Washington's toughest job
The CIA is only one can of worms. How will the DNI monitor and control the FBI's counterintelligence operations here at home? Negroponte will not be directly in charge of any operation; nor of covert actions; nor possibly of CIA station chiefs; nor of the army of analysts whose job it is to connect the dots; nor of the operators of high-tech collection systems critical to finding and disrupting terrorist plans; nor of the Defense Department assets such as the satellite-eavesdropping systems.
What he will have to do is gain adequate access to the people in the trenches. Negroponte's acute knowledge of how power works in Washington will help him, but he will need the resolute support of the president and the Congress, especially when things go awry. We should have learned by now that an intelligence service dedicated to a mistake-free, risk-averse zone of operations will not protect us. Intelligence is a business that must be prepared to assume risks and to accept the inevitability of some failures. The terrorists are conniving strategists who will fail frequently and be caught before they strike, but once in a while they will be able to get through. To be risk averse means never to be bold enough or creative enough to meet their challenge.
George Tenet, former head of the CIA, made lots of progress in bringing the 20th-century intelligence community infrastructure into the 21st century. The new DNI will surely maintain and, let's hope, enhance that tradition of support for services that are so critical to our national well-being in the face of cunning and ruthless enemies.
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