Under Analysis

General Michael Hayden, the president's nominee to head the CIA, is in for a grilling this week. But the expected flaying doesn't have anything to do with the CIA. Instead, the Senate is eager to use his confirmation hearings to investigate the National Security Agency's controversial warrantless wiretapping program and its creation of a database for tens of millions of domestic phone calls--both programs that Hayden approved when he headed the secretive spy outfit. Already, several Republicans have suggested that Hayden isn't the right man to lead a CIA in crisis.But, if Hayden's Capitol overseers are wary, his troops-to-be are ecstatic. Over his 19-month tenure, Hayden's much-loathed predecessor, Porter Goss, turned the agency from a wilderness of mirrors into a vale of tears, firing longtime operatives for insufficient political fealty to President Bush and unapproved chats with reporters. The reaction to Goss's departure--and presumably that of his lackeys, whom longtime CIA officials derisively termed "the Gosslings"--has been nothing less than gleeful. "Thank God," says Buzzy Krongard, the CIA's former number-three man, who quit in 2004 over Goss's political strong-arming. "He set the agency way, way back. His legacy is certainly not one he should be proud of. Porter was very ill-served by his staff." By contrast, Hayden's nomination--and the selection as his deputy of Steve Kappes, a beloved case officer whom Goss forced out--has signaled that the CIA is set for a long-overdue revival. After all, Hayden currently serves as the right-hand man to John Negroponte, the first-ever director of national intelligence. Putting Hayden in charge of Langley, the thinking goes, is a vote of confidence in the CIA from the new intelligence czar--and an overdue olive branch from a White House that has used the agency as a scapegoat for its foreign misadventures. "I am very strongly a fan of both Mike Hayden and Steve Kappes," gushes John Brennan, a longtime CIA official who, until last year, headed the National Counterterrorism Center. "I've been critical of some of the administration's actions in the intelligence arena previously, but this shows much better thought and planning." In backing Hayden, Negroponte's primary goal is to revitalize the agency's much-derided human intelligence, or "humint," capability--the classic spycraft of infiltrating shadowy terrorist cells, stealing secrets, and recruiting spies. According to Negroponte, "the CIA must remain the intelligence community's premier human intelligence agency." That's a good thing, but CIA veterans might want to hold their applause. Negroponte's enthusiasm for espionage is not matched by his enthusiasm for the CIA's other mission: analyzing the meaning of the information it collects. Indeed, Negroponte has spent his 13 months as director filching analysts from the CIA for his own office. Worse, he's changed the agency's focus to short-term analysis at the expense of peering over the horizon to forecast future threats. Of course, after Iraq, there has been little dispute that the agency's crystal ball needs a vigorous polishing, but Negroponte has been doing more harm than good. And Hayden's nomination shows that he has no intention of stopping. Since September 11, a procession of high-profile commissions impaneled to scrutinize the CIA emphasized that the agency needs to improve its spying capabilities. But, while no one disagrees that better human intelligence is essential to, say, averting the next train bombing, such information rarely illuminates the broader context of the threats the U.S. faces--where the next jihadist sanctuary will emerge, for example. That's a job for analysis: taking the available data and explaining its implications. At its best, CIA analysis reveals truths concealed in plain sight, as with a famous piece of ignored analysis from August 6, 2001, titled, "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S." Of course, CIA analysis has hardly been at its best recently, as when it concluded that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. But, rather than strengthening the agency's weakened analytic limb, Negroponte seems intent on amputating it. An "emerging scenario," according to Steven Aftergood, an intelligence expert at the Federation of American Scientists, is "the dismemberment of the CIA and its reduction to the humint function." Over the last several months, Negroponte has steadily exerted more and more control over analysis. Among his first acts as director of national intelligence was to make himself, and not Goss, responsible for Bush's daily intelligence briefing, which is now compiled by Negroponte's personal analyst, Thomas Fingar, a State Department veteran. Then, Negroponte took the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the intelligence community's long-range think tank, out of Langley and incorporated it into his own office. Perhaps most significantly, he has been appropriating CIA analysts for his own use. According to Time, about 90 analysts have slowly migrated from the CIA to Negroponte's office, and even more have gone into the new community-wide centers for high-priority subjects like terrorism and weapons proliferation. This shift is motivated in part by simple institutional interest. Negroponte is responsible for briefing the president, but he started his job with few analysts