(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Steve Wampler, CIA)

This column was originally published at Truthout.org.

It is time for serious soul-searching regarding the role of the CIA and the intelligence community. Last month’s operational and intelligence failures led to the deaths of seven CIA officers in Afghanistan and might have resulted in nearly 300 deaths on a Northwest Airlines plane headed for Detroit.

It is particularly shocking that President Barack Obama’s chief of counterterrorism, John Brennan, conceded that the latter failure was caused by the fact that there was “no one intelligence entity or team or task force assigned responsibility for doing a follow-up investigation” of the considerable intelligence that was collected. It is unbelievable that the president had to order the creation of a system for tracking threat reports. The failures beg the question of what have we learned since 9/11.

Previous CIA failures regarding the unanticipated decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq War demonstrate a $75 billion intelligence enterprise that can provide neither strategic nor tactical warning to policymakers and is reluctant to provide uncomfortable truth to power.

The serious problems that need to be addressed include the important nexus between intelligence and policy – and the need for a CIA that is not beholden to policy or political interests; the militarization of the intelligence community – which must be reversed; the lack of Congressional oversight – which must be corrected, and the decline of operational tradecraft – which must be investigated.

Before addressing reform in Part II, however, we must first confront the mythology that surrounds the intelligence enterprise.

The Greatest Myth: The 9/11 Commission offered insight into the systemic problems of the CIA and the intelligence community. The Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 solved the problems that had been exposed by the 9/11 Commission by creating a director of national intelligence, the so-called intelligence tsar. In fact, the 9/11 Commission failed to use the powers it had been given to explore the reasons for the 9/11 intelligence failure.

It deferred unnecessarily to the White House’s use of “executive privilege,” and failed to stand up to CIA Director George Tenet, who refused to permit commissioners to debrief prisoners held by the CIA. The commission failed to use its subpoena powers and lacked experience in the world of the intelligence community.

The CIA’s Inspector General concluded that the 9/11 failure was about personal failures, accountability and bureaucratic ineptitude. The same could be said for the Christmas Day events. The commission focused on larger issues: budgets and funding, organizational problems and structural fixes.

The Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 actually made a bad situation worse. It created a new bureaucracy under a director of national intelligence (DNI) beholden to the White House, as well as a centralized system that stifles creative thinking and risks more politicized intelligence.

The DNI was not given the authority to challenge the Pentagon’s control of key intelligence agencies and their budgets, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was not given a central depository to fill the analytical gaps between domestic and international terrorist threats.

Thus, the major problems exposed by 9/11 – the lack of a centralized repository of data and the need for more, rather than less, competitive analysis on terrorism – was repeated in the Christmas Day failure. Finally, by making the DNI responsible for the daily briefing of the president, it ensured that the “tsar” would have little time to conceptualize and implement the strategic reforms that were needed. President Barack Obama’s unwillingness to request a National Intelligence Estimate before making his decision late last year to increase military forces in Afghanistan revealed his lack of respect for the work of the intelligence community.

Myth Number Two: The intelligence community is a genuine community that fosters intelligence cooperation and the sharing of intelligence information. The intelligence community has never functioned as a community. With the exception of the production of National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), which are indeed a corporate product of the community, there is limited sharing of the most important and sensitive documents collected by the various intelligence agencies, and very little esprit de corps within the community.

There have always been deep rivalries between civilian and military agencies, with the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence Research often lined up against the Defense Intelligence Agency and the four military intelligence branches. This division was particularly profound during the debates over Soviet military power and the verification of Soviet and American arms control agreements, with military intelligence consistently exaggerating the strength of the Soviet military and opposing the disarmament agreements of the 1970’s and 1980’s. The 9/11 and Christmas Day failures revealed continued parochialism and lack of cooperation within the community.

The intelligence community suffers from an inability to learn from its failures and successes. The CIA needs to emulate the US Army, which routinely conducts after-action reports and boasts a Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The center has a small staff, takes advantage of teams of experts to investigate specific issues, and maintains a direct line of communication to senior military leaders to understand what needs to be examined. Conversely, the CIA has resorted to a culture of cover-up to conceal failures such as the collapse of the Soviet Union; 9/11; the Iraq War; the Christmas Day event, and the suicidal bombing of the CIA’s most important facility in Afghanistan.

Myth Number Three: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence offers a genuine possibility for exercising central control over the intelligence community. The creation of the DNI has worsened the malaise within the CIA without reform for either the agency or the intelligence community.

The fact that the president had to meet with more than 20 intelligence principals to discuss the Christmas Day failure points to the crazy-quilt bureaucratic structure created in the wake of 9/11, as well as the lack of centralized authority and responsibility within the community. The Pentagon has veto power over the DNI with respect to transferring personnel and budgetary authority from individual agencies into joint centers or other agencies. This fact undermines the possibility of any legitimate reform process.

The first DNI, John Negroponte, became frustrated and left suddenly in December 2006 for a lesser position at the State Department. His two successors have been retired naval admirals, Mike McConnell and Dennis Blair; neither has an understanding of the importance of strategic and long-term intelligence. The DNI spends far too much time preparing for his daily briefing of the president, which should be in the hands of the CIA, and the issue of cyber-security, which should be in the hands of the NSA.

Instead of pursuing reform, Negroponte, McConnell and Blair have built a huge, lumbering and bloated bureaucracy that includes a principal deputy director, four deputy directors, three associate directors and no fewer than nineteen assistant deputy directors. The DNI has a huge budget (over $1 billion) and has taken its management staff from the CIA and INR, thus weakening the overall intelligence apparatus. There has been no real accountability of the DNI; Congressional intelligence oversight committees have failed to monitor the DNI’s hiring of contractors with extravagant salaries.

Myth Number Four: The CIA is not a policy agency, but is chartered to provide objective and balanced intelligence analysis to decision-makers without any policy axe to grind. This is possibly the most harmful myth of all, because CIA’s covert action, which has registered a series of strategic disasters over the past 60 years, is part of the policy implementation process. As a result, much clandestine collection over the years has been designed to collect information that supports policy.

The CIA was unfairly described 30 years ago as a “rogue elephant out of control.” In fact, the CIA is part of the White House policy process. Various presidents have authorized regime change in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, the Congo, the Dominican Republic and South Vietnam, which have had disastrous consequences for US interests. The White House authorized assassination plots in Cuba, the Congo and South Vietnam, and provided legal sanction for the CIA to create secret prisons, conduct torture and abuse, and pursue renditions, often involving totally innocent people without recourse to judicial proceedings.

Myth Number Five: The 9/11 and Christmas Day failures were due to the lack of sharing intelligence collection. The conventional wisdom is that the 9/11 intelligence failure was caused primarily by the failure to share intelligence, particularly the failure of the CIA to inform the FBI of the presence of two al-Qaeda operatives in the United States. In actual fact, the problem was far more serious; it was a problem of sloppiness and incompetence in dealing with sensitive intelligence information.

