It gets depressing, but we really need to continue to look at the Intelligence problem, IMO. From NRO
September 24, 2002, 9:25 a.m.
Black Hole
The Bush intel problem.
By Mark Riebling
One year ago, in his primetime address to a joint session of Congress and the American people, President Bush vowed "to strengthen our intelligence capabilities, to know the plans of terrorists before they act, and find them before they strike." He received a thunderous ovation. Now, a year later, in his new national-security strategy, the president has finally outlined his vision for intelligence reform.
What a difference a year doesn't make.
After months of bruising revelations ? capped last week by the Joint House-Senate 9/11 Committee's interim report ? the need for radical spy reform could not be clearer. Yet spy reform is precisely the issue about which the president, in his otherwise bold strategy document, has the least to say. It's also the area where what he does say is least specific ? and where specific, most adherent to the outmoded models he vows to transform.
"Intelligence ? and how we use it," the new strategy affirms "is our first line of defense against terrorists and the threat posed by hostile states." Agreed. Yet of the nearly 13,000 words in the document, only 295 ? two percent ? touch on intelligence. Far more words are devoted to environmental protection (373), regional conflicts in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa (722), aid to underdeveloped nations (1,235), and foreign trade (1,470). We're given whole paragraphs on literacy training and AIDS, health care and clean water, low marginal tax rates. National security is construed so broadly that it sounds like advice from a motivational talk at a Rotary Club pancake breakfast: "our national security begins" with our "entrepreneurial energy."
The 9/11 hijackers did not succeed because our "entrepreneurial energy" failed us. They did not succeed because our environmental-protection, foreign aid, or trade policies failed us. They succeeded because our intelligence community failed us.
Our intelligence community failed us, as we now know in depressing detail, at a particular stress point. It failed at the seam of foreign and domestic spying, at the division between law enforcement and intelligence, at the wedge between FBI and CIA.
The president acknowledges this fatal rupture, but proposes no remedies. "Since the threats inspired by foreign governments and groups may be conducted inside the United States," he writes, "we must also ensure the proper fusion of information between intelligence and law enforcement." He does not say how this fusion, which thirteen White House directives by previous administrations have failed to effect, will finally work on his own watch.
President Bush concedes that "the distinction between domestic and foreign affairs is diminishing," but he does not draw the logical conclusion: that the distinction between domestic and foreign spying ought to be correspondingly diminished. He simply refers to globalization as "a new condition of life," as if it must be passively accepted. The "distinctly American internationalism" he urges abroad will be backed, it seems, by a distinctly American provincialism at home. We will remain the only major democracy that lacks a true internal spy agency. We will continue to split counterterrorist duties between cops and spies.
What about counterintelligence ? the thwarting of enemy spy services? President Bush deserves credit for at least mentioning the issue, which is too often ignored. "[We are] investing in future capabilities while working to protect them through a more vigorous effort to prevent the compromise of intelligence capabilities...."
But what is this "more vigorous" effort? How will it resolve the ancient rivalry between collectors of positive intelligence, and the naysayers of counterintelligence? Will the 1973 CIA decision to emphasize collection over protection now be officially reversed? This vital question is not answered, or even asked.
Where President Bush does give detail, it is in his vow to "tak[e] full advantage of science and technology" to improve our intelligence. This will be done specifically "by developing assets such as advanced remote sensing...." Yet no one has suggested that 9/11 could have been averted by a larger fleet of robot planes. Only penetration agents in al Qaeda could have tipped us off. The number of words devoted by the White House to the improvement of human espionage? Zero.
With that lacuna, the document achieves a kind of negative logical perfection. Simply stated: The more directly vital a policy transformation is to the prevention of another 9/11, the less directly the new strategy addresses it.
President Bush promises, for instance, "a fundamental reordering of the FBI," referring apparently to the improvement of FBI analysis, for which he has budgeted $35 million. But that is all he has to say on the repair of the broken system which prevented the prevention of 9/11. That's it: Just that one lonely sentence. The White House document spends nine fulsome paragraphs, by contrast, detailing how our national security will be enhanced by research into "greenhouse gases."
How are we to interpret this vacuity? One might posit that the president is being coy for security reasons. Perhaps he doesn't want to tell our enemies what we're doing. I pray that is the case. But I don't think it is.
The president's relative de-emphasis on intelligence, after all, is not merely rhetorical. He not only spends more words on greenhouse gases than on FBI reform; he's spending far more money as well. He proudly points out that the $4.5 billion he's shoveling into research on "climate change" is "the largest sum being spent... by any country in the world." What the president does not point out is that he's thereby spending 1,285 times more tax dollars countering the "green menace" than fixing the problem that led most directly to 9/11.
Money alone is not the solution to our intelligence problems. But money is a good indicator of the relative priority accorded an issue in Washington. And the warning signs of a Bush blank-out on intelligence have been flashing since early summer.
In the homeland-security plan, less than two pages (of 28) addressed the overhaul of intelligence. At the time, critics ascribed this relative lack of emphasis to the political rush in which the plan was released. That excuse can no longer be mustered: The president and his national-security staff have been huddled over the new strategy for months.
It's been widely reported that President Bush has delegated the responsibility for intelligence reform to former national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft. It's also been reported that Scowcroft opposes any reform more radical than strengthening the authority of the director of Central Intelligence.
Shoring up the DCI's authority is, to be sure, a good idea. But doing that, and doing nothing else, is a recipe for disaster. As the strategy document rightly notes: "The major institutions of American national security were designed in a different era to meet different requirements. All of them must be transformed."
If this transformation is, in fact, controlled by a coterie that opposes transformation, something is wrong. One must hope that, contrary to all reports, Scowcroft is writing even now a plan for radical reform, which he keeps locked at night in an office safe, and which the president will soon make public, in the White House Rose garden, with Scowcroft standing dutifully behind him. One must hope that this plan will contain detailed prescriptions to seal the counterintelligence gaps, to help our human spies steal enemy secrets, and to heal, at last, the FBI-CIA split.
The status quoism in the new strategy document makes this hope increasingly difficult to sustain. But a full year after his pledge to strengthen our intelligence, it's a hope the president should finally and decisively honor.
? Mark Riebling is the author of Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 ? How the Secret War Between the CIA and FBI Has Endangered National Security.
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