Paul R. Pillar is a 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency

Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...

 (CIA), a visiting professor at Georgetown University

Georgetown University

Georgetown University is a private, Jesuit, research university whose main campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic university in the United States...

 for security studies and a member of the Center for Peace and Security Studies.

Prior to joining the CIA, Pillar served as a U.S. Army officer in Vietnam

Vietnam

Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...

. He earned an A.B. degree from Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...

, and received the B.Phil from Oxford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

.

He became chief of analysis

Analysis

Analysis is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle , though analysis as a formal concept is a relatively recent development.The word is...

 at the Agency's Counterterrorist Center

Counterterrorist Center

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center was established in 1986. It is not to be confused with the National Counterterrorism Center, a separate entity.-Foundation and early years:...

 (CTC) in 1993. By 1997 he was the Center's deputy director. But in summer 1999 he suffered a clash of styles with the new director, Cofer Black

Cofer Black

Joseph Cofer Black is an American counter-terrorism expert and consultant. He had a 28-year career in the Directorate of Operations at the Central Intelligence Agency, culminating in his appointment as Director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center in June 1999...

. Soon after, Pillar left the Center.

His 1990 and early 1991 experience were described in a 2006 interview, in which he spoke of the CIA role in assessing Iraq in preparation for the 1991 war. At that time, according to Pillar, the intelligence community

Intelligence community

Intelligence community may refer to* Bangladeshi intelligence community* Croatian intelligence community * Israeli intelligence community* Italian intelligence community, see SISMI...

 (IC) judged that Iraq had active programs for development of weapons of mass destruction

Weapons of mass destruction

A weapon of mass destruction is a weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans and/or cause great damage to man-made structures , natural structures , or the biosphere in general...

 (WMD). "One of the revelations after the invasion and after the inspections began in Iraq was that some of those programs had gone farther than had been believed. The intelligence community had undershot, if you will, in its assessment of just how far along, especially on the nuclear program, the Iraqis had been...."

Pillar notes "I did not receive any [intelligence] requests from a policy-maker on Iraq until about a year into the war...policymakers decided "My goodness, this shows us how much we might not know." And as people like the vice president and others repeatedly reminded in the lead-up to the Operation Iraqi Freedom, "We don't know what we don't know." [said by Donald Rumsfeld

Donald Rumsfeld

Donald Henry Rumsfeld is an American politician and businessman. Rumsfeld served as the 13th Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under President Gerald Ford, and as the 21st Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 under President George W. Bush. He is both the youngest and the oldest person to...

]"

He was a Federal Executive Fellow at the Brookings Institution

Brookings Institution

The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C., in the United States. One of Washington's oldest think tanks, Brookings conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in economics, metropolitan policy, governance, foreign policy, and...

 from 1999-2000. From 2000-2005, Pillar worked as the national intelligence officer for the Near East

Near East

The Near East is a geographical term that covers different countries for geographers, archeologists, and historians, on the one hand, and for political scientists, economists, and journalists, on the other...

 and South Asia

South Asia

South Asia, also known as Southern Asia, is the southern region of the Asian continent, which comprises the sub-Himalayan countries and, for some authorities , also includes the adjoining countries to the west and the east...

. After December 2004, the National Intelligence Council, to which national intelligence officers report, moved from the CIA to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Observations and recommendations about Congressional oversight of intelligence

Paul Pillar, National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East between 2000 and 2005, wrote, in
Foreign Affairs, "Intelligence affects the nation's interests through its effect on policy. No matter how much the process of intelligence gathering itself is fixed, the changes will do no good if the role of intelligence in the policymaking process is not also addressed.... But a few steps, based on the recognition that the intelligence-policy relationship is indeed broken, could reduce the likelihood that such a breakdown will recur."

He emphasized the need for a "a clear delineation between intelligence and policy", suggesting that the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 sets an example "where discussion of this issue has been more forthright, by declaring once and for all that its intelligence services should not be part of public advocacy of policies still under debate. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Tony Blair accepted a commission of inquiry's conclusions that intelligence and policy had been improperly commingled in such exercises as the publication of the "dodgy dossier," the British counterpart to the United States' Iraqi WMD white paper." The National Intelligence Council, and its National Intelligence Officers, act as an intelligence "think tank", and routinely consult with experts outside government. Pillar has been criticized for leaking the NIC's advice to President George W. Bush in the course of such consultations.

