Intelligence pours into the capitals of the larger nations like a fire hose held to the mouth, to use a simile made popular by a former NSA director, Admiral Noel Gayler. Each day, some four million telephone, fax, and email intercepts – often in difficult codes that must be deciphered or exotic languages that must be translated – flood the NSA. Hundreds of satellite photographs arrive at the NGA. This volume is unlikely to dissipate. Every minute, for instance, a thousand people around the world sign up for a new cell phone. A further problem is that nations are always short on translators, photo-interpreters, and codebreaking mathematicians. In response to a query about the major challenges facing U.S. intelligence, no wonder Vice Admiral J.M. “Mike” McConnell remarked when he was NSA director: “I have three major problems: processing, processing, and processing.”49 Most every intelligence expert agrees that the collection of information worldwide has far outraced the ability of intelligence services to process the data.
The day before the 9/11 attacks, the NSA intercepted a telephone message in Farsi from a suspected Al Qaeda operative. Translated on September 12 – a couple of days too late to help – the message proclaimed: “Tomorrow is zero hour.”50 Whether a more rapid translation might have led to a tightening of U.S. airport security procedures on the morning of September 11, thereby thwarting the attacks, is anyone's guess; but it may have. Today the vast majority of information gathered by intelligence agencies is never examined; it gathers dust in warehouses. An estimated 90 percent of what the U.S. Intelligence Community collects is never examined by human eyes (although “watch lists” are used to scan for key topics like “bombs,” “Daesh,” or “Al Qaeda”). As many as 99 percent of the telephone intercepts gathered by the NSA are never analyzed.51 Here is a supreme challenge for the government's IT specialists: improving the nation's capacity to sift rapidly through incoming intelligence data, separating the signals from the noise, the wheat from the chaff.
In the United States, additional IT challenges present themselves. The computers in the seventeen intelligence agencies still need to be fully integrated, so collectors and analysts can communicate better with one another from agency to agency. Currently the connections are spotty. This data integration must also be carried down to the new intelligence “fusion centers” that have been developed for counterterrorism purposes at state and local levels, where officials stand on the front lines of counterterrorism and seek better intelligence from Washington. Further, as this organizational integration is pursued, steps must be taken to ensure that the channels of information-sharing are protected by firewalls that guard against cyber-intervention by hostile intelligence services. These are all tall orders for IT specialists, many of whom would rather make big money in Silicon Valley than work for government wages in Washington, DC.
Intelligence analysis
Analysis, the next phase, lies at the heart of the intelligence cycle: the task of bringing insight to the information that has been collected and processed. The method is straightforward enough: namely, hiring smart people to pore over all the information from open and secret sources, then present the findings to decision-makers in written reports and oral briefings. The Washington Post reported in 2010 that the Intelligence Community produces some 50,000 intelligence reports each year.52 If these reports and briefings are unable to provide reliable insights into the meaning of the information gathered from around the world, then each of the preceding steps in the intelligence cycle is for naught.
Here's the bad news: intelligence analysts will always be taken by surprise from time to time, a fate guaranteed by the twin dilemmas of incomplete information and the uncertain light of the future.53 Dean Rusk often advised DCIs during the Cold War that intelligence reports ought to start off with the honest caveat: “Damned if we know, but if you want our best guess, here it is.”54 Not all the news is bad, though. Western nations have taken long strides toward improving their intelligence capabilities against the enemies of democracy. The enormous amount of money spent on intelligence each year by the United States, for example, has allowed officials to deploy the largest and – at least in terms of spy machines – the most sophisticated espionage apparatus ever devised by humankind. This brings in a torrent of information, much of which improves the nation's safety.
Still, things go wrong. Perhaps nothing underscores this reality better than the surprise attacks of 9/11, followed by the intelligence misjudgment about WMD in Iraq. A look at the most prestigious intelligence products in the United States, the President's Daily Brief (PDB) and National Intelligence Estimates, illustrates the vulnerabilities of national security intelligence to human error.
