It Walks Like a Duck…: Questions Persist That Clinton C.I.A.’s Missile Threat Estimate Was Politically Motivated

(Washington, D.C.): At a Capitol Hill
hearing today, members of the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence heard
testimony that was sharply
critical of the Clinton Intelligence
Community’s National Intelligence
Estimate 95-19, an assessment
focussing on the future long-range
missile threat to the continental United
States.

In the course of the hearing, former
Director of Central Intelligence (DCI)
James Woolsey repeated a critique of the
NIE that he has repeatedly offered to
congressional and other audiences over
the past year.⁽¹⁾
His predecessor, Robert Gates, reported
on the just-completed work of a special
DCI panel he chaired to evaluate the NIE.
And, in the course of the hearing, the
highly critical conclusions of a General
Accounting Office review of the
intelligence assessment were also made
part of the record.

All three of these critiques have a
common theme: The methodology used to
produce the NIE’s controversial
conclusion — i.e., that no nation other
than Russia or China will be able to
attack the U.S. mainland with long-range
ballistic missiles for at least fifteen
years — was seriously flawed. In fact, the
flaws are sufficiently grave as to call
into question the value of this analysis
as a guide to policy-makers.
Among the problems identified, for
example, by the Gates panel, were the
following:

• “The failure to
  address adequately the motives
  and objectives of governments
  developing missile programs and
  how they affect technology needs.…What
  is required technically for a
  crude terror weapon is very
  different than what is required
  for a weapon that is militarily
  useful….A country might
  assemble a missile that appears
  to have intercontinental range
  but never even test it, in order
  to intimidate the United States
  or other countries from taking
  action.”
• “The estimate did
  not give nearly enough attention
  to the potential for missiles
  launched from within several
  hundred miles of U.S. territory,
  for example land-attack cruise
  missiles and sea-launched
  ballistic missiles. It
  also discounted the likelihood of
  such deployments. And so we ended
  up with a conflicting rationale.
  ICBMs were considered technically
  infeasible and thus motive was
  relatively unimportant. On the
  other hand, shorter-range
  missiles were considered
  technically feasible even now,
  but the general judgment was made
  that it was not likely.”
• “This estimate fails
  to ask a critical question: ‘What
  if our potential adversaries
  pursue approaches, technical or
  otherwise, unexpected by the
  intelligence community?
  The consequences of being wrong
  on this issue are very
  high.”
• “The possibility of
  a threat from missiles of
  less-than-intercontinental-range
  warrants more attention than
  given in the estimate.
  Since developing missiles with
  sufficient range was identified
  as one of the most difficult
  technical obstacles which would
  have to be overcome before the
  United States would face an ICBM
  threat, the lack of serious
  attention to possible alternative
  threats is all the more
  noteworthy.”
• “The estimate places
  too much of a burden on the
  Missile Technology Control Regime
  as a means of limiting the flow
  of missile technology to rogue
  states.”
• “With major forces
  still in play in Russia, the
  panel believes the estimate’s
  discussion of unauthorized launch
  from that country is superficial
  and may be overly sanguine.…The
  economic conditions inside Russia
  are affecting the military, the
  military-industrial complex and
  weapons design and engineering
  institutions, and may provide
  incentives that increase the risk
  of leakage of hardware and
  expertise that could help
  governments aspiring to develop
  ballistic missiles, cruise
  missiles and weapons of mass
  destruction.”

It Quacks Like A Duck…

To be sure, the Gates panel found that
— despite these shortcomings — the NIE
did accurately address the question put
to it which may be summarized as follows:
How quickly would a country other
than Russia or China be able indigenously
to develop an ICBM capable of
reaching the continental
United States? Messrs. Gates et.al.
appear to have satisfied themselves,
therefore, that the Intelligence
Community’s analysis was not influenced
by external pressures or otherwise
“politicized.”

