The Warning Failure
It’s time to clean house at the CIA
By Melvin A Goodman
October 30, 2001
WASHINGTON -- One week after the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the president's national security adviser, Condoleeza Rice, told the press corps "This isn't Pearl Harbor." No, it is worse. Sixty years ago, the country did not have a director of central intelligence with 13 intelligence agencies and a combined budget of more than $30 billion to produce early warning of our enemies' moves.
Prior to the horrific events last month, we had eight years of Osama bin Laden's activities against America at home and abroad as well as a raft of threatening indicators concerning his organization and its key players. After the attacks against the World Trade Center in 1993, a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000, and the plan to crash commercial airlines into CIA headquarters in 1994-95, it is mind-boggling the CIA did not provide urgent warning to the policy community of the possibility of terrorism in the United States.
Unfortunately, our bureaucratic labeling for national security has led to a false sense of security about intelligence. Despite all the impressive labels, there is no intelligence community, no director of central intelligence, no Central Intelligence Agency. What we have is a gaggle of competing intelligence bureaucracies, whose rivalries have contributed significantly to the warnings failure. Intelligence can have no genuine director when George Tenet must deal with key agencies that are staffed and funded almost totally by the uniformed services and responsible to the Pentagon, not to him.
Tom Ridge must learn from Tenet's experience that as the new homeland security czar, he will not actually preside over a council of key agency and department heads if he has no control over the funding and personnel for counterterrorism. Ridge will require the very capability that Tenet lacks -- an all-source intelligence shop that analyzes raw operational intelligence from both the CIA and FBI. If Ridge lacks such capabilities, it will soon be apparent that his position will be no different than Tenet's as director of central intelligence--all hat and no cattle.
The three most recent intelligence failures illustrate the problem: the failure to monitor Indian nuclear tests in 1998; the 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade; and now the absence of warning for terrorism in the United States.
The Pentagon, which drives intelligence collection requirements and dominates the intelligence community, has never demonstrated a significant interest in the problems of proliferation and terrorism. The Defense department, where cold war status quo thinking has persevered, has built weapons systems ill-suited to a war on terrorism. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been far more concerned with the phantom menace of rogue state missiles than with the concept of maneuver warfare required to counter terrorism and which demands trenchant intelligence analysis.
Since the CIA failed to provide timely and relevant intelligence during the war in the Persian Gulf in 1991, the Pentagon has taken control over most of the intelligence community and weakened the CIA’s ability to serve as an independent and objective interpreter of foreign events.
The Pentagon's increased control of intelligence collection has led to a downgrading of the important role of verification and monitoring of arms control. For the first time in nearly 40 years, the director for central intelligence testified to Congress that the intelligence community could not monitor a strategic arms control agreement--the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty--which contributed to the Senate's refusal to confirm the treaty.
So what is to be done? The White House and the CIA must reverse the efforts toward militarizing the CIA and re-emphasize the role of strategic intelligence. A separate analytic office needs to be created for the presentation and interpretation of strategic intelligence. In his memoirs, former secretary of state George Shultz reminded us that when operations and analysis get mixed up, "the president gets bum dope."
There is no doubt that Washington has the will, resolve, and character to eventually win the war against terrorism. But such a victory will demand accurate and objective intelligence analysis, both short-term and tactical as well as long-term and strategic.
But the CIA will have to install a new leadership team, particularly in its intelligence and operations directorates. These careerists carry the message that the CIA still favors a management style that puts personal ambition ahead of solid intelligence analysis.
Melvin A. Goodman, former CIA analyst, is a professor of national security at the National War College and an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.
Copyright 2001, Global Beat Syndicate, 418 Lafayette Street, Suite 554, New York, NY 10003 http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate.