Reform of the intelligence community. Authors: Berkowitz, Bruce D. Source: Orbis; Fall96, Vol.

40 Issue 4, p653, 11p Document Type: Book Review Subject Terms: *INTELLIGENCE service *BOOKS -- Reviews Geographic Terms: UNITED States Abstract: Reviews a number of books on the United States intelligence. Includes `Making Intelligence Smarter: The Future of U.S. Intelligence: Report of an Independent Task Force,' by Richard Haass; `Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards: U.S. Covert Action and Counterintelligence,' by Roy Godson; `A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century,' by Jeffrey T. Richelson. Full Text Word Count: 4914 ISSN: 00304387 Accession Number: 9610043761 Database: Academic Search Complete
Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence. By the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States InteLligence Community. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996. 151 pp. $19.00, paper.) IC21: Intelligence Community in the 21st Century. By the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. House of Representatives, 104th Congress. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996. 335 pp.) Making Intelligence Smarter: The Future of U.S. Intelligence: Report of an Independent Task Force. By Richard Haass. (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996. 39 pp. $5.00, paper.) U.S. Intelligence at the Crossroads: Agendas for Reform. Edited by Roy Godson, Ernest R. May, and Gary Schmitt. (McLean, Va.: Brassey's, 1995.315 pp. $25.95.) Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards: U.S. Covert Action and Counterintelligence. By Roy Godson. (McLean, Va.: Brassey's, 1995. 337 pp. $24.95.) A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century. By Jeffrey T. Richelson. (New York: Oxford University Press,

1995. 534 pp. $30.00.) The U.S. Intelligence Community, 3rd ed. By Jeffrey T. Richelson. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995. 524 pp. $60.00; $26.00, paper.) The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA. By Evan Thomas. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. 427 pp. $27.50.) Inside CIA's Secret World: Declassified Articles from the Agency's Internal Journal. Edited by H. Bradford Westerfield. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. 489 pp. $35.00.)

To paraphrase Jimmy Durante, when it comes to intelligence lately, everybody wants to get into the act. Not since the 1980s have this many books been published on intelligence policy and operations. And the timing is right, because the country is ready for a debate on U.S. intelligence policy. Furthermore, most of the recent scholarship is more substantive than previous works and as concerned with the intelligence community's performance as with exposing impropriety. Four of the books under review are reports from commissions, task forces, and study groups convened to assess the current state of U.S. intelligence and recommend changes for the future. Preparing for the 21st Century has received the most attention because it was produced by the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community (better known as the Brown Commission, after its chairman, former defense secretary Harold Brown), a body that reports directly to the president. The Brown Commission was an outgrowth of the Aldrich Ames espionage case. Senator John Warner (R-Va.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had argued for several years for a commission study of U.S. intelligence. Warner thought the intelligence community lacked vision and hoped that a commission would define key issues and form the consensus necessary for the post-cold war era. The Ames case gave Warner the support he needed to include a mandate for the study in the Intelligence Authorization Act. The Brown Commission (originally chaired by the late Les Aspin) consisted of seventeen senior officials, legislators, and former officials, nine appointed by the president and eight by Congress. The report itself was written by a staff under the direction of L. Britt Snider, who has held a number of intelligence-related positions including, most recently, chief counsel at the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Brown Commission report's strength is that it provides an excellent unclassified and authoritative primer on the structure and operation of the U.S. intelligence community in the mid-1990s. The report describes the various agencies within the community, their missions, and how they operate. The Church Committee broke similar ground in the 1970s, although much of the material that it made public was outdated. But the Brown Commission's recommendations are disappointing. Like many reports of its kind, the commission's treatise provides a long list of recommended actions, giving the semblance of comprehensiveness and specificity. Yet this appearance is illusionary. Many of the recommendations border on the banal, such as: "The Commission recommends that the President by Executive Order reaffirm that global criminal activities such as terrorism, narcotics

