Several months ago, this post addressed Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner‘s criticism of the recommendations contained in the final report of the 9/11 Commission. In doing research on the 9/11 Commission report, Judge Posner decided to write a new book on intelligence reform, on which he is currently working.
In this NY Times op-ed, Judge Posner points out that the reason the Bush Administration is having trouble finding someone to fill the “Intelligence Czar” position that the Commission recommended is that the proposed position is ill-conceived and makes impossible demands:

The beguiling premise of the commission’s report was that the 9/11 attacks occurred because there wasn’t enough sharing of intelligence data among America’s 15 or so federal intelligence agencies. The report’s reassuring conclusion is that we can solve the problem by centralizing the control of the intelligence system. The premise is doubtful; only in hindsight do the scattered clues gathered in the summer of 2001 point to the attacks that took place.
And slotting in a new bureaucracy (the director is authorized a staff of 500) above the existing agencies will not increase information sharing. Instead, by adding a layer to the intelligence hierarchy, it will delay and diminish the flow of information to the president.

Read the entire op-ed. Key thought here — more centralization of information analysis does not equate with better analysis.

This NY Times article reports on the FBI’s longstanding and intractabe computer network problems. Amidst the dismay over the national security concerns that this problem presents, there is a good thesis topic here for some public policy grad student somewhere.

In this Opinion Journal piece, Edward Jay Epstein reviews former KGB Col. Victor Cherkashin’s new book, Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer (Basic Books, January 1, 2005). Although there is no assurance that the ongoing reform movement in the Central Intelligence Organization is going to remedy the longstanding problems that have evolved in that agency over the past generation, Col. Cherkashin’s book makes clear that the U.S. has little to lose by seeking to correct the CIA’s deficiencies. In short, the KGB played the CIA like a fiddle during the Cold War.
Mr. Cherkashin had a distinguished 40 year career in the KGB that began in 1952 under Stalin, included a hitch as deputy KGB chief at the Soviet Embassy in Washington from 1979 to 1985, and ended when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. During that period, Col. Cherkashin primary mission was to organize KGB operations aimed at undermining the CIA’s integrity, confidence and morale, and he was pretty darn good at his job:

Mr. Cherkashin describes in detail how he helped convert two American counterintelligence officers–one well-placed in the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division, the other in the FBI–into moles. Their names are notorious now, but over the course of a decade Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen operated with anonymous stealth, compromising most of the CIA’s and FBI’s espionage efforts in the Soviet Union.

But Mr. Cherkashin does not attribute his success solely to his personal cleverness:

Mr. Cherkashin skillfully torments his former adversary, the CIA, by attributing a large part of the KGB’s success to the incompetence of the CIA leadership, or its madness. He asserts, in particular, that the CIA had been “all but paralyzed” by the “paranoia” of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s longtime counterintelligence chief, who suspected that the KGB had planted a mole in the CIA’s Soviet Russia division.

Mr. Cherkashin is right that Mr. Angleton’s concern retarded, if not “paralyzed,” CIA operations in Russia. After all, if the CIA was indeed vulnerable to KGB penetration, as Mr. Angleton believed, it had to assume that its agents in Russia would be compromised and used for disinformation. This suspicion would recommend a certain caution or tentativeness, to say the least. Mr. Cherkashin’s taunt about Mr. Angleton’s “paranoia” echoed what was said by Mr. Angleton’s critics in the CIA, who resented his influence, believing that polygraph tests and other security measures immunized the CIA against such long-term penetration.

But of course Mr. Angleton was right, too. On Feb. 21, 1994, Mr. Ames, the CIA officer who had served in the Soviet Russia division, was arrested by the FBI. He confessed that he had been a KGB mole for almost a decade and had provided the KGB with secrets that compromised more than 100 CIA operations in Russia. Mr. Hanssen was caught seven years later.

Since Mr. Cherkashin had managed the recruitment of Mr. Ames and helped with that of Mr. Hanssen, his accusation that Mr. Angleton was paranoid for suspecting the possibility of a mole has the exquisite irony of a stalker following his victim in order to tell him that he is not being followed. Mr. Cherkashin adds a further twist by suggesting that Mr. Angleton’s “paranoia” made it easier for the KGB to recruit demoralized CIA officers as moles. According to this tortured logic, if the CIA — and its counterintelligence staff — had acted more ostrich-like, by denying the existence of moles in its ranks, the KGB would never have found Aldrich Ames or penetrated the agency in other ways.

Read the entire review.

This prior post reviewed one of the books by the CIA counterterrorism agent who authored two books under the alias “Anonymous” that were highly critical of the Bush Administration’s approach to battling the radical Islamic fascists.
Now, Michael Scheuer, who turns out to be Anonymous, has decided to resign from the CIA and violate the trench-coat oath by going public with his criticism of the government?s war against the radical Islamic fascists. His views are interesting, but made less credible by his decision to cash in on them at the expense of the trench-coat oath.

The Houston World Affairs Council was formed about 15 years ago to provide a forum for all sides of current global issues, to promote better understanding of international relations and to contribute to national and international policy debates. The Houston World Affairs Council is an affiliate of the World Affairs Councils of America and is the now fifth largest such organization with over 4,000 citizen, corporation and foundation memberships.
Ted Barlow over at Crooked Timber reports on a recent HWFC forum in which Marty Peterson, deputy executive director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was the guest speaker. Mr. Barlow’s entire post is a must read, and the following are a few of the observations that Mr. Peterson made at the forum, beginning with the CIA’s record regarding the situation in Iraq leading up to the U.S.-led invasion:

He was also defensive about the CIA record regarding missing WMDs in Iraq (Note: Mr. Barlow notes in his post that the word ?defensive? has a negative connotation that he did not mean to convey here). In his recounting, the CIA underestimated Saddam?s missile programs, which were more advanced than anyone realized; they overestimated his biological and chemical weapons programs, which he described as ?more capabilities than functioning programs?; and they were approximately right regarding his nuclear weapons programs, which hadn?t restarted. In response to a question, he said that he doubted that Saddam had smuggled out WMDs to other countries before the war.
He made the point that the CIA wasn?t involved in the policy decision to invade Iraq, without expressing an opinion about whether it was the right decison. In general, I felt that he was making a good-faith effort to be non-partisan.

And do not expect quick returns on greater governmental investment in intelligence gathering:

He felt that excessive peace dividend cuts in the 90s had starved the CIA of resources. (Interestingly, he said that the underfunding reversed in 1998.) He also said that it takes him a year to hire an agent, and six or seven years to train and season him or her to the point that they can be trusted to try to recruit a foreign intelligence source. So the hiring boom that?s currently underway won?t pay off for years to come.

And what about the CIA’s being held responsible for its misinterpretations of intelligence data:

He resented being asked to answer for policies that the CIA didn?t create, and being judged for past actions based on the standards of the day. At one point, he said that he only asked for two things- sufficient resources to do his job, and a clear set of rules that he could expect to be judged by. ?In thirty years, I?ve never had either of those.?

As with Judge Posner, Mr. Peterson is not a supporter of the proposed election year reforms being bandied about regarding intelligence gathering and analysis:

He?s not a fan of the proposed reorganization of the nation?s intelligence services. He mentioned a point when another higher-up at the CIA (I don?t remember who) was discussing the issue with Congress. The CIA guy asked, if there was another catastrophe, who would be held accountable? None of the Congressmen could answer the question. (A cynic might ask who was being held accountable for September 11th, but I suppose that that?s why the reorganization is necessary.)
A detailed discussion of his preferences in intelligence reform was probably not in the cards, as he wasn?t even allowed to say how many employees the CIA has. As general principles, he favored (a) short lines of communication and (b) taking our time to think about things. He clearly was concerned that intelligence reform was being rushed to fit an election-year schedule.

Finally, Mr. Peterson’s views on the current “hottest spots:”

He?s very concerned about China and Taiwan. He says that China is investing heavily in their military, and that we can tell that they?re doing drills that show that they?re learning how to use their new hardware. He thinks that the end result of this activity is likely to be a crisis over Taiwan.

North Korea (he says that he believes that they have at least one nuclear weapon), Pakistan (he praised Musharraf?s participation in the war on terror, but is concerned that he might be assassinated) and Saudi Arabia (he?s concerned about a coup there, too.)

