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By Root 661 0

assets in Guatemala had violated human rights, including those of some American residents in that country. New rules were promulgated, requiring headquarters approval of any such recruitments in the future. After the terrorist attacks, the rules were widely criticized, with many people asserting that they had limited the CIA’s ability to penetrate terrorist groups. CIA officials maintained that no valuable relationship was ever turned down because of the Deutch rules. Critics countered, however, that the very existence of the rules bred timidity in the DO, as officers would be more cautious about whom they recruited, running the risk of losing useful sources, instead of having these recruitments be scrutinized on the basis of changing standards. By the end of 2001, the Deutch rules were no longer considered an operational factor as field stations were told they could be ignored. In July 2002 they were formally rescinded. Writing in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks, Deutch defended his rules, arguing that they allowed DO officers to recruit with clear guidelines and focused on acquiring high-quality agents.

In the United States, constant tension exists between HUMINT and the other collection disciplines. The dominance of technical collection periodically gives rise to calls for a greater emphasis on HUMINT. So-called intelligence failures, such as the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979, the unexpected Indian nuclear tests in 1998, and the 2001 terrorist attacks have led to demands for more HUMINT. There is something odd about this recurring call for more HUMINT in that successful HUMINT is not a question of the mass of agents being assigned to a target. Some targets, such as terrorist cells, or the inner sanctum of totalitarian regimes, will always be difficult to penetrate. There is no reason to believe that the twentieth agent who is sent will succeed when the first nineteen have not. It is not possible to swarm agents against a difficult HUMINT target in terms of the agents’ availability and. more important, the risk. Such an effort would be more likely to alert the target to possible penetration attempts, further hampering HUMINT.

Again, no right balance can be struck between HUMINT and the other collection disciplines. Such an idea runs counter to the concept of an all-source intelligence process that seeks to apply as many collection disciplines as possible to a given intelligence need. But not every collection INT makes an equal or even similar contribution to every issue. Clearly, having a collection system that is strong and flexible and can be modulated to the intelligence requirement at hand is better than one that swings between apparently opposed fashions of technical and human collection.

As with all other INTs, it is difficult, if not impossible, to put an ultimate value on HUMINT. It is one of the two most democratic INTs (along with OSINT), because any nation or group can conduct HUMINT. Clearly, it would be preferable to have good HUMINT access for key issues. But cases such as Ames and Hanssen raise questions about HUMINT’s value. These two spies provided the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia with invaluable information, largely about U.S. spy penetrations in that country but also, in the case of Hanssen, about technical collection operations and capabilities. When their activities are added to past espionage revelations—such as Kampiles (IMINT), the Walkers (SIGINT), and Pelton (SIGINT)—the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia gained substantial knowledge about U.S. collection capabilities. Yet the Soviet Union lost the cold war and ceased to exist as a state. One could argue, on the one hand, that all of this HUMINT ultimately proved to be of no value, thus raising questions about HUMINT’s utility. On the other hand, one could argue that no amount of HUMINT—or any other INT—can save a state that has profound internal problems.

Critics of HUMINT argue that the most important spies (Penkovsky, Ames, Hanssen, and many others) have tended to be walk-ins rather than recruited spies, which raises