Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power in American National Security.

• Author: Logan, Justin
• Position: Book review

Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power in American National Security Richard K. Betts New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, 264 pp.

After the shocking intelligence failure of September 11 and the faulty estimate of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, many observers are asking why such egregious mistakes happened, and what can be done to prevent repeat performances. Washington has never been short on proposed intelligence reforms. Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed shuttering the CIA altogether while Gary Schmitt advocated giving Congress more raw intelligence. These and other proposals have varied a great deal in quality and feasibility.

Richard K. Betts, professor at Columbia University and one of the best-informed pathologists of the intelligence process, has offered a book that diagnoses the enemies of intelligence: "outside enemies," or outright adversaries who are attempting to defeat the nation's defenses; "innocent enemies," or feckless or incapable American bureaucrats; and, most frequently overlooked, "inherent enemies," which Betts describes as "an amorphous and impersonal group of dysfunctions" that "grow out of the human condition and the dynamics of the intelligence function itself" (p. 12). Betts is primarily concerned with these inherent enemies.

In Betts's view, our expectations for intelligence should be lower. He believes intelligence analysis is at bottom little more than research--enhanced by secret information, when possible--that can inform national policy. This view stands in stark contrast to both the popular conception of swashbuckling secret agents punching their way out of cocktail parties as well as the more sophisticated view that intelligence should be capable, ultimately, of predicting the future with relatively little error. Indeed, Betts concedes that his is "a tragic view of intelligence failure" (p. 13). The tragedy of his view is rooted largely in the belief that it is inherent enemies that pose the most insidious threat to intelligence.

Inherent enemies often manifest as tensions between competing objectives. One example is the tension between centralization and competitive analysis. As Betts observes, "Centralization improves efficiency by reducing redundancy and waywardness among organizations, but it is just those inefficient qualities that foster diverse views and challenges to any single orthodoxy. Pluralism fosters disorder, but centralization suppresses diversity and innovation" (p. 148).

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