Reports, politics, and intelligence failures: The case of Iraq

Abstract

The intelligence failure concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has been the center of political controversy and official investigations in three countries. This article reviews the Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 7 July 2004, Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, a Report of a Committee of Privy Councillors to the House of Commons, 14 July 2004 (the Butler Report), Report to the President of the United States, The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, 31 March 2005. It explores the reasons for their deficiencies and the failure itself. This case and the investigations of it are similar to many previous ones. The investigations are marred by political bias and excessive hindsight. Neither the investigations nor contemporary intelligence on Iraqi WMD followed good social science practices. The comparative method was not utilized, confirmation bias was rampant, alternative hypotheses were not tested, and negative evidence was ignored. Although the opportunities to do better are many, the prospects for adequate reform are dim.

Key Words:

• intelligence
• intelligence failures
• Iraqi WMD
• official inquiries

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Richard Betts, Peter Gourevitch, Deborah Larson, Melvyn Leffler, Rose McDermott, Paul Pillar, Marc Trachtenberg, James Wirtz, and several members of the intelligence community for ideas and comments.

Notes

¹Truth in reviewing requires me to say that I chair the CIA's Historical Review Panel which advises the Director on declassification policies and priorities, wrote a post-mortem for the CIA on why it was slow to see that the Shah of Iran might fall that located a number of errors which recurred in the Iraq case (‘Analysis of NFAC's Performance on Iran's Domestic Crisis, Mid-1977–November 1978’, declassified as CIA-RDP86B00269R001100110003-4), and led a small team that analyzed the lessons of the Iraq WMD failure. This essay has been cleared by the CIA's Publications Review Board, but nothing was deleted and there is nothing of substance I would have added if I had not had to submit it.

²The Report of the Inquiry into Australian Agencies, Canberra, July 2004 (the Flood Report) is not as detailed as the US and UK reports and I will say little about it. The UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee had investigations and reports, although what is of value in them for our purposes is subsumed by the Butler Report. The UK also held a special investigation into the suicide of David Kelly and the related question of whether the British government had ‘sexed up’ its public dossier on WMD (the Hutton Report). The Butler Report covers some issues of policy as well as intelligence, in part because in the UK the line between the two is not as sharply drawn as in the US. Indeed, ‘assessment is really viewed in the UK as a government function and not specifically an intelligence function’: (Philip Davies, ‘A Critical Look at Britain's Spy Machinery’, Studies in Intelligence, 49/4 (2005), 41–54). For other analyses of the Butler Report, see Philip Davies, ‘Intelligence Culture and Intelligence Failure in Britain and the United States’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 17 (Oct. 2004), 495–520; Nigel West, ‘UK's Not Quite So Secret Services’, International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 18/2 (Spring 2005), 23–30; Mark Phythian, ‘Still a Matter of Trust: Post-9/11 British Intelligence and Political Culture’, ibid. 18 (Winter 2005–2006), 653–81; Alex Danchev, ‘The Reckoning: Official Inquiries and The Iraq War’, Intelligence and National Security 19/3 (Autumn 2004), 436–66 Prime Minister Blair gave his response to the Butler Report in a speech to the House of Commons on 13 July 2004. For Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) responses, see Associated Press, ‘CIA Revising Pre-Invasion Iraq Arms Intel’, New York Times, 2 Feb. 2005; CIA Directorate of Intelligence, ‘Continuous Learning in the DI: May 2004 Review of Analytic Tradecraft Fundamentals’, Sherman Kent School, CIA, Tradecraft Review 1 (Aug. 2004); Richard Kerr et al., ‘Issues for the US Intelligence Community’, Studies in Intelligence 49/3 (2005), 47–54. For earlier discussions of the intelligence failures, see Peter Bamford, Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday 2004) and, especially, John Prados, Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (New York: New Press 2004). These accounts do little to explain the failures, however. It also appears that intelligence made errors in other areas, especially in underestimating the deterioration of Iraq's infrastructure. But little attention has been focused here, or on areas of intelligence success, especially in anticipating the obstacles to political reconstruction.

³Danchev, ‘Reckoning’, 437.

⁴The four investigations of Pearl Harbor conducted in the five years after it failed to settle the basic questions, as shown by Martin Melosi, In the Shadow of Pearl Harbor: Political Controversy over the Surprise Attack, 1941–46 (College Station: Texas A&M Press 1977), and it took an unofficial (but government sponsored) study much later to shed real light on the problems in an analysis that remains central our understanding not only of this case, but to surprise attacks in general (Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision [Stanford UP 1962).

