Authors: Matthew M. Aid
The Central Intelligence Agency's intelligence analysis component, the Directorate of Intelligence, likes skeptics and contrarian thinkers hired out of academia, while the agency's cloak-and-dagger component, the National Clandestine Service, tends to be more eclectic in who it hires. It takes a special sort of person to do this job given that one must lie for a living, be willing to take chances that would get one fired in any other civilian job, and be willing to make deals with individuals so disreputable that one would never invite them home for dinner with the family. During the Cold War era, one of the groups of people the CIA's clandestine service liked to recruit was former college football players because they were physically and mentally tough and enjoyed a good fight. Since 9/11, the CIA has hired hundreds of former prosecutors and defense lawyers, policemen, and detectives because, as a group, these men and women are mentally tough, can think on their feet, are used to dealing with professional liars, cheats, and thieves, and have a Type A personality willing to take risks and a desire to win, even if it means occasionally bending the truth.
But hidden from view, thousands of these talented individuals are leaving the intelligence community every year. During George W. Bush's second term in office, the number of employees resigning or taking early retirement exceeded the number of new recruits being brought into the intelligence community. The departure of so many of the intelligence community's best and brightest people was causing incalculable damage because they took with them their institutional knowledge and unique skills learned during decades of service.
While many of the departing staffers said that they were leaving to seek better economic opportunities in the private sector, many left because they could no longer accept the enormous hardship and sacrifices that the job required. The stress and strain associated with working in the intelligence community, combined with long workdays, poor pay, lack of recognition, frequent overseas deployments, and the depersonalized and secretive nature of the job, took a terrible physical and mental toll on many intelligence officers.
NSA medical studies have shown that the agency's workforce is prone to a higher occurrence of ulcers, digestive tract problems, and sleeping and eating disorders than civilians who work ordinary nine-to-five jobs. A study of the health of military intercept operators at four NSA listening posts in the mid-1990s revealed that these personnel suffered from a host of maladies and ailments, such as high rates of diarrhea, constipation, gastritis, respiratory problems, back pain, forgetfulness, nervousness, and irritability.
Excessive drinking remains commonplace in the intelligence community; so do fatigue and a host of other stress-related illnesses. The divorce rate among workers in the intelligence community is one of the highest in the nation, and the suicide rate is also well above the national average. Mental disorder and breakdown statistics for intelligence workers are well above virtually any other government job.
One result is that the number of intelligence officers resigning before they reach retirement age because of stress and overwork is increasing. Many have left because they had to make a choiceâtheir families or their country. Nine times out of ten, family won out. In the fall of 2008, I was forced to watch as a friend, a career military intelligence officer, was told in no uncertain terms by his wife to either get out of the service or agree to a divorce. He submitted his retirement papers that same week.
As amply demonstrated by the May 1, 2011, killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy commandos, there have been marked improvements inside the U.S. intelligence community since 9/11. According to interviews with over a dozen senior intelligence officials over the past three years, dramatic strides have been made since 9/11 in knocking down the security firewalls that prevented the sharing of information among the agencies that now make up the intelligence community. There is also better coordination of effort within the intelligence community; the quality of the intelligence analysis that is being produced has improved significantly; and there are signs that the intelligence community's relations with Congress are on a much better footing than they were during the Bush administration, when the White House deliberately withheld crucial information from the House and Senate oversight committees.
Monumental efforts have been made over the past decade to make the vast amount of information being generated by the intelligence community available to those who need it. The 100,000 intelligence reports, memos, briefs, and cables that the intelligence community produces every month are fed into a new centralized computer database called the Library of National Intelligence, roughly patterned on the massive Library of Congress collection of books and magazines, which all analysts with the appropriate security clearances can access.
However, the intelligence community failed to effectively address the fundamental underlying problem, which was that it was collecting far more data than its analysts and computers could conceivably process. Throughout the Bush administration, U.S. intelligence officials struggled to try to rectify the problem, but with little success as spending on new high-tech collection systems, like unmanned aerial drones, exploded but no new funds were allocated to hire and train the personnel to analyze the data. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it in a declassified memo, the intelligence community was producing
“more data than we can translate into useable knowledge.”
Moreover, according to intelligence insiders, the intelligence community still lacked the technical tools to sift and search through this data in a timely fashion so that analysts can spot potential threats. According to a congressional source, the available data was proliferating faster than the search tools needed to analyze what was in the databases. According to the source, “It was as if someone was paid to paint a picture and they never painted the picture but continued to argue that they had made gallant efforts to buy as much paint as they possibly could ⦠Paint is still paint ⦠it ain't a picture.”
Beyond the data avalanche, interagency turf battles over access to information were still taking place. According to Colonel Barry Harris, who commanded a U.S. Army intelligence unit in Iraq, the U.S. Air Force refused to allow reconnaissance data from their unmanned drones to be given to his unit because they would not countenance army personnel controlling one of their intelligence assets.
“This is parochialism at its worst,”
Harris said, “and it deprived soldiers ⦠of intelligence that could have given them a significant advantage.”
The quality of the analysis coming out of the intelligence community has also improved since 9/11, thanks in part to the efforts of former deputy director of national intelligence for analysis Dr. Thomas Fingar, who now teaches at Stanford University in California. Still, some of the intelligence community's consumers remain highly critical of the quality of the intelligence reporting. According to a senior State Department intelligence official, much of the intelligence reporting he saw coming out of DNI headquarters resembled “the fast food my kids eat at McDonald's.”
