Reforming the ODNI and the National Intelligence Community (IC) is a strategic imperative for the 21st century.
Part 1 introduced the idea of reforming the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Intelligence Community (IC) and offered a top-level plan. Part 2 was somewhat of a review of world and US events over the years that led to somewhat of a culminating event.
I apologize to dear reader for leaving you hanging at the close of part 2, but I went long and I think the context is important to the issue of how and why we have gotten to the point where the ODNI-as executed-is a failed concept.
Failure is a strong word. But how many intel failures are we willing to suffer before we admit it? Why has it failed? The simple answer is likely politics.
In spite of the importance of spy and tradecraft for nation states, recall that at one time our State Department head declared “Gentleman don’t read other gentleman’s mail,” reportedly as a prelude to shutting down State’s code breaking unit.
As a side note to the above, it is near criminal for such an action to happen in consideration of how difficult and important a skillset this represents “in the business.”
Spy craft can be a dirty nasty business where “oopsies” happen.
In part 1 I mentioned the infamous U-2 incident that scuttled the planned President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Kruschev nuclear summit. Our IC committed the near ultimate faux pas in failing to advise the president that not only had the Soviets captured the plane largely intact, but they had the pilot-Francis Gary Powers: awkward!
Or-one of my favs-the case where President Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan was caught spying on the SSCI staff when they were granted access to Abu Grab files during an ongoing inquiry. From the piece:
CIA Director John Brennan denied the charge. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “We wouldn’t do that. That’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we’d do.”
Hahahaha: He did it.
Sometime later there was a huge bruhaha and outcry when it was discovered President Obama’s NSA had been “spying” on Angela Merkel and other European diplomats: Not good…
Or better yet-but in this case worse-when President Obama was caught spying on the Trump candidacy and later the presidential nominee and still later the president. Only for us to discover that it somehow did not constitute spying, at least according to the LSMBTGA, cause Orange Man Bad…
There is very little plausible deniability if a nation state is playing the game at the level necessary. It is a risky business, particularly in a risk averse government that of late has been increasingly concerned about 57 genders, pronouns, DIE, CRT, ESG and Unconscious Bias (conscious racism.)
And ensuring our military correctly genders the enemy while closing with and killing them.
We left off with President Clinton’s nomination of Anthony Lake for Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) shockingly rebuffed by the senate.
To keep a long story only semi-long, Lake had serious political baggage, and a minor crisis or more appropriately a stalemate threatened to emerge in finding a suitable replacement.
A compromise was reached in short order and former Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Staff Director George Tenet-then serving as Deputy Director CIA-was selected to fill the void.
The point of building up to this point in the story is this was-and is-a case of Yogi Berra, “Deja Vue all over again.”
Lake’s failure to be elevated to the DCI position was a shock to the system that many felt was a clear case of political games by republicans. A president should get to pick his cabinet-his core team-it is somewhat of the “gentleman’s agreement” in the swamp.
But Congress depends on the fruits of the proverbial administration labor to accomplish oversight. This reliance extends to the production of analysis and assessments of global affairs and events for the “advice and consent” role of congress in terms of recommendations and decisions-particularly budget related matters, treaties, the legislative side of policy, etc.
You might be surprised how much congressional engagement occurs for issues and programs of interest. Political picks that fail to meet the position requirements in terms of skills, knowledge and ability do a disservice to the larger United States obligations as a global power and often draw the ire of congress.
Not to sidetrack but we just lived through an analogous period where President Biden clearly set an open border policy agenda (for whatever reason not germane to this story) and his designated stooge to execute his guidance-Mayorkas-was doing exactly that bidding. Which in Mayorkas’ view of his direction meant the border was secure.
Holding Mayorkas responsible was feckless because it was the administration’s policy, and he did his best SGT Schultz impression a la former FBI Director Comey in stonewalling congress at every turn.
In truth it would not/did not matter who was nominated for the position with the administration plan to pursue an open border policy facilitating the trafficking of illegal aliens by the government.
