Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [223]
Efforts to redress glaring failures or misdeeds are easy to understand. Efforts to improve intelligence per se are more difficult to assess. Few reliable guidelines are available for measuring intelligence, which makes it difficult to determine what constitutes efficiency or how to achieve it. The problem may be more difficult for analysis than it is for collection or operations. Assessing the latter two activities is more straightforward. Either the capability to collect against a target exists or it does not, and if it does, then the collection has either been accomplished or it has not. Extenuating circumstances may arise, but the evaluation process for collection is simple. Similarly, for operations, the goals are either achieved or unmet. Some operations may go on without resolution, such as U.S. support to the Nicaraguan contras, but the lack of resolution itself may be an important indicator of the likelihood of ultimate success. Analysis remains more elusive. Few efficiencies are to be had in what is essentially an intellectual process. Volumes of reports or batting averages are not useful measurements.
The terrorist attacks in 2001 brought renewed calls for intelligence reform, with some of the most persistent advocates arguing, “If not now, when?” Even so, the purposes of reform have not been entirely clear. Several different purposes, not all of which are mutually exclusive, can be discerned.
• To improve the intelligence community’s ability to deal with terrorism overall
• To prevent further terrorist attacks against the United States
• To determine if the attacks occurred because of specific intelligence lapses, and, if so, who was responsible for them
• To use the attacks as an opportunity to push intelligence reform concepts, whether or not related to the attacks or the war on terrorism
However, the issue that provided the ultimate impetus for the intelligence legislation of 2004 was not the investigations into the September 11 attacks but the issue of Iraq weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The gap between prewar estimates and what was found (or not found) in Iraq since military action commenced in 2003 helped push many who had been undecided into the camp of intelligence reform. This factor also helps explain why the legislation focused so heavily on the management and oversight of analysis, with less attention given to the perceived problems that led to the September 11 attacks.
One final factor that must be taken into account is the misperception that the advent of multiple round-the-clock news media makes the intelligence community redundant. Those who hold this view believe that the community must transform itself to be more competitive.
journalism and intelligence have some interesting similarities: the need for reliable sources, the need to make complex stories comprehensible, the tyranny of deadlines. But there are also important differences. Deadlines may be even more tyrannical for the news media—both print and broadcast, but especially the latter—than they are for the intelligence community. News broadcasts must go on the air as scheduled, regardless of the day’s events. Journalists accept this operating necessity and use updates, corrections, or retractions as necessary. Whenever possible, intelligence managers and analysts seek to delay reporting (sometimes too long) until they have the story correct, or as correct as collection will allow. Indeed, Gen. Michael Hayden. when he was the director of the National Security Agency (NSA), urged his staff “to get the intelligence out” as soon as it was useful to someone—in other words, to publish intelligence as soon as it informs someone, even if it can be refined further, at which point it still can be published for yet another