Improving the Law-Enforcement-Intelligence Community Relationship

UNMASKING NETWORKS:
DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION
TRADECRAFT
FOR THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY
Gloria Freund
Fellow, Center for Strategic Intelligence Research
The IC never signed on enthusiastically to the counter-drug mission.
Counter-drug intelligence analysis has evolved separately from more
traditional IC problem sets. Counter-drug analysts in DIA, for example, have
long been housed across town from other analysts, who were working order
of battle, force capability, infrastructure, and other conventional foreign
intelligence problems. Over the years, these CD analysts had little if any
interaction or cross-feed with their counterparts—either about potentially
overlapping subject matter or about analytical tools and techniques.
The Department of Justice’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is
even further removed. A small group at DEA has recently been re-admitted to
the IC. It is even more distinct in its mission, focus, and institutional culture.
Compared to conventional IC analysis, DEA counter-drug analysis, especially
at the field office level, is akin to unique animal species that have evolved in
isolation on the Galapagos Islands: It uses distinct analytical tradecraft that
few IC analysts working traditional problem sets would recognize.
Yet some asymmetric problems with which the IC now struggles have
more in common with asymmetric drug networks than with foreign states
or armies. For cracking drug networks, DEA counter-drug analysts have
been plank owners of unique models and techniques that confer “survival
value” and that they have continued to refine. Insights from their models and
tradecraft can assist in solving a broader set of intelligence problems.
DEA’s structure and tradecraft illuminate three particular areas of interest
to the IC:
● the tailoring of counter-drug intelligence to explicit and
clearly-understood user purposes;
● the HUMINT focus of its strategies and proactive sourcedevelopment
for generating new information; and
● the recognition of illegal service providers as a key for
unlocking the networks of those using them—whether for the
narcotics trade, other criminal activity, or terrorism.
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