Why U.S. Intelligence is Inadequate, and How to Fix It

Covert Action

Not only has CIA’s covert action, full of half measures and bloody betrayals, produced countless dead Kurds, H’Mong, and other would be allies. Also, it has crippled America’s capacity to deal with terrorism. That is because much of CIA’s interference in the affairs of the world has consisted of promoting precisely the regimes and ideas that are the matrices of terrorism.

From its earliest days, CIA built a dysfunctional relationship with the “third world.” CIA Director Allen Dulles financed political revolutionaries such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, as well as intellectuals such as Franz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth, the ur text of anti-Westernism. Though CIA did not invent the Ba’ath party, no one who knows the region would suggest that these parties would have come to power without CIA. To Iraq, CIA sent a young thug named Saddam Hussein .  CIA’s assumption was that these movements would take its advice, and at least that CIA would retain the loyalty of enough of their members to never lack for excellent sources of information about them.

Wrong on all counts. Third world movements turned against America.  Meanwhile CIA‘s large emotional and organizational investment in these movements led it to be their advocate within the U.S. government. To ordinary Americans a Yassir Arafat is a disgusting thug. But to CIA he is always full of hopeful signals. Sunni , Ba’athist domination of Iraq might be patently disastrous to any number of people, but to 9 CIA Saddamism, first with later without Saddam, has been the way to go. CIA’s political prejudices color whatever realities U.S. intelligence comes across.

Reform

No one has attempted to show how the main proposals for “reform” proposed by the 9/11 commission and endorsed by both 2004 Presidential candidates would remedy any fault of US intelligence whatever. Creating the post of Director of National Intelligence with budgetary and programmatic authority (Kerry) or supervision (Bush) over all intelligence agencies, as well as a national counter terrorism center to direct all aspects of intelligence about as well as action against terrorism, sidesteps all substantive questions about what intelligence is to be sought, how its integrity is to be guarded, how controversies over its interpretation ought to be resolved, and what action ought to be taken. Much less could anyone show how either of these organizational changes would safeguard America.

The proposal for a Director of National Intelligence has been around since the 1970s. Its implementation would have few if any effects beyond somewhat complicating an already complex bureaucracy. But a national counter terrorism center that could order any agency to collect in certain ways, come to certain conclusions about who is a terrorist, and act on those conclusions without the adult supervision of, say, the Secretary of Defense or State, would likely spawn any number of embarrassing activities. All to naught. Since incentives for terrorism continue to increase, opportunities for attack are irreducible, and fundamental intelligence faults remain unaddressed, events will surely discredit such irrelevant “reforms.”

Putting resources into boxes with the proper label does not produce good outcomes. These depend on people knowing the right things to be done, and actually getting them done. Alas, intelligence officials whose work has been their own secret for two generations have defined excellence simply as whatever they happen to turn out.  There is no substitute for firing massive numbers of people who have performed badly or are just useless, and replacing them with persons picked for their capacity to do the job expected of them. But there is the rub. Someone at the top must define the job.  Intelligence is an instrument of conflict. In any given conflict, intelligence is good insofar as it contributes to victory. Whoever is responsible for any operation must – as part of the exercise of his responsibility – define what information is needed for that operation’s success.

For that reason, the idea behind the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, namely to separate responsibility for knowing the world from responsibility for defense and foreign affairs was a bad idea. Intelligence reform should proceed from the premise that intelligence is naturally the handmaid of strategy.