The New York Times posted a long editorial last week to make the case against choosing Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence. That was not a difficult case to make, but it didn’t question whether we should even have an Office of National Intelligence. The answer to that particular issue requires an understanding of why the intelligence failure of 9/11 took place and why the many investigations of the failure came up with the wrong answers.
There have been two major strategic intelligence failures over the past 85 years—Pearl Harbor and 9/11. In each case, nearly three thousand lives were lost because of the intelligence failures that accompanied Pearl Harbor and 9/11. In both cases, there was sufficient intelligence available to prevent—or at least mollify—the attacks. In both cases, the intelligence analysis was unimaginative, divided, and diffuse. The lack of intelligence sharing was central to the failure at Pearl Harbor, but the problem of sharing was exaggerated in the case of 9/11.
There was one major difference between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The surprise Japanese attack led to a major reform of the national security community in the form of the 1947 National Security Act, which created the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sadly, all of these institutions have been politicized and weakened in the Trump era.
The Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, which followed 9/11, was totally inadequate to the task of reform, creating an intelligence tsar and centralizing intelligence analysis. As a result, the White House and the Pentagon received enhanced roles in the structure of intelligence, making future intelligence failures and the politicization of intelligence more likely. To make matters worse, the congressional oversight process has been broken, with little scrutiny of the intelligence community in the wake of the failures of 9/11 and the Iraq War.
Flawed assumptions and a lack of imagination accompanied the failures of Pearl Harbor and 9/11. It was simply assumed that the Japanese lacked the moxie and the wherewithal to attack Pearl Harbor so far from Japanese waters and that the terrorist community would target vulnerable U.S. assets abroad and not the United States itself. For years prior to 9/11, there was no cataloguing of information on weaponizing aircraft to be used against civilian targets, despite the intelligence on the Bojinka plot that outlined such targets as the Pentagon and CIA headquarters. There was some concern at the CIA about possible attacks within the United States, but there was insufficient interest in the policy community. The President’s Daily Brief never provided a strategic warning to the president.
The 9/11 Commission had a broad mandate for investigating the terrorist attacks, but provided little insight into the systemic problems within the intelligence community. It focused on budgeting and funding, organizational problems, and structural issues within the community. Less attention was given to the keys to the failure such as personal failure, accountability and bureaucratic cowardice. The members of the Commission were primarily lawyers with little intelligence experience or insight. They represented a balanced group of Democrats and Republicans who wanted to protect the blunders of the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, respectively. As a result, their only “reform” was the creation of a new management structure under the Director of National Intelligence.
The staff director of the Commission, Philip Zelikow, had extremely close ties to the Bush administration. He was politically, personally, and ideologically involved with many of the key individuals who should have been investigated. The lack of interest within the Bush administration regarding domestic terrorism was insufficiently explored. Even today, the Department of Homeland Security is politicizing the sources of domestic terrorism.
The Commission wanted a lean office of national intelligence, with a small but powerful staff. Instead, the director of national intelligence has a huge budget with a large management staff that took too many officials from key intelligence agencies, thus weakening the overall intelligence apparatus. The major task of the office of national intelligence should be making sure that an independent intelligence community tells truth to power. Theoretically, the DNI was supposed to be able to shift resources as needs changed. It was naive to think that office would ever have enough influence to move funds from one agency to another.
The centralized framework within the intelligence community weakens the importance of diversity and competition in the collection and analysis of intelligence. Currently, we are operating with a system that is not sufficiently accountable and responsible. To make matters worse, we are led by a president who has no interest in intelligence matters, which guarantees that the White House will not receive the alternative analysis and the contrarian views that are needed in dealing with threats to our security.
