Spy V. Spy
This column from The New Republic was written by the editors.
John E. McLaughlin, the acting director of central intelligence (DCI), has a finely developed sense of irony. With the 9/11 Commission delivering its final report this week (the day after The New Republic goes to press), McLaughlin took to "Fox News Sunday" to preemptively argue against one of its most important recommendations: the creation of a director of national intelligence (DNI), distinct from the CIA, to oversee the nation's 15 intelligence services. "A good argument can be made for that," he conceded, but "it doesn't relate particularly to the world I live in."
Of course it doesn't. McLaughlin is a 32-year veteran of the CIA. Ever since the 1947 National Security Act created the modern U.S. intelligence apparatus, the DCI has theoretically led the entire intelligence community while simultaneously managing one of its component agencies, the CIA. In reality, the lion's share of the DCI's attention has gone to running the CIA and not its sister organizations, a situation exacerbated by the fact that he controls only about 12 percent of a $40 billion intelligence budget -- the percentage allocated to the CIA. After two catastrophic intelligence failures -- September 11 and the Iraq war -- attributable in no small measure to the fragmentation of the intelligence system, McLaughlin needs to live in a new world. It's time for a new intelligence czar.
A Cabinet-level intelligence chief will not be a panacea for the intelligence community's ills, but it could go a long way toward bridging the divisions between the spy agencies. Consider what happened in the run-up to September 11, 2001. After the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, then-DCI George Tenet declared war on al Qaeda, circulating a directive demanding that, "no resources or people [be] spared in this effort, either inside [the] CIA or the Community." But, while the CIA's Counterterrorist Center got the message, the FBI's counterterrorism chief told the joint congressional inquiry into September 11 that he "was not specifically aware of that declaration of war." And the director of the National Security Agency (NSA) added, "We had about five number-one priorities." Tenet may have technically been head of the entire intelligence community, but it seems he communicated chiefly with his home institution. As General William Odom, a former NSA director, has said, "The DCI becomes trapped if he's also directing an agency, and therefore he doesn't look at the community as much as he could." An intelligence czar would not have that problem.
But, just as the new spymaster must be responsible for the whole intelligence community, so must the community acknowledge that the intelligence czar is running the show. Right now, the largest institutional obstacle to this is the secretary of defense, who controls roughly 85 percent of the intelligence purse. To cement the new intelligence chief's authority, he (or she) should be given control of the entire intelligence budget, and the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence should be abolished. The czar should also be given a fixed term -- one that does not coincide with each change of administration -- to help shield him from political influence.
Consolidating power in this way, however, does not mean the intelligence community should be morphed into a single Cabinet department or that the new czar should function as a secretary of intelligence, running the day-to-day operations of the various agencies. At best, that would lead to an "additional layer of bureaucracy," as McLaughlin has charged, and at worst, it could produce a Frankenstein's monster of disparate parts stitched together like the Department of Homeland Security (see Michael Crowley, "Playing Defense," March 15). Instead, the new intelligence chief should set policy, provide resources, and enforce inter-community collaboration, leading the intelligence community just as the national security adviser directs the National Security Council -- precisely what the 1947 National Security Act envisaged. (In fact, the institutional resources for the office of an intelligence czar already exist in the DCI's Community Management Staff, which facilitates interagency cooperation.) It's true that some of these steps could be taken without creating a new position. The CIA director could be allotted a fixed term (as McLaughlin has suggested) and greater budgetary authority (as McLaughlin and two of his predecessors, Tenet and Robert M. Gates, have suggested). But that would still leave the CIA director in his own world, disconnected from other agencies that need his help and whose help he needs. McLaughlin may feel safe living in that world, but we don't.
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