Managing Information

The Senate Intelligence Committee's 521-page critique of pre-Iraq War intelligence is more than a shot across the bow of U.S. intelligence agencies. It's a slap in the face, a kick in the pants and as pointed a reprimand as the august body could muster without degenerating to fisticuffs.

The review concludes that the government's intelligence agencies, in particular the Central Intelligence Agency-their conduit to the president-assumed a lot about Iraq's efforts to build and use weapons of mass destruction, including chemical, biological and nuclear devices. Many of their assumptions were wrong, which is problematic since President Bush used them in issuing his call to upend Saddam Hussein to save the world from his WMD.

The botched analysis was manifest in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which supposedly represented the consensus of all 14 intelligence agencies. But Senate investigators found reports, some never included in the NIE, that contradict its conclusion that Iraq possessed WMD and could make more. This missed call has been labeled "an intelligence failure."

But the fundamental problems with the NIE didn't stem from the quality of the intelligence, an examination of the Senate report shows, although some of it was deficient. Rather, the government's inability to assess Iraq's weapons programs represents a failure of management, primarily at the CIA.

Trouble at the Top

Consider the intelligence production cycle. Information arrives at agencies-from human sources, from satellite photos, from the morning paper-and analysts study it. Then they write documents-such as briefings or NIEs-that are consumed by decision-makers. It's essentially a secretive publishing enterprise-information comes in at the lower levels and is read at the highest.

As information rises up the chain in any hierarchical organization, such as the CIA, the FBI or even the Coca-Cola Co., pieces of it fall away, like jettisoned stages of a rocket, until a capsule of distilled information remains, easy to consume, brief and, most important, decisive. It's the preferred method of creating executive-level summaries-"Just tell me what I need to know"-and it occurred with textbook regularity when the intelligence agencies sat down to write the Iraq NIE.

The problem is, the National Intelligence Estimate didn't tell decision-makers everything they needed to know. The Senate report exhaustively documents the exclusion or stifling of alternative analyses of Iraq WMD.

Dissenters from Air Force intelligence, for instance, were sidelined when they challenged the CIA view that Saddam Hussein would use his unmanned drone aircraft to drop toxic biological specimens on U.S. cities. The Air Force said the drone fleet was too small for that. The Air Force may be the leading authority on aircraft, but CIA analysts, with access to exclusive sources, considered themselves the experts on bioweapons.

Something similar happened with the CIA's examination of aluminum tubes, which analysts thought Iraq would use to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. The agency didn't invite nuclear experts from the Energy Department to look them. A CIA analyst told Senate committee investigators, "We were trying to prove some things. . . . It wasn't a joint effort."

Considering the decisive role the drone and aluminum tube data played in characterizing Iraq's intentions as bellicose, CIA managers should have played devil's advocate and required their analysts to hear dissenting views, the Senate investigators concluded. But the managers didn't do that, investigators found. As a result, an NIE that could have been a fragrant stew was reduced to a thin consommé.

The report's authors singled out the top manager, former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, painting him as an absent leader. Tenet told the committee that he doesn't expect to hear dissenting analyses "until the issue gets joined" during an NIE writing. The committee members indicated that if someone had looked at the issue before it was joined, the 373 members of Congress who voted to let the president invade Iraq might have changed their minds.

"The whole Iraq misadventure calls into question the very concept of an NIE," says Steven Aftergood, an intelligence expert with the Federation of American Scientists, who has spent years studying how the CIA works. "In retrospect, we would have been better off if each agency . . . produced its own estimate. The profound differences of opinion . . . would then have had a better chance to be aired and evaluated."

Or managers could have interceded. But, says one former CIA executive, that wouldn't happen under Tenet. "George doesn't do paper," the official says. "He doesn't do analysis. That responsibility fell back to [Deputy Director John] McLaughlin [now the interim CIA chief] and the staff."

But there, too, things broke down. CIA managers in the Directorate of Operations, the spy side of the house, withheld information from analysts. "Significant reportable intelligence was se-questered in CIA Directorate of Operations cables, distribution of intelligence reports was excessively restricted, and CIA analysts were often provided with 'sensitive' information that was not made available to analysts who worked the same issues at other . . . agencies," the Senate report says. "These restrictions, in several cases, kept information from analysts that was essential to their ability to make fully informed judgments." Some "sensitive" information concerned the reliability of two main sources on alleged mobile weapons labs and information pertaining to Iraq's aerial drone program, the one that raised dissents from Air Force analysts.

Cowardly Bureaucracy

Considering that the Iraq assessment went so wrong, can the intelligence process be fixed? Any reforms must be targeted at the CIA's inherent managerial weaknesses, experts say.

On the analysis side, the former intelligence executive says the agency's secretive and hierarchical nature has created "a lot of little hollers" in which senior analysts mentor junior ones who sometimes parrot their teachers' convictions. That cannot continue, he argues.

The CIA produces some radical, relatively heretical thinkers. But one analyst, who headed the agency's group targeting Osama bin Laden and wrote two books on radical Islam, says those bosses aren't serving their decision-maker customers because they don't encourage contrarian thinking.

Instead, the senior service is "just willing to go which way the wind blows," says the analyst, a senior service member himself, who uses the nom de plume Anonymous. Their resolve is most tested when they meet the people on the pointy end of the intelligence fork. In that risk-averse air, he contends, managers become much more selective in what they tell decision-makers, including the president. No one wants to stake his reputation on a bad analysis.

But that's just what happened with Iraq. And it begs the question of whether CIA managers pushed for analysis that jibed with the White House's public declarations that Iraq was a weapons-wielding worldwide threat. The Senate report says White House officials exerted no undue influence over the writing of the NIE. It blames the CIA's laser focus on trying to prove, rather than disprove, the presence of WMD partly on the agency's lack of awareness of how far Hussein had gone with his nuclear program before the first Gulf War and a desire not to get snookered again.

For now, the question of why the intelligence process was so one-sided remains. Whatever the reason CIA managers withheld information from analysts, the fact is, they did it. If they hadn't, the NIE might have read differently.

Undoubtedly, calls for reform will include an admonition to challenge intelligence assumptions, perhaps by creating a formal mechanism, such as an intelligence watchdog unit. But intelligence managers would do well to take on that responsibility. Otherwise, like cigarette packs, NIEs might have to carry a warning label: "Caution: Conclusions in this document may not reflect reality."