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By Tim Stoddard
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Arthur Hulnick, a CAS associate professor of international relations, is teaching a new course entitled Intelligence and Homeland Security. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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On the second anniversary of September 11, as students and faculty lit
candles of remembrance in Marsh Chapel, Arthur Hulnick was giving his
students a grasp of the evolving disciplines of espionage and counterterrorism.
His popular new course Intelligence and Homeland Security is one of the
first in the nation to examine the sprawling responsibilities of the
six-month-old Department of Homeland Security. “The central theme,” says
Hulnick, a CAS associate professor of international relations, “is
what is the proper trade-off between freedom on the one hand and security
on the other?”
The course will explore that question through the
lens of intelligence-gathering. “First
of all, we’re going to look at what went wrong before 9/11, and
try to figure out what that means for homeland security,” says
Hulnick. “I want students to understand how intelligence works
in this domestic environment as compared to overseas.”
Hulnick discusses
U.S. intelligence with considerable experience. Before coming to BU in
1989, he had served for 7 years in the Air Force Intelligence
Agency and 28 years in the CIA as an intelligence officer. “All
through the Cold War, intelligence was foreign-focused,” he says. “The
bad guys were the Soviets or the Chinese or the North Koreans. It involved
spying overseas, stealing secrets abroad, and bringing them back for
analysts to pore over. We never had domestic security issues, except
in countering the bad guys, such as Chinese and Russian spies.”
But
as the September 11 hijackings revealed, the U.S. intelligence system
is not designed to keep close track of threats within our own borders. “We’re
the only industrialized country that doesn’t have an internal security
service,” Hulnick says. “The CIA is strictly foreign intelligence;
the law establishing the CIA in 1947 specified that it would not engage
in law enforcement or domestic security matters, specifically to prevent
fears at the time that we were creating a secret police.”
One of
the topics the course will explore is the future of the FBI, which has
always been a police organization, investigating federal crimes and
enforcing federal statutes. But now, Hulnick says, the FBI is trying
to expand its purview to domestic intelligence. “One of the issues
is whether the United States should create a new domestic security agency
like Britain’s MI5, instead of splitting the FBI’s responsibilities,” he
says. “Cops are cops, spies are spies, and trying to make them
work together is a difficult problem. This is one of the big issues with
regard to the USA Patriot Act, which breaks down the firewall that used
to exist between intelligence and law enforcement. Using secret intelligence
in a court case where a defendant doesn’t have access to full disclosure
of evidence doesn’t fit with our normal system of justice.”
Fine line
Gathering intelligence the old-fashioned way
doesn’t work very
well in our country, Hulnick says, because Americans don’t like
having George Smileys trampling on their civil liberties. As an example,
he points to the capture and detainment of a few Americans who President
Bush declared as enemy combatants. “We don’t know where they
are,” Hulnick says. “They don’t have access to lawyers
or to due process. This is the way it worked in Nazi Germany. What have
we come to in this country when that kind of thing happens? We need to
understand what the limits are, and how we can legitimately go after
terrorists without destroying the fabric of our legal process.”
Defining
those limits will be a major objective of the course. After outlining
the scope of the FBI and the CIA and the range of threats to
the United States from abroad, the course will address what responsibilities
should be given to the Department of Homeland Security. For instance,
should drug enforcement fall under homeland security when the sale of
narcotics finances terrorism? “How about trade secrets?” Hulnick
asks. “We lose billions every year to industrial espionage. Shouldn’t
that be part of protecting our homeland security?”
For some students,
Alissa Brodie (CAS’04) for example, part of
the appeal of this course is the ambiguous definition of homeland security. “It’s
a work in progress,” she says. “It’s interesting to
be able to learn about it as it’s developing.”
Others, like
Matthew Hite (CAS’04), are interested in following
in their instructor’s footsteps. “Many of us are taking the
class looking to future careers in intelligence,” Hite says. “After
9/11, the intelligence field has gained a lot more funding, and it seems
like there are many new job openings.”
To aspiring spies and spooks
and special agents, however, Hulnick offers a few words of caution. The
country doesn’t need more 007s right
now, he says, but men and women who can help reinvent U.S. intelligence
in the context of homeland security. “When I was a CIA officer,” he
says, “my colleagues and I were tasked with going abroad and recruiting
agents to steal secrets from people — that’s illegal, but I got
medals for it. At home, it’s a different story. Now the problem
is how to root out terrorists without destroying the privacy and civil
rights of our fellow citizens. If we destroy these values, we’ll
do more damage to ourselves than the terrorists ever could.”
26
September 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations