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The tragic events of September 11, 2001, and the false assessment ofSaddam Hussein's weapons arsenal were terrible reminders that good information isessential to national security. These failures convinced the American public thattheir intelligence system was broken and prompted a radical reorganization ofagencies and personnel, but as Richard K. Betts argues in this book, critics andpoliticians have severely underestimated the obstacles to true reform.One of the nation's foremost political scientists, Betts drawson three decades of work within the U.S. intelligence community to illuminate theparadoxes and problems that frustrate the intelligence process. Unlike America'sefforts to improve its defenses against natural disasters, strengthening itsstrategic assessment capabilities means outwitting crafty enemies who operate beyondU.S. borders. It also requires looking within to the organizational and politicaldynamics of collecting information and determining its implications for policy.Combining academic research with personal experience, Bettsoutlines strategies for better intelligence gathering and assessment. He describeshow fixing one malfunction can create another; in what ways expertise can be both avital tool and a source of error and misjudgment; the pitfalls of always strivingfor accuracy in intelligence, which in some cases can render it worthless; thedanger, though unavoidable, of "politicizing" intelligence; and the issue ofsecrecy& -when it is excessive, when it is insufficient, and howlimiting privacy can in fact protect civil liberties.Bettsargues that when it comes to intelligence, citizens and politicians should focusless on consistent solutions and more on achieving a delicate balance betweenconflicting requirements. He also emphasizes the substantial success of theintelligence community, despite its well-publicized blunders, and highlightselements of the intelligence process that need preservation and protection. Manyreformers are quick to respond to scandals and failures without detailed, historicalknowledge of how the system works. Grounding his arguments in extensive theory andpolicy analysis, Betts takes a comprehensive and realistic look at how knowledge andpower can work together to face the intelligence challenges of the twenty-firstcentury.

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Richard K. Betts is director of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of numerous books on military strategy and foreign policy. He has served on the National Commission on Terrorism, staffs of the Senate Intelligence Committee and National Security Council, and advisory panels for the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Preface	p. xi
Twenty-first-Century Intelligence: New Enemies and Old	p. 1
Permanent Enemies: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable	p. 19
Theory Traps: Expertise as an Enemy	p. 53
Incorruptibility or Influence? Costs and Benefits of Politicization	p. 66
Two Faces of Failure: September 11 and Iraq's WMD	p. 104
An Intelligence Reformation? Two Faces of Reorganization	p. 124
Whose Knowledge of Whom? The Conflict of Secrets	p. 159
Enemies at Bay: Successful Intelligence	p. 183
Notes	p. 195
Index	p. 229
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpt from the Chapter "Whose Knowledge of Whom"

Intelligence Collection and Civil Liberties

There is a world of difference between the problems of collecting intelligence abroad and at home. All U.S. intelligence operations must conform to U.S. law, but that law leaves operations outside U.S. territory relatively unconstrained. When doing their jobs abroad, American agents may break the laws of the countries in which their operations are undertaken. They may give money to political parties, plant bugs in defense ministries, bribe legislators, tap the phones of diplomats, and do all sorts of things to gather information that the FBI could not normally do within the United States, at least without a court order. More intrusive collection inside the United States would have done the most to boost the chances of averting the September 11 attacks. Great changes in that direction may make Americans fear that the costs exceed the benefits -- indeed, that if civil liberties are compromised, the terrorists will have won.

The unique responsibility of intelligence collectors is to penetrate enemy secrecy, to uncover information that adversaries try to conceal. Since spies or terrorists pose as innocents, maximizing collection of potentially useful information means that intelligence collection becomes a fishing expedition, and that most suspects made subject to surveillance and searches are innocent. To minimize intrusion against innocents, as well as to target intelligence resources efficiently, collection is not maximized, at least in situations short of immediate threats to national survival. Normally, only those who present some substantial cause for suspicion have been subjected to surveillance. How substantial that reason must be -- or whether large numbers of innocent people should be observed to determine which among them are suspects to be scrutinized -- are matters of regular political and legal debate.

Critics of aggressive government intrusion often cite a famous warning by Benjamin Franklin. In congressional debate on the USA Patriot Act, for example, Senator Patrick Leahy cited the gist of what Franklin said as "If we surrender our liberty in the name of security, we shall have neither." As Michael J. Woods points out, however, "Franklin's actual words are more nuanced.... 'Those who give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.'" Whatever Franklin meant, security and liberty can go together, but only if each is compromised to some extent to protect the other.

