Introduction
The following notes are based on my experiences and observations while working to document and limit the damage caused by Antifa during the fiery but mostly peaceful riots of the 2020 “Summer of Love.” I participated in three “operations”:
- Tracking the evolution of CHAZ/CHOP in Seattle, Washington
- Tracking the riots in Philadelphia
- Tracking a major Antifa/BLM protest in one of the suburbs of Philadelphia
These operations contained elements of military intelligence, police investigation, private investigation, and corporate competitor analysis but do not fit easily into any one of those categories. However, there is much in common with military intelligence when it comes to building an effective team to monitor those riots.
The organization and processes described here are not limited to monitoring Antifa but are also applicable to the investigation of child predators and human traffickers.
The purpose here is to examine how these civilian intelligence teams operate, with the long-term goal of adapting the aspects that make military intelligence teams effective to these civilian analogs.
Goal of an Effective Intelligence Team
The goal of an effective intelligence team is to develop relevant, accurate, timely, and actionable information. This goal is realized by three “information paths” within the team:
- Incoming data (raw and unverified – could be called “pre-intelligence”)
- Analyses by individuals and teams to convert this data into intelligence (verify, deconflict, and determine significance)
- “Upward” movement as intelligence is organized and unified with other sources and becomes actionable.
These aren’t one-way paths, however – there must be a cycle that starts with evaluating a piece of information’s accuracy, classifying it according to relevance, and using that intel to drive follow-up investigations.
Qualities of Good Intelligence Team Members
Besides initiative, the most important quality that all team members must have is a sense of objectivity, which means that the team member:
- Can distinguish reality from hearsay and from political bias
- Can judge the quality of incoming data
- Is self-aware enough to know what he/she does not know
- Has a bearing of “effective professionalism”
A skill any analyst must possess is the ability to translate intelligence goals into relevant collection and analysis tasks. This doesn’t come naturally to many people and must be developed through experience and mentorship.
The team member must possess appropriate technical skills, such as using GIS, working with OSINT sources, having the ability to infiltrate, etc. Infiltration (either physical or on-line) is not something everyone is willing to do and requires the ability to be inconspicuous while still making important observations. We found that for best results – in general and not just for infiltration - the team member’s skills and interests must be matched to his role.
Finally, team members must understand and practice excellent OPSEC. This need was demonstrated when one of the teams tracking the riots in Philadelphia (not mine!) decided to live-stream their operations on YouTube. This allowed Antifa supporters to locate the exact hotel room from which they were operating in under 30 minutes.
Leader’s Role
The leader of an intelligence team must be able to identify intelligence gaps and set goals to fill those gaps, and clearly communicate those goals to the analysts. He must prevent team members from “going down the wrong rabbit holes” – performing investigations on topics or individuals not clearly related to the goals. He must act as a sounding board while providing analysts with a healthy dose of skepticism when appropriate.
The leader must be able to package-up the results of the team into recommendations and supporting documents for action by the relevant authorities. In the case of Antifa, child predators, or human traffickers, those authorities are law enforcement agencies.
Leadership Style
The sociologist Douglas McGregor described two broad styles of leadership, which he labeled Theory X (lack of trust in subordinates which leads to micromanagement) and Theory Y (confidence in subordinate’s ability to be self-motivated)1. McGregor recommends Theory Y, though it can devolve into “servant leadership.”
A different way of looking at Theory Y are the leadership styles known as "mission command" and the older German concept of "Auftragstaktik." Mission command has officially been a part of the US military command doctrine since the 1980s, though was practiced much earlier2, and states that a good commander sets the mission and constraints (e.g. time bounds), and lets subordinates choose the means to accomplish the mission. Auftragstaktik3 is broader and more fundamental than mission command because it is a type of military professionalism based on three virtues: “knowledge, independence, and the joy of taking responsibility.” Mission command can thus be seen as a corollary of Auftragstaktik.
Mission command and Auftragstaktik are both excellent and appropriate styles for leading effective intelligence teams, either civilian or military.
Establishing a Team
Once a group of individuals comes together to perform intelligence activities, and after basic groundwork (meeting times, communication methods, etc.) is laid, there are three tasks that must be performed: creating an area study, identifying and developing information sources, and making contacts with law enforcement.
An area study is packaged information about the team’s geographical area of interest. Besides physical aspects (physical terrain, weather, transportation systems, and critical infrastructure), the area study must include economic, political, and cultural factors (businesses, governance, law enforcement and security agencies, and political leanings). Finally, it must include a threat overview - in this case that would be information about the local Antifa members and activities. This will involve performing a RAFT (relationships, actors, functions, tensions) analysis4 on Antifa.
