White House Calls for Counterproliferation Center

The White House today announced creation of a new National Counterproliferation Center to coordinate U.S. efforts to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, April 1).

The creation of the Counterproliferation Center is one of the 70 recommendations accepted by the White House from its blue-ribbon WMD intelligence commission.

The president also announced today that FBI information collection and analysis efforts will be merged and that a national security division at the Justice Department will be created, according to AP.

President Bush further approved placing CIA chief Porter Goss in charge of all overseas human intelligence work. The Washington Post reported today that since Sept. 11, 2001 the CIA, FBI and Defense Department have clashed over foreign intelligence collection (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, June 29).

The president has also: asked Congress to reform oversight of intelligence agencies; recommended legislation extending the time foreign agents can be under electronic surveillance; implemented new procedures for intelligence dissemination; and established managers to deal specifically with a country or area (Katherine Shrader, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, June 29).

The commission made 74 recommendations. Of the four that were not accepted, three are still being reviewed and one was changed, sources told Reuters (Tabassum Zakaria, Reuters, June 28).

National Intelligence Director John Negroponte has selected Kenneth Brill as director of the new Counterproliferation Center, the Washington Times reported.

However, conservatives on Capitol Hill and in the Bush administration said Brill, former U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, is not qualified for the job.

“We expected to see someone with operational and intelligence experience, not somebody who is a Foreign Service officer,” said a Senate aide.

Others charged Negroponte was attempting to dominate the intelligence community by appointing Foreign Service officers to high posts.

The Counterproliferation Center is expected to have less than 100 employees (Bill Gertz, Washington Times, June 29).

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