Douglas London is a retired senior CIA Operations Officer and Adjunct Associate Professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. Mr. London served 34 years in the CIA’s Clandestine Service that included several Chief of Station assignments and executive Headquarters management positions.
Since retiring from the CIA’s Clandestine service a year back, I’ve watched the predictions of doom for Human Intelligence (HUMINT) with varying degrees of fascination and skepticism. Well researched and thoughtful articles appropriately raise the threat that technology poses to this most ancient of human endeavors. Artificial intelligence, biometrics and the exponential capabilities of data collection and analysis are said to undermine anonymity, cover, and clandestine communications between the world’s intelligence services and their agents. Such dire assessments are backed by stories concerning China and Iran’s counterintelligence successes in compromising U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) agents. Unquestionably, technological evolution changes the clandestine battlefield, but is a double-edged sword for the hunted and the hunters alike. Still, espionage’s foundation has always been people. It’s the personal relationships, imagination and unlimited human ingenuity that makes it work and evolve. Arguably, it might be harder to clandestinely run agents today than 5, 10, or 20 years ago, but hardly hopeless.
Unfortunately, with these concerns has concurrently come the rush to divest ourselves of HUMINT in favor of more technologically based intelligence collection. A visit to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)’s website reveals its declaration that HUMINT is no longer the most important collection means. Besides hurting this aging spy’s heart, the sentiment does disservice to espionage’s enduring value and relatively modest fiscal expense. A troubling consequence of the government’s proclivity to depend on metrics and chase the next biggest thing, our readiness to distance ourselves from one of the world’s oldest professions is unsurprising in this political climate, but costly.
The post 9/11 environment has given way to significant cultural changes within the CIA and the country’s more politicized view of “spying” and “spies.” Not limited to residual anger or mistrust at CIA for “missing” 9/11 or “getting the Iraqi WMD question wrong,” the term spy has itself taken on a far more derogatory meaning. President Trump and his associates deride the IC, CIA in particular, and have been quick to accuse it and the FBI of “spying” on it, and in particular, their 2016 campaign.
All that notwithstanding, 18 years plus after 9/11, the IC’s size, resources and responsibilities continues to expand. Unfortunately, metrics still rule as the government’s principal means to show progress and impact. But having witnessed this phenomenon over the course of supporting both hot wars and cold, where casualty counts guided strategies that proved ineffective, it’s prudent to question that math. In HUMINT, bigger is not necessarily better, and metrics alone fail to tell the real story.
Unquestionably, evolving technology offers great collection promise, but fails to reveal what’s in the hearts and minds of adversaries and strategic rivals. The issue is placing intelligence in context. Only in HUMINT does the consumer have the luxury of profound understanding for how the collection came to be acquired and the agent’s motivation in sharing it. This provides great advantage when evaluating and analyzing its credibility and meaning from which to accurately build assessments that informs decision making.
Just as an army requires boots on the ground to secure territory, secrets ultimately reside with people who must be engaged at a personal level. Their plans, intentions and motives unlocked only through securing the cooperation of those with direct access to the secrets we prize. Such is the business of HUMINT, where spies steal secrets from agents betraying their governments and groups for ideology, ego, fortune or revenge. No intercepted conversation or deeply concealed facility imaged can unlock the riddle of mindset and intent. In truth, even much of our technical collection depends on HUMINT to enable it. Drones and satellites need to know where and when to look and listen, start points that HUMINT provides.
Dealing with humans, of course, makes espionage the most dangerous means of intelligence collection. People are unpredictable and vulnerable. They have lives, fears, dreams and responsibilities, dynamics that change over time and circumstance. And people get caught, mostly due to tradecraft mistakes owing to carelessness and hubris, occasionally moles, and sometimes just due to the randomness of chance. And when they do get caught, the price is often death or life in prison, the family’s ruin, and political consequences for the country behind the thievery. Iran’s clerical regime, for example, has historically charged families the cost of the bullets used in executing convicted spies in exchange for returning their tortured bodies. HUMINT therefore comes with its own complex set of ethics, rules and values as employed by the practitioners. It is for this reason that CIA, the nation’s civilian, foreign intelligence service, is the collector of last resort.
In the inverse of the U.S. military’s budget, however, where manpower costs outpace that of weapons and technology, HUMINT is the cheapest means of intelligence collection, with the greatest “bang for the buck.” That’s if your measurement is money alone, given the costs in human capital should necessarily be seen on an entirely different scale. Whereas technology requires millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions in investment, agents with firsthand access to secrets cost a fraction as much to pay and handle clandestinely.
