PEACEKEEPING INTELLIGENCE: Emerging Concepts for the Future
Chapter 20—Loch K. Johnson, from Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, & Thugs
America’s Intelligence Liaison with
International Organisations
Loch K. Johnson1
During the cold war, the United States faced one major threat: the bloc of
communist countries led by the Soviet Union and mainland China. With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the drift of China toward a stronger interest in
commercial relations with the United States and the rest of the world, America’s
threat assessment changed. As former DCI R. James Woolsey famously put it, ‘we
live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.’2
Highest among the new threats were, initially, the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction and ‘rogue’ nations like Iraq and North Korea, along with international
drug dealers, organised crime, and terrorism. With the September 11, 2001, attacks
against the United States, global terrorism (and especially the al-Qa’eda
organisation) jumped to the top of the list, accompanied by Iraq in particular (as
war plans heated up against the regime of Sadam Hussein) as well as a more
assertive North Korea seemingly bent on developing an arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The drug dealers and international criminals did not disappear, however; nor did
the need to keep an eye on countries like Russia and China, which maintained a
sobering military the capacity to inflict great damage on the United States. All these
threats summed to a simple truth: even the wealthy United States needed help from
allies and international organisations to maintain a global watchfulness against what
seemed to be a rising tide of new threats in place of the highly dangerous but more
focused threats of the cold war. Since the end of the cold war, international
organisations, especially the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation, have played an important part in America's foreign policy. During the
Persian Gulf War, the United States relied heavily on the UN as a framework for
building a coalition of forces to repel the Iraq army from Kuwait. In the pursuit of
this military objective, the US intelligence community shared information and
assessments with coalition members as the war unfolded. Even before the end of
the cold war, the United States had been sharing intelligence with NATO members
‘for many years on a classified basis, albeit within established limits.’3
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As a larger organisation with less well formulated security procedures (and with
some members hostile toward America), the UN has received less information over
the years than has NATO from the U.S. intelligence community, although,
according to the Aspin-Brown Commission, the United States still provides the
majority of information used by the UN in support of its world-wide activities
(contrary to a CIA officer's claim to a reporter that ‘we don't get involved with
international organisations’4). When UN and NATO missions overlap, as they did
in Bosnia in the early 1990s, the intelligence community provides one level of
classified information to NATO participants and a more filtered version to UN
participants.
Most of the US intelligence shared with the United Nations is quite low-grade in
classification, a special category of ‘UN Use Only,’ not to be distributed to the
media or anyone else outside the framework of the United Nations. This means that
the information can go to 185 nations, including a number of America’s
adversaries. As a result, the information is unlikely to stay secret. With this in mind,
the intelligence community provides to the UN what one of its representatives has
called ‘vanilla’ information: somewhat bland, highly sanitised documents which,
after various interagency ‘pre-dissemination reviews,’ are usually less than timely in
their arrival to consumers at the United Nations. Nevertheless, the information is
still considered useful by UN officials, for often it is the only reliable source of
analysis on some global issues.5
If asked, the United States will sometimes provide information on specific topics of
interest to the United Nations, at a somewhat higher level of classification than
normal, although still carefully sanitised to remove signs of sources and methods
before being passed along. A recent example was an analysis of military, political,
and economic developments in a war-torn developing nation. As a rule, the United
States does not provide classified documents to the UN, with the occasional
exception of tactical battlefield information in times of crisis for the UN’s ‘Blue
Helmet’ troops.
Another venue of ‘information-sharing’ (the term the UN prefers over the more
intrusive sounding word ‘intelligence’), and one that avoids giving sensitive
documents to the United Nations, is the timely oral briefing. When the intelligence
community determines that the Blue Helmets are in jeopardy, a member of the US
Mission to the United Nations will (with clearance from the Department of State)
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present valuable battlefield information orally to the appropriate UN officials,
possibly saving lives but without leaving any intelligence documents behind.
The question of intelligence sharing with international organisations is complex and
nuanced, depending on the kind of organisation (its size and whether its members
are U.S. allies, for example) and America’s experience with the organisation.
Whoever the recipient may be, the sharing of information by the United States is
carried out through the most exacting procedures. Usually the intelligence is given
in a highly diluted fashion; and when more sensitive information is disseminated, it
goes only to a small group of consumers. There have been mishaps. In Somalia, UN
officials poorly handled US intelligence documents and, worse still, left some
behind during the withdrawal in 1994.6 Subsequent inquiries into this case
revealed, however, that the documents were less sensitive than initially feared.
More importantly, as a result of this experience security procedures have been
tightened by UN administrators to better safeguard intelligence documents in the
field.
In all instances of US information sharing with the United Nations, the purpose is
to advance America’s national security interests, not to achieve some ill-defined
goal of enhancing good feelings among UN officials toward Washington.
Information that uncovers transgressions by Saddam Hussein, protects
peacekeepers in Bosnia, provides a realistic understanding of events in Rwanda, or
proves acts of atrocity by Serbian or Albanian soldiers, all are illustrations of
information shared with the United Nations that benefits the United States as well.
As a general proposition, America’s best interests are served when the United
Nations is in possession of accurate information about world affairs.
In many cases, UN officials are already well informed. As a result of their
diplomatic contacts, world travel, and perusal of the standard sources of public
information, most perceive no great pressing need for secret information (short of
tactical military intelligence when Blue Helmets are under fire). These officials
would like, nonetheless, to receive from reliable member states more studies
produced by their individual intelligence agencies on the issue of human rights, as
well as on such broad topics as world population growth and global food supply.
The extent of US liaison involvement with international organisations raises the
significant question of the degree to which Washington’s secret agencies undermine
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Chapter 20—Loch K. Johnson, from Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, & Thugs
their credibility by making them appear lackeys of American foreign policy. This
risk came to the public's attention in 1999, when news reports revealed that the CIA
and the NSA had assisted the UN Special Commission (known as UNSCOM) in
eavesdropping operations against some of Iraq's most sensitive communications. In
this case, the United States had decided to go far beyond its normally low-level
intelligence activities with respect to the United Nations.
The UN commissioned UNSCOM, a team of arms inspectors, to monitor Iraqi
compliance with a 1991 cease-fire agreement requiring it to dismantle its program
for strategic weapons. The team was nothing less than what one reporter called An
international intelligence service for the new world order . . . the first of its kind . .
.,’ adding: ‘More than 7,000 weapons inspectors from around the world served
UNSCOM over seven years, spying on Iraq, surveying its military and industrial
plants, trying to do what smart bombs could not: destroy nuclear, biological,
chemical and missile programs hidden by Saddam Hussein.’ 7 Germany provided
helicopters to UNSCOM, for instance, with special radar to penetrate Iraqi sand
dunes in search of buried weapons; Britain contributed sensitive scanners to
intercept Iraqi military communications; and the United States loaned U-2 spy
planes and even Navy divers to probe Iraqi lakes and rivers for submerged
weapons.8 In the description of another reporter, ‘The spirit of post-Cold War cooperation promised a miracle: UNSCOM, operating on behalf of the UN Security
Council, would utilise the secret intelligence agencies of its members states,
Communist and non-communist alike, to investigate the Iraqi arsenal.’9
Information acquired by the NSA, which has the capacity to unscramble encrypted
telephone conversations between Saddam and his aides, could assist the UN's
search for weapons of mass destruction inside Iraq. At the same time, UNSCOM
could be used by the US intelligence community for its own agenda: namely,
ridding the world of Saddam Hussein. Under UNSCOM cover, the NSA apparently
had even wired a UN microwave transmission system (without the knowledge of
UN officials), which allowed the eavesdropping agency to monitor a wide range of
secret Iraqi military communications.10
‘The UN cannot be party to an operation to overthrow one of its member states,’
complained a confidant to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, when the US
intelligence ties to UNSCOM became a matter of public knowledge. ‘In the most
fundamental way, that is what's wrong with the UNSCOM operation.’ 11 Had the
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Chapter 20—Loch K. Johnson, from Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, & Thugs
UNSCOM weapons inspectors restricted their activities solely to its nonproliferation agenda, which had widespread support in the world, they could have
preserved the high esteem in which most member states held them. Instead, news
leaks and speculation from one of the inspectors (a former US Marine intelligence
officer by the name of Scott Ritter) raised suspicions that UNSCOM had gone
beyond just trying to find Saddam's weapons. According to these reports, the CIA
had used UNSCOM in 1996 as an umbrella for its own intelligence collection
operations, as well as for covert actions designed to topple Saddam Hussein.12 The
Clinton administration conceded that the CIA had been assisting UNSCOM
‘through intelligence, logistical support, expertise, and personnel,’ but denied using
the team as a medium for coup plotting against the Iraqi leader.13
Wherever the truth may lie, UNSCOM had been fatally tarred by these charges. The
independence of the United Nations was severely compromised, in perception if not
in reality. In order to advance its plans to destroy Saddam Hussein, the UN liaison
operations of the US intelligence community (presumably acting under White
House orders) had instead destroyed the most important international effort in the
modern era to halt the proliferation of dangerous strategic weapons.
To avoid the problem of national bias that comes with reliance on individual
national intelligence services for its information, the UN will need to create its own
intelligence capabilities, a professional corps of intelligence officers with a
commitment to making the UN work (with all the necessary safeguards against the
misuse of shared information). The UN is already taking some steps in this
direction. It has set up a Situation Centre, which is building up a computer
infrastructure for the collection, storage, and retrieval of open-source information
on world affairs. Its modest resources, though, make this endeavour limited in
scope.
The United Nations has also recently acquired authority to start up a satellite
surveillance system that would allow its International Drug Control Program to
monitor the cultivation of illegal drug crops in the major source countries. In this
manner, the UN can establish an internationally accepted benchmark for measuring
the faithfulness of promises by countries to reduce their production of drugs. ‘For
the first time the international community will have a very reliable instrument to
measure the extent of illegal crops,’ according to the executive director of the
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program.14 The European Space Agency is contributing the necessary satellites and
technical expertise to support the operation.
These experiments in international intelligence remain alive, despite the UNSCOM
setback. Still, it has been difficult to overcome the old mentality of viewing the UN
as either a target or a cover for intelligence operations, rather than a customer for
information and insight gathered by the secret agencies of member nations for the
benefit of the whole world. This change in attitude is ‘ill thought out and
haphazard,’ in the words of a former British Ambassador to the United Nations.15
The relationship between international organisations and intelligence raises a
paradox: how can these organisations be effective if they are so poorly informed
about the outlaw nations they are expected to tame? The UN is meant to engage in
conflict resolution, peacekeeping, peace enforcement, economic sanctions,
controlling the spread of large-scale weapons, combating organised crime, fighting
drugs, and bringing to justice war criminals and human rights violators. All of these
tasks require intelligence, yet the UN has little at its disposal. International
organisations cannot afford to develop their own full-service intelligence agencies.
Besides, member nations are unlikely to tolerate the risk that the UN might end up
peering into their own backyards. Member states could provide more intelligence
assistance themselves, but they fear leaks of sensitive sources and methods. Further,
the UN must worry about the national biases of intelligence emanating from
member states.
Despite these dilemmas, one can envision nations and NGOs providing to the UN
and other international organisations additional, second-hand satellites and other
surveillance equipment for watching global environmental conditions, refugee
flows, arms-control monitoring, and suspicious military mobilisations. Satellites
can even track mosquito populations around the globe, by focusing on vegetation
patterns and breeding grounds that attract the disease-bearing insects.16 The UN
could establish an Assessment Board comprised of retired senior intelligence
analysts from member states: men and women with extensive analytic experience,
known for their fierce independence and wisdom, who could evaluate the quality
and objectivity of member-state intelligence reports solicited by the Secretary
General of the UN.
