As Bush Mulls Creation of Intelligence Czar, Related Measures Continue to Spark Opposition

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — As the Bush administration considers creation of an intelligence czar, officials, experts and members of Congress are continuing a torrent of criticism of previous post-9/11 reforms undertaken in the same spirit as the reported new proposal and with many of the same goals (see GSN, April 16).

White House consideration of establishing a single overseer of U.S. intelligence, first reported last week in the New York Times, is an effort to address flaws in the information-gathering system that have come to light in high-profile hearings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

Several related measures have already been taken in a 2-year-old intelligence centralization campaign. “We just happen to be in a cycle ― it looks like a centralization cycle,” said RAND Corp. political scientist William Rosenau.

The new agencies created have generated frequent opposition. In creating clearinghouses to eliminate information-sharing barriers, the administration has failed to address some structural problems and to define some fundamental goals ― and has failed to make the country much safer, according to expert and official sources interviewed last week by Global Security Newswire.

Rosenau, an author of a recent RAND report on domestic intelligence and counterterrorism agencies in other countries, said the administration should decide what new capabilities it needs to prevent terrorism before tinkering with bureaucratic structure. Completing a national assessment of the terrorist threat ― a task now assigned to the Homeland Security Department (DHS) but progressing slowly, according to Rosenau and many other experts (see GSN, Feb. 13) ― is an essential first step, Rosenau said.

“We’ve got to start by saying, ‘Well, what do we want in terms of this assessment? What do we want it to say?  What kinds of information do we need to get out there?’ and basically say ― have the president say ―‘I don’t care what it costs. We’re going to do this,’” he said.

Especially harsh criticism has focused on the CIA-based Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), which, like the less-publicized, FBI-managed Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), was created last year by presidential order. Reagan-era National Security Agency chief William Odom offered a blunt assessment of the integration center in an interview last week with GSN.

“TTIC is a total fraud.  I wouldn’t even give it the time of day. … If they want to have that thing out there to get some sharing, and they just want to pay for an inefficient thing, well, that might do a little good, but it’s not going to solve the systemic problems,” said Odom, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. 

The center’s budget comes from several sources and is classified, but spokesman Donald Tighe of the Homeland Security Department’s Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate told Congressional Quarterly in February that his department’s portion for fiscal 2005 will be $24 million, “passed back” to the center from the department via the FBI.

The creation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center was ― like the launches of the Terrorist Screening Center and the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate ― a bid to streamline operations, so that information could be more widely shared and responsibility less diffuse. Recognizing that poor communication among existing agencies facilitated the Sept. 11 hijackers’ success, the administration sought to help analysts to “connect the dots,” in the current Washington parlance.

Confusion followed, however, and after more than a year of pressure by Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), who chairs the Governmental Affairs Committee, the heads of the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security Department and Terrorist Threat Integration Center wrote a letter to clarify the respective roles of their agencies. They designated the integration center as the lead agency for analysis of terrorism information (see GSN, April 21).

The letter underscores, but does not appear likely to stem, mounting criticism from those who say such measures, although meant to streamline operations, have created new bureaucracies while undermining previous efforts. Despite this criticism, administration officials told the New York Times last week that President Bush could create a director of national intelligence post to oversee all U.S. intelligence operations.

Such a move has wide support and has also been advocated in bills from Representative Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.). The agency heads, however, gently warned in their letter against too much structural tinkering.

“Regardless of the particular analytic roles of any USG [U.S. government] counterterrorism element under our control,” they wrote, “we have committed all such elements, consistent with the president’s policies, to share terrorism information with one another to ensure a seamless integration of such information. … The president and Congress have not directed and, as a matter of effective government and common sense, should not direct that all USG functions related to terrorism … be carried out by a single department or agency.”

Bush’s reported consideration of the new post comes 16 months after the first major event in the “centralization cycle” identified by Rosenau: the November 2002 passage of the Homeland Security Act.

Under the act, the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate was to “access, receive and analyze law enforcement information, intelligence information and other information from agencies of the federal government, state and local government agencies and private sector entities and to integrate such information” to identify and analyze terrorist threats.

The Homeland Security Department “has been chipped away at since then,” according to University of Maryland intelligence expert William Lahneman, who coordinates the National Intelligence Council Project at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland.

Before the department was even up and running, the administration created the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, a separate operation in which the Homeland Security Department was only one participant. The administration promised that the center would “merge and analyze terrorist-related information collected domestically and abroad in order to form the most comprehensive possible threat picture.”

The center “will continue to close the seam between analysis of foreign and domestic intelligence on terrorism,” the White House said at the time.

The center’s establishment as what some saw as a competitor for the new department generated a great deal of controversy, as reflected in the yearlong effort by Collins and Levin to obtain clarification from the agency heads.

In a report last month, Homeland Security Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin paraphrased at length the Homeland Security Act’s provision for the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate, noting that “the TTIC and TSC were created after IAIP was established” and citing “confusion” among officials about the respective roles of the three agencies.

