America's national security and intelligence revisted--Part 1 of "Top Secret America"

Overview

The first article in "Top Secret America" is "A hidden world, growing beyond control." Here's the lead paragraph:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

And this is four years after I said that "As a result of the Homeland Security Act and creation of DHS, the federal bureaucracy is a big mess which has yet to be sorted out and which has resulted in further confusion and red tape and inefficiency and thus hurt efforts in the war on terror."

As I said in my previous post, the series by the Post proves my earlier conclusion correct but also shows that the mess has grown far bigger than I imagined. This post addresses matters raised in "A hidden world, growing beyond control," but the article contains much more detail than this post and reveals problems I am not going to address here. Thus, I urge everyone to read the article.

What should become apparent--if not in this post then certainly in the articles in the Washington Post--is that while there are individual flaws and problems in the system, they all synergize into one huge mess where any one problem causes and/or exacerbates other problems. Nevertheless, I am going to attempt to address some of the problems separately.

The intelligence community has been supersized.

Actually, my previous statement about DHS and the bureaucracy is not accurate because it is so limited in scope. The intelligence apparatus has expanded so much that DHS is but one piece of a large, irregular puzzle. Let's start with the largeness. As reported by the Post,

• DHS, established in late 2002, now has 230,000 employees, making it the third largest federal agency (after the Departments of Defense and Veteran Affairs).
• 854,000 people have "top secret" security clearances. NOTE: In the U.S. government, there are three basic levels of security clearance, with "top secret" being the highest, followed by "secret" and "confidential." "Top secret" applies to information or material the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security. And a mere 854,000 people have access to such information. Wow.
• "In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space."
• "In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances."
• "Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States."
• The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was created in 2005, and its purpose was to oversee and coordinate the ever-growing intelligence community (more on ODNI to follow). When it opened, ODNI had 11 people with offices in a secure vault with tiny rooms. One year later, ODNI took up two floors in an office building. In spring of 2008, ODNI moved into a 7-story huge office complex it shares with the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC).

Speaking of the current ODNI location, the complex is called Liberty Crossing, and here is a picture.


So, in three years, ODNI went from one vault with small rooms to this.

"A hidden world, growing beyond control" has plenty more facts regarding the sheer size of the intelligence community. The article--and some other sources--also show how irregular and jumbled the puzzle is.

WARNING: Reading the rest of this post presents a greater than zero chance of causing a severe case of tired head.

What in the wide, wide world of intelligence is a goin' on here?

NOTE: It is my belief that quoting or paraphrasing Slim Pickens is an inherently good thing.

As noted by the Post, after 9-11, the lines of responsibility and mission started to blur, so pursuant to the recommendation of the 9-11 Commission, Congress and the Bush administration created the ODNI. The idea was to establish an authority to oversee, manage, and control the entire intelligence apparatus. The previous discussion about how big the intelligence community has become should give an idea as to the enormity of the task given to ODNI. For details of ODNI's mission and purpose, check out this page on the ODNI website and the ODNI Fact Sheet.

Rather than setting out the mission and objectives stated in those sources, I choose instead to convey the difficulty of the ODNI's job by listing some of the organizations that ODNI is supposed to manage and coordinate. As stated in the ODNI Fact Sheet, "The DNI oversees a 17-element Intelligence Community[.]" Here are those 17 elements:

• Central Intelligence Agency
• Defense Intelligence Agency
• Department of Energy (Office of Intelligence & Counterintelligence)
• Department of Homeland Security (Office of Intelligence & Analysis)
• Department of State (Bureau of Intelligence & Research)
• Department of Treasury (Office of Intelligence & Analysis)
• Drug Enforcement Administration (Office of National Security Intelligence)
• Federal Bureau of Investigation (National Security Branch)
• National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
• National Reconnaissance Office
• National Security Agency/Central Security Service
• United States Air Force
• United States Army
• United States Coast Guard
• United States Marine Corps
• United States Navy

Notice that ODNI is supposed to oversee and manage only one protion of some of these groups. That means that these portions are supposed to be managed by their own organization (for instance, the DIA is managed by the Defense Department) AND by ODNI. This gives me visions of TPS Reports, memos, and multiple bosses. But seriously, who do you think the people working in these "portions" are going to follow--ODNI or their immediate bosses within their own organizations? Notice also that ODNI is supposed to oversee and manage part of DHS. So, our government first added a level of bureucracy by creating DHS--which was supposed to oversee and manage--and then our government decided that the original solution had to be overseen and managed by another office, and that simply added another layer to the bureacracy. Getting back to the puzzle analogy, the puzzle already had many pieces, but instead of trying to put them all together, we decided that the way to put the puzzle together was to add more pieces.

