Espionage and Intelligence | Introduction
Forword
By definition, controversies are “discussions of questions in which opposing opinions clash” (Webster’s Twentieth Century Dictionary Unabridged). Few would deny that controversies are a pervasive part of the human condition and exist on virtually every level of human enterprise. Controversies transpire between individuals and among groups, within nations and between nations. Controversies supply the grist necessary for progress by providing challenges and challengers to the status quo. They also create atmospheres where strife and warfare can flourish. A world without controversies would be a peaceful world; but it also would be, by and large, static and prosaic.
The Series’ Purpose
The purpose of the Current Controversies series is to explore many of the social, political, and economic controversies dominating the national and international scenes today. Titles selected for inclusion in the series are highly focused and specific. For example, from the larger category of criminal justice, Current Controversies deals with specific topics such as police brutality, gun control, white collar crime, and others. The debates in Current Controversies also are presented in a useful, timeless fashion. Articles and book excerpts included in each title are selected if they contribute valuable, long-range ideas to the overall debate. And wherever possible, current information is enhanced with historical documents and other relevant materials. Thus, while individual titles are current in focus, every effort is made to ensure that they will not become quickly outdated. Books in the Current Controversies series will remain important resources for librarians, teachers, and students for many years.
In addition to keeping the titles focused and specific, great care is taken in the editorial format of each book in the series. Book introductions and chapter prefaces are offered to provide background material for readers. Chapters are organized around several key questions that are answered with diverse opinions representing all points on the political spectrum. Materials in each chapter include opinions in which authors clearly disagree as well as alternative opinions in which authors may agree on a broader issue but disagree on the possible solutions. In this way, the content of each volume in Current Controversies mirrors the mosaic of opinions encountered in society. Readers will quickly realize that there are many viable answers to these complex issues. By questioning each au- thor’s conclusions, students and casual readers can begin to develop the critical thinking skills so important to evaluating opinionated material.
Current Controversies is also ideal for controlled research. Each anthology in the series is composed of primary sources taken from a wide gamut of informational categories including periodicals, newspapers, books, United States and foreign government documents, and the publications of private and public organizations. Readers will find factual support for reports, debates, and research papers covering all areas of important issues. In addition, an annotated table of contents, an index, a book and periodical bibliography, and a list of organizations to contact are included in each book to expedite further research.
Perhaps more than ever before in history, people are confronted with diverse and contradictory information. During the Persian Gulf War, for example, the public was not only treated to minute-to-minute coverage of the war, it was also inundated with critiques of the coverage and countless analyses of the factors motivating U.S. involvement. Being able to sort through the plethora of opinions accompanying today’s major issues, and to draw one’s own conclusions, can be a complicated and frustrating struggle. It is the editors’ hope that Current Controversies will help readers with this struggle.
Introduction
“Despite [an] expansive intelligence-gathering system, America has not been invulnerable to attack. Perhaps the best example of the intelligence community’s failure to protect Americans is the September 11, 2001, terrorists attacks.”
From its inception, the United States has engaged in espionage and intelligence-gathering activities in order to defend against its enemies. Intelligence gathering was initially a function of the Department of Defense, which has several agencies under its umbrella: the Defense Intelligence Agency, the intelligence agencies of each arm of the military, the highly secret National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Over the years other executive departments have also created intelligence divisions. The Department of Energy, for example, has an intelligence arm to protect nuclear secrets. The Department of State and the Department of the Treasury also conduct intelligence to safeguard national interests under their protection.
Probably the most well known of the departmental intelligence agencies is the FBI, which is part of the Department of Justice. The FBI was initially a law enforcement agency. Prior to World War II, the Bureau had been winning wide public support for its highly publicized capture of gangsters. With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, however, the FBI began to focus more on the investigation of subversion, sabotage, and espionage. After World War II Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower granted the FBI the authority to conduct background investigations on present and prospective government employees. Many suspected and convicted spies, such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, had been federal employees, and FBI background investigations were considered to be vital in cracking major espionage cases. In 1982, following an explosion of terrorist incidents worldwide, FBI Director William Webster made counterterrorism an FBI priority.
Tracking terrorists has always been a priority of the CIA, whose function is to collect and analyze foreign intelligence and distribute it to government officials and other intelligence agencies. The CIA also conducts covert operations to spur changes abroad advantageous to the United States—such as supporting coups to depose uncooperative leaders—while disguising America’s role in the action. Although the United States has long been involved in these activities, the CIA itself, as it is presently known, was not established until after World War II came to an end. The agency’s origins can be traced directly to that war.
As the United States edged closer to entering the war in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt the need for a civilian intelligence agency devoted to national security. In July 1941 he created the office of Coordinator of Information (COI). The agency’s primary directive was to monitor the activities of Adolf Hitler. However, only five months later Japan led a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United States declared war against Japan. Since the United States was at war in Europe and in the Pacific, in June 1942 Roosevelt replaced the COI with a more diversified intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS developed into a worldwide clandestine service that provided valuable intelligence on enemy targets and directed and analyzed Allied bombing raids. After the war William J. Donovan, head of the OSS, recommended that a civilian-run organization be created to coordinate information gathered by the various military and non-military intelligence communities, and President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947, which established today’s CIA. The head of the CIA, the Director of Central Intelligence, also supervises the FBI and the other twelve intelligence agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community.
