THE NEED TO KNOW

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88G01332R000901090004-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 13, 2012
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: May 1, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/01/13: CIA-RDP88GO1332R000901090004-9
SECURITY!
ESPIONAG
MAY 1986 Pq.38
BY LEO CHERNE
he primary purpose of intelligence is to avert war by
flagging dangers to national security. The second role
of intelligence is to help us make the wise judgments
needed to retain our military, political and economic
strength against the many threats to each of these.
And some of these dangers will grow in the years ahead.
We are living in a world in which interdependence increases
more quickly than we are able to assimilate its significance. That
interdependence involves manufacture and trade, commodities and
credit communications, vital resources and ideas. It also stimulates
tensions between nations and instability within them. The tech-
nological developments that have revolutionized world banking
and the transfer of credit result in consequences requiring prompt
and accurate assessments. The United States depends increasingly,
even for vital sources of military strength on capabilities and resources
that are diminishing within its borders and increasing elsewhere.
The difference of intelligence in the democracies and the
Marxist-Leninist states is that the normal purpose of Western foreign
intelligence is to buttress stability, make change as unturbulent as
possible and protect the democratic order.
The KGB's rc'e is almost t`:e precise opposite except within its
political domain. Its function is to generate and exploit turbulence.
'The worse, the better" is an old Russian nihilist maxim that aptly
describes the thrust of Leninist intelligence activities wherever
stability exists. The Soviet intelligence apparatus is inherently the
provocateur. the merchant of disorder, the magnifier of social,
economic or political weakness or distress.
One of the requirements for the late Eighties is to confront the
fact that there are those intellectuals who are blind to an adversary
that prohibits ideas. Peacemakers exist who are uncritically ready to
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serve aperpetual wf iou develop myopia
when confronted with a system that prohibits the freedom of the
press. Civil libertarians are slow to criticize a system that most com-
pletely obliterates civil freedoms.
It is said that Marxist-Leninism as an ideology no longer exerts
the appeal it once did. Nevertheless, each of the previous paradoxes
remains and is now expressed not by yesterday's adulation of the
war-maker, the USSR but by a constant and undiminished opposi-
tion to those who would keep the Kremlin's dangerous propensities
in check In short we, not they, are the enemy.
The Ambiguity about Hostility
Today's and tomorrow's societies differ in critical respects from
the international military environment that essentially ended with
World War IL
Among the 42 current conflicts involving 4 million people
engaged in wars, rebellions or civil uprisings, few nations have
declared war upon another. This ambiguity about hostility today
places a particular premium upon effective intelligence.
The massive lethal power possessed by the great nations-and
most particularly the United States and the USSR-has had a still
inadequately understood effect upon warfare. Smaller nations are
infinitely more free to take belligerent action than are the two
muscle-bound giants.
This does not mean that the United States and the USSR adapt
to this reality similarly. The belligerent propensities of smaller
nations all too often involve the interests of the superpowers and,
somewhat less often, the participation of a superpower by means
short of war. Hocv, where and why such indirect intervention occurs
is a crucial difference. So, too, is the freedom or eagerness with
which such indirect action occurs.
The Soviet Union has pressed to the hilt the use of proxy
nations to perform its purposes, content to rely on the fear of wider
war to keep the United States largely paralyzed.
Within this rubric, we have seen the growth of a new form of
war-terrorism-supported, if not spawned, by nations vinual v
secure in the absence of risk to themselves. Such involvement is
invariably supported by the Soviet Union and its client states, while
joint action to punish those who unleash terror is shunned by
U.S. allies.
There will be no more difficult task for intelligence in the years
ahead than to penetrate the small, fanatical groups that perform the
terrorist acts, groups utterly without moral restraint and that hold
the innocent in complete contempt. But that intelligence task
becomes a nearly impossible one unless there is a better
understanding that terrorism is itself simply another form of
warfare.
