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This article is from NameBase NewsLine, which is distributed to users of
NameBase, a microcomputer database with 166,000 citations and 76,000 names.
This 3-megabyte database is available on floppy disks and is used by over
650 journalists and researchers around the world. For a brochure write to:

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                   Tel: [phone]  Fax: [phone]

From NameBase NewsLine, No. 6, July-September 1994:


                    Cold Warriors Woo Generation X:
           As the world turns, history hits the spin cycle

                          by Steve Badrich

     After more than three decades of down-and-dirty operations for the
CIA, San Antonio resident Kenneth Michael Absher has come in from the
cold.

     Sitting in the sun-drenched living room of his house in the upscale
Alamo Heights district, Absher, 59, seems glad to be back in friendly,
patriotic South Texas, glad to reminisce about the many Cold War crises he
saw close up. The Cuban missile crisis. Vietnam. Running agents in foreign
countries he's not even allowed to name.

     Spies in John le Carre novels often doubt themselves, and their side.
Absher, apparently, does neither. He's Texas-friendly and seemingly quite
at ease in his own skin. In a low-key way, he's also quite eloquent, the
kind of natural explainer and storyteller one is glad to encounter at the
front of a classroom.

     Boink, Absher's graying black tomcat, keeps his master under lazy
surveillance as one Cold War tale suggests another.

     "It's my favorite subject," Absher says, disarmingly, about the
often-maligned trade of intelligence. Now Absher hopes to pass his
enthusiasm on.

     Retired as of last year from the CIA's Operations Directorate, Absher
has introduced a historically-oriented course at a local university on the
enduring value of "espionage," the covert stuff -- apparently the only
declassified college-level course on this subject in the United States.

     More than a hundred colleges and universities nationwide offer
courses on national security or intelligence. For example, the University
of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), where Absher now teaches, also offers a
"big picture" course on "the intelligence community" taught by James
Calder, a UTSA criminal justice professor with a background in military
intelligence.

     But Absher's course, uniquely, concentrates on the potential value to
policymakers of intelligence obtained through covert means like spying.

     It's a declassified version of a course Absher once taught at the
Defense Intelligence College at Bolling Air Force Base. At Bolling,
Absher's students were military personnel with at least "top secret"
clearances. At UTSA, they're South Texas representatives of Generation X
-- most of them politically a notch or two to the right-of-center, but
without being diehard ideological conservatives. Nor are many of them
overburdened with historical knowledge.

     UTSA's big, airy campus, just south of the Texas Hill Country, is far
more "Anglo" than the rest of San Antonio -- spiritually, the northernmost
major city in Mexico. Land for the campus was donated to the state by
big-dog developer friends of former Texas governor John Connally.
Connally's friends expected the value of their surrounding property, which
is extensive, to ratchet up. It has.


     The CIA's Publications Review Board duly cleared Absher's syllabus
as posing no threat to the CIA's interests. But the Agency has no other
official link to Absher's teaching. Texas taxpayers rather than the Agency
are paying his part-timer's salary. Nor is Absher part of the CIA's often-
criticized Officer-in-Residence program, which places active CIA personnel
on campus as temporary professors -- and unofficial goodwill ambassadors
for spookdom.

     Absher acknowledges, but shrugs off, the fact that his course takes
as its point of departure the existence of state secrecy. "There are
always," he says mildly, "going to be secrets."

     Absher's students swear by his course. "He's a gifted instructor and
a wonderful, enthusiastic man," says Elaine Coronado, a Washington-savvy
UTSA senior working on a second UTSA degree in political science. Her
first is in history.

     Coronado plans eventually to return to "the policy arena" in
Washington, D.C., where she has already worked for the Hispanic Alliance
for Free Trade, a pro-NAFTA lobbying group. Coronado's group project for
Absher's course, in fact, wound up recommending an expanded CIA role in
monitoring world trade.

