The impact of a new intelligence czar

Almost everyone agrees that the nation's broad-ranging intelligence community needs a strong centralized leader. But a sharp debate is emerging over whether that person is the national intelligence director as proposed by President Bush this week.

Supporters contend that such a powerful position will be able to coordinate the nation's 15 different intelligence agencies, focus their various expertise and synthesize critical intelligence - a kind of one-stop shop for the nation's leaders at a time of crisis.

Critics generally agree that reforms are overdue, but they don't believe the position as proposed by President Bush would be able to accomplish those goals. The reason: The director would be hampered by a lack of control over pursestrings and programs at various agencies - a challenge that now faces the director of central intelligence. He or she would have little or no control over the spy budget at the Pentagon, which currently controls about 80 to 85 percent of the estimated $40 billion or more that Americans spend on intelligence each year.

"Yes, it's important to have a central authority with budgetary authority, who's not in the White House who will make heads roll when necessary and bring together the 15 different agencies in the intelligence community," says Tom Sanderson, deputy director of transnational threats at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. "But getting from here to there is going to be difficult."

Tuesday lawmakers on Capitol Hill echoed those concerns at a hearing on President Bush's proposals. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D) of Connecticut worried that "when everyone is in charge, no one is in charge."

Still there's general agreement that a centralized authority is necessary. Here's why: As evidenced by the findings of the bipartisan 9/11 commission and the failures of various agencies to share critical intelligence about the hijackers, the current state of intelligence affairs appears chaotic at best.

One former senior official who worked at both the CIA and the FBI describes the situation akin to a kids' soccer game. All of the 15 agencies are aggressively going after the same thing - think of intelligence as the ball - routinely bumping into each other, stepping on each other's toes and sometimes duplicating moves. Meanwhile, the congressional committees that have oversight are like parents on the sidelines, cheering, criticizing, and sometimes hollering out contradictory instructions. In the middle of it all is the current director of central intelligence. Think of him as the coach with no whistle. And the only players that take him seriously are the few on his team (the CIA).

Supporters of the president's proposal contend it will give the coach a loud whistle and the ability to organize and direct the teams, even without direct control over the Pentagon's intelligence gathering. And they say he or she will have some say on budget matters.

Page: 1 | 2