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| Authors: | Richard K. Betts |
|---|---|
| Jane Harman |
March 8, 2004
Council on Foreign Relations
Speaker: Jane Harman, member, U.S. House of Representatives, (D-Calif.)
Moderator: Richard Betts, director of The Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University; Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow and director of National Security Studies.
Council on Foreign Relations
New York City
Monday, March 8, 2004
BETTS: Could I ask you to just take a moment to assure your cell phones are turned off. And also, I’d like to remind the audience that this meeting is on the record. I’m privileged to welcome Jane Harman to the Council. As you know, she’s serving her fifth term in Congress, where you can see from her bio that she’s become one of the absolutely key figures on [Capitol] Hill in dealing with intelligence, counterterrorism, homeland security— the issues that have really become our top-priority national issues in the last couple of years. But Congresswoman Harman didn’t just come to focus on these issues after the shock of September 11th, as so many other people did. She’s been on them a long time. And I first saw her in action about four years ago when we served on the National Commission on Terrorism, whose chair was [current head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq] Jerry Bremer and whose vice chair was [senior advisor for Bear Stearns & Company] Maurice Sonnenberg, who I thought might be here tonight, but I guess is not. In any case, that commission managed to remain thoroughly bipartisan, yet still come out with recommendations that were unanimous and hard-hitting. And I thought Jane’s deft role in that process had a lot to do with it. And that put me on her list of admirers a long time ago. We’ll have a little conversation about some of the recent issues you’ve been dealing with, and then the audience will have more than enough time I hope to have at you.
Everyone has been discussing in great detail the question of the missing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction [WMD]. And I think I, like many observers before the war, had assumed that the intelligence community had a fair amount of secret information piled up to fill in a lot of the circumstantial evidence that seemed so overwhelming from the previous cat-and-mouse game with UNSCOM [United Nations Special Commission to investigate Iraq’s WMD]. But in the aftermath, it seems that we had almost nothing, that the real scandal was not that the books were cooked, but that there was so little in the books. Does that accord with your impression of what the real problem was?
HARMAN: Well, let me first, Dick, if I might, just say hello to family, friends, law school classmates, mentors. It’s really a huge honor for me to look at this crowd and see who showed up tonight. I mean that. You may not know this: I’m a CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] member myself. I’ve been a member for 12 years, and have spent too little time in this organization, and I’m happy to be here not just as a speaker but as an attendee tonight. And finally I want to say about [Council President] Richard Haass— I like to think I have the Richard Haass role in Washington now. He left, so somebody had to do it. [Laughter.] And that is somebody who at least tries honestly to understand the issues and proceed forward in a hopefully bipartisan way. And I think Richard tried that for many, many years, and I salute him for his service in Washington, and I think CFR is very lucky.
As for you, my friend, we did serve together on the Bremer Commission, which made its recommendations in the year 2000. Just one comment on that, which is that on September 10, 2001, Jerry Bremer and I had lunch in Washington. Jerry Bremer is now the civil administrator in Iraq, L. Paul— Ambassador L. Paul Bremer is Jerry Bremer. And we had lunch the day before 9/11 in Washington, bemoaning the fact that no one was paying any attention to our recommendations. That will serve me right. I think I won’t have lunch with him again— [laughter]--but we’ve come a long way since then. Now of course I forgot what the question was.
BETTS: We didn’t understand why we just didn’t have anything.
HARMAN: Well, I am not one who buys into this notion that it was a great conspiracy, and everybody knew there were no weapons of mass destruction and people were deliberately misled. If you’ve come here to hear me say that— I am not saying that. But I am saying that we had a massive intelligence failure— we did have it— on two levels; both in terms of the quality of the intelligence and then in terms of the cherry-picking of the intelligence by policymakers, which gave an impression that was much stronger than the intelligence supported. I believed the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. I believed the people who told me what they knew. And I think they tried to be honest. I voted for the resolution on Iraq. I don’t regret that vote, because the basic reasons for regime change and dismantling the weapons of mass destruction were good reasons, and I don’t regret that vote. But I do regret the fact that there weren’t more policy options we could have taken before embarking on military action. And I think if we had understood the intelligence better, if the intelligence had been better, we would have had more options, such as more time at the U.N.
But, at any rate, having now read the supporting materials for the big intelligence document, the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, and having talked to dozens of people, and having an excellent staff, including a CFR term member, Marcel Lettre, who is right there, who will answer all the hard questions— I believe that we had much too little collection. We did not have enough sources. And our analysis not only failed to appreciate the fact that there were too few sources, but really was based on a tautology that is false. The tautology was that the failure to prove things were destroyed was proof they existed. And we have now learned that there were other hypotheses that should have been tested, such as: they never existed; they were degraded; they were transferred to other countries. There were so many layers of deception that really nobody knew what the truth was, which I think is where this is all coming out, and we missed it. We— not just the U.S., but the world intelligence agencies. And [former head U.S. weapons inspector] David Kay is right in my view when he says we were all wrong. We all got it wrong.
BETTS: Well, the debate will go on, but in a way this issue is water under the bridge. What do you see as the major intelligence challenges for dealing with Iraq now— the transition period, internal instability, intelligence on political factions and all of that?
