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Quandaries

Max Boot asks:

Does the Press Have Better Intel than the White House?

The answer is yes, in particular in Benghazi, for the reasons Boot cites.  The press has people on the ground.  Both the State Department and intel officers from Benghazi were evacuated immediately after the September 11 attack on the consulate, according to press reports.

What difference does that make?

Eyes and ears on the ground are vital to accurate intelligence.  Once upon a time, I was in the office of the Italian prime minister’s diplomatic adviser when a call for me from the White House situation room interrupted our chat.  They wanted to know what was going on at Fiumicino airport, because they had a report of AK47 firing nearby.  I asked the diplomatic advisor, who knew nothing about it and called the intelligence service.  Yes, they said, some dufus who had bought an automatic weapon decided to enjoy target practice at his farm, which happened to be on the final approach to a Fiumicino runway.

I don’t really know how the White House got wind of this in the first place, but if I had to guess it was probably sigint (signals intelligence).  Highly reliable in and of itself, sigint doesn’t always tell you what is actually happening and its significance.  The sit room clearly imagined it was more menacing than a gun enthusiast enjoying his latest acquisition.  You need eyes and ears on the ground, or in front of the Benghazi consulate, to really understand the situation.

The press is better informed than the intelligence community in many circumstances because it takes greater risks.  Journalists move towards the sound of gunfire.  Diplomats and intel officers do not.  My friend Kurt Schork, dean of American war reporters in his day, was killed in Sierra Leone when he followed the sound of gunfire into an ambush.  The press does not evacuate its people readily.  Even when it does, it maintains stringers who continue to report.  The results show all too clearly in the statistics:  a lot more journalists are killed in conflict zones these days than diplomats or intelligence officers.

Of course the press also makes a lot of mistakes in what it reports, and social media reports from conflict zones can be both highly informative and difficult to interpret, not to mention misleading.  Having people on the ground is not a guarantee of accuracy, only a healthy check on fallacious interpretation.

The problem is that we move our government officials away from risk en masse in a quixotic effort to reduce risks to zero.  It is absurd that FBI agents were apparently not allowed for weeks to visit the Benghazi consulate to collect evidence.  Benghazi is relatively friendly turf.  I’m not guessing–I’ve been there (without personal protection other than anonymity) twice since Qaddafi fell.  Would Chris Stevens have been safer to walk out to the street and melt into the night than to seek refuge in a supposed safe haven in which he apparently suffocated to death?  We can certainly put a couple of anonymous FBI agents on the ground in Benghazi quietly for a day or two, moving them low profile with some Libyan protection.  But we hesitate, because we don’t want to risk the embarrassment of another incident, no matter how small the risk.  Put yourself in President Obama’s size 11s.

There is an additional problem.  Highly classified material is valued highly in the bureaucracy.  It takes time to reach the top.  The President’s daily intel brief does not include a lot of “open source” material (that’s material from the press, blogs, Twitter or other generally available media).  UN Ambassador Susan Rice apparently had ample classified intelligence material telling her that the attack on the consulate originated from a demonstration against the Innocence of Muslims video, which had already generated problems in Cairo earlier in the day.  She would not be alone in the government in believing the highly classified stuff rather than the New York Times.  The CIA reportedly prepared her talking points but decided later on that the initial report was erroneous.

There are a lot of quandaries here:  should we maximize the safety of our people, or take greater risks in order to keep eyes and ears on the ground?  do we do as good a job as we should in integrating “open source” material with highly classified intelligence?  how quickly should intelligence estimates move up the chain of command?  should we communicate what we think we know about an incident to the American people, or should we hold back until we are sure what happened?

But let’s be clear:  there is no absolute safety, no perfect intelligence, no error-free transmission of information and no absolute certainty.  We are not likely to know the complete story until publication of the Accountability Review Board’s report, if then.  Tonight’s presidential debate is not the time or place to shed light on who or what caused the tragedy.