Why US Intelligence is Inadequate
By Angelo M. Codevilla
Dr. Codevilla is a professor of international relations at Boston University, a fellow of the Claremont Institute and an editor of TAS, was a Foreign Service officer and served on the staff of the US Senate Intelligence Committee between 1977 and 1985. He was the principal author of the 1980 Presidential transition report on intelligence.
Conventional wisdom used to be that US intelligence was the lifeblood of the war on terror. By 2004 no one contested that intelligence, especially the CIA, was at the heart of policies that had failed to stem terrorism and had turned military victory in Iraq into embarrassment. The high level commissions that examined current failures began to suspect that these reflected longstanding, basic faults. They only scratched the surface. In fact US intelligence in all its functions – collection, quality control (otherwise known as counter intelligence), analysis, and covert action –is hindering America’s war.
The public, accustomed in recent years to stories of botched anti Saddam coups, had learned that CIA covert action works only in the movies. But in the summer of 2004 newspaper readers were shocked by the CIA’s admission to Senate investigators that it had precisely zero agents in Iraq in the years prior to the invasion, because getting and keeping agents in such places is tough. Was it not CIA’s job to have agents in tough places? The attentive public also remembered that the President had struck specific bunkers at the start of the Iraq war because CIA’s most valued sources assured us Saddam was staying there. But US troops inspecting the wreckage had found neither Saddam nor bunkers. Wasn’t CIA supposed to know enough not to help play America for a sucker? The commissions seemed most impressed that CIA had translated scarce and bad information into misleading analyses without dissent. Groupthink, they called it. Voters and taxpayers wonder how an institution in which so many had placed so much trust could suddenly have been found to be such a loser.
To those close to the intelligence business however, such things are an old story. There never was a golden age of CIA. Its performance against terrorism is not so different from what it was during the Cold War.
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