Why Intelligence Fails

Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War

Robert Jervis

• Editorial: Cornell University Press
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780801457616
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Intelligence & Espionage

The U.S. government spends enormous resources each year on the gathering and analysis of intelligence, yet the history of American foreign policy is littered with missteps and misunderstandings that have resulted from intelligence failures. In Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis examines the politics and psychology of two of the more spectacular intelligence failures in recent memory: the mistaken belief that the regime of the Shah in Iran was secure and stable in 1978, and the claim that Iraq had active WMD programs in 2002.

The Iran case is based on a recently declassified report Jervis was commissioned to undertake by CIA thirty years ago and includes memoranda written by CIA officials in response to Jervis's findings. The Iraq case, also grounded in a review of the intelligence community's performance, is based on close readings of both classified and declassified documents, though Jervis's conclusions are entirely supported by evidence that has been declassified.

In both cases, Jervis finds not only that intelligence was badly flawed but also that later explanations—analysts were bowing to political pressure and telling the White House what it wanted to hear or were willfully blind—were also incorrect. Proponents of these explanations claimed that initial errors were compounded by groupthink, lack of coordination within the government, and failure to share information. Policy prescriptions, including the recent establishment of a Director of National Intelligence, were supposed to remedy the situation.

In Jervis's estimation, neither the explanations nor the prescriptions are adequate. The inferences that intelligence drew were actually quite plausible given the information available. Errors arose, he concludes, from insufficient attention to the ways in which information should be gathered and interpreted, a lack of self-awareness about the factors that led to the judgments, and an organizational culture that failed to probe for weaknesses and explore alternatives. Evaluating the inherent tensions between the methods and aims of intelligence personnel and policymakers from a unique insider's perspective, Jervis forcefully criticizes recent proposals for improving the performance of the intelligence community and discusses ways in which future analysis can be improved.

[1]

Adventures in Intelligence

The trouble with this world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.

—Mark Twain

If it were a fact, it wouldn’t be intelligence.

—General Michael Hayden, then head of National Security Administration

We missed the Soviet decision to put missiles into Cuba because we could not believe that Khrushchev could make such a mistake.

—Sherman Kent

Failure may be an orphan, but it is often a closely observed one. This is especially true for failures of intelligence, which tend to be as misunderstood as they are berated. They clearly are important. Despite the fact that most theories of international politics assume that actors see the world fairly accurately, many wars are preceded if not caused by failures to predict what others will do, and almost by definition crises involve intelligence failures. ¹ For members of the general public, intelligence failures are of course upsetting because they are often linked to costly policy failures. The public often blames intelligence agencies, a propensity that policymakers are happy to encourage because it shifts the responsibility away from them. ²

This book examines in detail two major intelligence failures: the inability of CIA and the wider intelligence community to understand the turmoil in Iran leading up to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the misjudgment of Iraq’s programs of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the period preceding the 2003 war. Before saying a bit about them, I should discuss the concept of intelligence failure, which is not as unambiguous as one might expect. ³

MEANINGS OF INTELLIGENCE FAILURE

The most obvious sense of intelligence failure is a mismatch between the estimates and what later information reveals. This is simultaneously the most important and least interesting sense of the term. It is most important because to the extent that policy depends on accurate assessments, almost the only thing that matters is accuracy.

In two ways the brute fact of the intelligence failure is uninteresting, however. First, it does not take much analysis to decide that there was a failure; all that is required is the observation that subsequent events did not match the assessments. Second, the fact that intelligence often is in error does not surprise scholars and should not surprise policymakers. Although most attention has been paid to surprise attacks because these failures are so traumatic, broadening the focus reveals many more cases, starting with the report in the Bible that the spies that Moses sent to the land of Israel overestimated the strength of the enemies to be found there. ⁴ As I will discuss further in the concluding chapter, the existence of failures is unfortunate but not mysterious. Intelligence is a game between hiders and finders, and the former usually have the easier job. Intentions, furthermore, often exist only in a few heads and are subject to rapid change. Deception is fairly easy, and the knowledge that it is possible degrades the value of accurate information, as we will see in the Iraq case. ⁵

The second sense of failure is a falling short of what we expect from good intelligence. Judgments here must be much more subjective, and we need to separate collection from analysis because what can be expected from the latter depends in part on what information is available. We also need to distinguish what could have been collected given the technical means and agents available at one point in time from what might have been within reach had different decisions been made earlier—e.g., had the United States made the recruitment of sources within Iraq a priority in the 1990s. It is particularly difficult to know what can reasonably be expected in the way of collection, however, given the limitations imposed by technology and the difficulty in recruiting informed and reliable sources. Thus while it is clear that Iraq was a case of collection failure in that the evidence collected was scattered, ambiguous, and often misleading, it is harder to say whether it was a failure in terms of what is usual and whether reforms can produce marked improvement.

