he build-up of forces along Ukraine’s border and the international community’s response to Russia’s mobilization spawned an interesting, if under recognized, confluence of intelligence-related developments. On the one hand, we witnessed what a mature open-source intelligence community is capable of achieving. Social media, particularly Twitter, was filled with accounts tracking the movements of units and equipment from Russia’s military districts to the border of Ukraine. Online sleuths identified the tanks, ships, artillery, and more, plotting their travels along road and rail and building a more complete picture of just how many forces Moscow was moving into position.
At the same time, the intelligence communities of Washington and London spoke with increasing frankness and candor about what their analysts were seeing. Whether reporting on Russia’s timetable or expected deployment, or more recently disclosing the “false flag” plans of Russian intelligence, the CIA and SIS seemed to be leaning far more forward into the information war than in previous encounters with Moscow. Some have expressed concern this could risk sources and methods, or potentially risk a greater politicization of intelligence. It is nevertheless an interesting development—a real-time look at intelligence in the information war.
For as visible as intelligence is in the present crisis, remains a significant lack of awareness of what intelligence is, what it does and cannot do, and how the community works. Princeton University professor, Dr. Amy Zegart, seeks to correct this in her new book “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms”. “Spies” could easily have been subtitled “Intelligence 101” as Zegart covers the panoply of intelligence from its history to its analytical challenges, traitors and counterintelligence, to open source research and the cyber domain. Zegart’s approach is very collegiate and professorial, but in a good way. Reading “Spies” reminded me of being in one of those undergraduate classes that I eagerly looked forward to attending—usually taught by Dr. Elizabeth Hanson at the University of Connecticut.
Zegart, like Hanson, brings topics to life by breaking their complexity down and presenting them in clear and interesting ways. There are several anecdotes sprinkled in with the academic approach that make the core content even more interesting. I quite enjoyed the callout to Julia Child, the well-known chef who was also an Office of Strategic Services officer who, among other things, came up with a shark repellent to aid the service’s clandestine operations.
Zegart primes each chapter with what is going to be covered and why it matters. In so doing, she helps reinforce her points and distills what is largely a dark art into accessible and straight-forward concepts. This is all the more important because today so much of the public’s understanding about espionage is wholly based off of “spytainment”—the Bournes and Bauers of the world. Were this misconception restricted to the general public it would be bad enough, but as she writes, this creeps into the policymaking world’s understanding of the IC’s capabilities and practices.
After having established a solid foundation on intelligence, she explores open source intelligence in practice (amateur nuclear sleuths) and the cyber-domain. The former has become increasingly mature, as seen with the aforementioned tracking of Russia’s military, but also with the discovery of China’s “bouncy castles of death” (inflatable shelters for ICBM silo construction). This identification was made possible by private, commercial satellite imagery—something that was once the sole domain of nation-states. That academic researchers were able to purchase commercial imagery from a private vendor to discover the activities of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force is all the more incredible when one reflects on that situation in comparison with the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 60th anniversary of which is this October.
In her chapter on the cyber domain, Zegart succinctly covers the panoply of digital challenges from social media manipulation to cyber warfare. Here, as with the book writ large, and as other reviewers have noted, I too wish there were more about the future of intelligence in the cyber domain. Peppered throughout the book are hints at how artificial intelligence and machine learning could change espionage, but a deeper exploration would be welcome. How can we maintain the cyber intelligence arms race, something Nicole Perloth covered brilliantly in her book “This is How They Tell Me the World Ends”? How can the IC better leverage emerging technologies from a Silicon Valley that is unreasonably hostile and skeptical of the community? What does quantum computing mean for the future? There are easily enough questions Zegart touches upon which can (and hopefully will) fill another book.
A deeper exploration of the role and future of human intelligence (HUMINT), the domain of the CIA, would also have been welcome. It seems there is a long-running debate about whether HUMINT has a future when secrets are stored online or in hard drives, and the art of running an agent is becoming more and more difficult. Some feel that the ubiquity of surveillance cameras, digital footprints, machine learning, and artificial intelligence all herald the end of the human spy. Others like Marc Polymeropolous and Douglas London argue that while it is and will become more difficult, running human agents will always be a priority and indeed a necessity. The secrets between a person’s ears will remain, at least for now, not downloadable.
Her discussion of covert action is both thorough and interesting, and illuminating for lay audiences. This is particularly welcome as espionage is currently seen as a Swiss Army Knife for nearly every intractable problem. While it is seen as a “third option,” covert action alone cannot achieve strategic effects—only when it is part of a coherent policy program can it have the desired demonstrable effects. Without that coherent program, as successive presidents have found, the CIA’s professionals can only achieve so much (and received subsequent unfair blame for the shortcomings). Indeed, the “failures” of intelligence are more often failures of policymaking or bureaucracy than of collection or analysis.
Zegart’s is the best single volume on American intelligence I’ve yet come across. It is well-written, well-structured, and engaging like a good college course. It should be issued to every incoming representative and senator taking a seat on the respective select committees on intelligence (which need to get back to the business over oversight, but that’s an essay in of itself), and be required reading of the principals committee of the National Security Council. Intelligence can do a lot, but it can’t do everything. Knowing those limitations is as important as anything else.
The book is not primarily written for an intelligence practitioner, but even they are likely to find interesting nuggets or information they know (or think they know) presented in a novel way. Revisiting cognitive biases is surely always beneficial. In her section on classification, I chortled at the guidance I once received suggesting that the easiest way to handle the classification issue was to mark everything the highest level, even emails about lunch—and one wonders why there is an issue of over-classification.
The opening chapter of “Spies” would be particularly instructive for members of the intelligence community (IC), helping them to understand just how disconnected the American public is from their mission. To the CIA’s credit they have leaned very far forward in recent years in opening up to the public, especially with a view to recruiting a more diverse workforce. Such practices will not only lead to a better-informed public, but also to a much more effective intelligence community.
Intelligence is misused and misunderstood more than any other asset. The IC’s successes are rarely public knowledge, but its missteps are front-page news, and the quiet professionals rarely are able to correct the record. In “Spies” Zegart does an admirable job establishing a base level of knowledge—a base that is critical if the American public and policymakers alike are to better use and understand the world of espionage and its products.
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February 19, 2022
In his latest book review, Joshua Huminski discusses Amy B. Zegart's "Spies, Lies, and Algorithms," praising the book as an accessible look behind the curtain into the world of espionage - which is itself undergoing a period of change due to exponential technologies.
T
he build-up of forces along Ukraine’s border and the international community’s response to Russia’s mobilization spawned an interesting, if under recognized, confluence of intelligence-related developments. On the one hand, we witnessed what a mature open-source intelligence community is capable of achieving. Social media, particularly Twitter, was filled with accounts tracking the movements of units and equipment from Russia’s military districts to the border of Ukraine. Online sleuths identified the tanks, ships, artillery, and more, plotting their travels along road and rail and building a more complete picture of just how many forces Moscow was moving into position.
At the same time, the intelligence communities of Washington and London spoke with increasing frankness and candor about what their analysts were seeing. Whether reporting on Russia’s timetable or expected deployment, or more recently disclosing the “false flag” plans of Russian intelligence, the CIA and SIS seemed to be leaning far more forward into the information war than in previous encounters with Moscow. Some have expressed concern this could risk sources and methods, or potentially risk a greater politicization of intelligence. It is nevertheless an interesting development—a real-time look at intelligence in the information war.
For as visible as intelligence is in the present crisis, remains a significant lack of awareness of what intelligence is, what it does and cannot do, and how the community works. Princeton University professor, Dr. Amy Zegart, seeks to correct this in her new book “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms”. “Spies” could easily have been subtitled “Intelligence 101” as Zegart covers the panoply of intelligence from its history to its analytical challenges, traitors and counterintelligence, to open source research and the cyber domain. Zegart’s approach is very collegiate and professorial, but in a good way. Reading “Spies” reminded me of being in one of those undergraduate classes that I eagerly looked forward to attending—usually taught by Dr. Elizabeth Hanson at the University of Connecticut.
Zegart, like Hanson, brings topics to life by breaking their complexity down and presenting them in clear and interesting ways. There are several anecdotes sprinkled in with the academic approach that make the core content even more interesting. I quite enjoyed the callout to Julia Child, the well-known chef who was also an Office of Strategic Services officer who, among other things, came up with a shark repellent to aid the service’s clandestine operations.