reporting directly to him. Negroponte, after all, may be the head of the intelligence community, but he doesn't actually run any of its 16 agencies. (By contrast, the old director of central intelligence, or DCI, was also head of the CIA.) Mark Lowenthal, a senior CIA analyst until last year, explains the resulting dynamic this way: "[Former Deputy DCI] John McLaughlin put it best when he said, `Do you know why the DCI relies so heavily on the CIA? It's the only agency that says, "Yes, sir" when he asks them to do something. Everybody else says, "I'll get back to you."' So, now, Negroponte is in that situation." The appropriation of analysts may seem like mundane bureaucratic reshuffling. But Negroponte isn't just moving analysts from one office to another. He's also changing how they work. Analysis, say veterans, is becoming the study of the day's events rather than of the broader trend--the trees instead of the forest. "Their time horizons are very short," says Greg Treverton, a former NIC vice-chairman now at the Rand Corporation. "[Y]ou ask them, `What about these longer-term questions, like how Al Qaeda is morphing?' They say, `That's a great question. I wish we could do something on it, but we just don't have time. '" The CIA, apparently with Negroponte's approval, even eliminated the agency's premier center for long-range forecasting, the Strategic Assessments Group. While CIA spokesman Tom Crispell says there has been "no analytic capability lost," Robert Hutchings, the NIC chairman from 2003 to 2005, calls it "a retrograde step," noting that the group "did some of the most imaginative and strategic thinking in all of government." Perhaps the biggest change has come to the NIC itself. Before coming under Negroponte's wing, the NIC was responsible for comprehensive analysis that drew on data from across the intelligence community, either in the form of the (supposedly) authoritative National Intelligence Estimates or reports like 2004's "Mapping the Global Future," which dealt with high-altitude questions like the effect of increasing religiosity on the territorial and political ambitions of Muslim states. Now, the NIC is becoming Negroponte's analytical shop, lending its focus to what the director needs to know in preparation for his next Bush briefing or National Security Council meeting. "This has become almost a total preoccupation for the NIC," says Hutchings. "What this will mean under any configuration is that the NIC is no longer as able to do long-range analysis." And, for Hutchings, the correlation between short-term analysis and the recent U.S. strategic blunders is unmistakable. "This administration has really undermined strategic analysis and strategic policy-making," he says. "You look at the course of our involvement in Iraq. It has just been adlibbing from almost the time main combat stopped." Nor is that happening by accident, he continues: "The administration has allowed strategic analytic capacity to erode because it doesn't want strategic analysis. It wants isolated facts and narrow analysis that it can draw upon to support its preferred policies." There's not a soul in Washington who would disagree with the proposition that the U.S. needs better spying. (Treverton quips, "That and the tooth fairy get you a quarter.") But analysts are often seen as subordinate partners in the intelligence world--or, in the Bush era, disloyal ones. And, as laudatory as Hayden and Kappes's focus on humint may be, it also risks exacerbating the intelligence community's analytical decline. Says Lowenthal, "You can argue about whether or not they get it right all the time, which is a stupid argument- -they don't, nobody does. But [CIA analysis] is the main analytical strength of the intelligence community. So you can't eviscerate it." For that reason, he's skeptical that Hayden or Kappes will actually further diminish the role of the agency's analysts. But not everyone is as convinced. "If there's a vision," says Treverton, "it seems like the vision for the CIA at play now is like the conception of the [CIA's] Counterterrorist Center: primarily dominated by operators," with analysts helping simply to pick their targets. And, by all accounts, Hayden has been Negroponte's key partner in that vision. "Negroponte apparently has confidence in him," says longtime defense wonk John Pike, "and must regard him as an effective manager who can be trusted to do the right thing without being watched all the time." The irony--and possibly the tragedy--is that all these moves were ostensibly designed to improve analysis. After both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the RobbSilberman Commission blasted the CIA for "groupthink" that led to a disastrously wrong picture of Iraq's WMD capabilities, Negroponte said his shake-up of the CIA would make the country less vulnerable to a deadly surprise. And, clearly, the agency needed to do something differently to avoid further catastrophic errors. But grinding analysis to the smallest bore makes it more, not less, likely to miss the next threat. Hayden's hearing will be dominated by the controversy over his warrantless surveillance at the NSA. His vision of analysis at Langley will surely be an afterthought at most. As happy as analysts have been to see Goss go, they may end up finding what comes after him is worse. Maybe they should have seen that coming, too.

By spencer ackerman