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The neo-con philosophy of
intelligence
By Tom Barry
(Used with permission from Foreign Policy
in Focus This is the first in a series of
investigative reports from Interhemispheric Resource
Center on the influence of a web of American
organizations and individuals - chiefly associated with
the right-wing Project for the New American Century - in
setting radical new directions in US foreign and
military policy.)
"The message is that there
are no 'knowns'. There are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns. That is to say there are
things that we now know we don't know. But there are
also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we
don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull
all this information together, and we then say, well
that's basically what we see as the situation ..."
- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, June 6,
2002
The deepening quagmire in Iraq and the
failure of the Bush administration to produce evidence
to back its arguments for invading Iraq have stymied the
American neo-conservatives' agenda for preventive war
and regime change around the world. But their assault on
what they call the "liberal establishment" in US foreign
policy has not completely stalled.
Neo-con
groups such as the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC) and the Center for Security Policy have seized on
the report by US weapons inspector David Kay to advance
their decades-old campaign to reform US intelligence
operations. They have adroitly brushed aside Kay's
statement that "we were all wrong, probably". They have
attempted to focus the deepening concerns about faulty
US intelligence on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
alone.
The neo-cons, along with the
Republican-controlled Congress and President George W
Bush himself, regard the failure to find the purported
stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) as
another opportunity to push ahead with their agenda to
overhaul the US intelligence apparatus. In announcing
the creation of a bipartisan commission in the wake of
the Kay Report, Bush said that the investigation would
recommend reforms that would enable the US government to
do a better job in fighting the "war on terrorism".
It's not that intelligence reform isn't needed
or that the CIA isn't due for some serious
housecleaning. But the right wants to permanently
disable the CIA as the government's main intelligence
agency. Over the past four decades, the ideologues of
the right have repeatedly charged that the CIA has
routinely underestimated threats to US national
security. It's been their contention that the CIA is so
caught up in the minutiae of intelligence that they are
unable to see the big picture of actual and future
threats. The CIA is thus being set up as the main
institutional fall guy in the Iraq WMD scandal. However,
the true problem rests with the very type of
intelligence that right-wing groups such as the National
Strategy Information Center (NSIC) and PNAC are now
hoping to institutionalize.
In a maddening and
bizarre twist of the Iraq invasion scam, the neo-cons
are attempting (and may likely succeed) to have the US
intelligence apparatus overhauled - not so that it
provides more fact-based intelligence to policymakers,
but to further decentralize intelligence gathering and
to further politicize intelligence.
Trust our
basic instincts
Gary Schmitt, executive director
of the PNAC, argues that what counts in intelligence is
not so much correct information but basic instincts. In
a Los Angeles Times op-ed on the findings of Kay and the
Iraq Survey Team, Schmitt acknowledges that the Bush
administration was wrong in making the case that Iraq
had an ongoing program to develop weapons of mass
destruction. Nonetheless, Schmitt, a longtime critic of
the CIA, says that "our basic instincts were sound".
What's more, he contends, we would risk the country's
security if we backed down now in what Bush this week
called "the war against weapons of mass destruction".
Instead, as they pursue reform in intelligence
operations, US policymakers and the presidential
commission "should understand that what we lack in
detailed intelligence about weapons is more than offset
by our strategic intelligence about particular
countries' intent". In other words, our instincts about
the intent rather than the actual capacity of countries
such as Iran and North Korea should be the true guide
for future foreign policy. This is what intelligence
reformers and hawks like Schmitt call "strategic
intelligence".
Thus, the neo-cons, who were the
leading strategists and cheerleaders for a new war
against Iraq, are among the strongest supporters of
plans to overhaul US intelligence operations - not
because they believe that the CIA doesn't get its facts
right. On the contrary, neo-cons like Schmitt, Richard
Perle, David Brooks and Frank Gaffney say the CIA is too
focused on the facts while giving short shrift to
"strategic intelligence" that pays more attention to
threat assessments based on instinctual understanding of
the intent of enemy nations. "It is premature to think
that military preemption can be taken off the table
completely," says Schmitt, simply because we didn't have
all the facts right. Given that basic instincts were
sound about "[Saddam] Hussein's intentions and history",
we would be "missing the forest for the trees" if we
were to back down from a war against weapons of mass
destruction, concludes Schmitt.
