In October 1985 Robert Gates, then the forty-two year old deputy director of intelligence, gave a paper to the eleventh convention of the association of former intelligence officers. The paper was titled "The future of the intelligence community" and it examined ten major areas of concern that Gates considered would dominate intelligence to the year 2000. The trends in these areas were, he argued, going to be a mixture of new, specific problems, and a greater complexity of existing ones.
Gates' first trend was the revolution in the way intelligence is communicated to policymakers, particularly electronic dissemination by computer. The second was the increasing difficulty of obtaining necessary data. Soviet camouflage techniques were already reducing the effectiveness of monitoring missile tests and sites. While information about the performance of the Soviet economy was increasingly restricted, even within the Soviet governing elites. The third trend identified by Gates was the problem of recruitment. There was a decline in the number of suitable potential recruits who could pass the polygraph, the main reason for which was drugs. However, once people joined the agency they tended to stay. The attrition rate was less than 4 per cent, the lowest anywhere in either government or industry. The fourth trend was a revolution in relations with Congress which was playing, and would continue to play, a much larger role in foreign policy. The fifth trend was the use by the executive branch of intelligence for the purpose of public education. Under the Reagan administration, intelligence was published to help win support for its policies in the press and in Congress.
The sixth trend, a corollary of the fifth, was the increasing dissemination of intelligence to U.S. allies and others. The seventh prospect already discernible was the dramatic increase in the diversity of subjects which the intelligence community was expected to address including foreign technology developments; genetic engineering; trends in worldwide food and population resources; religion; human rights; drugs; terrorism; high-technology transfers. This also led to a wider range in the users of intelligence right across the Washington bureaucracy. Gates' ninth trend was the growing centrality of intelligence to the foreign policy process of the government. In certain areas, Gates suggested, notably technology transfer, drugs and terrorism, there would be no effective policy without intelligence.
The tenth and final trend was that "intelligence is the only arm of government looking to the future". As the world became more complex and as policymakers needed more information, the intelligence community was the only sector of the government which was looking ahead. The community was faced with the constant uphill struggle of trying to convince a policymaker to do something which would benefit the future. It was a problem of democracy's short horizons and brief attention spans which had faced Gates' predecessors and would prove no less pressing to his successors.
Gates defined these new trends in terms of a bureaucracy seeking to identify with the other important government democracies. His imagination was reserved for methodology, not objectives or opportunities.
CHANGE
Since 1985, the old certainties in which the CIA was founded have shattered. Gates' trends are still valid, but they will operate in a radically different context. The 1991 Gulf war; the withdrawal by the Soviet Union from eastern and central Europe; the demise of the Soviet communist party and communist system; the complete discrediting of totalitarianism of the right and left; time running out for the oligarchs in Red China; the failed coup in the Soviet Union in August 1991 that led to radical internal reform, were all changes that no-one had foreseen even in 1988. The U.S. is now the only superpower and most of its former enemies are competing for its friendship.
There has been a sea-change in the assertion of democratic belief around the world. In America, government is more accountable to Congress than it was a decade ago. There has been a sharp decline in the ideal of secrecy, a growing refusal to accept a world of secrets upon which intelligence operations depend. In consequence, an intelligence agency needs to think imaginatively about the future, largely because the complexity of events, and of technology, means that imagination is the most effective tool left to the human brain trying to comprehend developments and possibilities.
NEW PROBLEMS
The Gulf War capped a string of post-Cold War changes -in Europe, the Middle East, South America, Africa, and the Far East - that have confirmed the United States as ascendant in the world. In turn, this has required a redefinition of U.S. security objectives, and thus intelligence objectives.
Instead of America going home, and the expressions of U.S. power therefore ebbing with the cold war's end, a Pax Americana - with the support of the Soviet Union and the Gulf allies - has developed. And this has cut across the NATO alliance, and the European Community.
In Europe, Germany, labouring under the burden of assimilating its new eastern third, has been totally absent from the Western security debate. Poland and Britain, with strong support from France and the USSR, are endeavouring to consolidate U.S. power in Europe in NATO as the best way of securing the containment of united Germany.
In the Soviet Union, both Gorbachev and Yeltsin have courted the United States as the best friend of their country's future. In Africa there has been a simple capitulation to the reality of Soviet withdrawal. In the Far East, U.S. power is seen as preventing any Japanese military resurgence. Smaller states see U.S. power as a protection against economic domination by larger regional neighbours. In contrast to the Vietnam war, U.S. performance in the Gulf "has left a very deep impression of competence" according to Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore's elder statesman. Bob Hawke, prime minister of Australia, has said that since 1945 the U.S. has seen its security commitment in Asia "primarily as a contribution to its global containment of communism and of Soviet military power," but that this has now changed to a peacekeeping stance.
MIDDLE EAST
In the Middle East, perhaps the most critical region, the Gulf war jolted every country in the area to compete for U.S. friendship. Now, even Iran seems to accept what Egypt and Israel have long accepted: that the key to the region's future is in Washington. In turn, Washington has encouraged France and the Soviet Union to act as go-betweens in the region. France deals with the PLO because Washington refuses to have official contacts with the organisation, and the USSR has brought its influence to bear on its clients in the region, notably Iraq and Syria, to reduce terrorism and hostility to Israel.
The Gulf War demonstrated that U.S. mid-east policy was distorted by the idea that "my enemy's enemy is my friend". Iraq had limited U.S. support in the Iran-Iraq war, and it was clearly hoped in Washington that Saddam Hussein would be an effective mid-east counterweight to Iranian disturbance. Senator Alan Simpson in April 1990 apologised to Saddam for the way the U.S. media was treating him. It was an example of the U.S. tendency to treat every client as a friend. U.S. support for Saddam was grossly over done. Iraq, after all, was also a substantial enemy of America's particular friends in the region: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.
The geopolitics of the region involve the world -and Washington politics - today more than ever. The Israeli lobby in Washington is of prime significance, especially given Israeli intelligence's historical ties with the CIA. Before 1967, U.S. oil companies offset Israeli influence in Washington; since then, Israel has dominated U.S. policymaking in the region. This is the real significance of the Iran-contra affair: conflict between Arab states is of direct benefit to Israel, and Israel's role as a middleman in the arms-for-hostages
