Intel Wars (11 page)

His successor, retired U.S. Navy Admiral John M. “Mike” McConnell, who held the position of DNI from February 2007 to January 2009, is best known for pushing through Congress a controversial revision to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). He also authored a number of modest reforms, which did not fundamentally change the way the intelligence community did its job. Like Negroponte, he too did little to impose the authority of his office over the fractious U.S. intelligence community.

So what Denny Blair inherited when he moved into the director's office suite at Liberty Crossing in January 2009 was a vast and still-growing intelligence empire that lacked a real leader.
This reality was summarized succinctly
by a classified 2010 study by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which concluded, “For the IC [intelligence community] to function effectively and deliver credible and timely intelligence, it needs an acknowledged leader. This should be the DNI.” But the report added that “this has not yet happened.”

With no leadership coming from the top, the office of the DNI had become just another layer in the intelligence community's already massive bureaucracy. A November 2008 report by the DNI inspector general, Edward Maguire, found that mismanagement and the failure of the DNI's office to provide effective leadership was “
undermining ODNI's credibility
and fueling assertions that the ODNI is just another layer of bureaucracy.”

Despite the plethora of problems remaining to be addressed, it now seems unlikely that reform will ever come from within the intelligence community's risk-averse bureaucracy because instinctive and reactive resistance to change of any sort is so deeply ingrained in the insular culture of the U.S. intelligence community, where conformity and loyalty are deemed to be far more important qualities than innovation and creativity.
According to Patrick G. Eddington
, a former CIA satellite imagery analyst, the U.S. intelligence community has become “a system that values consensus over creativity, conformity over conscience.”

Senior intelligence and congressional officials point to the host of problems they have experienced over the past decade trying to get the FBI to modernize and change the way it does business because of the deeply ingrained cultural resistance to reform among senior bureau officials. Efforts to bring in outside talent after 9/11 to build an intelligence analysis program for the bureau were met with resistance by the bureau's insular bureaucracy. Admiral David Jeremiah, formerly vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board during the Bush administration, recalled that FBI director Robert S. Mueller III tried to implement these reforms but ultimately gave up because he
“received a lot of resistance from [within] the FBI.”
The cultural resistance to any meaningful reform within the bureau was so fierce that the former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), admitted that he had
“doubts whether the FBI can carry out reform.”

This sort of obstructionist behavior was an unwanted legacy from the intelligence community's Cold War past. All of the agencies who comprised the intelligence community traced their origins to the post–World War II era, when the Soviet Union was the main threat to the survival of the United States. The Cold War intelligence community had been constructed using Henry Ford's automotive assembly lines in Detroit as its model. Sheer size and massive output were the standards of the day. Raw materials went in on one end, and finished products destined for consumers came out the other.

The system remains essentially the same today, even though the targets have changed completely. But the big difference between then and now is that sixty years ago when the intelligence community was young, quality was job one. The men and women who then ran the institution were first and foremost practitioners of the art of intelligence who had started at the bottom of the heap and worked their way up through the ranks.

Eventually, though, the bureaucrats took over. The emphasis on product quality was replaced by a focus, just as in the struggling American automotive industry, on the mass production of products that were flashier but not as well built as in the past. The professional spies at the top of the intelligence community were over time replaced by professional managers, staffers who had been kicked upstairs because they could handle paperwork and manage personnel and resources, even though they were not necessarily the best spies. Promotion no longer was decided by skill or subject matter expertise but rather by being a “team player” and not “rocking the boat.”

In this kind of environment, more often than not, mistakes are covered up, mediocrity tends to get rewarded, and unconventional thinkers are viewed, according to a current-serving CIA intelligence analyst, as “heretics.” As a result, it is very difficult for eccentrics, iconoclasts, and freethinkers to survive, much less prosper, in today's intelligence community, since the natural tendency of all bureaucracies is to demand conformity, stifle dissent, and squelch personal initiative. A number of senior intelligence officials reluctantly admit that in this oppressive atmosphere, real and fundamental reform of the intelligence community stands little chance of ever seeing the light of day.

Take the example of Thomas A. Drake
, a bright mid-level NSA official who tried to bring to his superiors' attention the fact that a number of the agency's modernization programs were being mismanaged but was ignored at every turn. He tried to take his concerns to Congress but ran into the same set of roadblocks. Angry and not knowing where to turn (intelligence community employees have no protection under the federal whistleblower statutes), in 2005 Drake began leaking information about these programs, which he has claimed was entirely unclassified, to a reporter from the
Baltimore Sun
. For his sins, in April 2010 he was indicted in federal court in Baltimore, Maryland, and charged not with leaking information but rather with five counts of retaining classified information in his home, obstruction of justice, and four counts of making false statements to the FBI.

On June 9, 2011
, three days before his trial was due to begin, Drake accepted a deal offered by the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore. The U.S. government dropped all of the felony charges, and Drake agreed to plead guilty to a single count of misusing government computers, but got no jail time.

Two weeks later, on June 22, 2011, the Department of Defense released to the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C., a heavily redacted version of a December 2004 DOD inspector general's report that corroborated many of the complaints that Drake had made about NSA's mismanagement of a number of high-tech collection systems.

The inability or unwillingness of the intelligence community to reform itself is immensely frustrating for many of the younger members of the community's workforce. The prevailing sentiment is that no matter how bright or talented you may be, or how vitally important the information you produce is, you are still a small and insignificant cog in a massive bureaucracy that is not only parochial and inefficient but obsessed with secrecy, focused on protecting its prerogatives, and inherently suspicious of, and resistant to, change of any sort.

