Schar School News May 2021

Recap: Former Intelligence Leaders Discuss the Future of the Field—and Offer Advice to Students

Andrew J Schappert — Fri, 21 May 2021 14:59:58 +0000

Recap: Former Intelligence Leaders Discuss the Future of the Field—and Offer Advice to Students Andrew J Schappert Fri, 05/21/2021 - 10:59

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Michael V. Hayden

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Screenshot by Mason Goad/Schar School of Policy and Government

“And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” – John VIII-XXXII

The quote inscribed on the wall of the Original Headquarters Building of the Central Intelligence Agency is memorable, given both its call to action and its irony. The Intelligence Community knows all too well that officers spend day in and day out dealing with incomplete facts, half-truths, and trying to determine what may be disinformation.

But the quote inscribed under the orders of CIA director Allen Dulles (1953-61), determined what must be done in eras receding from our memory and into an increasingly distant past. What, or who, could possibly determine the future of intelligence?

The Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security at the Schar School of Policy and Government hosted an event to answer what the future of intelligence might hold, bringing lessons from the past to a present (albeit virtual) audience.

Schar School distinguished visiting professor Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA, hosted a 90-minute conversation with three former senior intelligence officials. Those included Susan Gordon, the former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence from 2017-2019 and Deputy Director of the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency (NGA); Robert Cardillo, who served as Director of NGA from 2014-2019; and John Brennan, who served as Director of CIA from 2013-2017. General Michael Hayden also participated in the discussion.

More than 400 viewers tuned in from around the world. Another 250 have seen the recording on the Hayden Center’s YouTube channel.

Morell began by asking the panelists if the mission of intelligence has changed.

“My definition of the mission of intelligence is to know the truth, to see beyond the horizon, and to allow leaders to act before events dictate,” said Gordon, in concordance with the other panelists. “That is the greatest advantage we provide…knowing a little bit more, a little bit sooner, so that a leader has a running start on making a decision rather than having their hand forced by events.”

In that sense, the future of intelligence is the future itself.

Although the mission of the Intelligence Community appears stagnant, the threats to the nation are not. Morell switched his questioning to the rise of China, and what the future threats will surely be.

“I agree that China demands a very prominent, almost dominant, sort of focus as far as resource allocation and the interest of the Intelligence Community,” said Brennan. “At the same time, though, there are so many other issues, and what we don’t want to do is deprive some of these other issues of the necessary resources and capabilities.”

One of those capabilities lies in the ability to cooperate between partners within the Intelligence Community and outside of it, a capability some may have fallen short on.

“I think we’re playing catch-up now to raise our game, to work with partners in Treasury, to work with partners in the international community, and to work with private companies as well, in a way that raises insight into trade, monetary policy, international sanctions, [and more],” said Cardillo. “What I worry about going forward is that bureaucracy will not adapt and provide the agility, the time sensitivity, the innovation that I believe is demanded now of the Intelligence Community.”

The rise of China is concerning enough, but the technological boom in the last two decades will prove to be another future issue to contend with.

“The Intelligence Community does not have the technical foundation to deal with this data world,” said Gordon. “Whether it is in its infrastructure, whether in its hiring, whether it’s in its speed of motion—its ability to work with data, it doesn’t necessarily have the collectors that it needs to go after data that are going to provide the advantage we once had.”

Finally, and ultimately, the future of intelligence will rest on future generations.

“I do think it’s a technical world,” said Gordon, addressing those thinking of a career in intelligence. “Whatever you study, you need to be comfortable with technology, because so many solutions are going through that. But at the same time, I really want you to be a critical thinker.

“As technology becomes less the discriminator itself and the use of technology becomes the major advantage, people with a great behavioral science foundation, a great social science foundation, a great ability to do critical thinking—I can’t pick one discipline. I would encourage you to be a reader.”

“Whatever it is that interests you or motivates you, study it with a passion, and with an enthusiasm,” Brennan said. “Because with almost any discipline you can find a role within the Intelligence Community or national security structure. Study as best you can, and what it is that you like to do, and really, seriously, consider a future for yourself—in terms of your profession—somewhere within that U.S. government superstructure.”

General Hayden had one final piece of advice to give to those working in intelligence, both now and in the future. “Very simply, tell the truth,” he said. “Tell the truth.”

Schar School note: A generous gift from the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation provides $450,000 in new 2021-22 scholarships for master’s students enrolled in the Schar School's security studies programs, which includes intelligence.

