It’s hard to imagine something similar happening today. Presidential administrations seem more cavalier with classified material. The political incentives to leak are simply too great, and the press is very willing to accommodate. The chances of a leaker getting caught are slim at best, and the government doesn’t have the resources to investigate a tenth of the cases presented to it.
In 2002, Thomas Fingar was the senior intelligence analyst who got Iraq right. He judged, correctly, that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted an abandoned nuclear weapons program. In accordance with the axiom that holds the absence of evidence not being the evidence of absence, he put the prewar pattern of facts together in a way that suggested that Saddam kept to a policy of deliberate ambiguity despite having no weapons.
Others in the intelligence community fiercely resisted his conclusions. His expertise, and the expertise of Department of Energy (DOE) specialists who actually build centrifuges, was simply disregarded. Fingar and the DOE analysts had contacted the company that made the centrifuge Iraq had been found with, and they told him in no uncertain terms that the centrifuges could not be used to enrich uranium at a rate that would produce weapons-grade material. There were ring magnets too, which the Office of the Vice President was obsessed with—magnets that might be part of a centrifuge assembly. They had many applications. “If you didn’t assume they were for centrifuges, you could have judged them to be used in many other places. In fact, we know now, they were used for their missile program.”
What galled Fingar, though, was that the National Intelligence Estimate was “terrible,” as he put it. Very few people read it. (Fingar knew this because the highly classified document had to be signed out by any official who wanted to do so.) So in his view, policymakers were acting like lawyers when it came to secret information. Find the precedents; build the argument; make a clear case. Saddam was evil; he had a nuclear program; he’d had a missile program; if he had one, he must have one. But intelligence isn’t like that, and the information had to be respected for what it was.
There is a reason the U.S. government spends so much time training analysts about the fragility of information. The methodology of intelligence analysis is a cultivated skill; its subtleties are not self-evident. Politicians bring to the table a set of prejudices and predispositions, as was illustrated during a “missile gap” exchange between Allen Dulles and Stuart Symington. In declassified transcripts from closed congressional hearings, the director of central intelligence explains to the senator from Missouri that the intelligence community cannot estimate raw information:
“When I saw you with other people who know their subject,” said Symington, “we offered you what we thought were evidences of more [missile] testing.”
“But gave me no evidence,” said Dulles.
“Well, we thought it was evidence,” said Symington. “Let’s not get into that.”
“You gave me assertions,” said Dulles. “I want to make that point perfectly clear.”
Later, tensions rise as Symington again asserts that the opinions of his advisers constituted information. Dulles responds, “I want some of the background on which this information was adduced. I mean, the—if someone says there are 55 [missile] firings, there must be some evidence of those firings. What is the evidence?”
When Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, the “facts” were based on a bad source, and assertions followed. (Echoes of Dulles: “You gave me assertions. . . . What is the evidence?”) It is dangerous when policymakers abuse their access to classified information. But in the case of Iraq, it was even more dangerous that they used the information without really knowing what they were doing.
The obvious solution to the misuse of intelligence was to broaden access to it so that analysts from many different perspectives could use their unique lenses to arrive at a conclusion. The experts had to be trusted and empowered. And the information itself, being that it formed the basis for National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), which formed the basis for policy that could lead the country to war, had to be processed in a way that took nothing for granted.
As the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2005 to 2008, Fingar would be the administration’s point person for writing the NIEs. In 2007, he was a principal author of an NIE on Iran. He knew quite plainly about the policy divide inside the administration. He also knew that once a piece of information made it into the brain of a policymaker, it would stick.
The process of crafting an NIE under Fingar could be interminable and exacting. First, analysts would come up with the assignment parameters: what is the puzzle to be assembled here, and what are reasonable questions that can—and can’t—be answered? If analysts needed more information, they would go to the collectors (CIA, DIA) and ask if more was available. If it wasn’t available, analysts would be asked if it could be acquired. Sometimes the answer was yes, in which case the NIE would wait on the new information so long as it didn’t push the time frame too far to the right.
Slowly, the framework of the estimate would come into form, as bits and piece of evidence were analyzed and validated, or rejected, or rejected or validated with caveats—whatever the iterative process showed. Often this entire process would be repeated if the information seemed incomplete and the analysis unsatisfactory. After a preliminary hypothesis was formed, the NIE would be distributed to the analytical arms of the U.S. intelligence community, and based on their feedback, the NIE staff would carefully note where the analysts agreed and disagreed. If the CIA disagreed about a certain conclusion, their analysts would be invited to hash it out. Often, Fingar found, agencies disagreed with the analogies or metaphors that were used to illuminate a conclusion. The NIE, after all, is a story written for policymakers. The metaphors had to be precise.