HARMAN: Well, the point on Iraq makes— well, there’s a very important point there which is, this is not all a history lesson. We’re not looking back at the [1962] Cuban missile crisis and wondering what could we have done better. I keep saying we’re looking back to look forward, because the challenges are right now. We have— it depends how you count— 130,000-plus Americans on the ground in Iraq now. We have an effort to transition sovereignty to some interim authority and then hopefully to a democratically elected, competent, moderate, transparent government now. And what intelligence we get— and how good it is— is a force-protection issue for America, but it also is a security issue for America going forward. So we have to learn how to do this better, which is why I am so disappointed that the highest levels of our government— the president and the vice president— have never said, at least nowhere that I’ve been or read or seen— that we have a problem, and we have to fix this problem. I think the senior levels at the CIA and some of other intelligence agencies are now saying that, and the CIA has undertaken several reforms recently that I think are very significant. But we can’t change this unless there’s an admission at the top that we need to change it. And I do think— and I’ve written about this and spoken about this— that there are things we could be doing right now to make our intelligence collection and our intelligence analysis and the use of intelligence by policymakers better.
BETTS: Would you expand on that, what those are, and maybe any other comments you have on other major reforms that seem warranted by the Iraq experience in everything else you’ve been working on?
HARMAN: You should all know— in case you don’t— that the guy over here is the one who wrote the article called "How to Fix Intelligence," [in the January-February 2002 Foreign Affairs] so he’s going to answer some questions. [Laughter.] But what can we do right now? Well, obviously we ought to be scrubbing our intelligence products, the ones that presently exist for Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria— you know, pick a country— we ought to be figuring out how good they are, whether they’re tainted by this same kind of tautology that tainted the Iraq products. We ought to figure out whether we have enough sources. One of the big problems in Iraq was inadequate human intelligence. After 1998, when the U.N. inspectors were kicked out of the country, we essentially went dark and we relied on, as we’ve now learned, defectors to give us a lot of the information that we have post-’98, and a lot of that information was wrong. So we can do better. Obviously we are doing better in Iraq. But we have to do better everywhere. We have to make sure that we have the best products we can. And one way, by the way, to do a little test is in Libya. Everyone knows that [Libyan leader] Muammar Qaddafi, whom I actually met with a couple of weeks ago, has decided to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction, and he’s cooperating with the U.S. and shipping lots of material out of the country and so forth. We have an opportunity there on the ground with a cooperative government to compare what we thought we knew with what is actually true. So that’s one thing— scrub the intelligence.
The second thing is, fix the analysis— just what I was talking about— make sure that we actually have devil’s advocacy built into the process. Never assume that one hypothesis is the only hypothesis. Test everything. And when the analytic products are written, do a better job than we did in that 2002 NIE [National Intelligence Estimate]. Put on the front page for dummies like me not only what we think we know, but what we don’t know. Don’t bury it in the back with the dissent of some agency. Put the whole thing together in a form where it is very hard to miss how unsure we are. I was recently in Iraq, and I can’t really reveal the conversations I had with intelligence folks, but I was impressed to see products that literally say on the same page what we know and what we don’t know. That’s the right way to do analysis. And then I also think we should be considering more structural reforms.
But one other thing I want to say about the present. There’s a lots of question— let’s leave it there— about whether or not in the Defense Department, in the Office of Special Plans or some of these other advisory groups there, there actually exists a separate intelligence agency that sends raw intelligence or even finished product in a special pipeline to senior officials in this administration. That has been denied at the middle levels of the Defense Department. But I think it is very important that we learn— that we fully understand what has been going on there, what is going on there. Policymakers have every right to get information from whatever sources they pick. But what would not be right is to have a shadow intel-collection agency that doesn’t vet its products the way the other intel agencies do, and that has a separate straight pipeline to the top.
BETTS: With the one-two punch of September 11th and the controversies over Iraq, there are a lot of demands for major structural reforms— big shake-ups, such as the proposal to create a new director of national intelligence, give him direct authority over Pentagon agencies like NSA [National Security Agency] or NRO [National Reconnaissance Office]. I think even [Democratic presidential candidate] Senator [John] Kerry has already said he favors that proposal. Do you have views on that about whether it’s desirable or politically feasible?
HARMAN: I do. You should understand the parentage of that idea. Well, first of all, what the idea is is to take our 15 separate intelligence agencies— did you know we have 15 of them?--they don’t all work well together. The director of central intelligence nominally has authority over all of them, but he has budget authority over the CIA, and he has real authority over only a few. Most of them are budgeted through the Defense Department. And so the idea has been to put them together, to have a senior person— senior to the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence]--the DCI would run the CIA, and this director of national intelligence would be in charge of everything. That idea, the parents of that idea, are [former National Security Adviser] Brent Scowcroft, who chairs the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and the congressional— I guess we weren’t parents, but we endorsed the idea— the joint— the 9/11 joint inquiry, which was a bicameral, bipartisan investigation of the Senate and House Intelligence committees into what led up to 9/11. Miracle of miracles, all 37 members worked together and came up with, I thought, an excellent report at the end of the last session of Congress. And one of our recommendations was to set up this DNI [Director of National Intelligence]. I do favor it, but I’m not sure I favor it as an actual physical thing, moving 15 agencies into one building. We’re learning as we stand up the Department of Homeland Security that that’s pretty hard to do. I favor it in virtual terms, and all the techies in this room get that. I favor it in terms of combining systems of all those agencies, and combining a lot of the other pieces of their programs in ways that give us an integrated capability.
