Key lawmaker laments lack of intelligence info-sharing system

The chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee on Thursday lambasted federal intelligence agencies for their reluctance to share critical data, a mentality that he said contributed to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But Pennsylvania Republican Curt Weldon, chairman of the Military Procurement Subcommittee, also acknowledged that some efforts are now underway to enact measures he has advocated for years as the route to better sharing of intelligence.

In speech at the Heritage Foundation, Weldon cited personal experience in his criticisms of the intelligence community. In 1997, while he led lawmakers to Europe to facilitate negotiations to end of Kosovo war, Weldon said the CIA failed to provide adequate information on a Yugoslavian family, the Karics, with whom Weldon and his congressional colleagues were to meet in Vienna. The CIA provided only two lines of background data, Weldon said.

Weldon then approached an Army intelligence unit at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, that had developed sophisticated data-mining capabilities, for assistance. The unit supplied Weldon with an eight-page profile on the family in advance of his meeting. Upon returning home, Weldon detailed how CIA and FBI intelligence agents frantically approached him for information on the family.

"Imagine asking a member of Congress to brief the FBI and the CIA so they in turn can brief our top State Department negotiators" who were seeking terms for an end to the war, Weldon said.

Weldon credited the vast data capabilities of the Army's intelligence gatherers for his success. He consequently proposed, in two different defense authorization bills, funds to build a central "data fusion" system to link information collected by the Pentagon, FBI, CIA, Treasury and others.

"I have seen the inept response of the intelligence community," he said. "They knew and we knew what should have been done, and they didn't do it because they all were protecting their [bureaucratic] stovepipes. ... Time and again we told the intelligence community what was needed, and time and again, they said, 'Go fly a kite.'"

Weldon also cited the work of an Army Special Forces command in Florida that, using similar data-mining tools, prepared a three-hour briefing for top military officials and recommended that five al Qaeda terrorist cells "be taken out."

When the brief was presented in January 2001 to Gen. George Shelton, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Weldon said, "It was condensed to a one-hour brief, and to the best of my knowledge, there were no recommendations to take out five cells or up to five cells of the al Qaeda network." He questioned why those recommendations never made it to Shelton.

But Weldon acknowledged some bright spots for repairing the intelligence gaps. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has an "aggressive program underway" to build a prototype National Data Fusion Center so federal agencies could link intelligence information for cross-agency access to classified and unclassified data.

Still, technology is only half the solution, he said, noting the need for better human intelligence and agents specially trained in information technology. More funding is critical for research and development efforts and for education, he said.