Intelligence reorganization
I typed a note for myself back in November: "National Intelligence Bureaucracy = politicized layer cake." It was a thought for a potential post that never went anywhere
Getting Spy Reform Wrong. I need a theory of bureaucratic organization, I remember thinking, and I don't have one. I thought I remembered Maryland taught a course like this. I actually looked through some old course catalogues but didn't see it. I should look for a book on the topic, something that outlines various basic models for various intended purposes. First, I suppose you have to decide what sort of animal you have. A director of national intelligence or director of central intelligence. I recall from my days as USN petty officer the DCI ran The Agency, with the assistance of strong deputy directors. He also stood at the head of a handful of agencies; governing them precariously through a coordinating board, but also through the prestige of being the conduit of briefings to the executive branch. The various agencies are largely organized around functional concerns - how they collect intelligence and what type
Open Source Intelligence - Forbes.com
. The point man to the President will either deputize coordinate or headline. The CIA took as its brief, the task of being the primary analytic agency and the chief instrument of covert international response, regarding the other agencies as suppliers of data. Various inherent considerations pushed this structure apart: the legal difference between domestic and foreign collection. Military, tactical and strategic matters of the enemies order of battle and its existing capabilities, against national strategic, more matters of potential adversaries (or competitors) potential capabilities. Further there is the divide between judicial, and preventative action (criminal vs war). The procedural wall between due process, admissible evidence and immediate action. Even without bureaucratic balkanization different types of analysis were going to be performed on data by these agencies, information sharing was never going to be complete. Now new agencies have been created and added - counter terrorism office and the department of homeland security. The Intelligence Reform Act has created a large coordinating bureaucracy: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) positioning it at cabinet level neither as far as a Cabinet Secretary nor as close as National Security Advisor, essentially to replace the former "second hat" of the Director of Central Intelligence. David Ignatius
Fix the Intelligence Mess would have you take a look at the organization chart, IC actor list , and boards that now structure US intelligence. The man at the center of all this, John Negropontes, now faces the judgement
In New Job, Spymaster Draws Bipartisan Criticism - New York Times
of an apparently unimpressive start
Negroponte's Office a Work in Progress. This assessment comes at the point of presentation of a budget for approval
Intelligence Director's Budget May Near $1 Billion, Report Finds
. The budget is the key. Not only for the fact that all other things being equal - in national intelligence you get what you pay for. You build programs for the information you want, you extract data from people of other cultures and languages. You regard nothing collected as complete in itself. Everything is disparate data until analyzed and assessed. But also budget is decision. It appears from the ODNI org. chart that there is an attempt being made to overlay categories deriving from the logical process of collection and examination rather than simply method. It should be understood that no true coordination can occur without budgetary ownership. How much personnel, information, and space would the DNI need to control the purse strings of his or her 16 agencies and offices. The answer apparently is: 1,500 employees with a $1 billion budget)
Spooked by red tape | Salon.com News.
Sliding from endemic to political problems Judge Richard A. Posner in a Washington Post article by Walter Pincus
Intelligence Redo Is Harshly Judged disagrees with the reforms with a coherent skepticism. He believes IC will resist this reform because it is largely a bureaucratic reorganization merely adding a layer across the top, and because the IC contains 3 very different work and career cultures embedded in agencies with "profound political imbalance[s]. All the worse for the ODNI appearing to build within itself the manpower to re-interpret and re-write analysis coming from below. Posner goes into more detail on this in his own essay for the AEI The Reorganized U.S. Intelligence System after One Year.
This brings us to the apparent overt politicizing of intelligence seen currently in Porter Goss's war with CIA. Purges, lie detector tests, and party loyalty questioning
Moves Signal Tighter Secrecy Within C.I.A. - New York Times . Little of this has the remotest legitimacy. This punishment of the community is not only dangerous Politicizing intelligence? | csmonitor.com, but appears purposeful. Taking policy failures stemming from ideological world views and blaming it all on group-think
How We've Improved Intelligence
and bad analysis(ts)
. To say that believing Iraq had WMD was the universal consensus opinion, that no one said or thought different. To speak as though to certify no pressure ever existed on intelligence as statements by the Senate Intelligence committees or its chairman have. All of this is to make U S professional intelligence a dog whipped of its natural purpose and chained to guard the junk yard of assessments made elsewhere. When the Congressional committees charged oversight with deliberately delay and partition reports that would describe and trace these actions to keep them overlooked until after an election, they are hindering democratic outcome (
You'll remember how Sen. Roberts (R-KS)... . If the press attempts to fill the gap, they run up against a regime policy of zero information and zero accountability. Even when they cannot identify exactly who has talked to the press about what they will separate people on undetermined grounds as they seem to have with senior analyst Mary McCarthy (not the author/essayist). Fired from the CIA within days of retirement after being made to take a lie detector test, leaving her twisting in the wind for days under the acquisition that she was one who leaked to Pulitzer winner Dana Priest. Only after her lawyer releases a statement denying this the does the Government acquiesce to this - without further clarification. By then the right commentarait had chewed her up. Among all this I kept looking for signals of political - process -autonomy in the details. The DNI and his principle deputy are appointed by the president; with the advice and consent of the Senate. I would expect to fixed terms and ones that would overlap the term of President's, so that each administration is relieved of the burden of pushing political appointees into all of ODNI's offices. This distance and preservation of independent outlook is crucial when confronted with an imperial presidency, afflicted by cult of empire and exceptional order, directed downward by the grundnorm of fear.
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