Valerie Plame should be the next Director of Central
Intelligence, not Gen. Mike Hayden. Now that the CIA’s Praetorian
Guard has — with the connivance of National Intelligence Director
John Negroponte — rid itself of Porter Goss, the CIA is
confidently preparing to march back into the intelligence dark ages
that preceded 9/11.
Gen. Hayden — former head of the National Intelligence Agency
and most famous for his strong defense of the NSA terrorist
surveillance program — is slated to be nominated for the DCI post
today. Hayden, now Negroponte’s deputy and choice for DCI, will
face tough questioning in his confirmation hearing about the
warrantless interception of phone calls and e-mail traffic between
known terrorist connections in the United States with their pals
overseas. Nevertheless he will be confirmed and take his place at
CIA or, rather, the place that the CIA bureaucracy has prepared for
him.
The entrenched CIA Praetorian Guard has announced its plan for
Hayden’s tenure. In two Sunday Washington Post stories
(here and here), another in the New York Times and a
Times editorial, CIA sources got their media pals to argue
that the greatest concern for the future of our primary
intelligence agency is how Gen. Hayden will conduct their turf war
against the Defense Department. In the two WaPo stories,
the CIA’s turf battle against Donald Rumsfeld is mentioned five
times. The NYT story is relatively mild in mentioning it
only once, but the editorial makes up for that by making the attack
on Rumsfeld’s partial control of intelligence its central theme.
The CIA sources who pushed these stories care only about their
power and privileges. The essential transformation of the
intelligence agencies to make America safer is not on their minds.
The CIA Praetorians prepare for Hayden’s arrival by questioning his
ability, in the words of one Post story, “to be
independent from Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.” Which
means that the CIA leaker brigade will attack Hayden as a failure
unless he allows the CIA bureaucrats to control what he does. If
that is Hayden’s future at CIA, it would be better just to appoint
one of the Praetorians to the job or to make Valerie Plame Wilson,
their consort, the CIA chief.
The CIA remains a dysfunctional agency. That results from the
failure to remove the Praetorians and from the Congressional rush
to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. In August
2004, Loose
Canons said, “We don’t need another layer of bureaucracy such
as the ‘national intelligence director’ the 9/11 Commission
recommended. We need — as Director of Central Intelligence — a
real leader and reformer with the stature and vision to force
jointness upon the intel community as it was forced upon DoD by the
Goldwater-Nichols legislation of the 1980s.” What we got was
precisely what I said we didn’t want.
The Director of National Intelligence, as Congress created him,
is just another bureaucratic layer that disperses our national
intelligence apparatus in precisely the manner that can most damage
the gathering and analyzing of intelligence information. John
Negroponte, the DNI, has tried to shift a large part of the CIA’s
intelligence analysis staff to his own office, splitting the
function that must be forced together and joined in a central
organization. Porter Goss fought against it, and is now being
blamed for resisting transformation and for stepping on too many
toes. Against him were both Negroponte and the other agencies that
were given new responsibility for intelligence analysis after 9/11.
Goss quit when Negroponte won the battle to shift some analysis out
of the CIA and into DNI.
What Negroponte should be doing is just the opposite. CIA
intelligence analysis is inadequate and splitting it up is no
answer. All the fuss about the Defense Department’s growing intel
apparatus is misplaced. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon are fighting a
war and to do that they need accurate intel and lots of it. The DoD
is only trying to create what it must have because it doesn’t get
it from CIA, DNI, or anywhere else. It’s the fastest solution to an
urgent national security problem. The problem only grows worse
outside DoD.
Creating the DNI, Kansas Senator Pat Roberts (chairman of the
Intelligence Committee) wanted to give it real power. As one source
told me, “The theory was a DCI or DNI on steroids with actual
control so there would be no more negotiating” among the disparate
intelligence agencies. Roberts wanted the DNI to have direct
supervisory control as well as budgetary authority. But Congress
didn’t adopt Roberts’s plan. Instead, it created a DNI that’s just
another layer of bureaucracy. The NIC is independent, and a whole
list of agencies — including the Department of Homeland Security,
Department of Energy, Treasury, the State Department’s INR and
Defense Intelligence Agency’s analysis branch — are all
semi-autonomous. It is precisely the opposite of the approach I
advocated in August 2004, which would have forced the same kind of
“jointness” on the intelligence community that the
Goldwater-Nichols bill of 1986 forced on the Defense Department,
making it ten times more effective and efficient as it was before.
Intelligence reform, if it is ever to happen, has to begin with
either eliminating the DNI altogether or going back to the Roberts
plan.
It’s probably too late to save the CIA. Gen. Hayden is, in any
event, the wrong guy to even attempt it. He’s a techie who has had
little experience in the human intelligence game where the CIA’s
failure is most important. But does he have the vision, guts and
experience to brush past the CIA Praetorians and reform our spy
apparatus while ignoring the bureaucratic battles that his boss —
the DNI — will be mired in forever? Unfortunately the answer is —
almost certainly — no.
Four months from now, on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the
President will give another speech about how much safer America is
than it was before the airliners hit the World Trade Center, the
Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania. He’ll speak with
confidence about how much better our intelligence agencies have
become. If only it were true.
TAS contributing editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are
Worse Than You Think (Regnery, 2004) and, with Edward
Timperlake, Showdown: Why China Wants War With the United
States (Regnery, May 2006 — click here to obtain a free chapter).
