Government Executive - Authors - Siobhan Gorman

The Decision Makers: Intelligence Agencies

Corine Hegland, Siobhan Gorman, and Terrence Henry — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 00:00:00 -0400

John Negroponte
Director of National Intelligence
202-395-7957

When Negroponte left his job as U.S. ambassador to Iraq to become the first director of national intelligence, he barely reduced his exposure to cross fire. But he has quickly, quietly begun reshaping the intelligence community. He has assumed the role of Bush's chief adviser on intelligence and delivers the President's Daily Brief. He has instructed CIA chiefs of station that they will be his eyes and ears in the field. And he's filling top positions in his office with respected veterans of the intelligence community. What will happen when Negroponte goes toe-to-toe with the Pentagon on budget and policy issues is unknown, although he seems to have successfully protested an effort by one of its top congressional allies to curb his authority over intelligence personnel.

Negroponte's challenge, according to 9/11 commission member John Lehman, is to avoid "being dragged into old wars and grudges and internecine turf disputes, rather than doing the dramatic and even revolutionary work that needs to be done in changing our intelligence establishment." He added, "The DNI's principal responsibility ... was to change this culture to [one] that attracts and holds bright, innovative, creative, and risk-taking people."

Negroponte, 65, grew up in New York City and went to Yale. He speaks five languages and served as ambassador to Mexico, the Philippines, and Honduras in the Reagan and Bush I administrations. Negroponte was sworn in to his current post in April. During his confirmation hearing, critics accused him of failing to report the gravity of the human-rights abuses by Honduran military groups when he was ambassador. He denied the charge.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden
Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence
202-395-7957

Hayden walks into the newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence with his insider credentials well burnished: Between a six-year stint as director of the National Security Agency and a posting as commander of the Air Intelligence Agency, Hayden, 60, has seen how the nation's 15 intelligence agencies function -- or veer into dysfunction. The Pittsburgh native joined the Air Force after college at Duquesne University. He delayed active duty while going for a master's degree at Duquesne. He jumped into the world of intelligence as an analyst and a briefer at Headquarters Strategic Air Command. In 1999, he took over the troubled NSA and cracked open the secretive agency just enough to give Congress and the public a glimpse of their tax dollars at work.

Hayden anticipates that he will focus most of his time at his new job on furthering the "smooth functioning" of the intelligence community.

Porter Goss
Director, CIA
703-482-1100

After the tumult that greeted his decision to fire several top spooks, Goss is settling into his newly redefined role as CIA director, where his focus is on rebuilding the agency in a post-9/11 world. Goss, who took the helm in September 2004, is seeking to remake the agency into a "field-first organization" focused on ensuring that agents have sufficient language skills and cultural understanding, says spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise. A 10-year veteran of the CIA's clandestine service, Goss served for 16 years in Congress, where he chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He also founded a newspaper in Sanibel, Fla., and later served as mayor there. Goss, 66, grew up in Waterbury, Conn., and graduated from Yale. Once thought of as a shoo-in for the new post of director of national intelligence, he angered the White House by allowing his personnel decisions to make headlines.

John A. Kringen
Deputy Director for Intelligence, CIA
703-482-1100

In February, Kringen took over the Directorate of Intelligence, the division where he got his start nearly 30 years ago as an analyst. He has spent most of his career at the CIA, most recently serving as director of the Crime and Narcotics Center. The intelligence directorate is responsible for providing analysis to senior policy makers, including the president. Given the high-profile intelligence failures of recent years, Kringen will have his hands full pushing for more-accurate and tough-minded analyses. He "agreed to become DDI at a critical point for intelligence analysis," says CIA Director Porter Goss, who appointed him. "He has the substantive experience, including time in the field, and leadership skills to foster the rigorous, competitive analysis our customers need." Kringen, 57, is from Garden Grove, Calif. He earned a bacheler's degree at the University of Southern California and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota.

Donald M. Kerr
Deputy Director for Science and Technology, CIA
703-482-1100

Since August 2001, Kerr has headed the CIA's science and technology division, which is responsible for collecting open-source intelligence, supervising satellite technology, and making gadgets for intelligence-gathering. Kerr is the only high-level holdover from George Tenet's reign. Kerr "brings a breadth of experience and knowledge to this post," says CIA Director Goss. Previously, Kerr was an assistant director of the FBI, overseeing its crime lab; an assistant secretary of Energy, working on nuclear weapons development and testing; and the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Kerr spent time in the private sector, where he held high-level positions at EG&G, SAIC, and Information Systems Laboratories. Now 65, Kerr is originally from Philadelphia. He received a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and a Ph.D. in plasma physics and microwave electronics from Cornell University.

Jennifer Millerwise
Director of Public Affairs, CIA
703-482-1100

Millerwise has a strong work pedigree for the Bush administration and its loyalists: She has been deputy communications director for the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign; Vice President Cheney's press secretary; assistant press secretary in the Bush White House; and a regional press coordinator for the Republican National Committee's "Victory 2000" campaign. Millerwise has also worked for Ari Fleischer (at the House Ways and Means Committee); for Spencer Abraham (while he was a senator for Michigan); and for her current boss, CIA Director Goss, when he was a member of Congress. Millerwise, who was Rep. Goss's press secretary, became the CIA's director of public affairs in January. "She is loyal, patriotic, and dedicated to our mission," Goss says. "Her experience and relationships with the media bring a unique asset to the CIA." Millerwise, 29, is from Pinconning, Mich. She has a degree in business administration and political science from Western Michigan University.

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Efforts to combat nuclear terrorism hindered by porous borders

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. and Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

As director of operations and emergency management for the Port of Los Angeles, Cunningham is responsible for securing a facility which, together with the neighboring Port of Long Beach, is the gateway for 44 percent of the goods that come into the United States. A bomb that gets through here is just a drive down the highway from any city in 48 states. "All the other threats, we can deal with," Cunningham says. "But the nuclear threat is probably the one we wouldn't recover from."

Cunningham's security challenge is hardly unique: America's porous borders and winding coastlines are impossible to fortify against bad people determined to get bad things into this country. The security consensus since 9/11 is that government officials should do everything they can to catch terrorists before they can launch an attack, but that they must realize they won't be able to catch all of them. The equation regarding the nuclear threat is different, however: Letting just one nuclear bomb through carries unacceptable costs -- mortal, economic, and psychological. So, this threat demands a response that -- ideally -- leaves nothing to chance.

With that in mind, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Cunningham and his Long Beach counterpart commissioned nuclear-security workups of their ports. The conclusion: Port officials could get the best protection against attacks by persuading officials abroad to tighten security at the foreign ports that feed shipments into Los Angeles and Long Beach. That's the mission that Cunningham and his colleagues began to pursue, at first meeting considerable push-back from the U.S. government. Now, their approach is a national model.

"The good news and the bad news is that Los Angeles is the best in the country," says University of California (Los Angeles) public policy professor Amy Zegart. She gives it a grade of C. A security expert who has studied the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex extensively, Zegart says that while Los Angeles has made more headway than any other jurisdiction, even after "superhuman effort" to coordinate jealously independent agencies, its security system remains full of holes, both technological and political.

The story is similar at the national level. Adm. James Loy, who until recently was the deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department, recalled a series of "Deputies Committee" meetings in the White House Situation Room in early 2004 at which federal security officials expressed nagging worries about efforts to combat nuclear terrorism. This was the one threat that required a "zero-tolerance policy," Loy said, and current efforts weren't cutting it.

Within months, Loy would become one of the leading advocates in the federal government for a new office dedicated to bolstering the country's nuclear-detection policy and technology. In Loy's vision, this office would drive a "mini-Manhattan Project" to push for a technological breakthrough that could revolutionize America's ability to detect nuclear material at its borders, inside its borders, and around the world. The proposal for the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office made its debut in the president's 2006 budget request.

But headway has been modest, at best. Many critics say the security system currently under development for ports and border crossings has inherent flaws. The chief weakness is that the system depends on newly installed "radiation portal monitors" -- which can't reliably detect the most-likely-to-be used material: highly enriched uranium. Nor can the monitors detect a shielded dirty bomb. And even if the devices could detect every type of nuclear material, as outgoing House Homeland Security Chairman Christopher Cox, R-Calif., points out, the current system assumes "that terrorists will do us a favor by bringing their nuclear material through a radiation portal monitor."

Indeed, it would be all too easy for terrorists to evade the portal monitors altogether by shipping a nuclear weapon -- whole or in parts -- on a yacht or in a truck, or even by carrying it in piece by piece in backpacks, or smuggling it across any number of unprotected sections of the northern and southern borders. Uranium, ironically, is so low in radioactivity that it is safe to handle without gloves, so a bomb's worth could even be broken into hundreds of half-pound chunks and smuggled into the country in people's pockets. One hundred kilograms (220 pounds) of enriched uranium, more than enough for a crude bomb like the one that shattered Hiroshima, would fit into a box 6 inches on a side -- about the size of a 1-gallon water jug. And while the Hiroshima bomb weighed 5 tons, a terrorist bomb designed to be detonated on the ground instead of dropped from an airplane could probably fit into a large SUV.

For decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States and the Soviet Union were safely deadlocked in a nuclear stalemate, because each country could count on its radar to detect the missiles coming and allow time for retaliation. In Noel Cunningham's world, there's no such heads-up. But with the right mix of intelligence, new technology, and sensible policy, there could be.

Some security experts say we shouldn't get too exercised over the nuclear threat, because the likelihood that we'll actually face it is low. But Cunningham says while that may be true for the country at large, it's not so for his port, according to the intelligence reports he sees every day. "We don't think the probability is low. We really don't," he says. "We have made that our top priority."

Detection Is Hard to Do

The best way to understand the challenges that Cunningham faces in protecting his port is to see it from on high. Flying over the Los Angeles-Long Beach complex, Cunningham's deputy for homeland security, Lt. Michael Graychik, points out the cruise ship terminal, several shipping terminals, a waste treatment plant, a petroleum processing plant, the Queen Mary, and wrecking yards. "Some of [the yards] don't have fences; they're just there," he says. Graychik then motions to three freeways -- Interstate 405, U.S. Highway 110, and Interstate 710 -- that thread through the port, and a couple of bridges as well. "In some ports, you close the gate and the port's closed. You can't do that here," he says. "There's no gate to close. You can see how porous it is."

Collectively, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach span more than 7,000 acres. Even their own managers don't always know where the ports begin and end. "We use a map with different colors," to sort out what belongs to whom, Graychik explains.

Still, he believes that even if a nuclear weapon arrives at his port undetected, it's not likely to be detonated there. "I envision a nuclear attack occurring in a place like downtown L.A. before it occurs here -- tearing the heart out of the city," he says. The Los Angeles-Long Beach complex is perhaps the ideal conduit for a nuke, however. It marks the beginning of what's known as the Alameda Corridor, which is the main rail route out of the complex to the rest of the country -- and which ends on the eastern side of downtown Los Angeles.

That scenario is what keeps Los Angeles City Council member Jack Weiss up at night. "If a nuclear weapon were smuggled into Los Angeles via the Port of Los Angeles and transported via the Alameda Corridor into downtown L.A.," he says, "I would be shocked if anybody would have any prayer of finding out about that." Weiss represents one of the wealthiest districts in the city, and his constituents rarely, if ever, talk to him about terrorism. But as a former assistant U.S. attorney and Capitol Hill national security aide, he's mounted a personal quest to raise awareness, and money, for terrorism prevention and preparedness. "It's inevitable," he says of a nuclear attack somewhere in the country. "I don't even view it in terms of risk."

But Weiss says he's fighting an uphill battle, because local officials are not elected for their anti-terrorism credentials. "The next attack, if and when it comes, will not galvanize most leaders in most American cities to do more," he contends. "The attitude will continue to be, 'It can't and won't happen here.' " He notes that the Los Angeles Police Department just changed the name of its Counter-Terrorism Bureau to the Critical Incident Management Bureau. "The chief of police believed that if he kept using the word 'terrorism,' it would be hard to keep getting additional resources from the City Council," Weiss says with a mix of exasperation and resignation.

By Sea

Noel Cunningham's terrorism fixation began in 1993, after the first World Trade Center bombing. One of Cunningham's closest friends was Ferdinand (Freddie) Morrone, the chief of police for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who worked at the World Trade Center and was subsequently killed in the 2001 attacks. After the 1993 bombing, as the two learned more about a group of Islamic radicals known as al Qaeda, they began a quiet maritime-security crusade. Their listeners were few and their success limited. Terrorism didn't sell.

Built like a linebacker, Cunningham has a grandfatherly demeanor and an easy laugh. He spent 25 years with the Los Angeles Police Department before moving to the Port of Los Angeles, which has its own police department. After 9/11, he saw his window of opportunity open.

Conversations with officials at the CIA, FBI, and Coast Guard led him to quickly conclude that preventing a nuclear bomb from going off in, or going through, his port had to be his top priority. He persuaded his Long Beach counterparts to go in with him on a $40,000 contract with the Energy Department's Sandia National Laboratories to study the threat; it was the first time these two fiercely competitive ports made a joint investment. Charles Massey, a border and maritime security expert at Sandia, spent five months on the job. "From that study, we determined that our best bet was to try to dedicate all our resources toward the port of origin rather than here," Cunningham said. As Massey succinctly put it, "Once [a nuclear weapon] gets on a ship, you're done."

Since 70 percent of the cargo that enters Los Angeles and Long Beach comes from Hong Kong and Singapore, Cunningham and Massey decided to focus there. They had to persuade not only the foreign ports, but also the U.S. government, to take a more systemic approach. "We finally won, and it was painful," Massey recalls of their efforts to persuade the Transportation Security Administration to let them use grant money for a program that did more than test gadgets.

Selling stepped-up security measures to overseas ports was challenging, too, because adding security measures costs money. The fact that the U.S. government didn't appear to be backing the security efforts didn't help Cunningham and Massey with their sales job. Cunningham tapped his business contacts in Singapore and persuaded the mayor of Los Angeles to join him on a trip to try to seal the deal. It worked, and Hong Kong -- not to be shown up by its maritime archrival -- followed.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security was trying to forge a separate relationship with ports to implement two container-security programs, one that places Customs officers overseas to monitor containers as they are being loaded, and a second to give a kind of Good Housekeeping seal to companies whose supply chain is demonstrably secure. The Container Security Initiative has now put Customs officers in 36 foreign ports, and the certification program counts 5,052 corporate members -- although the Government Accountability Office has noted holes in both programs' vetting processes.

The Energy Department runs parallel port-security initiatives of its own. Energy's "Second Line of Defense" program has trained 1,400 U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, as well as some foreign customs agents, at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, putting them through three-to-five-day crash courses complete with simulated seizures and practice samples of real uranium. And in 2003, an offshoot program called "Megaports" began installing radiation detectors to screen cargo containers at the largest foreign ports.

Back in the States, Homeland Security expects to have 90 radiation portal monitors operational at the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex by the end of the year, making it possible to scan every container arriving from abroad. And the Los Angeles port is trying to piece together federal money to set up security cameras and other monitoring systems.

It's been slow going, says George Cummings, the Los Angeles port's homeland-security director. He sent the Homeland Security Department a sequenced, prioritized five-year plan (developed with his Long Beach counterpart), but DHS took a Chinese-menu approach, picking and choosing which parts to fund. The department will pay for worker security cards with snazzy biometrics, for example, but not for machines to read the cards.

The biggest on-the-ground bugaboo is what's known as secondary inspection. Right now, when a container that raises suspicion needs to be unloaded, it's driven eight miles to the Customs inspection facility in Carson, Calif. Cunningham has been lobbying for a new state-of-the-art inspection facility within the port, and planning for a $60 million facility is getting under way now, even though the proposal has caused much controversy in the surrounding community.

