The Soldier Spies: PREFACE

(Draft version written in 1998)

War is coming. One can say these words at any point in history, and they will be true. Determining where, when, why, how, and for whom they will be true is the task of military intelligence, a discipline traditionally symbolized by The Sphinx.

In the United States, this discipline is dominated by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Its duty is to provide policymakers with warfighting wisdom. Who is the enemy? How strong is he? Where are his forces? What are their weapons? When will he move? Why does he fight?

To find out, DIA daily does thousands of things, but in the end it just does just three. It steals other countries' secrets. It tries to make sense of them. And it tries to get policymakers to pay attention.

CIA does the same things, but for different reasons. Its focus is political and economic. CIA does famine and revolution, culture and belief, ethnic ferment and the sociology of change. DIA does war.

So do the Army, Navy, and Air Force. But where the military services want tactical intelligence, DIA stresses strategy. Tactics integrates men and weapons, to fight individual battles. Strategy integrates battles, to win or lose whole wars.

DIA's strategic orientation is the key to its power. To build a big picture from billions of bits, it must be the "brain center" of the largest spy network in the world. It angles the lenses in the Pentagon refractory, targets the "platforms" and interprets the "take." It tasks the National Security Agency (NSA), which breaks codes and taps telephones, and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which operates surveillance satellites in space. DIA is also the lead spy-agency on weapons proliferation, cease-fires, arms-control, POW-MIAs, foreign space objects (including "UFOs"), "psychic warfare," computerization, narcotics trafficking, environmental protection, United Nations peacekeeping, and nuclear targeting. The agency has been involved in at least one successful assassination, and has helped overthrow several foreign governments. In short, DIA does most everything connected with warfare except actually fight it. And sometimes, it also does that.

A Black Hole

Despite its importance and power, DIA has remained a "black hole" in the vast literature on secret intelligence. Indeed, when Americans think "spying," they typically think "CIA," about which hundreds of books have been written. But of the $30 billion tax-dollars spent annually to spy, only $3 billion goes to the Central Intelligence Agency. Most of the other $27 billion is in fact managed by the DIA, about which no book has previously been written.

Congressman Michael Harrington lamented more than 25 tears ago that "little had been learned little publicly" about DIA, and urged that it "be investigated more thoroughly." But the agency, as ex-DIA officer Patrick McGarvey boasts, has "always managed keep investigators arm's length." Says one senior Pentagon officer: "They [DIA] are the agents no one talks about."

Even experts and insiders confess ignorance. Air Force General C. Norman Wood, the U.S. European Command's top intelligence officer, "never was really sure what these [DIA] units were doing in my theater." James Carroll, who won the National Book Award for a memoir about life with his father, the first DIA Director, concedes that most of the agency's history "remains unknown to me." When asked why DIA was allowed to operate a secret division of the Library of Congress, then-Librarian Daniel Boorstin, once described as "a man who knows everything," admitted that he had "no answer."

Some would blame a lack of sources. "There are no records," the DIA's own in-house historian, Deane Allen, told me in 1994. "To make sure nobody looks bad, the documents have all been destroyed." This is not quite so. There are 8,421 cubic feet of undestroyed DIA documents at a National Archives annex in Suitland, Maryland. Scattered but often valuable references to the agency may also be found in hundreds of Congressional testimonies, and in no fewer than 16,000 news stories. The difficulty in DIA research is not a lack of information, but rather to derive knowledge from a glut.

DIA itself has always been dogged by this same problem. Usually termed "overcollection," it may also be described as "underproduction." The information age has made it more acute, for both historians and spies. As electronic technology makes collecting facts faster and easier, the explosion of input makes interpretation slower and harder. No matter what digital tools are used to process data, as one DIA deputy director has said, "at some point a human has to take a look at it." Computerization, by increasing the volume of data which any mind must process, has made consciousness more determinant in human enterprise -- not less. That is perhaps the central problem of our time.

