Dimensions of Future Intelligence

This world truly is at an inflection point, but one much more shrouded in uncertainty than the two previous inflection points in the last half century—the end of the Soviet Union and 9/11.

By Gregory F. Treverton

Note: The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of SMA, Inc.

This world raises more questions than it provides answers, but it surely calls into question many of the presumptions on which modern intelligence services, especially those of the United States, have been based. Here are nine dimensions of the challenges national intelligence faces.[1]

• Dealing with ubiquitous information. The over-arching challenge is moving from a world dominated by collection to one of ubiquitous information, where transparency is the order of the day, and the familiar intelligence cycle is less useful than ever. That cycle was almost industrial, starting with requirements, then collecting against those requirements, to processing to analysis, to dissemination. It always was a fiction, for steps got skipped, but perhaps it made sense during the Cold War when intelligence’s various sources, the “INTs” (espionage or HUMINT, signals or SIGINT, imagery or IMINT) were asked, in effect, what can you contribute to our understanding of the over-arching target, the Soviet Union.

It makes much less sense now, and “activity-based intelligence” (ABI) usefully explodes it, in spirit if not in practice. ABI, which was very useful in unravelling terrorist networks in Afghanistan and Iraq, geolocates information from various sources. Then, if a drone observes a truck pulling up to a farmhouse, it searches the database for that place. If the event is one of interest, so be it; if not, the information is simply stored in the database in case it might become relevant later.

ABI is sequence neutral: we may know the answer before we know the question. Later events may make that truck’s arrival consequential. Think how often in life we don’t realize we were puzzled until the puzzle is solved for us. ABI is also information neutral; it doesn’t prize intelligence’s special sources. And it is about correlation, not causation, which I find more appealing as I age and get less confident about causation in human affairs.

The question arises whether ubiquitous information makes spying less important. Surely, we took too much time to take Putin seriously over Ukraine, and he got Ukraine wrong. But does ubiquitous information lessen the need for secrets? The question is open, but I incline toward “yes.” While we think of spying as a way to get into an adversary’s head, it is a target of opportunity enterprise: “our” spy may not be in the right meeting or may not be able to pass information to us. I once did a rogues’ gallery of those Americans who had spied for foreign countries, and almost all of them had access to technology, codes or agent names – things that would still be valuable tomorrow if they couldn’t be transmitted today.

• Rebalancing strategic and tactical intelligence. After a generation of fighting wars, it is an open question whether US intelligence still has the capacity to do strategic intelligence, even as the shapelessness of this inflection point makes strategic understanding all the more important. When I chaired the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in the mid-2010s, when we looked at Nigeria, there was not much Nigeria. It was all Boko Haram, the terrorist group. And when we looked at Boko Haram, there was not much Boko Haram either. To be sure, we cared where the group came from and where it might go. But the emphasis was on unravelling the network and targeting the leaders.

Intelligence is telling and adjusting stories. If there is no story, new information is hard to process, and communication between intelligence and policy is parlous. At the other extreme, if the story becomes too durable and widely shared, that is likely to lead to what gets labelled an “intelligence failure.” In the instance of Iraq in 2002, everyone—including people like me who opposed the war—thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Or, to use an example from medicine, there was a compelling story about Ebola: it would flare up in isolated regions, but because it was lethal, it would die out before it could be communicated. The story was true until it wasn’t, until better communication between rural and urban areas in Africa meant it could be spread. Now, the test case for strategic intelligence is China: can we fashion an appreciation of China and Sino-American relations that is richer than old cardboard stereotypes like “new Cold War”?

• Harnessing technology for analysis. Artificial intelligence, or AI, will be a great boon, helping analysts cope with the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day. It will help them create and test hypotheses, and it will remember the past. Don Rumsfeld, as defense secretary, famously used the categories of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknows, but I’ve come to be impressed by the fourth cell in that matrix, unknown knowns—things we knew but forgot, like those Arab men taking pilot lessons in the years before 9/11. AI will not forget. The CIA has been using IBM’s Watson for more than a decade know, but it has taken several rounds of incorporating data analysts for them and intelligence analysts to understand one another well enough to work together. And surely, we are aware of how easily AI can come off the rails, making things up and producing bizarre results. For intelligence, as for other realms of knowledge, the challenge will be for analysts to understand AI’s algorithms well enough to trust them and convey them to policymakers so they believe the results.

Interestingly, the CIA has come to “crowd-sourcing,” if belatedly. In the Ukraine war, it has posted on Telegram, a popular site for Russians, asking for help and providing means to secretly get in contact. It got 2.5 million hits. Fifteen years ago, in doing a RAND study of social media use by intelligence, I came across an impressive group of young CIA analysts who had created Intellipedia, a classified wiki. Their cards described them as “Intellipedia evangelists,” a label that made me hope they didn’t meet the fate of the original evangelists! But a conversation with one of them stayed with me. He wanted the CIA to be out on Facebook and Twitter, openly as the CIA. He knew they’d get lots of disinformation, but they already got plenty of that. What charmed me was his conclusion: “some of them might even want to help us.”

• Coping with ubiquitous transparency. Not only is data ubiquitous but so is transparency in an era of cameras everywhere, retina scanning and facial recognition. In that sense, where we are with the tradecraft of espionage reminds one of those old roadrunner cartoons, where the roadrunner would run off the cliff but not begin to fall until it looked down. We are off the cliff; we just haven’t quite looked down yet. When I was at RAND, a colleague who had been a CIA station chief was asked to do a task for the Agency. He was happy to do it but only on the condition that he go to the country in question under true name, for he knew that if he travelled under cover he would be found out and never be able to return to that country.

