James Risen
STATE OF WAR
The secret history of the CIA and the
Bush Administration
223pp. Free Press. £18.99 (US $26).
0 7432 7578 0
Richard A. Posner
UNCERTAIN SHIELD
The US intelligence system in the throes of reform
219pp. IL: Rowman and Littlefield. $19.95.
0 7425 5127 X
Jennifer E. Sims and
Burton Gerber, editors
TRANSFORMING US INTELLIGENCE
276pp. Georgetown University Press. Paperback, $29.95.
1 58901 069 8
Managing national intelligence during peacetime has always meant problems for the United States, and not without reason: when the people are sovereign, it is not easy to keep secrets from them. It is awkward also to work covertly inside a bureaucratic structure which the Founding Fathers had meant to be transparent. Until the Second World War, in fact, the United States got along nicely without the thing at all – a rare exception in the community of civilized states, not to mention the uncivilized ones. When President Truman created a Central Intelligence Group in 1946 and signed the National Security Act the following year, he was responding to a universal demand that something be done to prevent another surprise like Pearl Harbor.
Knowledge might be power, as Sir Francis Bacon said, but after 1941 it was seen more as a way to disarm the power of others: the word “security”, in fact, often became interchangeable with “intelligence”. The American experiment with an intelligence bureaucracy started small, but grew fast; in the course of the 1950s and 60s, acquiring and analysing strategic intelligence became one of Washington’s principal growth industries, only slightly less intensive than that of real estate development, and brought about some of the most striking changes in the mental and bureaucratic landscape of federal government since the New Deal. The appetite for its product was sharpened by the Cold War and a search for the unlovely acronyms of secret knowledge (SIGINT or COMINT, ELINT, MASINT, OSINT and HUMINT) was carried on at the boundaries of the earth’s atmosphere and in remote cafés which had never seen a health inspector. Analysts laboured to distil, from all this, the wisdom that would turn policy-makers into statesmen.
The Central Intelligence Agency took the lead role among the fifteen intelligence shops in town as the main source of finished intelligence and holding the sole responsibility for espionage – the collection of information from human sources. Over the years, it has had its ups and downs, seeing much of its reputation with the public (and possibly also with many who should have known better) drawn from fiction or politicized gossip, both at the less plausible end of the spectrum.
Whatever some sceptics may say, there certainly were successes: covertly acquired, detailed knowledge of Soviet missile specifications greatly helped President Kennedy deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and NATO strategists were no doubt glad to have comprehensive access to Warsaw Pact war planning, which a CIA asset provided. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union (and really for some time before), the added value the Agency represented for America came increasingly into question. Before anyone had devised an answer, however, the CIA found itself at the centre of two historic security catastrophes: the attack of 9/11 – the first on the continental United States since the burning of Washington in 1814 – and, not long after, the mistaken assessment of Iraq’s nuclear capability, which helped precipitate a controversial war. The books reviewed here deal with the impact of these twin debacles.
James Risen, a New York Times writer on national security affairs, shared a Pulitzer Prize for his paper’s coverage of the 9/11 attack. His partnership with Milt Bearden on The Main Enemy (reviewed in the TLS, August 22, 2003) demonstrated the level of his access to CIA personnel and familiarity with the world they live in. In State of War: The secret history of the CIA and the Bush Administration, he mines such contacts for a sense of how they viewed events leading up to 9/11 and the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction assessment. The picture is not reassuring: staff under pressure to provide definitive information which they did not really have and to make estimates with a confidence they could not muster; management reluctant to displease or disappoint their customers; breakdown of the firewalls by which all bureaucracies, in some compensation for their inevitable clumsiness and sloth, protect themselves against recklessness, self-delusion and overconfidence.
Harassment by urgent requirements, an institutional bias towards compliance and a surfeit of cooks seem to have played a part in all this. But so too, it is claimed by Risen’s informants, did CIA Director George Tenet’s “chaotic management style” and the President’s tendency to send Aesopian signals of his objectives, banking on the ambition and enthusiasm of underlings to sort things out. “Decision making was short circuited.”
