The embassy shutdowns and the traveler warnings resulted from intercepts of terrorist communications devices – phones and computer links that the terrorists surely knew are being monitored....

Manipulating the U.S. Intelligence

 Community Shouldn’t Be This Easy

by Angelo M. Codevilla

The US government shut down all US embassies in the Middle East for the first weekend in August and notified all US persons traveling abroad that they face extra danger of being set upon by terrorists. Because, says the official announcement, US Intelligence detected “increased chatter” among suspected terrorists that contained “specific threats.” The closings and warnings are dreadful policy. The intelligence on the basis of which the policy was made suffers from a lack of quality control – counterintelligence in the language of the trade – so serious as to expose US policy makers to being manipulated by foreign enemies.

The US intelligence community’s aversion to quality control is congenital. From its very inception in the 1940s, US intelligence has dealt with the imbalance between the many certainties demanded of it and the paucity of the facts it can supply by not asking too many questions about its sources’ reliability, passing on what it gets and calling it good. Neither with regard to technical sources such as communications intercepts any more than for human sources is there any independent evaluation about “operational security” – namely for devaluing or discarding sources the existence of which is known to the targets of the collection.

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