Abstract
The U.S. government's umbrella intelligence agency keeps getting bigger … and bigger.
Even before John Negroponte assumed the role of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in April 2005, he was confronted by skeptics. Members of Congress who debated the merits of the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act that created his job identified several concerns. Would the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)–tasked with coordinating the efforts of the six largest intelligence-gathering agencies–morph from a managerial role into an entirely new intelligence agency? Would the ODNI further accentuate the competition between civilian and military intelligence? Would ODNI insert another layer of bureaucracy into the very system it was supposed to streamline?
Last May, Negroponte had an opportunity to assuage these concerns, when he testified before Congress and issued his own report card. “Dozens of institutional and policy reforms have been initiated,” his report noted. “Major budget decisions have been made; and the customer community that receives intelligence has been involved more deeply in the process of determining which threats and trends deserve our [intelligence community's] priority attention.” Yet, despite these assurances, a closer look at the events that have transpired over the last 17 months suggests that some of Congress's fears were well founded.
Ever since the first Bush administration, the real story of U.S. intelligence has been the erosion of the distinctions between “national” intelligence, intended to inform policy decisions, and “tactical” intelligence that supports the military. While useful to U.S. troops in the field, this move has opened the door to the militarization of U.S. intelligence. Beginning with the 1991 Gulf War, increased demands for better military access to national intelligence has resulted in much greater use of those resources for tactical purposes.
More recently, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has cited the need for tactical intelligence to justify a host of Pentagon encroachments on what used to be CIA preserves–the latest of them being military intrusion into the clandestine collection of information, the heart of the CIA's espionage enterprise. In the guise of “deconflicting” the military from CIA activities, Rumsfeld reached an agreement last fall with then-CIA Director Porter Goss that actually ratified the military's role. Negroponte supervised the agreement, although his own report card hints that this was not done without some reservations. The ODNI, he notes, has put some of its own people inside the Pentagon to give it “national-level focus.” Equally likely, those personnel are there to keep tabs on what the heck is going on.
For many years intelligence budgets have been formally apportioned between national and tactical programs. Negro-ponte's first major budgetary decision was to order the cancellation of an imagery satellite system (widely regarded as a management disaster, behind schedule, and way over budget) favored at the Pentagon. His ability to make that decision stick–very much unclear at this writing–will be a measure of the DNI's authority. If Negroponte does not prevail, it will be a strong indication that the Pentagon now dominates the U.S. intelligence system.
In the old days, the CIA was the counterweight in these turf wars. But that role increasingly falls upon ODNI as it encroaches upon the CIA's duties. Negroponte has placed his own man, former ODNI deputy director Gen. Michael Hayden, at the helm of the CIA. The DNI also created a National Clandestine Service (NCS), effectively absorbing the CIA's Directorate of Operations, tasked with coordinating the covert “human intelligence” activities conducted abroad by the CIA, Pentagon, and FBI. The director of the NCS reports to Hayden, but Negroponte's staff oversees the agency's work. Negroponte has also conducted a review of U.S. intelligence alliances with foreign security organizations, another move that must have sent shivers up spines at Langley, since its foreign entanglements have never before been questioned.
As for the ODNI itself, congressional concerns over an expanding bureaucracy are becoming fact. Despite protestations from Negroponte and ODNI spokespersons on many occasions, this organization is more than a management staff. Press reports indicate that personnel have climbed to just under 1,000 and that the ODNI budget is on the order of a billion dollars–thus about a million dollars per employee. Negroponte's office absorbed the CIA staff that formerly produced the President's Daily Brief. He added a strategic planning unit to it as well as an interagency advisory board. Negroponte has also taken the National Intelligence Council (NIC) out of the CIA, as provided by the reform act, and included it in his domain.
Responsible for producing the national intelligence estimates, the highest level of U.S. intelligence reporting, the NIC initially was a small board of experts supported by a small analytic group. The DNI has added a long-range analysis group to the NIC, perhaps an admission of the extent to which the council had become preoccupied with current reporting. And Negroponte has made the NIC directly responsible for intelligence support to the White House National Security Council and its Deputies Committee, the Homeland Security Council, and the Cabinet. Such expanded duties are not possible without additional, dedicated staff. Moreover, Negroponte has created two new DNI centers, dedicated to tracking proliferation and open-source intelligence. Negro-ponte has given the CIA the administrative responsibility for these centers, but since they duplicate existing CIA units, the future of these redundant CIA offices are uncertain.
In the aftermath of the Iraq intelligence debacle, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction recommended reordering U.S. intelligence to put “mission managers” in charge of matching priorities with resources. To that end, Negroponte has revised the process for establishing the priorities, but he has been slow to install the mission managers. As of May, only four mission managers have been appointed: for counterterrorism, counterproliferation, North Korea, and Iran. Managers are being considered in a dozen other areas, but obviously, there are many more subjects that need attention. Negroponte himself has said that “the most dramatic change of all in the last 15 years is the exponential increase in the number of topics and targets we must identify, develop, track, and analyze.” Given these developments, the prospect of improving the accuracy of intelligence analyses–yet another mandate in the 2004 reform law–is uncertain. The ODNI mantra of creating evermore managers and review staffs to pore over reports could divert personnel from the crucial function of actually doing analysis.
Finally, Negroponte does not seem to be keen on accountability. He has steadfastly refused to be forthcoming on the key controversies of the moment–the National Security Agency wiretapping scandal and the debate over the CIA's secret prisons. Last October, he concurred with Porter Goss's refusal to release the CIA inspector general's report on the 9/11 failure. And while Negroponte has appointed an ODNI civil liberties guardian, the office remains unfunded and moribund. Freedom of Information Act requests for NIC reports bounce back and forth between ODNI and the CIA, with each saying the other bears responsibility. At the National Press Club on April 20, Negroponte remarked that this year ODNI has already been asked to brief congressional members or staff 150 times. However, the ODNI has released less than a handful of statements to the public, and some of those are essentially duplicates. Also, for the first time ever, ODNI conducted last year a survey of intelligence community personnel, questioning them about many aspects of their work environment. The survey had no questions at all on whether analysts felt pressured to come down a certain way in their reporting–a worrisome omission suggesting that reforms to protect against politicized intelligence are not as high a priority as they should be.
With a broken congressional intelligence oversight mechanism, severely limited accountability, a burgeoning ODNI, a crippled CIA, and a Pentagon hungry for power, everyone should hope that no unforeseen intelligence disaster looms. The continuing failure to appreciate the nature of the insurgency in Iraq, and the evidently growing strength of the Taliban resistance in Afghanistan cast doubt on the performance of the “reformed” U.S. intelligence community, even as the Iranian and North Korean problems remain unresolved.
duly NOTED
Supplementary Material
The National Intelligence Strategy of the United States of America: Transformation Through Integration and Innovation