Sins of Omission and Commission: Strategic Cultural Factors and US Intelligence Failures During the Cold War

Abstract

American intelligence professionals have long understood that the US intelligence community is, and always has been, a closed and insular society, with each agency within the intelligence community taking pride in having its own unique bureaucratic identity, distinct corporate culture, operating environments, social dynamics, and internal behavior patterns that have been molded and shaped by external events and internal forces over the past 60 years. These ‘strategic cultural’ factors mean that the agencies comprising the US intelligence community are, in many respects, unique bureaucratic entities, operating far differently than comparable large American corporations and government agencies. These strategic cultural factors shape and define the environment within which the US intelligence agency works, dictate how American intelligence agencies perform their mission, and also help to explain why they repeatedly make the same mistakes and find it difficult to fix the longstanding problems which contributed to the failures. Within the context of the recent 9/11 and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction intelligence failures, this article explores the role played by these strategic cultural factors in helping to explain a series of historical intelligence failures by the US intelligence community.