SIX-plus years after 9/11 — the most devastating intelligence failure in US history — signs are rife that our intel bureaucracies still haven’t cleaned up their act.
Post-9/11, Congress was quick to slice and dice the bureaucracies, creating a new Office of the Director of National Intelligence to preside over the CIA and the other 15 agencies that make up the “intelligence community.” But did the “reform” really change much?
Consider the Nada Nadim Prouty case.
In the decade before 9/11, the CIA and FBI both discovered that Soviet agents had penetrated their highest ranks (Aldrich Ames at CIA, Robert Hanssen at FBI). Each supposedly redoubled its counterintelligence efforts to prevent future such catastrophes.
Yet late last year, the public learned that Prouty, a Lebanese immigrant with close ties to Hezbollah — and quite possibly an actual agent of that radical Shiite group — had managed to get a string of sensitive jobs at FBI and at CIA. The “beefed-up” post-Ames/Hanssen background checks had utterly missed the false marriage that enabled her to enter the United States and the prominently pro-Hezbollah leanings of her family back home.
Our intel agencies desperately need Arabic speakers to have any chance of doing their job in the War on Terror. Yet the hiring pool will be impossibly small if they can’t properly vet people who grew up speaking the language.
Even more disturbing are the clear signs of politicized analysis. The CIA can scoop up all the most secret data in the world and still be a total failure if it can’t make sense of what it has learned — or if its findings get presented to policymakers in a form distorted by political bias.
That was plainly the case with the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s bid to build the bomb — a report that sharply undercut the Bush administration’s policies.
In its opening sentence, the declassified summary of the NIE declared that the ayatollahs had halted their nuclear-weapons program five years ago. Yet the same document recorded, buried in a footnote, that the single most important element of Iran’s nuclear-bomb program – the enrichment of uranium — has continued unabated.
The only real backup for the NIE’s headline claim was the fact that Iran had suspended the secret military side of its program in 2003. Even then, to be able to make their misleading opening assertion, the report’s authors had to reverse the standard used in past NIEs for judging the status of Tehran’s quest for the bomb.
That is, the political-bombshell conclusion was based less on new information than on an arbitrary-seeming (and tendentious) re-definition of terms.
Experts across the political spectrum, from conservatives like Henry Kissinger to the liberals at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, agree that the NIE was flawed. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell basically disavowed it last month, telling Congress the public version should have been written differently.
Too late: The NIE had already decisively shifted the public debate, rendering unlikely for the near future effective US or international action on the issue.
The apparent goal of the report’s authors was to take off the table any chance of a US strike on Iran. In other words, it’s plain that elements of the intelligence community, dissatisfied with President Bush’s policies, pulled off a political coup.
Of course, analysts are supposed to be nonpolitical. Yet ranking intelligence officials plainly are not.
Consider, for example, Richard Immerman, who holds the titles of “deputy director of national intelligence for analytic integrity and standards” and “analytic ombudsman.” He is thus responsible both for maintaining the reliability of intelligence and for investigating cases in which reliability falls short.
Before assuming this critical post last September, he taught history at Temple University — where he participated in “teach-ins” against the war in Iraq and wrote pseudo-scholarly articles denouncing the Bush administration for being “cognitively impaired and politically possessed” and having “lied too often to count.”
Those are, of course, the views of many left-wing Democrats. Yet the personnel of an intelligence agency plainly should not be publicly aligned with the views of an extreme wing of either party. That a radical anti-war activist holds the job of ensuring the integrity of US intelligence analysis brings instant suspicion upon forecasts and estimates of his agency — even when those forecasts and estimates happen to be correct.
How can the Bush administration remain passive in the face of the intelligence community’s mounting deficiencies? This, too, is nothing new. The president kept CIA Director George Tenet in place for years after the agency’s 9/11 failure — and even after Tenet’s “slam-dunk” judgment that Saddam Hussein was still pursuing weapons of mass destruction. He even awarded him America’s highest civilian commendation, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
It’s plain the current administration won’t confront the problem. Will whoever is elected in November also shrink from this cardinal responsibility?
Gabriel Schoenfeld, senior editor of Commentary, writes daily for connectingthedots.us.com.