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2008-11-07 13:23:42
By Adam Brookes
BBC News, Washington
President Clinton complained that most days he had read its contents elsewhere.
But President Bush took from it the message that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction and posed an imminent threat. And he may have passed over its
warnings of the threat posed by al-Qaeda.
The President's Daily Brief (PDB) occupies a fabled place in American politics.
It is an ultra-secret compilation of the latest intelligence presented to the
President every morning.
And later on Thursday, Barack Obama will start to receive the PDB as
president-elect.
Every evening, reports over the years tell us, the PDB is roughed out by
intelligence officials.
Its contents tend towards the very topical:
Meade, Maryland
agents, or to the operatives of the Defense Intelligence Agency
Bethesda
Perhaps most importantly, the PDB sums up the conclusions about the state of
the world as reached by analysts from across some 16 US intelligence agencies.
Dynamic process
The President could not possibly absorb the sum of the information gathered by
the huge American intelligence apparatus.
FBI information indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country
consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks
Excerpt from PDB
6 August 2001
The PDB must synthesise and distil key conclusions from a mass of data.
So the PDB is a highly selective document. And it must be written very
carefully.
Intelligence staff continue to work on it overnight, as fresh reporting comes
in.
In the morning the final version is reviewed by the Director for National
Intelligence (DNI), or one of his staff.
The current DNI, Mike McConnell, likes to take the PDB to the White House and
present it to the President, sources say.
He takes with him staff members who are specialists and can answer questions
the President might have.
"It's a dynamic process," says Thomas Blanton, Director of the National
Security Archive at George Washington University.
"The President hears what the intelligence people want him to know, and the
intelligence people learn what the president is interested in."
Human intelligence
There are only a few PDBs - or portions of them - in the public domain. And
those are mostly associated with highly controversial topics.
Here is an extract from a 1998 PDB given to President Clinton. It is often used
to illustrate that the US clearly understood the al-Qaeda threat years before
President George W Bush took office:
"SUBJECT: Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks
"Reporting [-] suggests Bin Laden and his allies are preparing for attacks in
the US, including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Shaykh 'Umar
'Abd al-Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Muhammad Sadiq 'Awda.
"One source quoted a senior member of the Gama'at al-Islamiyya (IG) saying
that, as of late October, the IG had completed planning for an operation in the
US on behalf of Bin Laden, but that the operation was on hold.
"A senior Bin Laden operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit IG counterparts in
the US soon thereafter to discuss options-perhaps including an aircraft
hijacking."
There is a lot of detail here, and references to individual items of HUMINT
(human intelligence), though President Clinton was renowned for his love of
just that.
But note the caveats: reports do not "tell", they merely "suggest".
Perhaps the most infamous PDB also concerns al-Qaeda. It went to President Bush
on 6 August, 2001 - just over a month before the 11 September attacks on New
York and Washington.
It contained the headline: "Bin Ladin determined to strike in the US".
It reads: "FBI information indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this
country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks."
Extraordinarily prescient? Or vague and unhelpful?
'Selling' intelligence
The Silberman-Robb report on US intelligence capabilities of 2005 found
"deficiencies" in the PDB. Its authors were scathing.
The daily reports seemed to be "selling" intelligence - in order to keep its
customers, or at least the First Customer, interested
2005 Silberman-Robb report
They alleged that the format of the Brief and the way in which it was delivered
helped inflate the sense of the threat posed by Iraq.
The "river of intelligence that flowed from the CIA to top policy makers over
long periods of time" through the PDB was "misleading", said the report.
"The PDBs with their attention-grabbing headlines and drumbeat of repetition,
left an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were very
few sources", it read.
"The daily reports seemed to be "selling" intelligence - in order to keep its
customers, or at least the First Customer, interested."
Since then, there have been changes.
The PDB now looks less like a newsletter, sources say. It may include graphics
and photographs.
Gone are those pithy headlines. And it is written in a way to reflect
uncertainty or disagreement within the intelligence agencies.
Intercepts and photographs
So what might Barack Obama's first PDB have in it?
Well, it is not hard to imagine that there would be an evaluation of Russia's
intentions regarding the positioning of its missiles, given President
Medvedev's recent belligerent statements.
The latest from the Afghan-Pakistan border, intercepts and photographs from
drones which reveal what militants are where, and the plans US intelligence has
to target them, perhaps.
And did US warplanes really kill 37 civilians at a wedding party, as the Afghan
government alleges?
And plenty more - that we will never know.