Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [74]
HUMINT officers must walk a fine line between prudent caution and the possibility that too much caution will lead them to deter or reject a promising source. For example, the United States initially rejected the services of Penkovsky, who then turned to the British, who accepted him. Only later did the United States take on this valuable spy. Deception is particularly difficult to deal with, because people naturally are reluctant to accept that they are being deceived. However, people might slip into a position where they trust no one, which can result in turning away sources who might have been valuable.
HUMINT’s unique sources and methods raise another issue. These sources are considered to be extremely fragile, given that good human penetrations take so long to develop and risk the lives of the case officers, their sources, and perhaps even the sources’ families. Therefore, the intelligence analysts who receive HUMINT reports may not be told the details of the source or sources. Analysts are not informed, for example, that “this report comes from a first secretary in the Fredonian Foreign Ministry.” Instead, the report includes information on the access of the source to the intelligence, the past reliability of the source, or variations on this concept. Sometimes several sources may be blended together in a single report. Although the masking of HUMINT sources promotes their preservation, it may have the unintended effect of devaluing the reports for analysts, who may not fully appreciate the value of the source and the information. This became an issue in the aftermath of the Iraq WMD experience, when it was recognized that some sources had been of questionable reliability and that analysts were not always given as much information as would have been desirable about the nature of some of the HUMINT reporting. It also denies all-source analysts the ability to make an independent judgment of the HUMINT source when compared with the other sources to which they have access. (HUMINT reports come with captions provided by reports officers as to the nature of the source: a reliable source, an untested source, a source with proven access, a source with unknown access, and so on.)
Also, as DCI Richard Helms (1966-1973) observed, most HUMINT sources are recruited for a specific assignment or requirement, based on their access to the desired intelligence. They cannot be assigned from issue to issue as they are extremely unlikely to have access to other intelligence. Helms also believed that spies who no longer had the desired access should not be held in reserve but should be dropped. He said that a well-run station (the base from which officers operate overseas) “does not cling to spent spies.” Thus, even successful HUMINT, although extremely valuable, is narrow in focus.
HUMINT also puts one in contact—and perhaps into relationships—with unsavory individuals such as terrorists and narco-traffickers. If one is going to penetrate such groups or develop other types of relationships with them, some may become recipients of money or other forms of payment. These types of relationships raise moral and ethical issues for some people (see chap. 13). In the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks, special attention was given to the so-called Deutch rules about HUMINT recruitment. In 1995, DCI John M. Deutch (1995-1997) ordered a scrub of all HUMINT assets, with a particular focus on persons who in the past had been involved in serious criminal activity or human rights violations. The scrub was the result of revelations that some past CIA