← The Watch Floor with Sarah Adams
Loading summary
Transcript7 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the watch floor. I'm Sarah Adams. Every time a crisis hits, be it Ukraine, Iran, Syria, terrorism, the same question pops up. Did intelligence fail? And almost every time that question is asked by people judging intelligence by the wrong standard, some of the most important CIA successes are actually viewed as fail because success takes time. And when you're not viewing it from kind of the lens in which the standards exist, you see, these operations are criticized, they're dismissed. Heck, some are even buried. But decades later, you really start to see the landscape that they shaped. How wars were avoided, how threats were disrupted, you know, and how adversaries really got boxed in over time. Today we're going to talk about CIA's law, long game, older operations that most people misunderstand, but they're still producing strategic wins Today. Before we get into operations, we need to set expectations. Because if you don't understand how intelligence works, everything we're going to talk about today really does sound like failure. That's no joke. Intelligence doesn't work alongside election cycles or to mirror news cycles. And it definitely doesn't work. Like Hollywood portrays. There are three rules that help define whether your intelligence operation is really a success. The first rule is delay beats denial. People think success means stopping something completely, right? There's no attack, there's no nuclear program. There was no progress made by the Chinese on hypersonics. That unfortunately is just not how the real world works. Think of it like a house fire. So it's really great if firefighters can just go in and put it all out quickly. But if they put out enough of the fire to save the lives inside, that's still a success. Intelligence works the exact same way. It slows momentum, it forces detours, and it buys time. If a nuclear program takes 10 years instead of three, that gives you seven more years for diplomacy, pressure to place in different deterrence. None of that time would have existed otherwise. Time is the most valuable commodity intelligence buys. The second rule is the one people struggle with the most. Behavioral change matters more than public outcomes. Most people judge success by exactly what they can see. A regime change, arrests, you stop that explosion from happening. Intelligence professionals judge success by what the adversary actually stopped doing. How did you impact them? A great example is of course the shoe bomb. The shoe bomb had kind of a fault in its design where moisture got in so it didn't go off. Well, the tear eyes could fix that problem very quickly. But the US leaned in and they put a lot of this extra screening in place. And to where? The terrace. It's not worth doing the shoe bomb, because the security is too enhanced to use it, so they took it completely off the table. That's a win. Unfortunately, about six months ago, we started decreasing the standards to scan shoes again. The terrorists now have a new shoe bomb going through the testing phases. So the shoe bomb's coming back. Unfortunately, you can have a win and then changes over time or people forgetting how that win works leads to other faults. And we have to keep that in mind. Now think of it like this. You go park in a bad neighborhood and you lock your car because you obviously don't want it to get robbed. So if it doesn't get robbed, you don't exactly know if it's because you locked your car. But if that whole street stops getting robbed, that is a change in behavior, right? That could be a success of everybody locking their cars on the street and not making it a soft target anymore. So it was like when terrorists knew they were being tracked via phones and they stopped using them. They controlled and restricted their movements and then they really stopped trusting each other. That's like intelligence pressure. That was a success against them. You know, another thing is like if you make a nation state slow down their decision making processes, they harden the their facilities, they second guess escalation with you. All of that is intelligence shaping behavior. The biggest intelligence successes look so boring from the outside. The third rule, you know, is a bit uncomfortable, but it matters. Strategic warning is the success, even if leadership ignores it. Intelligence doesn't make decisions, it only informs them. Think of this, you're a meteorologist, you predict a hurricane's coming. People don't evacuate. Your strategic warning was correct. Their decision is what's wrong, that's not on you. You fulfilled your warning. That was your role. Leaders choose to do what they want to do and that's completely outside of the control of intelligence. You just give them the best information available possible at the time for them to make the decision. It doesn't actually stop a surprise or anything like that. It just helps reduce some of the risk. But they never completely go away. There is a human element involved in all of this. Now once you understand these three rules, the so called CIA failures we start to talk through now, they're going to look different to you. We're going to walk through some of the strongest examples of that and then tie it to present day and how you might see a similar operation play out. The first example is in the early 1950s. Berlin of course was divided and there were intelligence officers everywhere trying to collect information. Of course with Soviets did is they relied very heavily on landlines. And then they buried the cables, obviously all over East Berlin so their military forces and their intelligence officers could communicate with each other. So the CIA, in working with British Intelligence, started the operation Operation Gold. And that's when they dug the tunnel under the Berlin Wall and tapped into these cables.
