The U.S. Intelligence Community has made “important progress” implementing the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, but institutional culture and potential budget reductions pose growing challenges to the government’s intelligence efforts, saidChristopher Kojm GS ’79,the commission’s former deputy executive director, in a lecture Monday afternoon.
“The real challenge [moving] forward is how to foster integration in a declining budget environment and to make sure that the choices we make ... enhance further collaboration and do not pull us apart. And that’s a significant challenge,” said Kojm, now the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, a division of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The talk, titled “Progress Addressing Key Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission,” took place in Robertson Hall just a week after the 10th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. The discussion was moderated by Wilson School professor Kim Lane Scheppele and attended by about 75 students, community members and staff.
Kojm split his time discussing his experience leading the 9/11 Commission — officially called The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States — and how present-day intelligence analysis has been changed by the implementation of some of the commission’s recommendations.
Kojm said that the commission’s leadership was cognizant from the beginning of its work that previous national commissions “had ended up as door stops, as bookends, as objects to be dusted.”
“We felt we had a responsibility to tell a story to the American people about what happened and why,” Kojm said.
The commission’s guiding principle was the “relentless assertion of the factual record,” Kojm said, because “what could be more partisan than who is to blame for 9/11?”
The commission’s 568-page report was issued in 2004, and many of the reforms for the intelligence community were included in legislation later that year. The most significant change was the creation of a Director of National Intelligence, who is in charge of ensuring cooperation and information-sharing among the government’s 16 intelligence agencies.
Kojm said that the new organization has made impressive progress in coordinating intelligence-sharing and creating technological infrastructure that allows agencies to share that information.
“The changes in the community have enhanced our ability to bring information and analysts to the table, and I think quite effectively,” he said.
However, key challenges remain, he explained, especially in defining the position of the DNI and transitioning from the intelligence practice of “need to know” to “responsibility to share.”
“The thing that is above all hardest to change is culture, [and] it’s a hard slog over time to bring change in government organizations,” he said.
Responding to an audience question about classified intelligence released by the organization WikiLeaks, Kojm said that agencies are now holding intelligence closer and are more reluctant to share.
“WikiLeaks has been a push in the wrong direction,” he said. “We have to get our security better, but not let those measures get in the way of ... information-sharing.”
In discussing the commission’s work, Scheppele said that “perhaps the most important change since the commission issued its report is that the public is no longer panicked.”
Several audience members said they appreciated the discussion of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations.
Sascha Krannich, a visiting researcher from Germany, said the talk was the first time he had heard about the commission.
“That was very interesting to hear,” he said. “I was very impressed by the speaker ... and how sensitive he was to find the right words.”
“We’re asking an important question here, 10 years down the road,” said Tom Tasche ’13.
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