OPINION — I recently enjoyed an overdue reunion with some college friends, wrongly assuming war stories from this retired CIA officer would wow my pals and earn me top bragging rights. Instead, our host, Brian, won the best-story-of-the-weekend contest, regaling us over drinks with his escapades in modern e-commerce. My former roommate’s digital exploits, I concluded, offered some lessons for old business, as the changing global order and technology buffet the world’s second oldest profession, espionage.
E-commerce isn’t exactly a life-or-death gig, but Brian’s ecosystem may foretell “what comes next” for the intelligence business. As he explained, Brian funds entrepreneurs he’s never met. In real time, these on-line hustlers identify gaps and trending items in the marketplace. They then piggyback on national box stores’ wholesale purchases; buy empty space on scheduled transport for warehousing at a major e-tailer; sell the goods at digital storefronts on a global platform; and rely on a major company’s distribution network for delivery to the customer. At month’s end, Brian receives a return on his investment. Oh, did I mention that he works from his beachside home, dog by his side, and his only complaint is that his partners aren’t scaling operations fast enough?
Lesson 1: Clear Policy and Governance Focus Decisions
We’ve learned the hard way that CIA’s performance peaks when there is a clear policy to guide operations and establish acceptable risk coupled with bipartisan governance to ensure accountability and empower practitioners. Alas, neither political theorists nor a national consensus has yet settled on a rubric to steer us through the fractionalization of the post-World War II system and the speed of technological advancement. As a result, the strategic and legal guardrails within which intelligence services – and not just ours — have long operated are buckling in unpredictable ways. As DCIA Burns sagely put it, the world is facing an era-defining “plastic moment,” where CIA’s “task is to shape what comes next,” to the extent it can.
Brian and company have a clear goal: profit. In pursuit of this objective, his partners nimbly adjust digital tradecraft to remain competitive, leverage empty space, and deliver in-demand products. At least half a dozen governmental and business bodies regulate Brian’s marketplace, by my count. The taxman must get paid, corporate boards must protect their brands, and the customer is always right. His is a successful business in part because of a clear policy of profit and governance of the ecosystem.
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In the espionage world, though, policies and governance increasingly reflect the erosion of the Bretton Woods period. At home, rally around the existential ideas of democracy versus autocracy, muddle through the strategic Great Powers competition, endlessly debate all sides of immediate crises in the Middle East, Europe, and our southern border, and tremble about new technology. Our elected representatives set the left and right boundaries for intelligence operations and collection priorities, but partisanship, annual budget grandstanding, and Luddite leadership are no way to run a modern railroad.
Lesson 2: Agility Increasingly Matters
Abroad, friends and foes alike are exploiting the changing world order and leveraging technology in aggressive and unpredictable ways – affording leeway to their spy agencies to move as adaptively as Brian’s e-commerce business. In 2023, our adversaries continued to push the bounds of spycraft: murderous Russian “active measures” in Europe, Chinese spy balloons over the U.S., an Iranian influence campaign to manipulate nuclear talks, and the arrest of a former U.S. Ambassador accused of spying for Cuba for decades.
But let’s not forget allegations of India’s assassination in Canada (and another plot disrupted in New York), Egypt’s subordination of a sitting U.S. Senator, and Ethiopia’s recruitment of a State Department employee. These are not exactly adversary nations, and they apparently took fraught risks that seemed way out of traditional bounds. In effect, they found empty policy space to exploit in the changing global landscape and delivered products to their bosses.
Every security service, including CIA, has better technology than Brian’s home office. Here, we debate endlessly about renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act versus the Fourth Amendment; keep strictly to our ideals by adhering to law of war and human rights except when we don’t; and, given our liberal economic principles, move slothfully on private-public partnerships. Meanwhile, adversaries are agilely employing artificial intelligence, deep fakes, and ubiquitous technical surveillance. Indeed, we’ve read more than we care to about foreign election interference, criminal-state ransomware attacks, intellectual property theft, big data heists, and leaked kompromat.
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Let’s go back to the risk-gain geopolitical calculations made by India, Egypt, and Ethiopia on human intelligence operations in the U.S. Just think of the risks these “swing nations” – and other, non- or loosely aligned countries from Algeria to Zimbabwe – can and will do with technology in today’s shifting world order. The leaders of these “swing nations,” many of them autocrats or one-party rulers, of course have their policy objectives and rely heavily on their intelligence services both at home and, increasingly, well beyond their borders thanks to technology. I can only presume that intelligence oversight in many of these nations is something like this: Who cares if we get caught, since everyone’s doing it. It’ll be yesterday’s news soon enough. No biggie, since we’re in that space between Great Powers, all of whom are wooing us.
Lesson 3: Great Powers Will Compete, and “Swing Nations” will Shop
China-based Alibaba’s mission statement is “to make it easy to do business anywhere.” U.S.-headquartered eBay’s is “to connect people and build communities to create economic opportunity for all.” These visions of two e-commerce powerhouses neatly capture the Great Powers’ respective approaches to shaping “what comes next.” Both companies pursue the policy of profit; however, one has more-than-troubling ties to the government, while the other operates under a liberal economic governance structure.
Brian and the “swing nations” will no doubt constantly evaluate which platform affords the most agility in the global marketplace to identify, buy, and deliver products at the right price point. And, both eBay and the U.S. will need to compete hard and adaptively for their customers, who from the comfort of their homes will toggle between Great Powers’ platforms or even invest in creative, e-commerce start-ups to better fill empty space.
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