The Cold War-era Intelligence Community (IC) was immensely unprepared for the new transnational threats that faced the globe and the U.S. The IC was built to combat the Soviet Union and deal with more clandestine and covert operations, such as proxy wars, turning foreign agents, and collecting information on the primary foreign powers’ capabilities and intentions in regions and foreign lands.
To quote Mark Lowenthal in his book Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, when the Soviet Union dissolved and a New World Order seemed apparent, “there was a yearning within the United States for a “peace divided,” meaning a re-allocation of resources with less going to national security and more to domestic needs… there was a widely held belief that the remaining issues that might challenge U.S. national security were of a much lower order than the nuclear-armed Soviet Union had been… At the same time, some assumed that there would be a new “ism” to confront the United States and other nations with shared values, but no one could define what it might be”. Many threats arose in this new era which the IC seemed inadequate to combat. The first was terrorism in all forms, domestic terrorism and religious extremism.
With religious terrorism, this was a new concept to many intelligence and law enforcement professionals, even those who had experience in dealing with terrorism as the vast majority of incidences had been politically based. Determining the causes behind terrorist actions which were religious based became difficult to combat, being that many of these ideas being promulgated by Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were attractive to many Muslims who believed that U.S. intervention in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East was wrong as well as despising those who they believed had odious values, the West and Jews in Israel. Furthermore, throughout the Cold War, the Soviet’s capabilities was very well known, but not their intent; the exact opposite was true for terrorism in that their intent was well known and obvious, yet their capabilities remained a mystery.
Nor could anyone have predicted that one of the largest threats to U.S. and European national security would be transnational organized criminal elements.
In the dissolution of the Soviet Union, one area that remained consistent with the past and did not undergo any debilitating change was Russian organized crime, the vory v zakone; in fact, it appears that the, “privatization of state property in Russia in 1992…expanded and solidified the complex relationship that had developed between the state and organized crime”. This privatization allowed organized crime massive assets which gave them, “enormous economic power, and hence political power as well,” which has aided them well in the long reign of Vladimir Putin. They posed such a threat that Director Louis Freeh of the FBI called Russian organized crime the, “greatest threat to US national security,” though he did retract that statement later.
Despite this, Russian organized crime foreshadowed the threats that would be posed by transnational organized criminal elements and how the IC seemed unable to halt or adequately assist in stopping these threats that oftentimes became enmeshed with larger insurgencies or terrorist groups, like FARC in Colombia or Hezbollah in Lebanon. The IC, when initially faced with these problems, was seriously underprepared to deal with such new and emerging issues and was unable to properly defend the nation against them in the immediate fall of the Soviet Union.
Throughout the 1990s, Lowenthal writes, “the U.S. national security agenda remained largely uninformed, not in terms of which issues mattered, but which of them mattered the most, and what the United States would be willing to do to achieve its preferred ends”. One of the most important problems from this new era of transnational threats is a developing, “gap between the intelligence community’s ability to provide intelligence and the policy maker’s ability to craft policies to address the issues and to use the intelligence”.
The fact is that the intelligence community still is not as adept as it once was to combat these new threats that are sometimes stateless and more difficult to define or pinpoint and must work to better provide more relevant and timely information to policymakers on threats from terrorists, narcotics traffickers, and hackers that pose a serious, if not extremely larger, threat than conventional states and their militaries.
