Conclusion

The story of the National Intelligence Council is also the story of strategic analysis, and so a number of themes recur. One is relevance. Especially before the NIC acquired the current intelligence support mission, NIC chairs sought to make national intelligence estimates and other products more readable and timely, and looked for other ways to reach out to policy officials. Credibility has been relevance’s twin, and NIC chairs have not been strangers to criticism—not least over the 2002 Iraq and 2007 Iran nuclear estimates. Over time, the NIC’s focus and method evolved to include more concentration on terrorism and China, and reaching out to expertise outside the government for work on climate, values, food, water, and more, and in preparing Global Trends. As this story concludes, the need for strategic intelligence to tell truth to power is at least as great as in Truman’s time.

From Afghanistan to Trump: 2014–2017

A friend who had been deputy national intelligence officer when Gregory Treverton was vice-chairman under Joseph Nye cautioned him that “this is not your father’s National Intelligence Council”. And indeed it wasn’t. Substantively, the biggest change was in mission—the enormous addition of current intelligence support to the government’s policy committees. That meant the NIC was in the thick of things, but it also meant than finding time for more strategic work was a constant frustration—all in the context of an administration trying to cope with crises from Ukraine to ISIS, from Afghanistan to Ebola. Procedurally, the biggest change was the creation, first of the director of national intelligence, and later of the national intelligence managers. The latter, especially, will remain a work in progress: it does let the NIC focus on what it does best, analysis, but at some cost in prestige and time spent in bureaucratic jockeying—the “black Suburban” issue: who goes to White House policy meetings.

America at War: 2003–2005

Robert Hutchings arrived as chairman just a month before the US invasion of Iraq, a move that he privately felt was a major mistake, for reasons that proved all too accurate. Once combat operations gave way to a heavy-handed US occupation regime, the analysis the NIC provided—that the anti-American insurgency was intensifying, and that this was because of the occupation itself—was badly received by policymakers. Such can be the consequences of telling truth to power. Moreover, when no WMD were found in Iraq, criticism mounted, some of it justified but some pure scapegoating. The perceived “intelligence failures” of 9/11 and Iraqi WMD crystallized in pressure toward major reforms to US intelligence. Nonetheless, during this period the NIC did seminal work in reassessing the nature of the terrorist threat and in producing the pathbreaking report, Mapping the Global Future, the newest iteration of the Global Trends series.

Introduction

“Truth to power”: it is a stirring phrase, but what does it mean? It certainly does not mean that US intelligence believes itself to possess the Truth with a capital T, but the phrase grows out of the initial mandate given by President Harry Truman: “to accomplish the evaluation and dissemination of strategic intelligence” and to do so independent of the principal policy agencies. This mandate created a built-in and deliberate tension between intelligence and policy—sometimes friendly and constructive, other times conflictual. The Office of National Estimates, set up in the immediate aftermath of World War II, produced some highly regarded national intelligence estimates but acquired a reputation for “Olympian detachment” that led in the 1970s to its replacement by a National Intelligence Council composed of around a dozen national intelligence officers led by a chairman or chairwoman.

A New Global Agenda: 1997–2001

The National Intelligence Council’s role in nontraditional threats grew considerably under John Gannon’s chairmanship to include major studies on issues such as technological innovation, narcotics, HIV/AIDS, and global migration. These and other reports informed the production of the highly acclaimed Global Trends 2015, which took its predecessor report several steps further, particularly in its engagement of nongovernmental experts and organizations. On a more contentious note, the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994 led to creation of a commission led by Donald Rumsfeld to look into what was seen by some as a too-sanguine assessment of the nuclear proliferation threat. The Rumsfeld Commission’s focus on North Korea, Iran, and Iraq was a harbinger of the George W. Bush administration’s focus on the “axis of evil” and its fateful invasion of Iraq in 2003, with Rumsfeld playing a lead role as secretary of defense.

Controlling Controversy: 1995–1997

As a leading international economist with prior high-level policy experience, Richard Cooper brought to the National Intelligence Council chairmanship an unusual level of authority on economic issues. This proved valuable in internal policy disputes over Japan’s financial situation, in which the NIC successfully challenged the Treasury Department’s assessment. His tenure also saw the challenges of dealing with the former Yugoslavia after the Dayton Accords brokered a tenuous peace, as well as the NIC’s first foray into nontraditional security issues such as climate change. Finally, the NIC published an influential report called Global Trends 2010, looking out 15 years to anticipate future challenges—and initiating a series of reports issued by the NIC every four years thereafter.

The Trauma of 9/11: 2001–2002

John Helgerson’s tenure began just six weeks before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The terrorist threat had been the subject of major analyses produced during John Gannon’s tenure; it became the overwhelming priority after 9/11. Helgerson describes the early responses as well as the longer-term analyses of the evolving terrorist threat and the new landscape of counterterrorist cooperation with traditional allies and former adversaries alike. The US intervention in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime gave way to a new focus on Iraq. The ostensible rationale for the invasion of Iraq was a controversial national intelligence estimate on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Although the NIE was published in the interval between Helgerson’s tenure and his successor’s, the chapter assesses the estimate and the decision to go to war in Iraq through the analysis of National Intelligence Officer Paul Pillar, who straddled both tenures.

Intelligence Integration and Reform: 2009–2014

Christopher Kojm inherited the continuing challenge of implementing intelligence reform. This time the tension lay between the two mandates given to the new director of national intelligence: to provide strategic intelligence analysis and to coordinate the activities of the far-flung intelligence community. The first mandate was clearly within the NIC’s purview; the second had been at best a collateral duty. To meet this second mandate, the DNI created national intelligence managers, whose charge seemed to erode the NIC’s mandate, causing several national intelligence officers to resign. More positively, unlike some of his predecessors, Kojm dealt with an Obama administration that welcomed dissenting opinions, as evidenced by the reception to the 2013 NIE on Afghanistan that informed a contentions policy debate over whether to draw down our military commitment or to “surge” to a higher level. Kojm’s tenure also saw production of Global Trends 2030.

New Missions, New Challenges: 2005–2008

Thomas Fingar’s chairmanship began with two overriding challenges: to implement the intelligence reforms of 2004–5 and to repair the damage to the National Intelligence Council’s credibility in the aftermath of the Iraqi WMD debacle. The reforms had created the position of director of national intelligence (DNI), with a large mandate but no staff, and much of the day-to-day analytic support that formerly would have been done by CIA now fell to the NIC—a major shift from its traditional role in strategic analysis. Ironically, in seeking to restore the NIC’s credibility, Fingar found himself in another controversy—this time over an NIE on Iranian WMD that seemed to downplay the threat. Fingar offers a detailed rebuttal of those charges and examines the larger question of the often-fraught relationship between the intelligence community and the Congress. Finally, the NIC produced both a path-breaking analysis of the security implications of climate change, and Global Trends 2025, which took the series to a higher level.

Estimative Intelligence after the Cold War: 1993–1994

In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the National Intelligence Council faced two kinds of challenges: coping with sectarian conflicts that emerged after the Cold War, and the helping to imagine and shape a post–Cold War order. This latter challenge was complicated by the collapse of the bipolar world order that had shaped US thinking for 40 years. As a leading Soviet official put it at the time, “We are going to do a terrible thing: we are going to deprive you of an enemy.” Accordingly, new chairman Joseph Nye put a high priority on refocusing the intelligence community for a new set of challenges. As a leading scholar of international relations, he worked to improve the art and discipline of estimative intelligence. With strong connections to senior policymakers, he also focused on strengthening the intelligence-policy relationship and improving relevance by producing shorter, more focused estimates.