Pillar suggested that an American equivalent of the issues "should take the form of a congressional resolution and be seconded by a statement from the White House. Although it would not have legal force, such a statement would discourage future administrations from attempting to pull the intelligence community into policy advocacy. It would also give some leverage to intelligence officers in resisting any such future attempts."

Inadequacies of current practice

Pillar criticized Congress both for not using the intelligence made available to it, as well as not necessarily asking questions about information not provided to them.

"The proper relationship between intelligence gathering and policymaking sharply separates the two functions....Congress, not the administration, asked for the now-infamous October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, although few members of Congress actually read it. (According to several congressional aides responsible for safeguarding the classified material, no more than six senators and only a handful of House members got beyond the five-page executive summary.) As the national intelligence officer for the Middle East, I was in charge of coordinating all of the intelligence community's assessments regarding Iraq; the first request I received from any administration policymaker for any such assessment was not until a year into the war.

While there is a CIA "politicization ombudsman," Pillar described the function as informally defined, and primarily listening to internal concern about politicization, and summarizing this for senior CIA officials. While he believes the intelligence oversight committees should have an important role, "the heightened partisanship that has bedeviled so much other work on Capitol Hill has had an especially inhibiting effect in this area."

Recommendation for improved legislative oversight

In the Foreign Affairs article, Pillar said that the legislative branch is the proper place for monitoring

...the intelligence-policy relationship. But the oversight should be conducted by a nonpartisan office modeled on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Such an office would have a staff, smaller than that of the GAO or the CBO, of officers experienced in intelligence and with the necessary clearances and access to examine questions about both the politicization of classified intelligence work and the public use of intelligence. As with the GAO, this office could conduct inquiries at the request of members of Congress. It would make its results public as much as possible, consistent with security requirements, and it would avoid duplicating the many other functions of intelligence oversight, which would remain the responsibility of the House and Senate intelligence committees."

Commentary by and about Pillar

There have been a series of press comments, for and against Pillar, starting before the 2004 United States Presidential election. Pillar also made several public speeches and publications. Pillar was still a National Intelligence Officer in 2004.

2004

Before the 2004 Presidential election

United States presidential election, 2004

The United States presidential election of 2004 was the United States' 55th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 2, 2004. Republican Party candidate and incumbent President George W. Bush defeated Democratic Party candidate John Kerry, the then-junior U.S. Senator...

, The Wall Street Journal editorial page criticized "CIA insurgents", including Pillar, for "engaging in a policy debate" and were "clearly trying to defeat President Bush and elect John Kerry." The piece asserted that Pillar had a "lousy track record" in assessing the terrorist threat and that he rejected the "war" metaphor for counterterrorism, comparing it instead to "the effort by public health authorities to control communicable diseases." The editorial also asserted that Pillar commented in a public lecture at Johns Hopkins University that "secular" Baathists in Iraq

Iraq

Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....

 would never cooperate with fundamentalists like al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda is a global broad-based militant Islamist terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden sometime between August 1988 and late 1989. It operates as a network comprising both a multinational, stateless army and a radical Sunni Muslim movement calling for global Jihad...

. The editorial writer asserted, "Tell that to Abu Musab al Zarqawi and the Baathists now cooperating in Fallujah."

In September 2004, Robert Novak

Robert Novak

Robert David Sanders "Bob" Novak was an American syndicated columnist, journalist, television personality, author, and conservative political commentator. After working for two newspapers before serving for the U.S. Army in the Korean War, he became a reporter for the Associated Press and then for...

 wrote "I reported on Sept. 27 that Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, told a private dinner on the West Coast of secret, unheeded warnings to Bush about going to war. I learned of this because of leaks from people who attended, but many other senior Agency officials were covertly but effectively campaigning for Sen. John Kerry

John Kerry

John Forbes Kerry is the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts, the 10th most senior U.S. Senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2004 presidential election, but lost to former President George W...

