You know something has gone wrong when products of the intelligence community constitute the centerpiece of a major national security decision. With the exception of specific warnings of imminent danger to U.S. security or vital national interests (i.e., Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962), intelligence should serve as only one of several essential inputs to the policy-maker.1 These include cultural, economic, and political factors, estimates of foreign leadership motivations, constraints and intentions, and sensible evaluations of our own true interests, as well as those of our traditional partners in each region of the world. The overwhelming use of U.S. intelligence products to justify the U.S. military intervention in Iraq in 2003 has stimulated widespread discussion of the appropriate role of the intelligence community in the formulation of U.S. national security policy. Apart from the vital "WARNING" function, where does intelligence fit into the U.S. national security process?
The Primary Role of the Intelligence Community: Bringing Order out of Information Chaos
The CIA absorbed the clandestine operation of the Second World War Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and established a super Directorate of Intelligence designed to digest, synthesize, and analyze for national security policymakers the extraordinary volumes of data arriving from many classified and unclassified sources around the world.
Wearing his DCI hat, the head of the CIA was given responsibility for coordinating the work of intelligence departments and units in fifteen government agencies. The most important of these are in the departments of State, Defense, and Justice. Two of the largest organizations in the community in terms of personnel and budget are the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The former deals with information captured from the airways, or "signals intelligence." The latter operates the worldwide system of satellites that transmit high-resolution photographic information in real time. The amount of raw intelligence harvested from clandestine sources, both technical and human, is vast. But an even greater volume of intelligence is obtained openly from reporting by Foreign Service officers at American embassies, foreign government documents and declarations, and foreign media.
Because of the sheer volume of data that arrives in Washington daily, the professional intelligence analysts in the various agencies bear the heavy responsibility for providing concise summaries and plausible conclusions based on the most reliable reports, as well as their own expertise in the countries, regions, and functional sectors that they cover. This process continues on a daily basis, with national security policy officials receiving tailored packages based on their respective areas or sectors of responsibility, from the president on down to country desk officers. In virtually all cases, the professionals who prepare the summaries with accompanying analyses are highly knowledgeable about and have extensive experience with the areas they cover. They usually know relevant languages and have strong groundings in foreign cultures, politics, and economic systems. Their mandate is to "tell it like it is" without any policy bias. To make sure that policy bias does not infiltrate the process, there is an informal system of "competitive analysis." Analysts in the CIAs Directorate of Intelligence (DDI), the State Departments Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), and the militarys Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) work from essentially the same raw data in support of their respective policy levels. The fact that they see one anothers work and meet regularly usually acts as a check on the infiltration of policy bias.
National Intelligence Estimates Bring In-Depth Expertise to Bear on High-priority Issues
The intelligence community deals with these weightier issues through the mechanism of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). All of the intelligence components are invited to participate and contribute draft sections of the final document under the coordination of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). This small body of veteran analysts and operatives from a variety of agencies and disciplines serves as the community-wide coordinating arm for the director of Central Intelligence. The top officials in the NIC are called National Intelligence officers (NIOs) for Asia, Africa, Latin America, nonproliferation, terrorism, and so on.
Whenever a decision is taken to prepare an NIE, the NIO for the region or sector concerned is almost always assigned to be the coordinator of the process. The NIO establishes the terms of reference and negotiates the division of labor for the preparation of the different sections. In the hypothetical case of an NIE about Iran, the CIA would prepare the section on Irans support for terrorism and clandestine political operations in the Middle East; State/INR might prepare the section on Irans political dynamics; the DIA might put together a document on Irans nuclear ambitions.
The Intelligence Process Is Not Immune to Tampering from on High
The ability of the community to resist policy level pressure varies from agency to agency. In the State Department, the secretary and approximately thirty other senior officials have a tradition of valuing the independent analysis of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. In State there is virtually no separation between the analysts and the policymakers due in large part to INRs small size. In other agencies, especially DIA and CIA, analysis must pass through several layers before it emerges at the policy level. The higher the level in these agencies, the greater the danger that the work of the originating analyst will be nuanced to conform to the prevailing political winds. When the U.S. presidency applies pressure in search of justification for an emerging high-profile national security policy, it is virtually impossible for the DCI and his senior colleagues to resist.
