Abstract
“Report to the President of the United States,” Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, March 31, 2005, 593 pages.
In February 2004, President George W. Bush established the “WMD Commission” in response to public demands for a deeper inquiry into the fiasco of pre-war intelligence. Bush widened the postmortem beyond Iraq to cover weapons of mass destruction in general. He ordered the investigation to be secret and told the commission to report by March 31, 2005, which it did.
Despite flaws, the report is essential reading for anyone seriously interested not only in the Iraq intelligence issue but also in broader questions of proliferation. In nearly 600 pages of history and prescription, the commission report delves into five major cases (Iraq, Libya, Al Qaeda, Iran, and North Korea) and provides nine chapters of analysis, with suggestions on intelligence organization and proliferation management. About 100 additional pages–the chapters “Iran and North Korea: Monitoring Development in Nuclear Capabilities” and “Covert Action”–are classified and therefore unavailable to the public.
The report presents 162 summary or detailed findings, including 74 recommendations–17 of which are secret. The text is supported by perhaps 2,000 footnotes, many maddeningly obscure. But the report is sourced, and that constitutes a strength, given that the investigation occurred entirely behind closed doors.
“An alternate theory holds that dinosaurs are extinct because they were overweight.”
Bush selected a strong group of commissioners, but they had very little knowledge of or experience with intelligence work. Of the 10 panel members, only retired Adm. William O. Studeman could be considered an intelligence professional. Commission co-chairman Laurence H. Silberman hovered on the periphery of the intelligence community during the Nixon-Ford and Reagan administrations and served as a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review; the other chairman, former Virginia Gov. Charles S. Robb, had no intelligence experience. For this job the commissioners had to be quick learners, and fortunately they benefited from an able professional staff. The final report is surprisingly good, given the commission's starting point.
On Iraq, the first chapter in Part One of the report (“Looking Back”), the commission's results are mixed. The report studiously avoids whether the Bush administration misused its intelligence and reaches the misleading conclusion that no politicization of the intelligence process ever occurred. (Interestingly, the commission's Libya investigation–no doubt conceived by the Bush White House as a helpful counterweight to Iraq, since it presents a success–actually shows that on an issue with less political salience, intelligence performance was better, even though the same limitations of evidence applied.) But the commission confirms–and puts beyond any denial–that U.S. intelligence was wrong about Iraqi weapons. In this respect it corroborates the earlier investigation of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and accepts the findings of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, upon which it relied for much data. One of the report's strong points is that, unlike the SSCI (which used a limited range of intelligence estimates and field reports), the commissioners brought together a wide array of source material. The part of the report dealing with Iraq that has received the most attention is the intelligence community's reliance on Iraqi defectors (particularly a source called “Curveball”), but perhaps this section's greatest contribution is its analysis of alleged Iraqi chemical weapons and unmanned aerial vehicles as weapon delivery systems (two purported threats that Bush cited prominently in his October 2002 speech making the case for war). Moreover, the WMD Commission's section on Iraq specifically concludes that electronic intelligence intercepts–a major attention-getter and key pillar of Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation on Iraqi weapons to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003–actually had little intelligence value.
“I can never find this ‘Waldo’! Those who continue to harbor him will pay the consequences.”
Throughout the report, evidence appears time and again of the central role that mere assumptions played in casting intelligence estimates. For example, when certain trucks that Baghdad once used for chemical decontamination were photographed in ammunition storage facilities, analysts simply assumed the facilities housed stockpiles of chemical weapons. There is also the notorious question of the supposed covert force of Iraqi long-range missiles, which turned out to be completely nonexistent. The report concedes that the Scud-variant missiles, unaccounted for due to poor Iraqi record keeping, were mistakenly assumed by the intelligence community to be an active, covert missile force (an error this author long ago pointed out using completely open sources). Students of intelligence are aware that assumptions are unavoidable, but observers of proliferation need to understand that the intelligence on that issue is profoundly dependent on fragile constructs and will continue to be so. The WMD Commission offers no hope of escaping from the assumptions trap, and its own report furnishes plentiful evidence of the phenomenon at work.
Consider, for instance, the Al Qaeda chapter, which consists entirely of a series of snapshots of what intelligence thought before the October 2001 Afghan campaign compared with what was found there afterward. In doing so, the commission overstates what was found, evaluating the Al Qaeda effort as having “fast-growing unconventional weapons capabilities and aggressive intentions.” The report acknowledges no such weapons–chemical, biological, or nuclear–or capabilities were found, and coalition forces encountered nothing more than scattered bits of lab equipment and some technical papers on computer hard drives. Clearly, Osama bin Laden was interested in such weapons, but there is little evidence of a coherent program, much less an aggressive one. Despite this, the commission tars U.S. intelligence with underestimating Al Qaeda's weapons capability–a judgment that smacks of post hoc justification for the war on terrorism.
The report concludes its treatment of Afghanistan with the apposite comment that “At the very least, analysts could have highlighted for policy makers the uncertain foundations of their key assessments.” Of course, this proposition can apply to every intelligence estimate, and it raises the question of how much interest the denizens of the White House, Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and elsewhere actually have in the arcana of intelligence judgments; the president (especially this president) and senior officials usually want the conclusions stripped down to bare essentials. The commissioners make a valid point, but reform requires policy makers to pay attention, and that is unlikely. None of the myriad recommendations in this report actually asks the president to pay attention to intelligence.
Part Two of the WMD Commission report, called “Looking Forward,” focuses entirely on organization and management. The commissioners make numerous recommendations, observations, and statements, some quite logical, others that should arouse public concern.
The authors propose two major organizational initiatives: regroup the means of intelligence collection and analysis around a set of “issue managers,” and create a new clandestine service at the CIA within the current Directorate of Operations (DO). As currently envisioned, issue managers would work for the new Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and their power would cross organizational boundaries. Both proposals stand to become highly contentious; a new clandestine service threatens to emasculate the DO. The proposal to establish issue managers will prove controversial and difficult to implement, since it would permit managers outside of the operating agencies to dictate collection and reporting requirements, to task analysts and covert officers, and to move these capabilities around at whim–regardless of formal lines of authority. Another proposal, one that is likely to be quickly implemented, is the formation of a National Nonprolifer-ation Center under the DNI, an entity that will absorb an existing CIA component, unfortunately increasing the negative entropy into which the CIA seems to be plunging.
While genuflecting to excessive classification–information sharing cannot really succeed in the present environment–the WMD Commission raises chilling possibilities for even greater secrecy. The authors advocate more use of secret wiretaps and “pen registers” (devices that record incoming and outgoing phone numbers). Alleging a “well-documented” plethora of damage to U.S. intelligence collection supposedly caused by media disclosures, the commissioners support coordinated leak investigations and focusing the DNI's inspector general on such investigations; paying more attention to making open information secret (while simultaneously proposing greater use of “open source” information for intelligence purposes); and starting a latter-day “Loose Lips Sink Ships” campaign. The commission discussed but could not close ranks on creating a “qualified privilege for reporters,” which could have restricted journalists' ability to protect their sources. Reporters, not leakers, could become targets of investigation, as is already happening in the Valerie Plame affair.
“Regrettably, and despite all of our efforts, we could not reach agreement on the details of such a proposal,” the report reads. But the public should be on notice that the idea might be gaining ground in Washington. It would be ironic if the legacy of a commission established to correct the flaws in U.S. intelligence capabilities would be to dampen the capabilities of a free press.