As the 9/11 Commission's hearings play out on
television, and as the new presidential commission to investigate
intelligence failures relating to Iraq and weapons of mass destruction
gets going, the coming weeks are sure to bring more revelations about what
went wrong in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks and in the subsequent run-up
to our war with Iraq. Good: We need to understand what went wrong with our
intelligence on the 9/11 attacks and Iraq's WMD, and if these commissions
can find some answers, we will owe them our gratitude.
But
enough information has already surfaced to make clear that behind the
CIA's failures surrounding 9/11 and Iraq's WMD lies an intelligence
failure about the war on terrorism that runs even deeper — and is of an
order of magnitude that neither commission may consider within its charter
to investigate. To understand this deeper failure, you need to understand
something about intelligence itself that, to my knowledge, no one has ever
disclosed before. For several years, during the Reagan administration, I
had access to many of our intelligence services' most closely held
secrets. And what I learned is this: The most vital, most actionable
pieces of intelligence aren't "secret" at all. They are visible to anyone
with a reasonable grasp of politics and economics — and, above all, anyone
with a willingness to see the obvious and then articulate it clearly
enough, and forcefully enough, so that policymakers cannot possibly ignore
it.
Before turning to the CIA's failure in the war on terrorism, let me
explain this point by outlining the CIA's deep failure in the Cold War. In
the late 1970s and early 1980s, the CIA produced a stream of intelligence
assessments whose key judgment was that the Soviet economy was growing at
an annual rate of more than 3 percent. The implication of this steady
growth was that the Soviet Union had the economic wherewithal to continue
fighting the Cold War for as long as anyone could foresee. There was just
one problem with the agency's key judgment: It couldn't possibly be right.
If you understood how an economy works — or if you just put on a pair of
comfortable shoes and walked the streets of Moscow, or Leningrad, or Minsk
with your eyes open — it was obvious that the Soviet economy wasn't
growing at 3 percent. It wasn't growing at all: It was starting to
implode.
THE VALUE OF INSIGHT
This wasn't a secret, but rather something
much more valuable in the intelligence business: It was an insight. And if
true, the implication of this insight was extraordinary: it meant the
Soviet Union could not continue to wage the Cold War; that it needed to
win quickly, before its economy collapsed, which meant in turn that the
Soviet Union was likely to become even more aggressive in the years ahead
precisely because it was starting to collapse. Armed with this insight —
which was developed by a group of "outsiders" appointed to key CIA jobs by
President Reagan's remarkable director of central intelligence, William J.
Casey — we ordered our clandestine service, and our analysts, to shift
their focus from Soviet strengths to Soviet weaknesses; in other words, to
see if they could uncover "secret" intelligence either to support the
insight or prove it false.
What flowed in was a stunning torrent of reports, intercepts, and
photographs — about factories shutting down for lack of raw materials,
about workers rioting to protest the lack of meat and soap, about Moscow
planners frantically shifting allocations of steel from tanks to
locomotives, the text of brutal memos from the Politburo putting more and
more pressure on the various bureaucracies to find new ways of generating
hard currency — all of which showed conclusively not only that the Soviet
economy was imploding, but that Soviet leaders knew it. Indeed, the one
"secret" that Soviet leaders were most determined to keep us from learning
— the one piece of intelligence whose discovery would be for them an utter
catastrophe — is that they were sitting atop an imploding economy.
They were right. Armed with the intelligence that the Soviet economy
was in deep trouble, President Reagan set a course to force that economy
off a cliff. We launched an arms buildup the Soviets couldn't possibly
match, including SDI. We got rough with our so-called allies in the
Mideast and forced down the price of oil, not merely to boost our own
economy, but to cripple the Soviet economy by cutting their hard-currency
earnings from oil exports. And when they scrambled to build a natural-gas
pipeline into Western Europe to generate the hard currency that oil
exports weren't providing, we played diplomatic hardball with our European
allies and got that project stopped. There was more to it, of course —
including CIA operations that even now must remain secret — but the point
here is that President Reagan found a way to use this intelligence to end
the Cold War with a victory for the free world.
Now let's fast-forward into the 1990s. The World Trade Center was
nearly blown up in 1993. American soldiers were killed in Saudi Arabia
when truck bombs took out the Khobar Towers barracks in 1996. In Iran the
mullahs were providing more and more support to Hezbollah and other
terrorist groups. In Iraq Saddam Hussein tried to kill President George
H.W. Bush and established at least a working relationship with al Qaeda.
The Taliban took power in Afghanistan, and gave al Qaeda a secure base of
operations. Al Qaeda itself began to operate beyond the Mideast, and in
1998 hit our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In 2000, al Qaeda wrecked
the Navy's most advanced destroyer, the USS Cole. And through all
this, literally month after month, Osama bin Laden issued one statement
after another calling for the destruction of Western Civilization
itself.