⁵Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (Univ. of Chicago Press 1996); Vaughan draws in part on Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents with High Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books 1984); for another superb analysis of this type see Scott Snook, Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Black Hawks Over Northern Iraq (Princeton UP 2000).

⁶Steven Weisman and Douglas Jehl, ‘Estimate Revised on When Iran Could Make Nuclear Bomb’, New York Times, 2 Aug. 2005.

⁷Much of this literature is summarized in Timothy Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2002). For a further discussion of this and related issues see Robert Jervis, ‘Understanding Beliefs’, Political Psychology, forthcoming).

⁸For a good argument that intelligence mattered less in the Cold War than is generally believed, see John Lewis Gaddis, ‘Intelligence, Espionage, and Cold War History’, Diplomatic History 13/2 (Spring 1989), 191–212; for the general (and overstated) claim that intelligence matters little in warfare, see John Keegan, Intelligence in War (London: Hutchinson 2003). For a small but important case in which good intelligence derived from intercepted cables guided policy, see Ken Kotani, ‘Could Japan Read Allied Signal Traffic? Japanese Codebreaking and the Advance into French Indo-China, September 1940’, Intelligence and National Security 20 (June 2005), 304–20. Not only may policy be independent of intelligence, which may not have been the case in Iraq, but good policy may rest on bad intelligence. In the most important case of this kind, in prevailing on his colleagues to continue fighting Nazi Germany in June 1940, Winston Churchill utilized estimates of German strength that were even more faulty than the WMD estimates: David Reynolds, ‘Churchill and the British ‘Decision’ to Fight on in 1940: Right Policy, Wrong Reasons', in Richard Langhorne (ed.), Diplomacy and Intelligence During the Second World War, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge 147–67.

⁹Numbers 13: 1–2, 31–32; for the most recent report of an intelligence failure, see Bill Gertz, ‘Analysts Missed Chinese Buildup’, Washington Times, 9 June 2005.

¹⁰The literature is enormous: the best discussion is Richard Betts, Surprise Attack (Washington DC: Brookings Institution 1982); the classic study is Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor, see also Emphrain Kam, Surprise Attack: The Victim's Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1988). Good historical studies are Ernest May, ed., Knowing One's Enemies: Intelligence Assessment Before the Two World Wars (Princeton UP 1984) and the special issue of Intelligence and National Security 13/1 (Spring 1998) edited by Martin S. Alexander on ‘Knowing Your Friends: Intelligence Inside Alliances and Coalitions from 1914 to the Cold War’, also in book form that year, now available from Routledge. For a detailed study of the failure of American, Dutch, and UN intelligence to anticipate the capture of Srebrenica and the massacre of the men captured there, see Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 1992–1995 (Munster: Lit 2003). Much of this work rests on analysis of how individuals process information and see the world, as I have discussed in Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton UP 1976). For an application of this approach to improving intelligence, see Richards Heuer, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (Washington DC: CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence 1999). For a superb study of individual differences in accuracy of predictions and willingness of change one's mind, see Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment (Princeton UP 2005). In my post-mortem on why CIA was slow to see that the Shah of Iran might fall (note 1), I came to the conclusion that many of the problems centered on organizational habits, culture, and incentives, however. For all their weaknesses in this area, democracies probably do a better job of assessing their adversaries than do non-democracies: Ralph White, ‘Why Aggressors Lose’ Political Psychology 11/2 (June 1990), 227–42; Dan Reiter and Allan Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton UP 2002).

¹¹Of course, it would be difficult to determine the percentage of cases in which intelligence was right or wrong, even leaving aside the questionable nature of such a dichotomy. Indeed, probably the more interesting metric would be a comparison of the success rate of the IC with that of informed observers who lack access to classified information.

¹²Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton UP 1976), 117. The Butler Report uses this quotation as its headnote.

¹³The Israeli service is often help up as a model, but for a review of its errors, see Ephraim Kahana, ‘Analyzing Israel's Intelligence Failures’, International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 18/2 (Summer 2005), 262–79.

