The New Craft of Intelligence:
Europe as Victim, Europe as Leader
Robert David STEELE Vivas1










Abstract ..................................................................................................................................................................1
A Short History of Intelligence—Europe as Victim ...............................................................................................2
The Purpose of Intelligence—Modern Theory and Practice ..................................................................................3
The Threat Today—Internal, External, and Common ............................................................................................3
Rethinking Intelligence in a Multipolar World—Change as Challenge .................................................................5
The New Craft of Intelligence—An Alternative Approach for the 21st Century ....................................................5
Encryption: Gaining Control by Giving Up Control ..............................................................................................6
Intelligence in the 21st Century: Thinking Creatively.............................................................................................7
 Requirements Definition .................................................................................................................................7
 Collection Management ..................................................................................................................................7
 Processing Information....................................................................................................................................8
 Producing Intelligence .....................................................................................................................................9
 Paying for Intelligence ....................................................................................................................................9
The Failure of the American Model—Europe as Leader...................................................................................... 11
Endnotes ............................................................................................................................................................... 11
Abstract
Over the course of human history, "intelligence"—the art of knowing the plans and intentions of
one's enemies—has become confused with spies and secrecy—the methods have come to
dominate the objective. The Americans, with their vast sums of money and their obsession with
satellite technology, have corrupted the modern understanding of intelligence. At the same time,
as we enter the 21st Century, each nation faces new and unusual internal threats, more complex
external threats, and many non-traditional common threats including ethnic conflict and water
scarcity along the Slavic-Islamic borders and the Sino-Slavic borders. There are two other
major changes each government must accommodate: the international information explosion has
shifted the challenge from one of stealing a few secrets to one of "making sense" of vast
quantities of open information; and at the same time, "who decides" has changed from a topdown command mode driven by elites, to a bottom-up consensus mode driven by non-state
actors. Under these circumstances, spies and secrecy must yield to scholars and open source
information as the primary foundation for national decision-making. The Internet is now the
common international vehicle for communicating and sharing information. Encryption must not
be controlled, so that the Internet can prosper as a means of sharing both open and restricted
information. National intelligence agencies must be recapitalized and restructured. They must
learn to discover, discriminate, distill, and deliver exactly the right information, even if it is not
secret. They must shift their spending from spies and satellites to analysts, analytic tools, and
open sources. Finally, each government must learn how to share the financial and intellectual
burden of "Global Coverage" by working closely with its national business, academic, and
media partners to create a "virtual intelligence community" that uses the Internet to produce
reports, administer expert forums, and provide distance learning on any topic to any citizen. The
American model for national intelligence has failed; so has the old European model. The new
European Parliament and the European Commission could now lead the way in creating a new
"internationalist" model of intelligence, a model better suited for the realities of the 21st Century.
2
A Short History of Intelligence—Europe as Victim
It is an honor to be here, speaking at the first truly European conference dedicated to the future
of intelligence. As Europe reconsiders the Atlantic Alliance, its new regional relationships, the
growing threats from the fringe regions to the West and from the Islamic, Arabic, and North
African zones of instability, as well as the new global economic and technological environments,
it is appropriate that we have a fresh review of this important topic.
First, the history of intelligence in three minutes. It started long before Christ, and initially
consisted of forward scouts and merchants—today we call them "legal travelers." Over time,
and particularly in China, it matured into a complex secret network of spies, counterspies, and
counter-counter-spies. It remained largely human in nature until World War II. Espionage was
the secret side of the "game of Nations," the sport of kings, and at its most ruthless, was a form
of permanent secret war between states.
