Intelligence Collection

The assignment is based on a scenario that intelligence officers frequently encounter when they collect raw intelligence. The exercise is to critically evaluate
source material,
then develop a planned intelligence collection approach that weighs the pros and cons of different strategies which we discuss in class. Examples of parts
that the examination could
include:
1. A new source is discovered. You must evaluate it, make a plan to exploit it, and assess all the risks.
2. The National Security Council tasks you with a new collection requirement. Develop a monitoring plan that explains how you will go about the collection.
include bullet points and important issues not just any sentence to fill the 5 pages, the quality is really important
Say you got dropped off at your new apartment and you have no idea how you got there. Then the question is how are you going to get to a restaurant that’s
on the other side of the city. Your options in the situation can include I will take an Uber, if the Uber operates in the city or in the city then I will take a cab us to
expensive I will take the bus if the bus is passing through some part of the town that I don’t feel comfortable passing I will look for other options this is a
simple scenario of the kind of situation that you are in in this scenario. You have very little information to begin with you don’t know much about what’s going
to happen in the future you are allowed to assume some stuff but the point is that you have very little information and you are supposed to assess your
options. While assessing the options you know each option have pros and cons and you are gathering information to figure out what’s your best option some
degree you want to talk about pros and cons of different options that you were going about.
But not completely about pros and cons
Talking about different intelligence collection methods or the timing of all of them the information that you are going to have about what we already collected
General instruction: The following assignment assumes that you are an employee at the NSC, or CIA working on broad collection planning. The prompt
focuses on a fictional terrorist organization named the Children of Colonial Oppression. This focus ensures that all the factual information you need to know
is in the prompt. You do not need to research or cite information about real countries that the CCO operates in.
Formatting your response: The response must be submitted with size 12, Times New Roman font, double spaced with 1-inch margins.
Endnotes and bibliography entries do not count towards your page limits. (these should mainly be used for references if you need them).
The Prompt:
The Children of Colonial Oppression in Context:
The Children of Colonial Oppression (CCO) are a terrorist organization. The CCO originated in Kenya in 2010 under the leadership of Jonathan Small. It
spread to Tanzania in 2012 and then to Mali in 2016. Their initial message was of colonial oppression. They claimed that colonial occupiers from Europe
stole their resources and forced them into a cycle of poverty.
In 2019, the CIA assessed that the COO posed no imminent or direct threat to the United States. However, the CIA did assess that the CCO posed an indirect
threat because it interacts with other terrorist groups of interest to the United States, and the CCO operates in Areas where Americans do business, and the
CCO is likely to disrupt our allies and partners. Based on this assessment, the NSC has not dedicated many resources to tracking COO activities.
British, German and several African diplomats have told the United States that they track CCO activities to the best of their abilities. However, their capacity to
collect technical intelligence is very limited. On several occasions, the United States provided satellite images to MI6 (Britain) to help them identify CCO
camps in Kenya and Mali.
Six months ago, the CCO undertook a dramatic expansion in ambition and coverage. Their new message directly targets the United States. They claim that
the United States has made this cycle worse by imposing unfair market conditions on them. They now seek to dismantle their local governments and force
Western democracies to abandon the global capitalist model. Local affiliates now attack governments in Asia and South America. Furthermore, their
weapons have become much more sophisticated. They have graduated from simple grenade attacks to sophisticated remote detonators and car bombs.
There are rumors of terrorist cells in Europe and the United States. But no attacks have happened.
Intelligence prompt:
Last week, a CCO cell kidnapped an American businessman in Kenya. The special operations forces took out that cell in Western Kenya. Among the targets
was a courier who is known to have worked for Small’s leadership team in 2014. His telephone history shows he has dialed hundreds of local phone
numbers as well as 3 phone numbers in the United States and two in Iran Several other cell phones were recovered in the raid all with local numbers across
Kenya and Tanzania.
The American businessman survived. One low-level CCO operator was also captured. Finally, we captured a local commander’s laptop. This has some
important membership documents and some information on the Cell’s purchases. However, we have little local context to analyze this information right now.
Presidential Directive:
Based on the CCO’s recent activities, we now consider them a direct threat to US national security. I want a comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate
that examines the CCO. I am most interested in information about their activities inside the United States. But I also want information on their structure,
areas of operations, and connections to state sponsors of terrorism. File a Special NIE 6 months from now, and then a regular report annually on the CCO.
Your tasks:
As part of that directive, you will provide the following documents:
Task 1: Overall collection plan (60%, 3 pages)
Write a collection plan that will serve as a long-term assessment. This should include the targets we hope to track, the sources and methods we should use
to track them. Be sure to recognize that our first report is due in 6 months, but we need sustained information beyond that.
Task 2: Making the most from the Raid (40%, 2 pages)
Write a two-page memorandum that explains how we should exploit what we captured during the raid to serve our collection plan. You should cover the
documents and telephones we recovered and the two people who survived and are in custody.
To be clear, you do not need to pursue every lead in detail. But if you think a source is not especially useful for our strategy, you should (briefly) say why.