An additional letter sent on July 7, 2008 is attached:

Director of National Intelligence and Attorney General letters to Senator Reid presenting the views of the Administration on reported amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 ("FISA") Amendments Act of 2008 (H.R. 6304).

For a PDF version click to  www.dni.gov

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has launched a new online video gallery.

It is now available online at www.dni.gov/video.htm.

Vision 2015 expands upon the notion of an Intelligence Enterprise, first introduced in the National Intelligence Strategy and later in the 100 and 500 Day Plans. It charts a new path forward for a globally networked and integrated Intelligence Enterprise for the 21st century, based on the principles of integration, collaboration, and innovation.

Vision 2015 is available online at www.dni.gov.

Interview of Mr. Patrick Gorman

July 24, 2008

AMY MORRIS (Federal News Radio):  Do you know where you’re going to be in 2015?  Well, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has a plan called the Vision 2015, a globally networked and integrated intelligence enterprise.  [Patrick Gorman is] Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Strategy, Plans, and Policy.

PATRICK GORMAN:  When the Director came on last March, you know, the discussion was do we sit down and try to figure out a strategy and a vision and a way forward, or do we focus on execution.  And so the decision was – the default mechanism was to go forward with an implementation plan because we knew the things that needed to be done.  Fix the IT, work policy issues, you know, all the things that have been listed for the last 40 years of studies about the intel community.  So the bias was we need to focus on execution and not work on vision and strategy at that point; we felt we had a strategy and knew where we were going.

As we got into it, a lot of people kept asking us well, okay, we’re doing an integration collaboration with what end; what’s this thing start to look like.  Can you describe it?  You know, if you look out 10 years, what would be the contours of this new organization or this enterprise?  And so last fall, we sat down with the seniors from all the agencies and developed a basically division, that you have a division document, and then we’ve been working and socializing with the community since then, until the release. 

So the intent – there’s two different pieces.  Part of the plan’s about execution, the milestones, initiatives, deliverables, and the vision is about articulating an instate.  What will come out of this will be basically a strategic roadmap that will say over the next six years – here’s what needs to be done and here’s who needs to do it, and here’s the type of money that will have to be aligned to make these things happen, in terms of people and budget.

MS. MORRIS:  I want to get back to the people and the budgets in just a second, but I also want to hit on the long-term goals and the short-term goals, and see how those sort of work together.  Let’s start with the short-term goals:  What’s at the top of your list?

MR. GORMAN:  I’d say top of the list on short-term goals are things like the single information environment, so if you look – you know, the division has a net-centric information environment, but there are very tactical things that have to happen, in terms of collapsing networks, common e-mail systems, et cetera.  So this is no small feat, so it’s been divided up.  So there’s something called single information environment that’s been worked under the 500-day plan, so that would be at the top. 

Security clearance reform is critical, so a lot of progress has been made in the last year, but now that has to go from a lot of the concepts and policies and start going into the implementation, probably over the next year or so.  (Inaudible) – three is basically in the policies associated with, you know, clarifying roles and responsibilities; that will be at the top of the list.  Things like the National Intelligence University, setting that up; we just appointed a new provost.  And so that should be at the top of the list, and other things like lessons learned, down at the lessons learned center, and capability for the intel community.

MS. MORRIS:  And long term, we’re talking 2015, this should be able to carry through the next administration and the next.

MR. GORMAN:  Well, I mean, if you start looking at, really, transformation as a process.  Quite frankly, 2015, we started this out with something called IC 2020.  We developed a vision, came up with this, and so the feedback we got from people is, you know, we should be doing this a lot sooner.  We don’t have 12 years to do this; we have to do this a lot sooner.  And so we picked 2015 as a milestone to back it up, to give some acceleration to this, but I would argue that when you get to 2015 there’s going to be more things you’re going to have to do.  So this is – it doesn’t stop at 2015.  You know, it’s not a close-the-doors and declare success at that point. 

MS. MORRIS:  What are some of the lead offices that are going to help carry this through for you?

MR. GORMAN:  Well, I think there’s two ways you got to think of this.  One is there are things that the ODNI will be doing directly, in terms of initiatives, and there are things that the agencies will be doing, so it’d be working at both levels.  A lot of the projects that we have are actually being done through the agency, so they have an executive agent role when they take these things on.  But I would say if you look at some of the primary offices could be things like the Chief Information Officer, General Meyerrose; it’s going to be things like the Chief Human Capital officer, Ron Sanders, who’s been working with joint duty and pay-for-performance, and the larger pay modernization piece.  And it’s going to be things like policy, in terms of trying to get the authorities and all the policies in line so that you have clear decision rights and, you know, we don’t have kind of layers of bureaucracy and trying to figure out who has what right to make what decisions on what issue. 

MS. MORRIS:  You know, a lot of what we’ve been covering here at Federal News Radio is the concept of information sharing, no longer stove-piping, and having a more uniform sharing of the information.  It seems like this would fall right into that, that this falls right under the whole need-to-share versus the need-to-know. 

MR. GORMAN:  Yeah, I think that’s correct.  But I would – I think when you look at these things, you go, well, we should be – how come we’re not sharing information and we haven’t been?  What are the issues?  There’s this inherent tension between secrecy, which is necessary, and sharing information.  And I would argue that over the last five or six years, the committee has done a report on this, it’s been hard to strike the balance between those two.  And I think if this project continues that further, I think we can get a lot of progress in terms of, you know, there’s a lot more information being shared when you look at the National Counterterrorism Center and some of the new organizations that sprung up after this, the PM for Information Sharing Environment.

So these things, I think, have helped a lot.  We have policies in place.  Now I think the next phase of this is really get a platform in place, especially the IT infrastructure, to really enable this and make this much more robust.

MS. MORRIS:  Do you see their having to be sort of a sea change in how people think about such things?

MR. GORMAN:  Well, I think when you go back to the core of information sharing, a lot of this, there’s things like policies.  There’s obviously IT.  There’s things like XNL standards.  So those are important.  At the core of this is culture.  And if you don’t address the cultural piece and it gets so that people have trust, that they know each other and they’re comfortable sharing, you’re not going to make a lot of headway in information-sharing. 

So I would think, like, I would suggest things like joint duty, things like the National Soldier’s University do a long way to building this relationship, building that trust because people are working side-by-side and they’re rotating and they know each other.  I would say that’s just as important for information-sharing as the information technology is.

MS. MORRIS:  So does it look to you then that this is going to really change how the intelligence community does its job?  Is it going to be a huge change?

MR. GORMAN:  I would say, what you’re going to see in the short term with most of these efforts, the short term, you’re going to see changes and I would say you’re going to have some impact, you’re going to have policy, you’re going to have better tools, better alignment with the budget, you know, all of the kind of mechanical things.  But, long term, it will have major impact.  And I think if you look at what happened with the OD with Goldwater-Nichols, when that came out in 1986, you didn’t see changes in ’88 or ’89.  But by the mid-’90s, you saw major changes.

So it takes a while to change the culture and change practices and the infrastructure in places to support all of that stuff.  So I would say short term we’ll have impact, long term would be major impact.

MS. MORRIS:  And how are you going to be able to measure progress when you implement your vision?

MR. GORMAN:  Well, I think there’s several ways.  One of the things we did with the 500-day plan was build this into the management agenda so that this is something that’s front and center instead of – on the management agenda when the seniors meet and have discussion.  How are you doing on the project?  Are you behind?  What do we have to do?  Do you need more support to do this?  And then there’s metrics against it to understand – not to measure the activity, like did I do X, Y, or Z, but also measuring the outcome and the impact.  What difference does it make and can you translate all of this stuff in some type of mission impact?

So there’s a whole series of performance-management activities that are taking place to support this and, again, to try to put this again – not a kind of bureaucratic performance management, but, really, what does all of this mean in terms of mission?  And we always have to go back to understanding what the mission impact is as we transform the intel community.

MS. MORRIS:  And we touched on this briefly at the beginning and I wanted to circle back and focus on it a bit more.  And that is the budget, the human capital, the resources, what it is you’re going to need to pull this off?

MR. GORMAN:  Well, I think our feeling is that we have existing resources that were already resourced, we funded that.  And as we start rolling this out in terms of the implementation plan, as I said earlier, the strategic roadmap, we are doing basically training programming guidance to understand, okay, if we have to do these things, what type of resources do we need?  Do we need more?  Do we need to reallocate?  And we’re still in the process of working that.

(END)

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:

DNI McConnell Op-Ed in USA TODAY on Proposed Media Shield Legislation

Bill wrongly shields press

Those who leak classified data should be punished.

By Mike McConnell - Op-Ed - USA TODAY

The Senate is considering a proposal that would bestow a "privilege" on reporters, shielding them from revealing confidential sources of important national security information, even when their sources have broken the law by disclosing classified information. The intelligence community recognizes the critical role that the news media plays in our democratic society. However, this bill would upset the balance established by current law, crippling the government's ability to investigate and prosecute those who harm national security.

I have joined the attorney general, the secretaries of Defense, Energy, Homeland Security and Treasury, and every senior intelligence community leader in expressing the belief, based on decades of experience, that this bill will gravely damage our ability to protect national security information. Unauthorized disclosure of classified information disrupts our efforts to track terrorists, jeopardizes the lives of intelligence and military personnel and inhibits international cooperation critical to detecting and preventing threats. Those who illegally disclose information recklessly risk our national security and breach a sacred public trust.

It is a delicate balance to protect national security information from improper disclosure, while respecting the rights of the press to publish information it deems of public interest. This legislation upsets that balance by shielding those who illegally leak national security information and increasing the likelihood of destructive revelations in the future. The bill forces the government to meet ill-defined standards that require the disclosure of additional sensitive information. It also cedes critical judgments about harm to national security from national security professionals, charged with protecting the country, to the subjective determination of individual judges.

We do not see the problem that this bill is meant to address. All evidence indicates that the free flow of information has continued unabated in the absence of a federal reporter's privilege. Indeed, prosecutions in this area are exceedingly rare, and the longstanding policy of the Department of Justice strictly limits circumstances in which prosecutors may seek information from journalists. We must retain the ability to bring to justice those who break the law and cause irreparable harm to the United States and its citizens.

Mike McConnell is Director of National Intelligence.

You are subscribed to receive transcripts of recent media interviews from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. This information has recently been updated, and is now available.

August 7, 2008: Dr. Joel Brenner, National Counterintelligence Executive, interviewed by CBS News.

NIO Gistaro Describes Current al-Qaeda Threats in Open Briefing

On August 12, 2008, National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Transnational Threats, Mr. Ted Gistaro, addressed The Washington Institute's Special Policy Forum. Mr. Gistaro was appointed NIO in November 2006 after nearly two decades of service with the Central Intelligence Agency.

His speech discussed the current state of al-Qaeda as well as the current threats facing the United States homeland.

A copy of his prepared remarks are available by clicking here.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ODNI News Release No. 14-08
August 22, 2008

Conference Call with Dr. Ronald Sanders
Associate Director of National Intelligence for Human Capital

Results of the Fiscal Year 2007 U.S. Intelligence Community
Inventory of Core Contractor Personnel

August 27, 2008

DR. RONALD SANDERS:  Good afternoon, everybody.  And I’ll look forward to hearing from you when we get to the question and answer part of the discussion.  Let me tell you first why we’re here and why we care about this topic, secondly who and what we’re talking about, third a very brief historical context.  Some of you were part of this press briefing last year, so that would be a bit repetitive.  And then lastly, I’m prepared to give you some figures.  Then we’ll open it up for questions and see where that takes us.

First, we are here to talk about the fiscal 2007 results of the intelligence community’s inventory of core contract personnel.  And let me emphasize here, these are core contract personnel funded by the national intelligence program.  As you may know, this is the second year of that inventory.  We began this effort in fiscal 2006 for a variety of reasons: congressional concern, ODNI concern, a desire to get a handle on the role of contractors, and the extent of contracting in the intelligence community.

Contractors are an important part of the intelligence community.  They are a key component of our total force.  We define that total force as military, civilian, and core contract personnel.  Those core contract personnel are a subset of the larger body of contractors that do various things for the intelligence community – everything from serving food in our cafeterias to building satellites and computers. These are a subset.  And I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a second.

The reason they’re so important to us is because they provide flexibility, responsiveness, and in many cases very unique expertise in support of the intelligence mission.  But, they do need to be subject to appropriate accountability and oversight.  And we’ll talk about what the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has done in that regard as we go through the session this afternoon.

Let me now talk about the definition.  It is probably easier to define what these people are not.  And one of our difficulties even in our second year is getting clarity around this definition.  There is no single contract vehicle that characterizes core contract personnel.  They come in a variety of flavors, literally, from indefinite quantity contracts to other things.  And so we’ve literally had to back into this definition.

As I suggested earlier, these are not what we’ve called commodity contractors.  They do not build things and deliver them to the IC – satellites, computers, other things that are simply represented by our requirement for a particular product and their delivery of that product.  Secondly, they don’t provide what are commonly called commercial services – anything ranging from food services, guard services, and the like.  These are contract personnel that actually augment our intelligence staffs – the military and civilian members of the intelligence community.

One of the myths we hope to dispel in this afternoon’s conversation is that these core contract personnel, as I suggested, are a subset of the larger expenditures that the IC makes that don’t go to the direct labor – our workforce in the intelligence community.  We buy power.  We buy heat.  We pay rent.  All of those things go into – there are things other than direct labor.  And for example, the figure of 70 percent has been tossed about that the intelligence community is 70 percent outsourced.  I’m here to tell you that that 70 percent includes some of those things that I’ve just described – heat, power, when you are buying computers, et cetera.  And we are talking about a subset of that 70 percent that perform various core functions for the intelligence community.

As I suggested earlier, these contract personnel in this capacity have been critical to our mission.  The intelligence community went through a period of fairly substantial downsizing in the ’90s.  We bottomed out on September 11th or thereabouts.  And on September 12th, as our operating tempo increased dramatically and demands on our personnel increased dramatically, contractors in this capacity operated more or less like the intelligence community’s reserves.  We were able to expand very, very quickly by using contract personnel.  In many cases, these personnel were former intelligence community employees.  They were able to come in quickly and perform the mission even as we were busy recovering the IC’s military and civilian workforce.

As you may know, we have been hiring a great deal since September 11, 2001, in part to fill in some of the gaps that were created during the downsizing of the ’90s.  We’ve just about recovered.  But as many of you may know, it takes a fair amount of time to take a raw recruit off the street and develop him or her into a seasoned intelligence professional – an analyst, a case officer, et cetera.  And in the meantime, we’ve had to use contract personnel to augment our U.S. government military and civilian personnel in order to perform the mission.

At the end of the day, we consider these contract personnel part of our total force; and one of the reasons we’re looking at them so closely is to get a handle on our total capabilities to deal with any particular intelligence issue or challenge.  If we’re faced with a particular challenge, it doesn’t matter to us whether we address that challenge with military personnel, civilian personnel, or contract personnel.  The important part is to address the challenge.  But in order to do that, we need to understand what our core capabilities are among those three components of our total force.  So that’s one of the purposes of this inventory.

Let me give you some figures and then we’ll open it up for questions.  The fiscal 2007 results – again to underscore, these are for the national intelligence program only.  There is a military intelligence program, an appropriation that funds contract personnel as well.  We’ve only begun to look at those.  This is the national intelligence program.  And that is the appropriation controlled by the director of national intelligence.

Let me first give you figures by function.  And these are percentages.  As I suggested last year, I can’t give you exact figures.  I can give you percentages, so that you can get a sense of the relative contribution of contractors.  In terms of the functions they support, 27 percent of those contract personnel support collection and operations; 22 percent support enterprise information and technology, literally helping us run our computer systems, keeping them up to date, information security, et cetera; 19 percent support analysis and production; 19 percent support what we call enterprise management and support – those are basically the administrative functions, processing travel vouchers, processing personnel actions, those support functions, backroom functions that enable the IC’s mission; 4 percent support something called mission management, basically a coordinating function; and the rest support processing, exploitation, and research and development activities.  If you’d like, I can go into some of the specific things they do for some of our agencies – again, not exact figures, but more some of the functions they perform.

One of the things we asked our agencies to support is the reason they use contractors in a particular case.  We established a taxonomy and we asked them to report that.  Here again, I’ll share percentages with you.

Our agencies reported that of the total number of contract personnel, core contract personnel supporting the intelligence community, 56 percent of that total provided unique expertise, whether it was scientific and engineering expertise, foreign language, regional and cultural expertise, et cetera.  This is expertise that we did not have resident within the intelligence community amongst our military and civilian personnel, or it’s so scarce or rare that we literally had to go out and find it and use and acquire it through contracts.  In some cases, these are individual contracts.  In other cases, these are contracts with companies.  But again, in order – 56 percent, far and away, the most reported use of contract personnel is to provide unique expertise to IC missions and functions.

Eleven percent of that total involved work that had we had additional budget, we would have hired U .S. government civilians to perform that work.  I’d like to point out here that Congress has been very helpful in this regard.  Of course, they’ve seen this report.  They’ve also seen the classified parts of this report.  And one of the things we were able to demonstrate to them is that there is work being done by contract personnel in the IC today that we would prefer be done by U.S. government civilians, but for limitations on the number of civilians we can employ or our payroll budgets, et cetera.  

Congress in the fiscal ’08 authorization bill – (phone rings) – even though that bill has been vetoed – somebody going to get that; I apologize for the interruption – even though that bill was vetoed, Congress in that bill provided flexibility to exceed our employment ceilings in order to convert contract positions to civilian positions.  Now, as I said, that bill never become law.  But we have been exercising that flexibility.

Let me just note here that the figures I’m sharing with you and some that we’ll get into later don’t really reflect that change.  Again, that was a change in the fiscal ’08 authorization.  The figures I’ve given you are for fiscal 2007.  So there is a lag here from a change in law or a change in policy to its actual effects in our agencies and elements.  But I want to publicly express our appreciation to Congress to giving us that flexibility.  This will allow us now to optimize the balance between military and civilian personnel on one hand and contract personnel on the other.

About 10 percent of the contract personnel are engaged in IC work because it’s simply more cost-effective to use them.  About 8 percent are engaged in IC work because of funding uncertainties.  For example, year-to-year emergency supplementals that fund, among other things, the global war on terror, those funds are from year to year.  And so, we are reluctant to begin hiring permanent civilian employees against those supplemental funds literally for fear that they go away and we have to lay off those civilians.  So because of funding uncertainties, 8 percent of our contract personnel are brought on board in order to – as a result.

About 5 percent of our contract personnel are on board because of surge requirements, another 3 percent because of non-recurring projects.  Let me distinguish between the two.  What we did after 9/11, we’d characterize as our surge, with contract personnel serving as our reserves.  We had to ramp up very quickly.  And while we were busy hiring civilians and training them and developing them and eventually deploying them, we needed contract personnel to fill in the gaps.

Only 5 percent of our contract personnel are characterized as surge, in part because we have now begun to completely recover our workforce.  We have begun to replenish our ranks.  And so the contractors that we brought on board in 2001 and 2002 are being shifted to more support operations or in some cases let go altogether, which is again one of the advantages of using contract personnel in circumstances like this.  So 5 percent for surge; 3 percent for non-recurring projects.  And that’s work that we know up front has a very specific and definite duration.

So these are projects that may be the design and development of a building before we occupy it or something else.  But very clear – we know when the beginning is; we know when the end is.  In those circumstances, again, you don’t want to hire U.S. government civilian employees for that temporary work.  You bring in a contractor.  And when the work is done, you let the contractor go.  So surge is probably more long-term.  And even there, I think we’re reaching the end of our surge.  Temporary and non-recurring projects, we’ll always have a certain amount of that in the intelligence community.  And the remainder go to such things as knowledge transfer, et cetera.

So those are – let me also give you a sense of where the contractors are located.  These particular contract personnel, 73 percent, are literally on our premises; 27 percent are off-premises.  That means they’re working in a building owned and operated by their contract employer.  But the vast majority are literally in our midst.  They are in buildings collocated with U.S. government military and civilian personnel.  Ninety-five percent of them are in the continental United States.  And of that, 81 percent are in the greater Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area, so mostly a local phenomenon if you define local as that greater Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area.

That concludes my remarks and I would be happy to take questions from the folks on the line.

