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This chapter presents an overview of the CIA's analysis of al-Qa'ida and Usama bin Ladin prior to September 11. It documents the scale of the CIA's failure to provide warning of bin Ladin's intentions and capabilities prior to the attacks. It describes how the CIA's culture and identity shaped the Agency's view of al-Qa'ida during each stage of the intelligence cycle prior to 9/11, and contrasts these mainstream Agency views with those of a Cassandra, Michael Scheuer. It describes how Scheuer, as head of the CIA's bin Ladin Unit, Alec Station, tried to provide strategic warning within the Agency, but was discounted and then demoted for his efforts. It documents how the Agency's homogeneity of personnel, scientism, preference for secrets and drive for consensus led to a fundamental misunderstanding of the threat posed by al-Qa'ida, and thus created the proximate conditions for an intelligence failure to occur.

This chapter explores how the accommodation by Japanese leaders to U.S. power and to the public's widespread aversion to security affairs shaped and stunted the Japanese intelligence community during the Cold War and beyond. Japan's intelligence failures in the Asia-Pacific War contributed to the new strategic environment that, in turn, drove the subsequent transformation of each element of Japan's intelligence community. The subordination of Japanese foreign and security policy to U.S. priorities set strict limits on the shape, pace, and direction of intelligence reform. In the nearly half century from 1945 to 1991 during which Japan was a junior partner to its conqueror, Japan's degenerated intelligence community became an undersized, compromised, and organizationally handicapped operation. Analysts have called Japan's Cold War intelligence community “a stark transformation from the past” marked by sharp “discontinuity.”

This chapter measures the Japanese intelligence community against likely shifts in the security environment, technological change, and the costs of intelligence failure. It reviews dynamics and speculations about the future of the Japanese intelligence community. The chapter also concludes that “having power over much but insight into nothing” can have devastating consequences. The Japanese intelligence and security communities have each experienced a kind of imbalance. During its imperial expansion Japan had great power but limited insight, and during the American century it had greater insight but much more limited power. The failure to strike an effective balance between power and insight has come at great cost to Japan and to its neighbors, no less than it has to its ally the United States, during its own imperial moment.

This chapter presents an overview of the CIA's internal culture and collective identity, and of the social mechanisms that created and maintained them between 1947 and 2001. First, it documents four persistent features of the CIA's identity and culture that later chapters use to understand intelligence failure: homogeneity of personnel, scientism, a preference for secret rather than openly available information, and a drive for consensus over other analytic values. In later chapters, these features are revisited during each phase of the intelligence cycle to help understand how they create the conditions for intelligence failure. Next, the chapter details the four key mechanisms that gave rise to these features of the CIA and explain their persistence: the self-selection of personnel, the active selection of personnel, the socialization of analysts, and the mirror-imaging not only of the Agency's targets, but also the CIA's intelligence community partners and intelligence consumers.

This chapter presents an overview of the CIA's analysis of the USSR prior to 1991. It begins by documenting the scope of the intelligence failure concerning the USSR's demise, especially contrasting the CIA's quantitative estimates of the USSR's economy with what was subsequently discovered. It describes how the CIA's culture and identity shaped the Agency's view of the USSR during each stage of the intelligence cycle prior to the Soviet collapse, and contrasts Agency views of the USSR's economic and social situation with those of Cassandras. These people, working with open-source information outside the Agency, formed what was later revealed as more accurate views of the USSR over the same period. It does not fault the CIA for a failure to predict the USSR's collapse, but it does document how the Agency's culture and identity led to a misunderstanding of its weaknesses, creating the conditions for an intelligence failure.

Desert Storm generated significant support for defense reform. This momentum was due in part to the timing of the war and the celebrity status General Schwarzkopf enjoyed following the US victory. With the end of the Cold War on the horizon and domestic pressure building to embrace the “peace dividend,” the conditions were set for policy makers and national security organizations to be more receptive to change. Schwarzkopf’s popularity ensured that any critiques he made were taken seriously and their legitimacy little questioned. Despite Schwarzkopf’s complaints being misplaced and later partially recanted, his words were embraced by policy makers and were influential in building the momentum for change. In this regard, Schwarzkopf can be both criticized for his uninformed criticism of the Intelligence Community and credited for the change his comments helped generate.