Excepting the newly arrived alien from a distant galaxy or those just emerged from persistent coma, there are few people anywhere who have not reached pretty firm opinions about 9/11, the Iraq war and the circumstances surrounding both. Of those who have, few are likely to change their views as a result of reading Risen’s book, which is, like much journalism, a collection of anecdotes and accounts left to speak for themselves without either attribution or rejoinder from those who might have seen things differently. The author acknowledges that his use of anonymous sources will invite criticism, and many readers may well feel uneasy reading such testimony without being given a better sense of the context in which it is set. In any large organization working under pressure, never mind one charged with the CIA’s unique responsibilities, opinions will be divided and very often polarized. Having said that, it is only fair to acknowledge that source descriptions and corroboration are rather a lot to ask for in a book about how a secret intelligence service operates in a crisis. As Risen points out, sometimes the best journalism depends on people who will speak only on condition of anonymity. On balance, his account does well what journalism is supposed to do: it provides what intelligence officers would call “raw reporting”, the initial account of what people heard and saw and what they made of it. Few can argue that its publication is not in the public interest.
For what is at issue here is America’s ability to understand and cope with a new source of disorder in world affairs – something in which other countries also have an important stake. Once again, when the going gets tough, the tough start restructuring. Legislators and consultants, themselves many pay grades removed from the level of the safe house and the analyst’s desk, tend to see bureaucratic reform as a matter of streamlining practice at the management level; hence a cascade of flowcharts and fusillade of bullet points, new routing of data exchange, new and more sinuous highways of command. Based on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (2004) has brought some important changes in the already Libeskind-like architecture of the intelligence community, the most visible being the creation of a Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI), a yet more exalted perch from which to survey the security landscape. The Central Intelligence Agency carries on as before, but its Director yields to the new DNI the role of America’s chief intelligence coordinator. At the moment that seems something like a mission without a job description: only a little more than a year into its shakedown cruise, it is too early to tell how seaworthy a vessel it will prove to be. Some in Congress have already begun to complain that the new directorate seems to be turning into yet another chunk of bureaucracy (it has slots for 1,000 new personnel), not the inspiring concert-master of the intelligence orchestra they had in mind. Many agree that the post of DNI chief will only be as good as its incumbent is able to make it, and that raising the game, as always, will ultimately depend on the quality of those working in the artfully networked boxes of the new organigram. Federal statutes have never made anyone smarter than they were before.
It is at this point that Richard A. Posner raises some thoughtful questions about the nation’s enthusiasm for “intelligence reform”. Posner is a Federal Appeals Court judge whose day job of supervising collective efforts to establish (or rule out) a finding of fact has probably given him more insight into the intelligence business than can be claimed by many of those tasked with reorganizing it. Crisply written, knowledgeable and cant-free, his book Uncertain Shield: The US intelligence system in the throes of reform combines common sense and the more uncommon insights of “organizational theory” to describe the way intelligence works – and sometimes doesn’t. Posner does not share the widespread assumption that more centralization is the recipe for improved coordination. On the contrary, he argues, there are benefits from competition among services, enabling them to minimize hierarchy and enhance the effectiveness of their operations. Conversely, there are costs in enlarging the footprint of a bureaucracy whose inevitable drawback is to inhibit initiative and imagination at the base.
The trade-off for greater coordination can well be that one has less useful information to coordinate, and there are other ways to ensure effective distribution of intelligence than by handing it over to a modern version of Dickens’s Circumlocution Office. At one point Posner describes the business of intelligence as “the production of information for use by the action arms of government”, and adds that this does not require unified command: “if it did, research universities would be organized altogether differently from how they are organized now”. (One cannot but reflect that the American FBI is a police organization meant to implement the criminal justice system, and that the CIA was shaped on the model of the most obvious “action arm” the State possesses – that is, the military. Not much research collegiality to be expected from either.) Almost five years after 9/11, Judge Posner wonders whether the rush to “intelligence reform” has simply created yet another bureaucratic add-on that will “slow, thin and scramble the information flow up and down the intelligence hierarchy”.
He believes that the official American review of the performance of its intelligence service was excessive in its censure and perhaps hasty in its calls for reorganization, and compares this with the more measured and temperate conclusions of the Butler Commission review of how British intelligence assessed Iraq’s alleged WMD. Like some latter-day Parkinson, he locates the anomalies of bureaucracy which usage, tact and resignation have often rendered invisible or beyond our powers to correct. The FBI is a particular source of Posner’s despair, and he strongly urges that a new agency modelled on the British Security Service (MI5) be created to do the domestic intelligence job of which the FBI seems incapable.
