More than a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US intelligence agencies are doing a much better job sharing information about terrorism and other national security threats. Their challenge now "is largely one of information overload," says a new report by the Congressional Research Service, published last week.
"Analysts now face the task of connecting disparate, minute data points buried within large volumes of intelligence traffic shared between different intelligence agencies. According to a [Director of National Intelligence] statement from July 2010, 'Terabytes of foreign intelligence information come in each day, vastly exceeding the entire text holdings of the Library of Congress, which is estimated at 10 terabytes.' In the additional views section of the Senate report on the Christmas day bombing attempt, Senators Saxby Chambliss and Richard Burr noted that analysts who could have connected the dots prior to the incident struggled to search the large volume of terrorism-related intelligence available to them. The same problem was identified at the FBI in the aftermath of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting."
The crippling dilemma of information overload is not news. (See here, here, here.) But in the context of the Boston Marathon bombings, and the inevitable questions that will follow about who knew what when, it's important to keep this salient fact in mind: The US intelligence community does not have a problem collecting information. It has a problem understanding much of it.
(Thanks, as always, to Steve Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists for posting this CRS report, among many others.)
Is David Petraeus about to jump into the world of high finance?
ValleyWag has gotten this terribly intriguing tip about the former general/CIA Director's possible comeback: "He has been making the rounds at a number of New York-based venture capital and private equity firms and one very knowledgeable source said Petraeus is slated to announce a relationship shortly." The source points to KKR & Co. as a possible landing spot.
More intriguing still, at least to me, is speculation that Petraeus could join the high-profile data-mining outfit Palantir. I can say from personal experience with Petraeus that he has been deeply impressed by the company, which did its early breakout work in the national security and intelligence communities. Petraeus even requested a meeting with the CEO after reading this story I wrote about the company in 2012.
Petraeus had recently become CIA Director, and apparently he didn't realize then that Palantir had a long history with his new agency. In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, was an early backer of Palantir. And the spy agency also gave the fledgling company an extraordinary test bed for its software:
"According to a government official familiar with the episode, the CIA allowed Palantir to set up its software in the agency’s counterterrorism center, the hub of its global campaign to track down terrorists. The official was astounded that a little-known company from Silicon Valley was allowed to place its equipment on a network that pulses with some of the most highly classified intelligence the government collects. The CIA let Palantir use some of that intelligence to show off its software, the official says, an extraordinary departure from normal security protocols.
"Palantir didn’t disappoint. The official says the company worked for several months without pay and convinced the CIA that its technology could do what it claimed."
Osama bin Laden may have met his fate at the hands of military men. But it's a lesser-known fact that, for more than a decade, many of the CIA officers who were tracking the terrorist leader were women. Indeed, for as long as the CIA has been in the business of finding the founder of al Qaeda, and eventually killing him, women have been leading much of the hunt. Some say it's work to which they're particularly well suited.
The CIA established a group devoted exclusively to gathering and analyzing intelligence on bin Laden, known as Alec Station, in 1996. Counterterrorism wasn't the high-stakes, career-advancing line of work that it would become after the 9/11 attacks. And the members of Alec Station, many of whom were women, took a professional risk by pigeon-holing themselves into a profession that didn't seem to have a future.
But this tight band of CIA officers, some of whom called themselves "the Sisterhood," had found a bit of refuge from the male-dominated culture of the agency, in which no woman has ever served as director. They also found a rare, and at the time maybe even unique kind of intelligence work, in which analysts--the traditionally desk-bound thinkers of the agency's Directorate of Intelligence--worked closely with those who ran spies and did the clandestine work of espionage in the field, the members of the agency's Directorate of Operations. Historically, those sides didn't mix much on a personal or professional level. But at Alec Station, analysts and operators worked together, and in fairly short order they realized that the man whom much of the CIA had written off as a feckless wannabe jihadist was poised to become extraordinarily dangerous.
The story of how the CIA first got onto bin Laden's trail, and how it ultimately pointed Navy SEALs to his physical address in Pakistan, is the subject of the new documentary Manhunt, premiering Wednesday night on HBO. Directed by Greg Barker (Sergio, Koran by Heart), it "stars" some of the former members of the Sisterhood and other CIA officers who joined in the hunt for bin Laden and his al Qaeda brethren before and after the 9/11 attacks. The film is based on the book Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad, by journalist Peter Bergen, the author of four books on al Qaeda who produced bin Laden's first television interview, for CNN in 1997.
