My standing orders to NSOC, my operations center at NSA, was simply to do what Charlie told them: “If he calls and says we have to move satellite collection in the Persian Gulf from Iraqi air defenses to Iranian test ranges because they are preparing a missile shot, just do it. And you can tell me in the morning. Unless someone else is going to call me and complain, you don’t need to call me.”
So the diagnosis that the DCI was not especially strong was wide of the mark. But there was a corollary that a source of his strength—that he was the head of CIA—brought with it inherent limitations, and that was closer to the truth.
When I became director of CIA (the first occupant of that suite not to have also been DCI) I would regularly tell the CIA workforce that one of the advantages of the new ODNI structure was that I could concentrate on just being director of CIA. Indeed, hardly a day passed that I did not wonder aloud how any of my predecessors could have done both tasks.
John Negroponte or Mike McConnell, the first two DNIs, would have to wake about 5:00 a.m. and begin their day by climbing into their armored SUV with their PDB briefer en route to the DNI’s office in the Old Executive Office Building. There they would prep for the morning meeting with the president, reading cables and field reports, reviewing specific PDB articles, adding or cutting as required, demanding more information on this or that matter. The DNI and the president’s briefer would cross West Executive Avenue and gather outside the Oval Office a few minutes before 8:00 a.m. The meeting with the president would last thirty to forty-five minutes and would often be followed by a formal or informal huddle with the national security advisor. And then the DNI would get back into the SUV for the drive to his office, arriving (on a good day) just before 9:30 a.m. At that point I would have been in my office, fully focused on CIA, for about three hours. How could someone with those demands run both CIA and the larger community?
A second limitation on the DCIA as head of the intelligence community was a little more subtle. There is an argument that any director of CIA would inevitably view the world through a CIA lens. Can the head of the nation’s human intelligence (HUMINT) service be counted on to make wise resource trade-offs between HUMINT, which he directly controls, and, say, signals intelligence (SIGINT), which he does not? My experience with George Tenet says that he can, but the question is not an unfair one.
I often wondered what President Bush really thought of the move to the DNI. Politically he had no choice but to support it; to oppose the 9/11 Commission during the campaign would have been read as an endorsement of failure. And the president paid a lot of personal attention to implementing the new structure once the law was passed and the campaign was behind him.
But his father had been DCI, and based on my contact with Bush 41, he had loved the job. The agency reciprocated the feeling. During our sixtieth-anniversary celebrations in 2007, we had a Texas barbecue on the lawn in front of the Original Headquarters Building. As I emerged from the lobby with Bush 41, the applause was instantaneous, warm, and sustained.
We all knew that Bush 41 had advised Bush 43 to keep George Tenet on as DCI after the 2000 election. Bush 41 had been in the job less that a year under President Ford and he had wanted to stay. He didn’t think that the job should be political. Incoming president Carter disappointed him and picked Stansfield Turner.
President Bush 43 was in my office at Langley with my family just before my ceremonial swearing-in in June 2006. He casually commented, “So, this was my dad’s office.”
My wife then asked, “Did you visit your dad while he was here?”
“No. I was considered too much of a security risk back then,” the president deadpanned.
He then looked around at the empty bookshelves (I had not yet moved in) and added, “They say you can tell a lot about a man from his library.”
Whatever the president or his father might have felt or exchanged in their personal conversations, in 2004 we all knew that the new law was going to take direct control of CIA away from the new head of the community. That meant that the legislation had to deal the new office a very powerful hand and had to do it formally and specifically. That’s what I told Senators Collins and Lieberman, key architects of the law, when I met with them that summer. That’s why Jim Clapper and I warned the House Intelligence Committee in late summer that a feckless DNI would actually make things worse.
Jim and I hit the same theme in front of a group of intelligence community seniors at the Wye River Plantation, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. We were even less inhibited there, since this was within the family, in a classroom setting, and was totally off the record. Right.
Before we finished our meals and left for the Bay Bridge and the trip home, somebody in the class had called the under secretary of defense for intelligence, Steve Cambone, and delivered a Stasi-like* report on our views.
That quickly got us invited to a lunch with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld that included his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, General Pete Pace (vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs), and Cambone. Clapper and I were lined up across the table from the DOD leadership and were invited to make our case. The alignment reminded me a bit of the table at Panmunjom, where I used to negotiate with the North Koreans, except that we had Mexican food between us rather than miniature national flags.
Rumsfeld was more cold than angry during the meal. He had some justification. The sitting heads of two of his agencies (I was head of NSA, Jim of NGA) had been going around town trying to strengthen legislation that he and his department opposed. We should have let him know. We should have gone to him first.
We certainly knew where the secretary stood. Brent Scowcroft, the former national security advisor, had shopped an ODNI-like structure around town in 2002 when he was head of the president’s intelligence advisory board. Rumsfeld had labeled it the dumbest idea ever.