Los Angeles has also made some headway from an organizational standpoint, in resolving the "who's-in-charge" question. Coast Guard Capt. Peter Neffenger established the Area Maritime Security Committee, whose 14-member executive committee includes a representative of each major stakeholder in the port, from the FBI to the local fire chief. Depending on the scenario, Neffenger can quickly delegate responsibility to the FBI, or the fire chief, or the local police.

Neffenger, who holds a master's degree from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, also likes to war-game terrorist scenarios as a way to think through anti-terrorism strategies, and to tap some Hollywood creativity, he recently invited five screenwriters and producers to join in. Through his war-gaming, he's concluded that terrorists might choose to use a vehicle other than a container, because they would want to be able to stay close to their nuclear weapon. Moreover, forgery of the shipping documents would require a network of collaborators. The more people involved, the more likely someone will get caught.

Thousands of fishing boats, yachts, and other small craft go in and out of ports routinely, without inspection, noted Matthew Bunn, a senior research associate in the Project on Managing the Atom at the Kennedy School. "Lord knows what's on them."

So for all of their work, the best Cunningham and Neffenger can probably hope for is to force a determined terrorist to go somewhere else, say to Seattle or across a land border. "That's the whole idea," Cunningham says with a hearty laugh. He's only half-kidding.

By Land

Three thousand trucks roll through the Otay Mesa border crossing in Southern California each day. Border officials opened this entryway in 1985 to redirect cargo away from the country's busiest border crossing, which lies just 15 miles to the west. In October, the Otay Mesa crossing got its batch of radiation portal monitors, which look like enormous stereo speakers with bright-yellow borders. As trucks exit the tollbooth-like border checkpoints, they drive through the monitors at regular speed. The monitors beep when they detect radiation. This happens about 15 times a day.

The person in charge of this and all the other border crossings on California's southern border is Adele Fasano, a veteran of the U.S. Customs Service, now known as Customs and Border Protection, within the Homeland Security Department. Every truck goes through these monitors, and half of the trucks are randomly selected to go through a second monitor that zaps the truck's load with gamma rays to take an X-ray-like picture of the density of what's inside.

The main thing these monitors have brought Fasano is peace of mind. "Now I know when a truck comes through, it's being screened," she says. "We'll move on to other [threat] areas." Asked to name the greatest threat to her many border crossings, she quickly replies, "Narcotics." But security expert Stephen Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former Coast Guard commander, says that Fasano's confidence is unwarranted because the radiation monitors and the gamma-ray density-detection machines "don't talk to each other at all." So a truck full of lightly shielded highly enriched uranium can clear the radiation portal monitor and face just a 50 percent chance of being sent to the gamma-ray machine, which might detect the shielding but not the radiation.

Still, terrorists might consider a 50 percent chance of getting caught too risky if they can cross the border at some other spot that has no detection equipment at all. Harvard's Bunn frets about hikers carrying pieces of a nuclear weapon across the woodland border between Canada and the United States. The Homeland Security Department, in its classified National Planning Scenarios, conjures up a situation in which "different groups of illegal immigrants" smuggle in materials and parts for a bomb. Or they might drive a fully assembled bomb across the border in a rental truck or a large SUV.

It's actually pretty easy to cross the border undetected, says T.J. Bonner, president of the Border Patrol officers union. There are plenty of small, unmonitored roads, especially along the northern border. "Drive-throughs are still an easy way to move material that happens to be heavy," he says. And as for people and vehicles that the Border Patrol does encounter on these roads, he says, "we just don't screen people to see if they're carrying any nuclear materials with them, nor do we screen vehicles we happen to catch that drive between the ports of entry." Smugglers have gotten contraband across the border undetected through tunnels, in planes, even hidden inside a tank full of propane. The possibilities are "only limited by your imagination," Bonner says.

Inside the Borders

Once a hypothetical nuclear weapon is loose in the U.S., the challenge of finding it becomes tactically, and bureaucratically, much more complex. By law, Homeland Security has a leading role, but DHS has almost no assets for searching for a weapon of mass destruction. As the "lead federal agency" for counter-terrorism within the United States, the FBI has the authority and the agents to head the hunt, but to get highly technical expertise, the FBI relies on the agencies that actually handle America's own nuclear bombs: the military and the Department of Energy.

The government got its first wake-up call in 1974, when a blackmailer demanding $200,000 claimed to have a nuclear bomb in Boston. The confused scramble to send qualified specialists to check out the threat -- and the humiliation of being hoaxed -- led to the creation of a special Energy Department program known as NEST. Over three decades, even the name (if not the acronym) has changed, from "Nuclear Emergency Search Team," to the less dramatic "Nuclear Emergency Support Team." But the essence of NEST remains the same: DOE scientists, engineers, and support personnel who work full-time on designing, testing, and maintaining nuclear bombs, or on managing civilian nuclear materials, volunteer to be cross-trained and to be on call to leave their lab jobs at a moment's notice and deploy to a threatened city. Since 9/11, they have been called out again and again.

If you haven't noticed all of this NEST activity -- and the teams have been called to Washington, as well as to Manhattan and Los Angeles -- that's because you're not supposed to. NEST searchers wear civilian clothes and use detection gear concealed in backpacks and briefcases. And while the original NEST approach was to swarm the target city with hundreds of personnel, as early as the mid-1990s the program began reorganizing into an array of smaller, more streamlined, and less conspicuous teams.

The first response is often a squad of seven people from the nearest Energy lab, mobilized under the Radiological Assistance Program. Founded in the 1950s, RAP historically assisted industry and local government with minor problems, such as an cancer therapy source that had been improperly tossed into a Dumpster. But since such accidents could actually be early evidence of terrorists' building or smuggling a bomb, the RAP volunteers were trained and equipped, even before 9/11, to look for signs of weapons.

Still, most RAP members are not weapons experts, and some NEST veterans fear that they'll miss key clues. Energy officials argue, however, that the small search teams in the field are linked electronically with weapons laboratories like Los Alamos, where a larger "home team" of scientists specialized in nuclear weapons design can use their supercomputers and lab facilities to analyze the searchers' radiation readings. These elite weapons laboratories would also assess any radiation warnings from law enforcement and intelligence officials. To weed out hoaxes like the one in Boston, experts are trained to analyze each threat not only for technical plausibility but also for linguistic clues, such as whether the suspect is making references to the Koran, or to Tom Clancy thrillers.

In the event that an intelligence tip or a RAP investigation revealed a serious threat, Energy would dispatch a specialized counter-terrorist Search Response Team, either from Nellis Air Force Base (just down the road from Energy's Nevada Test Site) or from Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. DOE has its own small fleet of aircraft, but they are frequently undergoing maintenance or carrying VIPs, according to a critical 2003 report by the department's own inspector general. NEST veterans talk of hitching rides on military planes or even commercial airlines to get to where they were needed.

The first-wave Search Response Team would consist (like a RAP team) of just seven Energy employees, linked to a home team at the labs. On arrival, the search team would expand by handing out detection equipment to a dozen or two local police officers. Just how user-friendly modern detection gear is, and how well the hastily trained novices are able to use it, is bitterly debated. (See sidebar, p. 1749.) In theory, cops can quickly learn to read a simple detector and call in the scientists to deal with anything suspicious -- and they know their city's streets as no scientist ever could. If time permits and the danger demands, more Energy technicians can flow in to reinforce the team. NEST even has planes and helicopters that can scan from the air, though such long-range methods are better suited for mapping nuclear fallout than for pinpointing an unexploded bomb.

If a bomb is found, Energy steps back into an advisory role. Seizing the weapon, and neutralizing any terrorists still around (to guard, transport, or put together the weapon), is up to the FBI's elite Hostage Rescue Team or to a military Joint Special Operations Command force code-named "Lincoln Gold." And it would probably be a Special Operations bomb squad that would disarm the device. (The FBI's explosives experts do not routinely handle nukes, as the military does.) Then, a larger Joint Technical Operations Team of military explosives-handlers, augmented by Energy weapons engineers, would move in to take the bomb apart.

These final steps have never been taken for real -- as far as we know. But the search process has been launched repeatedly since 9/11, especially during the fall of 2001, when ominous reports from a CIA source code-named "Dragonfire" convinced administration officials that al Qaeda had a bomb. "Our activity level certainly went up in the year and a half after 9/11, [and] from December '03 to late spring '04," says Joseph Krol, the retired Navy admiral who runs the emergency-response program at Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. "We were really up against it."

In the jittery new world, anomalous radiation readings could prompt panic. In several cases, said one NEST veteran, officials in D.C. went to high alert over false alarms that field teams could have easily resolved, "but they wouldn't listen to the field." And adding a Homeland Security Department only compounded the confusion of "multiple agencies trying to report straight to the president."

The law creating DHS gave it authority to call out the Energy experts in a crisis, but no authority over the day-to-day management of the teams themselves -- after all, their members work full-time at Energy labs. Former DHS officials say the newborn department, struggling to resolve its role, left the pre-9/11 system mostly intact. "The way we've worked it out," says Energy's Krol, "we are allowed to respond to anybody, and we let DHS know within 15 minutes via phone call. They certainly retain the right to say no, but the lead agency in most cases would be the FBI."

The biggest change of late has been to back off the hair-trigger responsiveness for NEST deployments. "A year and a half ago, it was automatic -- we'd just deploy. [But] we've had a better dialogue with the FBI and the intelligence community," says Krol, "and in some cases, the answer has come to be 'No, we don't have enough corroborated information to do a deployment.' " Without detailed intelligence to narrow down the search, the cold fact is that no number of experts can find a bomb in time. Today's technology can detect bombs from tens of yards away, not from miles away. "Our teams have a reasonably good chance if we were searching a large building or a city block," says one former Energy official. "If you told me a city, and didn't give me more clues than that, I wouldn't feel confident about our chances."

The Way Ahead?

No one wants to wait to start searching until after an A-bomb is inside an American city. No one can build a Great Wall of China that will stop every nuclear smuggler at the U.S. border, either. The most promising defense is not one rigid barrier, not one supersensor, but a network of intelligence -- both high-tech and human -- to spot suspicious anomalies while they are as far away from America as possible. Across the ocean in the port of Hong Kong, a pilot project is under way to scan every cargo container for nuclear material.

Stephen Flynn, whose previous advocacy effort evolved into the Container Security Initiative, persuaded Hong Kong to experimentally run every container through both radiation and gamma-ray density sensors, and then to take a picture of the container's identification numbers to match against databases for additional screening -- all while the container is moving along at about 9 miles an hour. All of these data build up a complete electronic picture of what a normal supply chain looks like, and may show how to flag aberrant containers without relying on inspectors to look at every image. The more information the system has about what is normal, the fewer false alarms it will produce.

Deploying such a system at every port in the world, Flynn estimates, would cost just $1.5 billion. But the Hong Kong project is in jeopardy because it lacks the blessing of the U.S. government, and without that, the port of Hong Kong can't justify spending $6.50 per container for the scan. Until recently, DHS has argued that only 3 to 4 percent of containers are sufficiently "high risk" to warrant scanning, not 100 percent, as in Flynn's model. However, the department announced recently that it eventually plans to run all international cargo and vehicles through radiation portal monitors, but not always in conjunction with density sensors that could detect shielded material.

Local innovation is brewing in Los Angeles as well. At the Terrorism Early Warning Group, which is run by the Los Angeles Country Sheriff's Department, Lt. John Sullivan has developed a model for relatively inexpensive sensors that could be networked around the city to spot nuclear material. Sullivan is the father of the Terrorism Early Warning Group, which is widely considered to be the most sophisticated local effort in the country to anticipate threats. Way back in 1998, he thought the city could usefully deploy a range of different, complementary sensors -- radiation, motion, photographic, weight -- that, if networked together properly, could detect and track a vehicle carrying nuclear material. (Additional sensors might also track biological and chemical agents.) Sullivan even mapped out where the sensors could go. The plan has sat for seven years in a white binder above his desk.

"You can't wire the whole country," Sullivan says. But -- like Flynn's pilot project in Hong Kong -- even a basic sensor system could give local officials a detailed baseline of what's normal, against which to gauge threats.

Any detection system, no matter how technologically advanced, is only as powerful as the information people use in deciding where and how to deploy it. "Weapon No. 1 is good intelligence," says Rep. Jane Harman of California, who is the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and whose district surrounds the port complex. "And we're not good at [nuclear] intelligence."

After all, the closest the United States came to catching 9/11 leader Mohammed Atta was when the police in Florida pulled him over for speeding -- and let him go. "The first discoverer of a threat may not be an intelligence agency; it may be a federal, state, or local law enforcement officer," says John Cohen, a former California detective and House Judiciary Committee staffer who now advises local governments. "Most police officers don't run across a bank robbery every day, but almost every police officer is trained to recognize one," Cohen said. Those hundreds of thousands of officers nationwide, he suggests, could be trained to watch for terrorists as well.

Harman goes further, saying, "One anti-terrorism strategy is a well-prepared public" -- if, she adds, officials can avoid the "crying-wolf syndrome" that has afflicted so many public alerts. If the government has real details on a specific threat, such as the description of the truck hauling the bomb or of the terrorist driving it, publishing that information could mobilize millions of citizens for the search. On the other hand, it could create a nationwide, nuclear-powered version of the D.C. area's 2002 hunt for sniper John Allen Muhammad's (nonexistent) white van. And once terrorists know that everyone is looking for them, they might simply decide to set their bomb off immediately in the nearest city rather than risk capture trying to reach their primary target; thus the search would save Washington, at the expense of, say, San Antonio.

Can a nuclear-bomb-hunting group small enough to keep a secret conduct a successful search? When, and what, do you tell the public? "Ten years ago, we were asking that question" in war games, says one former counter-terrorism official. "I don't think we have a good answer."

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Plan to improve nuclear-detection technology mired in red tape

Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

In 2004, he worked on another Defense Science Board report that highlighted the need to improve nuclear-detection technology. This time, he wasn't about to let the report go unnoticed.

Ikle knew that the Center for the Study of the Presidency, a small Washington think tank, had been organizing roundtables aimed at offering practical advice to the Department of Homeland Security. The center, founded by former NATO Ambassador David Abshire, used its pull to assemble a heavyweight group of scientists who had defense backgrounds, including Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin.

In the spring of 2004, the roundtable convened and concluded that politics, more than technology, was hindering the development of nuclear-detection capabilities. The group thought that if someone could break through the bureaucracy and create a type of "mini-Manhattan Project," the government could perhaps produce a real technological breakthrough in five to 10 years. The goal would be to create nuclear-detection equipment that was small enough and cheap enough to deploy around the world -- from Tora Bora to the Port of Los Angeles -- and sensitive enough to detect highly enriched uranium.

Ikle and Richard Wagner, who authored the 2004 Defense Science Board study, pressed their Defense Department contacts. James Loy, the deputy secretary at Homeland Security, pressed within his department. Eventually, the issue rose to the level of a White House "Deputies Committee" meeting.

"In Washington, people mostly have meetings," Ikle grumbles, noting that while the Manhattan Project produced the A-bomb in 28 months, "it takes Washington 28 months to produce an organizational chart."

It was really more like six months before the deputies settled on a model, which they called the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, and got the go-ahead from the White House. Loy says the purpose of the office was to balance the premise that nuclear-detection capabilities were inherently limited by physics and couldn't get much better, against the more optimistic notion of Ikle and his allies that scientists weren't pushing the limits of physics hard enough. So, the office was charged with both maximizing the current capabilities and establishing a "mini-Manhattan Project."

Vayl Oxford got a call in November 2004 asking him to lead the office's start-up. At the time, he was director of counterproliferation at the National Security Council. He accepted and immediately began drawing up his plans. The office would coordinate detection efforts across the federal government; establish common operational plans for officials at all levels of government who handle detection; and develop a global "architecture" of nuclear detection.

But even as Oxford was planning, a skeptical Congress began yanking the rug out from under him. Arguing that DHS had no clear plan for how to spend the money, the House Appropriations Committee slashed the office's funding from $227 million to $127 million. "We're not going to resign ourselves to that number," says Oxford, noting that budget figures are rarely final this early in the year.

