Getting it 'dead wrong'
So, how fouled up are the nation's spy agencies? Oy
When America's $40 billion intelligence community warned in October 2002 that Saddam Hussein had restarted Iraq's chemical weapons program, it did so almost entirely on the basis of a few tanker trucks. In particular, analysts poring over top-secret satellite photos of Iraqi ammunition dumps noted a dramatic increase in sightings of a particular kind of tanker truck that had been used for shipping chemical weapons in the 1980s. Extrapolating from this, the analysts concluded that the boost in activity could mean only that Iraq was producing and deploying chemical weapons. The analysts, as it turned out, were completely wrong. Somehow, the analysts were unaware that U.S. satellites had more than doubled their surveillance of Iraq, meaning that they were simply collecting more pictures of these facilities, and so they were simply seeing more of the trucks.
The 15 U.S. spy agencies were so dysfunctional that a change in U.S. satellite schedules was mistaken as proof of Saddam's guilt. That's one conclusion of a presidential commission formed to review the intelligence agency's erroneous assessments of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. The panel found that U.S. spy agencies routinely made assumptions about Iraq and "swathed them in the mystique of intelligence, providing secret information that seemed to support them but was in fact nearly worthless, if not misleading."
The commission's report further shreds the credibility of the nation's beleaguered spy agencies. The bipartisan panel, headed by retired federal judge Laurence Silberman and former Sen. Charles Robb, concluded not only that the intelligence agencies were "dead wrong" on Iraq but that they know "disturbingly little" about the WMD capabilities of the nation's other enemies. "In some cases," the report says, "[the intelligence community] knows less than it did five or 10 years ago."
For the Bush administration, which has articulated a doctrine of pre-empting deadly threats based on intelligence, perhaps the only saving grace is that some of the most alarming findings were kept classified--like the dramatic gaps in U.S. knowledge of North Korean and Iranian weapons programs. The commissioners said they did not want to help the nation's enemies learn too much about U.S. vulnerabilities. But Tehran and Pyongyang could find solace in the report's portrait of the U.S. intelligence community, which is described as a lethargic, even petulant, bureaucracy: "It is reluctant to use new human and technical collection methods," the report says. "It is behind the curve in applying cutting-edge technologies." When it comes to biological weapons, spy agencies are not performing some of the most "rudimentary" kinds of intelligence collection. These are only a few of the challenges the commission laid out for the nation's first director of national intelligence, U.S. diplomat John Negroponte, who is scheduled for Senate confirmation hearings next week.
Wild pitch. Some of the failings were quite basic. Take the tale of the source code-named Curveball. The report describes how spies routinely withhold critical details about their sources. That policy kept intelligence analysts and higher-ups from learning that Curveball was nearly the only source for their conclusion that Saddam had resumed making biological weapons. But Curveball, a defector in German hands, was thought to be alcoholic and out of control. Only one American had ever met him, and Pentagon officials receiving updates from the Germans never even tried to evaluate his credibility. Indeed, Pentagon officials dismissed concerns from some at the CIA about the lack of vetting, saying the "CIA is up to their old tricks."
Such miscues are part of a larger problem, the commission found, in how intelligence agencies communicate with policymakers--and each other. For instance, there are no communitywide procedures for correcting intelligence after a source has been discredited. The commission also issued a rare critique of the President's Daily Brief on intelligence, saying it often carried alarmist headlines and failed to mention uncertainties behind its conclusions. Reading the presidential report every day, the commission concluded, could "create, over time, a greater perception of certainty about [intelligence analysts'] judgments than is warranted." Commissioners did not examine whether the Bush administration misused intelligence in making its case for the Iraq war, saying that was beyond their purview.
The report did praise the spy agencies for their work shedding light on Libya's WMD program and uncovering the nuclear smuggling network of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan. It said that innovative efforts in collecting and analyzing intelligence helped officials gather enough information to force Libya to abandon its nuclear and chemical programs. The commission also acknowledged that agencies had made some reforms to improve information sharing.
But commissioners issued 74 recommendations to revitalize the "disorganized and fragmented" spy agencies, calling for "stronger and more centralized management" and for clearer authority for the new director of national intelligence. The FBI, it said, needs a reorganization to strengthen its focus on national security.
President Bush promised action, but the report was timed to come out safely after the presidential election and Congress's major intelligence reform. The commissioners warn that Negroponte will have trouble taking on the Pentagon, which owns 80 percent of the intelligence budget, and the CIA. The spy agencies have "an almost perfect record of resisting external recommendations." After all, they note, many of their proposals have been made before--in some cases, as long ago as 1971.
This story appears in the April 11, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.