In addition to the internal problems that both scandals revealed, the two cases served notice that espionage among the great powers continued despite the end of the cold war. Some people found this offensive, in terms of either Russian or U.S. activity. Others accepted it as an unsurprising and normal state of affairs.
THE TERRORIST ATTACKS AND THE WARON TERRORISM (2001- ). The terrorist attacks in the United States in September 2001 were important for several reasons. First, although al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s enmity and capabilities were known, the nature of these specific attacks had not been anticipated. Although some critics called for the resignation of DCI George Tenet. President George W. Bush supported him. Congress, meanwhile, began a broad investigation into the performance of the intelligence community. Second, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, widespread political support emerged for a range of intelligence actions to combat terrorism, including calls to lift the ban on assassinations and to increase the use of human intelligence. The first major legislative response to the attacks, the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act of 2001. allowed greater latitude in some domestic intelligence and law enforcement collection and took steps to improve coordination between these two areas. In 2004, in the aftermath of a second investigation (and also prompted by the failure to find WMDs in Iraq that intelligence had argued were there), legislation passed to revamp the command structure of the intelligence community. (See chap. 3 for details.) Third, in the first phase of combat operations against terrorism, dramatic new developments took place in intelligence collection capabilities, particularly the use of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles, or pilotless drones) and more real-time intelligence support for U.S. combat forces. (See chap. 5 for details.) The war on terrorism also resulted in an expansion of some CIA authorities, including its ability to capture suspected terrorists overseas and then
render
(deliver) them to a third country for incarceration and interrogation. This activity became controversial as some questioned the basis on which people were rendered and the conditions to which they were subjected in these third nations.
By 2004, two intensive investigations had taken place of U.S. intelligence performance prior to the 2001 terrorist attacks. Although both resulting reports noted a number of flaws, neither was able to point up the intelligence that could have led to a precise understanding of al Qaeda’s plans. The tactical intelligence for such a conclusion (as opposed to strategic intelligence suggesting the nature and depth of al Qaeda’s hostility) did not exist.
INTELLIGENCE ON IRAQ (2003- ). The Bush administration was convinced, as was most of the international community, that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction, despite his agreement at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War to dispose of them and to submit to international inspections. (The fall 2002 debate at the United Nations was over the best way to determine if he held these weapons and how best to get rid of them—not over whether or not Iraq had them.) However, more than two years after the onset of the ongoing military conflict, the WMDs had not been found. As a result, the two main issues that arose were how the intelligence could come to such an important conclusion that proved to be erroneous and how the intelligence was used by policy makers. Coupled with the conclusions drawn from the two investigations of the 2001 terrorist attacks, intelligence performance in Iraq led to irresistible calls to restructure the intelligence community. The Senate Intelligence Committee found that groupthink was a major problem in the Iraq analysis, along with a failure to examine previously held premises. At the same time, the committee found no evidence that the intelligence had been politicized. The WMD Commission (formally the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction), established by President George W. Bush, came to the same conclusion regarding politicization but was critical about how the intelligence community handled both collection and analysis on Iraqi WMD and on other issues.
In addition to intelligence that may have provided a
casus belli
(justification for the acts of war), subsequent intelligence on Iraq continued to be controversial. As Iraq descended into a bloody insurgency, former intelligence officials pointed out prewar estimates that suggested such a possible outcome. In 2007, at the request of Congress, the intelligence community produced an estimate on the likely course of events in Iraq and possible indicators of success or failure. The
key judgments
of this estimate were published in unclassified form, adding additional fuel to the political debate over Iraq.
As terrible as the 2001 terrorist attacks were, the initial Iraq WMD estimate points to much more fundamental questions for U.S. intelligence. The analytical failure in Iraq likely will be a burden for U.S. intelligence for many years to come. Subsequent analyses also seemed to point to increased politicization of intelligence, not by those who wrote it but by those in the executive branch and in Congress seeking to gain political advantage by using unclassified versions of intelligence.
The Iraq analytical controversy continued to serve as a touchstone for future intelligence analyses. In 2007, the DNI released unclassified key judgments of an NIE on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, which reversed its earlier (2005) findings and concluded that the weapons aspects of the program had stopped in 2003. This immediately became controversial not only because of the judgments themselves but also as some observers wondered whether this reflected either “lessons learned” from Iraq or some means of compensating for earlier errant estimates, a curious view that betrayed significant misunderstandings of the estimative process.
INTELLIGENCE REORGANIZATION (2004-2005). Three things contributed to the 2004 passage of legislation reorganizing the intelligence community: (1) reaction to the 2001 terrorist attack: (2) the subsequent 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission; and (3) the absence of Iraqi WMDs. despite intelligence community estimates that indicated otherwise. Congress replaced the DCI with a DNI who would oversee and coordinate intelligence but who would be divorced from a base in any intelligence agency. This was the first major restructuring of U.S. intelligence since the 1947 act. (See chap. 3 for details.) In March 2005, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction issued its report, recommending additional changes in intelligence structure and in the management of analysis and collection.
