June 7, 1998

          Naivete at the CIA: Every Nation's Just Another U.S.

          By TIM WEINER  From New York Times Sunday edition:  Week In Review

          [W] ASHINGTON -- Niccolo Machiavelli had it right: never
              assume the other guy will never do something you
          would never do. Too bad Machiavelli never worked for the
          CIA.

          The world might be less dangerous than it is today had
          the CIA and its sister intelligence services foreseen
          India's nuclear tests last month. Armed with that
          foresight, the United States might have been able to
          forestall a test, as it did back in 1995, and thus
          prevent an arms race in one of the planet's least
          pacific places.
         
          A report last week by retired  Adm. David Jeremiah, a former   
          vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blamed the failure on 
          systemic flaws in the way the intelligence community gathers and
          handles  information, trains its thousands of analysts and
          commands its $27-billion-a-year empire.

          But underlying those failures, Jeremiah said, was a
          classic American cultural assumption: "This 'everybody
          thinks like us' mind-set."

          The "underlying mind-set" was that India "would behave
          as we behave," he said. "We should have been much more
          aggressive in thinking through how the other guy
          thought."

          Instead, he said, U.S. analysts decided that the newly
          elected Hindu nationalist political party, the BJP,
          couldn't possibly be serious when it campaigned on a
          nuclear weapons platform. Westerners saw good reasons
          for India to eschew testing and therefore thought
          Indians must understand their own best interests the
          same way.

          Intelligence professionals have a name for this kind of
          thinking: mirror-imaging. It is considered one of the
          most basic mistakes in the spy manual. "Mirror-imaging
          -- projecting your thought process or value system onto
          someone else -- is one of the greatest threats to
          objective intelligence analysis," a senior CIA officer,
          Frank Watanabe, wrote last year in Studies in
          Intelligence, the agency's in-house journal. "Avoid
          mirror-imaging at all costs," he advised.

          Failing to follow such counsel led the United States to
          believe that Japan would never attack Pearl Harbor and
          that Saddam Hussein would never invade Kuwait.

          But no analyst in the government imagined India testing
          a nuclear bomb. "The amazing thing was the unanimity," a
          senior State Department official said ruefully. "There
          was nobody anywhere -- no voices -- saying 'Watch out!"'

          As Watanabe notes, "When everyone agrees on an issue,
          something is probably wrong."

          There is something peculiarly American about the trap of
          mirror-imaging. Americans overseas like foreigners to
          speak, dress, eat and entertain as Americans do. They
          may well believe that everybody also thinks as they do.
          The whole world buys Big Macs -- so the ideas must come
          along with them, like a side of fries. This way of
          thinking meant that, last month, the United States
          government looked down at India from its spy satellites
          -- and saw the United States.

          What does this say about the state of U.S. intelligence?

 
         First, mirror-imaging filled a void. America had few or
          no spies in India reporting on the nuclear program. So
          its analysts had to think without the benefit of facts.

          Second, the CIA does not always teach people to think
          straight, said Mark Lowenthal, a former staff director
          of the House intelligence committee. "They don't do a
          lot of training," he said. "They say, 'Congratulations,
          you're the Mali analyst, have a nice day.' They need to
          spend some time on thinking about how you think. Very
          few analysts come by it naturally and almost none are
          taught to do it. Crisis-driven as they are, they don't
          have a lot of time to step back and say: 'Have I missed
          something? Is this the right way of thinking?"'

          Third, group think grinds top-secret papers into
          intellectual pulp, said Angelo Codevilla, a former
          senior staff member of the Senate intelligence
          committee. "Our intelligence community thinks in herds
          -- 'Stay close. Don't get out ahead. Don't be thought of
          as crazy,"' he said. "There is a tremendous lack of
          diversity of mind. The most typical phrase in an
          intelligence estimate is 'We believe' -- the corporate
          belief, the office view, calibrated to satisfy -- not 'I
          think."'

          Fourth, "we have a brain-power problem" in American
          intelligence, said Robert Steele, a former CIA officer.

          "The average analyst has 2 to 5 years' experience,"
          Steele said. "They haven't been to the countries they're
          analyzing. They don't have the language, the historical
          knowledge, the in-country residence time or the respect
          of their private-sector peers."

          In its defense, the CIA was not the only outfit in
          Washington that had a mirror where its crystal ball
          should be. So had the White House, the Pentagon and the
          State Department.

          The agency's reporting on Pakistan's subsequent nuclear
          tests was prescient and precise. But Jeremiah found the
          CIA misread India's nuclear ambitions because it was
          short on insight, expertise, training and leadership --
          a strange state of affairs for an intelligence agency
          created to be the deepest think tank in the world.

          The CIA, the admiral found, was not thinking clearly,
          and so deceived itself.