     Absher also wins praise from UTSA colleagues, even out-and-out CIA
critics. Absher was hired by Dr. David Alvirez, Director of UTSA's
Division of Social and Policy Sciences. Alvirez minces no words in
blasting CIA interventions in Chile, El Salvador, and elsewhere.

     But Alvirez thought UTSA students could benefit from Absher's
"special expertise," and feels vindicated by the course's reception.
Alvirez praises Absher's ability to attract high-level former CIA
colleagues as guest lecturers. Absher's spring-semester course was visited
by such figures as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence William
Studeman, a four-star admiral, and Dawn Eilenberger, a deputy to CIA
General Counsel Elizabeth Rindskopf.

     (Eilenberger was a last-minute replacement for Rindskopf herself, who
was forced to stay in Washington to put out fires started by the Aldrich
Ames "CIA mole" case. Perhaps it's just as well that Rindskopf never made
it to UTSA. Absher, without consulting local feminists, had scheduled
Rindskopf's visit to coincide with UTSA's Women's History Week. Students
who met with Eilenberger found her engaging -- whereas Rindskopf, a former
General Counsel for the National Security Agency, was a never-give-an-inch
stonewaller during the Iran-contra affair. According to published accounts,
aides to Lawrence Walsh eventually found it difficult even to be in the
same room with her.)

     Absher, for his part, is glad to have a forum to address issues
he considers important. He sees his course as part of a new era of
"demystification" of intelligence issues, of CIA glasnost (if not yet of
perestroika).

     Such issues, he says, are not only intrinsically important, they're
grist for the mills of future scholars. He cites the case of one of his
former UTSA students, who is contemplating writing a master's thesis based
on newly-declassified CIA documents on the Bay of Pigs debacle.

     "The last thing I want to do," Absher says, "is to be intellectually
dishonest in any way. I've pulled no punches in this course. I've talked
about intelligence failures, policy failures, everything. I've encouraged
my students to make arguments against the continued existence of the CIA."

     Elaine Coronado confirms this last statement. In conversation,
furthermore, Absher deplores what he considers CIA failures and abuses --
and loose cannons like Ollie North.


     Nevertheless, Absher remains, at bottom, a believer: someone who
looks back on his almost thirty-two years in the CIA without regrets. He
has no doubts that the right side won the Cold War, nor that CIA espionage
helped.

     He also believes that espionage continues to be necessary in a world
in which the Russian mafia has replaced the Politburo, trade wars are
supplanting most large-scale "hot" and "cold" wars, and tinhorn dictators
in backwater capitals think about going nuclear.

     Absher is stoical about the Ames case, which he calls "a wake-up call
for everybody about what life is going to be like in the post-Cold War
period." Ames's unmasking proves only, Absher says, that "there's never
going to be a total symmetry of national interests" between the U.S. and
the new Russia.

     Nor is Absher an enthusiast for "open source intelligence" (OSCINT),
the hottest new topic within the hermetic world of theorists of
intelligence. There's more useful information to be gleaned from a good
library, as serious students of intelligence have always acknowledged,
than there is from almost any meeting in a back street in the Casbah.
This fundamental principle explains why intelligence agencies took an
interest in the academic world in the first place.

     But in a wired world, libraries and other vast archives of
information are rapidly going on-line. A skilled net-surfer with a fast
modem can routinely download volumes of the kind of high-grade information
that old-style intelligence services once had to pay for with time, sweat,
and money, if not blood. Or so say the proponents of OSCINT.

     Robert David Steele, the champion of OSCINT, still believes in a
strong intelligence community. Too young for Vietnam, he is a CIA veteran
with three back-to-back postings in Latin America (including El Salvador
from 1980-1981), and in 1988 became the senior civilian responsible for
establishing the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Center. But Steele
nevertheless foresees, in an age of tight budgets, the death of
intelligence dinosaurs like the bloated, centralized CIA of the 90s.
In Steele's vision, many U.S. intelligence needs of the near future will
be met by decentralized, shoe-string bands of cyberspooks tapping into a
digitized sea of "open-source" information.

