U.S. Intelligence Needs More than Another Report

By Jeff Stein

With his slice of the $75 billion annual intelligence budget, top U.S. spymaster Adm. Dennis Blair today issued a thick report saying that a "deeper and broader understanding of threats and opportunities" is "necessary to ensure [success]."

We wish him luck. After all, if understanding what's going on in the world can't be bought for $75 billion a year, what good is U.S. intelligence?

The fact is, there are plenty of bright people laboring away in the analytical bowels of the CIA, Pentagon, etc. But what gets to the President too often is hyped and biased, according to another new report on U.S. intelligence, this one from the Brookings Institute.

That's long been the system. What U.S. intelligence really needs, it suggests, is a good old-fashioned city editor with a sharp blue pencil and a nose for b.s.

City editors, for example, regularly ask tough questions about a reporter's sources, which tends to pin-prick the balloons floating a story far beyond its mooring in facts.

But according to "The U.S. Intelligence Community and Foreign Policy: Getting Analysis Right," the CIA briefers hype their presidential daily briefs (PDFs) with references to hush-hush, classified information.

"But such information is often incomplete, may be less timely than open source materials, lacks important context and" says the study's author, Kenneth Liberthal, a former National; Security Council staffer in the Clinton White House, "is occasionally of dubious reliability."

In the world of intelligence analysts, he suggests, classified -- i.e., stolen -- information is like catnip.

They "tend to gravitate to information obtained by clandestine means. Yet much of that information lacks context and is substantively rather marginal," Lieberthal writes.

"As a consequence, analyses overly driven by classified sources may suffer from ignorance of important information in unclassified sources. This is especially notable with the explosion of unclassified material now available on key targets such as China."

In other words, the analysts should try reading newspapers.

Perhaps even worse, Lieberthal alleges, analysts "sometimes 'save[d]' useful information for PDB use," which sounds like the CIA's version of putting a shiny apple on the teacher's desk.
Saving some bits of information for the president's eyes only make sense sometimes, Lieberthal noted drily, but "withholding less sensitive information for hours or days so it appears first in the PDB is dangerous."

When Adm. Blair roots out behavior like all this, then we'll know the Director of National Intelligence is earning its money.