The United States of America, despite its successful use of military spies in the Revolutionary
War, was by its nature not well-suited to the art of espionage. As Christopher Andrew has
documented so brilliantly in his book on intelligence and American presidents, only four
American presidents have properly understood national intelligence in over 200 years: George
Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and George Bush the father.2 The son gives no
sign of appreciating the value of intelligence, and his current Secretary of Defense is on record as
saying that the Director of Central Intelligence has a "a crappy, irrelevant job."3
The Americans, the newcomers to the world of intelligence in the 1940's, made up with money
and technology what they lacked in finesse and analytical insight. Sherman Kent, a brilliant
man, introduced the new American definition of intelligence, one focused on analysis rather than
secret warfare.4 Unfortunately, the Americans have only paid lip-service to analysis in relation
to the over-all roles and missions of the larger U.S. Intelligence Community. If one examines
the record of U.S. intelligence spending since World War II, it is easy to establish that the
Americans are spending roughly 85% of their $30 billion dollars a year on satellite-based covert
technical collection. This is bad, but it gets worse—the Americans are only processing 10% of
their collected images, 6% of their Russian and Chinese signals, approximately 3% of their
European signals, and less than 1% of their "rest of the world" signals. They have sacrificed
analysts, analytic tools, and access to open source intelligence; in their obsession with waste and
mismanagement in outer space. The latest plans to recapitalize satellites continue this pattern.
Europe would be foolish to follow this example. Europe is already a victim of the American way
of espionage because Europe has become too reliant on American intelligence products and the
American intelligence relationship at the same time that Europe has failed to properly capitalize
its own national and regional intelligence architectures. Europe has also been "sucked in" at the
highest levels to a "systems of systems" approach to military and intelligence communications
and computing that demands interoperability with the Americans. I am here to tell you that the
American approach to communications and computing is not affordable by the Europeans and
that it also cuts its commanders off from 98% of the relevant information that is available only
from the private sector. Spies and secrecy are a very small part of national intelligence in today's
world. The new European intelligence community must find a new model for its future.
3
The Purpose of Intelligence—Modern Theory and Practice
Each nation and each private sector organization has a choice about how it approaches the
mission of intelligence. In theory, in the ideal, the mission of intelligence is to inform policy.
That is the argument I make in my book and that is the argument I have made to over 6,000
officers from over 40 countries who have chosen to attend my annual May conference on
intelligence reform and open source intelligence.5
In practice, the reality is that most nations focus on expensive technical collection that they
cannot process, and on secret clandestine activities that are very inefficient as well as insecure.
We like to pretend that our spies, most of whom are working out of official installations, are
doing important secret work. The reality is that local liaison—the local government's
counterintelligence organization—knows with certainty who all of our spies are, and is
controlling at least half of our so-called secret agents.
Both governments and corporations have a similar problem in their general approach to
information and information technology. Most have made the mistake of spending money on
information technology—on expensive communications and computing equipment—without
giving any thought to the sources of information that they are seeking, or the analytic processes
they wish their experts to pursue, or to the products that are to be created and distributed to
policy makers. An expensive cooking pot will not improve old fish or a bad cook.
It has been my experience that 80% of what we need to know to produce useful intelligence is
not secret, is not online (either on the Internet or available from premium commercial sources
such as Factiva), and is generally not even published in hard-copy. It has also been my
experience that governments and corporations are not competent as discovering, discriminating,
distilling, and digesting open sources of information. We have much to learn.
The purpose of intelligence must be to inform policy-makers, acquisition managers, and
operational commanders including law enforcement commanders. Anyone who persists in the
belief that the purpose of intelligence is to collect secrets is betraying their responsibility to their
country and undermining the national security as well as the national competitiveness of their
home country. Intelligence in the 21st Century must focus on open source intelligence, on many
smart analysts working together, and on analytic tools. Spies and secrecy have a role to play, but
it is a very small role and must be carefully managed within a larger holistic approach to the new
craft of intelligence.6 Let me be clear: my vision for intelligence reform includes dramatic
improvements in our clandestine service—we must have spies that the French cannot find—but
this is a very small part of the much larger issue of how we manage the totality of national
intelligence collection and production.
The Threat Today—Internal, External, and Common
Before we consider how best to rethink intelligence in a multipolar world, let me spend just three
minutes on the nature of the threat today. This is an area where the preceding speaker, Dr. John
Gannon, not only excels, but in so doing he sharply outlines a new globalized understanding of
4
non-traditional threats. I agree with everything he says. I wish to focus in general terms on
three areas of concern: internal threats, external threats, and common threats.
