The presidential commission tasked with investigating intelligence failures warned on Thursday that the US knows “disturbingly little” about efforts by Iran, North Korea and others to acquire nuclear weapons, adding that in some cases the quality of intelligence had deteriorated over the past decade.
At the same time, it issued the harshest assessment yet of the US pre-war intelligence on Iraq, concluding: “The intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.”
The findings of the commission, appointed last year by President George W. Bush, will increase the pressure for restructuring the intelligence-gathering agencies that began after the September 11 terrorist attacks and continued with the creation by Congress last year of a new director of national intelligence.
The panel, led by Laurence Silberman, a Republican, and Charles Robb, a Democrat, blames spies at the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency for providing “worthless or misleading” information.
It absolved the Bush administration of responsibility, concluding that “it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments”.
Mr Bush welcomed the “sharp critique”. He appointed Fran Townsend, his homeland security adviser, to review the recommendations with a view to swift adoption.
Scott McClellan, White House press secretary, noted the investigation found no individual or agency to blame, but said “systemic failure” was responsible for the flawed intelligence on Iraq.
But the most striking conclusion of the report may be that the intelligence on future threats to US security is little better than the Iraq intelligence. Most of the commission's findings on Iran, North Korea, China and Russia were not released. But the unclassified summary said the US had “only limited access to critical information about several of these high-priority intelligence targets”.
That conclusion will do little to reassure US allies, which are heavily dependent on US intelligence. The panel offered a fatalistic assessment of its proposals: the intelligence community, it noted, “has an almost perfect record of resisting external recommendations”.
Still, the Silberman-Robb report laid out 74 proposed changes, many with an emphasis on improving co-ordination and information-sharing in an intelligence community that is “not so much poorly managed as unmanaged”. The chief recommendations include:
● Give the new director of national intelligence (DNI) more power, including the ability to set the budget and make personnel choices; otherwise the CIA and the Pentagon will “run around or over the DNI”. Under the 2004 reforms of US intelligence, the new position of DNI was created to oversee the agencies, but the official was not given clear budgetary and personnel authority.
● Reform the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an agency singled out for its reluctance to work as part of the broader intelligence community. The panel proposes the creation of a National Security Service inside the FBI.
● Press the intelligence community to “explain what they don't know”.
● Rethink the President's Daily Brief. The commission insists it is not a good idea for the new director of national intelligence to deliver, or even regularly attend, the briefing.