The PDB
From among the hundreds of classified reports prepared each year by the Intelligence Community, the PDB is the most prestigious document. Former DCI Tenet referred to the PDB as “our most important product”; and Thomas Kean, the Chair of the 9/11 Commission, dubbed it the “Holy Grail of the nation's secrets.”55
The PDB is distributed by CIA couriers each morning to the President and a few top cabinet officials and aides. The number of recipients has varied from administration to administration, rising to as many as fourteen in the Clinton Administration and as few as five in the Reagan Administration, six in the second Bush Administration, and eight in the Obama Administration. The document often sets the agenda for early morning discussions in high councils – a “catalyst for further action,” in the words of a NSC staff aide.56
The format of the PDB has varied over the years, though it has always had three core objectives: readability, logical reasoning, and fidelity to the Intelligence Community's sources. The document is normally fifteen to twenty pages long and printed in impressive four-color graphics, vividly displaying, say, global economic trends with multiple lines on a graph. The PDB – “the book,” as it is known inside the CIA – is designed to grab the attention of busy policymakers and provide them with “current intelligence” about events that have just transpired around the world over the previous twenty-four hours, commenting perhaps on the health of an aging foreign leader or the deployment of a new Chinese weapon system. The PDB's spiral-bound, glossy pages are attractive and easy to read. Further, the PDB focuses on topics known to be high on the President's agenda, rather than the daily smorgasbord offered readers by regular newspapers. The document attempts, as well, to integrate information gathered clandestinely from around the world by each of the secret agencies – the all-source fusion concept that permits “one-stop shopping” for information on global events.
The PDB comes with another important service unavailable to ordinary newspaper subscribers: follow-up oral briefings designed to answer specific questions posed by its VIP readership – six or sixty minutes of additional information, depending on the interest and patience of the policymaker. Here is a rare opportunity for a president or other official to talk back to their “newspaper” and actually get some immediate answers.57 During a typical year of the Clinton Administration, for example, forty-two follow-up oral briefings took place in the offices of PDB recipients; and the CIA sent an additional 426 memoranda to those readers who requested more detailed written responses to their queries. About 75 percent of these follow-ups occurred by the next working day.58 Thus, the PDB is more than a document; it is a process, allowing intelligence officers to interact with decision-makers and provide useful supportive information. As an NSC staffer noted during the Carter Administration, this interaction keeps “the CIA boys hopping, but, most importantly, it lets them know what is of interest at any given time to the President.”59
Presidents and some other subscribers in the small “witting circle” of PDB recipients have sometimes complained about the quality of the document. George W. Bush, for instance, received the PDB and oral briefings during his first presidential campaign in 2000, along with other leading candidates, a service provided by the CIA since 1952 to presidential contenders.60 He found them unhelpful and remarked: “Well, I assume I will start seein
g the good stuff when I become President” – without realizing the Intelligence Community was already giving him its best material.61 Yet when George Tenet was the senior intelligence director on the NSC staff in the mid-1990s, he observed that the PDB was “for the most part, a high-quality product. There are days when it's not earth-shattering; there are days when it's really interesting.”62
The Aspin–Brown Commission's examination of whether the Chinese were selling M-11 missiles to Pakistan between 1989 and 1995 provides an example of the value added by the PDB. Reporting in public newspapers was filled with ambiguities about the alleged weapons sales.63 The spy agencies, however, possessed geoint and sigint that moved the case from one of speculation to a level of reasonably strong evidence that the Chinese were indeed providing Pakistan with missile components. The sighting of “cylindrical objects” at the Sargodha Missile Complex in Pakistan and “unidentified, suspicious cargo” being unloaded in the Karachi harbor provided useful humint clues. When coupled with telephone intercepts between Pakistani and Chinese officials, “cylindrical objects” being unloaded from Chinese ships in Karachi harbors, and photographs of missile launchers at Sargodha, the President had more information about the weapons controversy in the PDB than he could have found in the public newspapers.