It has been established that 50-60 analysts and operatives from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA had access to information that Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who had links to al-Qaeda, had entered the United States long before 9/11. These analysts and operatives failed to inform leading officials at their own agencies of the two al-Qaeda operatives, who fell through the cracks of the system. Eight years later, the Nigerian bomber similarly escaped detection despite excellent intelligence collection that was seen by most intelligence agencies.

There is still an inadequate flow of information between intelligence agencies. The United States lacks one central depository for all information on national and international terrorism, and the proliferation of intelligence agencies makes sharing of intelligence products even more cumbersome. The DNI and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) were created after 9/11 to make sure that intelligence was shared, but this led to a downgrading of the CIA and the lack of a single agency responsible for analyzing intelligence on terrorism.

Tremendous amounts of useful intelligence are collected, but intelligence analysis has not been appreciably improved. The NSA had information on the Nigerian bomber that wasn’t shared with the CIA and the FBI; the CIA prepared a biographic study of the Nigerian bomber, which it didn’t share with NCTC. The State Department did not pursue whether the Nigerian bomber had a US visa, let alone a multiple-entry visa, in his possession.

The so-called intelligence community lacks an effective computer system to coordinate all intelligence information, although it does have access to the State Department’s consular database listing visa holders, which it failed to consult. The DHS’s customs and border units had sufficient intelligence to interrogate the bomber when he landed in Detroit; its Transportation Security Agency lacked intelligence to keep him from boarding a plane to Detroit.

Myth Number Six: The CIA successfully recruits foreign assets. The CIA’s National Clandestine Service (NCS) relies on walk-ins and rarely recruits major espionage assets. The most successful walk-ins, moreover, such as Col. Oleg Penkovsky, often have great difficulty in getting CIA operatives to accept them.

The NCS has had little success in recruiting assets in the closed world of terrorism or in closed societies such as China, Iran and North Korea. Many of the agents recruited from Cuba, East Germany and the former Soviet Union were double agents reporting to their host governments. The suicide bomber in Afghanistan last month was a double agent.

The CIA has to rely on foreign intelligence liaison sources for sensitive intelligence collection and even the recruitment of foreign assets. There are few al-Qaeda operatives who have been killed or captured without the assistance of foreign liaison, particularly the Pakistani intelligence service. But the suicide bomber at the CIA base in Afghanistan last month was recruited with the help of the Jordanian intelligence service, an extremely risky way to recruit assets; he was brought onto the base without proper inspection and met with more than a dozen officers.

The loss of top-ranking CIA operations officers in Afghanistan points to the need for a review of CIA clandestine operations. The current CIA director, a former congressman, has surrendered to the clandestine culture and cadre; he is unlikely to lead a reform movement. And President Obama’s appointment of former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, a master of the CIA cover-up over the past two decades, points to a continued cover-up.

Instead of a CIA outside the policy community telling truth to power, providing objective and balanced intelligence to policymakers and avoiding policy advocacy, as President Harry S. Truman wanted, we now have the CIA as a paramilitary organization.

Indeed, there has been a trend toward militarization of the entire intelligence community. In the Bush administration, the CIA was significantly weakened, with a director, Michael Hayden, who was a four-star general. The Obama administration appointed a retired admiral to be the director of national intelligence, a retired general to be national security adviser, and retired generals to be ambassadors to key countries such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

By placing the position of the DNI in the hands of the military, the Bush and Obama administrations completed the militarization of the CIA and even the intelligence community itself, where active-duty and retired general officers run the Office of National Intelligence, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office.

The Pentagon is responsible for nearly 90 percent of all personnel in the intelligence community and 85 percent of the community’s $75 billion budget. The absence of an independent civilian counter to the power of military intelligence threatens civilian control of the decision to use military power and makes it more likely that intelligence will be tailored to suit the purposes of the Pentagon. This is exactly what President Truman wanted to prevent.

Finally, the Congressional intelligence oversight process has made no genuine effort to monitor CIA’s flawed intelligence analysis or its clandestine operations, and failed to challenge the illegal activities of the CIA that were part of the policy process. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has sat on her hands while CIA Director Leon Panetta methodically dismantled and marginalized the oversight responsibilities of the Office of the Inspector General.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

They have supported the use of military force in Iraq and Afghanistan; offered apologies for the CIA crimes of torture and abuse, extraordinary renditions, and secret prisons; and criticized efforts by the Obama Administration to reverse these policies and to rely on multilateral diplomacy and arms control and disarmament to resolve outstanding problems. The key writer in Hiatt’s stable has been David Ignatius, who is this year’s winner of the WashPost/Compost Award for the most incomprehensible and fanciful op-ed of 2009.

Ignatius’ winning op-ed was written last month. He sought to justify U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan that, he says, will lead to a “sovereign Pakistan that controls all its territory”; a “future common market between Pakistan and Afghanistan that can power economic development in both countries”; and a “stable structure for Central and South Asia in the 21st century.”

Ignatius believes that, just as the Mexican-American War “helped make the United States a continental nation” and the European wars of the 19th century “helped unify Germany and Italy,” the Af-Pak wars will stabilize a lawless tribal region that has been in turmoil for 150 years. There is no Afghan or Pakistani leader who genuinely believes that the current strife can lead to stabilization.

Indeed, there are few Afghan and Pakistani leaders who understand all the roles being played by Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda, various tribal leaders, and the Pakistani intelligence services, which have played key clandestine roles in multiple crises that have affected Kabul, Delhi, and Islamabad. If the local actors can’t comprehend all the major factions, U.S. leaders (and commentators) are not likely to do better.

Ignatius brings an unusual ignorance to the subject of Pakistan, which he treats as a normal nation-state. In reality, Pakistan is an artificial political entity that has long been both dysfunctional and unstable. In their partition of South Asia in 1947, the British hoped to create one region (Pakistan) that would provide military facilities to Britain. To accomplish this, the British merged five key ethnic groups that had never co-existed in the same body politic historically, according to Selig Harrison, a senior fellow with the Center for International Policy.

The Bengalis were the largest ethnic group, outnumbering the other four: the Punjabis, the Pashtuns, the Baluch, and the Sindhis. The Bengalis seceded in 1971, forming the independent state of Bangladesh. The Punjabis now outnumber the Pashtuns, Baluch, and Sindhis, but the three smaller groups have ancestral claims to more than 70% of Pakistani territory, ensuring continued ethnic and tribal strife.

The essential instability of the Pakistani state and the continued military conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan will make it impossible to create the network of institutions that Ignatius believes can “create a stable structure for Central and South Asia in the 21st century.” He wants unidentified American and Pakistani “statesmen” to “show the same vision and maturity” that post-World War II American and European statesmen used to create the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund.

These international institutions were born during WWII, however, in an effort to restore international order and prosperity at a time when the U.S. economy was booming and could finance postwar recovery and ensure currency stability. American leaders had a good understanding of the political and economic problems of Western and Central Europe; in contrast, U.S. leaders are basically ignorant about the frontier along the Afghan-Pakistani border and the tribal wastelands of Southwest Asia. The World Bank and the IMF have had their successes, but they have never been able to create positive economic development among the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world; both Afghanistan and Pakistan are key members of this unfortunate group.

