Posted on 12/08/2004 7:30:39 AM PST by leadpencil1
WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 - For nearly 50 years, a director of central intelligence has stood at the pinnacle of American intelligence agencies.
Now that role is to be played by a new, even more powerful figure, a national intelligence director, created by Congress as part of its response to a series of catastrophic intelligence failures.
The question is whether the changes will make much of a difference in combating terrorism and weapons proliferation, two of the major national security challenges facing the intelligence services. On that question, even some supporters of the legislation to overhaul intelligence acknowledge their own agnosticism.
"It will continue to come down to leadership," said Representative Heather A. Wilson, Republican of New Mexico and former Air Force officer who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
The changes that will matter most still lie ahead, Congressional and intelligence officials say, as the agencies and their lawyers wrangle over the division of their new powers and as personnel are installed in the new posts.
Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel of the C.I.A., said he had found considerable "confusion and contradiction" within the intelligence bill. "Lawyers across the intelligence community will be arguing about what these provisions mean for many months to come," Mr. Smith said.
In some ways, the new intelligence overseer will exercise more authority than predecessors did, particularly in controlling how a $40 billion budget is divided among 15 rivalrous agencies and 200,000 employees. The changes will leave the old director of central intelligence in charge of the Central Intelligence Agency alone, establishing the intelligence chief as the one figure unquestionably in charge of a sprawling enterprise that is now often only loosely coordinated.
That will provide an answer to complaints from Congress and the Sept. 11 commission that, until now, no one has really been in charge of American intelligence.
But in other ways, the national intelligence director will be constrained in the ability to wield that authority, operating at an altitude a further bureaucratic step removed from spies, analysts and others on whom intelligence successes and failures ultimately depend.
"The danger is that by putting someone above the fray, you leave him without a day-to-day window into what any of the agencies are really doing," said Michael Scheuer, the former senior C.I.A. official whose book, "Imperial Hubris," is critical of how the agency and the government as a whole have addressed the terrorist threat.
At least in the short term, the national intelligence chief is expected to move into the suite occupied by the director of central intelligence, on the seventh floor of the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. (If Porter J. Goss, the director of central intelligence, is elevated to the new post, he would switch titles, not offices.)
Under a contingency plan being discussed within the agency, the main nerve center for the C.I.A. itself would be demoted, at least symbolically, to a less-prestigious lower floor, ending a position of pre-eminence that the agency has enjoyed since 1947.
Even so, the new intelligence chief, like predecessors, would still have to balance two responsibilities that sometimes collide - serving simultaneously as the president's chief intelligence adviser and as the overall leader of intelligence agencies required by law to remain fiercely independent.
Among other provisions of the new law, the National Counterterrorism Center it created in fact already exists, established under executive order by President Bush this summer and up and running beginning this week, at an undisclosed location in suburban Virginia.
And nowhere in any of the blueprints is a clear plan for how intelligence agencies might address what the Sept. 11 commission described as the "failure of imagination" that kept intelligence agencies from adequately foreseeing and thwarting those attacks.
In interviews, a broad range of Congressional and intelligence officials from both parties say the most significant benefit of the new structure may be to make sense of how the nation's constellation of spy satellite programs are managed, reshaping relations between the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and other organizations. The highly classified satellite programs, for imagery, eavesdropping and other kinds of technical intelligence collection, cost taxpayers billions of dollars a year, and many experts have said there is room for significant efficiencies, saving money for other uses, like the kind of human intelligence necessary to penetrate terrorist organizations.
Another important change could be the ability of the new intelligence chief to promote information-sharing among agencies from a position of neutrality. Yet another could include the elevation of the National Intelligence Council, which is supposed to represent the views of all intelligence agencies, to a position that reports to the new intelligence chief, at greater remove from the influence of the C.I.A., whose prewar assessment of Iraq and its weapons prevailed in an interagency debate but proved to be badly mistaken.
Still, there is much that remains uncertain about the plan, with the legislation itself leaving much to be worked out by the agencies affected. Among these is the precise division of authority between the intelligence chief and the Pentagon, which until now has controlled 80 percent of the overall intelligence budget, and how much authority the intelligence chief will exert on operational matters, like those that have been weighed every weekday since the Sept. 11 attacks at a 5 p.m. meeting on terrorism over which first George J. Tenet and then Mr. Goss have presided.
The plan represents a triumph for people like Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and an influential proponent of the plan, and Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser, who drafted a similar recommendation for Mr. Bush early in his first presidential term only to find it ignored.
Among those for whom passage is a defeat is Mr. Tenet, who was among a group of notable former officials, along with Henry A. Kissinger and John Hamre, the former deputy director of defense, who expressed deep public misgivings about the intelligence overhaul plan as it was being debated over the summer. Those officials argued that improvement could best be accomplished by granting additional powers to the director of central intelligence, instead of creating a new bureaucratic layer.
It was Mr. Tenet who derided the Congressional effort as part of a "mad rush to rearrange wiring diagrams in an attempt to be seen as doing something." In the end, with some late help from the White House, that Congressional impulse to do something prevailed.
A couple of questions:
Who, other than Senate and House Intelligence will be able to review in detail the budgets and spending of this Agency?
Who, other than Senate and House Intelligence will be able to review internal metrics for performance?
Is there an independent group that will act as arbiter (real time) for crital decisions and tasking (other than possibly the President/Vice President or NSC Advisor)?
What do we really know about this Bill?
Does the Director of CIA report to this person? By law (1947) the Director of CIA is responsible for all intelligence. He just did not have budget authority to empower the tasking orders.
Should the American public trust Jane Harman to get it right?!
And that goes double for the idiot widows.
There are no answers.
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