Our Dysfunctional CIA

What Ails the Central Intelligence Agency?

By Marilyn M. Brannan, Associate Editor

Unravelling The New World Order

November 17, 2003

Since September 11, 2001, there has been an ongoing furor over the failings of our Central Intelligence Agency to keep our government abreast of potential threats to the security of the United States.  The finger pointing and wrangling in congressional committees still goes on, and the American people seem to have little confidence that our intelligence gathering is any better now than it was prior to 9-11.

On November 19, 2003, USA Today reported that the Director of the CIA, George Tenet, has ordered investigators to substantially widen their internal probe of Iraq intelligence to determine whether the agency overlooked signals that Iraq had rid itself of its weapons of mass destruction before the U.S.-led invasion in March of this year.

That probe parallels on-going investigations by the House and Senate intelligence committees where the emphasis seems not to be focused on why such colossal lapses occurred, but rather on who missed the signals.  Bush haters, Democrats and establishment media have made much of the fact that significant quantities of weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq since the invasion, and they are eager to place the blame squarely on George W. Bush.  The Bush administration did, in fact, rely on pre-war intelligence that indicated Saddam Hussein's regime had chemical and biological weapons and a resurgent nuclear weapons program.

Democrats campaigning for their party’s presidential nomination—and desperate for political capital—have stooped to accusing the Bush administration of deliberately misrepresenting the situation in Iraq for political reasons.  Ted Kennedy, oozing his particularly rancorous partisan poison on the floor of the Senate a few weeks ago, accused George W. Bush of  “lies, lies, and more lies” to justify going to war against Saddam Hussein.

Americans are tired of the finger-pointing and accusations and want some answers:  Why did our Central Intelligence Agency fail to provide the kind of intelligence needed to better prepare us for the possibility of terrorist attacks? 

Most Americans do not believe that the Bush administration deliberately misrepresented the threat from Iraq; most believe that the intelligence provided to the White House was faulty, and they want to know why.

This past September, Herbert E. Meyer, who served with the CIA during the Reagan administration, delivered a lecture entitled “What’s Wrong with the CIA?” at Hillsdale College in Michigan (text published in Imprimis magazine, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242, October, 2003).  The information shared in that lecture is some of the most interesting and informative material we have found on the problems with the CIA.

Meyer began his address by stating what has become painfully obvious to many Americans—that in the midst of a war in which intelligence must play a central role, we need a CIA that is “razor sharp and playing offense, not one that blindsides the country or embarrasses the commander-in-chief.”

The problem at the CIA, Meyer says, lies with the culture and structure of the organization, not the people.  Many of them, he says, are “some of the hardest working and most decent men and women I have ever known.” 

In order to clarify what he means by  “culture and structure” problems, Meyer compares intelligence gathering to science, emphasizing that the success of both “depends utterly on having the most brilliant people studying a problem.”  During World War II, he says, we had this kind of intelligence service in the Office of Strategic Services—an agency he describes as “a free-wheeling collection of our country’s best minds,” recruited from Wall Street, the corporate world, academia, research labs, and other endeavors.

What the best scientists and intelligence experts have in common, he explains, is the ability to spot a pattern with the fewest possible facts, make the intuitive and logical leaps needed to quickly figure out what the indicators mean, and articulate their conclusions—early enough, in the case of intelligence experts, to get the policymakers moving before it is too late.

After World War II, Congress created the CIA to pick up where the OSS had left off.  Over the years, the CIA became more like every other government agency, hiring people who joined with the objective of doing well, moving up through the ranks, and providing their families with a decent income, good health-care coverage and a government pension.  Some truly brilliant analysts still signed up, Meyer says, but the agency was mired in the problems and limitations of bureaucracy and those people would often become so frustrated by the CIA’s culture that they would resign. 

The man President Reagan chose to head up the CIA, William J. Casey, had served during World War II in London as head of secret operations for the OSS.  He understood the problems, Meyer said, but his heroic efforts to improve and reform the CIA generated “more leaks, lies, smears and congressional inquiries than any of us who worked with Bill Casey care to remember.”

To keep the agency from being totally destroyed by bureaucratic attacks, Casey quietly created an OSS within the CIA; he brought in a small cadre of outsiders (Meyer was among them) to work with him to get the job done.

Meyer shares his insider’s view of problems in the CIA while he was there:

·        Most of the analysts were not as well read as they should have been, seeming not to know or understand more history than most college graduates. That is a fatal flaw for CIA personnel, since the president relies on them to know what is going on in the world and to extrapolate from a sound historical perspective what is likely to occur in the future—and to do so early enough to effect critical policy changes.

·        The analysts weren’t as well connected as they ought to have been.  In fairness, Meyer says, the agency’s strict rules about talking with outsiders resulted in diminished access to some of the world’s smartest people and the information these people were picking up while forging careers in business, in the investment community and in politics.  The CIA’s people were working hard, but all too often they just didn’t have the intellectual firepower and knowledge that one finds at our country’s leading think tanks.

·        It was hard to get CIA analysts to “connect the dots.” The elements of intuition and logic play as important a part in intelligence operations as “hard” evidence such as documents and photos.  Some of the analysts just didn’t “get it,” and others didn’t want to get it.  Many CIA analysts (as is true today) were career analysts, not supporters of the President. They didn’t like Reagan or his policies and they were reluctant to give him information that would have helped him accomplish his goals.

Accounts of Casey’s attempts to deal with political sandbagging and bureaucratic drag within the agency would often show up in the Washington Post the next day, and Casey would then be hauled before some congressional committee and shredded for what committee members perceived as pressure on intelligence professionals to change their judgments to support the president’s policies.

Casey figured out how to reduce the chances of President Reagan being blindsided by career analysts who weren’t as good as they should have been or embarrassed by a bureaucracy that disliked him and his policies. He would permit analysts to say whatever they wanted in their reports; then, he would quietly authorize another member of his inner circle to produce an alternate memo that reflected his or her judgment (and Casey’s).  The official report would be published and distributed, so that no one could accuse him of interfering with the intelligence professionals.  He would then put a few copies of the unofficial memo in his briefcase and head down to the White House to hand them out personally to the President and other key members of the administration.  It wasn’t “elegant or pretty,” Meyer said, but it worked, and it was legal.

In the years since the Reagan administration, the CIA has reverted to its pre-Reagan culture, Meyer says, noting that “It’s better now than it was before 9/11—especially in operations, but still falls short of where it needs to be.” 

The Reagan/Casey solution of creating an OSS within the CIA may not be the right way to go in today’s world, but President Bush deserves a CIA that is highly competent, playing offense and led by people who support him and his policies.  Sadly for America, he doesn’t have that. 

“The good news,” Meyer says, “is that our country is fairly teeming with talented men and women from all walks of life who want to help fight and win the War on Terrorism, and who would make superb intelligence officers.”

Let’s hope President Bush can find and utilize those people.

Editor’s Note:  Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the director of the CIA and as vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council.  He is the recipient of the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the intelligence community’s highest honor.  Meyers also has an impressive background in publishing, having served as associate editor of Fortune magazine and having written widely in The Wall Street Journal, Policy Review and National Review Online, among others.  He is the author of several books and a new video entitled, “The Siege of Western Civilization.”