Read the entire post and, if you are a Houstonian, support the The Houston World Affairs Council

UCLA School of Public Policy professor Amy Zegart is the author of “Flawed by Design” that examines the flawed national security process in the United States government. This earlier post on the 9/11 Commission hearings provided her astute insights into the problems that arise from failing to establish clear priorities in the intelligence gathering process.
In this Newsday op-ed, Professor Zegart — who had Condi Rice as her thesis adviser — examines how far we have come in terms fo homeland security since September 11, 2001, and she does not find the results encouraging:

Homeland security funds are flowing, but not to the right places. Since 9/11, Congress has distributed $13 billion to state governments with a formula only Washington could concoct: 40 percent was split evenly, regardless of a state’s population, targets or vulnerability to terrorist attack. The result: Safe places got safer. Rural states with fewer potential targets and low populations, such as Alaska and Wyoming, received more than $55 per resident. Target-rich and densely populated states like New York and California received $25 and $14 per person respectively. Osama bin Laden, beware: Wyoming is well fortified.
It gets worse. Over the past three years, the federal government has spent 20 times more on aviation security than on protecting America’s seaports, even though more than 90 percent of U.S. foreign trade moves by ship, but less than 5 percent of all shipping containers entering the country are inspected. One recent study showed the odds of detecting a nuclear bomb inside a heavy machinery container were close to zero. As the 9/11 Commission concluded, such a lopsided transportation strategy makes sense only if you intend to fight the last war.

And on the intelligence front — which is Professor Zegart’s area of expertise — the lack of progress is equally appalling:

Then there is our intelligence system, a dysfunctional family of agencies that have proven uniquely adept at resisting reform, getting the wrong information into the right hands and the right information into the wrong hands. The past three years have witnessed the two greatest intelligence failures since Pearl Harbor. Yet Bush has held no one accountable for these results, and has avoided leading the charge for reform.
The president grudgingly embraced one of the 9/11 Commission’s key recommendations – creating a national intelligence director with “full budgetary authority” – only under strong pressure and finally, last Wednesday, after opposing the idea for weeks. There is urgency and boldness for you.

Not only has Bush shown tepid support for the 9/11 Commission’s ideas, he seems to have none of his own. For instance: How can we fix the cultural pathologies that cripple our intelligence system? Bush has said nothing about this and the Commission identified the problem but left it to the national intelligence director to solve.

While Bush has placed the biggest burden on his own record in the campaign, it’s important to note that Kerry has offered only a lackluster alternative that can be summed up as, “I’m for whatever the 9/11 Commission says.” This is like a diner who orders the entire menu because there’s nothing he really wants except to avoid making a choice. The commission’s recommendations are good, but far from perfect.

And Ms. Zegart is not one to criticize without providing constructive proposals on how to improve intelligence gathering in the federal government:

Building new organizational arrangements with more people and more power will not make us safer if intelligence officials still view the world through the same old lenses and hoard information in the same old stovepipes.
The FBI, for example, faces a daunting cultural challenge: transforming a crime-fighting culture that prizes slow and careful evidence gathering after-the-fact into an intelligence culture that takes fast action to prevent future tragedies. Training programs are crucial to this effort. Today, however, counter-terrorism training constitutes only two weeks out of the 17-week required course for all new agents. That’s less time than agents get for vacation.
Then there is the unspoken 11th Commandment operating inside the CIA, FBI and the other 13 intelligence agencies: Thou Shalt Not Share. Here, too, the core problem is cultural – the reluctance to pass information across agency lines is deeply engrained, based more on habit and values than policy or organization charts. And here, too, training is key.
Creating a “one-team” approach to intelligence requires developing trust and building informal networks between officials in different agencies. This is best done by requiring cross-agency training programs early in officials’ careers. By current policies, however, most intelligence professionals can spend 20 years or more without a single community-wide training experience. Dots will always be hard to connect when intelligence agencies do not trust or understand each other.

Read the entire piece.

Richard A. Posner is a highly-regarded judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, a prolific author, and should be one of the leading candidates to become the next Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (which probably means that he is not).
In this brilliant New York Times book review, Judge Posner reviews the 9/11 Commission’s report and he is not particularly impressed, particularly with the Commission’s recommendation for centralizing intelligence gathering:

