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New National Intelligence Director Could Prevent Repeats of Past Errors, Powell Says By Mike Nartker WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday that the creation of an “empowered” national intelligence director would help prevent intelligence mistakes such as the flaws in the presentation he made last year to the U.N. Security Council on prewar Iraq’s alleged WMD efforts (see GSN, June 2). In his presentation to the Security Council, Powell included a since-discredited claim that prewar Iraq possessed mobile biological weapon facilities. The reported source for that claim was an Iraq defector known as “Curveball,” who was made available to Western intelligence agencies by the Iraqi National Congress, a prewar exile organization that has been heavily criticized for providing false information on Iraq’s alleged WMD programs. In May, Powell publicly said that he had been “disappointed” that the sourcing for the mobile biological facility claim in his U.N. presentation had been inaccurate, and accused the sources of such information of having intentionally misled U.S. intelligence (see GSN, May 17). Testifying yesterday before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on the issue of intelligence reform — a topic that has dominated Congress since the July release of the findings of the Sept. 11 commission — Powell said that he had also been “distressed” that he had been unaware of the concerns of some intelligence analysts over the source of the mobile biological facility claim. “It did not all come together in a single way with a powerful individual and a powerful staff who could force these people to make sure that what one person knew, everyone else knew,” Powell said. “There were some intelligence communities that had put out disclaimers about some of the sourcing that were not known to the people who were giving me the analysis and the conclusions.” Powell also said that the creation of a strong national intelligence director — one of the key intelligence reform measures recommended by the Sept. 11 commission — would help to prevent such mistakes in the future (see related GSN story, today). “Now it seems to me that if you have a powerful, important, empowered national intelligence director, you are less likely to have those kinds of mistakes made,” he said. “If you focus this new system, this new approach to business on sharing all information openly, widely and without fear of busting your stovepipe, then it’s less likely you will have the kind of situation where I go out there and I’m saying something while there are people in one part of the intelligence community not connected well enough to another part of the intelligence community know — they knew at the time I was saying it — that some of the sourcing was suspect,” Powell added. Last week, the Bush administration submitted its plan to Congress for the creation of a national intelligence director — one that would act as the main intelligence adviser to the president and oversee the entire U.S. intelligence community and who would have budgetary authority over the National Foreign Intelligence Program and a strong role in the appointment of heads of intelligence agencies. In addition to the White House plan, lawmakers in both houses of Congress have proposed various approaches to the creation of the new national intelligence director. In his testimony yesterday, Powell offered support for one aspect of an intelligence reform proposal made by Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) — assigning responsibility for post-hoc evaluations of intelligence assessments to a new inspector general’s office (see GSN, Aug. 24). “The intelligence community does many things well, but critical self-examination of its performance, particularly the quality and utility of its analytical products, is too often not one of them,” Powell said. “Thousands of judgments are made every year, but we’ve got to do a better job of subjecting all of those judgments to rigorous post-mortem analysis to find out what we did right as well as what we did wrong; when we did something wrong, why did we do it wrong, to make sure we don’t do it wrong again,” he added. Powell also said yesterday that he believed it was “unlikely” that coalition forces would find stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons in Iraq. The Iraq Survey Group, the unit conducting the search for evidence of prewar Iraq’s WMD efforts, is set to release its final report by the end of this month (see GSN, Aug. 23).
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