- [08:04]
B
We got all kinds of personality data, operational data on the operations of Soviet military counterintelligence, so that we were at that point totally on top. We thought of the counterintelligence picture in Berlin.
- [08:23]
A
It took months of planning. Obviously, there's engineering involved, of course, there's risk involved. And then, as you can imagine, they really did realize, okay, the Soviets know about this. So most history books just stop there, right? It's a failure, but it actually isn't. So even when you have a risk of compromise or even when something is compromised, you learn something from that, right? So, like, if China was going to hack me today, and let's say they took some information out of my email, I mean, that's very unfortunate that they did this, but I can see how they chose to hack me, right? They left a digital trail. I can learn from that. And that is advantageous to me if I know how to use it to my advantage. So even though there was this compromise and the Soviets knew it was happening, intelligence analysts learned tons about force protection, about the command structures, and about how the Soviets chose to communicate when they were under pressure. If you know your opponent is listening, you get to see what they're comfortable talking about, and then what? They stay completely silent about you. Fast forward. Today we have these undersea Internet cables, telecom infrastructure. Obviously, we kind of just talked about cyber intrusions. Modern cyber warfare really is the same concept of the Berlin tunnel. It's like, you don't have to be perfect to affect a piece of the process. Compromise doesn't mean a failure all the time. So sometimes just having access or control to that information is power. Now, a second example it was during the Cold War. U.S. policymakers started to treat the communist threat as one big, solid unit. And in that case, they made almost like China in the Soviet Union as one equal threat. And CIA analysts started to challenge that assumption and say, hey, we shouldn't bucket them together. There's deep fractures, right? The compete over leadership of the communist movement. They have border policies that don't align, and they fundamentally think a lot different about their strategic priorities. You know, the analysis at the time wasn't very popular, but leaders did take it on, and it stopped them from viewing China and Russia as this, like, unstoppable block that was joined at the hip. It created like this diplomatic space that really avoided escalations. It prevented a lot of assumptions from happening. Just because two people wear the same uniform does not mean they're on the same team. Now look at China and Russia today. They cooperate when it's convenient. Arms sales space, even propaganda messaging campaigns. But the distrust between the two is so deep, they quietly compete all the time in Central Asia, all over Africa, down in South America at times. And then, of course, they even fight over their influence inside of Iran. So alliances of convenience are not alliances of trust. And if you understand that, it puts you in a really good position in that game. Now, example three, beginning in the Cold War, the CIA was deeply involved in counter proliferation. We needed to stop kind of this nuclear advancement and this arms race. But that did not mean you just go in and can go in and stop programs overnight. Right? You have to be realistic about it. So what they did is it was almost like one and two steps out. They targeted suppliers, materials, logistics, like the expertise, the scientists who run these programs, they force the adversaries to improvise when they no longer could purchase a certain item for their program that they were maybe getting from France at the time. You don't need to stop someone from running forever. You just need to trip them a bunch of times and that is going to fit their outcome, you know, at the end of the race.
- [13:13]
C
The United States has launched an unprecedented attack on three nuclear sites in Iran. Those sites include the facility at Isfahan and their underground facilities at Natanz and Fordeau. Now, Fordo is dug deeply under a mountainside, and it's long been believed that America would need to use specialized bunker busting bombs to destroy the facility. Now, Iran has acknowledged these attacks, but we don't yet know just how much damage has been done. President Donald Trump has addressed the nation from the White House. He warned Iran not to launch any attacks in response. However, we've heard from Iranian officials all the way up to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that any American attack in the region would draw an immediate Iranian response.
