The release several weeks ago of the Weapons of Mass Destruction panel report underscored several realities that were not unexpected but were still disturbing.

In one conclusion, the panel reported: “Our collection agencies are often unable to gather intelligence on the very things we care most about….Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world most dangerous actors.”

On page five of the executive summary, the panel states: “Current intelligence in support of military and other action is necessary, of course. But we also need an Intelligence Community with strategic capabilities: it must be equipped to develop long-term plans for penetrating today’s difficult targets, and to identify political and social trends shaping the threats that lie over the horizon.”

The report continues, reporting that the Intelligence Community: “is reluctant to use human and technical collection methods; it is behind the curve in applying cutting-edge technologies; and it has not adapted its personnel practices and incentives structures to fit the needs of a new job market.”

In short, our Intelligence Community has failed to follow many of the most basic precepts of strategic planning. Day to day demands apparently prevent analysts from doing long-term and strategic analysis. Bureaucratic rivalries and jealousies have prevented cooperation at the highest levels, and entrenched status quo thinking has proven an obstacle to better results even in the face of pressing national emergencies.

Whether creating the many new bureaucracies recommended by the panel will actually fix these issues is a matter of debate. To an outsider with limited knowledge, it seems to me that simplifying the web of reporting and oversight would make more sense than creating an even more complex structure of reporting and accountability.

One thing is certain -- our intelligence situation is a mess. One has to pause, for a moment, and reflect on how we got here.

During the 1970s, in the aftermath of Watergate, Vietnam and revelations about CIA involvement in covert activities, the U.S. Congress, then controlled by the Democratic Party, convened public hearings on CIA operations. On the Senate side, the investigating committee was chaired by Frank Church, a liberal Democrat from Idaho who harbored presidential aspirations. As besieged CIA Director William Colby volunteered information about mail interceptions, wiretapping, and covert operations, including assassination plots aimed at Fidel Castro (orchestrated by the Democratic Kennedy administration, one must add), the hearings quickly became politicized.

One Republican staffer who worked with the Committee observed: “My whole vision of him (Church) is blurred by his drive for recognition, publicity, his obvious ambitions. The Committee was used to boost those ambitions.” (As quoted by author Frank J. Smist, Congress Oversee the United States Intelligence Community, 1947-1989)

Even Democrats accused Church of using the investigation as a public relations platform in an effort to further his presidential hopes. This has been reported by Loch Johnson, who worked for Les Aspin and was assigned as staff to the committee. Johnson, now a scholar and author of several books on the CIA, documented the hearings in A Season of Inquiry.

It was during this period, too, that leaks about sensitive national security issues became standard operating procedure in Washington. These were no laughing matter. When leftist radicals published the name and home address of Richard Welch, station chief in Athens, Welch was shot and killed at his residence (1975). Likewise, leftists like Phillip Agee went so far as to advocate that CIA operatives should be exposed publicly. If this did not drive them from the country, Agee suggested, “the people themselves will have to decide what they must do to rid themselves of the CIA,” a comment that seemed an invitation to our enemies to murder CIA operatives. (Agee is quoted in John Ranelagh’s history of the CIA, The Agency.)

The Church Committee included a number of prominent liberals, including Church, Gary Hart, Phil Hart, and Walter Mondale. Even Republicans on the committee had extremely high ADA ratings, notably Charles Mathias and Richard Schweiker. Though Howard Baker, John Tower and Barry Goldwater provided some political balance, the committee was clearly liberal in perspective and displayed much of the distrust of the CIA and the defense establishment so evident during the Vietnam/Watergate era.

The House Select Committee on Intelligence was even more of a disaster than the Church Committee, both from a policy perspective and from a public relations point of view. Its membership was dominated by leftists and liberals, as Smist documents using ADA and national security ratings. The first Committee, chaired by Congressman Lucien Nedzi, had an accumulated ADA rating of 83.2.

Moreover, one of the committee members was Massachusetts leftist Michael Harrington, who was appointed by House Speaker Tip O’Neill as a political favor to Harrington’s father. Harrington quickly discredited himself on the Committee when he leaked private testimony on Chile by then CIA head William Colby. The legislative counsel to the Committee called Harrington’s actions “totally irresponsible.”

The Committee, under the leadership of Nezdi, quickly fell apart and Otis Pike, a maverick, took over the chair and reconstituted the committee. Again, liberals dominated, with a combined ADA rating of 72. Pike quickly maneuvered the Committee into an adversarial position with the Ford administration, including presuming to drive national security issues that were historically the domain of the executive branch. When major portions of the House report were leaked to the New York Times and CBS reporter Daniel Schorr, who then provided it to the Village Voice, the Committee came under intense criticism. Even Pike admitted that too many of its members were more interested in television cameras than in the hard work of managing intelligence issues.

All of this had an effect. When Jimmy Carter became president, a move was afoot to reduce human intelligence resources and to focus more energetically on electronic surveillance. Carter was not very savvy about the ways of the world. According to several reputable scholars, he did not even appreciate the need for the CIA and his knowledge of international politics and history was sparse. Carter himself admitted to the Washington Post that he had read more about history and international affairs during his few years as president than all the rest of his life combined. (For all the criticism leveled at Reagan for not being an intellectual, it is increasingly apparent that Reagan had a far more active mind in a global respect than Carter.)