The film Manhunt is a work of broad ambition, so broad, and covering so many years, that after the first half hour, when we were still not very close to Abbottabad, I wondered how Barker would ever bring the story to a satisfying conclusion. (Even though we all know how this story ends.) But the film succeeds by turning the bin Laden story into a personal and intimate one, told entirely through the perspective of the people who actually tried to track him down.
Not every member of Alec Station is here, nor is everyone who played a central role in bin Laden's ultimate demise. But those who speak on camera do so without aliases or disguises, and in numbers that, as far as I can tell, is unprecedented for any work of film or television. If Manhunt weren't also an engrossing story, it would still be notable just for brining into the Klieg lights so many people who spent their lives in the shadows.
The film portrays intelligence work up close, with a particular emphasis on the role of women. Cindy Storer, a former CIA analyst, and Nada Bakos, a former CIA targeting officer who tracked al Qaeda in Iraq, demonstrate how to locate a terrorist using fragments of disjointed and often contradictory information. We watch them tack photos and bits of paper to a white board, connecting the items with colored lines. The picture doesn't come together as quickly as some of Carrie Mathison's jazz-fueled intel binges on "Homeland," but like that fictional representation, real-life analysis is tedious, frequently maddening, and often unproductive. But when it pays off, it does so with lethal effects.
There are times when Manhunt feels like fiction. Marty Martin, who was in charge of the operational hunt for bin Laden after 9/11 and most purely represents the spying-side of the agency (now known as the National Clandestine Service), is as flamboyant and mischievous a character as you'd expect to find in an espionage potboiler. He's full of war stories and serves as the brawn to the analytic brains, and, visually at least, a strong masculine counterpoint to a story dominated by women.
But like a good spy story, not everything is what it seems. Far from butting heads with his women colleagues, either owing to their gender or some link to the "other side" of the CIA bureaucracy, Martin fuses with them. And the farther we get in time from the 9/11 attacks, the more the distinctions across the CIA between men and women, analysts and operators, start to fade, until they become arbitrary. Bakos represents the final synthesis of the two--a targeting officer is both an analyst and an operator. And the blending of those two worlds brings us to the modern CIA, which is more a global paramilitary organization than a Cold War spy house.
Manhunt is a work of empathetic storytelling. Barker doesn't want to tell you the story of finding bin Laden so much as show you how the hunters did it. And because you walk in his subjects' shoes, you feel their triumphs and their failures acutely. You can imagine yourself sitting in an office like theirs, doing mind-numbing work and taking it home in your head at night. You can grieve with the CIA officers who talk, through tears, about their friends and co-workers who were killed in a suicide bombing in Khost, Afghanistan, in 2009, an event that the film accurately portrays as a turning point in the CIA's war against al Qaeda--it galvanized the agency to recommit to finding bin Laden. These testimonials make the bin Laden story, which has been the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters, accessible.
Manhunt inevitably draws comparisons to that other big movie about killing bin Laden. But while Zero Dark Thirty purports to be a work of journalism, Manhunt actually is. There are no pseudonyms or character composites. And when some of the same events are portrayed in Zero Dark Thirty, which is a superb film, they feel beyond the realm of our everyday experience. We can more easily imagine ourselves like Storer, showing up to work every day and banging her head against a desk, than we can see ourselves on the deck of a Blackhawk helicopter, wearing night-vision goggles and carrying an assault rifle.
Barker's empathy imposes certain limits on his film. You don't know where he stands on some of the most controversial and socially important questions of the bin Laden story, such as whether torture produced information that helped the CIA finish their manhunt. When Barker and I met in Washington a few weeks ago, he told me it's the mark of a successful film that you can't say for sure what he thinks. Not everyone who watches Manhunt will be satisfied with Barker's approach, which leaves some very big questions about some very dark days not fully answered.
But we shouldn't expect every story about bin Laden to be told through the lens of a moral dilemma. It's enough, at least for this film, to show people doing a job, one that was measured in years and lives lost, and that changed those who did it, just as it changed history.
If you've been watching the nearly non-stop coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings, you've seen a parade of alleged terrorism experts on the major networks and cable outlets. If you've seen Phil Mudd's face, however, you've seen the genuine article.
