DATELINE LANGLEY: FIXING THE INTELLIGENCE MESS

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• Document Release Date: February 18, 2011
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DATELINE LANGLEY:
FIXING THE
INTELLIGENCE MESS
lr Allan E. Goodman
FOREIGN POLICY
1'9.nter 1984-85
The recent campaign for the White House
marked the third straight presidential election
in which the American intelligence communi-
ty's performance was a major issue. From
their memoirs it is clear that Presidents Rich-
ard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger, and national security
adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski all left office
thinking intelligence had not served them
well. Moreover, ever since the debacle in Iran
the Senate and House select committees on
intelligence have been sharply critical of the
substantive briefings they have received from
the intelligence agencies.
As early as 1981, the Reagan administra-
tion's disappointment was underscored by
Admiral Bobby Inman, the 'country's most
senior and respected career military intelli-
gence -officer and deputy director of central
intelligence until 1982. Inman told several
audiences that the U.S. intelligence communi-
ty's performance was at its lowest level since
Pearl Harbor. And in the wake of the most
recent bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut,
Lebanon, President Ronald Reagan himself
expressed concern about "the near destruction
of our intelligence capability," which presi-
dential spokesman Larry Speakes blamed on
"a decade-long trend of a climate in Congress
that resulted in inadequate funding and sup-
port for intelligence gathering capabilities."
Intelligence and foreign-policy profession-
als should take such criticism seriously, de-
spite the political circumstances and motives
that may have generated it. Many intelligence
operatives have left the profession wondering
if the community has become too fragmented.
ALLAN E. GOODMAN is associate dean of the School of
Foreign Service at Georgetown University. From 1975
to 1980, he served in several senior staff positrons in the
Central Intelligence Agency, including presidential
briefing coordinator for the director of central intelli-
gence.
tually impeded the sharing of information.
And rival agencies in stiff competition for
funding prepare such divergent analyses that
the system fails to provide enough accurate,
timely, or complete information to policymak-
ers. Unfortunately, such' problems have
plagued the intelligence community for more
than a decade and are so deeply rooted' that
only fundamental change in the system will
improve performance.
The intelligence community comprises the
agencies and organizations specifically autho-
rized by the National Security Act of 1947 and
subsequent executive orders to conduct intelli-
gence activities "necessary for the conduct of
foreign relations and the protection of the
National Security of the United States." The
current members of the community all fall
within the executive branch and report to the
director of central intelligence (DCI), the Na-
tional Security Council (NSC), and the presi-
dent-in that order. The community includes
the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the
military service and special collection offices
in the Pentagon, the State Department's Bu-
reau of Intelligence and Research, the Trea-
sury Department's Office of Intelligence Sup-
port, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and
a unit of the Department of Energy. The CIA,
however, is the only agency controlled direct-
ly by the DCI.
Intelligence activities revolve around four
functions. The first, intelligence gathering,
includes human intelligence (HUMINT), pho-
tography, and the processing of electronic and
communications signals (FLINT and
COMINT). The second and third functions
involve analyzing information and getting the
results to those who need them. The fourth
function is covert action. While controversial,
it represents only a minor part of intelligence
activities and despite controversy and mistakes
is generally better managed than either the
collection or the analytic functions. Thus a
central concern is whether information col-
lected in the field is properly analyzed and
reaches the right people in a usable form.
What policymakers expect and need from
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the intelligence community are timely facts
and insightful analyses that improve their
ability to understand issues. Such analyses
come in four basic forms. First is the current
intelligence report, produced usually within
hours of an event, to inform policymakers
about current developments and to give esti-
mates of how these developments will affect
the situation in the near term. The National
Intelligence Estimate (?CIE) is a longer and
more in-depth look at a specific international
situation that presents judgments on future
developments and what they portend for the
United States. NIEs represent the judgments
of all agencies in the intelligence community.
Intelligence assessments are virtually identical
to NIE,; except that they are produced entirely
by one agency and are not coordinated within
the community. Finally, intelligence memo-
randa are reports of basic research on complex
scientific, technological, economic, sociocul-
tural, political, geographic, or biographical
issues.