Collins’ office said this week in a press release that the Terrorist Threat Integration Center’s dominant analysis role and ability to commission analysis from other agencies “are substantially different from what was originally envisioned when TTIC was created last year and represent a significant expansion of TTIC’s mission.” Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), the senior Democrat on Collins’ committee, has gone significantly further in criticizing the center.

“In the case of TTIC, the president has simply ignored the law,” Lieberman said on Feb. 27.

“The Homeland Security Act provides for an intelligence fusion center within DHS to receive and analyze information on terrorist threats from all sources. … DHS’ fusion center was supposed to have access to all necessary information while serving as a crucial bridge to local law enforcement, yet President Bush has continued to oppose both the letter and spirit of the law he signed on this issue. The newly created TTIC … lacks the structure and support to be the pre-eminent fusion center envisioned by the Homeland Security Act,” Lieberman said.

Maryland’s Lahneman said that, with the creation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the CIA appeared to have “won the battle” for control of terrorism threat information. He criticized the CIA’s apparent decision to provide the Homeland Security Department information directorate with only summary reports from the integration center ― not raw intelligence ― and expressed concern that “the FBI is not talking enough, harming the homeland security effort.”

“That all smacks of turf battles to me,” Lahneman said.

In congressional testimony on April 1, Homeland Security Undersecretary for Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Frank Libutti defended the decision to establish the center, but in terms that seemed unlikely to end the confusion.

“I believe that the decision to stand up [establish] TTIC, to charge TTIC with the mission principally of integrating foreign overseas intelligence and domestic intelligence, was done for the right reasons, at the right time, at the right place, with the right leadership,” Libutti told the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee.

“We are TTIC. The FBI is TTIC.  CIA is TTIC. The composition of TTIC represents the intelligence community overall. We are customers of TTIC.  We’re also contributors to TTIC. We also work directly with the CIA in terms of their CTC [Counterterrorism Center] and the FBI in terms of their CTD [Counterterrorism Division], as well as other intelligence organizations in the federal government,” Libutti said.

In the view of Lieberman and others in Congress, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center has usurped a role initially staked out for the Homeland Security Department. “What TTIC does is what DHS was supposed to do. … It was supposed to be essentially a clearinghouse. You’ll have to ask the administration why they created TTIC,” a congressional aide said last week.

With the Terrorist Threat Integration Center apparently firmly in place, officials and legislators have turned their attention to new reforms, such as the proposed director of national intelligence post and measures to address the shortcomings of the FBI, which has come under especially harsh criticism at hearings of the Sept. 11 commission.

The Congressional Research Service early this month issued a report listing five possible approaches to reforming the FBI’s intelligence operation, including creation of a new stand-alone domestic intelligence agency that would “fuse all intelligence from all sources, domestic and foreign, on potential terrorist attacks within the United States and disseminate it to appropriately cleared federal, state, local and private-sector customers.”

The description echoes the language used to tout both the Homeland Security Department and the Terrorist Threat Integration Center when they were created, and it is unclear what relationship the proposed new service would have to the two recently established entities. Senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) prepared legislation that would create an agency like the one mentioned by the research service, and one congressional source said the agency as proposed by Edwards would “plug very nicely into TTIC,” not replace it.

Former National Security Agency chief Odom, who is calling for a new agency dedicated to counterintelligence, said the Sept. 11 panel has opened an unprecedented window of opportunity for addressing the FBI’s flaws in the intelligence area. “It’s the first time I’ve ever heard anybody with any political clout talk about taking on the FBI on this,” he said.

“I never thought it was possible before because of the political clout of the FBI. The FBI’s ability to let the enemy get into this country and screw us up and not take the hit for it is hard to overstate,” Odom said.

Whether or not the FBI is stripped of some responsibilities, it seems clear that the intelligence “centralization cycle” cited by Rosenau will continue, paradoxically, to spawn new government agencies.

According to the RAND expert, a variety of agencies can improve intelligence by creating healthy competition. “We believe in competing centers of information. … It’s not any surprise, given our belief in capitalism, that we believe that competition produces better results. … Are we really comfortable having DHS be solely responsible?” Rosenau said.

Rosenau criticized officials for even discussing “which box” activities should be placed in before taking up more fundamental questions about intelligence reform. “The right question,” he said, “is, ‘What do we need to be doing? What are the capabilities that we need to have and nurture?’ and depending on those answers, then you can decide what it is we need to do about it.”

“Rather than saying, ‘What does DHS need to be doing?’” Rosenau said, “we need to go back to the first-order questions and say, ‘What do we need to prevent terrorist attacks from happening in the United States?’ and that’s what we haven’t really done. It was just latched onto as part of this centralizing impulse. They said, ‘We’re going to bring everybody together under one roof, OK? So that will make things easier, and we’ll have sort of one person in charge. We’ll be able to point to this person and say, “You’re responsible.”’ That’s not how the U.S. government actually works.”

Rosenau said that what the U.S. intelligence community needs is a better understanding of the terrorist threats it faces, as well as more analysts, better language skills and more funds. Perhaps demonstrating the difficulty of separating “first-order” from bureaucratic matters as he recommends, he continued, “We’ve probably got to designate one organization to be in charge of doing that.”

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