Whatever Happened to the National Intelligence Council?

As the saying has it, our memories are good but many of the things we remember best never happened. In that vein, it surely is all too easy for “formers” to cover their times serving their country with a rosy gauze of nostalgia. So, we write carefully about the fate of an esteemed national security institution, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), one we both served as Chair. We are worried that it has virtually disappeared, buried in the bureaucracy of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) under a deputy for something called “mission integration.”

 By Gregory F. Treverton and Robert Hutchings

Note: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of SMA: The Program Lifecycle Company.

To be sure, the needs of the nation change with administrations, and institutions adjust, even disappear, though rarely in government. Yet the NIC’s mission seems to us even more important now. The NIC and its predecessors drew not only the best analysts from inside the Intelligence Community (IC) but also the nation’s leading national security experts from outside the government. These were people with no more worlds to conquer in, say, the academy but who had a yen to look at the world from inside government. They wanted to give something back to their country in the process. These prominent outsiders used their connections to engage the best experts around the world in the NIC’s work.

The NIC was also the cheerleader and focal point for strategic analysis. That is, analysis that sought to look beyond the immediate and tactical. Analysis that pushed forward in time, traced connections across issues and endeavored to provide some shape to the often-dizzying pace of current events. Not for nothing do they call the NIC’s signature product the National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE. Now, so far as we can tell, the NIC hardly performs that estimative function. Nor does it attract leading figures from outside, and the quality of our strategic intelligence suffers for it.

The Legacy of the NIC

When President Harry Truman set up the strategic intelligence function at the end of World War II, he understood that the United States had been thrust into a global role for which it was not prepared. Tellingly, his National Intelligence Authority Directive No. 5, on July 8, 1946, instructing the director of central intelligence to “accomplish the evaluation and dissemination of strategic intelligence,” was not sent to the secretary of state or to the leaders of the armed services. Rather, he sent it to the National Intelligence Authority—and soon thereafter to the newly created Central Intelligence Agency—precisely to ensure that strategic intelligence analysis was developed independently of the principal policy agencies.

The United States wasn’t prepared for its Cold War role, but, in retrospect, that role quickly became clear, perhaps all too clear. The world soon turned bipolar, and whether prepared or not, no nation but the United States could lead what too easily was labelled the “free world.” Now, however, despite the America-first breast-thumping of the Trump Administration and the Biden administration’s successful coalition building in the Ukraine war, the United States finds itself at a point where it possesses neither the power to impose its will on the rest the world nor the clarity of purpose that the Cold War seemed to provide. If anything, today’s world is more confused and confusing than that of the Cold War. The need for strategic understanding is all the greater lest the country fall back on unhelpful and intellectually sloppy analogies, like “new cold war” with China.

The NIC’s origins go back at least back to the Korean war in 1950 and the creation of the Office of National Estimates (ONE), with an accompanying Board of National Estimates (BNE), and a new art form, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). ONE was a CIA organization but when William Colby supplanted it with National Intelligence Officers (NIOs), those reported to the Director of Central Intelligence not as CIA director but as overseer of the Intelligence Community. In 1979, the NIOs were organized into the National Intelligence Council, the structure that has lasted until now. In many respects, the NIC was the DCI’s—and the Intelligence Community’s—think-tank.

Strategic analysis aims to improve understanding, not predict the future, but ONE, then the NIC, got most of the big issues right.[1] ONE concluded early that the Communists would prevail in the Chinese civil war, and both ONE and the NIC were consistently more accurate than policymakers or outside commissions in assessing the Soviet strategic threat. The NIC chronicled the rapidly deteriorating Soviet economy and growing instability in eastern Europe, at one point presenting three scenarios for revolutionary change in the region. It forecast the inevitability of China’s rise two decades ago, long before this was broadly understood on the policy side. As early as 1994, the NIC forecast conflict between Russia and Ukraine over Crimea.

Aside from its strategic threat analysis, the NIC’s most important contributions may have been in highlighting coming issues that were neglected at the senior levels of government: HIV/AIDS, climate change, migration, cyber security, and infectious disease. An unclassified 2004 report predicted a major global pandemic by the year 2020 and, alas, spelled out its implications for the world almost exactly as occurred. Looking back, perhaps the strongest conclusion is that the NIC consistently provided a broader global perspective and often raised issues that were not on the radar screens of busy policymakers.

