The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2014 29 intelligence analysts and diplomats to confront a new, diffuse global threat environment in which non- state actors—including ter- rorists, WMD proliferators and cybercriminals—oper- ated against U.S. interests across national borders, including our own. The second revolution involves technology —pri- marily information technology, but also the rapidly advancing biological sciences, nanotechnology, material sciences, neuro- science and robotics. We have moved in one generation from an environment of information scarcity to information glut, and into a world where the United States no longer dominates technology R&D and is subject, more than ever, to technologi- cal surprise. In the late 1970s, it took at least a week for me to receive newspapers from Latin America and the Caribbean. Today, Washington analysts receive newspapers and media reports often before the people in the country of interest. Governments have less and less capacity to control infor- mation flows, including social media. In recent years, the Arab Spring in the Middle East and widespread protests in Brazil and Turkey are cases in point. Meanwhile, international organized crime groups, terrorists, narcotraffickers and pro- liferators are taking advantage of such technology, bypassing governments or seeking to undermine them to protect their illegal activities. The third revolution relates to homeland security , which may not seem appropriate for the diplomat’s agenda but is. Multiple federal agencies, state and local governments, and “first responders” have a legitimate need for information about threats that originate abroad, including human traffick- ing, refugee flows, migration patterns and infectious diseases. Looking ahead, diplomatic reporting will be expected to advance our understanding of a growing number of such com- plex issues in an increasingly interconnected world. Responding to Change From 1998 to 2001, as the first assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production, I chaired the National Intelligence Production Board. The NIPB, a working group spanning 11 agencies, including the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, worked to bring ana- lytic production into the 21st century. This meant responding to both the post–Cold War geopolitical transformation and IT- driven technology revolu- tion that were producing such churn in our work- place. In 2000, the group pro- duced The Strategic Invest- ment Plan for Intelligence Community Analysis (ADCI/AP 2000-01), which recommended intelligence agencies invest in recruitment and training, interagency collaboration, use of external expertise and aggressive exploitation of open-source information. These resources will help counter “a dispersed, complex and ‘asymmetric’ threat assessment in which infor- mation technology makes everything move faster.” INR, then headed by Tom Fingar, was ably represented on the NIPB panel by Chris Kojm, the future chair of the National Intelligence Council. INR has always been one of the smallest organizations in the intelligence community, but it punches well above its weight. It makes up for small numbers in its impressive analytic expertise and in its intimate connection to State’s indispensable diplomatic reporting. Yet I saw diplomatic reporting as undervalued within the State Department—and even more so on the Hill. State lacked strong legislative advocates, even at a time of growing global threats to national security. The failure to adequately fund the department was a blow to all the agencies that relied on diplo- matic reporting, including mine. Critics have asserted that while U.S. diplomatic reporting has a rich and noble tradition in our country, it has suffered from the advent of the Internet and easy access to valuable open-source information. Policymakers, the argument went, could now mine the Web for the country-specific information they needed and make direct contact with official counterparts and other valuable foreign sources—all in real time. Embassy political and economic officers, who generally rejected this line, could now be directed to reduce their substantive report- ing activities and take on more of the embassy’s operational duties such as managing congressional delegations. This critique, which exaggerated both the vulnerability of diplomatic reporting and the potential of the Internet, had surface appeal for a time. Experienced FSOs and government INRmakes up for small numbers in its impressive analytic expertise and in its intimate connection to State’s indispensable diplomatic reporting.