Leadership for Intelligence Professionals   

The Need for Courage in Intelligence Analysis and Leadership

An article in Vanity Fair magazine of May 2004 reported on "The Path to War", including the Administration’s use of intelligence leading up to the Iraq War.  According to that article, prior to the war intelligence analysts were saying that:  

...many Administration officials reacted strongly, negatively, and aggressively when presented with information or analyses that contradicted what they already believed about Iraq....Intelligence officers who presented analyses that were at odds with the pre-existing views of senior administration officials were subject to barrages of questions and requests for additional information. They were asked to justify their work sentence by sentence....In many cases intelligence analysts were distrustful of those sources [cited by the officials], or knew unequivocally that they were wrong. But when they said so they were not heeded; instead, they were beset with further questions about their own sources....

Richard J. Kerr, a retired former DDCI and earlier head of the CIA Directorate of Intelligence was brought back by CIA to conduct a classified internal review of the prewar intelligence and how it was used by the White House.  He said in a series of interviews:

There was a lot of pressure, no question. The White House, State, Defense were raising questions, heavily on WMD and the issue of terrorism. Why do you select this information rather than that? Why have you downplayed this particular thing?...Sure, I heard that some of the analysts felt there was pressure. We heard about it from friends. ...There were people who felt there was too much pressure. Not that they were being asked to change their judgments, but they were being asked again and again to restate their judgments—do another paper on this, repetitive pressures. Do it again....Some of the analysts felt that this was unnecessary pressure [from] senior customers...the White House, the Vice President, State, Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But, Kerr pointed out that he considered that to be "part of the process of intelligence...part of the normal process..." Confirming that approach, Vice President Cheney is quoted as saying , "I ask a hell of a lot of questions. That’s my job."  According to former DCI, Jim Woolsey, "Policymakers, if they don’t like intelligence, are always going to ask tough and sometimes hostile questions of the analysts."  But, as Woolsey said, "It is the DCI’s [or their direct Leader's] job to protect them."

In his book, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11,  Ron Suskind  also covers the same period.  He says after providing a briefing on an issue, the White House staff would ask skeptical questions and says:

CIA would then commit a team to digging out the answers, present them, and then get new versions of the questions.  No pressure, in any overtly articulated way.  Just repetition….“What became apparent,” said the DI chief Jami Miscik, “is that some questions just kept getting asked over and over again…as if, somehow, the answer would change, even without any good reason for it to change---like any new information coming in.”

We understood that the government was more ideologically driven and that analysts were being ignored all over, including teams at State and even some at Defense” said one official from the DI.  “Its just we thought that such a thing wouldn’t apply when we were going to war---that it was a different standard than, say, budget policy or tax cuts.  Our job is to tell the President what’s true, so he can make sound decisions when lives are at stake.  It’s what we do.  To ignore that is to say you don’t need a CIA.”

At issue was the last in a series of draft reports about the connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.  How many drafts?  Miscik couldn’t remember.  The pressure from the White House---and from the various intelligence divisions under the Vice President and Secretary of Defense---had started a week after 9/11. …Cheney’s office claimed to have sources.  Rumsfeld’s too.  They kept throwing them at Miscik and CIA.  The same information five different ways.  They’d omit that a key piece had been discounted, that the source had recanted.  Sorry, our mistake. Then, it would reappear, again, in a memo the next week.  The CIA held firm…

Miscik was no fool.  She understood what was going on.  It wasn’t about what was true, or verifiable….A few days later, when she had sent the final draft over to Libby and Hadley, she told them emphatically, This is it. There would be no more drafts, no more meetings….The report was not what they wanted.  She knew that.  No evidence meant no evidence….“I’m not going back there George, “ Miscik said.  “If I have to go back to hear their crap and rewrite this goddamn report…I’m resigning right now.”…Tenet picked up the phone to call Hadley.   She is not coming over” he shouted into the phone.  “We are not rewriting this f-ing report one more time.  It is f-ing over.  Do you hear me!.  And don’t you ever f-ing treat my people this way again.  Ever!.” And they did not rewrite the report.

In his book, At the Center of the Storm, Former DCI George Tenet, tells the same story:

There is little doubt that future policymakers will continue to ask the tough questions of intelligence analysts and demand additional work and material from the analysts when they get intelligence they don't like.

In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post on 14 February 2007, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas J. Feith defended the performance of his policy staff against a Defense Department Inspector General's report calling his questioning of the CIA analysis of the "Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship" "inappropriate.  In doing so, he admited that

The CIA has a hard job. Some of its work has been good; some has been famously and disastrously bad, as anyone familiar with the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction fiasco knows. Intelligence is inherently sketchy and speculative---and historically often wrong. It is improved when policy officials freely probe and challenge it.
In evaluating our policy toward Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001, my office realized that CIA analysts were supressing some of their information. they excluded reports conflicting with their favored theory: that the secular Iraqi Baathist regime would not cooperate with al-Qaeda jihadists....Pentagon officials did not buy that theory, and in 2002 they gave a briefing that reflected their skepticism. their aim was not to enthrone a different theory, but to urge the CIA not to exclude any relevant information from what it provided to policymakers....
A 2004 Senate intelligence committee report praised the quality of the Pentagon's Iraq-al-Qaeda work---the critical briefing and the related Pentagon-CIA dialogue. The policy officials "played by [intelligence community] rules" and asked questions that "actually improved the Central Intelligence Agency's products", it said.
The recent inspector general's report argues that policy officials "undercut" the CIA by pointing out "fundamental problems" with the way the Intelligence Community was assessing information.

This requirement to have the courage to stand up for one's intelligence analysis in the face of pressure is not new. In his study of "The 'Photo Gap' that Delayed Discovery of Missiles in Cuba" in Studies in Intelligence (Vol. 49, No. 4 of 2005), Max Holland quotes the January 1969 farewell address of Thomas Hughes, the Director of the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research who said:

Over the long run, the prospect for preserving intelligence and policy in their most constructive orthodox roles will depend on the real-life resistance which intelligence officers apply to those pressures [from policymaker], as well as to the self-imposed restraints which impede the policymakers from originally exerting them.

Then Holland concludes that "Telling the president and his top advisors what they prefer not to believe...is not a job for the faint of heart.”

And, the best Intelligence Leaders have always done so and will continue to do so.  In response to questions from members of Congress during his 1 February 2007 confirmation hearings to be the Director of National Intelligence, Vice Admiral J. Michael McConnell said:

There have been a number of occasions in my career when I had to not be popular but to speak truth to power.  I’ve lived it, I’ve learned it, I believe it, and I can only tell you that’s what I’ll do.

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