The worlds of intelligence, the military, and academe reflect very different, at times conflicting, cultures, ethical norms, and priorities. This examination assesses the evolution of the sometimes fractious relationship between scholars and government military and intelligence officials, disputes among them, and cases of convergence and critical collaboration.To be effective in policy and decision making, the U.S. government needs the best information and thinking it can obtain. Much of that expertise resides in academia. For their part, social scientists and members of the healing professions, in particular, must be attentive to the moral, intellectual, and ethical dictates of their professions when participating in support of government employment of coercive military force and extraordinary means of intelligence acquisition. Finding the appropriate balance between helping safeguard national security and upholding the tenets of professional integrity is a joint task of soldiers, scholars, and spies.
President John F. Kennedy, inaugural address, January 20, 1961
2.
Joseph S. Nye , Jr., "Peering into the Future," Foreign Affairs73, no. 4 (July/August 1994): 90.
3.
Comments upbraiding officialdom, such as "The nation’s leaders must understand and help all Americans understand that, as a country, the United States has no exclusive ownership of ideas or knowledge," miss the target since it is worker bees who are more guilty of such bias than senior officials. Quoted from Jacques S. Gansler and Alice P. Gast, "Academics and National-Security Experts Must Work Together," Chronicle of Higher Education, http:// chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i44/44a05601.htm (accessed October 17, 2008).
4.
According to one recent account, some 37,000 contractor personnel work in the business of U.S. intelligence and annually cost approximately $207,000 each, versus the average government intelligence salary of $125,000. Robert O’Harrow, Jr., "Contractors Augment Intelligence Agencies,"Washington Post, August 28, 2008, D1.
5.
Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 40. Hereinafter Camelot.
6.
With apologies to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, act III, scene 1 (also known as Hamlet’s soliloquy).
7.
See David Price, "Science: Anthropologists as Spies," in Ethics of Spying, ed. Jan Goldman (Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield, 2006 ), 336-42.
8.
Jorge Montes, "A Communist Commentary on Camelot," in Camelot, 233. This volume contains a wealth of history, commentary, and criticism of this endeavor, from which some very salient questions and themes are extracted here.
9.
Horowitz, Camelot, 7.
10.
This episode differs from the earlier case in which leading social anthropologist Franz Boas had accused colleagues of faking fieldwork in Latin America as cover for spying against the German navy in WWI. See "Critical Mass-Embedded Anthropologists," signed Network of Concerned Anthropologists, Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i08/08b00401.htm (accessed October 17, 2008).
11.
Cited in Dante B. Fascell, "Behavioral Sciences and the National Security," in Camelot, 184.
12.
For a full account of this chapter of American intelligence and security policy history, see John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York : New Press, 2004).
13.
Jacob Kipp , Lester Grau, Karl Prinslow, and Don Smith, "The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Century," Military Review, September-October 2006, 8.
14.
Ibid., 10.
15.
For instructive background on the origins and intentions of the Human Terrain Team program, see the works of Dr. Montgomery McFate, inter alia, "Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship," Military Review, March-April 2005, 24-37; and "The Military Utility of Understanding an Adversary Culture," Joint Forces Quarterly 38 (3rd Quarter 2005), 42-48.
16.
Such fears abound, as seen in such references as "anthropology long [being] the hand-maiden of empires" (David Vine, "Enabling the Killing Chain," Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54i14/14b00901.htm [accessed September 12, 2008]) and "history tells us that [anthropological and other scholarly information] can easily be misused when put into the wrong hands" (Roberto J. Gonzalez, "We Must Fight the Militarization of Anthropology," Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/ weekly/v53/i22/22b02001.htm [accessed September 26, 2008]).
17.
Vine, "Enabling the Kill Chain."
18.
The American Historical Association and the American Psychological Association have both taken positions, to be ratified by votes of their entire memberships, rejecting the morality and acceptability of the war in Iraq and/or of participating as consults in maintaining terrorist prisons abroad, specifically excluding cooperation in the conduct of prisoner interrogations. The latter body has recorded a vote of 8,702 to 6,157 in favor of a resolution banning consultations by its members in detainee interrogations. "Psychologists Vote to End Interrogation Consultations", New York Times, September 18, 2008, A23.
19.