Placing the Blaine
The quality of the intelligence provided by
the community has been seriously questioned
for some time. There have been at least 30
alleged intelligence failures investigated by
Congress or by the press since 1960. Since the
White House has not permitted the DCI to
release an unclassified version of the CIA
annual report, the number of successes is not
known and therefore it is impossible to com-
pute a track record. But it is not reassuring
that the failures show patterns and that many
of them involved issues and threats of major
strategic, diplomatic, or economic importance
to the United States.
American intelligence has frequently mis-
judged Soviet behavior and capabilities- tar-
gets of highest priority. U.S. intelligence
erred, for example, about the Soviet threat to
American U-2 reconnaissance flights in 1960.
It failed to predict Soviet Premier Nikita
Khrushchev's deployment of offensive mis-
siles in Cuba in 1962; the successors to Khru-
shchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Yuri Andropov;
the level of Soviet defense spending; and
Soviet industry's ability to design and produce
a nuclear arsenal of 1,000 missiles with,accura-
cies comparable to America's in 5 years. The
intelligence community.also bungled the ques-
tion of the origins and intentions of the Soviet
combat brigade "discovered" in Cuba in 1979.
Such misjudgments have all been extremely
costly to U.S. security. Some of these failures
led to major crises, like the Cuban missile
crisis; others, such as the underestimate of the
Soviet nuclear build-up, led to complacency
about America's own arsenal and the need to
modernize it.
U.S. intelligence agencies also have failed to
anticipate military attacks and to identify
tactics and targets in limited wars. The intelli-
gence community has rarely predicted correct-
ly the use of force by one state to achieve its
aims over another. The failures include the
North Korean attack on South Korea in 1950;
the risk to the uss Liberty of Israeli air attack
if the ship continued a surveillance mission
during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; the risk to
the Uss Pueblo of its surveillance activities.
near North Korean waters in 1968; the objec-
tive of the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968;
the 1973 Arab-Israeli war; the Argentine sei-
zure of the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas)
and the subsequent British sinking of the
Argentine cruiser Belgrano; and the efforts by
Iran and Iraq to destroy each other's oil fields
and export facilities once the Persian Gulf war
broke out.
Even when there were indications that a
military attack was planned, these findings
failed to make their way up the chain of
command or were dismissed' because they
contradicted prevailing intelligence communi-
ty judgments. The intelligence community
tends to underestimate the willingness of
antagonists to fight rather than negotiate, as if
it projects on to other countries America's
own desire either to avoid using force or to
limit combat.
The record is also poor in protecting Ameri-
ca's economic and geostrategic interests in the
Third World. The OPEC - (Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries) revolution
was not predicted, nor was the overthrow of
King Idris of Libya in 1969 by Colonel Muam-
mar el-Qaddafi or the fall of Shah Mohammed
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Riza Pahlevi of Iran and his replacement by
the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. More re-
cently, the official Defense Department in-
quiry into the October 1983 bombing of the
U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut concluded that
"the U.S.... commander did not have effec-
tive U.S. human intelligence support."
In each of these cases, ill-conceived or
mistaken policy also was at fault. But to blame
the policymaker for the failure, as many
intelligence professionals have done, would be
a serious mistake. However the policymakers
reached their conclusions, they were guided
by faulty intelligence analysis or poorly served
by the slow or incomplete dissemination of
reports by the intelligence community.
The most hotly debated intelligence failure
of the 1970s was the Iran debacle. Actually, a
aeries of failures along with a vacillating
policy toward the shah led to the seizure of the
U.S. embassy in November. 1979 and de-
stroyed vital American economic and security
interests in the region. To be sure, as the
consultants who compiled the CIA's postmor-
tem on Iran later discovered, not a single
-person in or out of government forecast the
ascent of Khomeini. Revolutions have rarely
been predicted correctly, but U.S. intelligence
agencies and their analyses failed even to come
close.
The findings of the Iran postmor-
tem ... were so embarrassing that
no more than a dozen persons
were. permitted to see the report.
