COMMENT The big secret of
that leaked NIE By Herbert E
Meyer
During this past week, politicians
and commentators from across the political
spectrum have been weighing in on the
now-declassified "Key Judgments" of that leaked US
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) about the
Iraq war and its impact on terrorism.
As
usual, it has turned into a partisan brawl. Those
on the left assert that the NIE supports their
contention that the Iraq war has made the
terrorist threat worse, while those on the right
insist that
the
NIE supports President George W Bush's assertion
that the conflict will reduce the terrorist
threat.
Unfortunately, everyone is having
so much fun scoring political points that they've
all missed the astonishing, deeply disturbing
secret that the NIE's Key Judgments inadvertently
reveal.
I spent several years of my life
managing the production of these NIEs for
then-president Ronald Reagan, and before
disclosing the overlooked secret contained in this
one, please allow me to explain just what NIEs are
and how the process works:
Simply put, an
NIE is a projection of trends and developments
that reflects the combined thinking of the 16
agencies that comprise the US intelligence
service. Its purpose is to provide the president
with an understanding of what the future is likely
to be - and to provide this understanding soon
enough, and clearly enough, that if the president
doesn't like what lies ahead he can take steps to
change the future before it happens.
The president's radar In this
sense, an NIE is to the president what radar is to
the captain of a Boeing 747. If the radar tells
the captain there's a mountain 80 kilometers
ahead, the captain has time to decide what to do -
to maneuver to a higher altitude so he can fly
over the mountain, for instance, or to change
course to fly around it. But if the radar doesn't
tell the captain there's a mountain dead ahead -
or if the radar doesn't see that mountain until
it's 800 meters dead ahead - then it has failed.
It will be too late for the captain to respond.
Moreover, if the radar screen displays so
much information - about what's ahead, what's
behind, above, below and what's off the port and
starboard wings - that the captain's eyeballs
start to bleed when he looks at that luminous
green line sweeping around the screen, then the
radar is worse than useless. It's a downright
hazard, and the pilot would be better off shutting
it down and flying by the seat of his pants.
In other words, the radar must provide
information about what lies ahead not only soon
enough to take action, but also clearly enough
that the pilot can understand what danger is real
and what dangers are merely theoretical
possibilities.
One problem inherent to
NIEs is that they sometimes reflect nothing more
than the institutional biases of each of the 16
participating agencies. A second inherent problem
is that sometimes these agencies are so determined
not to be proved wrong about what the future holds
that they try to have it both ways, for instance
by obscuring their projections beneath an
avalanche of "on the one hand, on the other hand"
sentences.
The best and most concise
description of NIEs that suffer from these
problems comes from Reagan's great director of
central intelligence, William J Casey: "Total
crap."
That's why Casey's orders to me
were to make certain that the NIEs we produced for
Reagan overcame these problems.
First, I
was to sort though the differing judgments of the
16 agencies to understand whether they were basing
their conclusions on the facts contained in the
text of the NIE itself or merely on long-standing
institutional biases. If the latter, my job was to
confront the agency representatives and then work
with them to align their judgments with the facts.
Second, when an agency wanted to dissent
from the consensus, it was my job to ensure that
this dissent was written as clearly as possible so
the president could understand not only what this
agency was saying, but why it had chosen to
dissent from the majority view.
Finally,
when all the bureaucratic fighting had ended and
we had hosed the blood off my office walls, it was
my job to run the crucial Key Judgments of the NIE
through my word processor one last time, to ensure
that the finished product was intelligible to an
intelligent but busy policymaker.
That
meant knocking out all the "on the one hand, on
the other hand" sentences and replacing them with
sentences that made a point. It meant eliminating
the gobbledygook sentences that invariably had
crept in, such as: "We judge that Soviet leaders
will be neither too hasty nor too reluctant either
to overreact or underreact to the developing
circumstances flowing from the new initiative." It
meant weeding out Key Judgments that were accurate
but worthless - such as the old standby: "We judge
that the future of US-Soviet relations will be
volatile and subject to change."
Casey
the wordsmith When I had done the best I
could, the NIE went to Casey, who himself would
read through it - pen in hand - and make whatever
changes he thought would clarify or sharpen the
Key Judgments. No matter how busy Casey was - and
he was a very busy man - he always found the time
to wordsmith the NIEs, because he believed that
arming the president with the best possible
intelligence greatly enhanced the president's
ability to develop the best possible policies to
accomplish his objectives.
The final step
in the estimates process was a closed-door,
secure-room meeting of the 16 intelligence-agency
chiefs, to hash out the final text of the Key
Judgments that would be sent to the president.
Casey himself would chair these meetings, and
while sometimes they were friendly and
workmanlike, more often they were contentious and,
well, explosive.
At one of these meetings,
the State Department's intelligence chief
delivered a rambling outburst whose point - as
best we could understand it - was that the
revolution we were predicting in a certain country
wasn't going to happen because there were other
countries in even worse shape that weren't likely
to see revolutions.
The deathly silence
that followed - none of us had the slightest idea
of how to respond to logic like this - was finally
broken by Casey himself. "That's the stupidest
goddamned thing I've ever heard in my life. But if
that's your position, so be it." Then he ordered
me to modify the NIE to include the State
Department's dissent ("... and write it just the
goddamned way he said it") and then get the
finished version printed and distributed.
Reading through the now-declassified Key
Judgments of the NIE on Trends in Global
Terrorism, it's obvious that the US intelligence
service has abandoned the Casey approach. Some
sentences in the Key Judgments contradict
themselves, and some are trite ("We judge that
groups of all stripes will continue to use the
Internet ..."). Others are classic examples of the
"on the one hand, on the other hand" syndrome. And
still others are simply unintelligible - they are
neither right nor wrong, but written in a way to
make them subject to whatever interpretation the
reader wishes to make.
No issue is more
important to the United States' security than the
future of terrorism, and nothing could be more
helpful to the president than a clear and accurate
projection of what that future is likely to be.
That is what this NIE should have provided, but
doesn't.
Now you see the "secret" that the
Key Judgments of this NIE inadvertently reveal -
and it isn't about Iraq or about the future of
terrorism. It's about the United States' own
intelligence service, and what this NIE has
revealed is that the radar is busted. That's
frightening, and what's even more frightening is
the realization that if we Americans know it, so
too do our enemies.
Rest assured they will
be looking closely to see if the president decides
just to ignore his busted radar and fly by the
seat of his pants - or if he decides to get it
fixed.
This article was originally
published in The American Thinker.Herbert E Meyer served during the Reagan
administration as special assistant to the
director of central intelligence and vice chairman
of the National Intelligence Council. His DVD on
The Siege of
Western Civilizationhas become an
international best-seller.
