Intelligence reforms hit resistance

Among the main recommendations of the 9/11 commission that Congress is considering is the creation of a new multiagency counterterrorism center. Also on the list is possible consolidation of the many Congressional committees with oversight power over intelligence, and the transfer of responsibility for secret paramilitary operations from the CIA to the Pentagon.

But the central change - and the one that has attracted the most controversy - would be the establishment of new NID with wide powers over all intelligence agencies. Since 80 percent of the intelligence budget is currently controlled by the Department of Defense, Pentagon officials generally oppose this change.

"This is your vintage, classic turf battle now between those who want to hold on to their budgetary and policy power and those who would take it away from them," says Jim Walsh, an expert on international security at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass.

In hearings over the last two weeks, both Pentagon officials and leaders of the armed services panels have expressed caution over moving DoD intelligence agencies under someone else's control. Their main worry is that battlefield commanders should have the same access to intelligence from all sources that they have now.

Former directors of central intelligence, for their part, have generally supported the creation of a more powerful NID in recent appearances on the Hill. Retired Adm. Stansfield Turner noted that President Carter gave him substantial budget power over the intelligence community via executive order. Such power could be reestablished with a stroke of a president's pen.

Yet taken as a whole this week's testimony hinted at a possible middle ground. On appointments, a new NID could be given joint authority with the Secretary of Defense for picking the chief of such important organizations as the eavesdropping National Security Agency, former Clinton intelligence chief Jim Woolsey told the Senate Governmental Affairs panel.

Woolsey and other former officials also said that the real issue on the intelligence budget is not drawing up original spending plans, but "reprogramming," or the ability to move money from one account to another after it has already been appropriated by the Congress. Such power would allow a NID to quickly put more money into, say, the recruitment of human spies, if need be. It could be exercised in consultation with the Secretary of Defense.

Virtually everyone agreed on one thing: It's bad to transfer all paramilitary operations into the Pentagon. The CIA needs the capability to carry out operations in support of intelligence-gathering. "There are clearly things that the Central Intelligence Agency does that are covert that the Department of Defense ought not to do," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said.

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