Reform bill misses the mark, intelligence veterans say

The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which Congress passed this month, has been heralded by its supporters.

"The most sweeping overhaul of the nation's intelligence community" is how the bill's authors, Sens. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, put it, saying the reform package gives intelligence agencies "the resources, personnel, oversight, coordination and accountability necessary to counter the security threats of today and the future."

But some seasoned intelligence practitioners, including some who worked for the past several months to influence the course of intelligence reform, don't see things that way. To them, the bill is a collection of half-measures that don't address the fundamental, often structural problems that vex the organizations that collect, analyze and disseminate information to policymakers. Real reform, they say, lies not in the bill, but in other actions to be taken in the years ahead.

The bill's proponents point to budgetary authorities for the newly created director of national intelligence as a source of all-important power. The DNI will provide "guidance for developing the National Intelligence Program budget," and will "develop and determine an annual consolidated" budget, the bill states.

But subsequent language narrows those powers. The DNI won't determine budgets for most Defense Department intelligence activities. Those reside outside the National Intelligence Program. Rather, the DNI "shall participate in [their] development" with the Defense secretary, the bill says.

The DNI also can transfer funds only within the national program, and then with approval from the Office of Management and Budget director. The transfer must be to a "higher priority" activity; less than $150 million and "less than 5 percent of amounts available" to the affected agency. It also can't terminate an acquisition program.

"Pretty thin gruel" is how one former CIA executive describes the DNI's budget muscle. "[The DNI] got some greater control in building budgets…but [the Defense Department] can still appeal to OMB," said James Simon, former assistant director of central intelligence for administration. "Raising the reprogramming threshold is nice…but [it's] truly a small sum for a big program."

Among those big programs are Defense Department efforts, such as those involving reconnaissance satellites. The Pentagon consumes most of the annual intelligence budget. Critics charge that, as a result, too much money is spent on sophisticated collection devices and not enough on analysis or human intelligence gathering. They had hoped the intelligence law would address that.

Instead, the bill may portend a showdown. Factions within the DNI's office and the Pentagon will "arm-wrestle" over what programs are under the DNI's control, said John Hamre, a former deputy secretary of Defense and now the president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "You can count on trench warfare over all the details," he said.

The bill also strikes the wrong note on personnel, critics say. It doesn't create a dedicated intelligence service, which might articulate employees' options for career development. Instead, the DNI will make "policies and programs" that let employees work at more than one agency, to broaden their understanding of how the entire community functions.

That troubles Michael Scheuer, who led the CIA's hunt for Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s. Scheuer, who resigned in November, warns that the intelligence agencies haven't cultivated terrorism experts. Instead, they've embraced generalists-often political scientists and historians-who sometimes may write brilliant analyses but who lack the daily experience tracking terrorist networks that Scheuer believes is essential to defeating them.

"The intelligence community has a contempt for expertise," Scheuer said. "Nothing in the bill says officers must work 10 to 12 years on a [terrorist] target….You're going to get Americans killed because you don't have any expertise."

Meaningful reform requires realigning intelligence functions, some say. Hamre proposed putting the "dot collectors," the agencies responsible for gathering intelligence with technology-such as signals intercepts or satellite reconnaissance photos-under the DNI's control. Doing so would free those agencies' department heads to spend more time analyzing intelligence, he said.

Another expert would go one step further. John Poindexter, who was President Reagan's national security adviser, has proposed creating a Directorate of National Information, which in addition to the dot collectors would include the human intelligence gathering efforts of the CIA. The intelligence analyzers would be managed separately by their existing cabinet level officers and kept distributed. This separation, Poindexter says, would create competitive, and potentially better, analysis. "Competitive analysis must be the expected standard," Poindexter said. Under his model, "the collectors should have no other responsibility other than providing their take" to the analyzers, he said. Poindexter also believes the intelligence reform debate should extend to the broader national security apparatus. "In the end, it all comes down to the president doing his job and the National Security Advisor making sure his directions are enforced," he said. President Bush, for his part, embraced the creation of a national intelligence director shortly after his presidential rival, Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., backed the idea. Politics has been the primary motivator for passing the reform legislation, the critics say, and that disquiets them, because it overshadows the need for managerial reform.

The bill "leaves so many unanswered questions," Hamre said, adding that its successful implementation depends on finding a DNI who wants to be a strong manager. But, at least in the intelligence bureaucracy's early days, he says, "you can count on chaos in spades."