Finally, Ignatius believes the U.S. buildup of troops in Afghanistan is the key to securing Pakistan’s control over its lawless tribal region. In fact, Pakistan understands that additional U.S. forces in Afghanistan will lead to increased warfare on the Afghan-Pakistan border and will ultimately drive more militants into Pakistani territory in Waziristan and the Northwest Frontier Provinces.

The suicide bombing of a CIA base along the border and the wave of bombings that have swept Pakistan over the past several months, including the eastern city of Lahore, are a reaction to the increased U.S. use of unmanned drone aircraft in Pakistani territory against al Qaeda and the Taliban. U.S. efforts to bolster border security in Afghanistan may well complicate the overall security situation in Pakistan. Moreover, the Obama Administration’s announcement of a troop buildup in Afghanistan, along with a timeline for withdrawal, presumably have emboldened both al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Pakistan has been masterful at playing off U.S. international anxieties in order to gain increased political and economic support. In the 1950s, the Pakistanis were handsomely rewarded for offering bases to U-2 spy aircraft; in the 1960s and 1970s, the Pakistanis received significant military and economic assistance for providing U.S. leaders with a clandestine entry into China to prepare President Richard Nixon’s summit meeting with Mao Tse-tung; in the 1980s, the United States overlooked Pakistan’s new nuclear weapons program in order to protect clandestine aid shipments to the Mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan; currently, the United States is so frightened by these same nuclear weapons that it is willing to overlook the myriad games that Pakistan is playing at our expense.

Goodness gracious, David Ignatius, why don’t these geopolitical realities register with you?

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

(Image: Troy Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: phunkstarr, Travelin' Librarian, Joshua Davis)

This story was originally published on Truthout.org and is being republished here under a Creative Commons license.

One week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told the press corps, “This isn’t Pearl Harbor.” No, it was worse.

In 1941, the United States didn’t have a director of central intelligence, 14 intelligence agencies and an overall intelligence budget of more than $50 billion to provide early warning of enemy attack. One day after a Nigerian man nearly blew an airliner out of the sky, Director of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told the media that the system had worked. No, the system was dysfunctional.

In 2009, we had two additional intelligence agencies, a czar for national intelligence and an intelligence budget of more than $75 billion. In all three cases, there was sufficient intelligence available to prevent the attacks. In all three cases, however, our intelligence efforts were unimaginative, divided and diffuse.

A blizzard of warnings went unheeded in all three cases. The United States had broken the Japanese military code, which provided many warnings of a decision to attack the United States. In the case of 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency received warnings from foreign liaison intelligence services, including the French, German, Israeli and Russian services.

The German intelligence service warned both the CIA and Mossad, the Israeli service, in the summer of 2001 that terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons to attack US targets. The Israelis issued their own warnings to the FBI and the CIA in August 2001 that al-Qaeda was planning to attack US targets. The State Department and the CIA even possessed information that al-Qaeda had decided on targeting American Airlines and United Airlines, prompting some Foreign Service officers to change travel plans.

As early as August 2009, the CIA and the National Security Agency had sensitive information on a person of interest dubbed the “Nigerian,” who was suspected of meeting with terrorist elements in Yemen. The mainstream media are treating Yemen as a new concern, but Yemen has been a problem for terrorism for the past ten years.

Adm. Tony Zinni had been warned in 2000 not to refuel ships off the Yemeni coast, but chose to ignore these warnings. The USS Cole was attacked in October 2000. A prominent Nigerian banker and former senior government official, well known to the international community, relayed suspicions about his son to the US Embassy and the CIA station in Lagos, but there was no effort to approach Yemeni officials to gather information on the banker’s son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

The son was a poster child for the “no fly” list, buying his ticket with cash, checking no luggage, lying to British authorities about his student visa and spending several months in Yemen. The British denied Abdulmutallab reentry, but the US State Department didn’t even bother to check whether he had an entry visa for the United States.

In fact, he had a multiple entry visa and, since all intelligence and law enforcement agencies have access to State’s consular database listing visa holders, this fact was available throughout the community. It’s one thing to worry about due process in dealing with a US citizen; it makes no sense to wait for additional derogatory information in the case of a foreigner who has traveled to Yemen and whose father has provided a warning about his son’s extremism.

The simple fact is that the intelligence community is not a “community”; it does not share intelligence effectively and it fails to make corporate decisions. The NSA had transcripts of al-Qaeda phone conversations in 2001 and sensitive intercepts on the “Nigerian” in 2009 that it didn’t share with the CIA, the FBI or the National Security Council. The FBI accumulated intelligence on al-Qaeda that it hoped to use in a criminal case against Osama bin Laden; therefore, most of this intelligence never left the compartmented areas of FBI headquarters. The CIA withheld information on two 9/11 terrorists, presumably because it hoped to recruit these suspects as sources.

We were led to believe the intelligence situation had improved in the wake of 9/11, but in view of the traditional cultural and professional jealousies of the military and civilian intelligence agencies, we have no evidence of significant change. Various departments and agencies have their own watch lists for limiting travel of terrorist suspects, but apply their own parochial concerns to operational activities and often ignore the intelligence products of rival agencies.

The master list at the National Counter Terrorist Center is too large and unwieldy (more than 550,000 names) to be useful, and the State Department computer network lacks an automatic feedback loop that would link a suspect to a US visa. The Department of Homeland Security never should have been created and should have been abolished in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (remember “you’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie”). If we must have such a superfluous organization, then it should possess a centralized depository of terrorist suspects containing all relevant information.

The analytical capabilities of the CIA, the FBI and the DHS have not been enhanced by the creation of the intelligence czar. Moreover, it is revealing that President Barack Obama made his decision last month to increase troops in Afghanistan without requesting a National Intelligence Estimate from the so-called intelligence community. Perhaps, he understands that there are too many instances where assumptions drive facts in the intelligence process.

Former members of the 9/11 Commission are claiming that their recommendations have not been fully implemented, but it was the 9/11 Commission that helped to create the crazy-quilt intelligence organization that we now have, with too many working parts and a cumbersome bureaucracy. The Commission is responsible for the creation of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a sclerotic and bloated bureaucracy that has done little to improve strategic intelligence, and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is at the center of the Nigerian intelligence failure. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 demonstrated DHS is dysfunctional; the Nigerian failure teaches us that the DNI and the NCTC need reform.

The 9/11 Commission’s creation of an intelligence czar has ensured that diversity and competition in collection and analysis of intelligence will be given short shrift. Truth is elusive within the intelligence process, and there is rarely a single answer to a controversial question or problem. The best intelligence analysis often comes from contrarian thinkers, but the militarized intelligence process rewards consensus and not competition.

In the one area where we need centralization, watch lists for terrorist suspects, we have a redundancy of collections. Homeland Security keeps one list for border crossings; the State Department has a list for visas; the Transportation Security Administration has a no-fly list and a selectee list with 4,000 and 14,000 listings, respectively; and the National Counter Terrorism Center has an unwieldy database of 550,000 names. The criteria for each list differ, and it takes an interagency group to determine whether to place an individual on a specific list.

