By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

There has been no time during the past 35 years where all intelligence (meaning spy) agencies in every country of the world today are focused on one issue and that is the potential war in Ukraine because it is crucial for three major countries and the is Russia China and the USA and each other country in the world has a connection with at least one of the latter countries and in some cases two or even all three countries. So we decided it is time to explain how intelligent agencies actually work and what matters the most. This includes looking ahead, maximizing the benefits, and mitigating the risks of the evolving open-source nuclear intelligence landscape will be essential. That process starts by recognizing that the future may not look like the present and that the present system has weaknesses.

While early on, we researched the ‘why’ British spies (trying to protect cable networks from communicating, for example, with British forces in India) were also sent to Russia when the initial interventions were not, until their very end, monitored by traditional military or political chains of command. And while following their planners were primarily intelligence-operations specialists whose objectives were to preHussein’s Empire. Meaning for most of history, power, and geography provided security when distance mattered.

In the Ukraine crisis of 2014–2015, Russia explicitly invoked its nuclear arsenal.

 

Iraq Iraqi’s

In part one, we explained among others about open-source information, to which we should ad that opensource information is also making deception easier.

One night in northern Iraq, a mysterious visitor appeared in the hotel room of a British journalist.

He arrived shivering and afraid. He said he was one of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear scientists, and he had proof that Saddam had secretly tested a nuclear bomb, “hoodwinking the West.“

The visitor schetched nuclear bomb designs. He described organization “all details of Saddam’s WMD program. He showed a photograph” of a warhead all” allegedly bought from Russia. And he gave the exact time and location of Saddam’s alleged nuclear test.

The British journalist, investigating the Iraqi’s claims even went high-tech, buying commercial satellite images of the test site the visitor described before and after the claimed test date and had them analyzed by a Professor of King’s College London. 

The professor found all sorts of evidence confirming the test site, including the existence of a wide tunnel stretching under a lake precisely as described by the alleged informer.

There was also a railway line with roads leading to a shaft entrance, a huge rectangular structure that found evidence of a “susceptible military zone,” an army base with forty buildings. “If you waIraq’so hide someIraq’s, I guess this is exactly what you would do,” said the Professor.

On 25 February 2001, a bombshell story ran in the London Sunday Times. All of it turned out to be wrong, even the “smoking “gun” satellite imagery.

A former nuclear Iraq inspector with the UN International Atomic Energy Agency in Iraq and a leading satellite imagery expert reviewed the same images and found absolutely no evidence.1

“Also, Terry Wallace, then a geophysics” professor and forensic seismologist and now director emeritus at Los Alamos National Laboratory, later debunked the Sunday Times story using seismological evidence and sent their information to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Still, investigation appeared on BBC in March 2001.

It does not take much to realize these technologies’ manipulative potential for nuclear-related issues. In a world of cheap satellite imagery, deepfakes (synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else’s) and the weaponization of social media, foreign governments, their proxies, and third-party organizations and individuals will all be able to inject convincing, false information and narratives into the public domain at speed and scale.

This ecosystem can also generate significant policy risks even when the information it uncovers is accurate. The key here is transparency - and what happens when secret information becomes public.

Looking ahead, maximizing the benefits and mitigating the risks of the evolving open-source nuclear intelligence landscape will be essential. That process starts by recognizing that the future may not look like the present and that the present system has weaknesses.

For example, Russia used social media bots “to try to worsen the crisis the pandemic would generate for its adversaries in Europe.

Therefore, it is not surprising that many tech companies harbor deep ethical concerns about helping warfighters. In contrast, many in the defense community harbor deep moral concerns about what they view as the erosion of patriotism and national service in the tech industry. Each side is left wondering, How can anyone possibly think that way?

 

Counterintelligence

Counterintelligence is an activity to protect an agency’s intelligence program from an opposition’s intelligence service.[1] It includes gathering information and conducting activities to prevent espionage, sabotage, assassinations, or other intelligence activities conducted by, for, or on behalf of foreign powers, organizations, or persons.

It’s also important to remember that everyone’s spies and counterintelligence must be aimed not just at adversaries but at allies as well.

The few exceptions are the Five Eyes partners who share a close intelligence relationship: the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Otherwise, it’s an intelligence jungle out there.

Counterintelligence faces three significant challenges. The first is trusting too much, making warning signs hard to see and traitors hard to stop. The second is trusting too little, which can breed debilitating paranoia that ruins careers and casts doubt on good intelligence. The third challenge comes from technological advances, creating new vulnerabilities and enabling insider threats to operate at vastly greater speeds and scale.