In the opinion of many intelligence professionals, the community's priorities are misplaced. Instead of obsessing about how to keep its secrets, the community should do a better job collecting intelligence, producing better products, and getting the material to the people who need it in a form that they can use. According to Major General Mike Flynn, the former chief of military intelligence in Afghanistan, the intelligence community has “
a culture that is emphatic about secrecy
but regrettably less concerned about mission effectiveness.”

The most striking example showing that intelligence reform had not yet taken hold was to be found in Afghanistan. The U.S. military's intelligence operations in Afghanistan were a disjointed and dysfunctional spit-and-paste conglomeration of more than twenty major intelligence organizations and at least double that number of smaller units lacking any centralized command structure. If one added to the mix the larger number of NATO and Afghan intelligence organizations, you ended up with a nightmarish Macedonian fruit salad, where waste and duplication of effort were so pervasive that, in many cases, these intelligence organizations were working at cross-purposes with one another.

The duplication of effort in Afghanistan had an almost surreal quality. In Kabul there were not one but four large intelligence fusion centers, servicing the intelligence needs of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. There was the multinational Joint Intelligence Center at ISAF headquarters, which supported U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Then there was the Joint Intelligence Operations Center–Afghanistan, 90 percent of whose intelligence product could only be seen by American military commanders. The CIA station in the U.S. embassy had its own independent fusion center, whose material the agency refused to share with either the U.S. or NATO military commanders in Afghanistan. And the fusion center supporting the joint U.S.-NATO special operations task force at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul produced intelligence reports that nobody could see except a Green Beret or Navy SEAL team member.

Also in Kabul there were two competing signals intelligence fusion centers—an American one at Bagram and one comprised of NATO personnel at ISAF headquarters in Kabul—plus three organizations engaged in counter-IED intelligence analysis and three performing counternarcotics intelligence.

Outside of Kabul, each of the five U.S.-NATO division staffs in Afghanistan, called regional commands, had its own large intelligence staff; as did each of the seven American and NATO brigades and twenty battalions or armored cavalry squadrons, each of whom was producing its own separate series of intelligence reports tailored specifically for its commanders. On top of that, dozens of smaller American, NATO, and Afghan intelligence fusion centers were sprinkled throughout every province and district because, according to a British intelligence officer stationed at ISAF headquarters in 2008, “you had to have one to have any standing.”

Intelligence operations in Afghanistan were hamstrung by layers of bureaucratic red tape. A U.S. Army officer who served a tour of duty with a brigade intelligence staff at Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan complained that his superiors at Bagram were “trying to run things out of a field manual. Everything had to be done by the book. Every op we ran, no matter how small, had to be written up in triplicate and endorsed three times before they would let us do it … These guys had no clue what it was like trying to run realtime intel ops downrange in a war zone.”

How did the intelligence situation in Afghanistan become such a mess? The answer is that the Pentagon, jealous of its bureaucratic prerogatives, told Blair's predecessors, John Negroponte and Mike McConnell, to stay out of Iraq and Afghanistan because they were military theaters of operation, and thus outside the DNI's jurisdiction. This has been a recurring problem in U.S. intelligence history, which clearly the creation of the office of the DNI has not resolved. During the Korean War, successive U.S. military commanders in the Far East demanded that the CIA subordinate its behind-the-line activities to those being run by the military. The same thing happened during the Vietnam War; the Pentagon insisted that the CIA subordinate its clandestine activities in North Vietnam to those of the U.S. Army. It was not until Barack Obama became president that the DNI hired a former CIA official whose name cannot be mentioned here to be the organization's first mission manager for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Despite the staggering number of tiny intelligence fiefdoms in Afghanistan, there were desperate shortages of just about everything that the intelligence operators needed—reconnaissance aircraft, unmanned drones, advanced SIGINT collection systems, clandestine intelligence case officers, Special Forces personnel, interrogators, translators, and analysts. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the equipment and personnel that should have been going to Afghanistan were being co-opted and sent instead to Iraq, which left only hand-me-downs for Afghanistan. When one intelligence officer cabled Washington to inquire why the increasingly quiescent Iraq was still getting first pick of all intelligence resources, he was told that the reconnaissance platforms he wanted had been “programmed” years earlier by the Pentagon for Iraq, and once the decision had been made there was no way to alter or change the order.

In effect, Iraq was sucking the life out of the U.S. intelligence effort in Afghanistan by starving it of desperately needed resources. Statistics provided by a former military intelligence officer tell the story in stark terms. There were fifty SIGINT intercept operators and analysts in Iraq for every one in Afghanistan. For every CIA case officer in Afghanistan, there were almost ten in Iraq. For every reconnaissance aircraft in Afghanistan, there were ten in Iraq. And for every unmanned drone in Afghanistan, the U.S. military in Iraq had almost five.
For example, the U.S. Air Force had 34 Predator drones
assigned to Iraq but only two in Afghanistan, while the U.S. Army had 256 drones in Iraq versus only 62 in Afghanistan.

The meager intelligence resources that were available in Afghanistan were being misused. Nearly a quarter of all American and NATO intelligence collection systems in Afghanistan were exclusively dedicated to trying to find Taliban commanders to hit with air strikes, despite reams of intelligence data showing that this effort was not working. According to Lt. Colonel Shane B. Schreiber, a Canadian officer who served a tour of duty in southern Afghanistan, “
We also spent a lot of time, money, blood and treasure
going after MVTs [medium-value targets] and HVTs [high-value targets] … and I don't think it had a great deal of effect on the Taliban … If we killed one guy, they just replaced him in about 10 minutes.”