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Intelligence

Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence Policy and International Security

Events

Schar School News May 2021

Hayden Center Event Recap: The Quotes of Authors

Andrew J Schappert — Wed, 05 May 2021 18:23:53 +0000

Hayden Center Event Recap: The Quotes of Authors Andrew J Schappert Wed, 05/05/2021 - 14:23

The next Hayden Center event is Thursday, May 15, at 7 p.m. ET, when Michael Morell, former acting and deputy CIA director, sits down with Matthew Pottinger, President Trump’s deputy national security advisor and former National Security Council senior director for Asia, to discuss “China: National Security Consensus?” They will be joined by two former leading CIA analysts on China: Christopher Johnson, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and John Culver, who retired last year as the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia in the National Intelligence Council after decades at CIA.

Meanwhile, in case you missed it, here are outtakes from the last Hayden Center event, in which Schar School visiting fellow and former CIA official David Priess discussed spy fiction with popular authors Brad Thor, Karen Cleveland, and Alma Katsu. The conversation is available on YouTube and as a Lawfare podcast.

Brad Thor:

You should write what you love to read, because that’s where your passion is.
There is no American dream without those willing to protect it, so I’ve always been enamored with our warrior class, whether these be people in the military, law enforcement, or the intelligence community.
I buy a lot of pitchers of beer and a lot of steak dinners. I could not do what I do without the generosity of people who have served – whether it’s in the special operations community, or the intelligence community.
It’s only through the grace and generosity of people who have been in the world and been in these places that are willing to work with me that I am able to get those things right. So, I’m just very fortunate to have the network that I do.
It’s one of the issues that thriller authors deal with: You hope you’re not giving bad guys ideas. But, by the same token, if I’m giving bad guys ideas they’re really not as good as we think they are. But a couple of books ago, Use of Force, I opened with the Burning Man festival in the desert, in Black Rock City, in Nevada. There was a federal review of the security situation because of the book, and they decided that what they had seen in my book was very plausible and they wanted to tighten things up at Burning Man.
There have been instances where I have suggested things in the book that have gotten the attention of the government. So, if I’m helping in my own very minuscule small way to make the nation a safer place through the stuff I put in the books, then that’s a good thing.
I’m a big believer in what Robert Frost said: “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”
Show up every day on the job as if it was your first day—and could be your last day on the job. I always want to strive to improve and get better. And that’s one of the great things I think about writing is that you always can get better.

Karen Cleveland:

When I wrote my first book, I decided to write about a CIA analyst because I was a CIA analyst. It was a world that I knew, and it was a world I was part of at the time.
I did try to take what I knew about those careers from working within them and apply them to my books.
I did have to submit all of my writing to the the CIA Publications Review board. That is sort of a life-long agreement that any CIA officer signs up for.
It is nice to have that check, I think. Because, I joined the CIA to help make our country a safer place and the last thing I would want to do is accidentally disclose anything classified, so I think it is a nice check to have.
I think one of the things that gets drilled into you as an analyst is that you can’t waste words, and policy makers have some real time constraints. You need to get to the point and you need to make them care about the issue and you need to make your argument compelling enough that they read your analysis to the end.
What people think about the CIA from movies and television a lot of times is this very flashy high-tech organization, and CIA is very high-tech but not in a flashy way. A lot of people work in cubicles and windowless vaults. Do you write it from that perspective? Or do you jazz it up a little bit?
I think it is important to show these strong female characters. There are so many different kinds of people who work at CIA. It’s not all gun-toting, globe-trotting men. There are plenty of gun-toting, globe-trotting women.

Alma Katsu:

I kept thinking: “I should be able to write a spy novel, right?” You know, I had this whole career in intelligence, and I can write. I should be able to put the two together. But it wasn’t until my editor really encouraged me to give it a try. And I knew there were things that I wanted to see in a spy novel that I wasn’t seeing in most spy novels up till now.
There was the aspect of knowing how gutting it is when you maybe have been working with a traitor—that somebody you know has been a traitor to the country. And I just wanted to bring that deep personal experience to that story.
The things they’re trying to protect are sources and methods. The entire time I was writing it, that was going through the back of my mind. You know, what could I say that wouldn’t strike anywhere near classified information.
I have really been heartened by the kind words people have shared, a lot of folks who have retired, who have worked in the intelligence community telling me how true to life it is.
Two-thirds of my career were spent with NSA. And NSA is a really interesting place to work—highly technical. And that’s the thing: The things the intelligence community protects the most are sources and methods, and it’s a story that probably deserves to be told. The people that work there are uniquely gifted people who give their lives in the service of the American people.
It’s really rare when there’s a clear-cut moral right and wrong.

