WASHINGTON — Gently admonishing President George W. Bush, the
nation’s newly retired chief intelligence analyst on Tuesday
suggested that the Iraq war was as much the failure of policymakers
as it was the flawed intelligence on which they relied.
Bush told ABC News last week his biggest regret was “the
intelligence failure in Iraq.”
“I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess,” Bush
said.
Thomas Fingar, until this week the deputy director of national
intelligence for analysis, declined to directly address the
president’s swipe. But he said: “I learned something a long time
ago in this town. There are only two possibilities: policy success
and intelligence failure.”
Fingar is in a better position than many in the intelligence
agencies to assess those possibilities. Before the Iraq invasion,
he was second in command of a small group of State Department
analysts that notably cast doubt— albeit behind closed doors — on a
key Bush administration rationale for the 2003 war.
A 2002 intelligence assessment pushed by the administration
contended that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had an active
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons program. Fingar’s office
dissented on the nuclear question.
His office “got it less wrong,” he told reporters Tuesday during
a valedictory round-table discussion.
But he acknowledged that the overall analysis of Iraq’s weapons
of mass destruction capabilities was wrong, and some of the
underlying intelligence false. In fact, an exhaustive search turned
up no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons or any evidence there
was an active program to develop it.
Part of the blame goes to time pressure, Fingar said: The Bush
administration ordered the report to be produced in less than two
weeks. Similar intelligence estimates can take months or years.
“It’s my observation that it’s very hard to dislodge a mistaken
interpretation once it gets into the head of a decisionmaker who
has used it in a speech, built it into a policy, conveyed it to
colleagues around the world,” Fingar said. “That puts to me an
awfully high premium on taking the time to get it right.”
Fingar said he does not think intelligence analysts have a
responsibility to correct politicians’ statements that veer off the
contents of secret intelligence judgments.
“I did not think that was part of my professional
responsibility,” he said. “That would imply excessive belief that
one view is right and another view is wrong.”
Instead, he said, intelligence analysts should work within the
system — point out the inaccuracy to the politician and let him
correct the record, or not.
“At some point you have to try to make the system work, holding
elected officials accountable, insisting that the oversight
committee do their jobs,” Fingar said, “not using the court of
public opinion.”
Speaking out publicly on intelligence carries with it the danger
of turning analysts into policy advocates, he said.
The 2002 Iraq WMD failure revealed critical shortcomings in
intelligence analysis which Fingar has spent the past three years
trying to fix. A major challenge was getting analysts from 16
agencies access to each others’ reports and analysis, a matter both
of incompatible computer programs and the secretive nature of the
agencies, even toward each other.
Unlike the flawed Iraq report, intelligence estimates now
prominently note when analysts disagree; there is no longer an
insistence that the reports reflect a consensus view.
“We had an awful lot of shared discontent in the way the
community worked,” Fingar said. “It proved more difficult to do it
than it was to imagine it.”
U.S. analysis has improved, he said.
“We’re right an awful high percentage of the time,” he said.