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.