One assumption commonly made when doing an area study is that the adversary’s command structure lies within the area of interest. Groups such as Antifa are decentralized organizations, and human traffickers are sometimes trans-national, so a RAFT analysis not constrained by geographic area is an invaluable supplement to the traditional area study.
Certain aspects of the area study will stay constant (e.g. physical terrain) whereas others (e.g. Antifa membership) will change, sometimes rapidly, and it is important to update the area study as needed.
The new team must also identify and develop information sources. For direct human sources this includes recruiting and vetting informants, determining their accuracy and reliability, and “handling.” There are also tasks needed for indirect sources: finding mainstream media news sources and online video streams that provide on-the-spot coverage, locating and infiltrating relevant chat rooms and other messaging systems, etc. Even GIS requires setup: for example, finding and importing the correct map layers for some geographic information systems can be an involved process.
Social media is yet another source of information. Antifa members like to announce their proclivities, the larger the forum the better. Once an Antifa member’s account is located on a social media platform, it is easy to find his/her followers and monitor their posts. This is very valuable, and for remote intel operations it is one of the few available roads to inside information.
In anticipating the creation of actionable information, it is necessary to identify the consumers, those who will act on that information (after they perform their own analysis), and this usually means law enforcement agencies. Given the “hands off” approach many law enforcement agencies and district attorneys take with Antifa, it may be necessary to “shop around” to find the proper consumer. Prosecuting child predators is something most law enforcement agencies are willing to do; the record on human trafficking seems to be mixed.
Specialized Intelligence Teams
There are types of military intelligence teams, such as Female Engagement Teams, Culture Support Teams, Human Terrain Teams, and High Value Target Teams, that use specialized approaches when confronting adversaries.
Human Terrain Teams
Human Terrain Teams consist of sociologists and cultural anthropologists used to advise military personnel on social norms and taboos within a target population5. There really is no civilian analog to HTTs – private or police investigators cannot afford to maintain a staff of social scientists, and any attempt to provide cultural interpretations of events involving child predators or human traffickers is nothing but rationalizing evil.
The other types of teams do have certain parallels in civilian intelligence operations.
Female Engagement Teams
In conflict zones in which women are marginalized, like in Afghanistan, Female Engagement Teams (FETs) were used to gain the trust and confidence of Afghani women6. They were initially controversial because they involved putting female soldiers or Marines into combat situations. The effectiveness of FETs and the related Culture Support Teams were brought into question because the FET were not able to maintain prolonged contact with the female population of any particular village7. Further, FETs required a male contingency to provide security.
In civilian and law enforcement intelligence teams, women can play several specialized roles. In child predator stings, they can serve as “prey,” specifically in the time immediately prior to in-person contact by the predators. In operations to disrupt human trafficking or prostitution rings, women go undercover with the goals of observing and recording evidence of wrongdoings by the ring leaders, and (maybe) getting prostitutes to disaffect.
These civilian and law enforcement intelligence operations are more successful than FETs for several reasons: first, limited time of contact is not an issue with child predator or human trafficking operations – contact is maintained only as long as it is needed to catch the predator or disrupt the traffickers; there is no need to maintain contact in perpetuity. Second, there is no need to provide ongoing security by male team members - security is supplied only as-needed.
Another reason for the success of undercover female officers is their expected behavior while undercover: by their actions, undercover officers seek to raise standards by eliminating criminals, and there is no attempt to be “culturally sensitive” to the predators and traffickers. The same cannot be said for FET members – their presence is designed to minimize “cultural threat” while still hoping to win female hearts and minds. This was demonstrated by the requirements that FET members have male escorts and that they always keep their heads covered.
High-value Target Teams
High-value Target Teams (HTTs) are interagency operations that use network-based targeting, combine intelligence with operational capability, and employ counterterrorist and counterinsurgency methodologies in unison. The idea is to use intelligence to find leaders (high-value individuals) in the insurgency network, and then target them with sufficient force and accuracy so that they are eliminated while isolating peaceful civilians from the effects of the elimination8. This tactic was credited for success in Iraq in 2007-2008 – by eliminating the most powerful insurgents, the civilian authorities gained the time needed to establish themselves and to dominate the less powerful insurgents.
There is no direct analog of HTTs in civilian intelligence operations, simply because either the operational capability is separated from the intelligence capacity, or (as in situations described above where district attorneys are sympathetic with Antifa) the operational capability is completely absent. There are a few similarities between HTTs and civilian intelligence teams, however. The most obvious one is that both analyze their adversaries’ networks to identify leaders and to seek and exploit vulnerabilities. The other similarities mostly lie in the factors determining team success. In particular, civilian teams are small, have common purpose, are not divided by loyalties to outside agencies.
