David R. Shedd: Snakes and scorpions

Early this year CIA executive David R. Shedd retired after a 33-year career in intelligence. He worked at the White House and for the Director of National Intelligence, and led the Defense Intelligence Agency. Here are edited excerpts from our interview.

You were born in Bolivia and lived in Latin America as a son of missionaries. Did that experience lead you toward a career in intelligence? My interest in national security goes back to the events surrounding a presidential election in Chile in 1970, when I became intrigued as a 10-year-old by the amount of international attention a presidential election in Chile received. International news was always a topic of discussion in our family, because my parents and grandparents were long-term missionaries in Latin America. In 1977, I went to Geneva College, and then the Lord opened the door for me to get my master’s degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and to pursue a career in national security focused on Latin America.

Your parents read WORLD? It eventually was a mainstay on my mom and dad’s coffee table because it reflected their values and provided a God-centered perspective on world events. It also challenged my dad in particular to think about events in the world and the belief that God is ultimately in control, no matter how badly events were unfolding outside the four walls of home.

Who was influential in your spiritual development? Mike Minter, my senior pastor at Reston Bible Church, is my mentor. His Bible teaching provided me a very strong spiritual foundation. I am also extraordinarily blessed to have a wonderful wife of nearly 34 years, Lisa, who has been my mainstay through the ups and downs of my career.

‘Ignoring the biblical definition of evil will result in very different policy decisions and outcomes. … And some international bad actors … see anybody who approaches them to “negotiate” as a weak counterpart.’

How has your background as a Christian helped you deal with challenging national security situations? Having a clear worldview that God is the ultimate authority, I never embraced today’s dominant philosophical views of humanism and relativism—a faulty view that mankind can solve all his own problems and that truth is a moving target.

In practical terms, I go back to the mid-1980s and what eventually became known as the Iran-Contra affair. I was serving in Central America at the time. Congress had passed a law called the Boland Amendment, which prohibited the provision of lethal aid from the U.S. government to Nicaraguans resisting the Sandinista regime in their country.

In retrospect, I may have exceeded the authority in the Boland Amendment. Private benefactors with ties to the U.S. government continued to deliver lethal assistance to the Nicaraguan Resistance despite the Boland Amendment limiting the support to the resistance to humanitarian assistance. I came away from that experience with soul-searching about how I could or should have done things differently. The issues surrounding the Nicaraguan events challenged me to determine how to do better in making difficult choices, even if it might lead to resigning my position.

Today, what are the most significant threats to the lives of American citizens at home and abroad? Vladimir Putin is seeking to restore the grandeur of Russia by his bellicose actions in the Ukraine today, and potentially in the Baltic countries in the future. He is very active along the lower border countries of the former Soviet Union, and he is not close to stopping his interventionist actions. He is applying some extraordinary lessons from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the way he masterfully integrates information and conducts deceptive information operations. He is skillfully using cyber network capabilities to conduct 21st-century warfare.

In the Far East, China’s Xi Jinping is challenging the international order by what the Chinese government believes is the country’s prerogative to pressure our friends and allies in the Asia-Pacific region in what China considers to be its “near abroad.”

What about the Islamic State (ISIL)? Concurrent with challenges posed by Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and other state actors are the actions of nonstate players especially linked to international terrorism. These terrorist groups should be thought of as a pandemic, rather than activities of individual terrorist groups. The Islamic State, also known as ISIL, has done horrific deeds, but the effect of establishing a caliphate would do away with Syrian and Iraqi borders that have been in place for a hundred years.

What happens if we ignore the existence of evil in the world or try to wish it away? Ignoring the biblical definition of evil will result in very different policy decisions and outcomes. Those who try to do so will generally be more accommodating to bad behavior and will try to mitigate that behavior through negotiations. And some international bad actors, described by former President George W. Bush as “evildoers,” see anybody who approaches them to “negotiate” as a weak counterpart. That’s when the snakes and the scorpions come out. I do not ever see any of those bad actors coming to the negotiating table in good faith, especially with a counterpart that appears to be weak.

Discussions of a “cyber agency” are underway in Washington: Would that provide cyber security to the American public and our domestic industries? In the world of cyber we don’t have the 100 years or so that it took to establish the law of the seas. We also face enormous challenges over privacy and civil liberties, as shown by the Edward Snowden case. My great fear is that we are only reacting to the tsunami of cyber attacks, and a major reason is the absence of clear cyber policy framework to define how to operate in cyber space. The House and Senate have been unable to come to terms over cyber laws, and the White House is well behind where it needs to be in pushing for achieving a consensus on cyber policy.

A cyber agency seems to be coming to the party late, because we still have a vacuum on policies. For example, how are decisions to collect, retain data, or attack in the cyber space actually going to be made? Who is going to make these decisions and under what circumstances? Without such a framework, I fear we will continue to make up the rules as we go, while our cyber adversaries continue to improve their capabilities.

—Gordon Middleton is a Patrick Henry College professor