By deciding to name a
director of National Intelligence to oversee our country's troubled intelligence
service, President Bush has done more than merely accept the 9/11 Commission's
key recommendation. He has accepted the commission's key conclusion: Namely,
that the 9/11 intelligence failure might have been avoided, and the attacks
themselves averted, if only a "czar" had been in charge of the CIA and the other
14 agencies that comprise our intelligence service.
In fact the
9/11 intelligence failure — and the CIA's cascading series of intelligence
failures involving Iraq in the years since 9/11 — all stem from a different root
entirely: personnel, by which I mean the poor choice of people who in the last
decade or so have been catapulted into the leadership of our intelligence
service. After all, in one sense intelligence is no different than any other
business: People matter more than org charts. Put the right people in charge of
an organization, and they overcome its structural problems or figure out on
their own what changes to make. Put the wrong people in charge, and not even a
perfect structure will avert disaster.
The key to understanding why personnel lies at the heart of all the
intelligence failures we've had, including 9/11, is to recognize that while most
leadership positions are interchangeable, some are not. More precisely, there
are some leadership positions that by their nature are more cerebral than
managerial. The difference isn't, so to speak, in the number of neurons the
leaders have firing inside their heads, but in the content of these neurons. For
example, the editor of a newspaper must be at heart a journalist. He must have a
"nose for news" in the sense of having good judgment about which stories to run,
and which to hold; about which story to put at the top of page one, and which to
bury on page 23; about whether to point his crack team of investigative
reporters at the mayor, or the police chief. Likewise, the director of a
scientific research institute must himself be a world-class scientist. Only a
world-class scientist can manage other scientists, for instance by knowing which
ones to hire, which of their research projects to back and which to stop, which
of their requests for new equipment to approve and which to reject. Only a
world-class scientist will have that priceless, unquantifiable gut feel for
where the big payoff lies.
The Need to Schmooze
Visit any newsroom, or any research lab, and you will see the editor or the
director in the thick of things. The editor is in the newsroom, or in his office
nearby, usually with the door open. He and his reporters are in constant contact
— not just formal meetings, but all those informal, unscheduled conversations at
someone's desk, or at the coffee machine. The lab director works in the same
way, and you are less likely to find him in his office than perched on a stool
at a subordinate's work bench, holding a test tube while the subordinate pours
in some frothing mixture. Both the editor and the lab director tend to hang
around late, and to drop by on a Saturday afternoon just to schmooze with
whoever happens to be around because — well, because that is who they are and
what they want to do.
Do these leaders also administer and "coordinate" their organizations? Of
course they do. But it's their judgment — their intellectual grasp of the
content of their work — that matters far more than their administrative skills.
Find the greatest "manager" this country can produce — someone like Jack Welsh,
the former chairman of General Electric Company — and parachute him in to head a
newspaper or a research lab. No doubt he will run a tighter ship, find ways to
cut costs, straighten out some tangled lines of authority — and the result will
be an utter catastrophe.
"Intelligence" is one of these specialties, which means that the individual
in charge of our intelligence service, regardless of what jobs he has previously
held, must have the heart and soul of an intelligence officer. Here's why: Our
intelligence service does two things: It gathers information relevant to our
country's security, and it tries to understand what the information means. In
other words, it collects dots and then connects them into patterns. Of the 15
agencies that comprise the U.S. intelligence service, the most important by far
is the CIA. That's because the "C" in CIA stands for "central," which means that
it's the CIA's job to take the dots that all the 15 agencies collect and connect
them into patterns that will alert the President to looming dangers. For the CIA
to work properly, the agency must have at its top echelon the kind of men and
women who have the knowledge, experience and talent to connect those dots into
patterns — and to do this soon enough, and clearly enough, so that the president
has ample time to respond to looming dangers.
This is done through the National Intelligence Estimates, which are the
top-secret, top-level projections for the president in which all those "dots"
the agencies and analysts have collected are pulled together into a pattern.
Despite the intense focus on the NIE process by the 9/11 Commission, and by the
Senate Intelligence Committee in its recent report — and in particular their
focus on the famously flawed NIE about Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction
program — both panels missed the key point: When a NIE is drafted, and when all
the differing judgments of the analysts and the agencies are outlined, someone
has to make the final decision about what the U.S. Intelligence Community really
believes is correct. In other words, someone has to call the shot and tell the
president that his $40-billion-a-year intelligence service believes that Iraq
has WMDs, or not, or that North Korea has nuclear bombs, or not, or that China
is planning to attack Taiwan, or not. Under the present structure, that
individual is the director of Central Intelligence. And this is why the director
must always be a world-class pattern-spotter. It's his judgment about what is
true, or untrue — and about which dissents to include in an NIE and which to
leave out — that the president and Congress depend upon. Whether or not the
director is a skilled administrator isn't nearly so important.
Their Insights, Not Their Secrets
This is why presidents have traditionally chosen their CIA directors from
among the best pattern spotters our country can produce. They wanted men who
knew their way around the world, had a deep grasp of history and global
politics, and above all had proven track records of success at seeing new trends
— and understanding what they meant — long before these trends were even visible
to everyone else. Among the CIA directors who fit this mold were Allen Dulles,
John McCone, William Casey, and James Woolsey. These were men whose
accomplishments had put them in the history books before taking charge at
the CIA. They were men whose advice, and whose insights about the world, were
sought out by politicians and world leaders even when they weren't in office and
didn't have access to secrets. (I used to tell people that Bill Casey wasn't the
most well informed man in Washington because he was CIA director; rather,
President Reagan had chosen Bill to head the CIA because he was the most
well-informed man in Washington.) And being the kind of men they were, when they
took charge of our intelligence service they sought out others who were like
themselves. They brought these world-class analysts into the agency and used
their talents, and their energy, to get the job done and thus assure that the
president would see the future soon enough, and clearly enough, to change the
future before it happened.