There is at least one thing we have to be thankful for. In view of the failed efforts of Robert Reid in 2001 and Abdulmutallab, we can be thankful al-Qaeda still has not perfected an effective detonator. We should also applaud the post-9/11 reforms that limited the amounts of liquid that can be taken on commercial aircraft.

The United States may not be so lucky the next time around, so President Obama must take a hard look at his entire national security team, particularly CIA Director Leon Panetta, DNI Dennis Blair, and NSC Deputy Director John Brennan, to make sure they are taking the necessary actions to reform the process. The failure points seem obvious, with bad decisions being made at a relatively low level in the process. The president has not demonstrated an interest in reforming the intelligence community, however, despite his campaign rhetoric.

Ironically, the president has left the CIA without its most effective component for investigating failure because he hasn’t named a statutory inspector general for the CIA to replace John Helgerson, who announced his retirement ten months ago. Helgerson was responsible for the most authoritative investigation of the 9/11 failure, which the Bush administration and the CIA managed to cover up.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

President Obama has repaired much of the scarred reputation of the United States and restored the hope of Americans and people everywhere who opposed the antidemocratic and authoritarian acts of the Bush administration. In less than a year, he has personally revived the indispensible role of the United States to renew multilateral diplomacy, arms control and disarmament, and human and civil rights.

The Bush administration created a strategic nightmare for U.S. interests at home and abroad over the past eight years. The Iraq War remains the center of this nightmare, and President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney worked assiduously to create and employ a strategic disinformation campaign to convince Congress and the American people of the need for war. Their manipulation of the American people (and the international community) is still not fully understood, but their lies and disinformation became conventional wisdom to the mainstream media, falsely linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks and Iraqis to al-Qaeda.

How many Americans gave their lives in Iraq actually believing the propaganda about these links as well as the outright lies and fabrications about Iraq’s enriched uranium, aluminum tubes for nuclear testing, and mobile biological laboratories. The CIA  incorporated these lies into a speech for Secretary of State Colin Powell, which was delivered to the United Nations just several weeks before the start of the Iraq War.

The Bush administration’s misuse of the intelligence community to make a phony case for war was matched by the politicization of virtually every agency in the national security arena. In addition to politicizing intelligence to make the case for war, the Central Intelligence Agency was brought into a world of secret prisons, torture and abuse, and extraordinary renditions. In an act of raw cynicism, President Bush gave the President’s Freedom Award, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a civilian in the federal government, to CIA director George Tenet, who directed these policies.

The National Security Agency developed an illegal intrusion into the privacy of Americans with a program of warrantless eavesdropping that was far more comprehensive than we were led to believe. (The New York Times covered-up this story for more than a year.) The developer of the policy was NSA director Michael Hayden, who was then confirmed as director of CIA with nary a question from the Congress on his role in warrantless eavesdropping.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation used the Patriot Act to issue more than 30,000 “national security” letters every year to individuals and businesses, which required telecommunications companies and financial institutions to illegally disclose private information about their customers. The FBI also conducted an aggressive campaign of ethnic profiling against Arabs and Muslims that led nowhere.

The Pentagon played a major role in the campaign of politicization, creating the Office of Special Plans and the Counter Terrorist Evaluation Group to circulate phony and worthless intelligence to make the case for war. The Pentagon also created the Counter Intelligence Field Activity to conduct illegal surveillance against American citizens near U.S military facilities or in attendance at antiwar meetings.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created an illegal fact-gathering operation called TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice) to collect “raw information” about “suspicious incidents.”  Readers of “Animal Farm” will not be amused.  President Obama certainly wasn’t; he has ended secret prisons, torture and abuse, and depoliticized the Department of Justice to make sure that renditions (and there have been none since his inauguration) are accompanied by judicial review and that the military respects the sovereignty of American citizens.

President Obama has methodically taken on these departments in an effort to demilitarize national security policy.  The military will find slower growth in its inflated defense budgets, genuine arms control and disarmament with Russia, and a rejection of General Stanley McChrystal’s demands for 40,000-50,000 more troops in Afghanistan. Fortunately, the president recognizes the physical, financial, and emotional costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On Saturday, the president pledged to end President Bill Clinton’s hypocritical policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which increased the hazing of gays in the military and abruptly ended the service of nearly 13,000 fighting men and women.

The CIA has had to accept the release of the Justice Department torture memoranda as well as the investigation of those CIA officers who conducted torture and abuse in excess of Justice Department guidelines. President Obama dismissed the objections of seven former CIA directors to this investigation. The CIA’s strategic intelligence may continue to have shortcomings, but not because the White House is demanding politicization of the intelligence product.

President Obama also inherited the numerous false representations of the Bush era, which damaged U.S. interests. The almost forgotten “axis of evil” speech of January 2002 illustrates the harm that the policies of President Bush did to our vital interests.  In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States and Iran engaged successfully in secret talks to deal with the chaos in Afghanistan in the wake of the overthrow of the Taliban.

The Iranians were elated to cooperate with us and to bolster the new Afghan government led by Hamid Karzai. Fortunately for our interests, Iran was holding under house arrest former Afghan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the most brutal mujaheddin leaders and a major recipient of U.S. assistance throughout the 1980s. Hekmatyar and his followers represented a major threat to the Karzai government, and we wanted him moved from house arrest to real arrest and eventual transfer to Afghan custody.

Following President Bush’s “axis” speech, however, which absurdly linked Iraq, North Korea, and Iran, the Tehran government released Hekmatyar and returned him to Afghanistan, where he resumed his leadership of the Hezb-i-Islami organization that is one of the deadliest insurgent forces in eastern Afghanistan. U.S. troops are taking their highest casualties in eastern Afghanistan since the invasion in eight years ago. President Obama’s new opening with Iran allows the United States to return the bilateral dialogue to the period after 9/11.

In less than a year, President Obama’s actions have significantly reversed the increased anti-Americanism and the decline in American influence that took place in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Nobel Peace Prize will enhance his credibility as well as the credibility of U.S. diplomacy. Troglodyte editorial writers may accuse the Nobel Committee of being “trapped in an adolescent adulation of Mr. Obama” (Financial Times) or describe a “certain cluelessness about America” (Washington Post), but the mere promise of Obama’s international agenda has led intransigent nations that seemed frozen in time to try to join the dialogue that Obama has started.

In the past few months, leaders in Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and even Burma have taken steps to enhance their international credentials. On Saturday, Turkey and Armenia, which had been prodded by the Obama administration, restored their diplomatic relations and reopened borders that had been closed since 1993. The Nobel Peace Prize gives moral weight and credibility to those who fight to end oppression and to energize international conciliation.

What in the world do the critics of the prize think that President Obama is trying valiantly to do?

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Their positions are consistent with previous militant stands favoring increased military deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Post’s criticism of the decisions to forego missile deployments in East Europe and to seek new arms control and disarmament agreements with Russia. The strategic mindset of the Post has no room for diplomacy, engagement, and disarmament, and—as a result—missed the significance of the Geneva meetings.

