The KGB Paradigm and the Failure of U.S. Intelligence July 27, 2004
By George Friedman
Two weeks ago, the Senate report on U.S. intelligence was released. This week, the 9/11 Commission report was made public. Both focused on the same theme: The U.S. intelligence community, taken as a whole, failed to function effectively before the Sept. 11 attacks. The fundamental issue is, what went wrong in the intelligence community?
In trying to think through the root cause of the Sept. 11 attacks, it seems to us, when everything else is boiled away, that there were two fundamental problems. The first was that the U.S. intelligence community was built specifically to deal with the Soviet Union and the threat posed by Soviet intelligence. The end of the Cold War should have led to a rethinking of both mission and organization. There was a bit of the former, but hardly any of the latter. Second, U.S. leaders did not understand the changes that were taking place in the Islamic world. They viewed al Qaeda as simply a new manifestation of the Arab organizations that had used terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s for limited political aims. The United States failed to realize that al Qaeda was fundamentally different. The second failure was rooted in the first failure -- indeed, it was the first failure that made the second almost inevitable.
The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the vast apparatus of the U.S. intelligence community were created in the late 1940s with one purpose: to combat the Soviet Union. They were constructed to contain and defeat Soviet power, and specifically to undermine the efforts of Soviet intelligence. In a very real sense, Soviet intelligence -- to which we will refer as the KGB for the sake of convenience -- was the model on which the U.S. intelligence organizations were built.
Soviet intelligence made certain fundamental assumptions about how intelligence operations should be carried out:
1. The primary purpose of Soviet intelligence was to penetrate the decision-making layers of opponent states and to transmit information to a central authority, which would use this information to formulate a picture of the opponents' capabilities and intentions and to make plans for countering them. The most important organization to penetrate -- what was called the "main adversary" -- was the intelligence organization of the United States. The single most important thing was to know what the CIA knew about the Soviet Union and how they knew it. The primary means for achieving this was to plant agents inside the CIA; the secondary means was technical intelligence. The Soviets spent an enormous amount of time and patience trying to infiltrate the CIA or subvert CIA employees. 2. The secondary purpose of the KGB was to use these agents to obscure Soviet intelligence activities and strategic intentions. The agents who were planted did not simply collect intelligence, but also were assigned to falsify intelligence being collected by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Confusing the main adversary was a primary goal of the KGB. 3. The third purpose of the KGB was the collection of technical intelligence. This was accomplished by placing agents in key programs, such as the Manhattan Project and the computer manufacturing industry in the 1980s. The collection of technical intelligence was intended to help the Soviets understand U.S. defense capabilities, while stealing technologies useful to the Soviet military. Later, the same programs were extended to civilian technologies. 4. The fourth purpose of the KGB was influencing and controlling leaders of other countries and movements, allowing the Soviet Union to destabilize Western countries and take control of Third World countries.
U.S. intelligence was created to block the KGB. But on a more subtle level, it was built as a mirror of Soviet intelligence -- designed to do to Soviet agents what they were doing to the United States. Like its Soviet counterpart, the U.S. intelligence apparatus saw its primary mission as penetrating the Soviet leadership, particularly the KGB, and preventing the Soviets from returning the favor. The second purpose was misleading the Soviets about U.S. capabilities and intentions. The third -- much less important for the United States than for the Soviets, but not trivial -- was stealing Soviet military technology. And finally, blocking Soviet attempts to use the intelligence services to recruit and manage assets in Third World countries -- while doing the same itself -- was critical to the United States.
U.S. and Soviet efforts diverged over time in a fundamental way. The United States became much more heavily dependent on technical means of intelligence-gathering than did the Soviets. Where the Soviets would try to recruit well-placed Americans to extract information, the United States would try to tap into Soviet systems of communication to gather the same information. The Soviets were obsessed with protecting their assets, the Americans with protecting their technical capabilities. Obviously, the United States ran agents and the Soviets had technology, but on this point there was a relative divergence of emphasis.
However, each side was obsessed with the other's covert capabilities. Each side looked at the world through the prism of that obsession. For the United States, the terrorist groups of the 1970s and 1980s were not seen as independent actors, but as entities designed or at least guided by the KGB toward psychological and political ends. On the whole, this was not a bad way to view the world. The KGB used these groups -- particularly Palestinian groups -- to create political environments that were conducive to Soviet ends. This was not to say that these groups were simply puppets of the KGB -- it was far more complicated than that -- but to say that these groups were enabled by the KGB and satellite organizations and could not have been nearly as effective without them. The Soviets maintained a program designed to seduce, manipulate and manage the leadership of these terrorist groups. The United States understood that the best way to defeat these groups was by disrupting their relations with the Soviets. Both sides were quite realistic.
By the time of Desert Storm, the Soviets were no longer key enablers of terrorism. The problem was that the CIA had lost the prism through which it viewed organizations that were using terrorism as a weapon. To be more precise, where the United States previously had viewed the Arab world through the prism of the CIA-KGB competition, the end of the rivalry did not bring with it a new prism. The CIA knew that the Soviets were no longer managing the situation, but they did not develop a new way of thinking about that situation.
