Friday, December 14, 2007
In releasing a bombshell about Iran's nuclear program, intelligence director Mike McConnell reversed a vow of secrecy. But he probably had no choice.
"You will be disappointed," Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told a gathering of journalists in Washington on November 13. U.S. spy agencies were putting the finishing touches on a National Intelligence Estimate about Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities, which included new leads that the agencies had been vetting since spring. But departing from recent practice, McConnell said, "I do not intend to release unclassified key judgments" of the NIE, those heavily edited yet potentially telling morsels of analysis that might ultimately show how close the United States is to a war with Iran.
"We have probably done a thousand of these" NIEs, he said. "We have done unclassified key judgments for maybe three. So we created an expectation that we do this, because we did it previously." And that was a bad idea, McConnell said, with some passion.
For starters, even the "sanitized" version of an NIE could compromise vital sources and methods, he said, because the target of the estimate is, of course, going to read the document. Second, "I don't want to have a situation where the young analysts" -- whom McConnell guards with particular devotion because he was once one of them -- "are writing something because they know it's going to be a public debate or political debate. They should be writing it to call it as it is."
McConnell, whom a longtime colleague describes as having "not a political or manipulative bone in his body," also stated he would "make every effort" to prosecute anyone who leaked the NIE. Then, he vowed (twice) to resign if the intelligence was "cherry-picked in an inappropriate way" by government officials.
Things changed dramatically in the three weeks after McConnell's public denunciation of leaks and declassification. On December 3, McConnell and his aides reversed that decision and released the unclassified key judgments of the NIE on Iran. Try as McConnell might to keep the lid on the new estimate, his lieutenants were influenced by the political realities of intelligence these days.
"They thought it would leak and be distorted, and they thought they'd get ahead of that," said one former senior intelligence official close to the deliberations. "They decided it was better to put out a clean set of key judgments." Vice President Cheney went so far as to say that officials expected to lose control of some classified material. "There was a general belief -- that we all shared -- that it was important to put it out, that it was not likely to stay classified for long, anyway," Cheney told The Politico on December 5. "Everything leaks."
The leak-prevention strategy was a stark departure from the guidelines that McConnell had set out, both in November and a month earlier, when he issued this official policy: "The possibility that the [key judgments] or other positions of an estimate will be leaked is not a sufficient reason for preparing unclassified [key judgments]." In a briefing with reporters after the NIE was released, a senior intelligence official acknowledged that declassification "obviously represents a departure from [McConnell's] guidance."
The banner headline of the key judgments -- "that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" -- put the intelligence community precisely where McConnell didn't want it to be: in the middle of a ferocious political and policy debate in which sources and methods of the intelligence on Iran, as well as the analysis, are being openly discussed, exposed, debated, and, yes, cherry-picked to suit a range of agendas. Indeed, even though the NIE does not say that Iran poses no nuclear threat, the key judgments on areas besides the weapons program have had to compete with the dramatic top-line assessment.
Because the new estimate upends its predecessor, made in 2005, and has undercut any nuclear-related pretext for a U.S. bombing of Iran, the political and ideological dispositions of the analysts who wrote the NIE are, predictably, under scrutiny. Within days of the key judgments' release, former Bush administration officials and neoconservative icons mounted a full-scale attack on McConnell's lieutenants, some of whom had long careers in the State Department and have, the critics contend, historically underestimated Iran.
These critics characterized the NIE as the lieutenants' way of cutting off Cheney and the president on their presumed path to war with Iran -- a contention that wasn't refuted by senior intelligence officials' repeated assertions that Iran's decision to stop its program in 2003 and to keep it shuttered resulted directly from international pressures and sanctions. Indeed, intelligence officials have been careful not to assert that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the key motivator for Iran's change of plans. Whether McConnell's aides meant to pre-empt the White House or not, the conclusion is undeniable: The intelligence community is at odds with President Bush's forceful rhetoric on Iran.
Since the NIE was released, McConnell has been notably absent from the public fracas. His deputy, Donald Kerr, a veteran nuclear weapons expert, has given the intelligence community's only two on-the-record statements about the estimate. McConnell was out of the country when the key judgments were released.
Around Washington, rumors persist that McConnell threatened to resign over the issue. It's not clear, however, whether he staked his tenure on the NIE being released or withheld, or whether he saw any cherry-picking by the White House, but the gossip is one more measure of just how political the release of this document has become. Observers point out that in the month preceding the NIE, Bush warned that Iran's nuclear ambitions could lead to "World War III," and Cheney, four days later, gave a bellicose speech reminiscent of the run-up to war with Iraq over its weapons programs. The White House already knew by then, at a minimum, that the intelligence community was vetting potentially groundbreaking intelligence on Iran that could change the NIE.
Perhaps under pressure to back up their bold new claims on Iran, senior officials have gone further, giving on-background press interviews in which they catalog the streams of intelligence that led the analysts to change their nuclear conclusions -- purloined laptop computers loaded with weapons diagrams; notebooks and intercepted phone calls from high-ranking officials; and, as reported by the Los Angeles Times this week, a clandestine operation called "Brain Drain," in which the CIA helped mid- and top-level Iranian nuclear experts flee the country.
Unless officials are trying to affect the Iranian government's actions through a massive disinformation campaign, it would seem that the intelligence community has set aside McConnell's concerns about sources and methods. "I'm shocked by the level of public discussion," said a former senior intelligence official who worked on Iranian issues for many years, adding, "I don't see much good that comes from releasing NIEs."
Kerr has said that the release "was coordinated in discussion with senior policy makers," but that the intelligence community "took responsibility for what portions ... were to be declassified." Officials weighed "the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security" against protecting sources and methods, he said, and "felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available."
Still, only a dramatic turn of events would have led McConnell to abandon his policy of not making NIEs public, several former officials who know him said. One former high-ranking official involved in clandestine operations said that in more than 30 years in the intelligence business, he had never seen a key judgment change so dramatically so fast -- indicating that the new intelligence that officials picked up amounted to a veritable "smoking gun."
"Keep in mind, this thing had been built up, which is somewhat unusual for an NIE," said another former senior official, who has also worked on Capitol Hill. The document was months behind schedule, widely anticipated, and focused on one of the top foreign-policy issues of the moment. "I think this was an extraordinary circumstance," the former official said.
Expressing concern over the public airing of sources, a Senate staffer said that the NIE "has certainly been sucked into a political debate," and that McConnell is clearly concerned about the effect that the fallout might have on analysts. "For that, we will have to wait and see," the aide said. "I still think that he simply had no choice. There was no way this would stay secret, and he didn't want to be accused of trying to bury it. I think he held his nose and let it go."
Many intelligence professionals concur. And in the NIE's release, they see signs not of an outright insurrection against the Bush administration but of a reassertion by the intelligence community of its ability to influence policy -- public or otherwise. McConnell's team is hardly backing down in the face of the neocon onslaught. Last Saturday, Kerr shot back at the NIE's critics in an unusual and terse public statement. Labeled "In response to those questioning the analytic work and integrity of the United States intelligence community," Kerr's statement said that the agencies' "task ... is to produce objective, ground-truth analysis. We feel confident in our analytic tradecraft and resulting analysis in this estimate."
So there.
Published in National Journal.
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence, Iran, Management, Politics
Full Article
Friday, September 21, 2007
Mike Wertheimer may be the most dangerous man in U.S. intelligence. You would probably never guess it, judging from his lengthy and opaque title -- assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic transformation and technology. A perfect testament to the well-worn bureaucratic tradition of offering little insight by tossing around a lot of words.
Wertheimer's squishy and unassuming title only hints at some vague, general notion of what he actually does for a living. Particularly for the uninitiated, the moniker buries a sense of authority beneath a pair of prefixes (assistant deputy) and offers an unsatisfying buzzword descriptor (transformation), whose etymology points to some consultant's pocket glossary. The title screams "middle management" and thus reassures, "This guy is not a threat."
That message is especially ironic, because to thousands of powerful career employees in the American intelligence community, Wertheimer is, in fact, very threatening. He threatens to upend their world, to change the way they work, and to foist on them the values of a younger generation of spies, who happen to outnumber them. He also threatens to change the way that policy makers use intelligence to reach decisions, and so to "transform" the intelligence agencies' role in the government. All of this makes Mike Wertheimer very dangerous to people who oppose his basic assumptions. And he knows that. He also knows that, to many thousands more in the intelligence field, he is something of a savior.
To understand the origins and purpose of Wertheimer's office, of which he is the first occupant, it helps to refer to a document that also bears a lengthy title, the report by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Better known as the WMD commission report, it provides a painstaking explanation of how 15 intelligence agencies collectively failed to discover that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction.
