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Lebanon and the Intelligence Community

Lebanon crisis (1982-1983),
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  A case study                          
                             
  Lebanon and the Intelligence Community    
                             
  David Kennedy and Leslie Brunetta                    
                             
Since 1957 the Central Intelligence Agency has funded a program with the John F. Kennedy  School o/ Government at Harvard University on Intelligence and Policy.. Under this program, which is managed by ClA's Center /or the Study of lntelligence,the Kennedy School conducts seminars and develops case studies that help to illuminate issues related to the needs of intelligence policymakers. This article is abridged from a case study done in 1988 for the Kennedy School  of Government..       which they might spell out the evidence and reasoning behind their reservations. While they waited, they pushed other established channels of communication, and their professional proprieties, to the limit in an attempt to get their message through. But dissatisfaction with Lebanon intelligence was almost universal: policymakers felt increasingly ill served, and analysts felt increasingly ill used. The two sides agreed only, if for different reasons, that intelligence analysis was not playing its proper role. The intelligence process may not, in the end, have offered up many insights about Lebanon, but Lebanon, in retrospect, says a great deal about the intelligence process.  
                     
'When the Reagan administration committed US Marines to Beirut International Airport in September 1982, it had the very highest of hopes. The White House meant to use American leadership and power to achieve great thinks in Lebanon: to end its festering civil war, banish occupying Israeli and Syrian armies, and infuse its battered government and armed forces with the strength they needed to run and protect their country. It meant, along the way, to bolster American influence in the Middle East, win a proxy superpower victory over the Soviet-backed Syrians, and, domestically, banish the "Vietnam syndrome" by demonstrating America's capacity for forceful and resolute action overseas. None of this came to pass. The administration withdrew a year and a half later in near ignominy, with its policy in tatters, Beirut in flames, and more than 250 Americans dead, most of them victims of a devastating and humiliating terrorist bombing.      
             
             
             
    Intelligence and Analysis      
             
    In the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence (DI), the Office of Near Fast and South Asian Analysis (NESA) was responsible for Lebanon intelligence. The typical NESA Middle East analyst had a graduate degree in some aspect of Middle Eastern studies and an abiding interest in the region's history, religions, and cultures: many understood at least one of the region's languages and had lived in the Middle Fast at some point.  
             
These analysts were prepared, as was the rest of the DI, both to alert the White House  and executive departments to emerging issues of importance and to respond to executive requests for analysis on any particular topic. A constant stream of different and carefully defined intelligence products, known to analysts as "art forms," flowed out of NESA. Most elemental were "talking  points." CIA personnel routinely performed dozens of briefings every day (the  most important usually being  those that always began National Security Council meetings): talking points were typically a few topical items-the intelligence equivalent of a TV headline update-singled out by Agency analysts to be highlighted in those
                   
Throughout America's Lebanon adventure, US intelligence analysts, particularly CIA analysts, were uncommonly convinced that much of the administration's policy was misguided and ill fated. They eagerly awaited the administration's call for a Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE), the premier instrument of US intelligence analysis, in      
                   
Copyright 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.  Reprinted and shortened by permission of the Kennedy School of Government Case Program, Harvard University.          
         
                   
                             
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Posted: May 08, 2007 08:53 AM
Last Updated: May 01, 2008 10:23 AM
Last Reviewed: May 08, 2007 08:53 AM