." Amy Sullivan of the Washington Monthly, wrote that Pillar's remarks had been made at an off-the-record dinner party. Pillar had said, at the party, that the CIA had warned the White House, in January 2003, that war with Iraq "could unleash a violent insurgency in the country." Sullivan wrote "Novak wasn't at the dinner, which was conducted under established background rules—the substance of Pillar's remarks could be reported, but not his identity or his audience. But someone there told Novak about it. So Novak, apparently feeling bound by no rules, outed Pillar by identifying him as the speaker. It's a trick he uses often—others attend off-the-record meetings or briefings, tell him about it, and he reports not just what was said, but fingers those who spoke as well."

In an October 2004 op-ed in the Washington Times, John B. Roberts II described Pillar is "a longstanding intellectual opponent of the policy options chosen by President Bush to fight terrorism." Roberts questioned Pillar's suitability to lead the writing of the NIE on Iraq, accusing him of disclosing, to academics and other nongovernmental personnel with whom the National Intelligence Council speaks, the advice given to President Bush.

Another critic of Pillar's speaking against Administration policy, focused around the dinner speech cited by Novak, suggested that CIA management, as a whole, might have been politicized against the Bush Administration. Observing that Pillar's speech was preapproved by CIA management, Stephen F. Hayes of the Weekly Standard questions why "A senior, unelected CIA official--Paul Pillar--was given agency approval to anonymously attack Bush administration policies less than two months before the November 2, 2004, presidential election. ... His was not an isolated case; CIA officials routinely trashed Bush administration policy decisions, often with official approval, in the months leading up to the Iraq War and again before the election."

2005

Pillar was a major participant in a conference "sponsored by the John Bassett Moore Society of International Law, University of Virginia School of Law

University of Virginia School of Law

The University of Virginia School of Law was founded in Charlottesville in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson as one of the original subjects taught at his "academical village," the University of Virginia. The law school maintains an enrollment of approximately 1,100 students in its initial degree program...

, and the Strategic Studies Institute

Strategic Studies Institute

The Strategic Studies Institute is the U.S. Army's institute for strategic and national security research and analysis. It is part of the U.S. Army War College. SSI conducts strategic research and analysis to support the U.S. Army War College curricula, provides direct analysis for Army and...

 (SSI), U.S. Army War College

U.S. Army War College

The United States Army War College is a United States Army school located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the 500 acre campus of the historic Carlisle Barracks...

, and was held February 25–26, 2005. Conference participants included representatives from government agencies involved in the U.S. war on terrorism, students and faculty members from other universities..."
Pillar coauthored a monograph from SSI, entitled Law vs. War: Competing Approaches to Fighting Terrorism.

2006

In early 2006, he wrote an article for Foreign Affairs

Foreign Affairs

Foreign Affairs is an American magazine and website on international relations and U.S. foreign policy published since 1922 by the Council on Foreign Relations six times annually...

criticizing the Bush Administration

George W. Bush administration

The presidency of George W. Bush began on January 20, 2001, when he was inaugurated as the 43rd President of the United States of America. The oldest son of former president George H. W. Bush, George W...

 for cherry picking intelligence to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq

2003 invasion of Iraq

The 2003 invasion of Iraq , was the start of the conflict known as the Iraq War, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, in which a combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq and toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein in 21 days of major combat operations...

. Pillar wrote that the Administration went to war in Iraq "without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq. It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized."

Scott Ritter

Scott Ritter

William Scott Ritter, Jr. was an important United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, and later a critic of United States foreign policy in the Middle East. Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Ritter stated that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass...

, writing on his blog in February 2006, agreed with Pillar's assessment of politicization, but suggested that Pillar had mixed motives in limiting "his criticism to the Bush administration during the time period leading up to the invasion in March 2003." Ritter criticizes Pillar for not mentioning "the issue of regime change and the role played by the CIA in carrying out covert action at the instruction of the White House (both Democratic and Republican) to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Because he was the former national intelligence officer for Near East/Middle East affairs, I find this absence both disconcerting and disingenuous. By failing to give due credence to the impact and influence of the CIA's mission of regime change in Iraq on its analysis of Iraqi WMDs, Mr. Pillar continues to promulgate the myth that the CIA was honestly engaged in the business of trying to disarm Iraq"*

Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus

Walter Pincus

Walter Haskell Pincus is a national security journalist for The Washington Post. He has won several prizes including a Polk Award in 1977, a television Emmy in 1981, the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in association with other Washington Post reporters, and the 2010 Arthur Ross Media...

 called Pillar's critique "one of the most severe indictments of White House actions by a former Bush official since Richard A. Clarke

Richard A. Clarke

Richard Alan Clarke was a U.S. government employee for 30 years, 1973–2003. He worked for the State Department during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush appointed him to chair the Counter-terrorism Security Group and to a seat on the United States National...