Rumsfeld had also worked out a good relationship with George Tenet; even before he returned to government, he had made it clear that he thought CIA an essential partner of DOD. He and Tenet routinely settled their inevitable issues over Friday lunches. The last thing Rumsfeld wanted was another player in that mix or another bureaucracy to deal with. Besides, he reasoned, what would a DNI be able to do that a DCI could not do if the president really wanted something to happen?
That was correct, of course, but it really didn’t matter. We were going to get a DNI, and there was real danger that Congress would create a leader of the IC who had less power than DCIs had actually wielded. We told Rumsfeld that this would be ruinous and argued for legislative language that would codify a robust role for the DNI even over those big national collection agencies (the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office) inside DOD. Jim even suggested a future where those agencies would be outside DOD and directly under the DNI.
As lunch ended and the secretary and his team were leaving, certainly dissatisfied with our explanation, I plaintively commented that we could be headed for disaster unless DOD could find it in its heart to be “generous.”
Secretary Rumsfeld understood the importance of intelligence. He made that clear to me very early on, well before 9/11. After his confirmation in the spring of 2001, he invited me to his office for a “get acquainted.” It was just the two of us, he in his characteristic sweater vest at a small table. I had a few paper slides outlining NSA and its work, but I didn’t get very far. “Who do you work for?” he quickly interrupted.
“You and George Tenet, Mr. Secretary.”
“Which line is solid and which line is dotted?”
“They’re both solid,” I replied, “and I suppose that could present me with a problem if someone around here paid any attention to us.”
I went on to explain that the “Good” in my “Good morning, Mr. Secretary” that day was the first syllable I had exchanged with a secretary of defense, even though I had been at NSA more than two years.
By 2004 the nation had been at war for three years and it should come as no surprise that the defense character of NSA, NGA, and NRO had become more pronounced as the years of war rolled on, even though a significant portion of their mission remained national and their first initial remained “N.”
Rumsfeld did not want to put that at risk, so he pushed back hard on legislation designed to strengthen the “center” and give the DNI more say over the current operations and future direction of the intelligence community.
The Armed Services Committees in Congress agreed and had already acted boldly on Rumsfeld’s behalf in 2003 when they created the under secretary of defense for intelligence. The new post—effectively a senior DOD official between the nation’s intelligence chief (then DCI, now DNI) and several of his big collection agencies—was reluctantly accepted by George Tenet but revealingly was inserted into the Defense Authorization Bill by the Armed Services Committees without the participation of either chamber’s Intelligence Committee. George confided to me at the time that he thought that it was all about “control.”
So it was no surprise that the 2004 intelligence reform act was gutted as it made its way through Congress. Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, inserted language in Section 1018 of the bill that nothing therein would abrogate the prerogatives and authorities of cabinet secretaries. Read that to mean that the secretary of defense had the final word on four of the biggest organizations in the American intelligence world: NSA, NGA, NRO, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The way this was playing out, we were going to reorganize, but the guy at the center was probably going to be weaker than George Tenet was at the end of his term.
This guy better be a hell of a choice, I mused at the time. At a minimum, when the president finally walked out to introduce the new DNI, most of America couldn’t be saying, “Who is that guy with George Bush?”
A lot of Americans should have recognized John Negroponte when President Bush introduced him in mid-February 2005. Negroponte was a respected career diplomat with recent stints in Iraq and at the United Nations. He didn’t know much about intelligence except as a consumer, but he was politically savvy and bureaucratically smart. His quiet style and unassuming personality were exactly what was needed. He also brought a personal gravitas to the job. Reactions from intelligence professionals and from the Hill were universally positive.
The law gives the DNI a Senate-confirmed principal deputy—the PDDNI—and recommends that either the DNI or his deputy be someone with military experience. I fit the bill and was announced at the same press conference where Negroponte was introduced. The New York Times story on the event, in its one-sentence mention of me, said that my choice—after having been at NSA since 1999—underscored the “seriousness” with which President Bush viewed the new ODNI.
I was honored to have been selected. I had been at Fort Meade for six years, then the longest tenure in the agency’s history. I was ready for a change. Porter Goss had floated the idea of my being his number two at CIA, but I wasn’t anxious to swap out the director post at the country’s largest intelligence agency for a deputy position elsewhere, even at CIA. The deputy DNI job was different. It meant a fourth star, but also a great challenge, since we were being dealt a tough hand trying to make a structure I considered badly flawed function effectively.
Prior to this, I had known Negroponte only by reputation. We hit it off. He was generous with me to a fault. We became good friends.
Good thing. Even without the responsibility of running CIA, the law gives the DNI two massive tasks: acting as senior intelligence advisor to the president and ensuring the smooth functioning of the whole intelligence community. Each is monumental. Together they are more than any one man can manage effectively. The morning briefing and other policy meetings downtown can easily consume the DNI, so it falls to the principal deputy to play Mr. Inside and routinely check the plumbing.
