Redesigning the leadership of American intelligence
In the waning days of 2004, Congress finally addressed the need for intelligence reform. The key provision of the much amended 600-page law, entitled the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA), was an Office of Director of National Intelligence. The DNI, though, was still nowhere near dominant enough to draw the now sixteen intelligence agencies together into one cooperative harness. Despite the horrors of the 9/11 attacks, the far-reaching mistakes related to the war in Iraq begun in 2003, and all the publicity associated with the findings of the Kean Commission that investigated the 9/11 failures, the best Congress seemed able to achieve were half-measures that proved unable to knit together the long-standing rents in the vast tent of the so-called Intelligence Community.
The DNI would have to go on sharing authority with the Secretary of Defense (SecDef) over military intelligence – the same situation faced by the DCI before the IRTPA was passed. This meant that the 800-pound gorilla in the Pentagon, the SecDef, would continue to dominate intelligence, maximizing support to military operations while minimizing resources for global political, economic, and cultural matters that might help curb the outbreak of wars in the first place. As vaguely stated in the IRTPA law, the new intelligence chief would be allowed only to “monitor the implementation and execution” of intelligence operations. Tribal warfare in the community would continue. Institutional diffusion had trumped consolidation. On one point practically every observer agreed: the statute was riddled with ambiguities and contradictions that would have to be hammered out on the anvil of experience over the coming years and strengthened by amendments. These amendments never materialized.
A revolving door at the office of the DNI
With this new Intelligence Reform Act, Congress – under pressure from the Pentagon – banned the DNI from having an office at the CIA (over the objections of the White House).32 It was payback time against the Agency by supporters of the other intelligence services, for all the CIA's slights and perceived arrogance over the years.
The first DNI appointee, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, eventually found space for his office in the Defense Intelligence Agency Center (DIAC), the new DIA Headquarters Building at Bolling Air Force Base, located across the Potomac River from National Airport. The Ambassador brought with him a few analytic components from the CIA and some other elements from around the Community. Most of the CIA's analysts remained at Agency Headquarters in Langley, however, a dozen miles away upstream on the other side of the Potomac. Nesting at Bolling only temporarily (the DIA wanted all its space back), intelligence managers and the White House set in motion plans to build a new DNI facility at Liberty Crossing, near Tyson's Corner in North Arlington, Virginia, ready for use in 2009. The nation's intelligence director would still be miles away from the CIA resources he needed if he wanted to be anything more than a shadow leader. Why not just move back to CIA Headquarters? That would require an amendment to the 2004 Intelligence Reform law. “That horse is out of the barn,” concluded an experienced intelligence officer, waving aside any thoughts about revisiting that battle and taking on the Pentagon brass again.33
Ambassador Negroponte soon fled back to the Department of State, after serving for less than two years as DNI. His successor, former NSA director Admiral Mike McConnell, stayed in the Bolling office for the time being and continued to build up a staff. Both Negroponte and McConnell were talented, bright spy chiefs; but, nevertheless, the United States, in a search for greater cohesion in the Intelligence Community, had created instead (ironically) in the DNI an Intelligence Director even weaker than the old DCI – a leader with ambiguous authority, a small staff, and an office miles away from most of the government's reservoir of intelligence analysts at Langley. Just what the nation needed: an isolated spymaster and a new, hollowed-out seventeenth spy agency.
During the confirmation hearing for Admiral McConnell's appointment as DNI, the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, John D. Rockefeller (D, West Virginia), raised serious questions about the weaknesses of the office. The Senator observed:
We did not pull the technical collection agencies out of the Defense Department [one reform possibility] and we did not give the DNI direct authority over the main collection or analytic components of the community. We gave the DNI the authority to build the national intelligence budget, but we left the execution of the budget with the agencies. We gave the DNI tremendous responsibilities. The question is: did we give the position enough authority?34
For most observers – outside the DoD at least – the answer was a clear “no!” Even McConnell, after serving two months as DNI, could only offer a euphemistic description of a job that he had clearly found unwieldy. It was, in his words, a “challenging management condition.”35 In particular, he complained about his inability to dismiss incompetent people. “You cannot hire or fire,” he told a reporter.36 The Admiral soon announced a “100 Day Plan,” in which he proposed a searching review of the DNI's authority and an ongoing effort to integrate the components of the Intelligence “Community.” He vowed: “We're going to examine it; we're going to argue about it; we're going to make some proposals.”37 Appearing before the Senate in February 2008, he further testified: “Our current model…does not have operational control over the elements that conduct intelligence activities. The DNI also does not have direct authority over the personnel in the sixteen agencies in the community.”38
At least the retired SecDef, Donald H. Rumsfeld, who opposed the DNI position to begin with, was no longer in Washington to stymie the development of an effective DNI Office. In Rumsfeld's place at the Pentagon had come Robert M. Gates, a former DI analyst and DCI, who understood intelligence probably better than any SecDef in the nation's history. Moreover, he had long been an advocate of a better working relationship between military and civilian intelligence agencies. Whether this happy alignment of the stars could overcome the DNI's inherent statutory weaknesses, though, was unlikely – especially with McConnell becoming more and more preoccupied with, and defensive about, the debate over controversial CIA torture methods and the NSA's use of warrantless wiretaps at the direction of the Bush White House (the latter a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978). In 2009, he resigned and was replaced by another former admiral, Dennis C. Blair, who would take up quarters in the new space for the DNI at Liberty Crossing.
