I don't think Congress should investigate this. Nor do I think the main Justice Department should. Because why? Because I don't trust either entity to handle the job: Congress was part of the problem, and whatever it does will be politicized, while the Obama Administration has made it very clear it does not want to turn over this rock.

Rather, I hope that the federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, that I've been hearing rumors about for a few years, which supposedly is looking into CIA torture issues, expands its scope to look at CIA domestic abuses.

In the wake of all the loose talk about the bin Laden raid, a friend who is a veteran of U.S. intelligence work tells me of a counterintutive phenomenon in clandestine operations: The more sensitive a planned operation, the less secret it becomes. This, he explained, is because the more sensitive it is, the more senior officials have to be read in to the matter, lest someone feel left out and blindsided when the headlines burst around them. "We called it the law of inverse compartmentalization," he said.

Those little grasshoppers wishing to know more should read Stuart Herrington's classic treatise on counterintelligence operations , Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catcher's World.

My CNAS colleague Amanda Pfabe wondered what was on the mind of former CIA director Michael Hayden. This is what she found.

Personally, I wish the general worried a bit more about the damage done to America by the government's embrace of torture as a policy under President Bush.

By Amanda Pfabe
Best Defense All American roving correspondent

Retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, spoke the other day at Johns Hopkins University's Rethinking Seminar about six security concerns that would keep him up at night were he still in the government. All six, he said, have a degree of imminence to them:

No. 1: Proliferation (specifically concerning Iran)
Hayden noted that answering questions pertaining to Iranian nuclear capabilities is easier to do than articulating how the Iranian government makes decisions. No one seems to know who or what influences policy. The confusion and mixed messages coming from Tehran surrounding the detention of the three American hikers, two of whom are still being held in Iran, in 2009 underscores the fact that Iran is a fully functioning society with a fully dysfunctional government.  

His scary bottom line: Iran's quest to obtain nuclear weapons is a means to deterring the United States. Attempts to affect their nuclear capability, such as Stuxnet, will simply make them more committed to that quest.

No. 2: China
Hayden was quick to explain that China is not necessarily an enemy, as there are "logical non-heroic policies available to both sides" that can prevent conflicts. However, China's recent international behavior, such as the Chinese fishing boat's collision with Japanese coast guard vessels, can be described as triumphal and akin to that of a teenager whose strength has outstripped his judgment, experience, and wisdom. Several structural problems, including its uneven distribution of wealth, gender imbalance, and environmental disasters, promise to cause growing pains for China as it continues its ascent. Moreover, the legitimacy of the Communist Party governance is based on an unsustainable ten percent GDP growth per year. 

Read on

The other day my CNAS colleague Soriana Crisan wandered over to the National Press Club to see what the terrorism big thinkers are thinking. She came back all gloomy, but what did you expect? I think next time we should send her to a Lady Gaga concert.

Here is her report:

By Sorina I. Crisan
Best Defense terrorism punditry bureau

Hey Tom, as you requested, here are some "high points" from the Jamestown Foundation's 4th Annual Terrorism Conference, held on Thursday, Dec. 9.

• Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, kicked off the proceedings by arguing that there is no "understanding of what terrorism strategy is." Today, al Qaeda is a networked transnational movement that is just "a shadow of its former self" but has been able to survive "because it has managed to adapt to a changing environment." He said we should employ a dual strategy of capturing terrorists and breaking the recruitment cycle by better reaching the youth demographic.
Read on

I see where the U.S. government has disclosed that its total intelligence budget is $80.1 billion. (I was surprised to see that the military chunk of that is so big -- $27 billion. I am guessing that a lot of that goes to satellites, probably the part of defense spending most neglected by reporters.) That means the U.S. intelligence community as a whole has a larger economy than any these countries, going by the IMF's estimates for nominal GDP, 2009:

• Angola
• Croatia
• Iraq
• Libya
• Ecuador
• Sudan
• Syria
• Luxembourg
• Belarus
Read on

A long-term plan to "infiltrate" think tanks, eh?

That is not a project that requires years of effort and much expenditure. I think someone was scamming Moscow Center. "Yes, comrade, we are planning to infiltrate the think tanks in five or ten years. Meanwhile, please send funds for a new car."

I also suspect the FBI is hyping this one.

