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Listening to DissentHow should a president handle uncertainties or disputes on intelligence?

By Fred KaplanPosted Tuesday, June 10, 2008, at 12:30 PM ET

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Last December, Bonnie Goldstein revealed the NIE of Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities. Fred Kaplan highlighted the importance of the dissenting footnotes in intelligence reports in 2004 and again in 2005. Additionally, in 2005, Jacob Weisberg found it "utterly, laughably, embarrassingly unpersuasive" that the report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction claimed to have found no evidence of "politicization" of the intelligence community's assessments that led to the invasion of Iraq.

But let's, as promised, be "forward-looking." What lessons can an Obama or McCain administration learn from this report?

On the first and last categories that the report describes—where Bush officials simply recited mistaken intelligence analyses and where they simply lied about them—there isn't much to say beyond "Mistakes were made" and "Don't lie."

But the middle categories—where officials either ignored dissents or hyped guesses into solid fact—are genuinely hard to handle. Almost all NIEs express "high confidence" in some of their judgments, "low confidence" in others. Several are cluttered with footnotes in which one or more of the 16 intelligence agencies dissents from the consensus.

Even with the most objective disposition (and the Bush people didn't have that on Iraq), how should a president handle uncertainties or disputes on intelligence, especially when questions of war and peace are at stake?

First, the intelligence process should be refined so that officials at the top are aware of dissenting footnotes. NIEs are explicitly written for the president, but by the time they're boiled down to "executive summaries"—which, in Bush's White House, sometimes amounted to a page or two—the footnotes have often been removed. The footnotes should be put back in, and if the disputes have implications for policy, the agencies should debate the issue in front of the National Security Council, including the president.

Second, when reading a dissent, pay close attention to which agency wrote it. For instance, the October 2002 NIE stated that Iraq was probably reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. One of the two dissents to that view was written by the Energy Department's intelligence branch. Most of the other intelligence agencies concluded that Iraq's aluminum* tubes were designed for nuclear-weapons production. The Energy Department's analysts insisted that they weren't at all suitable for nukes, that they were probably artillery tubes. The Energy Department runs the U.S. nuclear-weapons program. If the president or one of his aides had known about this dissent, he might have thought, "Hmmm, maybe these guys know something about aluminum tubes."

Similarly, where the NIE asserted that Iraq's unmanned aerial vehicles could deliver biological weapons, U.S. Air Force Intelligence wrote the dissent, concluding that the vehicles were more likely designed for reconnaissance. If the president had known this, he might have thought, "Maybe the Air Force knows more than these other agencies about aerial vehicles." (Click here for an exception to this rule.)

Third, the next president or his director of national intelligence should commission a study of NIEs in the past decade—specifically of patterns in which agencies have been most consistently right and wrong on what topics. Those that have been most correct should be made the lead agency on all the NIEs on that subject. Those that have been most mistaken should be cleaned out.

A model for this exercise might be a Pentagon memo, written during the Kennedy administration, titled "But Where Did the Missile Gap Go?" John F. Kennedy had run for president charging that the Russians were ahead in missile development. He believed in this "missile gap," as did most experts. Soon after he became president, he realized there was no missile gap. He wanted to know why the NIEs of the late 1950s were wrong. (The last time I looked, the declassified memo was in the archives of the John F. Kennedy Library, specifically Box 298 of the National Security File, in the folder marked "Missile Gap, Feb.-May 1963.")

Intelligence, as they say, is as much art as science. Evidence is sifted through assumptions. People usually find what they're looking for and often ignore or misread what they're not. This is, to some degree, inevitable. The important thing is to be aware of the tendency, to keep questioning premises, and to let informed dissenters have their full say.

Correction, June 10, 2008: This article originally referred to Iraq's aluminum tubes as "uranium tubes." (Return to the corrected sentence.)