Iraq Lessons Can Avoid Disaster in Iran

John Negroponte faces a daunting task if, as expected, he is confirmed in April as America's new intelligence director. This week the Commission on Intelligence Capabilities, chaired by Laurence Silberman and Charles Robb, issued a searing critique of how intelligence agencies failed in Iraq. Mr Negroponte will be charged with repairing a system marked by two big failures — inadequate warning of the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11 2001, and incorrect attribution of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the US-led March 2003 invasion. America's independent commission into the 9/11 attacks focused on the failure to "connect the dots" and recommended bureaucratic changes, including the creation of Mr Negroponte's position. Better co-ordination of budgets and personnel and daily briefing of the president may help Mr Negroponte on this task. But the WMD problem that Judge Silberman and Senator Robb focused on was the opposite mistake of connecting the wrong dots, and that will not be solved by bureaucratic reshuffling.

As questions over Iran's nuclear programme increase, Mr Negroponte should look closely at the intelligence lessons of Iraq, including Britain's admirable Butler Commission report. Mr Negroponte should read the new US report in light of the British experience, because the two countries made similar though not identical errors.

Not all recent intelligence relating to WMD has been a failure. As the Butler Commission reported, intelligence was quite accurate about nuclear programmes in North Korea, Libya and the illicit network set up by AQ Khan, the Pakistani scientist. Moreover, as David Kay, the American weapons inspector, said of WMD estimates in Iraq, "we were nearly all wrong". But the US and UK experience is an example of an almost perfect intelligence storm, combining failures at all three levels: collection, analysis and public presentation.

Iraq was a hard target for intelligence collection. Saddam Hussein was a dictator who instilled fear by killing those who talked. According to Lord Butler, Britain had few reliable spies. After Iraq expelled United Nations inspectors in 1998, the US lost access to impartial human intelligence and often filled the vacuum with the polluted testimony of Iraqi exiles who had their own agenda. Analysis was also weak. There was a tendency to overcompensate for the discovery after the first Gulf War that Mr Hussein was closer to developing a nuclear weapon than originally thought. Vowing not to underestimate again, analysts overestimated. This so-called "groupthink" should be challenged by various analytical devices such as designating devil's advocates and creating teams to think like the enemy, or forcing analysts to ask what change in assumptions would undermine their analysis. By all accounts, this rarely happened.

The presentation of intelligence to (and by) political leaders was also badly flawed. There was little warning that WMD was a confusing term in the way it lumped nuclear, biological and chemical weapons together. Thus the British government dossier of September 2002 included a claim that some weapons could be deployed within 45 minutes of an order to use them, though Tony Blair, the prime minister, said he was not aware this referred to battlefield weapons only. Political leaders cannot be blamed for the analytical failures of intelligence but they can be held accountable when they go beyond the intelligence and exaggerate what it says. The British government was not beyond hinting the intelligence was more certain than it actually was. In the US, Dick Cheney, the vice-president, said there was "no doubt" that Mr Hussein had WMD, and George W. Bush, the president, stated that the evidence indicated Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear programmes. Such statements ignored the doubts expressed in intelligence reports.

Trust in intelligence runs in cycles in our democracies. During the cold war, intelligence officials were often seen as heroes. After Vietnam, they became villains. The 9/11 attacks restored public realisation in the importance of good intelligence but the failure to find WMD in Iraq renewed suspicion. The lessons for Mr Negroponte are clear. In addition to his bureaucratic tasks of co-ordinating budgets and agencies, he will have to stimulate better tradecraft in collection, improve use of alternative analysis techniques and encourage more careful presentation to political leaders and to the public. And we must hope he can make these changes before the debate over Iran heats up.

The writer, a professor at Harvard, is currently a visiting fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, and author of The Power Game: A Washington Novel (Public Affairs Press)