Echoing Schmitt,
Frank Gaffney, a protege of Richard Perle and director
of the militarist Center for Security Policy, also
seized on the Kay Report as an opportunity to bash the
CIA. Gaffney, who recommended that Kay be named new
director of central intelligence, has called for the
dismissal of CIA director George Tenet. As a moderate
conservative and part of the circle of realpolitikers
close to the president's father, Tenet has long been
considered by neo-cons as an obstacle to their designs
for reshaping the US intelligence community.
Perle, like Gaffney and Schmitt, believes that
the Iraq invasion was the right policy even if the
administration's arguments for the war were based on
faulty intelligence. In fact, he uses the Kay Report to
underscore his long-running contention that "our
intelligence in the Gulf has been woefully inadequate" -
in a reprise of his past attacks on the CIA, Defense
Intelligence Agency, and the State Department's
intelligence operations for underestimating threats and
having an Arabist prejudice.
David Brooks, a New
York Times columnist close to neo-con political camps
both inside and outside the Bush administration, also
jumped into the slash-and-burn campaign against the CIA.
Like Schmitt, Brooks is an advocate of "strategic
intelligence". He charges that the main problem with US
intelligence is not that it cannot get the facts right
but that its intelligence gathering "has factored out
all those insights that may be the product of an
individual's intuition and imagination". At the CIA,
contends, Brooks, "scientism [is] in full bloom". Brooks
describes scientism as an old-school approach whereby
intelligence is obtained through a scientific method
that sidelines policy analysis and psychological
assessments of foreign regimes as well as a
Dostoyevsky-like understanding of the forces of good and
evil, crime and punishment.
Setting the agenda
for a new intelligence paradigm
Two longtime
advocates of the type of flexible intelligence operation
put in motion by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith are Abram
Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, senior associates at the
National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) in the
1990s. The NSIC along with a half-dozen other
think-tanks and committees produced reports in the
mid-1990s that recommended intelligence reforms. As it
turns out, the NSIC's recommendations had the most
influence in shaping the intelligence practices of the
George W Bush administration.
In 1996 the
Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, a project of
the NSIC, produced a report entitled "The Future of US
Intelligence", whose recommendations prefigured the new
forays into intelligence operations by the Pentagon and
the vice-president's office. Co-authored by Shulsky and
Schmitt, the report argued that the intelligence
community should adopt a new methodology aimed at
"obtaining information others try to keep secret and
penetrating below the 'surface' impression created by
publicly available information to determine whether an
adversary is deceiving us or denying us key
information". The document recommended the establishment
of "competing analytic centers" with "different points
of view" that could "provide policymakers better
protection against new 'Pearl Harbors', ie, against
being surprised". Rather than a narrow focus on
information collection, "intelligence analysis must ...
make it more relevant to policymakers by emphasizing the
forces that shape a given situation", the authors
contend.
The study's overall conclusion was that
the "future of intelligence" depended on building a new
model that would offer "greater flexibility in the
collection process" and produce the "big picture" of
security threats. Ultimately, Shulsky and Schmitt
concluded, the purpose of analysis is to help the
policymaker shape the future, not predict it.
Intelligence analysis should go beyond simply
identifying security threats and assessing the military
capabilities of a present or future enemy or a
competitor nation; it should be "opportunity analysis"
that anticipates chances to advance US interests.
Conclusions of "Future of Intelligence"
report
- The centralization of intelligence
under the CIA should not be extended to post-Cold War
circumstances.
- Intelligence analysis should focus
more on opportunities to shape situations rather than
concentrating on predictions of the future.
- Covert
action operations should be reintegrated into foreign
policy and should be considered an instrument to foster
democratic transitions and to counter efforts that
frustrate these transitions.
- A "new paradigm for
intelligence" would closely integrate a more
decentralized intelligence community with policy and
military sectors. No longer would the CIA's national
intelligence estimates be considered superior to
policy-driven intelligence.
- The timeliness,
accessibility and focus of an intelligence product can
be as important as its scholarly quality.
- Greater
flexibility and a more diversified structure are
necessary in the intelligence collection process.
-
Counterintelligence should be a wholly integrated part
of the new intelligence paradigm and should extend
beyond counterespionage to include a collection and
analytic process that penetrates and manipulates the
intelligence efforts of US adversaries.
