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US Intelligence and Weapons of Mass Destruction
May/June 2005
Yale University President Rick Levin ’74PhD was interviewed by Kathrin Day Lassila ’81
In 2004, U.S. president George W. Bush '68 named Yale president Richard Levin ’74PhD to the commission investigating U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. The commission’s report, released in late March, harshly criticized the intelligence community and recommended numerous changes.
Y: First, how did a federal commission produce a report with such clear prose?
L: I am going to take great delight in answering this question. Experts from the intelligence community wrote the first drafts of each chapter. They knew the substance. But from that point on, our seven-person writing team included five Yalies: two Yale College 2004 graduates, Kate Heinzelman and Ted Wittenstein; and three Yale Law School graduates, Brett Gerry, Thomas Lehrman, and Phil Kunsberg. Of course, I did a little editing, too.
Y: Much of the report is on management, which you’re known for at Yale. Did your Yale experience help?
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When I was appointed, some questioned my expertise for the assignment. I questioned it myself.
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L: When I was appointed, some questioned my expertise for the assignment. I questioned it myself. But the White House wanted a few people with fresh perspectives. Then, when the commission turned to making recommendations for changing the management of the intelligence community, I recognized that a university president is well suited to look at this question. There are 15 different entities responsible for intelligence. Each has a proud organizational culture. The cultures are distinct. The leadership is distinct. Generously put, they are loosely governed and barely coordinated.
What better analogy to a university? Universities are full of distinct organizational entities with their own cultures, more or less loosely managed from above. I have given a lot of thought to mechanisms that make coordination more effective, bring people together, and allow information to flow across boundaries.
Y: Can you give an example?
L: The report recommends the use of “mission managers.” An analogy would be the Office of International Affairs. We set up this office not to supervise, but to coordinate and share information among all of the international projects going on at Yale, and to identify and support those of greatest strategic importance. In the intelligence community, we might envision a dozen or so mission managers covering key countries and a few topics, such as biological weapons or nuclear proliferation. The mission manager for Iraq would pull together those responsible for Iraq from the different agencies and ask, “Just what do we know about the Iraqis, and what don’t we know? And who would be best deployed to fill the gaps?” Then, the actual operational control of securing, let’s say, human intelligence about Iraq might be assigned to the CIA, and the actual instructions as to who does what would be given by the CIA—just as a dean or program director implements a program, not the central administration coordinator.
Y: Did this experience give you ideas to try at Yale?
L: There were a few insights, but they are pretty obvious. The knowledge base in this country about Islamic cultures and politics is deficient. So there is a role for universities to play in building research programs in contemporary Islamic cultures.
Y: What about the area of greatest controversy—the commission’s decision not to expand its mission and look at the use of information by policy makers?
L: Some still believe that the administration either, one, exaggerated the evidence they were given; or, two, pressured the intelligence community to produce the answers they wanted. All this misses the point that the intelligence community was absolutely convinced that Saddam Hussein had restarted a nuclear program, had a biological weapons program in place, and had a chemical weapons capacity. Momentum for this conclusion built all the way through the Clinton administration; it didn’t start with Bush’s election.
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Should the president—given that information—have gone to war?
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The picture was reinforced by a stream of daily briefings for the president that were even more unqualified. Given all that, what is left to study about the use of intelligence? The only thing left is: should the president—given that information—have gone to war? Well, that is a political judgment. Our commission would have probably split on that question and it would not have been a very constructive contribution to public dialogue. Now, all that said, we did offer a strong suggestion to policy makers that they should be more skeptical about the intelligence they receive.
Y: The report says, “No important intelligence assessment should be accepted without sharp questioning.” To some extent, that is a management recommendation for the administration. The administration could use that recommendation as a standard for evaluating its past response to intelligence.
L: Sure, that is true. The complication is this: asking questions could be interpreted as an attempt to get a different answer. That trajectory clearly has to be avoided. It’s one thing to ask, “What’s the basis for that conclusion?” But you don’t want to be sending the signal “I want you to find evidence that points to the opposite conclusion.” It was somewhat reassuring that, when we met with President Bush, he said something to the effect of: “I know you are concerned that the written daily briefings I receive are superficial. But I think of them just as starting points for conversation.” Which suggests that he recognized that sometimes you have to push underneath what’s indicated in the briefing.
Y: What about the administration’s strong statements to the media that they believed Saddam Hussein had the weapons? Can public expressions by higher-ups influence the process at the lower levels—whether in government or at other institutions?
