A Drug War Boondoggle
The White House wants to kill it, but a little government agency may manage to live on
In 1993, when the NDIC officially opened, the congressional General Accounting Office issued a damning report citing duplication among 19 drug intelligence centers that already existed. And many involved in the process said the idea of gathering information from other law enforcement agencies for strategic assessments on drug trafficking just wasn't workable. In some cases, federal law prevented agencies from sharing sensitive intelligence; in others, rival agencies simply refused to give up proprietary information. "The bottom line," Milford said, "was that we had to actually search for a mission."
Stonewalled, the NDIC began operating, effectively, as an extended staff for other drug agencies, working on projects too cumbersome, peripheral, or time-consuming for their own teams of intelligence analysts. The center was costing about $30 million a year, but, as a former official of the drug czar's office put it bluntly, "we saw nothing" from it.
Former DEA official Dick Canas, who took over the NDIC in 1996--one of the few bosses who actually moved to Johnstown--was determined to elevate the facility's status. He began collating and analyzing "open-source information" --intelligence already available to the public--and pulling it all together in one place. The plan was "nonthreatening" to other agencies, Canas argued, and would at least provide policymakers with a general overview of the war on drugs. That project morphed into an annual report called the National Drug Threat Assessment, which officials say is of some real value.
The Johnstown center racked up one other success. Its "document exploitation" program regularly dispatched analysts into the field to process files seized by other law-enforcement agencies using software it developed called RAID (real-time analytical intelligence database). Johnstown analysts used the software to organize data and help law enforcement agencies develop investigative leads.
Cronyism? In 2000, the Clinton administration tried to define the center's role more sharply by releasing the General Counterdrug Intelligence Plan, which restricted the reach of the Johnstown center to domestic intelligence only. Canas, gone by 1999, was replaced by another DEA executive, Mike Horn, who was the fifth interim or permanent director in six years; Horn kept an apartment in Johnstown but traveled back to a home in the Washington area on weekends.
Horn's tenure made everything that came before it seem placid. Despite the NDIC's domestic mandate, Horn and his assistant, Mary Lou Rodgers, made frequent trips abroad to promote a new version of the RAID software in places like Hong Kong, London, and Vienna, racking up nearly $164,000 in travel expenses in less than four years. A Justice Department investigation in 2003 admonished Horn for "unprofessional conduct in . . . dealings with Ms. Rodgers," but that wasn't the end of it. A letter-writing campaign by NDIC employees accused Horn of continued travel abuse and cronyism, prompting another review by Justice lawyers last year. It was also discovered that the new version of the RAID software promoted by Horn had yet to be developed. Many NDIC insiders say morale was poor.
In March 2004, Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis suspended Horn's power to authorize travel for Rodgers. In June 2004, Margolis fired Horn. The Justice Department won't comment on the matter. Horn claims all travel was approved and says he has not been made to pay restitution. Horn blames the low morale on malcontents who resented the quality of work he demanded. "I recognized that a lot of reports were God-awful, poorly written, poorly researched, and, in some cases, wrong," he says. Some insiders say that under Horn, the center got as close as it ever would to producing some truly strategic intelligence reports. Not surprisingly, in light of the morale and other problems, others disagree.
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