Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [84]
BRIEFINGS. Briefings for policy makers are a form of current intelligence. Many are routine and take place first thing in the morning. Briefings are one of the main ways in which current intelligence is conveyed. One of the main advantages of briefings is the intelligence officer’s ability to interact directly with the policy maker, to get a better idea of the policy maker’s preferences and reactions to the intelligence, thus overcoming the absence of formal feedback mechanism. Risks also are involved, though. Briefings, as their name indicates, tend to be brief. Given policy makers’ schedules, most briefings are limited by the time allotted for them. Moreover, the morning briefings usually must cover several topics. Thus, providing the necessary context and depth in a briefing can be difficult.
At their best, briefings can be a give-and-take between the policy maker and the intelligence officer. This sort of exchange can be stimulating, but it runs risks. The briefer must be sure of his or her information, some of which may not be in the material that was prepared for the briefing. Briefers have to be taught to say, “I don’t know” and offer to get the desired information later, not hazard guesses. Furthermore, the briefing has an ephemeral quality. The briefer may not be able to recapture all that was said after the fact.
Briefings raise issues associated with analysts’ more proximate relationship with policy makers, particularly the ability to and necessity of keeping some distance from policy to maintain analytic objectivity. The regularly assigned briefers have a two-way role, conveying intelligence to the policy makers and conveying the policy makers’ needs or reactions back to the intelligence community. The briefers must avoid slipping into a role of advocacy or support for the policy makers’ policies, either writ large or in bureaucratic debates.
An area of controversy that arose in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in 2001 was the nature of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) briefing for the president and senior officials. The briefing, which centers around the president’s daily brief (PDB), was a CIA publication, conducted exclusively by the CIA. Although senior officials in the executive departments and in the intelligence community are privy to the PDB, this group is very small. Thus, other intelligence agencies do not necessarily know what the president is being told. This engenders a certain amount of jealousy and can lead to a situation in which analytic components of the intelligence community are working at cross-purposes.
In the aftermath of the passage of the 2004 intelligence legislation, control of the PDB shifted. The PDB staff became part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, coming under the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis. For the CIA, control over the PDB was one of its crown jewels, giving it an assured level of access. However, responsibility for conducting the morning briefing has passed to the director of national intelligence (DNI). Under the DNI. the PDB is open to contributions from many analytical components. This makes it more of a community product and may also add greater breadth, but it highlights a problem in the DNI structure. When the DCI controlled the CIA and the PDB, the DCI had a greater sense of who was behind the PDB articles and, perhaps, a greater sense of ownership than the DNI. The DNI controls no analysts beyond the NIC, so the DNI is, in effect, presenting the work of other agencies. In theory, and in law, the DNI has responsibility for all intelligence components but has authority over very few of them.
Some believe that too much emphasis has been placed on the PDB, which has had a negative effect on overall analytic efforts. Spending time with the chief executive on a regular basis and being able to put an intelligence product before the president routinely are valuable assets. No intelligence