What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

4.

In the early 1970s, a professor of psychology at Stanford University named David L. Rosenhan gathered together a painter, a graduate student, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a housewife, and three psychologists. He told them to check into different psychiatric hospitals under aliases, with the complaint that they had been hearing voices. They were instructed to say that the voices were unfamiliar, and that they heard words like empty, thud, and hollow. Apart from that initial story, the pseudo patients were instructed to answer every question truthfully, to behave as they normally would, and to tell the hospital staff – at every opportunity – that the voices were gone and that they had experienced no further symptoms. The eight subjects were hospitalized, on average, for nineteen days. One was kept for almost two months. Rosenhan wanted to find out if the hospital staffs would ever see through the ruse. They never did.

Rosenhan’s test is, in a way, a classic intelligence problem. Here was a signal (a sane person) buried in a mountain of conflicting and confusing noise (a mental hospital), and the intelligence analysts (the doctors) were asked to connect the dots – and they failed spectacularly. In the course of their hospital stay, the eight pseudo patients were given a total of twenty-one hundred pills. They underwent psychiatric interviews, and sober case summaries documenting their pathologies were written up. They were asked by Rosenhan to take notes documenting how they were treated, and this quickly became part of their supposed pathology. “Patient engaging in writing behavior,” one nurse ominously wrote in her notes. Having been labeled as ill upon admission, they could not shake the diagnosis. “Nervous?” a friendly nurse asked one of the subjects as he paced the halls one day. “No,” he corrected her, to no avail, “bored.”

The solution to this problem seems obvious enough. Doctors and nurses need to be made alert to the possibility that sane people sometimes get admitted to mental hospitals. So Rosenhan went to a research-and- teaching hospital and informed the staff that at some point in the next three months, he would once again send over one or more of his pseudo patients. This time, of the 193 patients admitted in the three-month period, 41 were identified by at least one staff member as being almost certainly sane. Once again, however, they were wrong. Rosenhan hadn’t sent anyone over. In attempting to solve one kind of intelligence problem (overdiagnosis), the hospital simply created another problem (underdiagnosis). This is the second, and perhaps more serious, consequence of creeping determinism: in our zeal to correct what we believe to be the problems of the past, we end up creating new problems for the future.

Pearl Harbor, for example, was widely considered to be an organizational failure. The United States had all the evidence it needed to predict the Japanese attack, but the signals were scattered throughout the various intelligence services. The army and the navy didn’t talk to each other. They spent all their time arguing and competing. This was, in part, why the Central Intelligence Agency was created, in 1947 – to ensure that all intelligence would be collected and processed in one place. Twenty years after Pearl Harbor, the United States suffered another catastrophic intelligence failure, at the Bay of Pigs: the Kennedy administration grossly underestimated the Cubans’ capacity to fight and their support for Fidel Castro. This time, however, the diagnosis was completely different. As Irving L. Janis concluded in his famous study of “groupthink,” the root cause of the Bay of Pigs fiasco was that the operation was conceived by a small, highly cohesive group whose close ties inhibited the beneficial effects of argument and competition. Centralization was now the problem. One of the most influential organizational sociologists of the postwar era, Harold Wilensky, went out of his way to praise the “constructive rivalry” fostered by Franklin D. Roosevelt, which, he says, is why the President had such formidable intelligence on how to attack the economic ills of the Great Depression. In his classic 1967 work Organizational Intelligence, Wilensky pointed out that Roosevelt would

use one anonymous informant’s information to challenge and check another’s, putting both on their toes; he recruited strong personalities and structured their work so that clashes would be certain… In foreign affairs, he gave Moley and Welles tasks that overlapped those of Secretary of State Hull; in conservation and power, he gave Ickes and Wallace identical missions; in welfare, confusing both functions and initials, he assigned PWA to Ickes, WPA to Hopkins; in politics, Farley found himself competing with other political advisors for control over patronage. The effect: the timely advertisement of arguments, with both the experts and the President pressured to consider the main choices as they came boiling up from below.

The intelligence community that we had prior to September 11 was the direct result of this philosophy. The FBI and the CIA were supposed to be rivals, just as Ickes and Wallace were rivals. But now we’ve changed our minds. The FBI and the CIA, Senator Shelby tells us disapprovingly, argue and compete with one another. The September 11 story, his report concludes, “should be an object lesson in the perils of failing to share information promptly and efficiently between (and within) organizations.” Shelby wants recentralization and more focus on cooperation. He wants a “central national level knowledge-compiling entity standing above and independent from the disputatious bureaucracies.” He thinks the intelligence service should be run by a small, highly cohesive group, and so he suggests that the FBI be removed from the counterterrorism business entirely. The FBI, according to Shelby, is governed by

deeply entrenched individual mind-sets that prize the production of evidence-supported narratives of defendant wrongdoing over the drawing of probabilistic inferences based on incomplete and fragmentary information in order to support decision-making… Law enforcement organizations handle information, reach conclusions, and ultimately just think differently than intelligence organizations. Intelligence analysts would doubtless make poor policemen, and it has become very clear that policemen make poor intelligence analysts.

In his 2003 State of the Union message, President George W. Bush did what Shelby wanted, and announced the formation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center – a special unit combining the antiterrorist activities of the FBI and the CIA. The cultural and organizational diversity of the intelligence business, once prized, is now despised.

The truth is, though, that it is just as easy, in the wake of September 11, to make the case for the old system. Isn’t it an advantage that the FBI doesn’t think like the CIA? It was the FBI, after all, that produced two of the most prescient pieces of analysis – the request by the Minneapolis office for a warrant to secretly search Zacarias Moussaoui’s belongings, and the now famous Phoenix memo. In both cases, what was valuable about the FBI’s analysis was precisely the way in which it differed from the traditional “big picture,” probabilistic inference making of the analyst. The FBI agents in the field focused on a single case, dug deep, and came up with an “evidence-supported narrative of defendant wrongdoing” that spoke volumes about a possible Al Qaeda threat.

The same can be said for the alleged problem of rivalry. The Cell describes what happened after police in the Philippines searched the apartment that Ramzi Yousef shared with his coconspirator, Abdul Hakim Murad. Agents from the FBI’s counterterrorism unit immediately flew to Manila and “bumped up against the CIA.” As the old adage about the Bureau and the Agency has it, the FBI wanted to string Murad up, and the CIA wanted to string him along. The two groups eventually worked together, but only because they had to. It was a relationship “marred by rivalry and mistrust.” But what’s wrong with this kind of rivalry? As Miller, Stone, and Mitchell tell us, the real objection of Neil Herman – the FBI’s former domestic counterterrorism chief – to “working with the CIA had nothing to do with procedure. He just didn’t think the Agency was going to be of any help in finding Ramzi Yousef. ‘Back then, I don’t think the CIA could have found a person in a bathroom,’” Herman says. “ ‘Hell, I don’t think they could have found the bathroom.’” The assumption of the reformers is always that the rivalry between the FBI and the CIA is essentially marital, that it is the dysfunction of people who ought to work together but can’t. But it could equally be seen as a version of the marketplace rivalry that leads to companies