Download or read book Why Intelligence Fails written by Robert Jervis and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. government spends enormous resources each year on the gathering and analysis of intelligence, yet the history of American foreign policy is littered with missteps and misunderstandings that have resulted from intelligence failures. In Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis examines the politics and psychology of two of the more spectacular intelligence failures in recent memory: the mistaken belief that the regime of the Shah in Iran was secure and stable in 1978, and the claim that Iraq had active WMD programs in 2002. The Iran case is based on a recently declassified report Jervis was commissioned to undertake by CIA thirty years ago and includes memoranda written by CIA officials in response to Jervis's findings. The Iraq case, also grounded in a review of the intelligence community's performance, is based on close readings of both classified and declassified documents, though Jervis's conclusions are entirely supported by evidence that has been declassified. In both cases, Jervis finds not only that intelligence was badly flawed but also that later explanations—analysts were bowing to political pressure and telling the White House what it wanted to hear or were willfully blind—were also incorrect. Proponents of these explanations claimed that initial errors were compounded by groupthink, lack of coordination within the government, and failure to share information. Policy prescriptions, including the recent establishment of a Director of National Intelligence, were supposed to remedy the situation. In Jervis's estimation, neither the explanations nor the prescriptions are adequate. The inferences that intelligence drew were actually quite plausible given the information available. Errors arose, he concludes, from insufficient attention to the ways in which information should be gathered and interpreted, a lack of self-awareness about the factors that led to the judgments, and an organizational culture that failed to probe for weaknesses and explore alternatives. Evaluating the inherent tensions between the methods and aims of intelligence personnel and policymakers from a unique insider's perspective, Jervis forcefully criticizes recent proposals for improving the performance of the intelligence community and discusses ways in which future analysis can be improved.

Download or read book Before Intelligence Failed written by Mark Wilkinson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the 2003 Iraq War, the term 'intelligence failure' became synonymous with the Blair Government and how it had used intelligence to construct a case for war. This book examines British secret intelligence over the thirty years preceding its very public failings. From the Soviet Union to South Africa and Libya, Mark Wilkinson provides a detailed analysis and vivid account of the development and functioning of Britain's intelligence agencies in the struggle against the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons. Based on archival research and interviews with key players in the intelligence establishment, he shows how a handful of chemical and biological weapons experts battled to make their voices heard. They had evidence that illegal weapons development was taking place but were continually rebuffed by adversaries in Whitehall. Fascinating, surprising and sometimes shocking, Before Intelligence Failed is a compelling account of what was known about chemical and biological weapons proliferation before the Iraq War.

Download or read book Breakdown written by Bill Gertz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Bill Gertz uses his unparalleled access to America's intelligence system to show how this system completely broke down in the years, months, and days leading up to the deadly terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Download or read book Understanding Intelligence Failure written by James J. Wirtz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection, comprising key works by James J. Wirtz, explains how different threat perceptions can lead to strategic surprise attack, intelligence failure and the failure of deterrence. This volume adopts a strategist’s view of the issue of surprise and intelligence failure by placing these phenomena in the context of conflict between strong and weak actors in world affairs. A two-level theory explains the incentives and perceptions of both parties when significant imbalances of military power exist between potential combatants, and how this situation sets the stage for strategic surprise and intelligence failure to occur. The volume illustrates this theory by applying it to the Kargil Crisis, attacks launched by non-state actors, and by offering a comparison of Pearl Harbor and the September 11, 2001 attacks. It explores the phenomenon of deterrence failure; specifically, how weaker parties in an enduring or nascent conflict come to believe that deterrent threats posed by militarily stronger antagonists will be undermined by various constraints, increasing the attractiveness of utilising surprise attack to achieve their objectives. This work also offers strategies that could mitigate the occurrence of intelligence failure, strategic surprise and the failure of deterrence. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, strategic studies, security studies and IR in general.

Download or read book Failing Intelligence written by Brian Jones and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book on Iraq by a British intelligence official involved in the process that led to the 2003 invasion.

