Intelligence Stovepipes: They're a feature, not a bug

The emerging consensus on pre-9/11 "intelligence failures" is that we would have prevented the attacks if only our intelligence and law enforcement agencies had done a better job "sharing information." There has been so much talk about "sharing intelligence" that one wonders if the Care Bears had a hand in writing the after-action assessments.

What is rarely mentioned is that there are good operation reasons for agencies not to share everything they know. Nor do most critics acknowledge the fragile nature of the information they want shared.

What critics see as organizational stovepipes are just the reflection of compartmentalization. The latter is an absolute requirement or security and intelligence. Without it sources dry up, codes get changed, and disinformation gets distributed. The most effective intelligence operations maintain compartmentalization even though it makes their reports less useful. That is an inevitable trade-off but it is justified.

This is clearly the case with World War II's ULTRA/Enigma code-breaking. Some information was provided to Allied ground commanders. But most of them were never told the sources of the information. This, in turn, made them hesitant to exploit the intelligence; they sometimes treated it with skepticism. Had all of them known that the intelligence came from high-level intercepts and not from spies, they would have exploited the intelligence more aggressively. OTOH, if hundreds of officers had known that Bletchley Park was breaking German codes in real time, the Nazis would have found out and changed their codes and methods of communication. ULTRA would have died.

Compartmentalization-- stovepipes-- were an absolute requirement for the successful use of the Enigma code-braking.

This remains true today. In hindsight there will always be pieces of the puzzle that CIA or the FBI or NSA withheld from local police or the FAA or Congress. What we should remember is that often that "noncooperation" is the price of having the information at all.