The Clipboard: Dumb intelligence

From an article¹:

Among the many reasons intelligence veterans see disaster on the horizon is that the new DNI is charged with completing myriad missions in an incredibly short time with woefully inadequate staff. Under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the DNI must serve as the president's chief intelligence adviser; the vanguard for improving personnel policies and technology programs across the entire IC; the hands-on quality-control and waste, fraud, and mismanagement cop for each of the 15 IC agencies; the principal liaison with the intelligence services of other nations; the creator and steward of an unprecedented "Information Sharing Environment" among agencies; and the author of the entire IC budget — among other duties. In theory, this makes for a powerful position.

In fact, however, that power may not amount to much. Legislation limits the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to a permanent staff of a mere 500 people. Three hundred will be transferred from the "community management" staff at Langley. But for the rest of the spaces, only 150 can be transferred from existing IC agencies — and they can be detailed to the DNI's office only for two-year stints. While the law does allow the new office a potential temporary location at the CIA's Langley headquarters, it also mandates that it not be located in the White House or any existing IC facility. So in reality, the DNI has not only a paltry staff, but a location removed from its subordinate agencies and its primary customer.

"Setting aside the logistics of finding space and physically setting up a new operation, which is pretty time-consuming in and of itself, and the issue of pulling some people out of existing agencies where agency heads will fight to keep them, you then have the issue of, within the first year, not only producing a slew of reports Congress has mandated be presented to them about what to fix and how to fix it, but actually beginning to fix things," says a veteran intelligence officer friendly with one of the DNI candidates who declined consideration for the job. "Just getting off the ground is a challenge enough, and we've seen how well it's gone at Homeland Security. But in addition, is a staff of 500 really enough to do everything ordered? In the context of the intelligence community, the DNI has no troops. Who in their right mind would want the job under these circumstances? For hell's sake, they're going to have the DNI briefing the president, and they didn't even give him the DI."

The "DI," or the CIA's directorate of intelligence, is the arm of the CIA that does nothing but intelligence analysis. Almost every group charged with making intelligence-reform recommendations over the past 50 years has argued not only that the roles of CIA director and DNI should be separate, but that the DI should be taken out of the CIA and put directly under the DNI. "The DI is the one place in the IC that does all-source analysis and has the most analytic resources," says a recently retired senior CIA official. "If the DNI is going to be the president's briefer, it makes sense he should have the DI in his office, not just because he's briefing the president, but because it gives him a real center of gravity in terms of power and manpower. But for reasons I and a lot of other people don't get, the 9/11 Commission didn't recommend this, and Congress didn't do it, either."

So, Negroponte's new office is likely to lack enough people, and enough of the right people, to carry out one of its principal missions — once, that is, it actually gets up and running. (link)

As the author says, Negroponte may end up wishing he had never taken this job (and his previous job as ambassador to Iraq was equally thankless; reportedly, he was saying he would do anything to escape it). Maybe he's thinking about Bush: with friends like this, who needs enemies?

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Complete text of the article, Dumb intelligence, by Jason Vest

ALMOST IMMEDIATELY after John Negroponte was announced as George W. Bush's pick for director of national intelligence (DNI), the blogosphere exploded with postings and articles exhuming Negroponte's dark, proconsul-like stint as Ronald Reagan's ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. This is, of course, entirely proper and germane: it's certainly worth reminding the world that the guy who will have ostensible control of the entire US intelligence apparatus — elements of which are currently operating a global archipelago of clandestine interrogation centers — has a history that includes enabling death squads and sacrificing facts on the altar of political convenience.

But the sad fact (to liberals, anyway) is that none of this is news — and rehashing it isn't likely to impede Negroponte's Senate confirmation. According to a number of active and retired career intelligence officials, however, Negroponte-haters need not worry. Actually, they say, a stint as DNI could very well be the career diplomat's Waterloo, illustrating just how poorly conceived the "bipartisan reforms" meted out by the 9/11 Commission and Congress really are.