This is an age-old problem that has never been fixed to anyone's satisfaction. Forty years earlier at the height of the Vietnam War, Henry A. Kissinger, President Richard Nixon's sometimes acerbic national security adviser, famously compared the authors of what he was reading coming out of the intelligence community to “
a hysterical group of Talmudic scholars
doing an exegesis of abstruse passages.” In plain English, Kissinger was saying that America's spies were, in his opinion, producing a lot of incomprehensible and irrelevant crap.
The intelligence community has also done a commendable job in recent years of pushing pertinent information to military field commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan as far down the chain of command as battalion and company level. Today, lowly intelligence analysts in Baghdad and Kabul can look at the same agent reports, satellite imagery, and SIGINT intercepts on their laptop computers that are being shown that same day to President Obama and the National Security Council (NSC) in Washington.
For example, in 2007 NSA deployed to Iraq an electronic system called Real-Time Regional Gateway (RT-RG), which for the first time gave field commanders access to the agency's SIGINT databases. Now deployed in southern Afghanistan, RT-RG has revolutionized the ability of intelligence analysts at isolated firebases far from major military installations to instantaneously access SIGINT about what is going on in their “neck of the woods.” It has also dramatically speeded up the ability of the analysts to process the raw intelligence.
According to a restricted-access Pentagon briefing
, thanks to RT-RG, “analysis that used to take 16 hours or more now can be done in less than one minute.”
While everyone celebrates the fact that Washington is now pumping vast amounts of intelligence information to the field, the result has been that the material is drowning the intelligence analysts in Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2009, the situation had become so acute that the head of the Kandahar Intelligence Fusion Center in southern Afghanistan wrote in a memo, “
Information is like confetti
; it is everywhere, but no one will turn off the fan!”
While it is certainly true that things have changed for the better within the U.S. intelligence community since 9/11, many of the most serious problems that had directly contributed to the 9/11 and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction intelligence failures remained unfixed. Many of the fundamental intelligence-community reforms and structural changes that the 9/11 Commission had recommended in its final report in 2004 were never acted upon by the Bush administration, like the recommendation calling for the creation of a domestic intelligence and security agency roughly comparable to Great Britain's MI5. And as we shall see, some of the changes that were made actually made the situation worse rather than better, according to intelligence officials. The result was that when Barack Obama entered the White House, the intelligence community remained
“fundamentally unreformed,”
according to Patrick C. Neary, who was the DNI's chief planner from 2005 to 2010.
The problems started at the top with Blair's own position as head of the intelligence community. In its July 2004 final report, the 9/11 Commission had strongly urged the Bush administration to create a new position called the director of national intelligence to provide strong and effective leadership for the fractious and strife-ridden U.S. intelligence community. The fervent hope of the commissioners was that by creating the position, the intelligence community would finally get a real leader, America's first true “intelligence czar,” who would bring order out of the chaos and make the gigantic American intelligence apparatus work the way it should.
But the commission's findings, while immensely popular with the American public and the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, were treated by the U.S. government like “a flaming bag of dog poo,” according to a retired CIA official. No one in Washington wanted intelligence reform. Not the Bush White House, nor the Pentagon, Congress, or the leadership of the intelligence community. The fiercest opposition to intelligence reform came from the Pentagon. On September 11, 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote a memo to President Bush strongly opposing intelligence reform, telling the president that “there is a risk that legislation could be drafted in a way that is damaging to our intelligence capabilities.” In particular, Rumsfeld opposed a proposal to give the director of national intelligence control over the budgets of all the agencies comprising the intelligence community, warning the president that to do so would
“be a train wreck.”
Inside the intelligence community, according to Pat Neary, senior officials “
looked at the reform brouhaha with detached bemusement
, believing reform would result in no meaningful change.” Sadly, they were right. The White House and the intelligence community's supporters on Capitol Hill watered down the legislation creating the position of DNI, stripping it of its control over the budgets of the sixteen intelligence agencies that it was supposed to govern, crippling the organization before it was born. Then the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Duncan L. Hunter (R-CA), and Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), got language added to the bill that exempted the Pentagon's vast intelligence empire from the DNI's jurisdiction. And the FBI's supporters in Congress piled on, successfully lobbying to keep the bureau's autonomy intact.
By the time the legislation was passed in December 2004, the DNI had been reduced to a figurehead position with little authority. Like his predecessors, Blair was going to have a sword hanging over his head every day he was in office. If the intelligence community made a mistake, however trivial, he was going to get the blame, even if he had no power to rectify the problem in the first place. It was, in the words of one of Blair's deputies, “an impossible job.”
Blair's predecessors had shown themselves to be reluctant to use the limited powers that Congress had given them to try to seize the reins of the U.S. intelligence community and provide it with the forceful leadership that it so desperately needed.
The first DNI, John D. Negroponte, who held the post from February 2005 until January 2007, is credited with canceling a controversial National Reconnaissance Office reconnaissance satellite that was five years behind schedule and massively over budget, and creating DNI mission managers to coordinate the U.S. intelligence community's collection and analytic efforts against a number of high-priority targets, such as Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, as well as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and counterintelligence.
In the opinion of a number of past and present DNI officials, however, Negroponte saw himself as a facilitator rather than a chief, and as such he did not forcefully make his office the command nexus for the entire intelligence community. For example, shortly after taking the helm of DNI in 2005, Negroponte proposed naming a National Security Agency official as the new chief of station in New Zealand, a position that in the past had always been held by a CIA official. When a number of senior CIA officials threatened to resign in protest, Negroponte backed down and rescinded the order.