Strange meat in the cooking pot

When instructing intelligence professionals, it is often difficult to find cases which can be used for exercises designed to improve political, military and transnational issues assessments in short sessions – particularly those conducted at the unclassified level - without touching upon accounts in which one or more of the students may have previous experience. While expertise in intelligence is never usually a bad thing, it does introduce distorting effects to the instructor’s attempts to evaluate a student’s mastery of core competencies and learning objectives. We will not go so far as to say it is an unfair advantage for the knowledgeable student – after all, they did invest the time and energy to understand often complex subjects, and this will serve them well in other aspects of their professional life. Nor can we expect students to come to our classroom tabula rasa – in fact, a good organization’s selection process should ensure that even entry level professionals (or academic students) bring something unique to the table; and we by no means are solely responsible for teaching only new candidates in the field.

Further, when finding the teaching cases and other examples to be used in the classroom, we emphasize the need to select the kind of edge incidents which exist at the intersections between a number of accounts. Nothing turns a student off more quickly than thinking a case does not apply to their assignment and needs –particularly so if that student has rarely rotated between organizations and billets, and has a narrowly constructed view of what it means to be engaged in the activity of intelligence. For this reason, we constantly quest for new material which may feed into the kinds of innovative and unconventional cases and exercises that will challenge students to get out of their existing mindset and truly begin to master their craft.

We are thus grateful to tdaxp for pointing out recent media coverage of the tribulations of the pygmies of the Congo (DRC). Amongst the other savagery of the continuing conflict in the troubled country – already an excellent teaching example for a variety of counterinsurgency, counter-smuggling, and other transnational issues problems – recent reporting now adds the problems of human trafficking and cannibalism. This is not the first time such stories have surfaced, but UN investigations are another thing entirely.

We have previously written about earlier, effective teaching exercises involving organ smuggling and corpse trafficking conspiracies. Such teaching cases have been greatly enhanced by the recent media coverage of the bone trade from India, which serve to illustrate well the complex relationships between black markets and legitimate industries in these spaces. We have no doubt that a case built upon the Congo incidents will also be effective in introducing a new set of problems and perspectives for the analyst and manager alike – especially as it more deeply reaches into the challenges of understanding events amongst “people of whom we know nothing”.

Cultural intelligence and the underground economies of the dead

Once upon a lifetime ago, there was a particular course on strategic intelligence analysis that was offered by a contractor (which shall remain nameless, to protect both the guilty and the innocent in the spirit of the Chatham House rule) in a number of USG and foreign government iterations (one of the few to span so many different countries, from the UK, to Sweden, to Australia, and even South Africa.) The primary audience for this course were law enforcement types, usually at the national level (this was also around the time of the first steps of the UK’s National Intelligence Model) – but these were also the halcyon days of the pre-9/11 world, in which matters of crime and disorder were enshrined by PDD-35 as among the top intelligence priorities for the community. Thus the audiences in some offerings tended to be quite a bit more diverse, so to speak, as an entire generation struggled to come to terms with transnational issues.

One of the more memorable exercises from the course involved class groups assigned to develop what essentially amounted to mission management planning for intelligence issues that were far outside of the current mainstream. The point was to get students out of their comfortable headspace and familiar issues and attack problems de novo. This was usually quite an interesting discussion, and although it was biased towards smaller agencies and functions, it was generally worth the time.

One of the unconventional intelligence issues sometimes presented for class discussion was a semi-notional problem set involving the illegal market for human organs. The initial scenario was based on a popular urban legend of the day projected into a futures scenario, but what was most fascinating were the real world events and incidents that were crystallized into an intelligence problem by many of the more imaginative of the students. Far from viewing the scenario in criminal analysis terms, with simple scams and investigative case outcomes, outlines of entire illicit medical structures and market exchange mechanisms that would be required to support organ harvesting activities emerged – touching on insurance fraud, professional and official corruption, pharmaceutical diversion, customs and border control weaknesses, and the very real challenges of collection against non-traditional targets spanning both domestic and international environments.

We are reminded of this exercise by the following item from the Economist, regarding the growing market for “ghost brides” in the PRC. The practice is a fascinating intersection of centuries old belief systems, draconian and disastrous Communist population control policies, and the emerging illicit markets in a country which knows almost no normal market structures in the first place.

The Chinese practice also recalls the Shi’ite tradition of seeking burial near the tomb of Ali in Najaf, Iraq - where it is believed that the rigours of death will be eased and their entrance to Paradise made faster. Since the medieval age, it has been common for bodies to be sent from around the Shia Islamic world for internment in what has become one of the largest necropolises in human history. This difficult terrain embodied entirely new operational challenges for urban combat during the 2004 actions against the Jaish al Madhi of Moqtada al-Sadr. The practice also spawned an entire industry of professional mourners, supported by unique memorial foundations and other funding structures that developed under the atypical constraints of Islamic financial restrictions – structures which to this day represent serious challenges to the financial intelligence community seeking to track and interdict terrorist funding sources.

Under the British Mandate, a Western power previously had cause to reflect upon these Shia burial practices as an intelligence challenge. The transport of corpses from abroad was restricted on the basis of sanitary considerations, with regulations prohibiting the transport of “wet” remains, and requiring that all bodies have been temporarily interred for at least one year before being permitted passage through the border as “dry” remains (with less likelihood of creating certain classes of disease in the wake of their passage). However, the psychological impact of this regulation, particularly on the devout near the seminary city of Qom in Iran, was far more serious than the British would have ever contemplated. A brisk smuggling trade thus emerged, in which the recently dead of the particularly religious would be moved across the border with false documentation, bribery, and a variety of other means of concealment. These smuggling routes exist to this day, some of them no doubt now being used to transport Iranian manufactured EFP IEDs to cells in Iraq.

We can think of few better examples of the kinds of cultural intelligence challenges that will increasingly come to define the hardest issues faced by the community in assessing the developing world, especially when those are mission critical issues encountered in the context of ongoing stability and support operations. It is exceedingly difficult to inculcate the flexible mindsets and analytical tradecraft practices that will be required to meet these challenges in the future, and this is perhaps one of most significant areas in which the intelligence studies academia could offer substantial contributions to the community. But thus far, cultural intelligence and related transnational issues (especially in the information operations realm) have been regrettably too long ignored…