Abstract
Since the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947, the modern American intelligence community — comprised of 13 major federal agencies — has focused on a set of traditional requirements for collection and analysis. The pre-eminent targets have included foreign military capabilities and intentions, the politics and economics of other countries and worldwide mapping (mainly for military contingencies). Throughout the Cold War (1945–91), these topics as they related to the Soviet Union — the only unfriendly nation capable at the time of destroying the United States in a hail of nuclear missiles — understandably attracted a majority of America’s intelligence resources.
The traditional idea of intelligence is the spy who provides the enemy’s war plans. Actually, intelligence is concerned not only with war plans, but with all the external concerns of our government.
Senior intelligence analyst1
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Notes
Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), declassified mimeograph statement presented to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee), dated 21 February 1974, and provided to the Committee in September 1975, cited in Loch K. Johnson, America’s Secret Power: the CIA in a Democratic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 80.
See Loch K. Johnson and Kevin J. Scheid, ‘Spending for Spies: Intelligence Budgeting in the Aftermath of the Cold War’, Public Budgeting & Finance 17, no. 4 (Winter 1997), pp. 7–27;
and Loch K. Johnson, ‘Reinventing the CIA: Strategic Intelligence and the End of the Cold War’, in Randall B. Ripley and James M. Lindsay, eds, US Foreign Policy After the Cold War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), pp. 132–59.
Among the most prominent were: John Hollister Hedley, Checklist for the Future of Intelligence (Georgetown University: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 1995);
Report of an Independent Task Force, Making Intelligence Smarter: the Future of US Intelligence (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996);
Staff Study, IC21: Intelligence Community in the 21st Century, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, US House of Representatives, 104th Cong. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1996); In From the Cold: the Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Future of US Intelligence (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1996); and Modernizing Intelligence (Fairfax, VA: National Institute for Public Policy, 1997).
See, for example, the scepticism expressed by some intelligence officials about using America’s secret agencies to monitor pollutants and other ecological dangers from outside the United States, cited in Loch K. Johnson, ‘Smart Intelligence’, Foreign Policy 89 (Winter 1992–93), p. 59.
See, for example, Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994);
Thomas Homer-Dixon, ‘On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Acute Causes of Conflict’, International Security 16 (Fall 1991), pp. 76–116;
Thomas Homer-Dixon, ‘Environmental Scarcity, Mass Violence, and the Limits to Ingenuity’, Current History 95 (November 1996), pp. 359–65;
Thomas Homer-Dixon and Valerie Percival, Environmental Security and Violent Conflict (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1996);
Dennis Pirages, ‘Microsecurity: Disease Organisms and Human Well-Being’, Washington Quarterly 18 (Fall 1995), pp. 5–12;
C.F. Ronnfeldt, ‘Three Generations of Environment and Security Research’, Journal of Peace Research 34 (November 1997), pp. 473–82;
Jessica T. Mathews, ‘Power Shift’, Foreign Affairs 76 (January–February 1997), pp. 50–66;
Myron Weiner, ed., International Migration and Security (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).
On the threat of global disease, see two works by Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague (cited earlier) and Microbes Versus Mankind: the Coming Plague (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1996);
Robin Marantz Henig, A Dancing Matrix: Voyages along the Viral Frontier (New York: Knopf, 1993); and Schumeyer, ‘Medical Intelligence’, pp. 11–15. A useful web site on this subject is: Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED), Federation of American Scientists, at http://www.fas.org/pub/genfas/promed.
See, for example, Susan E. Robertson, Barbara P. Hull, Oyewale Tornori, Okwo Bele, James W. LeDuc, and Karin Esteves, ‘Yellow Fever: a Decade of Reemergence’, Journal of the American Medical Association 276 (9 October 1996), pp. 1157–62.
See, also, Richard Betts, ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’, Foreign Affairs 77 (January/February 1998), pp. 26–41, who calls for ‘standby programs for mass vaccinations and emergency treatment with antibiotics’ to increase protection or recovery from biological terrorist attacks (37);
also, Jonathan B. Tucker, ‘Chemical/Biological Terrorism: Coping with a New Threat’, Politics and the Life Sciences 15 (September 1996), pp. 167–85 and accompanying commentaries by a host of experts. On 22 May 1998, President Clinton announced a series of measures to improve US defences against bioterrorism, including the stockpiling of antibiotics and vaccines (William J. Broad, ‘How Japan Germ Terror Alerted World’, New York Times, 26 May 1998, p. A1).
On the US intelligence community’s psychological profiling of foreign leaders (a micro-health intelligence problem, in contrast to the macro-health issues that are the primary focus of this article), see Tom Omestad, ‘Psychology and the CIA: Leaders on the Couch’, Foreign Policy 95 (Summer 1994), pp. 105–22. The health of an individual foreign leader is a far narrower topic than the broader public health issues at the focus of this study; nevertheless, these individual health profiles are important to US officials as a form of political-risk analysis and the same intelligence agencies are expected to produce both micro- and macro-health reports.
See the account by Richard Preston, The Hot Zone (New York: Random House, 1994).
See Reuters, ‘Zaire Fighting Endangers Refugees, U.N. Says’, New York Times, 25 October 1996, p. A7; see also, George A. Gellert, ‘International Migration and Control of Communicable Diseases’, Social Science and Medicine 37 (15 December 1993), pp. 1489–99.
Tucker, ‘Chemical/Biological Terrorism’, p. 177. For a plea to improve coordination of the broader US public health infrastructure in the fight against global infectious diseases, see Stephen S. Morse, ‘Controlling Infectious Diseases’, Technology Review 98 (October 1995), pp. 54–61.
See Loch K. Johnson, ‘Analysis for a New Age’, Intelligence and National Security 11 (October 1996), pp. 657–71. The third obligation of intelligence, and the most important, is truthfulness.
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Johnson, L.K., Snyder, D.C. (2001). Beyond the Traditional Intelligence Agenda: Examining the Merits of a Global Public Health Portfolio. In: Price-Smith, A.T. (eds) Plagues and Politics. Global Issues Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524248_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524248_11
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