trafficking, organized crime and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction are national security matters and require a coordinated multi-agency response" (p. 39). Such proposals are cant, with the sole purpose of demonstrating where the commission reached consensus. The Brown Commission was intended to build consensus among U.S. leaders on the future of intelligence, so perhaps the ritual listing of "findings" and "recommendations" will serve a purpose, However, while the report may demonstrate consensus, it fails to demonstrate vision. In the end, the most significant issue that the Brown Commission addressed was one that has troubled the intelligence community for almost fifty years: how to provide leadership, direction, and effective management. The greatest obstacle to dealing with these issues has also been the same for almost fifty years: the intelligence community is a confederation of agencies created under a variety of circumstances, and the top U.S. intelligence official, the director of central intelligence (DCI), does not fully control these agencies. Most intelligence agencies are actually within the Department of Defense (DOD), including the ones with the largest budgets, the National Reconnaissance OfFice (NRO), responsible for space-based national intelligence systems, and the National Security Agency (NSA), responsible for signals intelligence and the security of U.S. government information systems. Other organizations with intelligence responsibilities can be found in the State Department, Energy Department, Justice Department, Treasury Department, and elsewhere. While the DCI reviews the budgets of these other agencies, they report to the heads of their respective departments. The fact that the intelligence community has evolved by accretion as agencies were created, consolidated, spun off, or realigned leads to a number of issues. Critics say, for example, that the patchwork intelligence community suffers from duplication, insufficiently coordinated effort, and no one official being fully in charge. Controversy also has arisen because the office of the DCI was created independent of much of the intelligence community, and because the DCI lacks direct control over all intelligence agencies except the ClA and his own staff. For example, although the DCI is supposed to be the leading government intelligence official, he does not control how certain intelligence assets are planned or how they are used on a day-to-day basis. The obvious solution would be to yank all intelligence-related organizations out of their parent departments and place them under the direct control of the DCI. But that could cause other problems. Leaving an intelligence agency inside a parent department usually makes it more responsive to its main customer (assuming the parent department is the main customer) because the lines of communication are shorter. Also, agencies respond faster when they know that the customer often can influence the agency's budget. Political issues also plague attempts to give the DCI greater control. Department heads do not want to lose turf, and they use every tactic in the book to defeat such proposals. To square the circle (or perhaps avoid the issue), the Brown Commission used the classic bureaucratic device of posing two extreme alternatives and recommending a reasonable, moderate option in between. The two extremes were to consolidate the intelligence community under the DCI, or take the opposite approach and allow most agencies to have their own intelligence arms--centralization versus decentralization. Instead of either of these drastic strategies, the commission proposed strengthening the DCI without substantially reorganizing the intelligence community itself.

The commission also recommended giving the DCI some say ("concurrence") over key appointments of DOD intelligence chiefs. Certain existing officials would be designated "program managers" for entire areas of intelligence collection in order to improve coordination and reduce duplication. For example, the director of NSA would review the program requirements for all U.S. signals intelligence programs, the director of the NRO would review all imagery requirements, and so on. Lastly, the Brown Commission would give the DCI two deputy directors of central intelligence (DDCIs) rather than one, as currently. One DDCI would oversee the ClA, and one would help run the intelligence community as a whole. In addition to improving the DCI's ability to carry out his work, two deputies would signify that the DCI's role as top national intelligence official is as important as his role as ClA head. IC21: Intelligence Community in the 21st Century, the report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), focused on a similar problem--how to organize the intelligence community for maximum effectiveness--but with a more ambitious agenda. Rather than tweaking the existing organization to fix recent problems, the HPSCI, chaired by Larry Combest (R-Tex.), decided to examine the intelligence community from top to bottom. The study that produced IC21 was carried out by the HPSCI staff, headed by Mark Lowenthal, the current staff director and a former analyst with the Congressional Research Service. The HPSCI report is, like the Brown Commission report, an admirable analysis of the current state of U.S. intelligence. IC21 reiterates that the structure of the intelligence community is an accident of history and circumstance. As a result, the report says, the intelligence community is prone to parochialism--a "stovepipe" mentality in which individual agencies pursue their own interests rather than working together to provide the best service to intelligence consumers. IC21 recommends what it calls a "corporate approach," which would create consolidated mega-offices for collection, analysis, and other basic intelligence functions. Both reports use familiar strategies to solve what they see as a problem of bad organization. The Brown Commission uses the "solution by czar" approach (although the czar in this case is not a fully autocratic monarch). That seems reasonable--give someone authority. IC21, on the other hand, uses an approach that would introduce common sense into the organization, which also seems reasonable. We expect big organizations to be arranged by function, to be non-redundant, and to have a logical functional flow. Unfortunately, the basic problem facing the intelligence community is not suited to solution by czar or a better organizational flow chart---even if the optimal solution were politically feasible. As recently as ten years ago it might have made sense to give the DCI greater direct authority over intelligence programs. Information technology and services were so exotic that only the intelligence community had the capability to develop the sensors, communications links, and agent networks that intelligence consumers needed. Moreover, because such information assets were so expensive, the intelligence community needed to husband its scarce resources carefully. The best way to ensure efficiency was to consolidate programs in order to take advantage of economies of scale, and the best way to ensure effectiveness was to appoint a czar--the DCI--to allocate resources.

