[Mb-civic] Fix the Intelligence Mess - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Fix the Intelligence Mess
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By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Friday, April 21, 2006; A23

For the U.S. intelligence community, the warning lights are blinking 
red. A reorganization that was supposed to bring greater coordination 
has instead produced a layering of responsibilities and bureaucratic 
confusion. A demoralized CIA that needed professional management is 
chafing under a Republican former congressman who has proved to be the 
most political and ineffective director in the agency's history.

Look at the organizational chart of the new Office of the Director of 
National Intelligence and you wonder if America has become a Third World 
country with a rival intelligence agency for each patch of turf. At last 
count, there were 16 different spy units under the DNI's umbrella -- a 
number that puts even Syria to shame. In theory, this flotilla of spy 
agencies is being supervised by a deputy responsible for "customer 
outcomes," whatever that means, and three other deputy directors. The 
organization chart gives each of the four a peppy two-word mission 
statement: "Want It," "Know It," "Get It" and "Build It."

I'd like to suggest a new mission for John Negroponte, the man who sits 
atop this intelligence ziggurat: "Fix It." One year on, the intelligence 
reorganization isn't working. It has overanalyzed the little problems 
without solving the big ones. It hasn't succeeded in coordinating the 
various agencies, and it has allowed the biggest problem of all -- the 
disarray at the CIA -- to get even worse. I'm told that several foreign 
intelligence services have recently observed a decline in CIA 
performance, which should scare us all.

"The reorganization reshuffled rather than augmented the nation's 
federal intelligence personnel," Richard A. Posner, a federal appeals 
court judge who knows the intelligence world well, argued in a speech in 
March to a gathering of CIA lawyers. He said of the DNI structure: "It 
has become a new bureaucracy layered on top of the intelligence 
community, a new agency on top of the fifteen or more previously 
existing agencies." According to The Post's Walter Pincus, Negroponte's 
budget is nearing $1 billion -- about five times what was previously 
spent for intelligence-community management. His staff is now 1,539 
people, about twice what was expected.

The intelligence mess is serious enough that it has triggered a quiet 
investigation by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a 
secretive blue-ribbon panel that advises the White House. The group's 
new chairman is Stephen Friedman, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs and 
former White House economic adviser. Other luminaries on the 16-member 
panel are former senator Charles Robb, former representative Lee 
Hamilton and retired Adm. David E. Jeremiah.

I'm told the intelligence board has summoned a series of top current and 
former officials in recent weeks to get a handle on the problems at the 
CIA and DNI. "They are trying to get a sense of what is really going on 
and how bad it is," says one intelligence insider. Because many of the 
board members have run big companies, they are said to be applying 
management metrics to the crazy quilt of the reorganization.

The Bush administration, unfortunately, is a big part of what's wrong. 
 From the start, officials close to Vice President Cheney viewed a 
moribund, risk-averse CIA as an obstacle to their goals. Certainly the 
CIA made mistakes, especially in its assessment of Iraqi weapons of mass 
destruction, but that's not why it was punished. It became a political 
whipping boy for the right wing largely because it tried to tell the 
truth on two key issues: alleged Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from 
Niger and alleged Iraqi operational links with al-Qaeda. On both, CIA 
analysts repeatedly warned the administration that the evidence didn't 
support its conclusions, yet the vice president's office kept coming 
back and telling them to take another look. The CIA issued a secret 
paper in January 2003 saying that there was no Iraqi authority, control 
or direction over al-Qaeda. Yet the political pressure continued.

Negroponte defended his performance in a speech yesterday at the 
National Press Club, and one can only wish him well. He has a huge job: 
The CIA has lost a generation of senior managers, burned off by Porter 
Goss and his political aides in a senseless vendetta. Dissatisfaction is 
growing in the middle ranks. Operations officers are looking over their 
shoulders; analysts are looking at the proliferating bureaucracies and 
wondering where to try to make their careers; and terrorism specialists 
are torn between the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and the DNI's 
National Counterterrorism Center. We don't have enough good spies to 
afford this confusion.

You would have thought it was impossible to make our intelligence 
problems even worse, but the Bush administration has accomplished that. 
This is a dangerous situation for the country, and it needs to be fixed, 
now.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/20/AR2006042001356.html?nav=hcmodule
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