The NIE
While the PDB is an example of current intelligence, a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concentrates on longer-range reporting, based on research intelligence. An NIE offers an appraisal of a foreign country or international situation, reflecting the coordinated judgment of the entire Intelligence Community. “Estimates,” as NIEs are sometimes called (or “assessments” in Britain), are the outcome of an intricate gathering and evaluation of intelligence drawn from all IC sources, relying on each of the “ints.”64 They are not limited to the task of predicting specific events (which the PDB often attempts); indeed, their primary responsibility is to assist the President and other leaders by providing background research on foreign leaders, unfolding situations abroad, and the military and economic activities of other nations. Many NIEs set down on paper, and often rank, a range of possible outcomes related to developments inside a foreign nation or faction; or they will address the likely long-range pathway of a situation developing somewhere in the world that could threaten American interests or present an opportunity for the advancement of U.S. interests. An Agency official provides this definition of an Estimate: “a statement of what is going to happen in any country, in any area, in any given situation, and as far as possible into the future.”65
A Range of NIE Topics
An Estimate sometimes begins with a formal request from a senior policymaker for an appraisal and prognosis of events and conditions in some part of the world. In an overwhelming majority of cases, however, the Intelligence Community itself generates NIE proposals – 75 percent in one recent year. In this manner, the Community attempts to “push” intelligence toward the consumer, rather than wait (perhaps endlessly) for it to be “pulled” by the consumer. The potential subjects for an Estimate cover a wide front, as shown by these examples from the Carter Administration:
the balance of strategic nuclear forces between the United States and the Soviet Union;
the conventional military balance in Europe;
the prospects for improvement in relations between the Soviet Union and China;
the outlook for cohesiveness within the Atlantic Alliance; and
the significance of the developing world's international debt problems.66
Preparing Estimates
In the preparation of an NIE, a panel of intelligence experts (known since 1980 as the National Intelligence Council or NIC – officially a part of the ODNI, but physically located at CIA Headquarters in Langley) initially examines the merits of each proposal in consultation with analysts throughout the Community, as well as with senior policy officials. If the decision is to move ahead, the NIC determines which segments of the IC can best contribute and then provides these agencies with an outline of objectives, asking them to respond with their facts and insights by a certain deadline. This outline is known as the Terms of Reference or TOR. A NIC document explains: “The TOR defines the key estimative questions, determines drafting responsibilities, and sets the drafting and publication schedule.”67
In response to the TOR, data and ideas pour back to the NIC from around the Community and are shaped into a draft NIE by one or more of the senior analysts who comprise the NIC, in continual dialogue with experts further down the chain of analysts. Since 1973, the senior analysts on the NIC have been known as National Intelligence Officers or NIOs. These men and women are expected to have “the best in professional training, the highest intellectual integrity, and a very large amount of worldly wisdom.”68 The ten to sixteen or so NIOs (the number varies from time to time) are considered the crème de la crème of intelligence analysts, drawn from throughout the Community as well as from academe and the think-tanks. A recent set of NIOs consisted of four career intelligence officers; five analysts from academe and think-tanks; three from the military; and one from the legislative staff on Capitol Hill. The NIC also consults regularly with some fifty individuals across the country who hold security clearances. For the dozen NIOs in the Clinton Administration, here is a listing of their “portfolios”: Africa; Near East and South Asia; East Asia; Russia and Eurasia; Economics and Global Issues; Science and Technology; Europe; Special Activities (a euphemism for covert action); General Purpose Forces; Strategic and Nuclear Programs; Latin America; and Warning. The NIOs work closely with the DNI's National Intelligence Managers to bring about the kind of synergy in the Intelligence Community that leads to the ultimate goal of “all-source fusion” – a blend of all the findings from the ints into comprehensive intelligence reports for decision-makers.
