The CIA's Weakest Link.

• Author: JOHNSON, LOCH

Forget James Bond. What intelligence agencies need are a few good professors.

EARLY ONE MORNING IN OCTOBER 1994, Secretary of Defense William J. Perry rose from behind his oversized desk to greet General John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Under his arm, the general carried a portfolio of satellite photographs of Iraq. He spread the imagery across a conference table in the drab, bunker-like room.

Using a pointer, Shalikashvili directed Perry's attention to a disturbing set of photographs, Improbable as it might have seemed coming just three and a half years after a United States-led coalition blasted Saddam Hussein to his knees, elements of the Republican Guard (Saddam's elite troops), supported by mechanized infantry, armor, and tank units, were moving at a rapid clip southward toward Al Basrah, a mere 30 miles from the Kuwaiti border. The force aimed like an arrow at the Al Jahra heights overlooking Kuwait City, in an apparent repeat of the same maneuver that led to the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait in 1990. At its current speed, the Republican Guard would pour across the Kuwaiti border in a couple of days.

Perry quickly ordered a U.S. armored brigade stationed in Kuwait to the Iraqi border. With a rising sense of uneasiness, the secretary of defense and the top Pentagon brass waited as young captains and lieutenants brought new batches of imagery into Perry's office over the next 24 hours. Upwards of 10,000 Iraqi troops had amassed in an area near Al Basrah. Steadily the number rose to 50,000, some bivouacking within 12 miles of the border. The American brigade had arrived, but consisted of only 2,000 lightly armed Marines.

While the United States also had 200 warplanes in the area on standby alert, the Iraqi armored force dwarfed the U.S. presence. President Bill Clinton ordered 450 more warplanes to Kuwait, along with the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division and a Marine contingent from Camp Pendleton. The aircraft carrier George Washington steamed toward the Red Sea. None of these forces, though, would arrive in time to halt an invasion of Kuwait. The secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff faced the strong possibility of a rout that would quickly wipe away the small American brigade assembled at the border.

When the next set of photos arrived, Perry and Shalikashvili could finally sigh with relief. The Iraqi troops had suddenly stopped and some elements were already turning back toward Baghdad.

The good news was that photographic intelligence may have prevented the outbreak of another war in the Persian Gulf. "Had the intelligence arrived three or four days later, it would have been too late," recalls a high-ranking official who followed the events in the Pentagon during those tense autumn days. But the episode carried bad news with it, too. Even though vital intelligence had arrived in time to allow Perry a chance to put up some semblance of defense at the border, the thousands of troops in the Republican Guard would have overwhelmed the single Marine brigade. The best the secretary could hope for was that the Marines would intimidate Saddam. Fortunately, the bluff worked.

Retrospective studies of the satellite photography taken of Iraq before the crisis disclosed palpable clues that, for weeks, Saddam had been gathering another invasion force near Baghdad. The photos showed trickles of Iraqi troops and armor moving toward Al Basrah that would eventually turn into a threatening flood.

Intelligence analysts in the National Photographic Intelligence Center had missed these signs, as had everyone at the CIA. The problem hadn't been lack of information; high-ranking government officials have access to enough paperwork and imagery each day to cover every desk in the Pentagon. But photos are just photos and, apparently, nobody had looked through them carefully enough to notice the accretion of troop buildups that signaled the possibility of an invasion.

That close call in the Middle East should have been a rude awakening to the nation's intelligence agencies that their analytical capacities were not up to snuff. Yet today, the nation's spy agencies are still relying on a technological edge to keep the country abreast of looming international crises, and are giving short shrift to the people who synthesize and interpret the mounds of intelligence pouring in from around the globe. The resulting analytical failures have shown up repeatedly since 1994 in a string of embarrassing--and often deadly--disasters.

* In 1999, CIA and other intelligence analysts provided bombing coordinates for NATO that designated the Chinese embassy in Belgrade as a local arms depot. Satellite-guided bombs from a B-2 NATO bomber killed three members of the embassy staff, injured 20 more, and sparked a wave of anti-American nationalism in China that continues to be felt, most recently in the...