Bureaucratic wrangling begins over intelligence reform

Current and former government officials picked apart recommendations from the 9/11 commission during the past week, often offering competing proposals that indicate pushing reform through the federal bureaucracy is going to be difficult.

A series of rare August congressional hearings have focused on overhauling intelligence agencies, with particular emphasis on two key recommendations: appointing a national intelligence director and creating a national counterterrorism center. The third day of hearings wrapped up Wednesday, with at least a dozen more planned by the end of the month.

The recommendations and the hearings have evoked debate and disagreement from government experts on issues such as whether the new intelligence director should have budget authority over the government's 15 intelligence agencies; whether the director should be able to hire and fire; whether the director should work out of the White House; whether the director should have deputies in other departments; whether the national counterterrorism center should do operational planning, and how to best protect civil liberties during a time of increased intelligence activity.

Some of the sharpest resistance to intelligence reform has come from officials closely associated with the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, who would lose some power if the recommendations were implemented without change.

"I have great reservations about making the [national intelligence director], through a deputy, the boss of all intelligence operations in the Defense Department," former Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre told the House Intelligence Committee Wednesday.

"I know the commission is not recommending removing the intelligence agencies from DoD, but they are setting up a worrisome tension in the system when they make the undersecretary who is in charge of all DoD intelligence activities a deputy to the [national intelligence director]," said Hamre, who serves on an advisory board to the National Security Agency and FBI.

Former NSA Director William Odom told the committee that the 9/11 panel's recommendation to cenralize intelligence operations "makes no sense."

"Not only would the commission's proposals set back years of improvements in managing collection operations and distribution of products, but it would also turn the management of resources into a nightmare," he said.

James Carafano, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, presented a competing proposal. He said the national counterterrorism center should be created within the Homeland Security Department by combining the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and the Terrorist Screening Center with the DHS Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate.

Members of the 9/11 commission argue that their recommendations should be viewed as a holistic prescription for improving the intelligence community.

But hearings have yet to occur on other aspects of the commission's report, such as improving educational programs and diplomacy in the Middle East; changing foreign relations with countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and strengthening counterproliferation efforts.

"Long-term success demands the use of all elements of national power: diplomacy, intelligence, covert action, law enforcement, economic policy, foreign aid, public diplomacy and homeland defense," the commission members wrote in their report. "If we favor one tool while neglecting others, we leave ourselves vulnerable and weaken our national effort."

Additionally, federal managers have dropped hints during hearings about personnel problems within their agencies, such as a lack of qualified intelligence analysts, a lack of diversity, the need for more linguists who speak languages such as Farsi and Arabic, and logistical problems integrating staff. For example, officials told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on Tuesday that the new headquarters for the Terrorist Threat Integration Center is not big enough to house personnel from the CIA's counterterrorism center.

Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Wednesday that the government runs the risk of placing too much emphasis on intelligence reform at the expense of other recommendations by the 9/11 commission.

"Reform is extremely time-consuming and distracting, and we should not do reforms just because one group of 10 smart people says we should. You can spend your whole time reforming if you do that," O'Hanlon told Government Executive. "On the other hand, I think it's important to seize the moment, and this is the moment we're going to have … These next six months are the right time to do whatever reform we're going to do."