Internal threats are growing with the open borders that characterize most of the world and
especially the European community of nations. Internal threats are also growing with our
reliance of electronic systems whose genesis and internal coding we do not understand. New
means must be found to provide intelligence and counterintelligence support for internal
stability, crime-fighting, disease control, and electronic systems. The proven process of
intelligence has much to offer to internal decision-makers, but we must set a new standard for
decision-making about all internal matters—all decisions must be informed by basic, estimative,
and counterintelligence operations and analysis.
External threats cannot be denied. I believe in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that is
represented at this conference by Brigadier General James Cox, and I believe that both NATO
and the various combinations of European nations, including those contemplating a separate
European rapid reaction force, must recognize that the security of Europe is rooted in out of area
instability and will require out of area military and assistance operations.7 In this regard, NATO,
and other European coalitions are urgently in need of new methods for sharing information that
permit the inclusion of non-governmental organizations in planning and operations—this
generally means that most of the information cannot be secret information. For this reason, I am
very pleased that as a result of leadership from the German, Dutch, Norwegian, and Canadian
flag officers within NATO, that today there exists a NATO Open Source Intelligence Working
Group that is specifically focused on a vision for future intelligence sharing with the Partners for
Peace and the Mediterranean Dialog nations. The future intelligence architecture vision of
NATO, if it is separated from the American obsession with very expensive technology, has much
to offer all of Europe as a model for thinking about the future of intelligence.
Finally there are common threats where we have failed to establish useful means of sharing the
cost of collection, processing, and analysis. OSS has been tracking eighteen different genocide
campaigns around the world. How many others are doing the same thing? Or when East Timor
became a nightmare, how many different Nations and organizations were duplicating one
another's work in basic collection and analysis? Then there is the fact that conflict is pervasive
throughout the world. Today we have 26 high-intensity conflicts, 78 low-intensity conflicts, and
178 violent internal political conflicts.8 Can each of our countries and businesses afford to be
monitoring all of these conflicts all of the time? I do not think so! In terms of future threats, I
am especially concerned about water scarcity, and the fact that water scarcity and ethnic conflict
are especially strong along the Slavic-Islamic and the Sino-Slavic borders. The proliferation of
bio-chemical weapons, trade in women and children, toxic dumping in European rivers as well as
in Africa, and the collapse of global public health, at every level and in every nation, are among
the things we must all worry about.
Spies and secrecy have very little to contribute to our understanding of these topics of common
concern, yet we have failed to establish alternative means of sharing open source intelligence
that are as structured as our many bilateral arrangements for sharing secrets.
5
Rethinking Intelligence in a Multipolar World—Change as Challenge
What has changed? Let me contrast the nature of intelligence during the Cold War with the
demands on intelligence in a new globalized world where instability and disease and water
shortages in otherwise insignificant areas can bring severe danger to Europe.
During the Cold War, we focused on collecting secrets about one denied area target, the Soviet
Union. Our customers for these secrets were the policy elite within government. We collected a
relatively small amount of information, and from this we made grand deductions.9
Today our challenges are completely different. Instead of stealing a few secrets we must make
sense of vast quantities of information that overwhelm us—information that is not secret. The
average man on the street has access, in one day, to more information on the Internet than any
President or Prime Minister receives during their entire Administration from their secret
intelligence services.
We must also accommodate ourselves to a complete change in "who decides." Instead of
government leaders deciding and issuing instructions in a top-down "command" fashion, today
decisions are made by multi-cultural and transnational groups, most of whom are non-state
actors. Openly-arrived at consensus, rather than secretly-derived command, is the operational
concept most relevant to thinking about the future of intelligence and its role in support of
national and regional decision-making.
