AJRC_Analyses_2017A03 Mark M. Lowenthal

A N TA L L J ÓZ S E F K N O W L E D G E C E N T R E

INTELLIGENCE AND COUNTERTERRORISM

MARK M. LOWENTHAL

COMMENTARY AJRC-Analyses 2017A03

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A N TA L L J ÓZ S E F K N O W L E D G E C E N T R E

AJRC-Analyses Series of the Antall József Knowledge Centre

Publisher-in-Chief: Péter Antall Managing editor: Tamás Péter Baranyi Editorial office: Antall József Knowledge Centre H-1093 Budapest, Czuczor Street 2

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© Mark M. Lowenthal, 2017 © Antall József Knowledge Centre, 2017 ISSN 2416-1705

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A N TA L L J ÓZ S E F K N O W L E D G E C E N T R E INTELLIGENCE AND COUNTERRORISM MARK M. LOWENTHAL1

Let me begin with a slight change of title, but one that is important, I believe, to our discussion. How you think about the problem matters, as it frames much of your response. We customarily talk about counter-terrorism, but, as former Director of the CIA John Brennan notes, we should think about counter-terrorist activity, not counter-terrorism.

We are trying to stop people, not a “thing.” We can defeat those who decide to become terrorists. We can make terrorism very costly and ultimately unattractive to would-be terrorists, but we cannot defeat the concept per se. It may recede and even disappear for a while, but it will return again in some other guise.

Terrorism is not a new concept or tactic, and terrorism did not begin on the morning of September 11, 2001. Terrorism is a recurring and worldwide phenomenon. The general goal tends to be similar from terrorist group to terrorist group — to create terror because of a grievance or cause; the specific motivating force differs.

If I may make a brief historical diversion:

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• In the late 19th century, we had anarchist terrorism in Europe and in the United States. For anarchists, the heads of governments were obvious targets. The Empress of Austria, the Tsar of Russia, and the Presidents of France and the United States were all killed by anarchist terrorists.

• In the 1920s, in the United States, we had an outbreak of pro-Bolshevik terrorism, including a series of bombings against government officials and “capitalist” targets, such as the Morgan Bank on Wall Street.

• In the 1970s, in Western Europe, we saw both left-wing radical terrorism — such as the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Brigate Rosse — and pro-radical Arab terrorism. There was also the rise of Arab terrorism, such as Abu Nidal and Black September.

Mark M. Lowenthal is President of the Intelligence & Security Academy. His U.S. Government service includes Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis & Production, Staff Director of the House Intelligence Committee, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence.

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A N TA L L J ÓZ S E F K N O W L E D G E C E N T R E • In the 1980s, there was state-based terrorism, including attacks

by Libya in West Berlin and Scotland, and by Iran in Lebanon and Argentina.

So, terrorism is not new. But there is one important difference between all of those cases I have mentioned and the terrorism that pre-occupies us today. These earlier cases all were politically motivated, and some had political solutions that were possible — after some time. In Northern Ireland, it was largely a question of giving greater political rights to the Catholics. In Colombia, it has meant some political role within the system for members of the FARC. But today’s terrorism has a religious context.

Let me be very clear on this point. I think you can discuss the religious context of today’s terrorists and terrorism without being Islamophobic.

Not every Muslim is a terrorist, but the terrorists about whom we worry are Muslims. These are not the same thing.

This religious, or pseudo-religious aspect of modern terrorism is especially problematic for most of Europe, where — with the exceptions of Northern Ireland until 1998 and the wars that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia — we decided to stop having internecine arguments about religion in violent ways. Therefore, the terrorism we now face makes us uncomfortable and makes it more difficult to discuss and to deal with.

This is especially true for the United States, given our firm belief in the absolute freedom of religion and a ban on any state-based religion.

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Before I turn to intelligence, I will make a short foray into policy. Do we have options beyond fighting the terrorists? I do not think so. First, we are dealing with so many diverse groups that, if we did try to negotiate an end to terrorism, it would be difficult to know with whom we should be talking. Second, even if we did strike some sort of a truce with one or two groups, there is very little expectation that this would lead to a general cessation of attacks. Third, what could we offer the terrorists? What might we negotiate over to bring this to an end? Global sharia? There is no negotiable end point. The demands of the terrorists are both so vague and so apocalyptic that we have little choice, but to accept their willingness to wage terror and war and to defeat them.

