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Remarks by Frederick P. Hitz
Inspector General, Central Intelligence Agency
November 11, 1997
"CIA in the 21st Century"
As I approach the seventh anniversary of my tenure as Inspector General at the CIA and the CIA celebrates its 50th birthday, I believe it appropriate to take stock of what I have learned in my position about the state of the CIA and my views about its future.
The starting point for such an assessment is the question of what we want and expect from US intelligence at the turn of the century. I would argue that the goals of CIA and the Intelligence Community remain remarkably close to President Truman's original hopes for CIA at its creation in 1947: an all-source intelligence collection, analytical and dissemination capability capable of providing US policymakers, civilian as well as military, with timely, focused intelligence information that serves no particular policy brief or bias. "Just the facts, mam" across the board, without fear or favor. How well are we meeting this goal now?
As with most things in life, the verdict is mixed. If permitted, the Intelligence Community would have some remarkable intelligence collection and analytical successes to crow about. At the same time, there are some equally noteworthy aspects of our intelligence apparatus that need work and improvement. Since we cannot discuss and are naturally inclined to build on our successes, let me concentrate on some of the weaknesses in hopes that open discussion will further progress there.
First, let me begin with that paradigm of Washington, D.C., bureaucratic oxymorons: The US Intelligence "Community." Despite the best efforts of Presidents and Directors of Central Intelligence since the mid-1970s, a budgetarily inter-related, fully cooperating, centrally targeted, family of intelligence agencies often seems as distant a holy grail as it has been since 1947. Why is this so? Part of the answer is historical and part organizational.
The Department of Defense elements of the Intelligence Community: the NSA, NRO, DIA, and now NIMA, have always existed primarily to serve the fighting men and women of the US, through the collection, analysis and dissemination of tactical and strategic intelligence to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense and, increasingly, the theater commanders. Unless the unitary command structure under which the US military has operated for so long and so well is abandoned, this will continue to be the primary mission of the DoD elements of the Intelligence Community.
None of the recent efforts at reform have challenged this underlying principle and some, like the charter of NIMA, have tended to reinforce it. Likewise, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the Department of State (INR) primarily serves the requirements of the Secretary of State to be informed on challenges to US Foreign Policy. The National Security Division of the FBI answers ultimately to the Attorney General and the Justice Department and concentrates primarily on foreign threats to US institutions and interests domestically. This mandate has recently been extended by virtue of a new criminal provision of law to comprehend foreign efforts to compromise US trade secrets, i.e., industrial espionage. This leaves CIA to concern itself primarily with developments abroad and national intelligence as I shall describe it more fully later.
The DCI has recently been given greater authority to organize and review the budgets of Intelligence entities beyond CIA and to kibitz on the selection of their heads. Nonetheless, I would submit that the underlying power relationships and responsibilities have not been fundamentally changed. Nor should they be in my judgment.
I believe that the responsibilities of the various intelligence entities in this country are so important, so wide-ranging and diffuse, and serve so many different constituencies that they do not permit operational control at the center by an intelligence czar. I believe what is needed is the strengthening of the discrete elements of the US Intelligence Community so that each does what it is assigned to do more efficiently and effectively, with the DCI acting for the President in consultation with the Secretaries of Defense and State and the Attorney General to minimize overlap and help make rational budgetary choices. We would have built the Intelligence Community differently in 1947 if we had known then what we know now. However, we now have in my judgment an historical and precedential attachment to the intelligence agencies as they are currently configured that cannot be easily or lightly altered. In my view, therefore, we ought to spend our time making them work better and cheaper for the US policymaker and the US taxpayer.
That brings me to my second point, which is (from my parochial standpoint) what is needed to make the CIA perform its mission more effectively. Remember, I advocate remaining faithful to the original charge in 1947 for CIA: to be the President's principal intelligence adviser and to be so without policy brief or budget to defend. In my judgment, it is CIA's responsibility to inform the President and his principal policymakers on issues of transcendental national interest, free from parochial bias or budgetary consequence. How are we doing on this assignment?
Let me observe at this juncture that it has been my unpleasant task as CIA Inspector General since 1990 to chronicle those episodes--the BCCI/BNL fiascoes; the Ames betrayal; the Guatemala tragedy; and the Paris Compromise where CIA performed less satisfactorily in a variety of ways than the President and the American people have a right to expect from the nation's, and indeed the world's, premier intelligence service. CIA acknowledges this state of affairs and for the past several years, under DCIs Gates, Woolsey and Deutch has been engaged in major efforts to come to grips with the professional and legal shortcomings made manifest in these celebrated affairs. [BCCI and BNL showed us the importance of improving our relations with law enforcement; Ames, the criticality of counter-intelligence and high personnel standards; Guatemala, the importance of verifying information and sources and weighing the value of intelligence acquired in a foreign country against involvement with elements whose behavior is antithetical to American cultural beliefs and standards; and finally, Paris, the essentiality of maintaining the highest professional standards of tradecraft and alertness to the efforts of other countries to uncover the operations of our service. All of these episodes also emphasized the need for heightened attention to the rules under which CIA is required to keep our legislative branch overseers, the Congressional intelligence committees, fully, currently and accurately informed of our activities. We are making some progress institutionally in learning and benefiting from all of these lessons.]