The Geneva meetings marked the most extensive talks in 30 years between U.S. and Iranian officials, offered the opportunity to reduce Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium, set a diplomatic clock for a solution to the nuclear issue, and demonstrated an important example of secret U.S.-Russian-French diplomacy to address the problem of nuclear proliferation.

The Western powers will have to hold Iranian feet to the fire on these issues, but Iran’s agreement to allow international inspection of the nuclear facility near Qom within two weeks will offer an immediate test of Tehran’s willingness to cooperate.  Iran has regularly lied to UN and IAEA officials on nuclear matters, which created very low expectations for the Geneva meeting, but the results thus far point to a major turning point.

Over the past several days, Post oped writers as well as guest columnists have focused on the instability of the Tehran government and argued that the proper mix of internal pressures could bring down the current government. All of these writers focus on the danger of nuclear weapons in the hands of the Iranian leadership, they ignore the national intelligence estimates from 2007-2009 that concluded Iran gave up its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

It should also be added that Iran sent a strong conciliatory message to the United States in 2003, when it suspended its enrichment of uranium, but resumed its enrichment efforts two years later when the Bush administration not only failed to respond, but endorsed clandestine and military measures against Tehran.

The most reckless advice at this possibly critical juncture comes from Post editorial writer Anne Applebaum, who wants the Obama administration to “increase funding for dissident exile groups, smuggle money into the country,” and to “bombard Iranian airwaves with anti-regime television.”

She ignores the fact that the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are not exactly strangers to domestic intervention in Iran, having sponsored the overthrow of the democratically elected government in 1953 in order to install the Shah of Iran whose corrupt regime was topped 26 years later. Applebaum believes such steps would “unnerve” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.  It is more likely that U.S. intervention would unnerve and discredit the political opposition in Tehran.

Oped writer Robert Kagan, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (!), supports “crippling sanctions” that would not necessarily topple the regime but would have a chance to succeed if they were a part of the “right mix of internal opposition and foreign pressure.” He ignores the fact that sanctions rarely work anywhere, that there is insufficient support for additional sanctions, and that—most importantly—the Iranian opposition itself strongly opposes the use of sanctions against Iran.

On the eve of the talks, Iran’s top opposition leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, issued a statement against tougher sanctions because they would hurt the opposition movement and ordinary citizens.  Kagan believes that any autocratic regime’s biggest fear is that domestic opponents may gain the support of powerful foreign patrons. In the case of Iran, however, foreign support for opposition groups or sanctions against the government would be counter-productive and permit Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guards to take more repressive measures.

It is also noteworthy that the Iranian opposition movement supports the nuclear program of the Ahmadinejad government as well as the current talks between Iran and the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

The day after the agreement, oped writer Michael Gerson continued to support an Israeli military attack against Iranian nuclear facilities and incorrectly pointed to the Israeli attack against Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981 as a success.  Most experts, however, have questioned the effectiveness of the Israeli raid on the Osiraq reactor. The attack simply intensified Saddam Hussein’s determination to acquire nuclear weapons and drove the Iraqi nuclear program underground or to camouflaged civilian installations.

As a result, U.S. intelligence was not fully aware of the Iraqi nuclear program and the extent of the intelligence failure was not made known until after the Desert Storm operation.  Most of the facilities committed to the nuclear program escaped attack during the military campaign in 1991.

Charles Krauthammer, the Post’s most zealous armchair warrior, castigated President Barack Obama for selling out Poland and the Czech Republic by abrogating a missile defense agreement for East Europe and for giving Iran “precious time” to develop nuclear weapons. He referred to the president as “feckless,” and made no reference to the adroit diplomacy between the United States, Russia, and France that will have Russia reprocess Iranian uranium and will have France convert the enriched uranium into fuel rods. This is an unprecedented diplomatic arrangement presumably beyond Krauthammer’s ken.

The editorial in today’s Washington Post falsely argued that President Obama’s first diplomatic encounter with Iran “had much in common” with the Bush administration’s encounter in 2008.  Undersecretary of State William Burns was the negotiator on both occasions, but in 2008 he had no ability to engage the Iranians substantively on any issue.  On Thursday, however, Burns and Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili held a private meeting for 45 minutes that included a “frank discussion” of human rights issues. The opposition of the Post to these talks is reaching a level of journalistic fanaticism.

Naturally, there can only be low expectations for negotiations at this time in view of the long period of strain and even hostility in U.S.-Iranian relations, but there is every reason to engage in discussions that could lead to a breakthrough in these relations. In the wake of Desert Storm, Iran offered U.S. oil companies an opportunity to take part in oil exploration in Iran, but the Clinton administration refused support for such activities and the oil companies lost their nerve.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States and Iran held successful secret talks on security issues that involved common concerns regarding Central Asia and Afghanistan, but the Bush administration refused to follow-up these talks and instead relied on a policy of coercion. There are many elements of the current situation, however, that suggest broad strategic discussions that avoid polemics and accusations could lead to some unanimity on regional security in the Persian Gulf, some understanding on the dangers of international terrorism, and even some transparency on Iran’s nuclear activities.

The United States and other permanent members of the Security Council as well as Iran have nothing to lose at this point and much to gain.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Their letter to the president is particularly self-serving for three of the directors (Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, and George Tenet), who would presumably be the subject of any investigation, and simply self-aggrandizing for the others (John Deutch, James Woolsey, William Webster, and James Schlesinger), whose stewardship of the CIA since the early 1970s has contributed to the Agency’s loss of influence and credibility.

The key to managing a complex organization such as the CIA is based on the integrity and competence of the director and his senior management. These traits were certainly lacking during the two decades these “magnificent seven” were at the helm.

The letter itself represents a stunning display of irrelevance and wrong-headedness. The former directors argue, for example, that any reopened investigation would damage the intelligence community’s ability to obtain cooperation of foreign intelligence agencies.

In fact, the opposite is the case. Foreign intelligence agencies have been holding back their liaison activities and their cooperation with the CIA because of the crimes associated with secret prisons, torture and abuse, and extraordinary renditions. It is quite unbelievable that CIA leaders decided to compromise the governments and intelligence services of the European community by locating secret prisons and using logistical facilities within their borders. It is very unlikely that any member of the European Union will cooperate with such CIA activities in the future.

The seven directors argue predictably that career prosecutors have already investigated the relevant cases where “Agency officers appeared to have acted beyond their existing legal authorities,” but with the exception of a prosecution of a CIA contractor there was a determination that prosecutions were not warranted. They do not mention that a political appointee in the Bush administration, Paul McNulty, was responsible for these decisions and they do not refer to the unconscionable politicization of the Bush administration’s Justice Department.

Finally, the letter argues that any criminal investigation would “seriously damage the willingness” of intelligence officers to “take risks to protect the country.”