     Steele and his Open Source Solutions, Inc. have a lot to say on these
topics, and his ideas seem to be riding a wave that will take them,
possibly soon, into closed Congressional hearing rooms. But it's a wave
Absher declines to get on.

     "We have tried 'open source intelligence,'" Absher maintains, "and
it does not work. Anybody who thinks George Washington could conduct a
revolution on the basis of `open source intelligence' hasn't read history."

     The syllabus to Absher's UTSA course suggests the historical
reasoning behind this remark. Called "The Role of Espionage in Foreign
Policy," Absher's course blends history and political science to examine
cases in which espionage helped policymakers make history. Absher insists
the course is no exercise in CIA self-glorification.

     He maintains, for example, that D-Day succeeded, in part, because of
a bogus military buildup -- complete with phony, inflatable "tanks" --
that fooled the Germans into thinking that the Allies had targeted Calais
rather than Normandy. Eisenhower's "Operation Fortitude," which created
this phantom invasion force, is only one of the case studies Absher's
course considers.

     Absher can cite a laundry list of similar cases to support his
contention that the U.S. still needs espionage, still needs a CIA.


     Not everyone agrees with this contention. Absher is well aware that
back in Washington, the CIA's detractors are enjoying another of their
periodic revivals. The Ames scandal revealed that despite the Cold-War-
cowboy bravado of William Casey, the Soviets have spent years pipelining
burn-before-reading secrets out of the inner sanctum of the CIA -- a fact
that resulted in the execution of a number of U.S. agents overseas --
while presumably spoon-feeding the CIA's own agents a steady diet of
disinformation.

     Ames, who may not be the last Soviet mole inside the Company, is a
creepy enough character. Still, his courtroom denunciation of U.S.
intelligence as a "cynical sideshow" seems to have struck a nerve with
many in Congress.

     Is this, many have asked, what the U.S. public gets in return for its
umpty-ump-billion-dollar classified "intelligence" budget? Could these
misspent dollars be related to the fact that nobody in the big-ticket U.S.
intelligence establishment seems to have foreseen the smashup of the
Soviet system?

     Such questions, furthermore, revive Congressional memories of CIA
failures and scandals of previous decades. It's a familiar litany, at
least for Americans who predate MTV.

     In the 1960s, radical journalists from the magazine "Ramparts"
revealed that CIA officers had used Michigan State University cover to
help create the security forces -- and the government -- of South Vietnam.

     And although this fact wasn't widely known at the time, such covert
CIA involvement with a university wasn't unique, or even particularly
unusual. Michigan State's "international studies" program, like similar
programs across the U.S., was a Cold War creation. The granddaddy of such
programs was the School of International Affairs at Columbia University,
founded in 1946, and soon a virtual nursery of future CIA employees and
intelligence.

     Such "international studies" programs came into existence as part of
a massive, wide-ranging effort by the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford
Foundations, and the Carnegie Corporation to enlist the U.S. academic
community in the Cold War. There's not enough space here to detail
everything they did. But it's worth noting that the CIA and its
handmaidens in the private sector regularly funded research and programs
designed to address perceived "political problems" of the Cold War.

     The leaders of the bloody 1965 coup in Indonesia, for instance, were
able to draw on the expertise of Indonesian elites trained at Ford
Foundation expense by faculty members from MIT and Cornell, Berkeley and
Harvard. Indonesian students at MIT attended CIA-funded Harvard seminars
led by Henry Kissinger.

     And university involvement didn't stop there. Sympathetic faculty
members on many campuses acted as "spotters" of potential future CIA
employees. And the CIA, as "Ramparts" also revealed in 1967, essentially
bankrolled the supposedly-independent National Student Association, and
used student leaders to carry out operational tasks. Feminist media star
Gloria Steinem, who later said she had been "duped," was one such student
leader.


     In the 1970s, Congress's Church Committee revealed for the first time
that the CIA had earlier tried to assassinate foreign leaders such as the
Congo's Patrice Lumumba and (with Mafia help) Fidel Castro.