[T]the commission’s analysis and recommendations are unimpressive. . . Much more troublesome are the inclusion in the report of recommendations (rather than just investigative findings) and the commissioners’ misplaced, though successful, quest for unanimity. Combining an investigation of the attacks with proposals for preventing future attacks is the same mistake as combining intelligence with policy. The way a problem is described is bound to influence the choice of how to solve it. The commission’s contention that our intelligence structure is unsound predisposed it to blame the structure for the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks, whether it did or not. And pressure for unanimity encourages just the kind of herd thinking now being blamed for that other recent intelligence failure — the belief that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
At least the commission was consistent. It believes in centralizing intelligence, and people who prefer centralized, pyramidal governance structures to diversity and competition deprecate dissent. But insistence on unanimity, like central planning, deprives decision makers of a full range of alternatives. For all one knows, the price of unanimity was adopting recommendations that were the second choice of many of the commission’s members or were consequences of horse trading. The premium placed on unanimity undermines the commission’s conclusion that everybody in sight was to blame for the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Given its political composition (and it is evident from the questioning of witnesses by the members that they had not forgotten which political party they belong to), the commission could not have achieved unanimity without apportioning equal blame to the Clinton and Bush administrations, whatever the members actually believe.

As an appellate jurist, Judge Posner is well-prepared to identify the flaw in the 9/11 Commission’s presentation — a fundamentally flawed premise:

The tale of how we were surprised by the 9/11 attacks is a product of hindsight; it could not be otherwise. And with the aid of hindsight it is easy to identify missed opportunities (though fewer than had been suspected) to have prevented the attacks, and tempting to leap from that observation to the conclusion that the failure to prevent them was the result not of bad luck, the enemy’s skill and ingenuity or the difficulty of defending against suicide attacks or protecting an almost infinite array of potential targets, but of systemic failures in the nation’s intelligence and security apparatus that can be corrected by changing the apparatus.

That is the leap the commission makes, and it is not sustained by the report’s narrative. The narrative points to something different, banal and deeply disturbing: that it is almost impossible to take effective action to prevent something that hasn’t occurred previously. Once the 9/11 attacks did occur, measures were taken that have reduced the likelihood of a recurrence. But before the attacks, it was psychologically and politically impossible to take those measures. The government knew that Al Qaeda had attacked United States facilities and would do so again. But the idea that it would do so by infiltrating operatives into this country to learn to fly commercial aircraft and then crash such aircraft into buildings was so grotesque that anyone who had proposed that we take costly measures to prevent such an event would have been considered a candidate for commitment.

The problem isn’t just that people find it extraordinarily difficult to take novel risks seriously; it is also that there is no way the government can survey the entire range of possible disasters and act to prevent each and every one of them. As the commission observes, ”Historically, decisive security action took place only after a disaster had occurred or a specific plot had been discovered.” It has always been thus, and probably always will be. For example, as the report explains, the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center led to extensive safety improvements that markedly reduced the toll from the 9/11 attacks; in other words, only to the slight extent that the 9/11 attacks had a precedent were significant defensive steps taken in advance.

Based on the 9/11 Commission’s proposals, Judge Posner is skeptical that the foregoing pattern will change:

Anyone who thinks this pattern can be changed should read those 90 pages of analysis and recommendations that conclude the commission’s report; they come to very little. Even the prose sags, as the reader is treated to a barrage of bromides: ”the American people are entitled to expect their government to do its very best,” or ”we should reach out, listen to and work with other countries that can help” and ”be generous and caring to our neighbors,” or we should supply the Middle East with ”programs to bridge the digital divide and increase Internet access” — the last an ironic suggestion, given that encrypted e-mail is an effective medium of clandestine communication. The ”hearts and minds” campaign urged by the commission is no more likely to succeed in the vast Muslim world today than its prototype was in South Vietnam in the 1960’s.
The commission wants criteria to be developed for picking out which American cities are at greatest risk of terrorist attack, and defensive resources allocated accordingly — this to prevent every city from claiming a proportional share of those resources when it is apparent that New York and Washington are most at risk. Not only do we lack the information needed to establish such criteria, but to make Washington and New York impregnable so that terrorists can blow up Los Angeles or, for that matter, Kalamazoo with impunity wouldn’t do us any good.
The report states that the focus of our antiterrorist strategy should not be ”just ‘terrorism,’ some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism.” Is it? Who knows? The menace of bin Laden was not widely recognized until just a few years before the 9/11 attacks. For all anyone knows, a terrorist threat unrelated to Islam is brewing somewhere (maybe right here at home — remember the Oklahoma City bombers and the Unabomber and the anthrax attack of October 2001) that, given the breathtakingly rapid advances in the technology of destruction, will a few years hence pose a greater danger than Islamic extremism. But if we listen to the 9/11 commission, we won’t be looking out for it because we’ve been told that Islamist terrorism is the thing to concentrate on.
Illustrating the psychological and political difficulty of taking novel threats seriously, the commission’s recommendations are implicitly concerned with preventing a more or less exact replay of 9/11. Apart from a few sentences on the possibility of nuclear terrorism, and of threats to other modes of transportation besides airplanes, the broader range of potential threats, notably those of bioterrorism and cyberterrorism, is ignored.