The episode caused Carter to send the
following hand-written note to then Secretary
of State Cyrus Vance, Brzezinski, and then
Director of Central Intelligence Admiral
Stansfield Turner: "To Cy, Zbig, Stan-I am
not satisfied with the quality of our political
intelligence. Assess our assets and, as soon as
possible, give me a report concerning our
abilities in the most important areas of the
world. Make a joint recommendation on what
we should do to improve your ability to give
me political information and advice." At the
_?4
3
senior level, and prodded by a political intelli-
gence working group composed of the deputy,
director of central intelligence, the under-
secretary of state for political affairs; and the
deputy assistant to the president for national
security, new priorities were set for political
intelligence in 40 countries whose stability
was judged directly to affect major American
interests. The group recommended. more re-
sources to hire expert political analysts-not
collectors- and decreed greater coordination
in the collection of political intelligence be-
tween the Foreign Service and the intelligence
community. The only tangible result achieved
by the group, however, was a substantial
expansion of reporting requirements that fell
largely on clandestine collectors because the
Foreign Service was not given the staff re-
sources to respond. And there was virtually no
change in the analytic methods and mid-level
management by which intelligence analysis
was produced and reviewed.
In part, these middle echelons have benefit-
ed from the general perception that U.S.
policy and Jimmy Carter were at fault in Iran.
Some critics of Carter administration policy
suggest that the United States failed to follow
through on its human rights policy. Had the
administration followed through, they argue,
America could have avoided both the hostility
of Khomeini and the taking of the hostages.
Other critics suggest that the error lay in
failing to back the shah fully. While both
views describe poles around which U.S. poli-
cymakers clustered in 1978 and 1979, neither
explains why the intelligence agencies failed
to detect a single clue to what was happening
in Iran. The failure over Iran was deeply
rooted in faulty intelligence collection and
analysis and its causes have yet to be remedied.
The United States relied too heavily on its
close working relationship with SAVAK, the
Iranian intelligence service, for information
about internal political developments espe-
cially dissidents. The fact that Richard Helms,
DCI from 1966 to 1973, was ambassador to Iran
from 1973 to 1976 probably did not help to call
into question this relationship or the validity
of the information it produced: It is widely
charged that the U.S. government agreed not
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to spy on the shah in return for his agreement
to permit the intelligence community to oper-
ate two listening posts designed to acquire
information on Soviet missile tests. Helms
flatly denies this. Yet a key factor in the U.S.
intelligence error was this reliance on SAVAK.
And today the intelligence community still
relies too much on such established relation-
ships and practices for internal political re-
porting.
Moreover, intelligence analysts had little
contact with actual conditions and political
forces in the field. Then as now, the intelli-
gence community had few analysts-as op-
posed to operations officers, who simply col-
lect information-posted abroad. Analysts
rarely seek such assignments because they
seldom lead to promotions. Although the
current administration has recognized this
problem, measures to counteract it have been
slow to take effect.
The analyst's life abroad is also complicated
by the tendency of most operations officers to
regard analysts as superfluous-or even dan-
gerous-to collection missions. As a result,
analysts stationed overseas can be as desk-
bound as they would be in Washington. Even
short field trips are hard to come by. Contrary
to the popular image of the intelligence officer
who crisscrosses the globe in search of an-
swers to policymakers' questions, American
analysts are generally limited to one 6-week
stretch of temporary duty (TDY) every 3 years
or so.
Hence, an analyst's primary source of infor-
mation is the "in" box, and analysts quickly
become passive consumers of the reams of
material generated by U.S. officials and ma-
chines abroad without asking what they really
need to know and may not be getting. In 1978-
1979, few of the analysts working on Iran had
served there recently or had much TDY time
on the ground; those who had this experience
came back with tales of broad support for the
shah everywhere they went-via contacts
arranged by the isolated U.S. embassy. Thus
part of America's blindness to events in Iran
resulted from conducting analysis in a vacu-
um. And this tendency is still part of the
.CONT.
intelligence community's bureaucratic culture
today.
In addition, key assumptions were not suffi-
ciently highlighted or, more important, chal-
lenged. In meeting after meeting, for example,
riots and demonstrations against the shah
were compared to the protests in 1963-the
last time the shah had faced serious internal
opposition-and were judged less severe. Par-
ticipants in the meetings assumed that if the
shah had squelched much more serious chal-
lenges in the past, he could and would do so
again. This assumption should have been
challenged, but the DCI could not get the
community to focus on it systematically. The
director's authority to demand such an exami-
nation was severely undercut by the tendency
for each individual intelligence agency to feed
its policymaking constituency with episodic
current reporting and assessments.