     But the Church Committee also revealed that the CIA was even then
making use of several hundred "academics" (professors, administrators,
and propagandists). In a related, mind-bending revelation, the Committee
disclosed that the CIA was even a factor in the psychedelic revolution of
the 60s. A CIA "mind control" project called MK-ULTRA had funded 1950s LSD
research -- including experimentation on unwitting subjects.

     And even this thumbnail sketch must at least take note of the
often-bloody overseas coups in which CIA involvement is either known or
suspected. Iran. Guatemala. Indonesia. Chile. The list goes on, and the
target governments, often enough, had been democratically elected.

     This checklist of horrors is enough to suggest why legions of people
who remember the 60s and 70s will believe anything about the CIA.

     The CIA's latest crop of critics tend to be "mainstream," which makes
them all the more dangerous to the CIA's future. This summer's Congressional
debate over the 1995 intelligence budget, for instance, could get intense.
R. James Woolsey, Clinton's cantankerous CIA director, has adopted a
hard-charging attitude that has alienated many in Congress.

     Even with the Cold War over, Woolsey has called for an expanded CIA
budget -- in part to upgrade the aging U.S. armada of spy satellites.

     But Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) complains that given its
large (classified) annual budget, the CIA should have foreseen the
implosion of the Soviet Union. Moynihan is pushing a bill that would shut
down the CIA and spin off its functions to the State Department, the
Pentagon, and other agencies. Unlikely to pass, Moynihan's bill
nevertheless reflects one mood in Congress.

     Absher deplores past CIA abuses as vehemently as anyone. Given CIA
compartmentalization, Absher says he learned about them through the same
newspapers and books as anybody else.

     But Absher counts on learning more from the ongoing declassification
of intelligence documents. When more is known, Absher suggests, the public
may find that bad policy was sometimes driven by the White House rather
than the CIA.

     Absher suspects this may have happened during the Iran-contra scandal
of the 1980s. Given Absher's CIA role at the time, he should have known
everything about Col. Ollie North's activities, if only North had been
going through channels. In fact, says Absher, North "was running his own
private intelligence operation" out of the White House.

     Even as he acknowledges past abuses, Absher charges that Moynihan's
bill would return the U.S. to "the situation we were in on Saturday,
December 6, 1941" -- the day before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

     Despite everything, Absher retains a bedrock faith in the U.S.
intelligence establishment to which he has devoted his life. That life was
shaped by a Cold War world that is rapidly passing out of existence, and
even out of memory.

     Perhaps this explains why Absher is so avid for his students to come
into contact with the human reality behind intelligence work.

     "We don't have horns," Absher says at one point, almost plaintively,
referring to himself and his fellow spooks.


     Yet Absher's own life, even though it doesn't officially figure in
his syllabus, makes a story as striking as anything his students are
likely to hear from visiting CIA lecturers.

     Take, for example, the interview that led to Absher's career in the
CIA.

     The date was 1961, a vintage year for Cold War paranoia. A CIA-
directed invasion force had folded up on the beaches of Castro's Cuba --
an event that first alerted many Americans to the fact that the CIA even
existed.

     As a Princeton philosophy major five years before, Absher had closely
followed the student-led Hungarian revolt that drew workers and others
into the streets before being suppressed by Soviet tanks.

     "We were students at Princeton," Absher says today. "We felt a
kinship with the students who were dying in the streets of Budapest. And
we could do nothing."

     As 1961 unfolded, Absher felt dissatisfied working at his promising
job in the San Antonio city manager's office. He had already served in the
Army, where he did his first teaching. But he wanted to do more. So Absher
paid his own way from San Antonio to Washington to enlist in the Cold War.

     His Congressman gave him some addresses to try. Absher's rounds
eventually brought him to a dark corner office in the ramshackle wooden
barracks that were the CIA's first headquarters.

     With a glance, Absher pegged the interviewer sitting behind the plain
wooden desk. The man looked like "a stern prep school dean," but was
obviously one of the aristo cowboys of the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS), the CIA's wartime predecessor.