Q:  Hi, I am Pam Hess with the AP.  I’ve got actually a bunch of questions that have to do with the data.  Can you tell us what percentage of your total workforce, which you all have publicly estimated at around 100,000 is contractors?  I understand the numbers that you’ve given us are how that pool of contractors breaks down between function.  But I don’t have a sense of how large the contracting pool is versus the civilian IC personnel.

DR. SANDERS:  I’m sorry.  I was interrupted there for a second.  I’m going to have to break in about 20 minutes.  But I’ll come back on the line.  I’ve got to take an important call.  But I’ll come back if you all don’t mind holding and we’re still talking.  I can this year give you a sense of the percentage of contract personnel as part of our total workforce.  You’ve given the figure that’s been quoted around 100,000.  Let me make sure you understand that’s around 100,000 U.S. government military and civilian personnel, funded by the national intelligence program.

When you consider our total workforce – military, civilian, and contract – contract personnel represent 27 percent of that total workforce.

Q:  And that’s – is that 27 percent above the 100,000 or 27 percent of the 100,000?

DR. SANDERS:  No, it’s above 100,000, so don’t get –

Q:  I’m trying – is it 27 – so if I were to back of the envelope, are there roughly 27,000 contractors, or is this above – roughly 27,000 contractors versus 73,000 military, civilian –

DR. SANDERS:  Let me walk you through this.  And you’ve reached the limits of my mathematical expertise, so bear with me.  Again, I’m not going to give you raw numbers.  You’ve got the around 100,000 figure.  That’s the best you’re going to get from me this afternoon.  That 100,000 is military and civilian U.S. government personnel.  So the figure that we arrived at the 27 percent by adding together military personnel, U.S. government civilian personnel, and contract personnel – full-time equivalents.  That’s the denominator of this equation.  The numerator is the number of contract full-time equivalents.

Q:  Okay, you just confused me more.

DR. SANDERS:  So if you divide the number of contract personnel full-time equivalents by the total military, civilian, and contract personnel, you get 27 percent.

Q:  Okay.  Here’s what I’m still unclear on:  When you’re talking about around a hundred thousand, I just need to explain this very simply to readers.  Is 27 percent of that around a hundred thousand contractors or is the 27 percent on top of that around a hundred thousand?

DR. SANDERS:  It is not 27 percent of the hundred thousand.

Q:  It’s on top of.

DR. SANDERS:  It’s on top of.  It’s 27 percent of the combined total of military and civilian, which is around a hundred thousand and the contract personnel added in.  That’s the size of our total workforce and the 27 percent represents the contract personnel contribution to that.

Q:  Okay, do you have a breakdown of this – the contracting pool, how many of them are individual contractors and how many of them are working for a company?

DR. SANDERS:  No, I don’t.  One of the methodological challenges here has been to figure out how we actually count this.  And we’re trying to get as close to an apples-to-apples comparison between our military and civilian personnel on the one hand and our contract personnel on the other.  I can tell you that of – there are several thousand, literally, individual contractors.  I don’t have an exact figure and that number does vary a great deal.  It’s probably worth addressing that for a moment.  

We do bring on board, particularly for unique expertise, individuals who are former intelligence community employees,  In most cases, we would prefer to bring them back as U.S. government employees, but there are a couple of constraints to that that we hope will eventually be eliminated.  As you may know, if you bring back a retired civil servant, that civil servant has to give up some of his or her salary, an amount equivalent to his or her pension.

So, in many cases, if you brought them back as a government employee, they’d be working for free.  As patriotic as our folks are, they’re not likely willing to come back to work for free.  Now, Congress in the Intelligence Reform Act gave us, gave the Director of National Intelligence, the authority to wave that offset so that we can bring them back, let them collect their full pension, and pay them a salary.

So that’s in place.  That’s something called the National Intelligence Reserve Corps.  We established that in the summer of 2006.  That does allow us to bring back retirees without any financial penalty to them.  There is another constraint – and, here again, I want to publicly express our appreciation to Congress for this – even if we brought them back as government employees, without that penalty, they would still count against our employment ceilings.  Bringing them back as an independent contractor, they do not count against our employment ceiling.

Q:  Isn’t the employment ceiling only at DNI?

DR. SANDERS:  No.  Let me get a bit technical here:  Our employment ceilings are established in our authorization bills.  We’ve not had an authorization bill for now three years, but we’ve respected the limits that Congress has put on us and those limits have cut across the entire intelligence community, the entire national intelligence program.

Now, one of the things Congress did in the ’08 authorization bill – again, it didn’t become law, but we’re still going to exercise the flexibility they provided for us – they have accepted – they no longer will require us to count re-employed retirees against our employment ceilings.

Q:  Okay.  And I have –

DR. SANDERS:  So where before we had every – there were just a lot of incentives to bring back people as independent contractors: they didn’t suffer a penalty; they didn’t count against our employment ceilings.  Now they don’t suffer a penalty; and with the ’08 authorization, vetoed, but still, with the ’08 authorization, they won’t count against our employment ceilings.  So my bet is that that number of independent individual contractors will begin to go down as we can now exercise that full flexibility.

Q:  In the human capital report in 2006, DNI mentioned that the intel community workforce had expanded by about 20 percent since 9/11; it had recovered.  I guess that was the goal.  Does that 20 percent include the additional contractors that you talked about at the beginning of this or is that 20 percent within that denominator?

DR. SANDERS:  It is only the U.S. government civilian component.  I’m not sure where the 20 percent comes from, but I believe, in that context, it’s only the U.S. government’s civilian component.

Q:  Okay, I think I have one more – (chuckles) – and then I’ll let my colleagues get a word in edgewise:  Do you have a goal set to reduce the reliance on intelligence contracting or increase it or –

DR. SANDERS:  No, I think our goal is to first understand it and then, second, to manage it, to optimize it.  And that will vary by agency and it will vary by function; and, frankly, it will vary over time.  Let me sort of reverse that equation.  We do want to understand what our core military and civilian employment requirements are.  We call that our base workforce.  The nature of contractors is such that you do have a great deal more flexibility.  You can expand and contract far more readily using contract personnel.  So in any given day, week, month, or year, that number may go up or down.  Our objective is to stabilize our military and civilian workforce and then use contractors as appropriate to deal with temporary work surge, unique expertise, et cetera.

I will tell you that one of the things that we’ve led in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is far more disciplined and sophisticated workforce planning.  Our agencies now all have very rigorous, extensive civilian workforce plans.  We are incorporating military personnel requirements into those plans and, eventually, we’ll do more than just report contract personnel; we’ll establish a doctrine for their use and then we’ll ask our agencies to begin managing them in a more deliberate – (inaudible) – as you’ve suggested.

Q:  And I lied; I have one more question.  Have you tabulated – one of the limits that Congress is seeking to put on you is a limitation on using contractors in interrogations and in some detention operations.  How crippling will that be to those operations?  How much do you depend on them for that work?

DR. SANDERS:  I’m not going to get into particular pieces of legislation, especially while it’s pending.  I can tell you that we have various policies and laws governing the involvement of contract personnel in the interrogation process and they vary literally by agency.  So I would refer you to our individual agencies for that specific question.  They’re in a far better position than I am to respond.

Q:  And I lied again:  Congress said 125,000 per government employee is the average cost; 250,000 is the average cost of the contractor.  How do those numbers track with yours?

DR. SANDERS:  We’ve actually gotten a little more precise in that regard and, again, one of our challenges is to try to make an apples-to-apples comparison.  On the civilian side, the 125,000 is consistent with our best guess.  That’s salary, benefits, as well as full lifecycle costs; it is pension costs and health benefits into retirement, et cetera.  So 125,000 is a good figure.  

This year, as a result of the second iteration of our contractor report, we’ve been able to I think become more precise in our per-capita cost per contractor, contract personnel FTE.  And we’re now estimating it’s about 207,000.  So it’s still higher than a U.S. government civilian.  And as best we can calculate it, that 207,000 is direct labor, does not include overhead,  When you start trying to figure where overhead plays on the contract side as well as on the U.S. government side, it gets really, really fuzzy.  

So we’ve tried to narrow this down so that it’s a – the direct labor, salary, and benefit costs of U.S. government civilian versus those as best we can calculate them for a contract personnel, contract person, at least the full-time equivalent.  We’ve literally had to do the latter contract by contract; but the overall aggregate average is now about 207,000.  And we have provided that figure to Congress.

OPERATOR:  Thank you, sir.  Our next question comes from Siobhan Gorman.

Q:  Hi, thank you.  Just a couple of questions to get at the trends here:  The 27-percent number that you were talking about before, I assume that that is for the core contractors that you were talking about because you also suggested in your opening comments that the 70-percent number is accurate, but very broad, including things like electricity and food services and things like that.

DR. SANDERS:  That’s right.  That 70 percent, for example, if you use the analogy of your household budget, I doubt whether you consider, whether you think you’re outsourcing electric power when you pay your electric bill.  But when we pay our electric bill, it’s in that 70 percent.  So the 27 percent is a subset of that.  Is that clear?

Q:  Yeah.  And that’s the core contractors that you’re talking about in the report.  In terms of the numbers, are you seeing a trend of increasing or decreasing use of contractors when you look at the total numbers?

DR. SANDERS:  From 2006 to 2007, that number was virtually unchanged.  We declined a little bit, but in the middle-double digits.  And that’s probably within the margin of error.  So it’s essentially a flat line from ’06 to ’07.  But I will tell you that some of the flexibility the Congress has given us and some of the specific initiatives that some of our agencies have undertaken – and in this case, I’ll point as a potential benchmark, the Central Intelligence Agency – General Hayden has specifically said it is now time, since we have replenished our core workforce, to begin shifting contract support out of intelligence analysis and collection and either into back-room support functions or out all together.

Those aren’t reflected in the ’07 figures because most of this has been occurring in calendar, in fiscal 2008.  And the flexibilities that we got to literally civilian-ize those contract positions are in the ’08 authorization.  So I would expect a re-balancing.  I can’t promise that they’ll decline because something may happen tomorrow that will require a surge or a unique set of skills.  But I can tell you that now that we have the tools, we have the inventory, we have the oversight in place and the planning process in place, we’re going to be able to optimize and strike the right balance on a forward-going basis.

Q:  And are you – are you also looking at how many contractors are doing what is known as inherently governmental functions?  I assume that’s something a little bit different from these core contractors.

DR. SANDERS:  That’s an easy question to answer.  There are no contract personnel doing inherently governmental functions, but there’s a technical nuance here.  The definition of “inherently governmental,” the very precise, technical definition, is in the Office of Management and Budget circular number A-76 876.  It is not the layperson’s definition.  Most people, if you ask them what they believe is inherently governmental, they would tick off functions that are far broader than that very narrow definition.  So we are in strict compliance with that definition but, again, I want to emphasize, it’s very narrow.  It basically says the only things that are inherently governmental are some of the key decisions that are made with regard to resources and contracts and personnel.

But some of the other things we’ve talked about, like core mission functions – analysis and collection – the layperson may say those are inherently governmental; but by the strict reading of the A-76 876 definition, they are not.

Q:  Is there an effort to reduce the number of people who are performing the types of functions that other wise you would have government employees doing if, for example, the budget were to allow it?  I mean, it’s just – it’s come up.  Congressional officials have said that oftentimes they’ve expressed a concern that they’re sort of – I think in the broader sense of inherently governmental functions, they feel that there are contractors doing that kind of work.  So I just didn’t know if you were categorizing that or examining that as a broader issue as opposed to the OMB definition, which I understand as you’re describing.

DR. SANDERS:  Let me characterize that so I don’t get in trouble with my lawyers.  Again, we don’t do any – we don’t contract out any inherently governmental work.  We do have contract personnel doing core mission functions, that literally an agency’s configuration in that regard varies agency by agency.  It depends on the stability of their budget and mission demands, et cetera, where they are in their workforce recovery, all sorts of variables.  I think our objective is not necessarily to reduce the number in core mission functions, but, at the very least, we need to be able to explain that number.

We ought to be able to go to Congress and say, here’s how many U.S. government military and civilian personnel we need in analysis or collection or research and development.  And we’ll meet our surge temporary unique-expertise requirement with contract personnel.  So I think – I hope that that will begin to satisfy Congress, that at least we can explain the rationale behind the mix without necessarily setting predetermined targets or quotas to have so many of this or so many of that.

Q:  Thank you.

DR. SANDERS:  And let me apologize.  Let me go make my call.  If you all don’t mind holding, I’ll come back in about five minutes.  Is that okay?  I’m going to assume okay.

DR. SANDERS:  All right, everybody, I’m back.

OPERATOR:  Sir, you may proceed.

DR. SANDERS:  Okay.  I’m ready for the next question.

OPERATOR:  Thank you.  Our next question comes from Pam Benson.

Q:  Hi.

DR. SANDERS:  Hi, Pam.

Q:  I was just wondering – this issue of hiring back people, people leaving and then, you know, returning as contractors, have you looked into that aspect and are you seeing any increase in that or how much of an issue that is then?

DR. SANDERS:  In terms of competing with our contractors for our own personnel, I can tell you that we are not – repeat, not – hemorrhaging talent to our contractors, especially as we’ve been able to acquire some of the tools I’ve described to you.  So, for example, if you’re a retiring intelligence officer, you now have the option of coming back as a reemployed retiree where before you really – your only choice, unless you wanted to work for free, was to go to work for a contractor.

But we are not hemorrhaging talent either at the senior levels or in our mid-career levels.  We are losing talent from time to time, individuals; and of course that happens.  Frankly, we are becoming increasingly successful in hiring contract personnel to become U.S. government civilians.  I can tell you I have hired two myself in the last six or eight months.

We want to just make sure that the playing field is level, and we want to get a handle on the extent of that movement, if there is any.  And I do think now that we do have a handle on it.  I will refer you to specific agencies for specific initiatives.  Here again I’ll point to the Central Intelligence Agency as a benchmark.  General Hayden has specifically announced what he calls a quote, “Go Blue” program, which refers to bringing contract personnel into the intelligence community giving them the blue badge that signifies that they’re a U.S. government civilian.

So again, we’re not hemorrhaging talent.  We lose people from time to time.  We do gain people back from time to time, and I would not characterize this as a major concern at this point.

OPERATOR:  Thank you.  Our next question comes from Ben Bain.

Q: Yeah, hi.  Thanks.  I was wondering if you had any – you mentioned before the different percentages by functions of a 27 percent.  I was wondering if you had any idea of the percentage of contractors who would be considered doing managerial roles versus those that might be doing non-managerial roles in those different functions.  I wonder if you had broken it down like that?

DR. SANDERS:  No, we haven’t.  I can tell you that it’s a – that is one of the inherently governmental functions, to manage contract personnel.  On the other hand, there’s most assuredly units that are comprised entirely of contract personnel that have their own managers.  So I’m sure there’s some of that in there, but I just don’t have a breakdown.

Q:  Okay, and just one more question.  In terms of getting these baselines – you know, mention – you can understand kind of where you’re at and go from there – do you have any idea how many more years you might want to gather information to come up with that baseline?  Are these two years sufficient or do you need to kind of do another one?

DR. SANDERS:  No, in fact, we’re going to make this a permanent reporting requirement.  We have a directive in draft, and because it’s in draft I can’t share all of the details with you.  But that directive will make this a permanent reporting requirement.  We need to manage this year in and year out.  We need to build it into our budget.  We need to plan for it over the long term.  Again, in part, this begins with identifying our military and civilian requirements with the notion that where necessary, we’d use contract personnel to augment them.  But, no, this isn’t going to go away.  This is – while we have two data points, this is going to be a continuing requirement on into the future.

OPERATOR:  Thank you.  Our next question comes from Max Cacas.  And as a reminder, anyone wishing to ask a question, it is *1.

Q:  Hi.  This is Max.  Hi, Dr. Sanders.  How are you?

DR. SANDERS:  Good, how are you doing?

Q:  Good, fine.  I’m kind of wondering.  I’m trying to put this report that you released today in some context. And I know that the Congressional Budget Office Study was recently done regarding the number of contractor personnel versus the number of military personnel in Iraq isn’t on point with this.  But if you were to make the same comparison – and I know you’ve probably touched on this already, but I’m kind of looking for a neat sort of succinct way to make the same comparison when it comes to the ratio of contractor personnel to staff within ODNI as the CBO did, if it’s possible.

DR. SANDERS:  I’m not sure it is.  Let me try this, though.  If you look at that report, I’ll go back to one of the reasons contract personnel are so important to the intelligence community.  They do allow us to expand to meet mission surge requirements, and then to literally draw down without any adverse impact to our core workforce.  If you use the Iraq analogy with the military, if and/or when we begin to draw down our military forces, the contract personnel who are supporting them in various capacities will be drawn down as well.

Those military forces will not be laid off; they’ll be redeployed stateside or somewhere else.  They’re part of the U.S. military core capability.  Those contract personnel, though, that’s the flexibility that contract personnel afford us.  They do allow us to expand and contract as mission needs dictate.  And while the mission needs in Iraq have been over the long term, half a decade or more, the fact is, as those requirements change, as they decline, we can adjust without adversely impacting our core workforce.  

And I think the same thing holds true for the intelligence community.  We too have to surge in part to deal with mission requirements in Iraq.  And as those mission requirements change or stabilize, we’ll be able to readjust the contract support we require in that regard.  Does that help?

Q:  Yes, sir.  Just to kind of follow up a little bit, are you generally satisfied that the number of contractors you have within the intelligence community, is it a sufficient number?  Do you see some needs, maybe agency by agency?  Do you see this changing appreciably over the out years?

DR. SANDERS:  I can’t predict from here whether the percentage will change appreciably.  This is literally an agency-by-agency determination.  As I suggested earlier, rather than trying to predict, we just need to be able to know and explain.  The inventory help us know, not only in the aggregate across the community but agency by agency.  And then our agencies have to explain to us and we in turn have to explain to Congress and OMB whether we have the right mix in that total force, military, civilian, contract.

And, again, it will vary by agency, it will vary by mission.  It will vary depending on the operating tempo of that mission and other demands on it.  So, again, without trying to predict the future, what we’re trying to do is make sure we have the data and the tools to be able to manage this in the right way.  I will tell you that based on two data points, we do not – repeat, do not – believe we are over-reliant on contract personnel to accomplish our mission.

Q: Thank you, sir.

OPERATOR:  Thank you.  Our next question comes from Robert O’Harrow.

Q:  Hi.  Thanks for having us here.  I’d like to know a little bit more about the basic number.  I just need to be clear before I write my story.  There’s 100,000 that you mentioned that sounds like it’s a number that excludes the contractor workforce.  Is that correct?

DR. SANDERS:  That’s correct.

Q:  On top of that, there is a proportion of contractor workers that represent 27,000 of the overall workforce that includes contractors.  Is that correct?

DR. SANDERS:  No.  So let me try the algebra again.  The 27 percent is the answer you get when you divide the raw number of contract personnel, expressed in full-time equivalents, by the raw number of military personnel, civilian personnel, and contract personnel.  That denominator represents our total force.  You know approximately the value of two parts of that total force.  You know that military – U.S. government, military, and civilian personnel comprise around 100,000.

There is a third raw number that I’m not going to give you that when you add that number with the 100,000, you get a total.  That’s a total IC workforce.  When you divide that total IC workforce by the number, the raw number of contract personnel, you get 27 percent.  Have I thoroughly confused you?

Q:  Well, it seems a little bit – I don’t – why couldn’t we just simply derive the number?  If 100,000 represents the workforce that doesn’t involve the government – I mean, the contractor workforce, can’t you just – can’t we just derive the number of contractors with that?  I mean, I don’t understand why you’re only giving us a percentage?

DR. SANDERS:  I suppose you could.  The reason I’m – well, first of all, the reason I’m only giving you a percentage is that the raw numbers, the breakdown of those three components remain classified.  It remains classified the raw number of military versus the raw number of civilians.  The only thing that has been de-classified here is the, quote, “around 100,000” figure.

Q:  So bear with me a second – I just – again, just to get this right because this is going to be news for a lot of readers, and it’s information and we want to get it right.

DR. SANDERS:  Absolutely.

Q:  We know that the intelligence community, including contractors is not 100,000 plus 27 percent of the total workforce.  Is that correct?

DR. SANDERS:  That’s right, yes.

