Global coverage

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Global Coverage, in the vernacular of the U.S. Intelligence Community, is the opposite of "Hard Targets" or "Denied Areas." It has been traditional for the secret bureaucracy to focus on China, Cuba, India, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Pakistan, and Russia, generally to the detriment of all other countries and topics.

DCI George Tenet commissioned a study on "The Challenge of Global Coverage" and received the final report in July 1997. At the time, despite the study's recommendation that $1.5 billion be found for Global Coverage (consisting of a $10 million a year "insurance policy" for each of 150 "lower tier" targets including terrorism, genocide, and poverty, the DCI concluded that he was in the business of producing secrets for the President, and would not in fact concern himself with Global Coverage (as recounted to Robert Steele by the author of the study, Boyd Sutton).

An earlier and complementary view of the importance of Global Coverage was published by General Al Gray, then Commandant of the Marine Corps, in "Global Intelligence Challenges of the 1990s" in American Intelligence Journal (Winter 1988-1989].

The earliest known reference to the need for a global intelligence network to produce Open source intelligence is that of Quincy Wright, then associated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "Project for a World Intelligence Center," in Conflict Resolution, Volume 1, Number 1 (1957).