Zegart, Amy. "American Intelligence -- Still Stupid." Los Angeles Times, 17 Sep. 2006. [http://www.latimes.com] Zegart, Amy. "American Intelligence -- Still Stupid." Los Angeles Times, 17 Sep. 2006. [http://www.latimes.com]
Five years after the 9/11 attacks, "all our worst intelligence deficiencies remain. Intelligence is spread across 16 agencies that operate as warring tribes more than a team. The CIA is in disarray. And the FBI's information technology is stuck in the dark ages. There are more intelligence agencies to coordinate than ever but still no one in firm charge of them all. In 2004, Congress established the post of director of national intelligence. Rather than integrating intelligence, however, the job's creation has triggered huge turf wars. For the last two years, while the office of the intelligence director has been fighting over who briefs the president and who staffs assignments, the Pentagon has quietly expanded its intelligence activities at home and abroad."
In a slick, sarcastic, and accurate turn of phrase that will probably be picked up and used again (perhaps by me), Zegart refers to the CIA as "the agency formerly known as Central."
[CIA/00s/Gen; DNI/06; PostCW/00s/Gen]
Zegart, Amy B. "'CNN with Secrets': 9/11, the CIA, and the Organizational Roots of Failure." International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 20, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 18-49.
The author finds the roots of intelligence failure in three organizational deficiencies (attributed primarily to the CIA but extending to the Intelligence Community as well): "(1) structural weaknesses dating back decades that prevented the Intelligence Community (IC) from working as a coherent whole; (2) perverse promotion incentives that rewarded intelligence officials for all the wrong things; and (3) cultural pathologies that led intelligence agencies to resist new technologies, ideas, and tasks."
[CIA/00s/Gen; GenPostcw/00s/Gen]
Zegart, Amy B. "An Empirical Analysis of Failed Intelligence Reforms Before September 11." Political Science Quarterly 121, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 33-60.
Since World War II, some forty separate reports have investigated and examined the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies. "This article seeks to lay the foundations for a more productive examination of intelligence failure by analyzing intelligence adaptation efforts between the Cold War’s end and the September 11 attacks.... The heart of the article is an analysis of all the major studies of the U.S. intelligence community and counterterrorism efforts between 1991 and 2001.... [E]vidence strongly suggests that U.S. intelligence agencies failed to prevent the September 11 attacks not because failure was inevitable or because individuals could not conceive of the threat or how to combat it, but because of politics."
[Reform/00s/Gen]
Zegart,
Amy B. Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Robert David Steele provides the following comments: "This is a very worthy and thoughtful book. It breaks new ground in understanding the bureaucratic and political realities that surrounded the emergence of the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA was weak by design, strongly opposed by the military services from the beginning. Its covert activities emerged as a Presidential prerogative, unopposed by others in part because it kept CIA from being effective at coordinated analysis, for which it had neither the power nor the talent. Most usefully, the book presents a new institutionalist theory of bureaucracy that gives full weight to the original design, the political players including the bureaucrats themselves, and external events. Unlike domestic agencies that have strong interest groups, open information, legislative domain, and unconnected bureaucracies, the author finds that national security agencies, being characterized by weak interest groups, secrecy, executive domain, and connected bureaucracies, evolve differently from other bureaucracies, and are much harder to reform."
Ratnesar, Washington Monthly, Jan./Feb. 2000, finds Flawed By Design to be "incisive and revealing.... Zegart ... is particularly thorough in describing the bureaucratic horse-trading that preceded the drafting of 1947's National Security Act.... Zegart reserves her harshest judgments for the design of the JCS and the CIA.... The CIA ... was created without the authority to coordinate 'intelligence from the rest of the community....' It was only after ... the Goldwater-Nicholson [sic] Act of 1986 that the JCS evolved into anything other than an ineffective and ultimately dangerous forum for interservice rivalry." The author argues "convincingly ... that U.S. interests have been compromised ... by the institutional design of national security agencies."
For Richelson, IJI&C 13.4, "Zegart frequently oversimplifies the history and issues involved in ways that lead to questionable judgments on her part.... Oversimplification and a lack of understanding of the issues involved are particularly evident in Dr. Zegart's treatment of the CIA.... Flawed By Design is itself flawed. One [flaw] is inadequate research."
Steele (positive) and Richelson (negative) exchange barbs over their conflicting assessments of Zegart's work in "Reader's Forum," IJI&C 14.2.
