TIM WEINER, "Report Finds Basic Flaws in U.S. Intelligence Operations," New York Times, June 3, 1998
WASHINGTON -- U.S. intelligence "needs to be scrubbed" from the top down, from its spies to its analysts to its bureaucratic barons, according to a classified report into the intelligence agencies' inability to foresee India's May 11 nuclear test.
The debacle revealed chronic failures of imagination and personnel, flaws in information-gathering and analysis, and faulty leadership and training, said the report's author, retired Adm. David Jeremiah, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
His investigation, requested by the Central Intelligence Director George Tenet provided a core sample of the structural weaknesses in U.S. intelligence that go far beyond the question of India.
Jeremiah said these included some sobering realities about the CIA and its sister services:
-- The CIA had no spies worthy of the name in India.
-- Its ability to pry information out of people is weak worldwide.
-- The nation's spy satellites typically produce far too much information for overworked and undertrained intelligence analysts to handle.
-- In India, satellites and analysts alike failed to focus on the nuclear test site, despite clear clues that a nuclear test was coming. Senior intelligence officials discounted those clues and did not order their underlings to examine them.
Senior U.S. policy-makers and intelligence officials had an "underlying mind-set" that India would not test its nuclear weapons, he said. That fixed idea was unaffected by the fact that India's newly elected Hindu nationalist leaders openly and repeatedly vowed to deploy the bomb. The United States never understood that they were driven by "national pride and psyche" to go nuclear, Jeremiah said. As a result, he said, its $27 billion-a-year intelligence eyes and ears were blind and deaf to the test, which ignited nuclear tensions and an arms race between India and its regional rival, Pakistan.
Jeremiah, a former commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, described a kind of intellectual laziness at the intelligence services.
"You fall into a pattern; you start to expect things to happen," he said. "You need to have a contrarian view." The CIA's managers were passive, he said, instead of taking command and saying: " 'Who's in charge? Take charge. Make things happen.' "
The CIA has talented people capable of great work, he said, and it "has had a startling number of successes" over the years. But it needs many more analysts with better training and sharper skills, he said. It should bring in outside experts to analyze major events. It must be "much more aggressive in thinking through how the other guy thought" -- breaking out of American political and cultural patterns to grasp the ways in which the rest of the world thinks.
None of the criticism in Jeremiah's report is particularly new. The House Intelligence Committee, for instance, reported last year that the CIA and its sister services lack "the analytic depth, breadth and expertise to monitor political, military and economic developments worldwide." But rarely has a report commissioned by the CIA drawn such swift and sweeping conclusions.
Other veteran intelligence officers concur with Jeremiah's judgments. Gordon Oehler, who retired last year as director of the CIA's Nonproliferation Center, said the group of intelligence analysts responsible for interpreting spy satellite photos is a far less skilled group than it was at the end of the Cold War. The analysts now have an average of about 18 months' experience in their highly technical tasks, said Jeffrey Harris, a recently retired director of the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that builds spy satellites.
Oehler said the "contrarian views" that Jeremiah called for are sometimes disregarded by senior officials, which discourages fresh thinking. Clinton administration officials dislike inconvenient facts about nuclear weapons, he said, and sometimes disregard information that does not fit "a preconceived view of what the world ought to look like."
Jeremiah, whose report remains secret, said he would recommend that the the director of Central Intelligence make changes to improve the ways the CIA and other intelligence agencies gather information, analyze that information, manage their employees and train new people. Tenet, who said he discussed Jeremiah's report with President Clinton on Tuesday, immediately accepted these recommendations.
Tenet said that, in a perfect world, the CIA would never again miss an event that changes the course of history.
"I hope I could say that it'll never again occur," he said. "But given the problems we face in the world, and given the kind of resources and commitments we have around the world, U.S. intelligence is stretched and we have to do the best we can."