Everyone agrees that the American intelligence project, moulded to accommodate the shape of the Cold War, had to change. What it will come to look like in the future is hard to predict, other than that it should not be more of the same. Transforming US Intelligence is the title and argument of a collection of essays by authors who feel the time is right to rethink, not just restructure. In the words of its co-editor, Jennifer E. Sims, it regards intelligence as an art, rather than a procedure, and looks at the attitudes and habits of mind that “determine how things are done even if no regulation, law or rule exists to enforce them”. Like Judge Posner, the contributors aim to get beyond the usual consultant’s boilerplate and think-tank exegesis (“more coordination, but less inflexibility; more staff, but less bureaucracy”, and so forth). Their essays are, in other words, welcome exercises in thinking outside the tank.
Some problems have been with us for a long time and will probably never go away. Much has been made recently of the dangers of intelligence people getting too close to policy-makers, yet, as Sherman Kent observed almost fifty years ago, building a wall between supplier and customer is as bad a practice in the intelligence business as in any other. There is also the role intelligence seems to have taken on as a national repository of knowledge for the State.
Should it really be a kind of clerisy, an encyclopedic Baedeker for everything touching on “abroad” – or should it stick to collecting the information which adversaries hope to keep concealed? All the contributors here agree on the importance of information from open sources – indeed, that it is not possible to make much sense from secret intelligence alone. John MacGaffin, speaking from the wisdom, and perhaps frustrations, of long experience in the clandestine service, hopes in fact that espionage will be called on only when the information is of the highest priority and can be obtained no other way. Open sources are many but not always easily harvested. In her essay, Amy Sands sensibly suggests that a way be found to give analysts better access to the huge resources of experience and area knowledge that exist outside, perhaps just down the road from, official government installations. Here, as elsewhere, the Spanish practices of bureaucracy sometimes undermine the purposes it was created to serve. Burton Gerber recounts how the CIA managed to screen out an applicant who would have been the Agency’s only Azeri-speaker because his English-language competence was not up to the employment standards of the Agency’s Office of Personnel. Robert Gates, CIA Director at the time, observed dourly that he already had plenty of English-speakers.
These three books were written in the shadow of what we have come to call “intelligence failures”. As heart failures are to cardiologists and business failures to accountants, intelligence failures are seen by the professionals as more complicated than they may appear to the layperson. The latter sees the attack on the World Trade Center as an intelligence failure because it happened. But al-Qaeda’s developing threat had been the subject of mounting warnings over the summer of 2001, including the CIA-prepared President’s Daily Brief of a month before, which stated that Osama bin Laden contemplated an attack in the United States. After the fact, Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Advisor, seemed to suggest that federal authorities awaited specifics of time and place – as if such precise details had ever been available for the thousands of such attacks worldwide over the years. (If they had come to hand, moreover, one hopes that the first call made would have been to the Boston police department rather than the White House.) We now understand that decisions on time and place were in fact left to Muhammad Atta, the group leader, and that he may not have shared them with the other team members until the last minute.
The very designation “intelligence failure”, when we contrast it with our attitude towards law enforcement, tells us something important about what people expect from intelligence. Police officers enjoy considerable advantages over criminals – they even know most of them – yet they are seldom held responsible for preventing crime: we ask only that they act after the fact to arrest and prosecute the guilty. Meanwhile, very large firms collapse in bankruptcy and fraud under the eyes of accountants, lawyers, security analysts and government regulators, all of whom have legal and unlimited access to the basic data. In the back of our minds, where literature and anecdote do their work, we expect more of the intelligence officer. No doubt we are unrealistic, for “intelligence failures” are a staple of history. How many wars were examples of the failure of one side to predict its own defeat? American intelligence did not anticipate the North Korean invasion of 1950, overestimated Soviet economic growth, gave assurances that the Soviet Union would not invade Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan, and for a long time worked on the default assumption that the Soviet Union was here to stay – something which led an exasperated Senator Moynihan to call for the winding up of the CIA. Other intelligence services have no better score cards and many much worse.