Q:  And so that doesn’t get us up close to 130,000 or 100 – the total workforce?  I mean, if there is a way of thinking about a way of releasing that or giving us an “around” number without giving us a classified number, that would be helpful for clarity and precision.  So think about that before the call is over.  That would be great.

Secondly, that 27 percent of the total, how is that relative to 2001 and maybe a decade ago?

DR. SANDERS:  The answer to your last question is easy:  We don’t know.

Q:  Okay.

DR. SANDERS:  This data wasn’t collected before fiscal 2006.  And I can tell you that one of the very first things we set out to do when the ODNI, when the office of the Director of National Intelligence was established, was to try to get a handle on this.  So we – and it’s not even clear to me whether our agencies collected that, some of them.  I can tell you that all of them did not, or all of them in the aggregate did not.  That began only in 2006.  So I can’t tell you what – quantitatively what the trend line looks like.

Q:  We know there’s been a sharp increase both in government employees and in contractor workforce, but we don’t know the precise numbers.

DR. SANDERS:  Again, let me parse that.  We know – you know there’s been a sharp increase in the number of U.S. government civilian employees in the intelligence community.

Q:  By about 20 percent.

DR. SANDERS:  I’m not sure of that figure, but it has grown substantially.  And I’m not being disingenuous; I’m just not sure where the 20 percent comes from.

Q:  No sweat.

DR. SANDERS:  But we do know that from ’06 to ’07, the number of contract personnel essentially flat-lined.  There’s a slight decline but within the margin of error.  So I can’t tell you whether the second part of your statement is true, whether there’s been a sharp increase.  I think – I’ll speculate – and I think this is a fairly safe speculation – we know there is a sharp increase in contract support immediately after 9/11.  Again, we just didn’t have the civilian employees on board, trained, developed, ready to deploy in order to accomplish our mission.  But that trend line is speculative.  I don’t have hard data.  The only hard data I have is for ’06 and ’07, and there it’s essentially flat.

Q:  Do you know how many – last question here – do you know how many military, government, and civilian intelligence employees there were at the low point in the 1990s?

DR. SANDERS:  I don’t off the top of my head, and I don’t know whether that’s classified or not.  If it’s not classified, we’ll provide it to you.

Q:  Very good.  And what about my – the very first question.  Is there any way to give an “about” number that doesn’t violate the classification rules and where you can tell us a rough kind of more-than number on the number of contractors that you found?

DR. SANDERS:  I don’t think there is anything classified about this.  I think if I were smart enough and there was enough time, you can just do the algebra –

Q:  Right.  Okay, very good.

DR. SANDERS:  And I just don’t have the algebra in front of me.

Q:  It’s simply 27 percent of the total workforce, and that number is larger than 100,000.

DR. SANDERS:  Yes.

Q:  Okay.  Thank you.

DR. SANDERS:  And, you know, my son could probably do the algebra; but his dad can’t.

Q:  I’ll give him a call on the hotline.

DR. SANDERS:  Okay.

OPERATOR:  Thank you.  Our next question comes from Siobhan Gorman.  Ms. Gorman, your line is open.  Ms. Gorman, please check your mute button.  Your line is open, ma’am.

DR. SANDERS:  I’m not getting anything on this end.

OPERATOR:  We are not either, sir.  And that is our final question.  We’re showing no further questions.

DR. SANDERS:  Okay, let me – if you’ll permit me then, let me just summarize.  As I said at the outset, this is – this is about our fiscal 2007 inventory of core contract personnel.  These are personnel funded by the National Intelligence program – per pre the questioning, they comprise 27 percent of our total force; that is, 27 percent of our combined total of military, civilian, and contract personnel.  These are core contract personnel.  They support our core mission and administrative functions.  They don’t build satellites or computers.  They don’t serve food or guard buildings.  These are in effect staff augmentees; they are embedded.  And as I indicated, literally three-quarters of them are in government buildings working side by side with U.S. government military and civilian personnel.

They are critical – they are a critical component of that total force.  We could not have accomplished our mission post-9/11 without them.  As we surge to hire civilians, we had to at the same time perform our mission and we had to rely on contract support in order to do much of that.  We are now in the process of optimizing the mix of military civilian and contract personnel.  I think the Office of the Director of National Intelligence deserves some credit for conducting the inventory, working closely with the agencies to define terms, develop a methodology.  And now as we begin to move forward, develop a doctrine for the use of managing these – for managing these core contract personnel, and then eventually incorporating them into the way we plan for our total workforce.

So I think we’ve passed the crawl stage.  We’re walking.  Eventually we’re going to be able to run on this, and I think it’s something we do owe the American taxpayer.  This is not – repeat not – an anti-contractor effort nor is a pro-contractor effort.  It is simply a way of trying to make sure we have the requisite capabilities to accomplish our mission, whether those capabilities are brought to us by a uniformed member of the military, a government civilian, or a contract person.  And it is – those contract people are a subset of that larger figure that’s been bandied about, the figure that includes the amount of money we pay others for rent, for heat, for power, for appliances, like computers, et cetera.  That 27 percent is a small subset of that larger figure.

So we’ll be doing this every year.  It is going to be a permanent reporting requirement.  And as we do this from year to year, we can’t predict whether the numbers will go up or down, but our objective is to be able to know, understand, and be able to explain the mix the military, civilian, and government personnel to OMB, to Congress, and ultimately to the American people.

Well, I’m done.

OPERATOR:  Thank you, sir.  This concludes today’s conference.  Thank you so much for joining.

National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) Director Michael E. Leiter Responds to The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/opinion/l31terror.html

The Terrorist Database

To the Editor:

Re “That Troubled Terrorism List” (editorial, Aug. 24):

You seem willing to accept as fact the press release of the subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology. You shouldn’t.

Railhead, our five-year information technology upgrade program, is not an “emergency program,” nor is it limited to our terrorist database and online terrorist information Web site. Railhead is the National Counterterrorism Center’s contracting vehicle to incrementally upgrade system capabilities over time and operate and maintain existing systems.

To suggest that the National Counterterrorism Center’s support to watchlisting is “on the brink of collapse,” as the subcommittee press release stated, is patently ridiculous.

The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment continues to do exactly what it was designed to do: serve as the nation’s database of terrorist information. In early 2008, the National Counterterrorism Center identified a number of issues associated with the Railhead contract. Corrective actions were initiated and the center briefed Congressional oversight committees.

The subcommittee’s chairman, Brad Miller, and his staff never engaged with the National Counterterrorism Center to address their concerns. Mr. Miller, his committee and ultimately your readers would have been better informed had such basic steps been taken.

Michael Leiter
Director
National Counterterrorism Center
Washington, Aug. 25, 2008

Mike Wertheimer, Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analytic Transformation & Technology, discusses Analytic Transformation on CNN & Federal News Radio

CNN:

WOLF BLITZER (CNN): Social networking for the intelligence community. That's the idea behind a brand-new website. Most of us will never even be able to see it, let alone join it.

Let's go to our Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr. She's got a little sneak peek for us. All right. Barbara, what is this all about?

BARBARA STARR (CNN): Well Wolf, we did get a sneak peek. The next time a real world James Bond blogs on, here's what he might see.

STARR: Facebook, one of the many social networks where millions meet online. The U.S. intelligence community has been eyeballing all of this, not to spy but to politely steal the whole idea. Welcome to Aspace, perhaps the most exclusive social networking site ever. It's open only to top U.S. intelligence experts. This is like Facebook for spies?

MIKE WERTHEIMER (ODNI): It's much more than Facebook for spies. Finally the spies are not only going to get Facebook, but they're going to get Facebook, they're going to get YouTube and Google.

STARR: You need a security clearance to join this unprecedented online revolution for an intelligence community trained to not share secrets. This is the place for experts to connect the dots.

WERTHEIMER: It's a place not only where spies can meet but share data they've never been able to share before.

STARR: Each analyst has a page like Wertheimer's to post information, ideas, even pictures. All aimed at unfettered discussion.

WERTHEIMER: Work spaces for us are private enslaves where you can invite five people, ten people, 100 to work a problem in collaboration with you.

STARR: Analysts from different agencies will be able to chat online about secret matters like a new Osama Bin Laden video, if there is one.

WERTHEIMER: They can put it up in almost real-time and share it with a network of folks working that issue.

STARR: The ultimate hope is this ability to think out loud and share classified information may someday prevent another 9/11.

WERTHEIMER: I don't know that it is preventable. But when I see analysts working here, I think it is our best chance to prevent it.

STARR: And Wolf, anticipating a question a lot of people might have, the intelligence community says it's got plenty of cyber security to protect this site. They even hope President Bush will want his own classified web page.

BLITZER: I hope they do have good cyber security. Thanks for that.

Federal News Radio:

MAX CACAS (FEDERAL NEWS RADIO):  All right, so Mike, tell us first off about the focus of the Analytic Transformation Conference that just wrapped up in Orlando.

MIKE WERTHEIMER (ODNI):  Last year, we had the premier event in Chicago where we announced the analytic transformation and we talked about the concepts and ideas.  So this year it was a real report card on what we were able to accomplish over the course of the last 12 months.  And we demoed our A-Space initiative, actually went live on it.  We talked about all the other initiatives that we had put in place and where they are now and let the audience really take our temperature and feedback whether they think it’s healthy or not.

CACAS: Now, in your keynote address to the conference, you mentioned A-Space.  You just mentioned it here.  Give us an update on what’s new with – this is basically a collaboration tool, am I correct?

WERTHEIMER: It definitely is. A-Space is designed for the analytic community of the intelligence community to actually have all the capabilities of social-network tools.  We have our version of Facebook, if you will, our version of YouTube.  We have our own versions of blogging, all the kinds of social networking tools that people have come to expect in their day-to-day lives on the Internet.  But we’ve plugged in data sources unique to the community from six different agencies, never before able to be accessed from one location.  So now our analysts not only have a space to communicate, to be social networked, but also to do the real work of analysis unfettered by all the firewalls and all the security controls we normally place on them.

CACAS: You know, we did some coverage of using Web 2.0 collaboration tools not too long ago.  And talking just about exactly the kind of things that A-Space covers, it sounds to me like you’ve made some remarkable strides in terms of using these social-networking tools made possible by Web 2.0.

WERTHEIMER: It’s exactly what we’ve done.  We’ve done it in a development cycle of only one year.  We’re issuing new capabilities every three months.  And the exciting part for us is September 22nd we go live, which means we are ready to go with two substantive analytic problems that we’re going to work – one that will be focused on what we call enigmatic facilities, facilities that aren’t what they appear to be; and another one on the FATA, the foreign-administrated (sic) tribal areas in Pakistan.  So those will be two legitimate full-op test suites that we’re training the entire analytic community that works those problems.  On day one, they’re going to be populated and off the ground and running.  We’re going to learn from them.  And then in three months, in January, we have our next major release with increased search capability.  Can you imagine, for the first time, analysts not only will be able to search across all our top secret and higher holdings they’ll be able to search down to all our secret holdings all in one time.  And we’re trying to build in, in a future release, the actual ability to search unclassified network all at one time.

CACAS: Wow, that’s incredible.  We’re talking to Mike Wertheimer, the Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analytic Transformation and Technology about the aftermath of the Analytic Transformation conference just wrapped up in Orlando.  Mike, could you talk to us a little bit about the impact that A-Space and other directives such as the outsourcing standard are expected to have on the intelligence community?  These are some remarkable tools you put together.

WERTHEIMER: The tools just drive the creativity of the analyst.  That’s the beauty of Web 2.0 tools.  They become for the first time able to manage their own environment.  So what we’ve found is that agencies, as they’ve become aware of A-Space and their analysts are starting to demand more access, agencies are actually ponying up more databases so they can expose more of what they collect for more analysis.  It’s having an actual cascading effect, which is I want to be in now instead of why I don’t want my folks – it’s just another tool.  They’re actually seeing it as the environment it needs to be.

We’re hoping not just about collaboration and not just about more data but the exposure of thinking and alternative hypotheses, where you get the power of a community to drive out bias and actually highlight more and more of the alternative analyses that in the past were so under the noise that we never gave alternatives.  We took one viewpoint.  And we’re driving those away.  And everywhere we go, and everyone we talk to, the analysts just feel for – just for the first time free.  I gave a metaphor during the conference that the analytic community is as if they’ve been in the middle seat of three seats on an airplane with their seatbelt tight – nowhere to move, no flexibility.  And we’re telling them, not only throw off the seatbelt; but we’d appreciate it if you’d walk around the cabin.

CACAS: There you go.  Now, Mike, give us a little update also on C-Space.  We understand that ODNI is developing C-Space for those who gather intelligence in the intelligence community.

WERTHEIMER: Well, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, we are very flattered, because the excitement and the capabilities of A-Space caused the collection community – that’s what the C stands for – to put in requirements for C-Space.  Our CIO who has been our partner in building A-Space has now put together a plan to take the best of A-Space and instead of build a duplicate C-Space to expand A-Space to have also collectors participate without losing any of the excitement that the exclusivity gives, yet still allows the greater community to participate.  I suspect we’re about two years out from having that full up and vetted, because the collection community will have to be modeled just like the analysts did.  Give them the kinds of capabilities that they’re excited by.

CACAS: Wow, that sounds terrific.  Mike, can you talk to us a little bit about the Multi-Intelligence Working Group and how they’re doing in some of their work?

WERTHEIMER: The Multi-Intelligence Working Group is a very, very exciting program where we have set aside about $5 million a year to invest in experiments that involve at least two agencies and two different kinds of what we call INTs, so maybe it’s a signals intelligence and human intelligence.  And these are experiments where no one agency feels they can afford to pay for the entire experiment or the risk is too high for them to bear alone.  So they applied for grant money to a committee that I chair.  And we take this money and we farm it out to entrepreneurs within the community.

The beauty of it is that in one case – let me give you one case just this year.  We invested $500,000 for a new initiative that everyone thought couldn’t succeed and no one was willing to invest in, in and of themselves.  It involved about five different agencies.  It has to do with drugs in the Caribbean.  And within one year, this program not only succeeded but interdicted over a quarter of a billion dollars worth of drugs and drug paraphernalia in one year.  And this is the story we get over and over again.

The beautiful part of this is for every dollar we spend, almost on average we get a dollar of investment from the community.  We’ve had over a 50-percent success rate of our experiments actually transitioning into operations.  I think it’s a very rare experimental program that for every dollar invested is matched by a dollar from the community and then has a 50-percent success rate of being a persistent capability.  And we are hitting home runs left and right through this.

It’s all about empowering analysts.  It’s empowering people who don’t have a vehicle when they’re only in one agency to reach out and meet another agency, be creative in how you can mix different kinds of intelligence together.  That’s what collaboration is about.  And the MINTWG – our way of saying the Multi-Intelligence Working Group – is helping to fund that.

CACAS: Sounds good.  Mike, do we have another Analytic Transformation Conference to look forward to in 2009?

WERTHEIMER: I sure hope so because if the story we can tell next year is anything like the story we told this year, we are going to knock that mission ball out of the park.

CACAS: Very good.  And where will that be held?

WERTHEIMER: Don’t know.  It’s up to the INSA – the Intelligence and National Security Alliance that has been our partner and our sponsor in this.  And it’s up to them.  They lead an industry group of very, very interesting and talented people.  And they demand – as long as they keep demanding, they want to know about – as long as they continue to demand to know about analytic transformation, I promise we’ll be there.

CACAS: All right.  Sounds good.  Mike, thank you very much.

WERTHEIMER: Thank you.

  Remarks and Q&A by the Deputy Director of National Intelligence
For Analysis & Chairman, National Intelligence Council

Dr. Thomas Fingar

2008 INSA Analytic Transformation Conference
Orlando, Florida

September 4, 2008

Morning & Evening Keynote Speeches

MR. JOHN BRENNAN (Chairman, Intelligence and National Security Alliance):  It is a great honor and privilege to have somebody who has been so instrumental in seeing through and standing up the task of orchestrating the analytic community within the intelligence community.  And Tom Fingar, who has had a long and distinguished career and was most recently at INR before he came over to the Office of the DNI.  Tom has done a superb job from a substance standpoint as well as from interacting with the analytic workforce throughout the community.  And so, without further ado, I’d like to introduce Tom Fingar, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis.

(Applause.)

DR. THOMAS FINGAR (Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis & Chairman of the National Intelligence Council):  I trust you can see me because I can’t see you.  The lights are really quite, quite bright.  I know I’ve got many friends out in this audience and I thank you for coming.  I thank John Brennan and INSA for convening you and for giving us the opportunity to build upon the foundation we laid in Chicago and the subsequent meetings in Washington, to give reality to the term alliance, and the partnership between the intelligence community, and between those of you who serve and support from outside of the government.

The opportunity, indeed the necessity, to combine what each of us know separately to form a larger body of more relevant and more timely information to keep our nation safe is one that we must not squander.  My task this morning is to talk about customer relations on the eve of an administration change.  I’m delighted for that even though I had no idea what the title meant when it was assigned to me because it provided an opportunity to think about three messages that I’d like to lay on you this morning and begin a dialogue.  And I mean that sincerely.  As we talk about the transition, the change of an administration, what are the things that we need to do that we may not have yet initiated?  Or that we may not have told you about?  What are the problems you think we need to be aware of as we go into a transition? 

One of the bottom-line realities is that the Officer of the Director of National Intelligence has never before been through a transition.  And simple questions like how many and which members of the senior staff are expected to hand in letters of resignation or expected to stay on into the next administration or to be around for just a period of transition?  In parts of the government, certain positions, this is spelled out very clearly in law.  It doesn’t affect very many people in the ODNI.  In others, there are precedents and traditions and patterns and the hardcore civil service component that is there, the career service.  We’re staffed, roughly 50 percent, by detailees, who by pure coincidence, are on terms of rotation that would normally expire at about the same time as we will change administrations.  So there’s a lot of, sort of, housekeeping detail that involves making it up as we go along.  That means there is both wide latitude for mistakes, but also great opportunity to take advantage of insights, suggestions that you and other friends of the community may have.

What I’d like to do this morning is to present a brief overview of the state of play, with respect to the ODNI and the transformation agenda.  I will be speaking from the perspective of analysis.  That’s the one I know best.  I’d like to provide a sense of what we are doing as we go into the ODNI’s first change of administration.  And then I’m going to rather shamelessly seek your support and they go to the bottom line of my presentation and my pitch, if you will, that though I am certain that we have not done everything perfectly, that there are still some pretty ragged edges around the transformation, around the stand up of an organization and the integration of the community, I think we’ve done more well than we’ve done badly and I think that one of the worst things we could do to our community over the next six months to a year, was to suggest that we ought to start all over again.  It’s neither necessary nor desirable to upend the grain board, make intelligence, the intelligence community, the centerpiece of partisan politics or reinvention.  I’ll come back to that point, but that’s where I’m headed in this presentation this morning.

First, where are we, with respect to customer support?  What’s our relationship with our customers?  When I accepted this job three and a half years ago, one of my highest priorities was to restore confidence, customer confidence, congressional confidence, the self-confidence of the analysts in our community.  We’ve been pretty badly battered, not just by the experiences of 9/11 and the Iraq WMD estimate, but by the way in which the tar brush was so liberally applied to tens of thousands of people who had not been involved in the production of the estimate or involved directly in 9/11-related activities.  Morale was pretty low.  The gang that can’t shoot straight, the keystone cops, couldn’t connect the dots.  You remember the imagery and verbiage that was used.  We didn’t have to sort of win confidence of people who didn’t know about us.  We had to restore confidence among people who had been dealing with us for some period of time.

We had to do this, in part, by restoring confidence in the quality of the work.  Quite simply, we had to make it better.  Many of you heard me say before, the overall quality of work was much better than it was depicted in the caricatures of the incompetent, bumbling community.  But it was nowhere nearly as good as it could be, as it needed to be, to meet the much more complex array of issues of which we were asked to provide information and insight.  We seriously had to tackle the trade craft issues, the collaboration issues, the sharing issues, in order to produce better support, better analytic support, more timely support from the collectors to military forces in the field in a very different kind of support for the intelligence community to our first responders, the law enforcement community, fire departments, and so forth inside our own country.

