Intelligence
Categories: All Reflections
& Story Boards
Robert
David Steele Vivas
We Lack Intelligence
with Integrity
Mr. President: Please
Fire Clapper, Vickers, & Brennan
Mr. President,
I hold Jim Clapper,
today the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and previously the
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (USDI) accountable for failing to
serve the public interest all these years. I believe you should fire him, Mike
Vickers the current USDI, and John Brennan, Director of the CIA, immediately.
Let’s start with the
reality that the secret world is not in the business of producing intelligence
(decision-support) with integrity. As William Binney has no famously observed,
they are in the business of keeping problems alive so as to keep the money
moving – secretly and without accountability. Torture is not the only secret
program that has failed to produce intelligence with integrity – this failure
is true of every part of the secret world from the CIA, which relies on foreign
liaison hand-outs for the bulk of its “clandestine” intelligence to the NSA,
which processes less than 1% of what it collects, to the NRO and NGA that are
inept at “Big Data” and incapable of providing all-source fused data to the
end-user at a desk in Washington or in a foxhole abroad.
For a quarter-century I
have been politely and persistently pointing out the severe flaws in the US
secret intelligence world. While I have not been the only one to do so – over 300 books I have
reviewed at Amazon on this topic provide compelling
documentation of the broad pathologies of the secret world – I am the most
published intelligence reformer writing in the English language, and the only
one to actually put forward explicit recommendations for comprehensive reform.
My first two books enjoy bi-partisan Forewords from past and then serving
Chairmen of the Senate Select Committee on Reform (SSCI) – Senator David Boren
(D-OK) for my first book, ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies
and Secrecy in an Open World, and Senator Pat
Roberts (R-KS) for my second of nine books, THE NEW CRAFT OF
INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, & Political. Beyond my extensive
public articles, briefings, and testimony – including a most
memorable public and private session with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
(D-NY) I wrote to you personally on 4
February 2011, and also to the Vice President on
1 May 2014. With this public letter, it is my hope
that we can get some choices on the table.
Twenty-five years ago I
ghost wrote the first modern intelligence reform article for Commandant of the
Marine Corps Al Gray, “Global Intelligence
Challenges in the 1990’s.” I followed that immediately with my own
article, published in 1990, “Intelligence in the
1990’s: Recasting National Security in a Changing World.” The graphic below
summarizes both the six fatal flaws or challenges I identified, and the money
we have wasted — $1.25 trillion dollars – in failing to address those
challenges.
Click
on Image to Enlarge
You need a DNI, right
now, who
is committed to restoring the integrity of the intelligence process, and
producing intelligence not only for you, but for all of our stakeholders in the
future of the USA, including Congressional jurisdictions not now receiving
decision-support (most of them), the media, academia, and of course the public.
I summarized these possibilities in an earlier article, “Intelligence for the
President – AND Everyone Else.” This individual
should also be charged by you with eliminating the Office of the DNI entirely,
prior to your departure from office, and would, upon their departure, step into
a new role as Director of a new national Open Source Agency (OSA) that has been
twice approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the first time by
Sean O’Keefe, but always contingent on you or a Cabinet Secretary asking for
it.
As with my letters to you and to the Vice President, my letter to Secretary
of State John Kerry of 15 February 2013 and my letter to Secretary
of Defense Chuck Hagel of 9 July 2014appear to have been
intercepted. This new agency would satisfy roughly 80% of all decision-support
requirements across the executive and legislative branches (providing both with
a common public estimate of best available truths), at a cost of less than $3 billion
a year, while allowing you to cut the secret intelligence budget in half over
time (protecting jobs district by district, but cutting the failed technical
collection programs that do not provide a return on investment).
You need a USDI, right
now, who
is committed to showing Ash Carter how to comply with your most reasonable
demand for a 30% cut across the Department of Defense (DoD) budget – where
waste is documented from 45% in weapons acquisition to 75% in Afghanistan.
However, you also need a USDI with the competence and capacity to show the new
Secretary of Defense and the Service Chiefs, in partnership with the theater
commanders, how to rapidly create a 450-ship Navy, a long-haul Air
Force, and an air-mobile Army at the same time
that we draw down on our expensive overseas presence that impedes our agility
and all attempts to achieve defense reform. I summarized the short-falls in
defense intelligence, for which I hold Clapper and Vickers accountable, in my
article “On Defense Intelligence
– Seven Strikes.”
You need a D/CIA, right
now, who
has the capacity to oversee jointly with the out-going DNI, the dismantling of
NSA and the NRO, each becoming an Office within the new Classified Intelligence
Agency. The NGA should be merged with USGS as recommended by the National
Academy of Public Administration (NAPA). This new Director of Classified
Intelligence or DCI must have the broad understanding necessary to recast Human
Intelligence (HUMINT) so as to properly manage all 15
slices, only four of which are classified; to recast
analytics to address the eight severe flaws from sourcing to
processing to analysis to dissemination that persist today; and to recast how
we approach science and technology innovation today; what we have now is a
national embarrassment.
Below is my broad brush
concept for evaluating what we have now and where we need to go.
Click
on Image to Enlarge
What Is To Be Done?
You could start by
paying attention – and recognizing that the intellectual and moral pathologies
of the secret world are what the rest of the world sees as representative of
your Administration and our Republic.
I am a natural-born
citizen, a “top gun” for intelligence with integrity, and Hispanic. I am
immediately available to help you with a conversation that will illuminate
choices. In my view, in the two years remaining in your second term, you have
ample opportunity to achieve intelligence with integrity within your
Administration and in the public interest.
Within your immediate
Executive powers, you have the capacity – I would say the obligation – to fire
Jim Clapper, Mike Vickers, and John Brennan. This is about far more than
torture – this is about the complicity of military and civilian intelligence in
assassinating thousands (with a documented 98% innocents along the way)
while spending over a trillion dollars in a manner that is not helpful to Whole
of Government strategy, policy, acquisition, and operations.
In partnership with
Congress, you have the potential of embracing the Smart Nation Actthat Congressman Rob
Simmons (R-CT-02) and I devised, in order to achieve a bi-partisan baseline for
going forward with shared truths – achieving intelligence with integrity in the
public interest.
I know how to do that. I
know who else knows how to do that. May we help you serve the public interest?
Very respectfully,
Robert David STEELE
Vivas
Oakton, Virginia
Oakton, Virginia
Read more:http://tinyurl.com/fire-intel-3
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