Mission Impossible
The inside story of how a band of reformers tried--and failed--to change America's spy agencies
The quartet who took the reigns of the ODCI--the Office of the DCI--are virtually unknown outside Washington's national security circles. But to many inside they are heroes, operatives who were given a true mission impossible--reforming the intelligence community before 9/11.
There was Joan Dempsey, an Arkansas native who had worked in U.S. intelligence since she was an 18-year-old Navy tech listening in on Soviet bomber and submarine traffic. Known as a tough, shrewd professional, Dempsey had risen to be the Pentagon's senior civilian career intelligence officer before joining the CIA as George Tenet's chief of staff. She was, says one colleague, the best "closer" he'd ever seen--someone who knew how to cut deals and get the job done. Dempsey was given the top spot, as deputy director of central intelligence for community management.
Under Dempsey were three veterans of the CIA. Her deputy for administration was a sharp-witted native of Montgomery, Ala. An amateur Egyptologist and 25-year veteran of Army intelligence and the CIA, James Simon had experience in almost every facet of the spy business, from imagery to eavesdropping. Placed in charge of analysis was John Gannon, a widely respected veteran who had run the agency's Directorate of Intelligence and was now chairman of the DCI's National Intelligence Council, which oversaw the community's weighty "estimates" on key issues. Finally, there was Charlie Allen, more of a legend than a man around the CIA. "If you don't think you're getting your money's worth out of the federal government," says an admirer, "you should meet Charlie Allen." A workaholic, Allen had served as an intelligence officer for 40 years and earned a reputation as a plain-spoken professional who regularly bucked the bureaucracy. After warning again and again back in 1990 that Saddam Hussein was about to invade Kuwait, Allen was dismissed as an alarmist and nearly disciplined. Saddam invaded two weeks later; Allen received a CIA Commendation Medal for his trouble. At the ODCI, Allen was put in charge of collection, overseeing the gathering of intelligence by everything from human spies to satellites to remote listening posts.
The nerve center of the new team was the sixth floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. There the ODCI staff, some 200 men and women from a dozen different agencies, spread out across a series of colorless government cubicles. The new managers harbored few illusions. The Office of the DCI was long seen as a backwater in the intelligence community. "You had a certain percentage of people there," said Simon, "who, frankly, had retired in place or were considered to be brain-dead."
Before the team was fully assembled, events interceded. In May 1998, the new nationalist government in New Delhi detonated three nuclear weapons in India's first tests since 1974, a move thought likely to spark a new arms race with Pakistan. Washington learned about the blasts from an Indian press release. White House officials were livid; critics branded it the worst intelligence failure since the inflated estimates of Soviet power. The CIA's new director, Tenet, put on his DCI cap and promised change. "I'm going to take direct charge of how our community collects information, how collection and analysis are lashed together," he told reporters, "to ensure that the kind of event that occurred here will not occur again."
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