The Political Interest

By Michael Kramer

"No Halcion for me," said George Bush last week, referring to the widely used sleeping pill. When the President has trouble nodding off, he reaches for a book -- or for a CIA paper: "They have marvelous studies of things all around the world."

Trouble is that too much of the CIA's product is fiction. Several days before Bush disclosed his bedtime habits, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan delivered a devastating critique of the agency's forecasting abilities. "For 40 years," said Moynihan, the CIA "hugely overestimated both the size of the Soviet economy and its rate of growth. This in turn has persistently distorted our estimates of the Soviet threat, notably in the 1980s when we turned ourselves into a debtor nation to pay for the arms to counter the threat of a nation whose home front, unbeknown to us, was collapsing." Overall, adds Moynihan, the CIA's misanalysis represents "the most massive intelligence failure of the cold war era."

While no one would expect the President to agree publicly with Moynihan, one would expect him to try to fix things. Which is why the newly constituted President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board merits attention.

The six-member PFIAB will be led by John Tower, a former Senate Armed Services Committee chairman. "But Tower is one of the boss's loyalty appointments," says a Bush aide. "After John's drinking problem cost him the Defense portfolio, the President felt he owed him." Four of the other members are among the nation's most competent analysts of scientific information. The only first-rate geopolitical thinker is the sixth member, Foreign Affairs editor William Hyland -- and that's the problem. Concedes PFIAB member John Deutch, an M.I.T. energy expert: "Our strengths run to the technical."

That expertise will come in handy as the $30 billion-a-year intelligence community budget is retargeted to accommodate a changed world. But the community's crucial task in the years ahead, says Harvard Sovietologist Richard Pipes, "will involve the proper interpretation of political, economic and social intelligence." The Tower group "is going to be great when it comes to helping us verify arms reductions," says Moynihan. "But what we are really going to need to know is whether the Soviet Communist Party is going to implode, and how we can compete in the 21st century as other nations play economic roles equal to ours. Who's going to analyze the data in a sophisticated way and help the CIA to collect them in useful forms? Probably not the new PFIAB."

The real story here is that George Bush has never cottoned to the idea of outsiders roaming around the CIA. As director of Central Intelligence in 1976, Bush watched as the famous Team B, a collection of outside experts led by Pipes, challenged the agency's more sanguine estimates of Soviet intentions and capabilities. In 1980 Bush admitted he had never favored the Team-B exercise. "It was forced on me by the White House," said Bush. By most accounts the President preferred abolishing PFIAB, but was eager to avoid a predicted congressional uproar. Recasting PFIAB so that its focus will probably be narrow represents the path of least resistance -- a politically clever but intellectually shortsighted move. Bush doesn't need intelligence reports that induce sleep; he needs the kind of thought-provoking analysis that can substitute for No-Doz.