Q&A: Charles E. Allen
Intelligence Integrator
Improving Analysis of Threat Information
Charles E. Allen
Chief Intelligence Officer
Department of Homeland Security
Charles Allen is the chief intelligence officer for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, reporting directly to Secretary Michael Chertoff. In this role, Allen is responsible for coordinating with the intelligence community and providing guidance on homeland-security-specific issues.
Prior to joining the department in 2005, Allen had served as assistant director of central intelligence for collection since June 1998. In this capacity, he was responsible for intelligence community collection and requirements management and reported to the deputy director of central intelligence for community management. Allen also chaired the National Intelligence Collection Board, which ensured that collection was integrated and coordinated across the intelligence community.
A native of North Carolina, Allen began his CIA service in 1958, holding a variety of positions of increasing responsibility both in analytic and managerial capacities. From 1974 to 1977, he served overseas in an intelligence-liaison capacity, and from 1977 to 1980 held management positions in the Directorate of Intelligence. From 1980 to November 1982, he served as a program manager of a major classified project.
In December 1982, Allen was detailed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he held a senior position in strategic mobilization planning. In 1985, he returned to the CIA in the capacity of a national intelligence officer (NIO) for counterterrorism. In February 1986, Allen was also appointed chief of intelligence in the CIA’s newly established Counterterrorist Center. As NIO for counterterrorism, he represented the director of central intelligence (DCI) in a number of interagency committees, including chairing the Interagency Intelligence Committee on Terrorism and serving as a member of the Interdepartmental Group on Terrorism and the National Security Council’s Terrorist Incident Working Group.
Following this assignment, Allen served as the NIO for warning from 1988 to 1994. In this capacity, he was the principal adviser to the DCI on national-level warning intelligence and chaired the Intelligence Community’s Warning Committee.
Allen earned a bachelor’s degree and completed graduate studies at the University of North Carolina. He is a Distinguished Graduate of the Air Force Air War College.
Allen was interviewed by Kerrigan Media International Editor Harrison Donnelly.
Q: How are you approaching your position as the first director of intelligence for the Department of Homeland Security?
A: I’m approaching it from the perspective that this is a critical position for homeland security, because intelligence—as Secretary Chertoff has said—is part of everything the department does. My point of view is that we need to more clearly define our goals and objectives, and our roles and responsibilities—we sometimes refer to it as “lanes in the road”—to ensure that we are most effective in working for Secretary Chertoff, as well as in response to Ambassador John Negroponte. I report up two chains—First and foremost, to Secretary Chertoff, to support him and his intelligence needs. But I’m also responsive to Ambassador Negroponte, because he establishes the needs and priorities for intelligence. He has several responsibilities that affect me. He sets intelligence policies, and makes decisions about how resources are allocated across the 16 intelligence elements within the community. He also provides guidance and oversight. I spend a lot of time working for both of them, and their needs are mutually supportive, particularly in working to assess and evaluate terrorist threats to the homeland.
Q: What are your duties as chief intelligence officer?
A: First and foremost, my responsibility is to improve the quality of overall analysis that is generated by my office on a daily basis, working in conjunction with other elements of the intelligence community, and with the intelligence elements within the operating components of the DHS. We’ve already significantly improved the way in which intelligence is presented on a daily basis to the Secretary and other DHS leaders, and also providing that information out to other elements of the intelligence community. To do that right, we are looking at hiring the best and brightest from American universities. We have started a recruiting campaign, and have a recruiting strategy. We also have a training strategy, to ensure that analysts receive the finest training. I didn’t find an end-to-end training strategy when I arrived, and we have produced one.
My second responsibility is to respond to Secretary Chertoff’s direction that we treat intelligence within DHS as an integrated enterprise. I must not only ensure that my own office of intelligence and analysis operates effectively, but also, in my role as chief intelligence officer, reach out and ensure that we have an integrated approach with the intelligence elements of the operating components, and build an integrated intelligence enterprise. I’ve just come from chairing a two-hour meeting of the Homeland Security Intelligence Council, where I meet every other week with the heads of the intelligence elements of the operating components. It’s a decision-making body, and I’m very impressed with the direction in which we are heading.
