| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Jennifer Sims Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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Do you think that one of the weaknesses of a democracy is that we lack the ways to shake the system up a little, and we have to wait until an event occurs that makes the kind of need you described necessary because of the event?
That's very well put. I think that people are talking now about whether the intelligence community failed or not prior to 9/11. I want to make it very clear from my perspective, we had a failure of intelligence, as significant a failure of intelligence as we had at Pearl Harbor. But that doesn't necessarily mean the intelligence community is either principally at fault or necessarily at fault at all. A lot has to be put on the policymaker side, and actually on the democratic system, because it's very hard to mobilize resources and move resources towards a threat that you haven't convinced the American people is really a threat to them.
Congress was funding intelligence support to military operations post-Gulf War because they understood Saddam Hussein was a problem, and they understood the kind of threat that Iraq posed. It is true that the intelligence community said over and over again, Osama bin Laden is a tremendous threat, terrorism is a tremendous threat. We had been hearing that from the intelligence community for quite a while, actually moving resources against that and giving the human intelligence collectors the authority and ability to go out and pursue that threat and try and go after it. That was another story. So I think that there's plenty of blame to spread around for the failure of 9/11, which I do believe was a failure.
One gets a sense that in the work of intelligence, information is politicized from the get-go. Is that a correct interpretation? In other words, part of the struggle that people in the intelligence community have to wage on a daily basis is making the information as scientifically sound as possible, but as soon as you have it, it's there to be politicized by others.
Politicization has been a very contentious issue in the intelligence community. As you may recall, during the nomination hearings for former Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates, the issue of whether or not he politicized intelligence was front and center, and shaped that whole debate, and eventually the vote on his nomination.
He had been Deputy Director of the CIA, and at the height of the Cold War, or the last phases under the Reagan administration, he had been accused of providing information in a such a way as to favor his political bosses.
He also had been an analyst within the CIA. He knew very well the trade craft of intelligence analysis, but he also had very strong political views.
I think the whole debate over politicization is a little bit of a red herring, if you will. One of the reasons we debate it is that there has been a long tradition in American intelligence, national level intelligence, since the 1950s, when the father of American intelligence analytic trade craft, by the name of Sherman Kent, outlined how intelligence analysts should behave vis-à-vis the policymakers they support. One of these principles was an intelligence analyst must stay absolutely objective with respect to the facts. It reflects, if you will, an American cultural intellectual tradition of scientific rationalism -- "just stick to the facts" -- and a great regard for those facts, and that if you stuck to the facts you would know the truth. That required maintaining distance from the angst the policymakers were going through with respect to the choices that they needed to make. You took the intelligence to them, you gave it to them, but you didn't advise them about what to do with it.
I think that whole approach is being reexamined in some important ways. There's no question but that everybody believes you shouldn't play around with the facts, you shouldn't distort them or skew them for policy purposes. But analysts do need to get right in the thick, in my view, of policy discussions, to help leaven them, enlighten them with the best information available, from open sources, as well as from classified sources, to help people make the choices they need to make.
The military understands this very well, they want their intelligence people right with them to help them choose which bridge to go over. They don't want to just be informed about what bridges are out and which bridges are still up, they want actual input into their next decision. Schwarzkopf had a great quote after the Persian Gulf War. He was criticizing the national intelligence collectors, and he said, "You know, the problem is I get these guys telling me that the bridge was 50 percent destroyed or 40 percent destroyed." He said, "What does that mean to me? I want to know whether I can go over the bridge or not. I'm not interested in the percentage of destruction, I'm interested in the utility of the bridge. Will it hold up the tank?" If analysts don't understand what is inside the policymakers' heads, what is shaping the choices there, they will miss providing the critical information the policymaker needs to make those choices.
What if the politicians want to stay away from issues? One of the criticisms of President Clinton and his presidency was that really he was a domestic president. He wanted to get the American economy back up to speed, and so on. How do you answer that question, that criticism?
I think that if somebody were to argue that the Clinton administration was not focused on foreign policy, it would be shocking. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright traveled around the world more than any other secretary of state before her -- really an extraordinary commitment to our overseas interests. The Clinton administration dealt with North Korea, dealt with Somalia, dealt with Bosnia, had a tremendous effort in the area of arms control, nonproliferation. I could go on. I think that the Clinton administration spent a lot of time on foreign policy, and many of the critiques are, in fact, that it spent too much time on foreign policy, and that it made some strategic errors or tactical errors in that domain, which I don't really want to go into at this point. But that the administration was committed to foreign policy, I think, is really unquestioned, or should be unquestioned. It's also true that he was very committed to domestic policy, and, in fact, we had very good economic growth during that period, as everyone knows.
