Intelligence Fable
The "stovepipe" theory of Iraq intelligence goes up in smoke.
Tuesday, April 5, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Among the many valuable conclusions of the Robb-Silberman report on U.S. intelligence, the most important is probably this: Policy makers need to be more assertive, not less. To put it another way, Vice President Dick Cheney should have asked more questions of the CIA during the run-up to war in Iraq, not fewer.
We realize this ruins the Aesop's fable that has developed about Iraq, and about the intelligence process more broadly. That story holds that CIA analysts are the final arbiters of intelligence truth, and that elected leaders must accept what they conclude as holy writ or else they will be "politicizing" intelligence.
Regarding Iraq, this fable holds that the problem was that Mr. Cheney and the Pentagon created a separate intelligence "stovepipe" that ignored CIA professionals, or, even worse, pounded them into concluding against all evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
The Robb-Silberman panel does the enormous service of exposing all of this as both false regarding Iraq, and dangerous if it colors the future. The problem in Iraq wasn't some rogue Pentagon intelligence operation that ran roughshod over the CIA and DIA. Far from it, the problem was a "climate of conformity" across the entire intelligence community that firmly believed that Saddam still had WMD. Instead of disagreement, there was almost no internal intelligence debate at all. Everybody believed Saddam had WMD.
Moreover, says the unanimous bipartisan report, "on the eve of war, the Intelligence Community failed to convey important information to policymakers." Remember the story that former Secretary of State Colin Powell has often told of preparing for his February 2003 U.N. speech by demanding that the CIA scrub its data so he could be absolutely credible? Well, says the report, "serious doubts" about one Iraq source (the infamous "Curveball") became known months earlier "within the Intelligence Community." But "these doubts never found their way to Secretary Powell, who was at that time attempting to strip questionable information from his speech."
This and other errors "stem from poor tradecraft and poor management" within the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, the report adds. But "the Commission found no evidence of political pressure" to alter intelligence findings. "Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter their analytical judgments," the panelists unanimously say.
These conclusions are all terribly inconvenient to those antiwar critics who are still promoting the Dick-Cheney-as-Rasputin fable of Iraq. And, incredibly, their response has been to imply that the Robb-Silberman panel is also in on this Big Con. A few open-minded liberals are even suggesting that no one should bother to read the report, which we suppose makes it easier to keep believing in the Grassy Knoll.
But do they really believe that Chuck Robb, a former Democratic Senator and Commission co-chairman, is a dupe? Or that Richard Levin, the president of Yale, and Pat Wald, a former chief judge on the D.C. Circuit appointed by Jimmy Carter, were also played for fools? Senator John McCain was a Commission member, and we know he pounded hard to expose the alleged Pentagon-Cheney "stovepipe" operation, only to come up empty. Is he lying too?
In one sense, it would be more reassuring if the conspiracy crowd were right; at least we could be confident that our intelligence agencies were competent. But the truth exposed by Robb-Silberman is more alarming: The CIA knows far too little about the enemies who threaten us with WMD.
One reason it overestimated Saddam's WMD capability in 2002-03 is because its analysts recalled how they had underestimated how far along his nuclear-weapons program had been in 1991. The agency was also surprised to discover, after the fall of the Taliban, how much progress al Qaeda had made toward gaining biological weapons in Afghanistan. Regarding both Iran and North Korea, it still knows disturbingly little.
The Robb-Silberman panel's response to all this is to recommend that the President give more power to the new Director of National Intelligence, a post soon to be filled by career diplomat John Negroponte. The hope is that the DNI will be able to shake up the various intelligence bureaucracies, forcing both more information sharing and less conformity of analysis.
We've been skeptical of the DNI on grounds that it will become just one more layer of bureaucracy slowly consumed by the culture of the CIA. And over time that may still happen. But judging by the Robb-Silberman findings, something drastic had to be done. The report is also notably critical of the FBI and its lack of commitment to counter-terrorism. For this to be true three years after 9/11 tells us that Director Robert Mueller is not the right man for that job. At the very least, Mr. Negroponte will have to smack heads and fire people to succeed.
Which brings us back to the myth of "politicizing" intelligence. The greatest danger is if policy makers heed Senators Carl Levin and Jay Rockefeller and conclude that they don't dare challenge a CIA consensus. If anything, executive branch officials need to probe and prod and question intelligence professionals far more than they do now. On the largest threats and issues, they may well need to set up competing groups of analysts to provide alternative interpretations of information or trends. A kind of permanent Team B.
Intelligence is supposed to be the tool of policy, not vice versa. The lesson of the Robb-Silberman report is that, in a world of terrorists eager to acquire WMD, political leaders have a duty to second-guess intelligence.
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