Customer Reviews

Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

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Undoubtedly the most interesting portion of this very interesting book, is the CIA sponsored post-mortem report on why the Iranian Revolution caught CIA by surprise. Remarkably, this report is presented in full with very few redactions and includes the critiques of the report by senior CIA officials. As such it makes for fascinating reading.
The brief given to Jervis (then a part time CIA consultant) and an unnamed CIA officer who was to assist in this work was to concentrate on the specific issue of the analytic tradecraft employed by CIA Iranian analysts prior to the revolution. On the whole Jervis and his shadowy assistant produced what appears to be a very fair report. This report concluded that given the information available to them, the two CIA political analysts assigned to Iran did a pretty credible job. One of these analysts was actually an Iranian target expert and Farsi linguist.
Yet it is clear that these analysts took a very narrow view of their specialty and failed to place political events in the context of social and economic changes then effecting Iran. They also failed to make use of open source information on Iran or examine the strong Shia religious influences affecting Iran. As Jervis noted in his report what was then CIA's office of political analysis failed to communicate with its office of economic analysis. Further the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Iran failed to communicate with any of the analysts working Iran or to provide any guidance to them. Although his brief specifically did not include collection issues, Jervis also noted that the U.S. Embassy staff in Tehran (including CIA officers) included no Farsi speakers and did not have significant contacts outside of the Iranian Government.
The CIA response to this report is quite illuminating if not surprising. They ignored his comments about lack of internal communication between the political and economic analyst, between CIA analysts and State INR analysts, and between the NIO and working analysts. They also ignored his comment about the cultural isolation of CIA officers in Tehran. They did however make a great deal of his general exoneration of CIA analysts on the narrow grounds that the information they were using was quite limited. And of course there was a good deal of bureaucratic posturing to demonstrate that no one at CIA could be blamed for this failure.
The second post-mortem that Jervis provides in this book that he did on his own dime, is a review of the notorious National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that argued that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had an active program for building Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). In this effort Jervis again makes a successful effort to present a fair and balanced account of how CIA produced such a completely incorrect NIE. In the course of doing so he provides very good discussions of the sensitive issue of political influence on intelligence production and conversely of the role of intelligence in policy formulation.
This is a good book for intelligence aficionados and for anyone trying to understand how the U.S. intelligence system actually works.

Why does intelligence fail? Is there anything we can do to address failure? Those are key questions addressed by political scientist Robert Jervis. His methodology is appropriate: he uses two case studies to examine intelligence failure and how one might diagnose failure and improve matters to reduce the odds of major failure in the future.

The two case studies are the Iranian Revolution and the fall of the Shah and the inaccurate intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the run up to the Iraq War and the deposing of Saddam Hussein. The first of the case studies is based on Jervis' own report to the CIA after the failure of intelligence in the Iran event. Here, the Shah of Iran was overthrown and the United States was caught unaware. Intelligence breakdowns of one sort or another were a part of this (from descriptive rather than analytic intelligence, pre-existing beliefs about what was going on, and the like). While Jervis notes some means of addressing problems, he notes that it would not be certain that--even then--the rapid fall of the Shah would have been clearly predicted.

The second case study is the failure of intelligence regarding WMD in Iraq. The book examines the nature of the failure and then tries to explain that failure. Among factors leading to failure--confirmation bias (seeking information to demonstrate that there were WMD), individual analysts'/operatives' failures (e.g., trusting Curveball, a source of information on Iraq who was, as it turns out, not a reliable source).

How to address intelligence failure? Jervis is critical of the "reforms" initiated within the intelligence community. Among these: postmortems (discussion of intelligence efforts after an event, to learn what went right and went wrong and try to draw lessons for future intelligence operations), peer review of intelligence reports, and so on.

Overall, an interesting--if somewhat dry--account of how one might improve intelligence. Also, there are valuable suggestions about simple solutions to a complex problem. The book does provoke some reflection, which is all to the good.

In 2010's "Why Intelligence Fails", author Robert Jervis offers some clear-eyed, rigorous analysis of two of the US Intelligence Community's more infamous alleged failures. Jervis is an academic by trade, but not an accidential tourist in the Intelligence Community, having served as an outside consultant.

The book has four parts. In an extended introduction, Jervis discusses his own background, including potential biases, and his personal interactions with the US Intelligence Community.

The second part is Jervis's official postmortem on the failure to predict the fall of the Shah in Iran in 1978, written for the CIA and only recently declassified. The third part is Jervis' review of the 2003 Iraq WMD controversy.

In the Iran and Iraq case studies, Jervis supplies valuable context on the respective analyses and finds that the analysts, based on the information available to them, came up with plausible and reasonable assessments, that happened to be wrong. Further, although he identifies both procedural and factual errors, he is skeptical that changes would have produced significantly better results, due in part to the nature of the respective targets.

The final portion of the book is a broad discussion of the interaction between the intelligence community and policy makers, focusing on why that interaction is so hard to get right, and why periodic reorganizations of the intelligence community fail to fix the problems.

"Why Intelligence Fails" can make for dry reading. However, Jervis' analysis is an antidote to an often incorrect public general consensus. This book, especially the last chapter, is very highly recommended to intelligence professionals, and the general reader looking for a reasonably apolitical perspective.

Robert Jervis has presented a book based in large part on a declassified report he did for the CIA concerning the failure to predict the Shah of Iran's fall. His style is concise and exacting. He also analyzes one of the most spectacular intelligence failures concerning Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. He speaks of lack of inter agency cooperation but what is glaringly absent from his book is almost any mention of the National Security Agency. As he writes of analysis and facts being obtained I kept searching for any mention of what we now know NSA had, and was not able to analyze in time or of this example of the problem of lack of interagency cooperation. Also lacking is any mention of the work and intelligence updates given by Britain's GCHQ. These were two major players in the intelligence gathering and even with what we now know as a huge lack of sharing of information, not to include this in this examination was beyond my comprehension. Yes, the main input is the CIA report regarding its' failure to predict or correctly maintain and stand by it's intelligence gatherings, but it would seem that this is a huge lapse in the presentation of the results in this intelligence break down.
I also constantly am amazed in the CIA's and other power brokers in the government community's complete obliviousness to the coming revolution in Iran. No one, including Jervis ever mentions the plastering of seemingly every available wall space and telephone pole in the Washington DC area before the Iranian revolution; by dissatisfied Iranians. It would have seemed somebody might have noticed there might be some growing revolutionary sprit? Didn't they look around on their morning commute to Langley?
In total for what there is contained in this study, is good and worthy of note information; it just seems as if this book too is lacking in its' total scrutiny.

An excellent composition of non-fiction information. It presents very good details about the foreign policy and current information. This book is a great read for the layman and the global security reader.

Author of THE SHEQEL