There is a subtlety here. When public consensus is the objective, and the citizen is the ultimate
consumer of intelligence, then the education of the citizen becomes rather important. Trying to
provide intelligence about global threats to Senators and Representatives and citizens who boast
that they do not have a passport and have no need to understand other countries or other peoples
is a very frightening and very real challenge we face today in America. Senator David Boren
and Mr. David Gergen have both called for the internationalization of education, and I believe
that we all share a common concern: real world information must be fully integrated into all
public educational curriculums—students must learn how to study and understand the various
constituencies in the real world—or we will all be trying to create intelligence for what will
arguably be "dumb Nations."
Intelligence in the 21st Century must embrace and inform every element of the Nation, from
policy and the military to law enforcement and coalitions, to business and the academy and the
man on the street.
The New Craft of Intelligence—An Alternative Approach for the 21st Century
Now I begin my conclusion, by outlining my vision for the future of intelligence. 10 It begins
with the Internet. The Internet is not, as some might assume, an alternative source of useful
knowledge. Over 90% of the content on the Internet is pornography, opinion, or advertising.
While it will no doubt improve over time, the importance of the Internet to Europe is primarily as
an alternative to the secret and expensive American command, control, communications,
computing and intelligence (C4I) system. That system is unaffordable, has access to only 2% of
6
the relevant information, and should be dumped into the ocean as soon as possible. Europeans
should not spend one additional Euro-dollar buying in to the American "system of systems."
Instead, Europe should focus on elevating the security of the Internet to the point that it can be
used as the C4I backbone for government and private sector information sharing, for intelligence
support and information sharing among ad hoc coalition partners including non-governmental
organizations, and as a means of mobilizing what Dr. Alessandro Politi called, in 1992, the
"intelligence minuteman"—the private citizen with knowledge or observations of immediate
value to the government.11
I believe that the Internet can offer the countries of Europe, and their corporations, and their
citizens, four specific functionalities that will characterize the virtual intelligence community of
the future:

Shared reports on every country and topic of common interest

Expert forums with differing levels of qualification and
including private teams

Internet and distributed database link tables creating a virtual
information network

Distance learning to internationalize education and help new
analysts come up to speed
Global Coverage—the ability to monitor every aspect of our global environment in order to
obtain early warning, estimate trends, and react responsibly to significant changes, is now
unaffordable by any government or any corporation. New means must be found to share this
burden, and I believe that the new craft of intelligence, with European leadership and perhaps a
Canadian role as an honest broker of shared Internet spaces, will move from the vaults of secrecy
to the open terrain of cyber-space. It is there that intelligent life is to be found in the 21st
Century.
Encryption: Gaining Control by Giving Up Control
Both the American and the European policies on encryption are inappropriate and unenforceable.
It is not possible to gain control over the wealth of information that could be communicated over
the Internet until every government is willing to give up control over encryption. Let me explain
this simply: 98% of the information we need to do good governance and good business is
available from private sector parties but we are either too afraid to let our analysts have a
connection to the Internet; or the private sector is not willing to put its information on the
Internet due to the lack of security that characterizes electronic communications and computers
today. We must all agree that the Internet, as the new international standard for sharing
information, requires the same level of security that now is provided for secret government
communications. If we give up control over encryption, then we gain control of—we gain
access to—the totality of world knowledge through the Internet. We "explode" the value of the
Internet a tri-billion-fold.
7
Two more quick points on this vital topic. First, I must observe that governments have already
lost control of the Internet and of encryption. The Internet interprets censorship and
government-approved encryption as a power outage, and routes around it.12 The Internet also
hosts new levels of anonymous emailing and hidden encryption, such as steganography (the
concealment of encryption within images) that are beyond the capabilities of the Americans as
well as the rest of the world.
Second, I must emphasize that while today there are roughly 3.5 million users of the Internet,
there will be, within 10-15 years, 3.5 billion users of the Internet. We are at the beginning of
time in terms of modern information practices, and government can no more stop this trend than
it can control the weather. 13
Government must become part of the total Internet, and stop trying to hide and isolate its secret
information. We must protect our secrets, but we must also allow the private sector to properly
protect its intellectual property and its secrets—in this way, the Internet can become the true
"information commons" of the 21st Century, and we will all benefit, irrespective of nationality,
ethnicity, or profession.
