Intelligence Advantage: Profiling African Leaders' Meetings with U.S. Presidents – csis.org

Photo: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
Brief by Judd Devermont
Published May 20, 2024
  
When President Joe Biden welcomes foreign leaders to Washington, he is inundated with paper. From talking points and draft statements to seating arrangements and dinner menus, the White House staff will prepare all of it, except for one essential document: the CIA leadership visit piece. It is this analysis—presented as a standalone assessment or integrated into the President’s Daily Brief (PDB)—that delivers decision advantage for the president of the United States.
A CIA visit piece is more than a written recitation of a foreign leader’s career highlights or a preview of potential agenda items. When it is done well, it is a revealing and yet remarkably succinct study on a leader’s hopes and dreams, attitudes and demeanor, and friends and enemies at home and abroad. In other words, it is a roadmap to understand who is sitting across the table and how to advance U.S. national security interests.
Effective leadership analysis is exceedingly difficult to do in the best of circumstances, and arguably even more challenging when it comes to sub-Saharan Africa. Relative to other regions, there has been less reporting, comparatively fewer intelligence analysts, and a limited number of senior policy interactions. It requires deep subject-matter expertise and superior intelligence tradecraft to transcend these shortcomings and contribute to a successful presidential engagement.
The declassified record, while incomplete and riddled with redactions, showcases how and why CIA leadership analysis has become pivotal to presidential meetings. By examining 34 PDBs and other intelligence reports from 1961 to 1987 and then cross-referencing these analytic assessments with 63 policy memos, public statements, and press reports, as well as personal reflections, it is possible to chart how the CIA perfected the visit piece; measure its policy successes and failures; and point to new innovations to elevate the art form, including through the transformative power of AI.
In the spring of 1961, President John F. Kennedy, still reeling from the Bay of Pigs crisis, expressed his dissatisfaction with his intelligence support. His staff piled on, complaining about the daily stream of reports from multiple government agencies and the dense, often inscrutable bureaucratic jargon.[1] The CIA, in response, rushed to create the President’s Intelligence Checklist (the predecessor of the PDB) to address Kennedy’s concerns. With crisp prose and a global perspective, it became an immediate hit. The president not only relied on the product to inform policy decisions, but it also served him well in his meetings with foreign leaders.
Kennedy believed in the power of personal diplomacy, especially with regards to Africa. He told his staff that he wanted to engage with his African counterparts, decreeing that “if African leaders want to meet me, good. Invite them down here.”[2] Kennedy’s interest and appetite for information about the continent was considerable; Arthur Schlesinger, one of Kennedy’s closest advisers, recalled that some African leaders told him that the “American president knew more about their countries than they did themselves.”[3] Three months after the creation of the President’s Intelligence Checklist, Kennedy received a CIA assessment regarding Sudanese general Ibrahim Abboud’s state visit. Abboud, who the analysts judged to be a “sincere patriot, disgusted by the corruption among the civilians,” was seeking to secure from Kennedy “some sort of dramatic impact project” to increase his prestige.[4]
The CIA informed Kennedy in 1961 that Sudanese leader General Abboud needed to “demonstrate that the visit has produced tangible benefit.”[5]
The “visit piece,” however, was hardly a developed art form, and it struggled to distinguish itself from traditional political analysis. In this early period, most assessments included a cursory reference to a leader’s planned travel to Washington before segueing into more standard assessments on the country’s political, economic, and security developments. While some exceptions exist (including an astute study on a “more self-assured” Zairian president Mobutu Sese Seko in 1973), the visit piece, as it related to African heads of state, was fairly mundane and not consistently crafted to advance a presidential meeting.[6] Judging from the declassified record, the art form only started to find its stride during the Carter administration and reached its apogee under President Ronald Reagan.
