- Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence by Joshua Rovner
The topic of politicization has been a perennial concern among intelligence professionals, but not usually one that compels any serious study or policy changes to prevent it. Joshua Rovner's Fixing the Facts suggests this is because few cases ever reach the point of becoming major national issues, and policymakers do not see it in their interest to prevent politicization. The book examines six major instances over a span of nearly sixty years—beginning with Vietnam, then turning to the U.S.-Soviet missile balance of the 1970s, and ending with the well-known Iraq weapons of mass destruction (WMD) controversy. In making his argument, Rovner presumably selected these cases for the availability of sufficient documentation, including declassified intelligence estimates. He does make excellent use of available documents, eyewitness accounts, and subsequent scholarship, but whether his documentation of only six examples over nearly six decades can validate his theory of "oversell" is another question.
Rovner's theory is provocative because it clashes with the views of other scholars and practitioners. In his view, others explain politicization as primarily the result of the personal proximity of intelligence advisers to policymakers, or intelligence organizations' proximity to or dependence on politicians. Taking issue with this view, Rovner contends that domestic politics is what drives policymakers to "oversell" policies and thereby find themselves forced to misuse and sometimes compel the intelligence community to alter its judgments. In this sense, he places the blame for politicization more squarely on policymakers than on intelligence professionals.
Students of the Cold War will be familiar with his examination of the Vietnam estimates (1964-1967) that clashed with the Johnson administration's views on the war's conduct or success. Rovner contrasts the Johnson administration's reactions to intelligence assessments done in 1964, which challenged the logic of the prevailing "domino theory," with the later military "order of battle" estimates. In the former case the administration largely ignored intelligence inputs, whereas in the latter the White House and military commanders aggressively moved to change estimates to be more in line with the military and public relations strategies. Rovner concludes that President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 had a credibility problem that had not existed earlier. [End Page 153] Because of congressional and public criticism that had grown since 1964, Johnson could not tolerate an intelligence community openly challenging the success of his military strategy.
Likewise, the Nixon and Ford administrations' views of the 1970s Soviet missile estimates and the 1976 "Team A/Team B" critique of strategic force estimates by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spurred them to attempt to change CIA and Intelligence Community (IC) views on the Soviet threat to justify, in the case of the Nixon administration, the pursuit of antiballistic missile defenses and, in the case of the Ford administration, to appease critics of Henry Kissinger's arms control and détente policies.
However, readers will be most intrigued by Rovner's comparison of the U.S. and British governments' attitudes toward and use of intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. This examination raises some interesting questions about two very different intelligence-policy arrangements that ended up fixing intelligence for almost the same purpose—namely, selling the Iraq War to skeptical publics. Readers will be intrigued to learn that the British system intertwines intelligence and policy officials in the development of their joint intelligence assessments, whereas the United States purports to keep intelligence at arm's length from policymakers in order not to encourage "intelligence to please"—or politicization. Rovner's findings suggest that the structural protections in the United States had little impact on politicization of intelligence because the administration of George W. Bush was determined to spin intelligence to support its war decision.
This reviewer was impressed with Rovner's scholarship and argumentation and largely agrees with the general notion that politicization is more likely when high politics and national security is at stake. However, Rovner only briefly notes the possibility that policymakers...