With his slice of the $75 billion annual intelligence budget, top U.S. spymaster Adm. Dennis Blair today issued a thick report saying that a "deeper and broader understanding of threats and opportunities" is "necessary to ensure [success]."
We wish him luck. After all, if understanding what's going on in the world can't be bought for $75 billion a year, what good is U.S. intelligence?
The fact is, there are plenty of bright people laboring away in the analytical bowels of the CIA, Pentagon, etc. But what gets to the President too often is hyped and biased, according to another new report on U.S. intelligence, this one from the Brookings Institute.
U.S. Intelligence Needs More than Another Report
That's long been the system. What U.S. intelligence really needs, it suggests, is a good old-fashioned city editor with a sharp blue pencil and a nose for b.s.
City editors, for example, regularly ask tough questions about a reporter's sources, which tends to pin-prick the balloons floating a story far beyond its mooring in facts.
But according to "The U.S. Intelligence Community and Foreign Policy: Getting Analysis Right," the CIA briefers hype their presidential daily briefs (PDFs) with references to hush-hush, classified information.
"But such information is often incomplete, may be less timely than open source materials, lacks important context and" says the study's author, Kenneth Liberthal, a former National; Security Council staffer in the Clinton White House, "is occasionally of dubious reliability."
In the world of intelligence analysts, he suggests, classified -- i.e., stolen -- information is like catnip.
They "tend to gravitate to information obtained by clandestine means. Yet much of that information lacks context and is substantively rather marginal," Lieberthal writes.
"As a consequence, analyses overly driven by classified sources may suffer from ignorance of important information in unclassified sources. This is especially notable with the explosion of unclassified material now available on key targets such as China."In other words, the analysts should try reading newspapers.
Perhaps even worse, Lieberthal alleges, analysts "sometimes 'save[d]' useful information for PDB use," which sounds like the CIA's version of putting a shiny apple on the teacher's desk.
Saving some bits of information for the president's eyes only make sense sometimes, Lieberthal noted drily, but "withholding less sensitive information for hours or days so it appears first in the PDB is dangerous."
When Adm. Blair roots out behavior like all this, then we'll know the Director of National Intelligence is earning its money.
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I have several comments. While I don't have much direct experience with the CIA I do have a lot of experience in other areas of intelligence. The problems we currently have with intelligence are macro sized ones, like inter-agency sharing and not micro sized ones like verifying sources and what not.
Let me explain the micro sized ones first. Metadata on information is critical. While analysts do range in quality, the majority are good enough to recognized that just having a piece of information ("missile strikes passenger jet") is useless without the source ("Le Monde"). Once you have the source you can identify a value P of its probability of being accurate, semi-accurate or total bullshit. Often if P isn't very high for total accuracy the data is not included in the analysis.
While the idea of a City Editor for a newspaper sounds like a good idea - for a massive operation like inter-agency intelligence reporting (or even just intra-agency) you end up with either the editor not knowing the problem domain well enough to make a valuable contribution or you end up with bias (either too negative or, even worse, too positive) which leads to false positives and false negatives. What is already in place are levels through which reports are processed. There are systems in place or being built where the "intel community" (at the local agency level now, someday across agencies - more on this later) can discuss a report and suggest improvements.
On the Macro-level we have a very simple problem with inter-agency sharing. The problem is there is no accounting for this sharing. Further there is no risk-abatement for sharing. Sharing is inherently risky for many reasons. The biggest are mis-use of data, compromised sources and methods and the biggest bug-a-boo: transfer of mission. On the last; that happens when one agency shares enough information with another that the other agency can now complete the task/mission and then gets assigned it. How would you like to lose your job because you helped a co-worker?
I've proposed a solution to the inter-agency macro-sharing problem but I haven't gotten traction yet. Eventually the right person will propose the same idea or a similar model and it will happen. The basic premise is that sharing activity between agencies needs to be brokered and accounted for; like a commodities market. Managing such a system would solve a ton of problems for the ODNI and shift the blame off of agency leaders.
I honestly feel the agency leaders are not the problem and the infighting between CIA and NSA is because there is no benefit to be gained from cooperation that counteracts the very real and negative results of cooperation.
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Posted by: Peter Mancini
| September 16, 2009 1:04 PM
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