Mudd was the deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and, later, the first-ever deputy director of the National Security Branch at the FBI. He left government in 2010, and now he's out with a new book that is part memoir, part inside look at the United States' hunt for the world's most wanted terrorist.
Takedown: Inside the Hunt for al Qaeda starts with Mudd, in 1984, driving up to the gates at CIA headquarters to answer a help-wanted ad he heard about through a family friend. "I have my resume here," Mudd told the guard through a rolled-down car window. (Not having seen the ad himself, Mudd didn't have an address to mail his application.) A month or so later, he writes, he came home to a message on his answering machine from a guy who only gave his first name. Mudd "knew instantly, despite my ignorance about intelligence, national security, or Washington itself, that this was the CIA."
Mudd's book is not a story of clandestine operators and special forces, but of the people who try to "connect" those proverbial dots about nascent, ambiguous terrorist plots, and who ultimately played just as vital a role in taking down Osama bin Laden as their gun-toting colleagues. The book is meant to evoke empathy for the pain-staking, frequently confounding work of what some have compared to putting together a jigsaw puzzle without the benefit of the picture on the box.
Of the CIA's failure to stop the 9/11 attacks, Mudd writes, "It is not that reasoned intelligence analysis could not have pieced together such a story; we learned a painful lesson about understanding this adversary that day. But no one could have believed the scenario that unfolded with enough conviction to take the kind of action needed to fight this threat--global military and intelligence operations, along with diplomacy--that came to convulse the planet."
Mudd's memoir will feel at home alongside operations-focused accounts of the CIA's war in the shadows, not because it's full of breathtaking adventures from the field, but because it's steeped in a particular culture and ultimately has the ring of authenticity. Mudd explains how the agency crafts the President's Daily Brief in such a way that it sounds more like a daily newspaper than a top secret intelligence document. But that's what you'd expect from someone whose job was to talk to top policymakers about classified material. For Mudd, this was a matter of routine, and while the significance of his line of work was not lost on him, it perhaps didn't seem as novel or enthralling as it may sound to an outsider.
There are some pretty harrowing war stories in the book. Mudd was part of a small CIA team that went to Afghanistan to help overthrow the Taliban, when the agency "took the gloves off," as Cofer Black, then the director of the Counterterrorist Center, liked to put it. But the book makes its most valuable contributions to the bin Laden story when we see Mudd trafficking in information--the most powerful currency in Washington--obtained from many parts of the vast intelligence system. He takes you deep into the confusing process of sorting all those puzzle pieces and explains that murky process in a clarifying way.
The FBI has released photos and video of two men described as suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings and has asked for the public's help locating them. FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard DesLauriers emphasized during a press conference that no detail was too small, and that these are the only two men the FBI considers suspects at this point. The public was urged to disregard other photos at this point and to call 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324), prompt #3 with information.
Officials did not say whether they think the suspects are part of a known terrorist group, whether foreign or domestic. A press conference in Boston this afternoon was short on details of the investigation. The man in the white cap, DesLauriers said, is believed to have put down a backpack that contained one of the two bombs.
It's obviously too early to say definitively who these men are or how they may or may not be connected to an organized group. But three former CIA officers who I spoke with this morning--before these photos were publicized--cautioned against ruling our a foreign connection at this early stage. The former officers were in Washington to talk about their role in the upcoming HBO documentary Manhunt, about the CIA's search for Osama bin Laden--in which they all played key roles. I'll have more on the movie in a few weeks. I asked them to give me their read on the unfolding investigation in Boston.
They all thought that it was premature to say this is not the work of al Qaeda or some foreign terrorist group. Just because this attack doesn't fit AQ's previous signatures doesn't mean the group hasn't changed up the playbook. And just because there were apparently few, if any, warning signs or chatter in the run-up doesn't mean that the attack must have been planned by a domestic terrorist group.
"My fear has always been that al Qaeda would go low-tech and tactical," said Marty Martin, who was in charge of the operational hunt for bin Laden after 9/11. Martin worried that the group would move away from its trademark spectacular attacks that cause mass casualties (blowing up buildings and airplanes) towards assaults on soft targets, such as shopping malls, that might result in fewer deaths but still end up sewing panic and confusion, and that are easier to plan and harder to interdict. The finish line of the Boston Marathon, Martin said, is a very soft target and a very high-profile one.
