Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [5]
TO PROVIDE LONG-TERM EXPERTISE. Compared with the permanent bureaucracy, all senior policy makers are transients. The average time in office for a president of the United States is five years. Secretaries of state and defense serve for less time than that, and their senior subordinates—deputy, under, and assistant secretaries—often hold their positions for even shorter periods. Although these individuals usually enter their respective offices with an extensive background in their fields, it is virtually impossible for them to be well versed in all of the matters with which they will be dealing. Inevitably, they will have to call upon others whose knowledge and expertise on certain issues are greater. Much knowledge and expertise on national security issues resides in the intelligence community, where the analytical cadre has been relatively stable. (This has changed in the United States since 2001. See chap. 6.) Stability tends to be greater in intelligence agencies, particularly in higher-level positions, than in foreign affairs and defense agencies. Also, intelligence agencies tend to have far fewer political appointees than do the State and Defense Departments. However, these two personnel differences (stability and nonpolitical) have diminished somewhat over the past decade.
TO SUPPORT THE POLICY PROCESS. Policy makers have a constant need for tailored (meaning written for their specific needs), timely intelligence that will provide background, context, information, warning, and an assessment of risks, benefits, and likely outcomes. Their needs are met by the intelligence community.
In the ethos of U.S. intelligence, a strict dividing line exists between intelligence and policy. The two are seen as separate functions. The government is run by the policy makers. Intelligence has a support role and may not cross over into the advocacy of policy choices. Intelligence officers who are dealing with policy makers are expected to maintain professional objectivity and not push specific policies, choices, or outcomes. To do so is seen as threatening the objectivity of the analyses they present. If intelligence officers have a strong preference for a specific policy outcome, their intelligence analysis may display a similar bias. This is what is meant by politicized intelligence, one of the strongest expressions of opprobrium that can be leveled in the U.S. intelligence community. If intelligence officers were allowed to make policy recommendations they would then have a strong urge to present intelligence that supported the policy they had first recommended. At that point, all objectivity would be lost.
Three important caveats should be added to the distinction between policy and intelligence. First, the idea that intelligence is distinct from policy does not mean that intelligence officers do not care about the outcome and do not influence it. One must differentiate between attempting to influence (that is, inform) the process by providing intelligence, which is acceptable, and trying to manipulate intelligence so that policy makers make a certain choice, which is not acceptable. Second, senior policy makers can and do ask senior intelligence officials for their opinions, which are given. Third, this separation works in only one direction, that of intelligence advice to policy. Nothing prevents policy makers from rejecting intelligence out of hand or offering their own analytic inputs. When doing so, however, policy makers cannot present their alternative views as intelligence per se, in part because they lack the necessary objectivity. There are no hard and fast rules here but there is an unwritten and generally agreed standard. This became an issue in 2002, when Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith created an office that, to many observers,