Cipher Brief Expert Jim Danoy is a retired defense intelligence executive and served as the National Intelligence Manager for Europe and NATO and a President’s Daily Brief (PDB) briefer to the 44th President of the United States.
The COVID-19 pandemic, as with previous cataclysmic events will likely result in the establishment of a national commission to examine the state of the country’s pandemic preparedness before the outbreak, its response during the outbreak, and plans for public health and economic recovery in the aftermath of the outbreak. This inquiry should include how the country must prepare for the next pathogenic event.
The threat infectious diseases pose to the national security of the U.S. has become all too apparent as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, there is a critical role the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) must play in combatting the “invisible enemy”. A pathogenic outbreak can occur at any time and at any frequency. Detecting an incident and isolating it through mitigation efforts before it can spread into an epidemic and ultimately a pandemic requires constant vigilance and exquisite intelligence acquired through comprehensive surveillance and monitoring. Since pathogens do not rest, neither can our national security apparatus. Since pathogens cannot be reasoned with nor deterred from doing what pathogens do, which is seek out victims, the only way to deal with a pathogen is to destroy it, neutralize it, or mitigate its deleterious effects.
The lessons which will be drawn from the COVID-19 pandemic experience should be used to examine how the IC can effectively and efficiently contribute to combatting the infectious disease threat. This would include how collection and analysis can be leveraged, how the IC can seamlessly collaborate with the scientific and medical community, and how infectious disease threat warning information can be communicated to decision-makers in a manner which will increase its receptivity. Also, how warning information can be disseminated quickly to first responders at the federal, state, local, and tribal level to facilitate crisis response.
While some may feel that the Intelligence Community is unsuited to prosecute a counter-infectious disease campaign, the fact is the tools and many of the methods intelligence services utilize to counter other trans-national threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction are applicable to combatting infectious diseases. To posture the Intelligence Community to properly address this threat will require a cultural shift, readjusting priorities, and a retooling of some sectors of the Intelligence Community, to include recruiting intelligence officers with the applicable skill sets to deal with this problem set. Despite the potential cost and upheaval to the Intelligence Community failure to address the issue is simply not a viable option. The country can ill afford to undergo another shock such as it has experienced during this pandemic. The COVID-19 has killed over 115,000 American citizens over a period of a few months, disrupting the lives of every American and sending the global economy into a tailspin unlike any terrorist group or nation-state adversary this country has ever faced. It is therefore imperative that the Intelligence Community respond to this threat by putting its formidable collection and analytic capability against the problem.
WARNING IS KEY, BUT WARNING IS NOT ENOUGH
As the COVID-19 crisis runs its deadly course media reports have circulated that warnings of the deadly viral outbreak in China were issued and not acted upon, to include warnings by the Intelligence Community. A thorough examination of what was known regarding this particular novel virus—when it was known and to who it was communicated will be required in order to fully evaluate the warning aspects of this crisis. Regardless, the IC should never engage in schadenfreude over any warning which goes unheeded for in the end a warning unheeded is little better than no warning at all. The IC must do all it can to see that warnings are understood by the decision-maker and result in actions taken.
The Intelligence Community (IC) did warn of the risk posed by a global pandemic caused by a highly transmissible and lethal pathogen as far back as two decades ago. In response to a Presidential Decision Directive on the threat of infectious diseases (PDD/NSTC-7) issued by President Clinton in June 1996, the IC’s National Intelligence Council (NIC) produced an unclassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in January 2000 entitled “The Global Infectious Disease Threat and Its Implications for the United States”. The NIE, which covered the range of infectious diseases to include HIV/AIDs and tuberculosis, noted that the risk of a “killer” influenza pandemic emanating from anywhere in the world was, according to epidemiologists, “high” and that “it was not a question of whether, but when [the next pandemic] would occur”. In 2004 in the wake of the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak, the NIC as part of its global trends series—unclassified studies of possible future trajectories based on internal IC analysis and extensive discussions with government and non-governmental experts—posited a pandemic as a potential “Black Swan”—an unforeseen disruptive event, which could derail the pace of globalization. In “Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project” released in December 2004, the IC noted that “some experts believe it is only a matter of time before a new pandemic appears, such as the 1918-1919 influenza virus that killed an estimated 20 million worldwide”. The study went on to state that “if the death toll rose into the millions in several major countries it would put a halt to global travel and trade during an extended period”.
Over the ensuing years the IC, in almost boilerplate fashion, made reference to the risk of a pathogenic outbreak precipitating a pandemic, one that would disrupt trade and the social fabric of nations. Former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Dan Coats in his last annual World Wide Threat Assessment to Congress in January 2019 conveyed the IC’s assessment that “…the U.S. and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of deaths and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support”.
