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The IAEA is charged with the verification of safeguards on declared nuclear facilities. The safeguards program, much like the NPT, relies on the integrity of the signatories. A country's clandestine nuclear weapons development program is designed to subvert this pledge. Foreign intelligence information is the means to ensure that states are fulfilling the letter and spirit of the regime. Those that sign the treaty have pledged they will not develop nuclear weapons. Intelligence can be used simply to verify this pledge. Further, most states motivated to possess a nuclear weapons capability are willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve that goal. The use of intelligence by the IAEA is a means of ensuring that the agency is doing whatever is necessary to achieve its goal of halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Just as revelations of the Iraqi program alerted the IAEA to its own inadequacies, they also provide a warning to potential proliferants. The next offender may be harder to expose. This argues for more sharing of intelligence in the future. It can be hoped that the U.S. Intelligence Community's relationship with the IAEA, born of necessity and sustained by success, can continue well into the future. The cost is only as much as the U.S. chooses to bear, and the benefits are many.

PEACE OPERATIONS

Robert J. Allen
Lieutenant, U.S. Navy
July 1995

It's the Member States Stupid! (Quoted in Preston b).

Alvaro de Soto, Executive Assistant to the UN

Secretary-General

EXCEEDING THE BOUNDARIES OF PEACEKEEPING

The problems experienced by the U.S. and UN in meeting the world body's intelligence support requirements are symptomatic of the difficulties of executing Secretary Boutros-Ghali's Agenda for Peace. Conditions upon which the well-understood and limited concept of UN peacekeeping depended in the past have largely been abandoned by modern multi-dimensional peace missions. An established cease-fire, consent of the parties to the presence of the UN, and the impartiality of the peacekeepers are no longer prerequisites for the deployment of a UN force into a conflict zone. The absence of functioning governments in these de facto wars has prompted the UN Security Council to intervene in the internal affairs of many states whose sovereignty was once considered inviolable. As a consequence, the UN finds itself confronting "armed groups outside the control of recognized political authorities" in its attempts to bring peace (P. Lewis b: A10).

William J. Durch, a peacekeeping expert at the Henry L. Stimson Center, warns of the dangers of this development:

UN peacekeeping has succeeded primarily where local peoples and political factions have both needed and supported the UN's presence. Any operation designed to intervene in situations in

which there is only partial local consent is not peacekeeping, but something else, and it usually runs into a whole string of problems, as the trials of UN forces in Angola, Bosnia, and Western Sahara currently [February 1993] attest. If the UN's member states continue to send the organization's peacekeepers into politically unstable situations, they risk the political and financial collapse of what has been to date one of the international community's most useful tools for containing and seeking to resolve regional conflicts (Durch c: 18).

NATIONAL INTEREST VS. PEACE OPERATIONS

In actuality, a Security Council vote to mount a peace operation is not so much an expression by UN member states-especially the Permanent Five (U.S., Russia, PRC, UK, France) on the Security Council - that a conflict involves their vital national interests, but rather an admission that it does not. The Washington Post's lament that the new U.S. government guidelines on "Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations" (PDD-25) relegate peace operations to "a sometime tool for third-level American interests, after other interests meant to be served by American's own defense forces and its alliances," ("Peace-Keeping”: C6) is an accurate assessment of how most governments have prioritized UN peace operations. More often than not, the Security Council decision to deploy a UN force represents an international lowest common denominator: an agreement to "do something," no matter how ill-conceived.

This frail consensus begins to unravel as peacekeeping becomes peace enforcement. Above all, a UN peace operation represents an artificial coalition that lacks the conjunction of national interests that underlies an alliance. As a consequence, the absence of shared national interests makes the peace operation's command and control fragile and its tolerance for casualties low. The tendency demonstrated in Somalia for national contingent commanders to disobey UN orders and contact their national capitals for instructions underscores this first weakness (Richburg a: A1). The assessment by General Maurice Baril (the Secretary-General's Military Advisor) concerning the lesson to be drawn from the Somali peace enforcement experience illustrates the latter point: "[C]ountries won't send their sons and daughters to die unless a vital national interest is at stake. And it's hard to show that humanitarian relief [and any peace operations by extension] is a vital national interest" (Brooks: A1).