Intelligence in the 21st Century: Thinking Creatively
Very briefly, I want to cover the fundamentals of intelligence, which most governments have
abandoned, and end with the need for new partnerships.
Requirements Definition
Requirements Definition is a lost art form. If you do not get the policy-maker to ask the right
question, then you will waste, as the Americans and others waste, billions of dollars collecting
too much of the wrong information at the same time that you fail to go get exactly the right
information. Policymakers and commanders must be trained in how to task and use
intelligence—this is not a game for children, an adult version of "I have a secret." Just a month
ago we had a two-star general ask his one-star intelligence general for "anything you can get on
mines." We wasted three days and over $6000 dollars before someone finally asked the two-star
general what he really wanted to know. It turned out that what he really wanted to know was
how a U.S. militant might incapacitate a U.S. port with commercial off-the-shelf explosives.
This was still not the right question—you can incapacitate a port with an electronic attack on its
computers or a chain saw on its communications cables, but this time we knew what was
expected. This mistake is repeated thousands of times every single day in every single country.
Collection Management
I have been a spy, I have helped steal signals codebooks, I have programmed funds for overhead
imagery satellites. I have also helped lead the open source revolution in partnership with many
others around the world. One of our biggest problems today is that we do not manage
collection—we let the collection resources dictate what we do. The U.S. Intelligence
Community is "severely deficient" in its access to open sources of information,14 at the same
8
time that it is spending billions of dollars on imagery and signals collection that cannot be
processed, and it spends so little on clandestine human intelligence that it must rely on low-cost
recent college graduates working out of official installations—non-official cover officers hired at
mid-career cost more and require more effort to support in the field.
As each country thinks about the future of its intelligence capabilities, it must first step back
from what exists, and think instead about what it needs. Most of what we have in the U.S.
technical collection architecture is from the 1970's and not worth saving—it is time for every
Nation to carefully consider the balance that it requires between spies and scholars—between
secret sources and open sources.
Finally, within collection management, it is imperative that the most senior collection manager
be an analyst, not a collector. Properly balanced collection management must keep the question
to be answered firmly in mind, must know the strengths and weaknesses of each collection
discipline, and must have the authority to narrowly focus each collection capability—often this
will require strict instruction to the spies to do nothing because the information is more cheaply
and more quickly available through open sources.
Processing Information
Where we in America have failed most dramatically, is in failing to invest any money at all in
what we call TPED—Tasking, Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination. We have spent
billions on overhead technical collection (and some ground level computer collection) and we
have spent nothing—quite literally, nothing—to create tools that analysts could use to task the
collection capabilities; to process the information being brought in; to cluster, weight, and
visualize the information so it could be understood; to distill the information into multi-media
presentations that could be quickly delivered to the customer.
Astonishing as this may seem, although we defined a desktop computer system for analysts in
1986 that could do all this using object-oriented programming, we were forbidden to develop it
because the official CIA computer was first the Wang and then the IBM PS 2, and neither of
these old computer architectures was capable of advanced processing. We are 20 years behind
private sector technology today, in the processing arena, because of terrible decisions we made in
the 1980's.
The information technology revolution has not yet reached the intelligence analyst. This must be
one of the top three priorities, apart from hiring more analysts and better analysts, and improving
our access to open sources of information. They must have the tools with which to think, or they
will drown in information and be rather useless.
There is, however, one other aspect to processing, including data extraction and storage, which I
wish to address. In the age of distributed information, the concept of centralized intelligence is
not only an oxymoron, it is the surest way to deprive government of access to most of the
information that it requires to make informed decisions. It is impossible for any central
intelligence organization to be effective at "Global Coverage."
9
Only by creating a "virtual intelligence community" that uses the Internet to establish open
source information collection, processing, and analysis partnerships with business and the
academy—and with other governments and their own internal private sector information
specialists—can any government hope to be truly informed and effective in the 21st Century.
