Like its counterpart, the office of Homeland
Security, the office of the Director of National
Intelligence (DNI) has been a colossal failure.
Both offices were created in the wake of 9/11
as part of the nervous and unnecessary overreaction
to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Hurricane
Katrina exposed the futility and feckless nature
of the office of Homeland Security. And now
the inspector general of DNI has confirmed the
ineptitude and mismanagement of the DNI.
The Intelligence Reform Act created the DNI
in December 2004 to centralize intelligence
production and end CIA’s dominance of
the intelligence production process within the
intelligence community. Centralized intelligence
production simply does not work and, in fact,
increases the opportunities for politicized
intelligence. When CIA director William Casey
wanted to politicize intelligence for President
Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, he appointed Robert
Gates to the key positions of deputy director
of intelligence and chairman of the National
Intelligence Council.
These positions allowed Gates to tailor all
CIA intelligence analysis, including the National
Intelligence Estimates, the daily briefings
for the president, and all current intelligence.
This is the only time in the CIA’s history
that one individual controlled these positions,
and it led directly to the politicization of
intelligence on the Soviet Union, Central America,
and Southwest Asia. Gates’s efforts led
the CIA to thoroughly miss the decline and fall
of the Soviet Union. Centralized intelligence
production free of debate and dissent also produced
the phony intelligence analysis that supported
the decision to go to war against Iraq in 2003.
The first intelligence tsar was a former ambassador,
John Negroponte, who covered up sensitive intelligence
in Central America in the 1980s and never displayed
a willingness to tell truth to power. Since
then, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama
have appointed retired naval admirals to be
directors of national intelligence, the so-called
intelligence tsar. Naval officers have rarely
distinguished themselves in long-term strategic
or geopolitical thinking, which are the main
problems confronting the CIA and the entire
analytic community.
The absence of an independent civilian counter
to the power of military intelligence not only
threatens civilian control over decisions to
use military power, but makes it more likely
that intelligence will be tailored to suit the
purposes of the Pentagon. The militarization
of the intelligence process has almost guaranteed
that diversity and competition in the analysis
of intelligence will be given short shrift.
President Harry Truman created the CIA in 1947
to make sure that no policy department, particularly
the Department of Defense, dominated the intelligence
process. None of these issues were debated in
the congress when retired naval admirals Mike
McConnell and Dennis Blair were named as intelligence
tsars.
The 9/11 Commission and Senators John McCain
(R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) bear major responsibility
for the creation of the DNI. They believed the
9/11 intelligence failure was due to organizational
and structural problems within the CIA and the
intelligence community, and ignored the problems
of accountability, bureaucratic cowardice, and
individual failure. The Commission concluded
that “no one could have anticipated using
airplanes as bombs” against targets in
New York and Washington.
However, there were at least three unclassified
studies in the 1990s that anticipated the weaponizing
of commercial aircraft. The first report was
prepared in 1993 for the Pentagon to investigate
the possibility of airplanes being used as bombs;
a year later, a disgruntled Federal Express
employee invaded the cockpit of a DC10 with
the intention of crashing it into a company
building.
The Commission claimed to favor a lean office
of national intelligence, with a small but powerful
staff. Four years later, we find a DNI sitting
atop a huge, lumbering, and bloated bureaucracy
that includes five deputy directors, three associate
directors, and no fewer than 19 assistant deputy
directors. The DNI budget is more than $1 billion
and the DNI management staff, for the most part,
comes from other intelligence agencies, thus
weakening the entire intelligence apparatus.
As a result, the intelligence community has
had to rely on independent contractors with
lucrative contracts, which has helped to drive
the overall intelligence budget to record levels.
The Pentagon actually manages the DNI, the
$55 billion intelligence budget, and most intelligence
personnel. The DNI has no real authority to
reform, let alone realign, the 16 agencies and
departments of the intelligence community; moreover,
it has made no attempt to create a corporate
analytic community. The DNI is powerless to
use the intelligence budgets and personnel of
the community to create an environment for genuine
reform. The undersecretary of defense for intelligence,
a retired three-star general, has veto power
over the ability of the DNI to transfer personnel
within the community, which makes it extremely
difficult to integrate the intelligence process.
The DNI has even failed to open up the analytic
community to the larger academic and think-tank
community outside the intelligence arena. In
such areas as ethnic politics and ethnic violence,
where the CIA lacks expertise in linguistic
and cultural studies, it is essential to gain
greater exposure to outside experts. There are
more linguists with the New York police department
than with the DNI and CIA. The CIA’s culture
is particularly insular and parochial and, as
a result, fails to take full advantage of outside
experts.
Both CIA and military cultures are driven by
a counterintelligence orientation, which puts
too much emphasis on security clearances, polygraph
tests, and the need-to-know. No one expects
the community to put sources and methods at
risk, but there needs to be a freer and more
open exchange of information to the people who
can offer the most substantive critiques. The
CIA community is extremely young and inexperienced,
another reason for drawing from the outside
community of experts.
Truth is elusive within the intelligence process,
and there is rarely a single answer to a controversial
question or problem that needs an input from
the intelligence community. A centralized system
worked for the Bush administration because Bush,
Cheney, and Rumsfeld never wanted tough-minded
intelligence analysis to inform foreign policy
decision-making. But Obama and Biden are more
open-minded and analytical.
All presidents and senior decision-makers deserve
a range of alternative analysis so that their
own ideas (and their exclusive information that
is rarely shared with the intelligence community)
can be tested by additional sources and assumptions,
particularly the contrarian ones. It is very
unlikely that an intelligence tsar, a militarized
intelligence community, or a Central Intelligence
Agency that has covered-up its recent analytical
and operational failures will protect the contrarians.
Melvin A. Goodman,a regular contributor
to The Public Record, is senior fellow at the
Center for International Policy and adjunct
professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.
He spent more than 42 years in the U.S. Army,
the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department
of Defense. His most recent book is “Failure
of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the
CIA.”
Copyright 2009 The Public
Record