Indeed, it could be put this way: The United States, during the Cold War, did not take seriously most groups that did not have a tie to the KGB. Without such a tie, such groups were not viewed as posing challenges to the United States and -- even if they wished to -- could not be effective unless they had access to a national intelligence agency. It was an article of faith that any group that was effective had a dependency on a national intelligence service -- almost invariably Soviet-bloc.
Al Qaeda -- not accidentally -- was designed to be as different as possible from predecessor groups that used terrorism. First, there was no dependency on a single intelligence agency: Al Qaeda used relations with Pakistani and Saudi intelligence, among others, but did not depend on them. Second, the group understood how the Soviets and Americans had used intelligence during the Cold War, and created an organization that was not easily penetrated by either human or technical means. They admitted into the inner circle only those they knew well so that agents could not easily be slipped in. They did not run cables that submarines could tap into or chatter on car phones, so the NSA had limited opportunities to intercept.
From the standpoint of the CIA therefore, al Qaeda was not a strategic threat. Without a state sponsor that controlled them, the CIA believed, they could not muster the resources needed to be truly effective. Since they avoided using the communications systems that U.S. intelligence regarded as essential for global operations, the assumption was that they did not represent a global threat.
The CIA did not take al Qaeda seriously because, from all appearances, it seemed to be the kind of organization that would have been easily dismissed during the Cold War. It did not fit into the paradigm the CIA had been working from during the previous 40 or 50 years. The CIA viewed al Qaeda as weak and underdeveloped -- primitive. The agency did not recognize al Qaeda as a group that had evolved in such a way as to deliberately come in below the U.S. intelligence radar, from both a technical and scientific standpoint. Al Qaeda did not intend to look threatening, and it was not perceived as threatening.
The CIA, institutionally, did not have a frame of reference for al Qaeda. The agency was organized for penetrating the upper circles and lines of communication of a nation-state or a state-sponsored group. It was built to deal with the KGB and its creations. Its analysts -- not all of them, by any means, but enough in senior positions -- despite understanding that the Soviet Union had collapsed, could not understand how the global threat had therefore changed.
The conclusion drawn by many in the CIA -- along with most of American society -- was that the threat to the United States had declined because of the fall of the Soviet Union. The idea that the nature of the threat had been transformed by the loss of an enabling superpower and that a range of unpredictable threats was now developing was not an idea that was easily embraced. To the CIA, the collapse of its main adversary could only mean that the world was safer. The agency was not ready to move into a world in which new adversaries existed.
That meant that there was no urgency in transforming the U.S. intelligence community as a whole. The same panoply of institutions -- CIA, DIA, NSA, NRO, etc. -- that had served in the Cold War was left in place. The internal structure of these organizations also was left in place. What had been built to be congruent with Soviet intelligence was now left standing alone, congruent with nothing. The perception was that there was no urgency to do anything about it.
This was, as the 9/11 commission put it, a failure of imagination. We would argue that it was, in some ways, an understandable -- if not defensible -- failure. What was harder to understand was not the events leading up to Sept. 11, but the events after Sept. 11. A reasonable person could have thought on Sept. 10 that there was time to redesign the intelligence community; no reasonable person could have believed on Sept. 12 that a system designed to defeat the KGB was going to be appropriate for defeating al Qaeda. Yet George W. Bush, in his most inexplicable action as president, made no substantial changes in either the structure of the intelligence community or in its personnel.
The Soviet Union was gone. The KGB was now the FSB, and it was merely one among dozens of intelligence agencies to worry about. The main adversary was now a non-state-sponsored group that was deliberately built to evade the well-known capabilities of U.S. intelligence. If the United States discounted al Qaeda before Sept. 11, continuing to discount it after it had managed to inflict a massive defeat on U.S. intelligence made no sense.
Yet -- and this is the critical thing -- the fact is that the old hands of the intelligence community, even after Sept. 11, did not think they were out of their league. Even after that defeat, they believed profoundly and completely that the same organizational structure and people that took down the KGB would eventually take down al Qaeda -- no wholesale changes required. It is understandable that people who had triumphed once would think that they could triumph again using the same tools. It is inexplicable that the president and his advisers would believe them. Simple common sense should have told U.S. leaders that it was simply fantastic to believe that a force built to defeat the Soviet Union could serve to defeat al Qaeda.
The 9/11 commission's report is insightful in tracing the failures -- intellectual, moral and technical -- that made the Sept. 11 attacks possible. What it does not explain -- and what remains inexplicable -- is why the Bush administration would believe that the attacks did not prove the need for an urgent overhaul of U.S. intelligence, but that business as usual would suffice. Whatever one thinks of Bush on other subjects, this decision remains unexplained and undefended. We specialize in identifying the hidden thinking behind strategies, but we remain baffled as to why Bush would have used a system designed to manage the KGB with which to fight al Qaeda.
(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.
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