One of the most penetrating and accurate descriptions of the
true nature of terrorism was contained in a statement from a con-
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ference on `State Terrorism and the International System," held by
the International Security Council in Tel Aviv. Sixty prominent
senior statesmen, active and retired military officers and national
security specialists from 12 countries convened to consider the
character and extent of state-sponsored terrorism. Among their con-
dusions, the following are particularly penetrating:
The problem indeed is not just loose, gang-like incursions. b is
terrorism-state-sponsored, state-supported, state condoned. and
even state-directed. Tyrannical and totalitarian ideologies have now
subscribed to a new gospel of violence as an instrument of political
change. A "radial entente' presently spearheaded by five militant
states (Syria, Libya, Iran, North Korea and Cuba) is making coor-
dinated efforts-by themselves and with others-to undermine the
power and influence of the United States and its allies. Here the well-
documented role of the Soviet Union is to provide the professional
infrastructure of terrorism including money, arms, explosives, re-
cruitment and training, passports, infiltration and escape routes,
transport, communications, safe havens, control officers and more.
Taken together. these constitute an elaborate international -network
of support systems for terrorists.
This is not to suggest that the Soviets push the buttons and that
their hand is always, directly or indirectly, in play. None of us sub-
scribes to that kind of oversimplification. But where they do not
initiate it, they encourage it The destabilization and subversion have
a pattern which serves Soviet interests, and this must be faced by
leaders of the Free World even if, for the moment, it is not high on the
official diplomatic agenda. Both lives and liberties are at stake. We
must learn more about what we are dealing with-and do more
about it
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union has pursued twin objectives
since the end of World War II: to separate the United States and
Western Europe and to mount a relentless, sophisticated and sur-
prisingly effective propaganda campaign to persuade the world that
peace is the Soviets' true purpose and that the risk to that peace
resides in Washington, not Moscow. And the Soviet Union has per-
fected the manipulation of proxy bodies essential to the propagation
of that all too widely accepted fantasy.
A great danger to stability is surprise. It is the vital attribute of
terrorism and aggression. Intelligence is our only available instru-
ment to keep these disasters in check
Means and Ends
Terrorism provides the clearest spotlight with which to
illuminate the true purpose of intelligence. Critics of U.S. intel-
ligence efforts virtually never extend their distaste to include intel-
ligence designed to alert the nations to impending terror or to
identify the terrorist perpetrators once they have struck. Yet in no
respect is the function of intelligence, whether analytic or clandes-
tine, different when applied to the frightful consequences of ter-
rorism than it is when applied to other international hazards, some
of which involve the threat to life and human safety that are infinitely
greater.
Intelligence will be increasingly important with each passing
month of these years ahead to protect not only freedom, security and
stability but to enhance the safety and stability of all the nations that
seek to avert war and cultivate their own growth with minimal risks
to their own tranquility. It is here that the rapid growth of inter-
dependence is especially relevant Following are listed a few of the
major dangers in which intelligence is an indispensable tool.
A decision was made by a handful of men that led to an oil price
reduction by more than a third in less than a month. The We and
death of nations and their economies will rest on how low that price
falls. Some nations will benefit Others face unmanageable social
and economic turbulence. The consequences to the United States
are many and varied. A number of U.S. banks may be in jeopardy.
Some industries and many localities face serious hardship. And
even as others momentarily remain unaffected or even benefit, an
economic fire storm may overtake all of us. Only wise, and some-
times swift, government policy provides the possibility of moderat-
ing these consequences. Policy formation will be at least partially
blinded in the absence of effective intelligence.
A number of less-developed nations are now indebted to
banks and government and international institutions by more than
$900 billion. It is less the debts than the consequences that flow from
their payment or nonpayment of the interest on those debts that
hold a world economy in thrall
It is unfortunate that many of those now in debt are countries
that only recently adopted democratic governmental forms. Political
and social instability in those-countries can swiftly snuff out that
recent progress; The danger maybe as close to the United States as
its southern border.
The meeting of the five leading finance ministers of the indus-
trial nations illustrates the urgency of cooperative international
policy if these shoals are to be-navigated- Intelligence is an indispen-
sable mapmaker of the charts needed to navigate these shoals.
This is the age of high technology married to the information
age of microchip, supercomputer and the new sophisticated
robots.
Labor-intensive industries will continue to die or adjust, move
their operations to countries that suddenly enjoy comparative
advantage or merge with successful foreign competitors.
There are virtually no US. automobiles made entirely of U.S.-
made parts. The five leading Japanese car makers are now operating
on U.S. soil. Television brings to every home in the United States the
$3,990 blessing of the Yugo, and South Koreans will make their
automotive presence vivid indeed with the $4,995 Hyundai
There are all the makings of international tension in these facts
of disappearing U.S. manufacture and growing U.S. manufacturing
unemployment And the mix is one that threatens the growth of pro-
tectionism. And all this is the grist of governmental policy that
depends on accurate and early intelligence.
