Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [143]
Policy makers may also be suspicious of intelligence that supports their rivals in the interagency policy process. They may suspect that rivals have consorted with the intelligence community to produce intelligence that undercuts their position. Again, the increasing political use of NIEs is a case in point. Finally, policy makers are free to ignore, disagree with, or even rebut intelligence and offer their own analyses. Such actions are inherent to a system that is dominated by the policy makers. (See box: “The Limits of Intelligence and Policy: Hurricane Katrina. ”)
This behavior on the part of policy makers can become controversial. Although policy makers are free to disagree with or to ignore intelligence, it is not seen as legitimate for them to set up what appears to be intelligence offices of their own and separate from the intelligence community. In the period before the onset of the war in Iraq (2003- ), Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith (2001-2005) set up an office that he claimed was a permissible analytic cell. Critics argued that it was charged with coming up with intelligence analysis that was more supportive of preferred policies than was being written by the intelligence community. Without admitting any fault, the office ultimately was disbanded. In February 2007, DOD’s inspector general (IG) released a report on the role played by this DOD policy office, an investigation requested by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. The IG found that the office had developed and disseminated “alternative intelligence assessments” on al Qaeda’s relationship with Iraq that disagreed with the assessments of the intelligence community. The IG found this to be inappropriate (although not illegal) because DOD-PRODUCED assessments were intelligence assessments but they failed to highlight for policy makers the disagreements with the intelligence community. In some cases, DOD-produced papers were presented as intelligence products. According to the IG, a version of the assessment shown to DCI Tenet and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) director Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby also purposely omitted material that was used when the briefing was given to senior officials in the White House. Feith took issue with the findings.
THE LIMITS OF INTELLIGENCE AND POLICY: HURRICANE KATRINA
Intelligence officers are fond of using Hurricane Katrina as an example of the limits of intelligence and the role of policy makers, even though it was not a foreign intelligence issue The intelligence on Katrina was nearly perfect the size and strength of the storm, the likely track of the storm and the unique nature of the threat that it posed to New Orleans in particular because of that city’s topography were all known In fact, these were known for days before the storm hit New Orleans However, policy makers in New Orleans and at the state level in Louisiana reacted much too late, thereby increasing the effect of the storm on an unprepared population. The lesson is that even perfect intelligence is useless unless someone acts on it.
A similar issue arose during the Senate hearings over John Bolton’s nomination to be ambassador to the United Nations (UN). Critics, including the former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, charged that Bolton took issue with intelligence analyses that ran counter to his policy preferences and that he substituted intelligence analysis with views of his own without making clear what he had done. During his confirmation hearings, Bolton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that a policy maker should be allowed “to state his own reading of the intelligence,” but agreed that policy makers should not purport that their views are those of the intelligence community.
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