¹⁴For the cogent but politically unacceptable argument that ‘if the September 11 and Iraq failures teach us anything, it is that we need to lower our expectations of what intelligence analysis can…do’, see Thomas Mahnken, ‘Spies and Bureaucrats: Getting Intelligence Right’, Public Interest No.81 (Spring 2005), 41. This would mean trying to design policies that are not likely to fail disastrously if the supporting intelligence is incorrect.

¹⁵Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster 2004).

¹⁶I am grateful to Richard Betts for this formulation.

¹⁷For comparisons between the classified and public American reports, see SSCI, 286–97; Jessica Mathews and Jeff Miller, ‘A Tale of Two Intelligence Estimates’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 31 March 2004; Donald Kennedy, ‘Intelligence Science: Reverse Peer Review?’ Science 303, 26 March 2004; Center for American Progress, ‘Neglecting Intelligence, Ignoring Warnings’, 28 Jan. 2004, <www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=24889>. One of the main recommendations of the Butler Report was that the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) not issue public estimates which, contrary to precedent, it did in this case.

¹⁸WMD Commission, 50.

¹⁹WMD Commission, 50.

²⁰Butler Report, 13.

²¹Israeli intelligence did employ a Red Team, but its arguments were found to be unpersuasive: Kahana, ‘Analyzing Israel's Intelligence Failures’, 273–4. This serves as a good reminder that many of the prescriptions offered in the report would not have changed the outcome. In fact, academic research casts doubt on the efficacy of this approach: Charlan Nemeth, Keith Brown and John Rogers, ‘Devil's Advocate Versus Authentic Dissent: Stimulating Quality and Control’, European Journal of Social Psychology 31 (Nov./Dec. 2001), 707–20. Within CIA, the best work on the related approach of Alternative Analysis: see especially his exposition of how this method could have been used before the Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba: ‘Alternative Analysis and the Perils of Estimating: Analyst-Friendly Approaches’, unpublished MS, 6 Oct. 2003.

²²SSCI, 20–21, 106.

²³‘Iran: Intelligence Failure or Policy Stalemate?’ Working Group Report No.1.

²⁴Only a few scattered individuals dissented. According to Hans Blix, France's President Jacques Chirac was one of them, remarking on the propensity of intelligence services to ‘intoxicate each other’: Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (New York: Pantheon 2004) 129.

²⁵For a brief discussion of an intelligence success, see David Robarge, ‘Getting It Right: CIA Analysis of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War’, Studies in Intelligence 49/1 (2005), 1–8. For a discussion of some of the earlier CIA post-mortems, see Douglas Shyrock, ‘The Intelligence Community Post-Mortem Program, 1973–1975’, Studies in Intelligence 21 (Fall 1997), 15–22; also see Woodrow Kuhns, ‘Intelligence Failures: Forecasting and the Lessons of Epistemology’, in Richard Betts and Thomas Mahnken, eds. Paradoxes of Strategic Intelligence (London: Frank Cass 2003), 80–100; John Hedley, ‘Learning from Intelligence Failures’, International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 18 (Fall 2005), 435–50. Douglas MacEachin, a former career CIA official, has done a series of excellent post-mortems: The Final Months of War With Japan: Signals Intelligence, U.S. Invasion Planning, and the A-Bomb Decision (Washington DC: CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence 1998); Predicting the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: The Intelligence Community's Record (Washington DC: CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence 2002); U.S. Intelligence and the Confrontation in Poland, 1980–1981 (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP 2002).

²⁶In fact, as the NIE was being written, confirming reports were received from a very well placed source. This was so sensitive that it was not shared with the analysts and so did not effect the estimate, but it reinforced the confidence of those in charge of the exercise and of the top policy-makers: WMD Commission, 117.

²⁷Richard Betts, ‘Warning Dilemmas: Normal Theory vs. Exceptional Theory’, Orbis 26 (Winter 1983), 828–33.

²⁸SSCI, 18.

²⁹Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1983); for later research in this area see Paul 't Hart, Eric Stern and Bengt Sundelius, eds., Beyond Groupthink: Political Group Dynamics and Foreign Policy-Making (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press 1997).

³⁰WMD Commission, 183.

³¹For reports of pressures to conform within CIA, see WMD Commission, 191–94; for the argument that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) has developed a culture that encourages dissent and the CIA has not, see Justin Rood, ‘Analyze This’, Washington Monthly (Jan./Feb. 2005), 18–21.