Within the CIA especially, as the crisis
worsened and opposition demonstrations
gained momentum, the career senior- and mid-
level management officials placed most of the
emphasis on current intelligence. This re-
sponse effectively relegated to secondary im-
portance any review of basic assumptions or
any discussion of a-range of possible scenarios.
According to the bureaucratic culture, such
exercises are too academic during a crisis. As
the crisis accelerated, the managers feared that
if they provided anything but current intelli-
gence reports they were likely to be blamed
for any subsequent debacle. The result, noted
the staff of the House Permanent Select Com-
mittee on Intelligence, was "an environment
which lacked incentives for analysts to chal-
lenge conventional wisdom." The committee's
January 1979 evaluation of U.S. intelligence
performance in Iran explained:
In the first place, analysts were not required
to consider the possibility that popular
opposition might undermine the Shah's
rule. Such alternative hypotheses tend not
to be addressed. Secondly, assessments
which cut across the grain of current or
proposed policy. tend to be downplayed.
Analysts' initiative tends to be clouded by
the perception that such assessments would
never be accepted. Whether because of
deliberate suppression of 'such views by
y
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intelligence managers, or simply because
arguing unconventional views is a time-con-
sumingg and unappreciated business, those
who challenge conventional wisdom have
little to look forward to in their intelligence
careers.
Immediately after this finding, the report
notes the appearance of "a favorable develop-
ment" represented by monthly warning meet-
ings held under the auspices of the national
intelligence officer,, "the purpose of which is
to deliberately assess the less likely hypotheses
and predictions." Such monthly meetings still
take place, but their purpose is to summarize
short-term trends rather than to imagine and
discuss the unexpected or to examine key
assumptions.
Moreover, the intelligence community does
not study its failures. By nature the communi-
ty is not reflective. Of the cases mentioned
above only a handful have been the subjects of
thorough postmortems. When such reviews
are undertaken, their results are not widely
disseminated or discussed even within the
community. The findings of the Iran postmor-
tem, which ran to more than 10,000 pages,
were so embarrassing that no more than a
dozen persons were permitted to see the
report by the end of the Carter administration.
None of those persons were young analysts
who should have been taught what went
wrong and why. No official postmortem was
done on the discovery of the Soviet combat
brigade in Cuba in 1979-an episode that was
filled with lessons about the costs of the
barriers the.community has erected to protect
the secrets about the information-gathering
process.
Past failures, however, invariably concern
subjects and problems-especially Soviet lead-
ership and Third World instability-that still
exist today. But because the intelligence com-
munity tends. to avoid learning from its fail-
ures, the outlook for improved U.S. intelli-
gence performance is still poor. As Bobby
'Inman stated in the 1983 volume Improving
Judgment in a Crisis shortly after his resigna-
tion as deputy director of central intelligence,
"If you worry that over the next fifteen years,
there ... will be many unstable governments,
where a new Soviet leadership may see the
potential for advancing its own interest by the
actual use of its own forces, then we are poorly
prepared to detect and to apprise policymak-
ers."
This was precisely the state of affairs that
Reagan wanted to change. During his 1980
presidential campaign Reagan pledged to
make improved intelligence one of his top
priorities. Once elected, he appointed his
campaign manager, William Casey, as DCI.
According to one White House staff member
interviewed, Reagan took a deep interest in
the CIA and during his first year in office
spent more time than any president in history
meeting with the DCI. Casey moved decisively
and rapidly to bring on his own team to
reorganize the analytic part of the CIA along
geographic lines, to parallel the organization
of the operations directorate, and to substan-
tially increase the National Foreign Intelli-
gence Program budget.
According to a January 16, 1983, New York
Times Magazine report by Philip Taubman, the
CIA is the fastest-growing major federal agen-
cy. Its 25 per cent budget increase in fiscal-
year 1983 exceeded even the Pentagon bud-
get's 18 per cent growth that year. Although
the intelligence budget's size is classified,
Taubman quotes congressional sources as peg-
ging the cost of annual CIA operations at more
than $1.5 billion. In his exhaustive 1983 study
The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford reports that
estimates. of the supersecret NSA's budget run
"as high as $10 billion."
