America's intelligence reforms
Can spies be made better?
Mar 17th 2005 | WASHINGTON, DC
(From The Economist print edition)
In the wake of recent shocks, intelligence-gathering is being reformed on
both sides of the Atlantic. The task is daunting. We begin in America
"WE TEND to meet any new situation in life by reorganising," Petronius
Arbiter, a 1st-century Roman satirist, is supposed to have remarked. "And
what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress
while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation." Wonderful,
indeed, for John Negroponte, America's ambassador to Iraq, who will leave
Baghdad this month to become America's first director of national
intelligence (DNI).
Mr Negroponte may come to question which job is the more harrowing. On one
side, murder and mayhem; on the other, mayhem and mystery.
The creation of the DNI was a well publicised reform, approved by both
Republicans and Democrats, which was intended to improve the performance of
America's intelligence agencies in the wake of the terrorist attacks of
September 11th 2001. But precisely what power it will confer on Mr
Negroponte is, as yet, unknown. So too is what power he will subtract from
others within the 15 arcane agencies he will direct. The Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), the best known, accounts for only about a tenth
of the intelligence budget; the biggest of all, the National Security Agency
(NSA), with 30,000 employees, resides in the Department of Defence (DOD)
under the pugnacious Donald Rumsfeld. As Mr Negroponte turns his thoughts
away from bombs and gunfire inside the green zone, he may hear a rattle of
daggers being drawn in Washington, Arlington and Langley.
America's secret world is inefficient and demoralised, and has been for some
time. The CIA in particular is an unreformed, substantially unaccountable
bureaucracy, which has almost never sacked anyone, which appears deluded by
its own mythology and which, despite some notable successes, is burdened by
a miserable run of failures. The entrance-hall at Langley is decorated with
a black star for every CIA officer killed fighting the cold war. A more
telling record, according to several former spooks, is that the agency in
those years did not recruit a single mid-level or high-level Soviet agent.
Every significant CIA informant was a volunteer. And the agency was
comprehensively infiltrated. At one point, every CIA case-officer working on
Cuba was a double agent. All but three CIA officers working on East Germany
allegedly worked for the Stasi. As for those brave volunteer agents, Aldrich
Ames, a greedy drunkard in the CIA directorate of operations who was bought
by the Russians, put paid to many-as did another mole, Robert Hanssen, in
the FBI.
When it comes to recruitment and filing intelligence from the field,
quantity has often mattered most. In cold-war Africa, American spooks
allegedly paid for the same information obtained for nothing by American
diplomats over lunch. One recent case-officer, Lindsay Moran, says she was
aware that an agent she was running in the Balkans was peddling worthless
information, but she was repeatedly refused permission to end the contact.
"It gets depressing," she said. "You start to wonder whether we can do
anything good at all."
More recent events have brought shame on the intelligence agencies as a
whole. They failed to predict both the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in
1979 and the Soviet Union's break-up a decade later. In 1998, America's
spies were taken by surprise when India tested a nuclear bomb; they then
advised Bill Clinton to flatten one of Sudan's few medicine factories,
wrongly believing that it made nerve gas. The next year, on the agencies'
mistaken advice, an American warplane bombed China's embassy in Belgrade.
The two main prompts to reform, however, have been the September 11th
attacks, in which some 3,000 Americans died, and the spooks' hallucinations
about Iraq's weapons programmes, which were used to justify a war and bloody
peace that have cost tens of thousands of lives. The fallout from
Iraq-especially a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee last year,
which accused the agencies of "a lack of information-sharing, poor
management, and inadequate intelligence collection"-forced George Tenet, the
CIA's second-longest-serving boss, to resign in June.
Porter Goss's burdens
Under Mr Tenet's successor, Porter Goss, a former Republican congressman and
spy, a dozen senior spooks have been sacked and two dozen have quit in fury.
Mr Goss's aides-most of whom have had no previous experience of intelligence
work-are said to be thuggish managers. Mr Goss is meanwhile finding his job
tough. On March 2nd, he said he was "a little amazed at the workload", which
was "too much for this mortal". Merely preparing the president's daily
intelligence briefing takes him five hours.
It was partly to ease this burden that the DNI was created, in a package of
reforms passed in December. These were broadly in line with recommendations
made by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, whose vivid report into the attacks
was a deserved, if unlikely, bestseller last year. (The recommendations were
not informed by the foul-up on Iraq; a presidential commission into the
pre-war Iraq intelligence is due to report later this month.)
The DNI will be charged with co-ordinating all the secret agencies, a job
which the CIA's chief-as the director of central intelligence-has performed
only in theory hitherto. The DNI will thus be held accountable for the
performance of each agency. Alongside a new multi-agency National
Counterterrorism Centre (NCTC)-which will have wider powers than its
existing equivalent, and may be the prototype for more specialist centres,
focused on China and proliferation issues-the DNI represents the biggest
organisational change to America's spy world since 1947.