And it is obvious that this 17-member Intelligence Community does not include all the "1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence." So who is supposed to oversee and, manage, and coordinate all those organizations and companies?

Apparently, despite the creation of DHS and ODNI, the answer to the question is "no one." This will be discussed later. Here's a scary excerpt from the Post:

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."

Welcome to the Department of Redundancy Department.

Given the massive size of the intelligence and national security apparatus and what I consider to be the obvious inability of ODNI (or any one else) to control it, there simply have to be problems with the system. One of those problems is redundancy to an extreme. Some redunancy is good. It can provide corroboration, and it can make sure that a given job is thoroughly done. However, what we have in our intelligence system now goes way beyond ridiculous. Included in the opening bullet points of the Post article is the following:

Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

Remember that because I will be writing another post about tracking terrorist money...

Here's one description of the redundancy problem:

The problem with many intelligence reports, say officers who read them, is that they simply re-slice the same facts already in circulation. "It's the soccer ball syndrome. Something happens, and they want to rush to cover it," said Richard H. Immerman, who was the ODNI's assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic integrity and standards until early 2009. "I saw tremendous overlap."

This redundancy has already resulted in real world failures. One of those was the shooting spree that took place at Ft. Hood. The shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, had trained at Walter Reed Hospital, where he had warned his "commanders that they should allow Muslims to leave the Army or risk 'adverse events.' He had also exchanged e-mails with a well-known radical cleric in Yemen being monitored by U.S. intelligence." And yet the Army unit charged with counterintelligence investigations within the Army knew nothing about any of this because the unit was busy assessing general terrorist affiliations in the United States--a job lready being done by DHS and 106 Joint Terrorism Task Forces in the FBI. The Army unit's reports "'didn't tell us anything we didn't know already,' said the Army's senior counterintelligence officer at the Pentagon." As a result, the one organization that probably should have issued a warning about Hasan failed to do so.

And the Army is not the only group that has suffered from the massive redundancy.

Even the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is supposed to be where the most sensitive, most difficult-to-obtain nuggets of information are fused together, get low marks from intelligence officials for not producing reports that are original, or at least better than the reports already written by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency.

When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. "I told him that after 41/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!" he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.

Two years later, Custer, now head of the Army's intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., still gets red-faced recalling that day, which reminds him of his frustration with Washington's bureaucracy. "Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn't gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?" he said. "Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn't produce the same thing?"

We already know the answer to Custer's question--"Nobody." And without any control over the redundancy, the whole system fails to be useful.

Bigger is not better.

Aside from the redundancy, the sheer size of the system results in an overall product that is counterproductive. To put the matter simply, there is more information that anyone has the capacity to absorb and assimilate. Here's another of the opening bullet points from the Post:

Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

And then there's this: "The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don't dare delve into the backup clogging their computers." And that leads to another problem. "They rely instead on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency's analysis, re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing." This will be addressed in another section.

The size of the intelligence community combined with the sheer volume of data and reports it generates makes the whole system like a teenage boy experiencing a sudden growth spurt--uncoordinated and clumsy. Here's one example from "A hidden world, growing beyond control:"

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases.

(emphasis added). And the problem is not just a multitude of databases. "The data flow is enormous, with dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with one another." (emphasis added). I don't think that even if it was possible there should be one database or that every database should interact with every other one, but to have that many databases AND the lack of interaction is ridiculous. The current structure necessarily means that time and resources have to be spent on trying to access and search all the databases before anyone can even begin to try to piece together all the data into something useful. And why does this situation exist? "There is a long explanation for why these databases are still not connected, and it amounts to this: It's too hard, and some agency heads don't really want to give up the systems they have." More on this in the next section...

As stated earlier, the creation of DHS and ODNI was supposed to solve the coordination problem, but that simply has not happened. Here's a scary excerpt from the Post:

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."

And just as the redundancy problem has resulted in real world failures, so too has this size/coordination problem. The chief example cited by the Post is the Christmas Day attempted airline bombing.

Last fall, after eight years of growth and hirings, the enterprise was at full throttle when word emerged that something was seriously amiss inside Yemen. In response, President Obama signed an order sending dozens of secret commandos to that country to target and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda affiliate.

In Yemen, the commandos set up a joint operations center packed with hard drives, forensic kits and communications gear. They exchanged thousands of intercepts, agent reports, photographic evidence and real-time video surveillance with dozens of top-secret organizations in the United States.

That was the system as it was intended. But when the information reached the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington for analysis, it arrived buried within the 5,000 pieces of general terrorist-related data that are reviewed each day. Analysts had to switch from database to database, from hard drive to hard drive, from screen to screen, just to locate what might be interesting to study further.

As military operations in Yemen intensified and the chatter about a possible terrorist strike increased, the intelligence agencies ramped up their effort. The flood of information into the NCTC became a torrent.

Somewhere in that deluge was even more vital data. Partial names of someone in Yemen. A reference to a Nigerian radical who had gone to Yemen. A report of a father in Nigeria worried about a son who had become interested in radical teachings and had disappeared inside Yemen.

These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for Detroit. But nobody put them together because, as officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred.

"There are so many people involved here," NCTC Director Leiter told Congress.

"Everyone had the dots to connect," DNI Blair explained to the lawmakers. "But I hadn't made it clear exactly who had primary responsibility."

And so Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253. As it descended toward Detroit, he allegedly tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. It wasn't the very expensive, very large 9/11 enterprise that prevented disaster. It was a passenger who saw what he was doing and tackled him. "We didn't follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence," White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan explained afterward. "Because no one intelligence entity, or team or task force was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation."

Un-freaking-believable. It is easy to pin the blame on ODNI and DNI Blair for this failure, but that is not entirely fair, as will be explained in the next section.

What is this? Junior high school?

Even though one of the stated intentions behind the creation of DHS was oversight and coordination, as I have said before, the greatest result of the Homeland Security Act (which created DHS) was a massive reorganization of the federal bureaucracy. In my opinion, such scale of reorganization was unnecessary and did more harm than good. The reorganization got rid of some very effective programs and ended up complicating, rather than simplifying, the bureacracy. The next "solution" was ODNI, but such solution was doomed to failure from the start.

From the start, ODNI never had the authority it needed to do its job. "[T]he law passed by Congress did not give the director clear legal or budgetary authority over intelligence matters, which meant he wouldn't have power over the individual agencies he was supposed to control." Also, the law creating ODNI did nothing to address the ever-present Washington turf wars. Damn near every federal agency wants to keep what it has, get more, and keep other agencies from getting any. These two deficiencies in the creation of ODNI meant ODNI could not succeed in the desired objectives, as noted by this excerpt from the Post:

Even before the first director, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, was on the job, the turf battles began. The Defense Department shifted billions of dollars out of one budget and into another so that the ODNI could not touch it, according to two senior officials who watched the process. The CIA reclassified some of its most sensitive information at a higher level so the National Counterterrorism Center staff, part of the ODNI, would not be allowed to see it, said former intelligence officers involved.

And that brings up related problems--the failure to share information and the keeping of secrets. Part of the effort by agencies to keep exclusive control of their organizations (and thus get an edge on other agencies) includes what are known as "Special Access Programs" or "SAPs." As the name implies, access to these programs is very limited, and they are monitored by only those way up the food chain. But even some high up on the food chain are not allowed access, as shown by this Post excerpt:

One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. "What do you mean you can't tell me? I pay for the program," he recalled saying in a heated exchange.

It doesn't take a vivid imagination to see how such secrecy probably extends outward through the whole system. Lest one thinks that SAPs don't pose a significant obstacle for the entire system, consider the following:

[T]he Pentagon's list of code names for (SAPs) runs 300 pages. The intelligence community has hundreds more of its own, and those hundreds have thousands of sub-programs with their own limits on the number of people authorized to know anything about them. All this means that very few people have a complete sense of what's going on.

"There's only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs - that's God," said James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the Obama administration's nominee to be the next director of national intelligence.

I think all this secrecy helps explain why the multitude of agencies are reluctant to change their databases and other technical systems (as mentioned above). If databases are consolidated or otherwise made accessible by other agencies, the secrecy will be harder to maintain, and a given agency's turf could be encroached upon.

And there's another aspect to "protecting one's turf, as pointed out by the Post: "Another senior intelligence official with wide access to many programs said that secrecy is sometimes used to protect ineffective projects." Ineffective programs could be cut, which would mean that agency would lose funding and prestige, and no agency wants that.

So, what I am reminded of is a line from the TV show "Burn Notice" as delivered by the great Bruce Campbell: "You know spies--bunch of bitchy little girls." What we have is a bunch of agencies that refuse to cooperate, refuse to share, keep secrets from other groups, are more concerned with their own interests rather than the nation's interests, and don't want to answer to any authority.

That's why this section is entitled "What is this? Junior high school?"

And another thing...This "junior high" atmosphere creates and/or exacerbates the problems of size, redundancy, and lack of coordination.

But wait, there's more...

So if you think this post paints a messy picture, you ain't seen nothing yet. "A hidden world, growing beyond control" details many more problems with our intelligence system, and the second article in the Post series presents yet another big problem. Stay tuned...