President Jimmy Carter regarded the CIA’s leadership analysis as vital to his diplomacy, especially his landmark summit with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1978. He told CIA analysts that he wanted to be “steeped in the personalities of Begin and Sadat.”[7] These psychological profiles enabled Carter to navigate negotiations between the two leaders; in 2013, he admitted that the CIA assessments had “steeled his resolve to seek a full-fledged treaty between Egypt and Israel.”[8] It stands to reason that this diplomatic triumph at Camp David reaffirmed the importance of leadership profiles and visit pieces. Carter, who boasted that he was more interested in Africa than his predecessors and spent “more effort and worry on Rhodesia than the Middle East,” presumably demanded similarly rigorous analysis to inform his interactions with African leaders.[9] While still uneven as an art form, the CIA’s 1978 assessment on Senegalese president Leopold Senghor, who possessed “an impressive blend of intellectual and political skills” and “moves as gracefully and comfortably in French culture as he does in African,” was a significant improvement in analytic quality and insights.[10]
The visit piece reached new heights during the Reagan administration. Indeed, the CIA started to regularly label these assessments as such; 13 out of the 19 declassified analytic reports published to coincide with Reagan’s meetings with African counterparts included the word “visit” in the title. The art form’s growing prominence reflected Reagan’s interest in people. His national security adviser, Bud McFarlane, said Reagan “always focused on the human dimension of foreign policy, waiting to know more about everybody.”[11] The increase in the quality of visit pieces also probably stemmed from Reagan’s engagement on Africa. He met with more African leaders than any of his predecessors, and his policies to eject the Cubans from Angola and secure Namibian independence, as well as his antipathy toward Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi’s adventurism in the region, framed many of his interactions with African counterparts. The CIA rose to the challenge, leveraging its expertise and tradecraft to ensure the president had the most critical analysis to charm, coax, and cajole his White House visitors.
The CIA’s visit piece, when at its best, consists of five elements. It delves into a leader’s personality, their goals, and the context for the meeting—specifically the country’s political, economic, and security situation. It also includes a warning component, informing the president that his counterpart may criticize U.S. policy or press for a change to the U.S. approach. Finally, it often features an outlook section, forecasting whether a leader or his country will succumb to or overcome emerging challenges.
The CIA warned President Reagan in 1983 that Kaunda may reiterate his criticism that the West is “applying a double standard on foreign policy issues to the Africans’ disadvantage.” [23]
A visit piece, regardless of how well written and considered, is only as valuable as it is convincing to the reader and adept at shaping the president’s conversations as well as contributing to favorable outcomes. While the CIA’s initial forays into visit pieces were occasionally outmatched by Department of State and National Security Council memos, the declassified record reveals some impressive results. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger took onboard the CIA’s message that Mobutu wanted to strike a balance between being viewed as independent while remaining “on good terms with the US.” In their meeting, Kissinger praised the Zairian leader’s UN speech as a masterpiece because it sounded “critical of the United States, but when one read it, it was not so bad.” Nixon added that the speech showed that Mobutu was a “skillful politician.”[31] The analysis on Senghor was prescient that the Senegalese leader fancied himself a mediator. He informed President Carter that “he is part Jewish and can speak frankly to both sides” of the Arab-Israeli question.[32] The CIA also accurately pinpointed Liberian leader Doe’s need for continued U.S. support to shore up his shaky regime. In press remarks following his White House visit, Doe exclaimed that “President Reagan assured me we can continue to count on America’s understanding and support.”[33]
The CIA explained Mobutu had “increasingly engaged in posturing on nonaligned issues” to address criticism that he is too close to Washington.[34]
The CIA particularly excelled at framing why African leaders viewed themselves as non-aligned and how navigating global geopolitical competition was central to their foreign policies. Following his engagement with Abboud, Kennedy publicly confirmed that the United States “fully endorsed the determination of the newly-independent countries of Africa to maintain their independence.”[35] In press interviews during his visit to Washington in 1985, Mozambique’s Machel was adamant that his country was “African, independent, and nonaligned,” adding that “there is no question of blocs.”[36] Reagan seemingly reached a similar conclusion, writing in his diary that Machel “turned out to be quite a guy and I believe he really intends to be ‘non-alligned’ [sic] instead of a Soviet patsy.”[37]