When bin Laden was alive, al Qaeda tended to favor bigger, large-scale attacks. But now that he's dead, the strategy may have shifted, noted Cindy Storer, an analyst who was part of the CIA "sisterhood" following bin Laden's trail in the 1990s. Martin added that an Egyptian, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's long-time no. 2, is now in charge of the group, and that Egyptian terrorist groups have historically used the lower-scale, tactical attacks like the one in Boston.
Nada Bakos, a former CIA targeting officer who tracked al Qaeda in Iraq, also urged people not to over-generalize al Qaeda. There are multiple variants and offshoots. Might the Boston attack have been executed by a group that hasn't shown up on the radar yet? Al Qaeda and its affiliates have also successfully recruited westerners and others who might draw less suspicion and have an easier time entering the United States, she said. Indeed, the group has made no secret of its desire to do so.
Everyone cautioned they were just speculating, but their insights were nevertheless instructive. For instance, despite some commentary that the attack must be the work of amateurs because it didn't kill more people and involved improvised bombs, all three former officers said the attack reflected a high degree of skill, and possibly some significant training. For starters, the attackers--they didn't know how many there were this morning--built two bombs that went off as planned. That's not as easy as you might think. Building an explosive device that works as intended it not as simple as following a recipe on the Internet. Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square car bomber, couldn't do it. Neither could Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Underwear Bomber who tried to blow up an airplane mid-flight.
Second, the attackers were able to "infiltrate, execute, and exfiltrate," as Martin put it, meaning they got to their target, planted and set off the devices, and then got away without being caught. Martin called that "disconcerting." Pulling off this kind of mission isn't easy, and the fact that investigators are coming up short on leads lends credence to the idea that the attacker may have been trained in how to avoid detection. Martin speculated that they might have used disguises like wigs or hats, which would make them harder to find now. (In the photos, both men are wearing ball caps. One is wearing sunglasses.)
Even though the signs don't point to a traditional al Qaeda attack, that doesn't mean it was planned at home or is the work of a lone-wolf. We could be witnessing something new, or a variation on an old strategy.
maradonna 8888/shutterstock.com
Here are some upcoming titles that have caught my attention in the past few months. Pub dates given if available.
Untitled book by Andrew Cockburn (Times Books)
The author of Rumsfeld, and future father-in-law to SNL cast member Jason Sudeikis, is working on a true story about drones and assassins.
We Will Not Be Silent: How the White Rose Student Resistance Movement Defied Adolf Hitler by Russell Freedman (Clarion)
A story about a small group of university students who distributed anti-Hitler leaflets and condemned his policies.
Untitled book on Russian protest group Pussy Riot by Masha Gessen (Riverhead)
The author of The Man Without a Face, about the rise of Vladimir Putin, has an untold story of Russia's most famous dissidents.
Pub date: Fall 2013
Untitled book by Karen J. Greenberg (Crown)
Greenberg, the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, is writing a narrative account described as "how the power and legitimacy of the Department of Justice have been radically challenged in the wake of 9/11."
Casablanca by Meredith Hindley (Public Affairs)
A narrative history of the famous North African city, against the backdrop of the French resistance, Gestapo, Vichy agents, and American spies battling for control.
The Russian Revolution by Sean McKeekin (Basic)
Billed as "a revisionist account of the Russian Revolution" based on new information from Soviet archives.
Pub date: 2017
CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys: How and why CIA Agents Conspired to Kill JFK and RFK by Patrick Nolan (Skyhorse)
An investigation of "CIA involvement" in the assassinates of President Kennedy and his brother Robert. Timed for release with the 50th anniversary of JFK's death.
Pub date: Fall 2013
Rogue Code by Mark Russinovich (Thomas Dunne Books)
The third novel in a thriller series about cyber-expert Peter Joseph. The first two books were Zero Day and Trojan Horse.
Untitled book by Adam Segal (Public Affairs)
Segal, who's a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and heads up their cyber security initiatives will write about "the geopolitics of information and what diplomacy looks like in the age of big data."
Forty-Seven Days by Mitchell Yockelson (Caliber)
How Gen. John "Black Jack" Pershing led the Army and helped it come of age in World War I, with the service of soldiers such as George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, and Harry Truman.
Pub date: Summer 2015
In 2006, as the war in Iraq was reaching a fever pitch, a Pentagon employee working on special operations teamed up with a Czech technology entrepreneur who had dabbled in the porn business and devised what they considered an ingenious plan. Knowing that video games played on mobile phones were popular throughout the Middle East, the team wanted to build games that contained positive messages about the United States. But the games weren't just about propaganda. Every download would give the United States a window into the digital comings and goings of whomever was playing it it, a cyber foothold that could allow American spies to potentially track and collect information on thousands of people.
