THEY say that Barack Obama does not do anger but it seems clear that the US president had some very harsh things to say to his intelligence chiefs this week. The CIA is most in the firing line for failing to “join up the dots” on all the information it had received about the young Nigerian suicide bomber, including a direct warning from his wealthy father. But the agency is not alone in getting it wrong. Indeed the failings of the US intelligence and security community may well stem from the fact that there are so many different agencies involved.
Besides the CIA and the FBI, there are 14 other principal organizations which have some role in gathering and analyzing intelligence, many of them pulling in data from all around the world. There are inevitable overlaps in “jurisdiction”. In the tradition of governmental organizations around the world, each seeks to protect its own turf and boost its standing and therefore budget by showing results. Such a mechanism is, however, inimical to successful intelligence and security, where every piece of information needs to be brought together, assessed and then analyzed.
In the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush blamed the failure of the US intelligence community to pick up on the airline pilot training being undertaken on US soil by the Al-Qaeda terrorists, on the lack of coordination between rival agencies.
He, therefore, created yet another organization, the emotively named “Department of Homeland Security” which, according to a senior FBI official at the time, was staffed in part with all the deadbeat operatives that other agencies had decided to “let go”.
Now Obama has banged his intelligence chiefs’ heads together. Whether it makes any difference may be doubted. If this week’s report by a top spy chief into the CIA’s intelligence operations in Afghanistan is anything to go by, the problems facing this agency at least are systemic. The CIA’s in-country operation in Afghanistan is its biggest since Vietnam and seems to have inherited the shortcomings of its predecessor. An inability to grasp a complex but different culture, a failure to identify with the locals and an insistence on interpreting almost everything from an American point of view, regularly produces the wrong answers, if for no more obvious reason than that the wrong questions are asked in the first place.
When the CIA operation in Vietnam finally got good, it was in time to anticipate the murderous 1968 Tet Offensive but also to realize that the US had run out of offensive options and had lost the war. What will be the agency’s learning curve in Afghanistan?
The shortcomings also demonstrate another important truth. In the light of all these recent spectacular failures by the multibillion dollar US intelligence and security community, will Washington reel back its frequent criticism of less well-heeled intelligence organizations in other countries? Good intelligence work is often very difficult, even when you have spy satellites, drones, signals intelligence, massive IT structures and bottomless coffers to buy information.
