Foreign Policy in Focus, February 19, 2004

Foreign Policy in Focus, February 19, 2004

The Neocon Philosophy of Intelligence

by Tom Barry

"The message is that there are no 'knowns'. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say, well that's basically what we see as the situation ..."

~ Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, June 6, 2002

The deepening quagmire in Iraq and the failure of the Bush administration to produce evidence to back its arguments for invading Iraq have stymied the American neo-conservatives' agenda for preventive war and regime change around the world. But their assault on what they call the "liberal establish-ment" in US foreign policy has not completely stalled.

Neo-con groups such as the PNAC and the CSP have seized on the report by US weapons inspector David Kay to advance their decades-old campaign to reform US intelligence operations. They have adroitly brushed aside Kay's statement that "we were all wrong, probably." They have attempted to focus the deepening concerns about faulty US intelligence on the CIA alone.

The neo-cons, along with the Republican-controlled Congress and President George W Bush himself, regard the failure to find the purported stockpiles of WMDs as another opportunity to push ahead with their agenda to overhaul the US intelligence apparatus. In announcing the creation of a bipartisan commission in the wake of the Kay Report, Bush said that the investigation would recommend reforms that would enable the US government to do a better job in fighting the "war on terrorism."

It's not that intelligence reform isn't needed or that the CIA isn't due for some serious housecleaning. But the right wants to permanently disable the CIA as the government's main intelligence agency. Over the past 4 decades, the ideologues of the right have repeatedly charged that the CIA has routinely underestimated threats to US national security. It's been their contention that the CIA is so caught up in the minutiae of intelligence that they are unable to see the big picture of actual and future threats. The CIA is thus being set up as the main institutional fall guy in the Iraq WMD scandal. However, the true problem rests with the very type of intelligence that right-wing groups such as the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) and PNAC are now hoping to institutionalize.

In a maddening and bizarre twist of the Iraq invasion scam, the neo-cons are attempting (and may likely succeed) to have the US intelligence apparatus overhauled – not so that it provides more fact-based intelligence to policy-makers, but to further decentralize intelligence gathering and to further politicize intelligence.

Gary Schmitt, executive director of the PNAC, argues that what counts in intelligence is not so much correct information but basic instincts. In a LA Times op-ed on the findings of Kay and the Iraq Survey Team, Schmitt ac-knowledges that the Bush administration was wrong in making the case that Iraq had an ongoing program to develop wmd. Nonetheless, Schmitt, a longtime critic of the CIA, says that "our basic instincts were sound." What's more, he contends, we would risk the country's security if we backed down now in what Bush this week called "the war against wmd."

Instead, as they pursue reform in intelligence operations, US policymakers and the presidential commission "should understand that what we lack in detailed intelligence about weapons is more than offset by our strategic in-telligence about particular countries' intent." In other words, our instincts about the intent rather than the actual capacity of countries such as Iran and North Korea should be the true guide for future foreign policy. This is what intelligence reformers and hawks like Schmitt call "strategic intelligence."

Thus, the neo-cons, who were the leading strategists and cheerleaders for a new war against Iraq, are among the strongest supporters of plans to over-haul US intelligence operations – not because they believe that the CIA doesn't get its facts right. On the contrary, neo-cons like Schmitt, Richard Perle, David Brooks and Frank Gaffney say the CIA is too focused on the facts while giving short shrift to "strategic intelligence" that pays more attention to threat assessments based on instinctual understanding of the intent of enemy nations. "It is premature to think that military preemption can be taken off the table completely," says Schmitt, simply because we didn't have all the facts right. Given that basic instincts were sound about "Hussein's intentions and history," we would be "missing the forest for the trees" if we were to back down from a war against wmd, concludes Schmitt.

Echoing Schmitt, Frank Gaffney, a protégé of Richard Perle and director of the militarist CSP, also seized on the Kay Report as an opportunity to bash the CIA. Gaffney, who recommended that Kay be named new DCI, has called for the dismissal of CIA director George Tenet. As a moderate conservative and part of the circle of realpolitikers close to the president's father, Tenet has long been considered by neo-cons as an obstacle to their designs for reshaping the US intelligence community.

Perle, like Gaffney and Schmitt, believes that the Iraq invasion was the right policy even if the administration's arguments for the war were based on faulty intelligence. In fact, he uses the Kay Report to underscore his long-running contention that "our intelligence in the Gulf has been woefully inadequate" – in a reprise of his past attacks on the CIA, DIA, and the State Dept's intelligence operations for underestimating threats and having an Arabist prejudice.

David Brooks, a NYT columnist close to neo-con political camps both inside and outside the Bush administration, also jumped into the slash-and-burn campaign against the CIA. Like Schmitt, Brooks is an advocate of "strategic intelligence." He charges that the main problem with US intelligence is not that it cannot get the facts right but that its intelligence gathering "has factored out all those insights that may be the product of an individual's intuition and imagination." At the CIA, contends, Brooks, "scientism [is] in full bloom." Brooks describes scientism as an old-school approach whereby intelligence is obtained through a scientific method that sidelines policy analysis and psychological assessments of foreign regimes as well as a Dostoyevsky-like understanding of the forces of good and evil, crime and punishment.

Setting the agenda for a new intelligence paradigm

Two longtime advocates of the type of flexible intelligence operation put in motion by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith are Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, senior associates at the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) in the 1990s. The NSIC along with a half-dozen other think-tanks and committees produced reports in the mid-1990s that recommended intelligence reforms. As it turns out, the NSIC's recommendations had the most influence in shaping the intelligence practices of the George W. Bush administration.

