Analyze this: inside the one spy agency that got pre-war intelligence on Iraq—and much else—right

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Justin Rood

In August 1998, North Korea's military caught Western intelligence off-guard when it announced it had successfully tested a ballistic missile called the Taepo-Dong 1, considered a precursor to the kind of intercontinental weaponry that could threaten America's Pacific coast.

Conservatives in Congress condemned the CIA for being caught with its pants down. Brandishing a report by a committee headed by the once and future Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, which called rogue states with missiles the biggest threat to American security, these same conservatives pressed the Clinton administration to set aside money for a missile shield. In an effort to play catch-up, the CIA put a team of its best analysts on the case, sorting through satellite photos, tips from defectors, and electronic intercepts to determine how close North Korea was to possessing intercontinental missiles. Six months later, Director George Tenet delivered the CIA's conclusion in testimony before the Senate: Contrary to its own earlier analysis, the CIA now believed that North Korea would test an intercontinental missile in the "near future." In response to this new threat, the Clinton administration earmarked $6.6 billion over five years to develop a missile-defense system.

CIA analysts weren't the only ones poring over the data, however. Throughout the government, other intelligence agencies were looking at the same material, and one of these shops came to a markedly different conclusion. Over at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), analysts argued that the North Koreans were much farther off than the CIA believed. North Korea could potentially threaten the United States within a decade "only if it abandons its current moratorium on long-range missile flight testing," Tom Fingar, then-acting principal deputy, assistant secretary of INR, testified before Congress in February 2001. Although the White House and Congress accepted the CIA's analysis, INR ultimately proved to he correct. In the five years since Tenet's testimony, North Korea has yet to test an intercontinental ballistic missile.

This wasn't just a case of dumb luck for INR. Over the last decade, INR has frequently arrived at more prescient conclusions than the CIA and other intelligence agencies about the nature of threats to the United States. In 2001, when U.S. intelligence agents intercepted a shipment of aluminum robes hound for Iraq, CIA analysts concluded they were for uranium enrichment, proof that Saddam Hussein was building a secret nuclear-weapons program. The INR, working from the same body of intelligence, concluded (rightly, it turned out) that the tubes were more likely intended for conventional, not nuclear, weaponry.

Indeed, on the whole question of Iraq's nuclear capabilities, INR came consistently closer to the truth than did other agencies. The intelligence community's collective analysis on this issue was assembled by CIA Director Tenet in a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a document that contains the consensus of all the government's intelligence agencies: the CIA, FBI, NSA, and intelligence groups at State, Energy, and Defense, among others. The 2002 estimate included the crux of the case that the Bush administration would present to the American public and the world in arguing for war. And the document's conclusion--that Iraq was three to five years away from being capable of building nuclear weapons--convinced many Democrats and other skeptics that a war in Iraq might be justified. But when INR received a draft of the estimate, it balked, believing that other intelligence agencies had vastly overestimated the status and capability of Iraq's nuclear program. INR thought the whole report was flawed; rather than including minor objections to specific statements, it took its name off of the estimate and detailed its objections in one long endnote. Of course, when American soldiers and U.N. inspectors combed through Iraq in the wake of the U.S. military conquest, what they found--and didn't find--confirmed INR's suspicions. The rest of the intelligence community had gotten it wrong again.

INR hasn't always called it right. The agency joined the rest of the intelligence community in greatly overestimating Iraq's chemical and biological weapons capability. And there have been some matters which the CIA has gotten right and INR wrong. INR dissented when the CIA concluded that Pakistan was selling M-11 missiles to China in the 1990s, though it turned out that the sales actually were taking place. Still, INR's overall record has been impressive. Richard Clarke, a former counterterrorism advisor to three presidents and a former senior INR official, called INR "the intelligence-analysis organization with the best track record for accuracy."

In the wake of Congress' restructuring of the U.S. intelligence establishment, the new national intelligence czar faces a mountainous task: compelling the CINs cowed and moribund intelligence collectors to get out into the field, coordinating disparate and warring bureaucracies, and coping with an ever more shadowy and cunning terrorist threat. Perhaps the new czar's most critical job will be improving the performance of analysts at the nation's intelligence agencies--the people who look at the material, connect the dots; and decide what it means. Thankfully, INR provides a terrific model for how the analytic shops at different agencies should operate. The new czar need only learn its secrets: that its performance derives from its analysts' high quality and depth of experience, from their facility with foreign languages, from their human contacts within the regions they study, and, most importantly, from an institutional culture that does not just tolerate dissent--but actually encourages it.