Memo to the Next President: Intelligence & Counterterrorism

In this exclusive web video, Eric Rosenbach, Belfer Center Executive Director for Research and former professional staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, outlines the priorities on which the next president should focus in order to improve U.S. intelligence capabilities.

For more videos, visit the Belfer Center YouTube Channel at http://www.youtube.com/belfercenter.

TRANSCRIPT

Eric Rosenbach, executive director for research at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and former professional staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, recently wrote a book chapter, “The Incisive Fight: Recommendations for Improving Counterterrorism Intelligence,” in which he outlines five priorities on which the next president should focus in order to improve U.S. intelligence capabilities.

You note that the next president should think carefully before attempting to reorganize the intelligence community again. Why?

The reason the next president needs to think carefully before he launches into a new reorganization of the intelligence community is that after the Intelligence Reform Act was passed in 2004 a lot of boxes and wire chart diagrams were moved around to try and make the intelligence community perform better. However, when you do that, a lot of chaos results and often people can’t focus on their jobs. And so the next president needs to focus more on developing good strong leaders in the intelligence community rather than focusing on the wire and block diagrams and how it’s organized.

What has stopped the National Counterterrorism Center from reaching its full potential and what should the next president do to ensure that it does?

The National Counterterrorism Center was created in the intelligence reform legislation in 2004 and it is a good idea. The idea behind it is that it’s the nexis of all the intelligence agencies who can coordinate and collaborate together in one central location to share information and conduct intelligence analysis in a joint way. However, there have been a couple things that have held it from reaching its full potential. The first is that it’s gotten a little bit too bogged down in tactical level tracking of terrorists and needs to think big strategic picture. So the National Counterterrorism Center, in one specific part called the Strategic Operational Planning section, needs to provide the strategic policy planning type information that the White House would need. Also, the NCTC needs to continue to work on sharing information, not only at the national level, but push it down to state and local governments. And also the National Counterterrorism Center needs to work very closely with the CIA to help them fully develop targets and big picture analysis of where the next terrorist threat may come from.

Voters seem more concerned with the energy and economic crises than intelligence reform. Why should voters care about this issue and what questions should they be asking the candidates about their plans for reform?

It’s a very good question and you have to remember that intelligence isn’t just focused on counterterrorism or isn’t just focused on preventing nuclear terrorism. It’s not purely a national security field. So, for example, you could see how the intelligence community could play an important role in trying to provide the next president with information about a forth coming energy crisis or about oil prices. For example, the national intelligence community recently conducted a study on the impact of climate change on national security. That was done by the intelligence community. That’s a way the intelligence community can work on the more pressing problems that are at the forefront of Americans’ minds that may not be terrorism.

Despite criticism of the CIA's relationships with foreign intelligence services, you encourage the next president to foster more of these relationships. Why?

Just like the when you’re working in the military or when you’re a diplomat, it’s very important for intelligence operatives and officers to work with allies who they have. Some of the allies are those that you would expect, that have always been close, traditional allies. And over the past several years we have new allies in the war on terror that help us get access to places that would otherwise be extremely difficult. This is important, but the intelligence community needs to enter into these types of relationships with a little bit of caution. One example is to look at the Pakistani ISI, who is helpful to the United States, but also may present certain hazards if they are, or certain elements of them are, aligning with the Taliban or with Al Qaeda.

How would you assess the capabilities of the intelligence community today, as compared with prior to the intelligence reform legislation that passed in 2004?

It’s pretty difficult nowadays to hear about intelligence without hearing about a failure or something that has gone wrong or some type of problem. But the reality is if you look at the intelligence community in a very objective way and you compare it to where it was at 9/11 or before the war in Iraq, that it’s progressed quite far and that the capabilities are actually quite powerful now. We can actually track down people who are dangerous to the United States. We conduct good analysis. If we look at the story of the Iran NIE, although it was very sensational in its top headline, the United States intelligence community was able to collect a lot of sources on a very hard topic in Iran and the trade craft that was used to produce the Iran NIE was a lot stronger than the example of the Iraq NIE.