These pandemic warnings by the Intelligence Community are what is commonly known in the intelligence business as strategic warning intelligence. There is no universally agreed upon definition of strategic warning. In Strategic Warning Intelligence: History, Challenges, and Prospects, authors John A. Gentry and Joseph S. Gordon describe strategic warning as the type of warning that “supports national-level decision-making by senior political and military leaders (Gentry 12).” Strategic warning intelligence is generally viewed as being general in nature with a long-term time horizon, as opposed to tactical warning which is more specific and primarily of an imminent nature. Traditionally tactical intelligence is viewed as supporting lower-level officials and military commanders. Erik Dahl in his book Intelligence and Surprise Attack: Failure and Success from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 and Beyond examined the utility of strategic and tactical warning and has questioned the utility of strategic warning to decision-makers due to its inherent vagueness and ambiguity. Dahl has argued that intelligence consumers, to include decision-makers, seek what has been referred to over the years as actionable intelligence. One of the qualities of actionable intelligence Dahl states is precision—that is that it contains detailed information, like tactical intelligence. The other key quality is that “it must be linked to the immediate and specific needs of the decision maker [Emphasis added] (Dahl 21-24).” Lacking those properties, Dahl argues, the warning message is likely to have low-receptivity with decision-makers.
Traditionally, the IC has placed greater emphasis on producing strategic warning products making the case that providing strategic warning intelligence is the mission of national-level intelligence agencies and is of most value to policymakers, this despite the growing appetite among senior-level officials for tactical intelligence in a rapidly changing environment. It may be that in part the IC has tried to make a virtue out of a shortcoming, in that detailed intelligence is difficult to acquire.
In the case of the threat a pandemic has posed to the U.S. the IC has fulfilled its task of providing strategic warning, although it is difficult to fully assess what effect these strategic warnings have had on senior-level policymakers. President George W. Bush’s focus on pandemic preparedness appears to have been fueled by the 9/11 attack and the potential for a bioterrorist attack, as well as the HIV/AIDs epidemic and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003. Most notably, President Bush reportedly was deeply influenced by John M. Barry’s 2005 book on the 1918-1919 H1N1 (Spanish Influenza) outbreak,The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, prompting him to call for a national strategy to deal with pandemics. President Obama carried forth with the foundational work done by the Bush Administration and was quickly confronted with the 2009-2010 H1N1 (Swine Flu) outbreak . The Swine Flu pandemic seems to have served as a useful “lessons learned” for the subsequent response mounted to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Not surprisingly “real world” events tend to have a more profound effect on policymakers than IC strategic warnings. Nonetheless, as memories are short the IC must continue to articulate the threat pathogenic outbreaks as disruptive events, pose to national and global security and stability. However, there is a need to improve the capability to provide specific tactical-level warning once a pathogenic outbreak has been detected.
THREAT MONITORING
The U.S. and other countries have developed data-driven alert networks to detect and warn of public health threats. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services conducts syndromic surveillance as a means of detecting infectious disease outbreaks and other health maladies, monitoring their spread, and determining a response. Within the U.S. this surveillance is conducted in cooperation with federal, state, and local health authorities, as well academic and private-sector partners under a framework called the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP).
Global health events are the focus of the CDC’s Global Disease Detection Operations Center (GDDOC) which conducts what it terms “event-based” surveillance. This involves examining reports, scanning the internet, and compiling anecdotal stories of health events for indications of activity which could signal an outbreak. The CDC has worked closely with the United Nation World Health Organization (WHO) and health organizations of other countries in this effort. The CDC even has what it calls Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officers who can be deployed to investigate pathogen outbreaks and collect “evidence” which could be used to develop mitigation measures. Ultimately, the efficacy of CDC’s global detection effort is highly dependent on host country cooperation and a trusted relationship in order to secure access to areas of high risk for pathogenic outbreaks and to acquire accurate data in the event of a suspected outbreak. This dependency while understandable is also a key vulnerability for which the IC may be in a position to mitigate through focused collection and analysis. In the case of COVID-19 indications are Chinese authorities were not honest or forthcoming to foreign officials about the details surrounding the virus outbreak in Wuhan. Unfortunately, this lack of transparency and a tendency to cover-up or downplay a developing crisis—such as was attempted with disastrous results in 1986 by Soviet authorities during the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion, is a common characteristic of authoritarian regimes.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
The Intelligence Community can play a vital role in “filling in the gaps” for the scientific and health community; acquiring infectious disease-related information in denied areas and supplementing and verifying information provided by foreign officials regarding the status of suspected pathogenic outbreaks. Signals intelligence (SIGINT) could intercept communications among foreign officials in an affected country indicating a yet-to-be disclosed incident. Geo-spatial intelligence (GEOINT) could detect evidence of population movements or quarantining in an affected area, and Human intelligence (HUMINT) through leveraging sources and conducting debriefings could shed insights into the existence and spread of an outbreak. Additionally, the Intelligence Community can examine how new and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and its subset machine learning (ML) which are being developed to assist in intelligence collection, processing, and analysis can be applied to the infectious disease problem set in partnership with the scientific and health communities.