Even this minimal exoneration
of the NIE seems debatable, however.
Consider the following facts:

• The narrowly constructed
  question the Gates panel believes
  was honestly answered is not
  the question that the
  Intelligence Community was asked
  to address in the
  request for this NIE was made by
  the Ballistic Missile Defense
  Organization. As the
  then-Director of BMDO —
  Lieutenant General Malcolm
  O’Neill — made clear shortly
  after he left office, href=”96-T122.html#N_2_”>⁽²⁾
  BMDO was interested in a range
  of scenarios that would have
  been covered had the NIE not had
  the sorts of shortcomings
  identified by the GAO, Director
  Woolsey and Mr. Gates’s panel. Who
  rescoped the question the NIE
  addressed — and why?
• The GAO report mused that it was
  curious that the previous
  National Intelligence Estimate on
  the ballistic missile threat (NIE
  93-17) included a lone
  Pollyannish forecast about ICBM
  and space launch vehicle
  development and transfers which
  was registered as one agency’s
  “alternative view.” By
  1995, the author of that
  alternative view had left his
  intelligence agency and become
  the National Intelligence Officer
  at the CIA responsible for
  producing the NIE.

Could the fact that
this individual in 1993 advanced
a substantive position consistent
with the Clinton Administration’s
determined effort to down-play
the threat of missile attack had anything
to do with his transfer and
promotion? If so, would the fact
that what had previously been an
iconoclastic view thereafter
became essentially the NIE party
line not smack of
“politicization”?

• The Gates panel notes that the
  1995 NIE was completed in
  haste, a
  consideration to which it
  attributed some of the estimate’s
  substantive and presentational
  shortcomings. When asked by
  Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) if the
  panel had established why this
  analysis — which had been begun
  in January 1995 — was hastily
  completed, Director Gates said it
  had not. Could the
  reason for that hastiness have
  been political?
• Such a conclusion is all the more
  plausible in light of the fact
  that the debut of this NIE
  occurred in the midst of a
  contentious Senate floor debate
  last December. Senator Carl Levin
  (D-MI), one of his institution’s
  leading opponents of missile
  defenses, cited an unclassified
  summary of the NIE’s findings as
  he advocated the Clinton
  Administration’s position that
  such defenses were not needed and
  should not be pursued
  aggressively.

Even if it cannot be clinically
proven that the Clinton Administration
manipulated the tasking, assumptions,
personnel, methodology and/or conclusions
of the NIE, there can be little doubt
that the Administration has used it from
the first for maximum political effect.

The Bottom Line

Whether the NIE was
“politicized” or not, its
myriad, serious and documented flaws
demand that it not be used as a basis for
making critical decisions leading to the
prompt deployment of effective U.S.
missile defenses. As Director
Gates put it in today’s hearing:

“My personal opinion…is
that in a world that is changing as
quickly as this one is, where events
are so dynamic, where more than a
dozen countries have ballistic
missiles and several are attempting
to develop longer-range ballistic
missiles, given unsettled conditions
in Russia and so on, I
believe that the fact that the United
States cannot defend itself against
even a single errant missile is
absurd.”

Fortunately, the Nation has two
opportunities to ensure that a realistic
view of the world like that enunciated by
Director Gates — rather than the flawed
and politically manipulated 1995 NIE —
becomes the determinant of U.S. policy
toward the emerging missile threat: 1)
the congressionally mandated “Team
B” that is to provide a needed,
independent assessment of that threat and
2) confirmation hearings for the new
Director of Central Intelligence. These
opportunities must be seized if there is
to be any hope of avoiding the grim
prospect to which the Clinton
Administration and its NIE 95-19 would
condemn this country — putting missile
defenses into place only after
they are needed, rather than prior to
that disastrous point.

– 30 –

1. See the
Center’s Decision Brief
entitled Yesterday Dhahran,
Tomorrow Pearl Harbor II? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_64″>No. 96-D 64, 27
June 1996).

2. General O’Neill
gave an interview on this subject which
appeared in the 14 June 1996 edition of
the Washington Times.