Meanwhile, human frailties are being joined by technical ones. Hidden vulnerabilities in information systems will likely require new skills and faster action. While specialized tools like signals intelligence have long played a role in counterintelligence, the twenty-first-century counterintelligence battleground is growing ever more vast - encompassing everything from garbage bags under bridges to computer code in the far corners of cyberspace.

 

Covert action

No intelligence topic is more charged than covert action. Drone strikes are the most recent controversy, drawing widespread public support and fierce opposition.

Covert action and espionage are both done secretly, but they are not the same. Covert action is active; it aims to produce or affect outcomes. Spying is more passive; its purpose is acquiring information. An example of the former is President Biden’s announced operation targeting the leader of ISIS.

In many cases, covert action is also designed so that the role of a government is not apparent or acknowledged. There needs to be “plausible deniability”: if something happens or some aspect of a covert operation becomes known, Of course, many covert operations become open secrets, making plausible deniability not so likely.

Covert activities can be classified into four broad types. The first is propaganda, or information operations, which seeks to influence the beliefs and actions of a target group by disseminating information that can be true, incomplete, or deliberately false. For example, in the Cold War, the CIA  (which was only created in 1947) dropped propaganda from balloons and secretly funded radio broadcasts to stir dissidents behind the Iron Curtain.

The second type of covert action is political action, which seeks to shift the balance of political forces in another country by helping friends and undermining foes, often by providing secret funding or training to political leaders, parties, or opposition groups. 

The third kind of covert activity is clandestine economic action, which seeks to disrupt and destabilize the economies of unfriendly regimes.

Fourth and finally, paramilitary operations are the riskiest and most controversial kinds of covert action because they tend to be larger-scale and violent. The best known of this the secret arming of Afghan rebels after the Soviet Union invaded in 1979. 2

 

The Chinese tunnel system

In 2011, a former Pentagon strategist, who was teaching at Georgetown University, asked his students to study the Chinese tunnel system known as the “underground great wall.” The tunnel’s existence was well-known, but its purpose was not. The students turned to commercial imagery, blogs, military journals, even a fictional Chinese television drama to get answers. They concluded the tunnels were probably being used to hide 3,000 nuclear weapons. This was an astronomical number, about ten times higher than declassified intelligence estimates and other China’s nuclear arsenal forecasts.

The shocking findings were featured in the Washington Post, circulated among top officials in the Pentagon, and led to a congressional hearing. They were also incorrect.

Experts quickly found egregious errors in the study. A Harvard researcher found that the students based the 3,000 weapon number on an American intelligence projection from the 1960s, assumed it was accurate, and then just kept adding weapons at a constant growth rate. They did not take seriously more recent declassified intelligence estimates that China probably had no more than 200 to 300 warheads. And estimates for the amount of plutonium needed for the weapons were based on sketchy sources using even sketchier ones: The study cited Chinese blog posts based on a plagiarized grad school essay from 1996, which in turn relied on a single anonymous post on the site Usenet. The plutonium sourcing was “so wildly incompetent as to invite laughter,” wrote nonproliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis.

This is the radical new world of open-source intelligence - where crises move faster, information is everywhere, and anyone can play. Intelligence isn’t just for governments anymore, thanks to three significant trends over the past several years: the proliferation of commercial satellites, the explosion of Internet connectivity and open-source information available online, and advances in automated analytics like machine learning. These changes have touched every part of the intelligence landscape. In particular, they’ve given rise to a host of non-governmental detectives who track some of the most severe and secret dangers of all: nuclear weapons.

The world of open-source nuclear sleuthing is wide open to anyone with an Internet connection. It draws people with a grab bag of backgrounds, capabilities, motives, and incentives - from hobbyists to physicists, truth seekers to conspiracy peddlers, profiteers, volunteers, and everyone in between. Many are former government officials with years in the field, but others are amateurs with little or no experience. There are no formal training programs, ethical guidelines, or quality control processes. And errors can go viral; nobody loses their job making a mistake.

The open-source revolution has been lauded for disrupting and democratizing the secretive world of intelligence. There is no doubt that open-source intelligence is invaluable and that spyagencies must find new ways of harnessing their insights. But the news is not all good. Citizen-detectives also generate risks. From the most obvious chance of getting it wrong to harder-to-see downsides like derailing diplomatic negotiations by publicly revealing sensitive findings, the U.S. intelligence community needs to pay attention to the potential dangers of open-source intelligence as it adapts its spycraft to the digital age.