The contrary assertion that he did have those weapons -- and thus was a threat to the Middle East and a potential benefactor for terrorists -- was, of course, the Bush administration's chief casus belli for the Iraq war. The claim was backed up at the highest levels of the intelligence community in a National Intelligence Estimate released to Congress in October 2002. The WMD commission, which published its findings in 2005, echoed the sentiments of many intelligence professionals, including some who had participated in and blessed the flawed prewar analysis, by pronouncing the episode "one of the most public -- and most damaging -- intelligence failures in recent American history."
Wertheimer's job is to prevent any more such failures and to make sure that the intelligence agencies can accurately predict a host of catastrophic events, including terrorist attacks and disease outbreaks. The commission laid much of the blame for the bad call on Iraq at the feet of analysts, whom it called "the voice of the intelligence community." Although the problems begin with the failure to collect the right information in the first place, the commission particularly faulted the analysts' inability to make sense of intelligence, and to present their judgments to decision makers. During his time in government, Colin Powell was widely regarded among professionals as a decision maker who understood this inherently murky process. He would say to his intelligence officers, "Tell me what you know, tell me what you don't know, and then tell me what you think is most likely to happen." When that analysis breaks down, as it did with Iraq, "the consequences can be grave," the commission wrote.
To be sure, many career analysts object to the "flaws" the commission cited in their tradecraft, regarding both Iraq and another notorious intelligence failure: the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But very few argue with the substance, or the roots, of these breakdowns. The "intelligence community," as the agencies are collectively known, hardly operates as one, and this lack of coordination and -- especially -- collaboration among analysts means that agency leaders and their clients often don't know what the analysts don't know. The disconnect also means that contrary analysis -- of which there was a significant amount in the run-up to the Iraq war -- may find no quarter in analysts' final judgments. It is a disastrous situation for policy makers, who are increasingly turning to nongovernment experts and the news media for rapid, cogent analysis that the intelligence agencies can't always provide.
The WMD commission identified the fix: "Integrate the community of analysts." That's easier said than done, of course, but Wertheimer and others who understand how very un-integrated the analysts are today know that it is prescriptive advice that they can't afford to reject.
The Threat Within
"Post-9/11, we coined a term, the 'asymmetric threat,' " Wertheimer says. "That's a fancy way of describing a future in which the targets for intelligence, the things that we will focus on, are built, designed, and operate completely differently than the way we do." Transformation, that fuzzy word in his title, means "removing that asymmetry."
Before the attacks, the intelligence community was "like a power builder -- very muscular but not very fast," Wertheimer says. Today, the agencies need to be swift. They need to analyze more information faster. But analysts also need new ways to connect to one another, to benefit from one another's knowledge. If a specialist on sub-Saharan Africa at the Defense Intelligence Agency is studying terrorist inroads into tribal communities, shouldn't a CIA expert in Africa studies know that? Might she have something useful to contribute to the inquiry?
Collaboration isn't an especially novel concept, and the WMD commission wasn't the first to suggest that analysts do more of it. But Wertheimer is the first official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence -- the "czar" of the community -- to make collaboration a full-time job. Gen. Michael Hayden, the former principal deputy director of national intelligence who is now the CIA director, created the position after talking with Wertheimer two years ago about how to change the way the community operates. The new intelligence director, Mike McConnell, has forcefully backed the transformational efforts, as has his deputy in charge of analysis, Tom Fingar, a career analyst who used to run intelligence at the State Department. Fingar, who is essentially the only official layer between Wertheimer and McConnell, is the political muscle in this endeavor. Wertheimer is the idea man, "my philosopher of transformation," as Fingar recently put it.
Transformation has less to do with changing procedures than with changing people. A key pillar is a suite of new information-sharing and collaborative technologies that look and feel a lot like Google, Wikipedia, and MySpace, the networking and search tools that younger analysts grew up using at home and in their dorm rooms. These newcomers have been baffled to find that these 21st-century staples aren't widely used within the intelligence community.
The first of the new intelligence tools came online recently. Analysts can now log on to Intellipedia, a collaborative knowledge base that they can use to swap leads and examine one another's work. (Officials say that Intellipedia helped one group of analysts create a helpful report on Iraqi insurgents' use of chlorine gas to increase the lethality of improvised explosive devices.) Later this year, Wertheimer's team will launch A-Space ("A" for analyst), modeled after MySpace and the popular website Facebook. Officials hope the new site will help analysts create social networks outside established channels.
In addition to the new tools, Wertheimer and his colleagues have created unusual training programs. One sends analysts to a monthlong retreat at a classified location where they work alongside private-sector experts to investigate complex intelligence topics. Another takes young analysts out of their assigned jobs for two years and puts them through an intensive training program where they learn the tradecraft but also such on-the-ground spy skills as defensive driving and weapons handling. Agencies will ultimately deploy these analysts to global hot spots to support spies in the field.
It's no accident that Wertheimer and his team are aiming these new tools and programs at the younger crowd. Sixty percent of U.S. intelligence analysts have five years of experience or less on the job. In the larger intelligence community of about 100,000 employees, which includes clandestine operatives and support staff, those young workers are about 40 percent of the rolls. America's spies are decidedly green, and they're not comfortable -- or particularly useful -- working in bureaucratic silos without Internet browsers, instant messaging, and social networking sites on their desktops.
In his quest for transformation, Wertheimer is playing to this youthful workforce that finds collaboration neither newfangled nor threatening. For these analysts, networking is just the way information moves. But to the intelligence establishment, information is power, and relinquishing it means losing that power, as the WMD commission and many other critics have repeatedly lamented. It seems illogical to the generation of electronic socializers, but when information moves around, and becomes known to people who don't have the "need to know," veteran members of the community view it as no longer special because it's no longer secret. Too much collaboration also threatens to reveal the sources and methods by which agencies obtain information -- secrets they must zealously guard lest those sources dry up or get killed.
Sharing and secrecy are opposing forces. So this is Wertheimer's task: Transform the massive intelligence bureaucracy into a collaborative network, in which loose lips are, in a way, encouraged; introduce technologies that many seasoned analysts neither understand nor trust; and build a cadre of young, ambitious rookies, who just can't believe they're not allowed to check their personal e-mail at work, into the future of the business.
The opposition is fierce. When The New York Times wrote about A-Space recently, analysts commented about the piece, and about Wertheimer, on a private intelligence community blog. Some recorded their dramatic dissent. "I guarantee," one intelligence employee wrote, "Mike Wertheimer will cause people to get killed over this."
"I am threatening the status quo," Wertheimer says. "And that's a hard pill to swallow for anybody."
Taking the Blame
Wertheimer, 50, is a mathematician who earned his master's and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He spent 21 years as a cryptologist at the National Security Agency, and rose to become the agency's most senior technical leader. On paper, he fits the stereotype captured in an old joke among NSA hands: "How can you tell an extroverted analyst? He's the one who looks at your shoes when he's talking."
But Wertheimer defies typecasting. When he speaks, he looks people in the eye, but often from above -- he is 6 feet, 1 inch tall. He has arching eyebrows that signal when he's listening but also serve as a warning for when he's about to descend with an impassioned argument or an analogy that he thinks perfectly captures what he's up against. (In a recent conversation, Wertheimer compared the government's attempts at collaboration to the Borg, the supremely villainous race of cyber-aliens on Star Trek: The Next Generation who "assimilate" whole societies by stripping people of individual character traits and turn them into one giant collective.) If you spotted Wertheimer in a room, or even better, watched him work a room, you might wonder why he hasn't sought his fortune on the motivational speaking circuit.
When he speaks, you get the feeling that he's talking to you. He reveals a lot about himself, which might be unsettling if he weren't so earnest about connecting his flaws and fears to his intelligence work. At a recent conference on analytic transformation in Chicago, Wertheimer confessed to a crowd of more than 400 people that after the 9/11 attacks he felt personally responsible for not anticipating Al Qaeda's strike. He became depressed, he said, and was inconsolable until his father snapped him out of it. "I don't blame you for this," Wertheimer's dad told him, and then warned, "You're scaring your kids," who thought that whenever their father had to rush back to the office, something very bad was about to happen. Wertheimer briefly left government in 2003 to work as a technology consultant but returned two years later.
Wertheimer is like a number of other veteran intelligence officials who were involved in the global hunt for terrorists before 9/11. They feel that their own actions -- more precisely, their inactions -- allowed the disaster. Wertheimer says he blames himself and his colleagues. He thinks he personally failed and, accepting his part in a broken system, he seems to have no qualms about tearing it down and rebuilding.
"It is something that he can appreciate as being absolutely critical to the future of this country and the protection of the country, and when you hear him speak, you get caught up in that emotion," says Tim Sample, a former analyst and staff director of the House Select Committee on Intelligence who knows Wertheimer well. Sample is president of the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance, which co-hosted the Chicago conference with the intelligence director's office.