Yet little improvement is apparent with
respect to the accuracy of the intelligence
community's product. Charges of intelligence
failures have surfaced over estimates of the
Soviet military build-up, the accuracy of arms
control monitoring, the threat against the U.S.-
embassy and the marine barracks in Beirut,
the viability of the Lebanese army, the nature
and extent of the Cuban presence in Grenada,
and the likely outcome of elections in El'
Salvador, as well as that country's domestic
politics in general.
The Del as Policymaker
Another major congressional and public
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.concern has been the politicization of the
position of the DCI in the Reagan administra-
tion. The appointment of Casey and his eleva-
tion to cabinet status have put the intelligence
community deeply into the policymaking are-
na. In the atmosphere of an NSC meeting, the
cabinet room, and the Oval Office itself, the
DCI can be tempted, if not basically inclined,
to take sides and to express a policy prefer-
ence.
Yet the temptation is an important one to
resist, especially for the president's sake. As
the president's principal intelligence adviser,
only the DCI can provide the N'sc with
assessments independent of policy prefer-
ences. Such intelligence can become a stan-
dard against which the president can evaluate
the advice he is receiving from others. Policy-
making is poorly served by intelligence when
the DCI becomes an advocate and thus de-
prives the president of a compass.
Casey, however, is not the first DCI to be
tempted by a policymaking role. Allen Dulles,
DCI from 1953 to 1961, enjoyed unusual status
and access to policy via his brother, then
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. John
McCone, DCI from 1961 to 1965, achieved such
status and access with President John Kenne-
dy. Yet both thought that it was unprofession-
al and unwise for the DCI-and by extension,
the intelligence community-to seek a policy
support role closely attuned to the tempo of
policymaking deliberations. Allen Dulles
made this point quite clearly in his now
declassified congressional testimony on the
National Security Act of 1947. Both Dulles
and McCone consistently sought to distance
themselves and their agency from policy deci-
sions and meetings and thought that the DCI
should not be considered a policymaker.1
During his tenure as DCI from 1976 to 1977,
George Bush thought of himself essentially as
the CIA's advocate with Congress, whose mis-
sion was to rebuild CIA morale while estab-
lishing a practical and legitimate oversight
relationship with the legislative branch. He
'See also Victoria S. Price, The DCI's Role in
Producing Strategic Intelligence Estimates (New-
port, R.I.: The Naval War College Center for Ad-
vanced Research, 1980).
did not think of himself, however, as an expert
on foreign-policy questions and did not pro-
mote a policy support role for the CIA. Stans-
field Turner, DCI from 1977 to 1981, did
consider himself to be an expert on foreign-
policy and defense issues. He welcomed a
policy support role 'for the agency, and pri-
vately briefed Carter on a weekly basis "until
1979, and on a biweekly basis thereafter, on a
mixture of traditional intelligence subjects, as
well as on foreign-policy matters. These
ranged from the status of new covert opera-
tions or problems in monitoring arms control
treaties to Israeli perceptions of the Camp
David accords and the impact of the adminis-
tration's human rights and nuclear nonproli-
feration policies. But these briefings always
stopped before they got to the material pre-
pared on "policy implications." Despite access
to policymaking meetings, Turner and his
deputies resisted the temptation to speak up
even when they personally thought, but had
no intelligence information to prove, that a
policy being adopted would not work.
The United States is further today
from having truly centralized in-
telligence collection or analysis
than it has been since Pearl Har-
bor.
Casey, in contrast, has gone further than
any DCI in history toward using his position
to advocate policy and to make intelligence an
adjunct of foreign policy. The trend today at
the CIA and elsewhere in the intelligence
community is to tailor the product to the
needs and nuances of policy debate. As one
senior intelligence officer said in an interview,
"Casey comes back here from the White
House looking for reports to buttress his
stand. He does not ask us for a review of an
issue or a situation. He wants material he can
use to persuade his colleagues, justify contro-
versial policy, or expand the Agency's involve-
ment in covert action."
