Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [214]
Some people find it morally objectionable that relationships are forged with those who may have engaged in activities directed against U.S. interests. Policy and intelligence officials must make a difficult choice between access to useful information that cannot be obtained through other means and the distasteful prospect of paying money to a terrorist or narcotics trafficker.
COLLECTION. Beyond the recruiting of human assets, intelligence officials use a number of techniques to collect intelligence, including the theft of material and various types of eavesdropping, which are deemed unlawful in everyday life. What legitimizes these activities as intelligence operations of the state? Within the United States, intelligence and law enforcement officials had been required to have court orders for eavesdropping and other techniques, and procedures are in place to prevent intelligence collections from including information about U.S. citizens, a category that includes legally resident aliens. The debate about reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) touched on these safeguards versus the need to adjust collection techniques in response to changing technology.
The same issues arise in counterintelligence when a potential suspect has been identified. In the United States, unlike many other countries, the law requires intelligence officials to obtain a court order before performing collection activities against a possible spy.
Collection also raises the moral question of responsibility for the knowledge that has been gained. Do intelligence officials or policy makers incur any obligations by discovering some piece of intelligence? For example, during World War II, British and U.S. intelligence became aware, via signals intelligence, of the mass killing of the Jews by the Germans. The Allies did not carry out military action (bombing rail lines and camps) for two reasons. One was the belief that attacking purely military targets would end the war sooner and thus save more people in the concentration camps than would direct attacks on the camps. Another reason was concern over safeguarding the sources and methods by which the Allies had learned about the camps. What are the ethical and moral implications of the decision to desist?
In 2004, a former minister in the British government alleged that Britain and the United States had conducted espionage at the United Nations in the period prior to the 2003 Security Council vote on Iraq WMI). By international treaty the UN is supposed to be inviolate from any espionage activities, although it is widely known that many states ignored this agreement. For example, for years U.S. officials assumed that Soviet members of the UN secretariat engaged in espionage for their home country even though they were supposed to be international civil servants. In 1978, Arkady Shevchenko, a UN undersecretary, defected to the United States after having passed information to the CIA for several years. Shevchenko confirmed that the Soviet Union used the UN to gather intelligence. Separate allegations also were made that the United States had conducted intelligence collection against the International Agency for Atomic Energy (IAEA), arising from concerns over Iran’s nuclear program. The IAEA, like the UN, is supposed to be inviolate from members’ intelligence activities. The attraction of the UN, or other international bodies, as an intelligence collection target for any nation is obvious. Almost every nation in the world has a diplomatic presence at the UN,