The propaganda/spy campaign was dubbed Native Echo, and it was conceived by Michael Furlong, a colorful civilian employee working for US Special Operations Command, and a company called U-Turn, which was headquartered in Prague and founded by a pro-American Czech national named Jan Obrman, whose parents had fled the Soviets in the 1960s. The idea was to target Middle Eastern teenagers in "high risk/unfriendly areas," and over time to integrate the US messages "into the lifestyle of the targets," ideally to make them more amenable to US armed forces, and to counter the rhetoric of Muslim fundamentalists.
The full account of this previously unreported intelligence operation is found in the new book The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, by New York Times national security correspondent Mark Mazzetti. The book explores the ways in which the CIA--which before 9/11 had long been out of the business of killing people--and the US military--which had not been the domain of spies--have often changed roles over the past decade. It is filled with characters, like Furlong, who move between the membranes of these two worlds, and find themselves at home in either one.
Mazzetti writes that the first mobile game developed for Native Echo was modeled on the popular Call of Duty series. This new "shooter" game, Iraqi Hero, "took the player on an odyssey through the streets of Baghdad, shooting up insurgents trying to kill civilians in a wave of terrorist attacks," Mazzetti writes. "The goal was to reach an Iraqi police station and deliver the secret plans for an upcoming insurgent attack, plans that had been stolen from a militia group's headquarters."
Native Echo was timed to coincide with the US troop surge in Iraq in 2007. Its "main focus was on combatting the flood of foreign fighters entering Iraq from Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and parts of North Africa," Mazzetti writes.
As an intelligence collection program, Native Echo was both broad and audacious:
"Thousands of people would be sending their mobile-phone numbers and other identifying information to U-Turn, and that information could be stored in military databases and used for complex data-mining operations carried out by the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies. The spies wouldn't have to go hunting for information; it would come to them."
In order to hide the US role in the scheme, "Furlong convinced [U-Turn's] executives to create an offshore company that could receive Pentagon contracts but not be tied directly to the United States," Mazzetti writes. Obrman set up JD Media Transmission Systems, LLC, incorporated in the Seychelles Islands, in order to receive money transfers from the US through a foreign bank account.
Furlong was a master at working the byzantine procurement bureaucracy to further his covert plans. "Taking advantage of a law that allows firms owned by Native Americas to get a leg up when bidding on government contracts, Furlong arranged for U-Turn to partner with Wyandotte Net Tel, a firm located on a tiny speck of tribal lands in eastern Oklahoma," Mazzetti writes.
U-Turn developed two more games for Native Echo--Oil Tycoon, which challenged players to protect vital pipelines and infrastructure, and City Mayor, in which players became urban planners and rebuilt a fictional city destroyed by terrorists. The team came up with various ways to distribute the games, including by hand via memory cards, which could be sold or given away in markets and bazaars, Mazzetti reports. "The way to get far wider distribution, however, was to post the games on Web sites and blogs frequented by gamers in the Middle East. This allowed [Special Operations Command] to monitor how many people were downloading the games and, more important, who was doing it."
Mazzetti concludes that it's hard to know how far Native Echo went, and even how many companies like U-Turn were hired to create propaganda for the military. Furlong came up with other wild ideas, some of which were never approved. But the relationship between the military and U-Turn blossomed, and it offers a concrete illustration of how the armed forces evolved into a network of spies.
The Way of the Knife is full of stories like this, of people living on the edge between two worlds, frequently not sure how to operate on turf that had long been forbidden. The book is a culmination of Mazzetti's years of reporting on the intersections of the military and the CIA, and it is a forceful, compelling articulation of a new way of war. Mazzetti's reporting has been among some of the most important, in that it has shed light on usually hidden practices, particularly the use of brutal interrogations on terrorist detainees. As the book unfolds, we see how the 9/11 attacks shake the CIA out of their Cold War culture of espionage, and turn the agency into a highly-efficient global killing force.
I spoke with Mazzetti yesterday as he was heading off to New York to begin a book tour. He said that he began working after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and that the first few months of writing were filled with some anxiety, since his journalism beat was now the hottest around. Lots of his competitors were writing books and long magazine articles about the raid. But Mazzetti said that he wanted to write something broader, to show how the long arc of the war on terror has fundamentally changed how the US fights.