In large measure, Wertheimer's charisma comes from his willingness to defy tradition. "We are going to share more," he said in his Chicago speech. "We are going to take risks." Directing his remarks at those who would rather preserve the status quo, he said, "For the first time, the challenge is not why we can't do it; it's how you're going to find a way to secure this." Rather than appeasing members of the intelligence community who blanch at collaboration and its attendant security risks, Wertheimer lays the burden on their shoulders and tells them that if collaboration doesn't happen, they'll take the blame.
But if Wertheimer succeeds, it probably won't be by convincing his intransigent opponents. Rather, he will work with that younger generation at whom transformation is aimed. By and large, these newer members of the community are optimistic and, like him, believe that the intelligence community is dangerously broken.
"It's Huge"
Sean Wohltman, a 25-year-old counter-terrorism analyst with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, embodies the kind of optimistic disillusionment that Wertheimer wants to harness. Two years after defending his master's thesis in geographic information science at Virginia Tech University, Wohltman joined the government "following a call for patriotism," he said. He encountered "disappointment and disillusionment" in his first three months on the job, however.
As Wohltman explained to the Chicago conference, "When I first logged on to what I expected to be a terminal from 24's [counter-terrorist unit] command center, I was instead driven to my agency's home page, which flashed information about an upcoming picnic and links to fill out my health insurance. And not only that, it launched in Netscape." Those in the audience who laughed understood that Netscape is an obsolete Internet browser.
Later, Wohltman explained why it mattered to him that the intelligence agencies were so far behind the technological curve. In 1999, when the popular and controversial music file-sharing system Napster debuted, he pointed out, Ricky Martin's "Livin' la Vida Loca" and other corporately manufactured pop hits topped the Billboard charts. Only artists from big record labels got mass recognition, and listeners were cut off from the bounty of independent and innovative artists who excelled in a variety of musical styles. But that year, Napster's collaborative technology allowed fans of lesser-known artists to share songs, which in turn boosted their recognition, fanned their popularity, and led to greater awareness of the wider music scene. It also fueled the market for independent music and challenged the record companies' dominance of the industry.
Taking Wohltman's analogy, Wertheimer says that the intelligence agencies could be compared to the record companies. Information is filtered through a hierarchical process that culminates in senior executives choosing what intelligence to disseminate to customers. Similar to Napster, tools such as Intellipedia and A-Space -- known as "disruptive technologies" -- bypass this process and get more information out to a wider audience.
But will collaboration guarantee better analysis? Did Napster improve music quality? Did it benefit the industry as a whole? Recording artists and companies sued Napster for copyright infringement, and the network shut down in 2001, eventually to be reborn as a pay-for-service system.
Napster did pave the way for other innovative technologies, which adapted to customers' demands to buy music a la carte, rather than having to pay for an entire album. Today, Apple's iTunes sells songs for 99 cents and threatens the record companies' control of their own products. Collaboration, in a sense, won out, and customers' demand for more music, delivered in new ways, has opened the market to more artists. "Will this lead to better music?" Wertheimer asks. "I can't believe that it will not."
Wertheimer and other transformation proponents often point to iTunes, and the hugely successful iPod music player, to support their theory that collaboration can fundamentally change and improve people's lives. And they reason that A-Space, Intellipedia, and other innovative services will create demand in the intelligence community and overwhelm the transformation naysayers.
Wertheimer channels the enthusiasm of Apple's CEO and co-founder, Steve Jobs, whose rousing keynote speeches, known as "Stevenotes," command more press coverage and world attention than speeches by most members of Congress. But as with Jobs, some skeptics question both the substance and the goal behind Wertheimer's zeal.
Early in Jobs's career, a co-worker coined the term "reality distortion field" to describe the aura that the Apple prophet cast over his spellbound audiences. The term could easily apply to Wertheimer's enthusiastic showmanship. Wikipedia describes RDF as "the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, exaggeration, and marketing. RDF is said to distort an audience's sense of proportion or scale. Small advances are applauded as breakthroughs. Interesting developments become turning points, or huge leaps forward." (The phenomenon has been applied to other leaders, as well.)
Wertheimer does, in fact, applaud certain advances as breakthroughs that others -- particularly those outside of government -- might find underwhelming. For instance, one planned transformation program, the Library of National Intelligence, would be a repository of all the documents produced by all of the agencies. Eventually, Wertheimer hopes, analysts will search the library for key terms, and an automated system will help to judge who should have access to classified materials. He calls this program "huge."
Why is it huge? Some observers would have a hard time believing that the agencies didn't already have such a resource, the kind that most large organizations take for granted. LexisNexis, for example, contains copies of every article published in most of the country's periodicals. Following basic business practices, most companies compile and retain their internal documents for research and for legal purposes.
Wertheimer is careful to put things in perspective. "It's big," he says of the library. But then he quickly follows up: "For us, it's huge." And he's right. Much to the consternation of the WMD commission and others, this is a giant leap for the intelligence community, a kind of moon-landing moment.
But do collaborative libraries -- and wikis, blogs, networking websites, and special training -- make transformation worthwhile?
Change Without End
Mark Lowenthal retired in 2005 as the assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production. Among seasoned intelligence officials, he is considered one of the most knowledgeable authorities on analysis, the agencies' shortcomings in that regard, and the education of young analysts in the ways of the tradecraft. So in Chicago, when Lowenthal stood up to question why Wertheimer and the DNI's office are expending so much energy on transformation, people listened intently.
"You are urging this transformation for an end that I do not understand," he told Wertheimer. "Collaboration is not an end in itself, to my mind. You want to do this, I think, ... to make analysis better. What does that mean? It means it would be faster? It would be more comprehensible? It would be more accurate more often? I don't think you have a way of knowing at the end of the day when you get there."
Lowenthal doesn't dismiss collaboration out of hand, and he has spent a sizable part of his career trying to create a true intelligence community. But his remarks reflected a palpable skepticism among those who think that it is impossible to know whether Wertheimer's ideas will actually fix intelligence. Lowenthal told him, "I think, unfortunately, a lot of this is pandering to a bunch of commissions that have no understanding of what we do for a living, or the nature of our work, and to a workforce. And I don't think that's a sufficient ground for a transformation. And so I'm left here wondering, what's the end state? For what reason?"
Wertheimer responded that he didn't have a satisfactory answer. The best he could offer, he said, were anecdotes. He has spent the past two years talking to analysts and trying to figure out what those who achieved real breakthroughs -- overcoming "hard problems," he said -- had in common.
The few successes were not enough to prove a theory, he admitted. But the one trait these breakthrough-makers shared was -- perhaps not surprisingly -- collaboration. These were analysts who challenged old assumptions, re-examined evidence that had been set aside as useless, and shared information beyond normal channels. They also, Wertheimer said, ignored their bosses' admonitions that such inquiries -- going back to ground that had been plowed unproductively before -- were "career killers." Bucking authority is another of Wertheimer's recurring themes. He says that a colleague once told him, "You will have succeeded when you become really hard to manage."
Wertheimer, however, plays down the notion of analysts as revolutionaries. "I don't like the thought that transformation is changing something from the past to something new," he says. Rather, transformation is about "creating an environment in which more things could happen than could happen in the past. It's liberating. Let's call it 'analytic liberation.' "
Wertheimer seems perfectly comfortable working in this gray area, where there is no obvious way to know whether his ideas are working and where concepts change on the fly (transformation becomes liberation) and the end goal isn't defined at the outset. Were it not for the DNI's backing, such a nebulous, high-risk approach to preventing another intelligence disaster might never take flight. Wertheimer might still go down in flames, but taking that risk appears to suit him just fine. "We can't afford the kinds of mistakes that we're making based on the way we're doing business today. It's just the bottom line," he said. Riffing off the intelligence blogger's comments, he added, "If I'm the first one to get killed, so be it."
The Hard Sell
Bravado may obscure Wertheimer's pragmatic streak. He is provocative and excitable, and sometimes brash. But those who know him well say that he is also humble and self-deprecating.
He frets that he will become too personally associated with his cause. "I'm a little worried about this being too personality-driven," he says. "This has got to be about ideas. We have to sell people on the ideas."
Wertheimer knows that the reason his pitch isn't resonating with enough people his own age is because he has failed to demonstrate how middle managers and veteran analysts -- the people who are feeling most threatened -- can take part in this grand enterprise, how they can be "liberated." Wertheimer, the realist, has promised to find a place for them. But he does not apologize for embracing young analysts and for assaulting the culture that reared him. "We don't allow our people to reach their full potential," he told the audience in Chicago. "This is a society, this is a community, that tamps down potential."
"We treat [analysis] like a guild," Wertheimer said later, a society of apprentices who study at the feet of masters. "This is like making a fine violin or studying opera. That [approach] makes a lot of sense at the scale that you build violins or have opera singers. But we're talking about massive [numbers] of young people coming in.... They learn on their own. They don't read the rule book. They don't read the owner's manual," he said. "They click buttons and investigate, and if they get bored, they do something else."
