Dan Snow's History Hit - Coronavirus: Intelligence Failure

Episode Date: May 26, 2020

The greatest threats we face are climate breakdown and pandemic disease. This was the assessment of security advisers before the Covid outbreak and the last few months have seen the stunning reality of this as the world lurches into a giant economic and political crisis. I am joined by Calder Walton, Director of Research of Harvard Kennedy School's Intelligence Project, to talk about whether there was a huge intelligence failure around the outbreak of the pandemic, but also whether our intelligence communities are properly organised to realistically evaluate the real nature of the threats to our societies. He also has a bold idea to help avoid a future recurrence ...Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's fair to say that some governments were taken by surprise when this global pandemic swept across the world. And Calder Walton, who is Fellow of History and Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School and an old friend of the pod, thinks it's the greatest intelligence failure in US history, which is up against some fairly stiff competition. So here's Calder on the podcast. You've heard him before. We talked about Russian interference in US presidential elections during the Cold War, with some pretty scary modern associations. And we were drinking martinis in a exclusive central London hotel where the spies used to go out during the Second World War. We drank lots

of martinis and I actually staggered out leaving Calder to go on into the wee small hours with team history hit he's tougher than I am anyway so we got Calder back on the podcast now talk about this is just such a fascinating subject he really charts how some governments taken by surprise and also what we can do about it in the future so I think this is a fascinating podcast and you can follow Calder's work online as well if you want to go and hear that previous episode of history hit with Calder then you're gonna have to go to historyhit.tv, which is where all of our back episodes are now. Subscriber access only. You can listen to more of our ads. You can also watch hundreds of hours of history documentaries, lots of wonderful documentaries going up at the moment. And then you also get

access to our weekly Zoom live podcast record this week. It is with Kate Lister. We're talking about the history of people having sex with each other in quarantine it's going to be an absolute humdinger make sure you get signed up there's an email that will be landing in your inbox probably Wednesday and then you just click on there and you'll get invited to zoom that's totally free for subscribers so go and do that you can subscribe at history hit tv if you head over there and use the code pod1 pod1 you know how it works you get a month for free check the whole thing out for free. Don't like it? Don't subscribe. And then you get the first month for just one pound, euro or dollar. So head over and do that now. Well, actually, listen to Calder Walton first. Enjoy. Calder, very good to have you back on the podcast.

Well, thanks for having me. It's great to be here under these rather surreal circumstances that we all find ourselves in. Exactly. Although the last time I saw you was a bit surreal because we were smashing martinis in a bar in the West End of London and I abandoned you with team history here in the pub. I didn't have the stomach for it or the head for it, whereas you were charging on, buddy. I don't think that was surreal at all. I think that's a perfectly appropriate way to discuss a deep dive into historical lessons learned. Well, totally. I totally agree. Now, you got in touch because you've done a lot of thinking

about intelligence failure. You put it in a kind of historical context here about this pandemic. You're calling it arguably the worst intelligence failure in US history. Well, that's a big issue for debate. And I've seen that being discussed quite a bit online. I'm not sure if I agree that it is the worst intelligence failure in modern history. But the starting point is, it seems to me that what we're living through right now is going to take its place in all of the great US national security disasters, Pearl Harbor, 9-11, and so on, and now the coronavirus. And there's going to have to be a commission, it seems to me, in the same way that there was a 9-11 commission to look into exactly who knew what, when in the White House.

Is it accurate, as the reporting in the public domain says, that the US intelligence agencies were warning about the coronavirus in November, December, and then with increasing alarm in the early new year, which President Trump ignored. Is that accurate? We're going to need to have a commission to investigate all of this. The starting point for, it seems to me, thinking about whether this was an intelligence failure is actually the first thing, the obvious thing, is what is the purpose of intelligence? Intelligence is to provide strategic or tactical warnings about threats to national security. And usually those people that research this talk about different functions of intelligence from collection, so collecting secrets, stealing secrets, if you like, analysis, analyzing that, collating it with other information, and then dissemination, passing it over to policymakers. But there's an absolute Nicene

Creed, if you like, within intelligence and statecraft, that intelligence services, at least in liberal democracies, do not get involved in policymaking. So looking at the evidence that we have so far, it seems that US intelligence community did provide warnings to the Trump White House, to the Trump White House, which the Trump White House ignored. Can we really call that intelligence failure? I don't think you can sort of by definition, because it seems that they did their job. They told truth to power.

But again, this will all need to be scrutinized in the commission. What was the nature of those warnings? Was there an interactive process between the US intelligence briefers and the White House where they were asking questions? Or was it a kind of dropbox scenario where they just simply put the warnings into a folder and didn't follow up? These are all massively serious questions as the coronavirus unfolds. But I think that the right time for a commission will only come at a safe distance once we have reached out of this acute phase.

