Acting Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, Admiral David Jeremiah, testified before Congress on the intelligence community's failure to foresee India's nuclear tests. Following a background report, Jim Lehrer and guests discuss the findings of the Jeremiah report.

JIM LEHRER: Now, the chairman and vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: Sen. Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, and Senator Robert Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska. So, Sen. Shelby, how serious an intelligence failure was this?

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Well, I described it as a colossal failure. That was my own description. I think it was big, but I don't believe you can blame it all on the intelligence community, because the policy makers have a role in this too, but the Jeremiah report, I thought was tough. You mentioned it a few minutes ago. We had a hearing on it yesterday. The question now, I believe, is what is the community, the intelligence community going to do about it.

JIM LEHRER: Senator Kerrey, do you think that Admiral Jeremiah got it right in terms of what caused this failure?

SEN. ROBERT KERREY: Yes, I do. And I'm urging the Director of Central Intelligence to de-classify the report. I mean, the public needs to see and be engaged in the debate, as does the full Congress. And there are corrective actions that need to be taken, many which, by the way, were recommended after the Aldrich Ames failure, and Congress failed to act. We passed a law in 1996 that has given the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, more authority. But one of the things that Admiral Jeremiah says is that the Director lacks the authority to manage the budget, to direct people around, and to do the things the American people need done to keep them safe.

JIM LEHRER: So it was a process problem, not just a specific problem on India?

SEN. ROBERT KERREY: Well, I think it is more than a process problem. It's a problem of the law. The law does not give the director-I mean, Admiral Jeremiah said something very important in this preview, and that is that the community is much more than the CIA. The community includes lots of other agencies, and the director does not have a sufficient amount of authority to control that budget and to direct those resources, and increasingly, the customer is a national customer, not just a military customer, and, as a consequence, it seems to me that we've got to take the recommendations that were made after the Aldrich Ames, de-classify the Jeremiah report so the public and the Congress can get their arms around what needs to be done, because literally lives are at stake, and lives are-and American security is hanging in the balance.

JIM LEHRER: Sen. Shelby, help us understand when somebody-when you all say the intelligence community, most of us think, okay, this is a CIA thing, but there are other elements involved in the India case, specifically, were there not?

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: There are 12 other agencies that we know of, 13, I believe, altogether, 12 other agencies, the CIA director sort of acts like a chairman of the board or the manager. He's the man at the end of the game, but as Sen. Kerrey said, sometimes he doesn't have the authority that he needs. Perhaps some things need to be changed. If it's legislation, Senator Kerrey and I are going to work together on this. We want our agencies to work. We want our policy makers to have the intelligence that they need. And in this case there were failures, but what we've got to do is learn from this, do something about it.

JIM LEHRER: But, Senator, Admiral Jeremiah said very specifically that one of the major failures here was not a lack of coordination and all of that; it was a mind set that the analysts had, in other words, they expected the Indians to act just exactly the way Americans do, and that's how they blew the deal.

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Well, that was one of them, and I think he's absolutely right. I've said and most other people that follow intelligence know that a nation ultimately will act in their best interest, and they might not manifest that the way we would.

SEN. ROBERT KERREY: But it wasn't just the-I mean, the mind set included all of us. None of us figured-from the president on down-that this was going to happen. Furthermore, I say again, Jim, I think it's very important that this report get de-classified. Otherwise, it's very difficult to get the full picture and to understand what needs to be done. The American people need to have this report de-classified.

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Jim.

JIM LEHRER: Yes.

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: I agree with Senator Kerrey on the de-classification. I've read the report. He's read the report. I don't think there's anything in there that is going to destroy anybody, or it's going to hurt us. I think it will help us, and the American people ought to know.

JIM LEHRER: Senator Kerrey, did it offend you when Admiral Jeremiah said that the analysts assumed that Indian politicians were just like American politicians, that they might say something in their campaigns and not really mean it?

SEN. ROBERT KERREY: No. More importantly, what we've discovered is that after the fact it makes perfect sense. I mean, their numbers-politicians' numbers are in the 90-percentile range. And we all understand here if you give me something that I can do to get my approval rate up in the 90's, I might do it too.

JIM LEHRER: And they did it by saying they wanted to be a nuclear power.

SEN. ROBERT KERREY: Exactly. Again, anytime you see something afterwards, it's much clearer to see and understand that it was going to happen. I mean, it didn't make sense for India to do this, but they went ahead and did it, and afterwards, now we're all saying, well, gosh, why didn't we figure it out beforehand? So, as Senator Shelby said, the most important thing right now is to figure out what we need to do to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. There's lots that needs to be done, and getting this report de-classified will help us do it.

JIM LEHRER: But, Senator Shelby, how does de-classifying a report change a mindset of individuals who are analyzing all this information?

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Well, it won't by itself, you're absolutely right on this, but I think it will let the American people know what some of the things that we're going to have to do. Our intelligence agencies have done a good job on many things. A lot of them they don't get credit for it. We use it. This was a failure. But let's don't kill everybody. Let's work from this and build a stronger agency or agencies.