I enjoyed that. I’d walk around the new ODNI spaces, enter an office, and ask, “So what do you do around here?” I got some interesting answers. I could also hold confession and counsel various office chiefs as tensions with new and untried relationships surfaced.
Negroponte and I were blessed with a very strong senior staff. Good people were interested in the new enterprise. The chief of staff was David Shedd, a career intelligence officer who had shaped the administration’s position on the intelligence reform legislation while at the NSC. David had been in Mexico with Negroponte; he later would become the deputy director and then the acting director of DIA. His deputy was Mike Leiter, a veteran of the commission that had looked into the Iraq NIE debacle and later head of the National Counterterrorism Center. Head of administration was Pat Kennedy, a career State Department officer who had held a similar post in Baghdad for Negroponte; Kennedy later became the under secretary of state for administration, a post he held under two administrations. The deputy for analysis was Tom Fingar, former head of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Major General Ron Burgess, later head of DIA, headed our customer-facing office. Head of collection was Mary Margaret Graham, a career CIA case officer.
That was a powerful group, and we all used our contacts to put other strong people in key posts for human resources, research, and the like.
Negroponte also pulled in a bunch of the young folks who had worked for him in Baghdad. Looking over this crew one day, I told Larry Pfeiffer, my talented chief of staff, “In addition to taking care of me, would you make sure these children don’t break anything?” Turned out they were all quite talented, loyal, and incredibly hardworking.
But we made a mistake in filling out the rest of the staff. We were in too much of a hurry and transferred the entirety of the DCI’s old Community Management Staff to the ODNI. That was the small staff George Tenet had used in his intelligence community governance role. It had pockets of real talent, but folks there had been habituated in the old structure to act as coordinators and even as supplicants to the big three-letter agencies around town. We weren’t going to find many disruptive forces there. We imported a conservative culture at a time when we would have benefited from aggressively recruiting some new blood. An unforced error.
One more unforced personnel error: I was PDDNI for only thirteen months before moving on to CIA. The position was vacant for ten months after I left, and indeed, by the time Stephanie O’Sullivan, a career CIA officer, was confirmed in early 2011, the position had been vacant for half of the preceding six years.
Bad mistake. Even if he had had the time, John Negroponte did not have the background to take on many of the inside tasks that had devolved to the deputy position.
And there was so much to be done. We were essentially managing a start-up. We didn’t even have an organizational chart, at least not until we started taping butcher paper to the walls of a temporary office in the Old Executive Office Building and marking up options. We had to spend time deciding the right shade of blue on the DNI shield and how many stars should be in the outer corona. More important was debating where we wanted the permanent ODNI to be and if we could tolerate a river between us and the White House.
Early on I created a list of some big things that we should try to accomplish in our first year. I wanted people to see that there was a new sheriff in town. Maybe I was thinking of Voltaire’s rationale for killing an admiral from time to time: “Pour encourager les autres.” My list included: 1) kill a program, somewhere, anywhere; 2) move some money from one account to another—it didn’t have to be a lot; 3) question (but not necessarily reject) a Pentagon personnel choice. Those were certainly stretch goals as far as the language of the law was concerned, but I was trying to leverage the bow wave of support we had at our launch. Negroponte was forever the diplomat and in effect said, “I hear you, Mike, but I’m not here to pick fights.”
We did manage in that first year to kill an element of a satellite program called FIA (Future Imagery Architecture). But this was little noticed; it was a troubled program anyway. We essentially shot the wounded and the stragglers.
There were other wins. One was creating the National Security Branch inside the FBI and getting the bureau to establish an intelligence discipline and intelligence branch. The events of 9/11 had shown the need, and Congress had mandated domestic intelligence in the 2004 legislation, but domestic intelligence has never sat easy in the United States. Indeed, other English-speaking democracies have domestic intelligence services—MI5 in Britain; CSIS in Canada; ASIS in Australia; NZSIS in New Zealand—but our culture is different, and none of our friends have put their intelligence service inside their federal police force.
This was difficult in 2005. It still is. We wanted FBI agents to gather information in the spaces between cases and develop data without a criminal predicate, but it took until the last months of the Bush administration to get the attorney general to issue guidance on exactly how to do this.
The handoff of the President’s Daily Brief to the DNI was seamless. Negroponte was good at it, and we involved the community beyond CIA in its production. CIA still did the most, but others got some daylight.
This was progress, but CIA was a recurring problem, and it absorbed more and more of our time. Even with perfect goodwill, calibrating the new ODNI-CIA relationship would have been challenging. The law put the ODNI at the center of the American intelligence community. History and tradition and many current operations still put CIA there, and CIA’s collective culture was very reluctant to admit otherwise.
Porter Goss had been DCI, the head of the community, for seven months before being “demoted.” When he showed up on a videoconference I was having with several agency heads, I quietly called him afterward and asked him to send his deputy to future sessions. It made me genuinely uncomfortable, and there was no need to rub this in.
Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror Page 18