And Judge Posner is singularly unimpressed with the Commission’s foremost recommendation — the appointment of a new intelligence agency “czar:”

The report’s main proposal — the one that has received the most emphasis from the commissioners and has already been endorsed in some version by both presidential candidates — is for the appointment of a national intelligence director who would knock heads together in an effort to overcome the reluctance of the various intelligence agencies to share information.

The commission thinks the reason the bits of information that might have been assembled into a mosaic spelling 9/11 never came together in one place is that no one person was in charge of intelligence. That is not the reason. The reason or, rather, the reasons are, first, that the volume of information is so vast that even with the continued rapid advances in data processing it cannot be collected, stored, retrieved and analyzed in a single database or even network of linked databases. Second, legitimate security concerns limit the degree to which confidential information can safely be shared, especially given the ever-present threat of moles like the infamous Aldrich Ames. And third, the different intelligence services and the subunits of each service tend, because information is power, to hoard it. Efforts to centralize the intelligence function are likely to lengthen the time it takes for intelligence analyses to reach the president, reduce diversity and competition in the gathering and analysis of intelligence data, limit the number of threats given serious consideration and deprive the president of a range of alternative interpretations of ambiguous and incomplete data — and intelligence data will usually be ambiguous and incomplete.

What is true is that 15 agencies engaged in intelligence activities require coordination, notably in budgetary allocations, to make sure that all bases are covered. Since the Defense Department accounts for more than 80 percent of the nation’s overall intelligence budget, the C.I.A., with its relatively small budget (12 percent of the total), cannot be expected to control the entire national intelligence budget. But to layer another official on top of the director of central intelligence, one who would be in a constant turf war with the secretary of defense, is not an appealing solution. Since all executive power emanates from the White House, the national security adviser and his or her staff should be able to do the necessary coordinating of the intelligence agencies. That is the traditional pattern, and it is unlikely to be bettered by a radically new table of organization.

Judge Posner concludes by noting the normal American reaction to an attack, and notes that wide-ranging reforms in response to such reactions are ill-advised:

So the report ends on a flat note. But one can sympathize with the commission’s problem. To conclude after a protracted, expensive and much ballyhooed investigation that there is really rather little that can be done to reduce the likelihood of future terrorist attacks beyond what is being done already, at least if the focus is on the sort of terrorist attacks that have occurred in the past rather than on the newer threats of bioterrorism and cyberterrorism, would be a real downer — even a tad un-American. Americans are not fatalists. When a person dies at the age of 95, his family is apt to ascribe his death to a medical failure. When the nation experiences a surprise attack, our instinctive reaction is not that we were surprised by a clever adversary but that we had the wrong strategies or structure and let’s change them and then we’ll be safe. Actually, the strategies and structure weren’t so bad; they’ve been improved; further improvements are likely to have only a marginal effect; and greater dangers may be gathering of which we are unaware and haven’t a clue as to how to prevent.

Read the entire review. Judge Posner is an unusally clear thinker, and his analysis of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations is far more insightful than the recommendations themselves.
By the way, Judge Posner is guest blogging over at Larry Lessig’s blog, and here is his blog post on his NY Times review of the 9/11 Commission.

Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the director of Central Intelligence and vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. In this Wall Street Journal op-ed, Mr. Meyer points out that intelligence is a nation’s radar in time of war. America’s radar is currently broken and Mr. Meyer observes that President Bush’s prospects for re-election may depend on how fast he moves to repair it. In noting President Bush’s failure to replace George Tenet and infuse fresh blood into the CIA during the first four years of his administration, Mr. Meyer quotes former Reagan Administration CIA chief, William Casey:

“When you get elected president, you must move fast to put your own people at Justice and CIA. In different ways, these are the two bureaucracies that can destroy a presidency.”

