Spying Blind: The Cia, the Fbi, and the Origins of 9/11

Amy Zegart's first book, Flawed by Design, explained why the intelligence community was incapable of doing its job during the Cold War. Spying Blind shows how it was even less capable of dealing with the post-Cold-War world. No conspiracy theory is needed to explain why the FBI and the CIA, which between them had all of the pieces of the 9/11 puzzle in their hands by the summer of 2001, filed to put the puzzle together until the planes hit the World Trade Center: all you need to know is the bureaucratic incentives that put a priority on "need-to-know" over "need-to-share." But the important message isn't about the past but about the future. The agencies that failed to find the 9/11 plot are ready to fail again tomorrow. Only if the new President and the Congress are willing to take on a massive political-bureaucratic battle is there any prospect of reform.

There have been a number of 9/11 postmortems, many focused on the catastrophic intelligence failure it represented. Nothing written to date by journalists or retired intelligence personnel rises to the level of analytical precision exhibited by Professor Zegart. The fundamental problem was information sharing - as the world knows (or should know) from the 9/11 Commission Report and subsequent disclosures by the government, various agencies of the US intelligence community possessed useful information on key individuals associated with al-Qaeda's September 11 plot, and could have apprehended two or three of them well before 9/11, which would probably have caused the entire plot to unravel. The barriers to information sharing and collaboration across agency boundaries were well known long before 9/11, highlighted in the recommendations of a depressing number of high-level intelligence reform commissions during the 1990s which all said, essentially, the same thing. Yet the institutional culture of the intelligence agencies (CIA in particular) and the FBI proved impervious to reform. Even now, approaching seven years after the disaster of 9/11, a truly collaborative approach to counterterrorism is still in its infancy. Among the many gems to be found in her exhaustive deconstruction of the pre-9/11 intelligence problem, Prof. Zebart thoroughly explodes the notion that the recently-declassified Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) of August 6, 2001 was a "smoking gun" that should have alerted the President and Condoleezza Rice that a major al-Qaeda attack was imminent. In actuality it was anything but a smoking gun, with little to say of any value or relevance to policymakers. Even those of us on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the Current Incumbent must give him a pass with regard to this particular "warning." Spying Blind is an exceptional work of public policy analysis, and deserves the widest readership.

Hopefully Dr. Zegart will be at the National Book Festival in DC on Saturday, September 29, 2007, so we can start a career-long conversation on her work . . . but in case she isn't . . . Here's one complaint, from a mostly satisfied reader: It has proven very difficult for the political science community to understand the organization theory community. Graham Allison tried in 1971, by contrasting the rational actor hyper-rational "Model I" (this porridge is too cold, Papa Bear), with the counterrational complex organizational processes "Model II" (this porridge is too hot, Mama Bear), before retreating to the safety of "pulling-and-hauling" of the political scientists in the bureaucratic politics "Model III" (this porridge is just right, Baby Bear). Even with Philip Zelikow's help in the 1999 second edition, the complex organizational processes chapter didn't progress very far. Meanwhile, though, in business schools around the world, Model II has been off to the races: Herbert Simon, James March, and Karl Weick lead a revolution that has gone so far into the science fiction future that Dr. Zegart's colleague at UCLA, Bill McKelvey, has become the Yoda of complexity theory in complex organizations. (Amy, Bill; Bill, Amy -- geez, why didn't you guys talk before this?) Dr. Zegart recognizes that businesses are under pressure to be high-performing systems, or they die; she recognizes that political systems are not under the same pressures; but she does not then draw the obvious conclusion that organization theorists in business schools know more about organization theory than political scientists in schools of government will ever be able to capture. I remember spending a long afternoon at a UC-Riverside classroom in summer of 2004 transcribing Dr. Zegart's testimony to the 9/11 Commission -- it was elegant, simple, but 15 years behind U.S. business schools' understanding of organization theories. In Dr. Zegart's defense, though, she is pulling a very heavy load in trying to get her political science brothers and sisters to invest more energy in organization theory and organization research. She feels that she is -- as she titles Chapter 2 of her book -- in "No Man's Land." Note to Dr. Zegart -- you are alone in No Man's Land because you assume that all knowledge about the U.S. national security community resides in political science journals. Here's where the battle line might be drawn in the Project for National Security [Management] Reform: Do we call the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs the "national security adviser" (e.g. Kissinger, Brzezinski, Rice) or the "national security manager" (e.g. Bundy, Scowcroft, Powell)? If we see the APNSA position as a mere stepping-stone to the way-cooler Thomas-Jefferson-like Secretary of State position, then the political scientists get to continue to "own" the topic of intelligence. If we see the APNSA position as the alter ego of the President who is able to knoc

