Mission Impossible
The inside story of how a band of reformers tried--and failed--to change America's spy agencies
All these projects encountered fierce opposition from the parent agencies in the intelligence community. "The reward systems are all based on protection," says John Gannon, who played a key role in trying to link up the community's analysts. "You don't come into work saying how can I share better today." The message was clear enough from a study the ODCI staff commissioned, in which virtual teams collaborated at the highest classification levels across seven agencies. The exercise was a resounding flop. An executive summary cited "significant cultural barriers to effective collaboration." In fact, participants were wary of sharing their secrets and blindly distrustful of each other. Worse, they saw few if any benefits from sharing their work product. Gannon was confronted by a member of the CIA executive director's staff, who insisted he explain why it was in the agency's interest to collaborate. "Why can't we do this ourselves?" he demanded. When it came to networking, concluded Gannon, the CIA "was a real dinosaur." It was easier for him to communicate with a CIA station in Azerbaijan than with the Defense Intelligence Agency 17 miles away.
Beaten down by the entrenched bureaucracies and the security police, the ODCI team gave up trying to network the intelligence community. In 2001, Dempsey transferred the position of chief information officer to the CIA, hoping that the agency's clout might make a difference. Her staff was furious and blamed the DCI for failing to support the networking initiative. "Tenet," complained a Dempsey aide, "could have made a difference."
And just where was George Tenet? The ODCI staff was beginning to get the idea that not even their boss was behind them. "There was no top leadership support for us," reflects Gannon, who faults not only Tenet but his predecessors. "The DCI s I worked with cared most about CIA resources that gave them clout in the White House, the Congress, and overseas. They saw little incentive to use even the authority they had to manage the community."
There was ample reason for this. Years as a top Capitol Hill staffer had taught Tenet about the politics of power. Given the inherent lack of authority in the DCI post and the absence of any mandate from the White House to shake things up, it made little sense to pick fights with the rest of the intelligence community. The ODCI staff felt they were left on their own. The result, says Simon, "was death by a thousand cuts."
Tenet takes strong exception to such criticism, and argues that community issues were in fact at the top of his agenda (box, above). But ODCI veterans disagree. The worst of it, they say, was that the CIA, on whose turf they worked, had become their toughest foe. Tenet never backed them on any project the CIA opposed, staffers claim, and by 2001 the list of casualties had grown long: computer networking, clearances, open sources, foreign liaison, and more. "The CIA," Gannon said, "was not much of a community player." They point to the fact that the ODCI's top executive, Dempsey, lacked an office on the seventh floor, where the CIA's other deputy directors worked.
advertisement
