Intelligence in Authoritarian Nations

The essential information problem that the US faces in understanding Iran is its lack of presence on the ground. Although there is HUMINT penetration, it does not necessarily add up to a strategic or even necessarily operational picture of the country's internal dynamics--especially when it comes to Iran's leadership elites. As the linked NYT article notes: "With no diplomatic relations and with foreign journalists largely expelled from the country, an administration that was already struggling to make sense of Iran finds itself picking up tidbits about the crisis in the same ways private citizens do: viewing amateur videos on YouTube and combing posts on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook."

Getting information from authoritarian nations has always been extremely difficult. The CIA's long and hard struggle during the Cold War to penetrate Russia is a case in point. Hence the importance of the superstitious tea-reading known as Kremlinology. More recently, the hermit kingdom of North Korea has posed immense difficulties for strategic analysis. Political analysis of North Korea's policies is dependent on the insights of former cooks and other palace personnel who defected from the regime. Exiles and opposition members become some of the only exploitable sources of information. The problem is that they often have agendas of their own--and their interests don't always coincide with yours. In the famous case of the "The Trust," the early Soviet Union used a fictional grouping of exiles to lure other exiles in and Gulag them as well as spread disinformation in the West.

Without presence on the ground, news organizations also become dependent on opposition groups for the entirety of their footage and information during crisis situations. The excellent documentary Burma VJ chronicles how one Burmese opposition group's network of underground video journalists essentially provided the entirety of footage for global media's coverage of the 2007 "Saffron Revolution." While many opposition groups' causes (opposing their brutal regimes) are undeniably just, the unavoidable reliance on their information essentially turns the network news and mainstream media into a giant advocacy network and echo chamber that may not give viewers and readers a good picture of the situation. And it can also serve as a vector for regime elements to spread disinformation virally.

Comments

[Fabius Maximus]

"Getting information from authoritarian nations has always been extremely difficult. The CIA's long and hard struggle during the Cold War to penetrate Russia is a case in point."

This is of course true, but I wonder if this difficulty is overstated, where there is some degree of openness.

Consider the Soviet Union of 1960. A fairly closed society, as such things go. Yet Robert Heinlein and his wife vised there in 1960. He wrote "Inside Intourist".

This contained insights about the USSR that I believe became visible to western intel only one or two decades later. He highlighted its relative povery, deduced from lack of railroad and river traffic, and the fertility collapse then in the early stages.

Any thoughts on this?

His article was published in the collection "Expanded Universe". It can be downloaded from the Heinlein archives:
www.heinleinarchives.net

[A.E.]

Yes, but in the case of Soviet union's relative strength and the analysis of it we have to take into account the political considerations that distorted analysis--most importantly the "Team B" incident.

[Fabius Maximus]

Agreed (esp the Team "B" scam, a monument to human stupidity). But our failure to clearly see the USSR goes beyond that, IMO.

I've seen nothing suggesting that Heinlein's observations were also seen by US government analysts, and surpressed. For expample, the demographic trends in the Soviet Union were not seen by the CIA (based on public evidence) until the late 1970's (that's from memory, and might be incorrect).

[A.E.]

That's another issue--lack of attention to open-source information. There is an unfortunate tendency to think that the only information worth having is classified--although open-source is experiencing something of a boom right now.