Some of the participants in the original think-tank group behind the idea worry that the research-and-development program won't have the stature of a Manhattan Project if it is buried in the bowels of the Homeland Security Department. Ikle is concerned that the R&D program, if it gets funded at all, might parcel out small amounts of money to universities in various congressional districts, and not amount to much in the end. Many in the original roundtable group are already trying to persuade the White House to establish a mega-nuclear-detection research project outside of the new office. At the White House, though, Kenneth Rapuano, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security, says he sees the office as an ambitious research effort. Ikle's criticism, he says, "is a bit premature."

If the new office eventually produces truly revolutionary detectors, the only place they're sure to be deployed is at the ports of entry along the border. Oxford has the power to cajole, but not to compel, the Energy Department and the FBI to heed his recommendations.

Insiders report that the Defense Department is transferring people and programs to the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and sticking Homeland Security with the bill. Meanwhile, as the office, which plans to eventually house 110 employees, collects agents borrowed from other parts of the government, it runs the risk of filling up with other departments' castoffs.

If all of these problems sound familiar, they should: The creation of the Homeland Security Department happened pretty much this way. Maybe the mini-Manhattan Project will do better.

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New intelligence director shakes up hierarchy

Siobhan Gorman — Mon, 09 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

"It has a lot of far-reaching implications," says one former senior CIA official of the memo. "The implication is [that station chiefs] should be in charge of coordination for others who want to do clandestine activities overseas. The challenge will be whether others pay attention" to Negroponte's directive. By "others," the ex-official meant the FBI and the Pentagon, but he added that the Negroponte memo definitely signals that CIA Director Porter Goss lost significant clout when he lost his other title, "director of central intelligence."

While members of Congress and the ever-growing intelligence commentariat wonder whether Negroponte will be able to bring the intelligence bureaucracy to heel in Washington, he's already consolidating power in the field.

"They're moving out very quickly to assert the DNI's authority over a number of troublesome issues within the intelligence community," said another CIA veteran. "Negroponte is saying, 'The chief of station is my senior representation there, and thou shalt report to me through him.' "

One intelligence community official characterized the Negroponte memo as a realignment of responsibilities now that the director of national intelligence has supplanted the director of central intelligence and is responsible for coordinating all 15 U.S. intelligence agencies. The official said that there's been "no change in reporting channels or CIA authorities" when a chief of station is working on a CIA project.

Nevertheless, one former senior CIA official noted that Negroponte's directive "does strip authority from the director of the CIA. There's no doubt about that." He added that the relationship between the DNI and the CIA director still has to be worked out internally. "It's another one of those vague things that is not really explained in the [intelligence reform] legislation."

Indeed, 16-year CIA veteran Ron Marks says Negroponte's memo undermines the entire CIA. "The agency, as we know it, is gone," Marks says. Its reduced status, he adds, "is not a good thing; it's not a bad thing; it just is."

Yet, other observers, including Michael Scheuer, who used to head the CIA's "Bin Laden Unit" and is perhaps better known as the once anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, worry that requiring station chiefs to serve two masters is a mistake. Scheuer predicts that the change will harm intelligence-sharing by creating yet another information channel between the field and Washington. "How can the head of a 15-component agency deal directly with station chiefs?" he asked. "It will create more confusion."

Chiefs of station largely stand to gain status and perhaps influence from the change, even though the new arrangement's implications for the station chiefs' relations with military intelligence officials and with FBI attaches abroad remain murky. Although station chiefs won't have control over their military and FBI counterparts, they will have "an edge," as one former intelligence official puts it. It's still unclear, though, who will referee turf clashes in the field.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is expected to release its organizational chart early this month. Since Negroponte was confirmed on April 21, he has handled the President's Daily Brief and participated in "principals meetings" at the White House, said Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino. Meanwhile, the White House is one month into its three-month review of the recommendations from the Silberman-Robb commission, which investigated intelligence failures that preceded the war in Iraq.

Intelligence community alums report that Negroponte is also beginning to flesh out his initial policy priorities. Among them are increasing open-source intelligence-gathering and bolstering the community's technology infrastructure. Both steps were strongly recommended in the Silberman-Robb commission's report, which has become something of a playbook for Negroponte's fledgling office.

Negroponte is considering establishing a directorate for open-source (or, publicly available) intelligence. One of the champions of open-source intelligence is David Shedd, who recently left the National Security Council to become Negroponte's chief of staff.

The new DNI is also likely to push for more research and development of information technology, aimed at blending data systems throughout the intelligence community, and for more-innovative approaches to the collection of technical intelligence. "They feel they're deficient" in those two areas, said a former member of the clandestine service. And Negroponte may have a personal interest on the technology front: His brother teaches media technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the meantime, one CIA veteran noted, station chiefs around the world are probably collecting their own intelligence on Negroponte's memo. "It does carry more than a subtle harbinger of the future," the veteran said. "If I were a station chief, I'd probably be calling on the phone or back channels to find out what this means."

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DHS chief floats idea of collecting private citizens' information

Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff this week floated an idea to start a nonprofit group that would collect information on private citizens, flag suspicious activity, and send names of suspicious people to his department.

The idea, which Chertoff tossed out at an April 27 meeting with security-industry officials, is reminiscent of the Defense Department's now-dead Total Information Awareness program that sought to sift though heaps of foreign intelligence information to root out potential terrorist activity.

According to one techie who attended the April 27 meeting, Chertoff told the group, "Maybe we can create a nonprofit and track people's activities, and an algorithm could red-flag individuals. Then, the nonprofit could give us the names."

Chertoff also suggested that private industry form a group to collect proprietary information about cyber- and other infrastructure-security breaches from companies; scrub it of identifying information; aggregate it; and pass it along to the department. The financial services industry already has such a group.

"The secretary was responding to a hypothetical question with a hypothetical answer," said Homeland Security Department press secretary Brian Roehrkasse. "He did not offer specific programmatic content or discuss any specific proposed approach. Rather, he was discussing, in general terms, the importance of this issue of balancing security and privacy."

Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, organized the gathering of about 50 security-industry executives from companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Verizon. Reached by phone at the meeting, he characterized the event as "an organizational meeting to discuss how the [information-technology] industry can work more effectively with each other" and with the Homeland Security Department.

Because the meeting was closed to the press, Miller would not discuss Chertoff's comments.One meeting participant said that Chertoff told the group that having a nonprofit collect names rather than the government "would alleviate some of the concerns people have." Not so for this participant: "This is what made me sort of shift in my seat. It sounds like investigating every person for no reason." He was particularly concerned that an unknown formula created by this new group would determine the red flags.

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Fewer, better spies key to intelligence reform, former official says

Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Bush listened intently as Kay explained what went wrong: "People connected the dots without collecting the dots. The most dangerous thing you can do is connect the dots when you haven't collected the dots. You build a universe that is fact-free."

Although Kay provided an interim report in October 2003, that 90-minute White House lunch on February 2, 2004, is the only conversation he has had with Bush about Iraq's apparent lack of weapons of mass destruction. Bush interrupted Kay frequently to probe further and "dominated the conversation," according to Kay, even though Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card were also there.

In a recent interview with National Journal, Kay recalled being surprised that Bush displayed no anger over U.S. intelligence agencies' failure to properly assess whether Saddam had posed an immediate threat. "It's one thing to say that there were other reasons to go to war," Kay said. "But that doesn't stop one from saying, 'I'm really pissed, and I don't want this to happen again.' I would not have controlled my anger -- and would have used my anger to push reforms ahead" within the Central Intelligence Agency.

Bush's subdued reaction contrasts sharply with President Kennedy's response to being failed by the CIA. After the Bay of Pigs invasion turned into a fiasco in April 1961 because Cuban forces quickly crushed CIA-trained Cuban emigrants intent on toppling Fidel Castro, Kennedy fired the director of the CIA and two other top officials at the agency.

But regardless of how presidents have treated the CIA, the United States has had an embarrassingly poor track record in gathering intelligence through the use of spies. Today, despite the latest wake-up calls -- the CIA's inability to prevent the 9/11 attacks or to know that Iraq no longer possessed WMD -- the United States' so-called "human-intelligence" capabilities are only marginally better than they were before the World Trade Center was destroyed, say ex-spies and outside experts alike. The Bush White House, according to a source familiar with its thinking, sees only "pockets of improvement" in human intelligence. And now, two years after the war in Iraq began, some intelligence veterans contend that the situation is worse than it was before 9/11.

If, as expected, John Negroponte, now the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, is confirmed as the first director of national intelligence, he will inherit an intelligence community at war with itself and a spying operation that's yet to break free of its Cold War mentality. Recognizing that the CIA is reeling from three and a half years of revelations about its failures, the Pentagon and the FBI have moved quickly to try to seize some CIA turf by beefing up their own spying activities.

Negroponte will come to his new job armed with a fresh report on intelligence failures, courtesy of the Silberman-Robb commission, which Bush charged with investigating the intelligence failures that preceded the war in Iraq. The commission plans to report its findings and recommendations to the president later this month.

Yet Kay frets that true reform of human-intelligence operations has "not really begun." Simply installing a director of national intelligence does not ensure that the right information "dots" get collected, he says.

The CIA was created in 1947 in response to the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor six years earlier. Today, the CIA and the intelligence community that has grown up around it continually monitor every country's military moves via satellite. The obsession with high-tech tracking of military operations has persisted, even after the Soviet Union's collapse and after outside analysts such as Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary of Defense, began warning in the 1990s that the United States was dangerously neglecting the sort of intelligence-gathering that can only be done by human spies -- as opposed to satellites and other gadgets.

The secret to improving American spying "is blindingly simple," says John MacGaffin, a 31-year veteran of the clandestine service. The transformation must come from both the top and the bottom, he argues. At the top, the director of national intelligence will need to define the unique role that each of the 15 intelligence agencies ought to play in human-intelligence collection and will need to make sure that every agency performs its assigned role. And clear directions from on high will need to be accompanied by commonsense ground-level changes, he says, such as rewriting the rules that govern the recruitment and promotion of spies, getting more serious about language training, and being more clever about how and where spies are deployed abroad.

Bush has responded to the CIA's manifest shortcomings by directing the agency to develop a plan to increase its roster of spies -- currently estimated at 1,100 -- by 50 percent. Yet, former CIA agents warn that simply pushing more recruits through the existing pipeline will do nothing to ensure that the CIA or its sister agencies will be able to collect information that is any more reliable.

"Fifty percent more gets you to 'Stupid,' " MacGaffin grumbles. "You'll get 50 percent more of what you've got now." The problem, he insists, is quality, not quantity.

Indeed, an important lesson from the U.S. failure to properly gauge Saddam's weaponry is that ensuring that the information Washington was getting from its spies and their paid contacts was accurate and complete was not given enough priority. Human spying needs to become more-precisely targeted -- toward obtaining only information that is absolutely essential and that cannot be gotten any other way. The vacuum-cleaner approach of sucking up and sending along every piece of "information" -- verified or not -- that's in the air in a targeted country just hasn't worked.

As John Gannon, former chair of the National Intelligence Council, puts it, "The solution is strategy and discipline. It's going to mean fewer human-intelligence resources, not many more." In Gannon's vision of a revitalized intelligence community, human spies would make up a "smaller but richer piece" of the pie, not 50 percent more filler.

A New Brand of Spying

The first war against Iraq taught the CIA that post-Cold War spying wasn't easy. During the Persian Gulf War, then-CIA Director William Webster's spies recruited a few senior people in the Iraqi army. But Saddam's inner circle was tight, and the CIA's turncoats weren't in a position to know specifics of Iraq's attack plans. "In that particular situation, I thought we got more information from what we could see from the sky," Webster recalled in a recent interview. He says that he worried about pushing the few sources he did have too far, for fear they'd get caught and probably killed, leaving the CIA with zero sources on the inside of Saddam's regime.

After that war, why didn't the United States work to improve its spy network inside Iraq? "If you look at the pattern after World War I and World War II, we tend to be very optimistic. We conclude we don't need those people anymore," says Webster, who retired from the CIA in 1991.

In addition, Americans aren't fond of the idea of paying government agents to snoop, so elected officials have rarely been pushed to make the United States more proficient at spying. Within intelligence circles, the CIA is continually accused of being mired in a "Cold War mind-set." But the CIA's problem is actually more akin to the joke about the man looking for his keys under a streetlamp. Someone asks him why he's looking there, and he responds, "That's where the light is."

The intelligence community recognizes that the biggest threat to U.S. security no longer comes from another government's secretly shifting troops or weapons around; it comes from terrorist cells under the direction of no head of state. Yet, intelligence officials still aren't proficient at tracking or cracking terrorist cells, so they cling to tactics that worked fairly well in the old days of fighting Communism.

Greg Treverton, a former vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, says bluntly, "We face an utterly different threat that we're almost perfectly unsuited to deal with."

Counting tanks and missiles made some sense during the Cold War (though the CIA apparently long failed to grasp that the Soviet Union was headed toward collapse). Osama bin Laden has no tanks or missiles to count. And to the extent that Al Qaeda has "troop movements" to detect, the CIA has not mastered how to do it.

The CIA's first post-Cold War director, Robert Gates, was quick to shift his resources away from the Soviet Union. In his first years on the job, monitoring Moscow went from swallowing about 65 percent of CIA resources down to just 17 percent, largely because the U.S. redirected some spy satellites, notes University of Georgia international affairs professor Loch Johnson, who has served in a number of advisory capacities to intelligence agencies over the years.

As the CIA was being hit with budget and personnel cuts during the 1990s, some intelligence insiders argued in vain that the United States was going to need the agency to assume new tasks. Gannon, a former deputy director for intelligence, was among those sounding the warnings. But, Gannon says, the government suffered from attention-deficit disorder. Every time he launched a project intended to develop strategies to counter emerging threats, the CIA would be told to redirect its talent toward the conflict of the day. "We wanted to do more long-term strategies, and then there would be a crisis in Bosnia, and off [my people] would go," Gannon recalls.

Likewise, the war in Iraq is now sucking up much of the CIA's human resources, says former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, better known as the "anonymous" author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror. "What has changed since 9/11, I think, is not a lot, because of the vast diversion of resources to Iraq," Scheuer says. "Probably two-thirds of the clandestine service is there. The idea that we have expanded human intelligence probably isn't quite correct."

And even if every CIA spy were assigned to fighting terrorism, Scheuer says, "the conditions of looking for human intelligence are so different from the Cold War that just more money and more people doesn't guarantee you anything." Scheuer, who headed the CIA's so-called "Bin Laden Unit," points to three key differences between then and now.

The first is recruitment of "assets" -- locals whom the CIA enlists to steal secrets. Recruiting people on the outer ring of the Soviet government was difficult because they'd been taught to believe that communism was fairer than democracy, Scheuer says. But if a U.S. spy could hook an apparatchik, reeling him in became easier as he rose through the Soviet system and saw rampant favoritism. The difficulty in dealing with Islamic fundamentalism is the opposite, Scheuer argues. It's comparatively easy to recruit people on the periphery of terrorist cells -- a group's document-forger, for example. But as those people spend more time within the cell, they tend to become true believers with no interest in providing information to U.S. agents.

Second, Scheuer says, the United States' information needs have changed. In the Cold War, the government wanted to get its hands on schematic drawings of Soviet missiles and electrical grids. So, the CIA sought out people who had the inside track on such information. Terrorist cells limit vital information about targets and methods to a tight group within the network; even most members may not have the whole picture, so the likelihood of the CIA's getting it is much lower. But terrorists don't hold all the information the United States needs. Often, U.S. intelligence agencies also need locals who can go where Americans can't and just describe what's on the ground -- details that are missing from outdated maps and unavailable by satellite, as U.S. soldiers learned the hard way in Afghanistan, where the mujahedeen were literally hiding in the shadows.

