Glasnost for the CIA

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COMING IN FROM THE COLD

During the Cold War, the purpose of the U.S. intelligence community was clear. American intelligence was a spyglass focused on the Soviet Union, keeping track of Soviet military research and development and watching Soviet activities throughout the developing world. U.S. intelligence caught other things only in its peripheral vision.

Now the Cold War is over. But its passing has hardly put an end to conflict, instability, or history. A dozen world hot spots clamor for attention, from Bosnia to North Korea, from Angola to Armenia, from Cambodia to Somalia. New areas of dispute--religious, ethnic, and national rather than ideological--threaten to replace the U.S.-Soviet standoff as the engines of world instability. At the same time, the United States has undertaken the herculean task of shepherding Eastern Europe and Russia through divisive and incredibly expensive economic and political reforms. In short, the Cold War has bequeathed an uncertain legacy to the economically and socially exhausted West; and if anything, U.S. intelligence must now come to resemble a wide-angle lens, focusing equally on a host of different countries and issues. In a time of geopolitical uncertainty and sharp cutbacks in U.S. defense spending, the flexibility and foresight provided by good intelligence may be America's most important foreign policy and defense asset in coming years.

In this new era, many U.S. defense doctrines and institutions must be reformed--and no reforms are more important than those focusing on intelligence.

While reforms in budgeting and organization are badly needed, thinking about U.S. intelligence requirements must begin with a fundamental reassessment of what the United States needs its intelligence services to do. What kind of information should they collect? To what uses will that information be put? We must redefine the nature of intelligence itself...