U.S. intelligence seeks foreign input in future study

U.S. intelligence seeks foreign input in future study

Tabassum Zakaria Reuters Langley, Virginia

The secretive U.S. intelligence community is reaching out to foreign experts around the world to help identify economic and security trends up to the year 2020, a senior U.S. intelligence official said.

Robert Hutchings, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said he believed three of the biggest countries -- China, India and Indonesia -- were open to significant and unpredictable change during the period covered by the year-long study.

The previous report, released in 2000, looked at trends to 2015 and had depended mainly on U.S. input. "As good as it was, (it) was pretty much America-centric. It was the American view of future trends. 2020 will really be a global view of future trends," he said.

Hutchings said the centerpiece of the new study would be a series of regional conferences in Europe, Asia, Latin America, South Africa, and, he hoped, the Middle East.

"We will invite a diverse group of regional experts to consider their own regions' future out to the year 2020," he said in a Reuters interview this week at his office at CIA headquarters. The National Intelligence Council acts as the U.S. intelligence community's think tank.

Hutchings said he hoped the report would reflect the enormity of changes under way. "I would hope it would somehow convey the magnitude of the flux of the world we're dealing with," he said.

China, India, and Indonesia are countries to watch for possible significant and unpredictable change, Hutchings said.

"It's really hard to imagine China looking much the same in 2020," he said, noting that its economy was growing so fast that it was radically transforming the country.

"So the question is how elastic that (China's) political system is and how creative. A continuing economic growth of the proportions we've seen in the last decade is incompatible with one-party rule over the course of say the years to 2020," Hutchings said.

The Middle East will be different in 2020, and the hope was that a prosperous, independent Iraq would emerge and affect the broader region, but there could also be "less hopeful scenarios," Hutchings said without giving details.

The National Intelligence Council has increasingly been reaching outside the spy world to network with experts from business, academia, and science partly due to government cutbacks that reduced U.S. expertise in areas like Africa and Latin America, Hutchings said.

"And frankly in a lot of the parts of the world where the questions (are that) we are addressing, the value of our secrets is no longer as great as it used to be," he said.

"The future of China is not to be uncovered by secrets or some secret cache of information in China to answer the question," Hutchings said. "It's a mystery that we're going to unravel by talking about it with lots of people who think long and hard about China."

The 2015 report was released in December 2000 just before President George W. Bush was inaugurated and nine months before the Sept. 11 attacks. The new report will be released after next year's presidential election and before the inauguration.

The 2015 report predicted increasingly sophisticated terrorist tactics "designed to achieve mass casualties" and a growing threat of missile attack.

"I think we still are dealing with the changing shape of international terrorism," Hutchings said. Al-Qaeda is "more a cause than an organization. It's going to be an ongoing challenge to deal with this threat."

But he said the fight against terrorism would be in better shape by 2020. "I can foresee a time in which the threat that seizes us now has been much attenuated."