Abstract
On May 7, at the peak of the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, U.S. B-2 bombers hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists, injuring 20 staff members, and wrecking the embassy. The Chinese government charged that the bombing was intentional.
On June 17, following an interagency investigation, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas R. Pickering explained in a hand-wringing briefing to the Chinese leadership in Beijing that the bombing had been a “terrible mistake” resulting from a series of “tragic errors.”
How could such a gaffe have occurred, considering, in Pickering's words, “President Clinton's strong personal commitment to strengthening the relationship between the United States and China”?
Why, Pickering asked, would the United States have bombed the embassy, an act that “not only intensified international criticism of the NATO bombing campaign, [but] also had negative effects on our diplomatic efforts, and affected in a deeply negative fashion Chinese attitudes and policies toward our effort in Yugoslavia” when that support was strongly needed?
While ruling out any deliberate targeting or suggestion of a “rogue” element in U.S. intelligence, Pickering painted a picture of incredible ineptitude leading to the attack–the use of out-of-date maps, the persistent failure to update databases, and the failure to run targeting information through reasonable cross-checks.
Pickering said, for example, that “despite the fact that U.S. officials had visited the embassy on a number of occasions in recent years, the new location had never been entered into intelligence or military data bases.”
Systemic failure
Assuming that Pickering's summary of how the United States came to bomb the embassy of the world's most populous nation was accurate, it was a jarring wake-up call. The bombing was simply one more destructive failure in a long string of U.S. intelligence failures.
And it again offered proof that the U.S. intelligence system is badly in need of reform. If the bombing had been an isolated incident, it could possibly have been considered merely a “mistake.” But it was not an isolated incident. It was the product of the systemic error that characterizes U.S. intelligence.
The U.S. intelligence system has not been seriously updated since the end of the Cold War. Its current budget–$29 billion–and its modes of operation still reflect the life-or-death view of international relations that characterized a phase of history that ended with the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Protected by secrecy, this system has indulged itself in methods that are inept, counterproductive, and immoral. Protected by ideology, it has engaged in operations that have seriously disrupted international relations, violated international law, and unnecessarily injured millions of people.
Between 1949 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, no cost was deemed too high and no deed too brutal when “national survival” could be cited as the justification.
Paramilitary operations, election rigging, misinformation, massive electronic eavesdropping, and aiding and abetting a host of the world's most undesirable characters were routinely engaged in, despite the fact that these actions systematically eroded the reputation of the United States around the world and the credibility of democracy at home.
We now know that our intelligence system served us badly even during the Cold War by providing unreliable intelligence on the Soviet Union and other areas of Cold War conflict. It also frequently succumbed to political pressure to “cook the books.”
By radically overestimating Soviet military strength and economic capacity, U.S. intelligence goaded the United States to vastly increase its military budget, resulting in a massive national debt.
And in the end, the intelligence community failed to predict the fall of communism and the break up of the Soviet empire, despite the fact that between 60 and 70 percent of U.S. intelligence assets were targeted on the Soviet Union.
Even worse, U.S. intelligence wreaked havoc around the world, supporting dictatorships, promoting the international narcotics trade, and repeatedly violating laws, foreign and domestic. In 1954, for example, the United States overthrew Guatemala's democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz through paramilitary action and supported a series of brutal dictatorships over a 40-year period.
Equally unjustified were the overthrow of the government in Iran, the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, and CIA operations in Laos, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central America in which the U.S. government made common cause with drug lords in return for their “help” against a variety of Cold War enemies.
Still other covert actions in the last 40 years indicate just how deeply enmeshed in skullduggery U.S. intelligence became–assassination plots in Cuba, the Congo, and the Dominican Republic; the alliance between death squads and the CIA in Honduras; the training of terrorists in Afghanistan, who eventually targeted not only Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, but U.S. installations in the Persian Gulf and North Africa; the support of Mobutu in Zaire; the subversion of the Allende government in Chile; support of the contras in Nicaragua; and, most recently, the compromising of the U.N. Special Commission in Iraq by CIA operatives.
Building political will
While reform is in order, there is little or no will to get it done. Far from it. “The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century,” a report issued in April 1996 by the House Intelligence Committee, noted that, “Intelligence, unlike other federal programs, has no natural constituency; therefore, Congress plays a vital role in building public support.”
That's intriguing. If the role of Congress is advocacy, as the committee suggested, then reform is hardly possible. To compensate for the lack of governmental will, the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based foreign affairs institute with which I am connected, has held seminars at the Senate Office Building and conducted research for the last four years.
The center's forthcoming book, National Insecurity: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War, summarizes these efforts. The authors, drawn from the Foreign Service, the Office of Management and Budget, the Congress, the National Security Archives, international law, academe, and investigative journalism, look at the intelligence community and suggest reforms.
First, the United States must be clear as to what intelligence is for. The primary role of intelligence is to supply the president and Congress with information about possible strategic threats to the United States.