LET'S START with Negroponte himself. According to the optimists in administration circles, the diplomat's history as a forceful troubleshooter-in-chief on projects requiring a mix of secrecy and interagency diplomacy makes him a natural for DNI. In theory, they have a point. But Negroponte's position on the list of preferred candidates may reflect a harsher reality. According to both political and intelligence-community sources familiar with the DNI search, Negroponte was approximately eighth on the White House's list of candidates who were either asked if they wanted to be considered or offered the job. In addition to previously disclosed names such as former CIA director Robert M. Gates, former senator Sam Nunn, and ex-attorney general William P. Barr, others who declined consideration include Retired General Tommy Franks, former CIA deputy director John McMahon, former NSA director and former CIA deputy director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, and former NSA directors William Studeman and William Odom.

As a career military man with no intelligence-community (IC) experience, Franks would have been horribly miscast (as he himself reportedly recognized), and Gates would not have been the most reassuring choice, given the criticism he received from veteran CIA analysts for politicizing intelligence in the 1980s. But aside from Franks, the prospective candidates were not only true IC veterans, but people who have publicly and privately made some of the most thoughtful and potentially useful recommendations on intelligence reform. While all are undeniably politically conservative, veterans like Inman, Odom, and McMahon not only appreciate the IC's long-standing systematic shortcomings; they've also done a lot of thinking about the IC's role in American democracy. They're by no means soft on intel issues, but they've all demonstrated that they recognize boundaries.

Given the thrust of their critiques, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that any of those guys would welcome the once-in-a-lifetime chance to serve as the nation's first intelligence czar and rejigger the IC to reflect his vision. So why take a pass? As some have noted, one of the inherent flaws in the 9/11 Commission-driven "reform" of the intelligence community is that while it has created a dedicated DNI, it has done so in a way that could make the hapless Department of Homeland Security look like a model of efficacy by comparison.

Among the many reasons intelligence veterans see disaster on the horizon is that the new DNI is charged with completing myriad missions in an incredibly short time with woefully inadequate staff. Under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the DNI must serve as the president's chief intelligence adviser; the vanguard for improving personnel policies and technology programs across the entire IC; the hands-on quality-control and waste, fraud, and mismanagement cop for each of the 15 IC agencies; the principal liaison with the intelligence services of other nations; the creator and steward of an unprecedented "Information Sharing Environment" among agencies; and the author of the entire IC budget — among other duties. In theory, this makes for a powerful position.

In fact, however, that power may not amount to much. Legislation limits the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to a permanent staff of a mere 500 people. Three hundred will be transferred from the "community management" staff at Langley. But for the rest of the spaces, only 150 can be transferred from existing IC agencies — and they can be detailed to the DNI's office only for two-year stints. While the law does allow the new office a potential temporary location at the CIA's Langley headquarters, it also mandates that it not be located in the White House or any existing IC facility. So in reality, the DNI has not only a paltry staff, but a location removed from its subordinate agencies and its primary customer.

"Setting aside the logistics of finding space and physically setting up a new operation, which is pretty time-consuming in and of itself, and the issue of pulling some people out of existing agencies where agency heads will fight to keep them, you then have the issue of, within the first year, not only producing a slew of reports Congress has mandated be presented to them about what to fix and how to fix it, but actually beginning to fix things," says a veteran intelligence officer friendly with one of the DNI candidates who declined consideration for the job. "Just getting off the ground is a challenge enough, and we've seen how well it's gone at Homeland Security. But in addition, is a staff of 500 really enough to do everything ordered? In the context of the intelligence community, the DNI has no troops. Who in their right mind would want the job under these circumstances? For hell's sake, they're going to have the DNI briefing the president, and they didn't even give him the DI."

The "DI," or the CIA's directorate of intelligence, is the arm of the CIA that does nothing but intelligence analysis. Almost every group charged with making intelligence-reform recommendations over the past 50 years has argued not only that the roles of CIA director and DNI should be separate, but that the DI should be taken out of the CIA and put directly under the DNI. "The DI is the one place in the IC that does all-source analysis and has the most analytic resources," says a recently retired senior CIA official. "If the DNI is going to be the president's briefer, it makes sense he should have the DI in his office, not just because he's briefing the president, but because it gives him a real center of gravity in terms of power and manpower. But for reasons I and a lot of other people don't get, the 9/11 Commission didn't recommend this, and Congress didn't do it, either."

So, Negroponte's new office is likely to lack enough people, and enough of the right people, to carry out one of its principal missions — once, that is, it actually gets up and running.