Here's a guest post by Guy Filippelli, a former Army intelligence officer with experience in both Afghanistan and Iraq, where he was one of  the unsung heroes of the surge era. He says the DNI really needs to be ENI -- that is, the "Enabler of National Intelligence."

By Guy Filippelli
Best Defense deputy chief intelligence bureau

First, the DNI needs to excel as a "service" organization. I know at the senior levels we like to speak about a "J2" or "principal advisor." I believe a more fitting comparison in certain areas might be to a HQ or Special Troops BN Commander.

Second, the DNI needs to "manage the commons" -- data, clearances, enterprise software licenses, general training, program management, etc. Major improvements in these areas would win major fans among the agencies.

Third, the DNI needs to be a "collaborative enabler" -- hosting physical and virtual engagements to bring together the individual agencies and the outside world of business, academia, etc.

What I'm trying to get at here is a mindset shift. It's not about taking control of the agencies, it's about discovering where the opportunities exist to add value to the existing processes. The DNI needs to simply start with "what's broken?" or "what's under-performing?" and start to reinforce.

By the way, I think this is fundamentally inconsistent with putting a 4 star admiral accustomed to running a massive, hierarchical organization in charge. This was doomed from the outset. We need somebody used to putting "the client" first -- in this case, the client need equally be the subordinate agency as well as the White House. I'd rather see the CEO of a major services company step in. I rarely advocate for the McKinsey types, but this might indeed be a good fit for one of that culture.

This is good news. Your tax dollars at work.  Congratulations to all involved.

(HT to AD)

Speaking of Iran, this is the most interesting line of the day on Iraqi politics: "A number of Iraqi politicians had headed to Tehran to meet Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to discuss possible coalitions with his bloc."

Here Adam Silverman, who served in Iraq as a civilian advisor to the 1st Armored Division, comments on what he thinks the real problem is that General Flynn and his guys were trying to get at.

Major General Flynn, Captain Pottinger, and Senior Executive Batchelor recently released an interesting, thought provoking, and largely excellent report dealing with both the problems of what types of intelligence or information need to be collected in Afghanistan (and by extrapolation other theater's of operation) and how such materials should be handled so that the decision makers have timely, accurate, and useful information to inform their decisions.  The focus of what is being referred to as the Flynn Report is near and dear to my heart as my work of the past two and a half years, in a variety of ways and locations has been about how to determine what the policy maker needs to know, how to get the data, how to package it, how to disseminate it, and how to archive it for easy retrieval by others.  From close reading of the report I think that MG Flynn and his colleagues have clearly recognized the scope and enormity of the problem - that there is information and intelligence [1] [2] that is collected, but that never makes it way very far up the chain of command. Moreover, the authors recognize that there are chokepoints in the flow of knowledge from the lowest levels to the highest ones. What I would like to focus on are what I perceive as a couple of discordant notes in an otherwise fine report that deals with both data collection and knowledge management.

Read on

On the other hand, Anthony Cordesman of CSIS is one old school intel guy who likes the Flynn report. Here is his view of it:

Fixing Intel is one of the most insightful reports I have ever read on combatintelligence, and one that tracks all too well with the lessons that should be learned from Vietnam and Iraq.

I was Director of Intelligence Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the end of the Vietnam War, and had to write a post mortem on the collapse. While it was a different war, and the collapse occurred under very different conditions, intelligence failures represented the same tendency to focus on the threat and ignore the range of politic-military and economic factors affecting South Vietnam. This was coupled to excessive classification and above all, to reporting systems that left military advisors largely in charge of assessing the ARVN while intelligence focused on heavily compartmented approaches to the threat.

This leads me to make some additional suggestions regarding the improvements that are need in both intelligence and the analysis of the war:

Intelligence has never really come to grips with the problem of net assessment. The intelligence community seems to have largely backed way from net assessment. So, however, have the US military or the Department of Defense. It is possible to argue that net assessment should be the function of plan, operations, and operations research and not intelligence. As Fixing Intel points out, however, intelligence must look beyond the threat and do so at every level. This sometimes may mean crossing the line into assessing the impact of plans, operations, and civilian activity. Yet, intelligence may well be the best place to conduct both net assessment and fusion analysis in a war that involve so many foreign actors involved in so many different activities.