Intelligence is needed on terrorism, the possible proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and on states that seem to present an actual rather than an imagined threat. This suggests a limited number of intelligence targets, not the comprehensive spread of intelligence over the entire world that characterized the Cold War era. A few specifics:
▪ Today espionage should only be exercised when reliable, open information cannot be secured on topics having direct bearing on national security.
Covert action should only be resorted to when the security of the United States is directly threatened, when statecraft can be shown not to work, and when the possible ill effects of the action do not outweigh its possible benefits. The United States simply can no longer tolerate an open license to practice espionage or covert action without the most stringent review.
Reining in espionage and covert action also requires the proper administrative arrangements within the CIA itself. Current efforts to create a separate organization for espionage within the CIA should stop, lest the new organization be given a free hand.
Meanwhile, espionage and intelligence gathering should be detached from analysis, so that one can no longer corrupt the other. Efforts to enlist journalists, the clergy, and Peace Corps volunteers as collectors of intelligence should also cease.
▪ Intelligence should become the servant of policy, not its initiator. The State Department, not the CIA, should be the premier agent of American foreign policy. Intelligence collection should rely predominantly on open sources.
Meanwhile, CIA personnel in the field, who frequently work at cross purposes with the diplomatic service, should be withdrawn altogether from friendly states as well as from many neutral states, except for those men and women needed to maintain liaison with other intelligence services.
▪ One of the reasons the intelligence community has escaped surveillance and public criticism is that it has shrouded itself in secrecy.
To balance openness and the requirements of secrecy, there should be the presumption of openness, a public-interest balancing test for secrecy, and the capacity for outside review, with Congress setting specific limits on the intelligence community's ability to conceal information.
Declassification should be a continuing process, not an occasional activity. Specifically, Congress should establish a clear and expeditious process for the declassification of documents of public concern, and adequate funds should be provided to Freedom of Information Act offices so that they can do their work.
In addition, legislation and administrative procedures should be strengthened to protect U.S. citizens from infringements of their privacy rights by U.S. intelligence organizations.
▪ The recent proposal by President Clinton that the CIA become a player in international narcotics enforcement flies in the face of its dismal 40-year record of drug dealing. The CIA should get out of the drug business and its liaison with criminal organizations should be curtailed.
Similarly, the intelligence community, whatever inducements it may receive from U.S. corporations, should refrain from economic espionage. This is simply an improper use of intelligence resources.
▪ While the public is preoccupied by the CIA, the lion's share of the intelligence budget is taken up by agencies concerned with electronic intelligence, such as the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency.
Their huge budgets have been justified not on the basis of national security needs and cost-benefit analyses. Rather, their budgets are more closely related to the fact that they are controlled by the Defense Department, and by the fact that supervising committees in Congress are compromised by contractors who spread around a lot of campaign money to congressmen–or jobs in their districts.
There also has been a revolving door arrangement between contractors, intelligence agencies, and congressional committees. Such compromising relations should be prevented by legislation and administrative practice.
▪ The present administrative situation is a nightmare. Although the director of central intelligence has statutory responsibility for foreign intelligence and the authority to participate fully in the preparation of the intelligence budget, he lacks the ability to impose his priorities on most of the agencies theoretically under him.
The directors of the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency should be hired in peacetime by the director of central intelligence, not by the secretary of defense.
▪ The input of agencies that use intelligence, rather than bureaucratic leverage, should determine the allocation of intelligence resources and tasks.
The budget process is the focal point of policy. But the budget process for intelligence has been overwhelmed by detail and unable to deal with the basic issues. For openers, a top-down review of requirements must replace the incremental budgeting approach used in past years.
If the minimal reforms suggested in National Insecurity are carried out, a savings of $4.1 to $5.7 billion a year is possible. That would amount to a reduction of 15 to 20 percent of the present intelligence budget.
Now is the time
The coming presidential election offers the best possible opportunity for reform. We need a president committed to intelligence reform and a courageous, independent director of central intelligence, not one whose primary loyalty is to the bureaucracies he heads.
Meanwhile, Congress must tighten its legal provisions about its right to know and about the timeliness of reports to Congress. It must take a close look at various laws and procedures, such as the Classified Information Procedures Act, which enable the agencies to block legitimate inquiry into their activities.
Finally, both the president and Congress must radically increase their surveillance of intelligence, if the United States is to have a system that is both effective and reflective of its democratic values.
If such changes are made, the capacities developed by the intelligence community in the last 50 years need not be lost. While continuing to protect U.S. security, U.S. intelligence resources can be pooled with the resources of other countries to fight international terrorism.
U.S. intelligence resources also hold possibilities for the monitoring of international agreements through the United Nations–if such arrangements are not used to gain clandestine information for the United States. U.S. intelligence technology also can be put at the disposal of specialized U.N. agencies like the World Meteorological Organization, or international and national scientific organizations.
We do not know what kind of world we will have 10, 50, or a hundred years from now. But as the world's leading military and economic power, the United States has the option of designing its institutions and setting standards that can help structure the future.
By reforming its intelligence system and by cutting down on its disruptive operations, the United States can work to enhance a world that differs materially from the violence-prone century from which we are about to emerge.