Historical Dictionary of United States Intelligence

ary 2004, the presidential commission evaluated the performance of the

U.S. intelligence community (IC) in forecasting threats to the United

States from countries thought to possess weapons of mass destruction

(WMD) programs. The administration of President George W. Bush

had used Iraq’s purported possession of weapons systems as justifica-

tion for launching a war in the spring of 2003 to oust Saddam Hussein

and destroy his WMD capabilities.

The commission’s report, released on 31 March 2005, found the

intelligence community to have been “dead wrong” in virtually all its

prewar judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. It also

concluded that the United States knew “disturbingly little about the

programs and even less about the intentions of many of America’s

dangerous adversaries,” including Iranand North Korea. The report

asserted that the spy agencies were disorganized and fragmented,

even after the changes instituted in the aftermath of the 9/11 Com-

mission’sreport in the fall of 2004 and the enactment of the Intelli-

gence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Actin January 2005.

The commission made 74 recommendations, the most important of

which are giving the new director of national intelligence (DNI)

greater powers over the intelligence agencies, including their budgets,

programs, personnel, and priorities; setting up a National Security

Service within the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) to address

counterterrorism and counterintelligenceissues; establishing a Na-

tional Counterproliferation Center to combat the spread of weapons;

creating a new office within the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA)

to coordinate intelligence among the different agencies; training

more intelligence agents; and revamping the president’s daily brief

(PDB) to include more divergent views and alternative analyses.

On the day of the report’s release, President Bush publicly said that

he shared the commission’s assessment that U.S. intelligence

“needed fundamental change,” but did not indicate which, if any, of

the recommendations he would consider implementing. U.S. intelli-

gence agencies have a solid record of fiercely opposing any change

proposed from outside the community.

COMMISSION ON THE ROLES AND CAPABILITIES OF THE

UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY. Also

known as the Aspin/Brown Commission, the congressionally man-

dated body began its work in 1995 with the charge to review “the

34 • COMMISSION ON THE ROLES OF THE UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

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