The term better doesn’t simply refer to the quality of tradecraft in the product, however.  The support that we provide had to be noticeably more useful.  It had to be timely.  It had to be on target.  It did very little good to restore confidence, indeed, very little good for the security of our nation to, at annual evaluation time, critique, in a rather boastful fashion, how many products we had produced, how significant that product had been to this or that customer.  We had to be truly useful.  We had to be there at the right time, in the right place, with the right information, with important insights.  We had to be able to move these across IT boundaries and across institutional boundaries.  We had to know exactly what our customers need and when they needed it and in what form they needed, at what level of classification they could use it, and a whole array of related questions.

We tackled this with a multi-pronged approach.  Beginning with the, what our customers need, starting point, we decided to take advantage of the existing structure of the community, a structure that is widely caricatured, ridiculed, why do you need 16 intelligence agencies?  Sixteen is actually a number that is too small when you consider that there are major players like the National Counterterrorism Center or the National Intelligence Council that aren’t counted in that number.  But they exist.

And they exist for one fundamentally important reason.  Each of the customer sets, each of the missions that they support is in some ways unique, requires tailored support, customized support, the right kind of expertise.  So as a collective, we’ve got a wide array of customers and issues.  But you also have a wide array of experts and organizations designed to support them.

Wanting to take advantage of the up-close-and-personal relationship between an individual briefer and the people they support, the folks who are down the hall in the same building, the weekly or other interactions that occurred to know what people needed, to vacuum up those tasks so that we could translate them into more useful products.  To take advantage of the difference in expertise, the difference in missions to capture synergies – synergies that in the past were too often lost because we didn’t know about work being done at another component of the community.  We didn’t know who was working on the same or related activities.  If we did know who they were and where they were, we didn’t know how to contact them.  If we knew how to contact them, the wires or the firewalls or the other technical impediments were in the way.

And if we’d solve that – there would be some, but that database is not open to people of this agency – kind of impediment.  And even if you overcame all of that, there was very little knowledge of the quality of work being done by colleagues who were not known personally.  Very difficult to take advantage of divisions of labor, to capture synergies without fundamental confidence in the competence of prospective colleagues.  So the confidence in our work is in part a confidence in one another to reinforce the self-confidence that we had to build.

We can talk, if you wish, in the questions, about some of the specific ways in which we improved the tradecraft, the adoption of standards for products, for sourcing of materials, the training programs, the way in which an increasing number of products – beginning with the President’s Daily Brief – through single agency products are being done with input from colleagues in other agencies.  This is mostly a bottom-up phenomenon.  It’s not senior managers going around and saying Fingar told me I have to make you do this.  It’s analysts who now that they have a vehicle through the ARK (sp) and the Yellow Pages, through interconnected e-mails to find one another, have realized that they produce better products with input from colleagues.

So this bottom-up phenomenon has resulted in a steady increase in the number of products.  And where I count them is in the President’s Daily Brief because it’s in my job jar.  The analysts get it.  They’re now discovering new ways and feeling more comfortable about producing better product and understand what’s necessary to produce that better product.  All of that is still in the nice to do category.  The real issue is do those we support think we’re doing better.  Do they have greater confidence in our work?

And here, I think the answer is overwhelmingly yes.  If anyone out there or several of you have picked up a different view, I would love to hear it, because that would mean it’s a specific problem that needs attention.  But the general situation, I think, is really quite good.

And let me cite some illustrative examples, which I recognize – as a 40-odd-year-long analyst do not constitute definitive proof of my proposition.  Let me begin with the first customer.  The President spends between 30 minutes and an hour with us six days a week.  He’s a very busy man.  He’s a very demanding senior executive.  If he thought we were wasting his time, we would get short shrift.  The views directly and indirectly from him, from Steve Hadley, from the cabinet members who now attend at least one day a week sessions built around the intelligence presentations, the introduction of what we call deep dives.  Read-ahead papers provided to the principals, analysts going into the Oval Office to present and defend and respond to questions sort of demonstrating who we are, what we know, to be able to say directly what we don’t know, what assumptions we are making, to talk about the collection capabilities.  We’ve done almost 100 of these deep dives.  We’ve had more than 200 analysts who have been participants in this.

I confess to a high degree of trepidation when we began this.  I knew we could start off with a bang.  I wasn’t sure how deep our bench was.  John Kringen and I, when John was the DDI, sort of can’t believe that the balloon is still up there.  I keep waiting for the air to come out of it.  But after 100 of these, we are still going strong.  And we have them scheduled out for weeks, and in some cases months in advance, because they have proven useful.  That is an important vote of confidence.

Second is our oversight folks, both congressional committees, and the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.  The PIAB did its own evaluation of analytic performance and has pronounced it much better on several dimensions.  Congress and oversight is a little more mixed.  That we have restored confidence in the product is tempered or obscured by the highly partisan character of an awful lot of exchanges.

Something that has produced a situation that is a little bit uncomfortable for us, for me personally, that as we have restored confidence in the product we have increased the incentives to use the intelligence community and intelligence products as a club with which to bludgeon opponents on issues.  And the desire to have unclassified products, the need to appear in sessions that are clearly structured with among the objectives embarrassing folks in the other party, that it’s very gratifying when members come up to me in person and compliment the product.  And when I have sought to gain dispensation from producing certain products or appearing in certain sessions, it is no, we trust you.  The you is not Fingar.  It’s the analytic community and the intelligence community, because we have confidence in you that we think it important that your insights be presented as a part of the public debate.  That’s more gratifying than comforting.

Third measure of quality and factual basis for confidence because we share it are the evaluations that we perform.  We established under the IRTPA legislation an analytic integrity and standards group.  With an action group comprised of representatives of all the agencies developed the standards.  Those standards are applied by evaluation teams of some ODNI staff and many contractors.  We are now standing up in agencies that did not have them evaluation programs of their own.  But the end of the year, all agencies will have them.  They will apply a common set of standards to their own product.

The vote of confidence – more than a dozen agencies have come to us and asked for special evaluations of product lines.  This is kind of cool, right?  When the kid comes to the teacher and asks for extra homework and then to have it graded.  Agencies are using these evaluations of strong points and weak points to adjust their training programs, to provide extra help to managers that have some weakness and so forth.  And it’s clear, because we’ve now got data on thousands of products that in aggregate, we’re getting better.  Probably agency by agency, we’re getting better.  I say probably because we have gone out of our way, again, to build confidence in the process by doing everything we can to preclude invidious comparison.

When we share results outside of an individual agency, they’re always aggregated – the community as a whole.  We give the results to the agency that requested them.  They can do with them as they wish.  But they own that.  And you can use it for diagnostic or pedagogic reasons.  But we’re not trying to introduce an element of unhealthy competition that would get in the way of confidence and collaboration.  And it’s working.

And finally, a point that I alluded to a moment ago with the bottom-up, agencies and analysts have more confidence in what we’re doing.  It’s sort of you know – it’s like pornography.  You know it when you see it.  If you’ve been around the intelligence community, you know what good and what is not as good.  You know when the reaction to your product is one that elicits a, I can use this.  Or even more frequently the case, when the ideas and the insights are stolen without attribution.  It’s not stolen.  We are a support organization.  We provide the input.  I’ve been around policy-makers long enough to know if there’s a good idea in there, and it becomes their idea, that’s a big win for us.  They take ownership of it.  They’ve accepted it.  They’ve accepted the quality of the work that underlies it.  And it shouldn’t bother us that we don’t get credit.

Some of the transformational tools, techniques that you’ve heard about from others and will hear about – intellipedia, A-Space, and so forth – have crossed a threshold or tipping point here.  To be not something that is sort of novelty – for many not something that is viewed as zero-sum.  I could do my real work or I can play in that particular sandbox.  But becoming tools that they have found useful.  And the numbers of users, the requests to be pilots in A-Space, from the beginning when this stands up to have some of the issues – enigmatic facilities, the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas in Pakistan and so forth, to be a part.  They see value in this.

So we’ve restored confidence in who we are and what we do and how we do the work.  Confidence is always, in my view, a fragile commodity.  Hard to build; easy to lose.  As my friend Ron Burgess has put it, one “oh shit” wipes out 100 “atta-boys.”  Just as in so many other endeavors, we have to be good every day in all respects or it undermines the confidence in everything we’re doing in all areas.

As we go into the transition, we’ve got some challenges associated with simultaneous support of multiple customers, with quite different needs.  And we’ve been thinking about this actually for several months.  Again, having been around through a number of transitions, there is a natural and normal process in the latter years of an administration, particularly a two-term administration.  They know a great deal about the issues being worked.  The agenda narrows to that smaller number of issues that are really important to wrap up, if possible, before the end.  And it’s not simply a legacy issue.  It’s a desire to take advantage for the nation of the work, the effort that has gone into working hard problems, to try and push them over the line before a handoff in our nation gives potential advantage to the folks we are working with or against on a problem, where they have continuity and we have learning curve.

So as we approach the end – and it’s been certainly over the past year – the bar for us with this administration is very high.  To come in with things that are very useful on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Arab-Israeli issues, and a dozen or so other.  It’s very high that the work that we do, the importance of the issues, the magnitude of the effort, the support to war-fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, the magnitude of the effort in the global war on terror has resulted in the reallocation of effort within the community.  Analysts, collection, resources, technical capabilities focused on these high-priority items.  No matter who wins, we know for sure that the next administration will not be as high on the particular learning curves that I’ve just described, that the agenda will be different.  It’s likely to be much broader.  It will include all of the high-priority issues that will be there for the handover.  But there will be many more.

So we started many months ago to wrestle with the how do we need to be using our rotational assignments, our recruitment practices across the community to rebuild capability that we have diminished in order to support higher priorities?  We have to be ready to go on January 20th.  We can’t take that as the starting gun for rebuilding capability in Southeast Asia, in Latin America, in Africa and some of the other areas where we have reduced effort.  So that has been (inaudible).

In addition the normal rather heavy load of support that we provide analytic products, we’ve generated dozens of community level NIEs and NIAs, ICBs, and ICAs, and other array of products so that they’ll be ready to go.  Again, experience indicates that people will want a fresh look at the issues.  Sort of dusting off something with a 2006 or 2007 date on it, and saying things haven’t changed very much with respect to this issues is not going to instill confidence.

We need to do the updating.  We need to do the rethinking.  Some of what passed for conventional wisdom or analytic insight before we had instituted the new procedures for tradecraft and quality and collaboration were simply not up to the current expectations and have to be reworked.

And we will have a rather full shelf of materials ready to go.  We will have groups of briefers ready to go on essentially any topic.  Some of these will be done out of the NIC-coordinated community level.  Most of them will be within agencies.  Most of the products prepared for the customer supported by a particular agency will be from that agency.  But again, we’ve got enough confidence in the quality of work done by one another that they will be leavened and enriched by products produced elsewhere in the community.

So part of what we need to convey from day one is that we are an integrated enterprise, that when you touch whatever your particular contact or normal or integrated intelligence unit, you’ve touched the community writ large.  And we will worry the problem through.  If we need to go to the Marine Corps, to the Air Force, to Treasury to get specific expertise and insight on a problem, we’ll do that for you.  We’re not going to say go to Treasury for that question.  And we’re not all the way there but we’re a long way toward where we need to be.

We know what we have to prepare for, for the next almost five months.  We don’t know with any precision what comes next.  We’ve begun to engage with the campaigns.  The President authorized us to reach out to the campaigns to offer substantive briefings at a time and place of their choosing.  We’ve now done one.  The Obama campaign, indeed Senator Obama, received a briefing on Tuesday.  Our approach in this is complete transparency.  If one campaign asks for something or receives something, we notify the other.  We don’t want to be an issue.  We don’t want to appear to be or enable anybody to construe us as being partisan in this.  We’ve provided an array of topics that we think sort of collectively in the community are ones that might want to know about early on.  But we’ll of course receive any request.

It’s a little different this year than it has been in any previous year or many previous elections.  It’s different because we don’t have an incumbent running for an office.  But it’s also different because we’ve got three sitting Senators who can call up any one of us in the community at any time from their Senate capacity and ask for things.  Is the request from the Senator as a Senator or is the request from a Senator as a Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate?  As a Senator, we wouldn’t tell anybody else what was asked.  Within the guidelines that we’ve laid out for the campaign, we want transparency here.

We’re preparing – and the agencies are preparing – materials on their specific missions and so forth.  We’re also preparing a guide for customers of intelligence that will be common in many respects: how to read intelligence, what confidence levels mean, how to interpret sourcing information and the like, and specific to the agency in question and the customer sets that they support.

We will be more useful if we have better informed customers.  And come January and February and March, again, no matter who wins the election, we anticipate having a large number of new customers who do not know the intelligence community.  They know about us from infamy, from reputation, from caricature, from open congressional testimony, from scurrilous press, from good repute, through trusted interlocutors.  But we will have to again build an understanding of what we can do and confidence in it.

I’m quite certain that we will be able to do this, not just because we’ve thought about it, because we have plans and procedures that are more or less in place, but because we do have a good product.  We have good people.  And we have confidence in ourselves.

Now, the pitch for support.  I mentioned the partnership, the alliance, that the community is able to do all that it does, not just because it has a large workforce and a large budget but because we day in and day out work with people like you.  You develop technologies.  You have ideas.  You have suggestions.  You prod us.  You taunt us.  You talk us up or talk us down in the circles in which you move.

And though I certainly would never, never ask professional colleagues and friends to say anything about analytic transformation or the efforts of the ODNI or the intelligence community that you believe to be untrue or inaccurate, to the extent that you’ve caught the wave, share the excitement.  Sense that we’re on the right track.  See the potential in what has been built over the last few years.  We ask that you share that with the friends and colleagues that you know.  Your opinions carry weight.

And if we do all that we can in order to increase the likelihood that we start off at zero, if not in the positive side of the ledger, if we minimize the goddamn intelligence community kind of stereotypical starting point, the better for us, the better for the nation, the more quickly we will be able to move forward and focus on the real issues.  And I will argue strenuously in any arena that the intelligence community should not be anywhere near the top of the next administration’s agenda.  We are not broken.  We are not the problem.

The nation has a long list of serious problems and challenges, and momentous if not historical opportunities that deserve and require the attention of senior people.  On some of them, we can make contributions.  On others, they’re just outside of our realm.  But the focus should not be on us.  We should not have another Monty Python moment of, “and now, for something completely different.”  Let’s upend the game board, knock the pieces over, and rearrange them.  We don’t need that.  And I believe it would be very, very undesirable if not dangerous to do so.

I’ll return to that.  But let me sort of prepare the way again by repeating the confession that we are not yet all that we aspire to be, that we haven’t done everything right, that there has been certain elements – maybe a high number of elements – of what the Chinese call crossing the stream by feeling for the stones with your feet.  See what’s going to work.  See which pilots are going to be successful and are worthy of further development and which should be abandoned.  Since our approach at the beginning was not we know exactly what needs to be done and decreeing that – I’ve been around Washington, as have my colleagues, too long to know that and to attempt that.

Building confidence in a new organization, going from a white blackboard with no people to an organization charged with overseeing a budget that is larger than the gross domestic product of most nations, running a hugely complex operation is not something that one should willy-nilly make changes or not willy-nilly discard what is in place.  We’ve done things more slowly than anybody would like.  Everybody would like to get from current situation to a more desirable one as rapidly as possible.

But it’s important to remember the context.  It’s a context that shaped us and will sound defensive and making excuses.  But it’s a context that by and large will persist into the next administration.  It includes such things as the sheer size and complexity of the community.  It’s like trying to turn an aircraft carrier.  It’s not going to turn on a dime.

Doing it in the midst of two wars – Iraq, Afghanistan – global terrorist threats, the long, growing list of complex challenges, nuclear proliferation, the rise of extremism, energy dependence, energy diplomacy, and the like – these ought to give anyone pause as they consider making the changes, that the challenge we’ve had and will continue to have is akin to what my friend Peter Clement described as swapping the wings on an airliner full of people at 30,000 feet.  We’ve got to make fundamental change and have been making fundamental change without breaking anything.  We don’t have the luxury to sweep that aside, do away with that activity.  It has to be incremental if it’s going to avoid immediate and serious deterioration of the support we provide to a wide array of customers.

We’ve been through the challenges of a start-up organization.  When I think back on things producing three budgets over a period of eight months – Caryn Wagner I think is here someplace – recruiting and bringing on board people – remember the first performance evaluations.  We had people from 22 organizations of the U.S. government for more than those in the intelligence community being evaluated by people from 18 agencies using – used to, accustomed to 14 different evaluation systems.  We’ve moved well beyond that.  But that illustrates sort of the magnitude of what we worked our way through.

And now that we are mostly through that, the transformation agenda has taken root, is picking up speed, and as importantly has momentum.  It has momentum so as it picks up speed it will be more self-sustaining.  I think it’s terribly important that we not lose that momentum, that we not expend a lot of time and effort in another series of studies to determine whether round really is the best shape for a wheel.  We just need to accept that we’ve got it more right than wrong and move ahead.

If my gray hair doesn’t convey it effectively, I’ve been in the intelligence community 38 years, 15 of them in senior positions.  And I have never seen the community perform more effectively than it does today.  That’s not simply because of ODNI.  It’s because of the commitment, the dedication, the capabilities of individuals and agencies throughout the community.  We are not broken.  We are working arguably better than we ever have.  And mostly, we know and agree on where we need to be.  Getting there is always a challenge.  The devil is in the details.  Turf issues arise.  Mythology is not yet dead about individual components.  But we’re getting there.

It’s not necessary to revolutionize the community.  And it’s also dangerous.  The intelligence community, as you know as well as I, is fundamentally about people.  We have great gadgets and gizmos and capabilities and creativity.  But they came from the mind of some individuals.  They’re usually individuals working collaboratively.  And morale matters.  And sense of achievement matters.  And confidence matters.

And I worry a lot – and this worry is reinforced – I do monthly brown bags with analysts that we pull out of the analytic resources catalog.  So they’re thematic; but other than that, they’re randomly generated.  And as I look at our graying baby boomer contingent that’s been through a lot.  From the halcyon days of the Cold War through the uncertainties of downsizing and rightsizing, to the excitement of rebuilding and transformation, I’m afraid that sort of let’s go back and start again, back to a blank piece of paper, back to square one, our most senior people will take advantage of the opportunities for retirement that they now have.

The other end of the spectrum are the 55 or 60 percent of the workforce that joined since 9/11.  Exceedingly talented, committed, patriotic, professional, whose initial experience in the community, by and large, has been in the new dispensation, within the era of transformation, within the ability to work through, in, build expectations, career expectations in an environment they expect to be predictable.  If we remove that predictability and they see the loss of the seniors at the top, I’m afraid that we will drive more of them in the direction that is predicted for the generation of short excursion tours in a variety of jobs and industries and activities.

And we don’t have to lose very many at either the high end or the youthful end of our spectrum before we are in a world of hurt as the expertise, the experience, the understanding of customer requirements that they have is absolutely critical.  With that rather shameless pitch for your help, your support, let me shift to invitation for questions and comments.  What did I miss?  What should we be thinking about as we gear up to support a new administration?  What should we be thinking about in terms of outreach to the Hill, to the media, influentials around the campaign?  Preparing now for the arrival of people who may have no experience or indeed may have experience with the intelligence community from a different era?

With that, let me thank you for your attention and invite your questions and comments.  (Applause.)  I’ll come out here and get in front of the lights so I can see you.  Do I just field questions?  I will invite them.  I hope I haven’t intimidated this crowd.  Anybody?

Q:  (Inaudible) – yesterday we heard colleagues getting up and say two things that were interesting.  One was that it’s possible that we have too much information sharing going on in the community and that there will never be a change in the way we handle the department – (inaudible) – I don’t want to mischaracterize what you were saying.  But I think the sentiment was that there is a lot of data to go through.  Not everyone needs to know everything.  I wanted to know – I wanted to hear your reaction to that.

DR. FINGAR:  Yeah, that’s the point Mike Wertheimer has been making for three years.  The conflict between the flood of information – that we take in enormous volumes of information – and we want to confound that problem by telling people to share it with one another.  Let me just – several points of that – one is, through the physical sharing, sharing of the digits for the information, we facilitate not just collaboration but we facilitate divisions of labor.  Trusted colleagues who I’ll follow this stream of reporting; you follow that stream of reporting.  We’ll share our notes and observations.

