For my last post, I asked intelligence officials to share their thoughts about the state of intelligence reform today. This response came from an FBI analyst. It left me both heartened and depressed, and reminded me why I spent the past six years researching intelligence adaptation failures.
Yesterday I ranked the intelligence reform plans of six presidential candidates (3 Dems, 3 Republicans) based on their essays in Foreign Affairs. John Edwards didn’t do so well.
This morning, I got a phone call and email from the Edwards campaign asking me to take a look at a recent speech and a newly unveiled counterterrorism plan. At first, I thought I wouldn’t, since it would screw up my nice, fair, apples-to-apples comparison (if the counterterrorism plan were so important, why weren’t any seeds of it planted in Edwards’ Foreign Affairs piece?) Considering extra campaign material for only one candidate would give Edwards an unfair advantage. Kind of like allowing extensions for some students but not others.
I don’t get it.
National security issues are huge this election cycle. So how come the major presidential candidates have paid almost no attention to fixing the most important national security weapon we have in a post-9/11 world—intelligence?
All those Democratic and Republican candidates can’t say enough about terrorism or Iraq on the campaign trail. And yet they aren’t saying much of anything about the intelligence agencies that helped lead us into Iraq in the first place and couldn’t stop the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.
I know, I know. Most voters don’t stay up nights worrying about whether we need an MI5 or how many CIA clandestine case officers speak Pashto. So I went directly to Wonk Central, Foreign Affairs magazine. If serious discussion of intelligence reform would be anywhere, I figured, it would be here. Six of the candidates—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and John McCain—have all published essays there. (Fred Thompson hasn’t written one yet, so he’s not included). Here’s how they stack up, best to worst:
One day in 2004, I got a telephone call from a senior intelligence official. “You’ll never guess what I did yesterday,” he began. “I spent four hours hooked up to a polygraph. The security guys wanted to know why I was talking to you.”
I thought he was kidding.
Three years later, I have a first amendment lawyer and a renewed appreciation for tenure.
I used to wonder why more academics didn’t study U.S. intelligence agencies. Not anymore. Getting data about spies and G-men is extraordinarily difficult. And sometimes it’s very very creepy.
My mother recently asked, “Honey, what exactly makes your book different than any other 9/11 book?” Nothing like a zinger from your own mother to get you thinking.
So here are my five most important findings.
Finding #1: Organizations, not individuals, were the root cause of failure
Most 9/11 books have focused on the personal drama of failure. It’s all about individuals, whose hair was one fire, who was sitting “at the center of the storm,” and the political battles they won and lost. But I’ve come to believe this emphasis is misplaced. And it’s dangerous because it suggests that a few pink slips can fix what’s broken in U.S. intelligence.
The real problem is worse. It’s called bureaucracy. Why were 19 terrorists able to kill 3,000 Americans? Because U.S. intelligence agencies never adapted to the end of the Cold War and the rise of a new enemy. In particular, the CIA and FBI were —and still are—hobbled by organizational structures, cultures, and professional incentive systems that didn’t give them a fighting chance against al Qaeda.
Welcome to Table for One, the guest-blogging section at TPMCafe.
This week we are joined by Professor Amy Zegart, the recent author of Spying Blind, an examination of the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. An associate professor of public policy at UCLA, she also wrote Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC.
See earlier Table for One guest-blogs:
Jacob Soboroff, Sam Quinones, Jeffrey Toobin, Ben Naimark-Rowse, Charlie Savage, Congressman Steve Kagen, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Scott Winship, Robert Hormats, Bill McKibben, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Sen. John Edwards, the ACLU's Anthony Romero, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Andrew Rasiej, Gov. Tom Vilsack,Gen. Wesley Clark, Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Sen. Russ Feingold.
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