Mr. Meyer then summarizes well the intelligence failures of the CIA during the Bush Administration:

The 9/11 attacks were themselves the worst intelligence failure in our country’s history, caused largely by the CIA’s inability to penetrate al Qaeda, to track the 9/11 terrorists themselves as they traveled the world to plan their deadly mission, and then to share whatever information the agency did collect with the FBI. And whatever may turn out to be the truth about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — whether they were destroyed or moved to Syria or Iran before Saddam Hussein’s overthrow — it’s obvious that the CIA failed to provide an accurate assessment of what U.S. forces would find in Iraq when they got there.
In addition, the CIA failed to project Saddam Hussein’s war strategy — to melt into the population and then launch guerilla attacks rather than fight our army head-on in the field — failed to project the sorry state of Iraq’s physical infrastructure including its oil pipelines and electric grids, and failed to accurately project the edgy, not-very-grateful attitude of Iraq’s political factions. And whatever may be going on with Ahmed Chalabi, the CIA’s clumsy efforts to discredit him through leaks to selected news organizations have made the president himself collateral damage.
One other intelligence failure, which has received less attention than these but which may turn out to be the most serious of all, has been the CIA’s failure to draw an accurate picture of the prewar links between Iraq and al Qaeda. While the CIA claims that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden had no more than an arms-length relationship, journalists including Stephen Hayes and Laurie Mylroie have uncovered an overwhelming volume of information which, when you pull the pieces together into a pattern, make a persuasive case that Iraq and al Qaeda worked closely together in the months and years leading up to 9/11. And as the information confirming this linkage has piled up, the CIA has obstinately refused to reconsider its judgment, preferring instead to trash the journalists who have so obviously run circles around its own collectors and analysts.

Mr. Meyer notes that this institutional CIA obstinancy is reminiscent of an earlier episode during the early stages of the Reagan Administration:

This is an eerie replay of what happened in the early 1980s, when the CIA bureaucracy insisted — in the face of all experience and common sense — that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the attempted assassination of the Pope. When journalists including Claire Sterling and Paul Henze uncovered powerful evidence of Soviet involvement, the CIA tried to discredit the journalists rather than consider their information and its horrifying implication. It took a special ad hoc team of agency officials pulled together by Casey over the “intelligence professionals” objections — a word that doesn’t begin to describe the Operations Directorate’s behavior; this was the nastiest, most vicious episode of CIA infighting I’ve ever seen — to finally figure out what really happened.

What exactly is the CIA’s problem? Mr. Meyer provides this insight:

During the Clinton administration, both parts of the CIA (collecting information and interpreting that information into patterns) were allowed to degrade. George Tenet has worked hard to improve the agency’s collection capabilities; if our espionage service is in good shape a decade from now (it takes a long time to rebuild a spy service) he will deserve much of the credit.
The big failure — and the real source of all the failures in these last few years — lies in the agency’s abysmal analytic skills. What’s happened, very simply, is this: The dot-connectors got shoved aside and were replaced by bureaucrats, such as Mr. Tenet himself and his key deputies. Think for a moment of our country’s great scientific research labs, such as the Salk Institute, Cold Springs Harbor Labs or Rockefeller University. Each one, and others like them, are headed by world-class scientists with proven track records of success (often with Nobel prizes to prove it) and who have now reached that stage in their careers when they can put aside their own research to manage teams of scientists who will make the next breakthroughs. Because these leaders have themselves succeeded so brilliantly, they have superb judgment on whom to hire, which projects to back and which to set aside — that priceless, unquantifiable gut feel for where the big payoff lies — what equipment to purchase and how to structure the organization itself.
It’s the same with intelligence. You cannot have a first-class intelligence service unless you put at the very top of it men and women with proven records of success at spotting patterns, at seeing where the world is going and what the next threats are likely to be long before they become visible. Intelligence isn’t org charts; it’s people. Get the right ones in place and all the organizational problems somehow get resolved. Indeed, the one quality all our great CIA directors have shared — Allen Dulles, John McCone, Bill Casey among others — is this remarkable talent for spotting patterns and connecting the dots.

Mr. Meyer’s recommendation for Mr. Bush?:

In light of today’s terrorist threat, President Bush might want to take a page from President Reagan’s playbook. When he named Bill Casey to head the CIA, his orders were to get control of the agency — fast — and to turn it from a lumbering bureaucracy whose judgments and predictions often were flawed into a razor-sharp operation that was playing offense.