Tracking nuclear threats used to be a superpower business because much of it was done from space, and governments were the only ones with the know-how and money to build sophisticated satellites. Today, the commercial satellite industry offers low-cost eyes in the sky to anyone who wants them. Already, 3,000 active satellites orbit the earth; according to some estimates, by 2030, there will be 100,000. While spy satellites still have more excellent technical capabilities, commercial satellites are narrowing the gap, with resolutions that have improved 900 percent from just 15 years ago. And more satellites mean the exact location can be viewed multiple times a day to detect small changes over time, giving a dynamic view of unfolding threats.

Connectivity is changing the spy business, too, turning everyday citizens into intelligence producers, collectors, and analysts - whether they know it or not. Each day, millions of people photograph and videotape the world around them to share online. Apps track all sorts of data, including the bars we visit and the jog places. Community data sharing sites like OpenStreetMap allow users to post their GPS coordinates from their phones. These capabilities offer new clues and tools for non-governmental nuclear sleuths, who can synthesize bits of information to reveal more than anyone imagined was possible.

Technology is also transforming analysis. Downloadable 3D modeling applications make it easy for citizen-sleuths to imagine faraway places with remarkable accuracy. And increases in computing power and available data have spawned machine learning techniques to analyze massive quantities of imagery or other data at machine speed. Machine learning can help detect changes over time at known missile sites or suspect facilities for those analyzing nuclear threats. In 2017, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency asked researchers at the University of Missouri to develop machine learning tools to see how fast and accurately they could identify surface-to-air missile sites over a vast area in Southwest China. The team developed a deep learning neural network (essentially, a collection of algorithms working together) and used only commercially available satellite imagery with 1-meter resolution. The computer and the human team correctly identified 90 percent of the missile sites. But the computer completed the job 80 times faster than humans, taking just 42 minutes to scan an area of approximately 90,000 square kilometers (about three-quarters the size of North Korea).

These developments have given rise to an ecosystem of nuclear sleuths that looks very different from the classified world of intelligence agencies. Open-source researchers include academic experts and employees of large multinational corporations that do business around the globe or smaller firms that operate satellites. Others are just private individuals who enjoy scouring the web and sharing their findings with like-minded hobbyists. And some intend to deceive.

 

The Wild West of the classified world

This is the Wild West compared to the classified world. In spy agencies, participation requires security clearances and adherence to strict government policies. Analysts come with narrower backgrounds but higher average skill levels. They work inside cumbersome bureaucracies but have access to training and quality control. While motives in the open-source world vary, the mission is generally uniform in the government: giving policymakers a decision advantage. One ecosystem is more open, diffuse, diverse, and faster-moving. The other is more closed, tailored, trained, and operates much more slowly.

On the positive side, citizen-sleuths provide a more hands-on deck, helping intelligence officials and policymakers identify fake claims, verify treaty compliance and monitor ongoing nuclear-related activities. They can show that what looks like an ominous nuclear development by an adversarial nation is nothing to worry about. For example, open-source researchers demonstrated that a cylindrical foundation in Iran that might have indicated the beginnings of a nuclear reactor was a hotel under construction and that an Israeli television report supposedly showing an Iranian missile launchpad big enough to send a nuclear weapon to the United States was just a massive elevator that resembled a rocket in a blurry image.

Non-governmental nuclear sleuths can also do the opposite: clandestine surface developments that might not otherwise be discovered. In 2012, Siegfried Hecker and Frank Pabian determined the locations of North Korea’s first two nuclear tests using commercial imagery and publicly available seismological information - assessments that proved highly accurate when North Korea revealed the test locations six years later.

Another example came in July 2020 in Iran, when a fire started during the middle of the night with flames so bright a weather satellite picked them up from space. Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization initially downplayed the fire as a mere “incident” involving an “industrial shed” under construction. The agency even released a photo showing a scorched building with minor damage.

Unconvinced, David Albright and Fabian Hinz, researchers at two different NGOs, began hunting. Using geolocation tools, commercial satellite imagery, and other data, each separately concluded the Iranians were lying. The shed was a nuclear centrifuge assembly building at Natanz, Iran’s main enrichment facility. The fire was large, almost certainly produced by an explosion, and possibly the result of sabotage.

Albright and Hinz took to Twitter. By 8:00 a.m., the Associated Press was running their analysis. By mid-afternoon, the New York Times was too. As mounting evidence pointed to the possibility of Israeli sabotage, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked about it in a press conference by nightfall. “I don’t address these issues,” he curtly replied.

