[Mb-civic] Tiny Agency's Iraq Analysis Is Better Than Big Rivals'

[Michael Butler]

July 19, 2004
INTELLIGENCE 

Tiny Agency's Iraq Analysis Is Better Than Big Rivals'
By DOUGLAS JEHL
 

ASHINGTON, July 18 ‹ On Iraq and illicit weapons, the intelligence agency
that got it least wrong, it now turns out, was one of the smallest ‹ a State
Department bureau with no spies, no satellites and a reputation for
contrariness.

Almost alone among intelligence agencies, this one, the Bureau of
Intelligence and Research, or I.N.R., does not report to either the White
House or the Pentagon. Its approach is purely analytical, so that it owes no
allegiance to particular agents, imagery or intercepts. It shuns the
worst-case plans sometimes sought by military commanders.

"They are willing to take on the accepted analysis and take a second, harder
look," said Alfred Cumming, a former staff director of the Senate
Intelligence Committee who is now an intelligence and national security
specialist at the Congressional Research Service, a branch of the Library of
Congress.

 With just 165 analysts, the bureau is about one-tenth the size of the
Central Intelligence Agency's analytical arm. But its analysts tend to be
older (most are in their 40's and 50's), more experienced and more likely to
come from academic backgrounds than those at other agencies, and they are
more often encouraged to devote their careers to the study of a particular
issue or region.

"They have a reputation for having personnel who have skills in one specific
area, as opposed to being utility infielders," said Senator Pat Roberts,
Republican of Kansas and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

That panel's otherwise scathing report on prewar intelligence on Iraq not
only spared the Bureau of Intelligence and Research from most of its harsh
criticisms, but also explicitly endorsed the dissent it had inserted into
the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, challenging as unsubstantiated
the view of other agencies that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons
program.

In addition, where the 2002 assessment included a prediction by other
agencies that Iraq could develop a nuclear weapon within a decade, the State
Department bureau said pointedly that it was unwilling to "project a
timeline for the completion of activities it does not now see happening."

The bureau was apparently still wrong, along with other intelligence
agencies, in asserting that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons.
But Congressional officials say that over all, its recent record on Iraq has
been better than that of its larger rivals, including the C.I.A., with more
than 1,500 analysts, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, with more than
3,000.

The example of the State Department bureau, Congressional officials say, is
being closely studied as the White House and Congress debate what changes
may help intelligence agencies avoid additional failures.

 Among other recent successes, the bureau's admirers say, was a classified
report in 2003 that criticized the Bush administration view that a victory
in Iraq would help spread democracy across the Arab world. It also predicted
correctly that Turkey might not permit American troops to cross its
territory en route to Iraq and dismissed as "highly dubious" a British
contention, now discredited, that Iraq was trying to procure uranium from
Niger.

Not surprisingly, the praise that has been directed at the bureau, including
a widely noticed column in May by David Ignatius in The Washington Post, has
prompted some backbiting at other intelligence agencies from officials who
argue that its successes are being exaggerated.

"Everyone has to get it right once in a while," a senior Defense Department
official said with some sarcasm.

"It's not in my interest to trash a fellow member of the intelligence
community," another senior intelligence official said of the bureau. "But
those who think they get it completely right are not completely familiar
with the record."

Not even the State Department bureau's admirers say that it alone represents
the answer to the kinds of shortcomings discussed in the Senate report,
which criticized as unreasonable and unfounded most of the conclusions
reached by intelligence agencies on issues related to Iraq and its illicit
weapons.

 The bureau, with about 300 people in all, including support staff, is too
small to shoulder the kind of analytical burden placed on the C.I.A. and the
even larger analytical branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Its
bureaucratic distance from spymasters at the C.I.A., the
signals-intelligence mavens at the National Security Agency and the
satellite gurus at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency means that it
has little interaction with those who actually collect information around
the world, intelligence officials say.

Any restructuring, the bureau's admirers say, should preserve debate and
rivalry among the intelligence agencies' analytical branches, which in
addition to the State Department agency and the C.I.A.'s Directorate of
Intelligence include most of the Defense Intelligence Agency; an element of
the geospatial agency, which interprets satellite imagery; the intelligence
office in the Department of Energy; and analytical offices in the military
services.

"The analysts at I.N.R. are a curmudgeonlike group who delight in being
different and getting to the body of something and not caring what other
people think," said Carl W. Ford Jr., a former career C.I.A. official who
led the State Department bureau from 2001 until he retired in late 2003.

 But still, Mr. Ford added in an interview, "It is important for all of us
in the intelligence community to talk about where we went wrong."

 In retrospect, Mr. Ford and current State Department officials say, the
bureau should have extended its doubts about others' assessments of Iraq's
nuclear program to the issue of chemical and biological weapons. They also
credit experts at the Department of Energy, who also operate independently
of the White House and the Pentagon, for taking the lead in challenging the
C.I.A.'s view on a critical question related to Iraq's nuclear weapons
program.

 The C.I.A. and other agencies concluded that aluminum tubes shipped to Iraq
were intended for use in centrifuges as part of that nuclear program; the
Energy Department and the bureau strongly disagreed. But senior State
Department officials say they believed that a combination of experience and
independence gave their analysts the confidence to challenge the judgments
of the C.I.A., the dominant agency within the community.

 "We're not flogging the fruits of anybody's collection system," a senior
State Department official said. "For us it's information, not looking to
advance N.S.A.'s budget or C.I.A.'s saying, `Golly, gee whiz, look what
we've got.' "

Altogether, the team of State Department analysts most directly involved in
assessing Iraq's political structure, economy, conventional military forces
and supposed illicit weapons numbered no more than 10 people, said State
Department officials, but many had more than a decade of experience in the
subjects on which they were focusing.

Those officials refused to identify the analyst whose dissent on Iraq's
nuclear program proved particularly prescient, but said the official had
worked on the subject for more than 12 years under a supervisor who had
twice as many years of expertise.

As an example of the kind of analyst the State Department bureau embraces,
the State Department officials pointed to Thomas Fingar, who was Mr. Ford's
principal deputy and is awaiting Senate confirmation to lead the bureau as
assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research. Mr. Fingar has
spent 19 years at the bureau, having been recruited from Stanford
University, where he had spent the previous decade as a political scientist.

 In recounting where their bureau got it right on the question of Iraq,
State Department officials acknowledge that the success was hollow, in large
part because Secretary of State Colin L. Powell ultimately sided with the
C.I.A. and not with his own intelligence shop.

In February 2003, Mr. Powell spent several days at C.I.A. headquarters
reviewing intelligence in preparation for his Feb. 5 speech to the United
Nations Security Council, in which he laid out the administration's case for
a possible war against Iraq. Mr. Powell did not invite any officials from
the bureau to accompany him as part of the review, and his speech endorsed
the very view on Iraq's nuclear weapons from which the bureau had dissented
so strongly.

"After reviewing all of the intelligence provided by the Intelligence
Community," the Senate committee wrote in its report, the panel "believes
that the judgment in the National Intelligence Estimate, that Iraq was
reconstituting its nuclear program, was not supported by the intelligence."

"The committee agrees with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and
Research alternative view that the available intelligence `does not add up
to a compelling case for reconstitution.' "

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |  Home |  Privacy Policy | Search
| Corrections | RSS | Help |  Back to Top