The third responsibility, and one that may be even more crucial, is to reach out to state and local governments and the private sector, to ensure that the state and local governments have the necessary information from us that informs and advises them about threats and how to mitigate and deal with those threats. At the same time, we also must listen to state and local governments and the private sector, because at those levels, and the first responder level, they have the data that is necessary to keep the country safe, because it is there that they will notice anomalies, trends and patterns that could be used to stage an attack. So it’s a two-way street. We are beginning to build a plan by which to interact with state and local government fusion centers. I’ve already deployed officers to New York and Los Angeles to work in fusion centers in those cities.
Fourthly, my role is to work in the traditional intelligence community to leverage that community and make sure that the DHS employs all the capabilities of that community to serve the needs of whatever element within the department needs them— whether it’s preparedness, policies or state and local government. I work very closely with the heads of the intelligence agencies. Many of them are close friends, so this is not a hard thing to do.
Finally, I believe that we have to have an end-to-end strategy to deal with Congress. My budget is authorized by the intelligence oversight committees, and appropriated by the homeland security subcommittees of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, so we have to work very closely with them. In addition, we have homeland security committees, in the Senate chaired by Sen. Collins, with Sen. Lieberman as ranking member. In the House, it’s Rep. King, with Rep. Thompson of Mississippi as ranking member. We have to be transparent, and work with them to show what we are doing right, and where we feel that we ought to do better. So it’s a very all-encompassing effort when I think about my mission. But I want to emphasize that my mission, first and foremost, is to keep the country safe—to provide the warnings and do our level best to keep the country from being hit by another devastating attack. I can’t promise that we will prevent all attacks, but our efforts must be strongly focused on preventing attacks that would have enormous political, economic or psychological effects on the United States.
Q: What do you see as the role of satellite imagery in the DHS context?
A: Because of satellite imagery and all the elements of national technical means that provide a geospatial product, we were able to keep the Cold War cold. We knew where the strategic forces of the Soviet Union were, and what their state of alert was. We knew where the general purposes forces were on a daily basis, in all weathers and conditions. The Cold War is over, but the urgency to have advanced remote sensing capabilities is an important part of U.S. national security.
From a homeland security perspective, it’s going to be important, for a number of reasons. For homeland security, we have areas where we can assist in planning for major events that occur in this country, and we also have to have geospatial products that help us with border issues. If we had an emergency or crisis, we would have capabilities to assist our national planners and first responders. But on a day-to-day basis, the civil applications are very important, and the DHS has to take a major role in the 21st century in taking over from what was the Civil Applications Committee, and its role in responding to non-national-security civil agency needs for remote sensing. It might be the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is part of DHS, needing imagery or other geospatial products to help it keep track of damage caused by hurricanes, or geospatial products needed by the Interior Department in case of fires across the country, or other kinds of products needed for a variety of civil applications of remote sensing. DHS has a very significant role here, and Secretary Chertoff understands and welcomes those responsibilities. He has a remarkable understanding of what can be done to help our society generally, outside of the national security arena, where there are so many opportunities for remote sensing.
Q: What resources do you need to accomplish your mission?
A: Shortly after taking office, I was asked to respond to Congress about my goals and objectives as chief intelligence officer. In my statement, I outlined where I wanted to go in bringing focus, energy and direction to intelligence support of the secretary and the department. It spelled out very clearly some of my roles and missions. I explained that I would need the support of Congress to appropriate the president’s budget. I was asked if I would need additional resources, and I said that I would work with what I had available, and would advise Secretary Chertoff if I didn’t have sufficient authorities and resources. We are still putting together a lot of new initiatives that have not been sized in terms of resources. For example, we’re developing an information architecture that will not only bring the technology that we need here to handle our information and make the data searchable, but also build an architecture that will link us to the intelligence arms of the operating components. We also have to reach out and have secure connectivity to the state and local governments and their fusion centers. There will be resource requirements in the early process of building the FY 08-13 budget, when I believe there will be a need for some additional resources.
Q: How would you define homeland security intelligence, and how is it different from other types of intelligence?
A: Homeland security intelligence as a discipline is very similar in many ways to what I have worked on for decades. You have many of the same intelligence disciplines, such as human and open source intelligence, signals intelligence and imagery. Some of these are extremely advanced technologies. At the same time, in Homeland Security, you have information that is collected by the operating components—that is, operational and law enforcement oriented. A lot of that has trends, patterns and techniques that may be used by terrorists wanting to do harm to our country. There is also law enforcement data on a major scale from the FBI, with which I must work in a very collaborative and supportive way.
What we have here in DHS is something a little different. You have the foreign intelligence, with which I am totally familiar, and then you also have investigative intelligence that you find here. So it’s a full spectrum, from foreign to domestic, and collecting information from all means, while also making use of investigative intelligence. A great deal of investigative intelligence can also be derived from the law enforcement and case files for intelligence purposes, just as the CIA has learned over the years to do a far better job of pulling out intelligence from its operational files and cables. It was criticized for not doing that effectively and now is doing it. We can do the same thing here. As the spectrum moves towards law enforcement, there’s a lot of information to derive.
We also bring a lot to bear that’s unique related to our borders, not only our land and air borders, where we collect a lot of information from Customs and Border Protection [CBP], Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] and the Transportation Security Administration [TSA]. We have a big intelligence arm that is big, powerful and extremely well led by Jim Sloan—the Coast Guard. We have the maritime borders, which are also unique. When you’re at CIA, you don’t necessarily worry about our 7,000 miles of borders, but we do here at DHS, every hour of every day. That’s another enormous differentiation from the traditional intelligence community.
Q: What is the information architecture that you’re working on, and how will it enable better information sharing among the intelligence agencies?
A: First, it will put us on the map. We’ll be able to better handle our files and search our data. But I also want to emphasize that it will also give us better and faster capabilities to purge our data of non-relevant data. One of the things we have to be very conscious of the privacy laws and civil liberties of American citizens. So having an IT capability here is going to make a huge difference in how we operate. The way it connects out to the operating components is going to be crucial. They have some advanced information handling tools that they’re making available to us, from ICE, CBP or TSA.
The problem is that until now we haven’t had the interoperability and interconnectivity that is required to enable us to move the data comfortably among the DHS elements. How we’re going to move in that direction—to be able to not only send out information at an unclassified sensitive level to state and local governments, but also to send classified information down to all states, fusion centers and homeland security advisers. If the information requires a classified communication in order to protect intelligence sources and methods, we can do that. We can do that today, but we don’t do it very well. We have a homeland security information network at a secret level, of which I am the program manager, but it is a system that we have to go far beyond. Where we want to go is to the Homeland Security Data Network, which is going to be the equivalent of the DoD’s SIPRnet. It’s a robust, secret-level system that the DoD uses effectively, and we have to do the same for Homeland Security.
Q: What some of the other programs are you working on?
A: Now that we’ve set goals, objectives and timelines, what we’re working on is implementation. I have a strategy plan that sets out my objectives for one year, three years and five years. I have a recruitment strategy and a training strategy. I’m building an intelligence campaign plan for the borders, which is a major effort. I also have a management directive that defines my roles and responsibilities as chief intelligence officer, and assistant secretary. I think that we’ve done the things at an accelerated pace that needed to be done and had not been done. But now the rubber is meeting the road, because we’re going to test our mettle over the next year as we begin to implement effectively a lot of these ideas.
In my talks with Rep. King and [House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman] Rogers, and senators Collins and Lieberman, they’ve all said they have high hopes of getting homeland security intelligence working within its correct lanes, moving forward in a strong way. These pieces that we’ve developed have to move together for me to say that I’ve been successful here. As Chairman Rogers said, our job is to evaluate you, and rest assured that we will give you those evaluations. So I feel that the bar has been set very high, not only by Secretary Chertoff and Ambassador Negroponte, but also by Congress. I hope that we as a team here will ensure that we work as an integrated enterprise across DHS, which is a strong challenge, but we have to make it all flow together.
Q: You mentioned border intelligence. What does that involve?
A: I can’t get into details, but the Secretary has a secure border initiative underway, which he has talked about at length. I’ve been with him to at least one port of entry, where he gave a talk on this. We also have other issues relating to the border, including narcotics, alien smuggling networks, and super-gangs that are growing in strength. The drug cartels appear to be engaged in internecine war in Nuevo Laredo, but also continue to flow drugs across the border. The border issue is one of the preeminent ones of our day, if you watch CNN, so it is something that is on everyone’s mind. The secretary has a strong, integrated strategy that he is building, and I have great confidence that with his leadership, we can do great things to secure our borders. ♦
