GodSend
10-05-2006, 10:27
http://www.stratfor.com
The Intelligence Problem
By George Friedman
Porter Goss has been fired as director of the CIA and is to be replaced by Gen. Michael Hayden -- who is now deputy to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and formerly was director of the National Security Agency (NSA). Viewed from beyond the Beltway -- and we are far outside the Beltway -- it appears that the Bush administration is reshuffling the usual intelligence insiders, and to a great extent, that is exactly what is happening. But there is more: White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, having decided such matters as who the new press secretary should be, has turned to what is a very real problem for President George W. Bush: a vicious battle between the White House and the CIA.
The fight is simply about who bears the blame for Iraq. The White House and the Defense Department have consistently blamed the CIA for faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and over the failure to predict and understand the insurgency in Iraq. The CIA has responded by leaking studies showing that its intelligence indeed was correct but was ignored by Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle. There certainly were studies inside the CIA that were accurate on the subject -- but given the thousands of people working for the agency, someone had to be right. The question is not whether someone got it right, but what was transmitted to the White House in then-Director George Tenet's briefings. At this point, it really does not matter. There was a massive screw-up, with plenty of blame to go around.
Still, it is probably not good for the White House and the CIA to be in a vicious fight while a war is still going on. The firing of Goss, who was a political appointee brought in to bring the agency to heel, is clearly a concession to the CIA, where he and his aides were hated (that is not too strong a word.) Hayden at least is an old hand in the intelligence community, albeit it at the NSA and not the CIA. Whether this is an attempt to placate the agency in order to dam up its leaks to the press, or whether Bush is bringing in the big guns to crush agency resistance, is unclear. This could be a move by Rumsfeld to take CIA turf. But in many ways, these questions are simply what we call "Washington gas" -- meaning something that is of infinite fascination within Washington, D.C., but of no interest elsewhere and of little lasting significance anywhere.
The issue is not who heads the CIA or what its bureaucratic structure might be. The issue is, as it has been for decades, what it is that the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community are supposed to do and how they are supposed to do it. On the surface, the answer to that is clear: The job of the intelligence community, taken as a whole, is to warn the president of major threats or changes in the international system. At least that appears to be the mission, but the problem with that definition is that the intelligence community (or IC) has never been good at dealing with major surprises, threats and issues. Presidents have always accepted major failures on the part of the IC.
Consider. The IC failed to predict the North Korean invasion of South Korea. It failed to predict Chinese intervention there. It failed to predict the Israeli-British-French invasion of Suez in 1956. It failed to recognize that Castro was a communist until well after he took power. It failed to predict the Berlin Wall. It failed to predict or know that the Soviets had placed missiles in Cuba (a discovery that came with U-2 overflights by the Air Force). It failed to recognize the Sino-Soviet split until quite late. It failed to predict the tenacity of the North Vietnamese in the face of bombing, and their resilience in South Vietnam. The IC was very late in recognizing the fall of the shah of Iran. It was taken by surprise by the disintegration of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It failed to predict the intentions of al Qaeda. And it failed in Iraq.
Historically, the American intelligence community has been superb when faced with clearly defined missions. It had the ability to penetrate foreign governments, to eavesdrop on highly secure conversations, to know the intentions of a particular foreign minister at a particular meeting. Given a clear mission, the IC performed admirably. Where it consistently failed was in the amorphous mission of telling the president what he did not know about something that was about to change everything. When the IC was told to do something specific, it did it well. When it was asked to tell the president what he needed to know -- a broad and vague brief -- it consistently fell down.
This is why the argument going on between the CIA and the White House/Defense Department misses the point. Bush well might have ignored or twisted intelligence on Iraq's WMD. But the failure over Iraq is not the exception, it is the rule. The CIA tends to get the big things wrong, while nailing the lesser things time and again. This is a persistent and not easily broken pattern, for which there are some fundamental causes.
The first is that the IC sees its task as keeping its customers -- the president and senior members of his administration -- happy. They have day-to-day requirements, such as being briefed for a meeting with a foreign leader. The bread-and-butter work of the IC is the briefing book, which tells a secretary of state what buttons to push at a ministerial meeting. Ninety-nine percent of the taskings that come to the IC concern these things. And the IC could get 99 percent of the task right; they know that this minister is on the take, or that that minister is in a terrible fight with a rival, or that some leader is dying. They do that over and over again -- that is their focus. They are rarely rewarded for the risky business of forecasting, and if they fail to forecast the invasion of South Korea, they can still point to the myriad useful things at which they did succeed.
When members of the IC say that no one sees the vital work they do, they are right. And they are encouraged to do this work by their customers. If they miss the fall of the Soviet Union, it is the bread-and-butter work that keeps them going. If the nuts and bolts of intelligence compete with the vital need of a government to be ready for the unexpected, the nuts and bolts must win every time. The reason is simple: the unexpected rarely happens, but meetings of the G-8 happen every year. The system is built for the routine. It is hard to build a system for the unexpected.