" and noted that this article was "the first time that such a senior intelligence officer has so directly and publicly condemned the administration's handling of intelligence."*

In an interview before the Council on Foreign Relations

Council on Foreign Relations

The Council on Foreign Relations is an American nonprofit nonpartisan membership organization, publisher, and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs...

, he elaborated on the politicization of intelligence on which he wrote in the Foreign Affairs article. Pillar said that the Silberman-Robb commission did not go into as much depth on the "differential treatment that different draft intelligence assessments get as they go through the procedure of being coordinated and approved. And you have to remember, anything that sees light of day as a published—published in the sense of a classified paper—intelligence assessment goes through usually multiple levels of review, various supervisors, branch chiefs and so on, weighing in, approving or disapproving, remanding, forcing changes. That can be a speedy process or it can be a long, very torturous process." He said the Commission found that assessments that tended to justify a casus belli

Casus belli

is a Latin expression meaning the justification for acts of war. means "incident", "rupture" or indeed "case", while means bellic...

with Iraq went through approval faster than those that did not support war. Pillar agreed, but said the Commission also should have asked why this occurred. According to Pillar, "I think the most important reason, besides the overall mind-set that turned out to be erroneous, was the desire to avoid the unpleasantness of putting unwelcome assessments on the desks of policymakers."

2007

In 2007, Novak decried Pillar's alleged leaking to the media of portions of a National Intelligence Estimate he viewed as supporting his policy path, though he acknowledged that Pillar denied leaking the report. The New York Times editorial page wrote in Pillar's defense, noting that the Bush Administration did not even ask the CIA for an assessment of the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion.

"When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, Mr. Pillar led the effort, which concluded in August 2004 that Iraq was on the brink of disaster. Officials then leaked his authorship to the columnist Robert Novak

Robert Novak

Robert David Sanders "Bob" Novak was an American syndicated columnist, journalist, television personality, author, and conservative political commentator. After working for two newspapers before serving for the U.S. Army in the Korean War, he became a reporter for the Associated Press and then for...

 and to The Washington Times

The Washington Times

The Washington Times is a daily broadsheet newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. It was founded in 1982 by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, and until 2010 was owned by News World Communications, an international media conglomerate associated with the...

. The idea was that Mr. Pillar was not to be trusted because he dissented from the party line. Somehow, this sounds like a story we have heard before."

A Wall Street Journal criticized Pillar's choices in releasing information.
Its author observed that " CIA officers on the cusp of retirement often enroll in a seminar that is supposed to help them adjust to life after the agency--teaching them, for example, how to write a résumé. I've begun to wonder if part of that program now includes a writing seminar on how to beat up on the Bush administration."

The author, Guillermo Christensen, agrees Pillar was central in the CIA's analysis of Iraq. Regarding the Foreign Affairs article, Christensen questions if that was the place to publicize that he thought the war was a bad idea and the President and advisors ignored him. He makes the assumption that But Pillar "actually did change his mind about all that work he'd done, and that he really did think the intelligence didn't support the case for war. If that was truly so, no one was better positioned to make the case against war within the government than Mr. Pillar himself." Christensen suggested that Pillar could have sent personal observations, with all relevant classified data, to senior Executive Branch officials. Further, Christensen suggested "that analysis with every single member of Congress by writing less-classified summaries of the conclusions, as is often done."

Thomas Joscelyn, in the Weekly Standard, writes that "Pillar demonstrates that he himself is a master of the art of politicizing intelligence. Far from being a dispassionate analyst, Pillar practices the very same 'manipulations and misuse[s]' he claims to expose."

