Good article; though it might have been more convincing with a few more mea culpas. The intelligence community still seems to shroud itself in seven veils of secrecy, when three or four would do.

Sometimes this reflexive default to secrecy approaches the ironic, as when a recently-launched open source intelligence center was shielded under what Maxwell Smart would call, "the cone of silence."

But: as for according the criminal Rumsfeld credit for the term "unknown unknowns:" not likely.

That term actually originated in the early days of the Apollo moon landing program. At the time, NASA scientists and engineers had vast areas of missing knowledge about conditions affecting human life in space and on the moon, including but not limited to the terrain and seismic qualities of the moon's surface, the various forms of radiation that astronauts might encounter &c.

These imponderables resolves themselves into categories of information that could at least be defined and other categories that defied analysis.

Rumsfeld's brazen hijacking of this term, from some Americans who really cared about the fact that they were sending their fellow countrymen into harm's way, stands as a wholly characteristic affront by the murderous George W. Bush clique to some hard working and honest people.

...but the intelligence was still wrong.

Perhaps it's also fair to say that the intelligence on Iraqi WMD was also labelled, usually at least, in the lowest category of human intelligence i.e., to be taken as part of a broader picture rather than relied upon as hard fact (although if it's not considered fact, why consider it as part of any picture?).

The problem with all this retrospective "we knew all along it was rubbish", from the likes of the author and former British intelligence chief John Scarlett, is that it didn't seem to bother them at the time. If a general is ordered to commit a war crime, we demand that he refuses even at risk to his own life, or we drag him before an international court. So is it not reasonable to ask an intelligence chief to merely speak out if he feels the material provided is being misunderstood or misused? After all, he only risks his career, and yet the consequences of failing to do so - massive, unnecessary loss of life - are the same.

It's perfectly correct that the politicians make the bad decisions. But when they do so clearly on the basis of overestimating the intelligence they've been given, it's the moral and civil duty of the agency that produced it to stand up and say "please don't rely on that, we know it's not very reliable". Of course that's embarrassing, but not half as much as the cowardly re-writing of their own history by former intelligence leaders while they search for their retirement consultancies.

I love how publicly statements from politicians, the heads of the CIA, etc all come out saying one thing but then months after and when it turns out to have been dead wrong the 'intelligence community' says 'oh, we knew that info was bad all along. Those darn politicians.' does no one recall George Tenet calling Iraq's WMDs a 'Slam Dunk' isn't the Director the CIA part of the 'intelligence community'?

The CIA is and has been a failure and an economic drain for the United States.

http://www.mosquitonet.com/~prewett/amdemcia.html

Or just stay stupid/ignorant.

" I served in the CIA for 28 years and I can tell you: America's screw-ups come from bad leaders, not lousy spies."

What kind of BULLSHIT is this anyway? A LOUSY spy is much more believable than a bad LEADER.

That is one thing that America is famous for, and that is TEAMWORK.
Everybody MAY have their say.
A government with minimal input is just like a crippled person with a big mouth , but only slowly ging forth.

A screw up, is when your goal has the ability to become a fact, when human beings are not involved.

A lousy government, now that can REALLY BE a fact.
But a country is ALWAYS innocent consisting of millions of beautiful innocent people.

i Agree in write about the abilities of US enemies or rivals, ignorant people accuse me of propaganda for the other side. The second sentence of the second paragraph captures most of America's problems with Idiots in Chief who think they understand strategy and the lessons of history, but they follow domestic opinion and their fears of mistakes instead of gathering accurate information about themselves and the other side(s) and creating a coherent, positive plan. In many cases, the US has armchair generals who don't know the limits of US capabilities and have no knowledge of the terrain, distances, or climate of a projected action..... pecas aeronaves

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I'm no expert, but letting a suicide bomber into a CIA outpost? Your entire Lebanon payroll getting rolled by Hizbollah? Having an Iranian-American spy hang out in the Bagram BX one month, then sending him into Tehran the next?

Sure sounds like lousy spywork to me. I'd much rather read an article explaining such recent high-profile Intelligence failures than hearing yet another former official shift the blame on Iraq and 911.

