I truly applaud those responsible for tracking down al-Zqwahiri and killing him. I think few appreciate the difficulty of such an operation – something like finding a needle in a haystack – and the courage it takes for a President to pull the trigger on taking out a house in downtown Kabul. What if we miss? What if there are civilian casualties? The operation deserves America’s praise. The person who planned the attacks on America culminating in 9/11 is dead. Good riddance. Having him dead and buried makes the world a much better place. The causes for my big BUT in the title, however, are twofold:
· First, I think it appropriate to pause a moment to consider the cost of counterterrorism spending since 9/11. A Stimpson Center study in 2018 “Counterterrorism Spending: Protecting America While Promoting Efficiencies and Accountability,” concluded that the way in which the Executive Branch reported such spending from 9/11 until 2017 was so screwed up (my characterization) that it was impossible to come up with an accurate accountability of how much money was spent on counterterrorism. Even so, I think it safe to say that since 9/11 counterterrorism funding for the Intelligence Community (IC) totals hundreds of billions of dollars. I don’t begrudge a single dollar spent on keeping us safe from terrorists. I just seek to highlight that over the same period this spending greatly exceeds the outlay for intelligence analysis, especially strategic intelligence. As with counterterrorism spending, attempting to discern the portion of the intelligence budget allotted for analysis is just as unreliable. I think it is safe to say, however, that it is miniscule in comparison to counterterrorism spending. In addition, most of the funds that trickle down to analysts end up being allocated for the warfighters as it should. Current intelligence reporters receive the leftovers. Virtually nothing is budgeted for what I refer to as Strategic or National Intelligence. The people and resources assigned to such activities were either turned into current reporters or let go altogether 25-30 years ago. The amount of expertise lost to support the President and other senior policy officials was enormous and helps explain the Iraq WMD fiasco and the more recent misjudgments on Russia and Ukraine.
· That leads me to my second But. A media personality with her own primetime news hour waxed eloquently how the killing of al-Zqwahiri redeemed CIA from all the recent criticism by President Biden and others focused on its horrendous misjudgments (1) that the Russians would take Kyiv in three days and (2) the Ukrainians would not put up much of a fight. No, I profoundly disagree! Counterterrorism successes have absolutely nothing to do with the state of analysis devoted to keeping the President better informed on strategic issues, or those that may soon become challenges for the nation. As I described in an earlier newsletter, the IC’s strategic analytical capability, what I call national intelligence analysis, is broken and very likely beyond repair. The killing of al-Zqwahiri, no matter how praiseworthy, does by no means take CIA off the hook for not having a robust research effort to support and better inform its current reporting. This monumental mistake was a conscience, albeit shortsighted, managerial decision to put all their eggs in the current reporting basket decades ago. Far worse, it continues to this day. As the argument goes, who needs research anyway? Such in-depth reporting is primarily written for other analysts and is much too detailed to present to the President. Okay sure, but I would also contend, that this anti-research bias also ensures that the Iraq WMD fiasco and the errant predictions about Russia’s military capability and Ukraine’s willingness to fight become the norm not the exceptional bad call. Good current reporting requires a robust research effort.
People tend to forget how much the tradecraft and analytical processes differ between a current reporter and a research analyst. At its most basic level, current reporting attempts to explain and help others understand an event that has occurred usually the day before. A research analyst starts with a question not with an event. For me it often started by asking whether the conventional wisdom on a particular subject could be improved with additional research. More times than not, I discovered evidence that the conventional answer was misleading and, in many cases, just flat wrong. True, such studies require a considerable amount of time; something that current reporters can ill afford. It was not unusual for me, for example, to spend months designing the research strategy, gathering the data, and then finally producing a very detailed report laying out my evidence and conclusions. Admittedly, such in-depth studies would only rarely reach senior officials directly. They did, however, frequently allow current reporters to incorporate new findings into the products that they were producing for such officials.
The distinct mindsets held by the research analysts and current reporters may more easily be grasped with a story from my time at State Intelligence & Research. After one of Secretary Powell’s morning staff meetings, he called me aside and asked that I walk back with him to his office. He said he had a special project for INR. He indicated that during meetings at the White House there had been several heated arguments about the violence on the West Bank and Gaza. Who was to blame? What were the disputes about? What type of violence was being reported? Where was the violence occurring? He, in effect, wanted my experts to make him the smartest person in the room the next time the issue came up again. I was very excited walking back to my office. The Secretary had tasked INR with providing him the answers to his questions and he stressed that he wanted as much “detail” as we could come up with. The fact that this sort of request from a senior policymaker happens far less than most probably imagine made me even more eager to pass on his request to my experts. Year in and year out INR current reporters are the best in the business. Boy was I in for a surprise.
When I passed on the Secretary’s request to my analysts, instead of being excited as I had been, you would have thought I had asked each of them to donate one of their kidneys. Such a project, they knew, would require them to develop a research design, create a data base, and fill it with the bits and pieces of intel over time that they would need to generate the more in-depth analyses the Secretary was seeking. Their first proposal in response to the Secretary’s directive was to prepare a thoughtful paper on the status of the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli and Palestinian relations. Everyone agreed. Yes, that was the way to proceed. When I explained that was exactly what the Secretary did not want; that he had made clear in our discussions, that he wanted details, they reluctantly bought into this old researcher’s idea of where we might start – defining what we meant by violence. Reluctantly, they agreed but approached the project still kicking and screaming.
We eventually defined violence by simply developing a list of the items that could cause it to occur (fist fights, rock throwing, small arms fire, mortars, bombs, rockets/missiles, etc.). We then prepared a list of questions we needed to answer for each incident of violence (where, when, casualties, and if possible, who started the event, etc.). Several weeks passed. Grumbling continued apace. Eventually, one of the most senior analysts came to me with the message, that much to his surprise, he was beginning to discover new insights from the database that he otherwise would have missed using his usual tradecraft. I asked him to write up his findings and we would send them directly to the Secretary. Powell responded almost immediately and was effusive in his praise of the piece, remarking that it was just the kind of information he was looking for. This encouraged younger analysts to explore the information in the data base more carefully and they produced several other reports for the Secretary.
Just as the data base was beginning to produce evidence that better explained the violence on the West Bank, Gaza and in Israel, analysts drifted away from collecting new data to add to the bits and pieces they had already collected. The Secretary received no more detailed reports on violence, and no one thought to apply the research lite methodology they had just used to other issues of special interest to the Secretary despite my encouraging them to do so. They quickly slipped back into the current reporters’ preferred method of passing on their thoughts up the chain of command – by preparing thoughtful papers based on their analytical expertise on events that had occurred the day before rather than providing new evidence for the policymakers to consider.
I’m not suggesting that current reporters become research analysts. They preform a valuable function – taking on complicated issues and writing them up to better inform senior policymakers. I do, however, believe that the decision to dismantle the IC’s analytical research capability was a huge mistake. Without rebuilding this capability, the information we provide policymaker will continue to be mere guess work. We have let Iraq WMD and the recent estimates concerning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine become the norm not the exception. The change I propose won’t come cheap or be accomplished overnight. It could take as much as 5% of the hundreds of billions we spend on counterterrorism diverted to strategic intelligence analysis, and at least a decade to rebuild such a capability. To continue our same path, however, could likely bring us mistakes even bigger than the ones we have already made.
Just saying.
Not only has the IC made this mistake, but so are the military services who are dumbing down their area specialists. It takes years to make a good area specialist, time that the services are reluctant to spend. You can't take a soldier and reclassify him as an area specialist without investing heavily in the education and experience to make him one.