Politics and the CIA (long read)

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The Crisis in the CIA
November 18, 2004 2323 GMT

By George Friedman

The CIA exploded in public rancor this week as two of the senior members of the Directorate of Operations resigned over the behavior of newly appointed Director Porter Goss and that of some of his senior advisers. As one report had it, some of Goss's people here "abrasive" and did not treat old-time CIA hands with appropriate courtesy. The real issue is who runs the CIA -- the senior professionals or the administration.

On the surface, the answer to this question should be easy. An intelligence service should be entirely independent, analyzing the world according to the highest professional standards. It's on the next level down that the problem appears. The CIA has not been doing a very good job in analyzing the world. It has been making some serious mistakes on some very important issues. Therefore, the question is this: What do you do when an intelligence service has failed and is incapable of repairing itself? Ultimately, the president is responsible for U.S. intelligence. It follows, then, that the principle of independence must submit to the principle of subordination when the organization has a systemic failure.

That is the argument in a nutshell. The chief lieutenants of former CIA Director George Tenet argue that the CIA has not failed. Rather, they argue, the failure was in the administration, which forced the agency to make dubious analytical calls for political reasons or, alternatively, ignored CIA analyses they disagreed with in favor of analyses they liked. The least grievous charge they make against the Bush administration is that it cherry-picked the analyses that fit with its world view and ignored the others. Therefore, not only is the CIA not a failed institution, but, to the extent it failed, it failed because of the administration that is now trying to repair it through Goss.

The administration counters that not only has the CIA failed consistently, but it has tried to cover up its failures by leaking classified documents that are designed to paint the administration in the worst possible light at the most sensitive political moment. So, for example, they charge that the CIA leaked a report indicating the agency had warned Bush about problems in Iraq -- and leaked it in a time and way that would cause maximum damage to the president. Similarly, they charge that the CIA floated a report that a Defense Department intelligence analyst was an Israeli spy, in order to damage Defense Department officials with whom it was at odds.

The Core Problem

This argument is certainly entertaining, and Washington lunches are being fueled by the cat fight, but it cannot be understood in the current context alone. The question of CIA effectiveness is a fundamental issue that has been on the national agenda since the agency was founded. This is merely the latest edition of arguments that raged in every administration -- from the Bay of Pigs to Rwanda. Who screwed up and when did they do it is an issue that has raged from the beginning.

The issue cannot be approached in a simplistic matter. It is essential to understand what the CIA is good at and what it is not good at. It is then necessary to determine what part of the CIA is most important and what part can be dispensed with at a particular historical moment.

The CIA has consistently failed to identify major historical events:

1. It failed to predict the North Korean invasion of South Korea or the Chinese intervention.
2. It failed to forecast or clearly understand the Sino-Soviet split.
3. It failed to understand the nature of the Cuban revolution until after Castro was in power.
4. It did not know that the Soviets had tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba and were prepared to use them in the event of an American invasion.
5. It failed to understand the probable course of the Vietnam War
6. It failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This is far from an exhaustive list. Moreover, it isn't quite fair to say the CIA failed to predict these things in the sense that no one in the CIA had any idea these things were happening. Rather, it means that institutionally -- in the official guidance given by the CIA to policymakers -- the CIA failed to clearly and unequivocally forecast what was going to happen. As all of us in the intelligence game know, one should always hold a contrarian analysis in a file cabinet somewhere, which, when produced, demonstrates that you knew it all the time. But the fact is, the only analysis that counts is the one you brief to the president and the National Command Authority -- and on that basis, this is a sampling of the failures.

If we look at this list, there are two classes of events with which the CIA has trouble. The first are events that are discontinuities -- or, in other words, when something completely outside the box occurs. When we look at these six cases, we see that they share a common thread: They violate the conventional expectations of the time. Arguing that the Soviets and Chinese were enemies, or that the Soviet Union was going to collapse, went against the received wisdom of the time. All of these did. The CIA has difficulty imagining major historical discontinuities.