In 2006, CIA director Porter Goss resigned. By 2007, the first DNI, John Negroponte, had stepped down to return to the State Department after fewer than two years in the DNI position. Retired vice admiral Mike McConnell replaced Negroponte. Several senior jobs on the DNI’s staff proved difficult to fill. Many observers took such staffing problems as evidence that the new structure was not working as smoothly as proponents had hoped.
KEY TERMS
competitive analysis
groupthink
key judgments
monitoring
national intelligence
national technical means
render
verification
FURTHER READINGS
Most histories ot U.S. intelligence tend to be CIA-centric, and these suggested readings are no exception. Nonetheless, they still offer some of the best discussions of the themes and events reviewed in this chapter.
Ambrose, Stephen E., with Richard H. Immerman.
Ike’s Spies. Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment.
Garden City. N.Y.: Doubleday. 1981.
Brugioni, Dino A.
Eyeball
to
Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Ed. Robert F. MeCort. New York: Random House, 1990.
Colby, William E., and Peter Forbath.
Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.
Draper, Theodore.
A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affair.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1991.
Garthoff, Douglas J.
Directors of Central lntelligence as Leaders of the U.S. lntelligence Community 1946-2005.
Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA, 2005.
Gates, Robert M.
From the Shadows.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Helms, Richard M. A Look over
My Shoulder: A Life in the Central lntelligence Agency.
New York: Random House, 2003.
Hersh, Seymour. “Huge CIA Operations Reported in U.S. against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.”
New York Times,
December 22, 1974, 1.
Houston, Lawrence R. “The CIA’s Legislative Base.”
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence
5 (winter 1991-1992): 411-415.
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri.
The CIA and American Democracy.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
Lowenthal, Mark M.
U.S. Intelligence.- Evolution and Anatomy.
2d ed. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992.
Montague, Ludwell Lee.
General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence: October 1950-February 1953.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick.
Secrery: The American Experience.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Persico, Joseph.
Casey
:
From the OSS to the CIA.
New York: Viking, 1990.
Powers, Thomas.
The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA.
New York: Knopf, 1979.
Prados, John. Lost
Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Ranelagh, John.
The Rise and Decline of the CIA.
New York: Touchstone, 1987.
Tenet, George.
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA.
New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
Troy, Thomas F.
Donovan and
the
CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1981.
Turner, Michael. “A Distinctive U.S. Intelligence Identity.”
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence
17 (summer 2004): 42-61.
U.S. Senate. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities [Church Committee].
Final Report.
Book IV:
Supplementary Detailed StafJ Reports on Foreign and Military Intelligence.
94th Cong., 2d sess., 1976. (Also known as the Karalekas report, after its author. Anne Karalekas.)
Wohlstetter, Roberta.
Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962.
Wyden, Peter.
Bay cf Pigs: The Untold Story.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.
CHAPTER 3
THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY
A
LTHOUGH VARIOUS agencies had been added to the intelligence community over the years, the basic structure had been remarkably stable since its establishment in the National Security Act of 1947. As discussed in the previous chapter, this changed in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, more popularly known as the 9/11 Commission, made a series of recommendations in its 2004 report to restructure the intelligence community. Aided by a savvy public relations effort by the commission, its staff, and some of the September 11 families, many commission recommendations were enacted after a relatively brief debate and intense bargaining among members of Congress and the George W. Bush administration.
The major change made by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004 was the creation of a director of national intelligence (DNI), who supplanted the director of central intelligence (DCI) as the senior intelligence official, head of the intelligence community, and principal intelligence adviser to the president, the National Security Council (NSC), and the Homeland Security Council (HSC). Previously, U.S. law had defined intelligence as being of two types, foreign and domestic. The DCI had been responsible for foreign intelligence or, as it was sometimes called, national foreign intelligence, to distinguish it from the more narrow defense-related intelligence. The IRTPA redefines the term intelligence. Now there is only “national intelligence,” which has three subsets: foreign, domestic, and homeland security. Thus, the DNI has broader responsibilities than did the DCI for aspects of domestic intelligence. Much of the impetus behind the act was the concern that agencies did not share intelligence well. Therefore, the DNI is to have access to all intelligence and is responsible for ensuring that it is disseminated as needed across the intelligence community. The DNI also has legal responsibility for the protection of intelligence sources and methods.
Unlike the DCI, the DNI is not directly connected to any intelligence agency but oversees them all. The DNI does this through a large staff, the size of which (approximately 1500) has been a source of criticism. The head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is now the director of the CIA or DCIA. In addition to the DNI’s staff, the DNI controls the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC); the National Counterproliferation Center; the National Intelligence Council (NIC); and the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX, see chap. 7 for details).