Today, however, information technology and services are cheap and plentiful. Because information requirements change rapidly, the configuration of data collectors and analysts best suited to a problem also evolves quickly. In the commercial world, companies are meeting this challenge by adopting networked systems, in which individual users plan and operate their own information assets. With such networks, tasking and coordination occur at various levels within an organization, depending on which configuration happens to be most efficient at a given moment. Also, users can tailor their systems to specific needs, modify them, and update them when it is cost effective. Thus, under today's conditions, consolidating organizations and giving the DCI greater authority may simply create a more ossified, narrowly focused intelligence community. It could preclude the community from taking advantage of the flexibility and diversification that have made commercial information services so efficient. The Brown Commission offers a false choice. Centralization versus decentralization is only part of the issue and is less important than deciding who will drive the planning process--wellintentioned operators or consumers who presumably know what they need. If a particular official is designated as a czar, there is no guarantee that he will be able to recognize the varied needs of a large population of intelligence consumers, let alone make plans that accommodate them. The commission considered and rejected approaches that would have put intelligence consumers in the driver's seat, such as providing them with funds to "buy" intelligence from organizations within the community. Instead, the report concluded that it is too difficult to price individual intelligence products, assets, or analytic services. Yet centralized planning systems need devices that serve an analogous function, and to date they have not had much success in developing such devices. For example, officials at the Community Management Staff often observe how difficult it is to create a universal measure of effectiveness, claiming central planners would need such a metric to make comparisons across intelligence programs. As a result, the agencies currently responsible for collection win. Everyone throws his hands up and agrees that the problem is insoluble, and the NRO, NSA, and operators of "human" collection systems like the CIA's Directorate of Operations continue to plan, build, and operate assets according to their best understanding of the users' needs. No matter how well intentioned, central planners are rarely able to anticipate the changing priorities of a large group of diverse consumers. (Gosplan tried to do exactly that for the Soviet economy, and look at the results.) Where the Brown Commission offers a false choice, IC21 errs in trying to emulate the Goldwater-Nichols defense reforms too faithfully. Goldwater-Nichols (the Defense Authorization Act of 1986) strengthened the hand of the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the expense of the individual military services. Goldwater-Nichols rationalized and integrated, and most experts agree that the reforms produced a better military (compare Desert Storm to Desert One). Alas, the problem for intelligence today is significantly different from the problem that the defense establishment faced in the mid-1980s. At the time, DOD's problem was figuring out how to make the military services work together in wartime and how to make the defense acquisition process more efficient. The answer was to increase the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and unified commanders in wartime and to give the secretary of defense and military commanders greater control over the acquisition process.

