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Jan 13, 2010
by HERBERT
E.
MEYER
In the wake of our country's latest intelligence failure -- allowing a
Nigerian terrorist to board Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam
to Detroit when his own father had alerted us to the dangers posed by
his son -- President Obama demands to know why our intelligence
service failed to "connect the dots."
So he's ordered investigations led by the very same officials who
presided over our country's intelligence failures. That would be John
Brennan, the president's counter-terrorism adviser whose job it was to
keep Umar Abdulmutallab from boarding that flight, and John McLaughlin,
the hapless, now-retired career CIA official who, as deputy director of
the CIA and then as acting director, signed off on the two most
screwed-up National Intelligence Estimates in our country's history: the
NIE about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then that
preposterous 2007 NIE which concluded that Iran had abandoned its quest
for nuclear weapons.
There isn't a chance that these clowns will come up with the right
answer, because they're the problem. Simply put, the reason our
intelligence service keeps failing to connect the dots is because the
officials in charge don't know how. And the blame lies squarely with
President Obama -- and alas, with President George W. Bush before him --
for appointing managers rather than dot-connectors to run our
intelligence service.
To understand why the absence of dot-connectors at the top lies at the
core of our intelligence failures, you must understand the relationship
between management and talent.
In most organizations, failure or success depends on the quality of
management. That's why in the business world, competent chief executives
are so highly compensated; they're rare, and they're worth every penny
they're paid. But there are some highly specialized organizations in
which failure or success depends not so much on the quality of
management or the structure of the organization, but on talent. For
example, an opera company. You can have the best manager in the history
of the performing arts, but if you're staging La Bohème, then
you'd better put two superstars like Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón
on the stage, or you'll have a flop on your hands. Likewise with a
scientific research institute: It isn't the administrator setting
budgets, monitoring grants, and assigning parking spaces who will find
the cure for cancer. It's the world-class scientists working in the
labs.
Talent at the Top
And if you're running one of these specialized organizations whose
success depends more on talent than on management, then you put a
talented individual in charge. First, he or she can actually do the job,
rather than run around looking important while managing people, who in
turn manage other people, who themselves manage the people who are
actually doing the job. Second, he or she will be able to recognize and
recruit other talented people. This is why organizations whose success
depends on talent tend to be led by people who themselves have it and
have proven that they have it. For example, the Washington National
Opera's general manager is the great tenor Placido Domingo. The
president of Rockefeller University is Paul Nurse, himself a Nobel
laureate in biology.
An intelligence service is one of these highly specialized organizations
whose success depends more on talent than on management. And the precise
talent that an intelligence service needs is the ability to connect dots
-- to spot a pattern with the fewest possible facts -- not only to
intuitively grasp what lies in the future, but to grasp it soon enough,
and clearly enough, so that there's time to change the future before it
happens.
We used to understand this. Our country's World War II intelligence
service, the Office of Strategic Services, was led by William J.
Donovan. He was a brilliant Wall Street lawyer with a razor-sharp
analytic mind and a talent for spotting talent. For example, when all
the experts told Donovan that it was impossible to get spies into Nazi
Germany, he gave the job to a young tax attorney he'd worked with who
seemed to have a knack for accomplishing impossible things. His name was
William J. Casey, and from his base in London as head of secret
operations for the OSS, he organized 103 missions behind Nazi lines. The
OSS was perhaps the greatest intelligence service in world history, and
its roster of stars included Arthur J. Goldberg -- later President
Kennedy's secretary of labor, Supreme Court justice, and U.N. ambassador
-- and even Julia Child.
After the war, we formed the CIA, and among its great directors were
Allen Dulles, John McCone, and Bill Casey himself during the Reagan
administration. These were men of enormous intellectual firepower. Time
and again, they saw the future before anyone else could, and they
spotted patterns when everyone else saw dots. I had the great privilege
of serving under Bill Casey -- I was among those few people he brought
into the CIA to help redirect the agency's analysis. Here's my favorite
story of Bill's extraordinary talent for connecting dots:
On the day the Soviet Union's long-time leader Leonid Brezhnev died, the
CIA went into massive overdrive to analyze what his death might mean for
U.S.-Soviet relations -- and more importantly, who might emerge as the
Kremlin's next boss. Top-secret telexes were pouring in from CIA
stations around the world, and throughout the building, analysts were
churning out reports and sending them up to the director's seventh-floor
office. By late afternoon, there was literally no more room on Bill's
massive desk for another document, and his secretary started making
piles on the floor.
Boiling It Down for Reagan
At about 6pm, when I walked into Bill's office to ask if there was
anything he wanted me to do, he was leaning back in his swivel chair,
calmly writing on a yellow pad. "Just leave me alone for a few minutes,"
he said, pointing with his pen at the piles of paper. "I want to boil
all this down for the president."
A few minutes later, he called me back into his office and handed me a
typed copy of his note to President Reagan. It was a short, informal,
but amazingly comprehensive summary of what we knew about the goings-on
in Moscow -- and it ended with what may be the breeziest and most
brilliant prediction in the history of intelligence: "As for me, Mr.
President, I bet Andropov on the nose and Gorbachev across the board."
Now you can see why President Reagan was so fond of the man he liked to
call "Director Bill." A president wants one thing from his intelligence
service, and that's to connect the dots and get it right -- to tell the
president the future. And how do you get an intelligence service that
can connect the dots? You put a world-class dot-connector in charge of
it.
Our country has no shortage of world-class dot-connectors. They're in
politics, in business, at think tanks, in the academic world, and at our
leading research institutes. You catch glimpses of them in articles they
write, speeches they give -- and sometimes even as talking heads on
television. Ask a dozen smart people to make lists of people they
consider to be world-class dot-connectors, and you'll get a wide range
of names, some of which will appear on more than one list. Now, do you
really believe that any of these lists will include, say,
counter-intelligence chief John Brennan, or CIA director Leon Panetta,
or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, or Director of National
Intelligence Dennis Blair? Are you kidding?
No one among us is perfect, or even close to perfect. In the real world,
intelligence failures will happen from time to time no matter how
honorable, hardworking, or talented the men and women are on whom we
rely to keep us safe. But after so many intelligence failures in such a
short time, we have got to stop making the same mistake over and over
again. This week's Washington cliché is that our system failed. No.
Systems don't fail; people fail. Put the right people in charge, and the
"system" will fail much, much less frequently.
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