For anyone who reads either the report of the "National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States" (the 9/11 Commission report) or the report of "The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction" (the WMD Commission report), this book is required reading. It provides a much-needed balance to the mistaken impression of an intelligence failure that was created in the two commission reports. Intelligence did fail, in both instances. But the intelligence failures were preceded by a series of policy failures. And the flawed Iraqi WMD result, as the book points out, was primarily due to improper pressures from the Executive Branch and intelligence leadership's inability to counteract those. Pillar's book details how US intelligence became the scapegoat for bad decisions made by US leadership based on flawed models of the world situation.
Professor Pillar's book is perhaps the best assessment to date of a continuing problem that US intelligence must deal with, though it is not the only one of merit. Other writers with a good understanding of intelligence have reached similar conclusions. For example, Professor Stephen Marrin, of the University of Brunel, UK, noted that
"Contrary to conventional wisdom, the description of 9/11 as an intelligence failure may be misplaced. Intelligence agencies provided decisionmakers with strategic warning of the coming threat from al Qaeda, but strategic warning did not lead to an effective strategic response. Instead, policymakers relied on intelligence agencies to "get lucky" at the tactical level (detection and disruption). This approach worked until, inevitably, it didn't.
Much emphasis has been placed on this tactical `failure to connect the dots'.... But is this tactical failure the most important intelligence-related lesson that can be derived from the 9/11 attacks? In my opinion, the answer is `no.' More important are the strategic policy failures that preceded the tactical intelligence failures.
Why does this matter? If this analysis is correct, it implies that much of the effort devoted to fixing or reforming intelligence capabilities after 9/11 would not prevent its recurrence. If we want to prevent the next strategic surprise, we have to stop focusing on the tactical intelligence failures that occurred and instead raise our sights to understand why not enough was done about the terrorist threat well before the events of 9/11 took place." (Stephen Marrin. "The 9/11 Terrorist Attacks: A Failure of Policy Not Strategic Intelligence Analysis. Intelligence and National Security. (2011) 26:2-3, 182-202)
Pillar's book also deals extensively with intelligence reform that has taken place since 2001, especially the changes embodied in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. His conclusions are not encouraging: Reform has been a step backward. It has added to the bureaucracy without reducing the risk of failures.
We want our intelligence analysts to "tell it like it is," to produce the best possible intelligence, uncolored by pressures to produce a specific outcome. Unfortunately, such pressures do exist. They can come from the outside or inside of the analyst's organization, and they usually are very subtle. This book details how those pressures have worked to produce a number of "intelligence failures" over history - Vietnam being the most egregious of many prior to the Iraqi WMD mis-call. The book's conclusion is that US intelligence is heavily influenced by policymaker preferences and will continue to be so. Pillar's book should be read not only by those in the intelligence community, but also by policymakers and decision-makers who do not wish to repeat recent history.
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