Fingar didn’t like his NIEs to have caveats. Better to draw a conclusion that incorporated the doubts by using language precisely rather than to say that agency X simply disagreed. At the end of the process, the staff would create several different versions: one for the White House, one for Congress, and one for senior officials elsewhere in government. Congress didn’t get to see as many sources and methods as the White House did. The final NIE, one hundred pages long, had fifteen hundred source citations.11
In the case of the 2007 NIE, Fingar was ordered, to his surprise, to create a fourth version—one specifically for public consumption.12 The order came straight from President George W. Bush. Fingar never knew precisely what the motive was, though he suspected that the Oval Office wanted to preempt the vice president’s office from making rash remarks about Iran policy.
So Fingar created an executive summary with sources and methods excised. One of the conclusions that he published for public consumption was that, with a high degree of confidence, Iran had “halted its nuclear weapons program” in 2003. He added the important caveat that
we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.
What Fingar could not publish was that the United States possessed evidence that Iran had started up a new, undeclared uranium enrichment facility at Qom. If that point had been published, it would have raised the question, How does the United States know this? The answer was a combination of human sources, signals intelligence, and imagery analysis. Fingar won’t say why the sources were too sensitive at the time, but in the judgment of the intelligence community, the fact simply could not be compromised.
Fingar added a footnote to his published co
nclusion stating that the NIE’s conclusion here referred to “Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.” Indeed, as he later noted, “The declassified portion of the estimate did not address how long it would take Iran to convert highly enriched uranium into a weapon but the classified text did. What I can say here is that we judged Iran has the scientific, technical, and industrial capacity to produce a weapon if it decided to do so.”
Iran wasn’t building bombs, but it still was converting uranium at a rate that could be used for bombs.
The previous NIE had concluded that a military option was probably the only viable one, given the time frame it would take for Iran to make an actual nuclear weapon. The new NIE suggested that although Iran had not abandoned its goal of possessing a weapon, it would take some time to actually build one, if they decided to do so. It did not mean at all that Iran was out of the nuclear business.
But the White House went out of its way not to clarify, and the press jumped on the conclusion that the weapons program had been shut down. Take that, Dick Cheney!
Fingar told the authors that “they wanted this out, and then they refused to take responsibility for it.” Even transparency can be used as a political weapon. To Fingar it was a reason to treat the privilege of accessing secret information with humility.
Wearing his other hat, as deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, he tried to change the culture of firewalls within the intelligence community that often provided for stovepiped, inaccurate, rushed, or just plain stupid analysis. The “need to know” habit long drilled into analysts turned into a “responsibility to share.” That is, if a report was produced from raw data, it would have to justify its use of caveats and compartments. Reports were to be written for as many people as possible to see. All information that is disseminated, he believed, ought to be discoverable to analysts working on the subject. If part of an analysis was based on an extremely sensitive source and had to be excised, the analyst would have to certify that whatever he or she kept from other analysts would not change the conclusion.
Fingar encouraged the creation of A-Space, a cross-agency collaborative database of classified and unclassified information that was easily searchable. He is also responsible for another innovation—one that the Obama administration has done away with. He allowed his National Intelligence Officers (NIOs) to brief members of the press on background about their subject areas. To him, it was useful for the press to understand the thought process of policymakers who were wading their way through a difficult subject. So long as his NIOs didn’t share classified information—and he trusted they would not—they could provide guidance to a reporter who was writing on, say, North Korea, or China.
Stephen Hadley, national security adviser to President Bush, knew that a pleasant spring morning in April 2008 would not become a pleasant spring day. A month after Israel had bombed what was believed to be a nuclear weapons manufacturing plant, Hadley was going to acknowledge to the House and Senate select committees on intelligence that the United States had provided Israel with intelligence well before the raid, knew for weeks in advance that Israel planned a strike, and (according to one official who remains in government) helped Israel disable part of Syria’s air defense system along its northern border with Turkey. (Other published sources dispute this account, suggesting that the United States did not know in advance and had asked Israel not to disclose it even if they wanted to.)
The September 6, 2007, raid caught the world by surprise. The White House refused to shed any light on the subject for months after. Slowly, details about what the site was, or wasn’t or might have been, began to appear in the press. Hadley had given the congressional Gang of Eight (four leaders from each party) a verbal briefing a week before. But the committees, controlled by Democrats in the throes of debating intelligence about the necessity of a surge in Iraq, demanded a full briefing. Why hadn’t the White House briefed Congress before? After all, a team of White House advisers had been meeting weekly to discuss the impending Israeli action, and at least some U.S. intelligence resources were involved.
It wasn’t, as some later speculated, that the United States didn’t agree with Israel’s interpretation of the intelligence. Hadley had simply made a judgment call about secrecy. Technically, since the United States was not running the operation, it was not an “ongoing and current” covert activity. Practically, he simply did not trust Democrats on the committee to keep their mouths shut. Many Democrats on the committee were haranguing the Bush administration on a daily basis, and Hadley wasn’t about to pull them aside and share one of the most sensitive counterproliferation secrets in the world.
