
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, October 9, 1995                   TAG: 9510090144
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: STEVEN GREENHOUSE THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

NATIONAL SECURITY'S TURNING GREENER

ALL THAT SPY STUFF may not be out the window, but the intelligence community also has new - and softer - targets these days.

Environmental threats such as the beautiful water hyacinths choking Lake Victoria and the desert sands eating away the sparse pastures bordering the Sahara are some of the issues deemed urgent today by American foreign policymakers in much the same manner as military threats such as new surface-to-air missile sites alarmed policymakers several decades ago.

These days, intelligence officials are being asked to look at softer targets - those flowers and sand dunes - to shed light on this decade's hot wars. Through this lens, Somalia and Rwanda can be interpreted not as spontaneous outbreaks of clan warfare or ethnic violence, but as conflicts nourished by the underlying strains of hunger, drought and a lack of arable land in Somalia, and huge population growth and population density in Rwanda.

So, in addition to their traditional intelligence gathering - arms, nuclear weapons programs, expansion of foreign armies - U.S. policymakers are looking more than ever before at natural phenomena in their search for the deeper roots of war and threats to global security.

They are expecting more wars like Somalia, where the United States sent troops to calm a desperate situation spawned by environmental calamities and the brutal political response to it.

To prepare for such future wars, they are analyzing new subjects.

In August, the Defense Intelligence Agency finished a study on the rapid spread of the water hyacinth plant in Lake Victoria, which provides 120,000 tons of fish each year to Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. The agency noted how a single water hyacinth can multiply into a million plants in one year and these plants ultimately could strangle the lake and kill most of its fish.

The consequences would be serious: famine and such political instability in neighboring countries that the United States could be called in to help.

In seeking the underlying causes of war and crisis, the intelligence community now looks, for instance, at China's economic boom and how it is causing considerable overcrowding in China's cities; at the AIDS epidemic in East Africa and how it is affecting the region's military and political elites; and at Mexico's industrial leap and how it has left millions of peasants behind.

Some old-line intelligence officials disparage this new focus on what they call ``soft stuff.'' But gathering the so-called soft intelligence has become routine. The CIA set up a global affairs department two years ago that analyzes environmental matters, the global food situation and other issues the agency once gave little attention.

``We've been looking at some of these softer issues for a long time,'' said one intelligence official. ``What's different now is these issues have moved from the periphery to take a more central role.''

by CNB