"I covered the Pentagon for five years, and then I have been covering the intelligence world since 2006," Mazzetti said. "And really, I realized that I was kind of covering the same beat. The lines that existed before 9/11, where the military did this and the spies did that, really have blurred."
Mazzetti said he's glad to be back at the Times after a 15-month book leave. He had missed the collegiality of an office. Writing a book is solitary business. But in the midst of the project, Mazzetti and his wife, Lindsay, welcomed Max, their first child.
"I can't wait until he is old enough to read this book," Mazzetti writes in his acknowledgments. "I cherish the memories of the mornings we spent together during the first few months, and of the smiles he delivered when I came home at the end of particularly frustrating days of book writing. They put things in perspective."
In the 12 years I've been writing about intelligence, I've heard from more practitioners of the craft than I can remember that women make better spies than men. Better analysts, too. And I don't just hear this from women. Indeed, I think I've heard more male intelligence officers say that their female colleagues' "intuition" and "patience" makes them particularly well suited to the painstaking job of cultivating sources or making sense of fragments of information. The thinking goes that there's something about the way women solve problems versus the way men do it, and something about the way women listen, observe, and even nurture other people that often yields better results.
The evidence to support this theory is, as far as I know, entirely anecdotal. But I've always found it compelling. I recall talking years ago with Michael Scheuer, who ran the CIA unit tracking Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks, that women made up the bulk of his analytic team, and that he thought they'd done a superb job. Was there something about their gender that predisposed them to being better at this kind of work than men? Scheuer seemed to think there was.
Another former intelligence officer shed more light on this idea when he recounted his own experiences tracking terrorist groups for the Army. Erik Kleinsmith, whom I write about in my book, liked to rate analysts using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which assigns people to one of 16 personality types depending on how they process information and make decisions. Kleinsmith thought the best analysts excelled at "sensing"; they tended to solve problems by relying on what they could see and touch in the physical world, on facts. Kleinsmith was a sensor, according to Myers-Briggs, as were most of the analysts on his team—who were mostly women.
Certainly the CIA leadership believes a woman is qualified to lead analysts. Fran P. Moore is the current director of intelligence for the agency, overseeing all its analytical work. And right now, the CIA director, John Brennan, is considering whether to put a woman in charge of the National Clandestine Service, the operational side of the agency. She is now acting in the role. (Her name has not been revealed publicly.) And filmmakers have turned to women as protagonists in spy stories, including Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty, and the upcoming documentary Manhunt, based on the book by Peter Bergen about the hunt for bin Laden.
Women intelligence officers I've heard from don't dispute that their gender gives them some practical advantages, even if they can't put their finger on precisely why. Three former CIA officers took up the discussion this week on the New America Foundation's "In the Tank" podcast. Valerie Plame Wilson, Nada Bakos, and Lindsay Moran, who all had exciting, challenging, and even historic careers in the spy business, thought being a woman gave them a leg up in certain respects.
As a female case officer, "you are less threatening," said Wilson, who was a CIA operations officer for 20 years. "And without going too far over the top, I do think women are more intuitive and much more cognizant of body language, picking up signals, and things that are really important to reading potential recruits."
"There's a lot of patience involved with following some of the issues," said Bakos, who was a CIA targeting officer and helped track Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, work that relied on a fusion of intelligence gathering and analysis, in concert with special forces. "I think women are probably a little bit more patient at pulling the threads and piecing some of this together."
"I was not a mother when I was a spy," said Moran, who was a CIA case officer from 1998 to 2003. "But I realized later when I did become a mother that that maternal instinct kind of plays into it, too. The foreign agents you recruit, you're really taking care of them in a way. . . . You're kind of like a psychiatrist or a therapist to them. You're listening to them. I think women are conditioned from a very young age to sit back and listen in a way that men aren't."
Moran noted an obvious disadvantage for women in the field: Most of the people they're trying to persuade to spy for the US are men. Men they're meeting with in parked cars, or in hotel rooms. "You have to walk a vey fine line between flattering that person . . . [and] at the same time making it clear you're never going to sleep with them."
