Max Holland: The Politics of Postmortems
How objective and useful are intelligence postmortems of the kind produced in Washington?
The press usually accords them an exalted status from the moment they are released, whether they are produced by the executive branch, Congress, or semi-independent commissions. Postmortems are regarded as a reliable account of what went wrong and why, if not an authoritative and objective one.
But should postmortems be embraced at face value? Or are they subject to personal/political/institutional pulls and tugs that can easily distort their findings?
In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, four separate postmortems examined the performance of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first two were internal reviews; the third was coordinated within the intelligence community by the US Intelligence Board (USIB); and the fourth was conducted by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).
Despite the sameness of the facts at issue, the four ex post facto analyses varied dramatically. They were subject to extraneous influences that distorted their findings and even their presentations of fact. The key conclusions depended on who wrote the postmortem, when, and for whom.
The lesson from these once-classified postmortems is that after-the-fact inquests in Washington should be viewed with the utmost caution.
The Critical Issues after October 1962
The public terms of the settlement all but guaranteed that the missile crisis would be perceived as a sorely-needed triumph for the Kennedy administration and the intelligence community, both of which were still smarting from the Bay of Pigs debacle of the previous year. As Richard H. Rovere, the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, observed in early 1963, “the handling of the October crisis was, of course, superb (an easy ex post facto judgment, based wholly upon success).”[1]
Yet the CIA’s margin of success had actually been dangerously narrow. When all the facts were in, the missile crisis could be fairly called a “near-failure of American intelligence . . . of the first magnitude,” as the late Alexander George, a Stanford professor, put it in 1974.[2] All the intelligence estimates prepared prior to mid-October predicted that the Soviets were not likely to implant surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs) on Cuban soil. Of equal if not greater moment, the first hard evidence of the SSMs’ deployment was not in hand until October 15, more than a month after they had arrived in Cuba and just days before the CIA would deem some of them operational. That meant Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had come shockingly close to accomplishing his strategic fait accompli.
Both these intelligence deficits—one analytical, one a matter of collection— were hinted at in newspaper stories published just after the acute phase of the crisis peaked. As a October 31 article in The New York Times put it, the first question was whether intelligence “estimates [had been] tailored to fit top policy beliefs,” or if administration officials had “reject[ed accurate] estimates as erroneous.” Meanwhile, the collection issue—which would be dubbed the “intelligence” or “photo” gap—turned on why it had taken the administration so long to detect the SSMs’ deployment. “[T]here is general mystification about how the Russians could have built so many missile sites so quickly without warning,” the Times article noted.[3]
All four secret postmortems would address these two primary questions. There was, however, a dramatic difference in the political consequences attached to each one.
With respect to the mis-estimates, unless it could be shown that the White House had tried to influence the analytical process—in particular, a mistaken Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) dated 19 September 1962—or flatly ignored evidence presented to it in an estimate, only the intelligence community stood to be criticized.
But the exact opposite was true with respect to the photo gap. In this case, the administration would surely bear the brunt of criticism, because it was the White House and State Department that had effectively ordered the CIA to attenuate U-2 surveillance in mid-September, just as the SSMs were arriving in Cuba. The CIA might conceivably be criticized for acceding too easily to the administration’s dictates on overflight policy. Still, most of the onus for the fact that “American intelligence . . . went blind for five crucial weeks” would almost surely fall on policy-makers in the Kennedy administration—that is, if all the facts came out.[4]
The photo gap thus represented a political problem for the administration. It left President Kennedy vulnerable to the charge that he had been taken in by the Soviets’ elaborate deception, to a point where the administration had even tried to foist a false sense of security onto the country. As Cynthia M. Grabo, a respected scholar of the intelligence process, would write in 2004, it really should not have mattered “what intelligence ‘thought’” about the likelihood of missiles being deployed in Cuba. “But it did matter, imperatively, that intelligence collect the data which would permit a firm judgment whether or not the missiles were there.”[5]...
[HNN Editor: Skipping to the conclusion ...]
Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit
The government’s seeming inability to be consistently objective in 1962-63 is a sobering thought during a period when looking backwards is a growth industry.
Two internal CIA postmortems, the Lehman and IG reports, were in close agreement over the plain facts and their meaning. But as responsibility for an ex post facto analysis moved outside the confines of the agency, both facts and their meaning became increasingly contested. The analyses careened from two that simply recounted the messy, non-textbook manner in which the missiles had actually been discovered, to one that papered over the collection deficit, and finally, to one that asserted the nation had in fact experienced a nearly catastrophic intelligence failure owing solely to the CIA’s dereliction of its responsibilities. The four postmortems bring to mind Akira Kurosawa’s film masterpiece, Rashômon. When each postmortem is deconstructed, it cannot be separated from the person(s) who wrote it or for whom and what purpose it was written.
What makes this finding all the more sobering is that this intense struggle occurred completely behind the scenes, and over a crisis that was widely considered an unmitigated triumph for the incumbent administration. If there was so much disagreement and hard bargaining over an intelligence success, it must be incomparably more difficult to reconcile competing interests when a failure is the subject of an inquiry, and when the exercise is conducted in public.
Postmortems are desirable and clearly necessary exercises. Yet the lesson from the analyses conducted in 1962-63 would seem to be that all such inquests must be viewed critically and with the utmost caution. They can easily be as flawed as the events they purport to recount and judge, if not more so.
After all, not knowing the future imposes a certain degree of honesty. With the benefit of hindsight, everyone knows what side to be on.