Producing Intelligence
I am concerned by several trends that I have noticed within the various production communities I
have worked with over time. First, it is very silly to try to have a 12 month production plan with
an 18 month editing cycle so that by the time the intelligence reaches the policy maker or the
commander the country in question no longer exists—or the topic is overtaken by events.
Production communities must shift to a "just enough, just in time" form of production. Most of
the writing should be left in the analyst's filing cabinet. Intelligence reports must be one page or
less, and the analyst must be able to answer any follow-up questions immediately and on the
secure telephone, in an interactive mode. In many cases, the analyst will not know but they must
be expert at "knowing who knows."15 The acme of analytic skill in the 21st Century will be the
ability to put the policy maker with a question in touch with a private sector expert who can
create new knowledge "on the spot", tailored exactly to the needs of the policy maker. This will
require dramatic changes in our intelligence cultures, and especially in our security culture.
I am also concerned about the obsession of production managers with creating huge piles of
paper, of creating very long reports that no one will ever read. Apart from the fact that they are
wasting the analysts' time (and driving the best analysts out of government), apart from the fact
that they are failing to meet the intelligence needs of the traditional as well as their new clients
across many different branches of government, they are also preventing their analysts from
thinking and training.
In my view, analysts should spend one third of their time traveling to conferences and to study
their target, one third of their time thinking without necessarily writing, and one third of their
time with their customers, seeing what their customers see, understanding their customers
problems, and gaining their customers trust. If we follow this path, we will be able to produce
superior intelligence on a "just enough, just in time" basis.
Paying for Intelligence
I must conclude this overview of needed changes in how we execute the new craft of intelligence
by speaking briefly about how we pay for intelligence.
Most countries today set aside a relatively modest amount of money for intelligence. In America
we set aside $30 billion a year, which is roughly 10% of what we spend on defense. This is,
however, a deceptive number, because all but $2 billion is spent on technical collection and
defense intelligence. Only about $2 billion is actually under the control of the Director of
Central Intelligence, and this pays for both the clandestine service and all of our national-level
analysts as well as a very expensive global communications infrastructure. In my experience
most major European countries are spending between $1 billion and $3 billion a year as a total.
10
I believe we are all spending our money badly, and we have failed to properly integrate the cost
of information support into every department of government. In America, for example, our
military builds very expensive weapons, mobility, and communications systems, and does not
plan for how the information and intelligence will reach these systems, nor does our military
include the costs of information support in the cost of the system. Precision munitions, for
example, require extraordinarily expensive classified imagery and imagery processing and
analysis support. The military "assumes" that the intelligence professionals will provide them
with what they need, when they need it, for "free." We must break way from this model.
Intelligence support in the future must be no less than 1% and ideally as much as 3% of every
department's total budget. That portion of every department's budget for intelligence should be
set aside, into a special intelligence fund, so that the department cannot choose to pay for travel
instead of intelligence, or furniture instead of intelligence, or new cars for the leadership, instead
of intelligence. This happens all too often in America, except that we spend our money on
people and in many cases our intelligence budgets are so heavily invested in people—over 50%
in most cases, up to 85% in some cases—that we have nothing left over to spend on actually
buying travel, training, expert consultations, desktop analytic tools, or improved access to open
sources of information.
There is plenty of money available for intelligence if we simply look deeply into our budgets and
establish two things: first, how must we are wasting on ineffective secret collection that is not
properly processed; and second, how much we are wasting on weapons, vehicles, and people that
will never be properly used until they earmark a fraction of their acquisition and maintenance
costs for intelligence support. Within government, there should be no difficulty with increasing
the intelligence budget by 20% by forcing the consumers of intelligence to allocate funds for the
intelligence they demand. At the same time, I recommend that the government cut the
intelligence budget each year by 20% for five years in a row, while asking for what we call "new
initiatives" that can be funded with the savings—in other words, cut 20% being spent on old
ideas that no longer work, while immediately restoring the same 20% for specific new ideas. In
this way, without reducing the budget for intelligence, we can "churn" it, renew it, and
completely refresh our intelligence capabilities.