(Source:
Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, Consortium for the Study
of Intelligence, "The Future of U.S. Intelligence"
(National Strategy Information Center, 1996).
The views of Shulsky and Schmitt on intelligence
reform and the political philosophy of intelligence are
now widely shared and expressed by the right's web of
think tanks, polemicists and administration officials.
Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff General Richard Myers, and other Bush
administration officials routinely employ the concepts,
terminology and code words of the neo-cons' agenda for
overhauling the US intelligence apparatus.
In
addition to the NSIC report, this neo-con agenda and
philosophy of intelligence is clearly articulated in
other publications co-authored by Shulsky and Schmitt,
who argue that intelligence gathering and analysis
should be considered more as a philosophy than a
science. Their contention that intelligence needs to be
more interpretive, rely more on covert action, and
accentuate counterintelligence operations is developed
in their book Silent Warfare: Understanding the World
of Intelligence. In their 1999 essay, Leo Strauss
and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean
Nous), Shulsky and Schmitt link their view of
intelligence reform to the controversial teachings of
Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who taught at the
University of Chicago from 1949 to 1967.
Strauss
was Shulsky's mentor when he was a graduate student at
the University of Chicago. Strauss, a German Jewish
emigre, developed a new school of Machiavellian
political philosophy contending that the means justify
the ends in governance as long as the regime has a firm
understanding of pre-modern natural laws - such as the
eternal conflict between good and evil. In such a
political philosophy, truth is not necessarily an
important value.
As Shulsky and Schmitt point
out in Silent Warfare, their own philosophy of
intelligence sharply contrasts with the scientific
approach to intelligence gathering. Allen Dulles,
director of Central Intelligence under president Dwight
Eisenhower, had adopted as the CIA's motto the biblical
verse: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall
make you free." That might have been fine as a guiding
principle in biblical times or even as a useful piece of
Cold War propaganda. But as an operating principle for
national intelligence, it was inadequate and
counterproductive, according to Shulsky and Schmitt, who
concluded their book advising that "truth is not the
goal" of intelligence gathering - the goal is "victory".
Targeting the liberal mindset at the CIA
During the Cold War, right-wing ideologues and
militarists repeatedly charged that the CIA and other US
intelligence agencies have routinely and systematically
underestimated Soviet military capacity and
empire-building ambitions. In their view, one of the
main reasons for this intelligence failure has been the
liberal mindset that pervades the CIA and State
Department. According to Shulsky and Schmitt, this
liberal belief system corrupts intelligence gathering
through mirror-imaging - "imagining that the country one
is studying is fundamentally similar to one's own and
hence can be understood in the same terms". This
mirror-imaging, they wrote, has led US intelligence
agencies to disregard one of the fundamental principles
of Straussian political philosophy: the need to
understand the nature of a regime in order to predict
its intentions. The neo-cons argue that by assuming the
universality of human political behavior, the liberals
at the CIA and State Department have blinded the US
government to the real capacities and intentions of
tyrannical regimes like the Soviet Union and Iraq ,
which think and operate differently from democratic
regimes.
For this reason, Shulsky and Schmitt
advocate the increased use of a counterintelligence
strategy guided by the principle that intelligence is
"part of a struggle between two countries". The two
principal corollaries of counterintelligence are that:
1) A country's intelligence should "limit or distort"
what its adversaries know about its capacity and
intentions; and 2) Each country must assume that it is
being deceived by its opponents and must therefore
penetrate the adversary to ferret out its capacities and
intentions based on what is known about the character of
each regime.
Shortly after the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz created a
new team to shape intelligence about Iraq . Not trusting
the CIA or even the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA) bureaucracies, they put their own team on
the job. A common charge by right-wing analysts is that
the State Department "regards security threats largely
as opportunities for diplomacy", and the CIA is
similarly regarded as overly bureaucratic and cautious.
Rather than rely on the main intelligence agencies, the
hardliners in the Bush administration created an
intelligence analysis group housed in the Pentagon. At
first an informal team, it later became the Office of
Special Plans. The OSP worked alongside the Near East
and South Asia (NESA) bureau, both of which reported to
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. In
late 2003, the Office of Special Plans morphed into the
Office of Northern Gulf Affairs.
