Intelligence for Multilateral

Decision and Action

INTRODUCTION

Perry L. Pickert

On 31 January 1992, the United Nations Security Council, meeting for the first time at the Heads of State level, recognized "favorable international circumstances" under which the Security Council could fulfill its responsibility for maintenance of international peace and security and invited the UN Secretary-General to recommend ways of strengthening the UN's capacity for preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping. In June, Boutros Boutros-Ghali issued An Agenda for Peace which outlined a set of wide-ranging proposals to enhance the UN. In his 21 September 1992 speech to the General Assembly, President George Bush welcomed the Secretary-General's new agenda and promised American support in key areas, including planning, crisis management and intelligence. As one of its first foreign policy initiatives, the Clinton Administration conducted a review of American policy toward the United Nations and adopted a new multilateral approach which included an unprecedented level of U.S. intelligence support.

Responding to the end of the Cold War and increased emphasis on multilateral institutions in U.S. foreign policy, the students of the Joint Military Intelligence College have made intelligence in a UN context a significant research agenda for the college by selecting master's thesis topics focused on:

■ Analysis of the Enhanced UN Role in World Politics

■ Intelligence in UN Decisionmaking

Support to Peacekeeping Operations ■ Nuclear Nonproliferation

Congressional Oversight

■Future of U.S. Intelligence in Multilateral Environments

The direct American intelligence participation and support in the context of multilateral institutions required rethinking basic assumptions about the nature of the intelligence process in a Hobbesean world of state against state in preparation for the next war. The students recognized that intelligence and policy in this area are beset by unresolvable tensions and trade-offs. There has been a clear perception of the need for a professional intelligence infrastructure in the international organizations charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. Yet this need for intelligence is balanced against the inherent problems of a multilateral bureaucracy and decisionmaking structures which reflect the narrow interests of the member states. Intelligence support of public diplomacy risks compromise of intelligence sources. Intelligence sharing is always a two-way street with dim lighting and few road signs. Ambiguity and an imperative to move forward have generated opportunities for original research.

Intelligence is meaningless if it is not an integral part of decisionmaking for action. In a UN context, however, the policy process is multilateral and actions are authorized and taken by individuals who are nationals of any of the more than 190 member states and at the same time international civil servants. Thus, intelligence in the UN is inherently a multilateral political process. As both the Bush and Clinton Administrations have indicated, American leadership in the post-Cold War world requires participation in UN decisionmaking and effective intelligence support to UN decision and action. This is no easy task.

In 1993, as an interagency review helped formulate Presidential Decision Directive 25, Captains John M. Piskator and Gregory D. Lautner suggested a methodology to analyze U.S. military readiness to conduct UN peace operations. They offered a decision matrix for use by U.S. policymakers as they decided whether to commit U.S. forces to a particular UN operation. The students concluded that while U.S. military forces were the most capable in the world for global power projection and could be used to conduct peacekeeping operations, a lack of experience, training, doctrine and a joint staff planning mechanism left U.S. forces only marginally prepared to execute the administration's ambitious multilateral agenda.

In the early 1990s, the conventional wisdom of the intelligence, press, academic and policy communities was that the UN lacked any sort of intelligence capability. Captains Timothy M. Sebenick and James D. Edwards and Lieutenant Robert J. Allen took a hard look at the UN organizational structures and decisionmaking procedures and found competing centers of power which had developed intelligence functions without using the "I" word. UN Headquarters shares many of the problems of highly bureaucratic, national foreign policy decisionmaking apparatuses that rely on compartmentalized intelligence capabilities. The UN's lack of integration of tactical and strategic intelligence was reminiscent of the U.S. Intelligence Community's lessons learned from the Gulf War. Yet especially in the area of direct access to both sides of a potential conflict and in humanitarian and refugee operations, the UN has an "intelligence architecture" that has worked for 50 years.

Blending theory and practice, students have studied the impact of enhanced intelligence support to post-Cold War peace operations. Captain William S. Brei evaluated intelligence support to the humanitarian intervention to help the Kurds in northern Iraq. Captain William E. Whitney analyzed the complex UN transitional regime in Cambodia, highlighting the inherent intelligence functions that were critical to the success of the mission. Finally, Lt. Allen and Technical Sergeant Payton A. Flynn reviewed the intelligence successes and failures of the UN operation in Somalia and discovered a mismatch between the rigid, highly technical U.S. intelligence capability being applied to a primitive tribal conflict and the required intelligence flexibility to change from a humanitarian focus to combat support.

