How to fix intelligence failures? New DNI told to end group think

FPI / June 19, 2020

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Newly minted Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe should make his number one priority the rooting out of anyone in the intelligence community who participated in the plot to bring down President Donald Trump, the executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security said.

In an open letter to Ratcliffe on June 3, Dr. Peter Vincent Pry said priority number two should be “to begin organizing the termination of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).”

Priority number three, Pry said, should be “reforming the intelligence community's culture to minimize ‘groupthink’ that is so often responsible for major intelligence failures.”

Pry served on the Congressional EMP Commission as chief of staff, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and in the CIA.

“Intellectual diversity is far more important to a healthy and trustworthy intelligence community than the diversity of race and sexual preference, the latter has long been the intelligence community's obsessive focus,” Pry wrote. “Too many intelligence officers come from inside the ‘Washington bubble’ and radicalized universities, so the intelligence community worldview is skewed leftward.”

The end result of “groupthink” and the coordination process, Pry wrote, “is intelligence products that reflect the lowest common denominator of views within an agency and, at the intelligence community level, the lowest common denominator between agencies.”
“In short, the result is mediocrity.”

The open letter continued: “In the aftermath of the Cold War, we now know from examining Soviet and Warsaw Pact archives that the ‘Team-B’ was right and the CIA was wrong. Soviet plans for waging nuclear war were not just for deterrence — and did not subscribe to Western theories about Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) — but were designed for achieving victory.

“Unfortunately, an embarrassed CIA never repeated the ‘Team-B’ experiment and did not learn from it. Indeed, the CIA purged the unpopular Team-B Report. When I was an analyst at CIA, I inherited the last surviving copy of the original Team-B Report, which had been hidden away and protected from destruction by a retiring conservative ‘dissident’ analyst, CIA’s version of samizdat.”

The intelligence community, Pry wrote, “is in a profound and unprecedented crisis, desperately in need of monumental reform.”

“Some of the most essential parts of the intelligence community were weaponized by the Obama administration to frame President Donald Trump with false allegations of ‘colluding with Russia’ to win election. They sought to delegitimize the Trump administration, cripple President Trump’s ability to govern through endless investigations, and set-up a legitimately elected President of the United States for impeachment on false charges concocted by the intelligence community.”

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