Third, Scheuer says, policy makers must get comfortable with making decisions about terrorists based on less than ideal information. In the Cold War, he estimates, the United States was 70 to 75 percent certain about most of its intelligence estimates. Now, he says, the CIA's intelligence on terrorist activities and intentions is only about 20 percent "certain."

In theory, these are the kinds of issues that were addressed in the secret plan that CIA Director Porter Goss sent to the White House on February 16 in response to the president's demand for 50 percent more spies. The report is classified, but one senior intelligence official called it "an aggressive and detailed plan" that signals "a focus never really seen before." Yet, a source close to White House officials who have read it says, "There is nothing new or very different about the plan -- and certainly nothing to make anyone think it would be any more successful than before."

Food Fight

As much as he doesn't like it, David Kay understands the Pentagon's drive for its own human-intelligence division. "I saw what happened in Iraq," he says. Soldiers needed intelligence on the motives and intentions of the insurgency, and "the CIA had no answers."

Had Bush used the Iraq intelligence failure to mandate changes in the CIA's intelligence-collection branch, Kay says, the Pentagon might have been willing to trust the CIA's intelligence capability -- or would at least have had a tougher time defending the creation of its new spy division, the Strategic Support Branch. Others argue that the Pentagon simply smelled blood in the water after the 9/11 and Iraq intelligence failures. Still, even if the Pentagon's intentions are good, Kay says, the Defense Department doesn't appreciate the "great dangers" of creating a new intelligence agency.

Since 9/11, a number of intelligence veterans contend, this country's human-intelligence capability has actually declined, because the CIA has been distracted by bureaucratic battles. The grab by the Pentagon and the FBI for a larger share of U.S. spying activities abroad has caused considerable confusion among those responsible for collecting human intelligence. "There's a vacuum in terms of organizational leadership, and some people's uglier instincts are taking over," says Winston Wiley, a former deputy director for intelligence who left the CIA in 2003. "You have a sort of food fight breaking out in the cafeteria." Looking ahead, he says, "the CIA, as it was known in the past, is no longer."

The confusion and infighting that Wiley sees can damage the quality of the intelligence collected. In fact, it may have already done so. If the trend continues, at some point, the CIA and either the FBI or the Pentagon will try to penetrate the same group, and one agency will slip up and blow the other's cover -- probably getting locals or Americans killed in the process. Or, if multiple U.S. agencies are working with a foreign intelligence agency, the foreigners might play the Americans against each other.

Putting aside the questions that CIA alumni raise about the Pentagon's espionage abilities, the U.S. military's freelancing in the spy arena could badly damage relations with U.S. allies. "Try to imagine the Special Forces marching into France without the ambassador's knowing it," frets one former CIA spy.

Breaking up the food fight would require the time and sustained energy of both the national intelligence director and the president -- at a time when Bush and Negroponte need to keep the intelligence community focused on building a cadre of spies geared toward fighting terrorism, and other threats over the horizon. Negroponte, with Bush's full backing, needs to work out a clear division of labor within the intelligence community so that agencies concentrate on what they do best. The result, Wiley says, would be a "system of systems" in which the work of each "collection agency" complemented that of the others -- and every agency in the community could trust that it could rely on the others for the information it wasn't collecting itself.

The CIA would collect human intelligence abroad in an effort to understand U.S. enemies and their strategic plans. But, as one former spy argued, the CIA should focus its limited resources on espionage rather than on peripheral activities, such as covert action and interrogation. ("It's supposed to be the Central Intelligence Agency, not the Central Interrogation Agency," he said pointedly.)

Stretched too thin, the CIA is now dispatching whomever it can to tackle the crisis of the day, the former CIA officer said. "The people we're sending are not prepared for that. Sending some out-of-shape guy from Paris, dressing him up in Lands' End clothing, and telling him which end to shoot from isn't going to do it."

The Pentagon maintains that it needs its own human-intelligence capacity to support its troops and that it ought to take over for the chubby guy sent out from Paris. The Pentagon would take charge of battlefield intelligence (so-called tactical intelligence) -- and nothing more. (See related story, p. 834.)

The FBI would, for now, handle domestic intelligence -- although questions remain about whether domestic intelligence collection will ever be the FBI's strength. Sources close to the National Security Council say that the FBI's intelligence products are still largely useless, and that bureau officials are more worried about the number of reports produced than about what's in them. And an internal FBI report uncovered last week by ABC News acknowledges that, despite earlier Justice Department pronouncements about rounding up terrorists in places like Lackawanna, N.Y., "to date, we have not identified any true 'sleeper' agents in the U.S." For its part, the FBI says that although it may not have uncovered terrorist cells, it has had success in learning about a number of terrorism-recruitment and fundraising efforts.

If confirmed, Negroponte will be responsible for enforcing these clearer job descriptions, but the president will need to publicly emphasize that the intelligence community must improve the quality of its work, says former Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., who served on the House Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 commission. "He needs to use the bully pulpit to transform the CIA and hold them accountable," Roemer adds. He said Bush's feel-good visit to the CIA's Langley campus last week sent exactly the wrong message. "The message out to Langley shouldn't be, 'You are very important, and you're doing a good job'; it should be, 'We need to do a better job.' "

Building a Better Spy

The lesson of Iraq that David Kay presented to the president is a painfully obvious one: Your intelligence community wasn't up to the task of collecting all of the information you needed. Indeed, the lesson of 9/11 was, by comparison, comforting: You've got all this great information; you just need to figure out how to make sense of it before it's too late. Together, 9/11 and the WMD debacle brought home a daunting truth: Not only is the U.S. intelligence community incapable of figuring out what information it has, much of that information is wrong.

The good news is that the government can do a lot to improve the quality of U.S. spy operations and, more generally, human intelligence-gathering. The bad news is that few of these ideas are new. Indeed, the intelligence community has tried and abandoned some of them, because they are difficult to pull off. The recommendations from those who have spent years stealing secrets fall into three broad categories:

1. Spy like a terrorist. The most frequently discussed proposal is to increase the number of spies who operate under risky "nonofficial cover," so-called NOCs. The oft-cited reason is: Terrorists don't go to embassy cocktail parties. NOCs are clandestine officers who pose as nongovernment agents overseas. They often work abroad, posing as anything from an investment banker to a computer-parts salesman. NOCs are expensive and difficult to support, and the CIA has used them sparingly. Such an agent must, for example, put in 14 hours a day as an investment banker and then write up intelligence reports on nights and weekends -- and all on a CIA operative's salary, not an investment banker's. And as the Mission: Impossible TV show put it, if NOCs get caught, the agency will "disavow any knowledge" of their activities.

The CIA has been trying to bost its ranks of NOCs. But it is "running into a brick wall," reports one former spy who still talks frequently with those inside the agency. The conundrum: What kind of cover do you use to position yourself to spy on an enemy who hangs out in caves?

Instead, MacGaffin recommends a tougher, but potentially higher-payoff, alternative to NOCs. He says that today's human-intelligence targets require an intelligence officer to openly put himself in a position to collect secrets, rather than pose as a computer salesman and then try to steal information that he'd never encounter while hawking computers.

For example, if the CIA thinks that important activities are taking place at a port in Yemen, the traditional approach would be to place a spy or operative within a peripheral component of the port, where he would attempt to learn what he needed without getting caught. Under MacGaffin's arrangement, the spy would establish a legitimate, profit-making enterprise that would run the port and, in the process, would have natural access to its secrets. Unfortunately, MacGaffin says, the CIA has not had the "flexibility or expertise" to establish and operate this sort of collection capability -- especially if it would turn a profit and thus trigger all sorts of government restrictions.

2. Recruit for the threats of today and tomorrow. Recruitment is the most discussed problem at the CIA. The challenge is quality control. The first problem is finding the right people -- those with very specialized skills, especially in Middle Eastern languages, who are willing to risk their lives in the least pleasant corners of the world for a CIA salary.

In a country of 290 million people, a logical step would be to go to, say, the Detroit area, home to the country's largest concentration of Middle Eastern immigrants, and recruit the best and brightest. Recent immigrants speak their native language, understand the culture, and have ties back home. Yet, the surest way to jeopardize one's security clearance -- and thus become ineligible to work for intelligence agencies -- is to travel to the Middle East or, God forbid, to have family there. Public policy professor Amy Zegart of the University of California (Los Angeles), who specializes in intelligence, recounted a recent experience with a talented Middle Eastern student who expressed an interest in working for the CIA and asked Zegart for help. Zegart checked with her CIA contacts. "The message was, 'Good luck. You'll never get him through the process,' " she says.

Further compounding the problem, Zegart says, is that three and a half years after 9/11, college students show only marginally more interest in international affairs than in the past, and the uptick is not translating into aspiring Arabists. "If you compare [enrollment in] Russian language schools in the 1950s to Arabic language programs now, it's pathetic," she says. According to a recent study by the Education Department's research arm, just six U.S. students graduated in 2002 with a major in Arabic.

An alternative, Kay points out, to recruiting first- and second-generation Americans to be career CIA officers is to hire as "assets" people like an Iranian-American dentist who travels to Iran every summer and probably picks up all kinds of useful information while there.

3. Align incentives with the new threat. If the CIA wants its agents to immerse themselves in the culture in which terrorists hide, it can't expect them to rotate to another country after a few years. And if it wants to retain officers in places where "diarrhea is the default position," as MacGaffin, who served as chief of station in several Arab countries, puts it, the government will have to pay higher salaries. The typical pay range of today's CIA operatives -- $60,000 to $70,000 a year -- isn't going to cut it, he says.

Unfortunately, if a spy wants to get promoted, quantity still counts more than quality in today's CIA, according to former officials. "People focus on numbers. This is especially true with terrorism," says a veteran spy. Sources with close contacts inside the agency report that leaders in the directorate of operations were trying to redesign that rewards system -- until Goss ousted them.

But even before the intelligence community embarks on much-needed changes, says Suzanne Spaulding, who's worked in the CIA general counsel's office as well as on intelligence panels on Capitol Hill, its leaders would be well-advised to double-check its current sources to see where the intelligence gaps are located.

Great Expectations

Because the U.S. intelligence community has a history of not knowing when it's getting -- and passing along -- faulty intelligence, just adding more and better spies and cooperative locals won't necessarily solve anything.

"In some ways, our biggest challenge is dealing with the expectation that comes from watching Alias or 24 -- that human intelligence, and intelligence in general, can be omnipresent and omniscient. It can't be," says Wiley, who doesn't align himself with the harshest critics of the U.S. intelligence community's human-intelligence operation. What is more realistic, Wiley says, is to aim to use human sources to help disrupt the "supply chain" for terrorism. He argues that the intelligence community could throw all of its resources at penetrating a terrorist cell and still fail. But if the goal is to learn about and disrupt activities -- such as money laundering -- that might support the next terrorist strike, the chances of success are much higher.

Given its limitations, human intelligence -- or "humint" -- works best in combination with the other "ints," like intelligence from satellites and intercepted signals of all sorts. Indeed, there's a technical term for this intelligence hybrid: "multi-int." Of course, multi-int happens to some degree now, but it's not ingrained in the system, says Gannon, who tried without success to institutionalize multi-int when he led the CIA's directorate of intelligence in the 1990s. "Multi-int is the wave of the future," he says.

With Bush's philosophy of pre-emption driving America's foreign policy, spying is not only an essential tool in the fight against terrorism, it can literally determine where the United States intervenes militarily around the world. Yet, in the year since David Kay lunched with the president, the CIA and its sister agencies, by all accounts, haven't gotten appreciably better at either collecting or connecting the intelligence dots. But Bush still hasn't gotten angry. Perhaps that job, too, will fall to the new director of national intelligence.

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False terror alert in Boston symptom of poor intelligence sharing, critics say

Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

When he returned to the meeting, according to one person familiar with the event, the agent described in "heavy detail" an uncorroborated threat report that had been working its way through local law enforcement channels: Two Iraqis and four Chinese chemists might be conspiring to launch some sort of nuclear attack on Boston.

It was an odd setting in which to share a rumor: 100 or so local officials, as well as health and transportation consultants from the private sector, were in the room.

"At that point, you're essentially briefing the public," said one senior Massachusetts official, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution from the FBI. "To maintain an expectation that the information is going to be kept quiet is absurd."

Earlier that morning, in response to a report sent from its San Diego office, the FBI had sent out a nationwide bulletin and alerted its Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston. By noon, state and local offices were deluged with phone calls from reporters nationwide. By 4 p.m., the Boston Herald had published a story online. The next morning, the FBI bulletin was front-page news. After a few days of investigation, the FBI concluded that the report was false. In its wake, fingers are being pointed over whom to blame for unnecessarily scaring the public.

Several Massachusetts officials, pointing to a February 7 Washington Post story in which an unnamed FBI official criticized state and local representatives for leaks, have said in the past week that the federal government made them scapegoats. The local officials in turn put the blame on the FBI. Asked why the FBI agent briefed the group, FBI Boston office spokeswoman Gail Marcinkiewicz said, "We would not typically talk about what goes on internally."

The incident illustrates a problem highlighted by the 2001 terrorist attacks: mangled lines of communication within government and with the public that could have spelled real danger. "The first step is to admit you have a problem," said one state homeland-security official. "We've been living in this fantasy world, saying information-sharing is better."

The root of the problem, says this state official, is that federal and state officials see information in ways that conflict. While the FBI is reluctant to share information because it could compromise an investigation, the local U.S. attorney might see the need to notify elected leaders, and state officials would want to notify people outside law enforcement and in the private sector.

Back at FBI headquarters, agents complain that they can't win. "It's become a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't type of thing when you're sharing information," said FBI spokesman Ed Cogswell. Additionally, the role of the Homeland Security Department remains unclear. Department officials believe they, not the FBI, should be the main conduit to state and local representatives regarding terrorist threats. "DHS could have presented it in a much better context," said one senior department official.

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney acknowledged recently that federal-state communications fell apart. "There were so many failings all along the line that it's impossible to point the finger at any one place," Romney said last week at a regional security meeting. What was particularly mystifying to state officials was that clear channels of communication were set up last summer for the Democratic National Convention. So when federal officials deviated from those protocols, said several state officials, they added credence to the rumor.

For example, instead of routing the threat information through the normal channels -- the FBI's Counterterrorism Watch Center and the National Counterterrorism Center -- the FBI's San Diego office sent an "urgent" report to headquarters and to the Boston field office. And instead of routing the information though the regular protocol in Massachusetts, which allows aides in the Executive Office of Public Safety to develop an action plan, the Boston U.S. Attorney's Office called the governor's office directly. For these reasons, say state officials, they took the threat more seriously, and Romney decided to skip President Bush's inauguration in Washington and return home.

Meanwhile, state and local officials responsible for communicating with the public say they felt muzzled by the FBI, even after the threat was in the open. Suppressing information compounded panic rather than quelled it, because rumors inevitably filled the gap, said Katie Ford, press secretary for the Executive Office of Public Safety. "Even though the people on the ground in Boston knew there was a need to put information out there," Ford said, "we were essentially being told by Washington, 'Don't do it.' "

State officials will soon have a chance to vent to their federal counterparts and to rewire lines of communication. Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan says he plans to convene his Anti-Terrorism Advisory Committee in the next week to dissect everyone's performance. "There are some things we learned from those experiences," he said. Declining to elaborate before the meeting, Sullivan said, "I certainly have some ideas along those lines."

Yet tangled communications persist: Marcinkiewicz of the Boston FBI said that her office had no plans to assess its response to last month's threat, and Massachusetts officials said at press time that they had yet to be told of such a meeting.

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DHS experience is cautionary tale for new intelligence director

Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The Bush administration's post-9/11 obsession with making the United States less vulnerable to terrorists has so far led to creation of the White House Office of Homeland Security, the Department of Homeland Security, the Homeland Security Council, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the Terrorist Screening Center, and the National Counterterrorism Center. And, of course, late last year the president signed legislation establishing a director of national intelligence.