As most intelligence officers recognize, combatting terrorists, especially in democracies, creates many strains. The first area of concern is warning, which is one of the primary functions of intelligence. As I teach my students, there is a very large difference between strategic and tactical warning. Strategic warning has to do with an enemy who can cause

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A N TA L L J ÓZ S E F K N O W L E D G E C E N T R E substantial damage to and perhaps even defeat one’s nation. We have seen many intelligence failures in strategic warning in the 20th century: • Japan’s attack against Russia in 1904; • Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941; • Japan’s attack on the United States in 1941; • The Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel in 1973.

Tactical warning deals with lesser threats. I have argued that terrorists fall into this second, lesser case. As disturbing and disruptive as even major terrorist attacks, like 9/11, can be they are still in the tactical realm.

And here we must recognize that even though the strategic attacks are more important, they are also — or should be — easier to detect. My colleague, Professor Richard Betts of Columbia University, has written on why tactical intelligence failure is one of the inevitable costs of being an intelligence officer.

That said, our citizens, our political leaders and the press usually take a harsher view. They view any successful terrorist attack as an “intelligence failure” by definition. It is and it is not. The lone wolf attacks of the sort that we have seen in both the United States and Europe are extremely difficult to discover and to prevent. Indeed, one can make the argument that if this is the sort of attack to which terrorists must resort, then we have actually been successful in defeating the larger attacks.

Also, this is at some level less an intelligence function than a local police function. In the United States, at least, these are not the same.

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All intelligence depends on collection. The collection array that we have built up since the 1950s was focused primarily on nation states and especially the Soviet Union. Nation states remain important policy and intelligence concerns. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are all nation states. But nation states are large, easily located and have known government leaders and fairly large infrastructures. Foreign military targets tend to “self-reveal,” that is, they operate in known ways in very large and identifiable bases, hold exercises, test weapons and so on. And they often do this on a schedule that repeats from year to year.

Terrorists are not states, although ISIL aspired to be one, which actually has made fighting it easier. This was an interesting gamble by ISIL, likely done in the hope of attracting so many adherents that they could hold down a significant swath of defensible land. In this and in their sheer brutality, they miscalculated. Given that terrorists are not states, the

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A N TA L L J ÓZ S E F K N O W L E D G E C E N T R E means by which intelligence is collected has to be adjusted and we have seen that in new technologies, such as the use of drones, which allow more tactical and more continuous coverage that are more useful for the terrorist target.

From intelligence collection, we go to analysis and there are several issues here. The first is the likelihood that analysts may have less collected intelligence than they would if they were working on a nation state issue.

This does not mean that the analyst gets to throw up his or her hands in frustration and wait for more intelligence to be collected. There is a CIA term that is appropriate — “analytic penetration.” This essentially means thinking your way through the problem despite the absence of collected intelligence. This is hard work, and it is likely to be less definitive, but it is not impossible — and it may be the only choice.

For many transnational issues, there is also a degree of intelligence sharing among like-minded states and intelligence services. Here, we face the problem of the rather large disparity among the intelligence services of many states. In Europe, the British and French services are vastly superior to anyone else, which can be frustrating when trying to coordinate intelligence on threats and likely attacks. And even if the lesser intelligence services try to beef up, it will take years before they are truly more capable.

Intelligence analysis, especially with regard to terrorism, serves several purposes. The first is warning, as discussed above. The second is trying to get a sense of the exact nature of the threat — numbers, location, capabilities. John McLaughlin, who was the acting Director of Central Intelligence, brings up an interesting irony. During the Cold War against the Soviet Union, we had a very good sense of Soviet capabilities, but worried about Soviet intentions. With terrorists, we know their intentions — which they advertise, but we worry about their capabilities. We have seen the development of several analytic tools or techniques that have been put to good use in combatting terrorism. Link analysis, which dates back to the 1970s in its earliest forms, is extremely helpful in understanding terrorist networks.