Somebody in this audience, who happens to be in a red suit, Zoe Baird, at the Markle Foundation, has written extensively on how you can do these things virtually. And I think we might start there— I think that would be politically easier— and move on after that, if we need to actually move them all physically together.
BETTS: There’s also a controversy about how close the DCI or DNI— whoever is at the top— should be to the administration. And some of these proposals advocate establishing a fixed term, as the director of FBI or Joint Chiefs of Staff have. Is greater distance and independence a good thing that should be statutorily enforced in some way?
HARMAN: I think we have to look at that again. I happen to like and admire Bob Mueller, who is the FBI director, and who is about two years into— he came I think a week before or a week after 9/11— what an introduction— so he’s two and a half years into his 10-year term. And I think having that kind of term gives him enormous advantages in terms of how he can reform his agency. And he’s done a good job, I think, transitioning from about the 14th century to the late 20th century. I mean, the FBI was hopeless. And it’s now quite impressive— especially in technology terms. And I was just meeting with the New York field office this afternoon, and they are very, very impressive. But that 10-year term gives him an ability to do that. In the case of the director of central intelligence, his ability— or her ability, why not?--to persuade a president is critical. So you want the DCI to have a relationship with the president. But I think we should consider the longer term, because I frankly think it would give that person more— a way to combat at least the perception of politicization.
One last comment. Jim Woolsey, who was the director of central intelligence in the early Clinton administration, had almost no access to Clinton, as everybody has pointed out— that was a downside. So I think it’s a close call, but I think we should reconsider it, and I think a long term to match the FBI director— maybe not be congruent with it, but to match that length, would be good.
BETTS: Is that because there’s recent criticism that [current director of Central Intelligence] George Tenet got too close to the administration, that distance in itself is good, but isn’t there a downside, as you pointed out with Woolsey, that you may simply remove intelligence from the upper reaches of the administration, in some sense, if you had someone who doesn’t have the rapport with the president?
HARMAN: There is a downside. I am a supporter of George Tenet, and I am because he arrived at the agency at a time of total turmoil. There had been massive turnover at the top. I think he’s restored morale. I think he has made enormous investments in human intelligence and a number of other things that were deficient in the agency. His own plan, which he has told me— I don’t think this is any secret— is to stay on through this election. And he serves at the pleasure of the president. But I think that would be a good outcome. I think if he should leave, confirming his successor will become a political football, and there will be no one at the top. And I do think the CIA is headed in better directions now.
BETTS: How can we fix all of this in an election year or around an election year without completely politicizing intelligence in negative ways? For example, the proliferation of official investigations now— the committees, the 9/11 Commission, the new presidential commission— are they going to build on each other and provide recommendations that will be implemented, or are they just sort of going to suppress the debate for enough time? Are intelligence professionals going to be squeezed in the middle between competing politicians?
HARMAN: Well I think we have a big problem. We ought to fix it right now, and we ought to fix it on a bipartisan basis. And I think we can agree on the basic outlines of short-term and longer-term fixes. I don’t think that part is hard. The hard part is doing it. I don’t think anyone has missed the fact that there is what I would call poisonous partisanship in Washington at the moment. On these issues I call myself a "passionate bipartisan." I think that there are people who really want to fix the problems. I am disappointed— and you heard me say it before— that the president and the vice president have not acknowledged that we have problems. But both Intelligence Committees are investigating these issues and are trying to work on a bipartisan basis to come up with recommendations. That’s two groups that are working at the moment. And then there are some outside groups as well. I mean, the CIA has someone looking into what some of the issues were. There’s a total of five. The president has named some very serious people to a WMD [weapons of mass destruction] commission that will report next March. That’s fine. But I don’t think we should defer everything until next March. As I said, we have a force protection issue in Iraq, and we have to get it right in Iran, North Korea, and Libya. I don’t think the terrorists are waiting for the election. I’ve often said that they don’t check our party registration before blowing us up. And I think it is irresponsible to put this off at least another 10 months.
BETTS: Well, everybody can agree in principle that we ought to do this in the way you say, in a totally bipartisan manner. Is that really practical in a political situation?
HARMAN: Well, no. [Laughter.] But it’s doable. It’s not practical. I mean, you have— Congress does get some things done— the urgent things done— on a bipartisan basis, especially in the national security area. We have to do this, and we have to do it right. And I’m not the only person saying this. I am teaming with a coalition of the willing— a few adventurous souls in both parties— to try to get it done. And I haven’t given up. And I think that hopefully, as a little more time passes, and the public tunes in more— I think that people are paying a lot of attention, and perhaps this becomes an election issue— that it will be on the front burner and attention will be paid and we will get action.
BETTS: I want to get to the audience in a moment, but are there any issues or thoughts you’d like to put out on the table before they put their questions to you?