"I keep asking people, 'Are we reformed yet?' " says Amy Zegart, a professor of public policy at the University of California (Los Angeles) and a longtime student of the structure of the intelligence agencies.

As the Homeland Security Department heads toward its second birthday and the government prepares to implement its latest anti-terrorism reorganization by selecting a director of national intelligence, it's time to ask: In all of this organizational churning, have we learned any lessons that can be applied to the upcoming intelligence redesign?

According to Homeland Security's first inspector general, the answer is that the department's early years should give the new director of national intelligence pause. "The Department of Homeland Security's problems in the last two years constitute a cautionary tale, as efforts begin to implement the 9/11 commission law," says Clark Kent Ervin, who was inspector general until December. "I am skeptical that an organizational change will result, necessarily, in improvements in the intelligence community's performance."

But now-departed Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has some very different advice. "My recommendation [to the director of national intelligence] is: Let DHS be the primary agency with which you share the information that is relevant down to the states and locals," he said in a farewell discussion with reporters last week.

To be sure, being the first director of national intelligence will not be the same as being the first secretary of Homeland Security. Running a department is different from coordinating a community. And pulling together 22 disparate agencies is arguably more difficult than corralling 15 agencies that have a history of more or less working together. "He inherits a better landscape," Ridge says.

But there are important parallels between the jobs. They both involve overseeing domains that underwent a painful birthing process. In both cases, Congress rose up against the White House's initial opposition, marshaled families of 9/11 victims, and embarrassed President Bush into embracing the latest reorganizational "solution" to the nation's security problems. Both the 180,000-person Homeland Security Department and the 500-to-650-person Office of the Director of National Intelligence are efforts to centralize planning and to coordinate government resources to thwart a catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Both of the first people to hold the jobs are -- or will be -- new kids on the block among some very territorial, well-connected, elbows-out departments and agencies.

The new intelligence chieftain might have an easier initiation period if he or she learns from Homeland Security's early, faltering steps. So, National Journal surveyed 25 national security experts -- who have experience at the department, in intelligence, at the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the private sector, or in academia -- on what can be drawn from the Homeland Security Department's very mixed record. The chief lessons can be distilled as follows:

1. Get White House Backup

2. The Alpha Wolf Rules

3. Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize

4. Management Matters

5. Think Expansively

Certainly, these lessons would be useful not only to the new intelligence director but to Ridge's likely successor, Michael Chertoff, who at his Feb. 2 confirmation hearing repeatedly stressed the importance of seeking "opportunities to learn" from past mistakes.

Given the extraordinarily high expectations placed on the new intelligence office -- much like those the Department of Homeland Security has tried to meet -- the best advice for the new director may be to stockpile antacids. "The first DNI will have a completely miserable experience on many levels," predicts former White House Deputy Homeland Security Adviser Richard Falkenrath. Former Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., who co-chaired the Hart-Rudman Commission on terrorism, recommends that the new director reread The Prince and channel his inner Machiavelli.

Lesson 1: Get White House Backup

Begin by getting the president on your side. Several sources who clocked time at the White House and at executive branch agencies name Ridge's failure to get White House backing as the mistake that has haunted the consensus-driven ex-governor and committed team player. "He's a decent, honest man in a world of thieves," as a Ridge friend puts it.

To avoid repeating Ridge's mistake, former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke says, anyone contacted by the president about becoming director of national intelligence job should try to nail down White House support before agreeing to be nominated.

The conversation should go something like this, Clarke says: "Mr. President, I'm coming into a new job. The secretary of Defense [position] is 55 years old. The secretary of State has been around for 200 years. The first year of this job is going to determine, for the rest of time, whether it's an important job. You saw, with the drug czar, that offices in the White House can be turned into a nothing job. If you want to make this a successful institution, you've got to let me win a few battles. I will choose them judiciously.... If you're not prepared to do that, give [this job] to someone else."

Clarke says the nominee-to-be might add: "I may find the need, during the first year, to fire one of the intelligence directors, and I will need your support. You have to make very clear to all the intelligence leaders, including [newly appointed Director of Central Intelligence] Porter Goss, that I am their boss. They have to go through me."

Based on what he's heard about potential nominees, Clarke says he'd bet that a conversation like that will happen and that the president will agree to give the first director of national intelligence a strong hand. (Already, the White House has been turned down by at least one person. Former CIA Director Robert Gates says he reluctantly declined.)

Down the line, maintaining good relations with the president and the White House senior staff will prove crucial for the first DNI, predicts Falkenrath, who helped design DHS during his stint at the White House. "A big reorganization tends to be White House-driven," he says. "In the early phase, the White House staff who are involved feel a lot of ownership.... There's a constant source of tension with new appointees to the new organization."

His advice to the DNI: Don't fight the White House. Such battles are futile. Nevertheless, he says, "you've got to try to get the White House to give you good people." How? "It's pure interpersonal politics."

Lesson 2: The Alpha Wolf Rules

Even as it was being built, the Department of Homeland Security was losing clout. Although the legislation that created the department spelled out its "very specific" intelligence responsibilities, notes one former administration official, "virtually none of them came to pass."

The first blow was the White House decision -- announced in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address just four days after Tom Ridge started his new job -- to establish the Terrorist Threat Integration Center outside of DHS to meld all of the terrorist information the government collects. Senior officials at DHS had thought that terrorist-threat integration was what they were supposed to do. Then, the White House put the FBI in charge of consolidating the government's multitude of terrorist watch lists and gave it responsibility for investigating terrorist financing.

The alpha wolf rules, and Ridge's failure to win interagency battles early on, say sources who worked at the White House and the department, left him unable to win the respect of his Cabinet colleagues. "I don't think the Department of Homeland Security ever had a red line of 'What are the things we can't live with?'" says James Carafano, a homeland-security and defense analyst at the Heritage Foundation. "The reason was, 'Look, we're just getting our act together.'" Carafano said the department should have put its game face on and demanded control over key responsibilities, such as domestic-intelligence analysis.

One need look no further than the protracted negotiations over the legislation establishing the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to know that the new director's fiercest turf battles will likely be with the secretary of Defense. Before a director has even been nominated, the Pentagon has made a major landgrab. According to leaked reports that have made headlines, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is directing new spying operations. In theory, the decision to give the Pentagon such powers should be made by the new director, say Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., authors of the intelligence reform bill. Last week, they wrote Rumsfeld to express their concern.

Clearly, Hart says, the new director must lay down the law early on by having a conversation with his agency heads much like the one that Clarke recommended the DNI have with the president. The conversation should go something like this, Hart advises: "I'm the new boss for intelligence. I'm really looking forward to working with all of you. But I've just had a talk with the president, and he said he would support me, which means the following 10 things.... There will be no backdooring and appeals of me; the buck stops here; the president has just said he doesn't want to talk to you." And Hart suggests the intelligence chief initiate a similar conversation with key members of Congress.

The president's continued support will also be crucial in helping the director of national intelligence fight the inevitable turf battles, Falkenrath says. "Don't think that the legislation is going to solve your problems in the interagency battles," he says. "The only thing that is going to solve your problems is the ability to get the president to support you at key junctures. The White House is going to be mediating the DNI's relationship with everyone else." And many security experts say that those relationships will be set in stone within the first year.

Lesson 3: Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize

With a long and winding To Do list from Congress and the White House, the Homeland Security Department started out trying to juggle far too many tasks. And just as the department's doors opened, the United States went to war with Iraq.

"It was more important to get it done quick than to get it done right," Heritage's Carafano says of the department's approach. "Let's not pressure the DNI to solve every problem in the first 30 days."

In Falkenrath's view, "DHS had a very rocky first nine months. It was a very difficult phase, where there was just too much going on for the people who were in place to manage it effectively."

Even when the department has tried to focus its energy, the results have been scattershot.

For example, although the department is attempting to develop a list of places and things whose protection is most critical, it has not developed any meaningful way of determining whether a Wal-Mart in Indianapolis or a golf course in Dallas should be included -- and, if it is, what its relative importance is compared with, say, the Golden Gate Bridge or the Jefferson Memorial. The current database of potentially critical infrastructure items numbers more than 850,000. "They're still trying to hone it after all this time," says a source in the private sector who does business with the department. "There's no national standard by which the vulnerability of those assets is being determined."

To be sure, the department has logged scores of accomplishments as far-flung as the US-VISIT border-security system, a public-preparedness campaign, strong relationships with state and local jurisdictions, a doubling of the rate of drug seizures, and a homeland-security command center. Many people at DHS have worked tirelessly. But to what end? Two years after the department's debut, the verdict from many observers, both inside and outside DHS, is that it is still little more than a loose collection of nearly two dozen agencies.

"One of the critical problems facing the Department of Homeland Security," says its former inspector general, "is it remains largely still 22 different disparate components, many of which were dysfunctional when they came over to the Department of Homeland Security, and many of them still are."

If the new intelligence office is to operate smoothly, its director's initial goals should be few -- one or two -- and attainable, say White House alums, including Clarke and Falkenrath. For example, Falkenrath says, the director will have a choice of either establishing long-range budget planning or becoming the supreme intelligence adviser to the president. "You're not going to be able to do both at the same time, overnight," Falkenrath says. "Pick the one you're most likely to succeed at."

Clarke advises the director of national intelligence to mount an early challenge to the intelligence bureaucracy's established way of doing things. He pointed to a project that then-CIA Director Gates tried to champion. Called "Cheapsat," the program would have ditched the intelligence community's prized satellite-building program and started using lower-cost assembly-line models. The shift would have allowed the government to launch more satellites and still have money to shift to human intelligence-gathering. Critics argued that the plan was technologically infeasible. Gates lost. Several years later, Motorola began producing assembly-line satellites. Clarke says that the idea is still worth pursuing and that the director could use Cheapsat as a way to challenge the powerful National Reconnaissance Office and show his budgetary mettle.

Still, before making major changes and launching new programs, the new director should get the lay of the land within the intelligence community, emphasizes Suzanne Spaulding, who helped write the intelligence legislation as staff director for the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee. The way to start, she says, is to get a handle on the overall intelligence budget and to claim the leading role in financial planning for the entire intelligence community. She drew a parallel to Rumsfeld's ongoing effort to have the Defense Department know where all its resources are deployed at any given time.

Clarke says the director should go further -- by reslicing the budget according to function. By dividing the 15-agency intelligence budget into categories -- such as counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, counterintelligence, research and development, and counter-proliferation -- the director could avoid arguing about, say, the National Security Agency's budget and instead take a broader view of available resources. Such an approach would also put the director in the best position to set priorities for the intelligence community as a whole.

The problems encountered by the Homeland Security Department, and by other anti-terror entities created in the past three years, also spotlight the importance of follow-through: Articulating a priority doesn't actually achieve a goal. "Do you have a road map?" asks Daniel Prieto, a former aide to the Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee and a onetime investment banker. "Do you have a manager who is actually able to follow it?"

Lesson 4: Management Matters

Without a functioning back office, nobody reacts when the person at the top of the organizational chart pushes a lever. At Homeland Security, says former Inspector General Ervin, "too often it's been a case of simply announcing something and not rolling up the department's sleeves, calling together the relevant people, and measuring on a consistent basis how far along they are."

The challenge has been getting employees to see the need to adopt integrated management systems across the huge department, says Darryl Moody, vice president for homeland security at BearingPoint, a management consulting firm that is working with the department on 80 projects. Moody's argument is that DHS officials need to know where the resources are so they can readily shift them to counter evolving terrorist threats. If they can't, lives are in jeopardy. Although that thinking is taking hold among people working to merge DHS's finances, he says, getting it adopted in the information-technology arena has been slow going.

Moody predicts that the new intelligence director will have a tough time persuading 15 agencies to modify behavior that hasn't changed much since the Cold War. Add to that the overlay of interagency warfare, and Falkenrath warns that the new director is "just going to get taken to the cleaners. Every single agency that has to give up anything to him will game the system as much as possible. Only by having an army of accountants and budgeteers and midlevel managers on your side going through every execution order can you fight this tendency."

But the nitty-gritty of management offers an opportunity for the new director to assert himself, Clarke notes. If the Homeland Security Department or the FBI can't get its own information systems in order, the DNI could temporarily hand the task over to, say, the National Security Agency, which has mastered information systems.

Lesson 5: Think Expansively

Ridge made sure that "homeland security" was defined to include state and local governments and their "first responders." Nearly every state now has a homeland-security office.

The director of national intelligence has a similar opportunity to redefine "intelligence-gathering" so that it includes state and local efforts, note Ridge and many others. While the new director likely won't be as visible to the public as Ridge was, he or she could highlight the contributions that state and local officials can make to intelligence-collection.

Massachusetts' homeland-security policy adviser, John Cohen, says, "We have to redefine how we think of intelligence. We have to take information that was produced through clandestine activities overseas and blend it with information that is collected through routine activities of state and local police officers."

A good starting point, says Spaulding, a former CIA assistant general counsel, would be to assign an aide to define homeland-security intelligence needs. From there, the new director could create a two-way communication system between the traditional intelligence community and the cop on the beat, or the hospital administrator.

Taken together, the moral of these lessons is: What happens after the reorganization can matter more than the restructuring blueprint. Reorganization offers a high-visibility -- but not necessarily productive -- way for the government to address Americans' fears.

Absent a repeat of 9/11, measuring the effectiveness of the first director of national intelligence could be difficult. One handy gauge, though, might be whether the director calms the government's mania for reorganizing its anti-terror resources.

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Homeland Security nominee seeks to bring allies to department

Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

But if he's confirmed as secretary, Chertoff's disciplinary options will be limited, unless he can recruit reliable allies to the department.

Shortly after being nominated, Chertoff inquired about how much influence he'd have over filling vacancies. Departing Secretary Tom Ridge had little voice in the selection of his own subordinates. And for Chertoff, the early signals from the White House have not been encouraging, according to sources close to him.

Beginning with the Reagan administration, secretaries' control over the appointments of their deputies and undersecretaries has declined precipitously, observes Paul Light, a New York University professor who has studied the presidential appointments process. He says among the current secretaries, the only two who've had much of a say are Donald Rumsfeld at Defense and Colin Powell, who is leaving the State Department.

In lower-ranking posts, Chertoff has found ways to pull in his own people. Soon after taking over the Justice Department's Criminal Division in May 2001, he fired half of the division's section chiefs. "People respect him enough and respect his judgment so that if he says, 'This is who I need,' he can make it happen," says one former colleague.

And Chertoff has a well-placed ally. Julie Myers, a former Chertoff chief of staff, is now working in the White House personnel office on the staffing of the Homeland Security and Justice departments. And there are enough vacancies in the top ranks of Homeland Security that Chertoff can quickly put his own imprint on the department, if the White House will let him.

Three senior posts -- those in charge of departmental security, cyber-security, and infrastructure protection -- are already open. And Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security Asa Hutchinson and Assistant Secretary for Information Analysis Patrick Hughes are rumored to be plotting exit strategies.

"It's an opportunity to get a management team around the secretary that collectively has all the qualities that we need for the leadership of the department," says former department Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin.

Chertoff has a bipartisan bench of allies to draw on, from his time as GOP special counsel for the Whitewater investigation; as a partner at the law firm of Latham & Watkins; and at Justice. Colleagues say he'd like to recruit the following:

Alice Fisher was Chertoff's deputy in the Criminal Division, where she spent much of her time on counter-terrorism. Fisher and Chertoff worked together on the Whitewater investigation. And Fisher was a partner in Latham & Watkins's Washington office when Chertoff lured her back to work for him at Justice. She's now back at the firm.

Matthew Martens and Chertoff began working together when Martens was an associate in Latham & Watkins's New Jersey office. Chertoff then wooed Martens to Washington to be his deputy chief of staff and, later, his chief of staff. Martens left the Criminal Division to become an assistant U.S. attorney in North Carolina, and he remains in close touch with Chertoff.

