Abstract
Turf wars and bad analysis are just two likely products of the disastrous new intelligence reform.
Gen. William Odom, former head of the code-breaking National Security Agency, responded to the passage of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 by speculating that the alliance of families of victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks may one day feel swindled at the paltry results of their Herculean efforts to push the Bush administration to reform the U.S. intelligence community.
Odom may be right. Or it may be worse. At the outset of the second George W. Bush administration, with the country involved in two wars and tempted to move against other nations as well, the U.S. intelligence system, critical to the country's safety in so many ways, has been plunged into a dark alley from which the exit is by no means apparent. Over the past months, the problems of U.S. intelligence have evolved in ways that may add to the trouble, not resolve it.
First there is the centerpiece of the reforms, the new post of national intelligence director, which is endowed–by law–with ambiguous powers. The model favored by the 9/11 Commission and the victims' families provided for a national director with broad powers to control U.S. intelligence–including budgeting and spending the money for both the CIA and the several major intelligence agencies that belong to the Pentagon. That “strong” national director would also have controlled appointments to the directorships of the various agencies and set the direction for intelligence collection and analysis across the board, on the presumption that money plus people and priorities meant power.
This has been the ideal since the creation of the CIA in 1947; the head of that agency, the director of central intelligence (DCI), was supposed to have functioned as the leader of the intelligence community. For five decades the central management issue in U.S. intelligence has been the continued inadequacy of the DCI's capability to exercise this role. The 9/11 Commission's recommendation for a new, single, overall director was rooted in the perception that the DCI had never attained true control over the intelligence community.
Bush attempted to avoid the national director formula advanced by the 9/11 Commission. Last August, Bush issued an executive order reaffirming the mandate of the DCI. That order, now superceded by the legislation Bush signed into law in December 2004, went further than the new arrangement in some respects. It gave the DCI the power to develop, determine, and present the intelligence budget “with the advice of the heads of departments or agencies.” Under the 2004 act, the national director will present budget proposals given to him by the agencies; his control function is limited to furnishing guidance based on the president's priorities.
Moreover, the DCI was to “participate” with the defense secretary in developing the Pentagon intelligence budget, an authority now wholly lacking. The DCI had the authority to reprogram funds, but the new law restricts the new director to approving transfers initiated by others–and 80 percent of intelligence funds are spent by the defense secretary. In fact, the language in the act merely obliges the secretary to “consult” with the national director before reprogramming money and says nothing of the provision that permitted the DCI to “monitor” those expenditures.
As for appointments, in the law the only nominations the national director will control will be those of his deputy and the director of the CIA. He is to “concur” with all the other senior intelligence community appointments, but that adds up to a much more limited role, without the right of initiation.
The DCI has overseen the Counterterrorism Center, which combined the functions of analysis and operations where terrorism matters were concerned. But the National Counterterrorism Center, set up by law under the national intelligence director, is specifically prohibited from carrying out field activities.
Of course the Pentagon stands at the center of almost all of this. Despite Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's announced support for intelligence reform during debate over the act, Pentagon allies in Congress worked to weaken the proposed legislation. Subordinate officials like Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone were hardly effusive in their support, and the eleventh-hour intervention of House Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter gutted much of what authority remained for the new director.
Congressman Hunter's stated concern, that the law not interfere with military commanders at war, or reduce the supply of intelligence to troops in the field, may prove to be the stalking horse for a military takeover of central intelligence.
The CIA is on the horns of a dilemma–director Porter Goss wants to unleash the agency but is trapped in the box of limited capability. By firing senior CIA officials, he has already made a mess.
The Pentagon intelligence budgets are grouped in two baskets, the Joint Military Intelligence Program and the Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities Program, which have long ensured that the Pentagon's needs are met. But these Pentagon programs exist in a milieu in which the distinctions traditionally made between “national” intelligence and the “tactical” variety have steadily eroded.
The Pentagon already controls the vast bulk of intelligence collection mechanisms (electronic monitors, signals interceptors, photographic and other satellites, and the agency for interpreting geospatial information), and the department has also replicated the CIA's espionage capability with its Defense HUMINT (Human Intelligence) Service and its Special Operations Forces, which function similar to CIA covert action elements. Then, in the midst of all the debate on intelligence reforms, late last November Bush signed an order giving the government 90 days to decide whether Special Forces should have a greater role in paramilitary operations previously assigned to the CIA.
At the other end of the spectrum, both the Department of Homeland Security, whose intelligence efforts have thus far slipped and stumbled, and the FBI, which for more than a decade has been sending tentacles out into the foreign intelligence field, will continue to nibble at the CIA's heels.