If the two sides of this generational divide are irreconcilable, Wertheimer doesn't seem worried, because the rookies have the clear majority. "It's simply a matter of time," he said. "Now, the question we all have in our minds is, how much time can we afford? We can't afford another day."
Several younger colleagues once asked Wertheimer to name his greatest career achievement at the National Security Agency. At one time, he said, he was the world's leading expert on a certain cryptographic technology, the smartest man alive on that one subject. But "that's not what makes me so accomplished," he said. "It's that I'm no longer the No. 1 expert, and that the experts are in this room, because I taught them. And they exceeded everything I could have done on my own."
That's one way Wertheimer judges success: Someone comes along and does it better. It doesn't quite answer his critics' concerns that his ideas might be flawed to begin with. But Wertheimer is a strong believer in the "wisdom of crowds." He and his bosses are betting that collaboration is the way to fix what's broken with intelligence and, by extension, to keep people from dying. If they are right that transformation, in all its forms, is the key to stopping another terrorist attack, or to avoiding another catastrophic intelligence failure, then it seems a decent bet that the next generation of analysts will follow Wertheimer's lead.
"If I can just start something for which a handful of folks better and smarter than me take over," he said, "if you could put that in my epitaph, I would die a happy man."
Published in National Journal
Labels: Director of National Intelligence, Human Capital, Intelligence, Management, Technology, Terrorism
Full Article
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Intelligence agencies must decode a human capital crisis.
When Tom Waters decided to become a spy, the first thing on his mind wasn't how much he'd get paid.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Waters, then a 36-year-old business consultant living in Tampa, Fla., packed his bags for a business trip to Montreal. His girlfriend, Cathy, called to say a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. Waters turned on the television and watched as a second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, plunged into the South Tower. "I thought, 'Oh crap, this is not an accident,' " Waters says.
What he did next tells you everything that is good, and that is truly regrettable, about life as an employee of a U.S. intelligence agency.
Three days after Sept. 11, Waters, along with more than 150,000 others, applied to work for the CIA. The CIA typically receives tens of thousands of applications, and accepts fewer than 1 percent. To handle the deluge of job-seekers, hiring officials brought in retired officers and seconded other staff. Nearly a year later, after a battery of interviews, medical exams and psychiatric tests, the agency offered Waters a job, and he joined the first post-Sept. 11 class of the National Clandestine Service - the country's top spies.
Waters, who wrote a book about his experience, called Class 11: Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class (Dutton, 2006), says he and his fellow spies-in-training were singularly motivated: "Everyone was there to make sure another attack didn't happen." The character of this class was unusual. "There was a strong business flavor. Investment bankers, corporate attorneys." Not the expected bunch of recent college graduates with no work experience and few marketable skills.
Waters had chosen a particularly inopportune time to join. Since applying, he and his girlfriend had married and were trying to have children. Waters writes that he "disappeared" for the first year of his marriage, "even when we [did] manage to live under the same roof."
Class 11 chronicles Waters' year of demanding training. The narrative is steeped in his sense of awe, intrigue and unbridled excitement about the lifelong adventure ahead of him. There is no doubt that he wanted to spy for his country. But by late 2004, he and Cathy were expecting their first child and planning for another. The path to parenthood had been difficult and expensive - they blew through much of their savings on fertility treatments. Cathy wanted to stay home with the baby. Waters knew promotions and pay raises in the CIA were based on time served; there was no accounting for his years of professional expertise, which would fetch higher wages in the private sector. Waters questioned whether he could support his family on an entry-level salary and pay for a home in the Washington area, all while pushing 40.
"I sat down and did the numbers and scared the hell out of myself," he says. "I would be 65 by the time my children got out of college. The first phrase that came to mind was, 'Welcome to Wal-Mart.' "
So in February 2005, Waters quit. "That last day, walking out, that was hard," he says. If the money had been right, "I would have never left." Today, Waters is a contractor for the Defense Department, working in counterintelligence at a security facility in the Army's Special Operations Command, back in Tampa. He also has done contract work for the CIA. In many ways, he hasn't left the intelligence community, but now his shopping options extend beyond the discount chain.
Mind the Gap
Tom Waters could be the poster boy for a new breed of intelligence agency employee. They are the future spies, analysts, technologists and linguists who signed up in the grips of a nationalistic furor over terrorism. They believe America has enemies, and they want to fight them. They hail from the best schools and come equipped with skills intelligence agencies desperately need.
Many of them also have no intention of spending a career in government. Pledging allegiance to a single agency and a 30-year career track is a foreign concept. Monetary concerns figure heavily in their professional calculus. Mobility isn't a ladder, but a hopscotch board. They might have multiple careers, maybe retire early, go to cooking school. Old hands have a name for these 21st century rookies, not all of whom are young. They call them, derisively, the "millennials."
The intelligence community is divided by a generation gap, one that threatens to undermine its ability to perform its missions, including keeping the country safe from terrorists. The intelligence workforce is out of balance. It can be plotted as two humps on a graph. At the beginning of the experience spectrum are the millennials, green, just learning the ropes, no more than a half-decade of experience under their belts. They make up more than 35 percent of the total intelligence workforce. At the far end is a large number of highly skilled, longtime employees, moving closer to retirement by the day. In between those two humps, where there should be a stockpile of experienced middle managers, the future leaders of the community, there is instead a deep, unsettling valley.
The agencies' top leaders are laboring furiously to fill it. In the nearly six years since Sept. 11, the CIA and other agencies haven't wanted for applicants; there are more people who want jobs than there are billets. But training employees takes years. To fill the gap in the meantime, during wartime, the agencies have hired contractors in record numbers. The agencies have outsourced some of the most sensitive functions, including analysis, spying on foreign adversaries, prisoner interrogation and translation services.
The outsourcing could be temporary, assuming intelligence agencies eventually replenish their personnel stocks. Except that the agencies actually are competing with the contractors for workers. According to the five-year strategic human capital plan at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "those same contractors recruit our employees, already cleared and trained at government expense, and then 'lease' them back to us at considerably greater expense."
Today's competitive job market is defined not by the institution, but by the free agent. The federal intelligence community has become a place where the millennials learn spying tradecraft, obtain a coveted top-level security clearance and then bolt to contractors for heftier paychecks. This has become so common that intelligence observers now fear it could become the career path of choice - break into the private sector via the government.
Assessing the situation, Ronald Sanders, the intelligence community's top personnel manager, says the notorious phrase "human capital crisis" is not a bad choice to describe the predicament. "Certainly potential crisis is an apt description," says Sanders, chief human capital officer at ODNI.
The Wages of Peace
No one in the intelligence agencies is surprised it has come to this. The crisis was entirely predictable, they say, and can be traced, ironically, to a peace dividend. Following the collapse of the Soviet empire, Congress and the administration decreased intelligence funding and pruned back the workforce. The decision was not without controversy, but the prevailing wisdom held that with the country's main enemy out of the way, there was no need to maintain a wartime footing. Former CIA director George Tenet has said that in the 1990s, agencies eliminated or didn't fill 23,000 positions. "The intelligence community was literally gutted," Sanders says. "By design or by default, we were downsized dramatically. We lost core capability."
What was left of the Cold War workforce moved into the senior ranks and management positions. "Now, you turn around and look behind them, there's nobody there," Sanders says. That's the valley between the two humps.
Fast forward to Sept. 11, when the anemic agencies were thrust to the front lines of a new war on terrorism. The workforce had to scramble against a new enemy, one that few understood. The hiring push, and the contractor spree, ensued. Sanders says staffing levels are "finally getting back to where they were" before the 1990s cuts. But most of the new recruits are filling entry-level jobs. "Our bench strength at the midcareer level is really problematic," he says.
The millennials still aren't fully trained, and aren't ready to head into the valley. It takes, on average, three to five years to season an analyst, and about seven years of work "on the street" to sufficiently train for clandestine work, says Mark Lowenthal, who retired in 2005 as assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production. He worked in the intelligence agencies for more than 30 years, and spent a good part of his career wrestling with the personnel crisis.
Historically, Lowenthal says, the agencies have trained independently. "If you join [the National Security Agency], you go to the NSA school. We put you in a stovepipe as soon as we get you." On the rare occasion employees want to transfer, managers see them as essentially untrained. "They treat you like they've never seen you before inside the system. You're an outsider," Lowenthal says.
Over time, employees developed narrower, agency-specific expertise about emerging threats. There was no spirit of collaboration, because the workforce wasn't designed for it. This is the institutional reason so many dots about terrorism remained unconnected before Sept. 11.