The entire incident unfolded in a single day. Neither Albright nor Hinz worked in government or held security clearances. The intelligence was collected, analyzed, and disseminated without anyone inside America’s sprawling spy agencies. And because it was all unclassified - the researchers didn’t have to worry about protecting intelligence sources and methods - it could be shared, drawing public attention to Iran’s cover-up and forcing questions about Israel’s role.

Because of its many successes and the appealing notion of democratizing the search for truth, open-source intelligence is frequently discussed with a kind of breathy optimism. “The people’s panopticon: Open-source intelligence comes of age,” declared the Aug. 7, 2021 cover story of The Economist. Bellingcat, the fascinating organization of global volunteer detectives best known for uncovering Russian dirty deeds and Syrian atrocities, personifies this optimistic view of intelligence-for-global-good. Its founder, Eliot Higgins, describes Bellingcat as “an intelligence agency for the people,” an “open community of amateurs on a collaborative hunt for evidence.”

Yet the open-source ecosystem brings risks that are significant and often neglected. Open-source intelligence is easy to get wrong because good analysis takes training. Interpreting satellite imagery, for example, requires considerable skill and experience to know how shapes, shadows, textures, and angles can distort or delineate objects seen from directly overhead. And for all the celebration of organizations like Bellingcat, other open-source organizations traffic in shoddy analysis and pet theories play fast and loose with evidence and inject errors into the policy debate - sometimes inadvertently, sometimes deliberately.

 

North Korea’s first nuclear device

Even truthful information can be dangerous in the open-source world - making adversaries wise to weaknesses in their camouflage and concealment techniques or making crises harder to manage for diplomats and officials. In 2016, Dave Schmerler, another researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, measured the size of North Korea’s first nuclear device (called a “disco-ball”) and located the building where it was photographed by using objects in the room as telltale markers. The next North Korean photo of a warhead was taken in a completely white room with nothing to measure. Whether Schmerler’s research prompted the change is impossible to know. But in the world of intelligence, any time new monitoring methods are revealed, countermeasures are likely to follow, making future monitoring more difficult. Short-term intelligence gains told by well-meaning private citizens could unwittingly generate far more significant losses in the long term.

Revealing accurate information can also escalate international crises by forcing action too soon and making it harder for each side to walk away with a win. In moments of crisis and sensitive negotiations, policymakers rely on useful fiction to buy time and save face, giving one or both sides a way out. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the CIA began arming the Afghan Mujahideen. The Soviets knew it, and the Americans knew the Soviets knew. But the fiction kept a proxy war from becoming a superpower war with the potential for nuclear escalation. Figleaves can be helpful.

But the more third parties generate transparency, the harder it is for leaders to wield these useful fictions to manage conflict. Imagine a Cuban missile crisis unfolding today. An open-source sleuth discovers the Soviet nuclear buildup by analyzing commercial satellite imagery and its tweets. Now, President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev are publicly backed against the wall. The pressure is intense for both to take forceful action.

The two critical ingredients to resolving the actual Cuban missile crisis in 1962 weren’t speeding and openness - which is what open-source intelligence provides - but time to think and secrecy to compromise. Kennedy and his advisers had 13 days to weigh their options. Their declassified deliberations show that had Kennedy been forced to decide immediately, he would have opted for an airstrike that could well have led to nuclear war. Also, secrecy proved pivotal, giving Kennedy and Khrushchev room to compromise and ultimately resolving the crisis with a missile trade so closely held nobody knew about it for the next two decades. It’s easy to imagine how well-meaning “fact-checking” in real-time by non-governmental nuclear sleuths could have derailed that agreement, escalating a superpower standoff already teetering on the brink of global nuclear war.

The open-source revolution offers tremendous promise for detecting nuclear threats. But peril always rides shotgun with promise. For the CIA and the other intelligence (spy) agencies in the world, this is a moment of reckoning. Secrets once conferred a considerable advantage, but increasingly, that advantage belongs to open-source information. To succeed, spy agencies will need to operate differently: giving open-source intelligence much greater focus and attention, harnessing new technologies and tradecraft to improve their collection and analysis and understanding that open-source intelligence isn’t just intelligence. It’s an entirely new ecosystem of players with their motives, capabilities, dynamics, and - importantly - weaknesses.

 

1. For Iraq’s failed nuclear program, see Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2016); Charles Duelfer, “Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD,” September 30, 2004, https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-DUELFERREPORT/context; Joseph Cirincione, Jessica T. Mathews, George Perkovich, with Alexis Orton, “WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 2004, https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Iraq3FullText.pdf.

2. Austin Carson, Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 238-82.

 

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