Paul R. Pillar is an academic and 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), serving from 1977 to 2005. He is now a nonresident senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies, as well as a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Institution's Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence.Brookings Institution, Paul R. Pillar He was a visiting professor at Georgetown University from 2005 to 2012. He is a contributor to The National Interest.The National Interest, Paul R Pillar
Background Pillar earned an A.B. degree from Dartmouth College (1969), and received the B.Phil from Oxford University (1971) and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University (1975 and 1978).Georgetown University, Paul R Pillar
Career Prior to joining the CIA in 1977, Pillar served as a U.S. Army Reserve officer in Vietnam, on active duty from 1971 to 1973.
At the CIA, Pillar served in a variety of positions, including Executive Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence, William H. Webster (1989–1991).Brookings Institution, Paul R. Pillar CV
He became chief of analysis at the Agency's Counterterrorist Center (CTC) in 1993. By 1997, he was the Center's deputy director. But in the summer of 1999 he suffered a clash of styles with the new director, Cofer Black. Soon after, Pillar left the Center.Coll, Steve, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin, 2005 revised edition), pp. 257, 375, 451, 457.
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 judged that Iraq had active programs for development of weapons of mass destruction (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]"
He was a Federal Executive Fellow at the Brookings Institution from 1999-2000. From 2000 to 2005, Pillar worked at the National Intelligence Council as the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, "responsible for production and coordination throughout the U.S. Intelligence Community of National Intelligence Estimates and other Community assessments". 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 clear delineation between intelligence and policy", suggesting that the United Kingdom 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 UK, 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, 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 would never cooperate with fundamentalists like al-Qaeda. The editorial writer asserted, "Tell that to Abu Musab al Zarqawi and the Baathists now cooperating in Fallujah."
In September 2004, columnist Robert Novak 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." In response, 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 remarked that "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, and the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), U.S. Army War College, 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