Trump Blasts His Intel Chiefs as Naive

The Intelligence Community Seal

UPDATE: [31Jan2019] 
Senator Schumer has called for an "Intelligence Intervention of Trump" to "educate the President on issues of National Security."  This comes from the Democrat Party which routinely leaks highly classified and sensitive materials to CNN and other elements of the Press.  

More importantly, Schumer's inference is that he is setting the stage for the "impeachment" of the POTUS, implying that Trump is incapable of managing the Affairs of State.  Mr Trump made clear early on that he had no confidence whatever in the US Intelligence Community's judgment, based on the weaponization of the Intelligence products he had received before and after his Inauguration.
Importantly, Schumer's comments border on Treason, and issue which could backfire on his belligerence.

The POTUS, like any other Chief Executive [Private or Public sector], listens to his advisors and makes his decisions which includes their input.  
[Obama was notable for ignoring his Presidential Daily Brief and instead going to the Golf Course; he was also notable for going to Las Vegas to gamble in the midst of the Benghazi disaster.]

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Yahoo News, by Dylan Sableford (Senior Editor)

According to the Yahoo News, President Trump has criticized his Intelligence Chiefs as "Extremely Passive and Naive" after they disagreed with his assessment of Iran as a "source of potential danger and conflict".   Trump also discounted their assessments of North Korea and ISIS as continuing to pose serious threats to the US.

This is not to say these managers are not professional and competent; it IS to say the organizations they manage, because of their histories and massive growth since 2001, no longer have the capability to produce objective, precision analysis - in a timely fashion.

Our opinion is based on roughly 50 years of experience operating in and around

 the Intelligence Community and LEC with Military Intelligence, CIA, DIA, NSA, 

DOJ, theFBI [including active roles as Analyst and Operations Manager, as 

Case Officer, Special Operations advisor, builder, instructor, and director of a 

national MilitaryIntelligence organization that trained over 1,000 units, 

Special Intelligence Advisorto the CG of Southern Command and to the 

CIA's DDO-LA, Director of Operations for the Defense Clandestine Service, 

and Editor of the (Intelligence) Black Book at  the Pentagon]. 

Our judgement is that Mr Trump is correct in doubting the ability of the current Intelligence Community to provide an accurate National Security assessment.  What he receives has no particular value.

The IC ranks are filled with programmed analysts who feed the current leadership the politicized drivel they’ve been forced to produce over the previous four Administrations.

This is a bloated, relatively incompetent bureaucracy, incapable of making objective assessments.

Now, what may have originally begun as an extremely accurate, objective assessment by an experienced and highly skilled analyst must currently  navigate through a dozen or more layers of politicized supervisory bureaucrats, altering content to meet the accepted political orientation of each layer.

By the time the modified assessment reaches the Director level, it has become worthless pablum, inoffensive to even the most mindless politician - and thus acceptable to brief the President.

Back in 2002, with Ed Meese, we redesigned the Intelligence Community and capped the entire IC at fewer than 10,000 for all the components, with no more than 100 staff for the newly created Director of National Intelligence [DNI] to replace the Director of Central Intelligence which had become an incompetent but all-powerful overseer of all the Intelligence organizations.

The DNI, as we envisioned it, would become a streamlined coordination point through which intelligence collection could be coordinated and assessments could be conducted in an open and collegial manner.

STU III

Previously, coordination of precision intelligence was routinely conducted over the Grey Phone
[aka: STU, or secure telephone unit] in which all levels of classified information could be discussed without fear of interception.

A collective call could bring in analysts from key agencies, complete with tasking and retrieval, and on the spot assessments -- to be translated into refined intelligence.

But, the last time we checked, the IC had swollen to nearly 900,000 underemployed drones cleared at the Top Secret level, staffing nearly 1,300 government organizations, supported by nearly 2,000 private companies in 10,000 locations, with a proposed budget of about $60 Billion.

Today, that same coordination would be either impossible, or would take weeks of coordination, and "oversight".

