May 2005

U.S. Intelligence Reform and the WMD Commission Report

On March 31, 2005, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction presented its recommendations to President George W. Bush. The Commission, co-chaired by retired judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb, concluded that the American intelligence community must undergo fundamental reform in order to confront the threats and challenges that face our nation. The Bush administration has already taken steps to address the weaknesses that plague the intelligence community. A Directorate of National Intelligence has been created, and the CIA and FBI have submitted draft reform proposals to the president. Are our intelligence agencies on the right track? What needs to be done in order to make America safer in the twenty-first century? These questions were considered by Judge Silberman and others at a May 4 AEI conference.

The Honorable Laurence H. Silberman
Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction

The WMD Commission had two basic functions. The first function was to look back and assess the work of the intelligence community with respect to Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. The evaluation was based on the intelligence available beforehand, not the knowledge acquired afterwards. Particular emphasis was placed on the efficiency of intelligence collection and how well analysts evaluated that information.

With regard to Iraq, the Commission determined that the intelligence community made a grave mistake in concluding that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction with a 90-percent degree of certainty. It would have been justifiable to have told the president and Congress that it was likely that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction based on his past use, insufficient indications of destruction, and his deceptive behavior. This mistake made by the intelligence community is not only determinable in hindsight. Rather, based on the information they had at the time, it was a mistake to declare the existence of WMDs with such certainty. The evidence that pointed toward the existence of WMDs was faulty, and there was a lack of internal communication within the intelligence community.

The conclusion that Iraq had reconstituted their nuclear program was based almost entirely on the importation of aluminum tubes. This conclusion was shockingly wrong, as it is clear that the tubes could have been designed for a purpose other than for centrifuges. Evidence for the existence of biological weapons came almost entirely from one source, a foreign liaison referred to as Curveball. The communication failure made the Curveball incident even more problematic, as speculation that the intelligence was fabricated never ascended through the ranks of the intelligence community. Using the pictures of tanker trucks thought to be designed for chemical weapons as evidence for the development of a chemical weapons program was justifiable. Hindsight proved this to be a false assumption, but it was a legitimate mistake. However, that the analysts did not realize the collectors had gathered more pictures of those trucks demonstrates an unforgivable lack of internal communication.

The second function of the Commission was to evaluate the suggestions for reform that have been made and to consider new ideas for reform. The 9/11 Commission report and the resulting legislation forced the WMD Commission to think about organizational reform in terms of a different structure. After examining the intelligence community and the mistakes of the past, two fundamental problems emerged. First, there was a leadership problem. Second, there was a problem of integration of collected information. In order to produce a sum of intelligence that is greater than the individual parts, it is important to ensure the synthesis of information, both in collection and analysis, within and between the agencies. Thus, integration in the intelligence community and leadership is essential.

An important step for the intelligence community to take would be to create a separate service that would focus on national security issues, foreign intelligence, counterespionage, and counterterrorism. However, resistance from the bureau and the Justice Department may make this separate national security service impossible. In that case, it would be wise to move toward the establishment of a separate MI5.

The Honorable Richard Posner
U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit

The tone of the WMD Commission report is too severe in its condemnation of the intelligence system. Intelligence reform through firing unsuccessful leaders is a flawed strategy. First of all, it is very damaging to the recruitment and retention of able people. Secondly, it contributes to the overselling of intelligence. Intelligence failures are not due to poor organization, bad practices, or bad personnel. Rather, they are inherent in intelligence. Intelligence involves activities that are, by their nature, fallible. For example, the need to protect the secrecy of intelligence and sources makes it difficult to integrate information. Another inherently problematic aspect of the intelligence system is that the United States simply cannot anticipate the actions of our enemies, due to the range of targets and methods. Additionally, career incentives prove problematic because success in intelligence is so difficult to evaluate. Finally, there is the problem of politicization that naturally occurs among government employees. These factors contribute to the profound uncertainty that is intrinsic to the intelligence task.