Web helps
spin tall tales
Before the Iraq invasion,
Rumsfeld promised that the US government would be acting
on "good intelligence". However, only those who closely
followed the debates and theorizing about intelligence
analysis over the past three decades would have known
that when the defense secretary referred to "good
intelligence" he meant what many intelligence experts
call "strategic intelligence". Good intelligence, in
other words, doesn't necessarily mean solid information
about such matters as offensive capability, support for
terrorism, or plans for aggression.
A few days
before Bush delivered his 2003 State of the Union
address citing damaging (but false) evidence that Iraq
was intent on producing nuclear weapons, Wolfowitz told
the Council on Foreign Relations that the case for war
against Iraq "is grounded in current intelligence - that
comes not only from sophisticated overhead satellites
and our ability to intercept communications, but from
brave people who told us the truth at the risk of their
very lives. We have that; it is very convincing." But
General Myers explained in the aftermath of the
invasion: "Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean
something is true." Myers, who was appointed by Rumsfeld
and who is highly regarded by the Center for Security
Policy and neo-con policy institutes for his strong
pro-missile defense, anti-China, and space weapons
positions, defined intelligence as merely an estimate.
Contrary to what many policymakers thought when they
supported the Iraqi war resolution on the basis of US
intelligence about Iraq's WMDs and terrorist ties, Myers
said that intelligence "doesn't mean it's a fact. I
mean, that's not what intelligence is."
Alarmed
by the takeover of the US intelligence apparatus by
philosophers, hawks and ideologues, former senior CIA
analyst Ray McGovern formed the Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity. The Pentagon's claims about
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were "an
intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions", said
McGovern. He claims that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz
established their own intelligence unit because the CIA
wasn't giving the hawks the "correct answers". Joining
the chorus of criticism of politicized intelligence,
Patrick Lang, a former director of Middle East analysis
at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) said
that Rumsfeld set up the Office of Special Plans to
undermine the CIA and DIA and then mounted a
threat-assessment campaign that was "political
propaganda", not intelligence.
So caught up were
they in their conviction that successful politics and
intelligence must involve the arts of deception and
counterintelligence that the neo-cons like Shulsky and
Wolfowitz and Republican Party hardliners like Rumsfeld
and Cheney ended up victims of their own philosophy of
intelligence. Their politicization and manipulation of
intelligence did succeed in winning public and
policymaker support for the Iraq invasion, but their
lies certainly did not lead to victory. Giving them the
benefit of the doubt, it appears not only did they
attempt to manipulate weak intelligence to make the
public case for war, but that they also deceived
themselves about the actual capacities and real
intentions of the Saddam regime. When they couldn't find
the hard evidence about the WMD stockpiles in Iraq ,
they saw this as further evidence that Saddam was a
master of deception. In other words, the absence of good
intelligence about the WMD capabilities and terrorist
connections was interpreted as proof that Saddam was a
liar and deceiver.
So convinced were the Bush
administration's hardliners by their own ideology and
their agenda for restructuring the Middle East that they
could not accept the determinations of the CIA and the
conclusions of the UN inspectors that Iraq had indeed
eliminated most if not all of its stockpiles of WMDs.
Rather than formulating policy based on this
intelligence, they sought to manufacture their own
intelligence through the Office of Special Plans and by
cherry-picking tidbits of gossip and unverified
intelligence from the CIA that would support their
conclusions about what the intentions of the evil Saddam
regime must be.
Leo Strauss, who taught the
neo-cons to look for the "hidden truth" in politics,
would surely have agreed with the assessment of then
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer who told reporters
that "there's a bigger picture here". The hardliners
have repeatedly argued that intelligence is not a
science but a best guess.
"Intelligence will
never be perfect," explained Rumsfeld to the Senate
Armed Service Committee following the release of the Kay
Report. "We do not, will not, and cannot know everything
that's going on in this world of ours," he explained.
Following the release of the Kay Report, Bush
defended his decision to launch a preventive war against
Iraq based on what was known about the "capacity and
intent" of the Saddam regime. Asked about the report,
the president responded: "I don't know all the facts.
What we don't know yet is what we thought and what the
Iraq Survey Group has found, and we want to look at
that." What the US public and Congress should expect is
that the president gets all the facts before declaring
war. The independent investigation should also
investigate why and how the intelligence that the
president did receive was so politicized to support a
policy agenda that existed prior to September 11.
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus.)
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