To clarify, supporting this monstrous behemoth, we calculate there is a core competency of about 10,000 superb analysts, operators, and support personnel whose professionalism and expertise carry the weight and expense of the other 890,000 non-essential employees.

These professionals can tap into the collection and analysis of experts in accessible organizations [e.g., NSA, DIA, or NRO] in order to add technical expertise to their assessments and operations.  Agencies such as NSA have highly sophisticated equipment which gathers an incredible amount of information, which is stored, but inadequately analyzed to become finished Intelligence.  Furnished to the right analysts, the information can serve to create accurate intelligence.


As a footnote, 
the IC is NOT composed of 17 agencies - as reported in the accompanying article which apparently uses Hillary Clinton or Senator Warner as its prime sources.

There are more than 1,000 organizations which collect, process, and contribute to a few actual agencies tasked with producing national Intelligence products.

These are:
1) CIA
2) DIA,
3) NSA [National Security Agency]
4) NRO [National Reconnaissance Office]
5) NGA [National Geospatial Intelligence Agency]

The DNI [Director of National Intelligence] is an Administrator - not an agency.

The following are not agencies, but are Intelligence subsets of Departments or other agencies
1) DOD/DHS
     a) Army
     b) Navy
     c) Air Force
     d) USMC
     e) USCG
     f) Secret Service [formerly under Treasury Department]
     g) ICE
     h) Customs & Border Protection
     i)  TSA

2) Treasury Department [Intelligence Bureau; Secret Service]
3) Energy Department [Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence]
4) Department of Justice
    a) FBI
    b) DEA
    c)  ATF
5) Commerce Department [Intelligence Bureau]
6) State Department [Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)]

There are a few other highly specialized organizations which conduct unique programs; but, those are not officially part of the Intelligence Community.

 In summary, Trump is correct in his assessment of the IC chiefs who are Administrators, and not experienced operators or analysts.

Mr Trump is better served by outside organizations which specialize in collecting and analyzing Intelligence on specific areas and topics pending a complete revamping of the Intelligence Community.

CIA Interrogations - Enhanced, or Torture

Enhanced Interrogation:  AKA - TORTURE

We've noted the circulation of what purports to be a CIA public service announcement regarding the value of "Enhanced Interrogation" of "Terrorist Prisoners" which allegedly produced extraordinary and actionable Intelligence.
[We've attached an extract of this report at the bottom of this blog post.]

Much of the published information is true, but it was definitely not produced from enhanced interrogation, but rather via different sourcing, much of it from unclassified, open-source newspaper accounts.  So, you may discount the origin of the data.

We are very familiar with all forms of interrogation and have conducted hundreds of interrogations, both tactical and strategic in war zones and  special facilities, as well as CounterIntelligence interrogations to determine espionage threats..  

We never had a prisoner who couldn't be broken -- and turned, to include NVA Political Officers and hardened guerrilla fighters.  And they were tougher than Taliban. At no time did we ever have to use other than normal interrogation techniques, and at no time, did we ever have to use torture to obtain results.  Essentially, torture routinely gives false results and misleading information -- and bad intelligence.

Successful interrogations come from sophisticated conversations, rather than beating information out of a prisoner.  Most prisoners willingly provide as much information as is requested or demanded, and a professional interrogator is prepared with background and confirmed data to determine how truthful the subject is.  

Essentially, there are three forms of interrogation:

1)  Simple debriefing is for prisoners who have no resistance training.  They'll be happy to chatter away and disclose everything they know, and often, information they were unaware they have/had.  Handled properly, they can be enormously helpful.  In one case, a teenager, illiterate and fairly simple, provided the location of the master logistics center for the Spring Offensive - allowing us to capture it, and essentially ending that war, at least for a while.

