Weekend Edition Sunday

The Senate Intelligence Committee released a blistering report Friday excoriating the Central Intelligence Agency for its assessments that were used to justify the war with Iraq. The committee said that most of the key judgments in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s illicit weapons programs were either overstated or were not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting. The committee also felt the intelligence gathering system was flawed by lack of information sharing, poor management and inadequate intelligence collection, and were bound by a group think mentality.

The question facing the country now is how to fix the problems. Joining us is someone with an intimate knowledge of America’s intelligence systems. James Woolsey was director of Central Intelligence during the first two years of the Clinton administration. He’s now a vice president of the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.

Thanks for being with us.

Mr. JAMES WOOLSEY (Booz Allen Hamilton): Good to be with you, Brian.

NAYLOR: First, do you agree that our intelligence systems are in need of major reform at this point?

Mr. WOOLSEY: I think organizational reform of the sort that has been talked about by Congresswoman Harman and others of setting up an overall figure as sort of chairman of the board, in a sense, of the intelligence community with more authority than the CIA director has now and separating that job from being the CIA director is probably a good step. I didn’t think so for some time, but I’ve come around to that view. I think it would help with community coordination a lot, because today if the National Security Agency has a dispute with the CIA, the director of Central Intelligence, who’s also the head of the CIA, can’t really fix it very well because NSA suspects him of being part of their rival organization.

NAYLOR: Mm-hmm. What of this notion of group think mentality at the leadership of the CIA? Do you think, based on your experience, is there a tendency toward group think at CIA?

Mr. WOOLSEY: Oh, no more so than there is in any other government bureaucracy. For example, the directorate of operations, the case officers who manage the spies, tend to give more credence than they should to an agent just because the agent is in their pay. The CIA was apparently pretty much on the money on the ballistic missile side of the threat from Iraq. They were off apparently with respect to these biological mobile production laboratories. I think they were not far off on the nuclear side of things. They had disagreements. They tried to resolve them. I don’t know that there was a single mind-set, and the Senate committee said that they thought the CIA’s assessments on the Iraq/al-Qaeda relationship were reasonably accurate.

NAYLOR: Well, let me ask you. After September 11th, Mr. Woolsey, you were an ardent supporter of the war against Iraq.

Mr. WOOLSEY: Yes.

NAYLOR: You said there was no doubt that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. You even used what George Tenet called a slam dunk in justifying that case. In the light of this new report, do you think that was a correct interpretation?

Mr. WOOLSEY: I think it was unwise for the CIA, indeed for the government as a whole, to talk about chemical and bacteriological weapons, because when you hear the word ‘weapon’, both the specialists and regular citizens, think of bombs and artillery shells filled with nerve gas and anthrax and great stockpiles of them. And they would naturally be quite voluminous, and if you don’t find those, people understandably say, ‘Where were these things you were talking about?’ If they had talked about biological or chemical agent, volumes that are much smaller. But I’m not sure that the CIA was wrong, that there were some amounts of chemical and bacteriological agent in particular that were still on hand in Iraq as the war began.

NAYLOR: But the report is critical on the source of a lot of the information that was used in the estimate. The source being perhaps an exile. What the report says, that the US had none of its own agents on the ground…

Mr. WOOLSEY: Right, right.

NAYLOR: …in Iraq. Do you think that that was a failure and should the CIA have tried harder to do that, looking back?

Mr. WOOLSEY: Not having people on the ground was a serious failing, but people ought to understand how hard it is to have someone on the ground when you don’t have a presence at all in the country for any purpose.

NAYLOR: What do you think is going to be the upshot of this report? There’ll be others as well looking at the intelligence community’s performance before 9/11. Is this going to change the way intelligence is handled on Capitol Hill and by the administration?

Mr. WOOLSEY: Well, I hope people focus on what can be done positively to make changes, and as I said I think establishing an overall head of the community separate from the director of Central Intelligence Agency is one very positive step. I think that one needs to make sure that that overall head of the community protects people in the sense that they are free to use their best judgment, even when there’s a risk that they may be wrong. One of the worst things we could do as a result of this current flap is to frighten CIA analysts and officers into being risk averse because we need many more risk takers. If you are willing to say roughly, ‘I think 2-to-1 or 10-to-1 this is likely or unlikely,’ it gives you a flexibility of saying, ‘I think it’s more likely than not that it’s going to occur.’ You have to do that sort of thing all the time in intelligence, and people ought to be free, I think, to give it their best judgment, and they shouldn’t be frightened away from that.

NAYLOR: James Woolsey is the former director of Central Intelligence under President Clinton. He’s now a vice president of the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.

Thanks very much.

Mr. WOOLSEY: Good to be with you, Brian.