Q&A: John Negroponte
U.S. News's David E. Kaplan and Kevin Whitelaw met with Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte in early October in his office, which overlooks the Potomac River and the Washington Monument on Bolling Air Force Base. The veteran diplomat became the nation's first DNI in April 2005. Before that, he served as the U.S. ambassador to four countries, including Iraq, and to the United Nations.
Extended excerpts:
What is your vision for where you're trying to go with your reform efforts?
The vision is to integrate foreign, domestic, and military intelligence so as to protect the homeland and United States interests and allies abroad. I think that in a nutshell is kind of our mission statement. And frankly, I think it's all about integration, and I think it's all about information sharing.
What does a 21st-century U.S. intelligence community look like?
Well, let me maybe not be so ambitious as to talk about the entire 21st century, but what should it look like in light of current circumstances and into the medium term. I think, first of all, you've got to recognize that each of these individual intelligence disciplines, whether it's human intelligence or geospatial intelligence or signals intelligence, can't operate on their own. I think we've always been aware of that, but I think it's been accentuated and highlighted more by advances in modern technology and the realization of what can be accomplished when these intelligence disciplines operate in an integrated fashion. And I think technology is our friend in this, and I think technology is actually helping drive us toward greater cooperation. So rather than believing that these different agencies and the people who manage these different intelligence disciplines resist integration, I would submit to you that they all see the logic of better cooperation, better information sharing, and better coordination between them.
Just to cite one example, there's no way on earth that [Iraqi militant] Abu Musab Zarqawi could have been killed if it had not been for the integration of intelligence disciplines. You've seen the accounts of how he was gotten.
Was there something qualitatively different in the hunt for Zarqawi that wouldn't have happened a few years ago?
I think the integration is much farther along than it ever was before. We used to think of [the National Security Agency] as a national intelligence asset that tended to be, you know, behind the lines and playing an important, but supportive, role from a certain distance from the tactical battlefield. But now, one of the interesting developments, I think, in modern intelligence is that the strategic and the tactical, the distinctions sometimes are blurred, and in actual fact, now we deploy some of these capabilities much farther forward than we used to. So, I think there is a big difference and that coordination has just been perfected, I guess, might be the word.
Is there something in particular you're thinking about in the way the Zarqawi operation worked?
Well, I don't have tidbits about how these things happen, but clearly, there was signals intelligence, there was human intelligence, there was geospatial intelligence. Plus there was cooperation between more than one intelligence service. So, I think you had integration in various ways. Not only within ourselves but also with foreign liaison partners.
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