Intelligence
To the Editor:
I commend Gabriel Schoenfeld for “The CIA Follies (Cont’d.)” [July-August], an insightful critique of the organization in which I spent seventeen years as a political-military analyst.
Mr. Schoenfeld rightly observes, from his reading of George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm, that the recently retired Director of Central Intelligence is “no student of history.” Tenet’s scholarly and analytical shortcomings come into even sharper focus when his book is placed beside From the Shadows, the CIA memoir of Robert Gates, another former CIA director and now our Secretary of Defense. Gates’s book sheds much light on the role of intelligence in history and policymaking, while Tenet reveals himself to have been essentially a bureaucratic tactician. Surely this says something about the quality of our intelligence in the last decade.
Regrettably, the leadership rungs of the intelligence community have been increasingly occupied by military officers, and less by civilian scholars like Gates. Advocates for the creation of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) office once argued that the post was desperately needed, in part, to shore up civilian influence in the intelligence community. But the majority of the intelligence community’s $40-billion budget remains controlled by the Pentagon, and the major intelligence agencies—DNI, CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency—are all led by retired or active-duty general officers.
There is no gainsaying our highly capable general-officer corps, but when retired and especially active-duty officers stack the leadership rungs of the intelligence community, we run higher risks of intelligence being overly influenced and tainted by military and operational factors. This is not a healthy practice in a democracy.
Richard Russell
National Defense University
Washington, D.C.
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Gabriel Schoenfeld writes:
In the aftermath of September 11, the CIA is doing some things better than it did in the past, and doing a great many things with a sense of tremendous urgency. But fixing the agency, as I attempted to show in my analysis of the George Tenet years, remains a critical task.
How to proceed? Richard Russell, whom I thank for his generous words about my article, touches on the composition of the agency staff and leadership and raises the question of what is the right balance between civilian scholars in the Robert Gates mold and military men in the (General) Michael Hayden and (Vice-Admiral) Michael McConnell mold. It is of course impossible to say which is better. Both civilian and military men have their professional strengths and professional deformations. What is clear is that the agency has a pressing need for risk-takers and unorthodox thinkers. What it does not need is more of the second-rate bureaucrats and careerists who rose to the fore in the years before September 11.
What it also does not need is self-deception and complacency about its seemingly intractable internal weaknesses. In a September letter marking the CIA’s 60th anniversary, McConnell hailed the agency staff for the “world-class operations” it conducts, the “best-in-class technology and services” it provides, the “brilliant analysis and reporting” it produces, and its all-around “tremendous work.” This extravagant self-praise, coming on the heels of two of the most spectacular and costly intelligence lapses in the CIA’s history, was undoubtedly intended as a morale booster. But we should not kid ourselves into thinking that these words reflect reality. Rebuilding a capable intelligence service is a process that will takes decades, and we do not have decades to deal with the dangers that have already unfolded before us.
