Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [173]
However, it is possible to make a distinction between the activities of interest that any state might undertake and those that only a few states would pursue. This rubric tends to divide into a set of “normal” state activities (political, economic, social, diplomatic, military) and activities that will tend to be covert and will often fall into the transnational category (WMD, support for terrorism). Even though there will be many aspects of the so-called normal activities that will be secret—especially plans and intentions or military research and development—the demands of these issues on the intelligence community will be very different from those activities that are more likely to be covert. With these distinctions in mind, in this chapter we examine current intelligence issues observing this separation: normal state-based activities versus transnational issues, keeping in mind that the two sets are not truly separable.
THE PRIMACY OF THE SOVIET ISSUE
To shed additional light on the distinctions, it is instructive to understand how the United States addressed the Soviet Union as an intelligence issue. First, the level of U.S. intelligence concerns about the Soviet Union were broad and far-reaching, embracing virtually every type of activity. Second, many of the forms and processes used to track activities in the Soviet Union continue to influence U.S. intelligence almost two decades after the end of the cold war.
A series of related Soviet issues—including the Soviet Union, Soviet satellites and developing-world allies, and communist parties in some Western nations—dominated U.S. national security and foreign policy from 1946 to 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. During this period, the requirements for intelligence on the Soviet issue were never in doubt. Although other issues might occasionally and temporarily supplant the Soviet issue, it remained in the top tier of matters of interest to the policy and intelligence communities.
A great clarity and continuity also existed in the policy that intelligence was expected to support. Inspired by the career diplomat George Kennan, the United States developed a policy of containment vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Kennan argued, first in his famous “long telegram” from Moscow in February 1946 and then in his “Mr. X” article in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, that the Soviet Union was, by its nature, an expansionist state. If the Soviet Union were contained within its own geographic limits, it would eventually be forced to deal with the inconsistencies and shortcomings of its communist system and either change or collapse. Kennan viewed the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union as largely political and economic. But others responsible for shaping policy, particularly Paul Nitze, the director of policy planning at the State Department (1950-1953), who played a key role in drafting the planning guidance document NSC-68 in early 1950, gave containment a more military dimension, as did the outbreak of the Korean War in June of that year. Still, this was a profound and extremely rare moment in any nation’s national security policy, when a largely intellectual argument that could not be tested or proven to any great degree became the accepted basis for the future development of national security. It also was important as a policy model after the cold war when, as noted, successive administrations sought to find a similarly coherent intellectual means of encapsulating their foreign policy.
THE INTELLIGENCE IMPLICATIONS OF CONTAINMENT. The containment policy included a role for intelligence analysis and operations. Analytically, the intelligence community was expected to know or be able to estimate • Likely areas of Soviet probes or expansion
• Imminence and strength of the probes
• Overall Soviet strength—military, economic, and social
• Likely Soviet allies or surrogates