Nearly seven months ago, CIA Director John Brennan publicly unveiled his plan to significantly rethink the organization of his agency and how it would conduct its business. In my previous columns, I have tried to link strategy, law and history; this linkage lies at the heart of the proposed CIA reforms.

The CIA was created in 1947, nearly six years after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. The chief reason given for its formation was to prevent another surprise attack against the United States, and for 60 years it succeeded. And yet, on Sept. 11, 2001 — a date that might also be said to "live in infamy" — another surprise attack hit the United States, resulting in a greater loss of life than the attack at Pearl Harbor. Despite an annual budget totaling twice the defense outlays of Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Cuba and Libya combined — and roughly equal to the entire British defense budget — the U.S. intelligence community was unable to thwart or even give sufficient warning of the attack.

Nevertheless, the failure to prevent the atrocities of 9/11 was not the most significant intelligence failure of the new millennium. In October 2002, the National Intelligence Council produced a National Intelligence Estimate that said Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. (The National Intelligence Estimate is the U.S. intelligence community's most authoritative intelligence assessment, drawn from all community sources and representing the conclusions of the community as a whole.) But according to the subsequent work of the Iraq Survey Group, this assessment was almost entirely premature. The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate also said that Iraq's biological weapons capability had grown more advanced than it had been before the Gulf War, and that Baghdad possessed mobile biological weapons labs. This, too, was wrong. The report further concluded that Iraq had resumed its production of chemical weapons, including mustard gas, sarin and VX, and had accumulated stockpiles of these weapons amounting to between 100 and 500 metric tons. These claims were also wrong. Finally, the intelligence estimate said that Iraq had obtained unmanned aerial vehicles intended for the delivery of biological weapons, also an erroneous conclusion.

In short, the intelligence community's assessments of Iraq were riddled with errors, and its reputation has yet to fully recover. The role the intelligence community played in persuading the public of the necessity of going to war has done historic damage to the country's trust in subsequent claims for intervention, and indeed, to the credibility of executive action more generally. The Robb-Silberman Commission charged with investigating the community's claims regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction concluded:

"While the intelligence services of the U.K., France Germany, and Russia also thought that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction [in 2002], in the end it was the United States secretary of state that put American credibility on the line, making this one of the most public — and most damaging — intelligence failures in recent American history."

The Dangers of Structural Division

At first glance, the intelligence failures of 9/11 and Iraqi WMDs appear to have little in common. The 9/11 Commission Report criticized the intelligence community for failing to share information among agencies, concluding that the lack of communication materially contributed to the wider failure to "connect the dots" — that is, to anticipate the attack and thwart it. "With each agency holding one or two pieces of the puzzle, none could see the whole picture." The Iraq WMD failure presented a different problem. It wasn't so much that analysts were unaware of what their counterparts in other agencies were thinking; it was rather that, with some exceptions, all of the analysts were thinking the same thing. Information that was inconsistent with the widely held thesis was discarded or, tellingly, reclassified as the result of Iraqi deception. Put simply, analysts enthusiastically connected dots that had little to do with one another or that might be better described as inkblots into a false picture.

But what the two fiascos did have in common was the fundamental structure of problem solving that existed within the CIA and throughout the intelligence community as a whole. This structure was the consequence of a particular way of understanding the collection and use of intelligence: Analysts treated these activities as a kind of proto-social science that they conducted from a detached, disinterested, scientific point of view. That understanding was then manifested in bureaucratic organization.