International organisations require reliable information on global conditions. As a
specialist on the United Nations notes, The UN must be given the means, including
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information-gathering and analysis, to make manifest its goal, as stated in the
opening words of the UN Charter, of ‘saving succeeding generations from the
scourge of war.’’17 So far members of the UN have fallen far short of satisfactory
intelligence cooperation, although some individual nations (like Great Britain) have
been responsive to requests from UN officials for intelligence assistance. Increased
intelligence burden sharing within the framework of the United Nations would
allow an opportunity for global dissemination of information to all member nations,
carefully reviewed by an esteemed Assessment Board to filter out national biases.
This would be a valuable contribution toward the search for solutions to the
challenges that confront all the world’s people.
Certainly as nations continue to face a steady flow of illegal drugs across their
borders, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, a growing presence of
international criminal activities within their cities, and rising terrorism, they
urgently need to identify and react to renegade behaviour in the world. The simple
truth is: the planet is too vast for nations to cope with these threats alone. All
civilised nations have a natural self-interest in dealing with these problems not just
the United States. The time has come for the globalisation of intelligence. Here is
something that France, Germany, Russia, China, the United States, and many other
countries should be able to agree upon and work together toward, even if they have
differences on the proper approach to the regime in Iraq and other specific topics. If
the world fails to work together to share information about and control the
proliferation of weapons, drugs, and crime, they shall find themselves separately
engulfed and overwhelmed by these destructive forces.
Endnotes
1
Editors’ Note: at our request, the author was good enough to extract and tailor for this
collection a section from his most recent book, Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, and Thugs:
Intelligence and America’s Quest for Security (NY: New York University Press, 2000),
pages 167-172.
2
Testimony, Hearing, U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 103d Cong., 2d.
Sess, March 6, 1993.
3
Aspin-Brown Commission, Report, op.cit.: 129.
4
Aspin-Brown Commission, ibid.; the quote is from Seymour M. Hersh, ‘Saddam's Best
Friend’, The New Yorker (5 April 1999): 35.
5
Author’s interviews with UN officials (29 November 1995), New York City.
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Chapter 20—Loch K. Johnson, from Bombs, Bugs, Drugs, & Thugs
Bill Gertz, ‘Clinton Wants Hill Off His Back’, Washington Times (1 November 1995):
A1.
7
Tim Weiner, ‘The Case of the Spies Without a Country’, New York Times (17 January
1999): E6.
8
Scott Ritter, Endgame (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999); A. Walter Dorn, ‘The
Cloak and the Blue Beret: Limitations on Intelligence in UN Peacekeeping’, International
Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 12 (Winter 1999-2000): 437-38.
9
Hersh, op.cit., 36.
10
Barton Gellman, AU.S. Spied on Iraqi Military Via U.N.’, Washington Post (2 March
1999): A1.
11
Quoted in ‘Inspectors 'Helped Washington’, New Zealand Herald (7 January 1999): B1,
citing a Washington Post report.
12
Ritter claims that CIA paramilitary officers were placed on the UNSCOM inspection
team beginning in 1992, growing to nine members by 1996, op.cit.
13
‘Intelligence Ties with UNSCOM Defended’, Otago (New Zealand) Daily Times (8
January 1999): 8, citing Washington Post and Boston Globe reports.
14
Quoted by Christopher S. Wren, ‘U.N. to Create Own Satellite Program to Find Illegal
Drug Crops’, New York Times (28 March 1999): A10.
15
Remarks (25 September 1999), Oxford University, England.
16
ABC News Report, Discover News Channel (8 October 1999).
17
Dorn, op.cit., 442.
6
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