It's fascinating, though, isn't it, that the coronavirus both came out of left field and yet didn't. Because if every time I went to an event, we were talking about strategic and global threat, antibiotic resistance and pandemic disease are always like number one ahead of great power conflict. And yet it seemed like we're so busy saying, oh, there'll be another great influenza one day like 1918. It was hiding in plain sight. And perhaps we all got bored of repeating this mantra. I think you're absolutely right. I mean, one of the reports about the US intelligence community's assessments

given to the White House stated that the light is blinking red. You know, this is an alarm bell ring, which is very close to the White House stated that the light is blinking red. You know, this is an alarm bell ring, which is very close to the same terminology used in the 9-11 Commission about the terrorist threat before 9-11. So it was blinking red. But had it been blinking red for so long that actually, as you said, there was a level of, is this something more unusual than normal? Or is this actually a paradigm shift in what we're seeing about the growth of this virus? I think you're absolutely right. I mean, if you look back at the recent history of US intelligence assessments, worldwide threat assessments, front and clear are warnings

about the threat from a pandemic. The 2019 US intelligence worldwide threat assessment said, I've got it right here in front of me, quote, we assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to a massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support, end of quote. And then it goes on in further detail. This was just in 2019. And you can go back further through declassified records and look at the similar kind of warnings about the threat of pandemics. So these are the broad strategic threats that the alarm bell's been ringing,

not just from the intelligence community. I think it was a TED Talk that Bill Gates gave a few years ago, where he set out sort of scenarios very similar to what we're seeing right now. What I, as an intelligence historian, will be extremely important to understand is whether there were more specific warnings given to the Trump White House as the outbreak reached outside of China. You're always knocking around with spies and politicians and policymakers going into exciting secret conferences and stuff. Is there a cultural problem? If you become a national security advisor and someone starts talking about pandemic disease or climate breakdown, you're like, hold on, I've been reading my Thucydides,

I want to go Athens, I want to get all Athens and Sparta on this. And of course, you don't read the Thucydides about the plague, but you want to get all kind of great power rivalry. And it just, those are the levers that you feel you're there to pull and push and manipulate. And also that plays potentially well with domestic political audiences in some ways. So do you think there's like a problem with how we think about threat?

I think you're absolutely right that what we are witnessing now is the dangerous view of not regarding globalized threats from either pandemics or from the climate crisis seriously. They have to take a central part in national security and intelligence going forward because the threats that they pose actually make great power competition and the Thucydides trap and so on pale into insignificance. Look at what is happening to the world's economy and international security right now, every day in front of us. It makes everything else, it seems to me, pale into insignificance. The climate crisis, which has not disappeared, again, the most profound threat to national and international security, to civilization in world history. There is a

massive role, it seems to me, for the intelligence community or communities in different countries to provide assessments to policymakers, objective assessments based on the resources, the collection capabilities they have. I'm thinking in particular from imagery intelligence, satellites, geospatial intelligence, mapping the changing nature of the landscape literally in front of our eyes. There's a massive need for that for policymakers and to take it seriously. So you're quite right that the sort of stock and trade issues of national security has been great powers, spies, spying, counter espionage, terrorism. I think that what we're witnessing

right now is going to have to be a redefinition of what we consider to be intelligence and the role of new kinds of intelligence about globalized threats, man-made and natural threats, and their impact on international security. Is there anything in the history here that can help us? I mean, have you studied individuals or currents within the intelligence community during the Cold War, for example, when everyone's focusing on which poison pills and which umbrella to it. But actually, were there more profound threats, be they biological, that some voices were trying to escalate? Yeah, that's certainly the case.

As I've been watching the coronavirus pandemic unfold and watching in particular the disinformation coming out of the Chinese government about the virus, alleging that it was US military that first brought the virus to China. It seems to me clear echoes from the Cold War and in particular what Soviet intelligence conspiracy theories that they promoted in the 1980s about an earlier pandemic, the AIDS virus. So in the 1980s, the KGB was extraordinarily successful at promoting the conspiracy theory that the AIDS virus was man-made by the US military, a bio weapon. And they promoted that by planting false stories in obscure newspapers and then reporting, the Soviet press then reported that story as established fact. It then, pardon the pun, went viral and it got into the mainstream press in Western Europe and the US. The first story appeared in 1985 and by 1987, the story had

appeared in over 50 countries, and I think in 70 different languages. This story persists, even after the end of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2005, polling of African Americans stated that 50% of those polled believed that AIDS was man-made. We now know from Soviet records after the collapse of the Soviet Union that this was a KGB disinformation operation, seeking to exploit the vulnerability and people being scared at the time of a new mysterious lethal virus, that this was an opportunity for Soviet intelligence to exploit and discredit the United States and to make both on the international stage and domestically people not trust the US government. That's been fairly well known within the specialized literature. I think something