Now, policymakers are demanding that agencies share their knowledge and expand their targets beyond the old Soviet foe. "The subjects that we worry about have all changed dramatically," Sanders says. The experience gap impedes the agencies' evolution. Personnel managers know they can't fill it by speeding up training times. So they've decided to get smarter about using the expertise they have. To keep the human capital crisis from sinking the intelligence community, they say, the community needs to act like one.
Taking Stock
Before he retired, Lowenthal helped launch a communitywide catalog of intelligence analysts, a kind of Yellow Pages that lets managers see who has expertise on specific regions or issues. Such detail is essential for long-term human capital planning, managers say, and reflects a core belief - which is not universally shared - that an analyst is an analyst, regardless of which agency he calls home.
Managers have made some startling revelations in the catalog. For instance, "We are woefully deficient in the number of analysts who have expertise in sub-Saharan Africa," a region of great concern to policymakers, Sanders says. Previously, managers understood such shortfalls only "at the anecdotal level," he says, and couldn't efficiently plot to fill the gaps. In the coming months, managers plan to launch catalogs for intelligence collectors, technologists and acquisition specialists.
Knowing how employees spend their time also lets managers eliminate redundancies, which they can ill afford. Recently, ODNI asked agencies, "Who does what on Iraq?" "[It] took a couple of iterations before people understood the question," Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence who oversees analysis policy, said in a speech in Denver in August. Some people replied, "We do everything on Iraq," and others said they did "important things on Iraq" and disseminated their work to "important customers" in all kinds of ways.
"We discovered a very large community of people acting like 8-year-olds playing soccer, bunched around a ball over here and a lot of areas of the field uncovered," Fingar said. But apparently, just knowing where the overlaps existed helped to get rid of them. "As soon as components of the analytic enterprise [the various agencies working on Iraq] saw that, they didn't need me to tell them to adjust; they began to adjust," Fingar said.
Managers are trying to fill other skills gaps quickly. To beef up the low numbers of linguists who can speak Arabic, Dari, Chinese and Korean - to name a few - agencies last year gave several hundred scholarships to college students. They agreed to study languages in exchange for a work commitment. ODNI also is paying for summer language immersion programs for elementary and high school students. "You've got to get to them as young as possible," says Lowenthal, who was in charge of language programs for analysts.
Officials want to close a gap in the security clearance process, as well. New Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell wants to speed up that process, which can take more than a year, and to make it less rigorous for first- and second-generation Americans, the native language speakers who hail from immigrant neighborhoods. The clearance process generally nixes people with relatives and business ties overseas, fearing that recruits could be blackmailed or compromised.
All these near- and longer-term fixes might help keep the intelligence ship afloat. But there's also a softer side of management for which there's no easy solution - keeping employees happy.
In Search of Leaders
Every year, Fortune magazine publishes the authoritative ruling on where companies rank in terms of employee satisfaction, the "100 Best Companies to Work For" list. It's compiled through surveys that ask employees to respond to such statements as "I've got all the tools I need to do my job" or "There's a minimum of back-stabbing and politicking."
Fortune's Milton Moskowitz, who co-wrote the 2007 survey, says that regardless of a company's size or earnings, two key trends help dictate how great a workplace actually is: "a strong mission and a strong culture that people buy into," he says, and "communication between management and employees. Not just from the top down, but are there opportunities for employees of these companies to talk back."
The Fortune survey doesn't examine government agencies. But Moskowitz says the essential themes are constant. So, where would the intelligence agencies rank? According to the most recent Intelligence Community Employee Climate Survey, released in April, 74 percent of participants gave a "positive" response when asked, "Considering everything, how satisfied are you with your job?" Only 12 percent responded "negative." The positive rating exceeds that of the 2006 Federal Human Capital Survey, which gauges the governmentwide mood.
But intelligence employees aren't as positive about their managers. Only 57 percent of survey respondents said they "have a high level of respect for my organization's senior leaders." Twenty-four percent were neutral, and 17 percent had a negative response. Asked to rate their leaders' ability "generate high levels of motivation and commitment in the workforce" the numbers fell: 43 percent positive and 25 percent negative. The five-year human capital planning document concluded that "many employees across the [intelligence community] are looking for even stronger leadership, and leaders who will help them fulfill their potential."
Such people are called mentors. The millennials crave them. And that leaves some old hands scratching their heads.
The intelligence agencies have some official mentoring programs, but longtime employees say these don't amount to a widespread, institutional focus on rearing a new generation. Mentoring "is one thing we do badly," Lowenthal confesses. New recruits, particularly younger ones, "have this expectation that they will have a mentor. I don't know where they get it."
Intelligence veterans are flustered by their needier colleagues. Intelligence is a silent service, they say. Most victories never are celebrated publicly, and the culture "does not cater to individual attention," says a former CIA official.
This official recalls an anecdote that exposes the dark underbelly of the generation gap. A senior officer, who managed a pair of new analysts, arrived in the office one day to find that "one of the kids hadn't shown up for work," the former official says. Hours later, the young analyst appeared, and the boss asked, "Where have you been?" The analyst explained that "one of his friends had had a 'professional crisis. We had to sit down and work things out.' " The former official says his colleague was speechless, and later said in private, "You know, I had a bad day once. No one cared!"
Senior employees who think these usually younger millennials are soft blame the parents, suspecting they were too quick to reward the child's every achievement, no matter how insignificant. The old-timers call them "trophy kids," a nod to Ben Stiller's character in the film Meet the Fockers, whose parents built a shrine for their son's 9th place ribbons for various childhood sporting events. Stiller's future father-in-law, played by Robert DeNiro, is repulsed by this celebration of mediocrity. Fittingly, DeNiro's character is a retired CIA operative.
"This is not a system where everybody sits around the table with their Play-Doh and shares and applauds for each other," the former official says. "It values devotion to the system and overwork, and an absolute feeling of being part and parcel of that system." But that, the former official admits, "creates turnover." Whether that's an acceptable outcome depends on who's asking the question.
Sanders says in core skills - analysis and collection - "our retention is very high." His office has measured top-performing employees against the overall government figures. "The attrition rate for the people with the highest performance ratings is markedly lower than it is for overall attrition," Sanders says. "So, we are keeping the very best people."
But some former spies say otherwise. Lindsay Moran, who worked in the clandestine service at the CIA from 1998 until 2003, has written that the agency's official attrition rate - about 4.5 percent - is, "like almost everything else about the agency . . . deceptive." Spies, she argues, are leaving at a higher rate.
"When I was a clandestine service trainee, we used to joke about people who were on the 'five-year plan,' " Moran wrote in Government Executive in 2005. Recruits would join, undergo training and then quit after a short overseas tour. "Sometimes these officers left for personal reasons, but more often they came to the disheartening realization that the operations directorate [where the spies work] was poorly managed to the point of near dysfunction," she wrote. Contradicting Sanders, Moran wrote that the CIA suffers from "reverse Darwinism: The best left early, while mediocre officers stayed and inevitably were promoted."
Lowenthal bemoans attrition as an unfortunate byproduct of the intelligence system. Before he retired, the community was attracting bright crops of analysts. "They were not all refugees from failed dot-coms," he says. "They were joining because they felt we had been attacked, and they wanted to serve our country. What else could you ask for?"
The rookies come from companies where mentoring isn't a foreign concept, and from a workplace culture that encourages versatility. Once they get inside the intelligence system, with its demand for an outdated kind of devotion, the excitement that drove them to service dissipates. "We do things to them in terms of career management that beats that out of them," Lowenthal says.
But the millennials and the trophy kids have a thing or two to teach their bosses about management.
Generation Next
"Intelligence reform" is an umbrella term that encompasses the changes in workforce culture that agency managers want to make. They want to enhance employees' use of technology, to allow a new generation of analysts and collectors to collaborate, to share information so they can connect the dots. To a lot of managers, these are buzzwords, but they have real meaning. And no one understands that better than the millennials.
"If you think about what skills those kids bring in, they have grown up with cell phones, e-mails," says Tom Waters, the former spy. "They do not know how to stovepipe information. It's completely foreign to them. Their encyclopedia is not Britannica, it's Wikipedia."
These new workers approach their jobs in a fundamentally different way, Waters says, one that's an anathema to many old-timers, but completely in line with where legions of experts and critics say the community needs to go. "They'll hear something, and they're going to immediately bounce it off their buddies, who are cleared." Problem-solving sessions could look a lot like two young analysts sitting down together and "working it all out." Intelligence could evolve into a far more open, and informal, craft.
Managers are starting to catch on. In the past year, the intelligence community has launched its own version of Wikipedia, called Intellipedia, which lets more than 3,600 users share information - and challenge it - in a classified setting. Analysts write posts and add to entries about the most difficult targets the agencies face. This year, employees will begin using other online collaboration tools, including one that gives credit by name to anyone who provides "insight that fills an intelligence gap," according to a DNI planning document.
