From: Robert David Steele Vivas

To:OSS.Net Community of Interest

Subj:Peacekeeping Intelligence Conference, 2-3 Dec 04, Stockholm, Sweden

Date: 4 Dec 04 [Updated 29 Dec 04]

Copy:1.2 pending contributions from others

Executive Summary

All participants are agreed that the conference series should continue, with the next one being in New York with United Nations interest, and the one after that possibly in South Africa or some other African venue (e.g. Kenya). All agreed that there is a very big need for a global network where information can be uploaded, make sense of, and shared by all those with an interest in specific peacekeeping situations. Haiti and the Congo were discussed as ideal pilot projects for all seven tribes working together to show the metrics of how the new model of information sharing could save lives, reduce costs, and accelerate conflict prevention, resolution, and recovery. The Swedish government, from the Minister of Defense to the Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces (who articulated the commitment personally) is moving forward with a training course on Peacekeeping Intelligence that will be open to all countries and all seven tribes. A general consensus existed with respect to the importance of including NGOs in all military exercises, and ensuring they were factored into all information-sharing and communications plans [as called for by DoD Directive 3000.cc.] In his presentation within the final panel, OSS CEO explicitly suggested the Nobel Peace Prize as the ten-year objective for the group, which should soon be institutionalized as some form of non-profit consortium dedicated to both peacekeeping intelligence, and the much larger arena of Information Peacekeeping (the latter included reality-based budgeting for countries).

Notes in Order of Presentation Except that Keynotes are Brought Forward

Director of the SwedishMilitaryAcademy

The Swedish government has officially commissioned a Joint Inter-Agency Committee with related networking that is focused on developing Peacekeeping Intelligence (PKI) concepts, doctrine, tables of organization, information-sharing agreements (both internal and external), etcetera. As part of this process, the Swedish government recognizes the extraordinary complexity of the peacekeeping and failed state environment, and the particular importance of integrating many non-state actors as well as law enforcement. The Swedish government is acutely conscious of the need to define a form of PKI that can be reconciled with impartiality, which must remain the preeminent precept for any UN operation or campaign.

General Haken Syren, Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forced

Civil-military integration of effort, multinational integration of effort, must be the foundation of a new focus on peacekeeping intelligence. It is now clear, as it may not have been before, that the success of any UN operation or campaign depends on intelligence “properly gathered and gathered in time.” Early warning is an essential and sought for ability that has the potential to reduce costs, delay in establishing mandate and fielding forces, and thus, fewer lost lives, risk, etcetera. It is essential that from the beginning of the decision to go into an area, that planning take place for post-peace, with a very heavy emphasis on civil-military integration at all stages of the planning and operations. It is now clear that the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) have a vital contribution to make to the Force Commander’s understanding of the picture in the shared Area of Operations (AOR). Among particular needs are a need for an Early Warning system that integrates what can be known from NGOs, as well as a field information collection and sharing program.

MajGen Hakan Pettersson, Director, Intelligence and Security Directorate,

Swedish Armed Forces HQ

The word “intelligence” must be accepted as part of the UN/PKI terminology. The European Union (EU) needs to focus on critic management and the creation of a truly international intelligence architecture that can integrate collection, processing, and analysis contributions from all parties.

Keynote 1: MajGen Patrick Cammaert, Royal Marines, The Netherlands, Military Advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations

General Cammaert opened by pointing out that the success of UN missions depends on two things: the mandate and the money. There are seventeen military missions on-going today, eight of them in Africa.

The Congo, which many agreed could be a great test case for our new concepts of information sharing and information peacekeeping (along with Haiti), is the size of Western Europe. Sudan is larger than the Congo.

General Cammaert focused on the complex of demands that are stressing the system and often causing it to fail to achieve consistency. He recommends that longer-term strategies be adopted that include careful plans for achieving conditions that allow an exit after the transition. [Note: if the UN or the US ever decided to sponsor a multi-national permanent agency to facilitate planning for OOTW and support to US operations in transition to and from war, General Cammaert is perhaps the only individual truly qualified to lead such an effort.]

General Cammaert believes that no individual mission can be effective if it focuses only on its immediate mission area, and that regional approaches are needed to what are in effect regional wars. These conflicts are mixing and matching all parties from all nations, and bleeding over the borders in ways that demand regional approaches to both information and operations.

He stressed that intelligence is not a dirty word any more within the UN. He repeated this two times. He then went on to note that poor intelligence and the wrong mandate will result in the wrong force at the wrong time in the wrong place, and hence lost lives.