THEN THERE'S the issue of how the DNI will interact with two of the IC's most important elements: the Department of Defense and the CIA. The DOD accounts for about 80 percent of the entire IC budget, since the three most pricey, technologically oriented intelligence agencies — the eavesdropping National Security Agency (NSA), the satellite logistics National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) — are under its control. But just as previous intelligence-reform bodies recommended that the CIA's DI be removed from Langley and put under DNI control, so, too, did many advise that the three DOD spy agencies be moved from Pentagon to DNI control. The rationale was fairly simple: the military's primary intelligence needs are tactical in nature (i.e., aimed at fighting and winning battles), and the systems under NSA, NRO, and NGA control are more strategic in nature, providing intelligence that isn't exclusively military.

But in Washington, manpower and budget size matter — and since becoming secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld has lobbied to retain control of the three big-ticket intelligence agencies. Not only has Congress left the three agencies under Rumsfeld's command, but it also mandated that the DNI not do anything affecting those agencies without "consulting" the secretary of defense. Furthermore, if such "consultations" end with the secretary of defense and DNI not seeing eye to eye, it's up to the president to intervene.

"And how do you think that's going to end?" asks a current congressional intelligence staffer and former CIA official. "On the one hand, you have a career diplomat without a strong relationship to the president who was far from the first choice. On the other hand, you have Rumsfeld, who despite fucking up a bunch of stuff and offering his resignation twice, is still in the president's favor and is championed by the most powerful and influential vice-president in history. Anyone doubt whose side the White House is going to come down on in any dispute?"

According to a CIA veteran who once worked with Negroponte and has served as a budget liaison with others in the IC and on Capitol Hill, in this respect the future does not look promising for the new DNI. "Negroponte has a reputation for being someone who's not easily bullied and unafraid to assert himself, and can hold his own with just about anyone," the officer says. "But like most professional diplomats, Negroponte believes that everything can be negotiated. And he's going to go into meetings with Rumsfeld or his people from DOD expecting a negotiation, and they're going to tell him, ‘This is our budget, this is where we're going, we're keeping it, and if you don't like it, be it in the Oval Office or on the Hill, we'll win.' And they're right."

OF COURSE, concern about Negroponte's ability to get the job done extends far beyond rivalries over budget powers, and the stakes are extremely high. He also faces the daunting task of preventing overreaching at the Pentagon and CIA. In late 2002, for example, when Congress gave Rumsfeld authorization to create a new Pentagon undersecretariat for intelligence, observers noted that the change would allow the Pentagon to start expanding clandestine human-intelligence operations; recent news reports in the New Yorker and the Washington Post have confirmed that the Defense Department is doing just that. Historically, however, the Pentagon hasn't been particularly skilled at running the spying and covert actions that are the CIA's stock-in-trade. Indeed, over the past 20 years, the intelligence community has had some embarrassing moments when DOD elements have tried to take on such operations.

As for the CIA, many veterans of that agency wonder just how much influence Negroponte can have there, even with the president's backing. Not only does the law afford the DNI little explicit control over each IC agency's actual operations, but even if it did, the sheer number of duties the DNI has to juggle doesn't lend itself to playing a hands-on role in fixing an agency recent director Porter Goss has arguably made worse.

"We're really are at moment when a strong DNI needs to step in and say, ‘Okay, you guys on the military end and CIA end are going to play to your strengths, period,' " says a former intelligence officer with both military and CIA experience. "Not only am I not sure that Negroponte as a person can do that, but even if he can, will he have the ability to enforce it, with such a small office with so much on its plate? I don't know, but I tend not to think so."

The consensus among many IC veterans is that Negroponte stands a chance only if he chooses an individual aspect of the DNI portfolio as his focus, and ignores the rest. But that carries its own risks. "It's Catch-22," says an IC counterterrorism officer. "You make it work by doing one thing to the exclusion of others, and you get attacked for excluding the others. Even if he does one or two things brilliantly, he's going to come under criticism. And if, God forbid, there's another terrorist attack on his watch and it has its roots in one of the areas he chooses not to focus on, he'll be crucified." That may cost Negroponte his career, but ultimately the country will pay the price.

reference=http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multi-page/documents/04495068.asp