To be sure, there were memorable failures as well, and outside pundits tend to remember those and forget the successes. A disastrous 1962 NIE on Cuba not only failed to warn of the impending Soviet installation of nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba, but resolutely argued, even as contrary evidence was accumulating, that such a move was virtually inconceivable. More recently, everyone remembers the flawed 2002 NIE on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but fewer recall the NIC’s two Intelligence Community Assessments of January 2003 that warned against the planned U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq but went unheeded by the George W. Bush administration.[2]

From the beginning, ONE and the NIC recruited the best and the brightest. William Langer and Sherman Kent, the first director and deputy director of ONE, were distinguished academics and veterans of the wartime Office of Strategic Services. They were joined by equally eminent academics across many disciplines, along with flag-rank military officers and businessmen. So, too, from the first one, Richard Lehman, NIC Chairs from inside the Intelligence Community constituted a roster of who’s who among intelligence professionals—Robert Gates, John Gannon, John Helgerson, Thomas Fingar. They were complemented by distinguished outsiders, Henry Rowen from the RAND Corporation, Joseph Nye and Richard Cooper from Harvard, and others.

So, too, the NIC recruited as NIOs world-class experts from outside government, many of whom we had the pleasure of working with—Ezra Vogel from Harvard, Enid Schoettle from the Ford Foundation, Richard Neu from RAND, Angela Stent from Georgetown, and Fiona Hill, also originally from Harvard. Those outsiders brought a fresh view and broad perspective to

intelligence, especially strategic intelligence. They also came with a stature in the policy world that few career intelligence analysts could match. What policy official, however senior, would turn down a meeting with Joe Nye!

From DCI to DNI

In retrospect, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004 was perhaps the beginning of the end for the NIC. With the creation of the DNI as the nation’s senior intelligence officer, both the President’s Daily Brief and immediate support to the NSC foreign policy committees, the Principals Committee (PC) and Deputies Committee (DC), fell to the DNI—the PDB to a separate staff, with the CIA still doing most of the actual items, and current support to the NIC, much to the surprise of NIC Chair Fingar and his colleagues at the time!

That change put the NIC at the center of policymaking but also dramatically accentuated the tyranny of the tactical. As an example, in 2016 the NIC produced about 700 pieces of paper, and more than half of those were memorandums from an NIO to the National Security Adviser, her deputy or another senior National Security Council official. They came directly from the deliberations of the PC or, especially, the DC, which met virtually every day, sometimes twice. Not all the taskings were purely tactical; some asked questions like “if we do X, how will Putin respond?” But all drove out time for more strategic analysis.

A second major change was the creation of, first, mission managers for selected issues, then National Intelligence Managers (NIMs) for all NIO portfolios. In principle, the creation of the NIMs offered the NIC the chance to concentrate on what it does best—analysis, not collection. However, in practice, it was more complicated, adding another layer of coordination and tasks to the NIC’s busy days, further reducing the NIC’s independence—and perhaps its stature. In effect, NIOs worked for both the NIC Chair and their NIM. Fewer outsiders were tempted to navigate this more complicated bureaucratic geography, let alone work for a NIM they’d never heard of. Physical geography also mattered: the NIC stayed at CIA headquarters, but the NIMs were located with the DNI at Liberty Crossing, a few miles away. NIOs rarely saw the DNI.

The NIC Today…and Tomorrow?

Today’s NIC is a far cry from what it was, the Community’s celebrated think-tank for strategic analysis. It is virtually invisible, not easily found on the DNI’s website. The NIC has had only acting Chairs for the last three years. It no longer draws the Langers or the Nyes from outside government. The DNI is still listed as the NIC chair, but the NIC hardly reports to her. Paradoxically, the organization that always spanned the many U.S. intelligence agencies when the Intelligence Community was much more stove piped than it is today has become almost entirely a CIA organization: both its acting Chair and Vice Chair are CIA officers, as is the officer to whom they report, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration.