The central premise of this remarkable book is that the intelligence failures that are associated with 9/11 and the failure of intelligence reform are both symptomatic of profound internal organizational flaws in CIA and the FBI (and by extension the other National Intelligence principals NSA, NGA, and DIA). The sub-premise is that both agencies were unable to adapt to the realities of a Post-Cold War world. This is a controversial premise because the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) generally denies that 9/11 was an intelligence failure and claims to have implemented major reforms. Zegart makes a persuasive argument that her premise is correct. Social scientist that she is, Zegart constructs a model to guide her analysis of both institutions. This model is based on what she identifies as three organizational characteristics common to both CIA and the FBI: structural fragmentation; dysfunctional cultural norms; and perverse incentive systems. She applies this model to both the institutions failure to adapt to 21st Century challenges and their failure to provide warning of the dreadful attacks of 9/11. Indeed Zegart notes that based on this model the intelligence record of both agencies wasn't very good during the Cold War either. In the course of developing her case Zegart provides the reader with a number of really useful concepts such as "change is not adaptation" and "rational boundaries." Although somewhat outside of the parameters of her model, Zegart also makes clear that the Defense Department and its allies in the congress also has contributed a good deal to failure of intelligence reform. Like her earlier book "Flawed by Design" Zegart has provided another perceptive and discouraging analysis of the U.S. national Security system. So is this an accurate and fair book? Well Zegart is a very careful scholar who has done an excellent job documenting her findings. She also appears to have maintained her objectivity and adherence to scientific standards of proof in the course of her analysis. And, for what it is worth, to this reviewer she seems to have correctly diagnosed a good part of what ails the U.S. Intelligence System.

As someone with nearly 20 years experience in the Intelligence Community (IC) as an analyst, I found Amy Zegart's book to be an outstanding read. So many, many things in it rang very true for me about the problems of the IC. I think the bottom line is that while individuals make mistakes, those individuals stand on the "shoulders" of organizational culture and bureaucratic politics. There are a number of things that Zegart explores that strike a painful chord with me: 1. The fact with a few honorable exceptions, the IC agencies routinely sacrifice strategic analysis to the gods of current intelligence. I have concluded that any analyst who wishes to work long-range analytical projects is well-advised to find himself or herself an office where such current intelligence requirements are not levied. 2. Fundamental reform of the IC is not going to take place unless leaders within it are committed to it and are helped from without by the Congress and the President. 3. Simply by virtue of its ninety year history as a law enforcement agency and its success in being one, the FBI is not going to be able to transform itself into an intelligence agency focused on preemption of terrorist attacks (as opposed to investigating them after the fact). 4. The bureaucratic culture of the IC still does not encourage collaboration and sharing between individual agencies (and sometimes, even within agencies). I could go on, but I probably would wind up depressing myself. My only criticism of Zegart's book is that when lamenting the fact that the CIA was never able to penetrate the leadership of al-Qaeda, she doesn't seem to appreciate the consequences of the US having an agent who is a member of a terrorist organization. Terrorists don't tend to trust those who have not indisputably spilled blood of their enemies. Therefore, the US would have to give such an agent license to commit crimes that conceivably would result in the deaths of Americans. I do not think that the American public would understand, let alone tolerate the revelation that the Intelligence Community had such an agent. Finally, I wish Zegart had written about the Iraq WMD failures. A lot of that is down to organizational culture and bureaucratic politics. Bottom line: this is a very insightful book, and people who want to understand why intelligence failures happen would do well to read it and skip books that try to blame the President, the Congress, the media, or some other bogeyman. Books like those are polemics, written not to persuade but to make people with already set opinions feel righteous about their views. Zegart's book gets --as I said in the title-- to the heart of the matter.