Although the intelligence community also needs to facilitate individual agencies' working together, providing information support to thousands of varied users is a different problem than pushing Iraq out of Kuwait. In a military operation, the effort of an entire organization needs to be focused on a single objective. In intelligence, the organization's effort must focus on a number of varied and rapidly changing objectives. Furthermore, while a centralized organization may work for the DOD acquisition process, where there are just three suppliers (the three military services) and a dozen consumers (the unified commanders), the intelligence community must tailor and integrate information systems supplied by many organizations to support a diverse set of consumers. Indeed, both the Brown Commission and IC21 seem implicitly to recognize these facts, because some of their specific recommendations seem counter to their overall findings. The best part of the Brown Commission report, for example, is the section on improving analysis. The commission proposes more direct interaction between analysts and consumers, decreasing the distance between the two. That would provide analysts with a better understanding of what kinds of intelligence consumers really need and would streamline the process of delivering an intelligence product to the consumer. Similarly, IC21 advocates increased use of small, tailored satellites for intelligence collection, a proposal that seems inconsistent with its comprehensively consolidated, massively integrated "corporate" approach. To meet the needs of intelligence users in the next century, the Brown Commission opts for a marginally adapted version of the status quo. IC21 is ambitious but depends on an outdated model of how information services work. At the bottom line, these reports reflect great intentions and good effort, but the issue will probably have to be revisited soon, following the next significant intelligence failure. Making Intelligence Smarter, a study presenting the findings of an independent task force formed under the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), is linked indirectly to the Brown Commission. The CFR believed that a non-government, unclassified panel addressing the Brown Commission's issues would allow a larger segment of the public to participate in the debate. The CFR task force consisted of twenty-five academics, businessmen, and former officials and was chaired by Maurice Greenberg, chairman and CEO of AIG, the international insurance giant. The report summarizes the discussions and the main points of consensus within the group and was written by Richard Haass, a senior National Security Council staffer during the Bush administration and currently director of national security studies for the CFR. The CFR study was born under an unlucky star. National Public Radio commentator Daniel Schorr happened to question Haass on a specific point the CFR task force supported: the need for a wider range of "cover" for U.S. intelligence officers working overseas. When pressed for examples, Haass offered "journalists." This response was picked up by the broader press and evolved into a soundbite saying that "the Council on Foreign Relations advocates using reporters as spies." Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch raised the level of controversy a notch when a few days later he confirmed that the ClA already had the option of using journalism positions as cover, though it was rarely done.

Actually, the council never advocated such a policy because the task force was independent of the CFR. The section about providing intelligence officers more effective cover is only a minor part of the report, and the report itself never explicitly lists journalists as an option. The greater problem for the CFR report is the same as that for the Brown Commission and IC21 reports: it focuses on organizational minutiae and specific missions and does not offer a broad vision of what the intelligence community should look like in the post-cold war era or how it should operate. The last of the four books dealing with intelligence reform, U.S. Intelligence at the Crossroads, is a product of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, headed by Georgetown University professor Roy Godson. Since the early 1980s, the consortium has held seminars on intelligence issues. The initial events were amateurish, usually consisting of people with little real intelligence experience or troglodytes arguing issues that had lost relevance many years earlier. But Godson has kept at it and has earned a measure of credibility among intelligence specialists. To compile information for this work, Godson and his co-editors, Ernest May and Gary Schmitt, established a special working group to address intelligence reform. The group's meetings are among the most interesting unclassified discussions of intelligence policy currently being held. The book, consisting of essays and responses presented at the meetings, often succeeds where the other three works fail because it allows individual scholars and people with actual experience in intelligence operations to give their own uncompromised views and recommendations (e.g., James Wilson on organizations, Joseph Nye on intelligence forecasting, Douglas MacEachin on analysis, and David Kay on detecting arms control violations). As a result, even though the book as a whole does not provide a strategy for improving intelligence, the individual pieces are useful. Godson's Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards is much less successful. In this book, he examines two types of intelligence operations--covert action and counterintelligence. He claims that these fields are the neglected areas of intelligence (as opposed to collection and analysis), and that the United States needs to develop them for specialized, critical applications in the post-cold war era. There are lots of problems with this book. First, although the ClA substantially reduced its covert action capabilities during the 1970s, covert action has been anything but "neglected." Godson goes on at length about the controversy over U.S. support to the Nicaraguan resistance in the 1980s and complains that U.S. covert action capabilities were allowed to "atrophy" after the "halcyon" days of the 1940s and 1950s. But he scarcely mentions U.S. support to the Afghan resistance--an odd omission, since most analysts agree that the Soviet Union's entanglement in the prolonged war in Afghanistan was a significant factor in the West's winning the cold war. The greater problem, however, is that Godson does not seem to have the foggiest idea of what covert action is. Covert action comprises those activities in which the United States conceals its responsibility. Although Godson acknowledges this official definition, he never addresses the most important issue that follows from it: when should an action be conducted covertly? He touts the potential usefulness of paramilitary operations, sabotage, propaganda, political action, etc. but does not discuss when such actions should be carried out in a deniable fashion. Almost all activities carried out as covert actions can be executed overtly. For example, the Church Committee reported that the ClA tried to have Fidel Castro killed in the 1960s, using Mafia

