“We were almost all wrong.” This was the conclusion reached by David Kay
about the assertion that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
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Kay was the
United States’ top weapons inspector in the period leading up to the Iraq War and his
admission pointed to the presence of a serious intelligence failure on the part of the U.S.
intelligence community. Intelligence analysis by governments is conducted in secret.
This is true regardless of whether the sources used are open or restricted and whether the
analysis is competitive or consensual. Our thinking about intelligence takes this context
of secrecy as its foundational reference point. Yet, intelligence does not always remain
secret. On occasion it becomes public. A review of instances where intelligence has
become public shows that it does so in a variety of ways. This stands in sharp contrast to
the almost universal tendency to combine all such instances under the single heading of
“leaks.” Doing so obscures the underlying dynamics of public intelligence, the forces
that give rise to it, and the potential consequences that public intelligence has for secret
intelligence. The need for systematic attention to public intelligence is seen both in past
examples of its occurrence and most recently by the manner in which intelligence was
used during the build up to the Iraq war.
“Secret” Intelligence
Secret intelligence takes many forms ranging from formal documents to informal
briefings. It maybe presented to policy makers at regular prescribed intervals (such as
annual national intelligence estimates or daily briefs) or given on an ad hoc or crisis
driven basis. Its content varies from what is essentially the reporting of news (current
intelligence) to speculative assessment of future trends and developments (national
intelligence estimates). Whatever its form or content, intelligence is effective to the
extent that it is informs or enlightens the policy making process.
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Judging the effectiveness of intelligence is not a straightforward task. When
intelligence is unrelated to policy it is of little value other than to those who produced it
and can be safely judged to be ineffective. The opposite case, however, does not hold.
Informing the policy process does not mean determining policy. What policy to adopt
ultimately is, and must be, the province of policy makers for it is they who in the final
analysis are accountable for those decisions. They are free to ignore the intelligence
given them or make decisions based on other criteria. Sherman Kent noted long ago,
“there is no universal law that obligates the use of intelligence.”
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More recently Pat Holt
commented “policy makers sometimes use intelligence the way a drunk uses a lamppost
–for support instead of illumination.”
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Rather than look for a one-to-one relationship between intelligence and policy in
making judgments about its effectiveness students and practitioners of intelligence look
for evidence from three different perspectives. Each offers insight into the potential
causes of an “intelligence failure.” The first is process oriented. Here, the concern is
with the collection of information and the delivery of intelligence. Collection failures
include not only the failure to collect needed information but reliance on questionable
sources or too few sources. With regard to the delivery of intelligence criteria include its
timeliness, the degree to which it addressed policy maker concerns, and the degree to
Convention