Remaking U.S. Intelligence - Part I: Introduction
Its backers dubbed it the "big idea." CIA Director Michael Hayden says it was "pass/fail" for the nation's espionage agencies. For years, America's allies had complained about the one-way flow of information with U.S. intelligence. Now, things were going to be different, according to the nation's first director of national intelligence. Founded in April 2005, the DNI was to be the change agent in the Washington intelligence game, the outfit that would fix the spy agencies caught flat-footed by the 9/11 attacks and embarrassed by their failure to accurately diagnose the weapons threat from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Change had to start somewhere, and in the DNI's view, there was no better place than SIPRNET. The Pentagon's workhorse computer network is jam-packed with real-time operational information from the CIA and other spy agencies. U.S. allies had long coveted SIPRNET access, but past efforts to share the information with them had foundered on the usual intelligence bugbear: "security concerns." Not this time, vowed DNI officials. They had a key assist: Hayden, a four-star Air Force general, had just arrived at the CIA after a brief stint as the deputy DNI. As the agency's new boss, he could have sought to curry favor with its espionage mandarins and balked at sharing SIPRNET's secrets. But his time at the DNI and, before that, as the head of the global eavesdropping National Security Agency allowed him a broader view. "If that didn't happen," Hayden says, referring to the opening up of siprnet, "then I think everyone would have doubted our seriousness about information sharing."
Hayden made the call: The CIA would play ball. As a result, in a bloody summer that saw sectarian death squads wreaking havoc in Iraq and terrorists in Britain plotting to hijack nearly a dozen airplanes, America's closest allies suddenly had a powerful new tool to use against terrorists. For the first time, Australian, British, and Canadian officials had immediate access to video feeds from unmanned Predator drones over Afghanistan and other real-time intelligence that allowed them to better coordinate search-and-rescue operations in Iraq. The allies were ecstatic; on a DNI executive's recent visit to Australia, espionage officials there practically fell over each other trying to thank the man.
Today, even with the SIPRNET chapter and other early successes, the DNI's effort to transform the nation's sprawling intelligence community is still in its early days. Veteran diplomat John Negroponte moved into the DNI's office with a sweeping reform mandate from Congress but missing some key tools he might need to accomplish the task. In the legislation that created the DNI, lawmakers failed to give the office full authority over the 16 agencies that make up the whole comprises its parts, always. we can say the 16 agencies that the intel community comprises if you prefer—the intelligence community.
Front lines. Despite some criticism that Negroponte and his staff have moved too slowly, U.S. News found that the DNI has embarked on an impressive array of reform efforts. Some, like pushing through a first-ever communitywide security badge, have had an immediate impact. Others, more ambitious, will take years to succeed—or fail. If they succeed, however, they will result in nothing less than the most sweeping reform of the intelligence community since its creation nearly 60 years ago.
For this report, U.S. News was granted extraordinary access to nearly two dozen of the most senior intelligence officials in the government, including Negroponte and the chiefs of the CIA, military intelligence, and the National Counterterrorism Center. In addition, the magazine interviewed dozens of former officials, congressional sources, and outside experts and reviewed hundreds of pages of documents. The results offer an unusual inside look at how, five years after 9/11, America's frontline defense against terrorism and rogue states is faring.
From its first cramped quarters in the White House's New Executive Office Building, the fledgling DNI staff began by simply taking stock. Negroponte and his staff—most, veterans of other U.S. intelligence agencies—lacked some very basic information about the size and scope of their new empire. The intelligence community numbers nearly 100,000 people, but nobody had ever succeeded in taking a complete inventory of its resources. What were all those analysts working on? Who was keeping track of them? And what about the spies on the ground? Who was making sure they were focusing on the right targets? The questions were endless; the answers, in many cases, disturbing. A DNI survey turned up 17,000 intelligence analysts in various corners of the government—that was 1,500 more than anyone knew about.
Even before the 9/11 attacks, the nation's budget for intelligence activity of all kinds had grown sharply, and no one had succeeded in reining in all the spending. In just eight years, Washington's intelligence budget more than doubled, making it one of the fastest-growing parts of the government. Officials insist on keeping the exact figure secret, but U.S. News has learned that the annual budget (excluding that for tactical military intelligence) soared from $15.5 billion in 1998 to $44.4 billion last year—an increase of 139 percent, after adjusting for inflation. With 16 agencies, hundreds of offices, and scores of different E-mail systems, DNI managers had to figure out how to make their authority felt across the patchwork-quilt intelligence bureaucracy. "How do you communicate down from where we sit?" asks DNI Chief of Staff David Shedd, a former CIA case officer. "It is a huge challenge."
And it's unlikely to be met anytime soon. To date, most of the nascent reform efforts don't seem to have penetrated deeply into the intelligence agencies' rank and file, where many remain skeptical about the DNI's chances for success. Intelligence veterans have seen would-be reformers come and go before, and many may just be waiting for the DNI to go the way of its predecessors. Since 1991, no fewer than 16 federal studies and commissions have called for major reform of the U.S. intelligence community, but for the past half century, its basic structure has remained essentially unchanged. Many of the reforms were attempted under CIA Director George Tenet, who, like other CIA chiefs before the advent of the DNI, also held the role of coordinating the community as the director of central intelligence. Joan Dempsey knows how tough the DNI's job will be. Until 2003, Dempsey worked as Tenet's deputy director in charge of "community management." Her reform efforts were largely stymied by the bureaucracy. Today, Dempsey wants to see the DNI leadership push hard for change. "We haven't started transformation in the intelligence community yet," she says. "We're still nibbling around the edges."
The offices of the DNI are now in more expansive, if temporary, quarters on the Potomac River, at Bolling Air Force Base, in Washington, D.C. Behind steel doors marked "Restricted Area," Negroponte and his top aides believe they have an unprecedented opportunity to drive real reform. "You've got a group of leaders in the community who, to a very large degree, are playing as a community," says Mary Margaret Graham, a veteran of the CIA's Clandestine Service who is the deputy DNI for collection. "In the early days there was...there wasn't much give and take. Now there is an extraordinary amount at the senior levels of the community."
NEXT:Part II: The Money