Secrecy Is CIA's Secret Weakness

by William M. Arkin

By now, almost everyone knows that the CIA is a mess. Almost everyone knows that what it needs is a top-to-bottom overhaul. Almost everyone is wrong.

What the CIA and the competing baronies that make up the rest of the intelligence community actually need is quite simple: They need to turn on the lights. And take a few names. Strange as it may sound, what's killing our secret intelligence services is secrecy. That and a lack of personal accountability. Even the most dedicated people can't do good work when they're sitting in the dark. And though we don't always like it, most of us work better if we get some outside input -- and if we know we'll be held accountable for our results.

Without question, the intelligence community needs fixing. It has produced fumbles so catastrophic that they might have been laughable if they hadn't cost so many lives. Just on the issue of Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction -- a major justification for the ill-starred U.S. invasion of Iraq -- the Senate Intelligence Committee last week issued a 511-page chronicle of such wrongheaded, slipshod, unprofessional work that the CIA has forfeited any claim to authority or competence. And the agency's defense of itself just compounded the embarrassment: It didn't get everything wrong, acting Director John McLaughlin said. And where it was wrong, he added, so was almost everybody else.

Unfortunately, the debate over reforming the CIA seems to be going off track. This being a presidential election year, Democrats and Republicans are of course blaming each other. The Bush administration pressured the intelligence community into providing a National Intelligence Estimate that validated its personal and ideological preconceptions, say the liberals. On the contrary, say the conservatives, the intelligence community is simply hogtied by outmoded rules and restrictions imposed by previous Democratic administrations. In the meantime, the policy professionals have plunged into a welter of complex proposals for restructuring the whole intelligence apparatus. Nothing makes Washington's policy wonks more comfortable than rearranging an organization chart.

No doubt some of the proposed reforms might make the intelligence community work better, but they miss the fundamental point: No amount of structural reform will have much effect unless the CIA changes an internal culture so obsessed with secrecy that it smothers its own best efforts. Nor will reform take permanent root without the principle of personal accountability. It may seem counterintuitive that a secret intelligence agency can suffer from too much secrecy. But that is exactly the case with the CIA. Boiled down to essentials, what the Senate Intelligence Committee -- and the nonpartisan 9/11 commission before it -- found was the CIA has become so addicted to a culture of secrecy that it is largely unable to operate in the real world. The agency's obsession with secrecy has also made it so insular that it is often unable or unwilling to reach out for help from outside experts.

In the run-up to Iraq, the Senate and House intelligence committees found, the leaders of the intelligence community failed to "adequately supervise the work of their analysts and collectors." Secrecy was so out of control that even CIA analysts with full security clearances were routinely denied access to crucial information by others in the agency. As for its cooperation with other agencies, the CIA -- even after the 9/11 communications failures -- refused to share everything it knew with outsiders, even those within the U.S. intelligence community. All governments must protect their internal security from outside penetration. But refusing to trust members of your own family is paranoia -- not tight security. And it's axiomatic that what makes good intelligence analysis is unfettered consideration of every aspect of every issue from as many points of view as possible. The more eyes and voices, the better.

As for personal accountability, it's the elephant at the party no one wants to talk about. Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, who presided over the recent disasters, has departed for "personal" reasons, accompanied by kind words from the president. As he left, Tenet urged CIA colleagues to ignore outside criticism.

He needn't have worried. Washington seems disinclined to blame anybody in particular. Instead, what seems to be developing is a bipartisan consensus that the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community need reorganization, plus an even more powerful director of central intelligence as well as new covert-action and domestic-intelligence agencies.

But what we need now is not a time-consuming and distracting renovation, but rather some simple measures aimed at forcing a change in CIA culture. The CIA's budget needs to be open to scrutiny, as do its organizational charts. We need to make public more of the analysis performed by staff members so that if the agency is failing to consider crucial information -- as it apparently did when the United Nations failed to find banned weapons in Iraq -- someone on the outside could ask why.

Real secrets, ones with a reason to be kept, can be concealed even in the midst of open debate. In fact, greater openness and the elimination of habitual and abusive secrecy will only strengthen the sanctity of real secrets.