Agency that got Iraq least wrong
Douglas Jehl/NYT NYT Monday, July 19, 2004
State Dept. bureau takes a 'harder look'
WASHINGTON On Iraq and illicit weapons, the intelligence agency that got it least wrong, it now turns out, was one of the smallest - a State Department bureau with no spies, no satellites and a reputation for contrariness.
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Almost alone among intelligence agencies, this one, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) does not report to either the White House or the Pentagon. Its approach is purely analytical, so that it owes no allegiance to particular agents, imagery or intercepts. It shuns the worst-case plans sometimes sought by military commanders.
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"They are willing to take on the accepted analysis and take a second, harder look," said Alfred Cumming, a former staff director of the Senate intelligence committee who is now an intelligence and national security specialist at the Congressional Research Service.
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With just 165 analysts, the bureau is about one-tenth the size of the CIA's analytical arm. But its analysts tend to be older, more experienced and more likely to come from academic backgrounds than those at other agencies like the CIA, and they are more often encouraged to devote their careers to the study of a particular issue or region.
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"They have a reputation for having personnel who have skills in one specific area, as opposed to being utility infielders," said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, the Republican who is chairman of the Senate committee.
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That panel's otherwise scathing report on prewar intelligence on Iraq not only spared this bureau from most of its harsh criticisms but explicitly endorsed the dissent it had inserted into the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002 challenging as unsubstantiated the view of other agencies that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. In addition, where the assessment included a prediction by other agencies that Iraq could develop a nuclear weapon within a decade, the State Department bureau noted pointedly that it was unwilling to "project a timeline for the completion of activities it does not now see happening."
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The bureau was still wrong, along with other intelligence agencies, in asserting that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons. But congressional officials say that over all, its recent record on Iraq has been better than that of its larger rivals, like the CIA, with its more than 1,500 analysts, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, with more than 3,000. The example of the State Department agency, congressional officials say, is being closely studied as the White House and Congress debate what changes may help intelligence agencies avoid future failures.
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Among other recent successes, the bureau's admirers say, was a classified report in 2003 that was critical of the Bush administration view that a victory in Iraq would help to spread democracy across the Arab world.
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It also predicted correctly that Turkey might not permit American troops to cross its territory en route to Iraq and dismissed as "highly dubious" a British assertion that Iraq was trying to procure uranium from Niger. Not surprisingly, the praise that has been directed at the agency, including a widely noticed column in May by David Ignatius in The Washington Post, has prompted some backbiting at other intelligence agencies from officials who argue that its successes are being exaggerated. "Everyone has to get it right once in awhile," a senior Defense Department official said with some sarcasm. "It's not in my interest to trash a fellow member of the intelligence community," another senior intelligence official said of the agency. "But those who think they get it completely right are not completely familiar with the record." Not even the State Department bureau's admirers say that it alone represents the answer to the kinds of shortcomings discussed in the Senate report, which criticized as unreasonable and unfounded most of the conclusions reached by intelligence agencies on issues related to Iraq and its illicit weapons.
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The agency, with about 300 people in all, including support staff, is too small to shoulder the kind of analytical burden placed on the CIA and the even larger analytical branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
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Its bureaucratic distance from spymasters at the CIA, the signals-intelligence mavens at the National Security Agency and the satellite gurus who serve the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency means that it has little interaction with those who are actually collecting information around the world, intelligence officials say. Any restructuring, the bureau's admirers say, should preserve debate and rivalry between the intelligence agencies' various analytical branches. In addition to the State Department agency and the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, these agencies include most of the Defense Intelligence Agency; an element of the geospatial agency, which interprets satellite imagery; the intelligence office within the Department of Energy; and analytical offices within the various military services. "The analysts at INR are a curmudgeonlike group who delight in being different and getting to the body of something and not caring what other people think," said Carl Ford, Jr., a former career CIA official who headed the State Department bureau from 2001 until his retirement in late 2003.
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But still, Ford added in an interview, "It is important for all of us in the intelligence community to talk about where we went wrong."
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In retrospect, Ford and current State Department officials say, its bureau should have extended its doubts about others' assessments of Iraq's nuclear program to the issue of chemical and biological weapons.
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They also credit experts at the Department of Energy, who also operate independently of the White House and the Pentagon, for taking the lead in challenging the CIA's view on a critical question related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
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The CIA and other agencies concluded that aluminum tubes shipped to Iraq were intended for use in centrifuges as part of that nuclear program; the Energy Department and the State Department's agency strongly disagreed. Senior State Department officials say they believe that a combination of experience and independence gave their analysts the confidence to challenge the judgments reached by the CIA, the dominant agency within the community.
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"We're not flogging the fruits of anybody's collection system," a senior State Department official said. "For us it's information, not looking to advance NSA's budget or CIA's, saying, 'Golly, gee whiz, look what we've got.'"
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Officials refused to identify the analyst whose dissent on Iraq's nuclear program proved particularly prescient, but they said that the official had worked on the subject for more than a dozen years under a supervisor whose expertise dated twice as long.
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