Mission Impossible
The inside story of how a band of reformers tried--and failed--to change America's spy agencies
The more the team looked, the more dismayed they became. Basic questions seemed to have no answers. No one had any idea how many analysts or linguists worked in the intelligence community, what expertise they had, or where they could be reached. Gannon launched a survey, found more than 10,000 analysts spread across a dozen agencies, and began building a database. Nor had anyone done a worldwide survey of U.S. collection efforts. Allen took that on and found a completely disjointed, uncoordinated effort. Among the holes in the collection net: central Iraq. While U.S. intelligence listened in and surveilled Iraq's northern and southern no-fly zones, incredibly, no one in the entire U.S. intelligence community was looking at Baghdad and Saddam's strongholds. When the United Nations weapons inspectors left Iraq, America's intelligence services were virtually blind. On the sixth floor at Langley, Charlie Allen was shocked at how dependent America's spy agencies had become on the U.N. inspectors. "We had," he recalls, "almost nothing."
The lack of basic data on collection meant, among other things, that there was no reliable way to determine which programs were more effective--and more cost efficient--among the different agencies. The intelligence community, Simon believed, was a good five years away from having the tools it needed. In the meantime, he mused, what passed for data were, in effect, "dueling anecdotes."
No inventory control. Perhaps most extraordinary was that analysts across the intelligence community had no idea what was happening to their requests for surveillance. Surprisingly, when analysts ask for raw intelligence on a target overseas--whether through satellite photography or electronic eavesdropping--they rarely know if the collecting agencies, like the NSA, consider the request their top priority or their 25th. They don't know when those agencies might respond, nor even if other analysts have made similar requests. The intelligence community is, in effect, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate with no inventory control.
ICMAP was meant to change all that. Proposed by Dempsey's staff in 1999, ICMAP was a computerized system that would set up an audit trail to look at "tasking" requests and responses throughout the intelligence community. "You could find out what you've forgotten or were not paying attention to," explains one of its backers. "You could find if we weren't watching central Iraq--which we weren't." The directors of the five big agencies-the CIA, the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Pentagon's National Imagery and Mapping Agency--all signed off on ICMAP. And then the fight began. "ICMAP was sabotaged and undercut at every turn," says Simon, one of its founders. The heaviest opposition came from the NSA, say staffers, which feared the program as conceived was intrusive, overly complex, and would force it to rework a labyrinth of expensive, aging databases. "This was a question of will," says a former top intelligence officer and ICMAP supporter. "Somebody should have been shot for blocking this."
Another project that went down to defeat was creating a standard clearance for members of the intelligence community. The ODCI staff's own security badges worked only at CIA and NSA. James Simon had to enter the Pentagon using his reserve officer ID. The patchwork of clearances had helped feed an astounding backlog of people waiting to be cleared. Standardizing clearances would have eased the wait (as long as two years today) while saving millions of dollars. This time the culprit was the CIA. Because Pentagon agencies didn't use polygraph exams in screening job candidates, the CIA's security people nixed the plan.
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