The Democrats had good reason to be upset, however. As the CIA later admitted, the United States had been observing the site with a spy satellite for more than a year before the raid, and secretly shared intelligence on the reactor site with Turkey in an effort to preempt the necessity of an Israeli attack. As a Bush White House official later conceded, “We were monitoring the site. That was an ongoing operation under almost any definition. But we didn’t trust them and they didn’t trust us, and this is the situation we found ourselves in.”
Indeed, any hope the Bush administration had in using the formal disclosure of U.S. participation to advance its nonproliferation policy or rally opinion against North Korea was dashed by the tribal emotions unleashed by Democrats on the Hill. Though the increased partisanship in Washington is rarely discussed in this context, it is a driving force in the secrecy debate.
To be clear, relations between the secrecy apparatus and Congress have never been cordial. Bill Casey, former director of central intelligence, referred to congressional intelligence committees as “those assholes on the hill,” and as Trevor Paglen noted, would mumble “incomprehensibly through his briefings, when he bothered to brief the intelligence committees at all.”13
Fairly or not, Congress has long had a reputation for leaking classified information. (Frederick Hitz disagrees with that assessment. “Since [1975], the most damaging leaks have come from the executive branch, from intelligence officers or administration operatives who disagree with the policy behind the spying or covert action, rather than from a more vulnerable Congress.”)14 In a preemptive move against careless revelations, on October 5, 2001, President Bush issued a memorandum stating that the need “to protect military operational security, intelligence sources and methods, and sensitive law enforcement investigations” was too great to entrust to 535 members of Congress and their staffs.15 The memo decreed that all such information would be restricted to the eight senior members of the legislative branch. Congress publicly balked, and five days later this policy was rescinded. Though “Gang of Eight” briefings became a regular occurrence (the NSA terrorist surveillance program being one such example), congressional oversight committees resumed regular hearings on national security.
According to The 9/11 Commission Report, in 1998 Osama bin Laden, ever on the move and tracked by satellite phones, stopped using this “particular means of communication almost immediately after a leak to the Washington Times. This made it much more difficult for the National Security Agency to intercept his conversations.”16 Jed Babbin, deputy under secretary of defense for George H. W. Bush, blamed an unnamed Republican senator for “blurting out” the information. CIA veteran Michael Scheuer, who ran the bin Laden program at that time, said in a 2005 speech that “a direct causal line from the publication of that story to the attacks of September 11” could be drawn.17
Even in instances where Congress is kept appraised of black operations, often and for political reasons knowledge of such briefings is later denied. Notably, in 2002 eventual Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was one of four members of Congress briefed on the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques. As described by the Washington Post, “Among the techniques desc
ribed, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.”18 Pelosi denies such details were revealed.
For a decade after 9/11, largely because of feverish levels of mistrust between Democrats and Republicans, congressional skepticism turned into defiance.∗ This damaged the intelligence community, Congress, and public trust in those institutions, and it had the perverse effect of weakening incentives for the secret keepers to exercise their power appropriately. Democrats will argue, with some justification, that Congress could not effectively fulfill its oversight functions in a political atmosphere where questions about counterterrorism policies were confused with (or deliberately turned into, by the White House) doubts about the righteousness of the American cause. This is true. So true, in fact, that the Bush administration’s own penchant for secrecy and its determination to keep Congress out of the loop ultimately wound up undermining even some of the less controversial but highly effective secret policies it put into place.
The partisan instinct deserves its opprobrium. At ill-timed moments, both Democrats and Republicans screamed solely because their activist bases demanded such screaming. At least five committees in each chamber have some piece of the oversight mix, and the most important of the lot, the select committees on intelligence, hold special status. In the House, their members aren’t appointed (as most members of most committees are) by steering committees. A single person, in other words, cannot overload a committee with allies. Instead, the Speaker of the House and the minority leader make the appointments.
During the height of hyperpartisanship post-9/11, the intelligence committees, particularly in the House, were treated as sinecures and, even worse, platforms for the airing of grievances. Sometimes the grievances were well formed. When members of the intelligence community brief Congress on highly classified programs, they’re incentivized to do so in a way that provides the necessary amount of detail to satisfy the legal and administrative requirements, and not a shred more. Since most members of the intelligence committees aren’t experts, an imbalance is built into the system. The briefers will use technical language, knowing that members often can’t share with their staffs enough information to develop follow-up questions. Members know this and tend to be on the alert for weasel words or any hints or indications that there are depths to the particular program that might not be visible in a briefing. The less trust there is between institutions, the more games are played in the briefings. These games have become endemic, which for oversight is troubling. The less trust we have in government, the more likely it is for freelancers and hobbyists, people who traffic in classified information that is expressly often pulled from its context, to decide whether to publish secrets. Don’t blame this on the lone wolves. Blame it on the gatekeepers for failing to maintain credibility.
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