-- Thomas Fingar, while Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence And Research, speaking before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on current and projected national security threats to U.S., February 2001
“We get it. We [in the intelligence community] realize we have got to rebuild confidence [in intelligence work].”
-- Thomas Fingar, Chairman, National Intelligence Council and deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, January 2007
Thomas Fingar is no more suited for US threat analysis work than Miss Beazley. So if Pundita had a really dark sense of humor, she might quip that the DNI was created solely as a desperation measure to dislodge Fingar from State because the man couldn't be fired.
I can dream on but even with the will to fire him, it would have been virtually impossible to do so. Why? Because for decades Fingar's China analyses were very useful to US administrations that wanted to normalize relations with China and downplay intelligence suggesting that China posed any kind of security threat to the US. But about 15 years ago Mr Fingar's intelligence analysis work at the US Department of State began to encompass all countries. I don't believe it's coincidental that during those years State developed a terminal case of Clientitis and was rendered as a blind as a bat.
Yet State's ineptness at assessing security threats and significant political changes in every region on the globe has been held up as a model of effective intelligence analysis. State's INR (Intelligence and Research) bureau has been exempted from DNI (Director of National Intelligence Office) oversight and is deemed the winner in intelligence analysis when compared to the CIA. The comparison is akin to asking whether a tricycle or pogo stick is the fastest means of cross-country transportation.
If that's not enough to give you nightmares, today Mr Fingar is the "keeper of the crown jewels," as one writer termed it. John Negroponte plucked Fingar from State to be the Number Two at DNI:
"The intelligence reorganization legislation gives Fingar responsibility and authority for setting standards and coordinating objectives for U.S. intelligence efforts, although it leaves the analysts at their respective agencies with the goal of allowing them to present independent views. Fingar will also have what a senior intelligence official involved in the process described to reporters yesterday as "governance" over the President's Daily Brief, the summary of most important items given to Bush each day."(2)Now what is Mr Fingar's idea of "standards" for the US intelligence community? Well, "objectivity" -- meaning intelligence that is not shaped to political ends -- is the buzzword in the new day. How does Fingar plan on bringing in more objectivity? We can glean clues from noting his scholarly background -- he's a China scholar -- and studying a program called SHARP. Watch carefully; don't blink:
Hey, Let's Play BallSo there you have it; Mr Fingar wants to do for all US intelligence agencies under DNI's oversight what he did for State. And he wants to inject into the intelligence community a high degree of dependence on scholarly opinion. The latter is another way of saying that Fingar wants more emphasis on forensic-style proofs in intelligence work, which of course is a contradiction in terms.
The insular world of intelligence reaches out for a few new ideas
By David E. Kaplan
U.S. News & World Report, October 29, 2006
At a modest office building just outside Boston last July, senior U.S. intelligence officials quietly set in motion an unusual experiment. For four weeks, a handpicked group of 20 outside experts brainstormed, argued, and chewed the fat with 20 top analysts from the CIA and eight other intelligence agencies. Their mission: to understand why people join terrorist organizations and other groups engaged in antisocial activity. The issues went to some of the most basic questions confronting Washington's intelligence mandarins: What's driving the spread of extremism around the globe, and how can it be stopped?
Dubbed the Summer Hard Problems workshop, or SHARP, the program is modeled after a highly successful project by the code-breaking National Security Agency, which for years has brought in top mathematicians to tackle cutting-edge issues in encryption. SHARP similarly threw together leading specialists, but from the social sciences: experts in anthropology, social psychology, insurgency, and Islamic thought, among other fields. But for all the esoteric talk about jihadism, group dynamics, and social networks, the SHARP participants had a second mission: to change the way U.S. intelligence agencies do their job, by opening the notoriously insular espionage community to the rest of the world.
SHARP is the brainchild of the 18-month-old Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is charged with overseeing and reforming the nation's sprawling $44 billion intelligence community. Key to that effort is an organized attack on the kind of "groupthink" that resulted in U.S. intelligence agencies getting dead wrong, among other things, nearly every facet of Saddam Hussein's banned weapons programs. Reformers at the DNI and other agencies hope to answer critics who call the nation's spy agencies obsolete -- a bunch of big bureaucracies so addicted to secrecy that they can't cope in the Internet age. "This culture of secrecy in an information-rich world is totally anachronistic," says Phil Williams, an international security expert at the University of Pittsburgh who often consults with intelligence agencies.
