Date: August 31, 2005 1:35:35 PM PDT
Subject: [Spy News] The Demise of the CIA
Published on Wednesday, August 31, 2005 by the Baltimore Sun
The Demise of the CIA
by Melvin Goodman
CIA Director Porter J. Goss invited eight of his predecessors and two of
their widows back to the agency recently, prompting his executive secretary
to exclaim, "Is this a great day for the CIA or what?" Well, not exactly.
The party was, in fact, a wake, marking the end of Mr. Goss' role as
director of central intelligence, the CIA's role as the central intelligence
agency in the intelligence community and, most important, President Harry
Truman's creation of an authoritative intelligence agency outside the policy
community providing objective and balanced intelligence estimates.
Few Americans will mourn the passing of an agency that missed the 10-year
decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the five-year planning cycle for 9/11
and the steady deterioration of Iraq's political, social and military
instruments that obviated the need for the U.S. invasion of 2003.
Nevertheless, it is important to understand the CIA's important
contributions to American national security in its first 30 years as well as
the more recent intelligence failures that were not corrected by the work of
the 9/11 commission or last year's intelligence reform legislation.
The primary mission of the CIA is to provide strategic assessments to
policymakers, telling truth to power. These assessments provided early
warning to U.S. policymakers about every Soviet weapon that was procured
from 1950 to 1990, the signs of the Sino-Soviet split that enabled the Nixon
administration to make a strategic opening in China and the reasons why U.S.
military forces would not be successful in Vietnam in the 1960s.
CIA analysis exposed the fictitious bomber gap in the 1950s and the missile
gap in the 1960s, and CIA monitoring permitted the successful arms control
agreements of the 1970s and 1980s with the former Soviet Union. Many of the
most successful strategic monitoring systems were designed and implemented
by CIA scientists and technicians, a capability that no longer exists at the
CIA.
Over the past 20 years, however, the CIA gradually became another political
tool in the policy process.
Under directors William J. Casey and Robert M. Gates, the CIA exaggerated
the military and economic power of the Soviet Union, gradually reduced its
role in producing strategic intelligence estimates and began to cut back on
analysis on controversial military issues in order to avoid contentious
battles with the Pentagon.
CIA Director John M. Deutch's creation of the National Imagery and Mapping
Agency enabled the Pentagon to become the sole interpreter of satellite
photography, our most valuable strategic intelligence collection. In its
brief history, this agency - renamed the National Geospatial-Intelligence
Agency - has been responsible for a series of major intelligence disasters,
including the failure to monitor Indian nuclear testing in 1998 and the
bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999.
It is ironic that the CIA's inept and corrupt handling of intelligence in
the run-up to the Iraqi invasion has led to the agency's demise, because
intelligence counted for very little in the decision to go to war. The sham
case for the invasion was based on the hate and hysteria that followed 9/11.
Before the war, British intelligence correctly told Prime Minister Tony
Blair that U.S. "intelligence and policy were being fixed around the
policy." The fact that CIA Director George J. Tenet thought that such fixes
would be a "slam dunk" helped to create the greatest intelligence scandal in
U.S. history.
Recent intelligence "reforms" have made matters worse. The creation of a
director of national intelligence will reduce the redundancy and competition
in intelligence analysis and will do nothing to weaken the power of the
Pentagon, which controls more than 85 percent of the budget, personnel and
collection requirements of the intelligence community.
Allowing the military to dominate the targeting of satellites and the
analysis of satellite imagery creates additional problems. This analysis is
used to calibrate the defense budget (spiraling out of control), to gauge
the likelihood of military conflict (with intelligence the key to
pre-emptive attack) and to verify arms control agreements. More recently,
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's appointment of an undersecretary of
defense for intelligence has enhanced the power of the military in the
intelligence field.
Meanwhile, nothing has been done to revive congressional oversight of the
intelligence community, with congressional intelligence chairmen considering
themselves "advocates" for the intelligence community.
The term limits on members of the intelligence committees and the increased
power of the armed forces committees on intelligence issues have contributed
to the decline of oversight responsibility. The oversight committees ignored
the poor intelligence provided on the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the absence
of strategic analysis on the terrorist threat in the 1990s and inept
intelligence on Iraq before the war.
Melvin A. Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, was
a CIA analyst from 1966 to 1990.
© 2005 Baltimore Sun
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