WE WERE AT WAR
Put all this together (and, in my mind, we need to
take a hard look at the Oklahoma City bombing and the explosion that
brought down TWA flight 800), and the not-so-secret insight hits you right
between the eyes: War has been declared on the United States. It has
been declared by al Qaeda, which has the support of other terrorist groups
and also of rogue states including Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Attacks to
date make clear that this anti-U.S. coalition of groups and states has the
capacity to plan and carry out sophisticated attacks on high-value
targets, and has a global reach. Most worrisome, our enemies' objective is
neither political nor territorial in the traditional sense. Rather, their
objective is our utter physical destruction. The implication is that
attacks on U.S. targets, both overseas and in the U.S. itself, inevitably
will increase both in frequency and magnitude. Of course analysts will
have honest differences of opinion over which terrorist group or country
carried out which attack. (Hint to all you terrorism analysts: Laurie
Mylroie is right; Laurie is always right.) But push beyond these
differences and you would have to be blind not to see that our country was
at war, and had been for several years at least.
It was the intelligence community's responsibility — probably by the
mid-1990s, but surely by the late 1990s — to reach this key judgment and
grasp its horrifying implications. And the community's leader, the
director of central intelligence, should have made sure that both the
judgment and its implications were delivered and absorbed. After all,
intelligence isn't like journalism; you don't just write your piece, send
it off for publication, and then keep your fingers crossed hoping someone
will notice your brilliant insight. In the intelligence business, you send
your judgment and explain its implications to the policymakers, then wait
a reasonable amount of time — about five minutes — before jumping in a
car, heading for the White House, or the State Department, or the
Pentagon, pushing your way past all the secretaries and confronting your
good friends and colleagues head-on.
In the intelligence business you need to market your product. You need
to confront the policymakers, force them to pay attention, make them "get
it." And if charm and courtesy don't work — and they rarely do, because
policymakers are busy, distracted by other problems, and they, like all
human beings, hate to be confronted with bad news — you need to shove the
intelligence down their throats. All this is part of the job — which is
why intelligence officials who are described as "well liked by
policymakers" are worthless. And if nothing you say or do gets the
policymakers to pay attention, you get back in your car, drive to Capitol
Hill, and talk privately with some of the more serious members of
Congress. And if you still can't get anyone to face the intelligence, you
resign and slam the door so hard on your way out that the whole country
hears it and asks why.
But none of this happened. The CIA and the
other parts of our intelligence community didn't "get it." They didn't
connect the dots. They didn't understand that, by the mid-1990s, the old
way of declaring war had ended — think of Neville Chamberlain's mournful
BBC broadcast in September 1939, telling the British that "...as Herr
Hitler has not responded to our ultimatum, a state of war therefore exists
between our two countries" — and that from now on wars just start without
the traditional formalities.
THE FAILURE OF FAILURES
This is the deep intelligence failure of
the war on terrorism. It was a failure of insight, and it was from this
failure that all the others flowed. Had our intelligence community made
clear back in the 1990s that the country was at war, and under attack, the
post-9/11 national focus on terrorism and on radical Islam would have
started years before. The questions of how best to confront our enemies,
and perhaps of whether to form a Department of Homeland Security, might
have become issues in the 2000 presidential elections. The
intelligence-sharing between the CIA and FBI that is only now beginning
might have been working smoothly long before those 19 9/11 hijackers ever
entered the U.S.
It's possible, of course, that none of this would have sufficed to stop
the 9/11 attacks. And it's possible that, in the late 1990s, we Americans
were having so much fun — a booming dot-com economy, a president whose
sexual antics kept us amused and revolted, all sorts of neat new
electronic toys to play with — that nothing our intelligence community
reported could have made us end our holiday from history and get serious
in time. But we will never know for sure, because our intelligence
community failed to sound the alarm early enough, clearly enough — and
loudly enough — to give us a chance.
To their great credit, both Republican and Democratic members of the
two intelligence commissions have made clear that they are more interested
in making needed changes to help prevent future failures than in assigning
blame for past failures. This means they will need to push beyond "secret"
intelligence of intercepts and satellite photos — and beyond the
headline-grabbing disputes over who said what to whom, or whose
recollection of some off-hand comment by the president is more accurate —
and reach to the core of how intelligence works.
The real value of intelligence isn't merely to provide a last-minute
warning so you can dodge a bullet or a bomb — or a hijacked 757. Rather,
it is to see the future clearly enough, and early enough, so that you can
change the future before it happens. To do this you need insight even more
than you need secrets; this means that, to prevent the next failure, we
will need to do more than merely re-organize the intelligence community,
or even name a director of national intelligence to oversee the whole
alphabet soup of agencies and offices. As I have said before, intelligence
isn't org charts: It's people. And this means that unless we put at the
upper echelons of the CIA the best analysts and pattern-spotters our
country can provide — the kinds of men and women who aren't likely to be
career government officials — we won't be ready for whatever the next
history-making cataclysm turns out to be.
— Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan
administration as special assistant to the director of Central Intelligence
and vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. His new video is
The Siege of Western
Civilization.
