Intelligence reform.

• Author: Roberts, Pat
• Position: Intelligence agencies

Not long ago, during one of the many terrorism alerts we have endured in Washington, it was made clear that even on matters related to the terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland, our intelligence agencies still refuse to share information. Two important intelligence agencies had different assessments concerning the seriousness of a particular terrorist threat. These differing assessments came about not because of different tradecraft or aggressive alternative analysis, but because one of the agencies did not have access to all the relevant information concerning that threat.

Unfortunately, this situation is not unique. The examples sound like this: Two intelligence agencies, both working on terrorism, will not share intelligence information with each other, even though both agencies are made up of patriotic Americans with the same top secret clearances. This failure to share is glossed over with arguments about security and "need to know", but it mostly comes down to petty bureaucratic politics.

Over the years, the intelligence community has evolved into a system of "have" and "have not" agencies. The agencies that collect the intelligence "have" the intelligence, and the agencies that perform mostly analysis "have not." The intelligence collection agencies enjoy significant clout in our government through their control over the flow of information.

Key terrorism analysts in our intelligence agencies must be given access to every single piece of relevant intelligence data concerning threats to the homeland. When analysts have uneven access to information, policymakers can't tell whether two analysts disagree because one of them has done a better job of sorting through the information, or if they disagree because one just doesn't have access to an important piece of information.

To make matters worse, analysts in the "have not" agencies often don't know what they don't know. What this means is that these analysts often don't even know the right questions to ask in seeking out information because they don't know that the information exists. The intelligence community is not a "level playing field" when it comes to information access.

Another illustration of this sad state of affairs is the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). If you visit the intelligence watch center, and look under one of the analysts' desks, you will find an amazing collection of ten or more computers, each with a different connection back to one of our intelligence...