The US intelligence community is a massive bureaucracy consisting of at least 16 different agencies. It includes the CIA; numerous agencies within the Department of Defense, such as the National Security Agency (NSA), responsible for electronic eavesdropping and code-breaking; the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) responsible for spy satellites; and bits of larger agencies such as the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research — which in the interest of truth in advertising I should mention that I once had the honor of being part of.
In 2008 the United States spent 47.5 billion dollars on intelligence — slightly less than the federal government spent on education. In view of the threats facing the United States today this does not seem like an excessive amount to spend on intelligence yet in an era of economic crisis there will almost certainly have to be cuts in some parts of the intelligence empire.
On Jan. 6 President-elect Obama completed the choice of his senior national security team by announcing that retired Admiral Denis Blair would assume the position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and that Leon Panetta, former Congressman and White House Chief of Staff under Bill Clinton, would become CIA Director.
Almost immediately the flak began, giving the heretofore smoothly functioning Obama team a glimpse of how full of pitfalls the special world of intelligence can be. The chair of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, Dianne Fienstein, sniffed unhappily that she had not been consulted. Others noted that Panetta has no experience in intelligence and that the CIA has a track record of chewing up and spitting out political appointees it dislikes.
Lurking behind Obama’s appointments are bigger issues including the role of intelligence agencies in the struggle against terrorism, the structure of the intelligence community after 9-11 changes, and the politization of intelligence analysis. In a recent interview Obama said that what to do with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, whose closure he reportedly intends to announce on his first day of office, is more complex than he originally thought.
He is likely to find that the same applies to some of the agency interrogation practices he has criticized such as waterboarding and the rendition or secret imprisonment of captives suspected of terror links. The CIA’s clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations or DO, which was widely thought to have lost its way after the end of the Cold War, has found new purpose after 9-11. The CIA took the lead when a reluctant Pentagon dragged its heels over President Bush’s insistence that the US invade Afghanistan and subsequently the Agency has been in the forefront of the global war on terror.
The challenge facing President Obama and his appointees will be to walk the line between cutting back on actions which have undermined the US moral stature around the world and not alienating the institutions and people on which it depends to continue the fight against terror and which are capable — as some Clinton and Bush appointees found out the hard way — of fighting their own bureaucratic guerilla war if they lose confidence in their political leaders.
There was a time when new Presidents did not routinely appoint new intelligence chiefs upon assuming office It is now too late for Obama to follow this example and probably too much to have expected him to have done so given the unfortunate politicization of intelligence under his predecessor but he and Congress could move in this direction by stipulating that the chief of intelligence would serve for fixed term outside of the quadrennial White Hose rotation — as is now the case with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Obama also needs to take a hard look at the intelligence management structure he inherited. In the wake of 9-11 Congress created the new position of Director of National Intelligence, intended to allow better coordination of the massive intelligence community.
The DNI has responsibility for the President’s daily intelligence brief, which gives its incumbent the enormous Washington resource of personal access to the President, but without hiring authority and with little influence over the budgets of the agencies nominally under his supervision. The predictable result has been the creation of another cumbersome level of bureaucracy with little gain in coordination.
The old system, under which the CIA chief was also supposed to coordinate the community wearing the hat of Director of Central Intelligence, did not work very well either. It may be unrealistic — and possibly undesirable — to expect lockstep coordination from the huge US intelligence structure but Obama could make a stab at reducing the size, expense, and bureaucratic inflexibility of the current system.
One of the most difficult challenges Obama faces is reducing the dangerously politicized nature of current US intelligence analysis. Intelligence professionals were justifiably angered by the manipulation of intelligence analysis to support the Bush Administration’s case for invading Iraq.
The community enjoyed its revenge with a notorious 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) which reported that Iran had stopped nuclear weapons activities — a conclusion it reached by focusing on the Iranian military and excluding from its analysis the Iranian civilian nuclear enrichment program, which is the chief source of concern about Iran’s covert nuclear activities and which seems almost certain to give Iran the capability to produce nuclear weapons sometime during Barack Obama’s presidency.
The NIE exploded across the global policy debate over Iran with the effect of a one megaton blast — if the Bush Administration had ever intended to attack Iran, the appearance of the NIE made such a move virtually impossible.
Opponents of the use of force against Iran may applaud this result but the handling of the NIE represented the politicization of intelligence just as surely as did the actions of the Bush Administration in 2003.
Once begun, this kind of gamesmanship is hard to stop, but the best way is for the US to get out of the business of publishing the results of its intelligence analysis. Having participated in the process of drafting NIEs, I have a hard time understanding how intelligence personnel can “tell it like it is” if the results of their work will be spread over the front pages of the newspapers and exposed to public and Congressional second-guessing. It also seems likely to have a chilling effect on intelligence collection whether from sources in the field or from the intelligence services of other countries.
In the “old days” of the Cold War, US intelligence agencies did not operate in this country nor, in general, did they collect against Americans abroad.
The “war on terror” it seems may require different rules, with the Bush Administration asserting the right to use the US intelligence assets to monitor American citizens suspected of involvement in international terror. Under the guise of “warrant less eavesdropping” this issue has been a boon to partisans on both sides.
Republicans could accuse the Democrats of being soft on terrorism while Democrats could charge their colleagues across the aisle with creating a Gestapo-like police state.
Meanwhile, out in the real world, few people are likely to object to the notion that US officials should be informed if the NSA happens to overhear an American talking on the phone with Bin Laden. It should not be beyond the capability of Washington to develop procedures that would allow the intelligence community to quickly exploit such targets of opportunity without directing the NSA to turn its formidable collection resources on US citizens indiscriminately.
With the elections over this is something which Obama should move to resolve quickly and hopefully thereby creating an atmosphere in which other contentious issues involving the intelligence community can be resolved with less partisan bickering.
(Louis D. Sell enjoyed a long and illustrious career in foreign policy, including positions as Executive Director and Founder of the American University of Kosovo; as Director for Kosovo, International Crisis Group, Pristina; U.S. Representative to the Joint Consultative Group and Open Skies Consultative Commission, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Vienna, Austria; Minister Counselor for Political Affairs, U.S. Embassy, in Moscow and Belgrade; and was a Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Sell speaks Russian, Serbo-Croatian and French, and lives in Whitefield.)