What are the causes of intelligence failure? Douglas MacEachin’s essay in Transforming US Intelligence notes that it is usually put down to a lack of information – that is, not enough spies. Certainly that is sometimes true, but bruising post-mortems have concluded that most failures “resulted as much if not more from what was or was not done with the information that had been acquired”.
Unfortunately for those who put their faith in the connecting of dots, we all come to complex data with some preconceptions, and it is there that things start to go wrong: the devil, after all, is not in the details but in the perspective we bring to them. The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (the WMD Commission) criticized American intelligence for putting the burden of proof on those who believed Saddam Hussein did not possess WMD. But Judge Posner calls on the Bayesian technique of rational estimation to argue that the analysts, in fact, were right to do so. Banking on Saddam’s known survival instincts, the experts could not conceive how he could invite disaster by concealing that he was, in fact, not the threat he was taken for. We now know from post-war investigations by the Defense Department’s Joint Center for Operational Analysis (JCOA), how far removed Saddam was from being able to judge his best interests as our analysts saw them. While we can anticipate the choices before a rational man, we cannot imagine the multitude of possible scenarios and stratagems available to those in the grip of delusion. Even when we perhaps should know better, we seem loath to regard those who exercise power as beyond the catchments of rational explanation: thus A. J. P. Taylor preferred to explain Hitler as a spokesman of traditional German Continental policy; Stalin was widely accepted as a master tactician steeled to the unfortunate necessity of breaking eggs for his political omelette; Mao taken for a cunning strategist and daring social experimenter, not the sociopath and fantasist that emerges from Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s recent biography.
Could we have used more spies in Iraq? No doubt – but only those who could have provided useful information, and often it is not easy to identify who those people might be. Most of the senior Iraqi combat commanders themselves were stunned to learn that the WMD locker was empty. Had the CIA been able to recruit one of those officers – a “high-level source with good access to military command information”, as he might have been described – the Director of the CIA, George Tenet would have been even more confident, and more irretrievably mistaken, that the matter was a “slam dunk”.
Intelligence, as MacEachin points out, “is a profession of cognition . . . how we absorb and mentally process information coming to us”. The busy espionage executive may sniff at the idea, but intelligence work in the end has as much to do with epistemology as it does with code-breaking and cover stories. “The human understanding”, Bacon points out, “is not composed of dry light, but is subject to influence from the will and emotions”, a fact, he warns, “that creates fanciful knowledge . . . ”.
There is also the matter of conflicts in the reporting that does come our way. When the agents Moses had sent to spy out the land of Canaan returned with different estimates of the enemy’s defences, the tribe refused to accept the riskier minority finding of Joshua and Caleb. This cost the Israelites another forty years of wandering in the suburbs – possibly the first but certainly not the last occasion when consumers paid a penalty for choosing one intelligence estimate over another.
None of this should come as a surprise to CIA officers. Every day, swarms of them coming to work will walk across the marble floor of the Langley headquarters in which is set the Agency’s shield and the motto from St John: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”. They are thus reminded of two conceptions – knowledge and truth – which have given humanity something to think about since it was first noticed that a stick which looked bent when half-immersed in water was perfectly straight when it was taken out.
Almost fifty years on since the US took its first steps to remedy the debacle of Pearl Harbor and then to confront Soviet expansion, it finds itself once again having to repair its defences even as it positions itself to take on a new and unfamiliar adversary. There is, again, a need for some hard thinking and, of course, not enough time in which to do it. As these books suggest, however, it may be useful not merely for the intelligence community to change itself, but for the rest of us to rethink what to expect of it. Perhaps we should substitute a more ordinary title – say “information and assessment” – for the word “intelligence” in an effort to avoid the latter’s hint of special insight and almost gnostic powers. Public opinion, too, should accept that analysing human affairs is a difficult job, and one for professionals, but that it is not an exact science – indeed, not a science at all. Tracing back the previous links in a chain of effects is (relatively) easy: projecting forward the eventual results over time of an unknowable volume of possible causes is impossible. Posner hence deserves much credit for telling us what we do not want to hear: “complete success in thwarting attacks cannot be expected”: there are surely more to come, whatever arrangements we make. As for the intelligence manager or officer, there is no shortage of advice on offer, but little that goes beyond what he knows already. “Be subtle, be subtle”, Sun Tzu enjoins those who find themselves in this line of work. It is not always a counsel which bureaucracy finds easy to take on board.
