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U.S. Intelligence Community Already Implementing Reforms, Deputy CIA Chief Says
The U.S. intelligence community has already taken steps to address the intelligence lapses uncovered by investigations into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and U.S. intelligence on prewar Iraq, Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin said last week (see GSN, June 17). “What shortcomings there were — and there were shortcomings — were the result of specific discrete problems that we understand and are well on our way to addressing or have already addressed,” McLaughlin said in a speech before a meeting of Business Executives for National Security. McLaughlin is set to become acting CIA director once current head George Tenet resigns this month. In his speech, McLaughlin offered advance criticism of a report set to be released next week by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concerning prewar intelligence on Iraq and a report expected to be issued later this month by the national commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the Washington Post. “Experiences and impressions that are just a few years old may be seriously out of date,” McLaughlin said. “There has been a real revolution in intelligence — from recruiting and technology to interagency cooperation and morale,” he added. McLaughlin rejected an oft-proposed idea to create an “intelligence czar” to oversee all U.S. intelligence agencies. He said that centralized control of the U.S. intelligence could be created “without the additional layers of command or bureaucracy such a change would inevitably bring” by providing the CIA director with overall decision authority over intelligence spending. McLaughlin also proposed giving the CIA director a fixed term in office “to underscore CIA’s nondepartmental, nonpolitical character” (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, July 1).
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