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The Negroponte
challenge
By B Raman
US
President George W Bush announced on Thursday his
nomination of John Negroponte, an officer of the
US foreign service who is currently the US
ambassador to Iraq, as the first 
US director of
national intelligence (DNI). He is to assume the
post after he is confirmed by the Senate.
Bush also nominated Lieutenant-General
Michael Hayden, the director of the National
Security Agency (NSA) of the Defense Department,
to be the deputy DNI. By doing so, Bush has kept
up the tradition generally followed in the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) under which if the chief
is a civilian, his No 2 is from the armed forces
and vice versa. The NSA is one of the principal
agencies responsible for the collection of
technical intelligence (TECHINT).
As
recommended by the 9-11 National Commission, which
submitted its report last year, Negroponte will
oversee the functioning of all the national
agencies of the US intelligence community. In the
United States, a distinction is sought to between
national intelligence agencies and departmental
agencies. A national agency caters to the
intelligence requirements of a number of
departments, but a departmental agency in essence
caters to the requirements of only one department.
For example, the CIA, the NSA, etc are national
agencies whereas the Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA) and the intelligence directorates of the
army, the navy, the air force and the marines are
departmental agencies. It is not clear what powers
of supervision the DNI will have over the DIA and
these intelligence directorates. The 9-11
Commission did not recommend bringing them under
his control as well.
The 9-11 Commission's
recommendation was that the DNI should bring about
a multi-agency approach in respect of intelligence
collection and dissemination and budgeting. The
commission wanted him or her to have a pivotal
role in the selection of the chiefs of all the
agencies, in allotting operational
responsibilities to different agencies, in
preparing a single budget for the entire
intelligence community, in getting it approved by
Congress, in making the allocations out of the sum
approved by Congress and in overseeing the
performance of the agencies.
The
commission's recommendations were due to two major
deficiencies noticed by it in the functioning of
the intelligence community. The first was there
was no single individual in the intelligence
community who had knowledge of all human
intelligence (HUMINT) operations and was able to
prevent wrong practices such as the overlapping of
operations, different agencies running the same
source, one agency recruiting a source discarded
by another, etc. Even though the commission's
report did not specifically cite this, the most
glaring example was the case of Ahmad Chalabi, who
was tried and discarded by the CIA as unreliable,
but was recruited by the DIA. It is widely
believed that it was he who gave to the DIA and
Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, much of
the wrong information about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction (WMD).
The second deficiency
noticed by the commission related to the tendency
of the intelligence agencies to avoid sharing with
each other all the intelligence collected by them.
They generally shared intelligence that in their
view called for immediate action by others, but
avoided sharing intelligence that did not seem to
call for immediate action and needed to be further
verified or inquired into. If they had shared
immediately, they might have found that the
additional details they were looking for were
already available in the files of other agencies.
The commission wanted that every agency should
know what intelligence other agencies already had
in their possession, whether immediately
actionable or not.
The commission,
therefore, proposed that the working principle of
all intelligence agencies should be not only the
need to know, as it was before, but also the need
to share. It wanted that there should be one
person in the US administration directly under the
president who should be responsible for tasking
the agencies, deciding on their individual
operational responsibilities, approving all their
major operations, keeping track of how they
carried them out and ensuring that all
intelligence collected was shared among the
agencies of the community.
The commission
also wanted the DNI to be given the additional
responsibility of supervising the new National
Counter-Terrorism Center, which would come
directly under his control and would help him in
exercising his responsibilities relating to the
so-called war against terrorism.
While the
commission thus wanted that the DNI should be the
principal intelligence adviser to the president
and should function as the intelligence overlord
in respect of all senior appointments, tasking,
operations and budgeting, it did not specifically
say that it wanted him to be the analysis chief of
the president. This gave rise to an inference that
it wanted the responsibility for analyzing the
intelligence collected and advising the president
on what the intelligence implied to rest with the
chiefs of the various agencies and that this
should not be entrusted to the DNI. The commission
members were apparently worried that if one person
were made responsible for all analysis, differing
points of view and perceptions might not reach the
president, resulting in serious errors in
decision-making.
The commission also
wanted that in future the CIA should be
responsible only for political covert actions and
that all responsibility for paramilitary covert
actions should be transferred to the Special
Operations Command of the Pentagon. This has
apparently already been done, as one could see
from the active role Rumsfeld is now playing in
the launching and coordination of paramilitary
operations related to neutralizing Iran's military
nuclear capability.
One does not know yet
whether all the recommendations of the commission
have been accepted or whether the DNI would have
the same powers as envisaged by the commission.
During the debate in Congress on the bill to give
effect to the commission's recommendations,
congressional members close to the Pentagon
insisted that the creation of the post of the
intelligence czar should not derogate from the
powers now enjoyed by the defense secretary in
respect of the collection and utilization of
operational intelligence required for military
operations.
While nominating Negroponte to
this new post, Bush stated as follows:
The job will be a vital part of US
counter-terrorism operations.
Negroponte understands the United States'
global intelligence needs because he has spent the
better part of his life in the nation's foreign
service.
"If we are going to stop the terrorists before
they strike, we have to ensure that the
intelligence agencies work as a single unified
enterprise."
Negroponte will take primary responsibility
for delivering the president's daily intelligence
briefing and will set budgets for the intelligence
agencies.
From the president's last
observation it would seem that the DNI will also
act as his analysis chief.
It is too early
to say how effectively the DNI will be able to
coordinate the working of all the intelligence
agencies and whether Rumsfeld and the Pentagon
agencies will allow him to do so. Robert McNamara,
the powerful defense secretary under president
John Kennedy, who set up the DIA with the idea of
using it to ensure the coordination of the four
intelligence directorates of the army, the navy,
the air force and the marines, found it very
difficult to do so.
In practice, there was
so much resistance from different wings of the
armed forces to shedding some of their powers in
favor of the DIA that ultimately many of
McNamara's ideas had to be watered down, if not
abandoned. This was the difficulty McNamara faced
when all the chiefs of his intelligence agencies,
including the chief of the DIA, were from the
armed forces and were hence birds of the same
feather.
Would Negroponte, a
foreign-service officer, be able to succeed in
coordinating the work of 15 intelligence agencies
- one of them (the CIA) coming directly under the
president, one (the Federal Bureau of
Investigation) coming under the attorney general
and the others coming under the defense secretary?
It has been reported that since this is a newly
created post, Bush wanted that the first incumbent
should be an intelligence professional who knew
the job of intelligence and whose words would
carry weight in the intelligence community. All
those approached reportedly declined, apparently
because they were not confident they would be
effective. Robert Gates, the former chief of the
CIA under George H W Bush, the father of the
current president, has publicly said that he
declined to take up this post.
In
intelligence parlance, the word "operation" refers
to the process of collecting and disseminating
intelligence as well as covert actions. If
Negroponte is confirmed to this post, will
Rumsfeld willingly surrender to him supervision
over all the covert actions mounted by the
Pentagon agencies against Iran and those they
might mount in the future against Syria? Will he
or his agencies fully share with Negroponte, a
foreign-service officer, knowledge of such covert
actions? Very unlikely.
Ultimately,
Negroponte might end up supervising all operations
for the collection and dissemination of
intelligence with very little control over covert
actions of a paramilitary nature, over which
Rumsfeld would continue to be the czar.
B Raman is additional secretary
(retired), Cabinet Secretariat, government of
India, and currently director, Institute for
Topical Studies, Chennai, and distinguished fellow
and convenor, Observer Research Foundation (ORF),
Chennai Chapter. E-mail: itschen36@gmail.com.
(Copyright 2005 B Raman)
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