Failed intelligence

When disaster strikes and catches a society completely un-aware, there is at least an even chance that some people would simply wring their hands, others would scream accusations and yet others would try to understand why the disaster had occurred and how it might be prevented or minimized in the future. For all of them, however, the shared feeling must be that "a failure of intelligence" had taken place.

As in the case of New York’s Twin Towers disaster, the bombings in Zamboanga and Metro Manila provoked much interest in why the Philippine military, police and other civilian "intelligence" groups had failed to anticipate the violent incidents and warned the public accordingly. The executive and the legislative are in the process of conducting well publicized inquiries looking into the organization, operations and budgets of agencies tasked with national security information gathering, analysis, selective dissemination and other related functions. The initial impression the public gains from these official probes is not very reassuring. Neither competency within each intelligence group nor coordination and cooperation among them appears characteristic of their operations. Turf orientations and partisan political work seem to disable them from doing effective, coordinated intelligence work.

The ongoing executive and legislative inquiries also reveal the usual budgetary deficiency that prevents much-needed material and financial resources from being acquired by most of these agencies. Currently, much of the criticism as well as the defense for intelligence groups/agencies turn on the issue of whether their budgets should be increased or whether they had made efficient use of their current allocated resources.

This emphasis on agency budgets could be misleading. While budgetary allocations must be be a major determinant in the ability or inability of intelligence groups to function well, one could suspect an even more basic factor. Competent and responsible intelligence work has always required a formidable melding of technological familiarity and well-developed human relations skills. Technology in our modern times does not only mean the available hardware and software — the satellites, computers and communication instruments and their sophisticated gadgets and special programs. Technology more critically refers to a particular mindset that has been nurtured by a person’s familiarity with logic, scientific methodologies and the vast store of empirical knowledge that the natural and the social sciences make available to the technically proficient. Without necessarily being a professional statistician, physicist, historian or sociologist, an intelligence worker must be able to understand probabilistic reasoning and the advisability of buying lotto tickets when odds uncharacteristically turn in one’s favor; one also must have some basic knowledge of the possible origins of the cosmos, the general course of human history and the functional workings of most societies — his own society even more so – and their indispensable institutions.

Together with this technological familiarity, the intelligence practitioner must develop communication and human relations skills that enable him to function well in communities that are often structured within a network of legally protected human rights, some degree of democratic politics, some semblance of market competition, uncompromising multicultural protection and even politically correct ecological concern. Operating in this milieu, intelligence workers have to project a humanist orientation, one that blends well with a general liberalizing outlook most citizens in these communities share.

For many of those in the intelligence agencies, there could be a strong tendency to go nostalgic. They might pine for the days when the rack and the water cure readily extracted valuable information from those they invited to their offices and camps, when corpuses need not be made available despite habeas corpus proceedings and when indefinite detention and property confiscation were standard items in the arsenal of official inquisitors fortified by a regime’s martial law edicts.

Intelligence gatherers, assessors and conveyors have to work harder and more sophisticatedly nowadays. Mostly denied the brutally effective methods of past intelligence work, they now have to confront terrorist adversaries who do not suffer from being similarly disabled. Those now in intelligence work have to be much more concerned about how far they can stretch the limits of the law. And when they do break the law in hot pursuit of information presumably vital to national security, they have to cloak their activities with dexterity, with even greater darkness to deflect media’s fatally penetrating light and to escape detection by so many media-excitable political personalities.

A "failure of intelligence" is first of all the failure of intelligence among those who institutionally do this work. It is mandatory for those who man this country’s intelligence groups and agencies to upgrade their workers so the latter are trained to understand and become comfortable with a modern society’s technological paradigm and the core human values of political democratization and cultural pluralism. In the present attempt to assess the community of Philippine intelligence agencies and their workers, the fundamental concern must be to honestly evaluate how many of those in this community are already endowed with the capabilities and values a modern intelligence worker must have. Running parallel with this concern must be another which seeks programmatically to build these capabilities and values into our community of intelligence groups and agencies.

Confronting terrorism, our political leaders and those in the intelligence community must understand that they can succeed in productive intelligence work only by discarding the medieval and inhuman ways the craft of intelligence traditionally had been associated with.