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DoD working on new human intelligence policy

The Bush administration later this year will issue a revised version of the Pentagon’s internal policy that guides how military entities carry out human intelligence operations. The guidance is still being prepared and should be formally approved by senior Defense Department “in the next few months,” Mike Pick, a senior official with the new Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center, told reporters at a briefing Tuesday.

The current directive was approved on Dec. 18, 1992, and is titled, “Centralized Management of Department of Defense Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Operations.”

But Pick said the DoD human intelligence policy is being rewritten to account for the major overhaul of the U.S. intelligence community orchestrated by the Bush administration in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. For instance, the new national intel apparatus features a Director of National Intelligence and an undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

The rewrite is intended “to just bring it up to date,” Pick said. Meantime, a new shop is being established within the Defense Intelligence Agency to replace the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which the Pentagon shuttered this week. Army Maj. Gen. Theodore Nicholas has been tapped as the center’s director.

The counter and human intelligence center will act “as a traffic cop” that will oversee and coordinate those two missions across the military, DoD intel officials told reporters during the same briefing. Its predecessor began to take fire in 2005 when it was discovered CIFA had kept information about antiwar activists in one of its databases.

CIFA erred because “it didn’t check submissions” of data that came in from military entities across the world, Sullivan said. Instead, “they trusted [those entities] to check the data.”

Pentagon brass eventually gave in to criticism about that shop and closed it Aug. 4 — at least under the CIFA moniker. But the officials speaking at the Aug. 5 briefing made clear the new shop will carry out all of the same functions as CIFA, but with added capabilities under the merger of counterintelligence and human collection capabilities.

The new outfit “picks up what CIFA was doing and continues what DIA already is doing,” said Toby Sullivan, counter intel director in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. It lacks the same designation as a law enforcement entity that CIFA carried, Sullivan noted. But the now-defunct organization, he said, was only given that designation as a tactic to allow certain personnel from the Navy and Air Force departments to do CIFA stints.

“Without it, we would have just had retired civilian guys … and Army guys,” Sullivan said. “And we wanted more than that.”

The Air Force and Navy departments have agreed “to detail” personnel for multiyear stints with the new hybrid DIA organization, the officials said. The officials stressed that CIFA did not spy on U.S. citizens or horde information about Americans. They said the new hybrid organization also will not carry out such tasks.

While the officials attempted to pour water on the CIFA database scandal, they also used the briefing to hail the creation of the new dual-role office. Pick trumpeted it as the first marriage of counter intel and HUMINT “at a national level.” It will be created within the military’s top intel agency, Pick said, “because DIA just kind of made sense.”

The U.S. military services and all regional combatant commanders already have created hybrid intel shops. This move will align high-level Pentagon functions with the rest of the military intel apparatus, the officials said.