Intelligence alert for health exigency

Vappala Balachandran

Ex-Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat

Global intelligence professionals were perturbed by the sensational revelation in Foreign Policy and The Guardian (UK) on March 29 by Micah Zenko, fellow, the Centre for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), describing the coronavirus as the “worst intelligence failure in US history”.

The title of his article might appear to indicate that he was blaming the intelligence agencies for not alerting the government. But it was not so. He was alleging that the Trump administration had forced a “catastrophic strategic surprise” on the American people by neglecting intelligence alerts. Quoting media reports the previous week, he said that the “detachment and nonchalance during the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak” would be the most costly mistakes that “any modern presidency had made”.

Zenko also quoted the NBC News of February 28, giving details of the US intelligence alerts in 2017 and 2018, more pointedly in January 2019. These had warned of a likely flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease due to the “growing proximity of humans and animals”. The alerts had also anticipated massive rates of death and disability, strain on international resources, and increased calls on the United States for support.

Assuming that these facts are true, a relevant question arises as to what the public should do if a calamity takes place through a neglect of intelligence warnings? In all such cases, it will be considered as “intelligence failure” since the agencies seldom indulge in public debates. A declassified study in 1974 on December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor attack by the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, Pennsylvania, had found that the data provided by the army intelligence after breaking Japanese codes was “excellent”. They had intercepted Japanese Ambassador Nomura’s cable on November 4, 1941. A 14-part message on December 6 from Japan’s spy in Honolulu had conveyed that the “opportunity for surprise attack against Hawaii was good”. Yet, no defensive measures were taken since “few diplomatic or military analysts anticipated such a bold manoeuvre”.

We had a similar experience in India. The sudden spurt in terrorist attacks after the Rubaiya Sayeed kidnapping in December 1989 had led to a motivated parliamentary question in 1990: why our intelligence agencies had failed to alert the government on the magnitude of ISI interference. On behalf of our foreign intelligence, I collected a sample of five alerts sent much earlier to the ministries on the PoK training camps and weapon dumps in the Valley on which the government had done nothing. Zenko quotes Henry Kissinger as to how senior politicians get over such embarrassing queries: “Well, you warned me, but you didn’t convince me.”

Towards the close of the 20th century, security and intelligence officials prodded by think tanks and academics, started thinking of new concepts of national security. Till then, they were preoccupied with “traditional concepts’ like border infiltration, military and nuclear issues, espionage, VVIP security besides financial and economic factors which were unilaterally faced by the individual states.

The lead for this new thinking in Asia was largely initiated by the Singapore-based Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in 1999-2001. I was fortunate to participate in these deliberations among the experts ranging from the Philippines to Morocco during 2006-09. The notion, “Non-traditional security issues (NTS)” emerged focusing on security threats from non-military sources like climate change, resource scarcity, infectious diseases, natural disasters, irregular migration, human traffic, drug trafficking and transnational crime in small arms.

We found that national or unilateral remedies were not applicable in these cases as they were trans-national issues. Control of epidemics like SARS, the precursor of Covid-19, was no longer the worry of one country. It affected the entire region. Similarly, the Indonesian forest fire from 1997-98 which caused a “haze”, affected all the countries in the region and disrupted air traffic.

The earliest intelligence service to study security issues in NTS was the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) which started it in 2004. Fortunately, it published their unclassified analysis. It found that climate change and environmental degradation would contribute significantly to conflicts and instability. Another adverse effect was illegal migration. In 2005, at least 80,000 Hondurans migrated to the US after Hurricane Mitch. In the case of poorer nations like Honduras, the capacity to limp back to normal was severely limited.

The report further said that Han Chinese migration into Western China and Tibet was because of the decreased precipitation in North Central and North-Eastern China. The unrest between Muslim Uighurs in North-West China and Han migrants was traced to this migration.

The study found a similar pattern in Pakistan which was experiencing a high rate of population increase, degradation of agricultural land and increasing rural to urban migration, all of which contributed to political instability.

US intelligence alerts mentioned by Micah Zenko must have been issued when they found possibilities of mass infection. However, intelligence agencies are not virologists or immunologists. They can only issue “pointers”. From then on, professionals in that area will have to take over. It would appear from Zenko’s article that this did not happen.

Coming specifically to Covid-19, many countries are seen utilising their police, security and intelligence agencies to help their health authorities in preventing further infection. None can object to that as it is a national crisis when every department has to participate in implementing government orders. Some countries like Israel are even exploiting their covert capability to purchase scarce items like ventilators. The Times of Israel (April 1), based on Channel 12’s Uvda Investigative News, quoted an unnamed Mossad officer claiming that they even diverted ventilators meant for the others. They could also procure 25,000 N95 respiratory masks, 20,000 virus test kits, 10 million surgical masks, and 700 overalls for frontline health workers.

Ynet News (April 4) said they are also using military radars to remotely monitor patients. Another report on Ynet News on the same day has raised a storm by human rights activists when told that they are using Shin Bet, their internal intelligence, to electronically track the persons who come in contact with confirmed patients.