The Sept. 11 commission’s final report is a surprise blockbuster in the stores. Congress, usually dreaming of vacation as August arrives, is buckling down and holding hearings on how to fix America’s intelligence agencies. That’s good. As commission Chairman Thomas Kean said recently: “Time is not on our side.”
The commission has issued a vast and detailed array of recommendations to make America safer. Chief among them: create a powerful national intelligence czar, develop a single counterterrorism center and streamline congressional oversight of the intelligence agencies.
Some of those ideas aren’t exactly new. Since 1995 there have been no fewer than 13 commissions or reviews of America’s intelligence community and its capabilities.
Those studies yielded what an earlier commission report called “a plethora of recommendations for reform.” But many of the best proposals were ignored.
If there ever is to be profound change in America’s intelligence services, now is the time.
After World War II, and after a major commission report investigating the failure to stop the Pearl Harbor attacks, the U.S. set out to build the world’s largest and most technologically sophisticated spy network.
In 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was created to spy, analyze and coordinate most of those efforts. But over the years, with new technologies and changing threats, intelligence grew to include 14 other agencies scattered across different departments. Experts estimate that about 80 percent of the intelligence budget isn’t in the CIA now, but in the Department of Defense.
Many of the problems the Sept. 11 commission described traced back to this: Who’s in charge?
That is, who ensures, as the commission asked, that agencies like the FBI and CIA talk to each other, pool resources, avoid duplication and cooperate in planning? Who oversees the massive integration of information and analysis that keeps America safe? The commission’s answer: “Too often, the answer is: `no one.'”
In 1998, after Osama bin Laden declared the U.S. was his target, former CIA Director George Tenet sent a memo to his top managers declaring, “We are at war. … I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the [intelligence] Community.” But several witnesses told the Sept. 11 commission that they had never seen the memo, or if they had, they didn’t heed its sense of urgency.
Creating a high-level director of intelligence, as the commission has recommended, is a good idea. The new director must be given significant budget and personnel authority over intelligence agencies. The director should lead a clear national anti-terror strategy and make sure the intelligence community shares information.
This change won’t work if the creation of a new intelligence boss becomes immersed in turf battles. It won’t work if the director squelches the diversity of ideas that must be nourished. That leads to the kind of groupthink that caused the disastrous intelligence errors in prewar Iraq, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded. It also won’t work if the director largely shapes intelligence to fit the policy objectives of his boss, the president.
An intelligence director must be willing to lead a deep cultural change in many different agencies. For instance, he or she must find ways to force the FBI and CIA to share information readily, to change a “need to know” ethic into “need to share,” as the commission said.
Much greater emphasis must be placed on the people who gather, analyze and discern the larger patterns in the torrents of information that come in every day. Bad information leads to bad decisions. Without enough agents on the ground, without enough trained linguists, without enough skilled counterterrorism analysts–without a better understanding of the enemy–American intelligence will falter again.
A change in the command structure must lead to change in how the country recruits and trains those who serve in its intelligence services.
Expanding the capabilities will take money and time. Some of that already has begun. But far more must be done as quickly as possible.
In the years before the intelligence failures of Sept. 11 and Iraq, maybe bureaucratic inertia could be understood, if not excused. America was at peace, reaping the benefits of a victory in the Cold War. The threats seemed distant. We snoozed as dangers gathered.
Now we’re wide awake.