     Absher's interrogator was cradling something in one hand. It turned
out to be a mound of birdseed.

     As the interview proceeded, Absher's interrogator would periodically
fling a seed across the room. In a cage against the opposite wall sat a
huge-beaked bird -- a toucan? -- as brilliantly colored as a parrot, only
four times as large and ugly as sin.

     "The bird," Absher recalls, "never missed a thing. Line drives. Fly
balls. Grounders. He caught them all."

     Absher himself, he admits today, was also caught -- as he says his
interviewer must have intended. Before there were batteries of
psychological tests, there were CIA mind-games.

     So, Mr. Absher, his interviewer eventually got around to asking, do
you think you want to come to work for us?

     I'm not sure, Absher admitted. I don't know much about you guys.

     This was true, and Absher wasn't alone. A Barnes and Noble how-a-
bill-becomes-law handbook Absher had brought with him on the train didn't
even mention the CIA.

     Good answer, Mr. Absher! responded his interviewer. You'll be hearing
from us. We'll be offering you a job.

     And they did. The letter Absher received offered such-and-such a
salary, but never specifically mentioned the CIA.


     Absher completed his training (which, because of the CIA's general
secrecy agreement, he still can't talk about) just in time to go to work
as a junior intelligence analyst during the Cuban missile crisis of
October 1962. It was to prove a defining event in Absher's life, a crisis
Absher thinks revealed to him "the unquestioned value of espionage."

     Absher found himself working under Sherman Kent, a legendary figure
widely considered the father of modern CIA analysis.

     Just one month before, the CIA had predicted that the Soviets would
probably not introduce missiles into Cuba. But the documents Absher was
asked to read indicated otherwise. So did the U-2 "spy plane" photos
Absher got to study almost as soon as JFK did.

     Espionage, he says, was delivering intelligence that was both
surprising and unwelcome -- but also unquestionably important.

     Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles based in Cuba had a
range of 2,200 miles. They could have hit any location in the U.S., except
Alaska and one small corner of the Pacific Northwest. The Soviets, Absher
believes, had seriously misjudged Kennedy.

     Some critics have expressed horror at the superpower face-off that
followed, seeing the entire episode as scary testosterone-driven
brinksmanship that almost blew up the world.

     Absher disagrees.

     "I happen to think," he says today, "that Kennedy handled this crisis
about as well as anybody could have." Absher is prepared to argue this
case on the historical record. The Cuban missile crisis, in fact, is one
of the episodes examined in Absher's course.

     Unfortunately, Absher can't very well argue for what he and his
colleagues accomplished during his subsequent CIA postings overseas.
Absher can't even say where he went.

     His resume acknowledges that Absher served in "Europe" and in the
"Caribbean," that he was CIA "Chief of Station" in two different
countries, and that he was awarded numerous medals, including the
Intelligence Medal of Merit (twice). Between overseas postings, Absher
also spent "four tours" in CIA headquarters, where he supervised U.S.
intelligence operations going on in (unnamed) foreign countries.

     Given these gaps, it seems odd that Absher feels free to talk, as he
apparently does, about 1972-73 in Vietnam. Once again, Absher has his own
line on the subject.

     "There were many wars in Vietnam," Absher acknowledges. The one
Absher fought was "a conventional war" against battle-hardened North
Vietnamese regulars operating at battalion strength. Absher zipped around
his province in a helicopter, and when necessary called in B-52 strikes
against suspected NVA troop concentrations.

     In the interrogations he supervised, Absher says, "I never saw any
brutality." It was the Viet Cong, Absher says, who went in for wholesale
assassinations of South Vietnamese teachers, officials, and others. Or
rather, Absher says, the competent and honest were assassinated. The
incompetent and corrupt were left in place.

     But what about alleged CIA assassinations, Absher is asked? What
about the notorious CIA "Phoenix Program" that became public knowledge in
the 1970s?

