Mission Impossible
The inside story of how a band of reformers tried--and failed--to change America's spy agencies
Moving on technology. Despite the opposition, the ODCI team did have some successes. The staff created a Mission Requirements Board, an interagency committee that, for the first time, ensures that future satellites and other key intelligence systems are compatible and wired into the community. On R&D, they set up the community's first joint research effort, the Advanced Research and Development Activity, which now spends up to $100 million annually on cutting-edge technologies deemed vital to intelligence. Among the project areas: using nanotechnology to create microscopic electronic bugs that can penetrate terrorist camps, and development of sophisticated new data-mining software, dubbed Novel Intelligence from Massive Data. Even a scaled-back version of ICMAP is getting funded, says Charlie Allen, who took over the project when James Simon left in early 2003. Allen expects a pilot version next year. All it took, he says wryly, were 23 drafts to get the proposal approved by agency heads.
By last year, Allen was the only survivor of the original ODCI team; the others have moved on to new jobs in national security. For fighting the good fight, Joan Dempsey was given the William Oliver Baker Award in July, an honor shared by four former CIA directors and, in 2002, by Allen. She is still pushing to tear down the walls. At the awards ceremony, she spoke ruefully of an intelligence community that believed "controlling intelligence was more important than using it." It was, she said, "the one constant in every job I've held and, frankly, I believe it is our biggest failing. . . . We simply must find a way to change the paradigm." Exactly who will change that paradigm is unclear. Dempsey's job, as head of community management, remains unfilled a year after her departure.
Well past retirement age, Allen remains at his post, tasking spies, satellites, and electronic eavesdroppers around the globe. "I'm the night watch for central intelligence," he jokes. "It's like housework; you have to keep it up." The problem, say his former colleagues, is that Allen is essentially a one-man show. "Even Charlie can only deal with the top 5 percent of problems," says one. "Who knows what will happen when he goes?"
Why the ODCI team failed to succeed, despite the high-profile talent involved, remains a subject of debate. Porter Goss, the CIA veteran who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, calls the ODCI effort "a brilliant fix that didn't work." But that, says Simon, is precisely because Congress failed to give the team real authority. The ODCI effort failed, Simon argues, because it lacked the two key elements of successful reform in government: control of budget and of personnel. "Congress put us in an untenable situation," he says. "Being clever can only take you so far when you lack resources."
Gannon sees it somewhat differently. "We were transforming, but we weren't transforming fast enough," he says. At an intelligence conference a year before the 9/11 attacks, Gannon warned of the consequences of failure, citing Will Rogers's old advice: "It isn't good enough to be moving in the right direction. If you are not moving fast enough, you can still get run over!"
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