Challenges for American Intelligence
The
Hon.
Lee H.
Hamilton
May 6,
2004
In
the war on terrorism, many of our most important fights will not take place onopen battlefields; they will take place in the hidden world of intelligence. Thus it iscritical that the American people consider the daunting challenges
facing
our intelligenceagencies.The United States cannot protect itself without good intelligence. The
agencies
ofour intelligence community played a key role in our victory in the Cold War, and they are
now
the most important tools we have in preventing terrorist attacks. Quality intelligenceprovides
information
and
warning; disrupts terrorist activity;
frames
issues
for
policymakers; and anticipates the consequences of U.S. policies.The demands are huge and growing. For most of my years in Congress, theparamount intelligence task was clear: counting missiles and evaluating the Soviet threat.Today, policymakers want to know anything and everything, ranging from the actions
and
intentionsofevery government,to thetopicofconversationin acave
halfway
aroundthe globe, to the health of foreign leaders, to the
future
of oil prices. But the
fact
is the
intelligence
community cannot
do
everything
and do it
well. Policymakers must
do a
much better job of setting clear priorities, and they must leave politics out of the process
of
gatheringandanalyzing intelligence.
Just
as it
faces
unprecedented demands, the intelligence community isoverwhelmed by its own unprecedented capabilities. Technology allows us to collectmillions and millions of bites of data every minute: conversations are recorded,photographs taken,
tips passed
on,
communications
intercepted.
In
short, more
raw
data
is
collected than we could ever use. The challenge is
sifting
through the mountains of data;
analyzing
it; deciding what is important and what is trivial; coordinating agencies; andgetting the right information to the right person at the right time. This is appropriatelycalled
"connecting
the
dots,"
but that is not so easy when you collect so many dots.
To
succeed, we need to develop new capabilities. Part of this is getting people
who
understand and can harness these technologies. But another part is developingexpertiseinmany areas, including linguistics.
After
all, whatis the use ininterceptingamessage if you
can't
read it or place it in context? This takes more than recruiting Arabicspeakers. In a world of globalized threats, we need people who understand certainregions, cultures,
and
religions,
and who
can
translate
- and
analyze
-
messages
in a
host
of
languages: Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, Hindi,
Dari,
Kurdish,orSomali,tonameafew.Itwill
take
years to build up and maintain these kinds of skills.We also need better "human intelligence": people on the ground who can detect
and
alert us to terrorist plots, or people penetrating opaque countries like North Korea
and
Iran.
We
should
not
have exaggerated expectations about what
we can
achieve
-
we're not going to have a guy sitting next to Osama bin Laden in a cave. The good news
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