Intelligence managers also want to sate younger workers' appetite for mobility. In the future, all promotions to senior positions will require joint-duty assignments. Employees must serve at more than one agency and try their hands at different skills. Sanders says he has spoken to hundreds of rookies full of wanderlust. "I can scratch that itch," he tells them.
Sanders and his colleagues are in a rush against retirement to institutionalize their reforms. "I don't think we have time for this to take 10 years," he says. "We're about two years into something that I hope we can get done in four, and at least say, we've reached the tipping point."
However agencies get there - probably through a generational shift - managers are banking on the fact that, for a select and sufficient few, the allure of the intelligence business always will be unique, and will bring the most dedicated to their door.
In Class 11, Waters writes about his first day at CIA headquarters, when he and his colleagues huddled around the famous agency seal, carved in granite on the lobby floor. "We grin like maniacs. . . . This is where presidents and dignitaries take pictures commemorating their visits. To stand here is to truly appreciate the exclusivity of our new jobs."
Today, Waters still has some entree into that exclusive club. His contractor work brings him, on occasion, back to headquarters. And though that trip is tinged with nostalgia, he says some things remain the same. "I've got that same, stupid grin on my face when I drive in again." he says.
Published in Government Executive.Labels: Human Capital, Intelligence, Management
Full Article
Saturday, January 13, 2007
The graybeards of spycraft are smiling: After two years of turnover and uncertainty in the top ranks of the U.S. intelligence establishment, which saw such outsiders as a former congressman and a career ambassador elevated to high posts, four of their own are now in control or soon will be.
In what one former official called "the closest thing to an intelligence coup d'etat," a set of old hands has been designated to lead at the principal military and civilian agencies. Career intelligence officials seemed to breathe a sigh of relief this past week and were hopeful that new management would help stabilize the spy agencies, which have been hurt by flawed analyses on Iraq, bureaucratic infighting, and a lack of experienced senior leadership.
In this new intelligence constellation, there are four key players, each of whom has led a major agency at least once. On January 5, President Bush nominated retired Navy Vice Adm. Mike McConnell, a former director of the National Security Agency, to be the second director of national intelligence. It falls to him as DNI to continue post-9/11 intelligence reforms and to act as a chief operating officer for the government's 16 intelligence agencies.
Next is new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has his hands on 80 percent of the intelligence budget and so has the most muscle to flex. A former CIA director, Gates will bring a keen understanding of civilian intelligence operations to his job.
Days before McConnell's nomination was announced, Gates asked retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, a deeply experienced uniformed intelligence officer, to take over the top spy job in the Pentagon, the undersecretary for intelligence. Clapper will replace a controversial civilian political appointee, Stephen Cambone, who was a close ally of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and had little career intelligence experience.
Clapper has held two top jobs, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes satellite and aerial imagery and data.
McConnell, Gates, and Clapper also have a friend in recently installed CIA Director Michael Hayden, a retired Air Force general who rounds out the new team. Hayden, who has been busy beefing up the CIA's human spying efforts, appointed a career clandestine officer as his No. 2. Hayden is professionally close to McConnell and Gates, and several former officials said that he and Clapper are "old friends."
"Here you have very trusted players who have been around each other for a long period of time," said Fred Burton, a former special agent for counter-terrorism in the State Department who's now the vice president of counter-terrorism and corporate security for Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. Those relationships, perhaps more than anything else, bode well for their chances of success, Burton said.
While McConnell was leading the NSA in the early 1990s, Clapper was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Gates was head of the CIA. Hayden held key positions on the National Security Council and in military intelligence, and he took over the NSA in 1999. Also, when McConnell was the military official in charge of intelligence for Operation Desert Storm, Clapper was the assistant chief of staff for Air Force intelligence and played a leading role in coordinating the air war.
It is unclear precisely who was behind the return of so many veterans. Vice President Cheney, who was Defense secretary during Desert Storm and worked with McConnell, is reported to have personally asked the retired admiral to leave a lucrative position at Booz Allen Hamilton, a major intelligence contractor, to return to government. Some have speculated that Cheney has recruited McConnell to back the administration's Iraq and Iran policies on Capitol Hill.
But others described McConnell as a nonpolitical professional, and said that Gates's hand is more evident in the recent shake-up. He is known to have a good working relationship with McConnell, with whom he'll have to craft the next intelligence budget.
In choosing Clapper as his undersecretary for intelligence, Gates picked a military officer who ran counter to Rumsfeld and Cambone when he recommended putting the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency under the DNI's control. Now Clapper is coming back in Cambone's old job.
Assessing that move, as well as McConnell's return and Hayden's efforts, many intelligence veterans see an about-face by the administration. "This is the revenge of the intelligence professionals, to take the job of running the intelligence community away from the ideologues and to put it back in the hands of those who probably are best suited to run the place," said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian.
The new power structure comes at a time when the intelligence community needs steady hands, observers said. Outgoing DNI John Negroponte, a career ambassador who is returning to his roots at the State Department as Condoleezza Rice's deputy, never seemed comfortable in his role as intelligence czar.
Several former officials noted that Negroponte had a powerful title but showed little inclination to challenge the entrenched forces of the CIA director or the Defense secretary. The DNI's chief job, in addition to briefing the president every morning, is largely managerial and takes an enormous amount of time and personal energy.
Negroponte rarely showed himself to be interested in or suited to such tasks, observers said, and he was often spotted at Washington's University Club on workday afternoons, swimming laps in the pool or getting a massage.
But to his credit, some said, Negroponte has assembled a staff of more than 1,500 people who have made progress on intelligence reforms. The DNI's office has developed new personnel and training requirements, and is tackling standards for information-sharing and new technology projects.
"There is a structure that Ambassador Negroponte has put together that can be used" to continue reforms, said Tim Sample, president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a contractors association, and a former staff director of the House Intelligence Committee.
Sample said that McConnell "really does understand the complexities of the community" and will embrace the managerial aspects.
McConnell has seen the intelligence world from two important sides -- the government's and a contractor's. The intelligence community's use of -- and in some cases, dependence on -- outside help is growing fast. Booz Allen has been a principal beneficiary of increased intelligence and security spending since 9/11. Among senior intelligence officials, McConnell has a rare depth of public- and private-sector experience that could be useful now.
But Aid, the intelligence historian, cautioned that McConnell's 10-year-long absence from government is not necessarily a plus. He left the NSA as the agency was searching for a post-Cold War mission. Under McConnell's watch, the NSA "got fat, bloated, bureaucratic, failed to adapt to the challenges," Aid said.
McConnell was loath to oppose budget cuts and didn't push to intercept communications on the Internet and through other emerging technologies, Aid added. Still, others are hopeful that if McConnell can now take up less sexy, but necessary, management tasks, it will free the others to focus on pure intelligence work.
Both Hayden and Clapper have experience taking over agencies in turbulent times. Under Hayden's watch, the NSA began the painful transition from a Cold War eavesdropping organization capturing signals from satellites to one that monitors fiber-optic networks, cellphones, and the Internet. The results have been decidedly mixed, but Hayden was praised for his foresight.
For his part, Clapper took over the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency when it was struggling to keep pace with technological advancements in satellite photography and mapping, and to stay relevant and useful in wartime. Under his guidance, the agency began buying satellite imagery from the commercial sector and moved into a new homeland-security role, providing support for special events like the Super Bowl and political conventions.
"He came in at a very critical point to really establish the agency as a credible force in military intelligence and geospatial intelligence," said a former senior defense official who worked with Clapper.
The personal affinity between Hayden and Clapper may help repair relations between the CIA and the Pentagon, which were severely strained in the run-up to the Iraq war when Rumsfeld set up an intelligence unit to challenge the CIA's assessments of Iraq's suspected weapons programs.
Some have questioned how much this new intelligence team can accomplish in the Bush administration's final two years. It's not much time to make major reforms, and the Democratic Congress is likely to keep officials busy with oversight hearings and investigations into prewar intelligence.
Experience is by no means a guarantee of success, and there will be plenty of opportunities for strong personalities to clash. One retired national security official who knows McConnell said, "He is not a particularly good team player unless he is in charge."
But as the agencies recover from high-level turnover and a series of miscast leaders, many said they're taking comfort in the familiar. As a former CIA official put it, echoing the sentiments of colleagues, "This is the intelligence professionals retaking the ground."
Published in National JournalFull Article
Thursday, November 04, 2004
Colin Powell has won his campaign to reform management at the State Department. Does it matter?
On Jan. 22, 2001, Colin Powell assumed command of an army in tatters. That cold Monday morning, his first day on the job as secretary of State, the celebrated former general strode into headquarters in Washington. A crowd of employees gathered to welcome him. Powell stood in front of a plaque honoring American diplomats killed in the line of duty. And as he exchanged pleasantries, Powell said something most of the onlookers probably hadn't heard in their entire careers. "I am not coming in just to be the foreign policy adviser to the president," Powell said. "I'm coming in as the leader and manager of this department."
