Glasnost for the CIA

Dave McCurdy

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1994

Article preview: first 500 of 5,191 words total.

Summary:  U.S. intelligence must widen its focus from bipolar, military issues to economic, diplomatic and political issues in numerous regions. The international community should ban economic espionage, but U.S. intelligence should monitor foreign spying and share information with U.S. companies. Close observation of democratic transitions and human rights abuses could also aid foreign policy. Greater strategic and battlefield intelligence must accompany the revolution in military technology. Most important, the intelligence community can assure the quality of its analysts by opening its doors to academia and business.

Rep. Dave McCurdy, a Democrat from Oklahoma, served for ten years as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

COMING IN FROM THE COLD

During the Cold War, the purpose of the U.S. intelligence community was clear. American intelligence was a spyglass focused on the Soviet Union, keeping track of Soviet military research and development and watching Soviet activities throughout the developing world. U.S. intelligence caught other things only in its peripheral vision.

Now the Cold War is over. But its passing has hardly put an end to conflict, instability, or history. A dozen world hot spots clamor for attention, from Bosnia to North Korea, from Angola to Armenia, from Cambodia to Somalia. New areas of dispute--religious, ethnic, and national rather than ideological--threaten to replace the U.S.-Soviet standoff as the engines of world instability. At the same time, the United States has undertaken the herculean task of shepherding Eastern Europe and Russia through divisive and incredibly expensive economic and political reforms. In short, the Cold War has bequeathed an uncertain legacy to the economically and socially exhausted West; and if anything, U.S. intelligence must now come to resemble a wide-angle lens, focusing equally on a host of different countries and issues. In a time of geopolitical uncertainty and sharp cutbacks in U.S. defense spending, the flexibility and foresight provided by good intelligence may be America's most important foreign policy and defense asset in coming years.

In this new era, many U.S. defense doctrines and institutions must be reformed--and no reforms are more important than those focusing on intelligence.

While reforms in budgeting and organization are badly needed, thinking about U.S. intelligence requirements must begin with a fundamental reassessment of what the United States needs its intelligence services to do. What kind of information should they collect? To what uses will that information be put? We must redefine the nature of intelligence itself.

A major underlying theme of the following analysis is that the U.S. intelligence community needs a new defining mission, an overarching purpose like the Cold War's emphasis on containing Soviet expansion, that serves to focus and justify the community's efforts. Many short-run tasks, from peacekeeping to regional conflict, will demonstrate the importance of good intelligence. But in the long run, the leaders of U.S. intelligence will need a grander notion of what they are about, a more sweeping definition of their job. Today, that defining mission can be the same one that justified the founding of the present intelligence community in 1947: to foresee and help prevent catastrophic attacks against the United States-that is, to avoid future Pearl Harbors, of whatever type.

During his campaign and the early weeks of his presidency, Bill Clinton articulated three organizing principles of U.S. foreign policy. These points provide a sound basis for crafting post-Cold War U.S. priorities abroad, and by extension for outlining U.S. intelligence needs. They include:

--Revitalizing U.S. economic strength and competitiveness;

--Maintaining a strong defense posture; and

--Promoting democracy abroad.

American intelligence capabilities must be geared, over the next decade, to serve these goals.

OPENING UP INTELLIGENCE

As intelligence has become more important, it has also ...

End of preview: first 500 of 5,191 words total.