READERS’FORUM
ROBERT DAVID STEELE (VIVAS)[1]
The Open Source Program: Missing in Action
I read Hamilton Bean’s article, “The DNI’s OpenSourceCenter: An Organizational Communication Perspective” (IJIC, 20/2, pp. 240-257) with deep interest. The author provides an excellent integration of his new-found skills in Communication Science with his past exposure to varied aspects of both government and private sector open source intelligence (OSINT) as practicedwithin the beltway. I consider it a privilege to have this opportunity to comment on this article, using it as a catalyst for both retrospective examination and forward-thinking engagement.
My primary purpose is to offer constructive commentary that might finally inspire the new and the former Directors of National Intelligence (DNI) to act on the general proposition that many of us as individuals, and the Aspin-Brown Commission and other bodies, have put forward: our access to OSINT is “severely deficient” and should be a “top priority” for both funding and attention.
My secondary purpose with this commentary is to correct errors, note omissions, and provide useful information that complements the original work, I will stress in advance that I consider the article to be the very best available overview, within the constraints of avoiding offense to the established stakeholders, of the continued and substantial inadequacies of the marginally-reinforced open source endeavors within the secret world.
The time has come for the two DNI’s—the former DNI as Undersecretary of State and sponsor of the Open Source Agency (OSA) and Open Source Program within Program 150, and the current DNI as sponsor of the Open Source Intelligence Agency and Open Source Program within the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC)—to put the OSINT magic into play.
HISTORICAL OBSERVATIONS
Ulysses S. Grant was among the first American military commanders to understand the value of open sources of information, and consistently did well for himself in this regard.
Since the National Security Act of 1947, there has been constant tension among the Departments of State and Defense, the intelligence and counterintelligence arms of the Executive, and the reality that most of the useful information is in foreign languages we do not speak. Virtually every single Commission since then has observed our deficiencies in foreign languages and to one extent or another the open sources they represent, and every single President, Secretary, and Director of Central Intelligence has seen fit to ignore these concerns, persisting with the understandable but necessarily erroneous view that the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is in the business of “secrets for the President.”
Allan Dulles was the first Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) to tell Congress that open sources of information provided 80% of his information, and DCI William Colby confirmed that when he addressed the annual Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Conference in 1994. What neither was willing to address, however, were the budgetary implications—the Return on Investment (RoI) implications—of spending next to nothing on that 80%, on spending tens of billions on secret collection, and on not having any single place where both secrets and non-secrets could be processed coherently and with all available automated tools. This remains the untreated cancer in the world of intelligence.
The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) was indeed the first modern effort to exploit open sources, along with theJoint Research Publications Service (JPRS), the first now renamed the Open Source Center (OSC), the latter defunct since the 1990’s. ShermanKent understood clearly that the primary value of strategic analysis demanded the integration of subject-matter expertise with open sources in all languages, rather than focusing only on secret collection and kludge analysis en passant.
The primary explanation for the demise of FBIS under varied DCI’s has to do with two facts: the first is that the consumer Departments and Agencies are considered by the IC to be responsible for their own open source information collection, processing, and analysis; and the second is that bureaucratic politics made it imperative for the IC to develop unique capabilities that did not infringe on their customer’s own claimed capabilities. This led to the unintended result of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) focusing on clandestine and covert operations instead of strategic analysis, something Harry Truman never intended, further mis-directing an organization that was already “flawed by design.”
The author is evidently unaware of the superb personal efforts of Mr. Jan Herring, then National Intelligence Officer for Science & Technology (S&T), and Mr. George Marling, then on the Intelligence Community Staff (ICS), in the 1970’s, to survey and enhance IC access to open sources. It generally has been the S&T analysts rather than the managers, collectors, or covert operators who have understood the extreme importance of access to open sources in all languages. Mssrs. Herring & Marling failed for the same reason that later reformists failed: the management mind-set is closed, narrow, and completely unwitting of the dereliction of duty attendant to ignoring open sources in all languages. Congress and the Executive are guilty as well—the gap between those with power and those with knowledge has grown so great in the final quarter of the last century that it can now be said—as I have in writing—that our government is either clinically insane, or insanely criminal, in its continued irresponsibility with respect to OSINT, processing, and multinational information sharing operations.
From 1988 to 1992, the author (with the support of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Al Gray, whose article, “Intelligence Challenges in the 1990’s,” was published in the American Intelligence Journal (Winter 1988-1989)) made the rounds within the government attempting to secure interest in both redirecting half of the National Intelligence Topics (NIT) away from the Soviet Union and toward the Third World; and in creating the open source exploitation capabilities that the Marine Corps Intelligence Command demonstrated were so lacking at the national level. The polite but adamant response was always the same: No.