Back to President Clinton, the timing of this action could not have been worse in the shadow of the recent and ongoing political slugfest discussed in Part 2 over the CIA Ballistic Missile National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) squabble still echoing in the halls of congress and in the swamp.
Clintonistas sought the high ground against the narrative that Lake was not the right man for the job, arguing that politics were impeding his ability to run the government.
The problem with that allegation and theory was that Democrat Robert Kerry, SSCI ranking democrat, declared Tony Lake “unfit for the position,” which doomed his nomination in committee.
The reason to belabor this incident-this point in time-is to highlight somewhat of a disconnect when it comes to the profession of intelligence in the modern era that has roughly encompassed the last six decades, and the role of the media.
There is a huge difference between the media’s job in finding and reporting the news to inform people, and the IC job of aggressively pursuing-stealing if necessary-information to feed assessments to produce intelligence to advise leaders and make recommendations based on that process.
The targeted information includes the gamut of topics, from political, strategy, technical, military, research and development, etc. The key issue for the media is news of any kind, while the essential element of information on the intel side is typically discerning intent.
This seeming paradox (information vice intelligence) is not a recent problem but has increased starting with the debut of CNN as an alternative to the “big three” networks where we suddenly had cable news breaking 24×7 but has certainly been exacerbated to the nth degree as the internet proliferated and the internet of things enabled unclassified reporting to proliferate via non-traditional means.
It is easy to get confused thinking that a breaking story that seems like a surprise to many is evidence that the news suffices to replace or as a substitute for intelligence.
This is an example of the difference. If you think back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it broke in the newspapers and became national news near immediately.
Long before this happened the CIA and NSC were typically following political events in Kabul where Soviet communists infiltrated the capital and rabble roused politics to propose dogmatic policy that stood little chance of being adopted.
Anarchy in the form of violence was plotted and carried out. The somewhat “mythical” aggrieved Soviet citizens-think the “little green men” later seen in Georgia, Syria and Ukraine-put in a “Mayday” call for Soviet help from “the Motherland.”
This was and is a standard Soviet-now Russian-playbook that we recently saw as an ecoutez et repetez operation in Crimea and the Donbas in Ukraine.
US resources were on the case in Afghanistan in the form of the State Department (Intel shop/IN,) intel like the National Security Agency (NSA,) Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and CIA-particularly the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) at the Washington Navy Yard, building 213.
The extensive-and exquisite-resources of the IC-including national technical means capability (e.g., satellite collected information-) followed the action and produced reports that made their way to the president via the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB.)
Contrary to the public view, this was not an invasion that happened overnight, a total surprise. The US government had years of information for President Carter that was closely following the political action and the Soviet scheming and machinations.
There was plenty of time to take steps to do something about it. That is not to say it would have been a huge priority in the scheme of things.
The Soviet invasion was not an intelligence failure and was not even a surprise. The proof is the photographic evidence of the invasion that arrived via the Corona Program NTM bucket return system. Corona had reached the pinnacle of program maturity represented by the Gambit Program with the high-resolution KH-8 and the later developed wide area synoptic KH-9 system that were on the verge of retirement as the invasion unfolded, at the dawn of the digital age.
In the “necessity and mother” invention progression, the RB-47 begat the U-2 and the SR-71, which begat Corona, Corona begat the Gambit Program, and Gambit begat the near-real time capability that followed.
These systems have been declassified and the collection catalogue is available online. And not to be a troublemaker, but the only way the US would have-in Jimmy Carter’s words-“Photo-reconnaissance Satellite pictures” of global actions such as Soviet Motorized Rifle Divisions staged for invasion is if we knew when and where to look….
The point of this diversion is that left to their own devices a president picks their cabinet-their team-and also sets the priorities of what that team works.
If President Carter-or in our current example President Clinton-desired to pick a DCI focused on political intelligence or on domestic vice strategic intelligence necessary for America’s global power projection efforts, that is their prerogative.