Read entire article at Washington Decoded (website run by Max Holland)
The press usually accords them an exalted status from the moment they are released, whether they are produced by the executive branch, Congress, or semi-independent commissions. Postmortems are regarded as a reliable account of what went wrong and why, if not an authoritative and objective one.
But should postmortems be embraced at face value? Or are they subject to personal/political/institutional pulls and tugs that can easily distort their findings?
In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, four separate postmortems examined the performance of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first two were internal reviews; the third was coordinated within the intelligence community by the US Intelligence Board (USIB); and the fourth was conducted by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).
Despite the sameness of the facts at issue, the four ex post facto analyses varied dramatically. They were subject to extraneous influences that distorted their findings and even their presentations of fact. The key conclusions depended on who wrote the postmortem, when, and for whom.
The lesson from these once-classified postmortems is that after-the-fact inquests in Washington should be viewed with the utmost caution.
The Critical Issues after October 1962
The public terms of the settlement all but guaranteed that the missile crisis would be perceived as a sorely-needed triumph for the Kennedy administration and the intelligence community, both of which were still smarting from the Bay of Pigs debacle of the previous year. As Richard H. Rovere, the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, observed in early 1963, “the handling of the October crisis was, of course, superb (an easy ex post facto judgment, based wholly upon success).”[1]
Yet the CIA’s margin of success had actually been dangerously narrow. When all the facts were in, the missile crisis could be fairly called a “near-failure of American intelligence . . . of the first magnitude,” as the late Alexander George, a Stanford professor, put it in 1974.[2] All the intelligence estimates prepared prior to mid-October predicted that the Soviets were not likely to implant surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs) on Cuban soil. Of equal if not greater moment, the first hard evidence of the SSMs’ deployment was not in hand until October 15, more than a month after they had arrived in Cuba and just days before the CIA would deem some of them operational. That meant Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had come shockingly close to accomplishing his strategic fait accompli.
Both these intelligence deficits—one analytical, one a matter of collection— were hinted at in newspaper stories published just after the acute phase of the crisis peaked. As a October 31 article in The New York Times put it, the first question was whether intelligence “estimates [had been] tailored to fit top policy beliefs,” or if administration officials had “reject[ed accurate] estimates as erroneous.” Meanwhile, the collection issue—which would be dubbed the “intelligence” or “photo” gap—turned on why it had taken the administration so long to detect the SSMs’ deployment. “[T]here is general mystification about how the Russians could have built so many missile sites so quickly without warning,” the Times article noted.[3]
All four secret postmortems would address these two primary questions. There was, however, a dramatic difference in the political consequences attached to each one.
With respect to the mis-estimates, unless it could be shown that the White House had tried to influence the analytical process—in particular, a mistaken Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) dated 19 September 1962—or flatly ignored evidence presented to it in an estimate, only the intelligence community stood to be criticized.
But the exact opposite was true with respect to the photo gap. In this case, the administration would surely bear the brunt of criticism, because it was the White House and State Department that had effectively ordered the CIA to attenuate U-2 surveillance in mid-September, just as the SSMs were arriving in Cuba. The CIA might conceivably be criticized for acceding too easily to the administration’s dictates on overflight policy. Still, most of the onus for the fact that “American intelligence . . . went blind for five crucial weeks” would almost surely fall on policy-makers in the Kennedy administration—that is, if all the facts came out.[4]
The photo gap thus represented a political problem for the administration. It left President Kennedy vulnerable to the charge that he had been taken in by the Soviets’ elaborate deception, to a point where the administration had even tried to foist a false sense of security onto the country. As Cynthia M. Grabo, a respected scholar of the intelligence process, would write in 2004, it really should not have mattered “what intelligence ‘thought’” about the likelihood of missiles being deployed in Cuba. “But it did matter, imperatively, that intelligence collect the data which would permit a firm judgment whether or not the missiles were there.”[5]...
[HNN Editor: Skipping to the conclusion ...]
Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit
The government’s seeming inability to be consistently objective in 1962-63 is a sobering thought during a period when looking backwards is a growth industry.
Two internal CIA postmortems, the Lehman and IG reports, were in close agreement over the plain facts and their meaning. But as responsibility for an ex post facto analysis moved outside the confines of the agency, both facts and their meaning became increasingly contested. The analyses careened from two that simply recounted the messy, non-textbook manner in which the missiles had actually been discovered, to one that papered over the collection deficit, and finally, to one that asserted the nation had in fact experienced a nearly catastrophic intelligence failure owing solely to the CIA’s dereliction of its responsibilities. The four postmortems bring to mind Akira Kurosawa’s film masterpiece, Rashômon. When each postmortem is deconstructed, it cannot be separated from the person(s) who wrote it or for whom and what purpose it was written.
What makes this finding all the more sobering is that this intense struggle occurred completely behind the scenes, and over a crisis that was widely considered an unmitigated triumph for the incumbent administration. If there was so much disagreement and hard bargaining over an intelligence success, it must be incomparably more difficult to reconcile competing interests when a failure is the subject of an inquiry, and when the exercise is conducted in public.
Postmortems are desirable and clearly necessary exercises. Yet the lesson from the analyses conducted in 1962-63 would seem to be that all such inquests must be viewed critically and with the utmost caution. They can easily be as flawed as the events they purport to recount and judge, if not more so.
After all, not knowing the future imposes a certain degree of honesty. With the benefit of hindsight, everyone knows what side to be on.