The President's commission on our pre-war intelligence has done some admirable work. The failures are embarrassing and have done much to damage our credibility on the world stage. Admittedly, the intelligence community has good reason to hang its collective head. But the critics seem eager to draw the wrong conclusions. Unarguably, our intelligence assessments were deficient and, in some cases, spectacularly wrong. But that hardly requires that we outsource our intelligence gathering to international organizations (like the UN), which is exactly what some are concluding:
The commission's findings, including a key judgment that U.S. intelligence knows "disturbingly little" about nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, are leading to calls for greater reliance on U.N. inspectors to test intelligence where the United States has little or no access.
"U.N. inspectors are boots on the ground," said David Albright, a nuclear specialist who accompanied the International Atomic Energy Agency to Iraq in the mid-1990s. Albright and others think the IAEA should be given greater access in Iran, and returned to North Korea.
Albright (and others) are right to call for more access for organizations like the IAEA. But it is foolish to insist that such international organizations represent neutral arbiters on the geopolitical stage. Organizations like the UN merely represent member states - each with their own interests. Those state - and the tenuous alliances that often form in times of crisis (witness the odd period of international unity during the build up to the Iraq war) - bring subtle pressures, interests and strategies to the meeting halls of international organizations. Those dispositions are bound to filter down to the efforts of the various agencies and inspectors (think Hans Blix) tasked with reliably assessing compliance and breach of agreement. Charitably presuming neutrality is essential to the functioning of such agencies on the part of all countries; but ascribing complete objectivity to their findings is to trust, for example, that a group of inspectors will place our security over an interest in regional stability or the economic interests of a particular region.
While it is true that there is no guarantee that our own intelligence agencies will not fudge the data as it suits their purposes, in most cases - and theoretically at least - those agencies act to represent our nation's interests and there is generally enough oversight and accountability that agencies cannot be too generous in their estimates without having to account for outright fabrications or unsubstantiated claims. Yes, our pre-war intelligence was not all credible, but there is no proof - despite the predictable hysteria of types like Maureen Dowd (how she is possibly employed is beyond me) - that the intelligence was doctored or massaged to fit a larger motive.
The intelligence was ambiguous in places, but more suggestive in others. And in a post-9/11 world, as many others have argued (most eloquently, Norman Podhoretz), inaction (or more bluntly, more years of whistling past the graveyard) was not even a mildly defensible option.
The moral to be drawn, however, should not be, 'let's outsource our intelligent functions'; it is that the CIA's failure is downright embarrassing and that it is time to overturn the political stigma of intelligence work. Let's allocate the necessary resources to vastly overhaul our own agency, the agency most responsible for supplying intelligence about our foreign adversaries.
In the April issue of Foreign Policy, Robert Baer makes just such a suggestion and offers up a laundry list of immediate action items to make the agency more efficient, more reliable, and - most desperately - more credible.
Reform the promotion system: Promotions were previously based on field experience, how much time an agent had spent in the field developing contacts and harvesting information. Over the years, however, much has changed and promotions are now based on the political games inside the beltway. Those reaching the top ranks of the agency have now rarely served outside the United States. Field experience is invaluable in developing intelligence instincts. More than developing significant experience, however, the old promotion system rewarded those agents that developed viable contacts. Under the new system, there's no incentive to work in the field and there's not guarantee that years of service will bring advancement. The CIA is left with agents working diligently within the beltway, with the end result being a reduced premium on the actual recruitment of intelligence sources.
Know your sources: The final assessments of intelligence should be vetted by top analysts, and the identities (including relevant facts about their interests, past associations, etc...) should be linked to the information they are providing. Doing so provides a method to 'weight' the information as delivered by sources. Anonymous information has its place, but only within a larger tapestry of reliable and accurate information.
Integrate federal, state, and local databases: Different agencies maintain and operate different databases. Each respective database lacks a 'bridge' tying it to another database. There is no super-database (or linking program) tying information from one database to data from another. As Baer writes, two of the 9/11 Saudi hijackers were listed as suspected terrorists within the CIA database. An FBI database search, however, failed to prevent the two men from entering because a routine check of the database yielded nothing. If the databases had been integrated, the two men would have been flagged.
Recruit on college campuses: The CIA used to depend on a network of college recruiters and was actively engaged in recruiting the best and brightest. The post-Vietnam era changed that. Most university cultures are now openly hostile to the CIA and anything else they perceive to be part of the 'military-industrial complex'. The CIA should begin to actively recruit again by developing a university network to cull the weakest performers and retain the strongest students.
Stop relying on foreign governments: The intelligence of other governments can be an invaluable resource, but is rarely a substitute for own intelligence gathering. Our own efforts reflect our own interests, rather than the interests of a foreign government. As Baer writes: "In the months preceding September 11, 2001, Germany, where the plot was hatched, was more focused on protecting the rights of immigrants than stopping an attack on the United States. We should have had our own spies in al Qaeda's Hamburg cell."
Recruit on the dark side: The agency must use all resources - even those unsavory characters that leave a bad taste in the mouth of the public (particularly the American media). After all, it's those characters that stand the best chance of obtaining the most reliable information, of getting closest to our enemies. As Baer writes:
The directorate needs to recruit a third class of employees: those who skirt the law. I have in mind the dealers in embargoed and stolen oil who beat a path to Baghdad through the 1990s and who stayed up late drinking and partying with Saddam's son Uday. Imagine if the CIA had someone next to Uday, some confidant to whom that psychopath might have blurted out the fact that his daddy had secretly destroyed all of the WMD. There might not have been a war. No mounting casualties and no intractable morass.
You know as well as I do, Mr. Director, the heat you'll take when one of these risky recruits goes bad. But it's up to you to tell Washington what many of the people around you are reluctant to say: We're waging war, not running a church social.
If the critics of our pre-war intelligence are serious about reforming the way our agencies gather information, then Baer's suggestions should be read as timely and helpful prescriptions. If, on the other hand, their criticisms are simply thinly veiled excuses to carp about the war that they never wanted fought, they can ignore them altogether. But they do so at their own risk.
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