As important as improving our performance in these areas of shortfall is for CIA's future, however, this is not the chief answer to the question of how to make CIA more effective as we enter the 21st Century. Through my experience as IG, I have identified five areas where a concerted effort towards improvement will bring big dividends in CIA's performance. First, identify and settle on 5 or 6 target areas around which to organize CIA's mission. The current Administration made a start toward this with Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 35 in 1995. Critically important hard target countries and issues have been identified and CIA is being restructured to pursue them as a top priority. But further refinement is necessary. For example, we have to face up to the practical problems confronting us in assisting law enforcement because we develop sources for the long term who cannot easily be given up to make a prosecution. In addition, some type of assistance may require changes in current law.
Further, CIA will continue to assist in the collection and analysis of economic intelligence, but will not engage in industrial espionage as that is commonly defined to include passing purloined commercial information to selected US companies. However, PDD 35 does not answer all our questions regarding CIA's current and future mission. To build a collection program solely around North Korean, Libyan or Iraqi targets is an impractical and incomplete mission in many areas of the world. We must recognize that there is still considerable interest in knowing what is going on behind the scenes in some countries where the United States enjoys correct diplomatic relations such as China or South Korea or where, for humanitarian reasons if not for national security reasons, the US Government may be called upon to intervene such as Somalia or Bosnia or the Eastern Congo. How well prepared are we to deal with these situations? If we don't have collectors on the ground in these problem areas, can we quickly augment our presence to meet the policymakers' needs? This is a problem we must be committed to solve. It has not been an easy adjustment from Cold War targets for CIA but we are adapting positively.
Second, CIA needs stability and consistency in its leadership. Nobody intended it this way but we are now serving our fifth DCI in five years. This is too much change at the top. Although I would not have testified this way when I was appointed to my current position as IG by President Bush in 1990, I am now in favor of a term of years for the DCI , for example six or seven, like the Director of the FBI or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Nonetheless, our new Director, George Tenet, appears likely to remain in his post for the remaining three years of the Clinton Administration and perhaps longer. He recognizes the need for stability and seems anxious to provide it.
Seldom mentioned at the same time as the rapid turnover of DCIs, however, is the turnover in leadership and staff of our principal legislative oversight committees, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). In addition to the change brought about by the shift from Democratic to Republican control in 1994 in both houses, there have been four different chairmen of both the SSCI and HPSCI since 1990 with substantial changes in the committee staffs which support them. This has necessarily led to shifts in emphasis in legislative oversight of CIA and the Intelligence Community and differences in budgetary and institutional support. CIA could use some stability and continuity in its legislative branch oversight.
Thirdly, and related to the first two, we must upgrade the quality of CIA's staff officers. Currently, there are many pockets of exceptional ability and performance. But there are inconsistencies and gaps in our coverage and performance that we must concentrate on trying to improve.
In response to the end of the Cold War, CIA embarked on a downsizing program in 1990 which has reduced our on-board strength by 23 percent since that time. addition, many able officers whose work helped win the Cold War, having emerged victorious, elected to retire. As a consequence CIA is seriously understrength in a number of key areas , affecting collection, technology and analysis. We have been trying to revitalize our staff recruitment machinery which was unfortunately permitted to atrophy during the early period of downsizing and to make up our shortfall temporarily by engaging annuitants on contract. However, we need to greatly revitalize and refocus our staff recruitment efforts to compete in a full employment economy where public service is less appealing and the immediate threat to US security is less obvious.
CIA had its origins in its ties to the great universities of our country which seconded professors to help analyze intelligence information in World War II and produced talented graduates to fill its ranks. With today's explosion of technology and open source intelligence information, more than ever we must be reaching out to academia and to think tanks to exchange information and ideas on how to interpret the tens of millions of bits of information we must process every day. Likewise, on the collection side, we should be working closely with US businesses and professionals who are working all over the world with access to intelligence information of vital interest to the United States Government. We need to pursue these opportunities with savvy, highly trained, language-competent intelligence officers who develop expertise in the subject and geographical areas of importance to US intelligence and who are in it for the long haul. CIA's sense of mission was gigantic during the Cold War. We need to recapture that elan with greater competence as we pursue the intelligence targets of the 2lst Century.
Fourth, we need to know who we are. We are the President's principal intelligence adviser, not the purveyor of nicely packaged, convenient bits of information that could otherwise be collected from an avalanche of publicly available, open sources. CIA is not the Central Information Agency that exists to supplant the routine information gathering functions of other departments and agencies. While we need to take account of open source information that concerns our objectives and products, our value-added must continue to stem from the uniqueness of our sources and the comprehensiveness and insight of our analysis. That's where we have our edge. And we must work to improve on it.
Currently, we are spread too thin, trying to meet requests for intelligence information from too many quarters to satisfy what are often marginal needs. After all, the official requesters for our products do not pay anything for the service, and don't sacrifice anything in their budgets to obtain it. As a can-do, mission-driven Agency, we are prone to respond positively to such marginal requests without reflecting on whether this is an appropriate claim on our diminished resources. I would prefer for our leaders to do the unprecedented and just say no. Then we could concentrate on those core areas of our responsibility where our input is unique.
Finally, the collection, analysis and dissemination of quality intelligence is a demanding, difficult and often risky business. It requires the full and articulated support of the President and his top policymakers and the confidence and recognition of the US public. An obvious and perhaps unavoidable side effect of recent revelations about CIA failures and mistakes has been substantial erosion in public support for the work of US intelligence agencies. I have been one of the most outspoken advocates within CIA that we need to learn from our mistakes and move on. However, we must not let these recent travails become a metaphor for CIA. The US needs a first rate intelligence agency operating with a high degree of professional competence and with solid morale or we will not meet the challenges of the 21st Century. Public support for CIA and its mission has never been more needed.
Thank you for your attention and I am happy to take your questions.