Read the entire op-ed. Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming Presidential election, a long-term bipartisan plan to improve America’s intelligence gathering and analysis needs to be devised and implemented.

Robert Baer is a former CIA intelligence field officer who has written extensively (“Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude“; “See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism“) about how political wrangling in Washington over the past 30 years has badly damaged the ability of the CIA and other intelligence gathering agencies to generate an effective product for our nation’s leaders for use in evaluating and implementing foreign policy.
In this Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed, Mr. Baer uses his extensive experience in intelligence matters to evaluate the recently declassified and now famous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (“PDB”) that President Bush and his advisors reviewed a little more than a month before the attacks of September 11, 2001. Mr. Baer begins by explaining the nature of a PDB:

. . . PDBs are the crown jewels. They meld the best information from the CIA’s clandestine sources, our embassies all over the world, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and every other federal agency with a possible input. Like crown jewels, too, they are protected to within an inch of their lives. In all my years in the CIA, I never once was given access to a PDB, and I was by far the rule, not the exception. Compartmentation rules forbid it. Sources and methods are too valuable.
The Aug. 6, 2001, PDB, in short, represents the very best intelligence we then had on Osama bin Laden and his plans.

So, Mr. Baer asks, how good was the August 6, 2001 PDB?:

In fact, pretty awful. The first item in the PDB refers the president to two interviews that Osama bin Laden gave to American TV in 1997 and 1998. In the interviews, bin Laden promises to “bring the fighting to America,” following “the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef.” As it turns out, bin Laden was telling the truth, but that’s not the point. In intelligence documents as in corporate reports and the evening news, the best stuff goes up top, and in this case the best was cribbed straight from the boob tube.
How about items two and three? The information in both relates to bin Laden’s intention to attack the U.S., but it is from “liaison services” — i.e. foreign governments. We now know from leaks what those liaison services were, but we don’t know the provenance of the information. Was our friendly liaison reading it in the local paper? Was it fabricating, as happened with the Italians and the Niger yellow cake that was supposedly going to Saddam Hussein? The CIA rule used to be that you never ever trust liaison reporting unless you can confirm it with your own sources. Imagine The Wall Street Journal relying on Mad magazine for its investigative sourcing, and you’ll see just where such sloppy vetting can lead.

And what of the PDB’s disclosure of a bin Laden cell in New York recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks? Mr. Baer is not impressed:

Not until three-quarters of the way through the PDB do we finally get to our own intelligence: a clandestine source who reported directly to a U.S. official that “a bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.” Why bury this seemingly valuable nugget? Perhaps because our own source was dead wrong. Sept. 11 was planned and organized in Afghanistan and Germany. The 19 hijackers found their own way here and relied on their own funds. Support inside the U.S. came from unwitting contacts. No American Muslim was recruited to help the hijackers.
What’s in the PDB is damning enough, but to me, maybe the most alarming part is what’s not there. In the entire document — this crown jewel of intelligence — there isn’t a single mention of Saudi Arabia, the real Ground Zero of 9/11. Apparently, we had no idea suicide bombers were being recruited there or that cash was being raised for an attack on America.

Mr. Baer closes with a cautious observation regarding the future of American intelligence gathering:

In his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, CIA director George Tenet — the most candid of any of the witnesses, by the way — said we need five more years to catch up. I think he’s optimistic. It takes a generation to build an effective clandestine service. In the meantime, we have no choice but to rely on the Saudis to tell us whether we need to worry about all the killing going on in the Kingdom, whether it really has the petroleum reserves it claims to have, and a lot of other issues vital to our national security.
Personally, I would like to have my own source to tell me what’s happening inside the Kingdom’s fire-breathing mosques. That’s the only way we’re going to find out if more young Saudis are being recruited and money raised for another 9/11. Until then, we’re flying blind not just on Osama bin Laden but on Islamic extremism throughout the Arab world and our own. That’s the opposite of intelligence.

Over the past generation, each Democratic and Republican administration has contributed in varying degrees to the progressive evisceration of the American government’s intelligence gathering capability. The government’s failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks was in large part the result of that gradual weakening of intelligence over the past 30 years. Consequently, during this political season, make sure that any politician who criticizes the present administration’s production or use of intelligence is not one of the politicians who was contributed to the demise of such intelligence in the first place.