There is one final observation that I would make on paying for intelligence: it must be paid for in
partnership with the business community and the universities. There needs to be a national
consortium, a "virtual intelligence community", with expert councils for every topic of common
interest. For North Africa, to take just one example, there should be a council with
representatives from each major organization that meets quarterly to discuss information
collection and analysis objectives, to establish protocols for information sharing, to discuss
changes to a shared Internet space with shared reports, expert forums, and distance learning, and
to agree on unfunded deficiencies that need attention from the government or perhaps from a
major business sponsor—or even a few directed dissertations by promising graduate students!
In the age of distributed intelligence, it is no longer possible for the government to be informed
without a full partnership with business and the academy. It is the role of government now to
provide leadership, but not to try to do everything by itself. Global Coverage is unaffordable by
any single government or any single corporation or any single university.
11
The Failure of the American Model—Europe as Leader
America has failed. I have failed. It cost the U.S. taxpayer $20 million for me to learn, in
creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Center, that 80% to 90% of what I needed to create useful
intelligence for my general officers was not online, not secret, and therefore not available from
the secret intelligence agencies.
Europe, like America, has been slow to grasp the urgency associated with redirecting our
intelligence spending from secret collection toward analysis, analytic tools, and open sources of
information. Europe, however, now has an advantage. If it recognizes the failure of the
American model; if it recognizes the failure of technology as a collection solution; if it
recognizes the fact that it is Europe, not America, that will suffer the most from the collapse of
Africa and ethnic water-wars between Russia and China and between Russia and Islamic
revolutionaries, then perhaps Europe might step forward to create a new "internationalist" vision
of intelligence.
Such an internationalist vision would create new partnerships between governmental and nongovernmental organizations.
Such an internationalist vision would ensure that open source intelligence was the source of first
resort, and that spies and secrecy were used only in the context of what could be legally and
ethically gathered, at low cost, from open sources.
Such an internationalist vision would restore Europe to the forefront of the global intelligence
community that is emerging in the Internet era, and would ensure that our shared global
intelligence endeavors reflect a proper multi-cultural and continental perspective.
Too often we mistake money for power and secrecy for knowledge. There are a great many
"naked Emperors", both in America and in Europe, and the time has come to either get them
dressed or throw them out of office.
Thank you.
Endnotes
1
Robert David STEELE Vivas is a 25-year veteran of the U.S. national security community, with over 20 years
residence in various countries in Asia, Latin America, and Europe. His family roots extend to the Barcelona region
of Spain in the 17th Century, and to a British silk weaver in Cheshire County in England, also in the 17 th Century.
He is the founder of www.oss.net and the Global Information Forum (www.oss.net/OSS01) held each May, and the
author of ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA International Press, 2000), available
from http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0916159280/qid%3D957557681/103-7533232-2724657. He holds
two graduate degrees, in international relations and public administration, and two advanced certificates, in
intelligence policy and in defense studies.
A copy of this paper with all endnotes is at
www.oss.net/Papers/white/FutureIntel.doc. Reproduction and dissemination are encouraged.
2
Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from
Washington to Bush (HarperCollins, 1995).
3
As quoted in Bob Woodward's "Editorial: Bush's Wild Card", The Washington Post, 01/12/2001, Page A25.
12
4
Michael Herman, Intelligence Power in War and Peace (Cambridge University Press, 1996). In addition to his
distinctions between the two major forms of national intelligence—the traditional European form, also characteristic
of the Israeli's, of intelligence as secret war, versus the American definition of intelligence as secret analysis—
Professor Herman also distinguishes between long-term intelligence endeavors that rely primarily on open sources,
and short-term espionage that tends to be intrusive and heighten the target's feelings of vulnerability and hostility.
5
I have not been alone. Over 500 distinguished international speakers have spoken at one of my 15 conferences,
and most of what they have said is on record and available for free at www.oss.net in the Open Archives where past
issues of OSS NOTICES and many White Papers can also be found. A complete index of all intelligence reform
conference presentations is provided in supra note 1, pages 403-420.