The cornerstone of General Cammaert’s accomplishments during his tour as Military Advisor to the Secretary General, is the Joint Mission Analysis Cell (JMAC), which is almost precisely aligned with the concept of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for regional Joint Inter-Agency Collaboration Centers (JICC), the first of which is being created at the Special Operations Command (SOJICC). This concept is also very close to that of Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02) for regional open source and multi-national information centers funded at $10M each, managed by the US theater Combatant Commanders (COCOM), but manned and directed by a multinational cadre centered on the military.

General Cammaert stressed that a major factor in any mission’s success on the Information Operations front was its ability to reach back to the archives of parent organizations as well as other organizations such as the UN, NGOs, etc.

He stressed that NGOs are vital to the information collection operation, but only indirectly. They cannot be tasked, but once they know something, it is incumbent on the military information operation to be able to draw that out legally and ethically.

The attack on the UN in Baghdad helped inspire a change of direction within the UN on the subject of intelligence, counterintelligence, and force protection through intelligence.

General Cammaert is now focused on cross-mission information sharing, on regionalinformation sharing, and on thinking about regional intelligence objectives and regional databases.

Haiti has a JMAC. [OSS Note: This is news to many of those that follow Latin American matters and Haiti specifically. There was a general consensus among those at the conference who understand these matters that the Brazilians have allowed their rather large ego to get in front of their professional competence, and that they have seriously over-reached and under-performed in Haiti. General Cammaert specifically avoided any commentary on this matter.]

General Cammaert said that his number one requirement was for a way to do data mining across the UN and its Member nations for information relevant to any given UN mission. He is specifically focused on unclassified information that in many if not most cases is not held by elements of any intelligence community, but rather by varied government agencies, military and law enforcement services, etcetera.

Keynote 2: Ambassador Kai Eide, Norwegian Ambassador to NATO, Former SRSG in Bosnia, former everything—this guy is amazing, right up there with Brahimi

National caveats are the Achilles’ heel of every UN mission. National interference and oversight, national micro-management of personnel and their subordinate mission areas, severely complicates and diminishes the ability of the UN to be effective with the limited forces and capabilities that the Nations contribute, with persistent “strings.”

The UN can be said to be suffering somewhat from the enchantment of many of the larger as well as the smaller member nations with NATO, rather than the UN..

The SRSG position varies so greatly from mission to mission that this too is an impediment to UN success. Depending on the mission, the mandate, the particular contributions and interests of the Member nations, the SRSG position can run from glorified clerk to supreme commander. Needs some stabilization and institutionalization of authorities (and particularly of explicit oversight over all elements of the mission with particular reference to the military.)

SRSG is a lonely position, in part because the UN does not have the ability to foster an active discussion and a competition of varied views at the tactical level. The SRSG is “hanging out” all by themselves.

199’s have been marked by enormous improvements in organizational cooperation both within the UN and external to the UN. The contrast with the 1960’s is striking.

Personalities make the difference. [OSS Note: This is also a theme in the literature, and was noted several times by participants. Regardless of how good or bad the intelligence is, the right mix of personalities is the single most critical ingredient for mission success.]

Ambassador Eide noted that there are two kinds of coordination: coordination of day to day matters, which tends to be institutionalized over time, and coordination of emergencies, which tends to be much, much worse than day to day coordination.

Ambassador Eidi suggested that SRSG cannot be both the lead negotiator and the person in charge of UN forces enforcing the peace, but also noted that the UN has not solved the problem of reconciling and coordinating the personalities of the two lead individuals when these roles are split.

Speaking of Member nations and UN emergencies, he observed that the US is slow to engage, early on, and that most Member nations are trouble-makers once the mission is underway, with each embassy pursuing a national agenda that disrupts and diminishes UN prospects for success.

Referring in passing to recent news stories about UN officials being caught trafficking in women and exploiting children, he observed that the embassies were interfering with justice by quickly removing the individuals from the reach of UN and host country investigators.

Afghanistan is a mess. The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) are islands, without the authority for all the pieces, which are distributed among the G-8 nations. [OSS Note: he painted a pictures, diplomatically, of competing authorities—UN versus the G-8, both versus the national embassies pursuing agendas of their own.]

NATO is thinking about military transformation, and he regards the new Atlantic Transformation Command with its multinational representation as potentially of enormous value. However, if the big countries do not live up their responsibilities and provide structured, timely, cooperation, then the UN is handicapped.

He has a very high opinion of emergent US diplomatic and national security personalities. They are giving “good signals” that show great promise.

Ambassador Eide focused his observations on peacekeeping intelligence on analysis. He observed that regardless of what collection is undertaken and achieved, that analysis is the weak point. The misreading of what can be known if more harmful that the inability to know enough.