Several students have conducted research on other countries' participation in UN collective security and peace operations. Captain John W. Loffert Jr. reviewed the history of Sub-Saharan African military performance in UN peacekeeping and assessed the prospects for their contribution in the future. He concludes that on the whole African forces have performed well and in fact are a mainstay of UN peacekeeping in general. Second Lieutenant Fae M. Crissman analyzed Japan's quest for international status through a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. The competition between regional groups and other prospective permanent members will make it difficult in the near term for Japan to achieve the consensus necessary to amend the UN Charter. Second Lieutenant Steven E. Maceda

analyzed the peacekeeping mission of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and concludes that in spite of the initial political controversy, there is broad support for peacekeeping as a substitute for the anti-Soviet justification for maintaining a military.

Well before the development of political controversy over increased U.S. intelligence support to UN peace operations, the U.S. Intelligence Community had begun enhanced support to the joint UN Special Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections of the Iraqi nuclear program. In 1992 Captain Audrey D. Hudgins produced the first paper in the college's line of research on intelligence support to multilateral institutions by outlining cooperation with the IAEA as a model for intelligence relationships for the future. Senior Master Sergeant William E. Campbell and Theodore W. Wolff Jr. followed up with studies of intelligence support to inspections and the public diplomacy of the Korean

nuclear crisis.

The prospect for a UN role in a peaceful settlement on the Korean peninsula was the subject of research by two students. Although the UN is known as the court of last resort in a crisis, it also has a role in preventive diplomacy and negotiations. Captain Jennifer M. Hoyle studied the UN's recent success in mediating the end of long-standing civil wars in Cambodia, El Salvador and Mozambique as potential models for a transitional regime to ease the reunification of Korea. Master Sergeant Bradley J. Curran reviewed the UN role in the Tumen River Development Project at the border between China, Russia and Korea. This project will use the incentive of economic development to build better relations between North and South as a bridge to eventual reunification.

The issue of the commitment of U.S. forces to UN operations and the Clinton administration's proposals for information support to the UN were also the subject of intense argument on Capitol Hill. Mr. William D. O'Hara monitored the debate as a classic case of constitutional separation of powers, and Mr. Joseph G. Hays III focused on specific congressional action on the issue of intelligence sharing with the UN. Not surprisingly, behind the political rhetoric there appears to be a bipartisan consensus that some U.S. participation in UN peace operations is necessary, and that intelligence sharing, if conducted professionally, is in the U.S. interest.

Finally, students have looked at basic issues in the future of the UN system of collective security. Major Gary L. Crone analyzed the legal basis in the UN Charter for increased UN intervention in the internal affairs of member states involved in civil war, humanitarian emergencies, or the massive violation of human rights. He notes that the rationale has been in the Charter since 1945, but superpower confrontation prevented action. He concludes that while on an abstract level the international community may wish to act in humanitarian crises, nationalism on a local level may be too powerful when set against an international force unwilling to sustain casualties. Ms. Margaret T. Mitchell reviewed the use of UN peacekeepers in recent humanitarian interventions and concludes that the internal logic of a traditional peacekeeping mission means it is bound to fail where humanitarian intervention is required. The prospects for the future of the intelligence mission in a UN context, with its attendant opportunities and risks, are considered by Captain Hudgins and Lieutenant Allen.

The student theses distilled for this volume have been modified as little as possible, and then only to preserve readability and continuity within the chapters. Inevitably, excerpts from some theses are lengthier than others. Any modifications of the original theses by the principal author or the editor are their responsibility alone.

Several papers on issues related to intelligence in the humanitarian or peacekeeping context were omitted from this volume. There is also considerable work in progress at the college on such topics as UN Safe Areas in Bosnia, the role of intelligence in UN Security Council-led destruction and monitoring of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, peace in El Salvador, East European contributions to UN peacekeeping, China's participation in the Human Rights Commission, the UN/NATO relationship in Bosnia and the impact of peacekeeping training on U.S. readiness for combat. At a future date this work may also be published.

The Joint Military Intelligence College offers a unique opportunity for students to conduct original research on intelligence and policy issues. The student body comprises professional intelligence officers who are trained to acquire, interpret and report. They have excellent analytical and writing skills, which are the prerequisites for academic research. In the past few years typical career paths have brought them from the field to the college for a mid-career academic program designed to provide a strategic perspective for young intelligence officers as they leave the tactical level