Mission Impossible
The inside story of how a band of reformers tried--and failed--to change America's spy agencies
Dempsey and her three lieutenants continued to push their reforms. But the more they pushed the worse things got. Representatives of other spy agencies failed to come to meetings convened by the ODCI staff. Some questioned their authority to even hold meetings. Others complained to Congress, says a former staffer, claiming the group was threatening the security of their agencies.
One area their detractors didn't mind was ODCI's fundraising. The concept of a unified intelligence community was a big sell on Capitol Hill, and in 1999, after a long drought, Dempsey and her team helped persuade Congress to loosen the purse strings. The team began moving funds to high-priority areas. Language training was key. So was research into open sources, public-record material spy agencies too often ignore. To NSA, the team dispatched funds for research into quantum computing--cutting-edge technology based on subatomic particles--that could revolutionize code-breaking. But once the funds were transferred, the agencies often moved them to other programs, say staffers, and ODCI was un-able to stop it. "CIA was the worst," says a former insider, "but every agency did it."
Among the most glaring problems was how to drive the intelligence community into the computer age. Insular and obsessed with security, much of the community had effectively missed the information and communications revolution of the 1990s. Security concerns prevented employees from bringing cellphones, laptops, and personal digital assistants into the CIA and other agencies. "It's a good thing the telephone was invented before the CIA existed," an analyst joked, "because if it were the other way around, they'd never let it in the building." In a world of networking, the price of such security was high. As the Internet and cellphones transformed how people worked and communicated, and sent productivity soaring in corporate America, many in the intelligence community lacked basic E-mail and Internet access. "We were focused on our navel," says a senior official, "during the biggest revolution since the Gutenberg press."
Despite its image as a gadget-happy, high-tech operation, the CIA was particularly backward. In 1995, electrical engineer Ruth David left Sandia National Laboratories to head the CIA's vaunted Science and Technology Division. She found an agency living in the past. Not only did her desk lack Internet access--so did most of the scientists and engineers who worked for her. "I was astonished," she told U.S. News . "You had a community that had fallen behind the power curve, not just in the use of technology but in how that technology was changing their world."
To help pull the community forward, among the ODCI's first steps was to do for the intelligence community what virtually every top corporation in America had already done--create a position of chief information officer. Remarkably, such a post did not yet exist. No one, in other words, was responsible for figuring out how to get the various agencies to communicate with one another. The ODCI's plan offered a vision of linking the disparate agencies with state-of-the-art tools for networking and shared databases. They began work on improving ICMAIL (pronounced ICE-mail), a clunky, classified E-mail system so unreliable that one top official likened it to "legalized gambling." Attachments could not be sent, and there were no address books. ODCI staffers also helped set up virtual communities, with code names like IranLink and Mexico Pilot, for intelligence analysts working on specific topics.
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