Social Network Analysis and the Capture of Saddam Hussein

Slate is running an interesting five-part series on the capture of Saddam Hussein in post-invasion Iraq.  Journalist Chris Wilson argues that social network analysis was the key to Saddam’s apprehension and provides a lengthy, well-researched narrative to back it up.

Two interesting conclusions struck me upon reading the first three installments of the piece.  First, it seems that one of the principal obstacles to the US pursuit of Hussein was the assumption that he would rely on high-ranking former regime officials to maintain his security post-invasion.  In fact, he eschewed contact with most of those he had surrounded himself with in the years before the invasion for reasons of operational security.  Instead, he chose to rely on a cadre of relatively anonymous, predominantly-Tikriti bodyguards (numbering about 40) to manage the insurgency and keep him out of American hands.

Second, Wilson’s narrative demonstrates the utility of routine interrogation against even the most uncooperative suspects.  Maddox, a US interrogator, relates how suspects would inadvertently divulge valuable information in their efforts to protect what they thought was more important information:

In piecing together a trail through his network, Maddox says detainees often simply told him what he wanted to know. “They’re not going to tell me about the insurgency,” he explained. “But they’ll talk about who’s drinking buddies with who.” In thinking that they were deflecting the interrogators, lower-level operators were in fact leading Maddox closer to his target. These detainees, in a way, were making precisely the same mistake that the American military made at the start of the Iraq war. Institutional information about the insurgency wouldn’t bring coalition troops closer to Saddam’s hiding place. The social information that these lower-level Musslits provided was much more valuable. Maddox wanted to know the names of Saddam’s friends, not his former colleagues.

Wilson’s implicit endorsement of social network analysis as a method of combating insurgencies is well-received.  However, his piece also demonstrates the overwhelming weakness of this analytic technique: it requires a tremendous amount of high-quality information inputs.  Furthermore, it is rarely apparent when you have “enough” good information to assign high-confidence to the conclusions arising out of a network analysis.  As Wilson makes abundantly clear, in the case of Iraq, this information could only be gleaned through a series of risky raids.

0-2 on the big ones? The NIC, the NIE, and the WMD.

The NY Times reports this morning that Obama Administration officials generally believe that the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the trajectory of Iran’s nuclear program was off-the-mark.  NIEs are produced by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and are the intelligence community’s best answer to the most important strategic issues confronting American policy-makers.  This particular NIE indicated that Iran’s nuclear weapons program was largely suspended after 2003 and generally played down the imminence of the Iranian nuclear threat.

Naturally, it’s bad news to hear that Iran has continued to develop a nuclear weapons program.  However, it’s also disturbing to hear that the intelligence community’s premiere analytic product came out on the wrong side of some important questions yet again.

Recall that the November 2007 NIE must be understood in the context of the 2002 NIE alleging the existence of Iraqi WMD programs and weapons systems that violated UN resolutions.  This NIE was a crucial element of the Bush Administration’s case for war.  The controversial Iran NIE was viewed by many skeptics, particularly within the Bush Administration and allied governments, as an over-reaction to the erroneous conclusions of the 2002 Estimate.  It now appears that it was.

So what is the problem here?

It seems we are asking unreasonable questions of the intelligence community and/or the intelligence community could do a better job of answering the questions being asked.  Leslie Gelb, President-emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations,  has an interesting take on this issue in his recently-published Power Rules. Gelb argues that we do ask unreasonable questions of the intelligence community noting that elections and policy choices are hard to predict in our own country much less another country (Who saw Senator Barack Obama becoming President Barack Obama back in 2004?  Likewise, who knew what healthcare reform legislation would end up looking like today a full six months ago?).  Gelb suggests that intelligence should instead be used to assess global trends, power structures, and the like.  In fact, the NIC does very well at this. Even Gelb, however, would probably consider strategic questions about Iraqi and Iranian weapons programs in-bounds.

Regardless, policy-makers will need to make some assumptions about these questions and the intelligence community is obliged to help out.  Therefore, the process must be improved if the outcomes are to become more acceptable.  This effort is already under way — the National Intelligence Council is attempting to de-politicize the NIEs by limiting what is actually released to the public.  But will this simple reform make NIEs more accurate?  Or are we already at the outer-limits of what’s achievable in the realm of strategic intelligence?

A future post will explore the impact that this apparently-flawed 2007 NIE has had on America’s ability to counter the Iranian nuclear threat.