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After Tenet, a call for reforms in spy agencies

By Chuck McCutcheon
Newhouse News Service

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS / AP CIA Director George Tenet ponders a question while testifying in February before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on national security.

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Tenet's decision to leave next month paves the way for a debate over how to resolve those issues.

The CIA and 14 other agencies representing the U.S. intelligence community have been beset by difficulties in recruiting human sources and by the inability to fully analyze and share information from reams of incoming data, many observers agree.

The CIA director also has managerial authority over only the CIA, with most other agencies and around 80 percent of the estimated $40 billion in annual intelligence spending under Pentagon control.

Tenet's resignation "presents an opportunity for the intelligence community to undergo the structural reforms critical to our national security that I have long advocated," said former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who had called for Tenet's resignation since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

"What this announcement does is completely shuffle the deck and open up some basic questions about the future direction of intelligence," echoed Steven Aftergood, an analyst who tracks government secrecy and intelligence for the Federation of American Scientists, a watchdog group.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., said yesterday that it would be wrong to try to undertake intelligence reforms during an election year and at a time when the CIA's performance on Iraq and other areas is still being examined.

Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, Tenet had tried to reorient spy agencies away from their traditional Cold War framework and toward terrorism and other "asymmetric" threats. He has sought more money to hire thousands of new employees, including analysts and Arabic translators.

Tenet's efforts won him strong support from President Bush and — in his initial years on the job — from a broad bipartisan group in Congress. But some lawmakers said changes were necessary after the Sept. 11 attacks and the failed prediction that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.

Others critics said Tenet became too interested in pleasing the White House to make the sweeping changes needed in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

"What we need is a director of central intelligence who is independent of the White House and who will provide accurate information on a timely basis, irrespective of what the folks in the White House want to hear," said Richard Stubbing, Duke University public-policy professor who oversaw intelligence and national security budgets for the Office of Management and Budget from 1974 to 1981.
 
Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced bills that would create a national intelligence director with greater budgetary authority over other agencies besides the CIA, which is similar to what Shelby is proposing. The House version, sponsored by Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., would make the director's position a 10-year term similar to that of the FBI director.

"We need a true director of the entire intelligence community — all 15 agencies — who has the necessary authority, responsibility and accountability," said Harman, the House Intelligence Committee's ranking Democrat.

Giving the Defense Department control over intelligence budgets "is not the way to have an independent intelligence community," agreed Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., sponsor of the Senate version.

But the Defense Department has objected to ceding any of its authority. Pentagon officials have argued that much intelligence work is still done in support of military operations.

In addition, some observers have worried that if the authority of Tenet's successor is replaced with a new position, it could make it harder to find the best person to continue to run the CIA.

"It might make it harder to get a new (CIA) director if reform means downgrading the position," said Norman Ornstein, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank.