Thursday, May 16, 2013

Spies

"You know spies.  A bunch of bitchy little girls." - Sam Axe, "Burn Notice"

"Burn Notice" is a pretty typical example of the way spies are depicted in fiction.  It is a long running TV show and the quote is from one of the show's first episodes.  The quote turned out to be so popular that for years now it has been reprised in the opening credits montage that starts each show.  The quote made a small amount of sense in the episode it was included in.  Stripped of context it makes no sense at all.

Each episode of "Burn Notice" features the now requisite amount of expended ammunition, car chases, explosions, and other colorful mayhem.  Miami is also displayed to advantage.  It looks pretty and exotic, a good place to visit on vacation.  And have I mentioned the scantily clad "bikini girls" that populate the background of many shots.  And, finally, there is the "eye candy" female regular.  In this case the assets of Gabrielle Anwar are on display as she expends ammunition, blows things up, etc.  What is not on display is the quiet careful acquisition of information.

The details of "Burn Notice" differ from those of say a "James Bond" movie.  But they are just that:  details.  James Bond leaps from location to location around the world.  The Burn Notice bunch leap from neighborhood to neighborhood in and around Miami.  James Bond drives a sports car model of whatever car company has bought sponsorship for a particular film.  The Burn Notice bunch drive the sports car model of whatever car company has bought the "tie in" rights for the season.  Lots of bullets are expended.  Lots of things are blown up.  Lots of time is spent in bars and other locations populated with beautiful people.  Lots of alcohol is consumed.  In older movies and TV shows, lots of cigarettes would have been consumed.

I like "Burn Notice" and other spy movies and TV shows that hew to this time tested trope.  It's fun to watch beautiful people behaving badly.  And the script is always contrived so that we have good guys to root for as they take down the bad guys.  And the fact that the bad guys are so bad justifies all the bad things (e.g. kill people, blow things up, sleep with women they are not planning to marry) the good guys (and bad guys) do.

And all this bad behavior is consequence free for the most part.  The principle characters suffer a lot (it makes for better drama) but their suffering is almost always solely emotional.  Nobody, even the bad guys, suffers a debilitating injury.  They either come out scot free, or are killed off, never to be seen again.  Oh, occasionally someone suffers a telegenic wound, something resulting in a sling or some plaster, but even that is rare.  And in almost all cases (the exceptions are inserted to create a plot twist) the authorities never catch wise.  Everyone, good guys and bad, can expend prodigious quantities of ammunition, blow up or burn down all kinds of stuff in a very telegenic matter, drive crazily all over the place, etc. and never be caught or even identified by the authorities.

Ok, but what's the point?  The point is that it doesn't work that way in the real world.  I have also read dozens of books over the years about real spies in the real world.  My most recent read is of "The Way of the Knife" by Mark Mazzetti.  And here in the real world the rules are quite different.

Mazzetti's book is about drones; how they came into existence, how they are used, and how they are affecting real world organizations like the CIA and the Pentagon.  He has something to say about the turf wars between the Pentagon and the CIA.  Drones were invented by the CIA (actually a contractor working for the CIA but that's the same thing in the modern world, another issue that Mazzetti gets into) but quickly also adopted by the Pentagon.

Drones are inextricably tied up in the war on terror.  They started out as an intelligence tool.  You could now get close up surveillance with TV cameras or use them to intercept cell phone signals, or do other kinds of "electronic" surveillance.  Here was a new tool to enable intelligence gathering in all kinds of places that had here to for been completely inaccessible.  It was the same kind of revolution that the introduction of the spy satellites brought decades ago.

In the '30s, '40s, and '50s spying on the Soviet Union (as an example) had been nearly impossible.  Movement of foreigners was strictly controlled so it was nearly impossible to get a spy within visual range of anything that was not located within one small part of Moscow.  Various "spy plane" over flights were tried in the late '40s and '50s.  But they were infrequent at best and eventually resulted in the famous Gary Powers U-2 shoot down incident.  Starting in the '60s it was possible to fly a satellite that could take pictures over the Soviet Union.  They were a long ways up (hundreds of miles) but it was now possible to photographically cover the whole country on a regular basis.  This was a vast improvement.

But spy satellites fly high and on a regular schedule determined by the laws of celestial mechanics.  So if something was small or well camouflaged or could be hidden under cover when the spy satellite was scheduled to fly over, it could be hidden.  Many things like factories or military bases or rocket launch pads are too big and too static to hide.  But it was definitely limiting to not be able to get "up close and personal".  Drones fixed this problem.  They could fly as close as a few hundred feet above the ground.  They were usually equipped with a TV camera.  But they could also be equipped with all manner of electronic gadgets.  The original drone designs were purposefully tilted toward slow designs that could "loiter" near the same spot for many hours.  In short, their capabilities were the opposite of those inherent to spy satellites.  They were a "complementary" technology.  What one was bad at, the other was good at.  And in these early "intelligence tool" days they were a good fit in the CIA and a poor fit at the Pentagon.

But, as Mazzetti goes into in some detail, it turns out that the Pentagon needs to know what's going on too.  Planning for a big military mission like the Iraq invasion requires a lot of detailed information.  Theoretically the Pentagon just goes to the CIA.  But the Granada invasion, the Iran hostage rescue, and other events made the Pentagon feel that the CIA was unable or unwilling to do the job.  This got the Pentagon, especially and particularly Defense Secretary Rumsfeld,  to start thinking that it needed to go into the intelligence gathering business.  In other words, the Pentagon felt the need to invade the CIA's turf.

Similarly, the CIA felt the need to invade the Pentagon's turf.  After 9/11 the CIA was able to get boots on the ground in Afghanistan much more quickly than the Pentagon.  And those boots, a relatively small group of CIA agents and Pentagon special forces under the command of the CIA, were able to gin up a military force and militarily rout the Taliban.  This made the Pentagon look very bad.  Then the CIA was able to weaponize the drone by adding a Hellfire missile to it. They used this combination to kill bad guys.  Power politics the way it is played in D.C. rewarded the CIA for these successful incursions into the traditional turf of the Pentagon.  So they wanted more, more, more.  Mazzetti concludes that this turning the Pentagon into a mirror image of the CIA and the CIA into a mirror image of the Pentagon is a bad thing.  I agree with him.

Mazzetti focuses primarily on the last decade.  Leaving the Pentagon aside for the rest of this piece, this struggle within the CIA to determine what its mission is has been going on dating all the way back to the World War II predecessor to the CIA, namely the OSS.  The OSS was supposedly based on the British model.  But the knock on the OSS as an intelligence organization was that it was too much "Burn Notice" and not enough boring intelligence collection.  The nickname of the director of the OSS tells us a lot.  He was William "Wild Bill" Donovan.  The OSS evolved into the CIA in several steps.  It's most famous early director was Allan Dulles who had been an OSS officer during the war.  It turned out that the early CIA was notoriously incompetent at doing HUMINT (human intelligence).

Efforts to insert spies into the Soviet Union (the "communist" version of Russia) or even Eastern Europe were frequently "blown" (i.e. all the spies were caught).  We later found out that Kim Philby was a Soviet mole that had been successfully placed into the British intelligence system in the '30s.  He was best friends with James Jesus Angleton, who had an "all access" security pass in order to hunt CIA traitors.  Angleton passed along the details of these operations to Philby who passed them to the Russians who rounded everyone up.  This pressured the CIA to engage in stunts.  They overthrew the government of Iran in 1953.  This effort was so successful that many similar efforts were undertaken in Central and South America in the decades to follow.  None of the results were as successful as Iran and some of them (e.g. "Bay of Pigs" invasion of Cuba) were spectacularly unsuccessful.

Another area where the CIA was unsuccessful in its early decades was in the area of assassination.  Various assassination attempts were undertaken in the '50s and '60s.  As the "Church Commission" Senate investigation later documented they were all unsuccessful.  Castro, for instance, failed to smoke the exploding cigar.  And this was in spite of the fact that the techniques used to such complete lack of success would have fit nicely into a "Burn Notice" episode.  If you want these kinds of things to work it really helps to have a script writer pulling strings in the background.

In contrast to this was the success of "national technical" spying.  In the '50s the U.S. Air Force, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pentagon, began mounting spy plane missions to overfly the Soviet Union.  These were initially flown in repurposed military planes like B-29s.  But eventually custom planes like the U-2 and later SR-71 were developed.  The days of U-2 over flights of the Soviet Union ended abruptly when Francis Gary Powers was shot down.  But the U-2 was later used successfully over Cuba (see the "Cuban Missile Crisis") and other less well defended targets.  The SR-71 missions are still classified but there are no known instances of it being shot down.  The Soviet Union did not say anything publicly about the U-2 over flights until they had shot one down.  So far no one has complained about SR-71 over flights.  The rule seems to be that "it's too embarrassing to admit is happening until you can actually shoot one down".

In the '60s the U.S. began flying spy satellites.  Again the mission was run by the Air Force.  Electronic spying is done by the NSA.  And, while technically not part of the Pentagon, the NSA's budget comes out of the Pentagon's and the director has always been a military officer, usually an Air Force General.  So generally the glory for whatever ELINT (ELectronic INTelligence - frequently referred to as "national technical means") successes we have had have redounded to the benefit of the Pentagon.   

All this pushed the CIA away from boring intelligence collection.  Another influence was the White House.  It didn't matter whether the occupant was a Republican or a Democrat.  They all felt hemmed in and the "plausible deniability" of mounting some spectacular CIA stunt was mesmerizing.  The White House theory always is "if it's a success - claim credit; if it's a failure - claim it was an 'off the books operation run by an agency gone rogue'".  In following the CIA for literally decades I have yet to observe a truly rogue operation.  Sure, operations blow up on an all to frequent basis.  But whenever the CIA is "going rogue" they seem to be doing something that the White House is known to want done.  Part of the CIAs mission seems to occasionally step in as whipping boy and all around blame deflector.  I don't know why anybody over the age of 5 is fooled any more by this sort of thing.

This tendency for the CIA to go all "Burn Notice" instead of doing the boring job of intelligence collection is too long standing a pattern to be the result of some transient congruence of the crisis of the moment or the personalities of the current set of players.  And I'm convinced that the underlying cause is short term thinking.  These CIA operations get green lit because someone sees a big short term benefit.  Some regime we don't like will get overthrown.  Some bad guy we don't like will get killed.  And the theory is always "nothing can possibly go wrong" and even if it does, it was worth trying.  And part of this is the whole "plausible deniability" thing.

Remember in "Burn Notice" where the cops never seem to catch on.  Well the theory is that the rest of the world will not catch on because of "plausible deniability".  The problem is that the deniability is not plausible.  In one case here or there people may buy it.  But, as in the case of the Iranian revolution, if it works once then there is every reason to try it again somewhere else.  And after it has happened in a couple of places it becomes a recognizable pattern.  So now everyone knows what is going on even if it isn't.  So now we have conspiracy theorists who say "the U.S. did it" even when we didn't.  And since we actually did it when we said we didn't in case after case, it now becomes implausible when we deny doing it when we didn't.

There is a famous quotation from "On War" the definitive tome on military strategy by Clausewitz.  He said "war is the continuation of policy by other means."  This usually interpreted cynically to mean "if you can't get what you want by playing fair, go to war".  That is not at all what he had in mind.  What he really meant was "The decision to go to war must be seen in the context of the national objectives of a country's foreign policy.  If war successfully advances those objectives at an acceptable cost then it a good idea.  But if it damages those objectives or if the cost is higher than the benefits then it is a bad idea".  Seen this way, going to war because you have been attacked is a good idea.  You are defending yourself and your interests from unjustified aggression.  But most wars of choice are a bad idea.  Even if you win the war you have spent a lot of money, gotten a lot of people killed or injured, damaged a lot of property, lost prestige and the moral high ground, etc.  In other words the costs are high.  And that's if you win.  If you lose the costs are even higher.  Rarely are the known costs and possible unknown costs going to be less than the calculated benefit.  And the calculated benefit may far exceed the actual benefit.  See the second Iraq war as a classic example where the actual benefits turned out to be far smaller than the calculated ones.

I contend that this same "continuation of policy" idea applies equally well to the business of spying.  The U.S. part of World War II lasted less than 4 years (December 1941 to August 1945).  The OSS could afford to have a short term perspective on its actions.  Everyone expected the OSS to shut down at the end of the war, and it did.  So they could calculate that "if we blow up this bridge it will shorten the war and whatever happens after the war doesn't count".  And this would be a reasonable calculation that would turn out to be reasonably correct.  People didn't hold a grudge against the U.S. because the OSS blew up a bridge in 1944.  Lots of people were blowing a lot of stuff up in 1944.

But the cold war lasted about 50 years.  And the "war on terror" was not over after 4 years.  We still have no idea when it will be over.  So the cost/benefit calculus is far different when the CIA goes all "Burn Notice".  The 1953 overthrow of Iran came back to haunt the U.S. in 1978/79 when the Iranians threw out the Shah, the guy we installed in 1953.  So the blow back happened 35 years later.  The long history of U.S. backed revolutions still haunts U.S. relations in Central and South America today, decades after the last CIA backed revolution.  People have long memories for this kind of stuff.  And then they put it in their history books and it influences generations.

I am very saddened by the militarization of the CIA for the umpteenth time.  It makes it much harder to actually do the job of collecting intelligence.  It is already hard enough.  First, there is the problem that no one wants to pay for intelligence on "quiet" spots (like Egypt and Tunisia before the Arab Spring) or allies (like Iran under the Shah).  Then they don't want to listen to you if you try to tell them things they don't want to hear (I have a bad feeling about what's going to happen in this "quiet" spot).  Then "allies" and, for that matter enemies, don't like to be spied upon.  (See trying to infiltrate the Soviet Union above as an example.)  And the best way to do intelligence collecting involves acting slowly and carefully over a long period of time.  But all Washington cares about is the crisis of the minute.

In Mazzetti's book he talks about the CIA parachuting (figuratively, not actually) agents into Pakistan after the Afghan war started up.  The problem (among many) was that none of these people knew anything about Pakistan.  They didn't understand the language (actually several languages were useful) or the culture.  (A key figure in Mazzetti's book was a South American specialist.  There were few Catholics who spoke Spanish in Pakistan.)  No one should be surprised that these people did not exactly cover themselves in glory.  What we needed were people who could blend in (e.g. brown people - not white people) and who understood the language and culture.  But we didn't have any of these.  (The obvious solution of recruiting people to spy for us from the U.S. population of people of Pakistani descent was impossible for political reasons.)  Unfortunately, I see the CIA as having yet again gone down the wrong path.  And I don't see any evidence that the intelligence community or the politicians that support them are willing or even able to learn from past mistakes.

So how should it be done?  It is possible to get this sort of thing done right.  And I would point to the Gates Foundation as an example of how to do things right.  They are not in the spy business. But they are in the business of dealing with peoples and cultures around the world through their Global Health Initiative.  And specifically I want to talk about their Polio program.  The Gates Foundation has been working on Polio for many years.  They have had a lot of success.  The number of new Polio cases in the world is tiny compared to what it was a decade or so ago.  But it is not zero and that's the goal.

The Polio solution looks simple.  Just vaccinate everybody.  If you have the kind of money the Gates Foundation has it would seem that this is not even particularly expensive. Just buy and administer 7 billion series of Polio shots.  That would make everyone immune and the problem would be solved.  But, surprise, surprise, it's harder than that.  Buying enough Polio medicine is easy.  Just write a big enough check to Pharma and they will produce the medicine.  It's a big check but not so big that it is a problem for the Foundation.  The first problem after that is getting the medicine to the patients.  Lots of them live on the back side of nowhere where the roads are crappy and there is no refrigeration.  This is a hard but solvable problem.  You buy some Land Rovers, coolers, etc. and off you go.  It's harder and more complicated than that but you get the idea.  It's still not a big enough problem that the Foundation can't solve it.

Those are essentially business/technology problems.  But they are not the really hard problems.  The really hard problems are people problems.  Throwing money or technology at these problem does not even make a small dent.  You need to get the vaccine to places that hate westerners.  You need to get the vaccine to places where the local medical infrastructure looks to us like a Witch Doctor.  You need to get the medicine to places where there is a serious hard core war going on.  And when I talk about "war" I mean child soldiers, rape as a military strategy, genocide, etc.  These are not "oh what a lovely war" wars.  They are not even "trench war with gas attack" wars like World War I.  These are really nasty wars.  But unfortunately Polio likes places where these kinds of wars are going on.  If you want to 100%, "to the last case", wipe out Polio, and that's what the Gates Foundation wants to do, you have to figure out how to operate effectively in even those places.

