The Coronavirus Is the Worst Intelligence Failure in U.S. History - Mark Stout (H-Diplo)

H-Diplo Essay 224- A Response to Micah Zenko. “The Coronavirus Is the Worst Intelligence Failure in U.S. History.”

by George Fujii

H-Diplo Essay 224
1 May 2020

A Response to Micah Zenko.  “The Coronavirus Is the Worst Intelligence Failure in U.S. History.”  Foreign Policy (25 March 2020).

https://hdiplo.org/to/E224
Review Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

Essay by Mark Stout, Johns Hopkins University

On March 25, Foreign Policy published an article by Micah Zenko entitled “The Coronavirus Is the Worst Intelligence Failure in U.S. History.”  While the main text of Zenko’s argument is well-considered, it is now clear that he somewhat overstated the case and he was not well served by the title of the piece.  Nevertheless, the article gives us a useful opportunity to consider the problem of intelligence warning in the era of President Donald Trump and the potential implications of the coronavirus pandemic for U.S. intelligence.

According to Zenko, “the Trump administration has…failed, both in taking seriously the specific, repeated intelligence community warnings about a coronavirus outbreak and in vigorously pursuing the nationwide response initiatives commensurate with the predicted threat.”  The result, he writes, is that “the Trump administration forced a catastrophic strategic surprise onto the American people.” 

The explanation for this failure, Zenko argues, consists of three points.  Taken together, they paint a stark picture.  First, Trump anchors very firmly on beliefs.  In this connection, Zenko notes that “leaders are unusually hubristic and overconfident; for many, the fact that they have risen to elevated levels of power is evidence of their inherent wisdom.” Second, Trump’s judgments are “highly transmissible,” capable of “infecting the thinking and behavior of nearly every official or advisor who comes in contact with the initial carrier.”  Third, “the poor judgments…contaminate all the policymaking arms of the federal government with almost no resistance or even reasonable questioning.”  In fact, Zenko observes, “even historically nonpartisan national security or intelligence leadership positions have been filled by people who are ideologically aligned with the White House, rather than endowed with the experience or expertise needed to push back” when the President has ill-conceived ideas.  He concludes, “Thus, an initial incorrect assumption or statement by Trump cascades into day-to-day policy implementation.” 

This is a sensible article burdened with an unfortunate title which the author may not have written.  The subtitle gives a much better summary of the contents: “It’s more glaring than Pearl Harbor and 9/11—and it’s all the fault of Donald Trump’s leadership.”  So, what does the article tell us about warning and intelligence-policy relations generally and in the Trump administration? This essay considers the three steps in Zenko’s chain and then offers some thoughts about the situation through the lens of subsequent developments and intelligence studies.

First, while President Trump seems to anchor particularly strongly on his beliefs, this is a difference of degree, not kind, with his predecessors.  Indeed, intelligence officers often believe that senior leaders are irrationally confident and convinced of their own correctness.  As Robert Jervis has observed, this is not necessarily dysfunctional: “A national leader who had no more confidence than an objective reading of the evidence would permit probably would do little or would be worn down by mental anguish after each decision.”^[1]

Second, Zenko’s claim that Trump’s judgments are “highly transmissible,” capable of “infecting the thinking and behavior of nearly every official or advisor who comes in contact with the initial carrier,” seems appealing on its face.  William Kristol seems to agree and he extends Zenko’s claim to the Republican Party broadly.^[2]   However, Zenko’s words “nearly every” are meaningful; there are clearly counterexamples to the broad claim.  As of this writing, the most famous is Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been quite willing to disagree publicly with the President.  More recently, the Surgeon General suggested—albeit rather gingerly—that Americans should not take disinfectants internally, despite President Trump’s suggestion to that effect.^[3]  We know little about the beliefs of the intelligence community’s leadership with regard to Covid-19.  However, it seems unlikely that all the IC officials who were exposed to the President during the relevant period were “infected” with his nonchalance about the virus.  While the Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Richard Grenell, who took up that post on February 20, was probably chosen in large part because of his personal loyalty to the president, his two predecessors, DNI Dan Coats and Acting DNI Joseph Maguire, both publicly said things that the President disapproved of.  Furthermore, briefers of the President’s Daily Brief are expected to be willing to speak truth to power, an attribute which is foundational in the intelligence community and there is no evidence that the Trump’s briefers have been any different in this regard.

Third, Zenko’s argument that “the poor judgments…contaminate all the policymaking arms of the federal government with almost no resistance or even reasonable questioning” is probably too strong.  In recent days, stories have hit the press portraying the National Security Council staff and Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, as being fully on top of the situation and unsuccessfully urging action on those above them.^[4]  And where did these officials get their information about the looming danger?  In large part from the intelligence community where largely anonymous collectors and analysts are still free to do their work as normal.

