Despite untold billions of dollars and the hiring of thousands of intelligence analysts and contractors the NSA and vaunted Western intelligence services failed to detect a major terrorist attack on one of our key allies in Africa prior to its execution. Having served our nation as a senior intelligence officer for over 23 years I am appalled but not surprised by this failure. Nor am I surprised that current unconfirmed reporting indicates that American's of Somali origin may have had a hand in this incident. The reason that I am unsurprised by this failure is that our intelligence services have lost the ability to think outside the box and become too dependent on technology.
This loss of ability is clearly illustrated by failure of the NSA, despite its' warrantless wiretaps, vacuuming up of all emails, text messages and social media posts to detect this operation prior to its execution. If despite all of this capability NSA can't detect something of this magnitude, it raises the question on what we have spent our money on, if we have gotten our money's worth and whether we have failed to train our intelligence analysts to think outside the box.
I note that I have kept apprised of threat developments in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean region of Africa to include Somalia. As part of advanced academic studies in the area of predictive analytics at the Masters degree level I looked at this region during our announced surge of troops into Afghanistan and noted that Al Qaeda was likely to respond to this push by attempting to attack our vulnerable flank in the Red Sea Region to Include Egypt, Somalia as well as in North Africa.
What follows is my assessment of the threat to our flank that existed during the period immediately following our announced surge of forces into Afghanistan.
02/21/09
Al Qaeda: A Second Front in the Red Sea?
Edward A. Chesky JR, Major, USA, MI, (RET)
Recent activity in the Red Sea region indicates the possibility that Al Qaeda, in an effort to counter the United States military build-up in Afghanistan, is attempting to open a second front in the Red Sea region. Analysis of the movement of Al Qaeda operatives into Yemen, statements issued by Al Qaeda leaders, along with terrorist operations in Somalia and Egypt indicate we may be seeing the first stages of a terrorist offensive in the Red Sea, Horn of Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa regions.
Further analysis of the current political-economic-demographic situation in Egypt, coupled to Al Qaeda’s existing technical capabilities, indicates that Al Qaeda could inflict serious harm and possibly destabilize Egypt through a coordinated, strategically targeted, and low cost terrorist attacks. Should Al Qaeda succeed in destabilizing Egypt this would seriously undermine the United States position in the region. The benefit to Al Qaeda; and other states hostile to the United States and the West; in accomplishing this would be to significantly raise the price of oil by forcing the re-routing of oil shipments away from the Suez Canal. Such a rise in oil prices would have an immediate positive effect on the economies of such nations as Iran and others hostile to the United States while negatively affecting United States and Western efforts to deal with the current economic crisis.
This effort, also if tied to coordinated attacks in Somalia; along with other operations in Sub-Saharan Africa also has the ability to stretch United States and Western forces to a degree that puts our efforts in Southwest Asia at risk.
Given these conditions, and Al Qaeda’s current technological, logistics, intelligence and information dissemination capabilities, such a threat must be taken seriously. As the United States and Western forces press forward with efforts contain and neutralize Al Qaeda in Southwest Asia it is clear that we face a substantial threat to our flank in the Red Sea region.
Countering this threat will take a coordinated effort by the United States, the Western nations, and supportive governments in the Middle East. Al Qaeda has clearly shown that it is capable of reacting to circumstances with extreme agility and has likely already seen and begun to exploit this vulnerable flank in an effort to undermine our push against it.
Despite statements to the contrary, Al Qaeda remains a formidable foe. In this fight it is imperative that we commit the best and brightest of our intelligence, military and security services in order to hold the line as we move forward in Southwest Asia. I note that much of this assessment was performed as a result of an advanced strategic military simulation I have run. The results of this simulation have been reviewed and accepted by a number of senior academics and military professionals. Given this, I feel it is imperative that the United States and its allies review the current threat posture in the Red Sea region and initiate an appropriate response to counter this emerging threat.
I note that within 72 hours of this assessment Al Qaeda affiliates launched a series of terrorist attacks in the region I addressed in accordance with my projections. A graphic outlining the effect of these attacks and the timeline of events associated with them is as follows.
As illustrated by this slide the ability to think outside the box, most of the time, beats the best technology we can bring to bear on a problem. I note that only using simple tools, off the shelf software and standard commercial computer equipment I was able to predict a major terrorist offensive that the United States intelligence community missed despite having the full resources of the NSA, CIA and the NRO available to it. As can be seen from this graphic it was not until days afterwards that the United States intelligence community was able to put the pieces together and issue a threat message via the embassy warden system.
A summary of the damage inflicted by this threat offensive is as outlined in the following graphic.
As illustrated by my work with the Red Sea problem set the ability to think outside the box is an essential component of the analytical process, a component that separates a intelligence analyst hack and want to be from a master of the craft.
The recent tragic events in Kenya clearly show that our intelligence and security services have lost the ball with regards to predictive analytics and need, rather than throwing billions at the problem and violating our civil rights, to go back to the basics and learn how to think again rather than surfing the web and its classified variants for intelligence.
If one former senior intelligence officer can outperform the entire assembled capability of the Intelligence services of the United States, we truly have a problem.