Comparison and Conclusions
Military and civilian intelligence teams share the goal of gathering valuable, timely, and actionable information about their adversaries. They both use methodologies such as RAFT analysis to organize that information and derive additional intel from it. They face the same problems – vetting sources, distinguishing false leads from actual evidence, identifying intel gaps, contending with rapidly changing intel priorities, maintaining OPSEC, and so on.
Both types of teams have similar organizations (both in terms of personnel and information flows), and their success depends on the effective leadership of competent and enthusiastic team members.
They face similar adversaries: during the GWOT, military intel teams were tasked with gathering information about Islamic extremists; civilian intel teams are needed to gather info on Antifa, child predators, and human traffickers. All these enemies have either no leaders or have a decentralized organization. They are also located and operate within the common population, and so they can “blend in.”
The similarities end there.
Military intelligence teams have the advantage when it comes to available information and resources. Civilian intel teams are limited to OSINT, IMINT, and limited forms of geospatial intelligence. Military intel teams are capable of all that plus SIGINT, MASINT, etc.
Military intelligence teams and civilian intel teams differ in that the former are part of a larger organization (the U.S. military) that legally can and oftentimes does act based on the recommendations from their intel teams. Civilian intel teams are not part of a larger organization, and many district attorneys support and cover for Antifa and similar groups.
Another difference is the quantity of information that is available to each – military intel teams must contend with information overload. Civil intel teams scramble for each bit of knowledge, so in that they are like private investigators. The only situation where the volume of information is remotely comparable is with the firehose of information available from social networks.
Perhaps the most important difference between military intelligence teams and the type of teams described here is that the former is a profession. It has a shared body of knowledge; various schools such as the Joint Military Intelligence Training Center (JMITC) and the United States Army Intelligence Center of Excellence (USAICoE) transmit that knowledge; and it has fictional heroes such as James Bond, Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, and even Sterling Archer, to inspire people to enter that vocation. In short, military intelligence has a culture.
Civilian teams have none of that – they come together in an impromptu manner, they must invent/discover the tradecraft needed to accomplish their goals, then they disband only to be reinvented when another group of agitators gains momentum – Hamas protesters, anyone? The closest thing to being an exception are individuals and teams that hunt for child predators and human traffickers. They mostly operate using sting operations, and while the results of these operations are popularized, the implementation details best remain trade secrets. Other than this limited exception, civilian intelligence teams have no means of transmitting their experience, or creating a body of knowledge, or building a culture. It is not a profession, it is an avocation.
Which is the superior institution? In combat situations, military intelligence teams have the wherewithal and experience to be extremely effective. In riot control and law enforcement situations, civilian intelligence teams are better in at least one aspect: it is more difficult to turn civilian intel teams inwards towards mass surveillance.
2020 Antifa/BLM Riots. Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images
Footnotes
- Mind Tools Content Team, “Theory X and Theory Y: Understanding Peoples’ Motivations.”
- Andrew Kiser, Mission Command: The Historical Roots of Mission Command in the US Army.
- Donald Vandergriff, “How the Germans defined Auftragstaktik”
- Dale Eikmeier, “Design for Napoleon’s Corporal”
- Ben Connable, “Human Terrain System is Dead, Long Live … What?”
- Megan Katt, “Blurred Lines: Cultural Support Teams in Afghanistan”
- Ibid.
- Christopher Lamb & Evan Munsing, “Secret Weapon: High-value Target Teams as an Organizational Innovation”
Bibliography
Connable, B. “Human Terrain System is Dead, Long Live … What?” Military Review, January-February 2018. Retrieved 25 April 2024 from https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/January-February-2018/Human-Terrain-System-is-Dead-Long-Live-What
Eikmeier, D. “Design for Napoleon’s Corporal.” Small Wars Journal, 27 September 2010. Last retrieved on 25 April 2024 from https://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/557-eikmeier.pdf
Kiser, A. J. Mission command: The historical roots of mission command in the US Army. Defense Technical Information Center, May 2015. Last retrieved on 24 April 2024 from https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1001514.pdf
Lamb, C. & Munsing, E. “Secret Weapon: High-value Target Teams as an Organizational Innovation.” Institute for National Strategic Studies, Strategic Perspectives, No. 4, 2011. Retrieved on 24 April 2024 from https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/stratperspective/inss/Strategic-Perspectives-4.pdf
Mind Tools Content Team. “Theory X and Theory Y: Understanding Peoples’ Motivations.” Mind Tools website, N/D. Retrieved on 25 April 2024 from https://www.mindtools.com/adi3nc1/theory-x-and-theory-y
Vandergriff, D. E. “How the Germans defined Auftragstaktik: What mission command is – and – is not” Small Wars Journal, 21 June 2018. Retrieved 25 April 2024 from https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/how-germans-defined-auftragstaktik-what-mission-command-and-not