2)  Professional interrogations, which require the interrogator to be  trained in psychology and who looks for nuances in the subject's eyes, facial movements, body moisture, voice rhythms, etc., to determine attempts to mislead the interrogator.  The interrogator begins with a number of folders on his/her desk, and accepts the prisoner who, through psychological manipulation, assumes and fears torture.  The folders contain parameters of verified information to answer key questions which can lead to new questions and sophisticated [though non-violent] techniques.  For the most part, the subject is unaware of the true objectives of the interrogation.

3)  Hostile interrogations are used to break down the  subject through disorientation, fear of the unknown, various forms of psychological techniques, and special manipulation techniques, augmented by input from HUMINT, IMINT, SIGINT, COMINT, ELINT, etc.  

Again, opening folders with information the subject believes was provided by other prisoners weakens his/her resistance.   Add in fear of being caught lying, and the fear of the unknown becomes far more effective than actual torture.  

[See Room 101 in the Orwell's book, 1984].  This process requires a great deal of sophistication and education on the part of the Interrogator, but, again, includes absolutely NO TORTURE.]

FITD [Forscom Intelligence Training Detachment] - the unit we formed at Ft Bragg [1976] trained all USFORSCOM [Forces Command] tactical units and strategic Reserve units in proper interrogation methods; we created SOPs and manuals, most of which were incorporated years later in TRADOC [Training & Doctrine Command]. 

FITD was later converted to the 111th MI Brigade which took over the mission.

[Notably, Enhanced Interrogation techniques were legalized, and added to the Army's Field Manual, though still regarded as extreme, and unnecessary for the most part]

Unfortunately, as we learned from many years of association with, and assignments to the CIA, their approach to interrogations was unique.  

Since they lacked professional interrogators, they would draw on the Military for both SpecOps and mundane things like interrogations.  Unfortunately, the CIA would secretly coordinate with the Pentagon for untrained Warm Bodies to conduct these ops, and they would frequently end up with unskilled Marines or Army Infantry troops unskilled in interrogation, but who learned their trade by watching TV programs like Jack Bauer's skill sets in 24, in which torture was routinely used -- with very poor results.  Although the Military had trained, linguistically skilled professional interrogators, the CIA would ignore them and frequently depend on local nationals who had knowledge of either psychology or interrogation skills.

The greatest issue we have with the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" technique is that other countries [hostile and friendly] follow our lead.  If the US does it, it must be OK.  Worse, our adversaries/enemies look at us as the penultimate bad guys reflected in their propaganda themes, and use those techniques when interrogating US soldiers.  We were briefly captive of the Pathet Lao in southern Laos near the end of the war and were not amused by these techniques, which included fairly crude attempts at torture, before we found a way to exit the situation.  Later, we were interrogating an NVA captain at one point and asked him why the NVA treated our soldiers so viciously when they were captured.  He was astonished at the question and admonished me, saying, 

"We simply imitate your atrocities. Why, your troops mutilate our troops!  Your newspaper - Stars & Stripes herald such actions of one of your colonels."

Hatchet Hank Emerson

We were astonished, but placed a secure call to Saigon to a trusted friend at MACSOG who verified the torture and mutilation, and even shipped a copy of the Stars & Stripes which headlined this local hero, Lt Col Henry Emerson, thus affirming that we were, in fact, bad guys, leading to the torture of our own soldiers.  Such incidents continue today where we have fought.

We have enough enemies around the world now; we don't need more but we create enemies with the concept of torture.

In short, we do not support "enhanced" interrogation, a technique of negative value falsely touted by the CIA as a productive tool. We guarantee Enhanced Interrogation techniques will be/has been used against US PWs as a retaliatory measure.  

Ultimately, we are not labeling the US as the BAD GUY; but, we very much wish to see the CIA removed from such operations, particularly from controlling our Special Operations forces and Military Intelligence operations -- the actual trained Professionals in Military Operations and Human Intelligence programs!  

Below is an extract of the CIA's claim to intelligence production gained through, and which they claim justifies "Enhanced Interrogation".  

Keep in mind that virtually all of this information was 

published in the US News Media or on the Internet.