Inside Information

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer

With the CIA's Directorate of Operations focused intensely on Saudi multimillionaire Osama bin Laden, its Counter Terrorist Center may soon reap the benefits of a new robo-agent, of sorts: a CIA machine that automatically translates Arabic to English, with a Persian-to-English prototype right behind it in the pipeline.

Development of such translation technology was highlighted in Director of Central Intelligence George J Tenet's annual report on the U.S. Intelligence Community, a little noticed compendium of interesting nuggets and factoids about what's happening in this $29 billion world of secrets.

Other technological achievements mentioned in the document included a prototype system developed by the Department of Energy for the Secret Service that enables vehicles to be tagged and tracked through a chemical spray that gives off ultraviolet or infrared signals and can be detected with an optical sensing device.

Tenet also reported that DOE's Special Technologies Program figured out for the U.S. European Command how to remotely interrupt broadcasts aimed at disrupting United Nations peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia. And he noted that the National Imagery and Mapping Agency continues to investigate hyperspectral imagery, a technology that enables analysts to spot poppy fields, camouflage netting, even tank treads on grass, by breaking photographs into extremely fine gradations of color and then comparing the ratios of various hues.

On the human side of the equation, Tenet reported that a pilot program coordinated by the National Intelligence Council, called the Civilian Intelligence Reserve, recruited seven academics to "provide watch coverage and in-depth background expertise" on 26 countries in Latin American and Africa. The program, Tenet said, is soon to evolve into a full-blown Global Expertise Reserve.

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For all that needs to be fixed inside the $4 billion CIA, the biggest challenges facing Tenet involve his management of the $28 billion intelligence community, a bureaucratic colossus consisting of 13 separate agencies. So says Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who pointed out in an interview this month, that Tenet may control the "community," but Secretary of Defense William Cohen is the one who controls nearly all of the community's money.

Tenet's biggest problem, Goss said, is getting "unvarnished" intelligence into the right policy-makers' hands at the right time. "All the intelligence in the world doesn't matter," he said, "if the pictures are sitting in a camera somewhere."

Beyond such obvious dissemination problems, Goss said, Tenet also must make a series of critical decisions about how many millions of dollars to spend on which new technologies at places like the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, not to mention the CIA.

Finally, Goss believes, Tenet must develop and refine the CIA's covert action capabilities so that the president has some alternatives "between doing nothing and doing stand off bombing."

"I'm talking about covert action, but not Bay of Pigs covert action," Goss said, running down a list of possibilities that included cyberwar and new forms of psychological attacks.

"There's got to be more tools in the tool box for the world as it is today," Goss said, and quoting former CIA Director Jim Woolsey, he added, "The big bear is no longer out there, but the woods are full of poisonous snakes."

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To the long list of perquisites Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) enjoys as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, add immortality: the defense authorization bill recently adopted by a House-Senate conference committee contains a provision renaming the Defense Intelligence Agency's Missile and Space Intelligence Center at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., as the Richard C. Shelby Center for Missile Intelligence.

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Vernon Loeb, The Washington Post's staff writer on national security issues, writes this biweekly column exclusively for the Web. His newspaper column, Back Channels, is also carried by this Web site, and Loeb answers questions from the audience in monthly online discussions. He can reached via e-mail: loebv@washpost.com.