R. James Woolsey and Jane Harman

With continuing fears of terrorism at home and no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) found in Iraq, there are increasingly vocal calls for intelligence reform across the political spectrum in the United States. Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-Calif.) addressed this critical national security issue at a March 5 AEI event along with former CIA director R. James Woolsey and AEI's Reuel Marc Gerecht.

Harman pointed to intelligence failures across several administrations, including the belief that the collapse of the Soviet Union would bring a safer world, the failure to predict nuclear tests in India and weapons development in North Korea, and the failure to anticipate September 11 or find WMD stockpiles in Iraq. Nevertheless, she stressed that intelligence played an important role in persuading Libya to dismantle its WMD programs and in exposing Abdul Qadeer Khan's nuclear technology network.

Harman advocated five main measures to prevent further intelligence failures. First, agencies should discard current WMD intelligence estimates globally and provide updates on all trouble spots, treating Libya as a model case to compare intelligence estimates with newly available hard evidence discovered on the ground. Second, the president should direct the intelligence community to improve the collection and vetting of WMD information, citing Iraq as an example of relying too heavily on satellite imagery and questionable human sources. Third, the intelligence community must refine its analysis of intelligence and how it communicates findings to policymakers in Congress and the White House. Fourth, the president should order a review of various Department of Defense offices that she believes fed unreliable information to Vice President Cheney. Lastly, she argued, President Bush should push for stronger international inspections and facilitate cooperation between the current U.S.-led investigation of Iraqi WMD programs and the UN team charged with such investigations before the war.

Woolsey likened today's situation to findings ourselves "in a jungle full of poisonous snakes, the snakes being proliferation, terrorists, and the like." He concurred with Harman's advice to scrap WMD estimates but noted that we should not be surprised by the lack of Iraqi WMD stockpiles since even Saddam Hussein appears to have been deceived regarding his WMD programs.

Gerecht predicted that Iran will become the next major target of WMD research and recommended studying how the CIA has run operations there since 1979. Calling the CIA a "battle-hardened bureaucracy," he criticized it as much more skilled at handling Washington than collecting information from abroad. Instead of strengthening this bureaucracy, Gerecht advocated "competitive intelligence," claiming that the more analysts bring opposing views to the table, the better off the intelligence community will be. Harman agreed but emphasized greater integration of intelligence-sharing between agencies. Gerecht also highlighted the need to strengthen clandestine services but cautioned his audience not to consider human intelligence a "silver bullet." He urged patience in judging the success of Iraqi intelligence, noting that interrogations of key players have fallen apart and the CIA finds it difficult to conduct clandestine operations at sites lacking a secure environment.

While differing on emphasis, the panel agreed that our intelligence shortcomings demand urgent and careful attention and must be remedied so that we can properly address continued threats from terrorism and nuclear proliferation among rogue states like Iran and North Korea.