Abstract
Abandoning National Intelligence Estimates would only worsen the CIA's existing woes.
In the wake of the fiasco over its pre-war Iraq reporting, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted a series of internal reviews. Such postmortems are standard fare for the intelligence community, but then-CIA Director George Tenet had special reasons for setting up a review panel in May 2003. A huge public controversy had erupted over the flawed October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and the question of whether intelligence had been politicized. Two months later, the review became even more salient following the acrimony over false intelligence inserted into President George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.
Apart from the issues of governance, the vital matter for America's future in an age of weapons proliferation was and is the question of the honesty and reliability of NIEs and other intelligence reports. NIEs are the highest level of U.S. intelligence reporting, representing the considered opinion of all U.S. agencies together. They are drafted by a body known as the National Intelligence Council, whose work became the focus of the review. In August 2005, the CIA declassified and released a version of a report produced by the review panel headed by retired Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Richard J. Kerr. The material appeared in the CIA in-house journal Studies in Intelligence. Rather than bolster confidence in future intelligence reporting, the Kerr panel reached some unsettling conclusions about the outlook for NIEs, counterproductively throwing into question the intelligence community's commitment to long-term intelligence analysis.
When Tenet first established the Kerr panel–comprised of Kerr, Thomas W. Wolfe, Rebecca Donegan, and Aris Pappas, all experienced intelligence officers–he gave it the limited task of compiling all of the disseminated intelligence on Iraq. In November 2003, Tenet expanded the panel's mandate to encompass examining whether the evidence on Iraq had actually supported the assertions of the Iraq NIE. The group examined 20 binders of documents and eventually compiled a 405-page report on the intelligence. It completed its second report, the so-called Tradecraft Review, in August 2004. The document the CIA released in August 2005 amounts to an overview of the two substantive reports.
The panel concluded that the “uneven performance” of U.S. intelligence “has raised significant questions concerning the condition of intelligence collection, analysis, and policy support.” It contrasts the NIE's mistaken conclusions on weapons with other intelligence reports' accurate predictions (based on even less evidence) of resistance to occupying U.S. forces after an invasion of Iraq. Overall, intelligence collection “had nothing like the richness, density, and detail that … [the CIA] became accustomed to having on Soviet issues during the Cold War,” and collection strategies “were too weak and unimaginative” to obtain such data. In addition, analysts were guilty of “uncritical acceptance of established positions and assumptions,” and the whole morass was exacerbated by poor quality control.
On the politicization issue, the Kerr report concedes that demands on intelligence in the months and weeks before the war were “numerous and intense.” The group could not bring itself to conclude whether politics influenced the making of the Iraq NIE, but it did break the Bush administration's chain of denial, noting that “some in the intelligence community and elsewhere hold the view that intense policy-maker demands in the run-up to the war constituted inappropriate pressure on intelligence analysts.” Finally, it contrasts performance on WMD with that on allegations of a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, noting that “the Intelligence Community remained firm in its assessment that no operational or collaborative relationship existed.” On WMD, where the views of the administration and intelligence analysts were congruent, the impact of pressure “may have been considered reinforcing.”
The larger issue embedded within the Kerr panel's findings was the utility of various types of intelligence reporting. The panel found that neither the careful, long-term analysis that produces NIEs, nor the oral or written spot reporting that contributes to intelligence products such as in the President's Daily Briefs, had served well on Iraq. The report notes, “Perhaps the most significant change [of the past 15 years] was the shift away from long-term, in-depth analysis in favor of more short-term products intended to provide direct support to policy makers.” The group sees this trend as weakening the analytic discipline and rigor that characterized reporting during the Cold War years, resulting in analyses that cover many separate aspects of a situation without synthesizing them into an overall picture. The drafting of NIEs traditionally has been at the center of this endeavor, but the Kerr report moves in the opposite direction, remarking that “the time may have come to reassess the value of NIEs and the process used to produce them.”
This conclusion is highly disturbing, considering that the CIA already has spent over a decade whittling away at the NIE process in an effort to become more “relevant” to policy makers. At a CIA conference in 1993, Joseph S. Nye, then-chairman of the National Intelligence Council, told the audience that providing leaders a way to bind their thinking was more important than producing estimates that were either God-like or trivial. John Helgerson, who would chair the council when the Iraq NIE was crafted (though he did not participate in that exercise), told the same convocation that being right versus supporting the policy maker was “a very profound issue” and indicated that accuracy might in fact be less important. Nye's successor, Christine Williams, moved the NIE drafters even further in the direction of short-term product. By 2002, these changes had been institutionalized and the result was the Iraq NIE.
The Kerr report correctly observes the consequences of what was done to the NIE process in its finding that the current process squanders the community's intellectual capital, but its prescription would only further eviscerate that process. Instead, the NIEs should be reestablished as the true flagship products of the community. In this respect, the recent reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community offers both opportunity and challenge. The National Intelligence Council has been moved from the CIA into the office of John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence (DNI). The law that created Negroponte's office also makes him responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the analysis.
“I may not know art, but I know what I like!”
Under the DNI, the National Intelligence Council will be freed from mundane CIA concerns, such as producing spot papers for its chief. But drafters of NIEs will be also divorced from the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, among the community's best repositories of intellectual capital. Moreover, the pressures for short-term analyses will continue as usual. The extent to which the DNI supports his analysts becomes crucial, not only to the reconstitution of the NIE process but to its very survival. The DNI needs to insulate the estimators from political pressures, refrain from substituting his own views for the council's, and work to preserve the relationship between the council and the CIA's intelligence directorate. Unfortunately, faced with a welter of demands–from fending off Pentagon encroachments on intelligence, to fixing the mess at the FBI, to reforming the U.S. clandestine service–Negroponte may be able to devote only limited attention to the NIE process.
If the Kerr report is any indication, the future of intelligence estimates is murky. But a step backward now would be deplorable. The United States does not need more biased NIEs, but it definitely cannot do without intelligence estimates. Without long-term, in-depth analysis there will be no truth to speak to power.