We’ll do this when we get to A-Space sort of on a board where the senior comments are available to anybody, the juniors questions and comments are available to anybody.  So that not everybody has to go through the same pile of data, that we have moved well down the road to making it accessible, making it sharable, making it interactive in facilitating the division of labor.  We have to continue to push in that direction or people will simply never move away from their electronic inbox.  It’d be constant constipation.

Can you have too much information sharing?  The short answer is no, my short answer.  There are materials that need to be protected that do not need to be, should not be shared with everybody.  I thin of this as concentric circles.  Most information in the community, the vast majority, should be available theoretically and actually to, say, everybody in the intelligence community with the right tickets.  We’re clearing people in the different agencies to the same level.  If they’ve got the same clearance, they should have the same access to the information, provided that the systems have been certified to the same level.  And they now have been.

The innovation of a single community CIO responsible for the accreditation of systems, we’ve now moved to the point where – again, in theory – essentially any information can move across the electronic pipes between all of the components.  I forced this one a little bit using my PDB responsibilities.  As that became a community product, we had to be able to share drafts across the community.  We had to get them off the dedicated LAN that they were – onto a larger one.  And we did it.  It wasn’t immediate, took a matter of several weeks.

Then, my argument became, if I can move the PDB containing the most sensitive information we’ve got across this system securely and it’s been certified, why the hell can’t I move garden variety secret vanilla materials across this same system?  So most stuff should be available so that we can have the divisions of labor.

Everything should be discoverable.  Everything will be discoverable in the Library of National Intelligence.  That does not meant that everybody gets access to everything, that there do need to be compartments, and SAPs and so forth.  But if you’re working on a subject as an analyst, you’re entitled to now – indeed, I’d argue you must know – if there’s a body of reporting, a body of analysis on your subject that you haven’t seen.

So discovery – and it could be really quite generic – Chinese submarines.  Now, that we actually collect on and worry about Chinese submarines is not going to surprise anybody.  There is no counterintelligence that we would do that.  So you know that it exists.  You need to be able to go to somebody in your own organization who has got access to that and say, I think I need that, to at least begin the dialogue that may result in, no you don’t.  I’m in there.  I review a product. I will ensure that you’re not saying anything that is inconsistent with that material but you don’t need it.

Or, yeah, I think you do need it.  And a process to request and gain access to a specific piece, a specific document, or perhaps the entire compartment.  So we need to have that kind of control on it to protect truly sensitive materials.  But we have to be able to discover their existence.  We have to have procedures that are not arbitrary and that begin from judgments about I need this to do my work as opposed to I decide on whom I will bestow the privilege of looking at this information that I’ve put into my compartment.

I hope that got to your question.  Anybody else?

Q:  As I was listening to Mike Wertheimer yesterday, I was struck by the implications for what he was saying about the analytic community.  And you know, I applaud all of the standards that are being written and all of the other things that you are doing to normalize analysis across the community.  The concern I have though is that once those documents are written and once they’re distributed, agencies are just by their natural inclination either going to move and put them into practice or say, okay, they’ve done their work.  I know best, and ignore them.  It goes on all the time in government.

So my question to you is, if you’re going to normalize the analytic workforce, are you thinking about the implications for what Mike has said?  Should we be thinking about the implications for what Mike has said?  For example, are we thinking about whether we ought to hire analysts into the community along the lines of the military services?  So you hire them in as a batch of people; you put them through common training, common understanding.  And then, from that pool of people, they go out into the individual agencies.  Have you gotten to that point in your thinking or should we be thinking along those lines?

DR. FINGAR:  This one is – there is a gap between my thinking, which would be my vision, and reality, and the what is possible.  Let me preface the rest of the answer with saying, sort of my approach is that it’s a lot easier to argue from demonstrated success than it is to sell an abstract vision, which is a kind of a step at a time and prove its worth and keep moving.  Don’t settle for anything that is good enough if you know there is something better.

I like the ideal.  I share the ideal of being a member of the intelligence community.  Where one happens to work within that community – CIA, INR, MCIA – sort of ought to be a function of interest, expertise, opportunities to build and use that expertise, not the basis of mythology about who is best and who is worst.  It ought to be governed a little bit by proximity to residence.  But building that sense of we are one community and analysts everywhere are as good as, as professional as those in any other part is a building process.

Pat’s catching my eye – the joint duty in the military that took a decade.  You know, good idea – it took a decade to put into place.  We are going to compress that – we are going to attempt to compress that.  Some of the reciprocity, the access to data, but you can’t have joint duty requirement and rotate people around who you expect to be your senior officers, and have them go from one agency to another agency and say, well, when you are here, you no longer have access to what you had access to in your other organization, but you can have this stuff, which you won’t have access when you go back.  So we have got to tackle that kind of problem.

There are serious differences of view among the leadership across the community as to whether having purple analysts here, bringing them into the community, giving them a sense of a community, and then specialized training, acculturation into an agency is the way to go.  Or it is community agency; understand the values, the mission, the practices of this agency before you go out into the larger sea of people because then you can contribute to understanding.  If you don’t know anything about your agency of assignment, you can’t sort of bring much to the table.  And the opposite is if everybody is blank at the same time, they build confidence in one another and a network of friends that goes –

We are going to move – unless what we are doing is a turn in a direction of bringing people into the community, into an agency, but building that integrated single enterprise early and rigorously.  One small step in that direction – critically important step – is sort of sharing of information on vacancies. 

First, at a collective – even though we are very big, that we shouldn’t exacerbate or perpetuate gaps by simply replacing with a clone somebody who has left – in a single agency, bill it without regard to the larger community.  If we have got three of those folks scattered around in other places, let’s get some complementary expertise, so making that transparent.  And when resumes come in, as they now do, we get far more well-qualified applicants for most positions than we are going to hire.  In most cases, the agency is going to hire one.  The rest of those resumes used to go into the burn bag.  Now they are shared around the community.  Here are some good people.  We didn’t pick them, but if you are moving toward a hiring opportunity for which this individual’s skill set might be appropriate, here they are.  Take advantage of it.  Posting jobs together.  We are moving there by steps. 

It is going to take, I think, the playing through of the generational change that we are now witnessing before it becomes easy and natural to do.  And guys like me have to get off the metaphorical stage to allow, again, the 60 percent that have come in, in a very different environment to move into the management positions and interact with their colleagues with the same disregard for lanyard and organizational boundaries that they have for barriers in the real world.

Q:  You mentioned the generational kind of difference between those folks that are about to – are at the sunset of their career and those that are at the sunrise – to use a metaphor, and that the – I might argue that – and many have – that the attributes that the newer generation are bringing are exactly those attributes that we would like to embrace and encourage.  However, almost all of our systems – the people policies, the business and mission processes are geared toward this generation that is about to move on.  And what is your feeling about the need to shift these policies and processes to better map to that younger generation?

DR. FINGAR:  The need is acute and it’s palpable.  The procedures and processes, the norms that we have in place that many of us have lived with – were not irrational.  They were well-grounded, reasonable; they work – or worked.  They work less well.  And I think – you know, my experience, sort of seniors and that tiny little band of mid-level – sort of GS-14, 15 types – recognize that what worked well in the past is not working as well in the present, as it did in the past, and probably won’t work in the – we are not going back to the future.  We are going into a new era.

The people who are gray and experienced and have been with this process for decades – I think by and large sort of recognize the dwindling adequacy of what we did – don’t have a clear idea of exactly what needs to replace it and are wary about transition, about running risk, about breaking something when you get from the known to the unknown.  Natural.  Social scientists will tell it.  But naturally, the younger people that you referenced here that come in with a different set of skills and expectations – I think it is not simply pandering to the way in which they like to work – the digital generation.  It is recognizing that technology and learning, availability of information is just very, very different than it was a decade – let alone three decades ago.  And instead of being – we shouldn’t simply follow the whim of the youth in our workforce to make them feel happy about coming to work, so that they will stay on the job. 

We need to be sensitive to that, but there is a – they have had more experience in a realm of capabilities that others of us have bumped up against after we were more set in our ways.  For me, it is still kind of an unnatural, self-conscious act to do things with the computer that is totally intuitive to my kids.  And as we link this back to the transition to the new administration, regardless of who wins – and this is not commentary on one or another candidate – regardless who wins, a greater percentage of those filling senior and mid-level positions are going to come out of that more digitally oriented generation, a no-limits generation, a no-barriers generation. 

They are going to be used to receiving information in little bits moving across the computer screen, to multitasking.  And we have to orient our mode of support to fit their mode of receipt.  If they change the shape of the outlet, we had better change the shape of our plug.  Otherwise, we are going to very quickly become unhelpful.  If we become unhelpful, we become irrelevant.  If we become irrelevant, we are obscenely expensive. 

Yes, ma’am?

Q:  Good morning, sir.  One of the comments made a little earlier with the ICDs and all that are coming out, which, by the way, I think are great – good guidelines and all to work from and oversight, governance, performance measures coming up.  My only concern is – not as an excuse or whining because I know the Army way is three bags full will do it no matter how many few people we have or how many are doing whatever.  It is not that anyone chooses not to do something or elects not to, it is how many people you have.  If you have three people and 10 tasks, it is doable.  If you have three people and 20 tasks and oversight and reporting to do, something either has to drop or done later. 

So the only thing – I guess what I am saying and not asking is that as all these ICDs keep coming out and provide a (inaudible) to do oversight on this and that.  We are going to run out of people, especially when we have to start pulling from our analytic community to help do these things because the non-analytic community is small.  Discussion yesterday came up about contractors, the percent versus government, converting to government, the percent of contractors to government.  Certain things are government inherent in oversight.  And we also have limitations on the growth to our government staff.  So there is only so much we can do depending on how more and more ICDs and oversight requirements come out.

Just something to consider.  I can’t necessarily tell you even right now where is the line as far as – you know – we have no more bodies to tap. 

DR. FINGAR:  This will sound somewhat Pollyannaish – probably admit that.  I’d juxtapose it – I probably wouldn’t be where I had been over the last 20 years if I was just Pollyannaish.  I think most of what you have described is both a very real problem and a transitory one.  Let me pick out a couple strands of that.

ICDs – most of the community will say, you know, another set of rules, have got to follow them, have got to change and do it.  Most of the ones in the – again, the analytic realm – (inaudible) – have actually been welcome.  There is not very much resistance to this.  These make sense.  This is good.  This is a good practice.  But at least as a transition, supervisors that need to assign resources to ensure that the good practices being mandated are actually being followed – to tutor, to mentor, to pair people up for mentoring, so that they can do it correctly.  The goal is not to have standards police.  It is to internalize the behaviors, to train people, evaluate, reward their performance, recognize managers on their performance, so that this becomes internalized and you don’t need the same overlay of mentoring and monitoring that clearly is necessary in the short run.

We would be remiss, in my view, if we simply tossed it out there and said, here is the new rules.  Get with the program or get out of town.  It is, here is the rules.  We are going to help you.  We have trained – ODNI, by analytic integral standard – have trained people in each of the agencies.  In some cases, we have made some money available to hire contractors to help get the programs off the ground.  I will try to make a broader point here.  It is not just the standards, but more broadly, it is not enough to decree new ways of doing things. 

We have to involve people in their development and the system to understand and implement.  But we will get there.  And I think we will get there pretty quickly, where these become an accepted – because we have pretty quickly achieved that in the past at an agency-by-agency level, either with comprehensive, written-down, trained to procedures unique to that agency or had no training at all.  And people on the job learned how to do it by watching others. 

The numbers-versus-tasks problem that you point to is a tremendous motivator to get the training wheels off the bicycle of new people, whether they are new to the community or new to the account, as quickly as possible, so they can carry their load.  So we are used to doing that.  We will continue to do that, but in a – again, I think a relatively short period of time, we will have complementarity across the community, the ability to mentor across agencies because it is to the same standards.

The final point concerns the when do you take stuff off the list.  This is hard.  We are working at ODNI level – not just analytic – on a budget process that we went through a drill in April of folks in from – I think it was 50 different constituencies within the community, customer sets, non-title 50, non-title 10 agencies.  I said, what do you need from the intelligence community?  Part of the drill was what should we stop doing.  What should we deemphasize?  Where can we get some savings?  It will surprise no one in this room that we had a list when we were done of 280 new requirements came out of this process.

And something on the order of two dozen – most weren’t serious – suggestions as to what we could stop doing.  It is natural.  It is normal.  We don’t have a lot of unimportant things on our to-do list.  And even the – in aggregate, least important is important to somebody.  And we do pride ourselves on being able to provide customized support to niche activities.  And in the aggregates, certain kinds of mapping support the fighter pilots – may not stack up real high on the list of – but it sure is important to the fighter pilot.  And it sure is important to the commander that is going to dispatch people.

So striking the right balance.  I think in the near term, getting things off the list is going to be hard.  And what we have to do is insist two managers.  You have been running some of these activities for a decade or more.  And every year you ask for more money to perform that activity.  What the hell kind of manager isn’t able to get efficiencies after a decade?  So more and more – we want to try and identify areas that we can perform at an adequate level of service with fewer people, maybe fewer dollars, and have it tailored to get to exactly the people we want and not the broad brush – somebody might find this useful, and keep operating on it.

Sensitive to it because the community will step up and try to do everything it is asked.  And if we get spread too thinly, again, we are not accurate.  We are not useful.  We are not relevant.

Yes, sir?

Q:  Hi, Tom.  Staying on the same theme of ICDs – in January of 2007, when John Negroponte was DNI, he signed Intelligence Community Directive 200, which essentially states the IC will not have the entire breadth and depth of expertise to cover all of its – and support its mission.  It must reach out to academia, think tanks, NGOs, private business.  How is, how should, how will the IC, whether it is ODNI or the entire community, reach out to those constituencies?  Is it a one-way street via IC reaching out?  Or does private business, academia, think tank knock on the door?  Or is there a portal –

DR. FINGAR:  It is a great question.  And some of you think it is a setup question – those who know me and my passion for outreach.  We finally got out – it is about a month, month-and-a-half ago – ICD 205, which is on outreach.  It took two years to work through the system – a directive that basically said it is the responsibility of analysts to reach out to expertise.  It is a responsibility of agencies to enable folks to reach out to the expertise.

CI concerns, notions of proprietary – who owns the experts that are outside of the intelligence community?  We have collectors who think they own anybody that isn’t wearing a badge inside the community.  They had to work through that.  We are now working through implementing guidelines on this.  But the basic approach is individuals – analysts is my world, collectors, technologists, IT types – know that there are people outside of their organizations, outside of the IC, outside of the U.S. government, who are knowledgeable, who are working complementary or the same issues.  They know or can know which one of those are good and which ones are not nearly as good. 

They should have as a part of the normal way in which we do work is spend taxpayer money to draw on as much expertise as we can – and efficiently.  And I am talking here not about contracted activity – that might grow out of this.  But the journalists, the professor, the corporate analyst or developer that is working a problem and is excited about that problem and publishes on that problem – to be reachable and willing to answer questions or share insights.  This should be as natural as the conversation you would have with the person in the carrel or office next to you.  It has to be a two-way street.  It won’t work if it is all take and no give. 

And here is why we have to be cautious here because we have to train people to compartmentalize – that, which they know because they are all source and they read the newspapers.  They are exposed – and that, which they only know because of sensitive collection activity.  And I recognize that it is quite different to talk about insights gained than it is to talk about the evidentiary base for those insights.  And they can actually go quite far – but we have to actually make our folks comfortable.  If we are not sharing insights and ideas with the people that we have reached to, what is in it for them?

Now, some get a thrill about, you know, group used to the intelligence community or components of the community.  Some are just excited about the subject.  But if this is going to be a meaningful exchange, there has got to be mutual benefit of this.  We are developing a rolodex of experts, which I hope we are actually going to stand up pretty soon.  These are outside experts, who have explicitly agreed to be receptive to approaches from analysts in the intelligence community.

We will try to work out rules to the road to make sure that the same individuals aren’t deluged.  But a lot of them are already on a list of individual agencies to make this possible.  It will surprise nobody here that we are going to have to make the rolodex of unclassified experts a classified document.  (Laughter.)  And therefore, hard for the outside people to update – had to develop all of the cutouts and so forth to make that work for sound CI reasons.  But we have to make it a part of the way we do our business because I would hazard to say it is a part of the way every person in this room does their job now.  You are in contact with colleagues and competitors, foreign folk working a problem at all stages of the process.  We have to do the same because when we need that expertise – I mean, really need it – it is too late to begin the search.  You have to have developed the ties, the relationship, the evaluative criteria.  And my vision on this is to have a chunk of the vetting located in the open source center.

So if somebody has developed sort of an understanding of what Susie X’s field is, what she really knows – her talents, capabilities, how she has interacted – that that become (inaudible) to anybody in the community, so that they can start further up the learning curve or understand I don’t need to bother Susie because she is a regular interlocutor of my colleague in the other agency and I just get it indirectly.

We are on the way there.  But this is a change of culture for the community, where if it ain’t secret, it ain’t real.  If somebody is not cleared, they are not worthy.  That is yesterday’s thinking.  We have got to get to tomorrow, where not just our own people, but our customers live.  I see John’s up, so my time must have been expired.  Thank you for all of the work you do for us.

(Applause.)

MR. BRENNAN:  Thank you very much, Tom.  We greatly appreciate your taking time out of your busy schedule to join us here.  But I think more than that, we appreciate your many, many years of selfless dedication and service to our country and to the national security mission of the intelligence community.  And I think I speak on behalf of all the folks here that it is heartening to know that at this time of a critical transition in our country that career professionals like yourself are at the helm and are able to steer the ship straight.  So we wish you luck in that endeavor.  And again, thank you very much for the time that you have been here.

DR. FINGAR:  Thank you, John.

MR. BRENNAN:  Good evening, everyone.  Can I have your attention, please?  I hope you enjoyed the meal and the conversation.  As I mentioned earlier, we are truly fortunate to have America’s premier intelligence analyst with us, Tom Fingar, who has been able to spend time with us today speaking about analytic transformation and the business of intelligence.  What we thought we would take advantage of is being here to address some of the substantive issues on our minds.  And I passed along to Tom a couple of subjects and topics that people would like him to address. 

But Tom is an exceptionally polished speaker, who has had to navigate the shoals of the political environment of Washington.  But we very much appreciate his willingness to use this opportunity to address some of those issues confronting this administration and will confront the next.  So Tom, please.

(Applause.)

DR. FINGAR:  A laptop in front of me – I have no idea what to do with that.  I am not a PowerPoint guy; I am an outline guy.  And what I would like to do this evening is to have a kind of a Build-A-Bear approach to a briefing – what I am hinting toward is a question-and-answer session – one of the things that I actually enjoy most is responding to questions and drawing upon the insights that I have gained from the people that I work with and have worked with for a long time. 

But let me begin by thanking two people, John Brennan, again, for the support.  (Applause.)

It at times is lonely out there on the forward edge of bureaucracy in trying to change deeply instilled practices and procedures.  And having had INSA as a source of support from the days that it was SASA [Security Affairs Support Association].  One of the first talks that I gave on taking this job was to this organization.  The feedback, the support, the encouragement, the reinforcement are genuinely appreciated by me and by all of my staff that work with you. 

And the other is to Mike Wertheimer.  I told him after his presentation that if only he had a little more passion – (laughter) – for what he does, we would be absolutely assured of success.  But the opportunity – (applause) – the opportunity to work with colleagues like Mike.  He mentioned Andy, who is here somewhere, I assume – Andy Shepard – and many, many others.  This is not a solitary journey.  This is a group effort, and a group effort that depends on continuous infusion of ideas and constructive criticism.  And I am sure we will get both from you tonight and in the weeks and months that follow.

I also appreciate the opportunity to do substance for a change.  In my Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis role, almost always I am speaking in the transformational mode, the standards mode, and so forth.  But at heart, I am an analyst.  And I enjoy thinking about, talking about, responding to questions about national security challenges.  And what I would like to do tonight is to illustrate why it is important to smash barriers to collaboration by presenting two illustrations of what we face.  One is subsumed under the rubric of 2025, the NIC [National Intelligence Council], now quadrennial look out into the future, which is done for new administrations.

We time this to be completed and released after the election, but before people are ensconced in their positions and are so busy with the daily grind that they don’t have any time to think.  This is sort of the strategic-level considerations.  The second will be an example that I will begin with Iran, which is one of the topics that John said someone had expressed interest.  Cutting into the complexity and interconnections of the world in a kind of a six degrees of separation or from this morning, 6.2 degrees of separation that are absolutely a fundamental part of the world we live in.  The interconnection, the overlap, the interaction of many seemingly discrete developments.  And I will work that, and then we will segue into whatever questions you might have. 