The Intelligence Problem
By George Friedman
Porter Goss has been fired as director of the CIA and is to be replaced by Gen. Michael Hayden -- who is now deputy to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and formerly was director of the National Security Agency (NSA). Viewed from beyond the Beltway -- and we are far outside the Beltway -- it appears that the Bush administration is reshuffling the usual intelligence insiders, and to a great extent, that is exactly what is happening. But there is more: White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, having decided such matters as who the new press secretary should be, has turned to what is a very real problem for President George W. Bush: a vicious battle between the White House and the CIA.
The fight is simply about who bears the blame for Iraq. The White House and the Defense Department have consistently blamed the CIA for faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and over the failure to predict and understand the insurgency in Iraq. The CIA has responded by leaking studies showing that its intelligence indeed was correct but was ignored by Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle. There certainly were studies inside the CIA that were accurate on the subject -- but given the thousands of people working for the agency, someone had to be right. The question is not whether someone got it right, but what was transmitted to the White House in then-Director George Tenet's briefings. At this point, it really does not matter. There was a massive screw-up, with plenty of blame to go around.
Still, it is probably not good for the White House and the CIA to be in a vicious fight while a war is still going on. The firing of Goss, who was a political appointee brought in to bring the agency to heel, is clearly a concession to the CIA, where he and his aides were hated (that is not too strong a word.) Hayden at least is an old hand in the intelligence community, albeit it at the NSA and not the CIA. Whether this is an attempt to placate the agency in order to dam up its leaks to the press, or whether Bush is bringing in the big guns to crush agency resistance, is unclear. This could be a move by Rumsfeld to take CIA turf. But in many ways, these questions are simply what we call "Washington gas" -- meaning something that is of infinite fascination within Washington, D.C., but of no interest elsewhere and of little lasting significance anywhere.
The issue is not who heads the CIA or what its bureaucratic structure might be. The issue is, as it has been for decades, what it is that the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community are supposed to do and how they are supposed to do it. On the surface, the answer to that is clear: The job of the intelligence community, taken as a whole, is to warn the president of major threats or changes in the international system. At least that appears to be the mission, but the problem with that definition is that the intelligence community (or IC) has never been good at dealing with major surprises, threats and issues. Presidents have always accepted major failures on the part of the IC.
Consider. The IC failed to predict the North Korean invasion of South Korea. It failed to predict Chinese intervention there. It failed to predict the Israeli-British-French invasion of Suez in 1956. It failed to recognize that Castro was a communist until well after he took power. It failed to predict the Berlin Wall. It failed to predict or know that the Soviets had placed missiles in Cuba (a discovery that came with U-2 overflights by the Air Force). It failed to recognize the Sino-Soviet split until quite late. It failed to predict the tenacity of the North Vietnamese in the face of bombing, and their resilience in South Vietnam. The IC was very late in recognizing the fall of the shah of Iran. It was taken by surprise by the disintegration of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It failed to predict the intentions of al Qaeda. And it failed in Iraq.
Historically, the American intelligence community has been superb when faced with clearly defined missions. It had the ability to penetrate foreign governments, to eavesdrop on highly secure conversations, to know the intentions of a particular foreign minister at a particular meeting. Given a clear mission, the IC performed admirably. Where it consistently failed was in the amorphous mission of telling the president what he did not know about something that was about to change everything. When the IC was told to do something specific, it did it well. When it was asked to tell the president what he needed to know -- a broad and vague brief -- it consistently fell down.
This is why the argument going on between the CIA and the White House/Defense Department misses the point. Bush well might have ignored or twisted intelligence on Iraq's WMD. But the failure over Iraq is not the exception, it is the rule. The CIA tends to get the big things wrong, while nailing the lesser things time and again. This is a persistent and not easily broken pattern, for which there are some fundamental causes.
The first is that the IC sees its task as keeping its customers -- the president and senior members of his administration -- happy. They have day-to-day requirements, such as being briefed for a meeting with a foreign leader. The bread-and-butter work of the IC is the briefing book, which tells a secretary of state what buttons to push at a ministerial meeting. Ninety-nine percent of the taskings that come to the IC concern these things. And the IC could get 99 percent of the task right; they know that this minister is on the take, or that that minister is in a terrible fight with a rival, or that some leader is dying. They do that over and over again -- that is their focus. They are rarely rewarded for the risky business of forecasting, and if they fail to forecast the invasion of South Korea, they can still point to the myriad useful things at which they did succeed.
When members of the IC say that no one sees the vital work they do, they are right. And they are encouraged to do this work by their customers. If they miss the fall of the Soviet Union, it is the bread-and-butter work that keeps them going. If the nuts and bolts of intelligence compete with the vital need of a government to be ready for the unexpected, the nuts and bolts must win every time. The reason is simple: the unexpected rarely happens, but meetings of the G-8 happen every year. The system is built for the routine. It is hard to build a system for the unexpected.