The need for intelligence reform

David Kay, the chief U.S. arms hunter in Iraq, has resigned, saying in a Reuters interview (link via Calpundit) that, “I think we have found probably 85 percent of what we’re going to find.” As to the question of large-scale WMD stockpiles, Kay said:

I don’t think they existed. I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War and those were a combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them. I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale production, and that’s what we’re really talking about, is large stockpiles, not the small. Large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the period after ’95.

In the battles over intelligence about Iraq’s WMD capabilities, it seems clear that the professionals were closer to the truth on Iraq’s actual capabilities than the Bush team. However, it’s also worth noting that even the professionals overestimated Iraq’s WMD capabilities — which is one reason why the Clinton foreign policy team has been relatively muted in its criticisms of the Bush team on this issue. The blogging over this Washington Post article from early this week on not finding WMD has been about whether the story stacked the deck against the Bush team. However, since the intelligence community was also off the mark, the key point is that the U.S. was going to be wrong about Iraq no matter what. The important point in the Post story is the bipartisan consensus that intelligence errors — regardless of the cause — can damage America’s reputation:

The inability to find suspected weapons “has to make it more difficult on some future occasion if the United States argues the intelligence warrants something controversial, like a preventive attack,” said [Richard] Haass, a Republican who was head of policy planning for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell when the war started. “The result is we’ve made the bar higher for ourselves and we have to expect greater skepticism in the future.” James Steinberg, a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration who believed there were legitimate concerns about Iraq’s weapons programs, said the failure of the prewar claims to match the postwar reality “add to the general sense of criticism about the U.S., that we will do anything, say anything” to prevail. Indeed, whenever Powell grants interviews to foreign news organizations, he is often hit with a question about the search for weapons of mass destruction. Last Friday, a British TV reporter asked whether in retirement he would “admit that you had concerns about invading Iraq,” and a Dutch reporter asked whether he ever had doubts about the Iraq policy…. “I think there are [diplomatic] consequences as a result of the president asking these questions [about Iraq’s weapons holdings] and the answer being no” weapons, said Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, who believes the ouster of Hussein justified the war. “The intelligence could have been better.”

Some might conclude that this is merely a case of the Bush team distorting reliable intel. However, other revelations this week suggest that the intelligence community can be wrong about important matters without any help whatsoever from the Bush team. Consider Jack Pritchard’s New York Times op-ed on how what’s happening in North Korea is at variance with intelligence estimates:

In December 2002 North Korea was suspected of having one or two nuclear weapons that it had acquired before agreeing in 1994 to freeze its known nuclear program and to allow it to be monitored. More than a year later, North Korea may have quadrupled its arsenal of nuclear weapons. During the intervening period, the Bush administration has relied on intelligence that dismissed North Korean claims that it restarted its nuclear program at Yongbyon with the express purpose of reprocessing previously sealed and monitored spent fuel to extract plutonium to make a “nuclear deterrent.” Now there are about 8,000 spent fuel rods missing — evidence that work on such a deterrent may have begun. It is just the most recent failure in a string of serious North Korea-related intelligence failures. When North Korea claimed in 1998 to have launched a three-stage rocket to put a communications satellite into orbit, American intelligence initially denied the rocket had this capacity — and then, days later, confirmed the North Korean claim. That same year United States intelligence insisted that Pyongyang had embarked on a secret underground project to duplicate its frozen nuclear weapons program. Eight months later, an American inspection team visited the underground site to find that American intelligence was dead wrong. Then there was the intelligence in the summer of 2002 that indicated the North Korean regime was on the brink of collapse. That reporting was later recalled as faulty — but not before the damage was done.

Kevin O’Connell and Robert Tomes argue in the most recent issue of Policy Review about the implications of faulty intelligence (link via Patrick Belton):

The anticipated intelligence reform debate cannot be limited to getting domestic and national intelligence agencies merely to share information or post data others can access. Anyone who regards this as the core issue has mistaken the tree for the forest. An overhaul of how intelligence and information are created, gathered, and shared throughout the national security enterprise is needed. Although recent discussions have focused on domestic information sharing, this issue also concerns relationships with allies and security partners that are historically dependent on American intelligence to supplement their more austere intelligence activities. When American information and knowledge entities fail internally to correlate and act upon collected or reported data, the negative effects cascade through information networks both inside and outside the Untied States. This has the potential to negatively influence those who share with us, jeopardizing a relatively small but nonetheless critical source of information our human sources are often unable to ferret out.

Let me be clear — I haven’t the faintest idea how these problems can be fixed. I trust my loyal readers can come up with a few thoughts of their own. UPDATE: Kevin Drum voices a similar concern from the opposite side of the political fence:

I think the administration did believe there was WMD in Iraq before the war. What’s more, the CIA and MI6 thought the same thing and the yawning silence from both Republicans and Democrats about how our intelligence services could have been so wildly off the mark is a scandal of the first order. Is anyone serious about this stuff?