CIA chief historian David Robarge on pivotal global events – “Intelligence Matters”

In the episode of Intelligence Matters, host Michael Morell speaks with David Robarge, chief historian at the CIA, about the agency’s performance during some of the most important global events of the last 50 years. Morell and Robarge discuss the insight and warnings CIA provided at pivotal moments during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first Gulf War, and the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. Robarge explains why the CIA has at times struggled to provide adequate tactical warnings of significant developments.  

HIGHLIGHTS:  Providing strategic v. tactical warning: “This brings us to what has been a perennial problem for the agency, both in the intelligence sense and in the policy sense, which is the difference between tactical and strategic warning. We can go all the way back to the Korean War with this issue, where you have indications that the agency provides a larger strategic view that an adversary has the capability and possibly the willingness to do something, but we don’t have particular evidence to indicate when they are going to do whatever the bottom line leads to. That is the tactical warning.” 

Acquiring exquisite intelligence: “Unless you have a penetration of the highest levels of the adversary’s decision making that is, in effect, the person sitting in the room with the Politburo or whatever, or you have a signals intercept that is indicating a conversation about the major decision, the ‘Go’ order in effect, you’re never going to have that kind of tactical warning that the policymakers seem to demand. They’re always expecting that the CIA, the intelligence community, are a bunch of seers, a bunch of prognosticators who can forecast the future with unerring inaccuracy. That’s not our business.”    

Balancing delivery of hard truths with access to policymakers: “[T]hat puts us in this difficult situation that we face throughout our history of, how do you balance the need to inform policymakers about what they need to know, even if it’s what they would prefer not to hear, with maintaining your access and, one hopes, your ability to wisely inform the policy making decisions? That continual tradeoff occurs in practically any major scenario that we’ve been through in our history.” 

MICHAEL MORELL: David, thank you for joining us on Intelligence Matters. It’s great to have you and I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

DAVID ROBARGE: Thank you, Michael, for the invitation. I’ve enjoyed your program and I’m very glad to be part of it.

MICHAEL MORELL: So when it comes to the CIA’s performance, David, I think there’s a couple of myths that are out there. One is the the kind of James Bond myth, that there’s nothing we don’t get right and there’s not a piece of information on the planet that we can’t get and there’s not a judgment we don’t get right. And that myth that’s been built up over a long period of time because of movies like that.

And then there’s the opposite of that, right? There’s the Legacy of Ashes myth that there’s nothing we get right and everything we touch goes wrong in some way. So I think that folks are going to emerge from this discussion with you with a much better understanding of reality. And I I think that’s really important.

But before we get to that, let me ask you a couple of questions about you and about the program that you run at CIA. So the first one is how did you end up at the agency and what did your career trajectory look like in terms of the kinds of jobs that you’ve had?

DAVID ROBARGE: I joined the CIA in 1989. I was finishing up my graduate work at Columbia, a Ph.D. in American history. I had a couple of jobs up in New York City and they ended abruptly. So I cast around looking for teaching jobs, jobs in the think tanks, analytic organizations, any place that would use a historian’s skills. CIA was one place I applied to in the U.S. government and I did get an acceptable offer, not one as ideal as I would have liked, but I figured a foot in the door and you never know what’s going to follow.

And that was certainly the case. I stayed in my beginning job as a documents indexer for about a year and a half, and then the first Gulf War broke out and a lot of vacancies opened up for analysts. So I moved over to the Counterterrorism Center, where I worked for about three years and a few interesting branch chiefs while I was there. John Brennan, future director, was running the Terrorism Assessment Branch. His successor was Mike Scheuer, and his successor was Paul Pillar.

And then in ’93, roughly, I moved on to the Near East office, where I was technically located on rotation to Counterterrorism Center and worked as a leadership analyst covering some Middle Eastern issues. And that lasted a few years. It was a pretty high-pressure job. I was the lead leadership analyst on these accounts, and by a few years I had decided I wanted a break. I’d finished my Ph.D. and then promoted a couple of times, so I met the basic qualifications to go to the history staff.

And that position opened up in late ’96. I worked as a staff historian until 2005 and then applied for and was appointed the Chief Historian where I’ve been ever since. So I have roughly 25 years on the history staff and several years before that at the agency.

MICHAEL MORELL: And David, for our listeners, could you tell him what a leadership analyst is?

DAVID ROBARGE: I got into that job because I was a biographer by training, so a leadership analyst studies living people, a biographer usually studies dead people. That’s pretty much the difference there. Leadership analysts, using all source information, prepare a basic art form called a leadership profile that is used all over the government and very much valued at the White House. As a quick look at a foreign leader of various levels, it could be a head of state and head of a service, a military general or something like that. And those are used for briefing before meetings or for atmospherics at a conference. Things like that. They were always very highly valued by the policymakers.

