President Nixon and his top national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, thought the reports they received from the Central Intelligence Agency suffered from "serious defects," newly declassified documents show, and prompted them to complain repeatedly about the caliber of the reporting to then-CIA Director Richard Helms.
Sadly, this sounds disturbingly familiar.
In a ridiculous over-reaction to the fact that the streets of Baghdad were not lined with canisters of nerve gas, the guidance in at least one intelligence agency came down fast and furious: assessments would contain nothing but fully footnoted bullets. Only the most trite and generic conclusions could be drawn ("we expect more deaths from IEDs" or "our computer networks are vulnerable to compromise"). Actual analysis was to be avoided because obviously we could not be trusted to think. The job of analyst became one of reformatting the reports written by collectors. The fact that pre-war assessments were based on bad, incomplete, or a lack of collection in the first place seemed to escape the hierarchy. As one wisenheimer pointed out, "they're paying me for my brains, but I'm using so little of it, I half expect my paycheck to be cut accordingly."
If you decided to fight the power and argue for a well-reasoned projection or estimate, you were forced to run the gauntlet of supervisors, editors and political schemers trying to avoid being tainted with the stink of an "intelligence failure." The review/edit process was farcical. Whereas previously you could craft a reasonably readable narrative from a given source report, now intelligence production became a mechanical process: an intro paragraph of what I am going to tell you, bullets with supporting data, a closing paragraph telling you what I just told you. Assessments became book reports. You don't have to take my word for it, read any of the recently released NIEs. We pay how much in tax money for these banalities?
People want to know why so many policymakers hold intel products in such disdain or why people think there is a "war" between intelligence and the administration? Now you have a pretty good idea. As my colleagues at Kent's Imperative pointed out recently, beat even your most loyal dog enough times and eventually he'll start to growl at you.
This is a problem with serious long-term repercussions. It is all well and good to want to recruit the best and brightest, but when you force them to work far below their potential you should not express surprise when they flee to contractors. Those that remain in the IC will most certainly give you what you want, but they will be largely unable to provide you with what you really need.
-- Michael Tanji, cross-posted at Haft of the Spear
