The CIAs career shows essential intelligence has suffered from the paramilitary preoccupation
Bill Keller
My Times colleague Mark Mazzetti has a new book out that is getting a lot of attention. The Way of the Knife recounts the recent transformation of the CIA from a traditional spying shop into more of a man-hunting paramilitary.
Alone among the many US intelligence outfits,the CIA has the job of supplying the president with the deep strategic intelligence that anticipates dangers and shapes American policy. The agency has always housed both covert operations and the more traditional gathering and analysis of information cowboys and eggheads,as one agency-watcher put it. The worry is that the eggheads have become so caught up in serving the cowboys tactical intelligence about high-profile assassination targets that they have less bandwidth to devote to longer-term threats. Gregory Treverton,a RAND Corporation expert who is a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council,said that as hundreds of analysts flood into the subject of the moment,they are assigned to narrower and narrower slices of the problem. There is less standing back and figuring out how it adds up,what might happen next.
We have learned,to our peril,how much it matters when intelligence lets us down. The CIA,having been hollowed out in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War,failed to see the signs of what would be 9/11. Then the CIA got the ostensible Iraqi weapons threat terribly wrong,drowning out more sceptical voices in the intelligence units of the state department and energy department,and paving the way to a colossal blunder of a war. By most accounts,including the assessment of intelligence insiders,academics and journalists who cover the subject,the conglomerate of intelligence agencies is in much better shape than it was before 9/11. Thats a low bar,but credit where credit is due. The agencies are better staffed and better at sharing information. Its hard for an outsider to tell until something goes wrong,but high-priority topics like Irans nuclear programme and Chinas development of cyberweapons seem to be getting the emphasis they deserve.
The concern that essential intelligence has suffered from the paramilitary preoccupation is shared by some of the presidents own advisors. Rebuilding traditional intelligence collecting and analysis is not a simple matter of reassigning case officers. The expertise is not always transferrable; the skills are not fungible. Of course,reorienting the CIA depends on the demands of its clients in the White House and its overseers in Congress. Much as policymakers insist they want smart,over the horizon intelligence,its todays news that grabs their attention,and covert operations that excite them. I dont suppose many of the boys in Congress grew up playing egghead.