The author overlooks the fact that in 1992, as a result of the initiative of Senator David Boren (D-OK) and Congressman Dave McCurdy (D-OK), the National Security Act of 1992 proposed an Open Source Office at the Central Intelligence Agency. That bill was destroyed by a senior Senator who believed that right-sizing meant down-sizing in his Commonwealth, and then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, whose letter opposing this legislation is posted at OSS.Net in the Archives.
Intelligence reform can and should be job and revenue neutral from state to state and district to district. We do the public a grave disservice by perpetuating secret programs that waste treasure while failing to produce actionable intelligence. It is also high time that the three national agencies break free of the strangle-hold of the military so the DNI can do his job well.
WHERE CIA WENT WRONG IN THE 1990’S
Partly in consequence of Congressional interest as well as the common sense case for making better use of open sourcesin the early 1990’s the IC created the Community Open Source Program Office (COSPO), first under Mr. Paul Walner, on detail from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and then under Dr. Joseph Markowitz, on detail from CIA. Good men both, both failed, and no discussion of the OSINT organizational communication perspective can be complete without a careful examination of the records, and an interview with each of these two well-intentioned and capable individuals. What I know about the 1990’s, from personal engagement, is written below:
1) In 1992, as a founding member of the Open Source Council, representing the US Marine Corps, I tried to make a case for an OpenSourceCenter with appropriate cover support capabilities and full direct access to all open sources in all languages. I lost to an argument advanced by MITRE, an argument promoting their emergent and not yet fully satisfactory implementation of the Open Source Information System (OSIS), and—I am not making this up—exactlysix open sources brought into the high-side at great and unwarranted expense.
2) In 1995 I testified to the Aspin-Brown Commission, and in 1996 they released their report, finding, on the basis of my success in producing—with just six telephone calls—all relevant information for Burundi over a week-end,, including Russian 1:50,000 combat charts with contour lines and French commercial imagery all cloud-freeas well as tribal orders of battle (the IC had a regional map without detail and an economic study with flawed assumptions), that the (US) IC is “severely deficient,” and that a draconian increase in access to open sources should be a “top priority for funding” and a “top priority for DCI attention.” A succession of DCI’s chose to ignore virtually all of the Aspin-Brown recommendations, a fact that is mentioned by Senator David Boren (D-KS) in his Foreword to my first book, ON INTELLIGENCE.
3) During Dr. Markowitz’s tenure at COSPO, for four years running, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Collection, Mr. Charlie Allen, asked the Director of Central Intelligence, then Mr. George Tenet, to give OSINT its own program line. Each time this was opposed by Ms. Joan Dempsey, then the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, for reasons that remain unclear, but whose consequences, including the lack of awareness of the spread of virulent Islam, openly in radicalized schoolhouses funded by Saudi Arabia from 1988 to 2001, continue to cost the Republic blood, treasure, and spirit.
The author is evidently also unaware of the study commissioned by then DCI Tenet, The Challenge of Global Coverage, and carried out by Mr. Boyd Sutton, one of the most intelligent and honorable individuals it has ever been my pleasure to work for. Interviewing virtually every Assistant Secretary across the government that mattered, and agency heads, the report did not lead, as DCI Tenet may have expected, to a need for more resources for secret penetrations all over the world, but rather to the need for $10 million per year per lower tier country or marginalized issue beyond inter-state and major power conflict. With 150 of these readily identified, the clear and compelling need for $1.5 billion a year for IC OSINT was established. As the story has been told to me, the report was disregarded for being inconsistent with the established focus on secrets It can thus be said, fairly, that In 1997 DCI Tenet personally neglected the last chance we might have had for creating a national OSINT capability badly needed to understand emergent intolerant and violent Islam, and other emergent non-traditional threats including eight of the ten threats identified in 2005 by the High-Level Threat Panel of the United Nations, eight threats that are not now covered by the existing IC. They will claim to be covering them, but when put to the test with a non-negotiable demand to actually produce intelligence, they will inevitably fail for lack of secret sources, open sources, on-hand subject matter expertise, and inherent analytic tradecraft.