The Gates Foundation is serious about wiping Polio out.  They have already put a lot of money into the business/technology side of things.  They have lined up production capability so that they have all the vaccine they need.  They have tuned up the vaccine so that it is easier to transport and deliver to the back side of nowhere.  They have figured out that you need to make sure that it goes where it is supposed to go.  So they GPS track the vaccine to make sure it actually gets to that fly speck village in the back of beyond.  They have tricked up the packaging so that if the vaccine is mishandled (i.e. gets too old or overheats) then an obvious "its bad" symbol appears on the package.  In short, they have examined the system from end to end and applied all the technical/business fixes they can think of.  But that's the easy part and the Gates Foundation knows it.

At the same time they have put a lot of thought, energy, and effort into the people problems.  Step one is to develop a very good working relationship with governments and other power players.  And a key to success is understanding the culture.  They work very hard to understand and work with the culture.  This is not a matter of "insert money here" although I am sure that the money helps.  The idea is to try to find a "win/win" strategy.  If the local power players come to believe that co-operation with the vaccination program will end up benefitting them politically they are much more likely to co-operate.  One tactic is prestige enhancement.  If you can convince the local powers that putting in the kind of infrastructure that the Foundation needs will benefit the local politicians then the politicians are more likely to go along.

The Gates Foundation does NOT try to rip out whatever medical infrastructure is already there, even if it is literally Witch Doctors.  Instead it sells the idea of beefing up what's already there.  They pitch "let us do what we want and you will get a better medical system and everyone will like you".  The Gates people literally go to Witch Doctors and say "we want to run this program through you.  It will make you more successful which will enhance your position".  That's a winning proposition to a Witch Doctor who is used to dealing with westerners who want to toss him out on his ear and replace him with a "foreign doctor".  Notice that a common thread here is investing the energy in finding out how the local culture works and then figuring out how to work with it rather than trying to tear it down or make it look bad.  And it's NOT Americans parachuted in with little training and no understanding of the local culture.  In fact, it's mostly not Americans at all.  It's locals.

The Gates organization in all these places is almost entirely made up of locals.  They come with those built in credentials of local linguistic and cultural knowledge.  This immediately translates to local credibility.  And the Gates people listen to the locals.  They know what they want to achieve.  But they are more than willing to trust the locals to get the details right, to get on with the job in the way that will work the best.  This is the strategy they applied in India.  India has zillions of languages and cultures.  The Gates people have wiped out Polio in India and they did it much more quickly than they thought they could.  Governments at the national, regional, and local level feel that they know and can trust the Gates people.  That means that when they want to the Gates people can move on to the next project  and the next.  The Indians see the Gates people as trustworthy people who truly do have the interests of Indians at heart.

Right next door to India is Pakistan.  The Gates Foundation is working in Pakistan.  Any doubt about that was recently removed when we learned that a number of Pakistani women had been killed while working on the Polio project.  It is important to note that the victims were Pakistani and that they were women.  These attributes alone indicate the degree of trust between the Pakistani government, and more broadly Pakistani society, and the Gates Foundation.  Pakistanis are not going to let the typical "foreign devils" employ their women.  And in the context of Pakistani society the Gates people decided that Pakistani women would be more effective in getting people vaccinated because they would be perceived as trustworthy and non-threatening.

Contrast that with how the CIA is viewed in Pakistan and the contrast could not be more striking.  The long term, culturally sensitive strategy of the Gates Foundation is working a lot better than the "Burn Notice", culturally ignorant strategy of the CIA.  The U.S. military will be substantially out of Afghanistan in about 18 months.  Based on past experience I would expect that at about the same time the footprint of the CIA in Pakistan will shrink away to almost nothing.  I have no doubt that the Gates Foundation will be active in Pakistan many years afterward, even if the Gates Foundation succeeds in eradicating Polio.  It would be nice to think that once the fire of war is no longer burning hotly next door in Afghanistan the CIA would have the time, resources, and inclination to install people with the appropriate training and attitude to replace the current "Burn Notice" bunch.  But which organization is likely to have a deeper and more thorough understanding of Pakistan five or even twenty-five years from now?  I wish I was not so confident I knew the answer to that question.