HARMAN: Well, I have to tell a funny story. I’m not good at this. My husband is great at this. But this actually happened this week— or last week. Last Sunday, Sidney and Jane Harman went to the Academy Awards— I want you to all be impressed. [Laughter.] I had never been invited before, although, you know, I lived in Los Angeles a thousand years. So we go to the Academy Awards, and one of the things I took away from that is that a billion people in the world are more interested in Middle Earth than Earth. [Laughter.] So I said that the next day at a panel on national security at Stanford [University], where I spoke with [former Defense Secretary] Bill Perry, who I think is one of the really wise persons in the world. I said that and announced that I was there to talk about Earth and the challenges facing Earth. OK, so we had our two-hour chat, and it was quite thoughtful I hope on everybody’s part. At the end, the president of Stanford and a couple of other people came up to me, and I thought, oh, they’re going to question something I said on some technical issue, and what— the question was: What was it like to go to the Academy Awards? [Laughter.] And I conclude a billion people in the world are more interested in Middle Earth than Earth.
BETTS: Okay. Well, the floor is open. Please wait for the microphone, and speak directly to it, and please stand and state your name and affiliation. And also, as you know, you should keep your questions concise so that as many people as possible get—
HARMAN: Well, everybody could hear me anyway, right?
QUESTIONER: [inaudible]
HARMAN: Okay, thank you.
QUESTIONER: Bill Vandenheuvel.
HARMAN: Hi, Bill!
QUESTIONER: Hi, Jane.
HARMAN: Good to see you.
QUESTIONER: The reports from London from a former Cabinet minister— and from someone who even was going to be put on trial— indicated that the British Cabinet was reading American intelligence reports that bugged the office of the secretary general of the United Nations. Without asking you to confirm whether American intelligence does that, I would ask whether or not, if it were in fact being done, you would ask the intelligence agencies to stop it, or do you think that’s a legitimate thing for the United States to do?
HARMAN: If I felt I could talk about that, I would. But I really don’t think I can even address the subject. I understand that it became a big subject in Britain— a whistle-blower spoke out and she was going to be prosecuted, then she wasn’t, which I thought was a good outcome. But at any rate, it’s the slippery slope. All my law school classmates understand, I just can’t even address the subject, and I understand it’s a subject of major concern, but I can’t address it.
BETTS: Scott Harold.
QUESTIONER: Congresswoman Harman, thank you for your remarks. Scott Harold , Columbia University. I have two questions, very brief. I’m worried about Pakistan—
HARMAN: Do you take his class?
QUESTIONER: I’ve taken his class, and he actually—
HARMAN: Oh, good— how is he? Is he good?
QUESTIONER: Quite good. Very strict. [Laughter.] In a fair way. I’m wondering about Pakistan though. It seems like a massive intelligence failure that our government’s never picked up on the fact that they were distributing this weaponry. And it also seems quite difficult to believe that the government actually didn’t know. What do we know, and what are we going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again? Second question, as a follow-up, totally different subject. Being a graduate student and having many students under me studying areas of the world that seem very essential to our security, can we get more funding for the study of languages and cultures in areas around the world that are essential to our security?
HARMAN: I hope this guy got an A. [Laughter.] Good. On Pakistan, again, there’s part of the story I can’t discuss. But that is a very important question that you ask. I commend to everybody an article in last week’s New Yorker by Sy Hirsch, Seymour Hirsch. I can’t say that every single thing he writes I always agree with, but this one is a very important article on Pakistan and the A.Q. Khan [Pakistani scientist who admitted to selling nuclear secrets to foreign governments] network. You can look at that both as a success and a failure. You know, George Tenet declassified the fact that our intelligence agencies knew a lot about that, about him and the transfer of bad stuff to bad guys all over the world over a period of years, and that whole operation is— I wouldn’t want to say totally wrapped up, but substantially wrapped up, especially since Libya has made its stunning decision to cooperate with us. But one irony there, which I’m sure you will all share— as we were engaged with Iraq, trying to shut down weapons of mass destruction that maybe didn’t exist, real ones were being distributed and sold around the world by this network operating inside Pakistan.
We still have to learn how much involvement the government of Pakistan had. Sy Hirsch has a number of claims in this article, but I think it is very worthwhile reading. And do we consider it a failure or a success? I think we consider it both. Unfortunately, a lot of these things are very murky. On the subject of languages and diversity in our intelligence community, we have been terrible at this, and learning things at cocktail parties is not going to teach us what the intentions are of— you know, pick one— [al-Qaeda suspect Abu Mussab al-] Zarqawi and his buds in some cave in wherever they are. We will not learn anything at the cocktail party circuit.
QUESTIONER: [inaudible]
HARMAN: So we have to recruit people who look like and act like the targets we want to penetrate. And we have done a very bad job at this. It’s very hard to do. If we can’t actually recruit the al-Qaeda members, we have to recruit people who have, not just an understanding and fluency in the languages that they speak, but some understanding of the culture in which they deal. And we are doing more, we are funding more— can’t go into specifics— but we have been way behind the curve. We missed— in fact, I would really say we just missed the whole generation of threats after the Cold War. That’s part of the problem we have with our intelligence. We thought after we won the Cold War that the world was going to become much safer. Does anybody remember the peace dividend? Yeah, right. We, under the first Bush administration, started reducing our defense procurement budget. We started reducing what we spent on intelligence— for good reasons. We didn’t think the world would be as dangerous. And the new generation of threats are more dangerous, I would say, because they’re less rational and they’re not state actors, and there are more of them than was the Soviet threat. And we are still not fully prepared to deal with them.
BETTS: Roland Paul?