BEYOND “REASONABLE DISHONESTY”
The author is to be complemented for focusing, ever so gently, on “the contestation, resistance, and indeterminancy” surrounding the creation of an OSINT capability. I would be more blunt—across the board, the members of the National Foreign Intelligence Board (NFIB) and the Military Intelligence Board (MIB) have been consistently derelict in their duty to the Nation by eschewing OSINT and seeking to protect secret budget share. These are the same individuals who sanction the manipulation and falsification of databases, such as at the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), in order to justify systems we do not need, at costs we cannot afford. In a time of war, that is treason. In a time of peace it passes as within the bounds of “reasonable dishonesty,” a term used by ShermanKent in talking to Sam Adams about the Pentagon’s continued insistence on falsifying the Viet-Cong presence by not counting guerrillas. Lies kill our comrades. It is high time we get back to honoring the truth in all its forms, including openly-available truths.
I am quite stunned to see the author say that the literature on OSINT is limited. Evidently he has not had the time to review the 20,000 plus pages posted to OSS.Net, representing the aggregate lectures of over 600 international speakers to the annual international OSINT conference that has taken place every year but one since 1992. When the author says that much of the literature that he considers to be sparse focuses on promotion of the field, he is evidently unaware of the 1994 Defense Intelligence Agency Open Source Handbook; the thousands of pages of detailed training information published since then, or even the more recent Special Operations Forces Open Source Handbook (Strawman) created in support of the new U.S. Army Civil Affairs Brigade. As the leading proponent for OSINT these past 19 years, I see a clear pattern of dual malfeasance within the U.S. Intelligence Community: the secret mandarins refuse to provide for proper open source information acquisition, and the open source orphans within the IC refuse to recognize innovation and knowledge from outside the wire. This is a certain prescription for self-immolation, and I see that in all that has occurred and not occurred since 5 December 2005.
The facts are straight-forward:
1. Consumers within the US Government are generally incompetent at the application of the proven process of intelligence, and with the exception of the Department of State, tend to be driven by dogma and practice rather than decision-support and reality.
2. The current model for providing open source support in the same fashion as secret support, with “butts in seats” consisting of U.S. citizens with clearances and little else to offer, is a complete failure. The best OSINT practitioners utilize very low-cost but very highly-skilled indigenous and foreign experts to achieve between ten and forty times more value than any single “butt in seat” man-year.
3. Ninety percent of the information we can get for free from the seven (now eight) tribes of intelligence around the world is not going to be made available to any element of the secret intelligence community, including the Open Source Intelligence Agency (OSIA) should the OSC be elevated. The foreign parties and international non-governmental organizations do not want to be portrayed as sharing information with a constellation of secret agencies best known to the rest of the world for warrant-less wire-tapping and rendition (kidnapping people outside due process, and exporting them to be tortured).
4. By contrast, and as suggested by Dr. Joe Markowitz and endorsed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) senior staff contingent on the agreement of Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, an Open Source Agency (OSA) as a sister-agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), would, with a diplomatic Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements, achieve at least a third of our global information acquisition objectives at no cost, and allow the OSA to create a global information sharing network open to one and all, but most especially, to the 90 nations of the Coalition that are not now allowed to be part of INTELINK-U, as well as the 100,000 or more private sector and non-governmental organizations without which no global open source network can be effective.
I find it troubling that neophytes within the US Intelligence Community feel compelled to address the “myths and half-truths that currently exist in the literature.” Such individuals are clearly limited in their reading, and have not read much, if any, of the wealth of resources maintained for the public at OSS.Net in the Archives. Apart from the 7,500 individuals I have hosted at the annual conference, there are close to 10,000 individuals who have been trained at the annual conference of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP), and a more select group that has been intensively trained by the Academy of Competitive Intelligence where Mr. Jan Herring, Mr. Ben Gilad, and Mr. Leonard Fuld remain among the handful of truly world-class practitioners in this discipline. Then of course there are the 90+ foreign government open source programs of which the OSC has next to no understanding. They feel safe with 11 countries, up from 7. This is not serious. OSINT is not something that can be controlled from a central authority—it is distributed, the intelligence is on the edges of the network, and our task is to facilitate multinational sharing, not try to control “dissemination.”
IT’S ABOUT THE MONEY
I admire the author’s focus on organizational communications, and agree with all that he discusses, with only two observations: first, as the above section documents, he has completely missed the 1988-2005 dog-fight; and second, his review takes place without reference to the politics of federal budgeting and Congressional pork. In my view, the next DNI needs to reduce the secret budget by 20% across the board, each year for five years running, in order to churn and dispose of the base and its 400 compartments that protect waste, fraud and abuse more than they do genuine secrets. I would restore 10% a year to open source initiatives, and redirect 10% a year to creating a global variation of INTELINK-U that can deliver free education in all languages, and free T-1 access across the southern hemisphere, using residual capabilities from abandoned DoD communications satellites. The leadership of the U.S. Intelligence Community is well-intentioned, but still trapped on the margins.