Emile Nakhlehis a retired CIA Senior Intelligence Service Officer and founding director of the CIA’s Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program Office. Nakhleh is currently a Research Professor and Director of the Global and National Security Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico.
OPINION — As the Biden administration takes office, it will have to prioritize a myriad of critical global and regional challenges, ranging from terrorism to rebuilding alliances and from failing states to ending “forever wars.” The last four years have seen transnational security agencies less interested in sharing intelligence with their U.S. counterparts, which in turn has deprived the U.S. government of critical information.
Under normal circumstances, a departing president usually shares with the incoming one, the “crown jewels” of intelligence reporting, sources, methods, presidential findings, and on-going cases. It has been an accepted truism in the U.S. government that intelligence plays a critical role in informing policy decisions. As the former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency Michael Morell has often said, ‘Intelligence matters.’ That has not been the case with President Trump.
Collaboration with intelligence agencies and services in friendly and not so friendly countries has been crucial to the security of the United States. It invariably benefits those countries as well. U.S. intelligence collectors and analysts need to collect all-source information—ranging from electronic intelligence to open source and human intelligence —across the globe relevant to important national security issues and policies. Senior policymakers usually rely on such intelligence to make major decisions on such existential issues as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and weapons of mass destruction.
Transnational intelligence partners expend resources and personnel to collect information about government and non-government entities, including savory and unsavory individuals and groups, involved in topics affecting U.S. national security. Since 9/11, terrorism understandably has headed the list of critical national security issues. Other targets have included weapons of mass destruction, nuclear programs and missiles, banking, trade sanctions cyber security and hacking, and intellectual property theft.
Once they collect the information, these partners share it with their U.S. intelligence collectors, often at considerable risk. As they do so, they expect the information they share with their U.S. counterparts to reach senior policymakers at the highest levels of government and result in efficacious policies to combat the national security issues on which intelligence has been collected.
During my government career, I interacted with dozens of intelligence services across the globe and often realized how much the national security of the United States was enhanced by the information and analysis they provided. No matter how many U.S. intelligence and national security officials are stationed overseas, they cannot possibly by themselves collect on all the critical national security threats facing the United States without collaboration with other intelligence services.
In his book At the Center of the Storm, former CIA Director George Tenet cites numerous trips he took to countries in the Middle East, the Balkans, Asia, and elsewhere for the purpose of collaboration with intelligence services. His personal contacts with the heads of those services helped cement intelligence sharing between the United States and other countries. He showed his appreciation to those services and highlighted the value of the information they provided in the fight against terrorism.
He wrote in part, “At least 90 percent of the trips I made overseas during my seven years as DCI were to the Middle East or to border nations of Central and South Asia. I went often, and I kept going back, to build personal relationships that might at some point yield a breakthrough.” (P. 26)
Partnering services continued to provide valuable information because they realized that senior policymakers in Washington, including the President of the United States, often relied on the collected information as they made decisions on terrorism and related issues.
During the past four years, however, as President Trump’s negative attitude toward American intelligence agencies, especially the Central Intelligence Agency, became more strident and as he continued to ignore and denigrate intelligence warnings and briefings, bilateral and multinational collaboration began to dry up. Foreign sources became less inclined to risk their own lives and expend precious resources to collect information for their U.S. partners. Some judged the potential risks to their agencies and staff as far outweighing the benefits that would accrue from a disinterested Trump administration. Nor were they confident that President Trump would not reveal some of the classified information to third parties.
More importantly, Trump’s disrespect of the intelligence community and inexplicable tolerance of the insidious behavior of unfriendly regimes, such as Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, has given them the audacity to wage dangerous social media, disinformation, and hacking operations against U.S. intelligence agencies and other government departments.
It could take years to regain the trust of foreign nationals.
Challenges and Pitfalls of Intelligence Sharing
Revitalizing bilateral and multinational intelligence exchanges requires rebuilding the trust that was lost. Foreign services will have to believe that the intelligence they provide will be valued and protected and that their sources and methods will be safeguarded. President Trump’s politicization of intelligence has been harmful, domestically and internationally. The complexity of transnational intelligence collaboration is a function of the partners’ professionalism, substantive and tradecraft training, political orientation, acceptance of shared values, and relationship to their countries’ national leadership.
Because of this complexity, transnational Intelligence agencies may be divided into different tiers: Commonwealth countries, other Western countries, East Asian countries, Arab and non-Arab Middle Eastern countries, Islamic countries, and African countries. Working with different services varies significantly from one country or region to the next. American intelligence cooperation with Western and other industrialized countries—including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand —is usually more encompassing and seamless because it reflects a commonality of concerns, values, and professionalism. Governments and national security agencies in these countries believe that intelligence is integral to international diplomacy and national decision making. They also realize that tracking and containing malevolent state and non-state actors and global threats—whether terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, or cyber security and hacking—to a specific country will serve the interests of other countries in this group.
Intelligence sharing with other countries outside this group is usually more challenging. Pitfalls could hamper such collaboration if intelligence collectors fail to take certain cultural, political, religious, and historical realities and biases into consideration. A key challenge arises when a particular foreign intelligence agency is controlled by an adversarial or hostile regime and engages in obfuscation, disinformation, denial, and deception.
As the incoming Biden administration begins to revitalize international intelligence exchanges, it will have to whittle away some of the key biases among international partners, for example in Muslim countries, that developed in the past four years because of President Trump’s Islamophobic statements and executive orders restricting Muslim immigration into the United States.
The new administration will have to work hard to de-politicize and professionalize intelligence collaboration. A first step would be to establish a set of strategic objectives that would underpin intelligence collection and sharing. For the United States, such a process should enhance the cause of diplomacy, identify and neutralize potential threats, and punish the hackers of American government and private institutions. It will also solidify the work of the national security establishment and political leadership across the government.
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