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Intelligence Chief Should Have Personnel, Budget Authority, Senate Panel Chairman Says By Mike Nartker WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate intelligence committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said yesterday that he is set to provide colleagues this week with draft legislation creating a national director with substantial budgetary and personnel authority over the U.S. intelligence community (see GSN, Aug. 16). The bill, written with Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel, envisions a director similar to that proposed by the Sept. 11 commission, Roberts told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. “That person would be empowered with the authorities to really lead the intelligence community as proposed in the 9/11 commission’s recommendations. Those authorities include the ability to hire and fire, as well as the ability to exercise control over the budgets of those agencies,” he said. Debate over the creation of a national intelligence director, one of the key reform measures recommended by the Sept. 11 commission, has largely centered on what authority the new director would have over the budgets and personnel of the various intelligence agencies, several of which are contained in the Defense Department. While the Sept. 11 commission has called for the new director to have the ability to apportion and reprogram funding to and among the various intelligence agencies and to have the authority to approve nominations to head the agencies, the White House has publicly supported the creation of a director with less budgetary and personnel authority. Rockefeller yesterday criticized the current structure of the U.S. intelligence community, which gives the Pentagon authority over about 80 percent of intelligence funding. “Where else in government or corporate America would you find such a split arrangement as we have now? It’s more akin to a custody settlement between divorced parents than an effective management plan for a 15-agency, multibillion-dollar entity called the intelligence community,” he told the Governmental Affairs Committee. Rockefeller also predicted bureaucratic opposition from both the Pentagon and lawmakers with jurisdiction over the department to providing the new national intelligence director with full budgetary and personnel authority. “So we’re going to have to break some china around here. Otherwise we will fail. We will fail. We will do the bits and pieces and we will be like Congress has so often been. The American people need real reform,” he said. Roberts said the draft legislation would also address concerns by the Pentagon that the new national intelligence director could hinder military operations by having too much control over tactical intelligence assets needed by commanders in the field (see GSN, Aug. 12). “I am confident that you will find … that the draft bill that we will provide to this committee does contain some very … innovative ways of addressing that problem,” he said. Roberts did not offer examples of those innovations. The Senate Armed Services Committee is scheduled today to hear from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers on the issue of intelligence reform. Former CIA Director William Webster, one of the three former agency chiefs to appear yesterday before the Governmental Affairs Committee, also stressed the need to provide effective authority to the new national intelligence director. “The intelligence community does not need a feckless ‘czar’ with fine surroundings and little authority. That is the wrong way to go,” said Webster, who served as CIA director from 1987 to 1991. “The designated leader must be clearly and unambiguously empowered to act and to decide on issues of great importance to the success of the intelligence community and the country,” he added. Former CIA Director James Woolsey said that providing the new national director with substantive budgetary authority would give the office-holder added leverage in debates over the allocation of intelligence assets, such as analysts. “He will or she will have a much better ability to say to the secretary of state or secretary of defense, ‘Look, I sympathize, I understand, I know that this fluent Arabic language linguist is a very rare asset, but you didn’t hear me: I really need her or him,’” said Woolsey, who served as CIA director from 1993 to 1995. Stansfield Turner, CIA director from 1977 to 1981, cautioned lawmakers, though, against providing the new national intelligence director with personnel authority over the heads of various analytic agencies within existing Cabinet departments. “The secretaries of those departments deserve to have their own intelligence advisor whom they have personal confidence in. And if you insist that they take somebody they don’t, that would just create a new intelligence operation of their own on the side anyway,” Turner said.
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