³²SSCI, 22. In the mid-1980s a similar conclusion was reached by CIA's Senior Review Panel based on examining a number of cases from 1945 to 1978: Willis Armstrong et al., ‘The Hazards of Single-Outcome Forecasting’, originally in Studies in Intelligence 28 (Fall 1984) and declassified in H. Bradford Westerfield, Inside CIA's Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency's Internal Journal, 1955–1992 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1995), 238–54. Political psychologists have similarly argued that much information is ordinarily processed ‘online’, i.e., that as new information is received it is melded with the person's standing judgment on the subject, with the person not being aware of how the latter was formed. See, for example, Kathleen McGraw and Milton Lodge, ‘Review Essay: Political Information Processing’, Political Communication 13 (Jan.–March 1996), 131–38; Charles Taber, ‘Information Processing and Public Opinion,’ in David Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis, eds., Oxford Handboook of Political Psychology (New York: Oxford UP 2003), 433–76. An interesting possible case is the CIA's over-estimate of the time it would take the USSR to produce an atomic bomb. It was so sure that the USSR suffered from a great shortage of uranium that it missed the signs that large-scale enrichment was underway: Donald Steury, ‘Dissecting Soviet Analysis, 1946–50: How the CIA Missed Stalin's Bomb’, Studies in Intelligence 49/1 (2005), 24–25.

³³SSCI, 161–62.

³⁴In addition to the Duelfer Report, see James Risen, ‘The Struggle for Iraq: Intelligence; Ex-Inspector Says CIA Missed Disarray in Iraqi Arms Program’, New York Times, 26 Jan. 2004.

³⁵SSCI, 102–3. Of course the general problem is that there are an infinite number of non-rational, non-unitary explanations that can account for any bit of data.

³⁶David Kay, ‘‘Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction’, Miller Center Report 20 (Spring/Summer 2004), 8. It also does not help when a CIA analyst is newly assigned to a case, he or she starts by ‘reading into’, not the field reports, but the finished intelligence that gives the office's established views.

³⁷Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics, Chapter 4.

³⁸For a summary, see Ziva Kunda, Social Cognition: Making Sense of People (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1999), 112–20.

³⁹SSCI, 21, also see 268.

⁴⁰WMD Commission, 93; James Rissen, ‘C.I.A. Held Back Iraqi Arms Data, U.S. Officials Say’, New York Times, 6 July 2004. For the dismissal of negative evidence that was received in another case, see Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1999), 282.

⁴¹SSCI, 3.

⁴²Iran's president reacted to the fact that lack of hard evidence that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons had not dispelled Western suspicions (justified, in my view) by declaring: ‘Usually, you cannot prove that sort of thing [i.e., that a country is not seeking weapons]. How can you prove that you are not a bad person?’ (Quoted in Steven Weisman and Warren Hoge, ‘Iranian Leader Promises New Proposals to End Nuclear Impasse’, New York Times, 16 Sept. 2005). As I will discuss in the next section, the paucity of evidence can be explained by the other's deception and denial activities, an argument made by the US in this case as well as about Iraq: Bill Gertz, ‘U.S. Report Says Iran Seeks to Acquire Nuclear Weapons’, Washington Times, 16 Sept. 2005.

⁴³Mahnken, ‘Spies and Bureaucrats’, 37.

⁴⁴SSCI, 184.

⁴⁵SSCI, 107. For a fascinating discussion of the ignoring of negative evidence from signals intelligence in the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, see Robert Hanyok, ‘Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964’, Cryptologic Quarterly 19/4–20/1 (Winter 2000–Spring 2001) esp. 31–2, 41, 43–4, available at <www.gwu.edu∼nsaarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/relea00012.pdf>.

⁴⁶Many estimates are built on beliefs that cannot be disconfirmed, and in most of these cases analysts and consumers fail to realize this. For example, as unrest grew in Iran in 1978 intelligence believed that if it were really serious the Shah would crack down, and the fact that he did not do so was taken as evidence that the situation remained in control. In 1941 both Stalin and most British officials believed that Hitler would not attack without making demands first and that some of the alarming signs emanated from the bellicose German military rather than Hitler, beliefs that only the attack itself could dispel: Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion, esp. 180–86.

⁴⁷Jervis, Perception, Chapter 6.

⁴⁸See, for example, WMD Commission, 22–178, 285–6, 320–21, 367, 437.

