Wikileaks revealed reports recently that indicate the government of Pakistan may be playing both sides in the war in Afghanistan. While the details are murky, we must always maintain our skepticism when dealing with Pakistan’s intelligence service or that of any other nation.
All nations see the world according to their own agenda. As an intelligence officer working in Pakistan in the ’90s, a pervasive rumor I heard repeatedly was that the United States wanted to take over the port of Karachi for use as a major U.S. Navy base. While Americans found this rumor absurd, every Pakistani I knew, from people on the street to a Harvard-educated Pakistani acquaintance, believed it was true. Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, which Americans view with revulsion, is seen by Pakistan as the mastery of complex technology and a source of national pride. Weapons developer A. Q. Khan is seen by his country as a sort of Pakistani George Washington.
Pakistan is hedging its bets in the region, just as every other player in the region does. From the perspective of intelligence gathering, we must focus much more on the intelligence we gather ourselves than what is provided to us by the Pakistanis, and we must do our best to ensure it is accurate. The Wikileaks reports show many examples of error and misrepresentation.
This means hard work, because operating on home turf is a huge advantage. Pakistan’s intelligence service is the very best intelligence service operating in Pakistan, just as the Swiss intelligence service is the best intelligence service in Switzerland.
The structure of CIA intelligence operations places too much emphasis on the value of warm relationships with collaborating, “liaison” intelligence services. It’s dramatically easier to gather reams of intelligence data from liaison than to get out and find it ourselves. Getting intelligence from liaison means visiting foreign counterparts in their offices and discussing the information, usually over tea. Getting the intelligence ourselves, on the streets and in remote tribal areas, is dangerous and complex. Naturally we lean toward intelligence that is officially provided by foreign governments. The Khost bombing was an example of too-heavy reliance on the work of a liaison service.
To strengthen the quality of intelligence in the region, we should rely less on liaison relationships and more on unilateral espionage work. We should get more of our officers out of the embassy system, because that system encourages liaison activities. We should ensure that CIA officers are rewarded for unilateral intelligence and not for collecting whatever a foreign service provides. We must trust intelligence gathered by the U.S. military on the ground in Afghanistan over that provided by the Pakistanis to our officers in embassies. We must always be wary in our dealings with other intelligence services and we must be skeptical of their motives.
We should also take steps to control intelligence better so that thousands of documents are not leaked to Wikileaks. This can best be done by reducing the numbers of Washington bureaucrats who have access to secrets. Eliminating many of these positions entirely — the Washington Post reported recently that 854,000 Americans have top-secret security clearances — will not only reduce leaks but will make intelligence collection faster and more efficient.
– “Ishmael Jones” is a former deep-cover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. He is the author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, published last year by Encounter Books.