Mission: Possible

Reforming the Intelligence Community

By Derek Reveron

By one count, there have been about 40 commissions since the US was surprised at Pearl Harbor that have proposed changes to how the country gathers and analyzes intelligence. Since the 9/11 attacks, four Congressional, Presidential, and independent reports have recommended major changes to the intelligence community—including the creation of a new Director of National Intelligence. Last week, former US Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte was officially sworn-in with his deputy former National Security Agency Director General Michael Hayden.

The Negroponte-Hayden team has strong bipartisan support (Negroponte was confirmed with 98 votes in the Senate) and has the full backing of President Bush. Negroponte is the President’s principal intelligence advisor, has the power to create national intelligence centers like the National Counterterrorism Center, and has budgetary authority for intelligence matters. "I've relied on his candid judgment to help solve complicated problems," Bush said at Negroponte’s swearing-in ceremony.  "Our nation is at war, and John is making sure that those whose duty it is to defend America have the information we need to make the right decisions."

Both Ambassador Negroponte and Air Force General Hayden are no novices when it comes to the intelligence community, Congress, and the federal bureaucracy. Both have had distinguished careers (nearly 80 years experience collectively) and have a distinct advantage over their colleagues who were given the task of overseeing the other new federal effort created after 9/11 for homeland security. Ambassador Negroponte is a career foreign service officer that has recently served the President well at the United Nations and as the first US ambassador to a free Iraq. General Hayden recently led one of the country’s largest intelligence agencies and earned his fourth star last month.

In spite of their qualifications, the task before them is monumental. The intelligence community is huge—15 agencies consuming an estimated $40 billion annually. While much attention has focused on the CIA these last few years, the defense intelligence agencies dwarf the Langley campus and consume nearly 80 percent of the intelligence budget. The first task the new DNI and his deputy face are effectively managing relations with the Defense Department, which has a two-year head start on intelligence reform.

About a year after the 9/11 attacks, Congress created a new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence or USD (I). Filled by a close Rumsfeld advisor, Steve Cambone has been leading the transformation of defense intelligence.  Rumsfeld supported the new office’s creation because he wanted “one dog to kick” for intelligence matters. USD (I) oversees the largest portion of the US intelligence budget and ensures no misunderstanding between the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence on intelligence matters.

While the 2004 legislation makes it clear that the Director of National Intelligence will be the President’s principal intelligence advisor and manage the intelligence budget, he will only “participate with” the Secretary of Defense on national intelligence matters. This is not too different from the statutory authority the dual-hatted CIA Director had when he also was the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), who had little control of resources outside the CIA. This ambiguity will require Negroponte to use his diplomatic expertise to ensure civilian and defense collection efforts are harmonized. With DoD controlling about $32 billion of the intelligence budget, this will be no easy task. But General Hayden, who formerly controlled much of this budget when he led the NSA, will undoubtedly be up to the mission.

Connect the dots…

Two different lessons have emerged from the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the Iraqi WMD National Intelligence Estimate. While it is only speculation (and much wishful thinking), 9/11 might have been prevented had only the “dots been connected.” The FBI had information that Middle Eastern men were seeking to learn how to fly aircraft and not land and the CIA had the names of two of the hijackers that entered the country. Had the FBI and CIA shared their information, the federal government might have had a chance to disrupt the 9/11 plot. Since this revelation first emerged several years ago, the slogan to fix intelligence has been to “Share! Share! Share!” The challenge for the intelligence community has been to balance the need to know with the need to share.

The lesson of the Iraqi WMD estimate failure was not about failing to share. Rather, there were not enough dots to connect. The President’s Commission on Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction http://www.whitehouse.gov/wmd/ makes clear:

The Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure. Its principal causes were the Intelligence Community's inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather, and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions, rather than good evidence.

While imagery could identify suspect buildings in Iraq, there was little to no reliable information to determine what was in the buildings. As such, the slogan to fix intelligence in the wake of this revelation has been “Collect! Collect! Collect!” Specifically, collect more human intelligence or HUMINT.

While both lessons are important and should inform Negroponte’s efforts, the solutions are different. The 9/11 lesson is viewed as more structural than cultural; much progress has been made to integrate the FBI more into the intelligence community during the past four years. The new National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) is now a single building housing both FBI and CIA intelligence analysts and operators to prevent any future failures in intelligence sharing. Increased technology spending by the FBI and its Executive Director for Intelligence Maureen Baginski (former NSA colleague of General Hayden) has connected the FBI more completely to the intelligence community. It has only been about two years since an analyst at FBI headquarters could email an analyst at CIA headquarters—but now they can talk. Though the FBI missed the Microsoft and the Internet revolutions of the mid-1990s, Ms. Baginksi has the FBI on a clear path to become a substantial, contributing member to the intelligence community. The Negroponte-Hayden team will have to ensure they continue on this course.

Collect more dots…

The lesson of failing to accurately portray Iraq’s WMD capabilities requires an entirely different set of solutions than co-locating personnel and modernizing IT infrastructure. Fundamentally, it is a collection problem—not enough dots were collected to accurately analyze Iraq’s weapons programs. While HUMINT has been portrayed as the silver bullet to fix the problem, there is no easy solution. The types of organizations and countries that threaten the United States do not lend themselves to be penetrated by US intelligence. North Korea, Iran, or the mountains of Afghanistan are difficult operating environments. The lessons from the Cold War should remind those that sing the praises of HUMINT—there were few successes in understanding the Soviet Union and a failure in predicting the timing of its demise. Similar challenges exist today for the CIA, FBI, and military services that attempt to penetrate a terrorist organization like al Qaeda.

To overcome this penetration challenge, the intelligence community has adopted “red cells” in an attempt to role-play how adversaries might behave. While this approach can be important to understand North Korea’s intentions, it will do little to locate al Qaeda’s senior leadership, identify terrorist operators, or disrupt terrorist plots. With the inability to disrupt the 9/11 plot being the principal reason for Negroponte’s new job, this is a challenge that will occupy his time by ensuring unity of effort to collect intelligence to prevent future attacks. The challenge will also be to balance collection efforts against other threats. If he fails to do this, then the Defense Department will likely exert its mass to ensure its intelligence needs are met.

Mission: Possible

With nearly a month on the job, President Bush is pleased with the DNI’s progress. "He's ensuring that our intelligence agencies work as a single, unified enterprise. And he's serving as my principal intelligence advisor," Bush said last week. With a good start, strong Congressional and executive support, Negroponte and Hayden should succeed in their mission possible. The trick for them will not to become mired in the day-to-day of current intelligence, but to craft a strategy to guide the intelligence community to collect and connect more dots.

Derek Reveron is the editor of America's Viceroys: the Military and U.S. Foreign Policy, associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, and a member of the intelligence community.