The second part of judging an intelligence failure is whether the analysts made good use of the information at hand, which is the topic of much of this book. The consensus is that there were many egregious errors in both the Iran and Iraq cases and that intelligence bears a significant responsibility for the policy failures. My summary view, however, is that while there were errors and analysis could and should have been better, the result would have been to make the intelligence judgments less certain rather than to reach fundamentally different conclusions. Furthermore, better intelligence would not have led to an effective policy. This argument is psychologically disturbing and politically unacceptable because it implies that intelligence errors can never be eliminated, makes blame hard to allocate, ⁶ shifts more responsibility to the political leaders, and indicates that the burdens of uncertainty under which they and intelligence labor are even greater than is generally acknowledged.

I believe that the unwillingness to confront these realities helps explain why most accounts of these and other cases imply that fixing the intelligence machinery will solve the problems. Politically this makes a good deal of sense; intellectually it does not. We like to think that bad outcomes are to be explained by bad processes and that the good use of evidence will lead to the correct conclusion, but as we will see, the prevailing reasoning often is done backwards: the fact that the answers were incorrect shows that procedures and ways of thinking must have been flawed. Even after correcting the significant errors, the most warranted inference may be incorrect; intelligence failures in the first sense should not be automatically seen as failures in the second sense. Improvements are possible, however, and intelligence and postmortems on failures can benefit from using standard social science methods. As the succeeding chapters will show, in many cases both intelligence and criticisms of it have only a weak understanding of the links between evidence and inferences and the most secure routes to drawing conclusions. More specifically, they do not formulate testable hypotheses and so often rely on beliefs that cannot be falsified, leave crucial assumptions unexplicated and unexamined, fail to ask what evidence should be present if their arguments are correct, ignore the diagnostic value of absent evidence, and fail to employ the comparative method and so assert causation without looking at instances in which the supposed causal factor was absent as well as at cases in which it is present. All too often, intelligence and critics rely on intuitive ways of thinking and rhetorical forms of exposition. More careful, disciplined, and explicit reasoning will not automatically yield the right answers but will produce better analysis, do a better job of revealing where the key differences of opinion lie, and increase the chances of being correct.

THE IRANIAN AND IRAQI CASES

Although my analysis of the Iranian and Iraqi cases draws on generalizations and other cases, it cannot establish how typical they are. But I think five points are clear. First, these cases are very important in themselves, being linked to policies that have had deep and lasting impact. This is not to say that the intelligence failures directly and completely explain American policies, let alone the outcomes. In the Iran case, even if the United States had been aware of the problems earlier, it might not have had viable options because the driving dynamics within Iran were largely immune to external interventions. Furthermore, the American government was so deeply divided that forewarning might not have led to the development of a policy that was coherent, let alone effective. In Iraq, although the belief that Saddam had active programs to develop WMD was central to the arguments for his overthrow, it is unlikely that any intelligence that was true to the information available would have produced a different decision. Nevertheless, these two misjudgments are central to the way the history unfolded, and I do not think I am alone in being curious as to how they occurred.

Examining these cases is especially important because the generally accepted views of them are incorrect. The failure to see that the Shah’s regime was in grave danger is often attributed to the posited fact that CIA received most of its information from SAVAK (the Shah’s secret police) and the misleading estimates of Saddam’s WMD programs are commonly explained by the political pressures exerted by the Bush administration. As I will show, these claims cannot be sustained. Furthermore, it is generally believed that intelligence not only was wrong but made glaring errors in that much evidence was ignored and the reasoning employed was embarrassingly deficient. In fact, although the analysts did commit significant errors, their inferences were not unreasonable, and indeed at several points actually made more sense out of the information than did the alternative conclusions that turned out to be correct.

Third, although the cases had unique aspects, they exemplify at least some of the organizational routines and ways of thinking that characterize much of political and social life. Here as elsewhere, what people saw in the evidence was strongly influenced by their expectations and needs. ⁷ Of course, one reply is that it is the expectations generated by my own previous work that leads me to this conclusion, but I doubt that this is the whole story. It would be surprising if intelligence organizations and the individuals who compose them were to think in ways that were radically different from everyone else, and one of the themes of this book is that political psychology is an indispensable tool for understanding how governments see the world and make decisions. Although we cannot simply carry over what we have learned from other forms of decision making, such as how people vote or how businesses decide to invest—let alone how college sophomores respond in the laboratory—we need to take full account of how politics and psychology interact. We are dealing with human beings who have to make sense of overwhelming amounts of confusing information and to do so in a realm with its own set of incentives and pressures, and its own organizational culture.

Even if these cases are similar to those of other intelligence failures, the fourth point is that these studies confront a basic methodological problem in the inferences we can draw. Looking only at failures constitutes “searching on the dependent variable,” a methodological shortcoming that makes it impossible to test causal arguments because it lacks the comparisons to cases of success that are necessary to determine whether factors that seem important are unique to cases of failure. Nevertheless, analysis of failures allows us to detect how people and units went astray and often permits comparisons within each case that establish the plausibility of causal claims.