⁴⁹For a discussion of similar weaknesses in the British system, see Butler Report, 102–4, and Davies (note 2). Late in the process (Dec. 2002) DO apparently did express skepticism about ‘Curveball's’ reliability: WMD Commission, 95–98. The most detailed discussion of Curveball is Bob Drogin and John Goetz, ‘How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of “Curveball,”’, Los Angeles Times, 20 Nov. 2005.

⁵⁰WMD Commission, 285–86, 320–21, 437. This complaint is usually focused on Humint, but SSCI (p.27) reports that CIA refused too share other information as well, and other agencies are not likely to be more forthcoming – information, after all, is power.

⁵¹Pat Roberts, ‘Comments & Responses: Intelligence Reform’, National Interest, No.81 (Fall 2005), 8.

⁵²SSCI, 43, also see, 46.

⁵³WMD Commission, 125–26; SSCI, 267–68. For some of the dangers of close contact between analysts and collectors, see Garrett Jones, ‘It's A Cultural Thing: Thoughts on a Troubled CIA,’ Part 1, 28 June 2005, Foreign Policy Research Institute, <www.fpri.org/endnotes/20050628.americawar.jones.ciaculture.html>.

⁵⁴WMD Commission, 321. For the (plausible) claim that when the Reagan White House was trading arms for hostages, political consideration led to the withholding of information on Iran and the status of political ‘moderates’, see the memo from an Iran analyst to the Deputy Director of Intelligence, 2 Dec. 1986, printed in John Gentry, Lost Promise: How CIA Analysis Misserves the Nation (Lantham, MD: UP of America 1993), 276–81.

⁵⁵SSCI, 247–51; WMD Commission, 87, 105, 195. Also see discussion of familiar problems on other issues in SSCI, 94, 239–46.

⁵⁶Bob Drogin and Greg Miller, ‘Curveball and the Source of Fresh CIA Rancor,’ Los Angeles Times, 2 Apr., 2005; Statement of John E. McLaughlin, former Director of Central Intelligence, April 1, 2005 (http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/wmd_mclaughlin.html).

⁵⁷On politicization in general, see H. Bradford Westerfield, ‘Inside Ivory Bunkers: CIA Analysts Resist Managers’ “Pandering” – Part I,’ International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 9 (Winter 1996/97) 407–24; Westerfield, ‘Inside Ivory Bunkers: CIA Analysts Resist Managers’ ‘Pandering' – Part II,’ ibid 10 (Spring 1997), 19–56; Richard Betts, ‘Politicization of Intelligence: Costs and Benefits,’ in Betts and Mahnken (note 24) 59–79; a personal account of some bitterness but also persuasiveness is Gentry (note 53). My analysis assumes that the administration believed that Saddam had WMD. Although this seems obvious, one significant bit of behavior raises doubts: the failure of US forces to launch a careful search for WMD as they moved through Iraq. Had there been stockpiles of WMD materials, there would have been a grave danger that these would have fallen into the hands of America's enemies, perhaps including terrorists. I cannot explain this failure, but the rest of the US occupation points to incompetence.

⁵⁸Douglas Jehl, ‘C.I.A. Chief Says He's Corrected Cheney Privately’, New York Times, 10 March 2004.

⁵⁹Butler Report, 125–27, which concludes that the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) ‘should not have included the ‘45 minute’ report in its assessment and in the Government's [public] dossier without stating what it was believed to refer to’; for related US intelligence, see SSCI, 251–52.

⁶²SSCI, 484–85.

⁶⁰Memo of 23 July 2002 from Matthew Rycroft to David Manning, which is printed in many places, for example New York Review of Books, 9 June 2005, 71.

⁶¹For a summary of the leaks about such pressure see Joseph Cirincione, ‘You Can't Handle the Truth’, Carnegie Non-Proliferation, 2 April 2005.

⁶³Quoted in Gentry, Lost Promise, 243.

⁶⁴The comparison between the views of different services can shed light on various causal propositions. Thus the common claim that Stalin was taken by surprise by Hitler's attack because of the particular infirmities of his intelligence system, although partly correct, needs to be reconsidered in light of the fact that Soviet and British estimates were closely parallel until the last weeks: Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion, esp. 264–65, 281.

⁶⁵Douglas Jehl and David Sanger, ‘Prewar Assessment on Iraq Saw Chance of Strong Divisions,’ New York Times, 28 Sept. 2004.

