As we mark another 9/11 anniversary, the Cipher Brief asked me to assess the impact of the past 15 years on the American intelligence community.
Let me begin by making one thing clear. The American intelligence community is actually pretty good at what it does. In fact, if we were marking on a curve, that would be the end of the discussion.
But we aren't marking on a curve. The requirements we have to meet are absolute, not relative. Being better, or even the best, is not the same as being good enough.
So it's a fair question: How are we doing? By the way, if any of what follows sounds critical, I am well aware that I had more than a small hand in shaping much of it.
Certainly the post 9/11 reforms are a mixed bag. Sharing within the intelligence community—never really as bad some alleged—has gotten better. Joint duty assignments in sister agencies and a more consolidated IT structure are making it even more robust. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) has proven its mettle, and an indirect but substantial benefit of the creation of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is that the Director of the CIA (DCIA) can focus on that job full time.
Still, the DNI continues to have more responsibilities than he has authorities, forcing him to negotiate and exhort rather than direct, which perversely contributes to a growth of bureaucratic staff to try to manage things. Even here, though, the mismatch is not so bad that I (or apparently many others) would call for a major new restructuring. This structure can be made to work well enough with the right people, as Jim Clapper and others have demonstrated, so all eyes should be on the personnel choices of the incoming Administration.
The case can actually be made that we don't yet know how the reforms will really work. A core element of that effort was to give the DNI more authority over the big three-letter collection agencies, most of whom are in the Department of Defense. Yet no Secretary of Defense – not even an intel community veteran like Bob Gates – is going to surrender any control of NSA, NGA, NRO, or DIA while he is at war, a condition that has pertained for the life of the DNI.
The pace and demands of war have had other effects on the U.S. intelligence community. The permanent global battlefield has driven us to be more tactical and more present-tense in a large portion of our work. That has enabled battlefield success, but it has come at a cost.
I reminded Dave Petraeus shortly before his confirmation hearings for the DCIA job that the Agency had never looked more like OSS (the World War II direct action arm under Wild Bill Donovan) than it did just then. America was safer for it, but I also suggested to Dave that he would have to work to remind himself (and the Agency) that it wasn't the OSS. It was, and is, the nation's global espionage service, a task that still needs tending.
A big chunk of what the Intel community now calls analysis is actually targeting: targeting for direct action, targeting for further collection, or targeting just to make sure that someone isn't allowed to get on an airplane.
It's really a process of disambiguation, and that has led to an extended romance with the concept and practice of big data. The more data we have, the more powerful the algorithm to mine it – the more certain we can be that this is the Abu Khabab that we are interested in.
It all works rather well, but it does bend attention toward the specific over the general, the immediate over the long term, the tactical over the strategic. It also tends to be ahistorical and history always matters.
Predicting discontinuities is always hard, but how much did this necessary focus on targeting, disambiguation, and big data get in the way of appreciating big picture items, like the Arab awakening or the rise of ISIS or anticipating Russia grabbing the Crimea or intervening in force in Syria?
It's fair to say that, as a nation, we were back footed in each of those instances. How much of that we should lay at the feet of intelligence, as opposed to policy makers, is another matter. The Obama administration has a well earned reputation for putting off tough decisions, and all administrations have a natural aversion to the "unpleasant fact." History will have to judge whether the intelligence community should have worked harder to impose more urgency on its policy masters.
There is at least one other area where political context has mattered since 9/11, and that's how much intelligence professionals believe that policy makers have their back. The IC was whipsawed when a variety of aggressive programs supported by the Bush Administration were not just abandoned but publicly condemned by the incoming Obama Administration.
The community found itself in a similar no man's land during the Obama administration when, after the Snowden revelations, senior leaders backed off collection efforts they had previously approved. DNI Jim Clapper showed a rare moment of pique when he said that he was being asked to perform "immaculate collection," that is, collection without any risk of political embarrassment.
Risk aversion is not an especially valuable attribute for an espionage enterprise, but the IC is a bureaucracy – actually a rather large one – and it will act like a bureaucracy given the wrong stimuli. It needs to be on guard. Being over-layered, over-lawyered, and over-cautious would hurt any enterprise, but it would be fatal for this one.
The broad political context also suggests that we need to work on our relationship with the public we serve. Traveling around the country on a recent book tour, I can report broad support for the intelligence enterprise from most Americans. But they also want to better know and understand what we do, and they are less willing to subcontract that out to Congressional oversight committees.
Presidents can order even very aggressive one-offs based on their own authority and be confident that the actions will be viewed as legitimate. But we have been doing some very aggressive things for 15 years now. Raw Presidential – or even Congressional – authority can only sustain for so long. Legitimacy ultimately must come from the concurrence of a sufficiently informed public.
On balance, then, it's been a tough but successful 15 years for American intelligence. However, clearly there is still work to be done. Old challenges persevere, and our very successes have generated new ones.