Before long, Admiral Blair found himself embroiled in a squabble over who should appoint the top U.S. intelligence officer in each American intelligence station overseas, that is, the chief of station or COS. The outcome provides an illustration of how enfeebled the Office of the DNI is. Blair claimed the right as the nation's intelligence chief to make these appointments, even though they had been named traditionally by the head of the CIA (who was dual-hatted as DCI as well, prior to 2005). The DNI issued a memorandum announcing that, henceforth, he would select each COS. The next day, the Director of the CIA (D/CIA), former member of the House of Representatives Leon E. Panetta (D, California), countered with a memorandum of his own that ordered Agency employees to disregard the DNI's message. Panetta – prodded by the Director of the National Clandestine Service, who does the actual selection of station chiefs – reasoned that the CIA had traditionally named the nation's COSs for good reason: it was the Agency that had almost all the intelligence billets in each of the stations overseas, so its officers could recruit local spies – human intelligence, or humint – for the United States. These delicate relationships could be torn if suddenly the locals had to deal with new case officers who were not even led by the CIA; therefore, Panetta argued, it made sense to have Langley's officers remain in charge.
Both arguments had some merit. On Panetta's side, it is true that U.S. intelligence officers in most stations are there to recruit indigenous assets, the job primarily of the CIA. Yet, in some countries where signals intelligence is a forte – Britain and Australia, for example – America's i
ntelligence officers serve chiefly as liaison personnel for sigint cooperation. In these cases, it made some sense for the COS to be from the NSA, America's sigint organization. Blair wanted to be able to make these distinctions, rather than simply have the CIA in charge everywhere. Moreover, if the Office of the DNI had been created in December 2004 to serve as America's intelligence chief, shouldn't Blair be calling the shots? He obviously thought so, but the White House eventually sided with Panetta in this dispute. President Barack Obama and his Vice President, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., may have bent naturally toward Panetta, a fellow pol and former member of Congress; and perhaps they were concerned, too, about a rumor circulating in Washington that Blair's gambit was an attempt by the military to further weaken the CIA, and that the DNI would soon name large numbers of senior military intelligence officers to COS positions around the world.
Blair, supposedly the CIA Director's superior on the organizational charts, was reportedly furious about what he perceived to be Panetta's insubordination. A New York Times reporter with an intelligence beat viewed the brouhaha as “further evidence that the intelligence overhaul five years ago did little to end longstanding rivalries or clearly delineate the chain of command within American intelligence bureaucracy.”39 The Admiral resigned in 2010 and President Obama replaced him with a seasoned intelligence official, former Air Force general James R. Clapper, Jr., mentioned previously, who had headed up both the DIA and NGA earlier in his career. In confirmation hearings, he vowed to establish better working relations with Panetta.
A dream still on hold
Would a strong DNI with full authority over the spy community solve America's intelligence woes and ward off future 9/11s? In itself, of course not. Improvements in intelligence must move forward across a broad front, a challenge explored throughout this book. The intelligence reform bill in 2004 represented, though, an important step toward the establishment of a genuine national intelligence chief. Here was a chance to have an intelligence leader with full authority over America's secret agencies, a spymaster who could overcome the twin banes of ineffective intelligence: interagency rivalry and parochialism. Yet a last-minute watering down of the reform legislation left the DNI enfeebled and separated from the National Intelligence Council and the rest of the vital corps of analytic “troops” who continued to be located in Langley at the CIA.40 General Clapper, well aware of the weaknesses in the DNI office, nonetheless expressed a determination during his Senate confirmation hearings in 2010 to bring greater cohesion to the Intelligence Community. To enhance IC integration, he established a team of fifteen or so (the numbers varying from time to time) National Intelligence Managers or NIMs with specific portfolios related to world regions or specific issues (such as the counterproliferation of WMD). The NIM for the Western Hemisphere, for example, is expected to pull together all-source information from throughout the IC in preparing reports on America's neighbors to the north and south for the President and other top government consumers of intelligence.
Thanks to Clapper's half-century of experience in intelligence work, along with his widespread contacts among intelligence professionals, he had considerable success in managing the Intelligence Community. It will be difficult, though, for his successor to match these fortuitous advantages.