Like any bureaucratic, government program, however, metrics are often what we use to measure impact and success, even in HUMINT. And for that reason, CIA and the other IC agencies see numbers and expansion as key to success. But my experience is that espionage’s metrics are often illusory and do not translate into impact and greater security. For example, while on the glide path to reduction, CIA’s presence in areas of active hostilities and conflict zones over the course of the last 18 years has been enormous. So large, in fact, that collectors generally found themselves restricted to huge, fixed fortresses. Security considerations, their profiles, and today’s hazardous meeting protocols making it virtually impossible to get on the street alone and blend so as to meet and develop recruitment targets and clandestinely handle existing agents.
Like a self-licking ice cream cone, though, much of such platforms’ time was spent in protecting themselves from threats caused by their rather obvious presence. Too big to hide, too obvious to blend, like the terrorist threats against whom we sought to apply pressure, more time was spent on defense vice offense. Our overall personnel numbers did not necessarily account for better quality intelligence. But a far smaller number of quality operations, where we were on offense and maintained a smaller footprint in some such perilous environments, did. In HUMINT, less is more.
The CIA considers me a hostile environment expert, or so allows my approved resume to say. That reflects my skills to securely conduct and manage clandestine operations in the world’s most challenging counterintelligence environments against our most capable adversaries. With that, I appreciate the danger that new technologies bring to securely meet agents in the current environment. Over the course of my 34 years, I routinely witnessed new threats from the evolving technology, and likewise the ingenuity we employed to refine our clandestine tradecraft in manipulating, adapting to, and overcoming such challenges. But the bottom line is that espionage can’t happen unless you recruit an agent in the first place.
Frankly, it’s no easy task to recruit a spy and not everyone can be turned, despite what might appear on the surface to be obvious motivations, or vulnerabilities. And the best of agents are not, in fact, all volunteers, as is sometimes suggested by those seeking to marginalize HUMINT’s essential contributions. Persuading someone to betray all they know and love for your cause, or so as to realize a need in them that the case officer has identified and nurtured, is more art than science. It requires time, access and the ability to penetrate another human being’s soul.
Recruiting agents is not a team sport in which additional numbers result in more quality. In reality, over the entirety of my career, one constant was the small percentage of CIA’s case officer cadre that actually accounted for the majority of its recruitments. Rather, it is focused, targeted, intimate and dependent on stealth, wit and manipulation, none of which are traits associated with numbers. Nor can such skills be transferred to just anyone. Not everyone can be trained to be a successful case officer, just as not everyone can be a fighter pilot, heart surgeon, composer or athlete.
There is no more reliable dynamic than that of agent and case officer in a well vetted and securely handled clandestine operation. While there are clear legal and statutory requirements for our agents’ behavior and conduct, as well as our collectors, which we uphold to the letter, there is no moral judgment. An agent meeting is more akin to a church confessional where agents find empathy and understanding, if not forgiveness. They can risk utter transparency in relating their soul’s darkest or most embarrassing secrets, as well as those concerning the realities, plans and intentions of their groups and organizations. After all, the case officer is not going to reveal the agent’s secrets to anyone other than “the team,” not to the agent’s family, friends or employer.
I have recruited all manner of people from around the world among our greatest state and non-state adversaries. Some were true patriots devoted to a cause, others mercenary in their quest for riches or revenge. And some simply at the end of their ropes needing a lifeboat, regardless the flag under which it sailed. These agents didn’t all love America or hate their governments or organizations, but they had a need, and cooperated based on trust. Trust, that they could tell us anything, and be protected.
Intelligence work requires agility, one of the reasons the CIA, as a smaller organization with flatter management, has tended to adapt more rapidly to crisis and dynamic circumstances on the collection and covert action battlefields. Some of that agility was diminished with the greater number of IC agencies now playing in the HUMINT arena, not to mention CIA’s own increased size and diminished autonomy. Moreover, the balance of power between foreign field case officers and homebound analysts decidedly shifted over the years in favor of the latter.
As CIA focused on its unique covert action authorities to develop highly effective capabilities, the operational targeters and analytical experts supporting such efforts grew in power and influence over the prioritization and conduct of clandestine operations, particularly in the counterterrorism realm. Some even approached their roles with incredulity and no small degree of disdain for HUMINT as the best means with which to place targets “on the X.” Despite coming to find that agents were vital to enabling the favored technological tools, their lack of personal investment and experience in recruiting and handling sources often undermined concern for protecting agents from exposure. This placed them at loggerheads with case officers whose primary obligation remained ensuring their agents’ safety.
Moving forward in an ever more complicated and dangerous world, it will be important for our intelligence community leaders and their political masters to place their faith in quality over quantity, mission over politics, and truth over personal ambition. Technology is critical and worthy of continued investment, but it should not be an either or choice with HUMINT. CIA and the rest of the IC should aim for balance and the capacity to address over the horizon threats before they metastasize. That means high quality reporting sources. More importantly still, our leaders should allow the IC to align its resources and focus against the nation’s most pressing security needs, rather than the White House’s political and often partisan agenda. Espionage may not be for the faint of heart, but an irreplaceable source of security that will always depend on the people, relationships and creativity that makes it work.
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