Kamarck Wants Better Intelligence

Despite hundreds of recommendations to improve the United States’ intelligence capacity after
the fall of the Soviet Union and before September 11, very few were ever implemented, writes Elaine Kamarck in her new report, “Transforming the Intelligence Community: Improving the Collection and Management of Information.”

In fact, she writes, “Reform in the intelligence community received more lip service than action.”

This was true even after September 11 when “intense bureaucratic skirmishes designed to prevent change” made reform efforts slow, at best. “In the first two years after the greatest American intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, no one was fired and very little has changed,” said Kamarck, who for the past two years has been working with the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Department of State on an intelligence project. Her recommendations for making change include the following:

1 The intelligence community should create a national Intelligence University, similar to the military war colleges, to provide continuous education and research to the American intelligence community.

2 The intelligence community should focus the CIA on the collection of secrets and sense making, and create a closer working relationship between collectors and analysts of intelligence as a means of collecting better and more meaningful secrets.

3 The intelligence community should have freer access to information and embed itself in a series of internal government networks. It should standardize security clearances and classification processes within the federal government, and all IT systems should have multi-agency compatibility.

4 The intelligence community should embed itself in a series of external networks including local police, other national governments, and academic and business circles. This network can be created and managed by the NIC (the National Intelligence Council), which has the advantage of being beholden to no other large bureaucracy or by another entity within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

5 The intelligence community should create a purely open source intelligence capacity that has no connection to secret organizations and allow the creation of a purely open source product that is seen by the same policy makers who see the secret products.

6 The intelligence community should experiment with both strategic rotation of employees and with matrix management systems.

7 The intelligence community should institutionalize systematic review of intelligence failures and share widely the knowledge gained.

8 The intelligence community should develop ways of providing intelligence to policymakers in real time.

To get a copy of the full report, go to www.businessofgovernment.org