WASHINGTON - National Intelligence Director Mike Mc-Connell has reversed the recent practice of declassifying and releasing summaries of national intelligence estimates, a top intelligence official said Friday.
Knowing their words may be scrutinized outside the U.S. government chills analysts' willingness to provide unvarnished opinions and information, said David Shedd, a deputy to Mc-Connell.
He told congressional aides and reporters that McConnell recently issued a directive making it more difficult to declassifythe key judgments of national intelligence estimates, which are forward-looking analyses prepared for the White House and Congress that represent the consensus of the nation's 16 spy agencies on a single issue. The analysis comes from various sources including the CIA, the military and intelligence agencies inside federal departments.
Referring to the public release of the reports, Shedd said during a Capitol Hill briefing: "It affects the quality of what's written."
So far this year, the national intelligence director's office has released unclassified key judgments from three national intelligence estimates - two on Iraqand one on terrorist threats to the U.S. homeland.
The trend toward releasing national intelligence estimates started about four years ago, most notably with the White House's July 2003 disclosure of key judgments from a national intelligence estimate on Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.
The White House was pressured to release those findings after parts of the national intelligence estimate that supported the Bush administration's case for war against Iraq were leaked to the press.
Steven Aftergood, the director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, says national intelligence estimates should be released in their entirety.
"That doesn't mean disclosing sensitive intelligence methods or the identity of confidential sources. But that's not what estimates are," Aftergood said. "The public needs unvarnished assessments as well. Without them, we stumbled our way into the war in Iraq."
The 2002 national intelligence estimate contained a warning from the State Department's intelligence office that it did not believe Iraq was actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. That dissenting opinion was not widely disclosed until after the war had already been launched, largely on the president's assertion that Saddam Hussein's program for weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat.
Robert Jervis, a Columbia University professor who heads up an advisory panel for the CIA on the declassification of historical documents, said releasing intelligence estimates increases the likelihood their contents will be used for political rather than foreign policy purposes, and influences how they are worded.
"In an ideal world these documents would be as objective, as honest, as separated from thepolitical preferences of the top people as possible," Jervis said. "If that's going to be public, you make the pressures of politicization that much greater. When you are writing an executive summary it's hard not to ask 'How is this sentence going to read in The New York Times?"'
Jervis, who calls himself "proopenness," nevertheless favors keeping most national intelligence estimates completely out of the public eye.
"There are some things that should be secret," he said. "If an NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] is any good at all on a hot topic, it's going to draw heavily on secret information."
Front Section, Pages 5 on 10/27/2007