Download or read book Intelligence and Surprise Attack written by Erik J. Dahl and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can the United States avoid a future surprise attack on the scale of 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, in an era when such devastating attacks can come not only from nation states, but also from terrorist groups or cyber enemies? Intelligence and Surprise Attack examines why surprise attacks often succeed even though, in most cases, warnings had been available beforehand. Erik J. Dahl challenges the conventional wisdom about intelligence failure, which holds that attacks succeed because important warnings get lost amid noise or because intelligence officials lack the imagination and collaboration to “connect the dots” of available information. Comparing cases of intelligence failure with intelligence success, Dahl finds that the key to success is not more imagination or better analysis, but better acquisition of precise, tactical-level intelligence combined with the presence of decision makers who are willing to listen to and act on the warnings they receive from their intelligence staff. The book offers a new understanding of classic cases of conventional and terrorist attacks such as Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Midway, and the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The book also presents a comprehensive analysis of the intelligence picture before the 9/11 attacks, making use of new information available since the publication of the 9/11 Commission Report and challenging some of that report’s findings.

Download or read book Intelligence Failure written by David N. Bossie and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2004 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight years before 9/11, on February 26, 1993, Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network declared war against the United States with a deadly attack on the World Trade Center. Al Qaeda continued to wage war on the U.S. throughout the Clinton Administration, attacking Khobar Towers in 1996, two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, and the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. How could these attacks happen? How could Al Qaeda wage these assaults against the strongest, best-defended nation in the world? Intelligence Failure is the definitive account of Bill Clinton's greatest failure as president. Using exclusive research and previously unreported findings from congressional investigations and other sources, David Bossie details how Clinton's poor leadership and denigration of both the U.S. military and intelligence services exposed America to terrorist assault. "September 11, 2001, may have happened under Bush's watch," Bossie declares, "but it will always remain Clinton's legacy."

Download or read book The Killing of Osama Bin Laden written by Seymour M Hersh and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Electrifying investigation of White House lies about the assassination of Osama bin Laden In 2011, an elite group of US Navy SEALS stormed an enclosure in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden, the man the United States had begun chasing before the devastating attacks of 9/11. The news did much to boost President Obama’s first term and played a major part in his reelection victory of the following year. But much of the story of that night, as presented to the world, was incomplete, or a lie. The evidence of what actually went on remains hidden. At the same time, the full story of the United States’ involvement in the Syrian civil war has been kept behind a diplomatic curtain, concealed by doublespeak. It is a policy of obfuscation that has compelled the White House to turn a blind eye to Turkey’s involvement in supporting ISIS and its predecessors in Syria. This investigation, which began as a series of essays in the London Review of Books, has ignited a firestorm of controversy in the world media. In his introduction, Hersh asks what will be the legacy of Obama’s time in office. Was it an era of “change we can believe in” or a season of lies and compromises that continued George W. Bush’s misconceived War on Terror? How did he lose the confidence of the general in charge of America’s forces who acted in direct contradiction to the White House? What else do we not know?.

Download or read book The Tet Offensive written by James J. Wirtz and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this account of one of the worst intelligence failures in American history, James J. Wirtz explains why U.S. forces were surprised by the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive in 1968. Wirtz reconstructs the turning point of the Vietnam War in unprecedented detail. Drawing upon Vietcong and recently declassified U.S. sources, he is able to trace the strategy and unfolding of the Tet campaign as well as the U.S. response.

Download or read book Covert Blunders written by and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Spying Blind written by Amy B. Zegart and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pathbreaking book, Amy Zegart provides the first scholarly examination of the intelligence failures that preceded September 11. Until now, those failures have been attributed largely to individual mistakes. But Zegart shows how and why the intelligence system itself left us vulnerable. Zegart argues that after the Cold War ended, the CIA and FBI failed to adapt to the rise of terrorism. She makes the case by conducting painstaking analysis of more than three hundred intelligence reform recommendations and tracing the history of CIA and FBI counterterrorism efforts from 1991 to 2001, drawing extensively from declassified government documents and interviews with more than seventy high-ranking government officials. She finds that political leaders were well aware of the emerging terrorist danger and the urgent need for intelligence reform, but failed to achieve the changes they sought. The same forces that have stymied intelligence reform for decades are to blame: resistance inside U.S. intelligence agencies, the rational interests of politicians and career bureaucrats, and core aspects of our democracy such as the fragmented structure of the federal government. Ultimately failures of adaptation led to failures of performance. Zegart reveals how longstanding organizational weaknesses left unaddressed during the 1990s prevented the CIA and FBI from capitalizing on twenty-three opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot. Spying Blind is a sobering account of why two of America's most important intelligence agencies failed to adjust to new threats after the Cold War, and why they are unlikely to adapt in the future.