⁶⁶For some evidence, but a muddy interpretation, see SSCI, 357–65.

⁶⁷SSCI, 249; also see WMD Commission, 189–91.

⁶⁸Wesley K. Wark, The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1985). The literature on motivated bias is discussed and applied to international politics in Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP 1985). Lord Hutton's report clearing the Blair government of the BBC's charges that it distorted intelligence notes the possibility that analysts were ‘sub-consciously influenced’ by their knowledge of what the government wanted to hear: quoted in Brian Urquhart, ‘Hidden Truths,’ New York Review of Books, 25 March 2004, 44. For a fascinating case of motivated bias in science, see Frank Close, Too Hot to Handle: The Race for Cold Fusion (Princeton UP 1991).

⁶⁹SSCI, 404–22 analyzes the extent to which the US provided intelligence to UNMOVIC, and the Butler Report, 87 briefly mentions the lack of assessments.

⁷⁰John Bolton, often accused of putting illegitimate pressure on intelligence, apparently believed that the problem instead was that members of the IC was over-reaching and trying to censor his ‘political judgment as to how to interpret this data’, in the words of one of his top aides (Douglas Jehl, ‘Released E-Mail Exchanges Reveal More Bolton Battles’, New York Times, 24 April 2005, and Jehl, ‘Bolton Asserts Independence On Intelligence,’ ibid. 12 May 2005). Unfortunately, it is much harder for anyone below the level of the president or perhaps the cabinet to make clear that what he or she is giving is a judgment different from that of the IC, because it would invites the obvious question of whether the president agrees.

⁷¹WMD Commission, 49, 56; SSCI, 85–119; the same problem appeared in the UK: Butler Report, 130–34. Some of the discussions of chemical weapons and UAVs also displayed this ambiguity: SSCI, 204, 221–30.

⁷²WMD Commission, 55, also see 67–68 and SSCI, 93–4, 100–2.

⁷³For a brief but trenchant discussion, see the Butler Report, 11; for discussion of a similar issue in judging the evidence of the existence of a bird long believed to be extinct, see James Gorman, ‘Ivory-Bill or Not? Proof Flits Tantalizingly Out of Sight,’ New York Times, 30 Aug. 30, 2005, Section F.

⁷⁴Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2003), 89.

⁷⁵For brief mentions of Kamel's testimony, see SSCI, 218; Butler Report, 47–48, 51.

⁷⁶WMD Commission, 173; apparently this was also true in Australian intelligence: Flood Report, 26.

⁷⁷Douglas Ford, ‘Planning for an Unpredictable War: British Intelligence Assessments and the War Against Japan, 1937–1945,’ Journal of Strategic Studies 27/1 (March 2004) 148; for other examples, see Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion, 233; Stephen Budiansky, Her Majesty's Spymaster (New York: Viking 2005), 203.

⁷⁸MacEachin, Predicting the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, 46.

⁷⁹Quoted in Gorodetsky, Grand Illusion, 305, 308. Shortly before he was overthrown in 1974, Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus dismissed the possibility because a coup would lead to an invasion by Turkey and so ‘would not make sense, it would not be reasonable’: quoted in Lawrence Stern, The Wrong Horse (New York: New York Times Books 1977), 106.

⁸⁰ Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD, 30 Sept. 2004 (hereafter Duelfer Report) Vol.3, Section on Biological Warfare, 56; Vol.1, Regime Strategic Intent, 32. In parallel, the American chief of intelligence in Vietnam looked back at the Tet offensive and declared: “Even had I known exactly what was to take place, it was so preposterous that I probably would have been unable to sell it to anybody. Why would the enemy give away his major advantage, which was his ability to be elusive and avoid heavy casualties?’ (quoted in William Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1976), 321.

⁸¹Duelfer Report, 29, 55, 62, 64 (this and subsequent references are to Vol.1). John Mueller had earlier speculated that Saddam's limitations on the inspectors were motivated by his fear of assassination: ‘Letters to the Editor: Understanding Saddam’, Foreign Affairs 83 (July/Aug. 2004), 151.