Joscelyn reasserted the conjecture that Saddam Hussein had a cooperative relationship with al-Qaeda. However, the official conclusions of investigations by the CIA, FBI, NSA, State Department, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the independent 9/11 Commission have all confirmed Pillar's view that there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Terrorism and Foreign Policy (book)

Pillar's interest in foreign policy resulted in a book Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy first published in 1999 and updated in 2004. The back cover of the book reads:

Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy is an essential gulde to more effective coordination between conventional foreign policy and efforts to prevent terrorist attacks and activities. This paperback edition includes a new, extensive, and provocative post-9/11 introduction, along with the author's in-depth analyses of current terrorist threats, the status of terrorism in world politics, counterterrorism tools available to the United States, state sponsors of terrorism, and how best to educate the public about terrorist threats and counterterrorism.

A review of the book in Foreign Affairs says: "The book's strength is its nuanced sense of how Washington's counterterrorism policy actually works, day in and day out."

The Washington Times wrote: "[Pillar] offers a valuable overview of the dimensions of terrorism and counterterrorism.... Mr. Pillar's recommendations for improving U.S. counterterrorism policy, such as paying attention to the full range of terrorist threats, as opposed to solely focusing on WMD terrorist warfare, and disrupting terrorist infrastructure worldwide, should be closely read by all those involved in the counterterrorism effort."

Articles and conference papers

Pillar emphasized that jihadist terror will continue to become more decentralized, but not wane, after the core of al-Qaeda is disrupted and pursued. with Al Qaeda waning, the larger terrorist
threat from radical Islamists is not. Al Qaeda-inspired or trained groups will operate locally, and both ad hoc groups (e.g., the organization that had been led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ; October 30, 1966 – June 7, 2006), born Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh was a Jordanian militant Islamist who ran a paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan...

, as well as established groups such as the Iraq-centered Ansar al-Islam and the Southeast Asian Jemaah Islamiya.
Even while having local focus, they tend to share anti-Americanism. Individuals may operate with limited help from organizations.

In the past, ad hoc had been deprecated as a term for terrorist organizations, but that grows increasingly true. [See motivations of terrorists and a discussion of the nontraditional clandestine cell system used by such groups.

Participating in a 2006 conference at the Royal Institute of International Relations, he analyzed and assessed the threat of jihadist terrorism

Terrorism

Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion. In the international community, however, terrorism has no universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition...

 on a worldwide basis. He described the threat as being generated by three complementary factors:

1. In any ideology, religion, or similar movement, the most extreme examples are the one that gain the most attention. There is more than one Islamic ideology, and some, such as Nasser's secular Arab nationalism, did not capture the heart of political Islam. Until a better alternative presents itself, jihadism
   Jihadism
   Jihadism is a term to describe the renewed focus on armed jihad in radical Islamic fundamentalism....
   
    may stay as a major expression for Islamist activists.
2. It is energized by "energy from friction along the fault line between the Muslim world and the West." Themes causing friction including cultural imperialism, oppression of Muslims, and lack of respect for religion. Controversy accelerates polarization, as seen in the Danish disturbance over cartoons of the Prophet.
3. Social, economic and political conditions contribute to terrorism, but there is much confusion here. Pillar argues with those that claim poverty must not a claim because the 9/11 hijackers, and Bin Laden himself, is wealthy. He argues there is a motivational difference between abject poverty that does not generate terrorism, and "frustrated ambition for economic and social advancement, which is." We hear, for example, that economic hardship must not be a root cause of jihadist terrorism because terrorists such as the 9/11 hijackers were not conspicuously poor, and the most prominent jihadist of all, bin Laden, is conspicuously wealthy. In like manner, he argues that authoritarianism is not a cause, because terrorist acts often happen in liberal democracies. And we hear that authoritarian politics must not have much to do with it either because jihadist terrorism takes place at least as often as anywhere else within liberal democracies, in places like New York, Madrid, or London. Pillar's explanation is that it is much easier to stage a terrorist attack in an open society than in the police states in the Middle East.

In an article appearing in the March/April 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs

Foreign Affairs

Foreign Affairs is an American magazine and website on international relations and U.S. foreign policy published since 1922 by the Council on Foreign Relations six times annually...

, Pillar is critical of two recently published books on purported systemic failures of the intelligence community and the necessity for organizational reform.