SEN. ROBERT KERREY: Well, let me take a shot at answering that too, Jim.

JIM LEHRER: Sure.

SEN. ROBERT KERREY: I mean, in the recommendations made by both the Brown Commission and many others after the Aldrich Ames incident, there was a recommendation that in law we have independent analysts come in from time to time and do some checking of the thinking that's going on, because it's human nature-not just intelligence people but all of us sort of get fixed in our minds, and we figure that we're right. And we need to have a process in law to get that done. But de-classifying the report, when you see the full language of the report and the urgency here and the risk to Americans if they don't change the law, I think it provides the impetus to get people in Congress say we've got to get this law changed soon.

JIM LEHRER: Jeremiah said, for instance, that if they had brought in some outside people to assess the inside assessments-you know, some people who kind of went against the grain and said, hey, wait a minute, I believe these people, they really are serious about it and about becoming a nuclear power, that that might have changed.

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Jim, I think it could have, but I think what we are operating from here some is complacency and a structure that needs to be changed.

JIM LEHRER: Complacency where?

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Complacency with some of the people in our intelligence agencies.

SEN. ROBERT KERREY: All of us were complacent in this regard, but, again, I believe that the law should say there needs to be periodic reviews from the outside to help our-the human beings and men and women that are having to make these judgments get their judgments checked from people who say, wait a minute, I think you've got this wrong; I think you ought to be thinking about it differently. And I think if you'll see the full report that Jeremiah-that Admiral Jeremiah produced, you'll begin to see that he has come through here and said, here's some potential risk that I think that you all are not thinking about.

JIM LEHRER: Senator Shelby, let's go back to the bottom line here. Let's say that the CIA or the Intelligence Committee got it right, and they predicted and said to the policy makers of the United States, hey, India is about to explode, or to conduct some nuclear tests. What difference would it make?

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Well, it may not have made a bit of difference. On the other hand, it made a difference in 1995, we were able to-with information-to share it with the Indians. Maybe we shared too much, but who knows-but we did thwart the detonation of the bombs. What else-we can play that all day. The failure was we didn't have the information.

JIM LEHRER: How do you feel about that, Senator Kerrey? Do you think we could have talked them out of it if we'd known about it?

SEN. ROBERT KERREY: I don't know. I mean, we may have had difficulty talking them out of it. I mean, we were able to talk the Congress Party out of it in 1995. I'm not sure you could have talked the BJP Party out of it. It's an uncertainty. I think Senator Shelby is quite right; that's a "what if" that we'll never know.

JIM LEHRER: So what's the problem then?

SEN. ROBERT KERREY: Well, the problem is we've got a law that doesn't give the DCI sufficient amount of authority, and, again, I think if we could get this Jeremiah report de-classified, you get a full range of suggestions that are being made. Some of its law; some of it's changing the mind set. Some of it is lots of other changes that need to be made, but what Jeremiah does quite effectively, it lets the American people, the citizens, know that their lives are at stake, and national security is real life-real life and death issues are involved.

JIM LEHRER: But Admiral Jeremiah made that specific point, that there were no lives at stake here, that nobody died in this-as a result of this intelligence failure.

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Maybe not today, but we don't now what will happen. We hope that no one dies from it, but the fact remains the world's changed a lot on the subcontinent in the last several weeks.

JIM LEHRER: Even without the report being classified -- de-classified, Senator Shelby, do you have the feeling that the leadership of the Intelligence Committee is going to do something with the Jeremiah report?

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Absolutely. Senator Kerrey and I have already been working, trying to change some things legislatively. We're going to work with the director, and we're going to use this report and some other stuff that we know about to try to do it. This is a wakeup call. It's waking up, we hope, a lot of people.

JIM LEHRER: Senator Kerrey, is the CIA fighting this, or are they going with Jeremiah on this?

SEN. ROBERT KERREY: Understand that-you know, as you indicated earlier, Director Tenet asked for this study, so he asked Jeremiah to do it. And he's indicated yesterday that he's going to accept the recommendations. But, again, I say from emphasis, we had the same sort of situation after Aldrich Ames. We evaluated it; we had recommendations; and we couldn't get the Congress for a variety of reasons to make all the changes that were recommended.

JIM LEHRER: Is it going to happen?

SEN. ROBERT KERREY: I hope so, but I think de-classifying the report and letting the American people see what's at stake here will help a lot. It'd be a big step.

JIM LEHRER: Who makes that decision?

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Director Tenet.

JIM LEHRER: He could just, on his own, de-classify this report?

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: Yes, he can.

JIM LEHRER: Have you asked him to do it?

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: We're going to, together.

JIM LEHRER: Do you think he'll do it?

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: We hope he will.

JIM LEHRER: When are you going to ask him?

SEN. RICHARD SHELBY: We're asking him right now.

JIM LEHRER: Okay, terrific. Well, we'll wait for the answer. Gentlemen, thank you both very much.