⁸²Duelfer Report, 34, also see, 57. The Duelfer Report itself should not be considered definitive. In many places it reads like a collection of note-cards, much information remains unexploited, and there is some tension between this report and Kay's views (note 37). Ending economic sanctions and ending inspections would not necessarily have coincided and it is not clear which of them was viewed as most troublesome, and why. The UN resolutions provided for the latter to continue even after the former ended, and Saddam had terminated inspections in 1998. This presents a puzzle because if inspections had been the main barrier, Saddam should have resumed his programs at that point, as most observers expected. But it is hard to see how the sanctions were inhibiting him because after the institution of the Oil for Food program and extensive oil smuggling, the regime had sufficient cash to procure what it needed.

⁸³Several other cases in which the behavior seems puzzling made sense once one understood the situation the other was in and the strategy it was following. Thus the US and Israel were taken by surprise by President Sadat's Egyptian and Syrian attack in 1973 because they failed to appreciate Sadat's desperation, the military improvements he had instituted, and his idea that what was needed was not a massive military victory, but enough of an effort to convince Israel that the status quo was untenable and to bring the US in as a broker. Here empathy would have been difficult, but not out of the question. It was even harder with Saddam because his behavior does not seem to have been the product of any reasonable calculation.

⁸⁴For a related argument, see WMD Commission, 10, 12, 173, 175.

⁸⁵SSCI, 187, 192, 194, 204, 213. The Butler Report makes a similar point about some instances of British intelligence, but without implying that this was illegitimate: 73, 75.

⁸⁶SSCI, 38, 228.

⁸⁷The Flood Report sees a similar trend in Australia: 69. But here as in many places it is difficult to make the crucial comparisons to the way things were in the past. A history of the Directorate of Intelligence reports that in the 1960s its leaders believed that long-term research had been sacrificed to the pressures of current intelligence: Anne Karalekas, ‘History of the Central Intelligence Agency’, in William Leary, ed., The Central Intelligence Agency: History and Documents (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press 1984), p.100. When I did the post-mortem on why the CIA was slow to see that the Shah might fall (note 1) I concluded that some of the reason was the pressures for current intelligence, which left analysts with not only little time but also little inclination or ability to look beyond the recent cables.

⁸⁸Flood Report, 27.

⁸⁹Woodward, Plan of Attack, 249. By this point Tenet may have also been biased by his knowledge that CIA had a string of sources in Iraq whose lives (and those of their families) would be sacrificed if the US did not invade: Jake Blood, The Tet Effect: Intelligence and the Public Perception of War (London: Routledge 2005), 176.

⁹⁰WMD Commission, 47, 408.

⁹¹For a discussion of the failure of previous CIA attempts to institutionalize competing views, see Gentry, Lost Promise, 53, 58, 63, and 94.

⁹²For justly critical reviews of the 9/11 Commission report, see Richard Posner, ‘The 9/11 Report: A Dissent,’ New York Times Books Review, 29 Aug. 2004; Richard Falkenrath, ‘The 9/11 Commission Report: A Review Essay,’ International Security 29 (Winter 2004–2005) 170–90; Joshua Rovner and Austin Long, ‘The Perils of Shallow Theory: Intelligence Reform and the 9/11 Commission,’ Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 18 (Winter 2005–2006), 609–37. For more of an explanation than a defense, see Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, ‘Sins of Commission?’ International Security 29 (Spring 2005), 208–9. For a good discussion of the 9/11 case, see Charles Parker and Eric Stern, ‘Bolt From the Blue or Avoidable Failure? Revisiting September 11 and the Origins of Strategic Surprise’, Foreign Policy Analysis 1 (Nov. 2005), 301–31.

⁹³Recent signs are not encouraging: see the testimony of Michael Hayden, Deputy Director of National Intelligence: <http://intelligence.house.gov/Reports.aspx?Section=122>. More on the right track is ‘A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis’, Sherman Kent School, CIA, Tradecraft Review 2 (June 2005). For discussions of some of the barriers to reform, see Richard Russell, ‘A Weak Pillar for American National Security: The CIA's Dismal Performance Against WMD Threats’, Intelligence and National Security 20/3 (Sept. 2005), 466–85; Gentry, Lost Promise, esp. 93–107, 184; Rood, ‘Analze This’; Mahnken, ‘Spies and Bureaucrafts’; Jones, ‘It's A Cultural Thing: Thoughts on a Troubled CIA,’ Part 2, 19 Aug. 2005, Foreign Policy Research Institute, <www.fpri.org/endnotes/20050819.americawar.jones.culturetroubledcia.html>.