Whither Intelligence?: Where Espionage Goes Wrong

The fall's new television series "Rubicon" is perhaps the single most realistic interpretation of intelligence analysis—the heart and soul of America's efforts to understand and predict world events that will ultimately impact security. In the second episode, the protagonist, supervisor Will Travers, walks by the office of Miles Fiedler, his most dedicated analyst and an MIT graduate with a genius-level IQ. A television blares in his office with a live news report from Lagos about an uprising in the Nigerian capital. "No one listens," says Miles.

Weeks ago, he had warned the appropriate authorities that a coup was imminent. He was humored, then ignored by the brass at the Central Intelligence Agency, State Department and National Security Council when he first issued his alert, and now, on television, the United States Embassy is ablaze and under siege. Rebels are murdering Americans and Nigerians alike. Miles is at once frustrated and mesmerized. When Will tells him to go home to his wife and children, he nods blankly and when Will turns to exit, returns to the horrifying scene unspooling on television. Miles has no life outside his work, monitoring global security.

Art imitating life, alas. Virtually from their founding, the CIA and its predecessor organizations have ignored analysts—at our peril. Since modern American intelligence was launched—by a youthful Allen Dulles, with the aim of keeping American negotiators informed of ongoing events in a defeated Europe during the Paris Peace talks that led to the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919—analysts have been variously scoffed at, then summarily blamed, when things went wrong just as they'd predicted.

It's time America took a closer look at the information its spies generate. After all, America's counterparts around the world have been doing so for years.

In 1996, collaborating with the longest-serving spymaster in Europe, Alexandre de Marenches, the veteran head of France's Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage [SDECE], I embarked on the research for what became the book The Fourth World War: Diplomacy and Espionage in the Age of Terrorism. I spent weeks with the Count de Marenches as he schooled me in the ways of intelligence—the information gathering (intel) and covert operations (ops) that are the yin and yang of most intelligence organizations. Both are deeply interdependent, as he described in operation after operation. No covert op had the remotest chance of success without the intel that was imbedded throughout its preparation and launch. Equally, the op itself would often yield invaluable intel that could determine political, diplomatic and military actions long after its success or failure.

Profiting from Intel

Intel can also exist most profitably on its own—as I discovered firsthand in the fall of 1974 when I was preparing to leave for Saigon to take up my post as a New York Times correspondent. The hot war in Vietnam (though not in Cambodia or Laos) had temporarily ceased, thanks to the truce negotiated by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho, for which both were eventually awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Before I left for Southeast Asia, however, I checked in with the usual suspects in Washington—Philip Habib, the Undersecretary of State for Asia, who would ultimately become the last senior American official to visit Laos; a couple of generals at the Pentagon; and my last stop, the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The Times' Washington bureau had set up my schedule, so I arrived at the front door of the facility with a phone number and a name.

My contact was Angus Thurmer, the public face of the CIA at the time and in the process of winding down an extraordinary career in operations as station chief in New Delhi and Berlin at the height of the Cold War. He ushered me through the security formalities and into a gray, windowless room with a single steel table and two straight-backed chairs. A few moments later a second door opened and a totally nondescript, middle-aged man...