- [14:03]
A
So if we go back to Iran and today and talk about their nuclear program, you know, it's been delayed plenty of times. It definitely was disrupted right when we struck it last year. And so many times they've been forced to put stuff out in the open about this program, you know, because of the different rules governing, you know, the access people get to some of their facilities. So every Year they didn't cross the threshold into like putting a nuke on a weapon and using it, you know, is a win. And it's also leverage against them. So the time kind of buys options. And then this delay created leverage that we still can use today and we get to use it against Iran. Now another example goes back to Al Qaeda, but this is Al Qaeda before the post 911 group we knew. It was learned really quickly in the CIA. Hey, terrorism just isn't about attacks. It's about these massive networks that support the attacks. There's travel routes, there's facilitators, there's logistical pipelines. There are safe havens. So CIA became the expert in mapping everything out, not as an isolated cell, but as a giant ecosystem. If you want to kill a weed, you don't cut off a leaf. You have to kill the entire root system. And this is the thinking behind it. Of course, when they did, then years later went to target like Al Qaeda, for example, all these locations were mapped out right when they started their drone program, they had 20 targets to hit day one because they spent the last 10 plus years knowing where everything was.
- [16:05]
B
This is about our sovereignty as well. Because there were a group of individuals who attacked the United States on 911 and killed 3,000 of our of our citizens. And we went to war against those who attacked the United States of America. The leadership of those that were involved in planning this attack were located in Pakistan, in the forest. And we have made clear to the Pakistanis that the United States of America is going to defend ourselves against those that would attack us. And we have done just that. We have gone after their leadership and we have done it effectively targeting, targeting Al Qaeda leadership and terrorists. Terrorists. And very frankly, the terrorists who threaten the United States threaten Pakistan as well.
- [17:18]
A
Now what groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS tried to do then is, oh, we'll just call ourselves something else. We'll throw a different name on our group. Right? We saw it in Syria so many times. Are you Al Nusra? Are you isis? Are you hts? There's even now some new names thrown around when it's really the same thing. But what terrorists forget is it doesn't matter if you still use the camps you use all the way back to the 1990s, which there are camps like that in Afghanistan. They're still using the same camps. If you use the same facilitators, if you use the same financial pipelines, if you use the same foreign fighter routes. Right, we know those. It does not matter what name you slap on your forehead, right? Because the infrastructure is understood and when it's understood, it can be disrupted pretty much at any time. So these networks never disappear if you put the time and effort into laying them out. Now, example five, this is right after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Intelligence agencies learned such a painful lesson then surprise is the real danger. So strategic warnings really became something that was institutionalized. It's not about prediction anymore, it's about warning. It's thresholds, indicators, please bring us dissenting views. And it wasn't something where anymore you had to say, hey, I know exactly when he's going to throw that punch. It was more important for you to say, hey, I see he's clenching his fist. So we saw that present day, we got these warnings obviously that, hey, looks like Russia's gonna invade China. And I mean, Russia's gonna invade Ukraine. I don't wanna start any rumors. And then of course, we're also seeing some of the same reflections happening with China's interest in Taiwan. Intelligence doesn't fail to warn. Leaders basically choose the level of risk they're willing to accept. And we did have some arguments obviously when it came to whether Russia was going to invade or not across our government intelligence community, because they get to decide how they assess that intelligence. It's a very interesting thing and that's lost on a lot of people. So the most important intelligence, like it doesn't age out, right? It compounds, you know, they really say, what I do now, I want it to be a 20 and 30 year success. Like that's a factual thing. When someone says that they want to change how adversaries behave, how leaders make their decisions, and then how catastrophes get avoided. If you only judge intelligence by what explodes or what doesn't, you miss all the things that were never happening because they were impacted in some way. So let's watch the signs, not the noise. Thanks for tuning into the watch floor.