Wars like Afghanistan are not red or threat side versus US or blue wars. They are dominated by the performance of threat versus host country forces, each of which is fragmented into  different regional, ethnic, sectarian, and tribal groups. Intelligence collection and analysis should be more capable of direct net assessment of these factions than any other element of the military and US analysis community. Friendlies and allies are never going to fully share US goals and interests, and key friendlies and allies will often be divided, suspect, and sometimes covertly hostile.

Read on

Richard Armitage is an unusual guy in Washington -- both candid and well-spoken. He also has a talent for making the right enemies. Now he of thick neck and broad shoulders has given an interesting interview to Prism, which is some sort of new publication at the National Defense University. 

Some highlights:

• At first, the U.S. government was able to keep Pakistani intelligence from meddling in Afghanistan. "The second surprise was frankly how successful we were for the first 4 years-almost 5 years-at keeping the ISI [Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence] relatively out of it. They were so shocked with the speed at which we invaded Afghanistan that I think the ISI felt it was only a matter of time until we prevailed." Armitage's timeline here suggests to me that Afghanistan started really falling apart when the ISI went back in. That's an interesting conclusion

• He says Bush and his war cabinet never formally considered whether to invade Iraq. "Never to my knowledge, and I'm pretty sure I'm right on this, did the President ever sit around with his advisors and say, 'Should we do this or not?' He never did it."

• The Bush administration didn't understand democracy and how to encourage it. "The Bush administration's push for votes as though voting equals democracy was wrong-headed because a vote is something that happens inside a democracy, but is not necessary for a democracy. You can have a democratic system without having people raise their hands and have a secret ballot. Loya jirgas to some extent are these."

• He believes Bush administration actions undercut the American position abroad. "It's harder and made more complex when we abuse the writ of habeas corpus here or when we torture people."

• Reading  he recommends, and why:  "Have you read the novels of Naguib Mahfouz? They're great, and through them all you get a couple of things, I think. First, the good humor of Egyptians; they have enormous good humor. Second, patience and long suffering, but you realize that at some point in time you can't joke something away. You can't outwait it. I would be afraid the tipping point is going to come, and particularly now that the strategic center of gravity in the Middle East has shifted to Riyadh and away from Cairo."

Alex Wong/Getty Images

I'm always struck by the tawdriness of the real world of intelligence, so unlike the glamour of many thriller novels. It turns out that a retired Israeli intelligence operative sold out to the KGB because he needed money to bail him out of some business failures. They worked him for seven years, during which he spilled as much as he could, including information about "American intelligence officers in contact with Israeli intelligence, including names, positions and specialties"-and received a grand total of $31,000. What a shmuck!  

Flickr user: zeevveez

Today's good news is that Israeli agents snuck into a London hotel room and planted software in a Syrian official's laptop that enabled them to collect information on Syria's secret nuclear program. This set up the surprise air strike in September 2007 against a nearly completed reactor out in the eastern Syrian desert.

phooky/flickr

My subway companions Krepninevich and Watts offer up a startling new definition of strategy in their essay about how to regain strategic competence. I am all for a new definition, because I think the ways-means-ends stuff they teach at the war colleges is not helpful. That is just not the way I have seen strategic decision-making occur. Their definition focuses on identifying asymmetrical advantages:

What, then, is strategy? In light of these various observations and insights, a pragmatic characterization is as follows:

Strategy is fundamentally about identifying or creating asymmetric advantages that can be exploited to help achieve one's ultimate objectives despite resource and other constraints, most importantly the opposing efforts of adversaries or competitors and the inherent unpredictability of strategic outcomes.

This is not, of course, the usual definition of strategy. However, it has the considerable merit of applying as readily to chess or a business firm competing against other firms for profits and market share as it does to military competition during peacetime or war. More importantly, it goes beyond the traditional definitions of military strategy by indicating how one actually goes about doing strategy. At its core, strategy is about finding asymmetries in competitive situations that can be exploited to one's advantage.

This definition strikes me as better than the ways-means-ends device, but still a bit narrow, and perhaps too focused on the enemy. I think strategy is more about defining who we are, what we are trying to do, and how we are going to try to do it. But these are smart, insightful writers, so I am going think long and hard about it before rejecting their definition.