The Wall Street Journal January 18, 1995, p. A14. Get Smart -- Eliminate the CIA By Angelo Codevilla Over the past several years, U.S. intelligence agencies in general and the CIA in particular have proved themselves incompetent in peacetime and of little use in conflict. Stripped of their mystique and lacking the capacity to reform themselves, these organizations are virtually in receivership. The maladies ailing the intelligence community are numerous. Independent quality control was never more than a pretense, and competition among intelligence agencies was nonexistent. Producers of intelligence -- rather than the soldiers and diplomats who have to use it -- have also become its judges. All this has spawned a complex of habits, procedures, mentalities and people too entrenched to be repaired and too noxious for any part to form the nucleus of a new, healthy system. Hence, we should take Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's advice, and rethink our intelligence from the ground up. A good place to start is with the fact that about half of the $28 billion U.S. intelligence budget pays for units directly controlled by military commanders, which routinely provide precise information for the armed forces' operations close to the front lines. The Treasury and State Departments also have their own intelligence units, which fit their needs quite well. So why do we need a national system headed by the CIA? The original justification for the creation of the CIA in 1947 was that intelligence would be best if its gathering and evaluation were divorced as much as possible from the operating departments of government -- State, Defense, etc. -- and placed under the president. This judgment has turned out to be wrong. Because presidents have relied on the CIA to run the system, the result has been a system dominated by the priorities of the producers -- not the users -- of intelligence. A basic failing is that the CIA has primary responsibility for intelligence and none at all for real world events. The CIA prefers to place its career employees in U.S. embassies, where they pretend to be employees of other parts of the government. Such "case officers" must acknowledge that they are gathering information for the U.S. Another disadvantage is that they don't speak foreign languages well. And unlike successful reporters, they virtually never know the substantive fields about which they are seeking information. Thus it is unsurprising that they are usually outdone in economic reporting by economic reporters, in military reporting by military reporters, and so forth. The Aldrich Ames case shows how much more highly the CIA values the smooth functioning of its system than what the system produces. Mr. Ames handed the KGB the capacity to shape the intelligence flowing to top U.S. officials during the endgame of the Cold War. Thus disinformation made presidents and secretaries of state more vulnerable to Gorbomania than the average citizen informed by newspaper accounts. How could the CIA fail to notice the fishiness of reports generated by a network controlled by the other side? The same way that, in the 1970s and 1980s, the agency had failed to notice that it was passing along reports from a network of agents in Cuba totally controlled by Castro's DGI, and from a network in East Germany all but a few of whose agents were working for the Stasi. In other words, while the Ames case was unusually destructive, it was a typical example of bureaucratic sclerosis. In the Gulf War, intelligence worsened the farther one got away from the front lines. The national system headed by the CIA misperceived the nature of Saddam Hussein's regime, failed to grasp the obvious signs of attack, and has yet to learn Saddam's military and political reasoning. Our imaging satellites failed to find mobile Scud launchers, and our communications intelligence antennas failed to shed light on the diplomatic intercourse between Saddam and the Soviets. National analysts misjudged Iraq's nuclear program, and were fooled by elementary camouflage. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's public belittling of CIA-run intelligence was matched by unprintable epithets from field commanders. What happened in the Gulf would have happened in any conflict because the intelligence community's cameras and antennas were conceived, and its people trained, on the CIA's assumption that cooperative competition with the Soviet Union would last forever and that the basic designs of weapons would not change. Thus cameras, for example, were optimized to take pictures of fixed installations rather than to keep track of attacking military forces or mobile missile launchers. Long before the Soviet collapse, however, it had become clear that the CIA made bad bets. The age of mobile missiles arrived long ago, and modern weapons are defined by the software they contain rather than by observable features. So what's the point of, for example, analyzing a radar signal that a computer can change in an instant? Divorce from operational responsibility also tends to make the reports that flow to top officials less valuable than the information used to compile them. (In any given subject, the CIA delivers a consensus of the system's several agencies. It takes far more time for a paper to go through the interagency process than for someone to write the paper. Considering the elementary errors and ignorance that often come out, it is clear that the conferees do not spend much time fact-checking. Intelligence analysts become spin doctors, concerned not with facts but with pushing policy makers in the direction of their parent agencies' prejudices. Hence the ultimate irony: A system whose ostensible reason for being was to eliminate from intelligence the parochial interests of tank drivers, diplomats, bomber pilots, etc. ended up aggregating the prejudices of the analysts -- prejudices unrelieved by the sobering prospect of having to carry out the policies they are pushing for. The CIA has maintained a monopoly on judging the quality of the system's operations and products. It does not heed presidents, much less their appointees. A decade ago, the agency ignored President Reagan's executive order to reorganize counterintelligence. Two decades ago, President Ford, shocked by how far intelligence estimates were diverging from reality, asked a group of distinguished outsiders (the B team) to see whether the intelligence community's data on Soviet nuclear forces could support conclusions different from those of the insider analysts. The B Team, despite resistance from the agency, came up with results far superior to the insider A Team's. A better intelligence system should be built on a model radically different from the 1947 original. Each of the major departments of the U.S. government (State, Defense, etc.) should be responsible for gathering and evaluating the information it needs to operate in the new world disorder. Intelligence, in short, should be franchised out to its consumers. There is reason to believe that the departments would do better without the ClA's tutelage than with it. In the past, the armed forces have asked to deploy officers who speak foreign languages, who could blend in with the local population, and who would be experts in the military fields on which they were reporting. U.S. military leaders have also clamored for satellites whose products they could use. Each time, the CIA made sure such requests were denied. If those requests had been granted, the country would be better informed. In all this there is a need for some central coordination. The several agencies have to mesh their quest for agents abroad, lest they stumble over each other. The information that any part of the government collects must be available to properly cleared people in all other parts, so that any and all analysis can be based on all the facts. Fortunately, maintaining a central registry nowadays requires computers, rather than the bureaucratic monster that arose a half century ago. Finally the president of the United States' own intelligence needs should be provided by his own staff. Among its duties should be to make sure that all the agencies get each others' estimates. The availability to the president and other top decision makers of contrasting estimates from through out the government would stimulate better performance all around. So, while there is a role for a central intelligence agency in a system based on consumer sovereignty, there is none for the CIA. Mr. Codevilla, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of "Informing Statecraft" (Free Press, 1992). End