L: In principle, that is true. But two pieces of evidence suggest strongly that the intelligence community was not trying to give the president what he wanted, but rather that they gave the president what the intelligence analysts truly believed. First, we talked to virtually every senior analyst involved in Iraq. To a person, they said they did not feel political pressure.
Second, an even stronger piece of evidence is this: there were public statements floating around about links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. If one suspects there was an environment encouraging a positive association between WMD and Saddam Hussein, surely the same kind of environment would have encouraged finding a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam. However, the intelligence community was reporting, uniformly, that there was no link. So, clearly, they were not trying to manufacture intelligence to suit the supposed beliefs of the policy makers. We didn’t see any evidence of people consciously distorting their interpretations of the evidence.
Y: What about unconscious distortion?
L: That can happen. But we didn’t see any evidence that intelligence analysts were motivated to give the politicians what they wanted. In some cases there may have been pressure within the intelligence community to conform to the majority view. But the urge was not so much to buckle to high-level political pressure, but to the group dynamics when everybody else sitting around the table seems so convinced. Also, this kind of thinking went on all through the '90s. It didn’t start when the administration changed.
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Why would Saddam want people to think he had these weapons if he didn’t?
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Yet it turned out that almost every piece of evidence about WMDs was unsound and false. We thought the reason the community was so easily swayed to accept weak evidence wasn’t pressure—but rather past history, and intuition based on that history. Saddam had more weapons in 1991 than we had expected. And then throughout the decade he kept evading the UN inspectors—playing a game of looking guilty all the time. Those two pieces had all the analysts thinking, “He must have something.”
Y: That failure to understand him goes to your point about the deficient knowledge base.
L: That’s true. Why would Saddam want people to think he had these weapons if he didn’t? It’s a very interesting question. Maybe he wanted to convince his own generals, who might be prone to rebellion, that he still had military strength. We can only conjecture. Had we understood the internal culture and politics better, we might have had better ability to interpret his behavior.
Y: What about the intelligence source called Curveball, who the operatives suspected was a fabricator?
L: That was our most dramatic factual finding. The executive assistant to John McLaughlin, deputy director of the CIA, sat in on a meeting in December 2002 and heard a full account of new doubts about the reliability of the source code-named Curveball. He sided with the analysts who argued Curveball was credible. Then, either he did or he didn’t tell McLaughlin about the meeting. McLaughlin denies being told.
But the most egregious cause for concern was a cable sent on January 27, 2003, from the CIA operatives on the ground back to headquarters, saying, in effect, “It would not be a good idea to rely on this evidence for something important.” Why didn’t that make its way up the chain? This came up late in the commission’s fact-finding, and we were unable to ascertain exactly who might have seen that cable. McLaughlin and [CIA director George] Tenet basically denied having been informed. But others are testifying, at least in the case of McLaughlin, that he was informed.
Y: Yet the information from Curveball ended up in the speech by Colin Powell before the UN in February.
L: All this was taking place at a time when Powell was scrupulously questioning every bit of evidence in the early drafts of his speech. He did not want to get up in front of the world and say anything inaccurate. Everybody knew, McLaughlin and Tenet knew, that Powell was trying to purge anything unsubstantiated. Clearly, this episode needs further investigation.
Y: It seems that Powell was doing “sharp questioning,” but it didn’t work.
L: It did work, in part. Entire subject areas were eliminated from the early drafts of Powell’s speech. The apparent suppression of evidence about the reliability of Curveball was an anomaly—a serious anomaly.
Y: What do you do at Yale to encourage questioning? What’s an effective way of breaking down groupthink?
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I think I’m known as a person who welcomes differences of opinion and fresh ideas.
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L: I think I’m known as a person who welcomes differences of opinion and fresh ideas. I just keep asking questions—forcing people to reexamine their assumptions regularly. I do that all the time with officers and deans and administrators. A key to good management is to approach questions the way a student or scholar should: with open-minded curiosity. Our officer meetings are filled with vigorous debate.
Y: Do you encourage that attitude in others?
L: Yes, so that it’s culturally accepted. We want to get the best answers, so we encourage people throughout the organization to ask, “Are we doing it the right way, or should we do it a different way?” You have to empower people to think for themselves, so that it’s permissible to say, “We could be doing this better, and here’s how.” People need to know that they don’t lose points for rocking the boat in this way.
Y: What do you believe is the commission’s major contribution to history?
L: We make some incremental contributions to unraveling the history of the Iraq failure, and we have a fuller diagnosis of the reasons for it. But I think that the creation of a new blueprint for the management of the intelligence community is our biggest contribution.  |