A case in point is Lebanon. Casey repeated-
ly returned drafts of one NIE for revision with
.CONL i Tr-
C/o
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the notation "try again." Many analysts think
Casey was dissatisfied with the NIE's conclu-
sion that the government of Lebanese Presi-
dent Amin Gemayel, and especially its army,
were not viable and that they would not be
significantly strengthened by a U.S. Marine
presence. Charges that reports have been
altered have also surfaced in connection with
the ciA's work on Central and South America.
Two senior analysts have resigned recently
claiming that Casey ordered their findings to
be rewritten to inflate the threat to U.S.
security, and Senate Minority Leader Robert
Byrd (D.-West Virginia) has asked the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence to conduct a
thorough evaluation of their allegations. "If
accurate," Byrd said in a letter to the commit-
tee's vice chairman, "these reports indicate
there has been a shocking misuse of the CIA
for political purposes."2
The search for reports and analyses to
buttress policy and the blocking of critical
analyses have been consistent and widespread
criticisms of Casey's stewardship voiced by
intelligence professionals. In addition, the
Senate select committee has repeatedly ex-
pressed "concern" about whether as DCI Ca-
sey would keep the committee "fully and,
currently informed of all- intelligence activi-
ties." These anxieties proved well-founded
when it was revealed by the New York Times
that the CIA had launched a covert action to
mine the harbors of Nicaragua without ade-
quately briefing the committee. Unfortunate-
ly, some of these problems are not new.
Policymakers constantly seek intelligence to
support their policies and frequently encour-
age the DCI to provide it. And intelligence
officials have always tried to tell congressional
oversight committees as little as possible, espe-
cially regarding covert operations.
. Legislation introduced by Senator Daniel
Moynihan (D.-New York) and cosponsored by
Senator Barry Goldwater (R.-Arizona), both
of the Senate Select Committee on Intelli-
gence, would require future directors and
deputy directors to be chosen from among
2"Byrd Seeks Senate Probe of Charges of Report-Alter-
ing at cm, " Washington post, 29 September 1984.
career civilian or military intelligence officers;
this is an important step toward establishing
adequate qualifications for the office. The bill
would disqualify Casey for a second term as
DCI, but it may go too far in disqualifying able
persons from outside the community's career
services. In another respect, the bill should go
further and establish the criteria to be applied
to the DCI's chief deputies, who should also be
confirmed by the Senate.
Nevertheless, neither the Moynihan-Gold-
water bill, nor a new DCI, nor even a new
president would be an intelligence cure-all.
The intelligence community's major prob
lems, which range from fragmentation in
collection and reporting to politicization of
analysis, are by-products of the way the com-
munity is organized and managed from with-
in.
One fundamental problem is that the cur-
rent reporting system discourages analysts
and agencies from sharing information. Con-
sequently, when collectors or analysts in one
part of the community find new data that
challenge conventional wisdom, their first
instinct is to squirrel them away. And if the
analyst is in doubt, his or her supervisor will
usually suggest this course of action. In addi-
tion, intelligence officers often compartmen-
talize data collected by the sensitive methods
of one agency and restrict dissemination to the
rest of the community. This practice is ration-
alized by narrowly interpreting the "need-to-
know" security guidelines. But the bottom
line is that the bureaucratic culture underly-
ing the American intelligence system does not
now guarantee that all of what is collected is
subject to community-wide, objective, and
rigorous analysis.
At the junior- and mid-career levels, more-
over, a promotion depends on an analyst's
ability to contribute to the many classified
intelligence publications prepared daily by the
community for senior foreign-policy officials.
and to move obligingly from one assignment
to another. As a result, analysts learn early in
their careers to be wary of doing longer=range
or in-depth studies. The task of writing such
estimates and think-pieces, according to the
culture, is to be avoided. In fact, these studies
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are largely turned out by members of a special
staff, who have made their peace with the
system and who do not expect or require
further promotion. Most analytic promotions
at the middle and senior levels require taking
on management responsibilities-for exam-
ple, to train junior analysts. Analysts and
reviewers of analyses are thus inbred and tend
mainly to develop only the skills essential to
crank out current intelligence.