Did you say $80Billion on intelligence? Was that the number back when we had the September 11 incident just a decade ago, or since then? Good gracious I can't believe how much we spend to find out how many this or how many that. What upsets me is when we do find out what country is up to what, then we spend more money trying to do what? So much for getting ouf of debt anytime soon. This country is going to heck in a vintagehandbag thanks to our leaders. Twenty eight years in the CIA, I hope you have a great retirement package.

Now that Petraeus is director, more attention than ever is likely to be focused on the agency. It seems incongruous that someone so needy for the spotlight heads a spy agency. This may not be a negative, though, having a self-serving, ruthless guy at the helm. He has the reputation for doing great things, more in Iraq than in Afghanistan, and a lot of that noise is due to his own self-promotion. Maybe he can do the same image-building for the CIA. Time will tell, if King David is reappointed by the Commander-in-Chief he so publicly and arrogantly challenged about the war. People flying close to the sun are always entertaining to observe.

As for agency operations and other costs to taxpayers, does anyone actually know this number? I expect Pillar to defend his former employer - or may be's still doing some moonlighting - but a more fascinating and informative piece would be more objective and less defensive. I enjoyed the reading, but I felt all along that it was based on half-truths, similar to reports from the Afghan War detailing how many Taliban leaders were killed and omitting the number of children whose faces had been blown off.

I think we often have both bad spies and bad leaders, because we balk at having serious people in these positions. I highly recommend “Advice to War Presidents” by Angelo Codevilla. I’d be happy to buy a copy for Obama and the GOP challengers—if they’d read it. I will link to this from my Old Jarhead blog.

Robert A. Hall
Author: The Coming Collapse of the American Republic
All royalties go to help wounded veterans
For a free PDF of my book, write tartanmarine(at)gmail.com

the leadership always takes the blame, but I think that it is rightfully so. the red tape that limits our leaders from taking action and forces them to focus solely on re-election and not on improving the country. Our world has become a short sighted world where we only focus on the short term and nothing to do with the long term austin usedcars...time to focus on the greater good and making things better for future generations. Leave it better than you found it, is always what my momma told me.

Pillar is correct that policymakers come with broad perspectives and alternative information sources that have shaped their views, which may or may not be all that much affected by the intelligence they receive. But as he himself admits, quoting Wolfowitz, the WMD intelligence (in the 2002 NIE) was the one thing on which all the senior administration officials could agree. That intelligence was deeply flawed, & Pillar had a hand in it, if I recall correctly. Had, for example, DOE Intelligence joined the State Dept. INR in taking a footnote on the nuclear issues -- as nearly every working analyst in DOE wanted to do -- the NIE might have hit a serious rock before publication, hampering the administration's timetable & their ability to put Powell in front of the UN as well as extract the AUMF from Congress.

A more serious example of bad intelligence that Pillar neglects is the criminally stupid application of "need to know" with regard to vital information the CIA obtained from the now-famous al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia -- that two known terrorists had multiple-entry US visas. Had this information been shared with FBI (who's representatives at CTC were in the know but not the Bureau itself), it would have been possible to track these terrorists when they entered the US a few months later and spent nearly a year in cellphone contact with Atta and the other conspirators before getting on airliners on 9/11. We had a chance to abort the whole plot, but the intelligence mantra of "need to know" triumphed and nearly 3,000 Americans died.

You can go online and see a million stories about the CIA and talk about our national intelligence and so many stories conflict with one another. How are you ever supposed to get to the truth?

Do political concerns often trump logical analysis? Of course.

However, I do not share Mr. Pillar’s faith in the accuracy of the people who make up the “intelligence community.” He references Bush’s trumpeting of intelligence reports on WMD–but have we forgotten that it was CIA Director George Tenet who gave us the infamous “slam dunk” quote?

As badly as the military has bungled our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, shouldn’t some of the blame for our woeful lack of useful tactical intelligence fall on the members of this “intelligence community,” both inside and outside of DOD? I seen a post at mamaws primitives about the problem of political preferences is probably compounded by inaccurate or conflicting intelligence estimates than by presidents willfully ignoring solid intelligence.

iraq was fully justified..only the pretext was wrong and that was largely to get around a blocking and hostile UN.....