that's not that well known are the countermeasures that the US government put in place to counter this Soviet disinformation about the AIDS pandemic. So they established an interdepartmental body called the Active Measures, that's the term for Soviet COVID action, the Active Measures Working Group. And its purpose was to collate intelligence from different parts of the government and to counter Soviet disinformation. And they were astonishingly successful at countering this KGB disinformation. They went public with it. And during a meeting between Ronald Reagan

and Gorbachev in Washington in 1987, Reagan actually called Gorbachev out and said, this has to stop and if it doesn't stop, we're cutting off all this has to stop. And if it doesn't stop, we're cutting off all scientific aid about AIDS research. And soon thereafter, the Soviet regime distanced itself publicly from the AIDS conspiracy theory. So I think that the underlying issues about how to counter disinformation during the times of pandemic from the Cold War still apply today. International cooperation, that light is the best disinfectant for disinformation, needs to be a coordinated response. And it needs to be based on fact-based rapid response. Now, clearly, things have massively changed between the Cold War history from that time and today with social media. But I think those underlying principles

still remain the same. Maybe I'm being naive about the nature of America's role during the Cold War, but if both parties today, if you like, the Americans and Chinese, both actually think there is an advantage to conspiracy, then you're in a pretty tricky situation. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there

are new episodes every week That's right. I think that the fundamental difference between the Cold War and that earlier example of disinformation about a pandemic with AIDS and the disinformation being promulgated by China, and it also now it appears from public reporting, Russia working with China to promulgate those conspiracy theories about the coronavirus being a bioweapon. The difference between the past and present is, I'm afraid to say, the misinformation being produced by Trump's White House. So this didn't exist in the Cold War. You didn't have Ronald Reagan promoting fairly straightforward, provably false ideas about the virus, saying it's just like flu, minimizing its impact, saying it will all go away, and then promoting drugs as panaceas to the viral

outbreak. That didn't exist. And as you said, alas, it's the case that the Trump White House has such terrible relations with the U.S. intelligence community. Trump called U.S. intelligence scum. That's following off the back of him calling them in recent years Nazis. We're in a completely different place, I'm afraid, now compared to where we were in the past. And for whatever reason, it seems that Trump's White House does exploit this vacuum of information or reliable information, I should say, to spin its own agenda about things like what are facts? What is truth? There's a perfect storm now arising after Trump's assault on truth and facts,

post-truthism and post-factual analysis, it all seems to be coming to a head right now during this pandemic. Well, as we've talked about before on this podcast, and as everybody who's ever talked about intelligence is only as good as the politician that you give it to then executes a policy based on it, right? I mean... That's exactly it, Dan. On that exact note, that's got me thinking recently about ways to try to ensure that intelligence about a future pandemic doesn't get lost in the corridors of power in the executive branch. I'm trying to do some blue sky thinking about this at the moment, but I'm wondering if what we need to set up is something like a public warning system about future pandemics. But I'm wondering if what we need to set up is something like a public warning system

about future pandemics. And I'm thinking particularly of the US side, but the same applies for other countries. A public warning system in which intelligence is collated and assessed and then disseminated in the same way that we have missile alert systems. We also have public warning systems from natural threats or hazards or disasters. I'm thinking of the US Geological Survey has a public alert system for earthquakes. It seems to me that what we're seeing now is so profound that we need to rethink the role of intelligence about pandemic threats and there being a public warning system. That would also, I think, maybe I'm being naive here, but I think that by having the ability to

go public with a threat assessment, you know, it could be a sort of a hazard range from red to green or whatever, whatever scale you want it on. But actually having that decoupled from politics, from the executive branch, would actually in many ways democratise intelligence. It would mean that we citizens are given the same level of warnings, not in the details, because you'd need to be careful about sources and methods, obviously. It's not our business to know about where the intelligence came from. But if we're presented with the fact that the US intelligence community has published

an alert saying in early January that the pandemic, that the outbreak in China is on a Richter scale of 10, I think would have dramatically changed the public policy response, that the public would have forced policymakers to hold their feet over the coals about this. The flip side to that is any intelligence community does not want to unduly burden and worry citizens. And so finding that balance between the day-to-day churn of threats and then something that really spikes out of the ordinary, that would have to be left to professionals. But I just think that what we're seeing now, where warnings apparently have got lost somewhere between the intelligence community and the White House, we need to all collectively think of a way of avoiding that happening. And as I said, I think a public warning system might be the way ahead. That's really exciting. Last time we were in the pub, we were hatching some other scheme for the public good. So Calder, you're full of them.