Clearly the United States was surprised by the Covid-19 pandemic.  The US government was insufficiently prepared for such a contingency, President Trump and at least some of his senior subordinates waited until mid-March to really take the problem seriously, and the administration’s responses have been faltering even after they started doing so.  The result is that the epidemic is ravaging the United States much worse than it might otherwise have done. This surprise happened despite the fact that the National Center for Medical Intelligence was reportedly aware of the issue as early as November 2019 and early intelligence analyses of it were written in December.^[5] The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reportedly had an article on the coronavirus in the President’s Daily Brief on January 3, 2020, numerous intelligence products followed, and, probably more importantly, the medical community was also sounding the alarm.^[6]

The intelligence literature is of some help to us in understanding the situation.  Some of the literature on surprise talks about the important role of cognitive biases held by analysts or leaders in a surprised country.^[7]  Zenko discusses one such bias—the President’s anchoring—and others were doubtless at play.  Beyond that, however, the literature on surprise largely deals with nation-states or sometimes non-state actors trying to surprise a target state—usually with a military attack—by concealing the truth and creating alternative explanations for what the target can perceive. To some degree, this fits the current situation.  China did endeavor to conceal the fact of and then the extent of the Covid-19 and subsequently has disseminated disinformation about its source.^[8] However, it seems unlikely that China was intending, per se, for the United States to be surprised and to suffer a devastating pandemic. Rather, the Chinese bureaucracy was probably protecting itself from the country’s senior leadership by concealing the magnitude of the initial problem and the senior leadership was trying to protect the image of the country through measures both defensive (denial) and offensive (disinformation). 

The fact remains, though, that the United States was not really surprised by China; it was surprised by a mindless virus.  Even if China had been forthcoming, the United States Government would have been surprised because responding to pandemics—let alone getting ahead of them—requires top-level leadership but such matters were not of particular interest to the Trump administration until it was too late. Ben Rhodes notes that this is not only the fault of the Trump administration, referring to a “multi-decade assault on the role of government in American life [that] led to a Trump administration that disregards expertise and disdains career civil servants.”^[9]

In such a circumstance, Richard Betts’s ideas about “enemies of intelligence”—those things which cause intelligence to fail—seem more applicable to understanding the Covid-19 situation.  Betts identifies three categories of such enemies.  One he calls “inherent enemies.”  These are a grab-bag of problems including the limits on human cognition and a great many dilemmas that are built into the business of intelligence such as tradeoffs between accuracy and timeliness, and between “the needs to keep secrets from outside enemies” while sharing “information widely to integrate our own knowledge.”^[10]  These do not seem especially applicable to the situation at hand.

However, Betts’s other two categories of “enemies of intelligence” seem potentially relevant.  One of these he calls “outside enemies.”  These are adversaries who “want to conceal or misrepresent their intention, capabilities, or vulnerabilities.”^[11]  Here Betts essentially incorporates surprise attack theory, deception theory, and others by reference.  Clearly, China’s efforts to conceal and dissemble about the Covid-19 situation fit here. 

The final category consists of what Betts calls “innocent enemies” because “they threaten intelligence unintentionally.”  These include “professionals alleged to have fallen down on the job,” dysfunctions and inefficiencies resulting from bureaucrats protecting their turf, and “the politicians…who deliberately try to constrain intelligence operations that conflict with other values.” ^[12]  Again there is some apparent congruence with the facts of the present case.  The emerging reporting indicates that the Administration clearly made some bad decisions and, as Zenko maintains, was more interested in pursuing the President’s overall agenda (which did not encompass the possibility of a pandemic) and validating the President’s belief that Covid-19 was no worse than the flu and would miraculously disappear.  The other priorities were probably the imperative of supporting the President’s position and a desire not to harm the economy. The pursuit of these priorities, then, hindered the intelligence community’s ability to carry out its warning function.  All of this happened, of course, within an environment of disdain for expert opinion at senior levels of the government.

In American intelligence theology, warning has occurred when the policymakers to be warned understand the warning.  They need not be convinced.  Zenko repeats the possibly apocryphal story about Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger telling an intelligence officer after something bad happened, “you warned me, but you didn’t convince me.”  From an intelligence officer’s perspective, this is an absolution. Policymakers, of course, can be forgiven for seeing the matter differently. Both have reasonable claims but at some point, the intelligence officers must be let off the hook. A leader who is impervious to logic or reason, who is unable to strategize, or who believes that other things are more important than what he or she has been warned about must, ultimately, take responsibility for that fact. And, in any event, taxpayers pay leaders to lead and to make hard decisions in the face of incomplete information and conflicting priorities. If intelligence personnel were to be responsible for making those hard decisions…well, they would be the president.

