Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [76]
One of the major concerns in HUMINT is the possibility that a clandestine officer will be caught and unmasked, with attendant personal risk for the officer and political embarrassment for the state that sent the officer. Even a successful long-term espionage penetration can prove costly. The case of Gunter Guillaume is illustrative. Guillaume was an East German spy who was able to penetrate the West German government, rising to a senior position in the office of Chancellor Willy Brandt. When Guillaume’s espionage was uncovered in 1974, Brandt was forced to resign. Many people believed that the political cost of the operation exceeded any gains in intelligence. Brandt’s Ostpolitik—or favorable policy toward East Germany—was never resumed by his successors, at great cost to East Germany, perhaps even greater than any intelligence that Guillaume produced over the years. Similarly, the fate of Jonathan Pollard (see chap. 15 for more details), who passed classified intelligence to Israel, became a constant irritant in U.S.-Israeli relations, again outweighing the value of the intelligence that Pollard provided.
The state of HUMINT remains a concern in the U.S. intelligence community. HUMINT suffered from budget cuts through the 1990s, as did all aspects of intelligence. Several officials have noted that the FBI had more agents assigned to New York City than did the DO worldwide. President Bush ordered a 50 percent increase in the number of DO (now NCS) officers. As noted, it will be seven years from their entry on duty (EOD) before these officers are considered fully operational. Porter Goss’s tenure as DCI and then DCIA saw the departure of many DO veterans, owing to friction with Goss’s staff. This seems to have eased under DCIA Michael Hayden but there have been press reports indicating that attrition rates in the NCS remained high, especially in the five- to ten-year cadre.
For the United States, at least, it remains important to view HUMINT as part of a larger collection strategy instead of as the single INT that meets the country’s most important intelligence needs. To place that sort of expectation on any one INT is bound to set it up for disappointment at best and perhaps even failure.
OPEN-SOURCE INTELLIGENCE. To some, OSINT may seem like a contradiction in terms. How can information that is openly available be considered intelligence? This question reflects the misconception that intelligence must inevitably be about secrets. Much of it is, but not to the exclusion of openly available information. Even during the height of the cold war, according to one senior intelligence official, at least 20 percent of the intelligence about the Soviet Union came from open sources.
OSINT includes a wide variety of information and sources.
• Media: newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and computer-based information
• Public data: government reports, official data such as budgets and demographics, hearings, legislative debates, press conferences, and speeches
• Professional and academic: conferences, symposia, professional associations, academic papers, and experts
In addition to these open sources, each of the classified INTs has an OSINT component. The most obvious is commercial imagery. One can also conduct a variety of SIGINT-type activities on the Worldwide Web, such as traffic analysis (the number of people who visit a Web site) or changes in Web sites. Given that some aspects of MASINT are related to geophysical phenomena, there are open aspects of MASINT. Finally, there is open HUMINT—the use of overt experts for their own knowledge or as sources of elicitation. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does give a feel for the range of OSINT within the