CIAO DATE: 04/05

Challenging the Red Line between Intelligence and Policy

James E. Steiner

March 2004

Institute for the Study of Diplomacy
Georgetown University

 

Abstract

The “red line” is a warning to intelligence officers that, in order to maintain credibility with the policy community, they need to limit their role to informing policy discussions rather than expressing a policy preference. If they were to advocate a certain policy, the logic went, intelligence officers could be accused of distorting intelligence to bolster their policy preference.

All participants agreed that if a “red line” dividing intelligence from policymakers ever existed, it has become blurred in the post-Cold War era because a variety of factors-perpetual war, technology, terrorism-have had a profound impact on the relationship between policymakers and an intelligence community charged with supporting them. The result is probably reasonable when dealing with the terrorism issue, but most intelligence officers were concerned about the implications for more traditional foreign policy issues.

After the events of September 11th, the global war on terrorism and operations in Afghanistan and Iraq became the dominant foreign policy and intelligence priorities. A number of intelligence officers highlighted the fundamental changes being made to our intelligence community to provide counter-terrorism and war-fighter support. These include the redirection of people and collection systems, as well as rapidly expanding programs, budgets, and capabilities. Yet, although the IC is charged with worldwide coverage, in practice, people and resources are being concentrated on a finite number of issues. While counter-terrorism capabilities improve, participants argued, the Intelligence Community’s (IC) capability to warn of the next global financial crisis or regional political-military disaster may well be eroding.

It was noted that the President and his senior advisors rely heavily on daily intelligence to conduct the war on terror, including in Iraq. However, it was also argued that because most senior policymakers and their staffs now have access to raw reporting and finished intelligence on their desktops, they are less reliant on traditional analytic centers at CIA, DIA, and State to tell them what the massive body of intelligence reporting means.

Full Text (PDF Format, 8 pages, 2.64 MB)