Transparency will compel a dramatic change in nature of tradecraft, one which has been going on at least since 9/11. An American officer, even one speaking perfect Pashtun, operating out of the embassy was not likely to penetrate terrorist groups, and so US intelligence had to rely much more on partners, intelligence liaison. After 9/11 the United States had intelligence sharing arrangements of various sorts with 27 countries, including such long-time “friends” as Russia and Iran. Social media adds another dimension to the challenge of transparency. An intelligence officer can become “conspicuous by absence”: if he or she is active on social media but disappears at age 22, that is tantamount to announcing, “I work for an intelligence service.” Or in another case a CIA officer under cover “liked” on social media his CIA colleagues who were not under cover but no one in his cover company.

• Releasing intelligence to provide public tactical support. Intelligence will be used, not just secretly to support policymaking and tactical operations—as in past—but openly and tactically in the information space.[2] In the Ukraine war, the United States and its allies kept Putin on his back foot by saying, in effect, “we know what you’re up to.” This public use on intelligence implies more risk taking about sources and methods than has been the custom, as Ukraine demonstrated: to be sure, much of the intelligence shared was open source, especially imagery about Russian deployments and troop movements, but the advance warning of Russian intentions indicated at least the existence of HUMINT or SIGINT sources.

• Asking over-arching questions about the business of government intelligence services. What is the mission for government intelligence services when many of intelligence’s classic products, like imagery, can now be purchased openly or had for free on Google. Now, also, a host of private organizations provide, in effect, crowd-sourced open-source intelligence, or OSINT, like the investigations done by Bellingcat, which produced first-rate analysis of, for instance, the Russian FSB.[3] In 2014 a private group looking at terrorists discovered that many of those posting on a “Free Syria” website were not Syrians but Russians. They took that observation to the US government, which at the time wasn’t interested in Russians, only terrorists, but they had, in effect, provided warning of Russian cyber activity two years before Russia’s interventions in the 2016 U.S. elections.

So, too, Eurasia Group, Oxford Analytica and numerous other business intelligence companies provide first-rate intelligence, some of it rising to the strategic. At the NIC, I came to feel I had too little contact with the deputies, the number twos in the national security agencies, and so tried to fashion a weekly “view from the NIC Chair.” But I abandoned the enterprise. If I curated products we had already disseminated, I’d be more likely to confuse than to inform them. So, I then thought I’d provide a broad strategic view but soon realized I couldn’t do any better than the weekly letter from Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group. I had the advantage of classified sources, but he had the advantage of continually talking with foreign leaders.

• Reshaping personnel and security procedures. Intelligence needs to dramatically reshape its personnel procedures to get access to the talent it needs. Now, the paradigm is joining a service after higher education and staying for an entire career (perhaps retiring and returning to the same agency as a contractor with a bigger salary). That is hardly a career pattern for Gen Zers, who will want to do many and varied jobs. When I was Vice Chair of the NIC in the 1990s, I could recruit as National Intelligence Officers world-class outsiders who had no more worlds to conquer in academia or the non-profit world. They were attracted by the opportunity to see how government worked and to give something back to their country. Now, the challenge for intelligence is to let younger people move in and out, all the more so if it is to attract technical experts who make much more money in the private sector but might be tempted by public service for shorter periods.

So, too, those generations who might want to move in and out of intelligence will be deterred from coming at all by outmoded security procedures. Imagine organizations where employees must leave their cell phones in their cars. Carmen Medina, a wonderful CIA officer and former colleague, once put it graphically: “I’d like to live my life like this,” putting her hands above her head quite far apart, “but the CIA wants me to live like this,” putting her hands much closer together, “and I’m sixty years old. Imagine if I were a Gen Zer.”

• Dealing with a world of disinformation in which the “truth” is personal or subjective. This is perhaps the ultimate challenge, for the very idea that statements can be empirically validated or invalidated seems under attack. At this point, I see no alternative for intelligence but to double down, to emphasize that its job is to reveal the truth as best it can. This will imply more emphasis on the validation function. Years ago, Harold Brown, a friend and mentor said to me that he wished intelligence would help him know which stories in his New York Times were true and which questionable. How much more important that function is now when the internet is a stew of fact, fiction, and disinformation! When I testified on Capitol Hill as NIC Chair, I was often asked why the intelligence community couldn’t reduce the number of its analysts. I tried to respond, politely, that not only were analysts relatively cheap by comparison to technology, but, more important, in this world policy officers needed more, not less, help is coping with information that was both huge in quantity and hugely varied in veracity.

Gregory F. Treverton stepped down as Chair of the U.S. National Intelligence Council in 2017. He is now Professor of the Practice at Dornsife College, University of Southern California, Chair of the Global TechnoPolitics Forum, and an SMA Executive Advisor.

[1] This is an edited version of a presentation to the SMA Town Hall, August 3, 2023: see https://youtu.be/2MqiySweV2g

[2] This issue is a theme of the most recent US intelligence strategy. See National Intelligence Strategy, 2023, available at https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/National_Intelligence_Strategy_2023.pdf

[3] Working with the private sector is another theme of the latest intelligence strategy, cited above.

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