He concluded by emphasizing again that personalities and national agendas are the weak points of UN emergency peacekeeping operations. He ended on a high note, pointing out that if we choose to work together, that is much more important to mission success than any amount of intelligence.

[OSS Note: This man is astoundingly impressive. We, and half of the Swiss delegation, gave him a standing ovation when he concluded his remarks. The rest of the audience played dead, as is the Swedish custom—they don’t ask questions either. If there were one person qualified to be the next Secretary General of the UN, after Kofi Amman chooses his own time to retire, this is the man. This guy is so world class he makes everyone else look like a rookie.]

Panel 1: Intelligence and International Law

Professor Ove Bring

The UN Charter is hostile to intrusive espionage, national laws have the final say. [OSS Note: this is disputed, but what is not in dispute is that the issue needs to be settled: does a UN operation to intervene bring with it a mandate to use all necessary measures including intrusive intelligence? Some say that it does, but only if intelligence and information are explicitly included in the original and renewed mandates.]

Professor Wilhelm Agrell

Conflicts exist between national organizations and their rules, and needed intelligence requirements. [OSS Note: one member of the audience with a law enforcement background observed that national mandates and guidelines were often much more restrictive than UN mandates and guidelines, and there needed to be a reconciliation of this conflict, or the UN would never have “unity of effort” in gathering and exploiting intelligence.] The Vienna convention is the one that most often violated, since intrusive intelligence is a violation of national sovereignty, even within a failed state. [OSS Note: One audience participant pointed to a recent book by a Cambridge law professor that was consistent with the UN’s declaration of human security as a cause justifying intervention. The book, titled Health of Nations, makes the case that the Treaty of Westphalia and Vienna Convention basically institutionalized the ability of states to commit war crimes and other atrocities against their own people by making all such “internal” crimes” a matter subject solely to the jurisdiction of the offending states rather than to the community of man organized as a community of nations.] New technologies are often outside the purview of old law. [OSS Note: this presentation inspired reflection. In the margins we have written the comment: “Party A’s morality should, when combined with Party B’s morality, be sufficient to justify intrusive operations. However, if Party A is not perceived as moral by the community of nations, then the prospects for peaceful and equitable resolution are diminished.”] We were reminded by this presentation of Ed Glabus’s presentation to the Army War College in 1998 or so, on the fact that terrorists and others were exploiting the “legal seams” between international and national and between civil and military and between military and law enforcement or military and intelligence. In our notes we have the following diagram:

Dr. Marie Jacobsson [UPDATED 29 Dec 04 with contribution from The Netherlands

Jacobsson takes on the notion there is no legal frame work to judge espionage. In her view, the UN Charter may be used as an ‘early warning system’ because it tells nations how to behave. But, for example, there is no mention of espionage in UNCLOS. There is indeed no definition of intelligence gathering, but one can look at the process with a prosecutors eye.

Where did the activities take place - air, land sea.
Are there bilateral or international treaties, is there a mandate or an inspection regime.
What is the effect of the espionage activities
What has been done with the information.
Wie was spying? A government, an organization, under what mandate. Or was the spy somebody involved with an organization.
When did the spying take place, during war, peace , a peace keeping operation or a grey zone or moment.
What kind of techniques where used, humint, sigint, opint, etc.

Dr. Cees Wiebes

[Need help with this one—absent doing email]

National units are often forbidden to use NGOs and media in active collection roles. [OSS Note: one participant commented that this prohibition could be side-stepped by focusing on consultations that drew out what the NGOs learned on their own, without in any way tasking them or seeking to direct them in a collection role.]

Need to get to real-time holistic analysis, with an emphasis on real-time.

Matthew Aid [UPDATED 29 Dec 04]

US emphasis on force protection in peace keeping operations is not a new phenomenon. It goes back to the failed missions in Lebanon and Somalia. The US military is still addicted to the Powell doctrine. The present operations in Afghanistan suffer from the same problems as the actions in the two countries. Most American soldiers have died in the post-conflict phase, Aid reported on the basis of interviews with returning Afghanistan veterans. Most US units only patrol a small area around the fire support bases that have been built along the Pakistani border. Intelligence collected is practically worthless because soldiers hardly meet anybody, and if they do, they have to resort to buying information. Also, the analysts serve on a three to six month rotational basis, hardly enough time to understand the situation or the country. As a result, attacks on protected Americans bases have diminished – and thus the operation is deemed a success by the Pentagon – but attacks on ‘soft targets’ such as NGO’s have increased.

Panel 2: Law enforcement and counterintelligence—policing the new world disorder