Truth to Power: A History of the U.S. National Intelligence Council

Robert Hutchings · Gregory F. Treverton

may 2019 · Oxford University Press

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Truth to Power, the first-ever history of the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC), is told through the reflections of its eight Chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. Co-editors Robert Hutchings and Gregory Treverton add a substantial introduction placing the NIC in its historical context going all the way back to the Board of National Estimates in the 1940s, as well as a concluding chapter that highlights key themes and judgments. This historic mission of this remarkable but little-known organization, now forty years old, is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. Its signature inside products, National Intelligence Estimates, are now accompanied by the NIC's every-four-years Global Trends. Unclassified, Global Trends has become a noted NIC brand, its release awaited by officials, academics and private sector managers around the world. Truth to Power tracks the NIC's role in providing strategic analysis on every major foreign policy issue confronting the United States during this consequential period. Chapters provide insider insights on the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, the nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea, upheaval in the Middle East including the rise and fall of the Islamic State, the rise of China, and the Russia's turn toward aggression under Vladimir Putin. The book also assesses the NIC's newly expanded role in direct support to meetings of the National Security Council as well as its longstanding role in producing longer-range strategic intelligence.

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Robert Hutchings is the Walt and Elspeth Rostow Chair in National Security and Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, and served as Dean of the LBJ School from 2010 to 2015. Before coming to UT, he was Diplomat in Residence at Princeton University, where he had also served as Assistant Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. During a public service leave from Princeton in 2003-05, he was Chairman of the National Intelligence Council in Washington, D.C. His combined academic and diplomatic career has included service as Fellow and Director of International Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Director for European Affairs with the National Security Council, and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State, with the rank of ambassador. He is author or editor of four books, including American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War and, with Jeremi Suri, Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy (Oxford). Gregory F. Treverton is Professor of the Practice of International Relations and Spatial Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and Visiting Fellow at the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies, Swedish National Defense University. He served as chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2017. Earlier, he directed the RAND Corporation's Center for Global Risk and Security, and before that its Intelligence Policy Center and its International Security and Defense Policy Center, and he was associate dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He has served in government for the first Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, handling Europe for the National Security Council and as vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, overseeing the writing of America's National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs). He has taught at Harvard and Columbia universities, in addition to RAND, been a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Deputy Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. His latest books are Dividing Divided States and, with Wilhelm Agrell, Beyond the Great Divide: Relevance and Uncertainty in National Intelligence and Science for Policy (Oxford).