Let me begin with a discussion of the 2025 project.  This is an undertaking that was begun by John Gannon, who I know spoke to you yesterday when he was the chairman of the NIC.  This is the fourth iteration.  Every four years, we go out an additional five.  I think this one may have as sort of the maximum.  We are going to have 17 years of forecasting and scenario building.  And that probably is the outer limit, and we will have to pull it back in.  But the idea here is to identify some of the developments, the dynamics, the dimensions, the drivers that will shape the world over the next now 15 years or so.  Some of these are absolutely inevitable, almost immutable.  Others are susceptible to policy intervention – policy that if wise and effectively executed can make the situation better – or if badly conceived or badly implemented will make it worse.

I will illustrate that in a moment.  It is also intended to shape the thinking of new administration.  One of the canards in my view that sort of exists in the commentary about the intelligence community and what it ought to do – more strategic thinking, less current intelligence.  When hears it, reads it all the time.  I have no idea what that refers to.  Strategic thinking must be a part of what every analyst does every day if they are going to do their job.  They have to have some sense of the larger trends if they are to interpret current developments.

But by my experience, administration’s notion of the strategic horizon begins in January, extends for four years, and gets shorted by seven days every week.  If it is not going to happen in my tenure, it is beyond the realm of what I am going to worry about.  There are exceptions to this, of course.  But there is not a great market for strategic thinking.  There is at the start of an administration.  And the 2025 global trends series that we have produced is an attempt to sensitize folks to where we think developments are hidden – or more accurately, alternative scenarios that manipulate some key and explicitly articulated  drivers and say this is where it is headed.

Usually the scenario makes us – some are kind of positive, favorable to the United States, and some not so favorable.  The 2020 report, for those of you who didn’t read it or don’t remember it, it included sort of a post-Davos world in which there was sort of globalization led to mainly, sort of, happy, positive developments.  It probably won’t surprise you that the President of the World Economic Forum thought this was a pretty terrific scenario.  It also included the new caliphate – Islamic extremism triumphant in the Middle East.  And much of the world that reads the 2025 global trends – 2025, as if it is the plan or the prediction or the aspiration of the United States government, and say, what part of the new caliphate did you think is in the interest of the United States?  It is intended to highlight some good and bad outcomes.

To identify inflection points along those trajectories that may be susceptible to invention.  If you like it, you may be able to reinforce it.  If you don’t like where it is going, you may be able to intervene and bring about a happier outcome.  And at a minimum, you will know what the side posts are to tell you which direction events are hitting. 

For 2025, which is a work in progress, the way in which we have built this, each one has been done a little differently – was to have – convene a number of seminars around, in this case, the United States – for 2020, we did six of them internationally – to do a Rorschach set of expectations.  What were the principal drivers and trends and where were they headed?  We pulled that together into a draft and we took that out to international audiences.  I participated in a session in Beijing that had representatives from all continents, nine countries to critique it, tear it apart.  We reworked that after a number of the international sessions.  And it is now being worked around American think tanks.

He is not right or wrong.  It is plausible, implausible, right indicators or the wrong indicators.  Do the scenarios help us?  I am not going to deal with the scenarios.  I am going to deal with some of the key drivers and key assumptions.  And I do this not to tell you about this project, or not exclusively tell you about the project, but also because this is what we would be telling the next administration.  This is what we think will be not the full answer and explanation and determiner of events, but will be in the mix.  This is not an exhaustive catalog.

One of the key assumptions or projections that we have used in sort of looking at the world going out 15, 17 years – the first assumption is that the process of globalization that we have witnessed over a couple of decades will both continue and continue to generate both greater wealth and greater inequality.  So the overall sort of economic status of the world will improve.  But the gap between rich and poor – internationally, regionally, and intranationally will grow – the elites and the disadvantaged.  There are strengths and there are hazards associated with this.

A second is that the U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished over this period of time.  That the truly anomalous situation that has existed since World War II we vivified after the demise of the Soviet Union of the overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military.  But part of the argument here is that by 15 years from now, the military dimension will remain the most preeminent will be the least significant – or much less significant than it is now.  Part of the – nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force.  Deterrence – nuclear deterrence will work.  So the nature of international competition and challenges to cyber threat to cite one.  It was just not susceptible to massive conventional military power.  There was a sort of a – it poses a situation choices of how do we invest our national security dollars. 

A third element here – this is partly an assumption, mainly an extrapolation of observable trends is that international institutions will be decreasingly – decreasingly capable of dealing with the new challenges of a more globalized world, a world in which the U.S. does not enjoy the preeminence that we did at the time the post-World War II system and institutions – the Dumbarton Oaks agreements and so forth were put in place.  This is the United Nations.  This is the World Trade Organizations.  It is the successor to GAT, IMF, World Bank, the Alliance Structure; it is NATO first and foremost.  These were terribly successful institutions.  They worked extremely well.  They achieved their objectives by and large of preserving peace and promoting prosperity.  Their very success has rendered them increasingly OBE.  And we need different or revivified, revitalized institutions to deal with the challenges, the consequences of globalization.  Globalization is a short-hand reference for all of the changes that are taking place in the international arena.               

Put together the last two points.  Diminished U.S. preeminence and decreased efficacy of the international institutions that preserve order that had been really essential to our own role in the world, peace of the world, the prosperity of billions of people.  They need to be adjusted, but we don’t have the capacity that we did almost 70 years ago to prescribe for the world what that replacement regime will look like.  And indeed, at least for some period of time, international dissatisfaction with American actions or policy or attitude or behavior, triumphalism, or however we want to characterize this means that should we suggest perhaps a very, very good course of action, it is tainted, if not dead on arrival because it is our idea.

But look around the globe and you say who else could have an idea that isn’t going to be encumbered by the same baggage.  A Russian proposal, a Chinese proposal, an Indian proposal, an EU proposal, if you could get one out of the EU – that  there is enough baggage, historical legacy here.  There is nobody in a position or likely to be in a position over this period of time sort of to take the lead and institute the changes that almost certainly must be made in the international system. 

A different kind of factor in the mix – the effects of climate change.  Directed by the Congress to do a study – we did a National Intelligence Assessment of the geopolitical effects of climate change – a subject worthy of discussion in its own right, if you are interested.  But looking – that looked out to 2030, which goes beyond our 2025.  But a couple things are worth noting this evening.  One is we did not do the science of climate change.  We accepted the international panel on climate change – a governmental panel on climate change, median projections, which have been validated by the American counterpart and other folks.  One of the points it makes is that there is absolutely nothing that can be done between now and 2030 that will change the projected impact on climate change.  That die was cast years or decades ago.  It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do things to affect the period of time thereafter.  But at least the argument here is that the changes in sea level, the changes in temperature, the impact on agriculture, the impact on water availability, the impact that comes from melting in the Arctic and opening up resources and extending growing seasons in some places, and shortening them in others.

That is going to happen.  Or we can begin to do now is prepare to mitigate those impacts.  Now, what are those impacts?  Water shortages.  As far as I know, there is no disagreement about the projection of strains in water in particular regions.  Regions that include the already unstable Middle East, that include China – that the projections of continued 10 percent growth for China and all that that means.  Ignore the fact that it has severe water problems now.  And they get much, much worse by 2015 or 2020.  Why does it matter?  Orders of magnitude in a North China plain that is running out of water because they are depleting the underground aquifers through millions of tube wells drilled in the 1960s, produces the food for 400 million people.

Think about the difficulty of scrounging up in the international system the food for 17 or 18 million North Koreans, for a few tens of millions on the Horn of Africa.  Any number – any activity put down in the Chinese context, you have got one hell of a problem.  And that is going to happen.  This isn’t in the maybe category.  This is in the for-real category.  Climate change, we concluded, is not by itself going to bring down any governments.  It is not going to lead to wars. 

But two things are pretty certain – that the already stressed and strained and flailing and flailing governments and states – this well could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  A little bit more severe water shortage, a little bit more severe food shortage, more people beginning to migrate, economic migrants looking within and across – within countries and across borders for better opportunities and better substance.

Tonight there are some 25 million people around the globe who are outside their home country – type of displaced or immigrant.  That is going to go up.  And they are going to go up from the poor, the disadvantaged, the ill – those will bad health, ill-educated, and they are going to be seeking opportunity in the more prosperous, richer countries.  You know, I would be a genius, and I think that is a problem.

Another element of this that is in the damn near immutable is demography.  And my colleagues who are demographers are really quite confident that the range of variation is very small.  And what this tells us is over the next 15 years, the West, Europe, in particular, Russia, and the honorary West, Japan, and, oh, by the way, China, which isn’t in the West, have very, very significant aging of their populations.  It is happening in Europe and Japan, Spain, Italy, in particular very, very rapidly, way below replacement levels.  China’s decades of one-child policy begins to kick in.  And by 2015, 2025, you are looking at a dependency ratio of young productive people to seniors.  It begins to approach one to three.  That is a pretty heavy burden on economic growth.  How do the Europeans sustain the social safety net?  Put people in the military if they don’t have enough folks to go into the workplace to generate?  Normal answer – migration, immigration.  Where is it going to come from?  Oh, yeah, the ill-educated, the sick, the poor, the benighted.  And they are going to go into countries or try to go into countries like most of Europe and Japan that are sort of, on a good day, highly chauvinistic.  The doors are not open.

If you are not born Hungarian of Hungarian parents, you are not Hungarian.  And to multiply that example, a tremendous cultural shift here to provide proper care for the senior citizens, maintain economic productivity and growth, provide troops, and preserve the homogeneity of the country.  You can’t get there from here.  And that is going to happen over the next decade-and-a-half.  The United States in this actually comes off pretty well – both climate change and demographics – because of our receptivity to immigration.  We are just about alone in terms of the highly developed countries that will continue to have demographic growth sufficient to ensure continued economic growth. 

And even with the climate change, it is not a good time to live in the Southwest because it runs out of water and looks like the Dust Bowl.  It is not a good time to be along the Atlantic seaboard, particularly in the South because of the projected increase and intensity and severity and frequency of severe weather – more hurricanes, more serious storms, and so forth.  And kind of practical problems – I think the number is 63 military installations that are in danger of being flooded by storm surges.  The number of nuclear power plants that are so similarly vulnerable is almost as high. 

How does this affect us?  Insurance rates, building standards, inspection regimes that all will change.  Urbanization – that the days when most people lived in the countryside are over, that the cushion of subsistence farming, even in Africa and South Asia, is rapidly disappearing as people move to the city because it is a better life – more amenities, better opportunities for education, better opportunities for the kids, and greater vulnerability to a breakdown anywhere in the global system.  Energy shortages, water shortages, subsidence, all of these things. 

And finally is energy security.  As the world continues to prosper and grow, and we are projecting that it will, it is not just the big developing countries, India and China, which do require an awful lot of energy, even though per capita use is still pretty small.  Any number times 2.4 billion – India plus China – is a big number, whether it is kilowatts or barrels of oil – with its impact on oil prices, on greenhouse gases, which, oh, yeah, reifies and ramifies, extends into climate change dimensions.  But who benefits?  The Mid-East authoritarian regimes that have the oil and gas?  Russia, which already is beginning to exercise some energy diplomacy and leverage.  That the instability of countries that will be affected by climate change and other effects like Nigeria, which on any given day is operating way, way below production capacity in oil because of instability or deteriorated infrastructure, and so forth.  Why does that matter?  We get about 9 percent of our oil from Nigeria, which, oh, by the way, is a higher percentage than we get from the Middle East.  We have diversified out of one on stable region into others. 

Let me shift to the six degrees of separation and building upon the 2020 – but now we are talking near – this is right now and next week, and when the next administration comes into office.  Since there is an interconnected world –the flat world of recent metaphor, you can cut in anywhere and start pulling on strands and looking – and I would start with Iran because of the interest expressed in that.  In looking at Iran, let me just sort of take off some of the dimensions that I think are important.  One is location.  Second is energy.  And I’m glad you said about energy security, oil and gas, and Iran’s concern about access to electricity and its rationale for a nuclear power program.

The nuclear program, proliferation concerns, Islam – it is a theocratic state.  And let me walk through some of the illustrative links here with you.  And there are lots more.  And we can talk about them in the question and answer.  Location – if I had a map, you would see – your mental map will tell you – Iran is situated between Iraq and Afghanistan.  The two shooting wars that we have are on the borders of Iran.  Iran has the capacity, which is exercises, to meddle in those two conflict arenas.  And they meddle in ways that are not to our benefit – IEDs to militias in Iran, support to the Taliban in some areas and to other insurgents in Afghanistan. 

Roll back the clock six years or so.  Who are the two biggest security threats to Iran?  Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.  The United States took care of Iran’s principal security threats – oh, yeah, except for us, which the Iranians consider a mortal threat to their nation.  So they are there.  It is a pivotal country of the kind of which there are about a dozen in the world by their location, by their population size, by their resource – you can’t ignore it.  This is not Malawi.  This is a country that does affect its neighbors.  It has an impact.  It has a history.  It has expectations.  It has a different – a security requirement.  We may not like the way they have defined their security requirement, but they consider it real and legitimate to respond to it. 

It is also next to Turkey.  And it is home to a portion of the Kurdish population, which also exists in Iraq and Syria and a large chunk of Turkey.  It’s a group of 25 million people with a guerilla group, a terrorist group, the KGK formerly known as the PKK – the Kurdish Workers’ Party, which has a kind of uneasy, allowed to exist, allowed to harass the Turks or the Iraqis, but not to cause trouble in Iran, but a potential for the Turks to come in and go after the Kurds who are there. 

The Persian Gulf – a huge percentage of oil moves through the Persian Gulf.  The Iranians have developed a capability to disrupt the flow of oil.  Again, it doesn’t affect us very much directly.  But it affects our partners, our trading partners, our allies, and it merits attention.  Iran is a double outcast, maybe a triple outcast.  It is a Shi’a nation in a Sunni sea.  Shi’a is a small minority of global Islam.  Its most numerous adherents are in Iran and Iraq.  Given the tensions in the Islamic world, given the religious tensions – to equate them with the Thirty Years’ War and the Protestant/Catholic in Europe is a stretch, but this is not harmony.  It is a potential for disruption.  It is compounded by being a Persian state in an Arab sea.  There is a lot of nationalist friction here.

They are outsiders to the region.  But they are bigger and they are more successful.  And they are more democratic.  And they have more money than a lot of their neighbors.  And they are more scared of their neighbors than maybe they ought to be or the neighbors are of them.  But there are reasons for them thinking they have a real problem – a problem that they have elected to deal with in part through two strategies.  One is at the high end and one is at the low end.  The poor man’s deterrent is terrorism.  Is it state-sponsored terrorism?  It supports Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad scattered in camps, also in the West Bank.  At the high end, it is pursuit of a nuclear deterrent.  At the low end, sort of the message is clear.  Don’t tread on me, don’t threaten me.  I know I can’t defeat you or even match you, or even hope to in conventional military.  But you can’t protect all your people everywhere all the time.

It is very blatant.  The aspirations for a nuclear weapon, which we judge in a recent estimate to work on the weaponization portion of the program was suspended.  But on development of fizzle material, the critical ingredient – that continues.  The sensitive Iranians say we are a – my word, “moral-less” law-abiding member of the non-proliferation treaty regime, the IAEA safeguards.  I say moral-less because they keep lying, and they keep getting caught, and they fess up after they get caught.  But we comply.  We are allowed to have nuclear power, civilian nuclear power.  There is no prescription on a fuel cycle.  We can enrich fuel.  And we live in this lousy neighborhood.  The Russians don’t like us much.  The Americans don’t like us much.  The French don’t like us much.  If we are going to have energy security, we need to be able to produce our own enriched uranium. 

It may be a disingenuous argument, but there are certain, actual plausible elements of this.  They have gotten assistance at the Bushehr nuclear power plant from the Russians.  But the Russians actually had been quite clear that they are very uncomfortable with the idea of a nuclear weapon program in Iran.  And they have enforced constraints on what Iran might do – had been sometimes eager and sometimes reluctant participants in the P-5+1 response to Iran’s nuclear program – P-5 – permanent members of the Security Council, which includes the Chinese, as well as the Russians, which have to be brought along by us and by the Europeans.

They have got mixed interests.  The Chinese get a large and growing percentage of their oil from Iran.  They say it is very well and good for you, Americans, to say clamp down and impose sanctions.  You don’t depend on that market.  We do.  The Russians are trying to manage the problem – most of the time – differently than we do because they are pretty close.  Iran and its energy – oil, natural gas, major supplier.  You can’t – the world can’t, even if we get orchestrated diplomatically, you can’t cut off their exports of oil and gas.  Too much of the world depends on them.  Too much of our economy depends on the oil and gas going to our trading partners.

But that enriches the regime and it allows them to bribe its people.  It enables them to have a little bit more performance-based legitimacy than they might otherwise have.  So the turn-the-spigot-off kind of thing – even if we could do it, it would be counterproductive.  The Russia-Iran had a nexus around energy.  The Russians are making very effective use of their oil and gas exports.  There are many Americans in Washington, who are more excited about European dependence on Russian gas than most Europeans seem to be.  There are two alternatives for pipelines to bring oil and gas out of Central Asia.  They either go through Russia and you reinforce its energy leverage, or it goes through Iran, and you reinforce the legitimacy and the capacity of the Iranian government.

Look at the map, guys.  There aren’t any other routes.  So there’s – either way there are political downsides, there are economic downsides, there are energy downsides, and much of the world is going to be making calculations around here that don’t go through the same screen of concern about proliferation or concern about a theocracy, or concern about extension of influence.

I mentioned Hezbollah, which is in Lebanon.  The Cedar Revolution, you remember, of a few years ago; the Lebanese reducing their dependence on Syria, Syria compelled to withdraw its overt presence from Lebanon.  Hezbollah is an arm and extension of Iran, but it’s also a political party with legitimacy, and Hezbollah’s raison d’etre is opposition to Israel, and the Israeli occupation of Lebanon – which is mostly over except for a little bit of territory by the Shebaa Farms, which we say is actually Syrian, not Lebanese.  Why do we say that?  Because it’s on their currency.  Their currency – the Syrian currency shows it as being in Syria.  Opposition, hostility to Israel, which is an Iranian position, is furthered by Hezbollah activity, but Hezbollah is a part of the political process and we support democracy in Lebanon.  

Manipulation – and I’ll bring this to a close here – of controls over energy flows and energy transport mechanisms that many people fear from a resurgent Russia – Russia’s economy is back on its feet.  It’s had several years of growth, impressive growth, much of which is associated with the high price of oil and gas.  But they’ve actually rather wisely invested money in other portions of the economy. 

The movement in Georgia, which I think has got more to do with it’s their backyard, it’s their Monroe Doctrine, without proclaiming it as such.  Saakashvili has been a real thorn in their side.  They did their “Dirty Harry” thing – go ahead and make my day; send troops into South Ossetia and we’re going to squash you like a bug.  Saakashvili sent the troops in and he got squashed like a bug.  We stand up for the democratic government in Georgia.  Most of our European allies are tying their shoes and not seeing things here at the moment.  The Russians are right there, that these troops moved a few kilometers to get across the border that had to go though the tunnel.  There’s not much we can do about it. 

And what is at stake?  One of the things is an east-west pipeline and a rail line that carries oil.  So, yeah, they want more ability to shut it down for political leverage, if that’s the intent, or it’s one more vulnerability of the Russians because they actually depend on the exports and being good commercial partners in order to sustain foreign investment in a range of other activities.  I could go on with this, but I think the point becomes clear that there is almost no problem anywhere on the face of the Earth that isn’t immediately, intrinsically, and importantly linked to many others, and if they don’t directly come back to affect American interests, they do so indirectly because they affect the interests, the lives of our major friends and allies.

What does this all mean for this administration, the next administration, any administration?  As we look out a few years, we’re probably going to be playing with fewer cards.  The face value of those cards will be diminished.  There will be more players in the game.  There will be more conflicting interests, interests that will be, end of the day if you looked at them objectively, legitimate interests that will be in conflict.  There’s no overwhelming enemy as Soviet-led international communism, an existential threat to our way of life.  There’s a whole bunch of – to borrow Jim Woolsey’s – a lot of snakes out there, no more dragons.

