Opinion Writer
By David Ignatius, Published: September 7
As America takes stock of its counterterrorism policies this week, it’s useful to review two major recommendations in the 9/11 Commission Report.
The first, which called for creation of a new director of national
intelligence to “connect the dots,” is finally making some progress in
coordinating the 17 agencies of the intelligence community.
But the commission’s second big proposal, urging Congress to reform itsintelligence oversight procedures,
unfortunately has gone nowhere. It seems members remain addicted to
petty politics, even when it comes to reforms demanded in the name of
Sept. 11 victims. We’ll get to that later.
Let’s look first at the performance ofJames Clapper,
a retired Air Force lieutenant general who is the fourth director of
national intelligence since the position was established in 2005. The
turnover suggests the difficulties defining the job. Too often, it
produced layering and turf battles. For example, Clapper’s predecessor,
retired Adm. Dennis Blair, was ousted after a self-destructive campaign to challenge CIA Director Leon Panetta.
Clapper, a goateed, wisecracking 70-year-old veteran of the
intelligence community, had no interest in jousting with the CIA. He had
run two Pentagon intelligence agencies and saw the DNI job as
coordination — a sort of intelligence version of the Office of
Management and Budget — rather than line management. Like his mentor,
former defense secretary Bob Gates, he’s fond of saying, when facing
bureaucratic obstacles, “I’m too old for this [expletive]!”
Clapper botched several early media appearances, misstating or
appearing unaware of major developments — not altogether surprising for
someone who had spent his career staying out of the limelight. But he
got strong reviews from the White House: Recognizing that President
Obama was a voracious reader, he revamped the morning intelligence
briefing so it wasn’t a rehash of the written “President’s Daily Brief” and would better meet Obama’s needs. White House officials say it was a welcome change from Blair’s briefing style.
More important, Clapper began to tackle the real problem the DNI job
was supposed to fix — the sprawling morass of the intelligence
community. He started by trimming some of the waste in his own shop,
which he thought had become a “Christmas tree” hung with ornaments from
Congress or other agencies.
Like Gates at Defense, Clapper showed he was actually willing to kill
programs and replace people. He dumped the incumbent deputy director
and chief information officer in favor of two stars he brought over from
the CIA. He sent one technical function back to the National Security
Agency and transferred an ill-definedNational Intelligence University to
the Pentagon. He trimmed the roster of deputy directors for national
intelligence from four to one, and he cut the ODNI staff to 1,600 from
about 2,000, with more cuts to come.
The heart of Clapper’s integration effort is a new team of “national
intelligence managers,” who drive collection and analysis in 17 subject
areas. The model for this sort of fusion is the Joint Special Operations Command —
which can conduct a raid at midnight, say, and analyze and exploit the
intelligence quickly enough to conduct another raid at dawn. Clapper
wants this kind of agility in the intelligence community as a whole.
The “NIMs,” as they’re called, just settled into their offices a
floor below Clapper at the DNI’s headquarters near Tysons Corner. The
new structure meant the demotion of the analysts who serve as “national
intelligence officers,” and several NIOs have quit in protest. Combining
supervision of collection and analysis makes sense, but the NIM project
needs strong follow-through.
More efficiencies are on the way as a shrinking intelligence budget
forces further consolidation. Look for joint information-technology
infrastructure across agencies, for starters; some planned
overhead-surveillance systems may also be axed, including ones that
intelligence professionals regard as “congressional ‘pet rocks.’?”
Now contrast Clapper’s push for integration with the refusal of
Congress to do the same thing in oversight of intelligence, as the 9/11
Commission recommended. Rather than consolidate authorization and
appropriation in the House and Senate intelligence committees, as urged,
the two remain separate. Worse, the intelligence budget remains hidden
in the budgets for the Defense, Treasury, State and other departments.
These buried budgets don’t make sense anymore, when the unified
national intelligence budget is a matter of public record. The Senate
intelligence committee did recommend moving to a single intelligence
appropriation for 2010, but this failed on the floor: Congress holds on
to the old system to preserve its traditional turf.
“Congressional oversight for intelligence — and counterterrorism — is
now dysfunctional,”the 9/11 Commission Report said. Oversight has
improved modestly during the past seven years, but none of the
commission’s major recommendations on Congress has been adopted. As the
10th anniversary of the attacks approaches, that’s a scandal.
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