U.S. Intelligence Agencies Need Reform, Resist Change, Presidential Commission Says

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence agencies were “dead wrong” about Iraq’s WMD programs but harbor staunch resistance to necessary reforms, a blue-ribbon commission reported to President George W. Bush today (see GSN, March 30).

The agencies were unable to collect good information about prewar Iraq, made mistakes in analyzing what they did collect and did not communicate well with policy-makers about the lack of evidence to ground their analyses, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction wrote in the unclassified version of a classified report delivered today.

“The intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure,” the panel told the president in a letter accompanying the report. The commission was led by retired federal judge Laurence Silberman and former Virginia Governor Charles Robb.

“The harm done to American credibility by our all too public intelligence failings in Iraq will take years to undo. If there is good news, it is this:  Without actually suffering a massive nuclear or biological attack, we have learned how badly the intelligence community can fail in struggling to understand the most important threats we face,” the report adds in its summary.

After interviewing hundreds of experts inside and outside intelligence agencies, the panel called for better intelligence leadership, including through creation of a National Counterproliferation Center; integration of, and innovation in, intelligence collection; improvement of analysis, and better communication between analysts and policy-makers; and better sharing of information among agencies.

Bush welcomed the recommendations in general terms.

“The central conclusion is one that I share: America’s intelligence community needs fundamental change to enable us to successfully confront the threats of the 21st century,” he said today, promising that his administration would “review the commission’s findings” and “ensure that concrete action is taken.”

The panel called for sweeping changes to bring intelligence agencies up to speed with current biological and nuclear weapons threats.

“Most of the traditional intelligence community collection tools are of little or no use in tackling biological weapons,” the panel said, adding that it could not discuss “specific challenges” in the unclassified version of the report. It called on intelligence agencies to reach out to biologists outside government and to make collection of biological weapon intelligence a higher priority.

“Many of our intelligence capabilities are inadequate” for learning about the nuclear programs of “terrorist organizations and smaller states,” the panel said. Intelligence agencies “must adapt to the changing threat” illustrated by the existence of insecure nuclear materials and the clandestine nuclear distribution network once led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, it said.

“Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world’s most dangerous actors. In some cases, it knows less now than it did five or 10 years ago,” the panel said. “As for biological weapons, despite years of presidential concern, the intelligence community has struggled to address this threat.”

The panel made 74 recommendations for improving intelligence, highlighting those it said “only you [Bush] can effect.”

It said the president should support the national intelligence director (DNI) — a post created under last year’s Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act and for which Bush has nominated longtime diplomat John Negroponte — as the director faces off with the “headstrong” Defense Department and the CIA. The two agencies, according to the panel, will “sooner or later … try to run around — or over — the DNI.”

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today thanked the panel for its work and said in a prepared statement that he has asked the relevant agency officials to “review the report with care, undertake a systematic review of the commission’s recommendations and make suggestions to me for improvements.”

The commission also urged Bush to “order an organizational reform of the [FBI] that pulls all of its intelligence capabilities into one place and subjects them to the coordinating authority of the DNI.” 

“The intelligence reform act almost accomplishes this task, but at crucial points it retreats into ambiguity,” the panel said. It said the act gives the director “broad responsibilities but only ambiguous authorities” and that the president should seek to ensure the law is implemented in a way that strengthens the director’s hand.

The commission also issued a general call for more official pressure on intelligence agencies to perform well and for more oversight of their findings.

“The intelligence community needs to be pushed. It will not do its best unless it is pressed by policy-makers, sometimes to the point of discomfort,” the commission wrote in the letter. “While policy-makers must be prepared to credit intelligence that doesn’t fit their preferences, no important intelligence assessment should be accepted without sharp questioning that forces the community to explain exactly how it came to that assessment and what alternatives might also be true.”

The panel stressed the difficulty that is to be expected in seeking to reform intelligence agencies, which it blasted as deeply resistant to change.

“Like government bodies everywhere, intelligence agencies are prone to develop self-reinforcing, risk-averse cultures that take outside advice badly,” the panel said in its report. “While laudable steps were taken to improve our intelligence agencies after Sept. 11, 2001, the agencies have done less in response to the failures over Iraq, and we believe that many within those agencies do not accept the conclusion that we reached after our year of study: that the community needs fundamental change if it is to successfully confront the threats of the 21st century.”

“Commission after commission” has made the same case, the panel wrote, but “the intelligence community is a closed world, and many insiders admitted to us that is has an almost perfect record of resisting external recommendations.”

The commission said it “found no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

“What the intelligence professionals told you about Saddam Hussein’s programs was what they believed. They were simply wrong,” the panel wrote to Bush. In its report, however, it added that in Iraq, “intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom.”

Touching on a frequent criticism leveled by opponents of the decision to invade Iraq, the panel said it was “not authorized to investigate how policy-makers used the intelligence assessments they received from the intelligence community.”

Former top U.N. weapon inspector in Iraq Hans Blix said last year in an interview with Global Security Newswire that prewar overestimation of Iraq’s WMD programs resulted not from faulty intelligence but from a failure of “critical thinking” at the highest levels of government (see GSN, March 24, 2004). A much-discussed Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report early in 2004 reached similar conclusions, adding that policy-makers appeared to have inappropriately influenced intelligence work (see GSN, Jan. 8, 2004).

Carnegie Nonproliferation Director Joseph Cirincione said in an interview today that the commission’s report reflects its allegiance to Bush.

“I think the White House got what they carefully designed: a report that sets up the intelligence community as a fall guy,” Cirincione said.

“What you find depends on where you look,” he said. “This is a hand-picked commission on a very tight presidential mandate to look only at the intelligence community, not at the administration’s use of the intelligence community’s findings.”

“This is sort of classic misdirection,” Cirincione said of the report. “We all know what the real problem is here: Our senior leadership made statements repeatedly and consistently that simply weren’t true, and those statements went way beyond what the intelligence community was saying.”

In particular, Cirincione cited Cabinet officials’ prewar statements about Iraq’s alleged efforts to reconstitute its nuclear weapon programs and about the alleged existence in Iraq of hundreds of tons of biological agents. Cirincione said such statements were not supported even by intelligence assessments he said were already tailored to the Bush administration’s goals. Caveats in such assessments, he said, were systematically omitted in administration statements.

Cirincione added that the commission’s contention that intelligence was hampered by management shortcomings, not politicization, does not explain why the intelligence flaws the panel highlights appeared to emerge under Bush.

“Why did the intelligence get so distorted in 2002? If this was a management problem, why wasn’t this apparent in ‘99 and 2000?” he asked.

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