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Then there is human intelligence, or "humint," which has been around since the dawn of spycraft and is
still vital. That's the tipster you cultivate and pay, or perhaps the unproven one who simply walks into a
U.S. embassy and offers information.
"Sigint," or signals intelligence, monitors or otherwise exploits radio, telephone or satellite phone
transmissions. "Imint" is imagery intelligence that includes photographs showing the outlines of a nuclear
power plant, obscured in desert sands, or a terrorist training base tucked in a mountainside.
Cybertracking is a newer tool, pursuing terrorists who use computers either to attack a computer network
or, more often, to organize how their own human network would launch a physical attack.
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Q: What happens to this mountain of raw material?
A: Each of those streams of data is captured by a multibillion-dollar worldwide network of U.S. satellites,
armed drones, static blimps and high-flying spy aircraft, manned or unmanned, that suck up so much
sound it takes massive computers to crunch all the data and help analysts overwhelmed by the technical
information to find meaningful clues.
Sometimes these streams are collected by U.S. operatives — Americans or those in U.S. employ — who
go behind enemy lines or into enemy homes, leaving behind the sensors that will provide the data.
True to its name, the Central Intelligence Agency is an "all-source" organization using all means.
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Q: How do all these eyes and ears work together?
A: Sometimes they don't. After a Nigerian allegedly tried to bring down a Detroit-bound airliner on
Christmas Day almost two years ago, it emerged that his father had warned U.S. diplomats about his
son's possible terrorist sympathies, but that tip was lost in the blizzard of counterintelligence.
But in the bin Laden raid, a human source led to the compound in the Pakistani army town of Abbottabad.
Signals intelligence monitored for phone calls emanating from there, and found none, because bin Laden
forbade them, hoping to evade detection by just such technical means. Masint was derived from the
imagery taken by drones and satellites.
All of this helped to convince CIA analysts they had found their man and persuade President Barack
Obama to approve a dangerous and diplomatically risky raid into Pakistani sovereign territory.
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Q: How is all of this intel sorted through so that the real threats are detected and averted?
A: The ever-present risk is that they won't be. One of the failings of pre-9/11 counterintelligence was that
information was jealously guarded by the individual intelligence agencies. Word of a potential plot to fly
planes into U.S. landmarks was received by one agency. Another agency had word terrorists might be
attending flight school. Each organization kept to itself the dots of information that, when connected, could
have revealed the larger pattern of a massive terrorist plot.
Before raw data and human tips can be called "intelligence," they must be analyzed, and if possible,
corroborated. The CIA alone has 2,500 people in its Directorate of Intelligence devoted to that task. There
are thousands more across the 16 intelligence agencies, sifting raw data, and cross-comparing within
their own agencies, and with others, to spot a pattern.
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