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,
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. - 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.
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”?
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? (
June 1996).
2. General O’Neill
gave an interview on this subject which
appeared in the 14 June 1996 edition of
the Washington Times.
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