MICHAEL MORELL: Yeah, I’ve always thought that too, and I thought that they would actually pay for them if they had to. They were so valuable.

OK, David, can you talk about the history program at the agency that you run? What’s its purpose? What do you guys do? Can you walk us through that?

DAVID ROBARGE: The agency has had a history function since 1950, which only three years after it was founded. So we’ve always had a sense, with some ebbs and flows, that documenting the agency’s history and using it to inform decision-making has been considered important. The current iteration of the history staff really goes back to 1991, when DCI Robert Gates started a big openness and transparency initiative, and he beefed up the history staff to include several scholars, some from the outside, some internal. And they got involved in documenting the agency’s history through books and articles and presentations, running a history of CIA class. That’s pretty much the way it was when I joined it in ’96.

It also, over the years, had become a little bit ivory tower-ish, a little bit out of the mainstream and not particularly well=-connected. So we’ve made a big effort in the past decade and a half in particular to reconnect with the mainstream business of the agency.

That is, instead of writing books that nobody reads and things like that, we try to connect very much with analytic, operational, managerial and technical issues, providing tailored products, briefings, a quick turnaround items. We’re involved in most of the internal education programs at the agency. We do a lot of teaching and briefing. Last year, we ran about 120 different presentations – and I only have a small staff, just a handful of historians, couple of contractors who work on specific projects. And then I oversee all of them. Plus I work on my own projects as well, when I have the time.

MICHAEL MORELL: You know, I remember, David, that after the bin Laden operation, I asked you guys to put together a history of that immediately to get people’s memories while they were fresh sort of as a first draft of history. And I remember that turned out exceptionally well and it was highly valued both in the building and outside the building. So, you know, it’s not only looking looking way back, but it’s looking at some recent developments as well.

DAVID ROBARGE: That’s right. And I should point out that the history staff is just one program in the agency Center for the Study of Intelligence, which we like to think of as CIA’s think tank. It looks at the past of our history through our staff and the museum. It looks at more contemporary events through a Lessons Learned program, and then it has an emerging trends program that looks at the future of intelligence, as various trends in society and the economy and the business world and technology affect it. So we try to hit all aspects of the business: past, present and future.

MICHAEL MORELL: David, thank you for joining us on Intelligence Matters. It’s great to have you and I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

DAVID ROBARGE: Thank you, Michael, for the invitation. I’ve enjoyed your program and I’m very glad to be part of it.

MICHAEL MORELL: So when it comes to the CIA’s performance, David, I think there’s a couple of myths that are out there. One is the the kind of James Bond myth, that there’s nothing we don’t get right and there’s not a piece of information on the planet that we can’t get and there’s not a judgment we don’t get right. And that myth that’s been built up over a long period of time because of movies like that.

And then there’s the opposite of that, right? There’s the Legacy of Ashes myth that there’s nothing we get right and everything we touch goes wrong in some way. So I think that folks are going to emerge from this discussion with you with a much better understanding of reality. And I I think that’s really important.

But before we get to that, let me ask you a couple of questions about you and about the program that you run at CIA. So the first one is how did you end up at the agency and what did your career trajectory look like in terms of the kinds of jobs that you’ve had?

DAVID ROBARGE: I joined the CIA in 1989. I was finishing up my graduate work at Columbia, a Ph.D. in American history. I had a couple of jobs up in New York City and they ended abruptly. So I cast around looking for teaching jobs, jobs in the think tanks, analytic organizations, any place that would use a historian’s skills. CIA was one place I applied to in the U.S. government and I did get an acceptable offer, not one as ideal as I would have liked, but I figured a foot in the door and you never know what’s going to follow.

And that was certainly the case. I stayed in my beginning job as a documents indexer for about a year and a half, and then the first Gulf War broke out and a lot of vacancies opened up for analysts. So I moved over to the Counterterrorism Center, where I worked for about three years and a few interesting branch chiefs while I was there. John Brennan, future director, was running the Terrorism Assessment Branch. His successor was Mike Scheuer, and his successor was Paul Pillar.

And then in ’93, roughly, I moved on to the Near East office, where I was technically located on rotation to Counterterrorism Center and worked as a leadership analyst covering some Middle Eastern issues. And that lasted a few years. It was a pretty high-pressure job. I was the lead leadership analyst on these accounts, and by a few years I had decided I wanted a break. I’d finished my Ph.D. and then promoted a couple of times, so I met the basic qualifications to go to the history staff.

And that position opened up in late ’96. I worked as a staff historian until 2005 and then applied for and was appointed the Chief Historian where I’ve been ever since. So I have roughly 25 years on the history staff and several years before that at the agency.

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