Which I believe makes the debate over President Clinton’s DCI choice somewhat of the tipping point where congress-the senate-decided they could not abide another politically motivated IC leader like the one that released the Ballistic Missile NIE.
Where congress and presidents are ill-served by politically focused leaders who seem to consistently confuse their Joe Friday “nothing but the facts, ma’am,” carry the message to Garcia mission, with their politically influenced and inspired “singing for their supper” messaging.
I first read this Center For Security Policy article shortly after it came out. The context of my interest was the delayed stand-up of what would become the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, an initiative of John Deutch that did not quite make it in 1995 but broke through the following year in the FY 1996 program budget process.
My office was also following the Ballistic Missile NIE kerfuffle when it broke out on the hill and then followed the travails of Deutch as NIMA was established and he suddenly left office.
Here is a quote from the article that I think you will find presents a shocking truth about the political nature of these positions and how having the wrong person-a politician, vice a career intel person-posted to such a position can be a very bad thing for our nation. From the piece:
Far from deserving criticism for making the enormous investment of executive time and energy required to perform this vetting function, the Intelligence Committee and especially its chairman, Sen. Richard Shelby, deserve every American’s thanks. They have spared the U.S. Intelligence Community — and the Nation it serves — a DCI incapable of providing the leadership so urgently required.
Wow! The article goes on to describe problems with Lake’s apparent replacement-George Tenet-who was suspected of leaking classified information that compromised CIA operations in Iraq that led to a loss of capability when the op was “rolled up” by Saddam Hussein in 1996, summarizing with:
This review must take into account not only the significant possibility that this nominee — like Tony Lake — will not be able to escape altogether responsibility for what he knew (or did not know) about odious campaign fund-raising activities, Chinese penetration operations and damaging leaks of classified information by the NSC and/or CIA. No less importantly, the
Select Committee must also consider whether this nominee really brings to the U.S. Intelligence Community the sort of strong, independent and prestigious leadership it must have now and over the next four years.
Of course, George tenet would be confirmed and would later be on watch during 9-11 and would go on to make the somewhat ironic observation that the case for invading Iraq was a “Slam dunk.”
Which was repeated by the administration-particularly Vice President Dick Cheney-and it provided a ready outlet for blame, notwithstanding it was very clear the core team of President Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were hell bent on finishing the job by invading Iraq, letting Colin Powell take point on the sale.
You also had the fact that congress voted on and approved the operation. The truth is that Iraq did have Weapons of Mass Destruction in the form of nerve, blister and chemical agents and they used it on their people. What they didn’t have was a thriving nuclear program, much less a miniaturization research effort that could result in a suitcase device carried by an Al Queda operative.
The Rumsfeld Pentagon was so distrustful of the CIA by this time-under what was likely considered his nemesis since Tenet was the DD CIA when the NIE was released-so, exacerbated by the experience of the aforementioned Ballistic Missile NIE, as well as issues from IC support for Desert Storm.
Which included dust ups over force numbers, casualty estimates and Battle Damage Assessment disputes (between CIA, DIA and United States Central Command.)
One of the first moves made in the wake of 9-11 as the political winds shifted back in favor of separating out the DCI position from the Dir CIA was the establishment of the Under Secretary of Defense-Intelligence as a power play intended to become a solution option as the defacto ODNI.
The Pentagon also stood up its own intelligence cell, the Counterintelligence Field Agency, a somewhat counter-intuitive move when you consider the mission of DIA as not only the Defense Human Intelligence manager, but also as one of the designated IC All Source Intelligence producers.
Again, what does this have to do with reforming the ODNI?
The establishment of the USDI under the Pentagon was a political power play intended to further blunt or undermine the influence of the CIA and played a very large role in shaping the 9-11 commission efforts, as well as the negotiations ongoing in congress and within the IC that shaped the resulting structure of the ODNI: not necessarily for the better.
14 February 2025
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