This Perspective was originally published in the August 1, 2004 Outlook Section of The Washington Post.
You can't talk about a national intelligence director, or intelligence czar, without understanding the structure beneath such a job or where the money for intelligence goes. In my experience in government, people pay attention only to people who control resources with real, not nominal, authority.
Our national intelligence structure was set up to be competitive -- to encourage independent analysis from different agencies in hopes such competition produces better judgments about how to act on the intelligence we have. So, for example, the work of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) would compete with the CIA's or Defense Intelligence Agency's.
Professionals from each agency would note differences in analysis and, by investigating and resolving them, come to a better understanding. When they are not worked out, differences must be highlighted and explained, all the way to the very top, and not papered over. With an intelligence czar and a unified intelligence center, the system would lose the competitiveness that's been an important element of its successes until now.
Not everything about the present situation is bad. On the question of whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, INR did better than everyone else. It's just that no one listened. It seems to me that whatever structure is set up, the principle of competitive analysis, as well as a system in which people can argue and disagree, needs to be preserved. And those people need to be heard by the national security adviser or the president.
The relationship between an intelligence czar and a president needs to be a personal one. Look at President Bill Clinton's first CIA director, James Woolsey. He never saw Clinton, which made it difficult for intelligence to inform policy.
It may seem paradoxical, but the only thing we need as much as competitiveness among agencies is coordination, especially if we go along with the commission plan to maintain separate agencies. The 9/11 commission's report made it clear that coordination was strikingly lacking three years ago, and that was at the root of our intelligence failure. For example: Before Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA had information about some of the hijackers, but they weren't on the Immigration and Naturalization Service watch list for visas.
Having a joint coordination center might have helped, but having an overarching czar wouldn't have solved that problem. If the national intelligence director is a member of the Cabinet and has all sorts of other responsibilities, he's not going to have time to run the center. Moreover, the real coordination isn't going to come from the top -- it has to be encouraged at a lower level, among analysts.
All these things need to be thought about -- and urgently. But there ought to be real discussion about how any reconfigured intelligence structure would work. The thought that the president is just going to adopt all these things -- especially in an election year -- is just wacky. You have to look at the total intelligence structure before you can say yea or nay.
Phyllis Oakley, a member of the Middle East Institute Board of Governors, spent a quarter-century in the U.S. Foreign Service and served as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research from 1997-1999.
Disclaimer: Assertions and opinions in this Commentary are solely those of the above-mentioned author(s) and do not reflect necessarily the views of the Middle East Institute, which expressly does not take positions on Middle East policy.
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This Perspective was originally published in the August 1, 2004 Outlook Section of The Washington Post.
You can't talk about a national intelligence director, or intelligence czar, without understanding the structure beneath such a job or where the money for intelligence goes. In my experience in government, people pay attention only to people who control resources with real, not nominal, authority.
Our national intelligence structure was set up to be competitive -- to encourage independent analysis from different agencies in hopes such competition produces better judgments about how to act on the intelligence we have. So, for example, the work of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) would compete with the CIA's or Defense Intelligence Agency's.
Professionals from each agency would note differences in analysis and, by investigating and resolving them, come to a better understanding. When they are not worked out, differences must be highlighted and explained, all the way to the very top, and not papered over. With an intelligence czar and a unified intelligence center, the system would lose the competitiveness that's been an important element of its successes until now.
Not everything about the present situation is bad. On the question of whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, INR did better than everyone else. It's just that no one listened. It seems to me that whatever structure is set up, the principle of competitive analysis, as well as a system in which people can argue and disagree, needs to be preserved. And those people need to be heard by the national security adviser or the president.
The relationship between an intelligence czar and a president needs to be a personal one. Look at President Bill Clinton's first CIA director, James Woolsey. He never saw Clinton, which made it difficult for intelligence to inform policy.
It may seem paradoxical, but the only thing we need as much as competitiveness among agencies is coordination, especially if we go along with the commission plan to maintain separate agencies. The 9/11 commission's report made it clear that coordination was strikingly lacking three years ago, and that was at the root of our intelligence failure. For example: Before Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA had information about some of the hijackers, but they weren't on the Immigration and Naturalization Service watch list for visas.
Having a joint coordination center might have helped, but having an overarching czar wouldn't have solved that problem. If the national intelligence director is a member of the Cabinet and has all sorts of other responsibilities, he's not going to have time to run the center. Moreover, the real coordination isn't going to come from the top -- it has to be encouraged at a lower level, among analysts.
All these things need to be thought about -- and urgently. But there ought to be real discussion about how any reconfigured intelligence structure would work. The thought that the president is just going to adopt all these things -- especially in an election year -- is just wacky. You have to look at the total intelligence structure before you can say yea or nay.
Phyllis Oakley, a member of the Middle East Institute Board of Governors, spent a quarter-century in the U.S. Foreign Service and served as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research from 1997-1999.