Research

It was the Intelligence Communities job to provide information and the president’s job to use the information to further the nation’s interests and to protect the capabilities that created such advantage. The only duty to national security that Trump retained upon leaving office was the lifelong responsibility not to disclose the information. He’s now being held accountable for his alleged failure to do so, as our system demands.

This paper provides a framework for a program to advance IC ethics professionalization, to better serve the national interest, avoid ethical lapses or moral pitfalls, and strengthen US national security and the Intelligence Community against the risk of politicization. The program would serve as catalyst for national security intelligence officials to better perceive, reflect on, make judgments about, and potentially act on ethical lapses in the midst, in adjacent units, or higher in the chain of command. The program would provide a means for officials to deliberate on real or hypothetical ethical dilemmas, both as individuals or in groups.

The Intelligence and Applied History Projects hosted a National Security Act Essay Contest in 2022 entitled: “Imagining a New National Security Act for the 21st Century.” The contest sought to generate new ideas for improving the intelligence and national security community in the US based on the dynamic security environment we face in the 21st century. The essay prompt offered a variety of hypothetical scenarios where intelligence failure contributed to catastrophic failure and posed the question: what you would change now to improve the intelligence and national security posture of the US?

The winning essays, from a field of approximately 75 applicants, were authored by (1) Russell Travers, (2) Sophie Faaborg-Andersen, and (3) Marie Couture and Laurie LaPorte. The authors' winning essays appear in this report.

Intelligence agencies have struggled to define how open source intelligence fits into its broader work, but the wide breadth of publicly available information about the Ukraine conflict, combined with proactive disclosures of classified information, are providing some clarity about OSINT’s role. Lauren Zabierek and Maria Robson Morrow spoke with the Federal News Network on how the public and private sectors are leveraging open source intelligence, including challenges and opportunities.

In more than seven decades of study after study, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) has identified a lack of diversity in the workforce as a problem. Beginning with a 1953 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report on women in the agency, tellingly titled “The Petticoat Panel,” organizations have documented a lack of presence and opportunity for women, minorities, and other groups including people with disabilities. Recommendations and actions were repeated over the years with marginal results. This paper reviews efforts of what has been done, what has succeeded, and what has failed as an important starting point for building a robust intelligence workforce for the latter half of the twenty-first century. It then offers recommendations for overcoming systemic challenges and fostering culture change to improve diversity across the community.

Protests against racism erupt in cities across America. A White House, under siege, believes a vast conspiracy is at work, and, to uncover it, instigates a policy to spy on Americans. This is not the United States in 2020, but half a century earlier. Using a wealth of declassified records, this article explores a domestic intelligence collection program (CHAOS) instigated by two  successive US administrations and conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The probability of terrorists getting and using a nuclear bomb appears to be low—but the consequences if they did would be so devastating that it is worth beefing up efforts to make sure terrorists never get their hands on a nuclear bomb’s essential ingredients. To see the possibilities, we need to look at motive, capability, and opportunity.

Jayita Sarkar explains why the Biden administration needs to re-conceptualize nuclear terrorism and act quickly.

Every president serving in the last two decades has said that nuclear terrorism is a significant national security threat. Analysis of this threat has been, for good reason, mostly focused on foreign extremist groups, but recent events raise questions of whether there should be greater focus in the United States on far-right, domestic extremist threats. These extremists represent a unique danger because of their prevalence in federal institutions such as the military and the potential that they might infiltrate nuclear facilities, where they could access sensitive information and nuclear materials.

America’s Intelligence Community (IC) faces a daunting array of traditional national security challenges. Terrorism remains a persistent global problem in form of Islamic extremism as well as far-right nationalism. Russia, China and other nation state threats have become a higher priority after a long period of neglect. Regional conflicts simmer and occasionally boil over, reminding us that our agencies must provide global coverage. And we are now engaged in perpetual cyber conflict, with ambient digital espionage and conflict raging across global networks.