Intel the Elephant

It’s like walking into the newsroom and missing the elephant standing there flicking straw onto his back.

This is the biggest, and best, news in the American War on Terror since the Pentagon added the “daisy cutter” and “mother of all bombs” to its anti-terrorism arsenal.

The missing ingredient that has cross-gartered efforts of presidents to make maximum effective use of secret information gathered by a swarm of United States covert and overt spies, human and electronic, is now being added – and right at the top of the intelligence chain.

It’s what most folks outside the intel community would have thought to be the first piece in place. Now it is the latest.

Simple and obvious, it is, in a word, assessment.

That this long-absent essential in the ultimate intel process should have escaped the notice of purported news organizations is, in itself, news. Or it ought be.

The reason it’s so grotesquely absurd that so-called journalists would not notice this elephant right under their noses is that assessment is the heart and soul of sound, responsible, professional journalism.

Making assessments is what genuine journalists do with the diverse scraps and mountains of intelligence (news) information they glean. The good ones do that assessing without editorializing – if such rare specimens are to be found in the news industry anymore.

In journalistic lingo, what’s been missing until now in U.S. spookdom is an old-fashion city editor, a hard-nose, no-nonsense practitioner of the fast-disappearing art of looking in 360 degrees to make certain every relevant, credible fact is brought in and then figuring out what the hell it all means and how important that is.

Wait a minute. Isn’t assessment something every intel agency in the world does for a living?

Of course it is. Now here’s the catch.

For years, various U.S. intel agencies – Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Information (FBI), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and National Security Agency (NSA), to name but a few – have been operating almost independently of one another.

Rarely does any single one of them, let alone all of them, possess enough puzzle pieces to assess the complete story.

Nor do they all send everything they know up the line – ultimately to the White House, where the final what-to-do decisions are made.

And the last thing they have wanted to do is share with their competitor U.S. agencies the richest nuggets they have mined.

Each agency makes its independent assessment of the intel it has gathered in its unique ways and looked at from the perspective of its unique function within the entire panoply of intel fiefdoms.

It’s like the story of five blind men, each feeling a different part of an elephant’s anatomy.

The one who touched the trunk said, “The elephant is like a large hose.” The one who got the ear said, “No, it’s like a huge fan.” The one with his arms around a leg disagreed: “It’s like a tree trunk.” Rubbing his hand along the elephant’s side, another said, “It’s like a high wall.” The fifth blind man, who had hold of the tail, said, “You’re mistaken. The elephant is like a length of rope.”

That’s been the intel game as practiced for ages by competing, conflicting agencies, each making its different assessment from its different point of view.

The result has been what is traditionally known as “turf war” or, more recently, “smoke stack” intelligence – with each agency reporting its findings directly up to the top. There, the particulate from all those smoke stacks has had to be sifted and sorted, as best as possible, by White House staffs limited in size and proficiency.

Assessing the often-conflicting intel data has not always been, to be kind about it, exemplary. White House staffers with their own agendas have been tempted to pick and choose among this welter of data to form rationales for actions they want to push – a sure-fire recipe for national-security near screw-ups and outright calamities. Until now.

So what’s new? Two things are. Both should give heart to all who want to see American policy-makers able to act more intelligently.

The president assigned TTIC the responsibility for receiving and sorting terrorism-related intelligence from CIA, FBI, DIA, NSA and an intelligence office in the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

With concurrence of Congress, the president also tasked those intelligence agencies to do two things strange and new to them, in some cases strongly resented.

They are to work closely with one another, sharing intel. Then they are to hand that data to TTIC on a timely basis. Translation: You can’t sit on this stuff any longer.

TTIC, at Langley, will be where the various intel agencies’ data is assembled and sorted. But it is at IAIP, on the District of Columbia side of the Potomac River, where the new function known as integrated assessment will take place – independently of all other alphabet-soup intel agencies.

It is to the staff at IAIP that the president will now look, through Tom Ridge, the Cabinet secretary in charge of DHS, for answers to the penultimate question: What do these new intel data really mean, in terms of a threat to the American people and infrastructure?

It is here, for the first time, that American intel – that immense elephant of variously gathered, disparately assessed raw information – is being assessed on an integrated, holistic basis.

This is the time-tested city-editor concept – looking in all 360 degrees to gain a full, complete understanding, in which the whole picture can often come up meaning a lot more than the sum of its parts.

It is the new format of intelligence – integrated threat assessment – that’s now going to the president, who has the sole responsibility for making the judgment call on what to do based on that assessment.

What he is seeing will be the entire elephant – not just a trunk, ear, leg, side or tail. And, one trusts, certainly not a rhinoceros or a giraffe or a wart hog.

All this may sound somewhat fuzzy and convoluted, but compared with the way Washington bureaucrats have grown accustomed to doing business, it is a breath of fresh air.

The new arrangement got its trial run May 2, the same day TTIC opened shop in CIA headquarters. The initial pieces of intel to enter the gathering and sorting hopper at TTIC had to do with the al-Qaeda plot to crash an explosives-laden light plane into the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan.

As soon as the plot was discovered by U.S. intel-gatherers, the information was funneled directly to TTIC through what once were smoke stacks. That was the first phase of the new intel process.

The second phase clicked in at once. IAIP, the new intel office within DHS, examined the information at TTIC and made its threat assessment.

That was cleared with the White House, and the same day – May 2 – DHS fulfilled another part of its new function by issuing a worldwide advisory to general and commercial aviation. The plot was foiled.

Was everyone happy? Certainly not the thwarted and captured al-Qaeda terrorists.

There is still some grumping within the traditional intel agencies. But not all of this can be written off as turf-war jealousies.

These intelligence officers, who work often at great personal peril where no light of public recognition and praise shines, have some valid points. Here is the straddle they constantly must make in dealing with intelligence:

Those are the kinds of legitimate concerns that have contributed to smoke-stack intel practices.

The aim of TTIC is to help protect all those sources and methods, while at the same time giving professionals within DHS the material they need to provide the president with timely, valid, integrated threat assessments.

What happened on May 2, with the disrupted terrorist plot to crash a plane into a U.S. consulate, is an important step in this direction. The new system worked.

Nothing succeeds like success, and the heads and staffs of all federal intel agencies have had their stern marching orders from the boss in the Oval Office.

Part of the good news is there is bipartisan congressional support for this new arrangement.

To be sure no one failed to get the message, on the same day the Terrorism Threat Integration Center opened at Langley, companion statements – largely ignored by the media – were released by Christopher Cox, R-Calif., chairman, and Jim Turner, D-Texas, ranking member, of the House of Representatives Select Committee on Homeland Security.

They wanted everyone to know Congress would insist that DHS fulfill its legislative mandate to “build its own threat-assessment capability” (that is, its new Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection directorate).

While welcoming the new TTIC at Langley, Cox said that “we should not mistake this new Center for what is required of the Department of Homeland Security in the Homeland Security Act."

“By law, the department is required to conduct its own analysis of raw intelligence received from federal, state and local government agencies. Based on this internal analysis, for which the department itself is responsible, it is to carry out a threat analysis to protect the American people’s safety.”

Turner, the top Democrat on the select committee, spelled out the different, discrete functions of the TTIC and the new intel directorate in DHS:

“TTIC will merge intelligence information, both foreign and domestic, and better coordinate the intelligence-gathering functions of various federal agencies.

“But DHS must carry out its statutory responsibility to analyze and assess this data and to make it available on a real-time basis to state and local law-enforcement agencies.”

Critics who contend the American War on Terror isn’t being waged with vigor or that U.S. intelligence efforts are still caught up in fistfuls of flypaper are simply not up on the news.

That goes double for the news media, which increasingly seem to be among the last to catch on to anything new – including Intel the Elephant.