With Chairman Porter J. Goss, R-Fla., declaring the measure was part of a long overdue "rebuilding" effort, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence voted Wednesday to authorize the nation's secret intelligence gathering apparatus to spend a collective total of about $30 billion in the next fiscal year.
The fiscal 2001 authorization bill (H.R. 4392), which covers the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and other secretive government organizations, cleared the committee by a unanimous roll-call vote during a closed-door markup session, according to sources in the room.
After the meeting, Goss criticized President Clinton for not requesting more money to rebuild the U. S. intelligence community, accusing him and Vice President Al Gore of "lack of vision" for not preparing the nation for the different and multitudinous threats of the post Cold War world.
"It's not the big bear in the woods we have to worry about," Goss said in an interview, "it's the snakes everywhere." The chairman said he has briefed Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush on these new threats, ranging from rogue states to cyber-attacks, and found him very receptive. Asked if he would be willing to become Bush's director of the CIA, a possible move that has been rumored, Goss responded, "Who knows?"
The chairman declined to discuss the intelligence authorization bill in detail but said it was close to Clinton's dollar request-which Goss did not disclose but is thought by independent analysts to be around $30 billion-and included money to modernize the eavesdropping equipment of the NSA and to streamline the management of the intelligence community, especially overseas.
"We've bottomed out in intelligence," he said in the interview. "We are rebuilding the community" to cope with global threats. "We're not set up to be global."
Expanding on this theme in a news release issued late Wednesday, Goss said that because intelligence agencies had been "hollowed out" in previous years, "we are woefully short on having the eyes and ears that can peer into the dark corners and pick up the plans of rogue regimes, hostile leaders, terrorists, narco-traffickers and proliferators of weapons of mass destruction. The technological changes are immense."
The release added that the bill "makes major new investments in the National Imagery and Mapping Agency" to exploit the potential of the new generation of satellites. In an apparent response to the State Department losing track of laptop computers full of secret information, the committee wants to bar the department from using funds earmarked for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research until the CIA director has certified that it "is meeting the necessary standards for protecting classified information."
Goss said he had not heard of any plans by his Senate counterparts to add legal protections to the new law empowering the federal government to seize the assets of international drug kings. He said the safeguards written into law last year seem to be working well.
The House chairman said, however, that he would have "an open mind" toward any additional due-process provisions offered in the eventual House-Senate conference that would meet later this year to reconcile the rival fiscal 2001 intelligence authorization bills.
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