The second class of events it has trouble with are those that are not amenable to covert intelligence collection. Some of these were, of course, things the Directorate of Operations should have known, such as the Korean War or tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba. But the most important of these things, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Sino-Soviet split -- things that really transformed history -- were not amenable to covert collections, because the decision-makers involved were not themselves aware of what was happening. The Sino-Soviet split emerged over time, even in the minds of the decision-makers. The last people to know that the Soviet Union was going to collapse were in the Soviet Politburo.

The greatest capability of the CIA -- and the intelligence community in general -- is covert operations that gather information from a nation's leadership. The CIA is not perfect at this, but it is outstanding. However, an event that involves non-nation-state actors (such as Castro, prior to the Cuban revolution) or more important, in which the leaders of the nation-state are themselves unaware, leaves the CIA helpless.

An event that breaks the paradigm of an era and that cannot be covertly sourced is what the CIA is worse at. Broad historical events that are visible to everyone, but which requires an ability to intuit the deep trend, is something the CIA simply doesn't do very well. When that broad historical event violates all conventional expectations, the CIA is fairly helpless.

The War

Al Qaeda was the classic failure for the CIA. Al Qaeda was not a national government but a small, apparently eccentric, collection of Islamists. This was already outside of the CIA's sweet spot. The Sept. 11 attacks were completely outside the paradigm that the CIA -- and others, including Stratfor -- was working with. The model of terrorism they had studied for a generation did not include an attack of this order. Therefore, since the CIA was dealing with a non-state group and with a historical discontinuity, the agency continued its record for getting it wrong.

The problem the CIA has is that it also failed in what was supposed to be its sweet spot -- covert gathering of intelligence from senior state officials in Iraq concerning a war that had been going on, in effect, since 1990. There were no surprises here, no discontinuities, no funky, off-the-wall groups. This was mainline intelligence-gathering.

It was here that the CIA made the core mistakes:

1. It did not tell either Presidents Bill Clinton or George W. Bush that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. It told both of them that it did.
2. It did not understand Saddam Hussein's war plan and did not warn Bush that the fall of Baghdad would trigger an organized guerrilla war. Warning of unrest is absolutely not the same as warning of a war plan.
3. It did not provide clear intelligence on the status of the Shia in Iraq and the degree of organization that had been achieved by Iranian
intelligence.

The failure to predict the Sept. 11 attacks was ultimately a systematic failure hardwired into the CIA. The ways in which it collects intelligence and the way its analytic process works have consistently generated failures on this level. When an institution fails to do a certain type of work well for 50 years, it is hardly fair to condemn it when it repeats the failure. The failures it can be condemned for, however, are the mainstream collection and analytic failures that shaped the Iraq campaign.

This is what the debate has raged over. The Bush administration gave the CIA a pass over Sept. 11; they are not giving it a pass over Iraq. The CIA is responding by arguing (a) they were forced to skew data and (b) they did provide accurate analysis but were ignored. The administration is arguing (a) no one forced them to skew data and (b) the claim that they did provide accurate intelligence undermines the claim in (a). They say that the CIA was just dead wrong in its intelligence and then tried to cover it up by savaging
the administration.

There are two conclusions here. First, the fact that the agency is being given a pass on Sept. 11 is the most serious problem. The consistent inability of the CIA to capture hard-to-source discontinuities is not a charming foible, but an unacceptable shortcoming. Being good in the small things doesn't matter if you can't do the big things. On that basis alone, the CIA should be rebuilt. But it is not on that basis that the administration is going after them.

Instead, they are going after the failure of the agency to do the small things right. We tend to agree that the CIA's failures in Iraq are too
numerous to be explained by political pressure. The consistent inability to generate radical analysis is caused by the inherent conservatism of the complex process that Tenet put into place. Where committees rule, the product will be the lowest common denominator. On this, we side with the administration.

However, the problem is not simply to streamline a process that works well on small things. The administration doesn't appreciate the fact that the enormous failures of the CIA on the big things are the real problem. It is what gave us everything from the Chosen Reservoir to bafflement at the sight of the Berlin Wall coming down. The administration is missing its chance to rebuild American intelligence in fundamental ways -- and there is no better time to do it than during a war, as "Wild Bill" Donovan and the OSS showed.

(c) 2004 Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.