The difficulty of marshalling a concerted response, or even the uncertainty about whether an orchestrated, coordinated response is appropriate; the inadequacy of existing institutions to deal with the problem – so what replaces them on a regional or sub-regional level?  Will there be resorts to force, to asymmetric warfare?  Maybe.  Maybe.  How should we be positioning ourselves as an intelligence community to anticipate, to explain, to identify opportunities to ameliorate a course of action.  How do we get across to those who will be moving into positions of authority and influence in Washington how complex the world is, how hazardous, off-the-shelf, knee-jerk, visceral kinds of fixes, solution, attitudes are, and that we just have to accept that we are viewed by the rest of the world differently that we were for most of the last six decades?  It’s going to be a whole lot harder to deal with a whole lot more problems that are going to be much more interconnected than ever in our past.

I bring this to closure before throwing it open to your questions by saying that’s why we need to transform everything about our business: what we go after, how we go after it, how we use technology and smart people to sharpen the questions that we then ask of the data that we already have or ask the collectors to go get for us.  These things are so bloody hard – again, my little examples.  To deal with that nexus of problems you better have Russia specialists, and Caspian region specialists, and Iran specialists, and Iraq specialists, and military and energy and economic and demographic, and on and on and on.  And if that array of experts isn’t consulted, isn’t sharing information, isn’t talking with one another and talking beyond the confines of the community, we will fail.

On that rather unhappy note, let me invite you to play stump the band here and ask me whatever is on your mind and I’ll make something up.  Thanks, folks.  (Applause.) 

Yes, sir?

Q:  Tom, you did make – (inaudible) – as you were talking through the demographics – (inaudible).  The general assumption is that – (inaudible) – and the question becomes in my mind, what’s the motivation for the Iranian bomb?  It has nothing to do – an Iranian nuclear weapon has nothing to do with the West but it has everything to do with the Shi’ite bomb to counter the Sunni bomb – (inaudible).

DR. FINGAR:  Yeah, did everybody hear the question?  What if the Iranian quest for a bomb – which assumes that continues – or certainly its original motivation were triggered not by fear of the West but a fear of the Sunni in Pakistan who do have a bomb?  That’s probably an element of it is that both the Paks and the Iranians have accused one another in recent years of fomenting insurrection in Baluchistan, the area – the tribal groups that span the border, which are not terribly unstable in relative terms but have the potential to be a problem. 

Iran, it has a lot of enemies, or a lot of adversaries, or a lot of potential enemies, most of whom happen to be connected to us, like the Saudis, the Egyptians –

Q:  Who happen to be Sunni.

DR. FINGAR:  – the Pakistanis – I’m sorry?

Q:  Who happen to be Sunni.

DR. FINGAR:  Happen to be Sunni – who happen to be Sunni.  There’s a religious element to it, for sure.  There is an approach to government – and this will sound strange but the Iranians actively have a better-functioning democracy than Pakistan does.  We may not like who they elect.  It may be a distorted process by the way in which people are vetted before they can run, but it’s actually pretty free and fair elections once they get to that point, and they have some authority afterwards.

Let me reverse the question.  See, if Iran were to get a nuclear weapon, would it make the region more or less stable?  And part of the projection that we make is that the Saudis – the keeper of the Islamic heartland who happen to be Sunni, who have a Shi’a minority in their Far-Eastern portions, which, oh, by the way, is where the oil is – will feel compelled to have a weapon.  They can’t make one, and whether they’ll rent one – maybe they’ve already rented it from the Pakistanis.  It may sit in a silo or a warehouse in Pakistan with a Saudi flag painted on it – I’m being metaphorical – but we don’t know on that one.  But the pressure to get one, the incentive to get – and, oh, it will expand up to the Turks as well, and the Egyptians, as they have made clear.

So the quest for security and stability has the very high prospect of making things less stable, and to contemplate a less-stable Pakistan is really quite frightening.  There is a large Islamic movement.  There is, of course, a large nuclear weapons capability.  There is the unstable northern territories, the ungoverned territories that have never been governed by anybody effectively.  And for those who haven’t been up there, if you’re readers of the comic strip of my youth, “Terry and the Pirates,” that’s it.  I went up to meet the Taliban a little over a decade ago.  It was my first TDY ever to the 14th century.  It’s time travel.  It’s strange.  But it’s also dangerous, not just as a safe haven for terrorists who can spread back into Europe, to the United States, and training, but for destabilizing Afghanistan. 

The instability fosters fear around the neighborhood, not just in India, but what might spill over?  What if the beards got the bomb, is the way it is put – if these extremists got control of nuclear weapons?  People who harbor terrorists – and these aren’t fissile – this is a bomb.  And, you know, we feel reasonably confident that the Pakistani military maintains pretty good control of this.  Well, what if the military sort of changes sides in this?  Then we’ve got a problem, so we do worry about it and work on it.

Somebody else.  Yes?

Q:  Thanks for that very impressive tour of the – (inaudible).  If the new administration comes in and – you know, just hypothetically, if they say – (inaudible) – an important element of soft power; we’re going to increase that soft power capability and we’ll triple the number of analysts in the intelligence community, if we could afford them.  If they were to do that, would the analytic transformation and framework at its current state as of 2009, would that help to be able to – could we bring them in, in an entirely new role?  What would the difference be?

DR. FINGAR:  Yeah.  I’m going to answer the question.  Let me preface it by sort of a cautionary note.  I realize that what I described can easily be heard as, oh, god, doom, gloom, pessimism.  It should not.  It’s attempted to describe the complexity of this.  I actually remain quite optimistic about our ability, of the intelligence community of the United States, us with our allies, to deal with this.  The flip side of every one of these complexity-derived or exacerbated problems is an opportunity.  They’re in there.  We have to be smart. 

Now to the – there is a certain, oh, that’s so last century to the way – as my kids would say – that if you’ve got a problem, throw more money and people at it.  If I were to be asked that question, I would say, no, no, no, no, no.  If the problem is defined as you did in the setup, the understanding of the world, I say take this money, take this effort, strengthen education.  I was a beneficiary of the Eisenhower-era National Defense Education Act, know your enemy kind of funding, which produced a generation and a half-worth of experts who we’ve not replicated.  Get people into the private sector who can do business, who can interact in NGOs, expand opportunities to bring foreign students to the United States.  They understand us better.  They don’t necessarily love us but they at least understand us better, and they can go home to positions there.

So I think, in terms of bang for a buck, making the analytic community larger doesn’t necessarily make it smarter.  I think it might actually slow down the transformation if it’s perceived as a band-aid that precludes the need for making the kind of hard, painful choices that Mike and I and others have described over the last two days.

That’s a top-of-the-head response.  I doubt that I’d change it much upon reflection, but that’s where I start.

Anybody else?

Q:  (Inaudible.)

DR. FINGAR:  Ah, yes, in the Army we call that a spring button.

Q:  (Inaudible) – you addressed earlier today in which we clearly got the message that you personally, and likely DNI – (inaudible) – believes that we shouldn’t – (inaudible) – and that there is merit to having – (inaudible) – personally agree with that.  I have a personal view that the terminology “community” – “intelligence community” is an oxymoron; that there has never been a community; that it’s a series of tribes with more or less important sheiks at the top.  So my question to you, Tom, is if the ODNI needs to be more successful than it has been – because my view, again, is that things are being done by consensus, necessarily so – what is the one thing, two things, three things that you, Tom, think needs to be done in order to accelerate into a – (inaudible) – dramatically lead in to turn the tribes into a real community?

DR. FINGAR:  Did everybody hear the question?

AUDIENCE:  No.

DR. FINGAR:  Given the –

Q:  Now I have to repeat it, Tom.

DR. FINGAR:  No, no.  Given the importance that I and other have ascribed to the role of the ODNI, it ought it be continued, not disbanded, what are the three things that I think need to be done in order to prevent reversion to the contending tribes?  That is our history.

Let me preface it by going back a decade or so.  I can’t remember the precise time, but it may have been 1997 on the 50th anniversary of the National Security Act – which the National Archives produced a volume on the formative years of the intelligence establishment, and I went down with a couple of the veterans who were in INR when I joined the bureau in 1986, who had been there literally from the beginning.  They had been in this part of OSS.  Some of you NSAers will remember Dick Curl.  Several of the speakers that day made the point that “intelligence community” not only was an oxymoron, that it was delusional, that the term “intelligence establishment” was chosen by these veterans who prepared this documentary history to reflect the fact that they were warring fiefdoms that didn’t trust one another, that existed in parallel structures because no head of an agency would rely on intelligence from an organization they didn’t control.  And coming out of the State Department – the INR was created at the same time as the CIA because George Marshall, given his military experience, explicitly said his intelligence shop was going to work for him – Army intelligence, Navy intelligence. 

That’s the genesis of it.  So we were born in an environment that put a patina of coordination and consolidation under the Director of Central Intelligence that from the beginning had no reality, as articulated by these sort of veterans of that time.  Even I was very young at the time they were talking about in the ’40s. 

Where we are now is, I think, that organizations – the organizations that constitute the intelligence community have more or less gotten over the fear concern that there was going to be a homogenization, that we were going to create a central intelligence establishment in a kind of a replay of all of the concerns that existed in the ’40s when that debate was first waged, and then that sort of led to the creation of additional agencies subsequently; that we would have, or strive for, something like a department of intelligence.  And as my boss, Mike McConnell, has said on many occasions, he’s less a Director of National Intelligence than a coordinator of national intelligence because he’s not the secretary of national intelligence.

Of the 16 agencies, 15 report to another Cabinet member.  So structurally, what I was referring to earlier in the day as a great asset for being close to our customers, it means that structurally there is a paucity of command authority – maybe put politely – and therefore a need to win grudging acceptance, if not consensus.  That’s what the law and the executive order are in the structure.   And, actually, I don’t have a problem with that.  I think that there is healthy tension in the system, but I think we’ve gotten over the fear of homogenization, of loss of mission stature and capability, and an increasing ability to see the agency’s future and the agency’s mission as being attainable – best attainable within the context of a better-integrated enterprise.  I said better-integrated, not integrated enterprise.  I think for a while the antibodies and the resistance to a truly integrated corporate entity here, which has divisions and division of labor and so forth, I think we’re headed in that direction and I think it’s going to be hard to get there.

So what three things would I recommend, now that I vamped long enough to think in parallel processing mode?  The budget authority that the DNI has – one of the few authorities that he really, unquestionably does have.  We have to overcome the propensity of at least some within the ODNI staff to view this as an opportunity to micromanage the community.  It has all of the silliness to me of a flea climbing up the tail of an elephant contemplating rape.  (Laughter.)  The budget is so huge, the range of activity so large, the complexity of activity such that a tiny staff has zero capability to micromanage the entire budget, and shouldn’t try.  We have agency heads, program managers.  They have authority, they have mission, they have understanding, and the vast majority of the activity should be conducted by them, in my judgment. 

But my metaphor here – and I’ve used it with McConnell – is that if we’re an aircraft carrier that we want to turn, I don’t care who runs the kitchen, I don’t care who is in charge of refueling, who cleans up after the airplanes; I just want the rudder.  And what the DNI and the ODNI I think needs to do is to identify those activities, those areas, those investments, those efforts that can best integrate the enterprise and get us moving forward so that the ability of each agency to achieve its objectives is enhanced by integration.  Some of it is IT, some of it is common training, some of it is common tradecraft, some of it is complementarity in mission on this, that using that authority, a few percentage of the budget over the FYDP, each year monitoring, that produces big bang for the buck, visibly so in changing the community, I think it will be self-sustaining.  So it’s sort of focus the effort where you can have an impact – it might not succeed but you can have an impact rather than squander it in a showboating effort that is almost certain to fail. 

The second is to hold agency heads and agencies accountable for adherence to those standards that have been adopted, implemented – everything from joint duty as a prerequisite for promotion into the senior service, the mobility dimensions of this, the compliance with sourcing standards.  We need to have the cascade effect here: if agency heads are accountable, then those accountable to the agency heads, and we’ll begin to have the kind of metrics and enforcement that was discussed earlier today in response to a question.

And the third is to sustain the quality of support that we provide, what I was alluding to in certain terms is confidence in the caliber, the quality of the support we provide, which most visibly to senior policy-makers are analytic products, which most visibly to the military services is the mixture of raw, tactical intelligence and information that is processed enough and analyzed enough to apply right now – operational information.  And for law enforcement, first responders, it’s much, much better distillation of what is a real threat and what isn’t, so that they can make appropriate judgments. 

I think if we focus on those areas, we will demonstrate the value of having an ODNI.  As I mentioned to John at the table, it wasn’t just the history, the structure, the authorities; it was the double – the dual character of DCIA from the beginning, running a big organization, arguably the preeminent, the major organization in the intelligence community, and attempting to herd the cats.  Inevitably the cat herding took second place, and with few unsuccessful exceptions over the history, there was no effort, serious effort, to get the integrated enterprise – to change it from an establishment if not into a community – my mind’s soft here – at least into an enterprise that could function together.

John is up, so I assume that means it’s time to disperse you.  Thank you for your time.  John, I’m not cutting you off, your announcement.  Thanks for your attention.

(Applause.) 

(END)

INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY CIVILIAN JOINT DUTY PROGRAM HONORED AS INNOVATIONS IN AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AWARD WINNER

Office of the Director of National Intelligence Receives Accolades from Harvard University’s Ash Institute

Cambridge, Mass., – September 9, 2008 – The Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School today announced the Intelligence Community Civilian Joint Duty Program as a winner of the 2008 Innovations in American Government Awards. This program of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence promotes cross collaboration and knowledge transfer across the entire intelligence community. As one of six 2008 Innovations winners recognized at tonight’s awards gala in Washington, D.C., the program will receive $100,000 toward dissemination and replication across the country.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence designed the Intelligence Community Civilian Joint Duty Program in 2007 to address the unique threats faced by American intelligence as detailed in the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act and the 9-11 Commission. The program instills a new model of collaboration by requiring personnel to serve a period of duty outside of their parent agency as a prerequisite for senior level promotion. As a result, Joint Duty personnel gain a deeper and broader knowledge of the inner-workings of American intelligence, and in the process, build the collaborative, inter-agency information-sharing networks so vital to today’s post-9/11 intelligence mission. Through the efforts of Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, as well as the strong backing of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, all 16 agencies, including those within the six cabinet departments that make up the intelligence community, participate in the program.

Previously, the intelligence community’s agencies and departments operated almost independently, with very little interagency collaboration and information sharing – an insularity deeply rooted in the Cold War and identified by the 9-11 Commission as one of the primary reasons the intelligence community failed to “connect the dots” leading up to the September 11th tragedy.

Under the guidelines of the Joint Duty program, all Intelligence Community employees are evaluated under the same performance standards, no matter which of the 16 agencies they may serve. Such standards include how well they collaborate, share information, and take integrated action across agency boundaries. Executives receive annual feedback from superiors, staff, and peers, through comprehensive 360-degree reviews standardized across all agencies. While formal outcomes are classified, the program is already receiving much anecdotal acclaim.

"Joint Duty ensures that leaders of the Intelligence Community acquire a deep understanding of how each element of the IC contributes to the overall mission," said Director Mike McConnell. "It's like the quintessential CEO who has spent time working in the mail room, advertising, distribution, sales, and accounting. A leader who understands and sees the big picture is eminently better prepared to handle the challenges of a complex global threat. The Joint Duty Program is one of the many fruits of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004."

“Knowledge-sharing between our federal intelligence agencies is key to improved national security,” said Stephen Goldsmith, director of the Innovations in American Government Awards at Harvard Kennedy School. “The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has developed an innovative solution for improving cross-agency understanding, while at once creating a more rewarding professional experience for intelligence community personnel.”

Since 1986, the Ash Institute’s Innovations in American Government Awards Program at Harvard Kennedy School has honored 187 federal, state, and local government agencies through Ford Foundation support. In highlighting exemplary models of government innovation, the Program drives continued progress in improving the quality of life of citizens and encourages scholarly research and teaching cases at Harvard University and institutions worldwide. Many award-winning programs have been replicated across jurisdictions and policy areas, and have served as harbingers of today’s reform strategies or as forerunners to state and federal legislation.

About the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation

The Roy and Lila Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation advances excellence in governance and strengthens democratic institutions worldwide. Through its research, education, international programs, and government innovations awards, the Institute fosters creative and effective government problem-solving and serves as a catalyst for addressing many of the most pressing needs of the world’s citizens. Asia Programs, a school-wide initiative integrating Asia-related activities, joined the Ash Institute in July 2008. The Ford Foundation is a founding donor of the Institute. Additional information about the Ash Institute is available at www.ashinstitute.harvard.edu. Applicants for the 2009 Innovations in American Government Awards are encouraged to apply at www.innovationsaward.harvard.edu.

# # #

Remarks and Q&A by the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
Michael V. Hayden

DNI Open Source Conference 2008
Washington, DC

September 12, 2008

To recall yesterday afternoon’s community panel session, I noted that as we developed our capabilities over the past few years, both in the Open Source Center and in the community writ large, we needed to secure a voice at the proverbial table or tables so we could begin to have those conversations that would institutionalize open source as a recognized program as well as, as a discipline.

One person who has been instrumental in getting open source a voice at those tables is our next speaker:  first, as Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence under our first DNI, John Negroponte; and now as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Michael V. Hayden has insured the Intelligence Community does not lose sight of an environment that we’ve seen over these two days is growing and morphing continuously in terms of its potential to improve our knowledge of and insight into the world in which we operate.  As much as anyone, Director Hayden has taken the community from acknowledging open source is good to actionable footing. 

As a former military attaché in J-2, he is deeply familiar with the value of open source on the ground, and as a former Director of the National Security Agency, he is certainly no stranger to the challenge of volume.

So without further ado, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce Mr. Michael V. Hayden, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

(Applause.)

DIRECTOR MICHAEL V. HAYDEN (Director, CIA):  Well, thanks, Doug.  Good morning, everyone.  It’s a pleasure to be here.  You get 39 years of being only to wear a blue tie, and you see what happens, huh?  (Laughter.)

As Doug suggested, I’m no stranger to the open source discipline and actually quite a fan of it.  As you mentioned, I’m a career intelligence officer, so I’d like to start today with maybe an observation that could surprise some of you.  Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession.  In fact, there’s real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.  (Chuckles.)

Doug mentioned I was an attaché in Bulgaria – a long time ago, about 20 years now.  Part of that job is immersing yourself in that society.  Someone once gave me – the description of a good attaché is someone who has become so immersed in the society that when he wakes up in the morning, he can sense that something is different today.  So in order to be able to do that, in order to immerse yourself, you read the press even if it’s the state-run press, you watch television even if it’s state-run news shows.  You make all kinds of official contacts that you can possibly make.  Most of that stuff is a little dry, but in essence it gave me a sense for norm; you know, it gave you a sense as to what the center line was.

Now there was a lot of information there, always freely available, and I collected it in open and sometimes not-so-open ways.  But the key was to actually know what to look for and then be in a position to absorb it. 

One of the things I did as an attaché – and I realize this is a little bit different than maybe the narrowly defined definition of open source, but I think it has powerful echoes, so I want to share it with you.  As an attaché, you are an overt collector.  And this was a communist country, a closed state in which attaches were fairly closely watched.  But again, you wanted to immerse yourself in that society to learn as much about it as you possibly could.

So one of the things I took to doing is, rather than driving on collection trips in the U.S. government Volvo that we had, I took to taking trains.  And so I would get up early in the morning, try to slip out of the house without being observed.  I’d take the streetcar down to the train station, buy the ticket that day, get on the train, and then travel across Bulgaria from Sofia to the Black Sea, and then turn around and come back.

Now, that was an attractive route for me because one of the more important things I had to observe was Bulgaria’s armored brigades, of which there were five.  And many of you probably know tanks are heavy, and they like to move them by rail.  So guess where all five tank brigades were.  They were all along the main east-west rail lines.

So I would go into the car and immediately go to the dining car and figure out some way that I could stay there beyond the 45-minute limit that was posted at both ends of the car; not because the Bulgarian breakfast food was particularly attractive – (laughter) – but because the dining car had windows on both sides, and that I could observe both sides as we traveled out.

