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Senate Committee Approves Intelligence Chiefs
The Senate intelligence committee yesterday approved the White House picks for national intelligence director and deputy director, the Washington Post reported (see GSN, April 13). The full Senate will now consider the nominations of U.S. Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte and Lt. Gen Michael Hayden to oversee the U.S. intelligence committee. Deputy director nominee Hayden testified yesterday that he and Negroponte are serious in their intent to exert control over the CIA and intelligence agencies within the Defense Department. “We want to strengthen the center of the community, give the DNI real power,” said Hayden, who currently leads the National Security Agency. Questioned about U.S. intelligence on prewar Iraq’s purported WMD programs, Hayden said he has studied the issue and found that “before the war … we had a mountain of evidence about WMD from which the community drew conclusions, but that mountain was essentially inferential.” There was “no smoking gun, it was indirect, it was oblique,” he said. Improvements have been made to a system “that wasn’t good enough” he said (Walter Pincus, Washington Post I, April 15). Meanwhile, the presidential commission on WMD intelligence last month said that the FBI and CIA modernization plans are inadequate, the Post reported. “We do not believe that either response is entirely adequate, the commission said in a March 29 letter to President George W. Bush. The plans indicate “just how important — and how difficult — Ambassador Negroponte’s job will be.” The FBI plan to develop a new directorate to handle and coordinate intelligence collection “fails to create a truly specialized and integrated national security work force,” the commission said. The directorate would not manage operational resources, making it “an overlay on intelligence activities that are managed by other elements of the FBI,” according to the letter. “The directorate’s lack of authority prevents the FBI from vertically integrating foreign intelligence collection, analysis and operations,” the commission said, according to the Post. A planned CIA effort to increase its staff of analysts and operations personnel by 50 percent is “too general to create accountability,” the letter states. The agency is hiring “a relatively small number of (new) analysts in this fiscal year,” with the rest to come of an unspecific “long term.” The slow hiring boost for operations officers means the agency might not meets its 2011 deadline, the commission said. The staffing plan “would still leave the CIA with a thin overseas presence, especially when there is a need to surge in a particular area such as Iraq,” panel member said (Walter Pincus, Washington Post II, April 15).
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