Fifth and finally, although we are not in a position to estimate the frequency of intelligence failures (and both the numerator and the denominator would be difficult to determine), it is clear that they are not rare events. There is no reason to believe that they have become less frequent over time, and their recurrence indicates that even if particular instances could have been avoided, the general phenomenon cannot. Even if intelligence officers and decision makers become better social scientists, they will continue to deal with problems more difficult than those facing scholars and to do so with much less reliable information. Even if they read the information with care and know the relevant generalizations, the latter always have exceptions. Indeed, many intelligence failures concern such exceptions, ⁸ and this was true for the cases of Iran and Iraq.

The plan of the book is straightforward. The rest of this chapter tells the story of how I came to the subject. Although my first two books dealt with deception and perception, topics that obviously overlapped with intelligence, I had no intention of doing any case studies until I got drawn into consulting for CIA, initially on the problem of discerning Soviet intentions, and what I saw in those months taught me much about how intelligence was and is conducted. The main part of the next chapter is the study I did on why the CIA was slow to see that the Shah might fall. Written in the spring of 1979, this is an original document that has just been declassified. I also include the memoranda written by CIA officials in response to the report. To place it in context, elucidate some ideas that I felt constrained from discussing in a government document, and say a bit about how the report was received and what scholars now think about the case, I have added an introductory section. Chapter 3 is a study of the Iraq WMD intelligence failure. This, too, grows out of work I did for the government, but thanks to the enormous amount of material declassified in official postmortems, I can present the analysis now rather than waiting thirty years.

Chapter 4 starts by discussing broader issues of the contested relations between policymakers and intelligence. The former find the weaknesses of the latter both troubling and reassuring. They are troubling for obvious reasons but are also reassuring in that they allow the policymakers to follow their own preferences and intuitions when these diverge from intelligence and give them a handy scapegoat when things go wrong. Indeed, despite the fact that decision makers always say they want better intelligence, for good political and psychological reasons they often do not, which is part of the explanation for why intelligence reforms are rarely fully implemented. I then turn to a range of reforms, both those that are overrated and those that involve greater training and infusion of social science and are worthy of more attention.

INITIAL CONTACT

My first association with CIA came, appropriately enough, surreptitiously. In the summer of 1961 I went on a student exchange to the Soviet Union (which produced my wife as well as some interesting experiences). Prior to the group’s departure, we received several briefings. Only one had much political content, and it stuck in my mind because as the trip progressed it became clear that none of my colleagues had sufficient political knowledge and skills to engage in serious discussions with the Soviet citizens we met, largely in staged settings. So this was left to me, and my Soviet hosts found me sufficiently argumentative that they assumed I was a CIA agent. On my return, I wrote the organization that had briefed us complaining that we were not putting our best foot forward.

I now assume that this organization was a CIA front. Not only does this fit with what we now know about how the U.S. government waged the cold war, but the following spring, when I was a senior at Oberlin College, I got a phone call from someone who identified himself as “with an agency of the federal government,” asking to meet me in front of the Oberlin Inn. Naive as I was, I knew this could only be the Agency. My hunch was confirmed by the fact that the gentleman was wearing a trench coat and that upon entering his room, he turned on the TV and moved it so it was facing the wall, thereby foiling any listening devices planted by Soviet agents who had penetrated the wilds of Ohio. He asked if I could do something for the U.S. government that summer (I assume this would have been attending the Helsinki youth festival). I was shocked, not because of such a request but because I had agreed to be a summer intern in the State Department and assumed that one part of the federal government would know what another part was doing. I’m afraid that my knowledge of how the government worked was excessively abstract.

One other aspect of my trip to the Soviet Union intersected with my later work for the CIA. In recent years, I have chaired its Historical Review Panel (HRP), which advises the Agency on declassifying documents of historical value. Under an executive order issued by President Clinton, materials at least twenty-five years old are to be reviewed for declassification, which is how my Iran postmortem was released. The project is an enormous one, involving the review of millions of pages a year, and starting such an enterprise from scratch was especially challenging. The officials in charge therefore decided to begin with material that would be relatively easy to declassify, including the extensive collection of photographs CIA had gotten from travelers to the Soviet Union, which were deemed useful for compiling all sorts of routine information and training agents who would be inserted into the country. Not odd, I guess, but I sat up and took notice when we were shown samples, because in 1961 I was an amateur photographer and Soviet officials had told us of all the structures we could not photograph (e.g., bridges, train stations, and police stations). I thought this was a marvelous example of paranoia, and partly for this reason I took pictures of this type. I never did find out whether any of them ended up in the collection, but it was a nice reminder that even paranoids have enemies.

CONSULTING FOR CIA

My next encounter came fifteen years later. In the interim, I had written one book about signaling and deception and another about perception and misperception, topics of obvious interest to CIA. ⁹ Furthermore, after Jimmy Carter’s election, a former Harvard colleague, Robert Bowie, had become director of CIA’s National Foreign Assessment Center (NFAC) (what before and after this period was the Directorate of Intelligence). In the spring of 1977, Bowie asked me to serve for a year as a scholar in residence. This was an intriguing opportunity, but it was not clear exactly what I would do because I was not an expert in a region or the nuts and bolts of military power. I realized that, in all immodesty, what I was an expert on was how to draw ...

Índice

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• [1]
• [2]
• [3]
• [4]
• Notes