This is arrant nonsense! One of the reasons why the CIA had to resort to independent contractors, particularly former military officers and enlisted men, to staff secret prisons and conduct torture and abuse was because of the opposition of professional intelligence officers to the policies of the Bush administration. An investigation would not compromise the national security interests of the United States, although it would cause grave embarrassment to those who carried out these policies and would perhaps guarantee that these actions would never again be permitted.

It is also worthwhile to examine those individuals who signed the letter to the president.  Jim Schlesinger abolished the Office of National Estimates, the most prestigious Agency department for intelligence analysis, because of its independence and created a group of National Intelligence Officers who would be more responsive to the policy demands of the White House and the National Security Council.

Upon arrival at the CIA in 1973, he assembled the CIA’s Soviet analysts and told them to “stop fucking Richard Nixon.” Judge William Webster obstructed the Walsh investigation of Iran-Contra, particularly the case against a high-ranking operations officer who was responsible for illegal arms deliveries to the Contras. The officer was indicted by a Grand Jury for making false statements and obstructing the investigations of the CIA’s Inspector General as well as the work of the Tower Commission, but the case was dismissed after Webster refused to release necessary documents.

Jim Woolsey and John Deutch were short-lived directors who weakened the Agency’s role in collecting intelligence and conducting analysis in the key fields of arms control and international terrorism. Woolsey’s unwillingness to punish any of the eleven senior officers who were responsible for allowing Aldrich Ames, the notorious long-spy for the Soviet Union, to move into sensitive clandestine positions over a ten-year period led the Clinton administration to force his resignation.

Deutch’s security breaches at the CIA included the compromise of the most sensitive clandestine operations of the directorate of operations.  Deutch had introduced sensitive intelligence to his home computer that had been used for accessing pornographic sites, but he blamed others in the household for the compromise.

Tenet, Goss, and Hayden were directly involved in the decision-making that led to the creation of secret prisons in Europe, Southwest Asia, and the Far East; the use of torture and abuse; and the rendition of individuals who were guilty of no crimes against the United States. Tenet, moreover, was directly responsible for the false intelligence given to the White House to support the use of force authorization against Iraq in 2002 as well as the phony speech given by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations in 2003.

Goss worked assiduously to cover-up the 9/11 accountability report of the CIA’s Inspector General. His handpicked executive secretary, the third highest position at the CIA, was Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who is currently serving a jail sentence for steering Agency contracts to a lifelong friend who bribed former congressman Randall “Duke” Cunningham.

Hayden entered the CIA under a cloud because, as director of the National Security Agency, he approved the warrantless eavesdropping program that began after 9/11.  And he left the CIA under a cloud this year because of his success in compromising the work of the Office of the Inspector General.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder must ignore the efforts of the former CIA directors and many others to find the truths that would be part of any investigation of activities that went beyond any legal authority. Twenty-five years ago, CIA director William Casey tried to cover-up crimes that were committed in the remote El Salvadoran village of El Mozote. Eventually the Salvadoran government established a Truth Commission to investigate the crimes that had been dismissed by the Reagan administration.

Today, the United States needs to create a Truth Commission to understand the crimes that were committed over the past decade.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

A Ground-Based Interceptor missile is tested near Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., in December 2008. Photo: Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency

For the past several months, the editorial and oped writers of the Washington Post have railed against Russia as expansionist and assertive toward the West and have argued against improving bilateral relations between the United States and Russia.

President Barack Obama’s plan to scrap a proposed anti-ballistic missile shield in East Europe has given them a new hobby horse to ride. In an editorial titled “Missile Strike,” the opinion writers predictably excoriated President Obama’s decision to scrap the shield as a concession to Kremlin hardliners who “implausibly claimed to feel threatened” by U.S. interceptors and radars.

These writers ignore three fundamental facts that have nothing to do with Russia: the unproven anti-ballistic missile system could not distinguish between an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and a decoy; Iran is not working on an ICBM; and the notion of an Iranian threat to Europe is purely fanciful.

They also fail to mention that the East European countries that were to accept the missile interceptors and radars (Poland and the Czech Republic) never expressed concerns with Iran’s capabilities and intentions and were never concerned with missile defense. In fact, public opinion in the Czech Republic was overwhelmingly opposed to taking part in the program, and the government of prime minister Mirek Topolanek toppled after agreeing to do so.

The Post writers also ignored Secretary of Defense Robert Gates admission last week that the radar for the Czech Republic “looked deep into Russia and actually could monitor the launches of their ICBMs as well.” Gates was the first U.S. official to acknowledge that the radar would be able to see as far as the Caucasus Mountains inside Russia.

In addition to their own editorial, the Post ran two opeds that reified the paper’s position. Ronald Asmus, a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, criticized the United States for preventing NATO from stationing its military forces in Central and East Europe.

Such a step would have been a gratuitous swipe at Russia. Asmus also ignored U.S. sponsorship of NATO membership for former members of the Warsaw Pact, a gratuitous act that betrayed former secretary of state James Baker’s commitment to avoid “leapfrogging” over East Germany to recruit new members for NATO. Baker’s commitment was part of the unwritten agreement that led Moscow to withdraw its military forces from East Germany. This withdrawal paved the way for the unification of Germany and the membership of a unified Germany in NATO.

The Post followed up with an oped from David Kramer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration, who called President Obama’s decision a “capitulation to Russian pressure” that marked a “serious betrayal of loyal allies in Warsaw and Prague.”

Both Kramer and Asmus are with the German Marshall Fund of the United States; they are major opponents of arms control with Russia. Accordingly, they do not mention that the scrapping of the missile shield of the Bush administration would improve the prospects for U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations that are currently underway. These negotiations could produce significant reductions in strategic and intercontinental missiles—a positive step for both countries as well as for West and East Europe.

The New York Times, on the other hand, termed Obama’s actions a “sound strategic decision” in an editorial titled “Missile Sense.”  Nevertheless, the Times followed up with an oped from Secretary of Defense Gates, who took credit for both the U.S. decision in 2006 to deploy ground-based interceptors in Poland as well as the U.S. decision in 2009 to discard the Bush administration’s plan for a missile shield.

In an incredible exercise in bureaucratic chutzpah, Gates, who politicized intelligence for the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s, said he was “all too familiar with the pitfalls of over-reliance on intelligence assessments that can become outdated.” Gates, the self-described “pragmatist,” certainly knows of what he speaks.

Before genuine pragmatists, progressives, and arms control advocates chortle over the decision of the Obama administration, however, several facts should be kept in mind. In stopping the missile shield technology for East Europe that was nowhere near ready and would have directed $5 billion to the Boeing Corporation, the Obama administration has endorsed dozens of interceptors for U.S. ships in the North and Mediterranean Seas in 2011 as well as interceptors for West and East Europe in 2015 that will direct $5 billion to the Raytheon and Lockheed corporations.

The Iranian threat may be non-existent and the missile shield unproven, but the military-industrial-congressional complex has triumphed once again. The United States has spent more than $100 billion over the past 50 years in its pursuit of a national missile defense. So much for pragmatism!