The Silberman-Robb Commission levels several questionable criticisms at the intelligence community. First, it criticizes the intelligence services for operating with the preconception that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The report assesses that this preconception guided their evaluation of evidence prior to the invasion and shifted the burden of proof to the doubters to show that Saddam did not have WMDs. This criticism is not justified because the use of logical preconceptions to guide inquiry is perfectly rational.

Second, the report does not give sufficient weight to the fact that there was a variety of data leading to the conclusion that Saddam had WMDs. A mass of weak observations can add up to strong evidence. Therefore, it is not clear that the intelligence error that was made was a culpable error.

Third, the devastating critique of the FBI’s response to 9/11 that the report issued is too harsh. The FBI’s resistance to creating an effective domestic intelligence agency is systemic. It is problematic to try to combine criminal investigation and intelligence in one agency. Criminal investigation will always be dominant in the FBI because there will always be more conventional law enforcement activity to engage in than national security intelligence. In criminal investigation, the goal is to maximize arrests and prosecutions. Intelligence is the opposite, as success is defined as the absence of activity, and arrests and prosecutions are unattractive because they reveal the information that has been gathered. This implies an incompatibility between the two activities.

The Silberman-Robb report’s suggestion for the structure of the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is to create a large staff who will exercise detailed supervision of the various functions performed by the various agencies. This may not be an efficient way to organize the new office. It may, in fact, delay information in getting to the top, dilute the intelligence on the way up, and slow the directions from coming back down. A better alternative would be a more horizontal, multi-divisional structure, similar to the British system. The four groups--military intelligence, foreign intelligence, technical intelligence, and domestic intelligence--would coordinate within themselves, and the DNI would coordinate the four groups.

Tom Corcoran
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

The position of the Senate Intelligence Committee is not that the intelligence community should have said Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. Rather, it is that they should have communicated the uncertainty behind their judgments. A more accurate warning about Saddam’s suspicious activity that did not attach certainty to the existence of WMDs would have led to a very different and more focused debate in Washington about what needed to be done in Iraq. With a more properly informed debate, the decision to go to war may or may not have been different, but it is clear we would not have regretted the basis of our decision.

Several reforms are needed as a solution to the failure of the intelligence community leading up to the war in Iraq. There must be a stronger chain of command and a more rational organization, and this requires more central authority. Additionally, there must be a paradigm shift within the intelligence community regarding information sharing. It must move away from the idea of “information sharing,” which implies that individuals or agencies own the information they collect and plays into the human impulse to hoard information and use it to empower oneself in the bureaucracy. Instead, the agencies must move toward “information access,” which would give analysts in different organizations electronic access to the databases of other organizations. This would also give analysts the ability to access information themselves without waiting to be told that the information exists.

Lindsay Moran
Former CIA Case Officer

The culture of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO) embraces a standard of mediocrity, a lack of accountability, and the striving for normalcy. For this reason, many able CIA officers are leaving the agency.

Leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the CIA did not have any Iraqi agents or assets. Thus, our decision to go to war was almost entirely based upon the intelligence information provided by one very unreliable agent, Curveball. The DO’s eleventh-hour effort to recruit Iraqis caused a rush of case officers with no knowledge of the language, culture, or even basic psychology of their targets to frantically try to recruit Iraqis worldwide. This sent the Iraqi diaspora the message that the CIA is incompetent and that the only means that it has to recruit is to issue veiled threats. Now that the mission has been accomplished in Iraq, the mass of case officers in Baghdad are idle and bored.

Silberman’s report revealed that the problem of the CIA lies with both the leadership and the underlings. The morale at the CIA is certainly devastated, but not because of this report. It was always devastated, and now it is an open secret. The problem of the DO specifically is the quality of people, from the leadership down. It is not the elite group it claims to be. The CIA’s standard of mediocrity is simply not acceptable for the intelligence service of the last remaining superpower.

AEI researcher Rachel Hoff prepared this summary.