Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (review)

Since the 9/11 attacks, there have been a plethora of studies and official reports dedicated to the topic of intelligence reform. Why Intelligence Fails, by Robert Jervis, provides a unique and welcome addition to this growing corpus of literature. In it, Jervis analyzes two noteworthy examples of intelligence failure: the inability of the intelligence community (IC) to understand what was going on in Iran prior to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the IC's misjudgment about the status of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in the run up to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. His startling conclusion: while there were significant lapses in each of these cases and "analysis could and should have been better, the result would have been to make the intelligence judgments less certain rather than to reach fundamentally different conclusions. Furthermore, better intelligence would not have led to an effective policy" (p. 3). As Jervis readily acknowledges, this interpretation is unlikely to be embraced by policy makers who, despite their calls for better intelligence and their genuine need for it, often do not want it. As the popular saying goes, "there is no such thing as policy failure, only intelligence failures" (p. 157).

The first case study, which focuses on the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) inability to anticipate the Iranian Revolution, stems from a recently declassified post mortem assessment Jervis did in 1979 for the CIA's National Foreign Assessment Center (NFAC), the predecessor of the current Directorate of Intelligence. Most of Jervis's original assessment, minus the classified redactions, is incorporated in the book, along with memoranda by CIA officials in response to Jervis' findings. As Jervis is quick to acknowledge, predicting revolutions is difficult, and intelligence organizations rarely have special advantages in this regard because they are primarily focused on analyzing secrets, "and secrets are rarely at the heart of revolutions" (p. 26). Revolutions are, by their very nature, unprecedented. Nevertheless, in the process of dissecting CIA reporting, Jervis identifies a number of mistakes that contributed to the IC's tendency to misdiagnose the situation in Iran in the period leading up to the Revolution. He attributes most of these to cognitive and methodological weaknesses that are endemic in the world of intelligence.

For instance, much of the CIA's analysis relied on circular logic. Analysts expected the Shah to crack down if the protests got out of hand, but since he did not, they assumed that the situation could not have been that bad. Given that until late 1978 the Shah continued to preside over a well-entrenched regime, a loyal military, and draconian security services, this seemed to be a well-founded assumption. However, its principal weakness, as Jervis points out, was that it could not be proven wrong until the situation had, in fact, become very serious. Additionally, few people in or outside of government at the time understood the role of religion in Iranian society and the respect that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini commanded among the Iranian masses. In this and the previous instance, IC analysts fell victim to their own predisposition to assimilate information that already fit their established worldview. The idea that religion could provide the ideological underpinnings of a revolutionary regime simply beggared belief at the time.

Although Jervis' post mortem primarily focuses on the analysis side of intelligence, he does not shy away from critiquing the collection efforts of the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO). In this regard, he challenges the commonly held assumption that the CIA did not see the Revolution coming because it was being fed misleading information by SAVAK, the Shah's domestic security service. On the contrary, SAVAK shared almost no information with the CIA about Iran's domestic opposition. If it had, Jervis notes, the CIA probably would have been much better informed. Instead, the CIA...