| 08 January 2006 Vertical Agency Bennie Thompson is the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee. He is now serving his seventh term as the Congressman from Mississippi 's Second District and second term on the Homeland Security Committee, which means he has been there since its establishment. The Second District sprawls vertically from Tunica, in the northwest corner of the state, meandering along the Big River to Jefferson County in the south. The Second blends the old agricultural economy “down the river” with the bright lights of Yazoo City . It is a created district, not as strangely Gerrymandered as some, but it ensures that there is a proportional voice provided to the voiceless. Thompson is the longest-serving African-American elected official in the state. He began his career in 1969, when the ghosts of Mississippi still walked during the day. Accordingly, he is a pragmatist, and has a reputation as a problem-solver. He served on the Agriculture, Budget and Small Business Committees before assuming the top Democratic position on Homeland Security. He thinks there is a problem in the Department of Homeland Security, and he is not alone. This week, he issued a statement that information sharing in the Department is broken, and that means it is broken in the Intelligence Community as well, since that is where it comes from. I had a call into an old ship-mate who is in charge of the information sharing program for Ambassador Negroponte to ask him what he thinks about it. I thought I had a pretty good shot at getting a minute of his time, since he used to know me, and his deputy was a guy I reported to when I worked on the staff of the Director of Central Intelligence. But I haven't heard anything, and had to slide into the weekend without a response to what the Congressman was asserting. Here is how I understand things. Washington operates at what is called the “all-source” level. That means that the most heavily classified information is laid out on the table with everything else, so that the complete picture is available for the decision-makers. That is fine for the top dogs in the departments, but it also empowers the agencies that produce the highly classified information. They have always had the power to say who was permitted to see their products, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that if the sources were disclosed or leaked, they would dry up and go away. Some of the sources are very expensive to operate, and others can be killed. So information is taken seriously, and there is a culture of secrecy that is perfectly reasonable and sometimes perfectly impenetrable. That is what prompted the 9/11 Commission to demand the re-organization of the Intelligence Community, and break down some of the walls. They wanted to put someone really in charge. With all the sparks and smoke of the last year, I think that what has been created is a system in which one person is responsible, but in charge of nothing. In order to get it to them, the Congressman is calling for yet another new intelligence unit to facilitate "vertical" information-sharing. In his vision, creation of a Vertical Sharing Office would convert classified intelligence into forms usable by state and local officials. It would also provide a channel by which terrorism information from state and local officials could reach federal authorities. But the information flow only went toward Washington , largely because of classification. When information went the other way, it was sanitized and massaged so that warnings were vague and non-specific, or worse, color-coded. It became an article of high-humor to the public, and a bane to local officials who had to schedule the over-time for the police. President Bush appointed my old colleague to be the federal program manager for information sharing last April. It was supposed to be a temporary thing, and was never intended to be a permanent fix. I have talked to some other old pals, and they say that he was supposed to get things rolling, wrap it up and shut down the office. The DNI's staff is just coming together after a year. The Senate confirmation of the new Chief Information Officer did not happen until just before Christmas. But Congress was eager for results, and the institutions did what they could with too-few people and no specific appropriations. Above all, there was no one to tell them what to do. Ambassador Negroponte was supposed to be the one to do that, or rather his staff, since he is an able administrator who does not know a great deal about the internal workings of the tribes he is chartered to rule. But of course, he did not have a staff, and all his officers were new to their jobs. One thing was true when I worked on the community staff of the Director of Central Intelligence. If you went to see him on a community matter, there was always the possibility that he would lean over to his Executive Director of the CIA and tell him to do something. That was the difference between then and now. There are existing organizations that should have had something to do with all of this. The Homeland Security Operations Center has a classified annex, though when I worked there I rarely saw anything issue from it. Perhaps it should have been the National Counter-Terrorism Center , or its predecessor organization that did it. What Congressman Thompson is calling for is an organization modeled after the United Kingdom 's Police International Counterterrorism Unit and Joint Terrorism Analysis Center . After 9/11, as I creaked toward the end of my career, I happened to be in London on a matter of business. I met with David, the senior career counter-terror official at New Scotland Yard. He gave me a briefing over several orange squashes at the Special Forces Club, located in the southwest part of town, near the back door to Harrod's Department Store. There is no nameplate on the door of the club, and the driver of David's black sedan waited unobtrusively down the block while we talked and drank. The Club was established by the resistance organizers of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose members were charged with "setting Europe alight" in World War II, and is now a second home for aging secret agents, and a meeting place for members and alumni of the SAS and intelligence services. David explained how his organization did things. When an indicator of an impending terror act was discerned in the all-source environment, a very limited number of police having the actual responsibility for the jurisdiction were brought in and all the relevant information was shared with them so they could do their job. There was no entitlement to continued access once the operation was concluded. Distribution was entirely situational, and the need-to-know was strictly enforced.
Congressman Thompson is on to something, though I doubt that yet another organization is the way to solve the problem. It seems as though we might be able to direct the organizations to work with one another, and share downward when there is reason to do so. But the rice bowls of the Agencies seem just as strong as ever. In fact, the establishment of a Director of National Intelligence who, in fact, directs nothing at all, seems paradoxically to have empowered them. At the Special Forces Club, I leaned over my third orange squash and asked David if the system he described to me had helped to defeat the terror tactics of the implacable Irish Republican Army. He looked at me, his face imperturbable. “Not in that case, my friend. In the end, we surrendered.” Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com |