Our only hope at this point is that someone in the Obama administration will read or reread President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address in 1961. Eisenhower, who prevented the unnecessary spending of precious dollars on unnecessary weapons systems, described the Pentagon’s pursuit of taxpayer money as “virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”

He also expressed concern to his granddaughter that future presidents, not schooled in military culture, would fall prey to the military’s insatiable pursuit of such systems.

Unfortunately, his concern was prescient as one naïve or willful president after another has caved to U.S. military’s demands.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Kenneth Lieberthal, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, is the author of a new study on intelligence reform.

The prestigious Brookings Institution has joined the ranks of various government and public institutions to suggest reform steps for the Central Intelligence Agency and the intelligence community (IC).

Unlike previous reform proposals, the Brookings study manages to overlook the serious systemic issues that face the world of intelligence analysis and to propose a full slate of boilerplate steps. The author of the study is the well-known China scholar, Kenneth Lieberthal, who is the director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings.

Since Lieberthal was a senior director for Asia on the National Security Council and a special assistant to President Bill Clinton for national security affairs and therefore a consumer of the government’s most sensitive intelligence analysis, his study is a particular disappointment.

What the CIA should be, what it should do, and what it should prepare to do is less clear than at any time since the beginning of the Cold War.  There should have been major reform of the CIA and the IC with the end of the Cold War, but there was none. Sen. David Boren and Rep. David McCurdy, both Democrats, made attempts in 1992 and 1994 to reform the CIA, but there was great resistance from Republicans who were under the influence of the Pentagon, and there was no support from their Democratic colleagues.

The politicization of intelligence on the Soviet Union in the 1980s and the intelligence failures that contributed to the 9/11 attacks created other opportunities for reform, but the flawed thinking of the 9/11 Commission, the Congressional rush to judgment, and unwise pressures from the families of the 9/11 victims led to changes that made a bad situation worse.

The creation of a new bureaucracy under a Director of National Intelligence (DNI or the so-called intelligence tsar) beholden to the White House led to a more centralized system of intelligence that stifles creative thinking and runs the risk of more politicized intelligence. Lieberthal’s failure to critique the role of the DNI is one of the major shortcomings of his work.

The congressional, political, and academic critics outside of the intelligence community simply have no idea of the decline and despair within the CIA that has led to a major deterioration in the ability to prepare strategic intelligence and to inform the policy community. There is no consensus whatsoever on what is needed to reform the world of intelligence. The Congress is an unlikely source for conducting a reform effort; its modus operandi calls for throwing money at problems, but the needed reforms have nothing to do with additional funds.

There has never been a time in the nation’s history when so much money has been spent on intelligence with so little accountability and so few beneficial results. We learned today that the intelligence budget is $75 billion, which more than doubles the budget for the State Department and the Agency for International Development.

The serious problems that Lieberthal fails to address include the militarization of the IC, which must be reversed; the absence of congressional oversight over a flawed intelligence product that paved the way to the Iraq War, which must be ended; the ability of the National Clandestine Service to politicize intelligence analysis, which must be stopped; and the inability of CIA to tell truth to power, which finds the Agency without a moral compass.

The Bush administration boasted of a “marriage” between the Pentagon and the CIA, which indicated its support for an intelligence community subordinated to Pentagon priorities. The current intelligence tsar, retired Admiral Dennis Blair, has strengthened this marriage, which finds the Defense Department the chief operating officer of the $75 billion intelligence industry. The Pentagon controls more than 85 percent of the intelligence budget and nearly 90 percent of the 200,000 intelligence personnel.

Most collection requirements flow from the Pentagon, and deference within the policy and congressional communities for “support for the warfighter” has elevated tactical military considerations over strategic geopolitical considerations.  The Pentagon has also moved into the fields of clandestine collection and covert operations, without the constraints of oversight that limit the covert actions of the CIA.

The decline of the CIA over the past two decades coincides with the end to oversight of the IC by the Senate and House intelligence committees. These committees have become advocates for the CIA—particularly for the clandestine world of spies and covert operations. In doing so, Congress has failed to make the CIA accountable for its transgressions and has ignored the major decline in the production of strategic intelligence. It took the Senate intelligence committee more than five years to issue a report on the Bush administration’s misuse of intelligence information, and even then it merely issued a majority-only written report.

Every congressional “reform” movement on CIA has started with the need for greater clandestine collection, particularly greater assets and personnel for the National Clandestine Service, which ignores the limits and myths of clandestine collection and exaggerates the value of human intelligence. The current CIA director, Leon Panetta, has been captured by the clandestine culture and cadre, and is unlikely to lead a reform movement. It is time to separate the CIA’s directorate of intelligence from the National Clandestine Service, but Lieberthal merely notes that there “strong arguments” for and against separation. Once upon a time, we counted on “independent” studies to resolve these arguments.

Unfortunately, Lieberthal takes the easy way out with a series of thumb sucking recommendations that do not address the problem of the decline of strategic intelligence. He calls for the creation of a National Intelligence University (!) with its own campus and faculty as well as “periodic formal training opportunities.” I would expect a distinguished academic such as Lieberthal to understand the difference between education and training.

He calls for greater hiring of “people who are in their late twenties or early thirties who have had extensive experience related to the country of concern,” which ignores the need to cross-fertilize the CIA with experienced analysts from the academic and think-tank worlds who have a little more grey hair than the average 20 or 30-something and more time overseas. These senior analysts would also be able to mentor the CIA’s analytic community, which is extremely young and inexperienced.

He calls for adding another layer of review, without acknowledging the petty tutelage that already exists in the review process and without endorsing the need for protecting contrarian and out-of-the-box thinking in the analytic process. Finally, Lieberthal recommends IC briefings to incoming policy makers in order to determine how policy makers “might best be served by the IC.”

Unfortunately, the CIA already spends too much time determining the interests of the policy maker and, as a result, often skews intelligence to serve those interests.

CIA directors Richard Helms, James Schlesinger, George H.W. Bush, William Casey, Robert Gates, George Tenet, and Porter Goss were guilty of politicizing intelligence, but Lieberthal doesn’t deal with the problem. The only protections against politicization are the integrity and honesty of the intelligence analysts themselves, as well as the protection of competitive analysis that serves as a safeguard against unchallenged acceptance of conventional wisdom.

The creation of a centralized director of national intelligence and the placement of key IC positions in the hands of the military do not augur well for the restoration of CIA’s moral compass.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Test of Soviet SS-18 (R-36) ICBM. (Kosmotras Web site)

A recently declassified study on Soviet intentions during the Cold War identifies significant failures in U.S. intelligence analysis on Soviet military intentions and demonstrates the constant exaggeration of the Soviet threat.

The study, which was released last week by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, was prepared by a Pentagon contractor in 1995 that had access to former senior Soviet defense officials, military officers, and industrial specialists. It demonstrates the consistent U.S. exaggeration of Soviet “aggressiveness” and the failure to recognize Soviet fears of a U.S. first strike. The study begs serious questions about current U.S. exaggeration of “threats” emanating from Iran, North Korea, and Afghanistan.

