11 April 2007
Top Cover
If you are going to get anything done in Washington, you need someone important to cover your actions. Power is too widely dispersed, which was the brilliance of the founders. They knew that inaction on the part of the government was, generally speaking, better than a rash that act that would alter the constitutional separation of powers.
Things are supposed to not work smoothly. That is the way the system was designed.
The clearest example was when the Republican majorities in the House and Senate allowed the Administration to run essentially without oversight for the first six years of the second Bush Presidency.
The change in Congress left the Administration blinking and petulant. They had lost their top cover, which is necessary to protect your ass while you are attempting to jam something up someone else's.
The intelligence community is fundamentally no better off today than it was before the Intelligence Reorganization Act that caused so much turmoil. That is not to say that there has not been great energy expended in establishing a new staff, hiring new people, and making speeches. There just has been no top cover for real change.
I am a fan of the people at Fort Meade. Professionally, their sources and methods allowed me to do my job for twenty-seven years. But you would not be far off the mark if you considered them to be the most high-handed and unilateral organization in a Community known for those qualities.
There is a reason, even dozens of reasons for why they are the way they are. Secrecy about what they do and how they do it is essential if they are to continue to do it. There are also stringent rules about what they do, since there have been abuses in the past, mostly distant but some not. People have gone to jail over some of them, and there is a natural reluctance to get in a position where the next career move could be a federal prison.
Also, Fort Meade is located closer to Baltimore than Washington, which leads to a perfectly natural confusion about who works for whom.
The current Director is a strong leader named Keith Alexander. He must feel he is under siege at the Fort, what with all the controversy over whose mail he is reading, and under what authorities. The controversy of the last two years has not gone away, and continues to simmer, even if it is not on the front page.
The uneasy collaboration with Justice and the FBI is another area of Keith's mission where things are prickly. The Bureau has been playing fast and loose with some of the procedures in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or what we call FISA.
There is a reason for that, too; the law was designed in 1978 to deal with an entirely different set of circumstances and a much less virulent category of Bad Guys.
Mike McConnell has two years to sort things out, since it is widely assumed that he will be Director of National Intelligence only while Mr. Bush remains in office. No one yet has managed to bludgeon NSA into being a plays-well-with-others Agency; it is not in their organizational DNA. It will take a large and blunt instrument to accomplish it.
So, with a limited amount of time and a lot of work to be done, the new DNI has set out a Hundred Days Agenda, and he intends to accomplish things in six areas, with ten priorities.
I think you can distill that into three things. He needs more flexibility under the law, more authority in his office to make people do what he says, and he needs to make the Agencies share information to accomplish their missions better.
To that end, his office is circulating a draft bill to make FISA reflect the world of the 21st century, and not that of Watergate. He is going to seek additional authorities for his office, including the ability to hire and fire the directors of the agencies who only theoretically report to him. With that, he also needs the ability to make people share their secrets.
Mike talked about it last week at the Excellence In Government Conference, and he was perfectly candid. Not only does he consider the Community to be hamstrung by the old laws, but he himself is stuck, personally. He is trapped in a dual role that is frankly impossible.
He is the personal intelligence briefer to the President, and simultaneously the CEO of a fractious coalition of intensively tribal and turf conscious agencies, some of which also have independent access to the Oval Office.
There are not enough hours in the day to do it, and Mike is tired. But there is one excellent aspect to seeing the President first thing every morning. A press release popped out of the Oval Office late yesterday, directing Mike to:
“…perform such functions in a manner consistent with direction and guidance issued by the President…(and) ensure that the official within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence previously designated as the program manager responsible for information sharing across the Federal Government pursuant to the Act shall be the assistant to the Director in carrying out the functions delegated by this memorandum.”
It is innocuous enough sounding, but it is a big deal; a very large stick indeed. It is what is known as Top Cover, in the trade, and it could mean some people are going to share information whether they like it or not.
We shall see who the first ones to feel the stick are going to be, but I think I know where they work.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com