What the Dog Saw [107]
The intelligence community that we had prior to September 11 was the direct result of this philosophy. The FBI and the CIA were supposed to be rivals, just as Ickes and Wallace were rivals. But now we’ve changed our minds. The FBI and the CIA, Senator Shelby tells us disapprovingly, argue and compete with one another. The September 11 story, his report concludes, “should be an object lesson in the perils of failing to share information promptly and efficiently between (and within) organizations.” Shelby wants recentralization and more focus on cooperation. He wants a “central national level knowledge-compiling entity standing above and independent from the disputatious bureaucracies.” He thinks the intelligence service should be run by a small, highly cohesive group, and so he suggests that the FBI be removed from the counterterrorism business entirely. The FBI, according to Shelby, is governed by
deeply entrenched individual mind-sets that prize the production of evidence-supported narratives of defendant wrongdoing over the drawing of probabilistic inferences based on incomplete and fragmentary information in order to support decision-making. … Law enforcement organizations handle information, reach conclusions, and ultimately just think differently than intelligence organizations. Intelligence analysts would doubtless make poor policemen, and it has become very clear that policemen make poor intelligence analysts.
In his 2003 State of the Union message, President George W. Bush did what Shelby wanted, and announced the formation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center — a special unit combining the antiterrorist activities of the FBI and the CIA. The cultural and organizational diversity of the intelligence business, once prized, is now despised.
The truth is, though, that it is just as easy, in the wake of September 11, to make the case for the old system. Isn’t it an advantage that the FBI doesn’t think like the CIA? It was the FBI, after all, that produced two of the most prescient pieces of analysis — the request by the Minneapolis office for a warrant to secretly search Zacarias Moussaoui’s belongings, and the now famous Phoenix memo. In both cases, what was valuable about the FBI’s analysis was precisely the way in which it differed from the traditional “big picture,” probabilistic inference making of the analyst. The FBI agents in the field focused on a single case, dug deep, and came up with an “evidence-supported narrative of defendant wrongdoing” that spoke volumes about a possible Al Qaeda threat.
The same can be said for the alleged problem of rivalry. The Cell describes what happened after police in the Philippines searched the apartment that Ramzi Yousef shared with his coconspirator, Abdul Hakim Murad. Agents from the FBI’s counterterrorism unit immediately flew to Manila and “bumped up against the CIA.” As the old adage about the Bureau and the Agency has it, the FBI wanted to string Murad up, and the CIA wanted to string him along. The two groups eventually worked together, but only because they had to. It was a relationship “marred by rivalry and mistrust.” But what’s wrong with this kind of rivalry? As Miller, Stone, and Mitchell tell us, the real objection of Neil Herman — the FBI’s former domestic counterterrorism chief — to “working with the CIA had nothing to do with procedure. He just didn’t think the Agency was going to be of any help in finding Ramzi