     Absher agrees that some such program did exist. Former CIA director
William Colby has said as much. But Absher thinks "Phoenix" had apparently
been phased out before his Vietnam tour.

     "You'll have to talk to somebody else," he says. "I haven't read very
much about Phoenix."


     Freelancer Doug Valentine has. In fact, Valentine says he interviewed
the CIA creators of "Phoenix" for his massive 1990 study "The Phoenix
Program." Interviewed by phone from his Massachusetts home, Valentine calls
Absher's comment on "Phoenix" technically correct, but misleading.

     "There were two CIA-created 'Phoenix' programs," says Valentine. The
second was the "Phoenix Program" in the narrower sense, which had in fact
been turned over to the Vietnamese before Absher arrived in Vietnam. This
program used CIA resources to identify and target Vietnamese civilians
that the American-created establishment in Vietnam considered "subversive."

     According to Valentine, this vast group included students, labor
organizers, and politically-active Vietnamese of all kinds. In American-
dominated South Vietnam, says Valentine, virtually every kind of political
and community activity whatsoever was illegal. After these "subversives"
had been identified, they were then assassinated by local death-squads
which had been organized by the CIA.

     No one knows for sure, Valentine says, exactly how many people were
assassinated. But Valentine notes that former CIA director William Colby,
who still defends the program, puts the total at 25,000. Other estimates
run much higher.

     But according to Valentine, there is another, more inclusive meaning
of "Phoenix." In this larger sense, "Phoenix" can stand for a whole style
of counterinsurgency warfare that the CIA brought to Vietnam, and to many
other places. (Unlike Absher, Valentine regards the nation of South
Vietnam itself as the creation of Americans, who stepped into the imperial
role abdicated by the French in 1954.)

     The CIA, Valentine says, maintained paid agents within the heart of
the South Vietnamese government. Any South Vietnamese politician who
deviated from the CIA line was himself in danger of being denounced as a
"subversive" -- and then being killed.

     Seen in the larger context of the CIA's history, Valentine maintains,
those B-52 strikes Absher was calling in on South Vietnam were part of the
larger "Phoenix" counterinsurgency strategy. So were the interrogations
Absher oversaw at the local Provincial Interrogation Center (PIC). The
entire PIC program, Valentine maintains, was a creation of the CIA's
original "Phoenix."

     Valentine, obviously, is no CIA-critic-as-Congressional-penny-pincher.
He's an old-style radical critic who turns Absher's contention that there
"are always going to be secrets" on its head.

     "If there are always going to be secrets," Valentine contends, "then
power is always going to reside with the people who keep the secrets.
Secrets are antithetical to democracy. But if there's no more need to keep
secrets, then there's no need for a CIA."

     Valentine comes from a military family, and says that he has plenty
of CIA-officer friends with whom he agrees to disagree. He says he's sure
he could get along with Absher the man.

     "But you have to remember," Valentine says of Absher, "he cannot
tell you the truth. All he can tell you is the cover story -- which is
designed to be plausible."


     One voice that might be expected to echo Valentine's is that of John
Stockwell, one of the top three CIA critics who became an author and
lecturer after resigning or retiring as an operations officer (the other
two are Philip Agee and Ralph McGehee).

     Stockwell is both a decorated military veteran and a former top-
ranking CIA officer. He ran massive, covert CIA operations in Africa
before resigning over some of the revelations of the 1970s.

     One thing that bothered him, Stockwell says today, was being asked to
lie to Congress -- like certain figures in the Iran-contra scandal. Another
was knowledge that the CIA was being asked to carry out assassinations.

     For decades now, Stockwell has been a well-known writer, lecturer,
and CIA critic. In 1986, he even spoke to a large student-and-faculty
audience at UTSA.

     Reached by telephone at his home in Elgin, Texas, however, Stockwell
has some surprising news.

     "Intellectually," he says, "I'm probably not too far from Absher
today."

     The end of the Cold War, Stockwell says, "swept all the pieces from
the board." Continuing to repeat his old criticisms in a changed situation,
Stockwell says, would turn him into a "sorehead" instead of the serious
intellectual critic he aspires to be.

