Know nothings: U.S. intelligence failures stem from too much information, not enough understanding

U.S. intelligence failures stem from too much information, not enough understanding.

Mr. Hillen, an NR contributing editor, is the Olin Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Over the past month diplomats and military officers from the U.S. and NATO have been struggling to figure out how to respond to Yugoslavia's heavy-handed repression of Albanian separatists in the province of Kosovo. They were searching for some sort of military action that would cause Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to rein in his troops and yet not encourage the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army in its fight for Kosovo's independence.

As the discussions grew frustrating, one senior official noted the sticking point. Over the past several years, NATO had learned what made Milosevic tick, but it knew little, if anything, about the KLA, its plans, leadership, methods, or supporters. ''We need to do a lot more work,'' the official noted, to figure out who the KLA is and how it works. After all, if one is in the business of sending signals, one must be relatively sure who the party being signaled is and whether he understands the signals and rules of the game. He might, after all, be playing by different rules. But who's to know?

Similarly, who's to know what is happening on the Indian subcontinent? The double surprise of India's nuclear tests in May brought on the usual round of CIA-bashing in Washington and in the national press. Members of Congress from both the Left and the Right, commentators of all stripes, and even some Administration officials bemoaned America's inability to predict India's brash entrance into the club of declared nuclear powers.

It was in the end, however, not a failure of the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, or the seven other federal bureaus that make up the government's intelligence apparatus. They had done what they were told, financed, and trained to do. They merely got beat in a tricky contest. As Indian nuclear researcher G. Balachandran said, ''It's not a failure of the CIA. It's a matter of their intelligence being good, our deception being better.''

The failure is much broader than getting one-upped in the satellite reconnaissance game. Techno-spying -- done well or poorly -- had little to do with America's being blindsided by other significant events such as Boris Yeltsin's sudden sacking of his entire government a few months back or Saddam Hussein's various fits of pique (from the last round right back to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait -- where we saw everything but knew little). Moreover, the U.S. is unusually clueless on things it really must know, such as what stands to happen in post-Suharto Indonesia, the security of Russia's nuclear weapons (and scientists), China's intentions about virtually anything outside its borders, Japan's economic and trading strategies, or the state of the North Korean regime.

The inability to make sense of these events reflects the composite failure of the wider quasi-governmental system that complements spy satellites and spooks. Former CIA director R. James Woolsey noted that the India surprise was not only a failure of U.S. intelligence but also a ''failure of academics, of think tanks, of the press, . . . of the Congress, [and of] the executive branch as a whole.'' With so many of our fellow countrymen looking, writing, analyzing, and thinking about the wider world, how do we know so little? It is a quintessentially American set of problems that has caused this dilemma. Indeed, all our powerful sources of national strength --pride, technological innovation, and organizational genius -- have been twisted into weaknesses. Pride has become unenlightened hubris. (Aren't they all like us?) A national talent for innovation has turned our intelligence gatherers into chairbound technophiles. An ability to command resources and organize them in heroic efforts has created a crippling bureaucracy that rapaciously feeds on itself, produces volumes of information, and constantly misses the boat.

President Clinton, in Germany at the start of a week-long European trip, put on his best disappointed-father face when denouncing the Indian nuclear tests. ''This is a deeply disappointing thing for me, personally. . . . It is just wrong.'' With the Bismarckian Helmut Kohl chuckling next to him, the President bemoaned India's decision to ''manifest your greatness'' with nuclear testing ''when everybody else is trying to leave the nuclear age behind.'' The New York Times echoed his sentiments, saying that India confused ''military might with self-esteem'' and opined that ''New Delhi is seen as swimming against history's currents.'' It seems quite a surprise to the majority of American foreign-policy specialists that the rest of the world may not be winging into the twenty-first century on Windows 98, a trade deal, and an environmental pact. Even more of a surprise that some countries may not seek to guarantee their security through multilateral arms-control negotiations steered by ''the haves.'' You could almost hear the astonished clerks in the State Department. ''Didn't India get the memo that there is to be a second American century?'' Smarmy State Department spokesperson Jamie Rubin said that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright found it ''appalling'' that Indian diplomats didn't check with her first. Apparently, Pakistan warned Ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson, who patronizingly refused to believe that nations crossing the bridge into the twenty-first century might still act out of Thucydidean motives such as fear, honor, and interest.