The National Drug Intelligence Center

Presented by NDIC Director, Michael Horn, at the Montreal Conference, July 1999.

Michael Horn is the newly appointed director of the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC). As director, he is responsible for producing strategic drug intelligence for the US counterdrug community. Before his appointment as director in July of this year, he was a career Special Agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), serving in various capacities from 1977 to the present.

The National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) was created by Congress in 1991 to develop better strategic intelligence for the nation’s counterdrug policymakers. A relatively new agency, NDIC is an independent component of the U.S. Department of Justice. The "Center" is located in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and has a liaison office in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. NDIC has about 300 employees, 120 of who are intelligence analysts. The Director of NDIC answers directly to the U.S. Deputy Attorney General.

NDIC’s unique mission is to support national counterdrug policymakers with strategic intelligence which is both predictive and timely. We are not an operational or policymaking agency. NDIC does not generate primary intelligence or collect primary intelligence from its own assets. It uses the existing findings of both law enforcement and intelligence community agencies as the basis of its analyses. Partnerships are built with federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community to obtain information. NDIC obtains the finished reporting from these agencies and synthesizes their information to prepare intelligence assessments that are disseminated widely throughout the entire counterdrug community.

Many law enforcement agencies in the United States collect information on all aspects of drug trafficking. However, they do not have the ability or NDIC’s mandate to merge information from multiple sources into regional and national assessments. Neither do they have access to each other’s information or their finished products. The intelligence products they produce relate to the operational needs of their own organizations. They do not have NDIC’s mandate to prepare a "macro-view" of drug trafficking regionally and nationally.

There are many drug intelligence centers in the United States. However, most of them are operational support centers. They track the movement of drugs, criminals, or currency and assist law enforcement agencies by providing tactical information to support active investigations. Unlike these centers, NDIC does not provide active case support nor do we maintain databases to provide tactical information. Instead, we produce strategic intelligence products, which describe emerging trends and patterns in drug trafficking. Our products provide policymakers the information they need to assist them in anticipating future dynamics in drug trafficking and to plan their drug control initiatives more effectively.

One example of such a product, which was completed recently at NDIC, indicated that the threat posed by foreign drug trafficking groups from the Dominican Republic has been expanding outward from New York City and the Northeast. Because of the saturation of key market areas and increased profit margins for narcotics sold outside national and regional hubs, these criminal drug groups are eager to expand to new market areas in smaller cities. By analyzing a variety of key factors regarding these groups and their illegal operations, we have determined that the Dominican drug problem likely will spread to communities like Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; Richmond, Virginia; and Raleigh, North Carolina. These communities share certain characteristics, which lend themselves to possible Dominican expansion, such as a sustainable drug market. Law enforcement in these areas must be on the alert for the initiation of Dominican drug operations and therefore NDIC informed local law enforcement officials of our findings by letter.

Each year, law enforcement agencies document the drug threat in their areas. These periodic assessments are usually required as part of a budget or reporting process and are a regular part of an agency’s planning cycle. Although they may not actually be called "threat assessments" per se, the information contained in them conveys the ongoing dynamics of drug trafficking in a given area at a particular time. These "assessments" are a valuable source of information as they are often exceptionally accurate since they are being prepared by the agencies most familiar and concerned with the activities in their respective areas.

Keeping this in mind it is important to realize that the United States counterdrug program consists of numerous Federal, state, and local agencies most of which do this sort of reporting on a regular basis. In addition to the federal enforcement agencies like the FBI, DEA, and the U.S. Customs Service, there are 93 U.S Attorney Offices, nine Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, over 20 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area groups, and thousands of police and sheriff agencies. NDIC is in the process of collecting the finished reports from as many of these agencies as we can to produce an annual National Drug Threat Assessment and seven regional threat assessments. Our intent in preparing a national assessment is to assist policymakers and counterdrug executives to make preemptive, rather than reactive, decisions by providing them with a comprehensive yet timely assessment, based upon the information collected from the most authoritative sources in the nation.

In January 1999, NDIC published the 1998 National Drug Threat Assessment: An In-Progress Prototype. The prototype attempted to give a strategic view of primarily anecdotal information from federal, regional, state, and local law enforcement agencies and organizations. With an information cut-off date of September 15, 1998, the prototype assessment was based upon admittedly incomplete, limited information. It included information from approximately 260 reports obtained from 160 agencies.

The intent of the prototype, as indicated in the title and expressly stated in the report itself, was "to solicit critical feedback from members of the counterdrug community at all levels on the structure, focus, and scope of future National Drug Threat Assessments."

In early 1999, an executive version of the prototype was briefed to the Deputy Attorney General, members of NDIC’s Intelligence Priorities Board, and the membership of the Major Cities Chiefs of Police. Hard copies of the prototype were distributed to approximately 200 Federal, regional, state, and local agencies with a request for critical review and comment. By April 23, 1999, NDIC had received over 70 written responses to the prototype. Most of the comments were positive, and many respondents offered valuable suggestions that NDIC will use in future iterations of the national assessment, as well as regional assessments.

While the regional assessments are in the publication process, NDIC will draft the 1999 national assessment. The 1999 national assessment will build on information gleaned from the regional assessments and incorporate national level studies and statistical information. The process of developing a National Drug Threat Assessment is evolving and will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future. Comments provided by many different agencies will assist NDIC in producing national and regional assessments that are useful to as wide a range of consumers as possible.

Although the National Drug Threat Assessment and the regional threat assessments are our keystones, NDIC is involved in a variety of other functions that support the counterdrug community. NDIC held a Northeast regional heroin conference in Baltimore, Maryland, in March of 1999, where we were privileged to have U.S. Deputy Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., as our keynote speaker. We produce a National Street Gang Survey Report every other year that is widely distributed throughout the nation. This Report summarizes our survey of over 375 law enforcement agencies throughout the United States to evaluate the relationship between drugs and gang-related activities. At the request of The Interdiction Committee (TIC), we have prepared threat assessments of the southeast and the southwest U.S. borders. We are actively involved in an interagency global heroin threat assessment as well as a multi-agency Colombian money laundering project.

NDIC periodically publishes a National Drug Intelligence Digest, an unclassified document containing articles on the most current drug topics of interest. The Digest is designed to alert the counterdrug community by highlighting changes, patterns, and trends on the domestic drug front. The digest is also available electronically, as are other NDIC products, through Law Enforcement Online (LEO), the Anti-Drug Network (ADNET), and the NDIC homepage, depending on each product’s appropriate classification.

We also maintain a domestic Document Exploitation (DocEx) capability. These teams support field offices overwhelmed with voluminous and perishable data that has been seized during national priority investigations. They are deployed against targets that have been deemed appropriate by the principal counterdrug operational agencies. Our DocEx teams help identify hidden assets, previously unknown associates, other related information and leads for further investigation.

To support NDIC’s activities, we maintain state-of-the-art technology and have developed a sophisticated ability to collect hard-copy file information, which is then converted and transmitted to our analysts for their use. NDIC uses powerful analytical tools for rapid assimilation of large volumes of information to aid in the analytical process.

NDIC has developed a threshold drug intelligence-training course for analysts at the Federal, state, and local levels to fill a training void in the community. The training is conducted in partnership with the DEA, FBI, U.S. Customs, and FinCEN. With the video technical assistance of the National Guard Bureau, we use video teleconferencing as a medium to send and receive real time audio and video from our offices in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and McLean, Virginia, to sites across the country. This provides the counterdrug agencies’ across the nation access to intelligence analyst training easily and without incurring expensive travel costs.