Vine, "Enabling the Kill Chain."
20.
John Allen Williams, "Our Intellectual Freedom," Armed Forces & Society34, no. 4 (July 2008): 534.
21.
David Glenn , "Patriotic, or Unethical? Anthropologists Debate Whether to Help Security Agencies," Chronicle of Higher Education , http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i29/29a01601.htm (accessed September 12, 2008). Glenn also cites his understanding of anthropology’s two core principles: do no harm and be honest and transparent.
22.
See http://www.aaanet.org/cmtes/commissions/CEAUSSIC/Ethics-Casebook.cfm (accessed November 3, 2008), emphasis added.
23.
For critical accounts of this involvement of physicians and psychologists in "torture" interrogations, see, inter alia, Scott Shane, "Report Outlines Medical Workers’ Role in Torture," New York Times, April 7, 2009, and Joby Warrick and Peter Finn, "Psychologists Helped Guide Interrogations," Washington Post, April 18, 2009, A1, A12.
24.
Quoted by then-Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Intelligence Robert M. Gates, "CIA and the University," speech at Harvard University, February 13, 1986.
25.
For a fuller, if often critical, account of these formative years and leaders, see Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 3-70.
26.
My thanks to Kurt Roth for calling my attention to this critical example of social science’s contribution to national strategy.
27.
Gates, "CIA and the University."
28.
One of the most vital advances in the intelligence-academic nexus occurred in 1987, when the CIA began funding a program at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to conduct seminars for intelligence professionals on "intelligence and policy" and to compile case studies "helping to illuminate issues related to the use of intelligence by policymakers." See David Kennedy and Leslie Brunetta, "Lebanon and the Intelligence Community," Studies in Intelligence 37, no. 2 (1994), 35.
29.
This discussion purposely leaves aside the science and technology arena, one less penetrable by this author and enormously complex, not to mention an area very sensitive in terms of disclosing just how the U.S. intelligence apparatus engages with outside technology experts and funds some of their leading-edge research and applications. This aspect of intelligence-researcher collaboration remains less transparent, largely to protect the development of sensitive intelligence systems and countermeasures against inadvertent, public disclosure to America’s adversaries-and even to our economic competitors.
30.
Joel Rosenthal, foreword to Ethics of Spying, ed. Jan Goldman, x.
31.
J. E. Drexel Godfrey, "Ethics and Intelligence," in Ethics of Spying, 3.
32.
Russ Travers , "The Coming Intelligence Failure," Studies in Intelligence40, no. 2 (1997): 27, emphasis added.
33.
See also the author’s essay "Improving All-Source Intelligence Analysis: Elevate Knowledge in the Equation,"International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence21, no. 2 (June 2008): 337-54.
34.
See Richard Holbrooke and Laurie Garrett, "‘Sovereignty’ That Risks Global Health,"Washington Post, August 10, 2008, B7.
35.
See http://www.promedmail.org, operated by the International Society for Infectious Diseases.
36.
See IRTPA (Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004), Pub. L. No. 108-458, December 17, 2004, sections 1017-19, "Alternative Analysis of Intelligence by the Intelligence Community," which stipulates "alternative analysis" and mandates an "analysis integrity officer"; also see section 1052, "Open Source Intelligence," which, inter alia, calls on the Director of National Intelligence to "ensure that the intelligence community makes efficient and effective use of open-source information and analysis" (emphasis added).
37.
For a telling example of this kind of outside perspective, see Rob Johnson, Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community: An Ethnographic Study (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2005).
38.
Gates, "CIA and the University."
39.
For the classic work on understanding the challenge of analytic mind-sets, see Richards J. Heuer, Jr., Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1999), esp. chap. 6, 8-10.
40.
One illustration of the size and breadth of intelligence-academic partnering can be found in the Central Intelligence Agency roster of "Intelligence Relations with Academe," available at http://intellit.muskingum.edu/cia_folder/ciarelations_folder/ciarelacademe.html (accessed September 26, 2008).
41.
The Global Futures Forum, formerly known as the Global Futures Project, is an unclassified, passworded network of government and private analysts (American and foreign) accessible only by invitation and subscription.
42.
William R. Polk, "Problems of Government Utilization of Scholarly Research in International Affairs," in Camelot, 255.
