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2002 WL 2085001

Foreign Affairs
Copyright 2002 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved. COPYRIGHT 2002 Council on
Foreign Relations, Inc.

Tuesday, January 1, 2002

ISSN: 0015-7120; Volume 81; Issue 1

FIXING INTELLIGENCE.(national security and intelligence services in preventing

terrorism)
Richard K. Betts
FULL TEXT

THE LIMITS OF PREVENTION

As the dust from the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon was still settling, the chants began: The CIA was asleep at the
switch! The intelligence system is broken! Reorganize top to bottom! The
biggest intelligence system in the world, spending upward of $30 billion
a year, could not prevent a group of fanatics from carrying out
devastating terrorist attacks. Drastic change must be overdue. The new
conventional wisdom was typified by Tim Weiner, writing in The New York
Times on October 7: "What will the nation's intelligence services have
to change to fight this war? The short answer is: almost everything."

Yes and no. A lot must, can, and will be done to shore up U.S.
intelligence collection and analysis. Reforms that should have been made
long ago will now go through. New ideas will get more attention and good
ones will be adopted more readily than in normal times. There is no
shortage of proposals and initiatives to shake the system up. There is,
however, a shortage of perspective on the limitations that we can expect
from improved performance. Some of the changes will substitute new
problems for old ones. The only thing worse than business as usual would
be naive assumptions about what reform can accomplish.

Paradoxically, the news is worse than the angriest critics think,

because the intelligence community has worked much better than they
assume. Contrary to the image left by the destruction of September 11,
U.S. intelligence and associated services have generally done very well
at protecting the country. In the aftermath of a catastrophe, great
successes in thwarting previous terrorist attacks are too easily
forgotten -- successes such as the foiling of plots to bomb New York
City's Lincoln and Holland tunnels in 1993, to bring down 11 American
airliners in Asia in 1995, to mount attacks around the millennium on the
West Coast and in Jordan, and to strike U.S. forces in the Middle East
in the summer of 2001.

Copr. © West 2003 No Claim to Orig. U.S. Govt. Works