Spies Need a Shake-Up

Why were America’s intelligence agencies, with their vast array of satellites, communications intercepts and trained agents and analysts, unable to detect India’s preparations to test nuclear weapons last month? A critique of the failure finds the explanation to be systemic rather than unique to this one event and potentially affecting much of what the intelligence agencies exist to do. India’s surprise tests were a political embarrassment to America’s policymakers but not a national security debacle. Next time things could be a lot worse.

A panel of experts headed by retired Adm. David E. Jeremiah cited a number of all-too-familiar shortcomings in intelligence operations. Among them: The United States relies too much on collecting technical data and too little on having spies in the right places on the ground. Its intelligence officials and analysts are often unprepared or unwilling to challenge their own mind-sets and think more creatively. And the huge volume of information collected by the technical services often overwhelms the resources that are available to analyze and interpret it.

Among the most significant--and least excusable--intelligence blunders was the refusal of veteran CIA political analysts to take seriously the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s campaign promises to conduct nuclear tests. Instead, said Jeremiah, the analysts assumed that Indian politicians, like their American counterparts, usually ignore their promises once they are elected. Such cultural myopia is hardly the starting point for perceptive analysis.

The gaffes and shortcomings to which the Jeremiah panel calls attention are fixable. The worrisome thing is that they are pretty much the same shortcomings other studies have for some time warned about. Clearly, a rigorous and urgent reordering of priorities is in order.

“Our human intelligence capacity is seriously limited . . . by the tremendously expanded coverage that we’re trying to deal with,” said Jeremiah. Even though some countries and movements are very hard to penetrate, human intelligence gathering activities must be reemphasized. At the same time more and better trained analysts are needed to interpret the mountains of spy satellite data being gathered. According to Jeremiah, only one analyst in the National Imagery and Mapping Agency had been assigned full-time to monitoring activities in India. In the light of all this, the big nuclear surprise last month was no surprise at all.

The panel’s report has, naturally, been classified by the CIA. Only some of its high points have been disclosed by Jeremiah. The chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee think the report should be made public. So do we. The American people have a right and certainly a compelling interest to know what’s wrong with the intelligence agencies that cost them $27 billion a year. Exposing some of the shortcomings of those agencies to full public scrutiny may be the best guarantee that improvements will at long last be made.