Download or read book Intelligence and U S Foreign Policy written by Paul R. Pillar and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A career of nearly three decades with the CIA and the National Intelligence Council showed Paul R. Pillar that intelligence reforms, especially measures enacted since 9/11, can be deeply misguided. They often miss the sources that underwrite failed policy and misperceive our ability to read outside influences. They also misconceive the intelligence-policy relationship and promote changes that weaken intelligence-gathering operations. In this book, Pillar confronts the intelligence myths Americans have come to rely on to explain national tragedies, including the belief that intelligence drives major national security decisions and can be fixed to avoid future failures. Pillar believes these assumptions waste critical resources and create harmful policies, diverting attention away from smarter reform, and they keep Americans from recognizing the limits of obtainable knowledge. Pillar revisits U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War and highlights the small role intelligence played in those decisions, and he demonstrates the negligible effect that America's most notorious intelligence failures had on U.S. policy and interests. He then reviews in detail the events of 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, condemning the 9/11 commission and the George W. Bush administration for their portrayals of the role of intelligence. Pillar offers an original approach to better informing U.S. policy, which involves insulating intelligence management from politicization and reducing the politically appointed layer in the executive branch to combat slanted perceptions of foreign threats. Pillar concludes with principles for adapting foreign policy to inevitable uncertainties.

Download or read book Burn Before Reading written by Turner Stansfield and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2005-10-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this "thoughtful, entertaining, and often insightful" book, a former CIA director explores the delicate give-and-take between the Oval Office and Langley. With the disastrous intelligence failures of the last few years still fresh in Americans minds--and to all appearances still continuing--there has never been a more urgent need for a book like this. In Burn Before Reading, Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA director under President Jimmy Carter, takes the reader inside the Beltway to examine the complicated, often strained relationships between presidents and their CIA chiefs. From FDR and "Wild Bill" Donovan to George W. Bush and George Tenet, twelve pairings are studied in these pages, and the results are eye-opening and provocative. Throughout, Turner offers a fascinating look into the machinery of intelligence gathering, revealing how personal and political issues often interfere with government business--and the nation's safety.

Download or read book Failure of Intelligence written by Melvin Allan Goodman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Failure of Intelligence is designed to inform the debate over intelligence policy and suggest a reform agenda. The provocative mingling of historical description with contemporary political analysis and reform prescription challenges the conventional wisdom on clandestine collection and ultimately and persuasively asserts that the failure to have diplomatic relations has led to the inability to collect intelligence.

Download or read book A Pretext for War written by James Bamford and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2005-05-10 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Pretext for War reveals the systematic weaknesses behind the failure to detect or prevent the 9/11 attacks, and details the Bush administration’s subsequent misuse of intelligence to sell preemptive war to the American people. Filled with unprecedented revelations, from the sites of “undisclosed locations” to the actual sources of America’s Middle East policy, A Pretext for War is essential reading for anyone concerned about the security of the United States. Acclaimed author James Bamford–whose classic book The Puzzle Palace first revealed the existence of the National Security Agency–draws on his unparalleled access to top intelligence sources to produce a devastating expose of the intelligence community and the Bush administration.

Download or read book Why Secret Intelligence Fails written by Michael A. Turner and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-07 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Turner argues that the root causes of failures in American intelligence can be found in the way it is organized and in the intelligence process itself. Intelligence that has gone awry affects national decision making and, ultimately, American national security. Intelligence officials are reluctant to talk about intelligence successes, claiming "the secret of our success is the secret of our success." But these officials also shy away from talking about failures, largely because doing so would expose the failings of American intelligence and have an impact on policy consumers who may become more reluctant to accept and act on the intelligence they receive. Rather than focusing on case studies, the book takes a holistic approach, beginning with structural issues and all dysfunctions that emanate from them. Turner explores each step of the intelligence cycle--priority setting, intelligence collection, analysis, production, and dissemination--to identify the "inflection points" within each stage that contribute to intelligence failures. Finally, he examines a variety of plans that, if implemented, would reduce the likelihood of intelligence failures. While examining the causes of intelligence failures, Turner also explores intelligence as a critical governmental activity, making the book an excellent primer on secret intelligence. Turner writes in jargon-free prose for the informed reader interested in foreign policy and national security policy matters and brings enough depth to his subject that even experts will find this a must-read.

Download or read book None So Blind written by George W. Allen and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2001 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From his vantage point as a chief official with the CIA and army intelligence, Mr. Allen reveals specifically how American leaders, unwilling to face up to bad news from intelligence sources, largely excluded intelligence from important policy deliberations until it was too late.