The 9/11 Commission's report told mostly the story of the months and moments
leading up to the attacks, with many details of the agencies' bungling. The
CIA noticed that two known terrorists had obtained American visas, but
failed to inform the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which is
responsible for domestic counter-terrorism. Notoriously, certain FBI bosses
failed to pick up on a report that a group of Arab men was learning to fly
planes, but not to land them. Overall, the commissioners diagnosed a grave
reluctance to share information within and among the agencies. Most
seriously, they found that the FBI's two main departments, responsible for
intelligence and criminal investigations, barely communicated. In part, they
were deterred by laws safeguarding Americans from government meddling,
though the reach of these laws was often exaggerated.
More generally, the commission observed a "failure of imagination" in the
agencies' response to the warning signs they did observe. A CIA report filed
in 1998 had warned that al-Qaeda might carry out suicide attacks with
hijacked planes; but the report's authors later said they could barely
remember having included the detail. The problems were only partly
organisational. Indeed, the commission noted that, when tipped off that
al-Qaeda was planning a range of horrific attacks to mark the end of the
last millennium, the agencies performed well; a number of bomb attacks on
embassies in the Middle East were averted.
The commission proposed that a DNI, crudely analogous to the head of the
armed forces, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, should be hired to
oversee all the agencies and correct what had gone wrong. To lend weight to
his admonishments, the DNI was to be given charge of the agencies' combined
$40 billion budget, though most of that is controlled by the Pentagon. The
DNI would be just what the agencies had not been: vigilant, imaginative and
single-minded.
Devilment in the details
Nobody really disputes the idea that America's intelligence system, which
was designed in 1947, was out of date, disorganised and had no recognisable
chief. Its 15 squabbling baronies, which were set up to deal with
conventional enemies, display precious little cohesion (with the Pentagon
particularly protective of the agencies it controls). It was thus not
surprising that the 9/11 commissioners fastened on the idea of appointing an
overall chief to bring the muddle together. The question is whether this new
job, without any other structural reform, can actually improve the system.
By the time the commission delivered its recommendations, some of the more
useful ones were almost three years out of date. The commission's period
under investigation ended on September 11th 2001; the commission's report
was delivered 34 months later. In the intervening time, the war on terror
was launched and changes were made. First, under the Patriot Act, many of
the inter-agency firewalls protecting Americans' civil liberties were broken
down. FBI and other agents were obliged to share intelligence on terrorists
within and among the agencies. The director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, was
required to attend the president's daily intelligence briefing, given by the
director of central intelligence (DCI).
Huge resources were shifted to counter-terrorism. In January 2003, a
multi-agency counter-terrorism think-tank, the Terrorist Threat Integration
Centre, was formed inside the CIA's headquarters. The centre produces a
daily briefing on terrorist threats and counter-terrorism operations, which
the president hears after the DCI's.
When the 9/11 Commission added its own recommendations to the pile, they
were accepted rapidly. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate,
endorsed the report almost before he could have read it. Bereaved relatives
of the hijackers' victims rallied behind its recommendations. Reluctantly,
and to Mr Rumsfeld's great annoyance, Mr Bush endorsed it too.
To general surprise, Mr Bush after his re-election made good on that
endorsement, signing into law the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism
Prevention Act. It was modelled on the commission's recommendations, with a
few modifications insisted on by pals of Mr Rumsfeld. For example, in
keeping with the commission's demands, the act authorises the DNI to "design
and deliver" a unified intelligence budget. But it also says that the
authority of the cabinet secretaries should be upheld.
This has created confusion over who will, in fact, control the
purse-strings. To extricate the defence intelligence budgets from the wider
defence budget could take several years and a staff of several hundred
experts. It might not even be desirable. America's generals almost always
get first dibs on the intelligence assets, such as spy satellites, that they
share with civilian agencies, and in wartime they always do. The law
similarly gives the DNI control over the agencies' personnel, but here too
there is devilment in the detail: in practice, the DNI can veto the
appointment of some second-tier officials, but he will not be able to sack
agency chiefs.
To shore up the DNI's putative powers, Mr Bush has suggested that Mr
Negroponte, not Mr Goss, will deliver his morning intelligence briefing. In
theory, this should allow Mr Goss to concentrate on managing the CIA. In
practice, the briefing is likely still to be prepared by the CIA and Mr Goss
will still be required to attend the meetings, with Mr Negroponte appearing
as an over-qualified court herald. Alternatively, he too could spend half
his working day drafting the briefing. He will exert even less control over
what goes into the counter-terrorism briefing that follows it, because
although the DNI will be in overall charge of the NCTC, the agency chiefs
retain control of their operations. Yet Mr Negroponte is to be held
accountable for their mistakes.