Wiki-spies?
To help change the way the nation's espionage agencies do business, senior DNI officials are pushing an effort unlike any seen since the height of the Vietnam War, nearly 40 years ago. The SHARP workshop is but one of a wide array of outreach projects now underway, involving millions of dollars in contracts, fellowships, conferences -- even wikis and blogs -- directed at scholars and other outside experts. DNI officials are mindful of the past, when Vietnam War-era funding drew loud protests on campus, amid charges that the CIA had skewed academic research on Asian studies and secretly backed groups like the National Student Association. The new effort has also begun to stir controversy, but for those who respond, the rewards can be considerable, including contracts, lucrative stipends, and a chance to influence analysis at the CIA and 15 other intelligence agencies. The scope is broad: A classified DNI survey this year yielded 240 pages of outreach efforts involving virtually every U.S. agency that generates intelligence information. Those interested (and invited) enter a world of exclusive conferences, workshops, studies, sabbaticals, and scholarships. Participants include not only academics but experts at think tanks, international groups, foundations, and businesses, as well as medical doctors and scientists.
"The intelligence community will never be big enough, will never have enough analysts," says Thomas Fingar, the DNI's chief of analysis. "There's an absolute need to go outside."
Fingar's office is spearheading the charge. The DNI's new plan, "A Strategy for Analytic Outreach," reviewed by U.S. News, calls for a major effort at building "communities of interest" with outside experts and revamping security regulations to allow far greater contact with the outside world. Fingar hopes to replicate what he accomplished as head of the State Department's small but respected intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. [...]
Set aside troubling questions about a much closer relationship between academia and intelligence work that Fingar's approach suggests, and which the U.S. News report examines in some depth. What are the biggest flaws in the SHARP approach to intelligence work?
Firstly, anyone who has seen the TV FBI drama Numb3rs knows that there is a very direct, very close relationship between mathematics and threat analysis. So the NSA mathematics project, on which SHARP is modeled, makes good sense. But where is the direct connection between anthropology and threat analysis? Between social psychology and threat analysis?
Secondly, even if you could develop a sound rationale for the All is Everything school of intelligence analysis, what the hell kind of data filters would you require, in order to make all the cross-discipline analysis useful for timely threat assessment?
You would end up with the same problem that NSA data analysts always face, which is Garbage In, Garbage Out. You would end up with zillions of teeny tiny data mosaics that may or may not add up to anything useful for threat assessment.
Mr Fingar is not stupid. He understands what I'm saying. So what is his real goal? He wants to purify US intelligence work of the dross of threat assessment.
That is another way of describing State's approach to intelligence work since being infected by the Clientitis bug. Over the decades, the mission of the US foreign office devolved from supporting US strategic objectives to "coordinating with the rest of the world," as one writer put it.
Now, after bringing Mr Finger to DNI, John Negroponte is headed back to State; it does not seem likely that Fingar will follow him back there. Keeping Fingar away from State would be a good thing for State, but keeping him at DNI would be very bad news for US intelligence work. Yet there is nothing you and I can do about the situation; Mr Fingar is burrowed too deep in the intelligence community to hope that anything but retirement will dislodge him.
So, taking a page from the cross-discipline approach, Pundita will attempt an assessment of the situation by quoting Tom Colicchio, head judge for the Top Chef competition. When a semi-finalist complained about the behavior of another semi-finalist in the kitchen throughout the weeks of competition, Colicchio replied:
"We're not judging your behavior in the kitchen. We're judging your food. I really don't care what happens in there, to tell you the truth."
By the same token, nobody outside the spy community really cares how spies make good evaluations. We just want the US government to become skilled at threat analysis. The only thing that is going to rebuild our confidence is if the intelligence community gets threat analysis right on all the big stuff.
1) Fingar 2001 testimony.
2) The Washington Post
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