To Warner, Studies 11 (Fall-Winter 2001), Zegart's "narrative has a shaky grasp of the historical facts of the Agency's origins. Flawed By Design thus builds some worthy insights on a wobbly foundation."
[CIA/Overviews; GenPostwar/Orgs/NSC]
Zegart, Amy. "9/11 and the FBI: The Organizational Roots of Failure." Intelligence and National Security 22, no. 2 (Apr. 2007): 165-184.
The author argues the FBI's failures related to 9/11 were the product of three organizational deficiencies: (1) longstanding structural weaknesses; (2) perverse promotion incentives; and (3) internal cultural pathologies. Her conclusion: "Yes, individuals made mistakes, but it was the system that failed us."
[FBI/00s/Gen]
Zegart, Amy. "Our Clueless Intelligence System." Washingon Post, 8 Jul. 2007, B1. [http://www.washingtonpost.com]
The U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks "has consisted chiefly of finger pointing and ax grinding.... Those who want to learn what went wrong and how to fix it need to understand ... bureaucracy -- the organizational weaknesses that cause smart people to make dumb decisions.... Despite the ... creation of a director of national intelligence, the U.S. intelligence community remains a dysfunctional family of 16 agencies with no one firmly in charge." The reason why "overhauling intelligence agencies" is so difficult is the Defense Department. For decades, it "has controlled about 80 percent of the intelligence budget and housed most of the agencies. And for decades, it has fiercely resisted any move to realign power in the CIA or anywhere else."
In response to Professor Zegart's "Outlook" article, NCTC Director John Scott Redd [VADM/USN (Ret.)], "Yes, We Do Have a Clue," Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, 13 Jul. 2007, argues that the progress of the Intelligence Community "since 9/11 has been nothing short of revolutionary. Today we collect, analyze and share counterterrorism intelligence within and among agencies vastly more effectively than Zegart claims."
In reply, Zegart, "What the Admiral Doesn't Say," Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, 13 Jul. 2007, notes that "Redd neglects to mention that only two of the[] agencies [that are part of the NCTC] -- the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency -- have serious experience conducting all-source analysis; all the other representatives dispatched to NCTC have been learning on the job. What's more, different people from different agencies still see different pieces of information.... Is NCTC a dramatic improvement? You bet. Is it where it needs to be? No way.... Make no mistake: Despite tremendous effort and substantial progress, the sad fact is that all the worst organizational deficiencies that hampered U.S. intelligence before 9/11 are still here."
[Reform/07]
Zegart, Amy. "Outside View: Hill Intelligence Unreformed." United Press International, 30 Aug. 2007. [http://www.upi.com]
"Six years after Sept. 11, the least reformed part of our intelligence system sits not in Langley, Va., or the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building, but on Capitol Hill.... Today there are more committees involved in intelligence oversight than ever. Committee term limits in the House remain. And radical intelligence overhaul still requires battling, and defeating, the powerful armed services committees.... It is all well and good for Congress to be demanding accountability from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. But accountability starts at home. Until Congress overhauls itself, intelligence reform will remain elusive."
[Oversight/00s; Reform/00s/07]
Zegart, Amy B. "September 11 and the Adaptation Failure of U.S. Intelligence Agencies." International Security 29, no. 4 (2005): 78-111.
[GenPostCW/00s/Gen]
Zegart, Amy B. Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Pillar, FA 87.2 (Mar.-Apr. 2008), finds that the author "strains to fit the record of the CIA's and the FBI's handling of terrorism" into her thesis that "traits inherent to any large organization, especially a government agency, prevent it from adapting well to new challenges and a new mission." In the process, "her straining leads to factual errors," many of which "stem from her extremely heavy reliance on postmortem inquiries, especially the 9/11 Commission report. In fact, much of Spying Blind is little more than a repackaging of that report." Zegart and Pillar exchanges barbs about Pillar's review in "Letters to the Editor," FA 87.3 (May-Jun. 2008): 164-165.
For Peake, Studies 52.1 (Mar. 2008) and Intelligencer 16.1 (Spring 2008), this work "is a thought-provoking, detailed analysis of current problems that takes historical precedent and the judgments of many distinguished thinkers into account." However, "she does not offer convincing evidence" to prove her assertions that "organizational weakness" or "organizational factors" account for the CIA's and FBI's failures to prevent the 9/11 attacks.
Wirtz. IJI&C 21.3 (Fall 2008), sees this as a "well-crafted analysis" and "an important and beautifully executed book. Nevertheless, portions of [Zegart's] argument are more compelling than others."
[CIA/00s/Gen; FBI/00s/Gen]
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