QUESTIONER: Thank you. Congresswoman, I’m Roland Paul with Ivey, Barnum, and O’Mara, and, like you, a graduate of the Harvard Law School. I thought it was very commendable of you to say in your remarks that you supported— and I assume still support— regime change. And I think it’s good. But you also said that you agreed with David Kay that, quote, we got it wrong. But, as you know, he said a lot of other things that didn’t really get reported in the press, and I wondered if you might agree with them, which included that it was a more dangerous place than we thought because of the corruption of the scientists, that he could easily reconstitute his chemical and biological weapons— and your friend Tenet said the same thing I believe on that one— and that the war was absolutely unjustifiable in his opinion.
HARMAN: Well, I don’t— I’m not sure I remember all those quotes exactly in that way. It certainly was and is a dangerous place. Saddam Hussein was absolutely ruthless, and may have killed more people on his watch than any dictator in history— maybe. I mean, I guess it depends how you add these things up. But it gets to the millions. And part of the problem in ever— perhaps ever understanding what he had, what he did is that the people who worked for him were so terrified, they never told him the truth, and he may not have known. And they may not have known. And now most of them were dead anyway, and so much of the stuff was destroyed that I actually believe— and I think David Kay agrees with this too— that we may never be able to tell the story. We just may never ever understand the whole story. So I agree with that.
As far as plans to constitute or reconstitute stuff, you bet he had them. The question is compared to other dangerous places in the world, is this where we should have taken military action when we did, or should we have tried more options for longer? And we can’t repeat history— we’ll never know— you know, we’ll never absolutely know. But the fact is, looking forward, that we still have insurgency and instability issues in Iraq, and we have very dangerous developments in places like Iran and North Korea. And we still have not wrapped up Osama bin Laden and some of his top folks. And Afghanistan is still dangerous. So when you put it all together going forward, all I’m saying is we need more brain cells on a lot of other targets in the world, and we need better intelligence to help policymakers make the best possible judgments of where we are going to put U.S. resources, and when.
BETTS: Back row.
HARMAN: Ken Brody.
BETTS: Microphone?
QUESTIONER: Having been a minor figure for a few years— [Laughter.]--in the middle ‘90s in the government, I found myself making extensive use of our intelligence agencies. And having a little bit of experience on Wall Street, I would compare the intelligence written reports to Wall Street analyst written reports— something that a sane person who understood what went on really wouldn’t pay very much attention to them. As a result, with the need to do my job, I, on an ongoing basis, had the intelligence officers who were compiling the information trot on in. We’d spend a few hours, and we’d get to the bottom hopefully of some stuff, and maybe some stuff we wouldn’t. The thing that I’m interested in with you— if one has a view similar to mine, which was compiled over a three-year period, as I said, with pretty extensive use of intelligence sources, with pretty rapid feedback, because we were dealing with a lot of economic issues, and come to this conclusion about the printed word and what The Economist would call the "agency problems"— not the Central Intelligence Agency problems, but "agency problems"— with respect to the stuff that goes into making a written report. If you have any sort of sympathy with that view, how do you get decent information in the hands of a broad number of decision-makers, including Congress? Sorry to be so long-winded.
HARMAN: Leadership, leadership, leadership— at every level. You have to have systems that permit you to connect the dots. And we have much better systems to do that. I mean, IT [information technology] systems and organizational systems that permit you to do that. But then you have to have people with judgment who know what they’re looking at, and who know how to test what they’re looking at at every level— up, up, up— and make sure that his president in his daily brief— the president gets more intelligence information than any of the rest of us does— and gets exactly what he or she needs to make the wisest policy decisions. That may sound kind of vague, but I— and maybe, Dick, you want to comment on this. But I don’t know another way to do it. It is at the end a set of human judgments. It’s a prediction about what is going to happen. Batting a thousand— and this is a Dick Betts deal— is impossible. Think baseball. You know, batting .500 is almost impossible too. So, you know, is it impossible? I don’t know. Anyway, that’s what we’re talking about here.
BETTS: Well, we’re really here to hear you.
HARMAN: No— but what would your answer be? You study this and work on it all the time.
BETTS: Well, I think it’s often a question of, is the glass half full or half empty, and also that there are multiple audiences for a lot of products, so you often get a great deal of frustration among experts with the quality of certain products that turn out to be useful to others elsewhere for other purposes. So I find it hard to generalize. But my own sort of—
HARMAN: Well, take the head of the Ex-Im [export-import] Bank, for example. How do we get him or her excellent intel?
BETTS: I don’t have a better solution than the homily that we need to hire better and smarter people. But that involves not only some general changes in personnel practices but some changes in social values too. We’ve been denigrating the value of public service for a long time in the media and elsewhere, and it takes a lot to turn that around. Sir?
QUESTIONER: [inaudible] --United Nations Association. One observation. I think it’s arguable— I think people would argue that Stalin caused the death of more people than the entire population of Iraq today. I think that’s—
HARMAN: Okay.
QUESTIONER: The question I have is about the National Intelligence Estimate. During— how much of an integrity does that system have today, and how much is it read by Congress and the president. During the Vietnam War, a group of us made some judgments about the intelligence sources in the late ‘60s— actually in ‘69. And we determined that the NIEs were closest to the mark on the problems that we faced in Vietnam, along with one other group in the Pentagon. And I worked on several NIEs, and they were impressive on how people thought out the intelligence problem. I guess— and I know in the summer of 2002, Senator [Bob] Graham [D-Fla.] asked, Has there been an NIE done on Iraqi nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction? They said, no, the last one was done in 1992. Let’s do a new one.
