Blinking Red: Crisis and Compromise in American Intelligence after 9/11 by Michael Allen (review)

In late fall 2004, shortly after President George W. Bush's reelection, Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA), the first major reform of the US intelligence services since the National Security Act of 1947. The 2004 reform was a compromise. It created the position of Director of National Intelligence to both oversee the activities of the sixteen component parts of the US intelligence community and serve as principal advisor to the president on intelligence matters, but it did not go so far as to create a Department of Intelligence, as some reformers had advocated, or redirect control of intelligence assets and budgets away from existing programs and departments. Most notably, the Department of Defense retained control of its very substantial intelligence assets.

Michael Allen's book is an account of the legislative history of this reform. As a legislative affairs officer in President Bush's White House, Allen participated in this process, and his book benefits from his deep understanding of it. Some of the most engaging sections in the book also reflect his status as an eyewitness: his descriptions of the physical space of various meeting rooms, the body language of the participants, who sat where, and how they interacted. The most important sources for this history, however, are not the author's experiences but the legislative record of hearings and debates, various archival records, media reports, and, most importantly, the more than eighty interviews the author conducted for this project. The interviews include every individual who played a significant role in this legislation, from President Bush to the most important congressional staffers to each member of the 9/11 Commission.

Allen has used this material to reconstruct what turned out to be a very difficult legislative process. The impetus for IRTPA was the 9/11 Commission's recommendation to reorganize US intelligence so as to improve coordination of the diverse branches of the intelligence community. 9/11 Families for a Secure America, as well as most Democrats in Congress, backed these reform proposals strongly, and there was a widespread sense generally that 9/11 demonstrated the need for changes in the way US intelligence operated. While President Bush eventually came out in support of some kind of reform, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, as well as a group of congressional Republicans who rallied around House members Duncan Hunter and Jim Sensenbrenner, opposed the wide-ranging reforms that the 9/11 Commission recommended. All of this took place against the backdrop of the 2004 presidential election.

The primary contribution of Allen's work is to explain how and why IRTPA was legislated the way it was. Much of this history is a matter of public record, but Allen's interviews add great depth to the story: time and again he is able to draw on the recollections of participants to explain their motives as well as the intricacies of the actual legislative process, the points where things got hung up, and how they were resolved in the end. In this respect, Blinking Red is a model oral history, even if Allen does not present his work as oral history. He treats his interview materials in exactly the same fashion as any of his other sources: where they are useful, he uses them; where they are not, he does not; and as much as possible he checks what his sources have told him against the written record and other interviews. When participants have different recollections, he carefully notes that fact in the endnotes. But methodologically Blinking Red does not offer oral historians much to work with even as it serves as an excellent example of what oral histories can bring to political history.

Not surprisingly, Allen betrays an occasional partisan bias, but on the whole the book is remarkably well balanced both in its narrative and its judgments. If the book has a weakness, it is that it does...