Getting on Board

Among the many issues U.S. President Barack Obama is grappling with early in his first term are some thorny intelligence problems. His director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, and his CIA director, Leon Panetta, have clashed over their respective roles, the politically charged investigation of the CIA's involvement in the "enhanced" interrogation of terror suspects continues to generate controversy.

Although Obama could clearly use some independent advice on these and other intelligence issues, he should be forgiven if he did not initially think of asking the President's Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB). The board, one of the smallest and most obscure parts of the U.S. intelligence system, has not always, especially in recent years, distinguished itself in providing independent counsel to presidents on the larger issues affecting the organization of the intelligence community and some of the core technologies on which it depends. It has developed a reputation among the intelligence cognoscenti as either a cushy "do-nothing" panel or as a highly politicized cabal that meddles in the affairs of the professional intelligence community.

Although there is some truth behind both views, the board is far from useless: over the decades, it has helped streamline the U.S. intelligence community and has pushed it to develop the technology crucial to the acquisition, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence. Likewise, it would be a mistake to ignore it today.

President Dwight Eisenhower established the board in 1956 as a bipartisan body that could serve as an independent source of advice on intelligence affairs. During the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations, the board fit that ideal. Its eight to ten members were prominent individuals with experience in the U.S. government and had the managerial or technical skills relevant to intelligence matters. These early panels, reflecting the intensifying technological race between the United States and the Soviet Union as well as the growing sophistication of intelligence collection, tended to focus on the role of science and technology in intelligence.

From its inception through the end of the George W. Bush administration, the PIAB has been involved in almost every important intelligence issue. (There are a few notable exceptions, such as National Security Review 29, a major effort during the George H.W. Bush administration to reconcile future intelligence resources and requirements.) And it has made important recommendations: to establish the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense Attaché System, and the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. It also suggested improving the operation of the Pentagon's National Reconnaissance Office. These recommendations have markedly improved the U.S. intelligence community.

But it has also had its share of failures, particularly in recent years. The nadir of the PIAB began with the competitive intelligence analysis exercise it conceived during the Ford administration -- the "Team B" study that analyzed the Soviet threat. The problem was not so much with the basic concept of having analysts with different ideological perspectives examine the same intelligence to see if they reached different conclusions about Soviet strategic behavior. Indeed, the intelligence community's Team A and the independent Team B -- both of which researched the accuracy of the Soviets' intercontinental ballistic missiles and analyzed their air defenses -- worked well together, despite their ideological disagreements. But the teams studying Soviet strategic objectives had a very different experience.

Unlike the other two issues, which were highly technical and about which there was relatively hard intelligence data, the third issue was subjective and, not surprisingly, contentious, given that the hard-liners on Team B had long thought the intelligence community had downplayed the Soviet Union's malign intentions. This controversy cast a pall over the whole exercise, and the proceedings were leaked to the Boston Globe. Although he had reluctantly green-lighted the exercise, George H.W. Bush, then the director of the CIA, later complained at a National Security Council meeting in 1977, saying that "the competitive analysis idea seemed good at the time, and I certainly did not think it would go public. But now I feel I have been had."

Although the Team B report itself remained classified for 16 years, the major conclusions of the panel became public during the first year of the Carter administration. Conservatives used the Team B report to support increases in defense spending and to solidify the image of the Soviet Union as an aggressive, expansionist power. The report accused the CIA of underestimating the Soviet threat by focusing too much on technical data at the expense of considering the history, strategy, society, and leadership of the Soviet Union. The leak had the effect of delegitimizing the PIAB in the eyes of subsequent administrations. As a result, Carter abolished the board altogether.