     The Cold War CIA, Stockwell suggests, has lost its traditional
rationale. And although Moynihan's bill will never pass, the CIA's critics
have been heard. Imperfect as it necessarily is, the existing system of
Congressional oversight is probably as good an instrument as can be
devised. The trick is to make it work, to curb the inevitable abuses of
power.

     But in the meantime, Stockwell says, Absher is right. The world
swarms with threats. He cites the case of vastly-overpopulated Rwanda, a
country he once kept track of for the CIA. The U.S., says Stockwell, does
need a streamlined, high-quality intelligence capability pretty much like
the one Absher calls for.

     "The next fifty years," he says, with no evident pleasure, "may be
much more violent than the last fifty."

     His words virtually echo Absher's warning about tinhorn dictators and
their "weapons of mass destruction."

     "We've got a window of opportunity," Absher says. "Let's not blow it."

     It's strange to find these two agreeing about anything -- the notorious
CIA critic and the unrepentant former spook now openly defending his craft
to a new generation of college students -- a generation which needs someone
to explain why anyone was ever out in the cold in the first place.


Sidebar from NameBase NewsLine, No. 6, July-September 1994:

                 Cyberspace Cowboy with CIA Credentials:
            Robert Steele and his Open Source Solutions, Inc.

                            by Daniel Brandt

     Whenever history is stranded between two epochs, those few who
recognize the shifting paradigms are usually voices in the wilderness.
Robert David Steele spent the 80s fighting the Cold War for the CIA in
Latin America, but now he writes for Whole Earth Review, invites Mitch
Kapor and John Barlow to speak at the symposiums he organizes, and jets
around the globe to swap impressions with unkempt hackers. Back at the
ranch, he keeps up a steady diet of schmoozing with Washington intelligence
professionals, testifying for Congressional committees, and consulting
with corporate information experts. He's a man on a mission.

     Steele believes that U.S. intelligence, with its cumbersome
classification system, is like a dinosaur in a tar pit. He likes to tell
the story of his "$10 million mistake." In 1988 Steele was responsible for
spending this amount to help the Marine Corps set up a new intelligence
facility. He acquired a system of workstations to handle Top Secret
information, which also meant that they could not be connected to any
unclassified systems. Meanwhile, a little personal computer in the next
room was the only station with external unclassified access. After the
system was built, they discovered that virtually everything the Marine
Corps needed -- from bridge loading capabilities to the depth of water in
ports around the world -- was available on the little PC through the
Internet. But none of it was found on the classified systems, which tended
to be filled with data on Soviet strategic capabilities.

     U.S. intelligence was destined for major budget cuts and restructuring,
even before the latest embarrassment of the Aldrich Ames case. The CIA's
mole problems are merely the last nails in the coffin, and lead to cover
stories such as the "U.S. News & World Report" of July 4, 1994, which
declares that the CIA is "plagued by incompetence and fraud." But Robert
Steele has a fix. All that's required is for U.S. intelligence to abandon
its obsession with secrecy and find the nearest on-ramp to the information
superhighway. He and his Open Source Solutions, Inc. will be happy to give
directions (11005 Langton Arms Court, Oakton VA 22124-1807, Tel:
703-242-1700, Fax: [phone], Internet: [e-mail]). Yes, they even
have their own Internet node.

     Steele's articulation of the shortcomings of U.S. intelligence, along
with other expert sources such as former Senate intelligence committee
staffer Angelo Codevilla's "Informing Statecraft" (1992), make a powerful
case that something has to change. The total intelligence budget is just
over $37 billion, with the major portion going for technical collection --
mostly satellites and related processing systems. But these systems are
narrowly focused, and encourage narrow policies designed to justify the
expense. The CIA's portion of this budget is about $3.5 billion, and the
NSA's is roughly $4 billion.

