US intelligence capabilities failing: Expert

Updated August 11, 2010 12:31:32

A U-S intelligence expert has painted an alarming picture of America's intelligence capability, warning that attempts at reform are stalling and, in some cases, sliding backwards.

And Amy Zegart says she fears only another major attack on the U-S homeland will galvanise fading attention to the issue. Associate Professor Zegart has researched widely on the organisational deficiencies of American national security agencies. She says key concerns are the continued weakening of the office of Director of National Intelligence and the failure to transform the F-B-I. Amy Zegart served on U-S President Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff in 1993 and is currently at U-C-L-A's School of Public Affairs as well as being a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Standford.

Presenter: Linda Mottram
Speaker: Amy Zegart, U-S intelligence expert visiting the U-S studies Centre at Sydney University

ZEGART: Well I think there's good news and bad news. We've certainly made some notable improvements and intelligence in homeland security since 9/11. I think perhaps the best is the creation of a national counter-terrorism centre which for the first time actually fuses terrorism threat reporting across the US Government, a capability that we did not have before to that extent.

At the same time, however, there are a number of reforms that are now stalling or in fact backsliding. I am particularly concerned about the new director of national intelligence, that office, the new intelligence 'tzar' that was created after 9/11 to try to coordinate this ever growing intelligence system, that position was weak when it was born and it's grown weaker in the past year or so under Admiral Blair. As you know, we have had now four directors of national intelligence in five years, the last one just confirmed last week or a couple of weeks ago and that's always a sign of organisational crises. Congress has not reformed itself to conduct oversight of intelligence and perhaps most troubling to me is the state of the FBI today, which is a critical player in domestic intelligence and yet in my view, failing to make the transformation from a law enforcement agency which it has historically been to a real domestic intelligence agency which it needs to be.

MOTTRAM: What needs to be done to drive the sorts of changes you're talking about, because it is indeed a massive enterprise, isn't it?

ZEGART: It is, and reform is a unnatural act for bureaucracies. It is a very difficult thing. Bureaucracies are not designed to be nimble. They are designed to be reliable and to do the same things over and over again, so it's always an uphill battle and it's especially hard the longer we find ourselves from 9/11, that urgency, that public pressure to change has declined. So I think in order to push reform forward, it really requires tremendous leadership at the top and that's a very challenging thing, particularly given that this particular President Obama has a very full plate with two wars that he is conducting, economic meltdown, and a variety of other big initiatives like healthcare reform that he is pursuing.

In the intelligence front, President Obama has really focused on what I call the spotlight issues, Guatanamo Bay, renditions, interrogations and he has not focused his energy on the plumbing issues of intelligence, making sure that the systems work well together and it requires that kind of sustained leadership from the White House for us to really continue to make progress.

MOTTRAM: Is there ever going to be that kind of sustained leadership from the White House though, given as you say, the very full plate that President Obama has, the very full plate that any incoming president in the US is likely to have in the future? Can you imagine that this is actually doable?

ZEGART: I think that's a great question. The odds are very low that any president, Democrat or Republican will be able to take that time to focus on things that are far outside the public spotlight, that don't win the president re-election, that don't get the president's party additional seats in Congress. Voters don't vote in elections for their representatives based on the state of intelligence reform. In fact, foreign policy in general is often rated very low, even in presidential elections.

In 1996 and 2000, foreign policy issues ranked dead last among issues that concerned American voters the most in exit polls, so it is always an ongoing battle. My concern is that well, it's going to take another major attack in order to get that kind of focus from the White House on intelligence reform.

MOTTRAM: And how likely is another major attack if I can ask you to venture into your own intelligence assessment?

ZEGART: Well, it's always a tricky thing to extrapolate into the future based on the past, that is one of the tricky things about terrorism is that it's a dynamic threat, it's always changing. But we do know that in the past year, the tempo of attacks against the American homeland has increased. So just to give you a couple of numbers.

Since 9/11, there have been 45 plots to attack the US homeland, involving 120 people that we know of. Of those 45 plots, 13 of them were conducted in 2009, so a dramatic increase in the number of plots in the past year. Eighty of those 120 people or 85 rather of those 120 people involved in plots just in the past year, so there is real concern among intelligence officials that while we saw a lull in plots after 9/11, that is picking up again and the plots are coming from more varied places. They are coming from al Qaeda central, they are coming from al Qaeda affiliates, like al Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula which was responsible for the Christmas Day bomber and they are coming from homegrown radicalised Americans, most notably or most recently the Times Square bombing attempt.

MOTTRAM: Now, the over arching sort of intelligence picture for the general public is the one about Afghanistan-Pakistan. Is that in a sense a distraction though from the kinds of issues you're talking about?

ZEGART: I think there's declining support as you know both in the United States and abroad for the war in Afghanistan precisely because of this question. We know that al Qaeda operates in 60 plus countries around the world, including the United States. The CIA estimates that there are fewer than 10 al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan today and we have 98,000 allied troops in Afghanistan and so it's an increasingly important question to ask, is this the best way to pursue the war against terrorism? And I think you're seeing increasingly members, retired members of the intelligence community and others really questioning whether this is the best strategy to confront a global terrorist challenge.

MOTTRAM: Now just talking a little bit more about Afghanistan-Pakistan. Can I get you to give me a bit of an assessment of what you think the nature of the threat there is, I mean Pakistan rather than Afghanistan in many peoples minds?

ZEGART: Right well, the best estimates are that Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan he's not in Afghanistan. There is real concern about Pakistani training camps. We know that there has always been concern about the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence services playing both sides of this game, supporting insurgents in the Taliban on the one hand and trying to be our allies on the other. So Pakistan is an area of rising concern I think to the United States security folks. At the same time though, I think we've seen that with the Christmas Day bomb plot, that there is increasing threat coming from Yemen and there is concern about radicalisation in the Somali community in Minneapolis and the threat posed from Somalia. So it's a constantly evolving threat. It's one of the things that make terrorism so much harder than our Soviet enemy during the Cold War, is that as one intelligence official put it to me, god love the Soviets. Everything was on a five year plan for them. But the terrorist threat is constantly changing and it requires a herculean effort to keep up with where the threat is evolving, where it is increasing, where it is decreasing and that is an ongoing challenge.