In the 1980s, long after Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signaled reduced growth in Soviet defense spending, the CIA produced a series of National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) titled “Soviet Capabilities for Strategic Nuclear Conflict,” which concluded that the Soviet Union sought “superior capabilities to fight and win a nuclear war with the United States, and have been working to improve their chances of prevailing in such a conflict.”

The notion of winning or prevailing in a nuclear conflict was, of course, ludicrous in the extreme, but this did not stop the CIA’s leadership (Director William Casey and Deputy Director Robert Gates) from endorsing the view that the Soviet Red Army could conduct military operations on a nuclear battlefield and had improved “their ability to deal with the many contingencies of such a conflict, and raising the possibility of outcomes favorable to the USSR.”

The CIA ignored the Soviet slowdown in the growth of military procurement, exaggerated the capabilities of important strategic systems, and distorted the military and economic power of the Warsaw Pact states. As late as 1986, the CIA reported that the per capita income of East Germany was ahead of West Germany and that the national income per capita was higher in the Soviet Union than in Italy. Several years later, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed, and former CIA director Stansfield Turner wrote that the “corporate view” at the CIA “missed by a mile.”

The Pentagon study demonstrates that the Soviet military high command “understood the devastating consequences of nuclear war” and believed that the use of nuclear weapons had to be avoided at “all costs.” Nevertheless, in 1975, presidential chief of staff Dick Cheney and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld introduced a group of neoconservatives, led by Harvard professor Richard Pipes, to the CIA in order to make sure that future NIEs would falsely conclude that the Soviet Union rejected nuclear parity, were bent on fighting and winning a nuclear war, and were radically increasing their military spending.

The neocons (known as Team B) and the CIA (Team A) then wrongly predicted a series of Soviet weapons developments that never took place, including directed energy weapons, mobile ABM systems, and anti-satellite capabilities. CIA deputy director Gates used this worst-case reasoning in a series of speeches to insinuate himself with CIA director Bill Casey and the Reagan administration.

In view of the consistent exaggeration of the Soviet threat throughout the 1980s, when the USSR was on a glide path toward collapse, it is fair to speculate on current geopolitical situations that are far less threatening than our policy and intelligence experts assert.

For example, is it reasonable to argue that the United States needs to deploy a strategic air defense in Poland and the Czech Republic to defend against a possible Iranian attack against Central Europe? How did our military planners come up with a scenario that projects Iran’s intentions to target Europe? Why do we dismiss Russian fears of the deployment of such a system in two former Warsaw Pact countries near Russian borders?

North Korea, like Iran, is another country that provokes irrational behavior and threat assessments on our part despite its military and economic backwardness. For the past several months, the Pyongyang government has consistently signaled an interest in improving relations with both the United States and South Korea.

The release of two American journalists and a South Korean worker as well as an agreement to allow tourism and family reunions to resume with the Seoul government point to an effort to ease relations after months of growing tension. What is North Korea demanding? Nothing more than bilateral talks with the United States. Why is this so difficult?

And why does President Barack Obama consider Afghanistan to be an “international security challenge of the highest order” and the Afghan war a “war that we cannot afford to lose.” The terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 were operating independently of any national government and did most of their organizational work in Germany and the United States. We were compelled to rout them from Afghanistan in 2001, but the wars in Iraq and the continued war in Afghanistan has not contributed to the security and stability of the United States.

The exaggeration of the Soviet threat in the 1980s led to an additional trillion and a half dollars in defense spending against a Soviet Union that was in decline and a Soviet military threat that was disappearing. It is time to recognize the great harm that was done to the intelligence community and the CIA with the politicization of intelligence in the 1980s as well as the militarization of intelligence over the past twenty years.

If we don’t reform the intelligence process and create a genuinely independent intelligence capability there will continue to be threat exaggerations that cost us greatly in blood and treasure over the next 10 years.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

The late senator Daniel P. Moynihan created the PIDB in the 1990s to reduce the “torment of secrecy,” which denied important information on national security to the American people. The EAB was designed to deal with the complexities of managing the CIA and to improve the access of intelligence information to the Congress and the American people. Hayden and Rudman have a cold war preoccupation with secrecy and have never been known for improving access. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-KY, is responsible for the Hayden appointment; CIA director Leon Panetta appointed Rudman.

As Steven Aftergood, the editor of Secrecy News noted, Hayden is “not well known as a classification critic or a proponent of declassification.” As director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Hayden instituted the warrantless eavesdropping program that violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution that prohibits unlawful seizures and searches.

In defending warrantless eavesdropping at the National Press Club in January 2006, he argued that the Fourth Amendment did not stipulate the importance of “probable cause,” which of course it does. Hayden also conceded that he relied on advice for the program from White House lawyers and never considered consulting the legal staff of NSA.

Soon after arriving at the CIA as director, Hayden began an unprecedented investigation of the Office of the Inspector General, which had been critical of the CIA’s renditions and interrogations programs. Hayden even targeted the statutory inspector general of the CIA, John Helgerson, who had recommended the creation of “accountability boards” for CIA officers, including former director George Tenet, involved in 9/11 intelligence failures.

The failure of the chairmen of the congressional oversight committees to come to Helgerson’s defense made it extremely difficult for the IG to do his job and he announced his retirement seven months ago. The White House and the CIA have still not named a replacement for Helgerson, which is particularly damaging in view of the high-level investigations of CIA detentions and interrogations programs as well as the numerous secret prisons or “black sites” established after 9/11, which would benefit from an aggressive Office of the Inspector General.

In addition to naming Rudman to the EAB, Panetta has made the former senator the director’s special advisor on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s (SSCI) special inquiry of past practices in detentions and interrogations.

Panetta has his own review group within the CIA on these practices, but has prominently placed current members of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) in the group. The Rudman appointment and the use of NCS officers does not augur will for genuine openness with the Senate inquiry. The NCS has been a major player in the culture of cover-up at the CIA, including the destruction of the 92 torture tapes that has been investigated by the FBI for nearly two years.

By placing Rudman as an intermediary between the SSCI and the CIA’s review group, Panetta has ensured himself that the most damaging information on detentions and interrogations will never see the light of day. Rudman was the most active member of the SSCI in trying to block CIA officials from testifying against the nomination of Robert Gates as CIA director in 1991.

Rudman actually branded those few individuals willing to come forward as “McCarthyites” in an effort to marginalize their testimony and to make sure additional witnesses would not testify or submit written affidavits against Bob Gates. There is ample evidence, moreover, of Rudman’s strong, even bellicose, partisan politicking over the years.

One of the greatest unknown scandals within the intelligence community is the over-classification of government documents in order to keep important information out of the hands of the American people. It costs billions of dollars for government and industry to classify documents, with several million individuals in the government and private industry having the right to classify information.

Government vaults hold over 1.5 billion pages of classified information that are more than twenty-five years old and, thus, unavailable to scholars and researchers, let along the general public. Documents are typically classified to hide embarrassing political information, not secrets. Greater respect for openness might have prevented the policies that led to the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the CIA’s network of secret prisons, and the CIA’s detentions and interrogations programs.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.