Despite this expansive intelligence-gathering system, America has not been invulnerable to attack. Perhaps the best example of the intelligence community’s failure to protect Americans is the September 11, 2001, terrorists attacks. On the morning of September 11, nineteen terrorists crashed two planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, a third into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a fourth, its actual target unknown, into a rural Pennsylvania field. These attacks killed more than three thousand people. The terrorists responsible for the attacks were believed to be part of al-Qaeda, a network of terrorists under the direction of exiled Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden. Almost immediately after this tragedy, people began to ask why the nation’s vast intelligence community—which had long been monitoring al-Qaeda—failed to prevent the attacks.
Some analysts argue that centralized decision-making at the FBl prevented the bureau from acting on valuable intelligence that could have prevented the attacks. These commentators cite the experiences of FBI agents Ken Williams and Coleen Rowley. In July 2001 agent Williams wrote a memo in which he expressed concern that Osama bin Laden might be sending terrorists to train at U.S. flight schools. Williams recommended canvassing flight schools for people who might be on terrorist watch lists. Although some maintain that William’s memorandum essentially predicted the terrorist attacks, FBI headquarters did not act on it. Coleen Rowley revealed that FBI management obstructed the investigation of terrorist suspect Zacarias Moussaoui, who some believe was also involved in the attacks. Rowley and her colleagues were denied permission to search his laptop computer and personal items to uncover evidence of terrorism or terrorist plots.
This centralized decision-making was the result of structural changes made within the FBI in the 1970s in response to criticism about the agency’s assaults on civil liberties. FBI documents leaked to the press at that time revealed that the bureau’s counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, had been illegally spying on civil rights, antiwar, and student leaders in a campaign intended to destroy their credibility. In 1976 President Gerald Ford created a commission to investigate intelligence agency abuses and suggest reforms. The Church Commission, led by Senators Frank Church and Otis G. Pike, recommended a more centralized FBI. After implementing the committee’s recommendations, the FBI required that agents seek permission from headquarters to pursue investigation of subversives or terrorists. Field agents no longer had the power to begin investigations without evidence that a specific crime had been committed or was going to be committed, and if agents had evidence, they had to wait weeks or months for express approval from headquarters before proceeding. Some analysts claim that these restrictions explain why the FBI failed to utilize the information it had on al-Qaeda to prevent the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Restrictions imposed by President Jimmy Carter also made it difficult for the CIA to gain valuable intelligence on the al-Qaeda terrorists, some claim. During his administration, Carter ordered reforms that called for CIA field officers to obtain approval before recruiting informants with criminal or human rights abuse records. Some experts claim that these restrictions hindered the CIA from obtaining intelligence that could have helped operatives anticipate the terrorist attacks. “These rules make absolutely no sense with respect to terrorist groups because the only people in terrorist groups are people who want to be terrorists,” says former CIA director James R. Woolsey. “That means they have a background in violence and human-rights violations.”
Other commentators claim that walls between the various intelligence agencies prevented them from sharing important information. According to Dana R. Dillon of the Heritage Foundation, “America’s foreign and domestic agencies either do not or cannot share intelligence resources.” Jurisdictional obstacles, she argues, discourage sharing. The FBI, as a law enforcement agency, gathers intelligence in order to present it as evidence in court, so it must protect the information to preserve the rights of the accused. The foreign intelligence community, including the CIA, protects its intelligence because it does not want to compromise information or endanger the lives of the informants and agents who provide it. As a result, says Dillon, “a breakdown occurred at the level of interagency communication, allowing two hijackers to board commercial planes despite being on the Central Intelligence Agency’s watch list.”
Other analysts maintain that fundamental cultural differences have long hindered cooperation between the CIA and FBI. The CIA was established to collect intelligence abroad, and its charter forbids it to conduct investigations inside the United States. Instead, it passes on intelligence relevant to domestic concerns to the FBI, which handles domestic investigations. These analysts assert that the United States often fails to anticipate cross-border threats like ter- rorism because it lacks a single agency devoted to collecting, analyzing, and piecing together both domestic and foreign information.
Still others argue that restrictions on surveillance prevent intelligence agencies from obtaining essential information on terrorist activities. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FICA) is a secretive panel of federal judges that considers requests from the U.S. Intelligence community to spy on foreign nationals and citizens suspected of being spies or having ties to overseas terrorist groups. To install a wiretap on a suspected terrorist’s phone, agents must prove to the court that the individual is an “agent of a foreign power.” Some agents interviewed by Greg Krikorian of the Los Angeles Times maintain that this requirement “often proved impossible, either because a suspect could not be linked to a specific hostile country or because the ability to make that connection hinged on court-ordered surveillance.” Although this standard is less than that required in America’s criminal courts, which requires a showing of probable cause that a crime is being committed, agents complained that “they faced more restrictions pursuing international terrorists than they did on teenage street gang members.”
In order to address these issues and protect Americans from future terrorist attacks, several reforms of America’s intelligence community have been proposed, although many have yet to be implemented. The USA Patriot Act, which went into effect on October 26, 2001, makes it easier for intelligence agencies to obtain search and surveillance warrants. In May 2002 Attorney General John Ashcroft revised the FBI’s investigative guidelines to allow field offices to open criminal investigations without first obtaining approval from headquarters. In the spring of 2002, FBI Director Robert Mueller announced plans to create an office of intelligence to gather, analyze, and share critical national security information with other agencies; he also proposed a national joint terrorism task force to help the FBI coordinate its efforts with the CIA and other agencies.
Whether or not these reforms will help intelligence agencies predict and therefore prevent future terrorist attacks remains controversial. The authors of the viewpoints in Espionage and Intelligence Gathering: Current Controversies examine these and other issues pertaining to the nature and scope of U.S. intelligence agencies. Authors also debate the social, legal, and ethical implications of espionage and intelligence-gathering activities.
