The Public Record:
During the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research was one of the few U.S. intelligence organizations to dissent from the Bush administration's allegations of a revved-up Iraqi nuclear program. Secretary of State Colin Powell ignored his own experts, but INR's prescience raised its prestige.
INR also got it right in its forecast of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, according to a recently declassified post-mortem on the U.S. intelligence failure during the October War, published today by the National Security Archive. In the spring of 1973, INR analysts wrote that, absent diplomatic progress in the Middle East, "the resumption of hostilities will become a better than even bet."
INR analysts argued that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would go to war not for specific military objectives, but to take "military action which can be sustained long enough" to get the United States and the Soviet Union strongly involved in the Middle East peace process.
The authors of the October War post-mortem saw the INR estimate as a "case of wisdom lost," because as the signs of conflict unfolded in the fall of 1973, the intelligence establishment forgot those warnings. The post-mortem, which reviewed failures to take into account communications intelligence (COMINT) and human intelligence (HUMINT), quickly became a secret "best seller" in the intelligence establishment after it was published.
When the Archive filed a mandatory review request for the post-mortem, the CIA denied much of the document, and it took a decision by the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) in response to the Archive's appeal to reverse the CIA decision and declassify much more of the withheld information. Acting as the court of last resort for mandatory declassification review requests, ISCAP recently reversed other CIA initial denials of documents from the 1960s and 1970s. While it exempted material it regards as sensitive, ISCAP nevertheless found that much of the information denied by the CIA could be declassified without harm to national security.
Declassified documents can be seen here.
During the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research was one of the few U.S. intelligence organizations to dissent from the Bush administration's allegations of a revved-up Iraqi nuclear program. Secretary of State Colin Powell ignored his own experts, but INR's prescience raised its prestige.
INR also got it right in its forecast of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, according to a recently declassified post-mortem on the U.S. intelligence failure during the October War, published today by the National Security Archive. In the spring of 1973, INR analysts wrote that, absent diplomatic progress in the Middle East, "the resumption of hostilities will become a better than even bet."
INR analysts argued that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would go to war not for specific military objectives, but to take "military action which can be sustained long enough" to get the United States and the Soviet Union strongly involved in the Middle East peace process.
The authors of the October War post-mortem saw the INR estimate as a "case of wisdom lost," because as the signs of conflict unfolded in the fall of 1973, the intelligence establishment forgot those warnings. The post-mortem, which reviewed failures to take into account communications intelligence (COMINT) and human intelligence (HUMINT), quickly became a secret "best seller" in the intelligence establishment after it was published.
When the Archive filed a mandatory review request for the post-mortem, the CIA denied much of the document, and it took a decision by the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) in response to the Archive's appeal to reverse the CIA decision and declassify much more of the withheld information. Acting as the court of last resort for mandatory declassification review requests, ISCAP recently reversed other CIA initial denials of documents from the 1960s and 1970s. While it exempted material it regards as sensitive, ISCAP nevertheless found that much of the information denied by the CIA could be declassified without harm to national security.
Declassified documents can be seen here.
1 comment:
WOW, "no military objective" except to drag everyone else into the mix. How right they were...very interesting stuff. Thanks Jason and SPB!
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