U.S. intelligence: Seeing the forest for the trees

In the wake of the House’s passage of the intelligence reform bill December 8 and the Senate’s passage the next day, New York Time’s columnist Thomas Friedman, in his December 9 Op-Ed The Suicide Supply Chain, makes some interesting points about changes planned under the new legislation.

Noting that the new organizational flow chart for U.S. intelligence is top heavy, with too many chiefs and not enough, well, you know; Friedman laments that “…it is a god-awful combination of new titles and jobs at the top, without clear lines of authority to the people on the ground.”

“The right way to improve U.S. intelligence,“ he says, “is to get more people on the ground who speak the languages we need and who can think unconventionally. If that sounds blindingly obvious to you, it is, but it is precisely the shortage of such people that explains to me America's greatest intelligence failure in Iraq - a failure we are paying for dearly right now. You see, we didn't invade Iraq too soon. We actually invaded 10 years too late.”

“Let me explain,” he offers. “America's greatest intelligence failure in Iraq was not the WMD we thought were there, but weren't. It was the PMD we thought weren't there, but were. PMD, in my lexicon, stands for ‘people of mass destruction.’ And there were far more of them in Iraq than anyone realized. The failure of U.S. intelligence to understand what was happening inside Iraqi society during the decade-plus of U.N. sanctions that preceded our invasion is the key to many of the problems we've encountered in post-Saddam Iraq.”

A wag once noted that the very nature of the intelligence business means that the public finds out, usually quite quickly, about its failures but, for obvious reasons, they never hear about its successes. This is likely true. However, the misses made by CIA over the decades are still hard to overlook.

The failure noted above by Friedman is a valid one, but it is just one of many chalked up by U.S. intelligence in general - and by the CIA in particular - over the decades (not the least of which is 9/11 itself). To history buffs, many more come to mind.

Over the years, the CIA:

- missed signs of the North Korean invasion of South Korea, June 25, 1950; and later evidence showing that China would directly intervene in the war;
- provided faulty information to the White House on the probable play-out and end result of the Bay of Pigs invasion April 16, 1961;
- failed to accurately estimate the number of Soviet troops in Cuba, and missed the fact that the Soviets were armed with tactical nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 19 to 29, 1962;
- misunderstood the North Vietnamese relationship with China and the Soviet Union, which greatly affected America’s understanding of the root causes of the conflict there and, therefore, the way it fought the war;
- missed signs of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Iranian Revolution, both in 1979;
- failed to uncover a plot to bomb the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut, October 23, 1983;
- failed to predict the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989;
- missed signs of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991;
- failed to uncover an al-Qaeda plot to bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, August 7, 1998;
- failed to uncover an al- Qaeda plot to bomb the USS Cole, October 12, 2000;
- failed to discover that Libya was actively developing WMD;
- failed to discover that Iran and North Korea were actively developing nuclear weapons;

These are the ones we know of. (It’s important to note that there are many more we don’t know of, and – further – there are those which we don’t know that we don’t know).

Friedman underscores the need for the CIA to get “more people on the ground who speak the languages we need and who can think unconventionally.”

He’s right on the mark. However the CIA also has to encourage its spooks to take more risks. Not that they don’t already, however it is quite apparent from the Company’s track record that it hasn’t taken the rights risks in the right places.

As mentioned by the 9/11 Commission, the agency also has to get out of the espionage and counterintelligence business. The U.S. military has special forces that are trained to conduct such operations. Let’s leave that job to them.

At this point it is, of course, far too early to determine whether the changes outlined in the new intelligence reform legislation will drive the changes that are necessary to take America safely into the next century. Clearly, structure is part of the problem.

But issues surrounding the CIA’s embedded culture seems to comprise most of the problem.

Whether the new bill will change that is anyone’s guess.

R.G. McGillivray

http://www.rgmcgillivray.com/pages/1/index.htm