Share but Beware

Managing intelligence in the age of Trump

We have two bonus guest posts this week (Sam is on a family holiday in Japan and will be back next week).

The first is from Greg Treverton. Few people are better qualified to comment on the challenges America’s allies face as they try to manage relations with the U.S. intelligence community. He has not only written widely on the theory and practice of intelligence but also has experience as Chair of the U.S. National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2017 under President Obama, having served President Clinton as Vice Chair from 1993 to 1995.

We asked him to assess how allies should navigate the challenges posed by the Trump administration with its lax attitude to secrecy, readiness to make sweeping staff cuts, and distrust of assessments that do not fit with its worldview.

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“Signalgate” – Trump’s foreign policy team discussing war plans against the Houthis in Yemen over Signal, a commercial messaging app – has dominated the news about intelligence.

It is probably the most damaging security breach the US government – as opposed to disgruntled individuals like Edward Snowden – has inflicted on itself in recent memory. But it also raises questions about whether and how the United States can continue to share intelligence with friends and allies, especially but not limited to the “Five Eyes” – the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. My advice to all those countries would be “share but beware.”

The Basics of Sharing

As someone who several times has managed U.S. intelligence agencies, including as Chair of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, I’ve long thought that the best way to persuade other countries to work with us was to help them see the issues in the same way we do. And that means sharing intelligence. It is useful to think of four forms of intelligence sharing, as in Table 1 below.

Most sharing is in the bilateral, transactional box. After 9/11, the United States shared intelligence with several dozen countries, including such long-time “friends” as Russia and Iran. Needless to say, that sharing was very transactional, limited to information about terrorist groups and activities that both countries perceived as threatening. According to documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, the U.S. signals intelligence agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), had secret pacts to share intelligence with at least 41 countries. Intelligence sharing in international bodies, including NATO, is also transactional, with countries sharing what they deem useful and relatively safe, assuming there is some chance that the information with become public.

For sharing to move beyond transactional to relational, the countries must also share powerful bonds borne of history and strategic perspective. Trust is imperative. There, the paradigm is sharing between the United States and Britain, which developed from the secret World War II alliance between their cypher and code breaking teams. The two signed a signals intelligence agreement in 1946, which was later extended to the three other members of the “Five Eyes”. It is unique as the only example of multilateral intelligence sharing that is relational and is based on a high degree of trust, with the presumption that intelligence will be shared. To be sure, nothing prevents the partners from acting unilaterally or refusing to share when they see fit.

Breaking Trust

“Signalgate” put an exclamation point to the concerns America’s friends and allies must have over sharing intelligence. The level of incompetence it displayed got worse and worse.