Costs of War: Top Secret Transparency
By Shaun Waterman for ISN
A US intelligence official confirmed to ISN Security Watch that there would be no unclassified version of the highly anticipated National Intelligence Estimate’s ‘Key Judgments’ or KJs - as there was of the last such assessment in 2007.
“It is not our policy to publish unclassified KJs,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, adding that, as a classified document, even the date of the estimate’s publication would not necessarily be releasable.
The December 2007 publication of the external pageKey Judgments of the last National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, on Iran’s nuclear program - in the crucible of partisan debate about former president George W Bush’s possible use of US military force - helped throttle back hawkish talk in Washington. Headlines highlighted the external pagejudgment that Iran had suspended its effort to build nuclear weapons in 2003.
The decision to publish, made by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell - and the estimate itself - were external pagewidely criticized. external pageMcConnell said the following March that he would not in future be publishing unclassified KJs “if I'm persuasive enough among the decision makers."
But one former senior US intelligence official told ISN Security Watch that McConnell had been “between a rock and a hard place” on the question of whether to publish in 2007.
“You have to remember the intensity of the interest back then,” the former official said, “It was inevitable that something was going to get out.”
“By publishing the Key Judgments, they were trying to get something out there that was reflective of the thinking of the intelligence community,” the former official said. “The concern was if they didn’t put something out in the unclassified domain, parts of it would get leaked by people on one side or another of the policy fights, and they would try and spin the conclusions.”
That, of course, is exactly what will happen when the long-awaited new NIE is finally complete, which - according to the external pagelatest reporting in the Washington Post - may not be until August.
The fact is, ever since the Bush administration tried to blame its disastrous decision to invade Iraq on the CIA, National Intelligence Estimates have been become highly political documents. They are at the center of debates about national security decision-making because - at least in theory - they represent the judgment of some of the smartest and best informed people in the US government about the issues at the heart of policy debates. In this case: Is Iran trying to build a nuclear weapon? How close is it to being able to do so?
Beware the audience
That following March McConnell external pagetold US talk show host Charlie Rose that he had learned “a big lesson” from writing the NIE the way they had.
“We wrote it for a sophisticated audience. We did not tell the whole story in our key judgments. We just talked about the changes [in our assessment since the last NIE]. And then we found ourselves in a position where we had to make that unclassified.”
As a result, all the attention focused on one judgment that had changed, about Iranian intentions, and not on the continuing assessment of Iranian capabilities, that they would have the wherewithal for a nuclear device by 2010-15.
“The lesson learned for us is in the future, even when we intend to keep it classified, we will write our key judgments as the whole story,” said McConnell.
Secrecy in vain
It seems that his successor as DNI, retired Admiral Dennis Blair, plans to continue playing this one very close to the chest. His office would not comment for the record.
At a recent hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, external pagedefense officials suggested going into closed session to discuss any questions about the estimate, including when it might be finished.
But it will all be in vain. There will be leaks.
The osmotic pressure of interest in the estimate and the high-stakes nature of the policy debate within the administration make it inevitable.
The worst leakers, as usual, will be those with the biggest axe to grind, and the worst reporters, as usual, will be the ones who carry the most water for them. There will be spin and confusion and partisan voices will be raised.
Of course, all this will happen anyway, even if unclassified KJs are released, but there will at least be a text - something about which a rational conversation can be had. Not snippets read down a phone by someone risking jail.
The problem, some intelligence officials say, is that it is difficult to convey the totality of a classified judgment in unclassified form, given that there is likely to be so much that cannot be disclosed without compromising sources and methods.
But of course the portions that will be leaked will not have been scrubbed at all. And the fact that something is difficult does not mean it ought not to be done.
Wrong lesson learned
The problem is the DNI has learned the wrong lesson about publication from December 2007. If the public got hold of the wrong end of the stick because the estimate’s key judgments were poorly written, the solution is not to keep them secret, but to get it right the next time.
The decision to keep the key judgments secret also sits poorly with the administration’s commitment to transparency.
The White House did not return a phone call requesting comment, but David Albright, a nuclear-weapons expert and president of the Institute of Science and International Security, told foreign policy blog external pageThe Cable:
"They owe it to us to provide clarification of their position publicly[...]. Speaking just as a citizen, I want my government to be transparent about something that could potentially involve military strikes."