A typical example of intelligence manipulation took place in 1984 when President Reagans DCI, William Casey, ordered the preparation of an NIE on Mexico. The exercise was launched during the height of the cold war against a backdrop of growing instability in Central America. Nicaragua was in the hands of the Marxist Sandinistas who clearly had pro-Cuban and pro-Soviet tendencies. In addition, there was convincing intelligence that the Nicaraguan government was providing arms to Marxist guerrillas seeking to destabilize the elected Christian Democratic government in neighboring Salvador. Because of this intelligence, President Jimmy Carter decided to reverse a long-standing arms embargo policy and provide weapons to the Salvadoran government a few months prior to his departing from the White House in January 1981.
Despite efforts by the Reagan administration to forge a political consensus around the dangers of Marxist subversion threatening regimes in Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, there was considerable skepticism among Democrats in Congress. They saw the main problem as repression and human rights violations committed against majority peasant populations by military establishments linked to ruling land-owning oligarchs.
The key question to be addressed by the NIE concerned the ability of Mexico to resist Marxist destabilization spreading north from Nicaragua. If the Mexican domino could fall to the Marxists, the American frontier would be menaced directly. A senior CIA veteran analyst was called back from retirement to coordinate the estimate. After several months of work, the finished draft was presented for review to the National Foreign Intelligence Board (NFIB), a body comprised of the heads of all the components of the community. CIA Director Casey chaired the review meeting. The draft reflected a unanimous conclusion that Mexicos stability and political conservatism would not be vulnerable to hypothetical Marxist destabilization coming from the south. Director Casey objected vehemently to this analysis and decided to have the estimate revised according to his own inclinations. The head of the CIAs Directorate of Intelligence (Gates?) caved in quickly, causing the NIE coordinator to quit in disgust and return to retirement. It was clear that the administration needed a rationale for a predetermined policy decision to increase politico-military pressure on Nicaragua against the will of a reluctant Democratic majority in Congress.
Intelligence in Support of Iraq Policy: How It Could Have Been Done Correctly
How the CIA succumbed to high-level pressure to declare "with certainty" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has been exhaustively described in the investigatory report of the Senate Intelligence Committee. This report was issued in July 2003 and has been extensively covered in the media.3
In a hypothetical flashback, let us look at how the intelligence communitys expertise about Iraq and the Middle East could have been used correctly and honestly to help inform President Bushs decisions on that region in the aftermath of September 11.
DCI George Tenets first mistake in his approach to the presidents deep interest in the Iraq problem after September 11 was to call for a National Intelligence Estimate focused exclusively on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. More appropriate would have been an NIE analyzing the threat posed by Iraq to U.S. security, to U.S. national interests in the Middle East, and to other countries in the region. The NIE would also have contained an updated analysis of the balance of power in the region. Such an NIE would have required a profound look at more than WMD. There would have been an analysis of the state of Iraqs economy and military capabilities after a decade of UN sanctions. There would also have been a study of Saddams relationships to international terrorism, as well as his political priorities at home. Such an NIE would have served as the basis for the preparation of options for the deliberation of the National Security Council and its associated organs. A broad new strategy for Iraq and the Middle East might have evolved. Such a strategy would probably have provided a far more solid rationale for regime change in Iraq than the issue of WMD. Once President Bush ordered forces deployed to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in the second half of 2002 to be ready to invade Iraq if he so decided, Director Tenet should have commissioned a second NIE focused realistically on the challenges that the United States would face in Iraq in conjunction with an invasion and subsequent occupation. That this was not done amounted to dereliction of duty on the DCIs part. Such a comprehensive study was done within the State Department, but the results were not taken into consideration by the Department of Defense (DOD). Coming from the intelligence community as a whole, such a study could not have been ignored within DOD as it prepared for a war of conquest and subsequent occupation.
Even for the limited NIE on Iraqs weapons of mass destruction, the responsible analysts at the base of the intelligence pyramid should have provided the only plausible analysis: "While Saddam has never abandoned his ambition to develop, manufacture, and deploy weapons of mass destruction, there is insufficient evidence to conclude that Iraq has reconstituted the stocks of chemical and biological agents destroyed during the first round of UN inspections prior to 1997." Certainly the secretary of states presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003 should have led to such a conclusion. Presumably based on the best intelligence available, the secretarys presentation was excellent on theatrics, but the material prepared for him by the CIA was very thin on substance.
Policymaker: Be Nice to Your Intelligence Analyst, and You Will Be Well Served
Originally published in American Foreign Policy Interests (National Committee on American Foreign Policy). Republished by permission of Dr. George D. Schwab, Director.