New Top Spy Post To Be Proposed?
Senior members of the Senate Intelligence Committee say they favor creating a new Cabinet-level position with authority over the nation's spy agencies, stripping that control away from the CIA director, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.
The proposal — almost certain to face resistance from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — has emerged as one of the major recommendations lawmakers are likely to make at the end of their investigation into the intelligence failures surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks, the newspaper said.
A final report from lawmakers is due early next year.
"I believe that we need a chairman of the board, a CEO, of the entire intelligence community," it quoted Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who is the intelligence committee's vice chairman, as saying Friday.
Sen. Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who is chair of the intelligence committee, also endorsed the idea, the Times said.
Shelby and Graham acknowledged to the Times that the idea will have an uphill climb. The recommendation is likely to "stir up a lot of hornets," Graham said in a television interview Wednesday. "There will be people who currently have that power who will feel threatened and resist."
The CIA director is technically in charge of coordinating the efforts of all 13 of the nation's spy agencies, the newspaper said. But 85 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget is controlled by the Pentagon and secretary of defense. As a result, lawmakers say, the CIA director has little leverage over other agencies, the Times said.
Much of the structure of these agencies will be affected by homeland security legislation pending before Congress.
The plan to create a new position for a spy chief, above the CIA chief, has gathered momentum in recent weeks amid disclosures in congressional hearings that many sections of the intelligence community failed to act on warnings from CIA Director George Tenet about the al Qaeda threat, the Times reported.
It explained that previous recommendations to strengthen the CIA director's hand by giving him more control over intelligence budgets have always foundered, often because of opposition from the Pentagon, which stands to lose control over billions of dollars of its budget.
The Times said Rumsfeld has already moved to consolidate authority over intelligence matters in the Pentagon.
At his urging, the Senate recently passed a bill creating the new position of undersecretary of defense for intelligence that would oversee the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and some other sections of the intelligence community. The House has yet to vote on the proposal, a Pentagon official said.
"Many intelligence insiders say Rumsfeld's move would erode Tenet's position because many of his coordination responsibilities would probably be absorbed by the new Pentagon undersecretary," the paper said.
"It is essentially a demotion" for the CIA director, said a former senior CIA official who asked not to be identified. Officials at the Pentagon and CIA declined to comment, the Times said.