Intelligence Project

Whatever the United States does, Syria will continue its long plunge down the regional elevator shaft, picking up passengers and speed along the terminal descent.  Washington would be well advised to consider this fact as the increasingly fractious U.S. political establishment debates what role, if any, America and her allies should play in the process.

The purpose of the paper is not to suggest that outsourcing has no place in the role of government; to the contrary, the paper argues the elements of these two spheres have morphed into this modern strand of DNA which cannot be undone but to the point, DNA functions within the confines of the right environment as should outsourcing under straightforward regulation. The privatization of intelligence cannot be allowed to function in a vacuum and inadequate oversight must be called out to avoid further exploitation by industry.

In May, a number of former intelligence officers, policymakers, cyber experts, and top journalists took part in a Belfer Center Intelligence Project conference titled “The Ethics & Morality of Intelligence.” Speakers at “The Ethics & Morality of Intelligence” conference identified and discussed key moral and ethical questions around the nature of current intelligence practices and future trends.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is departing as Director of the Belfer Center’s Intelligence Project. In that capacity, he has run the Recanati-Kaplan Foundation Fellowship, which educates rising thought leaders in national and international intelligence. He previously served for a quarter century in intelligence, both in the CIA, where he became station chief in Moscow, and the U.S. Department of Energy, where he was Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. After 9/11, he led Washington’s efforts to determine whether al Qaeda had WMD capabilities and to prevent a nuclear terrorist attack.

Norman Roule, a 34-year CIA veteran and Middle East expert, sits down with with Aroop Mukharji to talk about the culture at the CIA, Yemen, and theater.

In mid-January, a team of scholars from the Belfer Center’s Intelligence and Managing the Atom Projects traveled to Tel Aviv, Israel to examine samples of, and receive briefings on, an archive of documents related to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The large cache includes some 55,000 pages of documents and a further 55,000 files on CDs that included photos and videos. A clandestine Israeli intelligence operation spirited the materials out of Iran in early 2018.

The documents that the Belfer group were shown confirm that senior Iranian officials had decided in the late 1990s to actually manufacture nuclear weapons and carry out an underground nuclear test; that Iran’s program to do so made more technical progress than had previously been understood; and that Iran had help from quite a number of foreign scientists, and access to several foreign nuclear weapon designs. The archive also leaves open a wide range of questions, including what plan, if any, Iran has had with respect to nuclear weapons in the nearly 16 years since Iran’s government ordered a halt to most of the program in late 2003. 

This brief report summarizes the group’s conclusions about what the archive reveals about Iran’s program and questions that remain open.

Dan Snow meets Calder Walton for a martini and an overview of Russia's history of interference in foreign elections.