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Intelligence analysis is also needed to help inform or even to target certain operations. The use of drones allows a more precise, but not flawless means of attacking suspected terrorists. Activity-Based Intelligence (ABI) and Pattern-of-Life (POL) analysis have been very useful in understanding the geospatial intelligence provided by drones, in identifying likely terrorists living within civilian populations. Again, no one wants civilians

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A N TA L L J ÓZ S E F K N O W L E D G E C E N T R E killed in drone strikes, but it is difficult to understand the arguments of those who oppose the use of this weapon. Would massive conventional air strikes be better? Finally, both good intelligence collection and analysis are crucial in operations like the one that killed Osama bin Laden.

One of the goals of a good analyst is to understand as best as possible the adversary, but one of the worst mistakes you can make is what we call “mirror imaging,” the assumption that the target is “just like us.” No nation state or set of foreign leaders is quite like yours — and the problem magnifies when dealing with terrorists, as they are committed to carrying out actions that we find abhorrent. Still, it is important that analysts try to understand the terrorists as well as possible. Here, of course, we run into issues of cultural understanding, the nuances of various types of Islam and language.

Policy makers also expect to see intelligence that will assist them in mapping out a campaign plan that will lead to the defeat of the terrorists, and here we are likely to encounter some disappointment. In some respects, it is more difficult to come up with a successful campaign plan to defeat terrorists than it is to create a strategic plan against a nation state adversary. There are fewer vital nodes and targets whose disruption or destruction will likely cripple the overall terrorist threat. This can be especially frustrating for policy makers, and for the public, who understandably desire quicker answers to even the thorniest problems.

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Finally, there is the issue of “analyst burn out.” The terrorist issue is a very intense issue in terms of what is at stake and in the fact that it is tactical in nature rather than strategic. There is probably a limit to how long analysts can stay involved in this area and yet one is loath to lose an analyst who has built up a wealth of knowledge and expertise.

A serious problem at least for the United States and perhaps other democracies as well, is dealing with an issue that overlaps foreign and domestic intelligence. One of the hallmarks of most democracies is the separation between their foreign and domestic intelligence services, the difference between law enforcement rules versus foreign intelligence collection and operational rules. They both should be under the rule of law, but the rules will be different. Most of us would understand the importance of this distinction, but it can lead to crucial intelligence disconnects. In the United States, officials referred to the “Chinese wall” that separated foreign from domestic intelligence. The events of 9/11 vividly brought home the fact that this “wall” could have serious negative ramifications. This was one of the major reasons why the United States

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A N TA L L J ÓZ S E F K N O W L E D G E C E N T R E created a Director of National Intelligence in 2004: to have a senior intelligence official who could range across foreign, domestic and homeland intelligence.

The creation of the DNI in and of itself does not fully resolve the issue, but it did create a single individual and office who had both authority and responsibility for all types of intelligence and therefore for all types of threats.

Indeed, for the United States, prosecuting the war against terrorists has led to several difficult decisions because of this intersection between national security and domestic law. Terrorists caught within the boundaries of the United States can be prosecuted for criminal activity, and we have had successes here. But as we move to overseas theaters there are other issues.

• One is the issue of extrajudicial arrests, which in intelligence parlance are called renditions, because the subject is “rendered” up to justice. These are, admittedly, breaches of the sovereignty of the nation in which they take place, but let us be honest about this. You cannot land an aircraft at a major international airport without being noticed and declaring who you are, even if it is a cover story. So, the host government knows that someone has landed in their territory, although they will be free to deny detailed knowledge later on.

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• Another is the issue of what one does with captured terrorists.

They are not, under international law, combatants. If there is a sufficient case, they can be brought to the United States for prosecution, but there is no certainty that they will be convicted.

Once captured, they become something of a problem and a legal issue.

• We have the issue of conducting lethal operations against a U.S. citizen, Anwar el-Awlaki. The U.S. Constitution forbids the loss of life or liberty without due process of law. The Obama administration faced a problem with Awlaki, who was a U.S. citizen, but actively promoted attacks against the United States from inaccessible locations in Yemen. The Obama administration, through the Justice Department, announced a policy permitting an attack on a U.S. citizen if that person was actively engaged in operations against the United States, and was in a place where either extradition or operational access was not possible.