Viet Dinh worked with Chertoff both on the Whitewater investigation and at Justice, where Dinh was the assistant attorney general for legal policy. Together, they led the department's work on counter-terrorism, especially on developing the USA PATRIOT Act. Dinh has since returned to teaching at Georgetown University Law Center.

Michael Horowitz was chief of staff in the Criminal Division in the Clinton administration and stayed on to help with the transition. A week after Horowitz's going-away party, Chertoff asked him to return as his first chief of staff. A former assistant U.S. attorney in New York, Horowitz is respected by both parties. Now in private practice at Cadwalader, Wickersham, & Taft, he was appointed to the U.S. Sentencing Commission by President George W. Bush.

Lucy Clark is an alum of both the Justice Department and Latham & Watkins. At Justice, she was counselor to the acting assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division. She then moved to the White House Office of Homeland Security and went on to serve as counsel to the secretary at the Homeland Security Department. She's now at FTI Consulting.

Julie Myers spent nearly a year as Chertoff's chief of staff. Now in the White House personnel office, she also worked at the Commerce and Treasury departments and as an assistant U.S. attorney. She was an associate independent counsel for Kenneth Starr's investigation of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Robert Giuffra Jr. worked with Chertoff on the Whitewater investigation and is currently a partner at the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. He has represented, among other clients, Enron's lead auditor.

Beth Wilkinson is a partner at Latham & Watkins in Washington. A top counter-terrorism official in the Justice Department during the Clinton administration, she was the lead prosecutor in the Oklahoma City bombing case. She is a former assistant U.S. attorney and a former captain in the Army general counsel's office.

People familiar with the complicated inner workings of Homeland Security say Chertoff must make his mark within 90 days, or he won't make one. Where his closest allies end up will be a real indicator of whether Chertoff is likely to succeed.

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I Spy Mismanagement

Siobhan Gorman — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Despondent CIA veterans, especially those with private-sector experience, have been asking: How could this happen? They worry that if the former House member, himself a former CIA agent, doesn't get their agency on track quickly, the results could be disastrous and lasting: widespread hemorrhaging of experienced officers; dampened recruitment; loss of public confidence; distrust from international intelligence agencies; and, worst of all, distraction from the daily work of the agency.

And for those officers who stay, a prolonged shakeout would likely foster a hunker-down mentality that discourages creative risk-taking and the questioning of higher-ups -- the opposite of the results Goss vowed to produce.

The CIA's current turmoil is a predictable byproduct of woefully inadequate management and poor communication, say intelligence experts and management gurus.

"The director is purported to have said, 'I don't do personnel.' Well, that's the name of the game," says former CIA general counsel Robert McNamara Jr.

And Goss's early missteps will continue to cost him. As one Bush administration insider put it: "Have you ever tried to recover from a really bad first date?"

Initially, the date went quite well. As soon as he arrived at Langley, Goss called a town hall meeting. He received two standing ovations there. But his relationship with the agency soured when he installed four close aides from his Capitol Hill staff in the upper echelon of CIA management. His choice of Chief of Staff Patrick Murray has proved especially irritating to agency veterans. Goss's team apparently behaves as if it were still on Capitol Hill.

While fierce protection of one's boss translates into success in the halls of Congress, says Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel who also worked on the Hill, "that does not work in an organization like the CIA, because you're all part of the same team."

Indeed, many of Murray's former colleagues clearly felt that he never viewed them as teammates. Murray served on the staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and then did a tour at the Justice Department before returning to the House committee, which Goss chaired, to serve as staff director.

"This guy is known as a hothead," says one former Hill aide. A former colleague could hardly contain himself at the mention of Murray's name. "He's a nitwit," he blurted out, describing what he saw as Murray's inept management style.

Another former Hill staffer said that when Murray returned to the Hill, staffers who knew him either left the committee or found ways to work around him rather than deal with him.

According to several CIA veterans, the top officials who have resigned recently, especially Deputy Director of Operations Stephen Kappes and his second-in-command, Michael Sulick, were reinvigorating the agency, especially its clandestine operations. One CIA veteran said that, unlike earlier senior managers in the Clandestine Service, Kappes and Sulick had reached out to former senior officers to draw on their experience and gain their assistance in such difficult areas as relationships with law enforcement and the military.

"The rank and file were finally saying, 'We have the leadership we need,' " this CIA veteran said.

Perhaps most distressing is that the CIA's current reshuffling appears haphazard, says former intelligence analyst Michael Scheuer, the "anonymous" author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror. "There doesn't seem to be a pattern," he adds. "There doesn't seem to be a view of where we're going."

Management 101 says: If you want to change an organization, make your blueprint clear, and sell it to your employees. That's precisely what's lacking at the CIA. But now, before the new director can sell (or perhaps even develop) a plan for organizational change, Goss must manage his current personality-driven personnel crisis.

To do that, he may need to enlist the president.Amy Zegart, a University of California (Los Angeles) public policy professor who specializes in intelligence, says, "There are really useful lessons to be learned from the private sector. In the private sector, new CEOs come in and turn around companies all the time."

Zegart did a four-year stint with the management firm McKinsey & Co. From a private-sector perspective, Zegart says, Goss's greatest failure was not to enlist the support of key people inside the CIA. "You can't have four people beating the [Directorate of Operations] into submission," she warns.

So where should Goss go from here? Zegart, author of Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC, offers suggestions: First, get out in front of the crisis publicly, with the aid of President Bush, and make clear that the agency is moving forward. Second, hold an offsite gathering with crucial CIA officials, listen to what they have to say, and devise a short-term plan for moving on.

Other observers suggest eliminating, demoting, or diluting Goss's tight advisory group and promoting strong managers from within. There's general agreement that Goss must begin communicating with his troops more clearly and more regularly.

"Porter has been holed up on the seventh floor," says Ron Marks, who spent 16 years at the CIA and worked on Capitol Hill before joining the private sector. "He's yet to develop what's needed for any senior manager handling a massive transition -- communicate, communicate, communicate. You have to make people feel like they are part of the process."

Indeed, a new CEO needs to convince his new colleagues that a process actually exists. But that's something Scheuer says had not been done when he left the agency on Nov. 11.

When asked about Goss's efforts to communicate with CIA employees since his town hall meeting, a CIA spokeswoman said, "Certainly there have been multiple e-mails." That includes a November 15 e-mail that reportedly stated, "We provide the intelligence as we see it and let the facts alone speak to the policy maker," but added that the CIA's job is to "support the administration and its policies in our work." The e-mail warned cryptically of "a series of changes" ahead.

Leaving underlings worried and clueless isn't generally regarded as good management. "I hear that [e-mail], and I say, 'God, no,' " says Zegart, noting that for all his faults, Goss's predecessor was known for dropping in on meetings unannounced just to listen.

Zegart says listening is among a good CEO's most important tools. If Goss is to succeed, she adds, he not only needs to explain his game plan to his personnel but also talk to them about their worries. Smart management, she continued, is "not about being tough; it's about being thoughtful."

Once Goss weathers the current crisis, Zegart and other management experts say, he must develop and communicate a plan for internal reform to senior management and the rank and file.

In the private sector, developing a strategy requires establishing a baseline -- what operating conditions are, what employees have been asked to do, and how close employees are to accomplishing those goals. The technique is known as fact-based change management. And in the business world, this assessment is a detailed process that takes four to six months. At the CIA, the agency is in disarray a month and a half after Goss's takeover.

To develop a baseline at the CIA, said one former CIA officer now in the business world, Goss should look at what the agency has produced over the past four years and compare those results with what it had promised to Congress and the White House. Goss should then identify the gaps between what was promised and what was delivered; design a plan for closing those gaps; and tell senior managers they have, say, six months to make specific progress or face dismissal.

Once Goss establishes a baseline, management experts say, he ought to spell out what he wants to change in the clandestine Directorate of Operations -- the quality of human intelligence or language capabilities, for example -- and decide how quickly he wants results, who should be responsible for producing them, and what support and authority they must have in order to meet his deadline.

In business parlance, this process is called workforce planning. And Marks says it has been sorely missing from the Directorate of Operations: "They've done everything on the fly."

Analysts within the Directorate of Intelligence, Marks says, face another basic problem that is common in the business world -- information processing. There, Goss needs to assess how the division is acquiring, analyzing, and disseminating information; decide whether and how those processes should be augmented with new technology and policies; and develop a plan to make the required changes happen. And that would involve rewriting some job descriptions.

"They're two generations behind," Marks says. "The CIA is a first-generation information business. It is just [fighting] the Cold War again and again and again."

Of course, the continuing uncertainty over Goss's own eventual job description -- as Congress dithers over whether to create a national intelligence director and as rumors fly that the position would be filled by Goss -- does not help.

"There's an impression that Goss is going to be the NID and that he just came here to clean out and move on," Scheuer says. Without a clear message from Goss about his designs for the agency, Scheuer adds, the agency's rank and file will likely conclude that Goss was sent to the CIA just to be a "hatchet man."

The solution, again, is more personal involvement, communication, and listening. But, the management experts say, if Goss were listening to his discontented agency, he'd already know all that.

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Lame-duck session last-ditch effort for intelligence reform this year

Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, led the post-election effort this week to reinvigorate negotiations between the House and Senate, or, as she put it, "to move the talks off dead center," only to be "disappointed" when House leadership, and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., immediately rejected her proposal. Meanwhile, another strong proponent of reform, former Democratic Rep. Tim Roemer, who served on the 9/11 commission, says, "I think it's do or die right now."

Reform advocates such as Collins and Roemer say the person who can save it is President Bush. And, they say, the lame-duck session of Congress slated to begin and end next week is Bush's best -- and, perhaps, last -- opportunity to make good on his word, which he repeated at his victory press conference, to create a national intelligence director responsible for the 15-agency "intelligence community."

The push for reform didn't start out this way. When the 9/11 commission submitted its final report in late July, Congress was embarrassed into working through its August vacation on the commission's top two recommendations: create a national intelligence director with total control over the budgets of the 15 agencies, and establish a national counter-terrorism center with responsibility for planning and implementing counter-terrorism policy. By September, the Senate and House each had drafted bills. Along with Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., Collins led the Senate charge from her perch as chairwoman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, while Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., ran the show in the House.

But the Senate addressed only the 9/11 commission's recommendations for a national intelligence director and a national counter-terrorism center, while the House wrote a much larger, and more controversial, package of anti-terrorism measures. And as the Senate pushed for public disclosure of the annual total intelligence budget, so that the intelligence director could have control, the House's version aimed to keep the budget a secret and to continue to funnel much of the money through the Pentagon. When the House and Senate passed their wildly differing bills, they locked horns.

Senate aides in both parties complain that the White House failed to put sufficient pressure on Congress to get a bill passed before the election. Though the White House said in a letter on October 18 that it preferred the Senate bill's stronger budget authority, one Senate aide said the administration sent its legislative team rather than its security team -- or Chief of Staff Andy Card -- to conference negotiations on the Hill. Had there been direct intervention by the president or more personal involvement by Card (more than just phone calls), Senate aides say that the White House could have persuaded Hunter and his Pentagon allies to buy into the Senate bill.

Three compromise proposals went nowhere. In what Collins calls a "good-faith offer," she and Lieberman submitted on November 8 a new proposal with three pages' worth of concessions, which included, most significantly, allowing the total intelligence budget to remain classified and letting the Pentagon retain some authority over it. Although the Senate has signaled a strong willingness to compromise, Lieberman says there are limits. "For me, the threshold is, is what we end up with not just marginally better but significantly better than the status quo? ... It's going to take compromise on all sides."

But the House has stood firm. "We're not going to accept their first comprehensive offer," said John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert. "We're happy they've made some progress." Feehery put the likelihood of a compromise next week at 60 percent.

Collins shies away from handicapping. "I still hope that we can produce a bill for consideration in the lame-duck," she said. "I wish I could give you a better sense of what's going to happen, but I can't. I just don't know whether the House is going to remain rigid."

But Collins is lobbying the White House behind the scenes. Earlier this week, she asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to get the White House, as she put it, "more fully involved." Roemer and his commission colleagues have also been asking the White House to turn up the heat.

Yet the word from sources close to the White House is that the administration's plan is to take one last pass at a compromise for the lame-duck session. "I don't think that the differences that remain are fundamental," said one senior White House official. But there's no guarantee the White House will push anew in January. Collins and Roemer were pessimistic about post-lame-duck prospects. "I think that other priorities will displace this one," Collins said.

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Congress hurtles toward intelligence overhaul

Richard E. Cohen and Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Less than an hour earlier, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and other Republican leaders laid out the game plan for the House, where action is expected by month's end on an intelligence bill coordinated by Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. Although DeLay said he welcomed Democratic cooperation and promised not to let "politics get in the way," he also touted "the tremendous amount of work" that the GOP-controlled Congress has already done in the past three years to strengthen national security.

The dueling press conferences made clear that lawmakers, back barely a week from their long summer recess, are intent on quickly implementing recommendations made by the 9/11 commission in late July. At this point, though, the legislative road ahead for the proposals appears uncertain and far from textbook traditional.

Even under normal circumstances, intelligence reform would be a heavy lift for this gridlocked Congress, but now only about six weeks remain before Election Day. And already, the House and Senate are taking strikingly different tacks. Still, it appears that political interests at the White House and on Capitol Hill are aligning behind a major reorganization of federal intelligence agencies, either before or shortly after the election.

As the debate begins to unfold, Hastert is working with senior Republicans to coordinate the work of key House committees in a way that also accommodates the interests of the Bush White House. In the Senate, by contrast, Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., has designated the bipartisan leaders of the Governmental Affairs Committee to take the lead.

Tensions, to be sure, are high. The proposed intelligence overhaul threatens the turf of many influential House and Senate committees. More broadly, how the debate plays out may well have a significant impact on the presidential and congressional elections.

Both parties are mindful that an election-eve debate two years ago over the creation of the Homeland Security Department became a political football. President Bush successfully cast the Democrats as standing in the way of the bill he had proposed (though Lieberman had proposed it long before). Ultimately, Republicans regained control of the Senate, and Congress approved the new department during a lame-duck session shortly after the 2002 election.

In recent days, DeLay stoked the partisan flames when he told reporters on September 7 that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had "no credibility" on intelligence reform issues and claimed that she and other Democrats are seeking political gain. Pelosi responded by challenging DeLay to a debate. It was all too much for moderate Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., a leading advocate of intelligence reform, who said he "almost wept inside" in response to DeLay's comment.

The legislative dynamics became further complicated this week, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence took up Bush's nomination of Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., to be CIA director. With questions swirling about whether Congress should create a post of national intelligence director, the committee's chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., noted, "Congressman Goss has been nominated for a position that is not likely to last for much longer."

Bush's Gradual Embrace

Since the 9/11 commission released its unanimous recommendations on July 22, Bush has gradually come to embrace sweeping changes in the nation's intelligence apparatus.

Initially, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card established a task force to examine the commission's proposals. And Hastert, for his part, talked about holding congressional hearings over the next "several months" on the recommendations.

But during the Democratic convention in Boston in late July, presidential nominee John Kerry called for fully implementing the commission's recommendations. House and Senate Republican leaders, sensitive to the political implications of having Congress appear to put its vacation ahead of national security, quickly changed course and scheduled hearings for August. And by August 2 -- just 11 days after the commission released its report, and immediately following the Democratic convention -- Bush announced his support for a national intelligence director and a national counter-terrorism center, the commission's top two recommendations.

The sticking point came over how much budgetary power a national intelligence director would wield, and it appeared that Bush's director would have a somewhat smaller power over the purse than the 9/11 commission had envisioned -- a detail that commissioners emphasized as they made their rounds at Hill hearings. Then, on the eve of the Republican convention in New York City, Bush signed four executive orders on August 27 to bolster intelligence.

