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27 December 1999. Thanks to DN.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30112-1999Dec23.html

The Washington Post, Monday, December 27, 1999

Inside Information

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer

Nearly four years after a congressionally mandated commission on intelligence reform released its final report, the intelligence reform movement in Congress has withered with precious little reformation in sight.

The commission, headed by former defense secretary Harold Brown and former senator Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), noted with more than a little concern in March 1996 that the director of central intelligence (DCI) controlled only 15 percent of the intelligence budget, estimated now at $29 billion, and needed broader authority. Guess what: The DCI is still stuck at 15 percent.

For that matter, the amount spent on intelligence remains a secret, despite the commission's recommendation that the total be disclosed to taxpayers. And so it goes, on down the commission's list of recommendations.

But now a number of intelligence reformers ­ all former intelligence officers ­ are hoping to jump start the debate with a series of books on intelligence reform in the digital age that go way beyond the gradualism of Brown-Rudman.

"We all hope we can restart a little bit of the debate about intelligence. It's kind of fallen off the agenda," says Greg Treverton, a Rand Corp. analyst and former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council. His book, "Reshaping Intelligence for an Age of Information," is due out in the fall of 2000 from Cambridge University Press.

Treverton believes intelligence reform has fallen off the radar screen in Washington because it's arcane, President Clinton isn't interested, and DCI George J. Tenet "has a pretty traditional view of intelligence."

Focus on Mysteries

Needless to say, Treverton and his fellow reformers do not. Treverton proposes nothing short of a paradigm shift for the entire community and says intelligence in the new millennium needs to turn itself into "the information business, not the secrets business."

"The existing intelligence agencies are pretty badly dysfunctional," Treverton says. "Their world was probably changed more by the end of the Cold War than any other part of the foreign policy establishment."

During the Cold War, Treverton says, the CIA had a single focus, a small number of customers in the national security community and a relatively small quantity of information, which only it possessed.

Today, everything's changed: There are dozens of targets, from rogue states to terrorists; large numbers of consumers, including NATO and the United Nations; and vast quantities of digital data, Treverton says.

While the CIA spent most of its time during the Cold War, Treverton says, figuring out answers to "puzzles" ­ e.g., the fundamentals of Soviet military doctrine ­ policy-makers today increasingly need analysis of "mysteries" for which there is no right or wrong answer ­ e.g., what will the Chinese economy look like 20 years from now?

"For the mystery side," Treverton says, "that means being more open, that means reaching out, that means trying to assemble the best experts you can" ­ all things the CIA has never excelled at doing.

Closer to Consumers

Bruce Berkowitz, a former CIA analyst, and Allan E. Goodman, former chief of the CIA's presidential briefing staff, argue a similar case in "Best Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age," to be published in April by Yale University Press.

The best way to make the community more responsive to policy-makers, they write, is to throw it open to market forces and give intelligence consumers in the executive branch a much greater say in how the intelligence they need is collected, analyzed and disseminated.

"We plan intelligence the same way the Soviets used to plan their economy," Berkowitz says. He argues that the intelligence community needs to off-load to the private sector a lot of what it's now producing so it can focus its energies on the really hard targets no one else can penetrate. In his view, lower-resolution satellite imagery and open-source analysis are two areas that at least theoretically could become for-profit products.

'They Only Know Secrets'

Robert D. Steele, a former CIA operations officers and Marine Corps intelligence official whose firm, Open Source Solutions Inc., works under contract for various intelligence agencies, thinks the community should be spending $1 billion a year buying open-source analysis from the private sector.

No surprise there. But Steele makes a persuasive case that the CIA and the other intelligence agencies give short shrift to openly available information in their analyses precisely because anyone can get access to the data.

"The problem with spies is they only know secrets," says Steele, whose working title is "On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World."

"The U.S. intelligence community culture and its existing leadership appear committed to the idea that their mission is to collect and produce secrets. I disagree," Steele says. "I believe their mission is to inform policy ... and operations leadership, and they cannot do this effectively if they continue to cut themselves off from the history, context and current intelligence available from open sources."

With the DCI lacking authority over 85 percent of the intelligence community budget, Steele said, "only the president has the programmatic authority to fix national intelligence."

Radical Surgery for Operations

Melvin A. Goodman, a Soviet expert and former CIA colleague who is now a senior fellow at Center for International Policy whose book "National Insecurity: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War" is scheduled for publication today by Temple University Press, agrees with Steele that meaningful reform will have to come from the next president.

But he sharply disagrees with Berkowitz's market approach to intelligence reform. The CIA's Directorate of Intelligence needs to remain strongly independent, he believes, not move closer to policy-makers. Having said that, he agrees with Treverton that far more time needs to be spent on "mysteries," as opposed to "puzzles."

"The CIA does very little strategic research and very little long-term analysis," Goodman says.

He also agrees that the DCI needs far more authority over the entire intelligence community and thus has proposed splitting the job in two, placing an independent CIA director responsible only for the agency out at Langley while creating a new post of director of national intelligence to lord over the community from the National Security Council.

Goodman, like all of the other reformers, also believes radical surgery is necessary on the covert side of the CIA's house, the all-powerful Directorate of Operations. Goodman, for one, would transfer all responsibility for special and covert operations to the Pentagon and move the rest of the agency's espionage service out of U.S. embassies abroad, where case officers' State Department cover is often too flimsy to fool anybody.

But Goodman isn't optimistic. "I remain skeptical," he says, "because we've had so many opportunities to look at reform."

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Coming from IntelligenCIA in two weeks: George J. Tenet's strategic plan for reforming the CIA from within.