Hunters not Gatherers: Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract Because of its origins in a sort of anti-Elizabethan paranoia against centralised government, the United States is poorly set up institutionally to cope with the major danger to itself in the twenty-first century: the threat posed by Islamist terrorism. The Director of Central Intelligence is neither central nor fully directing. A large part of the intelligence community, especially in terms of budgets and supervision, is outside his direct control. There is a 'waters edge' separation between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the CIA. Essentially the CIA collects foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence overseas. The FBI, primarily a crime-oriented organisation, has had only a secondary function of domestic counter-intelligence. It is a case-oriented agency focused on establishing past facts in order to bring suspects to justice. It is psychologically ill-adapted to conceptualising threats that lie upstream, that is, in the future. In this context, September 11 can be most properly described as a failure of imagination. Remedies being proposed range from creating an internal security service à la Britain's MI5 to establishing a semi-autonomous domestic counter-intelligence agency within the FBI. In the field of covert action, intelligence in the twenty-first century likely will be characterised by what could be termed an offensive hunt strategy. Put in another way, intelligence operatives in the twenty-first century will become hunters, not gatherers. They will not simply sit back and gather information that comes in, analyse it, and then decide what to do about it. Rather they will have to go and hunt out intelligence that will enable them to track down or kill terrorists. This will involve sending operatives into countries with which we are not at war, indeed in some cases countries with which we have correct relations. In many circumstances, however, terrorist leaders will be hunted down with the help of host country elements. The likelihood is that this new strategy will be implemented primarily in terms of Special Forces operations aided by CIA elements. Modalities will have to be worked out between the Department of Defense and the CIA as to how such offensive hunt operations are to be carried out and how congressional oversight will be exercised.