Experts Warn U.S. Intelligence Help Has Limits

While Defense Secretary William J. Perry has promised beefed-up U.S. intelligence to help Western allies better manage peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia-Herzegovina, officials and independent analysts warned Tuesday that U.S. measures to protect peacekeepers will be hampered by Bosnia’s mountainous terrain, the bitter nature of its civil war and the absence of a spy network operating among warring ethnic groups there.

Another considerable concern, U.S. analysts said, will be the lack of clear-cut policy or military objectives for the United States and its allies.

Without clear goals guiding Western involvement, they said, it becomes hard to focus intelligence-gathering efforts on the right targets.

The potential for “mission creep” in an unfamiliar region torn by civil strife reminded many analysts of difficulties U.S. forces encountered in Somalia, where dozens of Americans were killed as their humanitarian mission, critics said, turned into a peacemaking effort.

“You need a fairly precise definition of the Bosnian military mission before you can turn the intelligence collectors loose,” noted one senior government source. “And right now, we don’t have that.”

The uncertain nature of U.S. policy in Bosnia was evident Tuesday when the Pentagon said that it was again reconsidering the size and scope of any operation there.

Those problems aside, the U.S. intelligence community will be able to provide high-tech surveillance unmatched by the European allies now embroiled in peacekeeping roles in Bosnia.

The United States will take the lead role in a new North Atlantic Treaty Organization “intelligence coordination cell” to be created specifically for the Bosnian mission.

Industry experts said, for example, that no other NATO powers operate unmanned drone surveillance aircraft that can keep watch on Bosnian Serb troop movements. The arrival of the craft should sharply expand NATO’s ability to keep continuous watch on small units of Bosnian Serb troops that often are difficult for satellites to spot.

Sources said the drones, including two types operated by the CIA and the U.S. Navy, can remain airborne for as many as 44 hours, circling over enemy units at either low altitude or as high as 25,000 feet. They will come equipped with radar and highly sensitive wide-angle cameras and infrared night-vision equipment.

Usually launched from Navy ships, they were used successfully in the Persian Gulf War to map Iraqi minefields and bunkers and will now be able to help hunt the highly mobile, Soviet-made surface-to-air missile launchers used by Bosnian Serb forces, which shot down a U.S. F-16 last week.

Given the dense fog and cloud cover that often shroud the mountains of Bosnia, reducing the effectiveness of orbiting satellites, “you need under-cloud systems, and the drone is one of the best ways of getting that capability,” Perry said. “If you’re only flying 1,000 feet above the ground, then you can have a rather rudimentary system and still get the same resolution” offered by more sophisticated satellites.

Best of all, no pilots are killed or captured if a drone is shot down.

Another expected advantage is that U.S. “signals intelligence,” handled by the National Security Agency, should have no trouble intercepting Bosnian Serb and Serbian government communications, government experts said. “We are already getting some pretty good intelligence out of Bosnia,” one U.S. official said.

“I think intelligence about the tactical military situation, provided largely through technical sources, will be a much easier issue for us than gathering political intelligence on what the Serbians and the Bosnian Serbs are thinking,” another official added.

Yet analysts noted that the inability of either the United States or NATO to find the downed F-16 pilot in the mountainous terrain of Bosnia offers an early hint of the obstacles that the U.S. intelligence effort is likely to confront.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon acknowledged that its faint hopes of finding the pilot alive were dimmed after signals that might have been coming from the downed pilot’s rescue beeper were no longer being received by NATO aircraft or other intelligence sources--apparently U.S. defense and intelligence satellites.

Much of the tactical information in Bosnia will be handled by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, while most political data will be handled by the CIA, officials said.

Congressional oversight committees are already concerned about U.S. intelligence-gathering in Bosnia and have asked the CIA and the Pentagon for confidential briefings to determine whether the intelligence community can adequately support any U.S. military role there.

As the Pentagon gears up for an expanded role, it is hoping to get its intelligence efforts off on the right foot by using the same organizational structure that was a success in the Gulf War. Intelligence will be funneled through a central clearinghouse to provide multinational commanders “real-time information.”

But the topography of the region may still defeat the best efforts of the United States’ technical surveillance wizardry. The SAM-6 ground-to-air missile launchers used by the Bosnian Serbs against NATO aircraft can be rapidly moved into forests or barns and thus are difficult for aerial hunters to find. Bosnian Serb crews also have learned to keep their SAM radar off until just before they fire, thus avoiding counterattacks from Western radar-seeking missiles.

“We couldn’t find any of these mobile launchers during Desert Storm and that was in a table-flat desert. So it is going to be hard as hell to find any of them up in those hills,” observed John Collins, a former Army officer and now a senior specialist on national defense at the Library of Congress. “We are simply not going to find them without real good human intelligence on the ground.”

But penetrating the myriad suspicious ethnic factions involved in the Bosnian conflict has proved difficult. “Our basic problem in Bosnia is the inadequacy of our human intelligence there,” one source said. “It’s like trying to infiltrate the Hatfields and McCoys.”