13 June 2001. Thanks to DC.

Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 09:45:11 +0200
To: [email protected]
From: David Crawford <[email protected]>
Subject: The Human Element

The International Intelligence History Study Group, 7th ANNUAL MEETING -- 2001, "Intelligence - The Human Element" was held 8 - 10 June 2001 at Haus Rissen, in Hamburg, Germany:

http://intelligence-history.wiso.uni-erlangen.de/meetings.htm )

I'm providing a brief overview from my notes of the most important paper:

The chief of operations at the BND (Ludwig Mundt) gave the keynote speech instead of the BND president August Hanning. This was very interesting do to Mundt's very frank discussion. Mundt's talk was on planning allocation of his agent-runner resources. Twenty percent he says are now in the weapons poliferation field. Mundt says the BND is very good at anti-proliferation work because the Rabta embarassment forced the service to invest tremendous resources in this field. Here the BND has an advantage because as a service that develops and uses clandestine operations, it is very good at recognizing when other organizations are using the same tradecraft. Additionally weapons proliferation has a weakness: much of the technology these organizations require has to be procurred on the world market, where this activity can be monitored.

A completely new area for him is providing military intelligence of a type and quality that the German military (Bundeswehr) needs for its new more active role abroad -- particularly in Kosovo. This is very new for the BND. He said, he is working hard to improve the quality of his product here, to give the field commanders the timely information they actually need.

He said improvements in HumInt operations in a specific field (without naming any) take about five years before they can be effective. The time is required to find the right mix of prospective agents, to recruit and train them, and to get them set in place and tasked. He also talked about the hesitancy his service has to task a HumInt source with an assignment. He said first the question has to turn up empty in the BND databases, then in open source material, then the sigint sources are checked. Only if all other sources fail will tasking a HumInt source be considered.

Mundt has to decide how this limited resource should be allocated among all the interests his service would like to investigate. Mundt said the BND does not have the resources to double task its agents with the same assignment just for confirmation purposes. He acknowledged this as a risk, but said, he just doesn't have the money to do this on a regular basis, like some of the superpower services. Agents themselves, he says are cheap. The primary restriction the BND has in its HumInt operations is its limited number of agent runners. Agent runners are civil servants and therefore expensive. The support infrastructure can also be expensive. HumInt operations, however, are much cheaper than technical intelligence means.

He said the BND sees itself as an all-source service with a global field of interest. On the other hand he says he doesn't have the resources to be active everywhere. He has to make a conscious decision about what field or regions to ignore. He called it having the "courage to leave a gap". The BND has liaison offices in about 70 countries, and these officers are expected to give the head office an overview of developments in their regions.

Mundt talked openly about the need to change the mindset of his own staff. The move (starting in September) of the BND evaluation units to Berlin is part of an effort to improve relations between the providers and consumers of intelligence. Mundt says it was a mistake for the BND to have been isolated for so many years in Pullach (near Munich): far away from the political and military decisionmakers in Germany. He hopes that the entire BND head office will move to Berlin in the medium term so members of the BND can regularly participate in the decision-making process. He quoted one of his former counterparts at the CIA (without naming him) "If the CIA was based in Houston, it would have been shut down years ago."

David Crawford

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