INDISPENSABLE INTELLIGENCE AND INEVITABLE FAILURES

Abstract

Preventing Catastrophe: The Use and Misuse of Intelligence in Efforts to Halt the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, by Thomas Graham Jr. and Keith A. Hansen. Stanford University Press, 2009. 300 pages, $35.

Keywords:

• Intelligence community
• nuclear weapons
• Iraq
• Pakistan
• counterproliferation

Notes

1. Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, March 31, 2005, cover letter, <www.gpoaccess.gov/wmd/pdf/full_wmd_report.pdf>.

2. For a recent review of the challenges inherent in the policy-intelligence relationship, see Roger Z. George and James B. Bruce, eds., Analyzing Intelligence: Origins, Obstacles, and Innovations (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008), particularly pp. 71–104.

3. Charles E. Lathrop, The Literary Spy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 200.

4. Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, July 9, 2004, p. 46, <www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/s108-301/sec2.pdf>.

5. George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), p. 326.

6. Graham and Hansen appear to fall into this trap themselves, introducing their discussion of this topic by referring to Iraq's efforts to acquire “highly enriched uranium” (p. 114). However, the remainder of the discussion makes clear they understand that the material in question is a form of natural uranium.

7. Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, “Report to the President of the United States,” March 31, 2005, pp. 81, 115.

8. Tenet with Harlow, At the Center of the Storm, p. 327.

9. Two recent books explain the cognitive and methodological limitations of intelligence analysis in some detail and place the Iraqi WMD experience in the broader context of intelligence failure as a recurring reality. See Richard K. Betts, Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge & Power in American National Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).

10. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “The National Intelligence Strategy of the United States of America,” August 2009, pp. 6–7, <www.dni.gov/reports/2009_NIS.pdf>.

11. National Counterproliferation Center, “What Is Counterproliferation?” <www.counterwmd.gov/>.

12. Richards Betts describes these two approaches as the “Sherman Kent model,” after the Yale historian and intelligence analysis pioneer who warned about the dangers of getting too close to policy makers, and the “Robert Gates” model, after the current secretary of defense and former DCI who emphasized that intelligence must take policy needs into account in order to be relevant. See Betts, Enemies of Intelligence, pp. 76–77. Resistance within the CIA to an increased focus on “actionable” intelligence was an important factor in the opposition to Gates's nomination to be DCI in 1991. See H. Bradford Westerfield, “Inside Ivory Bunkers: CIA Analysts Resist Managers' ‘Pandering,’” reprinted in Loch K. Johnson and James J. Wirtz, eds., Strategic Intelligence: Windows Into a Secret World (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 2004), pp. 198–217.