Obama’s Islamic State Blame Game

President Barack Obama took a shot at the U.S. intelligence community Sunday night when he told CBS News "60 Minutes" that America’s spies had "underestimated" the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. It wasn’t an entirely inaccurate statement, and as Obama himself noted, his own intelligence chief had made the same point a few weeks ago. But come Monday, U.S. spies were complaining the president had "thrown us under the bus," as one former official put it, by trying to shift the blame for a foreign policy crisis away from the White House and towards the nation’s beleaguered intelligence community.

This isn’t the first time U.S. spies have accused the president of not having their backs. After former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed spying operations directed at U.S. allies and foreign leaders, intelligence officials said they felt abandoned by the White House, which they said had known about and authorized the spying. And in February, after Russian troops annexed Crimea in what appeared to be a surprise assault, intelligence officials were quick to point out that they’d been warning that a military incursion could come at any moment. Obama’s latest remarks will do little to repair the rift between him and the spies he commands.

In a bit of rhetorical jujitsu, Obama didn’t personally blame the intelligence community for failing to predict that the Islamic State would capture vast chunks of territory in Iraq earlier this year, prompting U.S. airstrikes and the deployment of some 2,000 special operations forces and other personnel. Instead, when correspondent Steve Kroft asked, "How did [the Islamic State] end up where they are in control of so much territory? Was that a complete surprise to you?" Obama replied, "Well I think, our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria," the country where the Islamic State gained force and then launched its assault on Iraq.

Obama was referring to an earlier interview that Clapper, the director of national intelligence, gave David Ignatius of the Washington Post on Sept. 18, in which Clapper said the intelligence agencies had "underestimated ISIL," using the administration’s preferred acronym for the group.

America’s spies are having none of it, and since the interview have been pointing to various warnings — some of them public — that the intelligence agencies gave after the Islamic State attacked two Iraqi cities, Fallujah and Ramadi, in January 2014, and before they took over Mosul and Tikrit in June.

In February, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), presented the Senate Armed Services Committee with his agency’s "annual threat assessment." The assessment had a prominent warning about the Islamic State: The group "probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014, as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah, and the group’s ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria," Flynn said in his prepared remarks.

A former defense official told Foreign Policy that the DIA had included the Islamic State warning in the threat assessment in order to make lawmakers and administration officials pay closer attention to the dangers that the group posed. "The DIA analytic machine cranks out the [assessment] drafts, and what is in there is often representative of the top things DIA’s analyst are worried about. Clearly, DIA’s analysts pushed for a paragraph on ISIL and sold the word ‘probably,’ which is a very strong word for analysts," the former official said. (Usually, analysts are reluctant to make emphatic assessments, much less predictions.)

After the Islamic State captured Mosul and Tikrit, U.S. intelligence officials pushed back hard against the suggestion that they’d been blindsided. Analysts had "closely tracked" the group and its predecessor organizations for years, said one senior U.S. intelligence official. "[D]uring the past year, [analysts] routinely provided strategic warning of ISIL’s growing strength in Iraq and increasing threat to Iraq’s stability," the official said.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Monday tried to repair some of the damage from Obama’s interview, arguing during a press conference that the president wasn’t blaming the intelligence agencies for underestimating the threat posed by the Islamic State. "Everyone was surprised by the rise" of the group, Earnest said. But reporters pointed out that Flynn had publicly warned about the group earlier this year, as had Brett McGurk, a top State Department official, in testimony before the House of Representatives in February. Clearly, "everyone" wasn’t surprised.

When asked about the two officials’ testimony months ago, Earnest referred to Clapper’s comments to the Post.

Obama’s relationship with his spies has always been rocky. He came into office having campaigned against controversial intelligence operations, including warrantless surveillance and brutal interrogations of terrorist suspects, which he called "torture" in a recent press conference. But the relationship became particularly strained following the first leaks by Snowden. In October, when documents revealed that the agency had been monitoring the personal cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the president professed to have had no knowledge of the operation, a claim that former intelligence officials said was laughable.