HARMAN: Right.
QUESTIONER: Now, I’d just like to know why that hadn’t been done. Is the NIE no longer an important document? Do you read them? And do you think the president reads them? Because I think it’s probably one of— historically has been one of the best ways in which the intelligence community can test each other on the validity of information.
HARMAN: Well, there’s a lot to answer there. I think the NIE is a very important document. And the one prepared at Senator Graham’s request in October of 2002 was not a very good document. But those who wrote it are defending it to this day. Stuart Cohen, who directed that, was on Nightline one night— which I thought was quite amazing— defending his product. And, you know, if you ran into him on a street corner, that’s what he would talk about. I mean, he thinks he and his team had great integrity and professionalism, and they called it the way they saw it. Three comments on that one that I think were bad. One is it was done in a rush, although I don’t know the answer to your question about why we hadn’t done one for 10 years. Maybe Richard knows or maybe Marcel does. Do you know why we didn’t have another one?
AUDIENCE: [inaudible] some extent had to do with the dynamics that we talked about earlier, that the policymakers start asking for a more regular back and forth and an informal dialogue. And until somebody calls for one on certain issues, they aren’t queued up in the --
HARMAN: Okay. So, shame on us. There should have been one, obviously. So that was one problem. The second problem is, to my amazement— I spoke about this the other day in talking to Cohen and others— they said they assumed the decision to go to war had already been made, and that the reason they were doing this was to advise policymakers, really the warfighters, on what to expect when they came over the berm from Kuwait. You know, should they wear protective gear? Were there chemical weapons, yes or no? Was there a biological weapon, yes or no? That was the wrong audience. The audience was Congress— advising us on whether we should support a resolution that, as a last resort, authorized the use of military force. That’s a different audience. So that was surprising. And I think that was their mistake. That was the second thing.
The third thing is, we somehow lost our way doing analysis. The analysts are not supposed to make the tough calls. They’re supposed to be honest brokers. They’re supposed to say, here’s what we know and here’s what we don’t know. They’re not supposed to make the decision. The president, commander in chief, and his advisors, are supposed to make the decision. And that NIE in my view crossed the line. The declassified portions of it say things like, Iraq has— not qualified— chemical and biological weapons. Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear capability. And you have to read back in the classified pieces and look below and see a few dissents and the little qualifiers— and a few qualifiers. But that is not the way to do this. I think the basic concept of an NIE is terrific. I think this one was a poor product.
QUESTIONER: Roman Martinez. To what degree is the failure of getting intelligence really the assets, or lack of assets, on the ground hampered by our own laws or our willingness to have a --or our wishes to have a transparent democracy? Have we overdone it over the last 25 years in the way we in effect maybe hamstring our own capabilities in that area?
HARMAN: Well, it’s a tricky thing. You’re probably referring— I don’t know how many of you are sort of inside these issues— but something that got enormous attention on the Bremer Commission, the Commission on Terrorism on which we served and since, was some guidelines issued by John Deutch when he was the director of central intelligence in 1995, following a major scandal in Guatemala. And Deutch issued guidelines that required a specific way to vet spies that you were trying to recruit in, you know, horrible places. And he did that— he said at the time, and I think he still believes— to protect the agents in the field, so that they would know that they needed approval from headquarters when they hired people with blood on their hands. I mean, it shouldn’t shock any of you that you’ve got to recruit bad guys to get bad guys. But the question is, how bad. And, you know, how reliable are they if they are major thugs and et cetera? And that issue requires care. You have to make sure you have the right kind of sources. At any rate, the Deutch guidelines were invoked after 1995— an excuse— and maybe a good reason— I don’t want to say they’re just an excuse, because I think looking back on them that they were— they did inhibit the recruitment of spies for some years. And in fact our commission recommended that they be suspended for the recruitment of terrorist assets.
But how we do that, what the limitations are, how we set that up does affect who we get. My bottom line is, we have to penetrate these cells. The only ways we will know the plans and intentions of these people is to have somebody in the room, or as close to the room as we can get it. Signals intelligence— what we can hear flying around with very impressive air and satellite power— a lot of it built in my congressional district, by the way— is not enough. It’s not enough. They’re smart. You know, they know. It became public knowledge that Osama bin Laden was using a Sirius cell phone. And as soon as that came out, he stopped using it. And we have beautiful pictures of buildings— Colin Powell showed a lot of them at the U.N. last year— but we didn’t have enough ground troops to know what was going on in those buildings. So we need a combination. We need more human intelligence, but we need to do it under some set of rules that is as reasonable as it can be. And, Dick, you may have something to add on that, because you were very active in that debate.
BETTS: Well, I remember we thought that was the recommendation that was going to set off explosions. And it turned out it was the criticism of the Greeks that caused all the problems. But isn’t there a building sort of reaction against the immediate consensus in favor of reducing some civil liberties right after September 11th? I mean, you had the Patriot Act passed before Congress even had time to read the bill. But now that we haven’t had any big terrorist attacks, is that necessarily going to sort of build the movement to revisit all that?