….
In trying to make espionage agencies more effective as a shield for the democracies – that is, less prone to failure and scandal – organizational reform at the DNI level of intelligence management is just part of the challenge. The mission of collection and analysis also cries out for improvements, as examined in the next chapter.
Notes
1 This reconstruction is based on the evidence presented in The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004) – the Kean Commission, led by Thomas H. Kean, Chair, and Lee H. Hamilton, Vice Chair.
2 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 117.
3 Letter from John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (Lord Acton) to Bishop Mandell Creigton, dated April 5, 1887, quoted in John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 14th edn (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), p. 750a.
4 In a speech given on July 8, 1975, Senator Frank Church (D, Idaho, for whom the author served as a speech-writer at the time) suggested that Lord Acton's famous admonition should be rephrased: “All secrecy corrupts. Absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely.”
5 Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (New York: Berkley Publishing, 1973), p. 420.
6 Loch K. Johnson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 3–32.
7 For example: Hans Born, Loch K. Johnson, and Ian Leigh, eds., Who's Watching the Spies? Establishing Intelligence Service Accountability (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005).
8 From a book review of Loch K. Johnson, ed., Strategic Intelligence, Vols. 1–5 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), in Intelligence and National Security 25 (April 2010), pp. 245–7, quote at p. 247. For examples of credible attempts to appraise national security intelligence across national boundaries, see Born et al., eds., Who's Watching the Spies?; Ada Bozeman, “Statecraft and Intelligence in the Non-Western World,” Conflict 6 (1985), pp. 1–35; Thomas C. Bruneau and Florina Cristiana (Cris) Matei, “Intelligence in the Developing Democracies: The Quest for Transparency and Effectiveness,” in Johnson, ed., Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence, pp. 757–73; Peter Gill, Intelligence Governance and Democratisation: A Comparative Analysis of the Limits of Reform (Routledge: London, 2016); John Keegan, Intelligence in War (New York: Knopf, 2003); and Walter Laquer, A World of Secrets (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
9 Fact Book on Intelligence, Office of Public Affairs, Central Intelligence Agency (September 1991), p. 13. An experienced foreign policy practitioner, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, liked to think of the purpose of intelligence simply as “informing policymakers about what is going on in the world”: see his As I Saw It, as told to Richard Rusk and edited by Daniel S. Papp (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 555.
10 The quote is from Peter Gill and Mark Phythian, Intelligence in an Insecure World, 2nd edn (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012), p. 19. On intelligence and the idea of decision advantage, see Jennifer E. Sims, “Decision Advantage and the Nature of Intelligence Analysis,” in Loch K. Johnson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 389–403. A legendary British intelligence officer (and academician), R. V. Jones, explained intelligence simply by noting that “a sensible nation will seek to be as well informed as possible about its opponents, potential or otherwise, and – for that matter – about its friends. It will therefore set up an intelligence organization”: “Intelligence in a Democracy,” lecture, Department of State, Washington, DC (December 4, 1975), p. 8. Even seemingly small matters can be important when it comes to intelligence. The great American general George Marshall recalls this memory from the Normandy invasion during the Second World War: “[Army intelligence] never told me what I needed to know. They didn't tell me about the hedgerows, and it was not until later, after much bloodshed, that we were able to deal with them”; quoted in Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commander: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 490.
11 Siobhan Gorman, “NSA Has Higher Profile, New Problems,” Baltimore Sun (September 8, 2006), p. A1.
12 Both 85 percent figures are from Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence, Report of the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community (the Aspin–Brown Commission) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, March 1, 1996), p. 49. The $80 billion figure is based on a first-time disclosure by the government, in October 2010, of both the National Intelligence Program (NIP, composed of the CIA and the large collection agencies) and the Military Intelligence
Program (MIP, composed of the Defense Department's tactical collection operations), as summarized by Walter Pincus, “Intelligence Spending at Record $80.1 Billion in First Disclosure of Overall Figure,” Washington Post (October 28, 2010), p. A1. This spending was a record high and represented a 7 percent increase over the year before, and a doubling of the aggregate intelligence budget from pre-9/11 levels. In 2009, a DNI said publicly that the Intelligence Community in the United States employs 200,000 people: Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, media round table, Washington, DC (September 15, 2009). For purposes of contrast, the British intelligence budget is reported to be about $3.6 billion a year: Philip Johnston, “GCGH: Licensed to Eavesdrop,” Daily Telegraph, London (August 27, 2010), p. A1.
13 Steven Aftergood, “DOD Releases Military Intel Program Budget Docs,” Secrecy New 79 (October 5, 2009), p. 1. For a perspective on Intelligence Community spending over time in recent decades, see the Report of the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community (the Aspin–Brown Commission), Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence (U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, March 1, 1996).
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