Ranelagh also documents Carter’s inept handling of intelligence issues. Carter first tried to appoint former Kennedy aide Theodore Sorensen to replace Bush at the CIA, until it was revealed that Sorensen had left government service in 1964 with classified documents in tow. Sorensen withdrew his name from consideration when it became apparent that his opposition to the Vietnam War and his secreting of documents, no doubt used to write glowing tributes to the Kennedys, might cause problems. Carter finally chose Admiral Stansfield Turner.

Though on paper Turner seemed capable enough -- he had a strong military background and had been a Rhodes Scholar -- he was more interested in ruling the agency than in working cooperatively with existing staff. Turner claimed that he was opposed because his agenda conflicted with the goals of the agency professionals, but he did not help the situation by taking his criticisms public.  For example, he raced to the Senate Committee on Intelligence to disclose the drug testing efforts conducted by the CIA back in the 1950s. This information was quickly leaked and caused more embarrassment to an agency already under fire. Turner also openly criticized the CIA for its efforts on the Kennedy assassination investigation, including the handling of a Soviet defector who had claimed the Soviets had no role in events in Dallas.

Turner treated the CIA as if it were a political organization. He drove out CIA staffers and brought in his own team of naval officers who buffered him from agency professionals. He also cut human resources, abolishing 820 positions, and devoted more resources to electronic and high-tech surveillance. This approach was partially discredited when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, much to Carter’s surprise, and the Shah was toppled and replaced by Khomeini, whose regime quickly took American hostages and precipitated a prolonged crisis. Many argue that this episode marks the true beginning of our current war with Islamic radicals.

The Reagan administration, with William Casey at the head of the CIA, tried to reverse some of these trends, but problems continued. The CIA began to resemble just another bureaucracy subject to political maneuvering. And leaks remained a common occurrence. According to historian Stephen Knott, in his book, Secret and Sanctioned, Senator Joe Biden twice threatened to expose covert activities being considered by the Reagan administration. Jim Lehrer of PBS observed that the House and Senate had become “colanders of leaks.” Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy was forced to step down from the Intelligence committee after giving a reporter access to a confidential report. Though Democrats were far more likely to leak, Republican Jesse Helms also engaged in the practice when he learned of agency support on behalf of El Salvadoran presidential candidate Jose Napoleon Duarte.

Casey understood the value of intelligence. He had been an OSS officer during World War II, and had witnessed firsthand the invaluable contributions of our intelligence operations. He did everything he could to beef up the agency. Many observers note that these efforts paid off, and many applauded the CIA’s work during the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe. But even Casey found himself caught in the institutional power struggles between Congress and the Executive Branch. Certainly, the Iran-Contra scandal reenergized Democrats in Congress who sought to assert their control over national security policy and curtail covert actions.

With the Cold War over, Clinton and the Democrats cut funding both for the CIA and for defense generally. Senator John Kerry was among those who supported these cuts. Moreover, as Dick Morris and many others have documented, President Clinton showed so little interest in the agency’s work that Clinton did not hold a meeting with his CIA Director for more than two years after the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Clinton failed to act on intelligence time and again, even when the Sudan offered the possibility of capturing and delivering Osama Bin Laden, whose threats and actions against the United States and its interests were by then well known. Clinton responded feebly when he responded at all.

Likewise, several major spy scandals emerged during the Clinton tenure, including the sharing of highly secretive technology that has given China the capacity to strike the United States with nuclear warheads. Reporter Bill Gertz of the Washington Times has documented this in detail. Clinton got plenty of encouragement for his nonchalant attitude from even so-called thoughtful Democratic leaders. The much vaunted Democrat Patrick Moynihan, the late former Senator and policy guru, recommended abolishing the CIA, arguing that the agency was no longer needed in a post-Cold War world.

So the problems, historically speaking, were twofold. First, you had agency insiders granted tremendous power by the government during the early years of the Cold War, and no doubt making questionable choices in the use of their power. Unfortunately, the overreaction to those abuses, spearheaded by the Democrats, made the situation worse. At least since the Kennedy/Johnson era, leftist thinking has dominated the Democratic Party on the issue of national security. Democrats, with occasional exceptions, have spent a quarter century of undermining, mismanaging and debunking our military and our intelligence capabilities.

The current Bush administration has not been perfect either. They clearly did not challenge vigorously enough the intelligence used to justify the toppling of Saddam and his regime. The costs of that war have been high, though the benefits may yet be great, but no fair-minded person can ignore that on several critical fronts our intelligence was wrong and our decisions based on false assumptions and erroneous information. The Bush team has likewise been slow to deal with homeland security issues satisfactorily, most notably border issues.

Yet at least Bush has shown some tenacity in trying to confront the problem. The Democrats, again with a few notable exceptions, have not demonstrated that they are ready to get serious about protecting our nation. Even the somewhat useful 9/11 Commission was marred, in the early days, by political grandstanding and sloppy attempts to blame the Bush administration for problems that were clearly rooted in 30 years of second-guessing and partisanship. Likewise, the rush by the media and the Democrats to embrace any critic of Bush, including discredited people like Richard Clarke and Joseph Wilson, underscored that politics, not policy, still ruled.

The hard work of rebuilding and conducting intelligence activities with tough-minded but shrewd judgment is a fundamental challenge that will be faced for decades to come. Democrats and Republicans alike will face serious challenges to our security. Partisan sniping does not make our nation safer. Tough-minded Democrats and Republicans need to come together and recognize that one of the fundamental responsibilities of government is to protect and defend our nation and its people.

There is more work to be done, so let’s get on with it.

George Shadroui has been published in more than two dozen newspapers and magazines, including National Review and Frontpagemag.com.

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