HARMAN: Well, let me again plug Zoe Baird and the wonderful work Markle has done. Finding the right way— balance is not the best word, because balance sounds like you take away from one to give to the other. But finding the right way to support both the protection of civil liberties and increased security is critical. It is absolutely critical. And there’s a tension. We have to think it through. But we live in a much more dangerous world than we did. And I wouldn’t say that we have now let up our guard more. We can’t sustain— just use the little color chart that [Secretary of Homeland Security] Tom Ridge used; we can’t all be in orange all the time. But we need a better system where we have the legal authorities— I support this— to go after the bad guys who use all the modern communications means. But we also limit those legal authorities in ways that help us target. And, again, it depends on how you collect data. If you collect data in sensitive ways, and you have to have all kinds of permission to get the key data, and you layer databases— you don’t just have one Big Brother database— and there’s a lot of learning about this— you can, I think, protect civil liberties and increase our security at the same time.
I am not in favor of letting our guard up. I think New York City— if [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg were here, he’d be furious at me again— has enormous vulnerabilities. I’ve been having a fight with the mayor because I think we have to raise the possibilities that subways are soft targets. But I do congratulate him for everything he’s doing to make subways safe in New York, I really do. And I know my kids take them, even though I tell them not to. But I think you have to know that it is more dangerous. You have to know that there are chances that very bad things can happen again here or anywhere in America. One of the things we predicted in the Bremer Commission was that there would be major terrorist attacks— plural— on U.S. soil. Everybody should get it that al Qaeda is looking for big opportunities again in America to hit the icons of America. There are some of those on the West Coast. I worry enormously about LAX [Los Angeles International Airport], which my district surrounds, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which are the largest container ports in America— 43 percent of our container traffic goes through those— movie studios, the Hollywood sign. All of this kind of stuff is vulnerable. And everyone is working hard to protect it. But we can’t— we can’t in my view forget that the world has changed and they are here.
BETTS: George Soros.
QUESTIONER: We are in the process of setting up an intelligence operation in Iraq for Iraq, and we are engaging some of Saddam’s operatives in this, from what the newspapers say. What safeguards are there that we are not setting up something like SAVAK [the Shah of Iran’s domestic security and intelligence service], given the fact that we are not going to have the kind of influence on the elected government as we were hoping when we went in there?
HARMAN: That’s a thoughtful and hard question. It’s hard to know how this is going to turn out. I don’t think the postwar planning in Iraq was one of our success stories, and it still isn’t. And we are going to have two levels of handoffs now— after June 30 we are going to have an interim government. I would guess and hope that we will have some control there in terms of the basic things it does, how security goes, how this project proceeds. But once elections are held, which will be the end of the year or the beginning of next year, I think we are going to have a lot less control— maybe none. And I don’t know how to predict— this is what a good analyst— that wouldn’t be me— needs to be focused on right now: What could that look like? What could go right? What could go wrong? How much do we know about this? And then the good policymaker, once he or she reads that, needs to figure out what policies can we put in place to make certain that’s right, that we aren’t rebuilding the horror— this time with a religious extremist in control— that we sought to eliminate just a couple of years ago. I think it’s very hard. I don’t know what the answer to that is. And if anybody here does, and it’s a good answer, I’d sure love to hear it.
BETTS: Gary Sick.
QUESTIONER: Gary Sick. I’m a colleague of Dick’s. I wonder— you talked about a tautology at the beginning, and it seems to me that the tautology was that everybody was absolutely certain that Saddam Hussein would never give up the capacity for weapons of mass destruction, that he simply was never going to do that; therefore, anything that wasn’t proved against him was in fact there, and so we could assume that that was the case. Now, I have two questions. One, if we had had Saddam as one of our agents, if we had managed to recruit him, would we had known the truth about what actually was going on? What was Saddam thinking during that period of time? Were we so badly wrong? And the second, which is perhaps more serious, is— because everybody— ideologically there were people absolutely convinced that this was the case— how do you extract that kind of ideology which goes with an administration, which goes with a certain group of people— how do you extract that from the intelligence process? And it seems to me that that is one of the problems that we never really resolved.
HARMAN: Well, on what was Saddam really up to, I have no clue. I don’t— he’s now in captivity, as everybody knows, and I know we are trying to learn more about him. And I can’t really comment on what’s happening with that. I guess I have to say I don’t think he ever would have given it all up. That would be my take on him. And I do think that that was part of the tautology. But I think even so that, even believing he wouldn’t have given it all up, we should have tested whether, for a variety of reasons, some of it was never there, some of it was transferred, some of it was degraded, et cetera— or some of the people under him were deceiving him.
The other part of the question was— oh, ideology, yes. How do you get ideology out of intel? Well, policymakers get elected— or at least those at the top— and they should be accountable for their ideologies. And if you don’t like the ideology you’re getting, vote for Brand X. That would be about them. But then going down to the intel products, the way I would put it is, we have to have a process that as best as possible gets us the best collection we can, and gets us analysis that does display the diversity of views, and operates as honest brokers. So that approach gets ideology as much as possible out of the intel products. Then I also think one more thing, which is that the intelligence community has an obligation to correct policymakers if they inappropriately use the intel products. That actually has happened recently. George Tenet did correct the president with respect to some of the information on Niger that got into a speech he was going to give in Cincinnati in the fall of, I think it was, 2002. But it then got right back into the State of the Union message, and Tenet took the fall for failing to correct that. I think there is an obligation that way.
But we can’t have an ideology-free government. Many of us want people in office who reflect ideologies that we share.
