The author of Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence, Dr. Rovner is concerned about the causes and consequences of breakdowns at the interface of intelligence and policy, and he believes that “the effort to reform intelligence will be all for naught if the intelligence community cannot build a productive relationship with policymakers.” In this article, the author first offers a framework for understanding intelligence-policy relations.

To that end, he stresses the importance of close and continuous interaction between intelligence analysts and policy makers and explains how intelligence can help manage ambiguities. Ideally, the analysts should produce objective assessments free of policy considerations while policymakers should be able to criticize inaccurate or unhelpful intelligence products and demand better without accusations of meddling. The relationship requires a healthy tension with each challenging the other to achieve the best product.

That healthy tension is too often replaced by friction since intelligence work embraces both scholarship and uncertainty, while policymakers are action-oriented and cannot allow uncertainty to prevent decision-making. Policymakers have their own worldviews and information networks and thus may doubt that an intelligence estimate offers any additional value.

The author identifies two pathologies to good relations between analysts and policymakers: neglect and politicization. The former occurs when policymakers either ignore the intelligence or “cherry-pick” from it for self-serving purposes. More damaging is politicization, or the manipulation of intelligence to reflect a policy preference. Politicization skews the tone and substance of estimates, inhibits reassessment, and can poison intelligence-policy relations by reinforcing mutual suspicions and stereotypes.

In the last twelve paragraphs of this article, Dr. Rovner revisits the pre-war intelligence concerning Iraq and he describes how both pathologies, but predominately that of the politicization of intelligence, figured significantly in the U.S. determination to pursue war and Great Britain’s decision to support that fateful decision.