Why the CIA is spying on a changing climate

WASHINGTON ― Last summer, as torrential rains flooded Pakistan, a veteran intelligence analyst watched closely from his desk at CIA headquarters just outside the capital.

For the analyst, who heads the CIA’s year-old Center on Climate Change and National Security, the worst natural disaster in Pakistan’s history was a warning.

“It has the exact same symptoms you would see for future climate change events, and we’re expecting to see more of them,” he said later, agreeing to talk only if his name were not revealed, for security reasons.

“We wanted to know: What are the conditions that lead to a situation like the Pakistan flooding? What are the important things for water flows, food security ... radicalization, disease and displaced people?”

As intelligence officials assess key components of state stability, they are realizing that the norms they had been operating with ― such as predictable river flows and crop yields ― are shifting.

Yet the U.S. government is ill-prepared to act on climate changes that are coming faster than anticipated and threaten to bring instability to places of U.S. national interest, interviews with several dozen current and former officials and outside experts and a review of two decades’ worth of government reports indicate.

Climate projections lack crucial detail, they say, and information about how people react to changes ― for instance, by migrating ― is sparse. Military officials say they don’t yet have the intelligence they need in order to prepare for what might come.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a 23-year veteran of the CIA who led the Department of Energy’s intelligence unit from 2005 to 2008, said the intelligence community simply wasn’t set up to deal with a problem that wasn’t about stealing secrets, such as climate change.

“I consider what the U.S. government is doing on climate change to be lip service,” said Mowatt-Larssen, who is currently a fellow at Harvard University. “It’s not serious.”

Just getting to where the intelligence community is now, however, has been a challenge.

Back in the 1990s, the CIA opened an environmental center, swapped satellite imagery with Russia and cleared U.S. scientists to access classified information. But when the Bush administration took power, the center was absorbed by another office and work related to the climate was broadly neglected.

In 2007, a report by retired high-ranking military officers called attention to the national security implications of climate change, and the National Intelligence Council followed a year later with an assessment on the topic. But some Republicans attacked it as a diversion of resources.

And when CIA Director Leon Panetta stood up the climate change center in 2009, conservative lawmakers attempted to block its funding.

“The CIA’s resources should be focused on monitoring terrorists in caves, not polar bears on icebergs,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said at the time.

Now, with calls for belt-tightening coming from every corner, leadership in Congress has made it clear that the intelligence budget, which soared to $80.1 billion last year, will have to be cut. And after sweeping victories by conservatives in the midterm elections, many political insiders think the community’s climate change work will be in jeopardy.

Environmental issues have long been recognized as key to understanding what might happen in unstable countries. In the 1990s, while spies studied such things as North Korean crop yields, attempting to anticipate where shortages could lead to instability, the CIA also shared a trove of classified environmental data with scientists through a program that became known as Medea.

“The whole group (of scientists) were patriots and this was an opportunity to help the country do something about the train wreck (we) saw coming” from climate change, said Robert Bindschadler, a glaciologist at NASA who received a security clearance when Medea started in 1992.

Cleared scientists also helped the CIA interpret environmental data and improve collection methods, former CIA Director John Deutch said in a 1996 speech.

But the Republican-controlled Congress gradually trimmed these programs, and after President George W. Bush took office in 2001, top-level interest in environmental security programs disappeared. Intelligence officials working on them were reassigned.

Terry Flannery, who led the CIA’s environmental security center until 2000, said he had to tread lightly in his final years running it.

“You had this odd thing where it became an interchange of science and politics,” he said. “At times, it was just strange.”

Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who led the CIA from 2006 to 2009, said issues such as energy and water made Bush’s daily briefings, but climate change was not a part of the agenda.

“I didn’t have a market for it when I was director,” Hayden said in a recent interview. “It was all terrorism all the time, and when it wasn’t, it was all Iran.”

By Charles Mead and Annie Snider

(McClatchy-Tribune Information Services)

(McClatchy-Tribune Information Services)