Should we be talking about the role of the intelligence community if it seems likely that the answer to ending this lockdown seems to be some kind of effectively massive government surveillance on a scale unimaginable hitherto in Western cultures, where every single person is tracked all the time and everyone they meet is basically logged. Is that something that should fall in the purview of the intelligence? Who owns that? What's the plan? That is a debate that's happening pretty urgently right now in the US and in the UK and in Europe. China and one party states are able to monitor their citizens through domestic security service, police, in ways obviously unimaginable in democracies. And China, there's a sort of, if you like, a soft power battle being waged between China

and America at the moment over which form of rule one party authoritarianism or liberal democracy is able to best protect its citizens. But it's not just China and other one party regimes that are using bulk collection, mass surveillance or contact tracing is what we're really talking about of infections. It's not just one party states that are using domestic intelligence services. Israel, its domestic security service, Shin Bet, has taken a lead on using technologies that it previously developed for counterterrorism to track the map infections with the pandemic. And far from being something that Israelis want to not talk about in polite society. Actually, my Israeli friends, this is just anecdotally, but they're proud of Shin Bet for doing this.

Would the same apply in Britain and the US? Well, this conversation, as your listeners will probably already be thinking about, has echoes of Edward Snowden's revelations and the bulk data collection. It seems clear that we have the tools literally in our hands that would allow us to map the infection rates domestically through your cell phones, mapping where you've been. What protections should we demand about how that data is used if we do go down that line? I think this is something that has to be urgently addressed in Parliament and in Congress. The history of the Snowden revelations shows the problems of doing this in what the intelligence community would describe as necessary forms of bulk collection that does help national security. The problem is when that's done in secret and in fact if you look at the US intelligence community's transparency reports that have been published after Snowden so the actual statistics of how

many US citizens their cell phones and metadata about their phone calls are being monitored it's astonishingly small I mean incredibly small the idea The idea that there was mass surveillance where intelligence services are reading all of our emails and so on just didn't occur. And actually, if that conversation and those statistics had been produced before Snowden, and there's no reason why they couldn't have been produced before Snowden if they were able to be produced after him, I think that a lot of the shock about it would have been dissipated. So the question is, and I don't have any answers, where is that balance that we're willing to put up with between public health security, mapping infections and privacy? And it has to happen right now, because as we all try to go back to work in one way or another, there is a huge public health security component about mapping infections. But at the same time, nobody wants to end up living in an

Orwellian big brother environment. You know, it's so interesting talking to you and thinking about the old cliche about generals fighting the last wars. You know, when you think about these people in intelligence services who thought it would all be about taking on China and Russia and South China Sea and all this kind of stuff. And actually, you end up doing public health and climate. This is not why these guys signed up. The culture shift must be remarkable. I mean, on that issue of should the intelligence community be involved in assessing climate crisis and public health, that kind of thing? Well, on its face, no, because those can be done by other organs of government that have the expertise. But I should have said this at the outset,

the intelligence community can provide information about those topics that other organs of government cannot. And that it seems to me they need to concentrate. So with the pandemic, an obvious area for the intelligence community to provide information on is whether foreign states, in particular closed regimes like China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, are actually being truthful when it comes to their infection rates. So verification is going to be a key component, just as it was in the Cold War, verification of arms control treaties, verification now about the regime's policies regarding their domestic infection rates, because what happens domestically with a pandemic, of course, reaches out across the world. So it's that kind of area.

And likewise, with the climate crisis, what can the intelligence community do that others can't? Well, as I said, the unique capabilities they have in terms of things like imagery intelligence from satellites mapping the changing nature of landscapes that simply other parts of government do not have. If anybody wants to look at it, the US Geospatial Intelligence Agency, part of the US intelligence community that not many people have heard of. Their responsibility is satellites and imagery intelligence and measuring intelligence. But they produced a really informative map on their website during the Ebola crisis in 2014 about the Ebola spread. And it's exactly that kind of formulation that I'm thinking of with, as I said, the public alert system for pandemics going forward, to have maps spreading and graphics and an alert system. Well, fingers

crossed. That's exciting stuff. Calder, you are an absolute legend. What have you got going on? Have you got a book out at the moment? I can't remember. I'm in the final chapters of writing it. Watch this space. It's about British, US and soviet intelligence in the cold war i've got several articles going on and i'm busily at work trying to keep my sanity whilst in lockdown in lockdown in cambridge massachusetts as worst places to be i'm sure it's a great place to be thanks so much dan for having me thank you for coming on man I hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go bit of a favor to ask I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money makes sense but if you could just do me a favorites for free go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast if you give it a five-star

rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. you