Some of the best work on this process of structural change is
being done by the analysts in the Central Intelligence Agency
augmented by expertise derived from conferences, many of them
unclassified, with businesses, universities, think tanks and others.
The Age of Information
Most observers who have studied the structural change
referred to believe we are entering the greatest threshold of de-
stabilizing change in the history of man-greater than the change set
into motion with the birth of cultivated agriculture, greater than the
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industrial age that followed, greater than mass manufacture, greater
than the birth of the service economy that now provides more than
70 percent of U.S. jobs. We have entered the age of information, and
we will wander through it blindly unless effective intelligence is an
instrument that helps shape prompt, effective and peaceful policy.
Without it, them is the greater certainty of turbulent, divisive and
dangerous economic conflicts.
The focus on intelligence requirements for the balance of this
decade may leave the misleading impression, especially in areas
involving the dramatic economic difficulties we are likely to face,
that the intelligence community is, or should be, the sole source of
the information and judgment required for wise and timely govern-
ment policy.
It is clear that in specific fields and on a number of the potential
difficulties lying ahead, the US. Department of the Treasury, State
Department, Federal Reserve Bank and Department of Commerce
have specific responsibilities, and they are assisted by sophisticated
sources of information available to them. Contributions made by the
intelligence community to those key government agencies are on
the one hand supplementary and on the other indispensable.
Not only must each of these instruments of the federal govern-
ment seek to improve their own sources of advanced knowledge
and judgment, not only must the intelligence community make a
unique contribution to that input, but it may well be that the greatest
contribution required in the interval ahead is one that addresses
itself to more effective coordination of intelligence sources without
which the policy responses may prove inadequate or late.
Tough, Indispensable
There are other very specific intelligence tasks that will be of
increasing importance for the balance of this decade. Some of them
are altogether new. Regrettably, almost none of them are easy. Yet
they are indispensable.
Among the urgent tasks for intelligence will be to fathom the
means by which the Soviet Union intends to derive the benefits of
the information age while withholding from its managers the
technology and the freedom to use it which are essential to
eminence in the revolutionary structural change taking place.
Linked to the challenges of the information age, a host of
intelligence questions emerge from the convulsive demographic
changes taking place in the Soviet Union. These changes are shifting
the balance of population to the Muslim republics and away from
Russia. where its government, industry and education are'concen-
trated. By what means can these ethnic tensions in the European and
Asian USSR be exacerbated?
Is it possible that the Soviet Union had chosen to buy and steal
the high technology it requires because those means of acquiring the
most advanced technology are easier and cheaper than in renting
and producing their own high-tech breakthroughs? Their technical
ability is surely not the total impediment
The spreading high-technology capability in the Third World
creates an in=used difficulty in averting transfer of sensitive
technology to the Soviet Union. And this, too, will complicate the
task for intelligence.
This new environment suggests still another need that partially
involves both intelligence and the continuous planning for indus-
trial mobilization that is the Defense Department's responsibility.
That question is, how do we manage our economy in an emergency
when we are increasingly dependent on strategic materials, facilities
and processes in other nations that may or may not be amenable or
reliable when needed?
'There is still another intelligence question regarding the
periodic difficulties in securing participation by U.S. allies in one or
another of the international difficulties we confront Perhaps the
most striking illustration of this question is why nations that have
suffered the destruction of life and property by terrorists far more
than the United States appear quite unwilling to associate them-
selves with the United States in any action to redress state-
sponsored terrorism.
Do we really understand why this is so? Are we altogether clear
why neutralism and unilateralism play as large a role as they do in
Europe? May not the distaste for the United States among many
Europeans exist because they correctly perceive the Soviet danger
and correctly judge that they cannot moderate that danger, while the
United States, by opposing the Soviet Union, would involve its allies
in a risky and costly hazard they are not prepared to assume?
Can we win the war of systems if we cannot win the war of
ideas or are unw-a: rag to pay for what it takes to do so? The Soviet
Union spends far more tc jam VOA, BBC, Deutsche Welle and Radio
FranFais than the West spends in efforts to reach the Soviet Union.
Are there means that have been neglected?