The visit pieces had mixed results when anticipating an African leader’s key priorities or potential issues to discuss. The CIA published a long paper on Liberia’s economy ahead of President William Tubman’s meeting with President Lyndon Johnson, accurately previewing the Liberian leader’s deep concern with his country’s pressing foreign debt service and rising commodity prices.[38] Tubman and Johnson subsequently dedicated several paragraphs to Liberia’s economic challenges in their joint statement.[39] Similarly, several of the CIA visit pieces accurately captured how many West African leaders had become apprehensive about Libyan meddling in the region, especially in Chad. After his meeting with Reagan in 1983, Senegal’s Diouf told the Washington Post that “we must stop the Chadian adventure.”[40]
On the other hand, the CIA repeatedly failed to identify global issues that the African leaders discussed in their engagements with U.S. presidents, including the situation in Berlin in the 1960s or Lebanon in the 1980s.[41] The agency’s obsession with Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) leader Thomas Sankara—they saw Libya’s hand behind his coup in 1983—prompted analysts to repeatedly flag the country as a likely topic in visit pieces on Senegal’s Diouf and Togo’s Gnassingbe Eyadema; Upper Volta, however, was absent in any of the public statements, press reports, diary entries, or the memorandum of conversation from Eyadema’s meeting with Reagan.[42]
The visit pieces had some other big misses. Ahead of Nimeiri’s meetings with Reagan in late 1983, the CIA raised concerns about the Sudanese leader’s “erratic personal behavior,” warning that his decision to introduce sharia law had alarmed the country’s leftists, secular elite, and predominately non-Muslim southerners.[43] Despite the agency’s growing worry that Nimeiri was vulnerable to a coup, Reagan seemed unconvinced and sidestepped any questions about the Sudanese regime’s increasing fragility; Nimeiri was eventually removed from power by a popular uprising some 16 months later.[44] Moreover, the visit piece in the 1980s failed in one fundamental aspect: they did not fully understand their customer. In his diaries, Reagan repeatedly opined on whether an African leader was a believer in “free enterprise,” whereas only the profile on Houphouet examined the Ivorian president’s economic philosophy.[45] A central precept of leadership analysis is knowing your principal’s interests, which the CIA seemed to have flubbed during the Reagan administration.
Profiling for the Future
When future African leaders visit the White House, President Biden almost certainly will benefit from the CIA’s insights on the leaders’ political acumen, as well as their top concerns for their country’s economy or security, or their views on global crises. The visit piece, after more than six decades of evolution and refinement, has become a vital resource for U.S. presidents, and it will undoubtedly serve President Biden well in his next engagements.
At the same time, the art form seems ripe for another innovation—this one powered by the generative power of AI. The drafting of leadership profiles and assessments are innately human endeavors, but AI has the potential to augment and enhance this critical intelligence product. In last year’s National Intelligence Strategy, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines committed to strengthening the intelligence’s community’s capabilities in language, technical, and cultural expertise harnessing open-source “big data,” AI, and advanced analytics.[46] Below are three recommendations on how to leverage AI in the analysis of African leaders, as well as other prominent global figures.
 The existing AI models remain underwhelming when generating leadership profiles and integrating the best standards of analytic tradecraft. It will require significant AI model training and iteration, as well as a proficiency with the art form, to raise the current AI level to something that will strengthen and enrich intelligence products. For example, when the leading chatbots were asked what Kenyan president William Ruto might raise with President Biden during their meeting on May 23, the answers ranged from unexceptional to unacceptable:
Judd Devermont is a senior adviser (non-resident) with the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
This report is made possible by general support to CSIS. No direct sponsorship contributed to this report.
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CSIS Briefs are produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).
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