Our Clueless Intelligence System

These and other crippling organizational weaknesses were no secret before 9/11. Between 1991 and 2001, a dozen reports examining U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism capabilities found serious organizational problems and urged immediate action. The consensus was stunning. Of 340 recommendations, 84 percent focused on the same four deficiencies: poor coordination across intelligence agencies, terrible information sharing, inadequate human intelligence and insufficient attention to setting priorities.

But almost none of the suggested fixes were implemented before 9/11. Most recommendations -- 268, or 79 percent of the total -- spurred no action. Nothing. The

9/11 commission and the congressional intelligence committees found that these same weaknesses led to disaster on 9/11.

If you think these problems have been solved, think again. Despite the recent creation of a director of national intelligence, the U.S. intelligence community remains a dysfunctional family with no one firmly in charge. The "new FBI" is still fighting the old FBI's cops-and-robbers culture. Visit the bureau's Web site, where job postings are divided into two categories -- special agents who wear badges, carry guns and catch bad guys, and everyone else. Analysts, those dot-connectors who since

9/11 have been touted as equal partners in the FBI's counterterrorism mission, are still relegated to "professional support staff," alongside auto mechanics and janitors.

Meanwhile, incentives still encourage analysts everywhere to think in the short term. At his confirmation hearings last year, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden warned Congress that unless the United States gets serious about doing big-picture analysis, it will be "endlessly surprised." And not in a good way.

Even our successes aren't cause for celebration. The FBI's recent disruptions of terrorist plots to kill soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey and to blow up the Sears tower in Chicago and New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport were all in the early planning stages -- more pipe dreams than pipe bombs. In January, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III characterized the bureau's 2006 record as one of stopping "several unsophisticated, small-scale attack plans that reflect the broader problem homegrown extremists pose."

Intelligence reform is failing now for the same reasons it always has: Transforming any organization from the inside is hard, and imposing reform from the outside is even harder.

No organization changes easily by itself. Businesses often fail to adapt to shifting market conditions even when their corporate lives depend on it. Government agencies are worse off because they aren't designed to adapt. They're built to be reliable and fair, performing the same tasks in standard ways over and over again.

This isn't all bad. Standard operating procedures ensure that all military pilots have the same rules of engagement and that everyone stands in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. But the downside is that government agencies are hardwired to keep doing things the same old way even when they shouldn't.

Imposing intelligence reform from the outside has always been a political loser. There's a reason why no president since Harry S. Truman has gotten serious about overhauling intelligence agencies through executive orders or legislation. It's called the Pentagon. For decades, the Defense Department has controlled about 80 percent of the intelligence budget and housed most of the agencies. And for decades, it has fiercely resisted any move to realign power in the CIA or anywhere else. Pentagon officials and their turf-conscious congressional supporters have been torpedoing intelligence reform forever -- crippling the CIA when it was created in 1947, savaging intelligence reform bills twice in the 1990s and fatally weakening the powers of the new national intelligence director during the last reform round, after the release of the 9/11 commission's report in 2004.

There's no magic potion for fixing U.S. intelligence. Meaningful reform will take years, requiring bottom-up cultural transformation as well as top-down policy changes. Sadly, it may need another catastrophic failure to gain traction. We've known about intelligence problems and their solutions for years. What we've never had, and desperately need, is the political courage in the White House and Congress to take on the Pentagon, demand radical overhaul and see it through.

Now that's where individuals matter.

zegart@ucla.edu

Amy Zegart is associate professor of public policy at UCLA and the author of the forthcoming "Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI and the Origins of 9/11."