Why U.S. Intelligence is Inadequate, and How to Fix It

From the Editor’s Desk

With President Bush himself now expressing strong support for the intelligence reform bill, its passage in early December 2004 would appear very likely. This would be unfortunate, because, as Prof. Angelo Codevilla argues persuasively in the essay below, this “reform” consists of little more than “rearranging bureaucratic wiring diagrams” and does nothing to address the systemic problems that have been dogging US intelligence for decades and are currently hindering America’s war on terror.  While most observers now agree that 9/11 was the result of a monumental intelligence failure, neither the 9/11 Commission nor the elected officials now clamoring for reform have delved seriously into the real reasons for this failure. Yet, in the absence of a critical reappraisal of what ails our intelligence, any “rewiring” reform of the kind suggested is likely to do more harm than good.

Where to begin such a reappraisal is exactly the focus of Mr. Codevilla’s essay. Armed with three decades of experience as a foreign service officer, key Senate Intelligence Committee official and an academic gifted with a keen analytic acumen, Dr. Codevilla zeroes in with characteristic clarity on CIA’s failings. These include but are not limited to the agency’s politicization and preference for influencing policy rather than providing impartial analysis, its abject failure in the humint collection area by a clandestine service that is “clandestine in name only” and largely incapable of covert action and its “groupthink” predisposition and lack of meaningful quality control. If his analysis is correct and it is difficult to argue with most of it, it is easy to understand why we are in the intelligence predicament in which we are and why bureaucratic reshuffling is not going to do much good.

One wishes that our elected officials will read Prof. Codevilla’s analysis before casting their votes for an intelligence reform that isn’t.

Alex Alexiev is Editor of the “Occasional Papers” series and CSP’s Vice-President for Research. He could be reached at [email protected].