     Steele points out that the cost-benefit ratio of open source
intelligence (OSCINT) is so productive that nothing else even comes close.
But U.S. intelligence is steeped in its old ways. He hears stories of
agencies that refuse to cite information in their reports unless it comes
from classified sources, or of CIA analysts who wanted to travel to Moscow
to take advantage of newly-opened resources but were threatened with loss
of their clearances if they made the trip. In other words, U.S. intelligence
is doing everything backwards. No one disputes the fact that 80 percent of
all the information worth analyzing is publicly available, and of the
remaining 20 percent, much of it is made useless by a classification
system that delays delivery and frequently restricts access to those who
are not inclined to use it. In a rational world, OSCINT would be the
"source of first resort."

     Open Source Solutions, Inc., of which Steele is president, sponsors
annual symposiums that draw a range of professionals: government
intelligence analysts, corporate competitor intelligence departments,
Beltway-Bandit think tanks that churn out classified studies for
government clients, and various on-line ferrets, hackers, and futurists
from around the world. They expected 200 for their 1992 symposium and got
over 600. In 1993 they had over 800 from 32 countries, including some
retired KGB colonels that made a few officials at CIA headquarters
extremely nervous. The next symposium, scheduled for November 8-10 in
Washington, will focus less on the U.S. intelligence community itself and
more on the intelligence consumer in the global private and public
sectors. These symposiums are financed by fees from those who attend ($500
unless you get an academic rate or "hacker scholarship"), and also from
corporations and organizations that pay for exhibit space. OSS is
nonprofit, but Steele also spun off a for-profit corporation that offers
consulting services and "best of class" referrals for $750 a day or $200
an hour.

     Steele's voice is one that needs to be heard in Washington. He's
strongest when he criticizes U.S. intelligence, and he's excellent for
those who are trying to keep up with cyberspace trends and information
resources. But when he presents open source intelligence as an elixir for
America's problems, from intelligence to competitiveness to ecology, his
reach exceeds his grasp. For example, Steele's assurances that
competitiveness and OSCINT are mutually compatible are unconvincing: it
seems reasonable that at some point, what I know becomes more valuable to
me by virtue of the fact that you DON'T have the same information. Human
nature being what it is, secrecy is not something that can be restricted
only to executive action and diplomacy, as Steele maintains. It is here to
stay, on every level of society. Steele's unreal optimism is a religious
conviction that's not uncommon among cyberspace cadets.

     Ironically, the same technology that efficiently delivers Steel's
open source intelligence has also given us the ability to keep digital
data very secret. There is no guarantee that the mountains of public data
won't someday become a Tower of Encrypted Babel. Steele's most glaring
omission is his lack of comment on public encryption technology and the
Clipper Chip -- the issue that has caused cypherpunks and some corporations
to declare war on the U.S. intelligence community. It seems that if Steele
took a strong position on this issue, he might lose half of his support in
a cyberspace nanosecond.


Sidebar from NameBase NewsLine, No. 6, July-September 1994:

                Vietnam Sets War's Toll at 3 Million Dead

HANOI (Kyodo) -- Three million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians died in
more than two decades of fighting during the Vietnam War, and defoliants
and other chemicals turned another 2 million into invalids, a government
report says.

     It is the first time the Vietnamese government has published an
overall estimate of the number of Vietnamese killed in the war that ended
with the country's unification under Northern control in 1975.

     The United States, which joined the war on the side of South Vietnam
in 1961, sprayed large parts of the Vietnamese jungle with Agent Orange
and other defoliants to fight the communist North from the air.

     The herbicides are believed to have caused some illnesses suffered by
veterans and their children.

     The Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Welfare said the
survey of war deaths and invalids it released Tuesday is in its "initial
stage."

     About 1 million of the war dead were North Vietnamese soldiers, and
the remaining 2 million were soldiers and civilians of the South, it said.

     In addition, more than 4 million civilians and soldiers sustained
injuries. The report, which decried the use of defoliants as "an extremely
shocking fact," put the number of people suffering from their effects
above 2 million.
                                        -- Washington Times, June 23, 1994


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