Very interesting story in US News & World Report about the failure of the last significant attempt at systemic reform of the "intelligence community:" a hard-charging team in the Office of the DCI, starting in 1996.
The problems were so many and so deep it was hard even to know where to begin. The budgetary and personnel systems were archaic and labyrinthine. Individual spy agencies resembled not so much modern corporations as feudal fiefdoms. Communitywide, there was only the most tenuous central authority, widespread duplication of effort, and secrecy bordering on paranoia.
The ODCI's top priorities?
...improving coordination and tasking, fostering cooperation and data sharing, standardizing security practices, and opening up and networking the community for the information age.
Iraq was just one example.
The more the team looked, the more dismayed they became. Basic questions seemed to have no answers. No one had any idea how many analysts or linguists worked in the intelligence community, what expertise they had, or where they could be reached. Gannon launched a survey, found more than 10,000 analysts spread across a dozen agencies, and began building a database. Nor had anyone done a worldwide survey of U.S. collection efforts. Allen took that on and found a completely disjointed, uncoordinated effort. Among the holes in the collection net: central Iraq. While U.S. intelligence listened in and surveilled Iraq's northern and southern no-fly zones, incredibly, no one in the entire U.S. intelligence community was looking at Baghdad and Saddam's strongholds. When the United Nations weapons inspectors left Iraq, America's intelligence services were virtually blind. On the sixth floor at Langley, Charlie Allen was shocked at how dependent America's spy agencies had become on the U.N. inspectors. "We had," he recalls, "almost nothing."
The details of the story are informative, but in the end the reform effort mostly failed. Why? "Leadership."
No one can be sure if the reforms pushed by the ODCI would have stopped the 9/11 or Iraq intelligence failures. But in both cases, a more open, more accountable, more fully networked intelligence community would surely have stood a better chance. "We did do a lot," says one former staffer, "but we could have done so much more had George [Tenet] backed us, or had we existed in a different structure, or had Congress given a rat's ass."Posted by Alan at July 25, 2004 07:53 AM