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By Root 746 0

at crop eradication and substitution stumble on the simple economic choices facing local farmers. Narcotics crops pay more than food crops do. Processing facilities, although U.S. intelligence can locate them, tend to be small and numerous. Drugs are so profitable that small amounts, which are easily shipped, are economically attractive. Shippers can use any number of routes, which they can change in response to pressure and efforts at interdiction. Finally, narcotics activities yield money in sufficient amounts to subvert the local authorities—civil, military, and police.

All experienced policy makers point to the importance of a domestic answer. If people do not have an interest in using illegal drugs, then everything else—growth, processing, shipping, and even price—becomes irrelevant. The drugs become valueless commodities. But the elusiveness of a successful domestic response leads policy makers back to foreign policy. (Legalizing drugs might not have the same effect on production and distribution as eliminating demand, because a black market might arise to compete with government-approved providers.)

The conjunction of the narcotics trade with international crime and with terrorism adds an additional dimension to the intelligence-gathering and policy-making problem. The profits from sales of narcotics, instead of being an end in themselves, now become the means to fund a different end. Also, new and more difficult demands are put on intelligence, because terrorists and criminals operate clandestinely. The United States must be able to establish intelligence about networks, contacts, relationships among individuals and groups, flows of capital, and so forth. For example, guerrilla and right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia have used cocaine to finance their operations. Finally, narcotics crosses the line established in the United States between foreign and domestic intelligence and between intelligence and law enforcement. The point at which an issue is handed from one agency to another is not always clear but is important, raising both practical and legal questions, some of which can impede prosecution. The status of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is an interesting bellwether. Formally part of the Justice Department, the DEA has moved in and out of the intelligence community. The DEA was considered to be part of the intelligence community in the late-1970s and early-1980s but then reverted to its former position as a law enforcement agency. In 2006, however, the DEA’s Office of National Security Intelligence was formally made part of the intelligence community specifically because of the link between drugs and terrorism.

ECONOMICS

Economics can be subdivided into several issues: U.S. economic competitiveness overseas, U.S. trading relations, foreign economic espionage and possible countermeasures, and the intelligence community’s ability to forecast major international economic shifts that may have serious consequences for the U.S. economy.

During the late 1980s some people maintained that several of these issues (overseas competitiveness, trading relations, foreign economic espionage, industrial espionage undertaken by businesses, and possible countermeasures) could be addressed, in part, through a closer connection between intelligence and U.S. businesses. Few advocates of closer intelligence-business collaboration, however, had substantial answers for some of the more compelling questions that it raised (which is one reason that this approach was quickly rejected).

• If the intelligence community were to share intelligence with businesses, how would they safeguard the sources and methods used in obtaining the information? If the underlying sources and methods could not be shared, would businesses accept the intelligence?

• With whom would the intelligence be shared, or, in other words, what constitutes a “U.S. company”? In an age of multinational corporations, the concept is not easy to define.

• Given that every business sector has many competitive businesses, which ones would