But you do put your finger on one thing that I think was probably, from my perspective, among the most unfortunate thing to happen in the Clinton administration with respect to commitment to overseas efforts. I don't think that the Department of State is anywhere near funded the way it needs to be in order to execute the very ambitious agenda of the Clinton administration and now the Bush administration. It is absolutely appalling to me the diplomatic infrastructure we have. The war we are fighting is a war unlike any before it. It is a diplomatic, law enforcement, and military engagement, and the only aspect of it that really seems to be very well funded is the defense and the defense-related intelligence aspects of it. The resources for the State Department are minimal. I was very disappointed in the recent budget submitted by President Bush in that regard. I also believe the Clinton administration, for all its commitment to our diplomatic endeavors, terribly under-funded the Department of State.
This was partly in response to Congress, correct? I mean, Jesse Helms, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Yes. People have talked a lot about the difficulty that Helms presented for funding the State Department. But in looking hard at Congress, one really overlooks the first issue, which is the budget that the president submits to Congress in the first place. The broker of that is the Office of Management and Budget. From my perspective, the State Department never got a full and integrated hearing in OMB. By integrated I mean, the State Department supports the worldwide infrastructure for U.S. government agencies deployed overseas. And we have more and more agencies -- the FBI is now present in many, many countries. When I left the State Department last year, there were, I think, somewhere between 150 and 200 FBI agents overseas -- a very large growth in law enforcement presence. But also, the Agriculture Department, the Defense attachés, many, many agencies are represented in our embassies overseas. And yet the information infrastructure for those embassies -- the buildings, the security of those buildings -- was really seriously under-funded. It wasn't until the embassies were bombed in Africa that the security funding got pumped up for the State Department. But you can't just fund security, you have to fund more than that, you have to fund the purpose of good buildings in the first place for embassies, you have to fund the communications. It's startling but true that only 20 of our something like 280 posts overseas, only 20 of them had classified web-based connectivity to State Department headquarters when Secretary Powell came into office. It's really a very sad state of affairs.
One of the important elements in all of this seems to be the very process that was part of your title at the State Department, coordination. Can you give us a sense of the conundrum there, where in the government sometimes the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, where one unit attempts to gather information, gathers it, but then doesn't share it with another unit? Give us a handle on that problem, which seems to be rather enormous.
There are at least two aspects of that problem. One aspect is technological, and has to do with legacy systems, information systems that exist in each agency. Most American citizens would be astonished to hear that our open-source information systems in our various agencies can't speak to one another, that's even at the unclassified level. That's because those systems were designed and funded at different times and separately, so that they aren't necessarily compatible.
Are you talking about computers?
Computer networks and sharing of databases. Now, to the extent that the difficulties in compatibility are identifiable, and you want to then begin to share information between the agencies, and you figure out what you need to do technologically, you have to have the resources for it, of course. But that's a doable thing, at least ideally. But then you end up with issues of security, and agencies are concerned that if they aren't in charge of the security protocols for a system that is connecting up with its agency system, that then they will have a problem with anything from viruses to insider security problems. There has been much talk about how some of the biggest threats to the integrity of U.S. government information systems are not from the outsider coming inside our firewalls, but from the trusted insider, exploiting problems, security, in the system itself.
So in any case, there is a set of technological issues involved here. But there are also the political cultural issues in intelligence-sharing in the U.S. government. It's not because U.S. government employees are bad people, but they come with a definite sense of mission. For example, let me just give you a hypothetical. I mentioned that our law enforcement community is spread worldwide now. That reflects an effort on the part of the former director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, to export our knowledge of the rule of law on how to build accountable law enforcement entities overseas in new governments. He traveled around the world to do this, and we developed a training center overseas to do it, and we developed new liaisons with law enforcement officers overseas. The idea here was to go after transnational threats that were of mutual concern -- international organized crime, international terrorism, that kind of thing. But also, the FBI helped these new governments weed out corruption and institute integrity and accountability in their own governments. At the same time, the State Department is overseas, hoping that the intelligence services will develop sources and information that help keep certain governments in power.
So you have the law enforcement community recruiting sources and dealing with liaison with host governments, and you have the intelligence community developing sources not necessarily to preserve a given government in power. And the sources could overlap; the sources could be working at cross-purposes with one another. So one of the big issues during the Clinton administration was how to make sure that law enforcement and intelligence work together, sharing enough information but without threatening, certainly in the national security area, sources and methods for, for example, the CIA. This is a very tough problem. The law enforcement culture is that the most important thing is the rule of law, not politics. And from the State Department and the intelligence community's point of view, the rule of law is extremely important in terms of their own operations and the way the U.S. system works, but overseas the most important thing is security. And sometimes the security interests of our country trump the law enforcement interests of the country in which they are operating. After all, the CIA breaks these laws all the time. So to have the FBI there helping the host government enforce the rule of law and the CIA there trying to break those laws to serve the national security purposes of the U.S. government puts them, one would say on the face of it, at cross-purposes.
Now, you can reconcile those things, but information sharing becomes more problematic when the mission drives are so very different. We can do this. We have been doing it. We are doing it. We're getting better at it. But sometimes it's the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing because there's been a mistake or there's been a technological problem, and sometimes it's deliberate. And deciding where that line is is a very important problem for the national security community.
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