At the moment, we know only the barest outlines of what the intelligence community concluded, what it told the policy community, to whom those warnings were given, and how.  Also, much remains to be learned about how the policy deliberations unfolded inside the Administration.  Sooner or later, however, the pandemic will have sufficiently abated that the time will come to gather data, derive lessons learned and probably take remedial or even punitive action.  The Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), Representative Adam Schiff, already has his staff considering the possibility of a 9/11 Commission-style investigation into what happened and the HPSCI is reviewing the intelligence record on the pandemic.^[13]  Such a commission would have to grapple with the fact that U.S. intelligence is only imperfectly organized and situated to deal with natural events which can only partially be influenced by human agency.  Nevertheless, Calder Walton suggests that one useful step might be to revive a version of the late Cold War’s Active Measure’s Working Group to counter the efforts of actors such as China.  He also predicts that “pandemic intelligence will become a central part of future U.S. national security.”^[14]  He may be right but one wonders about the implications for privacy and civil liberties.

Rhodes goes farther, predicting that the greatest future threats to the United States will not be terrorism but “climate change, pandemics, the risks posed by emerging technologies, and the spread of a blend of nationalist authoritarianism and Chinese-style totalitarianism that could transform the way human beings live in every country.”  He argues that meeting these challenges will require “Americans…to rethink the current orientation of our own government and society, and move past our post-9/11 mindset” with a concomitant reorganization of the country’s spending priorities.^[15]

9/11 occasioned the most sweeping reforms to the United States intelligence community and substantial changes to other parts of the national security apparatus, many of them inspired by the work of the 9/11 Commission.  The stage seems set for another reorientation.  We can only hope that the reforms that will follow on the present surprise will be well-considered.  However, we can predict that like the tangible results of the 9/11 Commission, they will be controversial for years to come.

Mark Stout is a senior lecturer with Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Advanced Academic Programs for which he heads the M.A. in Global Security Studies program.  He is also a former intelligence officer.

Notes

[1] Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 166.

[2] William Kristol, “Trump Has Broken the Republican Party—and Conservatism—for Good,” The Bulwark, April 2, 2020, https://thebulwark.com/trump-has-broken-the-republican-party-and-conservatism-for-good/.

[3] Deb Riechmann and Aamer Madhani, “Don’t Inject Disinfectant: Blunt Pushback on Trump Musing,” NBC New York, April 24, 2020, https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/lysol-maker-please-dont-ingest-or-inject-our-product-to-treat-coronavirus/2388212/

[4] Maggie Haberman, “Trade Adviser Warned White House in January of Risks of a Pandemic,” New York Times, April 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/us/politics/navarro-warning-trump-coronavirus.html?referringSource=articleShare. Josh Rogin, “The National Security Council Sounded Early Alarms about the Coronavirus,” Washington Post, March 30, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/30/national-security-council-sounded-early-alarms-about-coronavirus/. Daniel Lippman and Meredith McGraw, “Inside the National Security Council, a Rising Sense of Dread,” Politico, April 2, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/02/nsc-coronavirus-white-house-162530.

[5] Ken Dilanian, Robert Windrem and Courtney Kube “U.S. spy agencies collected raw intelligence hinting at public health crisis in Wuhan, China, in November,” NBC News, April 9, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/u-s-spy-agencies-collected-raw-intel-hinting-public-health-n1180646.

[6] Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, “The U.S. Was Beset by Denial and Dysfunction as the Coronavirus Raged,” Washington Post, April 4, 2020,  https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/04/coronavirus-government-dysfunction/?arc404=true. Julian E. Barnes, “C.I.A. Hunts for Authentic Virus Totals in China, Dismissing Government Tallies,” The New York Times, updated to April 7, 2020,  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/us/politics/cia-coronavirus-china.html.  Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima, “President’s Intelligence Briefing Book Repeatedly Cited Virus Threat,” Washington Post, April 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/presidents-intelligence-briefing-book-repeatedly-cited-virus-threat/2020/04/27/ca66949a-8885-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html.

[7] The literature on surprise is extensive but following items are excellent beginnings.  James Wirtz, Understanding Intelligence Failure: Warning, Response, and Deterrence (New York: Routledge, 2017), “Introduction,” 1-23. Uri Bar-Joseph, The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise of Yom Kippur and Its Sources(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). Erik J. Dahl, Intelligence and Surprise Attack: Failure and Success from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 and Beyond (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2013).  Robert M. Clark and William Mitchell, Deception: Counterdeception and Counterintelligence (Thousand Oaks: CQ Press, 2019) is also helpful.

[8] Barnes, “C.I.A. Hunts.”

[9] Ben Rhodes, “The 9/11 Era is Over,” The Atlantic, 6 April 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/its-not-september-12-anymore/609502/.

[10] Richard K. Betts, Enemies of Intelligence: Knowledge and Power in American National Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 12-13.

[11] Betts, Enemies of Intelligence, 9.

[12] Betts, Enemies of Intelligence, 9.

[13] David Ignatius, “The U.S. Needs to Know What Went Wrong,” Washington Post, 31 March 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-the-pandemic-subsides-the-us-must-learn-from-its-mistakes/2020/03/31/99a37368-7387-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html.

[14] Calder Walton, “Spies Are Fighting a Shadow War Against the Coronavirus,” Foreign Policy, 3 April 2020,  https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/03/coronavirus-pandemic-intelligence-china-russia/.

[15] Rhodes, “The 9/11 Era is Over.”