The NIC has become just one more bureaucratic office. it has retreated into its secret cocoon and no longer engages as it once did with experts outside government. Much of its pioneering unclassified work—large volumes of declassified NIEs on China and Vietnam, speeches, and articles by past chairs, etc.—have been erased from the NIC website. In 2019, the NIC hosted a conference marking its 40th anniversary—an opportunity for stocktaking and interaction with outside experts—but the conference was classified and thus inaccessible to most.

The old NIC reached out in a variety of ways, especially through the NIC Associates, later Intelligence Community Associates. These numbered several hundred and were selected by the NIOs from experts in think tanks, the academy and the business world. Most did not have security clearances. They were consulted informally, for instance when they had travelled to countries of interest; they were asked to produce papers or to prepare trips. One group of strategists and international relations specialists met often over a number of years to review NIC products. Had they constituted a university department, it would easily have been the best in the world.

In our times as Chair, we didn’t want to see the NIOs very often. Rather, we wanted them to be downtown meeting with policy colleagues, in circumstances when they didn’t have to be too careful about what was intelligence and what was simply advice. We realized that while NIEs were our homework and calling cards, the NIC’s real product was people, NIOs, not paper. Now, unfortunately, the NIC has reverted to CIA rules for outreach, which require an approval trail before any contact downtown that is daunting.

The NIC has become an intelligence support operation, mostly for the DNI and the Deputy Director for Mission Integration, who is the intelligence representative at virtually all the DCs. It looks like a CIA office, not the NIC of yore. Its products are papers, not people. And, also paradoxically, while the NIC has become CIA-centric, the incentives for CIA officers to work for it are weaker: the CIA has labelled many CIA jobs as “purple”—that is, counting for cross-agency credit. In those circumstances, why be second to the NIC to get credit you can get at home?

Meanwhile, the National Security Council staff continues to burgeon, reaching over 300 in the Obama administration. It and the State Department’s policy planning staff have followed a similar path—becoming totally preoccupied with current problems, with the result that the nation has lost its capacity for strategic intelligence, at the very time that it is needed most. Three quarters of century ago, in what was the most interesting debate about strategic analysis the country has ever had, Willmoore Kendall worried that Sherman Kent’s strict separation of intelligence and policy and his rigid methods for intelligence would reduce analysts to “mere research assistants to George Kennan.”[3] Now, it is fair to worry that the NIC has become merely the research arm of the NSC.

In 2004 at the time of the IRTPA, critics worried that creating the DNI would only add a bureaucratic layer to an already cumbersome Intelligence Community. A generation later it is not obvious they were wrong. The ODNI, perhaps like most maturing organizations, has become more and more insular despite its mission of integration. It is not hard to see why policy makers often don’t want strategic analysis. They have ascended to senior positions because they have (or want to project) a high degree of self-confidence and self-assurance, and they don’t like their pet projects subjected to critical scrutiny. But history has shown that they need it whether they want it or not. The government needs to develop—or rebuild—the habit of strategic thinking and embed strategic analysis into policy decisions, so that it can discriminate more rigorously among ambitious and sometimes dangerous foreign policy ambitions. A policy maker who does his own strategic analysis is like a lawyer who represents himself in court: he has a fool for a client.

And so, we hope the nation’s leaders will decide again that the nation needs a NIC—or something like it—to perform what Kendall seventy years ago called “the big job—the carving out of United States destiny in the world as a whole.”^[4] The nation needs it more than ever.

Gregory F. Treverton stepped down as Chair of the US National Intelligence Council in 2017. He is now Professor of the Practice at Dornsife College, University of Southern California, Chair of the Global TechnoPolitics Forum, and an SMA Executive Advisor.

Robert Hutchings was Chair of the NIC from 2003 to 2005. He is now Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas and Lecturer with the rank of Professor at Princeton University.

[1] This record is explored in more detail in Robert Hutchings and Gregory F. Treverton, eds., Truth to Power: A History of the National Intelligence Council, Oxford University Press, 2019, esp. pp. 1–22.

[2] Paul Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 55–58.

[3] Kendall, Willmoore, Review of The Function of Intelligence, by Sherman Kent. World Politics 1, 4 (1949): https://doi.org/10.2307/2008837, 550.

[4] Ibid, 548.