Replacing the cra
The immediate need is for an overhaul of
the analytic career service and production
process that will correct patterns of thinking
and of management that have contributed to
past intelligence failures. A central, communi-
ty-wide foreign-intelligence data base should
be created to assure that an analyst working
on a specific problem would have access to all
the information collected. Analysts should
also be provided with incentives to do more
reflective writing and research. Work and
travel abroad should be facilitated and a thor-
ough, substantive review procedure for all
products and publications should be devel-
oped. These steps would greatly improve the
accuracy and quality of the intelligence prod-
uct.
It should be standard community operating
procedure, for example, to ask the author of
every written assessment: What are your as-
sumptions? Do they still stand? Analysts must
also pay more attention to distinguishing
between what they know and do not know, to
identifying judgments based on specific evi-
dence versus those. based on speculation, and
to making projections about the future. Ana-
lysts should give policymakers much more of
an indication of what they should look for in
the way of events or developments that can be
used to test the judgments given in a particu-
lar estimate or assessment. By telling policy-
makers something more than the facts-what
is known as "cable-gisting"-analysis should
help to uncover the implications of the issue
discussed for other problems, issues, and rela-
tionships.
Another key ingredient for improved per-
formance is change in the nature and quality
of the intelligence community's relationship
with the U.S. academic community. Current-
ly, more than 100 professors serve as consult-
ants and read drafts of national intelligence
estimates and other analyses. Yet the value of
this form of "academic relations," as it is
called, is low. Within the bureaucratic culture,
attempts to reach out to academics are strong-
ly resisted and dismissed as cosmetic. Scholars
are perceived as being less informed and up-to-
date than analysts. When an academic criti-
cizes an assessment or estimate, the analyst
typically reacts by producing new intelligence
to support judgments reached. Supervisors
generally rally to the sides of their subordi-
nates and argue that incorporating the con-
sultant's advice would make the final product
less timely and relevant. As a result, conven-
tional wisdom is all too often reinforced rather
than examined.
What academics should therefore be encour-
aged to focus on are projections and assess-
ments of the future environment in which
U.S. intelligence services will operate, the
challenges they will face, and the innovations
that will be required. Government officials
rarely do such thinking and planning effec-
tively or expeditiously. And even when such
work is ordered by the president or Congress
the results are slow in coming. For nearly 5
years the House Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence "urged in vain that the intelli-
gence community develop a multi-year plan
for the systematic improvement of the Na-
tion's intelligence capabilities," according to
its.1982 report to Congress. Such a plan was
only submitted with the fiscal-year 1983 bud-
get. As part of the effort to cope with the
challenges of the 1990s and beyond, the DCI
should establish a steering committee com-
posed of official and academic leaders to
stimulate future research on an ongoing basis
and to assure that the results are useful to
managers and other operations personnel in
the community.
Changes in analytic methods and manage-
ment are likely to-reduce the failure rate for
American intelligence over the short term.
But the inability of the community as a whole
to centralize intelligence collection and analy-
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sis on areas where it has erred consistently
suggests that much more fundamental changes
are also required.
Reorganizing the way U.S. intelligence
services collect, analyze, and disseminate the
knowledge essential for national decision mak-
ing should be a high priority for the new
administration. In particular, a return to the
concept of central intelligence collection and
analysis would help improve the performance
of both tasks. Such centralization, along with
the separation of collectors from analysts,
would break down agency-erected barriers to
the badly needed sharing of all information.
Thus the United States should establish a
central collection agency, able to command
and mix human and technical intelligence
collectors to use each most effectively. This
mix should be determined without fear of how
it will affect the power, status, or budget of
various agencies. Also needed is a central
agency for research and analysis where, again,
the best talent can be deployed to work on a
problem in as much depth as required. These
two agencies should replace the CIA, the NSA,
and the other intelligence organizations
lodged throughout the federal bureaucracy.
Casey ... has gone further than
any DCI in history toward using his
position to advocate policy.
The current system, in which these various
agencies' collection systems and analytic capa-
bilities are all rapidly expanding, and in which
the DCI has national responsibilities but no
departmental authority beyond the CIA, works
against such centralization. The result is an en-
vironment in which managers of the individual
agencies withhold information from each other
and eschew teamwork.