In 1996 the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, a project of the NSIC, produced a report entitled "The Future of US Intelligence," whose recom-mendations prefigured the new forays into intelligence operations by the Pentagon and the vice-president's office. Co-authored by Shulsky and Schmitt, the report argued that the intelligence community should adopt a new methodology aimed at "obtaining information others try to keep secret and penetrating below the 'surface' impression created by publicly available information to determine whether an adversary is deceiving us or denying us key information." The document recommended the establishment of "competing analytic centers" with "different points of view" that could "provide policymakers better protection against new 'Pearl Harbors', ie against being surprised." Rather than a narrow focus on information collection, "intelligence analysis must...make it more relevant to policymakers by emphasizing the forces that shape a given situation," the authors contend.

The study's overall conclusion was that the "future of intelligence" depend-ed on building a new model that would offer "greater flexibility in the collection process" and produce the "big picture" of security threats. Ultimately, Shulsky and Schmitt concluded, the purpose of analysis is to help the policy-maker shape the future, not predict it. Intelligence analysis should go beyond simply identifying security threats and assessing the military capabilities of a present or future enemy or a competitor nation; it should be "opportunity analysis" that anticipates chances to advance US interests.

Conclusions of "Future of Intelligence" report

The centralization of intelligence under the CIA should not be extended to post–Cold War circumstances.

Intelligence analysis should focus more on opportunities to shape situations rather than concentrating on predictions of the future.

Covert action operations should be reintegrated into foreign policy and should be considered an instrument to foster democratic transitions and to counter efforts that frustrate these transitions.

A "new paradigm for intelligence" would closely integrate a more decen-tralized intelligence community with policy and military sectors. No longer would the CIA's NIEs be considered superior to policy-driven intelligence.

The timeliness, accessibility and focus of an intelligence product can be as important as its scholarly quality.

Greater flexibility and a more diversified structure are necessary in the intelligence collection process.

Counterintelligence should be a wholly integrated part of the new intellig-ence paradigm and should extend beyond counterespionage to include a collection and analytic process that penetrates and manipulates the intelligence efforts of US adversaries.

Source: Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, "The Future of US Intelligence" (National Strategy Information Center, 1996)

The views of Shulsky and Schmitt on intelligence reform and the political philosophy of intelligence are now widely shared and expressed by the right's web of think tanks, polemicists and administration officials. Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, chairman of the JCS Gen. Richard Myers, and other Bush administration officials routinely employ the concepts, terminology and codewords of the neo-cons' agenda for overhauling the US intelligence apparatus.

In addition to the NSIC report, this neo-con agenda and philosophy of intelligence is clearly articulated in other publications co-authored by Shulsky and Schmitt, who argue that intelligence gathering and analysis should be considered more as a philosophy than a science. Their contention that intelligence needs to be more interpretive, rely more on covert action, and accentuate CI operations is developed in their book Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence. In their 1999 essay, “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous),” Shulsky and Schmitt link their view of intelligence reform to the controversial teachings of Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1967.

Strauss was Shulsky's mentor when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Strauss, a German Jewish émigré, developed a new school of Machiavellian political philosophy contending that the means justify the ends in governance as long as the regime has a firm understanding of pre-modern natural laws – such as the eternal conflict between good and evil. In such a political philosophy, truth is not necessarily an important value.

As Shulsky and Schmitt point out in Silent Warfare, their own philosophy of intelligence sharply contrasts with the scientific approach to intelligence gathering. Allen Dulles, DCI under president Dwight Eisenhower, had adopted as the CIA's motto the biblical verse: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." That might have been fine as a guiding principle in biblical times or even as a useful piece of Cold War propaganda. But as an operating principle for national intelligence, it was inadequate and counter-productive, according to Shulsky and Schmitt, who concluded their book advising that "truth is not the goal" of intelligence gathering – the goal is "victory."

Targeting the liberal mindset at the CIA

During the Cold War, right-wing ideologues and militarists repeatedly charged that the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have routinely and systematically underestimated Soviet military capacity and empire-building ambitions. In their view, one of the main reasons for this intelligence failure has been the liberal mindset that pervades the CIA and State Dept. According to Shulsky and Schmitt, this liberal belief system corrupts intel-ligence gathering through mirror-imaging – "imagining that the country one is studying is fundamentally similar to one's own and hence can be understood in the same terms." This mirror-imaging, they wrote, has led US intelligence agencies to disregard one of the fundamental principles of Straussian political philosophy: the need to understand the nature of a reg-ime in order to predict its intentions. The neo-cons argue that by assuming the universality of human political behavior, the liberals at the CIA and State Dept have blinded the US government to the real capacities and intentions of tyrannical regimes like the Soviet Union and Iraq , which think and operate differently from democratic regimes.

For this reason, Shulsky and Schmitt advocate the increased use of a counterintelligence strategy guided by the principle that intelligence is "part of a struggle between two countries." The two principal corollaries of counterintelligence are that: 1) A country's intelligence should "limit or distort" what its adversaries know about its capacity and intentions; and 2) Each country must assume that it is being deceived by its opponents and must therefore penetrate the adversary to ferret out its capacities and intentions based on what is known about the character of each regime.

Shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Rumsfeld and Wolfo-witz created a new team to shape intelligence about Iraq. Not trusting the CIA or even the Pentagon's own DIA bureaucracies, they put their own team on the job. A common charge by right-wing analysts is that the State Dept "regards security threats largely as opportunities for diplomacy," and the CIA is similarly regarded as overly bureaucratic and cautious. Rather than rely on the main intelligence agencies, the hardliners in the Bush administration created an intelligence analysis group housed in the Pentagon. At first an informal team, it later became the OSP. The OSP worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau, both of which reported to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. In late 2003, the OSP morphed into the Office of Northern Gulf Affairs.