The department had few friends. The Congress members who controlled its budget criticized State's leaders as aloof and arrogant and held the foreign affairs budget to levels most in the department believed to be untenably low. In the past few years, diplomats had come under physical attack during the simultaneous bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in August 1998
By the time Powell arrived, morale had deteriorated. On his fourth day as secretary, he addressed an assembly of employees, many dispirited by the 11 independent reports written over the preceding three years enumerating State's weaknesses. Powell delivered a rallying cry, urging his troops into the breach. Like Shakespeare's King Henry V, the famed and charismatic Powell had come not just to buoy the soldiers for battle, but to show them what he was made of. He made them a promise: "I view it as my solemn obligation to make sure that you have all the resources you need to serve the American people," he said. "We're going to start doing things right away."
Powell wasn't planning a revolution. He believed radical reforms would take more energy than the limping department could muster. Instead, Powell launched a systematic campaign attacking the department's problems on several fronts. He sought to:
Improve relationships with important congressional staffers whose bosses control State's purse strings.
- Outfit diplomatic posts with the tools of the Information Age.
- Hire more Foreign Service officers, specialists and civil servants to fill the gaps created by retirements.
- Create new courses in management and leadership, and make such training a steppingstone to promotion for career employees.
- Shore up embassy security.
The administrative tangles of "the Building," as State's Washington headquarters is known, were so daunting that two decades of secretaries had avoided them. Not since George Shultz, who in the early 1980s paid genuine attention to management, had any secretary concerned himself or herself with nuts-and-bolts operations. Instead, each opted to play full-time the role of president's foreign policy consigliore, and highest-ranking member of the Cabinet.
Powell hammered out his plan to reverse that neglect in daily meetings with his management team. "It's the philosophy I used as a soldier," he says now, almost three years later. "You make clear what you're trying to accomplish, you make clear the mission, you go get the resources needed for that mission, you take care of the people who are entrusted to your care, because they are the ones who are going to accomplish the mission, you do everything you can to empower them to get it done."
Nearing the end of President Bush's term, Powell is, by all accounts, adored by department employees. An assessment of his first two years by the Foreign Affairs Council, a consortium of 11 organizations of career and politically appointed State employees and foreign policy experts, said Powell had fulfilled his promises to institute ground-level reforms, and summed up his term as "historic."
But does it matter? Eight months into the occupation of Iraq, and two years after the invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. foreign policy is denounced abroad. America's oldest allies and the United Nations have renounced the Bush doctrine of military preemption. The administration's Middle East road map to peace is crumbling. There's little evidence that efforts to win hearts and minds in the Middle East are bearing fruit. Iraq's reconstruction has been beset with problems.
For some time it appeared that the Pentagon had displaced the State Department in leading the rebuilding of post-war Iraq. Only recently has State begun to play a more prominent role. In early October, the White House tapped National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to oversee reconstruction efforts from Washington, signaling that the administration felt the project was veering off track. State immediately committed to double its representation in Baghdad.
Powell's leadership of the department has come under attack by a prominent member of his own party. In a July essay for Foreign Policy magazine, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called for a revolutionary overhaul of State akin to what Donald Rumsfeld is implementing at the Defense Department - the very kind of change Powell eschewed.
In "Rogue State Department," Gingrich skewered the step-by-step reform strategy Powell has been implementing, writing that it wasn't drastic enough. He questioned whether the department really was unable to withstand a top-to-bottom shakeup, and concluded, "The State Department is far too busy being ineffective to bother fixing its internal structures in order to become more effective."
Gingrich also assailed the department as a fifth column, undermining President Bush's assertive foreign policy. "In Washington today, two worldviews on U.S. foreign policy are colliding," Gingrich wrote. "One view emphasizes facts, values and consequences. The other believes in process, politeness and accommodation. . . .The State Department (as an institution) and the Foreign Service (as a culture) clearly favor" the latter view.
Gingrich accused diplomats of a "deliberate and systematic effort" to undermine President Bush's foreign policy, particularly by leaking to the news media a report that was skeptical of liberal democracy's chances in Iraq. And Gingrich blasted the department for a "failure to communicate" U.S. policies and messages abroad, fingering the department for failing to curb growing anti-Americanism.
Gingrich's critique was strongly rebuked by foreign policy experts from both parties. Nevertheless, it raised the question of what State's role should be in crafting foreign policy. Powell has chosen to fight internal battles he can win, and has racked up impressive victories. Yet, within the Bush administration, his power appears contested, if not diminished. In the face of criticism, Powell tends to emphasize technical successes: "The President has eliminated the Taliban in Afghanistan, eliminated Saddam Hussein in Baghdad," he says. But, characteristically straightforward, he acknowledges, "We still have a lot of challenges in front of us."
TAKING THE HILL
For Powell the incrementalist, building foreign policy success has meant constructing a foundation of administrative achievements. Like any campaign, Powell's couldn't begin without significant financial investment - something State historically has found difficult to win. State Department employees were notorious for their cantankerous relations with the committee members and staffers who set the department's budget.
"Shortly after I got here," Powell says, "in one of my staff meetings, I said to my assistant secretaries, 'How many of you are reluctant to go up to Capitol Hill and deal with members of Congress on a particular issue?' Quite a few hands went up. And those that didn't raise their hands had nervous looks on their faces."
A widely circulated study commissioned by the Una Chapman Cox Foundation, a Foreign Service advocacy group, surveyed 25 key congressional staffers, revealing "an enduring perception of the Foreign Service as 'arrogant' and insufficiently responsive to the legislature." The result: State couldn't "mobilize support for important policy and budgetary issues." The study was completed in October 2002, but State's bad image had persisted for years. Congressional staffers complained that State's policy experts didn't respond promptly to their requests for briefings. The experts, in turn, complained that legislative assistants wanted synopsized versions of nuanced issues that the department had spent years studying.
Powell had no patience for any of it. Early on, he told his employees: "I want to make sure that . . . when some committee calls you, you say, 'I'll be right there,' not 'I can't do it, I'm rearranging my sock drawer.'" Powell's admonition wasn't so much an order as an aspiration. He hoped that with time and familiarity with his priorities and approach, his aides would learn the value of heading to the Hill.
Powell's strategy appears to have succeeded. After years of reductions in the budget for administering foreign affairs, which fell from $5 billion in 1994 to $3.6 billion in 2000, Congress approved $5.5 billion for fiscal 2002. Lawmakers also increased the fiscal 2003 budget so State could invest more money in information technology, hiring and embassy security. The Cox report also showed that about one-third of congressional staffers interviewed were aware that Powell had made getting on their good side a management priority. "I could not have better support or relations from and with Congress," Powell asserts now. "And I think it pays off."
KEY BATTLES
Powell's victories in administrative areas might appear mundane, but he maintains they were epochal. So far, Powell's campaign has captured ground on every front:
PersonnelFrom 1994 to 1997, State hired only enough people to replace half the number it lost to retirement, resignation or death. Various reports concluded the personnel shortfalls jeopardized the department's ability to execute foreign policy. To correct this, Powell implemented the Diplomatic Readiness Initiative, which sought to add, by 2004, 1,150 employees in addition to those hired to offset attrition. In fiscal 2002, State hired 1,780 new Foreign Service and civil service employees, nearly 60 percent more than the previous year, and now has met the readiness goal.
Training To his displeasure, Powell discovered that many career officials had little to no management or leadership training, says Ambassador Katherine Peterson, the director of the Foreign Service Institute, State's training arm. Senior staff had taken only a two-week seminar that focused mainly on administrative issues. "This is ridiculous," Peterson recalls Powell saying. Employees were thrust into managerial positions with no formal preparation. Powell thought leadership courses would benefit everyone. Even Foreign Service officers who weren't managers might lead a staff at an embassy. Now, those officers must take at least six weeks of management and leadership training. Courses focus on team building, but also contain crisis simulations that teach how to respond, for example, to an airplane crash or a coup d'etat. After 2006, such courses will be a prerequisite for promotion.
Information Technology In 2001, only 2 percent of State Department computers were connected to the Internet. A 2001 report by a task force headed by former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci found that 92 percent of overseas posts had "obsolete classified networks, some of which have no classified connectivity with the rest of the U.S. government." Powell, who checks his own e-mail every day, made technology upgrades another pillar in his reform plan. By January 2003, 81 percent of all desktop computers were connected to the Internet. Today, 100 percent of the computers are connected, Powell says, and every post is connected to the department's classified information network."I want to get information out to every mission in the department instantaneously - not [in] 12 hours, 18 hours . . . instantaneously," Powell says.
