Intelligent Design?

In the 67 years since the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, countless commissions, committees, and other official inquiries have lamented the shortcomings of the U.S. intelligence agencies. Even more unofficial ink has been spilled on intelligence failures and the supposed need for reform. But then why, if there is a problem that needs fixing, has it not yet been fixed, despite the enormous amount of attention devoted to it?

Some observers argue that the U.S. government simply has not found the right formula for change. Yet the many volumes already devoted to the subject of intelligence failure and reform make it unlikely that any bright new ideas (or even dim ones) will emerge. Another popular explanation is that reformers have had good ideas but the political stars have not been aligned in their favor. After all, it took the combination of an election campaign, the trauma of 9/11, and an aggressive commission that skillfully exploited public insecurity to bring about legislation establishing a director of national intelligence in 2004 (an idea that had been discussed for decades). However, this explanation overlooks the strong bias toward reform among managers inside the intelligence community. Like ambitious managers anywhere, they make their careers not by sitting on the status quo but by championing new initiatives and strategic redirections. The dominant pattern in the U.S. intelligence agencies has been not stasis but almost constant revision, even to the point of disruption. Another common claim is that the challenges faced by the intelligence agencies have changed so dramatically that solutions from the Cold War era are now obsolete. But the intelligence agencies were addressing the "new" issues of terrorism and the proliferation of unconventional weapons while the Cold War was still raging. It is true that threats such as terrorism have evolved, but they have not changed nearly as much as the public believes. The shock of the 9/11 attacks was so profound that many Americans mistakenly assumed that they must have come from a new danger that no one, including their own government, had recognized or understood.

Although there is an element of truth to each of these arguments, they all miss the point. There are three far more promising explanations for why intelligence reforms so often fail to live up to the demands and expectations of U.S. citizens and politicians. First, the American public consistently believes the intelligence community's record to be worse than it actually is, prompting calls for reform even when none is required. The stir created by the December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities is a case in point. Lacking important details, the media (unfortunately encouraged by the estimate's wording and structure) oversimplified what the intelligence community was actually saying, leading the public to believe that it had dramatically reversed previous judgments. In fact, the key aspects of the community's assessment of the Iranian nuclear program were unchanged: Tehran, despite its denials, remains interested in the option of building a bomb; it will have the capability to build one by the middle of the next decade; and its choice to exercise that option will depend on decisions that Iranian leaders have not yet made. Nevertheless, the outside-the-Beltway belief that this is yet another example of the intelligence community's incompetence has become widespread.

In the intelligence business, failures (and apparent contradictions) make headlines, while successes generally remain secret. Failures also prompt inquiries, whereas successes go unnoticed. It is the nature of these inquiries to devise solutions to problems regardless of whether they are soluble and to shift blame in order to avoid political land mines. Moreover, retrospective evaluations make events that were cloudy and ambiguous in real time seem blindingly clear in hindsight.

Second, calling for intelligence reform serves psychological and political purposes that have nothing to do with the intelligence agencies' successes or failures. Such calls remain a fixture of public debates because they satisfy Americans' deeply felt need to attribute bad things to a specific, fixable problem and because they reinforce Americans' comforting but naive belief that similar bad things will not happen in the future if a proper solution is found. But reforms that pander to psychological needs and political agendas encourage changes that are more disruptive than productive. Moreover, they foster falsely reassuring notions of accomplishment -- as if the redrawing of the intelligence community's organizational chart three years ago left Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri shaking in their djellabas.

Finally, intelligence failures are inevitable. This fact, however discomforting, flows directly from the nature of the job, which involves trying to uncover information that is extremely difficult to obtain. Intelligence officers share with debt collectors, vulture investors, and trauma surgeons the challenge of giving unpromising cases their best shot. The information they process is ambiguous and fragmentary and can be assembled in countless ways. Intelligence is called on to connect dots even though, unlike in children's puzzles, many of the dots are missing or have no number. The principal challenge for the U.S. intelligence agencies is outsmarting adversaries who work assiduously to keep secret what the U.S. government hopes to find out. One side's intelligence success is the other side's counterintelligence failure. And the difficulties mount when an intelligence service is expected -- as the United States' services have been in recent years -- to predict almost every significant occurrence across the globe.

INVISIBLE SUCCESS