The Intelligence Community's Failure In The US

The US Intelligence Community has come a long way in terms of their use of technology and collecting and analyzing data compared to the past. These developments have helped increase The United State’s security, keeping its citizens and the IC’s secret information safe for most of the time. However, despite these improvements throughout the years, the Intelligence Community still faces a number of threats. The biggest one, however, is failure within the Intelligence Community itself. Failure within the IC can bring about multiple different consequences, such as losing the US public’s trust in the government, enemies obtaining the government’s secret information, and attacks from the US's enemies. The first consequence of failure within the
An example of this is is espionage within the community. Back in mid 1980’s the Soviet Union had been arresting and killing a large number of American spies. According to Lowenthal, the possibility of espionage within the CIA had not been taken seriously, as they thought it wasn’t possible. Failure to take this possibility seriously from the start resulted in the IC’s information to be handed over to the USSR for over a decade. The IC failed to search for indicators within their personnel, and had they noticed these indicators earlier it’s possible that they could have found out who the spies were sooner. Due to this failure they were unable to expose the second spy, Hanssen, until 2001. Unfortunately, though, by the time Hanssen had been arrested he had already given the Soviets a large amount of the IC’s classified information. Had the IC started the investigation sooner, it is possible that some of their classified information could have been prevented from being acquired by the Soviet
Analysts were unable to anticipate this attack despite the information they had gathered beforehand. Part of the reason why they failed to anticipate the attack was due to the fact that they were unable to link together the information they had gathered, or rather “connect the dots” as Lowenthal had put it. Another reason was that the CIA and FBI had failed to share the information they had on Al Qaeda, which could have been at least a bit useful in anticipating the attack. Moreover, similar to Pearl Harbor’s situation, the analysts did not try to to view the situation from the terrorists’ point of view. Failure to anticipate this attack unfortunately led to the loss of thousands of