From the Los Angeles Times

Political clashes underline limits to intelligence reform

Analysts are forced to defend their controversial Iran report, which was intended as a symbol of change.

By Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

May 15, 2008

WASHINGTON — As head of analysis for all U.S. spy agencies, Thomas Fingar was making final edits last summer on a long-awaited intelligence report on Iran.

The draft concluded that Tehran was still pursuing a nuclear bomb, a finding that echoed previous assessments and would have bolstered Bush administration hawks. Then, just weeks before the report was to be delivered to the White House, new intelligence surfaced indicating that Tehran's nuclear weapons work had stopped.

Fingar was acutely aware of the stakes. Five years earlier, grave errors helped start a war in Iraq that most Americans now regret. "This was a WMD issue in the country adjacent to Iraq," Fingar said of the Iran intelligence. "We wanted to get this right."

But Fingar would learn that getting it right did not mean he could avert the ongoing conflict between politics and intelligence in the nation's capital, and his Iran report only underscored the limitations of urgent efforts to reform the U.S. spy system.

In several interviews, Fingar offered new insight into the last-minute reversal of the Iran intelligence estimate, and the controversy that has continued to reverberate.

The report, reflecting the new intelligence, kicked the legs out from under the administration's hard-line Iran policy and stunned the diplomatic world, touching off a political maelstrom that has barely abated after five months.

For more than three years, Fingar had pushed through sweeping changes: ramping up training, adapting tools from the Internet and instituting more rigorous review for major reports. Yet the improvements in tradecraft failed to protect the Iran analysts from criticism or to preclude charges that they had political motives.

And were it not for the new intelligence that surfaced last summer, Fingar acknowledged, a key piece of the Iran report would have been wrong.

And he was forced to defend a report that was intended as a symbol of reform.

"We didn't have the dismissal of dissenting views. We didn't have a 'Curveball,' " Fingar said, referring to the discredited source behind much of the prewar intelligence on Iraq. "The image that this was somehow sloppy work in some respects has a splash effect that hits a lot more than just the analysts who worked on it. It's [as if] the whole damn community is still incompetent."

As deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, Fingar's job is to make sure that after Iraq, the teams of experts searching for answers in fragments of intelligence never again get it so wrong.

A serious manner

Fingar, 62, has blue eyes, a deep voice and a serious mien. He grew up on Long Island, where his family operated a market and gas station. He said he is the only surviving member of his youth baseball team -- the others were killed by cars, drugs or Vietnam.

Fingar served as a German linguist in the Army, and was a professor of political science at Stanford University before being lured away in the mid-1980s to serve as a China expert at the State Department.

"What I liked in him was his analytical style," said Richard Clarke, who was one of Fingar's first bosses before becoming a counter-terrorism advisor to Presidents Clinton and Bush. "He was more open, honest and user-friendly than the intentionally obtuse analysts we sometimes get."

Fingar rose to become head of analysis at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Known as INR, the bureau is tiny compared to the CIA, and has a reputation for analytic independence if not obstinacy.

INR was almost alone in voicing any skepticism of the prewar claims that Iraq had stockpiles of banned weapons. As a result, the bureau had new clout when the intelligence community came in for sweeping reform.

Fingar was picked to fix the system's shattered credibility. He went from overseeing a few hundred analysts at the State Department to head of nearly 20,000 analysts across more than a dozen spy agencies.

Some of Fingar's first moves were scripted in the legislation that created his job. The law called for basic standards, so analysts now wear cards around their necks reminding them to remain "independent of political considerations."

But others were improvised. Fingar hired a former cryptographer at the National Security Agency, Michael Wertheimer, to help brainstorm ideas; and a former academic, Richard Immerman, as an ombudsman and to enforce quality control.

Fingar's team assembled a directory of analysts, the first time that had ever been done. They launched classified versions of the Wikipedia and MySpace websites, so analysts from different agencies could collaborate online.

Nearly half the nation's analysts have joined the government since 2001. To speed their development, Fingar required new hires to take a six-week course called Analysis 101.

During a recent class in northern Virginia, students from a dozen agencies formed teams to work on a war scenario. It was their first day of class, but many seemed to have arrived having absorbed the lessons of Iraq.

Dissent was encouraged. Attempts to goad students into policy debates were rebuffed. As one young analyst went through the mock exercise of briefing a general who was considering an invasion, she offered a pointed warning.

"Once you go into a country and take it over," she said, "it would be best to have a plan."

Agency has limits

Senior intelligence officials praise Fingar's efforts, though some complain that there are some problems he lacks the authority to solve.

In 2006, the Defense Intelligence Agency went to Fingar for help in tracking the Iraqi insurgency but was turned away.

"They explained to me, 'We're about standards and oversight and tradecraft,' " said Robert Cardillo, head of analysis at DIA. "I was looking for command and control."

Fingar said the law didn't give him power to shift resources the way Cardillo wanted. And even if he could, Fingar said, "there was no bench full of analysts waiting to get in the game."

In speeches, Fingar compares the stigma of erroneous Iraq assessments to "having your yearbook picture taken on the worst bad hair day ever."

The controversy over the Iran report is likely to linger as well. Asked whether he anticipated the fallout from the Iran estimate, he said: "I don't think I thought about it very much. Maybe I should have."

The first line in the report said that analysts judged "with high confidence" that Tehran had halted nuclear weapons work in 2003. The finding was based in part on captured journals that recorded Iranian decisions to stop weapons work.

But a footnote at the bottom of the page explained that analysts meant only that Tehran had halted warhead design work, not its efforts to enrich uranium, which experts regard as the most difficult hurdle to making a bomb.

Weeks earlier, President Bush had warned that a nuclear-armed Iran could trigger "World War III" and speculation mounted about the possibility of a military strike.

Democratic lawmakers and liberal columnists cast the document as evidence that fed-up spies were finally striking back against their political masters, while Iran hawks accused Fingar of subverting the president's policy.

Even those who defended the report's findings faulted the way it was put together. Fingar's boss, Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell, testified in February that the report had caused such confusion that if he could rewrite it, he would "do some things differently."

Accusations of bias

Critics said Fingar's team understated the threat to undermine the president.

"They wanted to forestall any possible military action by the Bush administration against Iran's nuclear program," said John R. Bolton, the former United Nations ambassador.

Bolton and others said that Fingar had surrounded himself with State Department colleagues who were hostile to the Bush administration and its approach to Iran. There is some evidence to support that view. Immerman published a paper before joining the government in which he called the Bush foreign policy team "cognitively impaired."

Fingar said the Iran intelligence report emphasized the halt in warhead work because that was the newest finding. He attributes the attacks to anger among hard-liners that the report didn't conform to their preconceived views.

"The unhappiness with the finding -- namely that the evil Iranians might be susceptible to diplomacy -- adroitly turned into an ad hominem assault," Fingar said. "Why do we have an intelligence community if all you want are cheerleaders?"

The lasting impact of the report on Iran policy has been unclear. Weeks after its release, the U.N. approved new sanctions against Tehran, but they fell far short of what the Bush administration wanted.

Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney continue to argue that Iran is unbowed in its pursuit of the bomb. And military officials are stepping up charges that Iran is helping destabilize Iraq, accusations denied by Tehran.

But even while brushing aside the complaints from hard-liners, Fingar said the reactions of those on Capitol Hill and elsewhere who welcomed the report's findings still ring in his ears.

"We briefed a lot of committees and members," Fingar said. "In every session, one or more people reached across the table and said, 'Thank you for your courage. Thank you for your integrity.' I began to resent this. Treating integrity and professionalism as if it is an unusual and courageous act. I frankly was dismayed."