PFIAB

God, it is Saturday and the quarterly publication is lying all over my floor, pictures not associated with articles, the print cartridge is out of ink, and my heart is starting to race. How am I going to get this done? The weekend is shot already. The floor guy is coming, Michigan is on TV at noon. Some things have to happen just right to cop a share of the Big Ten crown this year.

I’m doomed. There is WAY TOO MUCH stuff going on, and not enough time to make sense of it. I looked through my notes. There is a nice account of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade’s activities in Spain; well written and with no visible connection to the mission of the Quarterly.

A quote surfaces from another age. I like it:

President Nixon once belittled the Central Intelligence Agency in words that capture a common mistake: “What use are they? They’ve got over 40,000 people over there reading newspapers.”

I thought I might use that as an introduction to a hard-hitting analysis of the new blueprint to overhaul the intelligence collection and analysis process. If I could find the notes I would get started. The plan was announced a couple weeks ago- where did I put them?

I shuffled through some chapter updates and cake-cutting ceremonies I have to re-format. There was Nixon again, he had the numbers wrong, but he echoed something pervasive about the way human intelligence was collected after the Pike and the Church commissioned raked the intelligence community over the coals in the mid-1970s . . . and thirty years later we finally we had 9/11 and the push for real and abiding reform.

I don’t know if that is going to happen, but there is certainly a new law to conform to, and a National Intelligence bureaucracy.

If I could just find the notes. Director Negroponte has a bold vision for  for improving intelligence gathering and assessment. If I could just find it.

That isn’t his fault. “The National Intelligence Strategy of the United States of America : Transformation through Integration and Innovation.” It has to be around here someplace . . . that is where I need to  start, with the vision and  with the Blueprint, and the establishment of the new Clandestine Service, but that is not the way my mind works.

Whatever is on top must be most important, so that is where I started to pound on the keyboard. I can get organized later.

President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) Gets new Chairman, Executive Director

Legendary intelligence official Joan Dempsey has left her post as the executive director of the PFIAB and joined consulting giant Booz-Allen-Hamilton as a partner . . . Joan started as a naval analyst at ONI in the 1980s, and then climbed the ranks at DIA and the Community Management Staff . . . she blazed a trail for other women in the intelligence field, and became the first Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management . . .she will be replaced at the PFIAB by Stephanie Osburn, currently Chief of Staff for the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Management . . .Stephanie is a career CIA employee with extensive service at the Community level, including the hard targets policy portfolio . . .

The PFIAB’s influence has waxed and waned over the years since it was created in 1956 by President Dwight Eisenhower to provide bi-partisan external advise on intelligence matters . . . there was recent controversy over the dismissal of former chairman Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor to Bush 1 and a man with close ties to every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan . . . that played out in the pages of the New Yorker Magazine and seems to be part of the melt-down in the Administration and Congress . . .past PFIAB chairmen have included Senator Warren Rudman, House Speaker Thomas Foley and former Defense Secretary Les Aspin after they left government service . . . the PFIAB has conducted investigations (often through its Intelligence Oversight Board) of spy-community controversies, including lax security at DoE nuclear weapons facilities, CIA involvement with Guatemalan human rights abuses, intelligence failures in Somalia, and the CIA’s CYA investigation of the security breaches of DCI John Deutch when he left the agency abruptly . . . the Board seems certain to have a more prominent role under the terms of the Intelligence Reform legislation . . . The White house announced the appointment of Stephen Friedman to be Chairman of the Board, and also Chairman of the Intelligence Oversight Board . . . Friedman is a former chairman of Goldman-Sachs who served in the Bush 2 White House as assistant to the President for economic policy . . . he had a previous tour as a member of the Board . . . There are other big changes in the panel’s two year appointments, with only a handful of the last board returning . . . Navy is well represented, and the full board membership is:

James L. Barksdale of Mississippi , former head of Netscape;
Arthur B. Culvahouse, lawyer and former Counsel to President Ronald

    Reagan;
William O. DeWitt, Jr., Cincinnati investor (part owner of the 

    Texas Rangers with George W. Bush);

Admiral James O. Ellis, USN (Ret.), former STRATCOM Commander;
Donald L. Evans of Texas, former Secretary of Commerce;
Martin Faga of Virginia, former NRO Director;
Lee Hamilton of Indiana, former Congressman and Vice Chair of the 9/11

     Commission;
Ray Hunt, Texas oilman;
ADM David E. Jeremiah, USN (Ret.), of Virginia, former Vice Chairman

    of the JCS;
John L. Morrison of Minnesota, investor and senior executive

    of the Pillsbury Baking Conglomerate;
Elizabeth Pate-Cornell, Stanford University Professor of Industrial

    Engineering and Management 

I had to look up most of the business people to figure out where they came from. I don’t know what it means, except that the business people all seem to be solid Republicans. But since they have an oversight role, it all is up to the Chairman to determine whether this will be an activist panel or a passive body.

It depends on the relationship with the President, I suppose, and they seem to be well positioned in that, anyway.

I sat back. Too much to cover. Almost game time.

I tried hard to think what it all means. I appeared before the PFIAB twice, holding horses for the grownups. It was a feisty bunch at the time, a Clinton body, and they asked a lot of tough questions. They met in a dedicated suite in the Old Executive Office Building , that giant Victorian wedding cake next to the West Wing of the White House.

Nice place to work. High ceilings. I think Stephanie will like being Executive Director. I wondered if I could figure out a reason to make a call on her.

I had to shake my head. There were gong to be F/A-18s flying over the stadium at Ann Arbor. Those Hornets are the most efficient converters of dinosaurs to noise ever built. The crowd will love it.

Maybe I can find that thing about the Clandestine Service before kick-off. Suddenly there is banging on the door.

Shit! the Floor Guy is here with his crew. I’ll never find my notes. This Quarterly business is kicking my ass.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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