LET’S TAKE BUREAUCRACY OUT OF INTEL: JOHN BOLTON
Let’s Take Bureaucracy Out of Intelligence
Groupthink products like National Intelligence Estimates make us vulnerable.
By JOHN BOLTON
Although the U.S. intelligence community (IC) has been stung by failures relating to the Christmas terrorist attack, these failures are symptomatic of far larger problems. In analyzing the ongoing Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons programs, both the IC and policy makers are guilty of politicizing intelligence, exactly the behavior harshly criticized during the Bush administration.
Now, however, the politicization threat dwells inside the IC, especially in the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) bureaucracy. Policy officials move in and out of intelligence jobs as if those jobs were interchangeable, carrying all their existing policy biases. Even worse, intelligence officers increasingly disdain to hide their philosophical proclivities, which have colored their intelligence analysis in years past. And, like generals refighting the last war to correct their mistakes, the IC is reacting against charges it overstated the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction by understating the threat of Iranian and North Korean weapons programs. So much for the wall of separation between policy and intelligence.
Ill-concealed policy preferences dominated the now-discredited 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. So eager were the NIE’s drafters to forestall the use of force against Iran that they distorted the intelligence, ignored contrary evidence, and overstated their conclusions.
We are still paying the price for this bureaucratic insurrection, as information emerges about Iran’s extensive efforts to conceal its nuclear program. Recent reports, for example, show that Qom is far from Iran’s only hardened underground enrichment facility. So much is unknown about Iran’s progress that the administration’s confident estimates about the time available to engage in fruitless negotiations work in Tehran’s favor.
Similarly, A.Q. Khan, proliferation’s pre-eminent entrepreneur, reportedly believes that Pyongyang’s clandestine uranium-enrichment began earlier and made more progress than many previously acknowledged. This and other new information, as recently explained by South Korea’s foreign minister, runs counter to the biases of officials who have tried to minimize the risk from Pyongyang to justify six-party talks. Instead, it suggests that the North’s repeated pledges to end its nuclear weapons program have been utterly worthless.
The Christmas terrorist attack demonstrates that we need more effective communication and analysis within the IC. Achieving this goal does not require more centralization of authority, more hierarchy, and more uniformity of opinion. The IC’s problem stems from a culture of anonymous conformity. Greater centralization will only reinforce existing bureaucratic obstacles to providing decision makers with a full range of intelligence analysis.
The problem is often not the intelligence we collect, but assessing its implications. Solving that problem requires not the mind-deadening exercise of achieving bureaucratic consensus, but creating a culture that rewards insight and decisiveness. To create that culture we should abolish the DNI office and NIEs.
Eliminating the DNI should be accompanied by reversing decades of inadequate National Security Council supervision of the intelligence function. The council is an awesome instrument for presidential control over the IC, but only if the national security adviser and others exercise direction and control. Sloughing off responsibility to the bureaucracy embodying the problem is a failure of presidential leadership, and unfortunately gives us exactly the IC we deserve.
Contemporary NIEs (and other IC products) reflect the bureaucracy’s lowest-common-denominator tendencies and should be abolished. Each intelligence agency should be able to place its analysis of data into a competitive marketplace of classified ideashis will help determine which is the superior product.
Finally, the real debatable issue is often not intelligence or analysis, but the inescapably political judgment of how much risk to our national security we are willing to tolerate. Today, the Obama administration’s level of risk tolerance for potential terrorists and proliferators is far too high. Changing that doesn’t just mean fixing the IC. It means fixing the White House.
Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of “Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad” (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
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