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The nation’s top spies, including the head of the CIA, the NSA, the Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency took the stage Thursday at the Intelligence & National Security Summit to discuss how their respective agencies handled the most important geopolitical event of 2014 — the rise of the Islamic State, the defenseone reports
Adm. Michael Rogers, who oversees the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, said intelligence on the rise of the Islamic State could have been “stronger.”
“If I’m honest with myself, I wish that the transition of ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) from an insurgency to an organization that’s also interested in holding ground and territory and the mechanisms of governance… we talked about it, but in hindsight, I wish we had been stronger.”
CIA Director John Brennan defended his agency’s performance on intelligence in Iraq, saying that the CIA had been watching for “many months” how IS was “growing in capability in Fallujah, in these areas, and how they were expanding their reach.”
Brennan said he felt satisfied that he presented Congress with enough information for them to make informed decisions, even if that information was, in some areas, lacking. “I think we teed up the right issues to policy makers,” but added. “You’re never going to get perfect insight into those developments.”
The question becomes, then, what could have made the intelligence gathering operation in Iraq more robust, allowing for better and earlier indication of the Islamic State’s capability? The panelists at the conference were in agreement: spies on the ground. “You have indirect capabilities in terms of intelligence, whether it’s overhead or from your sources. But unless you’re actually there, you’re getting second, third hand intelligence,” Brennan said. In other words, the haste of the U.S. withdrawal in Iraq in 2011 played a causal role in the intelligence community’s myopia.
Rogers, too, urged the public and policy to understand that intelligence-gathering capabilities in Iraq saw a significant decline following the withdrawal of U.S. forces in that country. “It’s Iraq of 2014, not Iraq of 2010. Your expectations in terms of what intelligence can generate and the timeliness of your insight needs to be caged to the environment we’re in now. Not necessarily the environment we’ve been used to.”
One of the biggest blind spots, according to the panelists, was the lack of good insight not only into the Islamic State, but into the readiness and state of the Iraqi security forces that the United States had been training and equipping for years. “One of the most difficult things is trying to determine the will to fight. It speaks almost to intent,” Brennan said.