Bush went further during a White House meeting with bipartisan congressional leaders on September 8, the day after Congress returned from recess. He announced his support for a new director with "full budget authority" over what is known as the National Foreign Intelligence Program. That's the section of the intelligence budget responsible for strategic intelligence, as opposed to tactical, military intelligence. It represents somewhere around 70 percent of the total intelligence budget, including a few big-ticket items currently in the Pentagon budget, notably the National Security Agency, which handles signals intelligence, and the National Reconnaissance Office, which is responsible for buying spy satellites. And Bush promised to send his own intelligence reform proposal to the Hill in coming days.

"The White House took a giant leap forward," Collins said of Bush's September 8 announcement. "I'm delighted. It greatly enhances our chances of producing a successful bill."

The White House received a stamp of approval from leaders of the 9/11 commission as well. "The president has moved a long way toward the commission's recommendation, and maybe all the way," said former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who co-chaired the commission with former Republican Gov. Tom Kean of New Jersey.

Tale of Two Camps

Meanwhile, the early birds of the intelligence reform debate were the fathers of the 9/11 commission: Lieberman and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. A few weeks before the 9/11 report was released, the two senators met with Kean and Hamilton to discuss legislation to implement all of the commission's recommendations. On September 7, the day before Bush's high-profile White House announcement, Lieberman and McCain introduced their bill enacting all 41 of the commission's recommendations, as they had promised.

Lieberman said that that bill was more of a marker or a starting point and added that the action now shifts to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. "I hope that the large bill has created some momentum in taking the process further than it would otherwise go," Lieberman said.

The intelligence reform legislation that Collins and Lieberman unveiled on September 15 doesn't go quite so far. To help write the bill, in the works since late July, they hired three 9/11 commission staffers to join the Governmental Affairs Committee. A team totaling 20 committee aides, including detailees from the FBI and CIA, drafted the measure. (And Collins has been working into the night in collaboration with the White House -- she found time to call National Journal just before 8 p.m. earlier this week while she awaited a call from National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.)

Collins and Lieberman expect to report their bill out of committee during the week of September 20. And Frist has scheduled the legislation for Senate floor consideration during the week of September 27.

The Governmental Affairs Committee's bill does not take on the issue of reorganizing the congressional panels that oversee intelligence issues and appropriations -- a reform that the 9/11 commission report had urged. Instead, Frist has convened a 22-member task force to establish a plan for congressional reform. Collins, a member of that task force, said the task-force proposal could be offered as an amendment to the bill on the Senate floor.

While Senate GOP leaders, at least for now, are letting a committee take the lead, House Republican leaders intend on playing a heavy role in crafting their version of intelligence reform legislation. "This will be a leadership bill," said Hastert spokesman John Feehery. "The speaker doesn't have his own ax to grind. He wants to get a bill enacted before the election that is consistent with the views of the White House and the goals of the 9/11 commission."

Both the House Republican proposal, outlined by DeLay and other leaders on September 15, and the Collins-Lieberman bill have at their core two now-familiar proposals drawn from the 9/11 commission report: to establish a national intelligence director, and to launch a national counterterrorism center to house terrorism analysts from a number of intelligence agencies and conduct operational planning.

Hastert has directed his staff to work with senior House GOP committee aides to begin drafting a legislative package. He also has held two lengthy meetings since Labor Day with several committee chairmen who have griped about turf.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., and other senior members of that panel are voicing some of the strongest objections. They fear that the legislation could jeopardize Pentagon access to vital military data by shifting control to the new intelligence office. "All of us believe that reform is necessary," said Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y. "But many of us -- myself included -- are deeply troubled by the generalization that there is a bright line between strategic and tactical intelligence.... A myriad of tactical weapons are used for strategic purposes."

Such disagreements may explain why DeLay left the door open for passage of an intelligence reform bill during a lame-duck session after the November election. At his September 15 press conference, DeLay said he expects a bill to pass "before Congress adjourns." But when National Journal asked whether he meant before or after the election, DeLay smiled and said under his breath, "You found my loophole," before stepping up to the microphone and saying, "We want final action" before the election.

In the House, where party discipline is strictly enforced, the Republican leadership's intelligence reform bill can be expected to prevail. But the Senate is far less disciplined. Maverick senators -- particularly those who sit on the Armed Services, Foreign Relations, and Intelligence committees -- may want to put their own thumbprints on the Governmental Affairs Committee bill. Floor debate could drag on for weeks.

"On the Senate side, it's a bit more of a wild card," said Frank Cilluffo, a former top White House homeland-security aide who now runs the homeland-security program at George Washington University.

Moreover, the narrow window for action this year may give added leverage to the White House and the House Republican leadership, said Ron Marks, a former CIA officer who has also served as intelligence counsel for the Senate Republican leadership. In a short timeframe, "it is often the last bill out that gets the best response," Marks said.

For her part, Collins said that even if the House leads the way, "it's fine," so long as the bill is in concert with the broad authority already outlined by the White House, because that proposal has moved considerably in the direction that she and Lieberman had hoped for.

Careful What You Wish For

Because Congress is feeling such intense pressure to complete a bill labeled "intelligence reform" before adjourning, some experts like Marks worry that members and their staffs will cut last-minute deals that could have grave consequences. "When you're writing language for these things, you don't always understand the implications of what you've just done," Mars said.

And some longtime observers of the intelligence community, such as Jim Wolbarsht, a management expert who has served on several intelligence and defense review boards, contend that the current focus on only two aspects of the intelligence problem -- the bureaucratic reorganization and the budget authority -- will not produce dramatic changes. Much of the debate appears to be centered on simple solutions and easy fixes, he said, rather than on identifying specific problems in the way intelligence is collected and analyzed and then crafting solutions to resolve them.

In some cases, said Alfred Cumming, former staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee, policy makers lack the information necessary to get specific. The 9/11 commission report offered few details on the progress that federal agencies have or have not made since the terrorist attacks. And the field research that the 9/11 commission staff did on agencies such as the FBI is now a year old.

"I've got this quiver full of arrows, so what do I do now?" Cumming asked, in describing the task that would face a new intelligence director with enhanced authority who, nevertheless, must first assess the changes that have been made within the intelligence community since 9/11. "I think it's quite problematic."

Other experts, like Cilluffo, also warn not to expect too much from a single reform, especially in the murky world of intelligence. "We need to recognize it's not always as easy as knocking on bin Laden's cave and saying, 'We want to join,' " he said.

Whatever the post's limitations, should Congress establish a director of national intelligence before leaving town, whoever takes the job will face an enormous early test: the 2006 budget. Negotiations inside the executive branch are already under way to divvy up the next federal budget. And the new director would have ample opportunity in the early days of this post to show the other members of the intelligence community that there's a new sheriff in town. How the White House resolves budget disputes among the intelligence agencies would make clear how large -- or small -- the new director's influence truly would be.

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Unseen multi-agency security force on the job at GOP convention

Siobhan Gorman — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0400

The announcement -- the result of a yearlong surveillance by NYPD intelligence officers -- underscored the theme of the week for life in and around the Republican National Convention compound: What you don't see is what's keeping you safe. What you do see mainly makes you feel better.

Kelly told reporters he had "no indication" that the two men -- 21-year-old Shahawar Matin Sinaj and 19-year-old James Elshafay -- were plotting to disturb the convention, and he says that they have no known ties to international terrorist organizations. But it seemed more than coincidental that the police would arrest two men they had been following for a year as soon as they discovered the two were casing the Herald Square subway station near the Garden -- three days before the Republicans began their confab.

The highly trained NYPD officers assigned to more-routine tasks such as checking credentials and directing confused pedestrians are well aware that they're more the face than the central nervous system of convention security. "It's what you don't see that is probably the actual response -- not people standing there with a rifle on the street corner," says Detective Vincent Aprea, a 13-year veteran of the NYPD and a member of the elite Emergency Services Unit.

Indeed, the real nerve center is what's known as the Multi-Agency Coordination Center, or MACC in conventionspeak. It's housed nearly eight miles from the Garden, on the eighth floor of the police department where 66 federal, state, and local agencies are represented, all of whom have a line into their own agencies' information systems.

But that won't be the only command post. In fact, convention security planners have established other secret shadow command posts in case the main one is taken out, according to a Department of Homeland Security official. And the MACC will be in continual contact with the Tactical Operations Center inside the Garden, as well as the Fusion Center, which is an intelligence outpost in Chelsea that draws together intelligence from the NYPD, FBI, and CIA.

In addition, across the bridge in Brooklyn, the city's Office of Emergency Management is standing watch at its own operations center, with 80 agencies plugged in. Other operations centers involved are as far away as Albany and Rome, N.Y.

On the ground, the NYPD alone is dedicating 10,000 officers to convention duty. They're carrying sidearms and high-tech gas masks. Sergeants also are carrying radiation detectors and can summon vans full of armor and hazmat suits on a moment's notice. "There's more cops here per square inch than I've seen in my life," said one NYPD officer, Brian Nyhus, standing watch Saturday morning in front of the Garden.

In reserve are 200 firefighters -- some of whom will be manning both a hazardous-materials unit and a decontamination unit dedicated to the Garden.

In Pennsylvania Station and throughout the subway system, armed guards are on patrol and bio-agent detectors are in place. Some 1,500 train cars and buses are checked each day. Hotels are also being guarded, though in a more understated way to avoid a prison-like feel. On the water, the Coast Guard is patrolling conspicuously. In the sky, both NYPD and Coast Guard helicopters are watching, with the Defense Department waiting in the wings.

Even garbage procedures have changed. Although normally done by private companies, refuse collection will be undertaken by city employees during the convention. And all trucks and buses delivering goods or people to the hall are being inspected at one of eight "sally ports," where the underside of the vehicles are scanned for bombs.

Protesters are probably the most challenging non-terrorism security target to contend with, not because they're inherently dangerous but because they're a distraction. "With this day and age of terrorism, this isn't going to help us do our job," says Detective John Heidrich. "It makes it easier [for terrorists], because it's a drain on our resources."

Even with physical security, the most important components "are things we can't talk about," notes Steve Hughes, the Secret Service's chief coordinator for the convention -- although visible security can also deter terrorists.

Of course, what we also don't see or hear about are the nonspecific threats or the scary potential-threat information, like the truck tanker that has recently gone missing in New York City, according to one Homeland Security Department source. Commissioner Kelly brushed off such concerns. "They usually don't pan out," he said.

Certainly, that's what President Bush is hoping for. For a president running on a safer America, a safe -- visibly safe -- convention is crucial.

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Secret Service coordinator in the eye of convention storm

Siobhan Gorman — Mon, 30 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Hughes, the Secret Service's chief coordinator for convention security, has been stationed in New York City for the past 15 months, overseeing security arrangements at Madison Square Garden and beyond the security perimeter. Hughes and two colleagues spent an hour earlier in the week walking Convention Daily through the hall and its security components -- well, at least the ones they're willing to talk about.

When Hughes arrived here last year, the Secret Service was already three months into its evaluation of the security scene at the Garden -- a five-month project that produced a phone-book-sized document that detailed every security hole and how to plug it -- including the security perimeter and all entry and exit points. It also designated ultra-secure places for holding VIPs and spots to position countersniper and counterassault teams.

Asked how this venue is different from Boston's FleetCenter, Hughes will say only, "Every site is different." Nudged a bit further, he says, "It is an urban setting here," meaning that the security team had to work around New York City's skyscrapers and traffic.

Before coming to New York, Hughes, 39, was a supervisor on President Bush's security detail for two and a half years. Before that, he was on President Clinton's security detail. Hardwired for secret-keeping, this tall, slim, blue-eyed agent with the short-cropped, conservative haircut divulges why he joined the Secret Service only after gentle prodding. It was the Reagan assassination attempt, he eventually confesses. After seeing the attempt on President Reagan's life in 1981, Hughes began reading up on the Secret Service and found his calling. Of the convention, he says, "It's unlike anything I've ever done before."

Working with the New York City police chief and even the secretary of Homeland Security, he's been star-struck in a security sense. "That's an opportunity we normally don't get," he admits.

Hughes's primary job here is ensuring that the right security forces are doing the right thing in the right place at the right time -- and lessening the tendency of police agencies to step on each others' toes. Although the Secret Service is in charge of the Garden, and the New York Police Department governs the universe outside the security perimeter, the picture is not quite that simple.

Inside the Garden, the NYPD supplies about half of the total security personnel. The rest are from the Secret Service, whose New York field office is one of its largest. The U.S. Capitol Police from Washington, the New York State Police, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of the Homeland Security Department are also assisting.

Hughes co-chairs the Law Enforcement and Public Safety Steering Committee with Assistant Chief John McManus of the NYPD. The committee has 18 subcommittees, one of which -- venue security -- Hughes also co-chairs. And on take-your-daughter-to-work day in April, Hughes's 5-year-old joined the monthly venue security meeting. "That was the high point," he says.

Scanning the hall for hidden security measures he can talk about, Hughes points to the hundreds of construction workers buzzing around the convention floor. He says, "Everyone in here has a background check."

Another hidden security threat, for example, could be high up in the Garden's rafters, where techies install lighting and speakers. So, bomb-sniffing dog patrols, known as EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) teams in security parlance, sniffed their way around the catwalks to ensure that no one had planted a bomb while screwing in lightbulbs.

"They're very agile dogs -- acrobatic dogs," jokes one of Hughes's colleagues. Yes, Secret Service agents do joke occasionally, but not for attribution.

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FBI chief struggling to turn rhetoric into action

Siobhan Gorman — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Despite its pre-9/11 mistakes and continuing problems, the FBI has emerged essentially unscathed, thanks to the savvy salesmanship of its director, Robert Mueller, who has mounted a steady and sustained lobbying campaign to convince those outside the FBI that the bureau can and should be trusted to be the nation's top domestic intelligence agency. "The [CIA's] Directorate of Operations has been grumbling mightily about that -- that the FBI has gotten off the hook," says a former Directorate of Operations official who talks regularly with his ex-colleagues there. "There is angst and gnashing of teeth and wailing."

Mueller's survival strategy is a mix of personality and pre-emption. He listens. He's deferential. He admits the bureau has made mistakes and has shortcomings. And perhaps most important, he keeps careful watch on which way the political winds are blowing and then proposes solutions to perceived problems before other solutions can be foisted upon him.

Exhibit A: Washington insiders were whispering in late spring that the 9/11 commission would recommend not a separate domestic intelligence unit like Britain's MI5 but a new cadre of intelligence officers within the FBI. So in June, just as the 9/11 commission entered the thick of its deliberations, Mueller announced his proposal to cordon off a Directorate of Intelligence within the FBI.

Mueller took the helm at the FBI just one week before the 9/11 attacks. Ever since those terror strikes, he has relentlessly argued that the FBI is better poised than any other agency to handle domestic intelligence and that rewiring the FBI would be far less risky than creating a start-up MI5. Mueller has also tried to elevate himself above the political fray. In fact, he declined an interview request for this article because, according to his press office, he was worried that any comments he made in this political climate could backfire. And unlike recently departed CIA Director George Tenet, Mueller has not been shackled with blame for pre-9/11 ineptitude. The 9/11 commissioners and members of Congress have been more willing to give him -- and his proposals for change -- the benefit of the doubt.

Mueller also gets considerable mileage out of simply playing well with others. When he testified before the commission in April, Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor not known for tossing softballs to administration officials, extolled Mueller's accessibility. "Sometimes you've come back and showed up when you weren't invited," he joked. In a recent interview, Ben-Veniste added, "Of all the agencies, our relationship with Director Mueller's FBI seemed to be the most engaged."

The bureau was rewarded by being the subject of just five of the 67 pages of recommendations in the 9/11 commission report. And three of the FBI-focused pages were devoted to agreeing with Mueller's repudiation of the MI5 concept. The other two pages put a virtual Good Housekeeping seal of approval on Mueller's plans. "I think our recommendations are parallel with what Mueller is doing now," commented Commissioner Slade Gorton, a Republican ex-senator from Washington state.

