Reviewing The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure
BOOK REVIEW: The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough
by Erik J. Dahl / Georgetown University Press
Reviewed by Dr. Kenneth Dekleva
The Reviewer — Dr. Kenneth Dekleva served as a Regional Medical Officer/Psychiatrist with the U.S. Dept. of State from 2002-2016, and is currently Professor of Psychiatry and Director, Psychiatry-Medicine Integration, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX; he is also a Senior Fellow at the George HW Bush Foundation for US-China Relations and is author of the novel The Negotiator’s Cross. The views expressed are entirely his own and do not represent the views of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Dept. of State, or UT Southwestern Medical Center.
REVIEW — Erik Dahl is a highly regarded professor and scholar of national security studies at the Naval Postgraduate School, where his research focuses on intelligence, threat analysis, and national security. His latest book, The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure dives into the controversies surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and he eagerly addresses issues surrounding how such medical intelligence was and is, gathered. He delves into issues as to why intelligence failed and compares this to other threats including 9/11 and recent pandemics from SARS to H1N1 , Ebola to Zika, and lastly, to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The book is a welcome addition to the scholarly and policy literature regarding intelligence analysis, threat warnings, and their ramifications.
In the book’s early chapters, Dahl expertly lays out his case that pandemics ought to be considered a national security problem, and he takes the reader through the history of such analytic objectives and enterprises. This debate, both within the US intelligence community and within academia as well as think tanks, dates from the early 2000s, when an analogous counterterrorism model, both at ODNI and CIA, proved highly successful in tracking, mitigating, and defeating the greatest terror threats of our time.
At a time when CIA has shifted to a model of gathering and analyzing intelligence regarding nation state threat actors – such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran – Dahl raises the question of whether transnational, multidisciplinary approaches to challenges like pandemics, food/water/energy insecurity, migration, and climate change remain worthy intelligence objectives at the highest level of reporting.
Careful readers will recall then CIA Director Leon Panetta’s attempts during 2009, to set up such multi-disciplinary programs, as well as the National Intelligence Council’s (whose membership included a senior US government physician, Dr. Clyde Manning, as Senior Advisor for Global Health Security) strategic reports in 2012, on issues such as global water security. So, there are important and perhaps useful precedents for such strategic medical intelligence analyses as noted by Dahl.
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Subsequent chapters examine the role of the US intelligence community, including CIA’s Medical, Psychological, and Health Security Center (headed by a senior-level physician in the Directorate of Analysis) and the National Center for Medical Intelligence, which is housed in the Pentagon.
The former has a long and storied history, founded, and developed under the leadership of the late Dr. Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist whose office provided (and continues to provide) leadership psychology profiles of world leaders for senior-level policy makers up to the White House and across the national security community.
Dahl makes a compelling argument that such offices and ranks of those who lead them deserve higher visibility in today’s threat environment. Dahl notes the difficulties inherent therein, as the intelligence community grapples with bureaucratic challenges, and – I would add – CIA itself struggles with finding the best model to collect, analyze, and summarize both strategic and tactical intelligence regarding future pandemic threats.
In this section, Dahl might have weighed in more heavily regarding which models might work best, e.g., a mission-centered model (following former Director John Brennan’s reform to the agency’s organization structure), or a more traditional regional/geographical model, where health/medical intelligence collection and analysis would involve medical/health experts, embedded in regional/geographic bureaus, or in ‘fusion cells.’ Recent media, policy, and academic debates suggest that the jury remains out on this issue.
Dahl gives an excellent overview of state, national, and international medical surveillance warning systems, and outlines how they failed in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic. He correctly points out how many outstanding and highly renowned medical experts were simply dead wrong early in the pandemic, losing a key opportunity, fatally so, to influence decision-makers regarding policy decisions made during the beginning of the pandemic.
One of the great ironies of the pandemic is that some of the first dire – and correct – warnings about the pandemic at the national security level were made by non-scientists, such as Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger (a former Marine, journalist, and China expert) and Assistant to the President for Trade Policy Peter Navarro (an economist). Dahl touches upon this theme, but I wish that he would have given it further explanation, assessing how influence is generated and measured within processes such as the President’s Daily Brief and the important, but little understood, President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. A lapse in Dahl’s book is under-emphasizing the prescient early warnings (which were tragically ignored by the US government) about potential lab safety that were issued in US Dept. of State cables from Wuhan during 2018.
A key point made by Dahl throughout the book is that recurrent, chronic strategic warnings about pandemics are likely to be ignored by decision-makers. Having sat through numerous pandemic preparedness meetings and ‘table-top’ exercises from the mid-2000s on, as a senior US Dept. of State physician-diplomat, I can personally attest to this. As Dahl correctly argues, what is required is tactical, real-time intelligence.
In this sense, the analogy with counterterrorism warnings is quite appropriate. Dahl proposes various models, such as enhancing NCMI and CIA’s medical/health analysis personnel’s roles, funding, and visibility. Novel programs such as IARPA and ARPA-H are noted by Dahl, and are likely to prove valuable in a strategic, risk-mitigation sense. Readers would do well to remember that DARPA’s 2008 Rapid Vaccine Development Program led by Drs. Michael Callahan, a pandemic and virology expert and Admiral Brett Giroir, later President Trump’s Coronavirus Testing Czar, laid the groundwork for the successful development of a COVID vaccine under President Trump’s ‘Operation Warp Speed’ program. Even among intelligence failures, there were some successes and the seeds of future successes.
While Dahl touches upon the controversy regarding COVID’s origins in Wuhan – a huge intelligence failure of a different sort – he sees this through the prism of medical and health intelligence and analysis. In this situation, he might have given greater weight and salience to the extreme difficulties of gathering any intelligence in states such as China, North Korea, Syria, Russia, and Iran – the hardest of targets – where the state actor actively hinders and covers up any outside assessments of disasters such as pandemics, natural disasters, and/or accidents. This highlights the importance of [on the ground] human intelligence sources, in addition to the vast technical capabilities of the US intelligence community and its allies.
Overall, Erik Dahl’s book is a most worthy and enjoyable read. It adds to the important academic and policy literature regarding debates on the COVID-19 pandemic and its origins, as well as its profound intelligence failure. If the book occasionally falls short, that has to do with the lack of our understanding of behavioral psychology and the psychology of intelligence analysis, and how intelligence products influence leaders and policy makers. Perhaps this is another tale for the future, one of black swans and gray rhinos. In that spirit, I look forward to Erik Dahl’s future work.
The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure earns a solid three out of four trench coats.
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