Lawrence Wright discusses the United States’ intelligence strategy with Mike McConnell, the director of National Intelligence. In a rare interview, McConnell, who has been charged with bringing unity to a set of agencies that, for years, have been “brutally competitive, undermining one another and hoarding vital information,” speaks candidly with Wright about cyber-security, torture, intelligence leaks, and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Cyber-security is one of McConnell’s top priorities; as he said in one Oval Office meeting, “If the 9/11 perpetrators had focussed on a single U.S. bank through cyber-attack and it had been successful, it would have an order-of-magnitude greater impact on the U.S. economy.” “My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens,” McConnell tells Wright. He is drafting a Cyber-Security Policy that seeks to protect not just government but also American industry and individuals from attack, but may be seen by some as violating privacy. Ed Giorgio, a former N.S.A. official working with McConnell on it, explains that the policy would give government “the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search.” Giorgio tells Wright, “Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation,” and warns him, “Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.” Wright emphasizes this tension between security and privacy, saying, “Americans will have to trust the government not to abuse the authority it must have in order to protect our networks, and yet, historically, the government has not proved worthy of that trust.”
Wright questions McConnell on the U.S.’s use of torture in intelligence investigations. McConnell denies that the U.S. tortures detainees, but says of the C.I.A.’s “special methods” of interrogation, “Have we gotten meaningful information? You betcha. Tons! Does it save lives? Tons! We’ve gotten incredible information.” When Wright asks him to define torture, McConnell answers, “My own definition of torture is something that would cause excruciating pain.” On the subject of waterboarding, he says, for him, “Waterboarding would be excruciating. If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture.”
Wright also discusses “the continuing failure of the intelligence community to capture or kill bin Laden and dismantle his organization.” David Shedd, McConnell’s deputy director for policy, tells Wright, “The trail is cold. It’s as hard a target as we’ve ever faced.” Wright notes that the C.I.A. shuttered its unit in charge of tracking bin Laden in 2005, and a former agency official tells Wright that “there’s a sense that there’s not a quarterback” in the fight against Al Qaeda. Regarding rumors that bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan, McConnell states that “you cannot indiscriminately attack a sovereign nation,” but does say that if bin Laden is located “we’ll bring it to closure.”
McConnell also gives new insight into the December release of the key judgments of the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which judged that, contrary to previous reports, Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons program in 2003. While McConnell initially said that he would not declassify the key judgments, he decided abruptly to do so, telling Wright that he feared that “if we didn’t release it, it would leak, and the Administration at that point would be accused of hiding information.” McConnell, who abhors leaks, tells Wright that anyone who leaked a classified document “ought to be put in the slammer.” He fears the spread of information to America’s enemies, saying, “If I have to inform the public, I am informing the adversary.”
McConnell has faced a tough challenge in reforming the intelligence community. Wright writes, “The intelligence community has lagged significantly behind private industry in the development and use of innovative technology” and notes that “only recently have BlackBerrys made their way into some agencies, and many offices don’t even have Internet connections.” McConnell has tried to rectify the technological shortcomings with innovations like intelligence-community versions of Wikipedia and MySpace, but Wright notes that the bigger problem may be in personnel: “The intelligence community is literally incapable of understanding the enemy, because substantial security barriers have been placed in the path of Americans who are native speakers of Arabic and other critical languages.”
