Spies and bureaucrats: getting intel right

Public Interest, Spring, 2005 by Thomas G. Mahnken

THE American intelligence community has suffered two blows to its credibility in the past three and a half years. First, intelligence agencies failed to detect al Qaeda's terrorist plans for September 11, 2001. Then, estimates of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs proved to be wildly off the mark. These failures have damaged decision makers' trust in the intelligence community. Faulty intelligence on Iraq has also hurt American credibility abroad, making it more difficult for the Bush administration to speak with authority regarding North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, at least before North Korea made its startling announcement about having the bomb. Such intelligence failures have justifiably prompted investigations of the performance of intelligence organizations and calls for reform. They have also exposed the Bush administration to both domestic and international criticism--in the case of September 11, for not acting on poor intelligence, and, in the case of Iraq, for acting on poor intelligence.

While the two failures differ in a number of respects, both are evidence of shortfalls in how our intelligence organizations collect and analyze information. The problem is less one of bureaucratic design than of institutional culture. Redressing these deficiencies, as opposed to the organizational reshuffling beloved by Washington politicians, must be a central thrust of any meaningful program of intelligence reform.

A tale of two failures

There is a joke told among military intelligence officers, often with some bitterness, that when things go wrong it is labeled an "intelligence failure," but when they go right it is called a "military success." The implication is that while intelligence plays an important role in the formulation of national security policy, its role comes to light only when there is a catastrophe. Rightly or wrongly, failures form the signposts of the history of intelligence, from Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, to the failure to predict--or even initially to detect--China's entry into the Korean War, to the overestimation (and subsequent underestimation) of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile force, to the inability to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the failure to foresee India and Pakistan's 1998 nuclear tests.

Even against such a backdrop, the American intelligence community's recent track record hardly inspires confidence. It is true that intelligence agencies have achieved several victories, such as gathering the evidence that forced Muammar Qaddafi to come clean regarding Libya's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and the information that allowed authorities to dismantle Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan's nuclear smuggling ring. Doubtless they have had other successes that will only emerge from the shadows over coming decades. Still, these pale in comparison with the failure to warn of the September 11 terrorist attacks and the gross mischaracterization of Iraq's WMD programs.

While there is much we still do not know about the performance of the intelligence community in these cases, there is much that we do know now. The release of the report of the joint congressional inquiry into the September 11 terrorist attacks and the 9/11 Commission Report provide extensive information on what American intelligence agencies did and did not know about al Qaeda. Similarly, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, the Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (the Duelfer Report), and the British government's Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, chaired by Lord Butler of Brockwell (the Butler Report), provide insight into American and British intelligence on Iraqi WMD. (Another group, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, reported to the president at the end of March, 2005.) Together these studies make fascinating, if at times alarming, reading.

Off the radar screen

Of the two most recent intelligence embarrassments, the worst--the failure to warn of the September 11 attacks--was also the least surprising. The intelligence community's inability to foresee suicide aircraft attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon represented a classic case of intelligence services failing to provide a useful warning for politicians and policy makers. Scholars have spilled gallons of ink and felled forests examining past surprise attacks, such as the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor and the Egyptian strike on Israel at the beginning of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. But, in truth, it is impossible to eliminate the possibility of being surprised because of the difficulty of sifting accurate "signals" of an impending attack from the sea of inaccurate or irrelevant "noise." As Roberta Wohlstetter concluded nearly four decades ago in her classic study, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, the Japanese attack caught the United States unawares not because of the absence of indicators, but because of a plethora of contradictory and erroneous reports. Averting surprise becomes even more difficult when the attacker chooses an unexpected method of attack, as the Japanese did when they used carrier-based aircraft to strike the Hawaiian naval base.