Among the pressing tasks facing intelligence for the balance of
this decade is the redefinition and legitimization of covert action,
unless of course we are prepared to accept the notion that covert
action is legitimate if used by the Soviet Union. its client states and
the states that sponsor terrorism, but unacceptable as a U.S. counter-
force. We are no longer in Henry Stimson's world where "gentle-
men do not read others' mail" or George Kennan's world where if
covert action cannot be kept secret, it must not exist."
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And closely linked to this, a fresh assessment must be made of
the consequences of sharply limiting the presence of the KGB on
U.S. soil. The Soviet Union's pervasive capabilities for telephonic
eavesdropping enjoy immunity among us, and they operate from
key urban locations. How can genuine symmetry be achieved in the
privileges the Soviet Union enjoys in the United States and those
they accord Americans in their midst? This is a major challenge that
will continue to bedevil U.S. intelligence.
If the Soviet Union is long permitted to enjoy a field day in the
United Stites, it should be noted that they have not had uninterrupt-
ed success in many of the world areas under their influence. We
must better understand what is producing Soviet distress among its
clients elsewhere in the world and particularly in Africa. That dis-
tress varies, but it has included Egypt, Somalia, Mozambique,
Grenada. South Yemen and Tanzania. There are now several on-
going insurgencies fighting against Soviet-backed Marxist regimes;
the wave of the future is not assuredly theirs.
Do we periodically subject our most certain conclusions and
cherished conceptions about our adversary to remorseless reex-
amination? For example, are we too ready to assume that the Soviet
Union's economic problems significantly diminish the continuing
danger to security represented by Soviet power and will?
It is clear that the tasks ahead for intelligence areboth ditterent
and greater than any intelligence community has previously con-
fronted. There will be many problems in dealing with this painful
reality. Almost all of them are affected significantly by the public's
misconceptions, let alone repeated evidence of media hostility.
There are bureaucratic and budgetary problems. There are prob-
lems that flow from the very nature of a democratic state and some
that flow from the particular culture of the United States. The United
States has a remarkable tendency to look at the mirror when it con-
siders its adversaries, and mirror-imaging is the curse of accurate
intelligence.
The United States must also ask can U.S. intelligence be as
good as it must be as long as U.S. knowledge of foreign languages
and cultures remains as poor as it is and is handicapped further by
the disinvolvement of centers of learning, research, science and
technology, some of which shun 'contaminating" contact with
the world of intelligence?
In conclusion: a prophecy and a challenge. One is unavoidable,'
and the other as yet unmet
Less than 50 years ago, the United States, unlike England. had
no need for economic intelligence. Whatever intelligence the United
States had was focused on the capabilities and intentions rooted in
dangers it perceived to be military.
During the remainder of the deade, the greater threats to
stability will flow from economic, social, cultural and political haz-
ards. Do not misunderstand. It is not that the military dangers have
receded. They have changed their character but are painfully with
us. But a new panoply of dangerous troubles creates urgent intelli-
gence needs in the years immediately ahead.
'The Challenge
Now the challenge! The actors in this new international drama
are not only governments, but include industries, labor unions,
universities, banks and stock and commodity exchanges.
Intelligence has thus far been essentially limited to informing
other government sectors. The United States imposes understand-
able limits-and they are sharp-to keep the world of foreign intel-
ligence and U.S. domestic life apart The United States also has its
antitrust laws. It does not, as the Japanese do, have an instrument
like MITI that performs some of the coordinating and judgmental
functions for Japanese industry.
Yet, how does the United States meet the manifold challenges
of the Information Age? How does it share essential intelligence
with the private sectors of society, the sectors upon whom tomor-
row's eminence depends?
And even were that intelligence to be shared, there remains the
central problem that exists even in the most urgent governmental
use of intelligence-how to make effective use of the information.
By informing a man about to be hanged of the exact size, location
and strength of the rope, you do not remove either the hangman or
the certainty of his being hanged.
All that intelligence can do is seek to concentrate the mind suf-
ficiently to reduce the chance of unanticipated crisis or, more hope-
fully-and less likely-avert it altogether. it
Leo Chernr is via chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Adrrsorv
&ant, which reports directly to President Reagan He is the ercrutine director of the
Research Institute of America. which he helped found This article is used with per-
mission of the National Strategy Information Center. Washington. D.C.
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