The putative discovery of the Soviet brigade
in Cuba was a nearly disastrous example of
how fragmented the intelligence community
has become. Knowledge that a Soviet unit had
remained in Cuba after the missile crisis had
lain in intelligence files since at least the early
1970s. Had the intelligence community been
well-organized enough to discern this quickly,
a major U.S.-Soviet confrontation probably
could have been avoided. The community's
performance during this episode, however,
epitomizes the tendency of each agency to
expand its own collection and processing
capability and to restrict dissemination of the
product.
These tendencies will never be effectively
suppressed as long as the separate intelligence
agencies are rivals for resources and the atten-
tion of policymakers. As a result, the United
States is further today from having truly
centralized intelligence collection or analysis
than it has been since Pearl Harbor.
Revolutions have rarely been pre-
dicted correctly, but U.S. intelli-
gence agencies and their analyses
failed even to come close.
By the late 1980s and 1990s the intelligence
community will require both a substantial
increase in human and technical intelligence
collectors and even more effective interaction
between them. The latter contravenes the
bureaucratic culture, which currently encour-
ages each collection branch to work as an
exclusive entity. Centralization would give the
DCI greater authority over the actual manage-
ment and coordination of U.S. intelligence
activities and.would subject the intelligence
community to a clear set of priorities for
collection and analysis. Under this system,
collection priorities would be set by a standing
committee of the NSC, and the DCI would
have the authority to determine which collec-
tion methods should be used. The NSC cur-
rently carries out this responsibility, but in a
perfunctory manner. Because they have all left
the current set of strongly entrenched agen-
cies . intact, none of the recent intelligence.
reorganizations under Carter and Reagan have
accomplished much to force the NSC to focus
on meaningful collection priorities. In- prac-
tice, the agencies often are asked to relieve
time pressures on busy policymakers by sug-
gesting either what the priorities should be or
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what, if anything, should be changed from one
year to the next. The current system of
"staffing out" the identification of priorities
thus tends to allow the collectors and not the
consumers to drive the process.
It is also essential to increase the authority
.of the DCI over the intelligence community's
entire budget. Under the current system the
United States faces an incongruous situation.
The DCI probably controls less than 15 per
cent of the total intelligence budget and per-
sonnel. The budget is actually under the
effective control of the military services,
which own the bulk of the collection plat-
forms the DCI uses. This puts the DCI in a
weak position to command or control most of
the intelligence community.
The principal risk of the degree of centrali-
zation proposed here is that the policymaker
would have less chance to pick and choose
from the different reports that now come from.
rival agencies. Yet this is a risk worth taking.
Centralization would not reduce the amount
of information available to the policymaker or
render information-gathering and analysis too
uniform. The policymaker still has many
departmental sources and assessments, and
much current reporting on which to draw-
and which the intelligence community now
duplicates. Nor must centralization mean the-
stifling of dissent. Under the current system,
new data and insights rarely see the light of
day anyway. In fact, what is called dissent
today takes place only in the production of
TIES, about 60 of which are produced annually
compared to the more than 2,000 formal
assessments that the agencies provide policy-
makers each year. Further, NIE dissents are
simply paragraphs prepared by agency repre-
sentatives to highlight differences with the
majority view. The trend and pressure in most
other assessments, however, are toward find-
ing an inter- or intra-agency consensus, espe-
cially because at budget time there are often
sharp penalties imposed on an agency or unit
known for either too much dissent or for
changing its judgments.
What the proposed centralization does pro-
vide is assurance that the policymaker will get
the best intelligence possible and the full
range of differing judgments without regard
to institutional rivalries. And when the best
work that can be produced still leaves unan-
swered questions, the policymaker will at least
be aware of the need to make a judgment
rather than be tempted to choose sides in an
interagency squabble.
There is much that the intelligence commu-
nity can do on its own to improve perform-
ance. But chances are that these improvements
will not be enough. In the past the intelligence
community has been reorganized after every
major failure. But none of these reorganiza-
tions has significantly changed the manage-
ment system or improved the quality of analy-
sis. The lack of centralized intelligence collec-
tion and analysis is the root of the problem. If
not addressed now, further disasters which
America cannot afford will be required to
convince a president that he or she can expect
better from the American system of intelli-
gence and get it.
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