| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Jennifer Sims Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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What are the particular difficulties that democracies have with regard to foreign policy and intelligence?
That's a very, very good question. I think since September 11th, we are grappling with this question front and center, and it's symbolized by the compromise struck on the U.S. Patriot Act that was passed by Congress.
Explain what the U.S. Patriot Act is.
The U.S. Patriot Act was an act passed following Congress' approval of the use of force to find and terminate the terrorists that perpetrated 9/11. Among other things, it gave additional authority to the law enforcement and intelligence communities to do their business, including roving wiretaps for national security purposes for the FBI, and the sharing of grand jury testimony with the intelligence community. It allowed the intelligence community to take that information and integrate it into its analyses. This was a departure from the post-Watergate period, when Congress and the American people came to understand how far the law enforcement community, particularly the FBI, had gone in its efforts to investigate communist or alleged communist activity and anti-government activity in the Civil Rights movement. These actions had led to abuses of power, and the intelligence community had also been involved in some of that activity. That led to the creation of oversight committees that would allow Congress to keep a watch on what the Executive Branch was doing in this area. I think the balance struck after the Watergate period, and the exposure of the "plumbers" and the abuses during J. Edgar Hoover's period at the FBI, was struck for a particular period in time.
The U.S. Patriot Act is a completely new balance that is being struck, and it is in recognition of the fact that we're at war, that we are pursing terrorists who are trying to use our very open and, if you will, liberal political system to perpetrate devastating attacks against us. There was a feeling that we needed to give more power and authority to the institutions that are responsible for protecting the American people. Whether that is the correct balance for the present time remains to be seen. We need to watch very carefully and be very vigilant to make sure that those additional powers are not abused. It does not mean that that balance will be correct for ten, fifteen, twenty years from now.
This goes back to my comment on our institutions. One of the strengths of our institutions is their flexibility. While we gave a lot of powers to the FBI and CIA and the rest of the intelligence community post-World War II, and we're giving them additional powers now, it's important for Americans to be educated about what powers they've given away to these institutions, and be ready to take them back if they need to be.
The other problem, in addition to finding a new balance and preserving democratic institutions, is responding to new challenges. One gets the sense that with the end of the Cold War in '89 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world of intelligence floundered a little because of a lack of mission. Is that a correct interpretation?
I think part of that is a correct interpretation. This [lack of a mission] was a real problem, and it continues to be a problem of ours. The intelligence community during the Cold War had a script, it knew exactly who the enemy was, and it knew it was going to have plenty of resources to collect information against that enemy, and against the threat -- a primary threat of a major nuclear attack against this country. It didn't need to be told that over and over again.
Those requirements did not change substantially over a number of decades. This actually led to a problem in the intelligence community. There became a sense in which the intelligence community thought of itself as a service industry. Policymakers, especially in the national security bureaucracies, thought of the intelligence community as service people, and a gap emerged. In a sense, intelligence was sort of thrown over the threshold for policymakers, who picked it up, read it. If they thought it was good and important, they kept it; if they didn't, they tossed it back. But there was not a lot of dynamic and flexible interaction between them. That's a very general statement. But in terms of a model to think about how intelligence supported the national security establishment prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is a useful model.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, suddenly we had our major adversary gone. And the question was, what do we need intelligence for? There were some senators on the Hill, and Jack Danforth, my boss, and Senator Glenn were two of them, also Senator Warner, who said, "Ah, but this is a period of uncertainty. During periods of uncertainty, that's precisely when you need your intelligence most." But there was a huge wave or momentum to cut back, to get the rewards of having won the Cold War, to get some of the resources back for other purposes. A very understandable desire. So anything in the intelligence community labeled "Soviet" was axed. These cuts had to happen quickly. The taxpayers wanted it, it was expected, it was sort of the reward for having won the Cold War.
As a result, we lost a number of intelligence programs that were highly applicable to the post-Cold War period. I wouldn't want to specify exactly what those programs were, but [losing] some of them led to gaps in the nineties in intelligence collection. And unfortunately, I think it also affected our ability to do human intelligence, which people are talking about a lot now, post-9/11. We took some serious hits in our ability to bring into the CIA, to train, and to maintain a human intelligence cadre overseas.
The other thing, though, that happened was we rapidly got into another war, we got into the Persian Gulf War. The military never forget the importance of intelligence support to military operations. To win a war, a modern war, you need very good, very flexible intelligence. And so when we were victorious after the Gulf War, we did a "lessons learned," what we needed to get back in the intelligence community that we had lost in our rapid cutting of previous years, and what new things were needed. Of course, the demands for intelligence support for precision-guided weapons was one, and that required a lot of new technology. The other thing that was recognized was that we needed to do better at getting those big national collectors, the imagery satellites, and our signals intelligence capability to support tactical commanders on the ground. There were some major disconnects in that support.
The focus on support to military operations after the Gulf War meant -- and this is a very long answer to your question, I know -- but it did mean that the intelligence community became skewed, in my view. It became significantly skewed both resource-wise and mission-wise towards support to military commanders in the field. What we lost in that process was a strong capability in the area of strategic warning and, in effect, tactical warning of the kind that led to or was involved in, in my view, some of the failures prior to September 11th.
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