The 9-11 Commission Adopted a Reform that Won't Work

Alexis Debat, in London's Financial Times (July 30, 2004):

[The writer, a former official in the French defence ministry, is a senior consultant to ABC News and will publish a history of the CIA next year.]

As reactions to the 9/11 Commission's conclusions about US intelligence failures continue to reverberate, historians of intelligence can only wonder how the commission could be so wrong for being so right.

The report's clever diagnosis of the state of US intelligence is surprisingly appropriate in its scope. It briefly but correctly emphasises the "cultural revolution" that America's intelligence establishment will have to undergo to turn itself from a sprawling and jumbled "information pipeline" to an integrated "system of knowing" capable of performing elaborate cognitive functions for the US government.

Alas, aside from this striving indication, the commission's laundry list of objectives to reform US intelligence resonates sourly to informed observers, especially now that politicians on both sides have pledged to act upon its conclusions. The reason is that this latest study of the breakdowns in the organisation of US intelligence repeats almost word for word the conclusions of about 25 such reports written over the past 55 years.

Time and again, these documents have reiterated the same fundamental diagnosis: the 1947 National Security Act, which created the CIA and organised the intelligence community as it is today, has never been able to lay the groundwork for the kind of intelligence centralisation that America needed before 9/11 and that it needs today. The CIA was forced on a chaotic system as a vehicle for centralisation, in the face of fierce opposition from other agencies and against the letter of America's political culture, which rejects both secrecy and the concentration of power. In this context, the CIA could neither overcome the bureaucratic opposition from other agencies nor the fundamental dynamics of America's political DNA.

Instead of being empowered with its original functions of "lead integrator", the CIA remained an "anomaly", left to compete with - and duplicate the work of - the FBI, the State department and the Defence department's various intelligence arms.

The 9/11 Commission should be praised for insisting on this fundamental historical reality. But this scope and relevance is precisely why we should be disappointed with the commission's recommendations regarding intelligence reform.

The proposal for the establishment of a cabinet-level "intelligence czar" is especially striking. Not for its novelty - it has been the mantra of intelligence experts at least for the past 10 years - but for its ignorance of one fundamental reality: the job already exists, and with the highest legitimacy possible.

The 1947 National Security Act clearly established that the director of central intelligence - who doubled as CIA director - had the power to not only oversee and co-ordinate the work of the entire "intelligence system" within the government, but also gave him the right to "inspect" all foreign intelligence held by other agencies and disseminate it as a single "producer" of so-called "national intelligence". Alas, this is almost word for word the job description that the 9/11 Commission has put out for the "national intelligence director" that it sees as crucial to intelligence reform....