members; that was a covert action. On the other hand, in 1986 the United States carried out an air strike against Libya in retaliation for a terrorist attack the Libyan government had sponsored against U.S. military personnel in Germany. F-111s carrying the insignia of the U.S. Air Force targeted the tent in which Muarnmar Qaddafi was known to sleep. One activity was deniable; the other was not. Without this fundamental understanding, Godson is unable to address the basic issues covert action raises: when is deniability effective and essential for operations, and what are its implications for accountability under a democratic government? Godson thus cannot discuss some of the most interesting potential applications of covert action today, circumstances when such action might make a significant contribution to U.S. security (e.g., influencing the development of technology in foreign countries and offensive information warfare, to name just two). Instead, he simply recounts tales of old forms of covert action (e.g., paramilitary operations) that may no longer be effective or feasible. Similarly, he is unable to develop a coherent analysis of the implications of covert action for American democracy. For Godson, covert action is merely an aberration from American values that is justified for the sake of national security. It is true that some of the activities undertaken under the rubric of "covert action" are controversial (e.g., assassination and attempting to influence politics in democratic countries), but these would be controversial even if they were carried out overtly. The real problems covert action holds for democracy concern accountability and participation--making sure officials are held responsible for their decisions and permitting an adequate number of representatives to take part in decisions entailing covert action. In the end, Godson's treatment of covert action is so far off the mark that one is tempted to ask him to leave the free points of the issue alone until he has mastered the basics. Jeffrey Richelson's Century of Spies is essentially a review of the twentieth century seen through the lens of the intelligence aficionado. It offers few surprises, but it is a good read and does an excellent job of showing how intelligence has been woven into politics, warfare, and the development of technology. For example, the typical reader might not know how intelligence services played a part in developing long-distance telegraphs and computers. Richelson also demonstrates how diverse events such as the two world wars, the Washington Naval Treaties, the Russian Revolution, and the cold war cannot be understood without considering the role of intelligence. Pick your point in history, thumb through the pages, and you will see where intelligence fit in. Richelson's more significant work, though, is the third edition of The U.S. Intelligence Community, a compendium and description of U.S. intelligence organizations. Like Godson, Richelson started writing about intelligence in the early 1980s. And, like Godson, Richelson was an outsider who lacked credibility. Indeed, he was viewed in an even worse light than Godson because he appeared determined to create a cottage industry devoted to describing as much of the classified intelligence world as possible. Much of the intelligence community considered him at best a security risk and at worst a menace. However, Richelson has spent so much time and devoted so much effort to the subject that he is now considered a legitimate scholar of intelligence. Indeed, he brings a unique perspective to the

