(Photo: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) President Bush tapped former National Security Agency Director Mike McConnell, an intelligence veteran, to be the country's second national intelligence director. In a reshuffling of his national security team, Mr. Bush also chose his former top spymaster, John Negroponte, to be deputy secretary of state. "Each of them will do good work in their new positions, and it is vital that they take up their new responsibilities promptly," Mr. Bush said on Jan. 5, 2006. The moves came as part of the White House effort to chart a new direction on Iraq and reshape Bush's national security strategy with two years left in his presidency. Part of the new course appeared to be a renovation of Mr. Bush's intelligence and national security team. In addition to Negroponte's shift, Defense Secretary Robert Gates took over the Pentagon in December 2006 and is expected to bring in retired Lt. Gen. James Clapper as his undersecretary for intelligence. McConnell said he looks forward to building on the accomplishments of Negroponte and his team, who had been in place just 20 months. Mr. Bush said he was confident that McConnell would give him "the best information and analysis that America's intelligence community can provide." Negroponte got his current intelligence job after the Sept. 11 Commission recommended in 2004 that Congress create a single official to coordinate all 16 spy agencies and avoid the mistakes made prior to the attacks of 2001. The prewar intelligence on Iraq only further tarnished the intelligence community's reputation. Negroponte sought to put those chapters behind the agencies he oversees. "I believe our intelligence community has embraced the challenge of functioning as a single unified enterprise and reaffirmed the fact that it is the best intelligence community in the world," he said. McConnell spent more than a quarter-century as an intelligence operations and security officer and caught the attention of then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell during the first Persian Gulf War. He regularly briefed the two as an intelligence officer for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and is known as someone who can distill complicated information into coherent presentations, said Matthew Aid, a historian who studies the National Security Agency. McConnell was tapped to lead U.S. eavesdropping efforts as director of the National Security Agency from 1992 to 1996. McConnell left the government and had worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a government contractor and consulting firm, for about a decade.