BETTS: Time is short. Let’s collect three questions and maybe you could answer them all at once. Sir?
QUESTIONER: Alan Hyman, Columbia University Medical Center. Thank you very much. Some of us really don’t know what the job of the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee is. How would you describe your job, and how would we evaluate your performance? [Laughter.]
BETTS: Let’s get a couple more. Sir?
QUESTIONER: Barry MacDougal from UPS. We had the senior person from the CIA here not so long ago who described what we knew— he was responsible for field operations— about the [October 2000 attack on the] USS Cole and the failures there, the two [U.S.] embassies [in Africa] that were bombed [in August 1998], and the [1993] World Trade Center attempt that didn’t succeed. And he said we knew at that time that they were all al-Qaeda and that they were all being trained in Afghanistan. What is your take as to why we didn’t do something meaningful at that time.
QUESTIONER: James Goodale. You referred to the fact that you had read the document behind the NIE. You said that you had to read the classified part of the NIE to understand the unclassified part. The only part of the NIE that the public had access to is seven pages.
HARMAN: Right.
QUESTIONER: When do you think that the public can have greater access so that we can make some judgment as to what our public officials did? I have to say I approach this question with more than passing interest, since I was counsel to The New York Times in the Pentagon papers case.
HARMAN: That would be fascinating to— you reminded me of— what does the ranking member do? Ah, well what it means— the position is the senior representative of the oppressed minority on the committee— [Laughter.]--that would be me. And, actually, it is a very special position even so. The Intelligence Committees are— they’re called "Permanent Select Committees." The members, all the members, are appointed by the House leadership. We don’t come up in the garden variety way through the Steering and Policy Committees, which is representative of the members of the House. It’s the leaders’ appointment. And it took me four years of badgering [House minority leader] Dick Gephardt to finally get the appointment to the [former House member] Bill Richardson seat on the House Intelligence Committee when he left in 1996. And it was a fabulous honor to serve there. When you are the senior of either party, you are in the "gang of four," so-called— that sounds like some kind of communist plot here— and the gang of four gets the special-special treatment which, for better or worse, means that we are briefed on the highest level secrets in the government— just the four of us. And it is really an enormously important— I take it very seriously— opportunity to try to make a contribution. What else does the ranking member do? Well, this one is trying to preserve the tradition of bipartisanship on the committee. I call the Intelligence committees— islands of sanity. I really was impressed by the joint 9/11 inquiry experience, and I do think we can continue to do that, and we are not at the moment adding as much value as I think we should.
On the question of al Qaeda and what did we know and why didn’t we do more, there were— and I think you’ve read this publicly— many people inside government in the Clinton administration very concerned about Osama bin Laden. If you’ve read what [former National Security Adviser] Sandy Berger has said, and you’ve read some of the other comments by senior Clinton officials— what George Tenet has said— you know that they were concerned. Here was the problem, you know, political will. There were many top priorities at the end of the ‘90s and early in the Bush term. I do think that Porter Goss, who is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, a Republican from Florida, has it right, when he says that what changed on 9/11 was the audience, and finally there was the ability to get things done that many people had talked about for many years— including Dick Betts and Jane Harman as members of the Bremer Commission. And the last question was on?
BETTS: Declassifying the NIE.
HARMAN: Well, teaching us all more about how intelligence works and declassifying— well, sharing more. I think we overclassify—
QUESTIONER: Particularly— [inaudible]
HARMAN: Well, I don’t think— I think we overclassify a lot in this country, and I also think what intelligence has been about has been inadequately understood. I think it’s going to become better understood now, because so many people are so upset about how we got it wrong in Iraq. And I think the presidential commission and all of these other committees are going to tell more of the story. But I can’t say that we should declassify this whole NIE. I would not say that— or the sources that led to it. A lot of those sources and comments contain active sources and methods— sources meaning human beings, the guy, and methods being how we get the information we get. And as imperfect as those products were, I would come at it a different way. I would try to tell a better story, a bigger story of what happened, what went wrong. I think our public officials should acknowledge that it was done badly. And I think kind of how it works and how it’s going to work should be better understood by the public. But I do think a lot of this world, both the successes and the failures— and there are a lot of successes too, let’s remember. Part of the reason I believe— I strongly believe this— that we haven’t been attacked again in this country since 9/11 is that the FBI, local law enforcement, the CIA and other intelligence agencies are doing their jobs well.
And let me just close on this, because I think that was the last question, and it’s 7:00 and something bad happens if you— [laughter]--right, Richard, something bad? There are terrific people who work in our intelligence agencies. And whatever you think of the leaders, think of the kids recruited out of college and the middle-level people who serve— oh-oh, somebody is going to be in big trouble— [laughter]--who serve in unbelievably awful places and are in danger all the time and leave their families behind. And think of the stars on the wall as you enter the CIA— many of those names— this person is in even bigger trouble— who can’t even be acknowledged now. I mean, it is enormous public service to do this work. And I think the people who do it do it with very good motives and an incredible amount of courage. And what we owe them, I think, is better leadership and a better way to do their jobs. And we have got to get this right, and we should be doing it now. We cannot wait for November. There may be another major terrorist attack here— let’s hope not— before November. Let’s make certain that the best and the brightest, many of whom work for our government right now, get all the protection and support they need. And that’s something I’m dedicated to as ranking member. Thank you very much. [Applause.]
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