subject because he learned it completely from the outside. These days the intelligence community cooperates with Richelson by providing unclassified, on-the-record interviews and responding to his Freedom of Information Act requests (Richelson may be one of the largest FOIA users). Retired officials have granted him interviews-some of which clearly crossed the line of classification--and he is recognized as a member of the professional community to the extent that he is invited to ClA-sponsored conferences. No one with a security clearance can say how accurate (or inaccurate) Richelson is. Suffice it to say that his book appears throughout Washington offices because it is convenient to have a comprehensive, unclassified reference on U.S. intelligence. Evan Thomas's The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared was showered with attention upon publication--moderator Gordon Peterson plugged it shamelessly on Inside Washington, the talk show on which he and Thomas appear. It, too, is an engaging read, as one would expect from the chief of the Washington bureau of Newsweek. Thomas describes the early years of the ClA's Clandestine Services, focusing on Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond FitzGerald. Yet, even though he makes much of the access he was given to the ClA's official histories, the book offers little that was not previously known. Most of the stories about CIA involvement in Europe, Iran, and Latin America were disclosed by the Church Committee or other writers, including Thomas Powers in The Man Who Kept the Secrets, a biography of Richard Helms. (Thomas, to his credit, amply acknowledges Powers in his foreword.) The real reason to read Thomas's book is to catch his portrayals of the ClA's founding fathers and their relationships with one another. Although they were hardly perfect--Thomas describes their egos and prejudices without pulling punches. he shows what a remarkable breed of men they were. Many hailed from the privileged class but left the comforts of an elite upbringing and the easy life in Ivy League colleges to find adventure and serve their country. Others were selfmade, rising to the top circles of government from humble backgrounds. Many of their "transgressions" were mainly a result of their being napped in a time warp in which actions of the 1940s and 1950s were judged by the standards of the 1970s and 1980s. Thomas captures both the bright and dark sides of this generation. Lastly, speaking of Ivy League schools, Yale professor H. Bradford Westerfield gives us Inside CIA's Secret World, a collection of declassified articles from Studies in Intelligence, the ClA's internal journal. Some of its jacket blurbs are absurd. For example, Bob Woodward cites the book as "a brilliant selection from the ClA's secret cold war archive--gripping, haunting, intellectually challenging as Le Carre." Robin Winks, author of Cloak and Gown, writes, "Seldom can a reader eavesdrop on intelligence professionals . . . . This book represents a breakthrough in intelligence studies." Westerfield himself wonders, "Can Studies survive the publicity that will attend the declassification and unrestricted publication of these articles? . . . Prospective authors will have to ponder some possibility of early release and guard their words more carefully" (p. xxi). Needless to say, no one who worries about such concerns has ever published in Studies. The journal is published at the "secret" level, which means that hundreds of thousands of people--theoretically millions--might have access to it. Indeed, sometimes the journal has brought highly classified programs to a broader, less-classified audience. The real value of Studies to

intelligence professionals is that it provides a forum for specialists to talk about their work or record their memoirs. Most people are not interested in the details of overhead imagery or arcane intelligence analysis methodologies, so intelligence specialists benefit by having their own journal. Like other specialized journals, Studies in Intelligence puts experience in the written record. The impact of Studies in Intelligence within the ClA is real but limited. A sampling of Studies does not reflect shop talk in the corridors at the ClA. When a specific article documents an operation, or when a noted official uses the journal as a vehicle to provide a point of view or insight, readers pay attention. The problem with Inside CIA's Secret World is that Westerfield was selected to choose the articles included in the book because he was an outsider, representative of academia. He selected journal items on the basis of whether they met academic standards. Unfortunately, there is no reason to assume that the articles he selected were those that had the greatest influence on the intelligence profession. That said, several of the articles are worth reading. The best essay is the account of the Yuri Nosenko case. It is a succinct, comprehensive analysis of a case that still affects U.S. intelligence. Some believe that the failure to detect Aldrich Ames in the 1980s was a byproduct of the ClA's mistake in the 1960s when it accused Nosenko of being a provocateur. (ClA security and counter-intelligence overreacted in the earlier instance and, as a result, may have been insufficiently vigilant in the later case.) There is also an important subtext to the article: by authorizing the story, the ClA leadership published a mea culpa for a botched counterintelligence case. Overall, in this collection of books, as in the intelligence process itself, there is more substance than ever before. It is up to the reader to sort through the information and insight in order to identify the truth. ~~~~~~~~ By Bruce D. Berkowitz Bruce D. Berkowitz, is an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of numerous books and articles on national security. He lives and works in Alexandria, Virginia.