In this effort, the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), a component of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) lead entity for medical intelligence can play a pivotal role, in conjunction with other members of the IC, such as the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). The NCMI mission is to provide information on foreign health threats and capabilities in support of the DoD mission, but it also supports wider U.S. government requirements. DIA notes that the NCMI mission “includes monitoring foreign environmental health and infectious disease risks, foreign biotechnology development and other issues that could potentially impact U.S. military operations and the health of U.S. troops”. The NCMI, then the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center (AFMIC), was one of the primary drafters of the January 2000 National Intelligence Estimate on infectious diseases which warned of the risk of a global COVID-19 type pandemic.
A number of measures the Intelligence Community could undertake to improve the country’s ability to combat the threat from infectious diseases are:
Enhancing intelligence collection will be required to improve early detection and warning of pathogenic outbreaks. The COVID-19 pandemic should prompt a review of the National Intelligence Priorities Framework (NIPF)—the IC mechanism to oversee customer priorities for national intelligence support, to include those of the President—with an aim at increasing the importance of collecting infectious disease-related information. Intelligence Community data bases regarding the locations of hospitals, medical laboratories, and other pathogenic-related facilities, particularly in countries prong to pathogenic outbreaks, should be updated. The IC can work with the other so-called “Five-Eyes” partners—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, as well as other key allies, Japan, South Korea, and the Europeans, to increase the priority of medical intelligence within each respective intelligence service. Overall, any collection enhancement approach should include an integrated multi-disciplinary collection plan which addresses key stakeholder requirements.
Increasing information sharing between the IC and the CDC is critical to the global detection effort. It is unclear to those outside the U.S. government as to what degree the IC and CDC share information with each other, however, there are likely opportunities to increase the flow of infectious disease-related information. The CDC understandable is unlikely to seek a high-profile relationship with the IC, however, increased information-sharing on global public health developments will assist in tipping collection assets, detection, and implementing mitigation measures. Proper dissemination mechanisms and disclosure policies if currently inadequate would need to be developed and implemented in order to facilitate the increase volume and rapid transmission of releasable information.
Improving warning mechanisms is essential to pandemic preparedness and response. Providing decision-makers timely and relevant warning of long-term and imminent threats is one of the most challenging tasks of an intelligence service. Much work has been done by the IC on the collection and analysis aspects of warning. However, a key component is the means by which the warning is disseminated with the overriding variable being the degree to which the intended recipient is receptive to the warning message. Past experience has shown that senior-level officials can be distracted with other priorities or the message gets “lost in the noise”. In order to mitigate this possibility, global health information, such as the state of infectious disease outbreaks, should at a minimum be incorporated into existing IC threat warning systems. As Dahl has stated this information should be specific and as detailed as possible. Devising a dedicated global health threat warning problem set in collaboration with the CDC, with the possibility of the NCMI as the lead IC element is also an option. The objective of either approach would be to identify potential infectious disease threats to U.S. interests as they emerge and raise the profile and the visibility of global health threat information “above the noise level” in order to warn of an impending crisis. Global health threat information should be communicated to policymakers and decision-makers on a recurring basis with changes in alert status flagged. Establishing specific and commonly understood warning thresholds is key to any warning regime as warnings should also be tied to prescribed actions in order to be of utility. This means a partnership between the warning element and the policymaker and decision-maker.
CONCLUSION
The IC should be commended for its long-time focus on global health as a security issue. In particular, the National Intelligence Council has been in the forefront in highlighting the threat infectious diseases pose to political, social, and economic stability. This work has been enriched through consultation with epidemiologists and health experts inside and outside the U.S. government. The opportunity exists to build on the work that has been done to date by deepening existing relationships the IC has with the public health sector and in forging new partnerships as part of a whole-of-society approach to combatting the spread of infectious diseases.
A critical component of this approach will be the IC’s relationship with the CDC. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), under which the CDC resides, is not a member of the IC, however HHS’s Office of National Security conducts intelligence functions and is headed by an Assistant Deputy Secretary who also serves as the HHS Secretary’s senior intelligence officer. Over the years HHS’s interaction with the IC has increased and one of the lessons drawn from the 2014 Ebola crisis was the benefit which could be derived from cooperation between HHS and the IC. Indeed, during the 2018-2019 Ebola outbreak HHS Secretary Azar and then DNI Coats reportedly met in March 2019 to discuss ways in which the IC could support HHS in addressing infectious disease outbreaks. At the time DNI Coats stated that “the IC strives to provide the best intelligence possible to inform US-led containment and relief efforts”. Given the importance of global health to national security a key question is whether it is now time for HHS to become a formal member of the IC?
Most health experts, to include the director of the CDC expect there to be subsequent COVID-19 outbreaks. These outbreaks will continue to adversely affect the country until an effective vaccine is widely available. The pandemic is placing tremendous financial and social stress on countries around the globe and the longer it persists the risk of widespread instability in various regions in the world will be acute. Adversaries will likely use the upheaval caused by the pandemic as an opportunity to undermine U.S. interests through disinformation campaigns and possibly undertaking provocative military actions at a time when the virus can affect U.S. force readiness. All of this points to the need for the IC to redouble its efforts against the global health problem set, focus its considerable collection and analytic assets, and join forces with the public health community in dealing with the current pandemic and helping prevent a future widespread pathogenic outbreak.
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