Ridge says intelligence czar probably unnecessary

Tom Ridge, President Bush's choice to head the Homeland Security Department, said on Wednesday that if the architecture of the department is carefully crafted, an "intelligence czar" would not be necessary, but added that the president has said the topic is "open for discussion."

Ridge said he believes technology could be sufficient to ensure that security intelligence is distributed effectively within the government, adding that his office is working with the FBI and CIA on such security efforts. Ridge made the comments to a task force of state lawmakers convened by the National Conference of State Legislatures to focus on homeland security.

The House-Senate intelligence panel investigating the events that led to the Sept. 11 attacks called Wednesday for the appointment of a new Cabinet-level intelligence chief. Such an official would significantly limit the current authority of the CIA director, who in theory should act as the government's chief intelligence overseer. The new director of national intelligence would have authority over the government's 14 civilian and Defense intelligence agencies.

Proposals to create a new intelligence chief post have circulated for years, experts said, and have been repeatedly struck down. Gregory Treverton, a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corp. in Los Angeles, said CIA directors historically have been unwilling to relinquish control of their agencies and personnel to a higher official. Also, the Defense secretary has been hesitant to step back from oversight of the Defense intelligence agencies, which comprise the bulk of the government's intelligence apparatus, Treverton said.

Both CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appear unlikely to buck that tradition, several intelligence experts said. Tenet has managed to keep his job despite numerous calls for his resignation following last year's terrorist attacks, and Rumsfeld has decided to appoint a new undersecretary for military intelligence, further solidifying the Pentagon's influence in intelligence management.

Treverton, who endorses the creation of a new director of national intelligence post, said that while many experts and previous congressional committees have also supported such a position, he sees "no way it can happen" given history and current political conditions.

"For years people have believed we really needed a true director of central intelligence," said one expert who asked not to be identified, noting that the head of the CIA has never really fulfilled the role the congressional committee would formally like to establish. And like the current situation, the proposal has been raised in the name of improving coordination among intelligence agencies, "which is the catch phrase for, 'we actually talk to one another,'" the expert said.

To improve intelligence operations as a whole, the committee also suggested that the National Security Council, in connection with a proposed director of national intelligence and the secretaries of the Homeland Security, State and Defense departments should submit to the president "a U.S. governmentwide strategy for combating terrorism, both at home and abroad, including the growing terrorism threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and associated technologies."

The White House released a national strategy for homeland security earlier this year. The Homeland Security bill also established an intelligence analysis division in the new department, which would receive information from other agencies to use in the fight against terrorists and in issuing warnings about attacks. No current intelligence agencies would move into the new department, which has caused some experts to question how effective the organization can be in helping to improve collection of information on potential terrorists.

The committee also said the administration should establish at Homeland Security an "all-source terrorism information fusion center [that would] improve the quality and focus of counterterrorism analysis." Lawmakers gave no specific guidelines on how to build such a center, but they said that it should retain a staff of permanent analysts and use technological tools such as data mining programs.

In addition to critiquing intelligence operations, the committee had instructions for the FBI. "Given the FBI's history of repeated shortcomings within its current responsibility for domestic intelligence…[it] should strengthen and improve its domestic capability as fully and expeditiously as possible," the report said.

According to the report, FBI leaders should enforce adherence to the new priority of counterterrorism within the agency. A series of recent news reports have suggested that while FBI Director Robert Mueller has made fighting and preventing terrorism the bureau's new mission, field agents have been reluctant to steer away from their traditional role as law enforcement officers. This has added to an increasing chorus of critics who suggest that the FBI isn't capable of being the nation's domestic intelligence agency or of preventing terrorism.

On the whole, the committees concluded that while numerous facts and connections relating to the Sept. 11 attacks were missed, no one could have known the terrorists' true intentions. The committee's report was notable for not assigning blame to any agency or individual for failing to prevent the attack, which prompted one member to dissent. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., has said he will issue a separate report that takes FBI and CIA officials to task directly. "Some people on the committee don't want to assign blame or accountability," Shelby said in a television interview Wednesday. "I'm not one of those people."

Technology Daily's Maureen Sirhal contributed to this report.