To improve the intelligence product, the secret agencies will sometimes (although too infrequently) reach outside their walls to solicit the views of private-sector experts in academe and the think-tanks. Perhaps the most well-known of the Intelligence Community's efforts to consult with outsiders for a critique of an NIE came in 1976, by way of a “Team A, Team B” review of an Estimate on Soviet military intentions and capabilities.69 The staff of the National Security Council selected the two teams. The CIA's own Soviet experts comprised Team A, and academics comprised Team B, led by Harvard University Russian historian Richard E. Pipes, known for his strongly hawkish views on the Soviet Union. Pipes and his panel were convinced the Agency had gone soft; its liberal “civilian” outlook, reinforced by naïve arms control experts in the scholarly community, had led to an NIE that downplayed the Soviet plan for world conquest. In the Team B view, the Soviets were subtly seeking – and could well achieve – a first-strike, war-winning strategy against the United States, rather than peaceful coexistence. Team B accused the CIA of miscalculating Soviet expenditures on weapons systems, thereby underestimating the formidable strength of the Red Army and its WMD. Team A, in turn, charged the Pipes panel with exaggerating the Soviet peril.
The upshot of this attempt at “competitive analysis” using outsider reviewers was that the CIA trimmed back on some of its more sanguine views about Moscow's intentions, adopting Soviet military production figures that were slightly more in line with the Team B projections. Nevertheless, a vast gulf between the two groups continued to exist on the subject of Soviet motivations: the more optimistic views of the Team A set against the pessimistic “hard-liners” like Pipes in Team B. The “debate” probably put a dent in the reputation of the Intelligence Community; the door had been opened to doubt about the wisdom of reliance on its internal judgments. Nonetheless, it was healthy for inside Agency analysts to have their views tested by outside experts, although the selection of an external review board known for a particular political stance – a hard-line anti-Soviet perspective – was less useful than would have been a reliance on more neutral authorities.
During the NIE drafting process, the NIO in charge will send
the first draft back to each of the intelligence agencies working on the study and so begins the process of interagency editing, as specialists from throughout the Community hammer the final document into shape. An analyst recalls this editing process in painful terms: “It was like defending a Ph.D. dissertation, time after time after time.”70
The NIC makes the penultimate judgment on the appropriateness of the data and conclusions presented in each Estimate, then sends the document along to the National Intelligence Board for further review. The NIB is made up of the senior representatives of the Intelligence Community and is chaired by the DNI, who is also in charge of the NIC and has the last say on an Estimate before it is distributed to senior policymakers. In the past, intelligence directors have occasionally so disliked an Estimate produced by the intelligence bureaucracy that they have written one themselves on the topic in lieu of sending forward the NIC version. This practice is rare, however, and carries with it the danger of an Estimate becoming too personalized or even politicized.71 Sometimes, though, intelligence chiefs can be correct and the bureaucracy wrong, as when DCI John McCone rejected the conclusion of an Estimate that predicted the Soviets would be unlikely to place missiles in Cuba in the early 1960s. The best approach, however, is to rely on well-trained and experienced analysts; then, if the Intelligence Director (or some other high official in the IC) disagrees with them, he or she can forward a dissent to policymakers as an addendum to the official NIO version.
The bulk of the NIE drafting resides in the hands of junior analysts within the IC – specialists who study the daily cable traffic from the country (or other topic) in question. The NIOs are expected to keep in touch with the various intelligence agencies that have contributed to the Estimate. Obviously, the tenor of the language in an NIE is all-important, especially the confidence levels evinced in the document (high, medium, or low). The NIOs must be careful not to claim more than the evidence can support, especially in the NIE's executive summary (called “Key Judgments” or KJs) found at the beginning of the document. This may be the only portion of an Estimate read by a harried (or sometimes perhaps lazy) policy official and it needs to convey the shades of gray, and the caveats, that serve as an antidote to overly assertive and simplistic conclusions.
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