Defending Democracy

The central problem of all time is war. As these words are written it is not, fortunately, the central reality; but when it does come it is always the central evil. It may be defined as a campaign of force and/or fraud, by or against governmental powers. For just this reason, perhaps, war has also been defined as just another means of "politics."

It would be better to say: "bad politics." The first duty of our government -- of any government -- is to defend its people from force and fraud. Sometimes, alas, this defense can only be achieved by fighting or fooling the enemies of peace.

The ambiguity, irony, romance and horror of war all derive from that paradox. The best war is but "excused hypocrisy." We must believe, at some level, that "two wrongs do make a right" -- and that we may do evil, without becoming so. The attendant danger, as Alexis de Toqueville observed, is that even a just, retaliatory defense may cause "the very disturbances which it should prevent."

Democracies attempt to defuse this danger by delegating warmaking powers to elected representatives of the people. The system can work well, but it has one weakness. Since wars are usually started by tyrannies, democracies -- whether at Pearl Harbor, or in the Persian Gulf -- are usually caught off-guard.

Even peace gives tyrants practice for war. In tyrannies, the main "peacetime enemies" are citizen activism and public memory, which are crushed with repressive force and propagandist fraud. In democracies, the peacetime enemies are citizen indifference and public amnesia, which must be routed by free press and forceful expression.

"Hugging Russia," as some military minds lament, has made the task harder. To warn of war today is almost to have bad manners. But such rudeness, such perfect indifference to our own feelings, is cardinal to all reality -- and to all war.

A budgetary ax has fallen on democracy's arsenals, and with some justice. But as funds and firepower fall off, intelligence grows more integral to readiness. If a "downsized" Pentagon is to "do more with less," it must achieve what President Bush called "True Joint: using the right tool at the time." This means reading current events, but also looking forward decades -- doing "deep strategy," especially to hedge optimism. Tomorrow may well be as peaceful as today; but just in case it isn't, someone should make the best case for the worst case.

Respecting Reality

A "devil's advocate," by definition, cannot be popular. In ancient armies, spy chiefs who spoke their minds could lose their heads. Today, it is more customary to simply not promote them. In all ages, though, the most infamous military disasters have been caused by commanders who ignored, evaded, or otherwise discouraged the upward flow of "bad" news. By contrast, the most dominating war machines -- Caesar's, Napoleon's, the German Blitzkrieg, and the United States in Desert Storm -- all made revolutionary innovations in the collection, processing, and dissemination of battlefield knowledge.

The first great innovator, Julius Caesar, was the true father of military intelligence. Caesar was the first commander to reject totally the estimates of oracles and omens; the first, we are told, to process data by "speed reading" silently, without moving his lips; and the first to write an honest memoir explaining to a wide public what he had done. His data were good, there was no backlog, and he used what he knew to win political support for his campaigns. His single, fatal defeat came only when he lost respect for reality -- when he started believing he was a god, and left unread a secret message warning of his imminent assassination.

America's own Caesars have failed, or succeeded, by the same principles. Gung-ho, can-do ignorance, which is really a cowardice of the too-real, has made bold generals like George Custer easy to deceive and trap. Conversely, a courageous acceptance of discouraging truths has made defensive, constantly retreating generals, like George Washington, practically invincible. When our commanders seek and face facts, and know what they are doing, they tend to win their campaigns -- even when, like George Washington, they lose most of the battles. When they don't know what they're doing, they can win most of the battles -- as did the U.S. in Vietnam -- and still lose the war.
To win we must be wise. We must pick the right fights, and only those; then, we must concentrate our forces correctly for maximum effect. DIA was designed to help do both.

But how well has DIA done its work? Where has it helped, and where has it hurt, national security? What can be done to accentuate its strengths, and shore up its weaknesses? Is DIA the best MI setup for the post-Cold War battlefield, or should some other arrangement be tried?

The importance answering these questions has been best expressed, perhaps, by General Norman Schwarzkopf. Someone once asked him: "Are you a dove or a hawk?" He thought for moment, then said:

"I am an owl. That is, smart enough to know that you do not want to go to war, But, once committed to war, then by golly, you put your brains into your muscles and you fight ferociously."