Priorities Among Liberties

There are two big mistakes one can make when confronted by the trade-off between national security and individual liberty. One is to deny that there is such a trade-off. The other is to embrace it without qualifying which specific aspect of liberty is at issue, instead lumping all liberties together. The first mistake, common only among the most fervent supporters of individual rights, denies the trade-off because it is psychologically unacceptable to admit that good things do not all go together. If forced to admit the trade-off, some zealots insist categorically that civil liberties must always take precedence over security, that if any liberty is sacrificed for the sake of combating terrorists, the terrorists will have won, or that any contraction of liberty is the camel's nose in the tent that portends the collapse of the Constitution. This sort of thinking is a recipe for dangerous constraints on the government's ability to gather intelligence, especially the type that offers the best hope of foiling terrorist plots.

The second mistake is more common: the assumption that the trade-off is between collective national defense and individual civil liberties, period. Thinking in terms of a dichotomy makes it much harder to strike a balance. Civil liberties should not and need not all suffer for the sake of security, because liberties are not all of a piece. The most legitimate trade-off is not between security and liberty in general, but between security and privacy, the one aspect of liberty that inhibits the government's acquisition of information. Limiting the government's knowledge of one's life and activities is an important freedom, but not the most important one. There is no need to compromise the more important elements of civil liberties having to do with freedom of speech, political organization, religion, or especially the right to due process of law -- the freedom from arbitrary arrest and incarceration without the chance to contest one's guilt. Having one's phone tapped without proper cause is not as damaging as being imprisoned for years without trial. I argue that it is more vital to keep within strict interpretations of the limits for the First and Fifth amendments in the Bill of Rights than for the Fourth Amendment. This argument is another that does not have support in the jurisprudence of the Constitution, which recognizes no hierarchy of rights; it is asserted as a practical matter of common sense, not as accepted law.

Zealots at both ends of the spectrum are allied against compromisers. (Consider one set of strange bedfellows: the American Civil Liberties Union has "entered into an alliance, called Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances, with conservative groups such as Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.") Libertarian absolutists mimic the National Rifle Association. Like ardent proponents of the right to bear arms, they see even a limited concession as the first step in the unraveling of all privacy rights. Supporters of highly intrusive intelligence collection, on the other hand, too often rest their case on such a breathtaking assertion of presidential powers that any significant improvement in the public's sense of security, or a change of administration, is bound to produce an antiauthoritarian backlash. The compromise argument in this chapter tilts toward liberty on the issue of due process and away from it on the issue of privacy. The latter part of the argument relates to intelligence: It is reasonable to invade the privacy of some citizens in order to gain information that might help to protect the lives of all citizens.

This compromise of one aspect of liberty ultimately serves to protect liberty and the rule of law in general. In the Constitution, life comes before liberty. Life without liberty is possible, but liberty without life is not. Without security, few Americans would be grateful for liberty. This is not readily apparent at most times -- and the proposition strikes some as authoritarian alarmism -- because Americans have habitually taken basic security for granted. They rarely give even a fleeting thought to the tremendous protection afforded the United States by its geography, the two huge ocean moats to the east and west and weak neighbors to the north and south. Indeed, it was the assumption of basic security by most Americans that made the Al Qaeda attacks such a shock to them, even though they caused damage no greater than many counterterrorism specialists had been warning about for a long time.

If those on either side of the debate insist on lumping all civil liberties together in a trade-off with national security, liberty comes out on top in the competition only as long as Americans are spared more attacks on the scale of September 11. Even then, some compromises of liberty remain, as represented by the USA Patriot Act and by congressional acquiescence to warrantless surveillance programs by the National Security Agency (NSA). If September 11 fades into history and terrorists manage only occasional, small provocations, political tides may roll back some of those constraints on freedom. Experience of more dramatic attacks, however, especially ones involving chemical, biological, or radiological weapons, would sweep away most concern for civil liberties in a panic. It is important to differentiate types and priorities of liberties so that they do not get thrown out wholesale in an emergency. It follows that it is also important to do so in order to facilitate intelligence collection that would raise the odds of preventing just the sort of emergency that could produce the panic. In short, reducing a bit of liberty today buttresses a lot of it tomorrow.