Estimating the estimators

Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this article with the button below. If the email is truncated please check the website.

Share

DNI Jay Clayton asked about the 2020 election during a confirmation hearing on 15 July (C-SPAN/YouTube)

The US got a new Director of National Intelligence (DNI) this week as the Senate confirmed the appointment of Jay Clayton to succeed Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned in May. The process may have been hastened by Congressional objections to Acting DNI Bill Pulte, who was still in place on Friday amid questions about why Clayton had not yet been sworn in. That is now expected to happen on Monday.1

Pulte delivered a parting shot on X, announcing that he was ‘executing a 5th and Near Final Round of TERMINATIONS, an approximately 30% Staff Reduction from Weeks Ago.’2

That was perhaps intended to concentrate minds on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the New York Times was doubtful how far such cuts had actually taken place.3

There is no doubt, however, that ODNI has experienced significant retrenchment. Gabbard claimed to have fired 30 per cent of the workforce, some 500 people. A number of units she accused of partisanship were refocused within the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which was itself relocated to ODNI headquarters.4

Pulte began his acting appointment last month with lay-offs at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).5 That was quickly followed by the departure of William Ruger, the deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration.6 Ruger’s responsibilities included the NIC and, according to SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff, a number of the Council’s senior staff departed with him.7

The National Intelligence Officers who make up the NIC are the most senior subject and area experts in the US Government, charged with boiling down a bewildering array of agency views and sources into National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). That makes the NIC a natural lightning rod for tensions between intelligence and policy.

Only last month, the Trump administration sought to exploit the NIC’s authority to make its case that China had interfered in the 2020 presidential elections, although the Associated Press concluded that its trove of declassified documents showed the opposite.8

NIC leaks have just as frequently provided ammunition for the President’s critics. In March, the Washington Post revealed the existence of an NIC report which concluded that ‘even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the United States would be unlikely to oust the Islamic republic’s entrenched military and clerical establishment.’ The administration declined to say whether President Trump had been briefed on this assessment before launching Operation Epic Fury.9

It is not surprising that a process with the potential for such embarrassments should attract suspicion from policy-makers. Former NIC chairman Gregory Treverton mounted a staunch defence against such doubts in an article on Pulte’s DNI appointment last month.

As chair of the NIC, I had no idea of the politics of my people, save for the several closest to me. For them, telling truth to power is not a slogan. It is what they do. They are always worried about “politicizing” – producing an assessment to suit a policymaker’s preference or, worse, being pressured to do so.10

That ethos has a long history which can be traced back to the NIC’s precursor, the Office of National Estimates, where it was indelibly associated with the name of early CIA analyst Sherman Kent.

The story of how Kent brought social science rigour to the CIA in the aftermath of a series of intelligence surprises, from the Soviet atom bomb, to the Korean War, is told in one of this year’s most important intelligence history books, The Intelligence Intellectuals, by Peter Grace.

In Kent’s view, the job of intelligence analysis was to ‘to see that the doers are generally well-informed: its job is to stand behind them with the book opened at the right page, to call their attention to the stubborn fact they may be neglecting, and—at their request—to analyze alternative courses without indicating choice.’11

Although Kent’s approach was foundational for CIA analysis, there were always critics, and Grace has an interesting pen-portrait of a key intellectual rival, Wilmoore Kendall, who left the CIA to work in psychological warfare for the Army.12

From the late 1970s onwards, Kendall’s banner was taken up by those who wanted a more covert action-oriented intelligence community, notably around the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence. One version of this critique was provided by Paul Wolfowitz in 1995.

Perhaps this is revealing a certain arrogance on my part, but I frequently think I am as capable of coming up with an informed opinion about a matter as any number of people within the Intelligence Community who feel that they have been uniquely appointed with this responsibility. Too often that attitude is a dodge that allows them to conceal ignorance of facts, policy bias, or any number of things… ….No one is allowed to question those judgements, especially not policymakers, or, as the argument goes, they will pollute the intelligence process with policy judgments.13

Kent might well have agreed with some of these worries about the distance between analysts and policy-makers. It’s harder to believe he would have approved of Wolfowitz’s handling of the intelligence case for the Iraq War at the Pentagon in the early 2000s. Policy won out over analytical independence and the results were not happy.

Yet the tension Wolfowitz identified is a real one wherever scientific objectivity has to be reconciled with political legitimacy. That is not everywhere. Peter Grace concludes that in the Eastern Bloc, there was no direct equivalent to Sherman Kent and his colleagues. ‘The role of the analyst was not to antagonize the party by stating uncomfortable truths or by predicting outcomes that might go against Marxist–Leninist doctrine.’14

After Jay Clayton’s confirmation hearings, one could be forgiven for feeling that the United States has gone more than one step down an equivalent road. Certainly, when the Director of National Intelligence does not feel able to tell Congress who won the 2020 election, his employees can hardly feel encouraged to tell truth to power.