The prestigious Brookings Institution has joined
the ranks of various government and public institutions
to suggest reform steps for the Central Intelligence
Agency and the intelligence community (IC).
Unlike previous reform proposals, the Brookings
study manages to overlook the serious systemic
issues that face the world of intelligence analysis
and to propose a full slate of boilerplate steps.
The author of the study is the well-known China
scholar, Kenneth Lieberthal, who is the director
of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings.
Since Lieberthal was a senior director for Asia
on the National Security Council and a special
assistant to President Bill Clinton for national
security affairs and therefore a consumer of
the government’s most sensitive intelligence
analysis, his study is a particular disappointment.
What the CIA should be, what it should do, and
what it should prepare to do is less clear than
at any time since the beginning of the Cold
War. There should have been major reform of
the CIA and the IC with the end of the Cold
War, but there was none. Sen. David Boren and
Rep. David McCurdy, both Democrats, made attempts
in 1992 and 1994 to reform the CIA, but there
was great resistance from Republicans who were
under the influence of the Pentagon, and there
was no support from their Democratic colleagues.
The politicization of intelligence on the Soviet
Union in the 1980s and the intelligence failures
that contributed to the 9/11 attacks created
other opportunities for reform, but the flawed
thinking of the 9/11 Commission, the Congressional
rush to judgment, and unwise pressures from
the families of the 9/11 victims led to changes
that made a bad situation worse.
The creation of a new bureaucracy under a Director
of National Intelligence (DNI or the so-called
intelligence tsar) beholden to the White House
led to a more centralized system of intelligence
that stifles creative thinking and runs the
risk of more politicized intelligence. Lieberthal’s
failure to critique the role of the DNI is one
of the major shortcomings of his work.
The congressional, political, and academic critics
outside of the intelligence community simply
have no idea of the decline and despair within
the CIA that has led to a major deterioration
in the ability to prepare strategic intelligence
and to inform the policy community. There is
no consensus whatsoever on what is needed to
reform the world of intelligence. The Congress
is an unlikely source for conducting a reform
effort; its modus operandi calls for throwing
money at problems, but the needed reforms have
nothing to do with additional funds.
There has never been a time in the nation’s
history when so much money has been spent on
intelligence with so little accountability and
so few beneficial results. We learned today
that the intelligence budget is $75 billion,
which more than doubles the budget for the State
Department and the Agency for International
Development.
The serious problems that Lieberthal fails to
address include the militarization of the IC,
which must be reversed; the absence of congressional
oversight over a flawed intelligence product
that paved the way to the Iraq War, which must
be ended; the ability of the National Clandestine
Service to politicize intelligence analysis,
which must be stopped; and the inability of
CIA to tell truth to power, which finds the
Agency without a moral compass.
The Bush administration boasted of a “marriage”
between the Pentagon and the CIA, which indicated
its support for an intelligence community subordinated
to Pentagon priorities. The current intelligence
tsar, retired Admiral Dennis Blair, has strengthened
this marriage, which finds the Defense Department
the chief operating officer of the $75 billion
intelligence industry. The Pentagon controls
more than 85 percent of the intelligence budget
and nearly 90 percent of the 200,000 intelligence
personnel.
Most collection requirements flow from the Pentagon,
and deference within the policy and congressional
communities for “support for the warfighter”
has elevated tactical military considerations
over strategic geopolitical considerations.
The Pentagon has also moved into the fields
of clandestine collection and covert operations,
without the constraints of oversight that limit
the covert actions of the CIA.
The decline of the CIA over the past two decades
coincides with the end to oversight of the IC
by the Senate and House intelligence committees.
These committees have become advocates for the
CIA—particularly for the clandestine world
of spies and covert operations. In doing so,
Congress has failed to make the CIA accountable
for its transgressions and has ignored the major
decline in the production of strategic intelligence.
It took the Senate intelligence committee more
than five years to issue a report on the Bush
administration’s misuse of intelligence
information, and even then it merely issued
a majority-only written report.
Every congressional “reform” movement
on CIA has started with the need for greater
clandestine collection, particularly greater
assets and personnel for the National Clandestine
Service, which ignores the limits and myths
of clandestine collection and exaggerates the
value of human intelligence. The current CIA
director, Leon Panetta, has been captured by
the clandestine culture and cadre, and is unlikely
to lead a reform movement. It is time to separate
the CIA’s directorate of intelligence
from the National Clandestine Service, but Lieberthal
merely notes that there “strong arguments”
for and against separation. Once upon a time,
we counted on “independent” studies
to resolve these arguments.
Unfortunately, Lieberthal takes the easy way
out with a series of thumb sucking recommendations
that do not address the problem of the decline
of strategic intelligence. He calls for the
creation of a National Intelligence University
(!) with its own campus and faculty as well
as “periodic formal training opportunities.”
I would expect a distinguished academic such
as Lieberthal to understand the difference between
education and training.
He calls for greater hiring of “people
who are in their late twenties or early thirties
who have had extensive experience related to
the country of concern,” which ignores
the need to cross-fertilize the CIA with experienced
analysts from the academic and think-tank worlds
who have a little more grey hair than the average
20 or 30-something and more time overseas. These
senior analysts would also be able to mentor
the CIA’s analytic community, which is
extremely young and inexperienced.
He calls for adding another layer of review,
without acknowledging the petty tutelage that
already exists in the review process and without
endorsing the need for protecting contrarian
and out-of-the-box thinking in the analytic
process. Finally, Lieberthal recommends IC briefings
to incoming policy makers in order to determine
how policy makers “might best be served
by the IC.”
Unfortunately, the CIA already spends too much
time determining the interests of the policy
maker and, as a result, often skews intelligence
to serve those interests.
CIA directors Richard Helms, James Schlesinger,
George H.W. Bush, William Casey, Robert Gates,
George Tenet, and Porter Goss were guilty of
politicizing intelligence, but Lieberthal doesn’t
deal with the problem. The only protections
against politicization are the integrity and
honesty of the intelligence analysts themselves,
as well as the protection of competitive analysis
that serves as a safeguard against unchallenged
acceptance of conventional wisdom.
The creation of a centralized director of national
intelligence and the placement of key IC positions
in the hands of the military do not augur well
for the restoration of CIA’s moral compass.
Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the
Center for International Policy and adjunct
professor of government at Johns Hopkins University,
is The Public Record’s National Security
and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years
with the CIA, the National War College, and
the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of
Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
Copyright 2009 The Public
Record
