TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/073090/0730107.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 4KB | 79 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 20

THE POLITICAL INTEREST

Prescription for Intelligence


By Michael Kramer


    "No Halcion for me," said George Bush last week, referring
to the widely used sleeping pill. When the President has
trouble nodding off, he reaches for a book -- or for a CIA
paper: "They have marvelous studies of things all around the
world."

    Trouble is that too much of the CIA's product is fiction.
Several days before Bush disclosed his bedtime habits, New York
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan delivered a devastating
critique of the agency's forecasting abilities. "For 40 years,"
said Moynihan, the CIA "hugely overestimated both the size of
the Soviet economy and its rate of growth. This in turn has
persistently distorted our estimates of the Soviet threat,
notably in the 1980s when we turned ourselves into a debtor
nation to pay for the arms to counter the threat of a nation
whose home front, unbeknown to us, was collapsing." Overall,
adds Moynihan, the CIA's misanalysis represents "the most
massive intelligence failure of the cold war era."

    While no one would expect the President to agree publicly
with Moynihan, one would expect him to try to fix things. Which
is why the newly constituted President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board merits attention.

    The six-member PFIAB will be led by John Tower, a former
Senate Armed Services Committee chairman. "But Tower is one of
the boss's loyalty appointments," says a Bush aide. "After
John's drinking problem cost him the Defense portfolio, the
President felt he owed him." Four of the other members are
among the nation's most competent analysts of scientific
information. The only first-rate geopolitical thinker is the
sixth member, Foreign Affairs editor William Hyland -- and
that's the problem. Concedes PFIAB member John Deutch, an M.I.T.
energy expert: "Our strengths run to the technical."

    That expertise will come in handy as the $30 billion-a-year
intelligence community budget is retargeted to accommodate a
changed world. But the community's crucial task in the years
ahead, says Harvard Sovietologist Richard Pipes, "will involve
the proper interpretation of political, economic and social
intelligence." The Tower group "is going to be great when it
comes to helping us verify arms reductions," says Moynihan.
"But what we are really going to need to know is whether the
Soviet Communist Party is going to implode, and how we can
compete in the 21st century as other nations play economic
roles equal to ours. Who's going to analyze the data in a
sophisticated way and help the CIA to collect them in useful
forms? Probably not the new PFIAB."

    The real story here is that George Bush has never cottoned
to the idea of outsiders roaming around the CIA. As director
of Central Intelligence in 1976, Bush watched as the famous
Team B, a collection of outside experts led by Pipes,
challenged the agency's more sanguine estimates of Soviet
intentions and capabilities. In 1980 Bush admitted he had never
favored the Team-B exercise. "It was forced on me by the White
House," said Bush. By most accounts the President preferred
abolishing PFIAB, but was eager to avoid a predicted
congressional uproar. Recasting PFIAB so that its focus will
probably be narrow represents the path of least resistance --
a politically clever but intellectually shortsighted move. Bush
doesn't need intelligence reports that induce sleep; he needs
the kind of thought-provoking analysis that can substitute for
No-Doz.