6
For one sharp contrast between the views of the current Director of Central Intelligence and myself, see Mr.
Vernon Loeb, "Back Channels: The Intelligence Community; Despite Objections, Authorization Bill Passes"
The Washington Post, 12/12/2000, FINAL, Page A45 and the article to which he refers, my "Possible Presidential
Intelligence Initiatives" in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (Volume 13, Winter
2000,
pages
409-423).
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/fedpage/columns/backchannels/A579102000Dec11.html
7
On 13 April 2000 I presented the lecture "One World, Ready or Not" to over 60 generals responsible for military
intelligence across the NATO community.
This lecture is freely available to the public online at
www.oss.net/Papers/white/SHAPE.ppt. My written materials included the following distinguished European
papers: "Towards a European intelligence policy" by Mr. Klaus Becher, Mr. Bernard Molard, Mr. Frederic
Oberson, and Mr. Alessandro Politi (Chaillot Paper 34, Paris, December 1998); "Open Source Intelligence: The
Challenge for NATO" by Commodore Patrick Tyrrell, OBE MA LLB RN; "Open Source Intelligence: The Lingua
Franca for regional intelligence co-ordination and information sharing" by General Director S. J. van Hulst of the
National Security Service (BVD); and "Open Source Intelligence: Foundation for Regional Co-operation in Fighting
Crime and Establishing a Regional Intelligence Community" by Mr. Jurgen Storbeck, Director of EUROPOL.
8
See the PIOOM project at http://www.fsw.leidenuniv.nl/www/w3_liswo/pioom.htm. Several of my recent papers
have focused on non-traditional threats and alternative military strategies, visit http://www.oss.net/White.html.
9
This contrast between the old and new paradigms of intelligence has been made in different ways by several
people. Dr. John Gannon, Associate Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis & Production, has addressed this
in several of his speeches and is in the best position to observe how the current environment impacts on his analysts.
My own distinctions between who decides, the nature of the sources, the timeframes, and the manner of deciding, is
depicted in supra note 1, page 205, in Figure 37: Intelligence Power from the People, to the People.
10
I first outlined my vision for the new craft of intelligence, on the need for the reconstruction and globalization of
intelligence, at the Canadian intelligence conference in Ottawa, in September 2000. My presentation in Canada,
none of which is repeated here, is at www.oss.net/Papers/white/CASIS2000.rtf.
11
Dr. Politi was among a very select group of Europeans that attended the first international conference on
intelligence reform, and was such a positive influence that his term, "intelligence minuteman", has become a
standard. He and others like him—the authors of Chaillot Papers, for example—represent the future of intelligence.
12
This penetrating insight was articulated by John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
at my first international conference in 1992.
13
The most authoritative information about the future of the Internet is available from Dr. Vinton G. Cerf, the true
father of the Internet. His personal web page is http://www.worldcom.com/about_the_company/cerfs_up and
includes all of his recent presentations documenting the past, present, and future directions of the Internet; for these
go directly to http://www.worldcom.com/about_the_company/cerfs_up/presentations/index.phtml. He is the source
of the estimate that we will have 3.5 billion users (as opposed to 3.5 million users today) within ten to fifteen years.
14
As a result of my testimony, and a spontaneous competition on Burundi in which my six telephone calls produced
more intelligence than was available from the entire $30 billion a year U.S. Intelligence Community, the AspinBrown Commission concluded that our access to open sources is severely deficient and should be a top priority for
funding. This recommendation, like their others, has not been acted upon by our current leadership. More recently,
the Hart-Rudman Commission, whose final report is available at www.nssg.gov, included the recommendation
(number 38) that we should incorporate more open source intelligence into analytical products, and that the U.S.
State Department should be more active in collecting open source information.
15
Dr. Stevan Dedijer, the father of business intelligence, introduced this concept to me when he spoke
spontaneously at the first international conference on intelligence reform in 1992.