Given the context of that time, going after saddam was more than justified...even the iraqi people themselves wanted the US to come relieve them of their mad dog...anyhow, the reasons for going after saddam were many what with russian out of work nuke scientists guns for hire, post 9/11 world, saddam had already used wmd's on his own people, he was slaughtering killing, butchering, torturing(waterboarding would have been a picnic to saddam), etc...the US and all countries went after qaddafI for faaaaar less.....

second, how about the RIDICULOUS NIE 2007 scam of a document....16 agencies ALL got iran wrong ? they said iran's nuke program was halted, ,and we now know, clearly it wasnt. fordow? qom? new centrifuges being designed? weaponization studies? ballistic missile improvement? come on....that NIE of 2007 was a complete disgrace.

One can only assume that at when someone is a leader or close to it at the CIA, that their ego's and Self Confidence would be through the roof. Power gets to the heads of nearly everyone, and when it does to people in control of extremely sensitive tasks, there could be failures on a grand scale.

Aside from Pillar's regurgitation of worn out excuses and self-indulgent pats on the back, I agree with some of his points. I take exception to the notion, though, of "bad leaders", as every Administration makes poor, sometimes detrimental, decisions. Intelligence will always be focused on the priorities of the seated Administration. When an Administration prioritizes its goals on something, the intelligence community tends to over divert its resources towards that end at the expense of most everything else, especially the CIA, which covets the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) as its own. The PDB focuses on the sexy issues du jour qua the Administration's priorities, so it is no wonder the CIA focuses so much of its attention towards feeding the PDB. It, like any govt organization, has to justify its existence, and there is no better way of showing the Administration it is meeting priorities than in the PDB. So, yes, any seated Administration has lots to be blamed if something that is not a priority happens, but so does the intelligence community. The CIA seems to have a terrible history of dropping everything and everyone, when the issue or those people no longer remain an Administration priority. It is easy to blame the "bad leader", rather than take responsibility for dropping all the balls in favor of fetching a stick for the master.

lousy spies: it seems with the reported worldwide roll up of so many CIA sources and infiltrations of CIA operating bases, the endless pot of money has created lousy spies, or at least bad trade craft. The fact is, the intelligence community has spent lots of money on developing lousy spies over the past decade since 9/11, granted in response to meeting the Administrations' priorities. The intelligence community, though, needs to check its ego, a step which seems foreign to Pillar, less it continue to breed future generations of hubris laden Andrew Warrens. The intelligence community has to balance providing the Administration with what it wants to know with what it needs to know, which aren't always the same nor consistent with Administration priorities.

This may not be a negative, though, having a self-serving, ruthless guy at the helm. He has the reputation for doing great things, more in Iraq than in Afghanistan, and a lot of that noise is due to his own self-promotion. Maybe he can do the same image-building for the CIA garment steamer reviews

During 9/11 Boy George was reading "My Pet Goat" to children, while Dead-Man-Walking Cheney was was at the scene of the crime (in the White House bunker) conducting scheduled, simulated war-games to fool NORAD and the FAA into standing down. Isn't it time we put these guys on trial for treason and mass murder?

I quote the current champion of non-elected crackpot war declarations, Mr Paul Wolfowitz -- writing in Foreign Policy two-and-a-half years ago. Whether or not Mr Pillar is completely accurate in his account of how well or ill intelligence services have worked, he certainly makes a sound point by saying in effect that while the intel establishment proposes, it's other public servants who decide what to do with the information. Mr Wolfowitz thought there was a good reason to go to war with Iraq despite what intelligence was telling the government. Dr Rice could be seen as the mother of the Afghanistan war by her refusal to pay attention to CIA warnings in 2001 that something bad was coming from al-Qaeda in the near future.

Mr Wolfowitz wants us to think he still matters, and occasionally writes something for FP to support this idea. His "This is not the place to reargue the Iraq war" makes it pretty clear his is an idea not worth supporting.

How well do these wars work out? Elsewhere in FP on February 13, a reader called for anybody who thought the Iraq and Afghanistan interventions had succeeded, to write in with the reasons.

Nobody did.

Chilling, huh?