Remaking U.S. Intelligence - Part V: The Analysts
Some of the toughest intelligence jobs are at home, making sense of all the eavesdropping information, satellite imagery, and stolen secrets. The intelligence community's analysts are still smarting after getting wrong nearly every aspect of Iraq's weapons programs before the war. To prevent "groupthink" and other failures, the DNI is moving to open up the analytic process to new ideas and new people. Its deputy director for analysis, former State Department intelligence chief Thomas Fingar, is pushing the biggest outreach program by U.S. intelligence in 40 years, hoping to draw upon expertise in the business and academic worlds. A year ago, the DNI established an Open Source Center at the CIA, designed to broaden the flow of ideas to analysts who rely so heavily on classified material that they sometimes fail to see the big picture or consider alternative views. DNI officials are also calling for more Red Teams–groups of critical, out-of-the-box thinkers who challenge conventional wisdom. One clear change, they say, can be seen in the President's Daily Brief, the top secret report given to the president each morning. Once prepared by the CIA, it is now compiled by the DNI and makes broader use of items not only from across the government but from public sources (although more than 85 percent still comes from the CIA, officials say). Another big change: creation of the National Counterterrorism Center, under the DNI, which brings together some 200 terrorism specialists from across the community.
Some reforms are so obvious that it seems surprising they weren't made earlier. Fingar's staff is creating a National Digital Intelligence Library, a central repository that for the first time will hold all newly completed intelligence reports. Other problems are more intimidating, such as the torrent of information swamping analysts. "In the Cold War, we struggled to get data," says John McLaughlin, a former deputy CIA director. "Today, the problem is that there is too much data–more than we can handle." So voluminous is the flow that experts say more than 30 percent of the imagery collected by U.S. spy agencies goes unexamined. Even the flow of "finished" intelligence can be overwhelming. Fingar estimates that the community produces some 50,000 analytical reports a year, many of them redundant and unread. "There can't conceivably be a market for 50,000 pieces of finished intelligence," Fingar has said.
A more controversial task will be protecting the community's analytical judgments from political manipulation–a charge leveled repeatedly against the Bush administration in its attempts to justify the Iraq war. "That's the elephant in the room," says a longtime reformer. The DNI has established an analytic ombudsman, but she has almost no staff. The lack of resources has prompted criticism from some on Capitol Hill who have called for the DNI to do its own "audits" to ensure the integrity of reports on key issues.
NEXT: Part VI: The Scientists