Q&A: John Negroponte
Well, there are cultural issues–they need to be worked–that range from security practices and practices with respect to security clearances to the way we go about sharing information with other countries; how to share information or release it to other countries without prejudicing sources and methods; so on and so forth. Intelligence has a long history, and people have their ways of doing things. Our objective here is not to undermine these strong traditions.
I think what we want to do, though, is find the commonalities–find the points where people can work in common–and really try to empower each and every one of them to even better be able to do their work and try to convince them that through sharing information across the community as a whole, through working together, they can further empower themselves, more than they were before. And I think that's catching on, I really do. I think we're getting traction.
What is the single toughest beast that you have to tackle?
Well, I think the toughest beast remains getting good, reliable information about the hardest targets, whether it's North Korea or Iran or counterproliferation or counterterrorism. When you're thinking about what's a big challenge for us, you've got to focus on, well, what is the product that we want to get as a result of all of this investment we make in our intelligence apparatus? And clearly what we want is reliable, good information about what is going on with respect to these different situations. I'm not saying that we're not making progress; I'm just saying, that's the big challenge. Hard targets, denied areas, denial and deception by our adversaries–those are the big issues we have to contend with, and we just have to keep striving to improve the effectiveness of our coverage.
We've been talking to several people about budget issues, such as the curtailing of the Future Imagery Architecture satellite program at the National Reconnaissance Office, which was seen as a test of the DNI's authority. Did it take your personal intervention?
Oh, yeah.
Was that a pretty tough fight?
It's a little hard to talk about budget issues in much detail because the intelligence budget is classified. What I can say is that, first of all, when I talk about my personal priorities, I always talk about improving analysis, I talk about building a sense of community, and then I talk about making the most effective use of the resources that have been made available to us by the Congress and the American people. So, when it comes to budget issues, with respect to any aspect of our intelligence activities, including national technical needs of intelligence collection, I have asked that we really take a very, very hard look at both the program proposals that are made and the funding requests that go along with that.
I was concerned when I first came in by reports that quite often we would enter into procurement practices or budgetary practices that would get one toe in the water, if you will, on a particular technology, and then it turns out that we would have very large cost overruns, and then we would be confronted with situations, several years into the process, where you might have eight or 10 projects on the books, but you really find that you can only afford five or six of them. So probably the most significant thing that I believe I've pressed for is realistic budgeting for these projects, so that we have a good appreciation upfront of what the costs are likely to be. I mean, you always run the risks of overruns.
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