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A N TA L L J ÓZ S E F K N O W L E D G E C E N T R E • Overlaying all of this is the constant tension between civil liberties and national security. Our citizens correctly want both and do not want to trade one for the other. But prolonged activities, such as the counter-terrorist campaign, create stresses on both areas, which get played out in a political arena.

Having laid out some strengths and weaknesses of intelligence when dealing with terrorists, it may be useful to look at where the issue seems to be today.

First, it is important to understand that it is very difficult to assess relative success in a terrorist war. What constitutes success? No attacks?

Only a few attacks? The number of casualties? For the public, it is an absolute — no attacks. That is unlikely. Again, the fact that in both the United States and Europe we have seen lone wolf attacks, but no attacks on the scale of 9/11 suggests to me, at least, a certain amount of success in addressing the terrorist issue. We have made it more difficult for the terrorists to operate in larger groups and to plan large, coordinated attacks. This does not mean that we may not see such attacks in the future, but their absence does suggest some level of success.

Second, our success in the terrorist war is also difficult to assess because the nexus of the terrorism keeps changing — Al Qaeda, ISIL, Al-Nusrah, etc. But the core is a fundamental discontent within a significant portion of the Muslim ummah. This discontent and something of sense of siege has a certain transcendent quality, but, again, this does not mean that all Muslims are or will become terrorists. Here, we are on more difficult ground, as we attempt to understand the roots of this terrorism.

I would argue that the spur is much more than the 1916 Sykes-Picot that looked towards the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire or the ongoing Israeli-Arab conflict. Neither of these issues is of any relevance or has much resonance at all in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Bangladesh or Indonesia.

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Something else is going on within the ummah, and largely within the Sunni portion of the ummah. I believe much of it has to do with the dissatisfaction of the Muslim populations with their own rulers, as we saw in the Arab Spring, but a desire to externalize this discontent, and blame in on the west. Some of it also has to do with a renewed religious fervor among some Muslims and their need to become dominant within the ummah and, then, around the world. We have seen this before in other messianic causes, mostly political in nature, that ultimately sought totalitarian global rule.

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A N TA L L J ÓZ S E F K N O W L E D G E C E N T R E Here are some hallmarks of where I think we are: • Al Qaeda is a smaller and largely marginal player — except in Syria and Yemen. They are much less central to most of the current trouble spots, and do not play the same motivational role that al Qaeda played in the past. To a certain degree, they have been by-passed by groups they helped inspire.

• ISIL is nearing defeat within its self-proclaimed Caliphate. This will likely reduce its appeal, but also may lead to a scattering of veterans, especially into Europe and North Africa.

• The multi-wolves or lone wolf attacks remain problematic. These are much more difficult to prevent, and, as noted, are more a local police issue than an intelligence issue. In most of the U.S. cases, at least, it is important to point out that someone else knew and failed to say anything. This was true in the Boston Marathon, San Diego and apparently in Orlando. This returns us to the importance of the ummah. They bear some responsibility for overseeing their own co-religionists. If they are going to protect would-be terrorists, they have to expect some level of negative repercussion.

• We need a better understanding of radicalization — who gets attracted and why. We need a better counter-narrative — but this requires support, again, from the ummah. In this regard, the Obama administration used cyber against ISIL, which appears to have reduced recruitment.

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• Finally, terrorism is NOT an existential threat. The term is overused. An existential threat is one that has the capability to defeat us or cause us serious harm. As an American, I see two existential threats — Russia and climate change. Terrorism is a serious problem, and will cause us more bad days to come in the future, but they do not have the capability to overthrow Western society.

• We have to be patient. Every terrorist war ends, and the terrorists have never won. But this can be a thirty to forty-year struggle.

This is not an easy undertaking for democracies, which tend to be impatient and expect quick answers to even the thorniest of questions. But that is how terrorist wars play out. Ironically, this war may end with a whimper, not a bang. There will be no formal surrender or declared end to hostilities. There will be a last attack, but we may not recognize for some time that it was the last attack. And then this terrorist war will be over.

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