These uncertainties have fuelled a noisy and ill-tempered debate about the
reforms in a country whose spies have traditionally excited fierce passions,
and where national security is a national obsession. Left-wingers loathe the
CIA, in particular, for its cold-war habit of plotting to murder left-wing
leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Fidel Castro of Cuba. On the
right, the CIA is often considered a nest of liberals, bureaucratic and
broken beyond repair, whose salvageable assets should be handed over to the
Pentagon. Some hawks justify the policy of pre-emption on the ground that
the agencies cannot be trusted to give warning of imminent threats. And, of
course, moderate opponents of all the above tend to take the opposite view.
A cornucopia of incompetence
Such passions lie behind the unerring certainty with which America's
politicians and pundits speak of a world that remains, after all, secret.
For many right-wingers, the DNI office will prove disastrous, adding an
unwanted layer of bureaucracy to an already constipated system. At worst, it
will go the way of the Office of Homeland Security, which was created after
the September 11th attacks with a mandate to co-ordinate agencies such as
customs and the coast guard, but which has since proved toothless and
wasteful. Others note the few factors in Mr Negroponte's favour. His chosen
deputy, Lieut-General Michael Hayden, is a well-respected former head of the
NSA. Above all, Mr Negroponte will have daily access to a president who
holds him in high regard.
The truth is, no one knows how the reforms will proceed. Mr Negroponte may
gain a modicum of control over the agencies. At best, he may ensure that the
information channels opened within and between the agencies after the hijack
attacks stay open. Yet, on his own at least, he will not be able to fix the
agencies' most grievous problems, highlighted by their performance on Iraq.
Last year's Senate report into the Iraq debacle found America's spies-and
especially the CIA-negligent and incompetent at every stage of the
intelligence-collection and analysis process. The CIA had not a single agent
in Iraq after the UN's weapons inspectors were expelled in 1998. They had no
fresh intelligence to claim, as they did, that Iraq had chemical and
biological weapons. Their claim that Iraq was "reconstituting its nuclear
programme" was based on the country's import of some aluminium tubes that
could have been used for other purposes, and was fiercely contested by most
experts across the agencies. They did not, at least, suggest that Iraq was
in cahoots with al-Qaeda, although members of the government, notably Dick
Cheney, the vice-president, did so often.
The key to the agencies' misapprehensions, the committee found, was a
predilection to "group-think". In other words, they failed to re-examine
received truths-for example, the historical fact that Iraq had prohibited
weapons. This was made manifest in numerous ways. The CIA's analysis was
seldom double-checked; detection of dual-purpose materials, that might
possibly be used in weapon programmes, was routinely taken as proof that
such programmes existed; and ambiguous scraps of intelligence were compiled
to reach an unambiguous conclusion, a process known as "layering". These
problems, said the report, stemmed "from a broken corporate culture and poor
management, and will not be solved by additional funding and personnel."
The spies' friends (and Mr Bush's enemies) rebut this. On chemical and
biological weapons, they say, the agencies were not all that wrong-the
report acknowledged that Iraq had retained the technology to rebuild its
stockpiles-and, moreover, no other western intelligence service thought
differently. On Iraq's nuclear programme, they say, the government was to
blame: under intense pressure to provide the case for a war that Mr Bush had
already decided to fight, doubters were muffled and caveats were cut.
Another defence is that intelligence, whether human or, far more commonly,
electronic, rarely yields the smoking-gun proofs that policymakers may wish
for. It is an accumulation of indicators, contradictory and unreliable,
which intelligence analysts turn into an estimation of a hidden reality-or,
even more precariously, use to predict the future. Intelligence is
inherently faulty. True: but why then did Mr Tenet-in a phrase quoted by Bob
Woodward, which Mr Tenet has not disputed-describe the case for Iraq having
banned weapons as "a slam-dunk"?
Mr Negroponte's uses
Despite all the recommendations, the rot may be hard to stop. After a decade
of cuts-the CIA's budget was chopped by 23% under Bill Clinton-the agencies
are indeed getting more money and more spies. This year, the CIA will
graduate its biggest-ever class of case-officers. With only around 1,200
stationed overseas, more case-officers are needed, but only if they are
properly equipped for the latest challenges. Around half of all the CIA's
case-officers are in Baghdad. But with only a handful of them fluent in
Arabic, they are mostly confined to the green zone, condemned to interview
Iraqi interpreters and watch endless episodes of "Sex and the City" on DVD.
Further organisational reform would not eliminate the problem. America's
spies do not necessarily need shifting; a good few need sacking. Mr
Negroponte is in too lofty and exposed a seat to manage such a programme.
But if he can shoulder some of the DCI's more onerous duties, including the
president's briefing and the intelligence budget, he might free a dynamic
CIA director to wield the axe for him. There is no time to waste. In a
precarious world, the full range of American intelligence and
intelligence-gathering on, for example, China's military build-up and Iran's
nuclear ambitions needs urgent re-evaluating. But that dynamic director may
not be Mr Goss, who sounds awfully tired.
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