David Priess:

I’m a big fan of Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, which is really foundational for anyone in this area. More recently, another foundational one is David Ignatius’, Agents of Innocence, a remarkable look inside a Middle Eastern operation.
Satire is starting to become an area of spy fiction.

Topics

Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence Policy and International Security

Hayden Center

Events

Schar School News May 2021

David Preiss

New ACE! Study Shows Reforms in Correctional Settings Require Community Buy-In

Andrew J Schappert — Mon, 03 May 2021 17:19:46 +0000

New ACE! Study Shows Reforms in Correctional Settings Require Community Buy-In Andrew J Schappert Mon, 05/03/2021 - 13:19

In This Story

Faye S. Taxman

Faye Taxman, director of the Schar School’s Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence

Researchers commonly work with the criminal justice system to implement reforms, bringing with them the latest science and data pointing to why a certain practice will help improve outcomes. New research from the Center for Advancing Correctional Excellence (ACE!) shows that if community corrections agencies are to sustain evidence-based reforms, they need to view them as legitimate.

Researchers worked with eight federal community corrections agencies to implement Contingency Management, an evidence-based practice used to help people convicted of drug offenses set and achieve goals to end addiction, avoid repeat offenses, and increase pro-social behavior. Such evidence-based practices and reforms are frequently put in place across the criminal justice system.

“We’ve seen millions of dollars spent by institutions on evidence-based practices in community corrections settings, but there is very little research on if the reforms stick after researchers leave,” said Shannon Portillo, assistant vice chancellor for undergraduate programs and an associate professor of public affairs & administration at the University of Kansas. Portillo was an assistant professor at Mason’s Department of Criminology, Law and Society (CLS) when she began co-authoring the study.

Danielle Rudes, associate professor in ��ӽ紫ý’s Department of Criminology, Law and Society

“We followed up after our original study with community corrections agencies, and we found reform only sticks when staff viewed the reform as legitimate. It is not enough to show that reforms are effective or efficient. Workers must view them as legitimate and aligned with their organization’s goals.”

The study, co-written with ACE! co-founders Faye Taxman, a University Professor in the Schar School, and Danielle Rudes, an associate professor in CLS, was published in The British Journal of Criminology. It was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The researchers returned to the eight community corrections sites five years after implementing Contingency Management. While all sites saw the reformed practices as legitimate enough to initially consider adoption, two sites never adopted them, four sites experimented with reform, and two sites continued to use the reform after the study was over. The research team evaluated the legitimacy of the reform on three levels: Pragmatic, or if staff recognized that the practice could fit with their site routines and operations; moral, or if it was viewed as the right thing to do to help their clients; and cognitive, or if they could understand how this reform was different from current practices and was a shift in behaviors that could fit their agency.

Shannon Portillo (Photo courtesy of KU Marketing and Communications)

Results showed that sites that sustained Contingency Management rated it moderately or strongly in all three areas but that it had to be viewed strongly in terms of cognitive legitimacy. Sites in which it was not sustained gave various reasons for scoring it lower; for example, one employee did not use the software provided to keep track of data, instead logging it manually and reporting it was additional work, resulting in a low score in pragmatic legitimacy. Leadership was key in implementing reforms but could not make others view them as legitimate simply by requiring staff to implement the new practice. In fact, leadership views of legitimacy, efficiency and effectiveness of the measure was not a key factor at all, compared to staff views of legitimacy.

“This shows it really had to be the workers who saw this change as worthwhile and saw how the reform was worth their time to change their behaviors and workplace practices,” Portillo said.

In some of the sites where the evidence-based practice was not sustained, workers and management discussed the reform, but they indicated they were not sure exactly what it meant or how they could find a way to make it fit in their operations, meaning it did not score well in cognitive or pragmatic legitimacy. Contingency Management works by helping individuals set goals for recovery, meeting requirements set in terms of their probation or by courts, and rewarding them with gift cards or points toward purchases when certain benchmarks are met.

“It sounds simple, but this is a huge shift in mindset for the criminal justice system, because the system is so punishment-oriented. So, it was not always viewed as legitimate,” Portillo said.

