West Des Moines, Iowa In a speech he gave at the Center for Strategic and International Studies back in late September, Mike Huckabee briefly described his plan to improve U.S. intelligence. “As president,” Huckabee said, “I’d like to beef up our human intelligence capacity, both the operatives who gather the information as well as the analysts who figure out what it means. I’d rather have more people in Langley so we can fewer in Baghdad.” But virtually everyone who has studied the U.S. intelligence community and its deficiencies believes that one of its most serious problems is that we have too many analysts at Langley and too few intelligence gatherers in places like Baghdad. The result has been that for years we’ve had an army of analysts poring over very little information. And what information they had, particularly on the nation’s most determined enemies, often came from sources who were not in a position to know what they were talking about. At his press conference yesterday outside a mall here, I asked Huckabee about this. Q: In your CSIS speech you called for more human intelligence. And then you said we want more people at Langley than we want in Baghdad. A lot of intelligence experts would say that’s the opposite of what we want. Could you clarify that? Huckabee: “What I mean by that is that our intelligence obviously has flaws. If you look at the NIE report we clearly have issues where sixteen different agencies contributing to the report and there wasn’t any clarity as to when that program of nuclear enrichment started or stopped and there still isn’t, I guess, a clear picture of where the Iranians are in regard to nuclear enrichment. There’s also a rivalry between military intelligence and the CIA and I think we have to make some major changes in revamping our intelligence agencies so that they work together rather than competitively. Um, that has to be a priority of the next president.” Q: But most of the human intelligence is actually out in the field, not at Langley, no? Huckabee: “Well, I think what I’m saying is you certainly have the intelligence – if you read the rest of that speech I talk about that we would be better off if we had embassies in some of these places where we pulled them out. I’m clearly not contradicting that. I’m saying that ultimately that intelligence would be processed at Langley. But I make the very point that I think you’re going to, which is that we need more diplomacy going on, we need to have more as I say, the exact phrase I used in the speech as well as the article was, we need more wingtips on the ground before we put boots on the ground.” UPDATE, 11:01 a.m.: A former intelligence officer emails: “Assuming for a second that [Huckabee]’s half-coherent at this point, he’s saying more fake diplomats collecting more disinformation at cocktail parties … wow, where do I sign up? Of course he’s not coherent, which leaves me to wonder: who is advising him on these matters? Maxwell Smart?”
