Why the Intelligence Community Ineffectively Uses HUMINT

Introduction

Since 9/11, the intelligence community has been at the heart of numerous policy decisions—from the invasion of Iraq to U.S. foreign relations with China and Russia. While the objective of the intelligence community is to provide legitimate intelligence to policymakers, numerous researchers have pointed out that in the post-9/11 era, policy has often shaped intelligence rather than the other way around, as it is intended to be.¹ As Richard Best notes, "intelligence from human contacts—HUMINT—is the oldest intelligence discipline and the one that is most often written about in the media."² As the CIA is the primary collector of human intelligence along with the Department of Defense (DOD), it plays a leading role in the use of HUMINT within the intelligence community.

With the wars in the Middle East having dragged on for nearly two decades, many are wondering why, with so many HUMINT sources available, these wars proved so difficult and disastrous on so many levels—and why faulty intelligence was used in the build-up to the Iraq invasion. This paper asks specifically: Why is the intelligence community so ineffectively using HUMINT? What is going on behind the scenes?

This issue remains a puzzle because the reputation of the intelligence community is that very little is kept from it in the modern era: there are few secrets and fewer surprises. For the intelligence community to get something so spectacularly wrong—such as the claim that Hussein possessed mobile weapons laboratories and weapons of mass destruction—gives one considerable pause: how could such gross miscalculations of judgment occur?

It is hypothesized that in the post-9/11 world, the intelligence community has allowed itself to be guided by policymakers instead of being the guide for policy. This study conducts a case study analysis to determine whether such an inversion has indeed taken place. By using the qualitative approach and the case study research design, the study answers those questions so as to better understand why HUMINT is not being effectively used by the intelligence community in the post-9/11 era.

The specific case examined is the way in which HUMINT was misused in the build-up to the Iraq War, particularly with respect to the source known as Curveball, whose information was problematically used to justify a full-scale invasion. This study provides a review of relevant literature with a focus on current knowledge gaps, explains how the study addresses those gaps, discusses the methodology used for collecting and analyzing data, and finally presents the analysis and findings with a detailed discussion of what those findings mean in terms of the research question and hypothesis.

Review of the Literature

While Colin Powell was testifying before the United Nations about Iraq's alleged yellow-cake uranium deals with Niger—which former ambassador Joe Wilson vehemently denied ever took place—Richard Perle, who chaired the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had been collaborating with Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Robert Kagan, both of whom also headed the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a quasi dual-American-Israeli think tank, to advance the story that Saddam Hussein posed a legitimate threat to the United States, particularly because of his alleged terrorist connections. Perle, Kristol, and Kagan were advisors to policymakers; their role was to put forward ideas about how foreign policy should be conducted. They were not intelligence analysts. The CIA did not corroborate the story these policy advisors were advancing, yet these advisors had the ear of the White House.³

Meanwhile, "CIA analysts complained publicly (through anonymous media leaks) that Vice President Dick Cheney was wrong to insist on a significant tie between al-Qaeda and Saddam. Intelligence reporting had come to just the opposite conclusion, although CIA analysts warned that indeed a bond might be forged between global terrorists and the Iraqi dictatorship…if the West invaded Iraq."⁴ This is, in fact, exactly what happened. The West invaded Iraq, Iraqi infrastructure collapsed, and out of the vacuum created by the destruction and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians emerged ISIS, which went on to wreak havoc throughout the Middle East. In other words, the HUMINT indicated that Iraq posed no threat and that the real threat of terror stemmed not from Iraq but rather from an invasion of it. In short, HUMINT implied that a U.S. invasion would serve as a catalyst for the growth of terrorism in the region.

It was almost as though the think tanks and policymakers were simply operating according to a pre-arranged plan and were assembling HUMINT sources to justify an invasion and provide a pretext that would look feasible to the world public. In fact, such a plan did exist: it was Oded Yinon's 1982 policy paper for Israeli strategists on how to destabilize Israel's enemies in the Middle East.⁵ That policy was being coordinated and implemented by White House policy advisors under Bush—via PNAC and Perle—in spite of the overwhelming evidence of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that there was no link between Iraq and terrorism or the attacks of 9/11.⁶