Presenting such a fundamental change in operations shows that reform cannot be implemented or sustained without demonstrating to those tasked with carrying it out of its value. Demonstrating the efficacy or leadership simply telling workers it is something they have to do was not enough. While much effort and money have been invested in criminal justice reform, a deeper understanding of what reforms work as well as how to make them stick is vital to improving the criminal justice system and helping individuals successfully transition back to society.

“This is definitely an area that needs more research, as the federal government invests a lot, and individual organizations invest a lot of time and resources in reforms and evidence-based practices,” Portillo said. “We need to know more about how reform can be successful and how it is sustained for the long term.”

(Michael Krings is a public affairs officer at the University of Kansas. This story is adapted from KU with permission.)

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ACE!

Schar School News May 2021

Danielle Rudes

Faye S. Taxman

Busting crimes and saving lives: Mason’s multidisciplinary research in action

Mariam Aburdeineh — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 19:09:36 +0000

Busting crimes and saving lives: Mason’s multidisciplinary research in action Mariam Aburdeineh Wed, 04/28/2021 - 15:09

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Louise I. Shelley

Louise Shelley, director of Mason's Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC). Photo by ��ӽ紫ý

Illegal goods can have deadly consequences. Whether it’s a counterfeit face mask that doesn’t provide a frontline worker adequate protection from COVID-19, or a counterfeit pill laced with fentanyl (a synthetic painkiller 50-100 times more potent than morphine), millions of lives can be at risk.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers and students at ��ӽ紫ý is working to stop such criminal activity. Thanks to a nearly $650,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF)—and a $16,000 grant supplement awarded to two undergraduates on the team—they will be investigating how to disrupt illicit supply chains, influence policy, and ultimately save lives.

“We’re dealing with problems that challenge the health of the American population in serious ways,” said Schar School professor Louise Shelley, who is spearheading the five-year project with Professor Edward Huang. “We need advanced data analytics to break these problems where the trade is on such a massive scale.”

Counterfeit personal protective equipment is part of the reason governments around the world have struggled to control the pandemic, Shelley said, adding that more than 38 million counterfeit masks have been confiscated in the United States. Huang said most deaths from opioids are related to fentanyl and online opioid sales. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accidental drug overdoses kill significantly more people than COVID-19 among those ages 25-44.

“We want to find artificial intelligence tools and data analytics tools to figure out how can we address these problems,” said Huang, an expert on supply chain network design in the Volgenau School of Engineering. “How can we prevent them from entering our markets so we can protect our citizens?”

Answering those questions takes investigative work to research social networks, money-flow relationships, how goods are shipped, and other aspects. Mason’s team is analyzing these findings, with additional data and collaboration from government and businesses, to understand and model the illicit supply chain networks.

Their research will move solutions forward, as they figure out how to effectively disrupt the illegal activity.

Juliette Reyes

In March, Shelley testified before Congress on their findings on their first joint NSF project, which Huang said could help determine what kinds of policies to implement to deter the crimes.

“This project is so important and will advance our national ability to counter malicious activity in the cyberworld,” said junior cybersecurity engineering major Ahna Mohiuddin, who will support the project with data collection and analysis. “It means a lot to me to contribute.”

“What the research opportunity struck for me was how it deals hands-on with the dark web, counterterrorist groups and looking into illicit networking when it comes to medicine,” said Juliette Reyes, a freshman studying government and international politics and conflict analysis and resolution. “We hear a lot about abstract ideas of counterfeit drugs, and the FDA having these problems, so I’m interested in understanding the inner-workings of these networks.”

In addition to helping solve global problems, the two undergraduates who are starting on the project this summer, and post-doctoral researcher Layla Hashemi, will be at the forefront of their fields in no time, Shelley said, as they embark on a new field of interdisciplinary research NSF has never done before.

“Mason is an absolute pioneer in this area,” Shelley said, adding that it’s one of the only institutions doing this kind of integrative thinking on illicit supply chains.

Ahna Mohiuddin. Photo provided.

The project would be impossible, Huang and Shelley agreed, without diverse expertise from across the university coming together, and the collaboration of outside partners, such as government and businesses.

“Without a whole of society approach, you can’t understand how these supply chains work because everybody sees a piece of the puzzle and nobody sees the whole,” Shelley said.

“[Our project] shows how the most advanced data analytics can be advantageous to the problems that threaten society,” she said. “Some of the great advances in science are made when you put theory, practice and experimentation together—that’s what we’re doing here.”

Topics

Students

Schar School of Policy and Government

Volgenau School of Engineering

NSF Grant

Cybersecurity

Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

Campus News

Research

Schar School News May 2021

Mason Momentum