Mission Impossible
The inside story of how a band of reformers tried--and failed--to change America's spy agencies
Three months later, al Qaeda's terrorists struck in East Africa, destroying two embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. On December 4, Tenet sent out his now famous memo: "We are at war," he declared. "I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the community." From her office on the sixth floor, Dempsey dutifully had the memo faxed to the heads of the other major intelligence agencies. The response: nothing. The new ODCI staff was getting its first taste of their limited powers.
Charlie Allen sprung to action. He began sending out "tasking" orders, demanding increased satellite coverage of Afghanistan and more electronic intercepts of al Qaeda's communications. "Charlie tasked the hell out of the collection agencies," says an ODCI staffer, "but Tenet's memo was completely ignored by the leadership." Why? The National Security Agency director at the time, Lt. Gen. Kenneth Minihan, told the 9/11 commission he believed the memo applied only to the CIA. Not so, says the staffer. "They knew they didn't have to respond to the DCI and they didn't . . . . they had lots of taskings so they can pick and choose what they do."
Pushing the Predator. Allen kept at it. "Everyone said this is a job that can't be done," he told U.S. News . "I began to task and to push and to shove." Eventually, things started to happen. "I had to lean on people," he says, sounding more like a Mafia boss than a bureaucrat. Allen convened daily meetings on al Qaeda with key players from across the community--specialists in satellite imagery, electronic intercepts, and covert action. He finally got a satellite moved--no easy task--and had U.S. intelligence charting al Qaeda's camps as never before. Working with the National Security Council's Richard Clarke, Allen pushed a new drone, the Predator, into service in Afghanistan--despite the CIA's reluctance. "It was," he said, "a bloody struggle."
The rest of the new ODCI team was finding it no easier. The problems were so many and so deep it was hard even to know where to begin. The budgetary and personnel systems were archaic and labyrinthine. Individual spy agencies resembled not so much modern corporations as feudal fiefdoms. Communitywide, there was only the most tenuous central authority, widespread duplication of effort, and secrecy bordering on paranoia.
The ODCI's first job, the team decided, was crafting a common vision, a strategic plan that set goals for the entire intelligence community. The fact that one did not exist, insiders say, was itself an indictment of the system. Within a year, the ODCI staff had produced a classified road map. Titled simply "Strategic Intent for the Intelligence Community," the plan was anything but simple. At the heart of the strategy was integrating a dozen disparate agencies into a true community by breaking down the walls that impeded the flow of intelligence.
The walls, however, were everywhere. Not just between agencies but within them, too. At the CIA, the spies of the Operations Directorate distrusted the analysts whose job was to make sense of patterns and look for clues. The FBI's criminal investigators and spy catchers refused to talk to each other. The National Security Agency, the nation's global eavesdropping shop, had so many internal E-mail systems that the director had trouble communicating with his own staff. In the arcane argot of the intelligence world, such divisions are called stovepipes, vertical tubes that send information upward for superiors to mull but seldom across divisions, where it could be checked and added to other data. Reformers spoke of "gorillas in the stovepipes" --program managers who protected their turf from outsiders at all costs. "If you collected it," Simon explained, "you own it."
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