Of course, the United States hasn't had a woman at the helm of the CIA. Tara Maller, the host of the New America Foundation podcast, has a list of reasons a woman should get the job. I like reason eight: "Plenty of women are qualified for this role." That should be the determining factor. But isn't it interesting to think about what a woman might bring to this job that a man might not? We've had plenty of time to consider the inverse. I suspect, given recent events, that we're soon going to find out what a female director can do.
Ken Anderson and Ben Wittes, two good friends of Dead Drop, are embarking on an intriguing and from my perspective quite welcome new project. They're writing a book that will pull together all the significant speeches Obama administration officials have given on national security law, and then "weave it all back together, creating a synthetic account of the administration’s views that is worth more collectively than the sum of its parts."
Called Speaking the Law, it will be "a kind of handbook on the framework for counterterrorism," using administration officials' own words as the foundation. "Consider it the White Paper the administration has never issued," say Ken and Ben.
I suspect Obama administration officials themselves will be among this book's most avid readers, given the authors' premise, and that journalists and scholars will find it useful as well:
"There is a myth that the administration has had little to say on the subject of its counterterrorism authorities, especially targeted killing and drones--largely because it has declined to release publicly its Office of Legal Counsel targeted killing memoranda. Part of the point of Speaking the Law is to show how wrong this myth really is. The administration has actually said a huge amount. It’s just that it has said a great deal of it orally, and has broken up its utterances among a number of different statements."
The authors are publishing the chapters serially online, and then the Hoover Institution will put out a hardcover version when all the work is finished. The introduction and first chapter are available now.
Reuters reports that the Treasury Department is going to give US intelligence agencies full access to a large amount of financial information that it obtains from banks and other institutions. This includes reports of money transfers that are routinely used to track terrorist and criminal finances around the world.
A plan being drawn up by the Obama administration would link the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), which is essentially a classified intranet for the Defense Department and intelligence agencies. Those agencies already have had access to FinCEN data, but only on a case-by-case basis. Now, Reuters reports, agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency are going to be plugged into the financial data network and have unprecedented ability to roam around.
This would be an incremental change in policy. But don't overlook its significance.
More and more lately, the government is focusing on what agencies do with the data they collect, rather than the means of collection. US law is currently oriented mostly to regulate collection. And practically speaking, the government can collect a lot--a whole lot.
It's all the post-collection activity--the moving and shaping and sharing storing of information--that we know far less about. Who can see it? How long can an agency hold onto it? What kinds of technologies are applied to make sense of it? These are arguably more important questions than how a piece of information was collected if you're truly concerned about protecting privacy and civil liberties, and if you want to know whether that glut of information coming into the system is actually keeping the country safer.
FinCEN is a good example of how collection really isn't novel anymore. It has a massive a massive data set based on routine and voluminous standardized reporting from banks and other financial institutions. It most famously includes so-called suspicious activity reports that institutions are required to file whenever they notice transactions or money transfers that might indicate criminal activity.
This collection occurs on a broad and massive scale. According to the Treasury Department, US financial institutions file more than 15 million suspicious activity reports every year about transactions that exceed $10,000. Only a fraction of them could involve criminal activity. But the end result is that if any significant amount of money moves from one set of hands to another through the US financial system, FinCEN is supposed to know about it.
And what it knows tells investigators a lot about the nature of organized crime and terrorist networks. FinCEN was around before the 9/11 attacks, and it earned a reputation among investigators for being a well-run operation with useful tools for peering into money laundering operations and detecting fraud. After the terrorist attacks, it became the centerpiece in an interagency effort--i.e., a shared information effort--to track down the conduits of terrorist money, and by extension, the terrorist themselves.
In the past few months, there have been other examples of the government shifting attention from collection of information towards analysis and sharing among different agencies, on the theory that the more access analysts and investigators have, the more likely they are to crack a case or find a lead.
The National Counterterrorism Center is now allowed to hold onto information about airline passengers, international travelers, and a host of other categories for five years, a much longer period of time than previously allowed.
The NSA has been sharing more information about cyber security threats with the Homeland Security Department, in an effort to protect critical infrastructure. And in the coming weeks that effort will be extended to the private sector, as the government gives threat signature data to US telecommunications companies, so that they can monitor their networks for malicious code and intrusions.
Each of these changes involves information that the government already collects, legally. But from the administration's perspective, information that sits in once place often loses its value. That explains the shift in policy at FinCEN and elsewhere. The information is flowing more freely now, and the volume and frequency of that flow is going to increase.