But in the last decade or so, pattern spotters have been replaced by
bureaucrats. George Tenet, who resigned last month as director of Central
Intelligence, was a congressional aide when President Clinton — to the utter
astonishment of everyone who knew anything about intelligence — named him deputy
director of Central Intelligence. It was even more astonishing when, after James
Woolsey's resignation, Clinton promoted Tenet to the director's chair. To
replace Tenet as deputy director Clinton promoted long-time CIA analyst John
McLaughlin. President Bush kept Tenet in place not only after the 2000 election,
but after the 9/11 attacks. And when Tenet resigned last month, he named
McLaughlin acting DCI. Both these men are decent, hard-working, deeply patriotic
Americans. I mean no disrespect by pointing out that the gap between their
backgrounds and credentials, and those of their various predecessors, is
enormous. Make a list of the 100 or so most brilliant pattern-spotters in our
country — look to the worlds of politics, business, Wall Street, academia, and
the think tanks for such men and women, with proven track records and the
reputations to match — and neither of these two gentlemen's names will be on it.
One telling indicator of the difference between these men and their predecessors
is their failure during recent years to seek out and recruit the kind of outside
analytic talent that the CIA in earlier years had routinely brought in to
enhance, invigorate — and challenge — the career CIA analysts and thus help
sharpen the agency's work, for example by breaking through the groupthink that
afflicts all organizations comprised solely of career insiders.
If the 9/11 intelligence failure were unique, it wouldn't be fair to come
down so hard on the people who were in charge at the time. Even first-class
intelligence leaders make mistakes — even big ones, sometimes with terrible
consequences. But the 9/11 failure has been followed by a cascading series of
intelligence failures involving Iraq. Whatever may turn out to be the truth
about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction — whether they never existed, were
destroyed or shipped to Syria or Iran before the war — the CIA failed to provide
an accurate assessment of what U.S. forces would find in Iraq when they got
there. In addition, the CIA failed to project Saddam Hussein's war strategy — to
melt into the population and then launch guerilla attacks rather than fight our
Army head-on in the field — failed to project the sorry state of Iraq's physical
infrastructure including its oil pipelines and electric grids, and failed to
accurately project the edgy attitude of Iraq's political factions. And in late
July the Washington Times reported that the CIA was caught by surprise
when it learned that China has developed and launched a new class of submarines,
whose only possible use would be to attack U.S. ships defending Taiwan from a
Chinese invasion.
It simply isn't possible that all these failures were due to a lack of
coordination, rather than a lack of judgment. There is no organization in the
world whose structure is so screwed up that good analysts cannot figure out a
way around it. Indeed, part of being a good analyst is knowing whom to touch
base with, and how. (And when the bureaucracy throws up a wall you cannot scale
— you just telephone over it and arrange for lunch or a quiet barbecue on
Sunday.) Ask the editor of any great newspaper, or the head of any world-class
research lab: you cannot stop serious and gifted reporters or scientists from
talking with one another, meeting with one another, coordinating with one
another. The hard part is getting them to shut up long enough to do their work.
Who Makes the Call?
In its recommendation that we create a director of National Intelligence to
"co-ordinate" our intelligence service, the 9/11 Commission ignored the key
issue of judgment. In other words, while all this highly touted coordinating is
going on, who will be doing the thinking? If we put a DNI on top of the DCI,
which one will have the ultimate responsibility for making the call — for
deciding what the intelligence service believes about Iraq, about the status of
nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea, and about all the other issues
on which our country's security depends?
The 9/11 Commission seems to envisage the new DNI as a sort of bureaucratic
Phileas Fogg — suspended in a hot-air balloon over the 15 intelligence agencies,
peering down at them through his telescope to see what's going on. But is the
DNI really going to say to the president: "Here's that new Estimate on Denmark's
Covert Nuclear Weapons Program that the DCI and his people have worked up. I'm
just the coordinator, so I don't have any opinion about it." Fat chance. From
the moment a DNI is named, this official will be calling the shots. And this
means that he will need to be in the thick of things — mixing it up 14 hours a
day with the analysts and the spies, always available for a quick word or some
advice, always hanging around to schmooze and point the way forward. If he does
this by putting his office out at CIA headquarters in Langley — which is where
the action is — then he's just the DCI with some expanded authority. If he tries
to do this from an office at the White House, or next door at the Old Executive
Office Building, he will need to establish his own staff there — in which case
all he's accomplished is to replicate the CIA itself at a new location.
Since the president holds an M.B.A. from Harvard, surely he knows that you
can never solve a personnel problem with an organizational change. Perhaps his
decision to ask Congress to create the new post of DNI is designed more to solve
a political problem; to show voters he's on the case and moving fast to fix our
broken intelligence service. And perhaps, if Congress creates the new post, the
President will choose as his DNI a world-class pattern spotter who will be able
to get hold of things regardless of where the new office is located or how the
new org chart is drawn. Let's hope so, because if the personnel issue isn't
dealt with our intelligence service will remain adrift, which in turn will leave
the country vulnerable to another 9/11 attack.
And then what? Probably another commission that will recommend creation of a
director of Intergalactic Intelligence, to sit on top of the director of
National Intelligence, who sits on top of the director of Central Intelligence.
— 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.