U.S. POLICY: BURDEN SHARING ON THE CHEAP?

The U.S. has chosen to provide intelligence support to specific UN peace operations on a case-by-case basis in accordance with U.S. national interests. Presidential Decision Directive 25 predicates any future U.S. support for and participation in UN peace operations upon advancement of U.S. interests. Critics charge that criteria elaborated in this policy are so restrictive "as to scope mission, duration, resources and risk that only the easiest, cheapest, safest peacekeeping operations could likely be approved under them, and many of the current operations could not" ("Peace-Keeping": C6). After the domestic political uproar caused by casualties in Somalia, provision of intelligence support to the UN gives the U.S. one option for participating in future peace operations without undue risk to combat personnel.

Canadian MG Lewis MacKenzie believes that U.S. combat troops should be kept out of UN peace operations. He notes: "You don't get your picture on the cover of Newsweek by killing Canadians. You've got to kill Americans." He suggests that, among other forms of support, the U.S. provide satellite imagery to the UN rather than combat forces (Rowley: A3). Indeed, as early as September 1993, with Congressional unease growing over UN operations in Bosnia and Somalia, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright noted "specialized areas such as logistics, training, intelligence, communications and public affairs" held the greatest promise for future U.S. contributions to peace operations (Goshko: A19).

U.S. CONSTRAINTS

U.S.government policy that has been established for sharing intelligence with the UN is not universally accepted either by the U.S. Congress or the Intelligence Community. Senator Robert Dole has been a particularly vocal critic of the U.S. intelligence relationship with the UN. Concerns over the extent to which UN intelligence capabilities would be expanded under PDD-25 led Senator Dole to introduce legislation in January 1994 to restrict U.S. support for that undertaking. Section 16 of Senate Bill S. 1803 would require a formal agreement between the U.S. and UN to be concluded governing intelligence sharing. As a formal agreement, it would be subject to review by both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (Best: 12).

Elements of the U.S. Intelligence Community, especially those outside the Department of Defense, remain wary of an intelligence relationship with the UN. The threat to sensitive intelligence sources and methods is the primary concern of the community. Beyond this legitimate and often-stated risk, budgetary considerations in an era of dwindling resources may eventually force the U.S. to limit any expansion of intelligence support to UN peace operations. This will especially be true if supporting the UN competes with higher priority U.S. intelligence interests such as nonproliferation. Richard Best, a national defense analyst with the Congressional Research Service, observes that "[i]n budget planning sessions, it is difficult to defend devoting collection and analytical resources...on targets whose importance at best is problematical (Best: 18).

DEPENDENCE UPON MEMBER STATES:
PITFALLS FOR THE UN

The combination of fiscal constraints on the U.S. Intelligence Community and the proclivity of the Security Council to authorize peace operations in regions of marginal interest to the U.S. and the other major powers is bound to present the UN problems in garnering adequate intelligence support from its member states. As William Durch explains:

Reliance on major powers for data could fail the UN... when an issue or a region important to the organization had not routinely received attention from the major powers' intelligence agencies; that is when its priorities failed to mesh with those of its most powerful members (Durch c: 8).

The paucity of U.S. human intelligence assets available in Somalia, due to its relatively low priority in American foreign policy, is an example of such a failure caused by UN reliance on a major power. Refusal by the U.S. to sanction UN intervention in Burundi during November 1993, and its initial opposition to deployment of an expanded peace operation in Rwanda in April 1994, should serve as warnings to the UN that it may not always be able to depend on the U.S. for intelligence support if UN activities are not in accord with high-priority U.S. interests, or the clear interests of our friends and allies.

Dependence on the U.S. and other member states for intelligence support could also fail the UN if national interests are perceived to be

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