsibility on top of the many others DHS has yet to fully discharge would be a recipe for failure.
At the end of the day, as these two issues demonstrate, this country must view the 9/11 Commission in a realistic, cold-eyed way. For the 9/11 Commission to argue that an intelligence czar and FBI-housed domestic intelligence capability will remedy the problems exposed by 9/11, and then to openly lobby and stampede politicians behind its flawed recommendations is a breathtaking example of arrogance and irresponsibility. (All this will be the subject of a future commentary on relying on well-meaning but unelected commissions to guide our country's national security policies).
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© 2004 Richard Coffman. All opinions expressed in this article
are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.
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