This chapter uses legislative changes in the structure of federal intelligence information management in the wake of 9/11 to explore problems that arise from the failure to distinguish the centralization/decentralization and coordination/independence dimensions of regulatory authority. According to the 9/11 Commission, created to investigate the intelligence community's inability to thwart the terrorist attacks, the failure of agencies such as the FBI and the CIA to share information with each other, attributable largely to a lack of coordinated information management, was a major contributing factor. The chapter contends that Congress and the 9/11 Commission's report-on which the former relied in 2004 in enacting the most comprehensive structural reform of the intelligence community in fifty years-erred by seeking to address coordination failures by centralizing aspects of the intelligence community through the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In addition, neither Congress nor the Commission distinguished clearly among three different information management functions-generation, dissemination, and analysis-in assessing past intelligence failures or selecting reorganizational responses to them. The chapter then uses the intelligence information management context to explore the policy tradeoffs of situating authority along both the centralization/decentralization and coordination/independence dimensions for each information management function.

By taking the first steps to weaken the powerful military services and establishing a unified DoD, the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 increased the DoD’s influence in US foreign policy while also creating policy and structure that enabled and required future DoD/CIA collaboration. The failures in the field that motivated defense reform were the same failures that initiated discussions on intelligence support to military operations. Reviews of Operation Urgent Fury and the Beirut barracks bombing criticized the lack of intelligence support to commanders. In this regard, the defense reform enacted by Congress through Goldwater-Nichols was the initial phase of broader national security reforms. Although intelligence reform was initially not embraced to the same degree as defense reform, policy makers, motivated by perceived “intelligence failures,” looked to restructure intelligence for a post–Cold War environment.

This chapter presents an overview of the CIA's analysis of events in Iran that led to the Islamic revolution in 1978–79. It first documents the scale and scope of the intelligence failure concerning Iran, and then describes how the CIA's internal culture and collective identity distorted its views of Iran prior to and during these events. It contrasts Agency views of the situation in Iran with those of Cassandras, people outside the Agency who anticipated the possibility of a revolution. It documents how the Agency's homogeneity of personnel, scientism, its preference for secrets and its drive for consensus led to a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation there, and thereby created the proximate conditions for an intelligence failure.

This introductory chapter describes the problems associated with scientific intelligence, and introduces the key questions of the book, namely: Considering how successfully the United States conducted the atomic intelligence effort against the Germans in the Second World War, why was the United States Government unable to create an effective atomic intelligence apparatus to monitor Soviet scientific and nuclear capabilities? Put another way, why did the effort against the Soviet Union fail so badly, so completely, in all potential metrics – collection, analysis, and dissemination? How did we get this so wrong?

This chapter explores the politics of assessing uncertainty in international affairs, particularly the notion that clear probability assessments expose foreign policy analysts to excessive criticism. Although this idea is widespread among scholars and practitioners of international relations, there is just as much reason to believe that the opposite is true. If foreign policy discourse is truly as polarized as the conventional wisdom suggests, then leaving key judgments vague could actually increase blame exposure by giving critics the opportunity to make ambiguous statements seem more mistaken than they really are. The chapter supports this claim by combing experimental evidence in a historical review of perceived intelligence failures such as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Yom Kippur War, and assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs.

The government appointed a four-member committee on 24 July 1999 'to review the events leading upto the Pakistani aggression in the Kargil district. … and to recommend such measures as are considered necessary to safeguard national security'. The article contends that the terms of reference were quite vague. Contradictory statements by leaders including the defence minister further raised doubts about the inquiry and its scope. Democratic accountability demands a thorough probe, covering not just initial intelligence failure but also the responses of leaders of the government and the army.

Beginning with a theoretical overview of surprise attacks, we discuss their important role in military strategy and success. We describe our case selection strategy, using criteria based on attacks that started a war, and subsequent events taken in response to those attacks. We discuss Roberta Wohlstetter’s pioneering and influential study of Pearl Harbor and describe the uniqueness of this case and why her argument about signal-to-noise ratio may be less relevant for other cases of intelligence failure. More often, high quality decision-making is impaired by specific obstacles in the psychological characteristics of leaders and the environments and organizations they structure.