Zegart primes each chapter with what is going to be covered and why it matters. In so doing, she helps reinforce her points and distills what is largely a dark art into accessible and straight-forward concepts. This is all the more important because today so much of the public’s understanding about espionage is wholly based off of “spytainment”—the Bournes and Bauers of the world. Were this misconception restricted to the general public it would be bad enough, but as she writes, this creeps into the policymaking world’s understanding of the IC’s capabilities and practices.
After having established a solid foundation on intelligence, she explores open source intelligence in practice (amateur nuclear sleuths) and the cyber-domain. The former has become increasingly mature, as seen with the aforementioned tracking of Russia’s military, but also with the discovery of China’s “bouncy castles of death” (inflatable shelters for ICBM silo construction). This identification was made possible by private, commercial satellite imagery—something that was once the sole domain of nation-states. That academic researchers were able to purchase commercial imagery from a private vendor to discover the activities of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force is all the more incredible when one reflects on that situation in comparison with the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 60th anniversary of which is this October.
In her chapter on the cyber domain, Zegart succinctly covers the panoply of digital challenges from social media manipulation to cyber warfare. Here, as with the book writ large, and as other reviewers have noted, I too wish there were more about the future of intelligence in the cyber domain. Peppered throughout the book are hints at how artificial intelligence and machine learning could change espionage, but a deeper exploration would be welcome. How can we maintain the cyber intelligence arms race, something Nicole Perloth covered brilliantly in her book “This is How They Tell Me the World Ends”? How can the IC better leverage emerging technologies from a Silicon Valley that is unreasonably hostile and skeptical of the community? What does quantum computing mean for the future? There are easily enough questions Zegart touches upon which can (and hopefully will) fill another book.
A deeper exploration of the role and future of human intelligence (HUMINT), the domain of the CIA, would also have been welcome. It seems there is a long-running debate about whether HUMINT has a future when secrets are stored online or in hard drives, and the art of running an agent is becoming more and more difficult. Some feel that the ubiquity of surveillance cameras, digital footprints, machine learning, and artificial intelligence all herald the end of the human spy. Others like Marc Polymeropolous and Douglas London argue that while it is and will become more difficult, running human agents will always be a priority and indeed a necessity. The secrets between a person’s ears will remain, at least for now, not downloadable.
Her discussion of covert action is both thorough and interesting, and illuminating for lay audiences. This is particularly welcome as espionage is currently seen as a Swiss Army Knife for nearly every intractable problem. While it is seen as a “third option,” covert action alone cannot achieve strategic effects—only when it is part of a coherent policy program can it have the desired demonstrable effects. Without that coherent program, as successive presidents have found, the CIA’s professionals can only achieve so much (and received subsequent unfair blame for the shortcomings). Indeed, the “failures” of intelligence are more often failures of policymaking or bureaucracy than of collection or analysis.
Zegart’s is the best single volume on American intelligence I’ve yet come across. It is well-written, well-structured, and engaging like a good college course. It should be issued to every incoming representative and senator taking a seat on the respective select committees on intelligence (which need to get back to the business over oversight, but that’s an essay in of itself), and be required reading of the principals committee of the National Security Council. Intelligence can do a lot, but it can’t do everything. Knowing those limitations is as important as anything else.
The book is not primarily written for an intelligence practitioner, but even they are likely to find interesting nuggets or information they know (or think they know) presented in a novel way. Revisiting cognitive biases is surely always beneficial. In her section on classification, I chortled at the guidance I once received suggesting that the easiest way to handle the classification issue was to mark everything the highest level, even emails about lunch—and one wonders why there is an issue of over-classification.
The opening chapter of “Spies” would be particularly instructive for members of the intelligence community (IC), helping them to understand just how disconnected the American public is from their mission. To the CIA’s credit they have leaned very far forward in recent years in opening up to the public, especially with a view to recruiting a more diverse workforce. Such practices will not only lead to a better-informed public, but also to a much more effective intelligence community.
Intelligence is misused and misunderstood more than any other asset. The IC’s successes are rarely public knowledge, but its missteps are front-page news, and the quiet professionals rarely are able to correct the record. In “Spies” Zegart does an admirable job establishing a base level of knowledge—a base that is critical if the American public and policymakers alike are to better use and understand the world of espionage and its products.
