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Knowing What To Look For: More with Herb Meyer
Last week, we shared an interview with Ricochet contributor — and former assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence — Herb Meyer, who then answered members’ questions about how national intelligence works, and sometimes fails to work, in the comments.
In the second part of his Powerline interview, Herb turns his attention to domestic surveillance and the threats posed from Islamist saboteurs and traitors:
The worst mistake you can make [in intelligence] is not to know what you’re looking for, and that’s exactly what’s happened.
So you’ve got the NSA — which is presumably listening to all your phone calls and reading all my emails — and yet they missed Major Hasan in Houston, the Army psychiatrist. He put “Soldier of Allah” on his business card. Look, I’m no genius, but even I’d recognize that as an indicator of trouble.
Then, you have the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston. They sent out every signal of a terrorist, and yet [our government] missed it. They didn’t know what they were looking for. See, what they didn’t say is, “Okay, look, we think there’s a danger from the increasingly radicalized individual.” Well, you can have experts say, “If someone becomes radicalized, these are the things you would look for: they’d drop out of their church or their mosque; they set up a terrorist training camp; they start reading magazines like this or that, etc.”
You could make that list. If you’ve got that list, all the board lights up… but if you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s bunch of noise and there’s the glitch…
[And] because they don’t know what to look for, they say “Oh, we have to know everything.”
Got a question for the recipient of U.S. Intelligence’s highest honor? Herb will be in the comments again this afternoon, answering members’ questions.
Published in General
You and Bill Casey and Ronald Reagan all knew that the econometric model was baloney. How do you convince a President who actually cannot tell the difference between San Diego and and Leipzig? Who actually believes that there is no difference between them because his goal of equality is being achieved in both places.
Nidal Hasan wasn’t missed. He was ignored.
I’m sure the problem wasn’t limited to that incident.
Knowing what to look for and questions to ask should be something a lot of people of various occupations can relate to (dr., dentist, mechanic, etc.). That is what separates the best from the rest.
What skills or interests are important for intelligence work? Is a knowledge of human history/behavior neccessary, or a quick mind, or persistence. What types of intelligence work is mundane, but very important? Car alarms go off falsely so often, no one pays attention to them anymore. I have often wondered how a few people working at NSA can moniter everyone’s phone calls. Even if you had a program that could catch key phrases or words, etc. wouldn’t a large portion of them be false alarms, and couldn’t technology be counterproductive?
“Econometric Potemkin” is the best turn of phrase I’ve heard in a while.
Herb,
You make the case that the most important skill is knowing what to look for rather than the pure volume intelligence gathered. This is perhaps the strongest counterpoint to the case for the NSA’s intelligence gathering apparatus I have ever heard. My questions are:
How do you know what to look for in the first place? You say that Casey and Regan had an intuitive sense that all was not right in the Soviet economy, but how do we develop that as a skill set at the CIA? Is it something that can be learned and passed on? Is it just a talent we need to hire specifically for? How does the bureaucratic nature of government get in the way of cultivating that talent?
A very quick 5 minutes. I wish these could be longer.
Which film or book, that you have seen and read, best represents the work of the intelligence services?
Jamie,
Your question of how do you know what to look for lies at the heart of this issue: For example, if I were asked to investigate whether a particular business was in worse financial trouble than people thought — I don’t really know what to look for. But the CEO of FEDEX would know. So would Mitt Romney. I’ve no idea if the guy sitting at the next table has a heart problem — but a cardiologist could take one look and see something the rest of us would miss. Well, in this same sense there are people with political and economic judgment. Thie means they have an intuitive sense of what to look for. Reagan and Casey had this judgment, which is why they were light-years ahead of so many professional analysts. You can train someone to have this judgment only up to a point. This is why it’s healthy for the CIA to bring in outsiders — people with proven track records of “getting it right” before anyone else. Especially in politics and global economics, the people with these sort of skills aren’t career officials.
There’s a British television series from the late 1970s called “The Sandbaggers.” It’s fantastic, and the most politically sophisticated series about intelligence I’ve ever seen. The series is hard to find now, and you’ve got to watch the episodes in order to really enjoy it (there are three seasons’ worth of episodes.) I mentioned this to someone the other night, in Florida, and he pulled out his cell phone, got onto eBay, and found the full set of “Sandbaggers” DVDs for, I think, $11. You’ll love it….
A roommate of mine introduced me to that show, good stuff.