Overseas Security In 1998, at the time of the Africa embassy bombings, 90 percent of U.S. embassies didn't comply with State's established building security standards. Powell secured $1.3 billion in fiscal 2002 and fiscal 2003 for security upgrades. President Bush's fiscal 2004 budget calls for another $1.5 billion. Powell also successfully resisted efforts to privatize the office that deals with embassy security and appointed a new director. By cutting construction costs and time, the Foreign Affairs Council noted in its report, the office "has increased confidence on Capital Hill that monies appropriated for embassy security will be well spent."
All these achievements are in line with Powell's overarching management philosophy: Don't make promises you can't keep. Pointing to his technology reforms, Powell says, "We proved to people that we would do what we said we would do." When employees "see that we are working hard to get them the tools they need to be a 21st century organization, they start acting like a 21st century organization, because they can. And when they see that the leadership of the department is concerned about their facilities, or . . . the way in which we improve our training systems . . . it shows in the department." The result, says Powell, is "better foreign policy."
Powell's attention to small victories borders on fanatical. In August, State won the federal interagency softball championship, he notes. Earlier, "we got recognized for having the best cafeteria facility. These are all little bitty things, and no one of them means a lot. But when you start piling them up, it generates a change of attitude within an organization and people start saying, 'We're proud to be a part of this organization, and we will now take our performance to a higher level.'"
It will take time to judge whether improved performance yields foreign policy victories. But it definitely plays an important role in Powell's effort to change the State Department's public profile and alter perceptions of U.S. policy.
PRIME TIME
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks affirmed for Powell and his lieutenants America's need to go on the offensive, to positively portray its image, particularly in the Middle East. To that end, State has funded a number of initiatives, including a television advertising campaign that showed Muslims prospering in the United States; an Arabic teen magazine; an Arabic pop radio station with news produced by the U.S. government; and the new Middle East Television Network, a 24-hour satellite channel showing news and American programs. All these initiatives fall under the broad umbrella of "public diplomacy," the attempt to influence foreign attitudes toward America and its policies.
The image campaign complements Powell's reform agenda. Before 2001, Foreign Service officers received only three weeks of training in public diplomacy. Today, 19 weeks of courses are offered through the Foreign Service Institute. Cultural affairs officers, who mount English literacy campaigns or bring U.S. artists to foreign countries, get eight weeks of intensive training in how to be public emissaries in the countries where they serve. Press officers also train for two months on how to handle foreign talk show appearances and navigate ambushes by aggressive reporters.
Powell believes that leaders represent their organizations. They should know the minds of their bosses well enough to serve as State's public face. For Powell, being a high-performance organization is intrinsically linked to being a high-profile one. "I want our ambassadors to spend more time on local television," he says. "I want all of my people to get on television, go give speeches and to be accessible to the press."
Powell is a media darling. As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he rocketed to celebrity status during the 1991 Gulf War as a fixture of televised briefings. He built his image in the public eye. Whenever Powell hosts foreign visitors in Washington, he takes them to face a gathering of reporters outside the headquarters building. "I take the visitor out so that I can get on television and so that the visitor can get on television. . . . I want [State employees] to follow the example we're trying to set." For the Foreign Service, which traditionally has been an intermediary between heads of state, that public style marks a fundamental change. And Powell says, "I want it to be changing."
But what's to be done with diplomats who don't want to become managers, much less talking heads? The Foreign Service attracts adventure-seeking globetrotters and would-be academics who want to steep in a particular region or culture. "There's no doubt there are people like that," says Grant Green, Powell's undersecretary for management. "I would hope that most would aspire to become members of the Senior Foreign Service." But, he acknowledges, not everyone will reach that level, "any more than not everybody is going to be a brigade commander or division commander in the military. . . . Whatever level they seek is fine. I don't think we discourage that."
As the Foreign Service evolves, interest in career diplomacy is growing. Enrollments for the Foreign Service exam surged after the Sept. 11 attacks. Today, the department is hiring 550 Foreign Service officers a year. In the early and mid-1990s, State hired fewer than 90 officers annually.
EXIT STRATEGY
Powell brings a personal touch, as well as a public one, to the State Department. He has become a fixture in State's everyday life. If he's in Washington, and not at the White House, Powell swears in every ambassador, as well as every graduating class of Foreign Service officers. He stops to chat with everyone from senior aides to maintenance workers.
The secretary hardly resembles his aloof predecessors. Some career ambassadors coolly note that they never met former secretary Madeline Albright, and they have trouble recalling much about her predecessor, Warren Christopher.
Powell is beloved. He draws on an "enormous depth of prestige," says one former ambassador. "He has a great personal story," says another. "He's bright, avuncular, articulate . . . someone people can look up to." It seems impossible to find anyone who will utter an unkind word about Powell. Even Gingrich, who slammed State's policies, recoils at the notion that he might be perceived as personally attacking the secretary. Through a spokesman, he declined an interview for this story for fear his critique would appear to be aimed at Powell.
Powell has rallied his troops, equipped them, improved their quarters and fought for the respect he believes they deserve. But in the end, does it matter?
"You can be a well-liked guy," says Ambassador Keith Brown, president of the Council of American Ambassadors, a group of former political appointees. "It doesn't mean a damn if you can't get anything done." Brown is one of Powell's biggest fans - he helped write the secretary's glowing two-year review. But his comments reflect the other side of Powell's story. He has excelled as the chief of State, but has he fared as well as the nation's top foreign policy official?
A debate is roiling over which organization exerts most power over foreign policy. Is it State, owing to Powell's enormous prestige? Or is it the Defense Department, where Donald Rumsfeld and his advisers won the battle to fight in Iraq, even without the United Nations' imprimatur, and have played a major role in its reconstruction? Former State officials herald Powell's last-ditch attempt to secure a U.N. resolution on invading Iraq as a diplomatic victory. But they concede diplomacy ultimately failed to swing much support for U.S. action.
Some observers who applaud the means Powell has given State employees to improve their careers point out that the general's plan may be lacking an end, a vision that defines State's role. "Powell is very popular, but what has he done" to craft a new consideration of foreign policy, asks Phillip Hughes, a Reagan-era ambassador. Employees appreciate Powell's changes, but "I'm not sure that that 'transforms' anything," Hughes says. "Where is real thinking about what we're trying to do with our diplomacy?"
Perhaps Powell doesn't believe that's his job. When he opines about U.S. foreign policy successes, he uses the pronoun "we," as if referring to a conglomeration of State, the White House, and the administration's entire foreign policy apparatus. He boasts of "the best relationship we've had with China in 30 years" and says "we now have a road map unfolding in the Middle East."
When Powell speaks of conquest, he defers to Bush. "The president has eliminated the Taliban in Afghanistan, eliminated Saddam Hussein in Baghdad." Powell's overall assessment of the department and its role is that "foreign policy is working well, and we're supporting the president." This is Powell the trooper, who says in his memoir, My American Journey (Ballantine, 1995), that he owes every commander-in-chief "a soldier's allegiance." This loyalty may explain why Powell hasn't articulated a vision for executing foreign policy: Crafting that vision is the president's job, not Powell's.
But if he seems to lack a vision, Powell at least has an exit strategy. How could he not? Having an endgame is the final tenet of the Powell doctrine of military engagement that guided the first Gulf War. According to Powell's principles, the military services must have a clear reason to fight, use overwhelming force, only attack with strong public support and define an exit. It's not hard to identify those tenets in Powell's tenure at State.
Powell had clear reason for his State Department campaign: State was crumbling from the inside. Not fixing it would have handicapped the business of diplomacy. And there was obvious support for reform. Powell didn't choose unpopular battles. Rather, he got behind what mattered most to the career employees, the people who would remain after his term ended. Powell also secured overwhelming force for change in the form of increased spending.
What's left is the exit strategy. Powell must carve in stone as many reforms as possible before his time is up. Some will easily survive. Computers will stay in the embassies. The new training requirements and promotion criteria are probably popular enough to last under a new administration. But Powell also wants to institutionalize the "new culture" he called for in his speech that fourth day in office. "When you leave, everything you've been trying to do leaves with you," he says. "So you've got to embed this in the organization.
"We're transforming the department," Powell says, "but doing it in a very careful way, because I want it to last after this set of leaders has gone on. And I don't want the person who replaces me, whenever that happens, to come in and say, 'We've got to fix all this.'"
It's up to the department's employees to carry on after Powell, to keep budgets large enough and to put the career establishment ahead of political interests. Those employees, past and present, describe the Powell era as a window of opportunity. Powell opened the window. What happens next is up to his army. If they can't press on, it will be their fault, and not Powell's.
"If all of that goes out when the secretary leaves, then we haven't learned anything," says the Foreign Policy Institute's Peterson.
Have Powell's loyalists learned? Have they absorbed the doctrine and created a new culture?
"I think so," Powell says. "If the answer is no, then I've got a problem."
Labels: Management, State Department
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