Guest columnist
Taming terrorThe U.S. must get smarter about intelligence

By Brewster C. Denny
Special to the Times

Brewster C. Denny

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It is clear that there were two failures leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: First, intelligence with a capital "I" — that is, failure to read the signs and prepare for an attack that was forecast in pieces of data in the system. That is analogous to the U.S. failure to accurately anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II. The other failure is the failure of intelligence, small "i." That is what the 9/11 commission called imagination and global strategy, including an overall understanding of the strategic situation, of our place in the world, or, as the commission put it, "the new challenges of the 21st century."

Adapting to the new challenges means accurately identifying just what those are and developing a range of policies and allies and international institutions to meet them. More than Pearl Harbor and 9/11, it is appraising the enemy and designing the policies and resources for the challenges of our new century. In this case, the magnitude of the analogue compares to George Kennan's seminal appraisal of the Soviet Union, aid to Greece and Turkey in the face of Communist-led insurgency in 1947, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO.

In short, we must develop policy of the quality of the successful policies and international institutions that kept the peace between the world's great powers longer than any time in modern history. The present watershed of history demands it.

Immediate attention to the correction of both intelligence failures is urgent. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, or the 9/11 commission, did an outstanding, nonpartisan job, in spite of early White House reluctance to support its efforts. Congress and the administration must address its recommendations promptly.

The 9/11 intelligence failure (big "I") is familiar. It's very close to what happened at Pearl Harbor. In both cases, there was reason to expect an attack. In the case of al-Qaida, we had already been attacked by them and other terrorists at home and abroad — the first World Trade Center bombing and the U.S.S. Cole attack, for example. And they had told us that more was coming. In the case of Pearl Harbor, diplomatic relations had broken down and we knew that Japan would at least move to attack in the Southwest Pacific, and that would mean war against us.

In each case, there were important indicators in the system that never got promptly to analysts, the decision-makers or the potential defenders. With Pearl Harbor, the smoking gun was still encrypted in intercepted Japanese military transmissions, because of a higher priority to deciphering diplomatic codes and bureaucratic bottlenecks in the interagency intelligence system much like those today. Field officers had even seen the airplanes on radar and the Navy had sunk an enemy submarine off Pearl Harbor shortly before the attack.

Similarly with 9/11, there were significant indicators — such as the training of the terrorist pilots to fly but not to land or take off — that were not reported up the line to either defenders or the highest levels of command.

In both cases, the interagency bureaucracy walls were significantly at fault, and the highest-level decision-makers were not prepared for, or did not understand, the emerging threat, nor had they adequately communicated to the intelligence community their concerns or intelligence needs.

The first part of the problem is what experienced people in intelligence call "the last hundred yards." That is the place where the highest decision-makers interact with the intelligence people, ask for information, and state their priorities, needs and broad understanding of our place in the world as guidance to the intelligence experts; and where the intelligence experts express their concerns, reservations and questions about the situation.

We do know from the 9/11 commission's report that some experts on terrorism had firmly warned the top decision-makers and even the president himself that there was major danger of a terrorist attack, including in the United States. But, it appears, there was more high-level interest in having the intelligence community find data to support an invasion of Iraq than to being alert to an immediate terrorist attack on the United States.

We also know that the Department of State — which knew more about Iraq and the Near and Middle East than anyone else — got the Iraq-terrorist relationship and the nature of the threat from Iraq right, but was largely ignored.

This is illustrative of the fact that the formal information of the intelligence community and the things learned from other sources, including foreign-service officer expertise on the part of the world in question, are often kept separate. That is even the case when experts on a country or a part of the world understand the situation better than the intelligence community's collectors and analysts.

But the largest problem is the one the commission described briefly and eloquently: "However the specific problems are labeled, we believe they are symptoms of the government's broader inability to adapt how it manages problems to the new challenges of the 21st century." Just as Pearl Harbor is a useful analogy to9/ll, the historic and correct decisions of the Truman administration (from the start of a bipartisan Cold War foreign policy to economic aid to Europe to military support for South Korea) come to mind when you consider global strategy. As New York Times columnist David Brooks has pointed out, we began with Kennan's assessment of the Soviet Union and its threat to us, and the foreign and national-security policy we would need to conteract it. There was an unusual collection of gifted nonpartisan foreign-policy leaders, I would add, who deliberated with a knowledgeable president, Harry S. Truman, on what to do.

When the Cold War ended, there was no question that we needed a new understanding of our place in the world and the broad policies necessary to achieve it. President George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State James Baker and national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft made a very good start on it, particularly in the negotiation of the treaties uniting Germany and settling the border problems of Northeastern Europe.

But the real work is yet to be done on developing a foreign and national security policy for very different challenges than those of the Cold War era. So far, a clear policy for the new era has not emerged. What we have so far in the new century is a formal policy of unilateral preemption even in violation of international law. This policy is accompanied by a disdain for "nation-building," a huge disrespect for the international community, the withdrawal from and denying of support for international treaties, weakened support for Nunn-Lugar programs to reduce the threat of "loose nukes,"and the rejection of old allies ("old Europe") and needed new friends.

America's century-long leadership to create strong international institutions to keep the peace and promote international law and to assure the safety, health and welfare of all people has been severely eroded. Work on the control and elimination of nuclear weapons has lagged terribly, and has been accompanied by our effective withdrawal from treaties and by reduced attention to the difficult diplomatic work with "rogue nations."

And with that erosion have gone our longtime respect and admiration from around the world. They were so clear after we suffered the 9/11 attack. And they are so gone now.

Looking ahead, the 9/11 commission's recommendations on repairing our intelligence network are good and should be adopted promptly. The intelligence community's position in the foreign-policy decision-making processes has long needed attention. I do have some reservations on the "intelligence czar" approach. I believe that former Secretary of State Dean Acheson's unadopted solution at the beginning of the Cold War era — putting the CIA under the Department of State, with the State Department having primacy in intelligence — should be reconsidered.

We also need a dramatic reversal in the reduction in size and training of the Foreign Service and in the clout of the State Department in foreign-policy decision-making. The marginalization of the secretary of state and the Foreign Service in this administration and in several others (remember Cordell Hull, William Rogers, Cyrus Vance, Ed Muskie) has been very costly to our foreign and national security policy for many years, never more costly than in the past four years.

Restoring the role of the secretary of state to be the principal executive after the president in forming and executing foreign and defense policy must be the first step. Along with that, the global strategy and intelligence-community recommendations of the 9/11 commission are excellent and should form the basis for major revision of U.S. foreign policy and policy-making. The congressional reforms are well-thought-out as well, and Congress must go against the grain and reform itself. The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy would be a good model. Bicameral and bipartisan cooperation on highly secret issues worked before. It can again.

And we need to get to it now, the election notwithstanding. The commission has set a high mark for bipartisanship in foreign and national security policy. And the present moment would be a good time to restore the earlier practice of taking the conduct of foreign policy out of politics.

There's work to do abroad that only a bipartisan foreign policy can accomplish. It starts with understanding that the invasion and occupation of a nation-state in violation of international law and in the absence of persuasive and accurate evidence of weapons of mass destruction were mistakes. A genuine collegial search for policy guidance, as well as support and help from an arrogantly snubbed international community and marginalized allies, would be a good place to start.

Brewster C. Denny is trustee and former chairman of the Century Foundation (formerly the Twentieth Century Fund). He is professor emeritus and founding dean of the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs.