Broad Support (and a Lot of Money)

It has been a big week. A major Terrorist organization declared itself out of business and we launched a Space Shuttle that we might not be able to get back down.

These are interesting times indeed. I am walking out the door to catch a train to New Jersey to make a pitch to the corporation to let me sell a dramatic new capability that could help the Intelligence Community, and I attempted to digest the testimony up on the Hill to see what the implications might be for the safety of my travel and prospects of business.

This was much easier when I traveled with large groups of armed people, but on the other hand, no one is sending me on deployment to places where it is really hot.

Mike Hayden was up to talk to the House Intelligence Committee this week, summoned to defend the progress made in implementing the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. The Bill was overwhelmingly passed last December with great reluctance by some members, who feel that the compromise on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission might be too sweeping.

It was the first meeting of the Intel Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, something that was mentioned in the 9/11 report. The bombings in London have everyone a little jumpy, and most of the full committee showed up to get on the record as being against surprise and violent death.

Mike was fairly direct in his remarks, even though it was an open session with the Press in attendance. He cloaked his words in the ambiguity that is used when talking publicly about secret matters.

The message was simple. He wanted bi-partisan Congressional support and a lot of money. I used to draft testimony like that, since that is an eternal truth. With sufficient resources and enough latitude, almost anything is possible.

Mike is the senior uniformed intelligence officer and Deputy to Ambassador Negroponte, and he is apparently charged with the day-to-day management of the Office. The Ambassador is busy frying other fish, some of which Mike had come to talk about.

He mentioned three dozen mostly procedural changes have been made over the last few weeks. The one he showcased was a new requirement for analysts to report their confidence levels in the veracity of their sources when developing National Intelligence Estimates, or the famous NIE’s.

The system is supposed to provide more latitude for doubt and dissent.

NIE’s are documents that take months or even years to produce in an atmosphere of painful interagency coordination. Footnotes in the documents used to be issues of huge confrontation and accommodation. Some could never be fully coordinated between the Agencies and died dusty deaths in thick files in the Community policy offices, far removed from people who were doing actual intelligence work.

Working in that process was a little like swimming in molasses.

The most famous NIE was the October 2002 NIE that concluded that Iraq had used chemical weapons against its own people, definitely had programs for nuclear and biological weapons, and in a wild leap of probable-ism, concluded Saddam still had some of them lying around some place.

I have a hard time getting particularly agitated about the conclusion. It was a completely reasonable interpretation of the existing information. It was also what the Administration wanted to hear, and was the justification for a policy decision that, as best I can tell, had already been made.

The mistake at the center was the failure to have human intelligence sources close to Saddam, or used them to place technical collection capabilities in a place where the actual truth might be discerned. That truth, which is still mutable, appears to be that Saddam abandoned the programs, but maintained a bold public profile to demonstrate to his people that the West did not cow him.

It is hard to remain an absolute despot, and the maintenance of fear requires constant attention, not to mention a certain ambiguity.

But no matter. The deal was that our spies were not very good at recruiting high-level, high-value sources in the places we needed them. Our Congress had thoroughly cowed the spies in the Clinton decade, and the last time the CIA was permitted a free hand was the proxy war against the Russians in Afghanistan . That was when we armed the older brothers of the terrorists who are fighting us today.

On the whole, the policy decision to rely on space-borne and other remote sensors to collect the bulk of day-to-day intelligence information was just cleaner, and a lot less messy.

You can readily imagine that National Technical Means of collection have only a tangential value against an enemy that is well aware of their general capabilities.

Disclosures in the press about bin Laden’s cell phone use, and other leaks of the same ilk, made sources dry up. Using the backdrop of the bombings in London and Egypt , Mike pleaded for support for what he called �a very expensive new capability.� Presumably it is technical in nature.

I don’t know what it is, though the Members do. I could speculate that it might be the one that a Senator disclosed a few months ago, going public because he was staggered by the cost, but I won’t. Once a capability is disclosed it dramatically loses its value. And this one apparently isn’t even funded yet.

To address the human intelligence issue, Mike said that the DNI is creating a new National Security Service within the FBI, as directed by the President last month. That will take support and several dollars, since they have to change the culture of the Bureau, which has been hardening since J. Edgar Hoover founded it.

And some other cultural changes will need to be made in the Intelligence Community itself. The old structure had ossified around the individual Agencies. The new one will become much more non-hierarchical, a network analogous to that of the decentralized terrorist networks.

In order to make this happen, Mike says a new hierarchy is required. The DNI staff is currently comprised of around 400 employees but will probably grow to anywhere between 500 and 700, if they can find office space.

Mike wants support from Congress, but he also wants a little room to maneuver. He pleaded for the sub-committee to let things settle out. The transcript says he said his office needs time “to stretch our legs” and “let the legislative dust settle.”

That seems reasonable, since there are other major challenges that the law told the DNI to fix. Information obtained by Homeland Security components must be made more available to intelligence analysts.

That is a tough nut, and the information tends to flow only one way. A police report is by definition a sensitive document, which could reveal law enforcement sources. It can also become a matter of public record in court, and it is definitely not �classified� in the classic National Security tradition.

The Cops don’t have many cleared people, and hence, once information gets into the system it tends to flow north to Washington and rarely south to the people guarding subways and trains.

Much less the people who own them. Most of the potential soft targets, after all, belong to the private sector.

An old associate of mine is in charge of the new Information Sharing Environment that operation, and he has my very best wishes in the effort. He appeared before the Committee this week in a separate session, and explained that he had a deputy and two contractors to help him sort out coordination between the Intelligence Community and law enforcement in the fifty states, six territories and dozens of sovereign Native American tribes.

He said he needed more support and a lot of money.

Mike Hayden completed his remarks to the oversight subcommittee by saying that the DNI staff is striving to fill key leadership positions and have the staff co-located by the time school starts again in August.

I’m pulling for Mike and the DNI. With a lot of support, and plenty of money, it just might happen. In the meantime, I have a train to catch.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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