At the time, a former White House official, who didn’t serve in the Obama administration, said it was essentially impossible that the president wouldn’t know foreign leaders were being monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies, and principally the NSA, as part of regular operations aimed at keeping him informed about diplomatic relations and negotiations. Information on foreign leaders that is based on recorded calls or other signals intelligence is "unique," the former official said, and its nature is obvious to anyone reading or hearing an intelligence report or receiving a briefing.

Amid the political fallout of the Snowden leaks and calls in Congress to cut back the NSA’s powers, current and former intelligence officials groused that Obama hadn’t made a strong public show of support for operations that he, after all, had authorized. He never went to visit the NSA’s headquarters at Ft. Meade, Md., as President George W. Bush had done in 2007 when Congress was also debating a law that might cut off the agency from certain streams of intelligence it considered vital to its mission. And Obama waited for three months to make substantive remarks about the Snowden affair. When he did, the president talked almost exclusively about how he hadn’t made the case that the surveillance programs were useful and hadn’t injured Americans’ civil liberties. There was no full-throated defense of the NSA, and Obama referred to his own skepticism about the agency’s programs when he was a Democratic senator running for president.

Perhaps sensitive to accusations that he had abandoned his intelligence community in one of its darkest moments, Obama gave a speech in January comparing America’s spies to Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty, some of America’s greatest patriots. Obama also announced that he was making few major changes to the way the NSA collects intelligence, confounding civil libertarians and some lawmakers in the president’s own party.

Those gestures were a step towards repairing the rift between the White House and the intelligence community. But then came Russia’s invasion of Crimea in February, and fingers were pointing at the intelligence agencies for failing to predict the crisis, a charge they rejected. The spies, said a senior U.S. official, had "warned that that the region was a flashpoint for a possible military conflict and that the Russians were preparing military assets for possible deployment to Ukraine" before the first of Putin’s shock troops stepped foot in the country. U.S. spies have been on edge ever since, which helps explain why they fought back so fiercely when the White House seemed to be blaming them for not predicting the success of the Islamic State.

But it wasn’t just the spies who came in for a drubbing in Obama’s "60 Minutes" interview. Again referring to Clapper’s comments to the Post, the commander-in-chief said the intelligence community had "overestimated" the willingness of the Iraqi military to fight the Islamic State. "That’s true. That’s absolutely true," Obama said. That was a not-so-subtle dig at the U.S. military, which spent ten of billions of dollars training and arming the Iraqi security forces, only to watch them flee — and abandon large quantities of U.S.-provided weapons — when the Islamic State began rampaging through western and northern Iraq.

There, too, U.S. spies see fighting words. Flynn, in his remarks to the Congress, had cautioned that the Islamic State’s ability to hold territory in Iraq would depend on "the responses of the [Iraqi military]," as well as opposition groups in Syria — the very groups that Obama now wants to be the ground force in a new war against the Islamic State there. (A war that the rebels themselves say is getting off to a rocky start.)

The senior U.S. intelligence official who said that analysts had "closely tracked" the Islamic State’s rise also said they had "warned about the increasing difficulties Iraq’s security forces faced in combatting ISIL, and the political strains that were contributing to Iraq’s declining stability." Analysts reported that the group was exploiting political rifts between the ruling Shiite government in Baghdad and the country’s Sunni minority, and that it had taken advantage of the war in neighboring Syria "to strengthen its operational capacity and intensify the threat to the Iraqi government," the official said.

None of this is to say that the intelligence community has been able to provide the kind of "anticipatory intelligence," to use Clapper’s phrase, that would have alerted Obama and his top aides to threats before they materialized. But clearly, America’s spies are sick and tired of shouldering the blame when a crisis erupts and the administration has to fumble for a response.

Some former intelligence officials thought Clapper, in that Post interview, was falling on his sword, and taking the blame for a failure that many say doesn’t belong with them. Indeed, the intelligence chief left little doubt that he felt buffeted by unfair criticism of U.S. intelligence and unrealistic expectations about what it can accomplish.

"We are supposed to keep the country safe, predict anticipatory intelligence, with no risk, and no embarrassment if revealed, and without a scintilla of jeopardy to privacy of any domestic person or foreign person. We call that ‘immaculate collection,’" Clapper said.

Kate Brannen and Gopal Ratnam contributed reporting.