The CIA itself is on the horns of a dilemma. Its new director, Porter Goss, is determined to unleash the agency. Convinced it did not pursue terrorists aggressively enough under George Tenet, Goss has waded through Langley sweeping out the cadre of senior professionals who supposedly stood in the way of “forward-leaning” operations. He has taken some actions so far–principally the recreation of the Directorate of Support, which used to do for the CIA's spies the types of things “Q” does for James Bond–that are clearly intended to underpin a newly energized effort.
Goss can be expected to fight hard against advances from every direction, but he is trapped in the box of limited capability. As chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Goss (and others elsewhere) previously maintained that it would take the agency years to develop a robust clandestine service. Bush recently sharpened that problem with another order–that the CIA should recruit massive numbers of new operators and analysts within a short space of time. Under the circumstances, it seems inevitable the CIA will have to accept Pentagon “help.” Only the Pentagon could temporarily assign extra people to the CIA to cover the agency while it recruits this new cadre. Defense also has the largest group of area experts and linguists, as well as a ready-made nucleus for a paramilitary capability (at least potentially clandestine) in its Special Operations Command. All the while, Rumsfeld's agency would be making inroads into traditional CIA roles and missions.
Meanwhile, DCI Goss and the crowd of Capitol Hill enforcers he imported from his former post as intelligence chair are essentially amateurs at the real game. Though Goss and some of the others have had intelligence experience in the past, for years they have functioned as overseers, not actual managers, and the mess Goss created by firing senior CIA officials shows that in high relief. Rank-and-file intelligence officers, already worried that the Bush White House considers them more of an enemy than Al Qaeda, see the Goss housecleaning as a Bush-inspired purge. That is not likely to call forth their best efforts. CIA morale is already low because of charges of CIA failures with 9/11 and the controversy over CIA reporting on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Stressed by limited resources to cope with the extremely high operational tempo required by the parallel struggles in Iraq and against terrorist groups, the CIA is not well positioned to resist encroachments. The state-of-the-art intelligence law may create a brave new world for spies, but not for the CIA.
One encroachment will occur immediately–the DCI's Counterterrorism Center will become the National Counterterrorism Center with narrower scope and authority. A similar DCI fusion center that handles proliferation issues will also become a “national” center, and the law gives the national intelligence director authority to create such additional centers as he deems appropriate. Therein lies the wedge for a whole new equivalent to the CIA.
The national director is charged with maintaining the flow and quality of intelligence, and the temptation will be to create a “center” at his own level each time some issue rises to national concern. Duplication is built into this system, and over time a CIA perceived as ineffective may be largely or wholly duplicated by a constellation of centers working for the national intelligence director. Nor is this entirely a CIA matter–as conflict over intelligence turf between the defense secretary and the national director intensifies, the director may conclude that the only way to preserve reporting sources independent of the Pentagon will be through such centers. Yet the centers will lack both the operational scope and the support structure available to their predecessors at the CIA. In short, this newfangled version of the CIA could be deformed at birth.
There are other problems resulting from the Intelligence Reform Act's requirement that the national director ensure quality intelligence by enforcing possibly flawed practices. One bit of conventional wisdom is that so-called alternative analysis enhances the accuracy of intelligence reporting. The new law demands that the national intelligence director set up a process and assign some individual or entity to ensure this kind of competitive reporting is performed in analyses. But the validity of the current fascination with alternative analysis, or “red teaming,” or any other buzzwords that apply, is not at all clear. Methodologies associated with these techniques remain primitive and most often consist of the inductive process of starting from the desired conclusion, then cherry-picking data points to support it, rather than the conventional deductive approach of comprehensively gathering evidence and letting it speak for itself. The disastrous Team B report of 1976 was just such a competitive exercise, as was the Osama bin Laden-Saddam Hussein alliance report, an analytical review assembled by the Pentagon before the Iraq War.
“Are you sure? I, for one, really wanted to bomb that country.”
Regardless of who is appointed the national intelligence director (at this writing Bush has yet to nominate anyone, though a selection is imminent), the existing organizational framework plus the new legal one add up to a recipe for bureaucratic clan warfare.
The conventional wisdom is that a person of stature can bang heads together and make the intelligence system work better than it ever has before. But there is good reason to expect the conventional wisdom to be wildly off the mark. It is a fair proposition that the national intelligence director, rather than knocking heads together, will have to scramble just to keep his or her own head above water in the face of a Pentagon onslaught, and that is just for the short run. Bush's record with Rumsfeld inspires no confidence that the president will rein in his defense secretary on these matters. Over the longer term, shortcomings in the national intelligence director's authority will hamper the intelligence effort and force the system into actions positively detrimental to the national interest. The spies' new world may not be so brave after all.