Henley-Putnam Teleconference Series — Lecture 1 — Fred Rustmann on The Reorganization of the Intelligence Community

If you visit the Henley-Putnam website real quick before you read this post, you can become more familiar with their teleconference series. Henley-Putnam is an online college offering bachelors and masters degrees in fields such as counter-terrorism. Once a month, they hold a new lecture that anyone in the world can listen in to and then they post it on their website. I really like this idea and will be giving you my outlines of the speeches and what I thought about what they talked about. This is the first one I will look at, as of now, there are eleven more.

The Speaker

Fred Rustmann is a retired Senior Clandestine Officer in the CIA. He was assigned abroad throughout the Cold War and was twice the Senior CIA Officer in the country he was assigned to. He was involved in the collection of foreign intel from both human and technology assets. He also dealt with the dissemination of reports on political and economic plans of foreign governments and parties. He also had dealings with terrorism. He has a unique insight into the reorganization of the intelligence community since 9/11 being highly involved with the CIA.

Pre 9/11

He began his speech highlighting what was wrong with the intelligence community before 9/11. He mentioned that the DCI was the head of the whole intel community and that over the years, the DCI’s budget became controlled by the DoD. The position never got a real grip on any budgetary aspects and really only had full control over the CIA.

Post 9/11

He recognized 9/11 as a major intelligence failure that lead a distrust in the CIA. However, he believes that the blame needed to be spread around, more than just the CIA messed up. He also said that it was more an internal than an external failure, but the FBI was more to blame than the CIA. The two agencies had communications problems. The CIA deals in intelligence and preventing crime, where as the FBI deals in solving crimes, not preventing them. The led to the reorganization.

Reorganization

This came with the creation of the DNI – Director of National Intelligence. Mr. Rustmann believed that the creation of this position was unnecessary because it was redundant. He wanted to see them give those powers to the DCI that has been around since the late 40s. He feared that this would just add another level of bureaucracy to the process and his fears became reality. Now the people under the DNI started off small, about 150 people. However, the numbers have grown to above 1,000 mostly from the middle to upper level in the CIA. He stated that the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTECH), which eventually became the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), and the DHS rape the CIA for officers. Those two agencies left the CIA with greatly diminished authority and effectiveness. Under the Mike McConnell as the DNI, 15/16 (CIA) intel agencies report to other offices and he cannot hire or fire from any or them. He has budget compliant issues and is limited in the same way the DCI is. His quote was, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” Now, during this time period, the CIA is has grown at a temendous rate. 130,000 applications were received in 2006 and 1/7 of the agency was hired in that year. 40% had joined between 2001 and 2007. This made the lack of senior officers a problem especially when the collection of intel has never been more important.

War today is much different from Cold War

He believes that the CIA is the most affective weapon in the National Security arsenal. This is an intel war we are in now, we must stop them before they start. Also, we know that it is not possible to stop 100% of attacks, once we stop them from accessing one location, they just move down their list. In the Cold War, we knew the enemy and the probability of attack was low because there were lines that just weren’t crossed. In this new day and age, everyone is threatened. His final statements were that we need to create good clandestine collection missions and we must stop bureaucratizing the intel process.

Wrap it up

He answered three questions that you can read in the attached outline that dealt with collecting intel from US persons, which agency collects economic financial data for anti money laundering, counterfeit trade and how it is disseminated, and how will the role of case officer change in the future. I found his lecture very interesting and very well informed. His bias towards the CIA was a little obvious, but expected given his background. This teleconference was held about a year ago, but all of the information is still valid and his speech was still very relevant. I encourage you to look at my outline below and to check back later to see more write ups on future teleconferences.

Fred Rustmann – Reorganization of Intelligence Community