So we get to Varna or Burgas – okay – and my goal there was to be – if I could possibly be invisible, I would have been, but I can’t, so I just try to keep my mouth shut, speak as little Bulgarian as I could – ordering things and so on – and, again, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

But on the return trip, I change the M.O.  On the return trip, I’d done all my observation.  On the return trip, I wanted to – back to that verb I used earlier – absorb, but this time I was going to absorb not visually, but socially, and so I would walk the length of the car – multiple cars – looking for that couchette that had the empty seat with seemingly interesting people in all of the other seats. 

I can recall one instance where I was walking by a couchette with six seats – five full, one empty.  The five individuals in the seats were Bulgarian air force academy cadets – (laughter) – and I just looked at the seat and said – (in Bulgarian) – is it free?  Da.  Got away with that without too much of an accent, sat down, pulled my hat down over my eyes, closed my eyes and just sat there.

They were practicing their aviation English.  Now the international language of aviation is English, and so if you want to be an aviator, you’ve got to – you know, you’ve got to have some working knowledge of English.  And so they would be saying some things in Bulgarian and coming back in English or saying some things in English and coming back in Bulgarian.  And one of the phrases – one of the phrases they put out was “runway.”  And there was a long pause because whoever they were asking this of didn’t know the answer.  So from the – beneath the brim of my hat, this voice – mine – simply said, pista (ph) – (chuckles) – which is the Bulgarian word for runway or racetrack and so on. 

And it was one of those Rod Serling kind of moments for those poor cadets.  (Laughter.)  I identified who I was, so as not to make them vulnerable or at least not to do something they weren’t prepared to – well, only volunteered to do, talk to an American.  One of them vaporized in an instant.  He was gone from the car and I never saw him again.  (Laughter.)  But the other four stayed there and we spent the rest of the time going into Sofia just talking about life and death and military service and how’s the academy and what’s your curriculum and what do you intend to fly and how long – how many flight hours do you get?  (Laughter.)  What’s the saddle depth of an SS-21?  (Laughter.)

I was doing, back in the mid 1980s, socially, absorbing information that wasn’t, in any real sense, protected, information that was available, would we but get ourselves up against it and be able to, again, use that verb, absorb it.  In today’s world, that information that would have been available 20, 22 years ago, only by this social discourse, is now available in what we call open source, out there in the electronic media in which our species has decided to put almost all known knowledge.  And so that experience as an attaché has given me an appreciation of that which we can learn, information readily available, unguarded, not classified, if we would but get ourselves in a position to access it. 

I should also add too that those five armor brigades that I wanted to look at from Kniajevo and Sliven and Yambol and Kazalak, okay, they were actually pretty big.  They were actually pretty easy to see.  Today, the job we have in the Intelligence Community is a lot harder and bit different.  The things we want to discover are not out there as the size of an armor brigade.  Collection, analysis, dissemination of information is as important as it has ever been.  And so your conference here, covering such a broad array of topics including – and I’m happy to see virtually every stakeholder in the open source enterprise here – makes abundantly clear that the rich potential, far reach, and real impact of open source intelligence has finally been embraced.

Now, it’s something I appreciated even before that tour in Bulgaria and I’ve tried to carry it forth ever since.  A little over three years ago, as Doug suggested, a small group of us sat down to figure out what the new Intelligence Community might look at under the newly created Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte.  John was at the DNI and I was his deputy.  We set up a shop just a few blocks from here in the Old Executive Office Building and literally taped blank sheets of butcher paper all along the wall of the temporary office we had been given.  And I mean – you know, we used the pages, blank as a metaphor.  This was not a metaphor – (chuckles) – okay?  The pages were blank.  And how did we want to structure this community? 

There’s a lot to think through.  But it didn’t take us long to identify the way ahead for open source.  In fact, we saw the establishment of this center, the Open Source Center, as one of the three most important objectives for the ODNI in its first year.  The other two?  The National Clandestine Service at CIA, second, the National Security Branch at FBI, and, third, a more autonomous Open Source Center for the Intelligence Community.  We considered a couple of options for creating this center.  But at the end of the day, we decided that voting on the expertise and the capacities of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service and placing the center in CIA made the most sense.  FBIS represented the strongest foundation on which we could build, with capabilities that were already out there, ranging from media and Internet collection to research and analysis to advanced I.T., database acquisition and training.  And keeping it in CIA allowed the Open Source Center to focus on mission while CIA handled most of the housekeeping chores that would come about from any such organization. 

So the aim from the start has been to build and strengthen those capabilities that already existed and then extend their reach.  And as I said, we made the Director of CIA the executive agent for open source.  I’d be responsible for the center’s success, not just in such traditional roles as collector and analyzer and disseminator, but in a new, broader role of community leader working to expand the open source discipline.  Let me make sure we understand that distinction.  The Open Source Center was designed to be a production line in terms of the creation of knowledge of use to American policy-makers.  But it was also designed to be an advocate, a spokesman, a facilitator for the open source enterprise for the open source discipline beyond the fence line, beyond the confines of the Open Source Center itself.

I don’t offer this bit of history as some sort of a lesson in the IC wiring diagram.  I want you simply to recognize that open source intelligence is widely seen as both an essential capability and a formal asset in our national security infrastructure.  As the DNI’s strategic plan puts it, and I’m quoting here now, “No aspect of collection requires greater consideration or holds more promise than open source.”  Here’s why.  Those working in this discipline are at the nexus, right now, of two intensely powerful dynamic forces: the media and information technology. 

And while the Internet has revolutionized human interaction, there is still an awful lot for us to learn about it and the opportunity that it now represents.  Finally, the questions our customers ask, whether it’s a policy-maker or military commander or law-enforcement official demand answers, many of which are only available through open source research. 

So when I became Director of CIA, one of the first things I did was to make Doug a direct report to me.  So Doug, in the org chart, is up there with the DI and the head of the National Clandestine Service, the Director of Support, and the Director of Science and Technology.  And early in my tenure I think Steve Kappes and I – Steve is the Deputy – had gone a bit public with the number of installations, the number of partners we visited.  Steve and I have been to more than 50 liaison partners in about a two-year time period.

In addition to that, we made a special effort to visit the outposts in the open source enterprise as well, and I think I’ve got four of those already in terms of notches on my belt.  One stop that meant a great deal to me was designed to be a courtesy call.  I was in Key West, not on business.  (Chuckles.)  And there is an open source facility there that looks at that island about 90 miles just off the southern marker buoy there. 

It was going to be a 20-minute courtesy call.  I was there for three hours because, talk about time on target, the people in this little cinderblock shack on the extreme southern reaches of Key West knew so much about what was happening in Cuba.  And for me as the Director of CIA to sit with them and watch Cuban soap operas and have them tell me what they were extracting from watching these soap operas was quite remarkable. 

They gave me a videotape, DVD, of a program that they had captured from the Internet.  And it had a Cuban soap-opera star starring in it, and there are only two other players.  And his name is Nicanor (sp) and he’s making a fine brew of coffee and there’s a knock at his door.  And it’s two individuals from the security service to install the microphones.  (Laughter.)

We’re here to install the microphones.  He says, what do you mean, microphones?  And it goes for about 17 minutes of some of the most subtle satiric commentary on a totalitarian state I have ever seen.  He mentions that – they have to decide where to put the microphones and they can’t put them in the kitchen because it’s too noisy and the bedroom air conditioner interferes with it.  So, finally, they say, we have to put the microphones in the bathroom.  (Laughter.)

So he says, when I criticize the government, I must go into the bathroom?  (Laughter.)  And he said, why don’t we put another microphone over here?  And then they begin to criticize him.  What kind of person are you?  There are only a limited number of microphones in Cuba!  (Laughter.)  There’s a family down the street that criticizes the government day and night.  They have 11 kids and they’re only allotted one microphone. 

It gave me a new appreciation for life and thought and the situation on the island.  And, again, back to riding trains to Kazanlak, it’s out there; it’s available, but you have to access.  And you access that truth in a way that’s different from running agents against a foreign government.  Now, given that importance to this discipline, Doug sits at my staff meetings each time they occur, and that’s three days a week.  Open source has a seat at the table, a seat at the table with every other core discipline that comprises the Central Intelligence Agency.  We think it’s a key component of our own strategic blueprint, which we call our strategic intent; that’s how important we think this is.

Now, as I indicated a few minutes ago, my job as executive agent for the Open Source Center is to help it achieve those two primary goals: one, a highly effective collector and producer in its own right, the production line; and, second, to be a catalyst for the larger community, for the open source enterprise about which you heard Doug talk about yesterday.

So how are we doing?  Well, one irony of working the open source side of the intelligence business, not unlike every other part of the intelligence business, is that the better we do, the less we can talk about it.  We are often addressing requirements or questions that are sensitive by nature.  The information is unclassified, our interest in it is not.

Open source, by the way, is now routinely packaged with the other ints in making our products out of our DI.  And I can assure you that on a recurring basis, you see open source material – cited as open source – in items in the President’s Daily Brief.  It’s also true that, from time to time, there are items in the President’s Daily Brief that are exclusively derived from open source and carry the logo not of DIA or NSA or CIA, but carry the logo to the President of the Open Source Center.

It contributes open source intelligence to national security in unique and valuable ways.  Take recent events – take this jump-ball, Russia-Georgia and now think about how open source could contribute to that.  How about what’s going on in Pakistan?  Think how open source can contribute to that and I think you have a pretty good idea of the kinds of things that open source can offer all of us.  It’s invaluable.  We couldn’t claim to do all-source analysis. 

How can you be all-source, which is what we claim to be, if Doug and his folks are not part of our team?  And that’s a baseline that helps us to find, by the way, what’s truly secret, what is not accessible in these ways, and allows us better to focus our espionage energy on those things.

Open source also helps us understand how others view the world.  Without that understanding, we’d fail in our obligation to provide insight, not just information, but insight.  Last spring, I was out at the Kansas State University as part of their Landon Lecture Series.  And one of the points I wanted the students to take away from my time with them was how crucial it was for us as a nation to understand others, to understand others’ viewpoints, friends and adversaries.  We can’t be myopic, see things only through an American lens.  It’s arrogant, but it’s worse than arrogant; it’s dangerous.  The lecture out at Kansas State focused on the growing complexity of the world and the fact that international relations in this century will be shaped by a greater number and more diverse set of actors than they were in the last century.  And the overriding challenges presented to those of us responsible for national security is that we now must do a far better job understanding cultures, histories, religions, and traditions that are not our own, or at least are not as represented even in our immigrant nation as much as our traditional cultures have been.

Open source officers have an important role in giving us that window.  They expose us to perspectives we might not otherwise see.  They broaden our understanding of the world.  That’s fundamental to our mission.  Now, let me talk for a minute about goal number two, you know, the advocate, the sponsor, the facilitator, the responsibility to lead the community in unleashing the full potential of open source. 

We can be proud.  We’ve made progress here as well.  Some examples – Open Source Center now provides the White House Situation Room with 340 real-time feeds from televisions broadcasts around the world.  It provides data that highlights to our commands like EUCOM through a customized Internet portal.  It’s formed new collaborative relationships with foreign partners.

Remember the comment I mentioned where Hayden and Kappes went out there and visited 50 liaison partners?  In several of those instances, the takeaway, the thing we brought home, was a new relationship between their open source enterprise and our open source enterprise as well.  We’re taking advantage of expertise across the spectrum from NGA headquarters in Bethesda to the Foreign Military Studies office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to the Asian studies detachment at Camp Zama, Japan.

Open Source Center is expanding its training from officers across the community.  Half of the Open Source Academy students this year work for organizations other than the Central Intelligence Agency.  Perhaps most importantly, the center is making more intelligence-related content available to more people in government than ever before. 

Fifteen thousand people, state and local, Congress, policy-makers regularly use opensource.gov.  Now, we want to build on that momentum, and that’s what drove the action plan that I know Doug’s already talked to you about.  It’s strategic in nature, but he and I have talked.  This isn’t about moon-shots or dreams; it’s about practical, near-term, incremental objectives.  I think we’ve set the path and now it’s simply time to execute. 

Now, one of the things we’re going to do to help Doug execute is to change governance a bit for the open source enterprise, not the center, but the open source enterprise.  So today I’d like to tell you a bit about the creation of a new community-wide governance board that will guide us as we move forward.  The Open Source Board of Governors will consist primarily of open source producers and stakeholders throughout the Intelligence Community.  And what we want to be able to do is to lead an integrated approach to exploiting openly available information.  The board of governors will set strategies and priorities for the open source enterprise based on the input from all who want to ensure its success. 

We see this board of governors as a forum where consensus can be reached on how best to use our collective resources today and in the future.  It will consider things like IT strategy and IT policy.  How do we wire up together?  The centralization of services, services of common concern like training or content-acquisition, things like standardization, standardization of tradecraft.  The idea is to set direction and priorities in a way that allow each of the players, each of the elements of the open source enterprise to develop and make the most of their capabilities.

We’ve had this for the past year for one of the other functions at CIA.  In addition to being the executive agent for the Open Source Center, I am the national HUMINT manager.  In that hat, we have a national HUMINT board of governors in which anyone who’s collecting information from our species has a seat at the table.  And we have been able, through consensus, to develop a set of priorities and standards that we will be able to use across the board in human intelligence collection and reporting.

Well, why can’t we do that in open source as well?  The open source board will meet quarterly.  The first session will take place before the end of the year and at that meeting, we’ll set a work plan for the coming calendar year with key milestones and decision points. 

Now, yesterday, as I know all of you know, we marked a solemn anniversary, seven years since the attack on our homeland.  That one terrible day prompted action across our community on many levels.  And I think the IC, the Intelligence Community, can be proud of the work that it’s done in the last seven years.  Together with partners across our country and across the world, we have kept the United States safe.

But we owe it to our people, the American people, never to be fully satisfied with the job we’re doing.  We owe it to them to constantly ask the question, how can we better do this?  How can we better achieve our mission?  There is abundant evidence that we’re asking that question and challenging ourselves now more than ever in the open source arena. 

So I’m delighted to be here today.  I’m even more delighted to see you here today representing the organizations of which you are a part, but maybe more fundamentally representing the enthusiasm that is now out there for this incredibly important discipline.

Thank you then for your energy and your dedication.  It inspires us as we continue to serve our fellow citizens to the best of our ability.  And with that, I’d be happy to take any comments or questions you might have in the time remaining to us.  Thank you.

(Applause.)

MS. SABRA HORNE (ODNI Senior Advisor for Open Source/Outreach):  Thank you so much, General Hayden.  We have four questions for you that we’ve taken from the audience.  I’ll start with the first one.  “This conference sponsored an open source analytic contest, an unclassified mini National Intelligence Estimate, if you will.  Why doesn’t the IC publish unclassified NIEs that could be subject to the peer review of the open source community?”

DIRECTOR HAYDEN:  Okay, what do the other three look like?  (Laughter.)  I don’t know if all of you know this, but even the classified NIEs are subject to peer review.  There are outside readers for even the most highly classified National Intelligence Estimates.  So that’s very important.  So in terms of the discipline, even at the highest levels of classification, we do get outsiders to come in and give us a view.  So I think that’s very important.

I guess the second observation I’d make is that the NIEs are kind of the capstone documents.  In fact, in some cases, they’re criticize them, looking at Mark here, too capstone, too ethereal.  But when they hit the sweet spot, when they bring in all of the threads of information in a digestible body for a policy-maker to actually think and decide on something that’s quite important.  So I guess what I’d underscore to you there – it’s all source.  It brings them all in so that the policy-maker can have all of the data that we have available to him in one place.

Now, that is not to undersell the independent analysis that’s done in the unclassified world in which we, frankly, shamelessly, try to leverage and exploit in our own classified work.

MS. HORNE:  “With respect to the phrase ‘Open source is good,’ do you believe open source is a double-edged sword?  We need to always understand how adversaries can use our open source information against us.  And what is being done about this problem?”

DIRECTOR HAYDEN:  Yeah.  Every intelligence discipline has the challenge you just described.  Vince Fragamini (sp) was my deputy when I became a brigadier and I was the EUCOM J-2.  And Vince was a career Navy Intelligence Officer.  He had run their intel school down at Dam Neck before he came out to Stuttgart to be the J-2.  Vince had a great phrase: live by SIGINT, die by SIGINT.  (Laughter.)  And it wasn’t designed to be critical of SIGINT, it’s just that SIGINT has the tendency to be out there on your breaking-edge news so you get the SIGINT report and Vince had another phrase: when in doubt, put it out, okay?  (Laughter.)  But then he would always remind me: live by SIGINT, die by SIGINT. 

And I guess what I’m trying to describe for you is the problem of deception is present in every intelligence discipline, whether you’re listening to someone, whether you’re observing someone or something, or whether you’re meeting with someone personally.  And it doesn’t have to be deception in terms of being intentional.  This guy may be giving his impression of a meeting.  How many of you had that guy talk to you, okay?  The guy gave you an impression of the meeting which is at total variance with everyone else who was in the room?

Well, when we intercept that conversation, that becomes intelligence and we report on it in the same way in which we would be looking at that individual’s remarks were he giving them at a press conference following the aforementioned meeting.  So this problem of sorting through is present in all of our disciplines so I think what I’d suggest to you is, open source, just like every other stream of intelligence available to us, has to be vetted and has to be bumped up one against the other in order to find out the best version of truth.

MS. HORNE:  “We’ve spoken of the importance and key role of open source.  Within the CIA, the unclassified resources, infrastructure, and support has lagged behind the classified.  How will the CIA put the unclassified and open source infrastructure on equal footing?”

DIRECTOR HAYDEN:  It’s challenge, you know, truth in lending among friends, these are not easy budget decisions, but we have made the commitment to strengthen this discipline.  And I should add, too, this discipline’s budget is set off for special scrutiny, set off from the rest of CIA’s budget so that it is visible and observed not just by me, but by people north of me in the organization chart. 

Now, we recognize that this does require investment.  Somewhat like the SIGINT enterprise, which I was familiar with in my time at NSA, you really need an awful lot of computational power and IT and storage to handle the kinds of volume we now get in American SIGINT and which Doug now has to deal with in American open source reporting.  So it requires investment.  We’re committed to that, but it’s a balancing act; a little more over here means a little less over there.  We just have to do the best we can.

I should add, too, we do recognize we’re digging out of a deficit here.  This is probably one discipline in which we have underinvested and we have to play some catch-up.

MS. HORNE:  And, finally, “How do we encourage more experiences like your Bulgarian open source experience?”

DIRECTOR HAYDEN:  One of the things we’re doing – and we’re very serious about this – we’re trying to shove our analysts out the door, off of Langley, and push them forward.  So a significant fraction of our analytic workforce now does its work – I mean, it does what it would be doing at CIA Headquarters, but it’s not doing it at CIA Headquarters; it’s doing it at forward locations. 

Now, a lot of those would be in Iraq or Afghanistan in direct support of what’s going on there.  But there’s also an awful lot who are not there, that are in other locations and the idea there is, well, to step back and put this into a second context.  Half of our analysts have been hired in the last six years.  So I go to Michael Morell or John Kringen and before him and say, we need more experience in our analytic workforce.

And I’m accustomed, as a former GI, you know, I know how long it takes America’s Army to build a battalion commander; it takes 18 to 19 years, then someone is a lieutenant colonel and he’s ready to command a battalion.  So I go to Michael or to John and say, how long would it take to build us an analyst with 20 years experience?  (Laughter.)

And the answer they come back with is frankly unacceptable.  (Laughter.)  We have found, pushing analysts forward into the area in which they report, the things they think about, accelerates this experiential curve.  And why does it accelerate the experiential curve?  Because the first newspaper they read in the morning is a local newspaper in the local language; the last thing they look at, at night before they go to bed is the local news in the local language.  They know whether things are comfortable or uncomfortable, the population is tight or relaxed because they’re on the metro with them, I mean, all of those things that an attaché can absorb, we’re trying to do that for our analysts as well.

So I think, in its own way, perhaps indirectly, it’s doing that kind of acculturation that I underwent when I was serving in Sofia back in the 1980s.

Thanks very much.

(Applause.)

MS. HORNE:  Thank you, General Hayden, for your comments.  And we especially appreciate your appreciation and advocacy for open source.

Thank you.

(END)