Yet, despite the faith that much of official Washington is placing in Mueller, it's not clear that the director's best-laid plans are translating into results in the field. Mueller's message that the FBI can successfully switch its focus from crime solving to terrorism prevention has resonated more strongly outside the bureau than within it. "The field is struggling to understand what its real mission is," says one former FBI senior executive. "That's the sense I get from a number of major field offices. They're really not sure what their role is."

In fact, one of the 9/11 commission's staff reports -- details of which didn't make the cut for the final volume -- described finding a considerable gap between the plans announced at FBI headquarters and the reality in the field. That preliminary report, based on field visits last fall, noted that many FBI analysts complain they have little time to do intelligence analysis because they are assigned "menial tasks," such as answering phones and emptying trash bins.

Can the FBI deliver on Mueller's ambitious reforms? That remains the big unknown, Ben-Veniste says. "While at the top of the agency Director Mueller is on the right track, the FBI is one of the most, if not the most, entrenched bureaucracies in the country," he adds. "Getting the field to accept the kinds of changes we think are necessary is a daunting task."

Mueller inherited an FBI that was virtually in the Dark Ages, organizationally and technically. Its center of power was in its field offices, where agents took full ownership of their cases and believed that sharing information would compromise those cases. Analysts were generally people who had excelled as secretaries, so they earned little respect and had little or no background in intelligence analysis. On the technical side, the FBI had yet to embrace even e-mail, much less computerized case files. Searching electronically through case information or analytical memos was impossible.

So, looking back at the pre-9/11 FBI, the fate of the memo written by FBI agent Kenneth Williams warning that Al Qaeda could be trying to send students to aviation school is hardly surprising: When the Phoenix-based agent sent the memo to FBI headquarters and to the New York field office, the system swallowed it. Nor is it surprising that the FBI's headquarters and its Minneapolis field office wrangled over authority to issue special search warrants to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui -- an aviation student of Moroccan descent in Missouri who had aroused the suspicion of his instructor and was in FBI custody -- and argued over whether the Federal Aviation Administration should be clued in. Nor is it surprising that a July 19, 2001, conference call that the FBI's acting director says he held with the heads of all 56 field offices about a heightened terrorist threat failed to penetrate beyond the New York field office, which specializes in counter-terrorism. Nor is it surprising that in the summer of 2001, the FBI's counter-terrorism budget was slated to be cut.

But Mueller has bought the bureau substantial time to demonstrate its mettle. Or has he?

"They're on the charm offensive," says one congressional intelligence aide. "But they're going to get tested very soon, if the conventional wisdom is correct" about Al Qaeda's desire to strike again before November 2.

The Perpetual Campaign

The former prosecutor's lawyerly skills were on full display before the 9/11 commission on the afternoon of April 14. Armed with a 75-page color report marketing the FBI's accomplishments since 9/11, Mueller carefully laid out the major steps he had taken to overhaul the bureau: reordering priorities, centralizing coordination of counter-terrorism, and building a capacity for intelligence analysis. "The pace of change has been steady," he assured the commissioners.

Before he closed, Mueller sternly warned against creating a separate intelligence agency, saying it would be a "grave mistake" to split domestic law enforcement and intelligence operations and to "leave both agencies fighting the war on terrorism with one hand tied behind their backs."

At his side was Maureen Baginski, whom he'd recruited a year earlier to head up the FBI's new intelligence push as his executive assistant director for intelligence. "I thought he was amazing," Baginski later gushed in an interview. "How did he make the case? He's an attorney." She says that Mueller's experience as a prosecutor leads him to examine his argument for holes that an opponent could exploit -- and then to strengthen the argument in those places.

That strategy worked with the 9/11 panel. "We were impressed with the decisiveness of his leadership," says Commissioner Gorton. "We saw far more changes in the FBI than we did at the CIA." Gorton said that the commission believed it had four options to choose among on the domestic-intelligence front: create a new freestanding agency, create a new agency within the Department of Homeland Security, expand the jurisdiction of the CIA, or expand intelligence capacity inside the FBI.

Mueller's pro-FBI argument proved persuasive. "His advertisement for not having a separate organization is that everybody who is recruited to the FBI will go through the same basic training and will have an assignment on both sides of the intelligence/law enforcement divide, and people in relatively high positions at the FBI will have to have a significant intelligence background," Gorton said. "If that works, it will strengthen both sides of the FBI and will certainly strengthen our intelligence."

Mueller also got points for style. The 9/11 commissioners said "Jump," and the FBI asked, "How high?" In contrast, the CIA argued there was no need to jump. Shortly after the commission was created, Mueller sent out a bureau-wide e-mail urging cooperation with it. The FBI offered up nearly 1.5 million pages of documents and provided about 370 interviews and 32 briefings to the commission. Meanwhile, the CIA initially rebuffed a number of the commission's requests for documents and became apoplectic when the panel pushed for declassification of such sensitive documents as the now-famous President's Daily Brief of August 6, 2001.

The 9/11 commission is only the most recent constituency successfully wooed by the tall, distinguished former marine who favors dark suits and crisp white shirts. A registered Republican, Mueller counts many lawmakers on both sides of the aisle as allies. And he clicked early with a particularly important constituent -- the president. These alliances have led policy makers to take a leap of faith and to endorse Mueller's plans for the FBI.

Even before he arrived at the FBI, Mueller had already won over California's senators, Democrats Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, for his work in San Francisco, where he cleaned up the U.S. Attorney's Office. The two senators praised Mueller at his confirmation hearing, where he was asked, once again, to straighten up a beleaguered office -- this one far bigger, plagued by security scandals, and troubled by a tangled technology system. "We must and we will confront these challenges squarely and forthrightly," he said.

But the 9/11 attacks immediately shoved onto the back burner such challenges as preventing future spy scandals. The attacks gave Mueller a tremendous opening to force the bureau's calcified bureaucracy to modernize and re-orient itself. And newly instituted daily morning briefings with the president gave Mueller an opportunity to bond with George W. Bush. "He has the unqualified support of the president," said one former administration official. "He has an audience of one, and that audience is very supportive of him."

By November 2001, Mueller had outlined a plan to shift the FBI's focus at headquarters toward counter-terrorism. He explained the plan both in meetings at headquarters and in an all-hands memo to FBI employees. But then more details emerged about missed cues, such as the Phoenix memo and the failure to alert the FAA about fears raised by the Moussaoui case.

Mueller, however, didn't get defensive. Instead, in May 2002, he announced a full-scale overhaul of the bureau, especially in the field, to focus agents on preventing terrorism. He centralized the counter-terrorism effort at headquarters, reassigned agents, hired more analysts, and established specialized "flying squads" to help field offices pursue terrorism cases.

Meanwhile, Mueller continued to campaign against the MI5 idea. "Over the last year, the FBI has identified, disrupted, and neutralized a number of terrorist threats and cells," he told law enforcement officials in New York City in December 2002. "We have done so in ways an intelligence-only agency like MI5 cannot."

Given the civil-libertarian worries sparked by the mere suggestion of creating of an MI5, Mueller found some unlikely allies -- including Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Bob Mueller is a fair-minded, accessible, thoughtful man who listens to different viewpoints," Romero said. He noted the irony that the ACLU has never had a better relationship with the director of the FBI, even though it has never had so many lawsuits pending against the bureau. Romero invited Mueller to speak to the ACLU last year, and Mueller not only spoke but took questions -- and received a standing ovation. (Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft turned down similar invitations, Romero says.)

By December 2002, Mueller was frustrated by his bureau's pace of change, so he fired off an internal memo that criticized "bureaucratic intransigence." And he corralled the special agents in charge of each field office on a conference call to impress upon them the importance of his re-engineering plan.

The following spring, Mueller apparently concluded he needed to push harder. He also decided that he needed backup with deep intelligence expertise, because he felt certain that improving the bureau's intelligence capacity was the only way to avert terrorist attacks. In April 2003, he called on a 25-year veteran of the National Security Agency, Baginski, for help. "It was a stroke of genius to bring in Maureen Baginski," said one former FBI senior executive.

Baginski has spent a little more than a year steeping herself in the FBI's culture. A former foreign-language instructor with a gentle demeanor, she has patiently tried to work through the vocabulary differences between the FBI and the foreign-intelligence community. Baginski spent several weeks working with people from every corner of the bureau to develop what the she calls "concepts of operations," akin to an intelligence blueprint for the FBI. They lay out, for example, how to draw up intelligence "requirements" (gaps in the FBI's terrorism knowledge).

As the 9/11 commission weighed its options this spring, Mueller became even more aggressive in advertising the FBI's intelligence efforts. On May 26, he and Ashcroft called a news conference to signal that their intelligence efforts were bearing fruit. They asked the American public to be on the lookout for six men and one woman suspected of ties to terrorist groups. Mueller and Ashcroft direly warned that Al Qaeda was 90 percent ready to strike.

Pre-Emptive Strike

Although overshadowed by CIA Director Tenet's resignation announcement, Mueller launched a precision-guided pre-emptive strike during a June 3 appearance on Capitol Hill. The 9/11 commission was to render its verdict in July on establishing a domestic intelligence agency, and commissioners were already hinting privately that they would not go so far as to recommend an independent intelligence agency. Nevertheless, Mueller would be much better positioned if he could point to plans in the works to beef up the intelligence operation within the bureau.

Mueller had been talking with Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., since February about Wolf's idea to establish a domestic-intelligence unit inside the FBI. "There was a reluctance" at first to create such a unit, recalls Wolf, who chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, and the Judiciary. But "never once did Mueller say, 'No.' He'd say, 'I don't know if that's a good idea, but let me look at it.' " Wolf's staff had assembled a group of experts on the FBI and organizations, as well as representatives from the 9/11 commission staff, to develop a plan for the unit.

Mueller was familiar with the concept. John MacGaffin, who spent 31 years at the CIA and another six advising the FBI, had testified before the 9/11 commission a few months earlier about a "service-within-a-service" proposal that he and six former FBI and CIA colleagues had assembled. Mueller met with members of the group. Its members envisioned a new career division within the FBI that would take on the duties of its current counter-terrorism and national security divisions and would recruit a largely new crop of analysts. Its head would be a presidential appointee from outside law enforcement who would report to the head of the intelligence community.

After meeting throughout the spring with Wolf's task force, Mueller's staff found common ground and assembled a proposal. And at the June hearing before Wolf's panel, Mueller endorsed the plan and cast it as the obvious next step in the FBI's evolution. "We have also seen the need to expand on what we previously felt was an adequate [intelligence] organizational structure," he said.

The plan calls for consolidating the FBI's 10 directorates into just five, including a new one called the Directorate of Intelligence. The intelligence directorate would subsume the current 70-person Office of Intelligence and have its own budget. Its head would be Baginski, who could be responsible for up to 1,000 employees -- most likely analysts at headquarters and in the field, as well as some agents. The new directorate would not run field operations. But it would be in charge of policies for intelligence-gathering and information-sharing, and it would establish a career path for intelligence analysts.

Commissioners Gorton and Ben-Veniste said that the main difference between their recommendation for an intelligence corps within the FBI and Mueller's proposal is that the 9/11 commission wants to ensure that the restructuring extends beyond Mueller's tenure. Of course, that's just what Wolf's bill will do if it becomes law.

"They've wonderfully hijacked the term," says MacGaffin of his "service-within-a-service" moniker. MacGaffin contends that for this intelligence directorate to work, it needs to control analysts as well as a large battalion of dedicated intelligence collectors in the field akin to the CIA's clandestine service -- people who are recruited specifically to do that job, will solely work in intelligence as a career, and won't just be holdovers from the pre-9/11 crime-fighting FBI. Those people would "work day in and day out to determine who would do us unthinkable harm and how they would do it -- not to put someone in the slammer."

The main worry that MacGaffin and other critics have is that to build an intelligence operation capable of understanding the nature of the terrorist threat to the United States, the FBI needs a whole different breed of agent. (See "Worlds Apart," NJ, 8/2/03, p. 2482.) Traditionally, FBI agents have been singularly focused on investigating and closing cases, not engaging in arcane discussions about an elusive enemy's capabilities and motives. And FBI agents continue to view intelligence as information they acquire in the course of investigating a case, MacGaffin says, rather than as information that may have no connection to lawbreaking but is obtained as a result of an organized, sustained effort to understand terrorists' means, motives, and designs.

So while grouping analysts and supervising agents under one bureaucratic roof may produce better analyses of information relevant to open cases, MacGaffin says he finds it hard to believe that the new FBI directorate will produce much beyond that.

Converting His Own

The FBI's new five-year plan looks like a corporate CEO's dream. It has color-coded feedback loops and diagrams of the FBI's post-9/11 "re-engineered" bureaucracy. It lists priorities and offers action plans.

Numbering more than 100 pages, including language addressing "internal and external stakeholders," that plan doesn't seem to have been written with the average G-man in mind. It's no surprise, then, that the FBI has run into difficulties translating paper plans into revamped field operations.

"I shake my head when I hear what Baginski says, and I wonder if there's any 'there,' there," says one former FBI senior executive who talks frequently with former colleagues in the field. "When you go to translate what headquarters is doing versus what the investigators out in the field are doing, sometimes it's a complete 180" from headquarters' intentions.

This former agent said that, from the field perspective, even Mueller's original move to centralize counter-terrorism operations at headquarters is wrongheaded. "That is fraught with peril," he said, because it reduces field operators to pawns of headquarters and eliminates any sense of ownership, which is the chief incentive that agents have to do good work. "They've now taken that carrot away from thousands of agents in the field," he warned.

Weighing in on Mueller's side, one FBI official defended the director's field outreach, saying he constantly takes the temperature of the field offices by holding videoconferencing calls with the heads of those offices. And Baginski said that Mueller is known for constantly asking for progress reports. "People know that he wants things done and that when things don't get done, there is engagement," she said. "Most people don't ever want Dad mad at them, right?" Baginski also points to a new carrot for analysts: a director's award for intelligence analysis.

But when the 9/11 commission's staff investigated the FBI's field operations last fall, it found that field agents no longer knew who their contact was at headquarters -- a problem that would certainly inhibit information-sharing with the mother ship. Among the staff's other findings: Field supervisors pulled personnel away from counter-terrorism to work on criminal cases; agents complained that their training on how to recruit and maintain sources was inadequate; and language specialists said that their summaries were not disseminated widely or analyzed for intelligence value. The staff report also expressed concern about the analysts' qualifications.

Reactions from the consumers of the FBI's new intelligence are also mixed. One state homeland-security adviser said he's had difficulty with such basic tasks as picking up a classified fax sent to him at the office of one of the FBI-sponsored Joint Terrorism Tracking Task Forces. Because he got his clearance through the Department of Homeland Security and not the FBI, the bureau barred him from reading his own fax. And he says that the FBI sometimes keeps the local U.S. Attorney's Office out of the loop. "It's a constant battle," he said. "The FBI has developed this culture in which information-sharing is basically the FBI taking as much as possible from different sources and deciding unilaterally what they should share with other law enforcement entities."

Even back in Washington, the culture of sharing is far from being fully realized. One former Bush administration official said he witnessed a meeting at the White House in which Cabinet deputies went along with the FBI's refusal to share its watch list of terrorist suspects with the new Terrorist Threat Integration Center and instead created the new Terrorist Screening Center inside the FBI to pull in all other agencies' watch lists. The former official added that, even now, the FBI rarely volunteers threat information. Instead, the FBI is forced to divulge what it has when the CIA and its foreign counterparts come forward with something they have learned. The sources of the problem, he explained, are "money, authority, turf -- the usual Washington issues."

That's not to say there haven't been improvements. The FBI's intelligence office has sent out numerous helpful bulletins to local law enforcement, explaining terrorists' current modus operandi, says James Kallstrom, counter-terrorism adviser to New York Gov. George Pataki and a former special agent in charge of the FBI's New York City field office. New York state has also established a statewide intelligence center, which includes a full-time FBI agent assigned to search FBI databases. Police officers can call the center to find out whether the driver they've pulled over for speeding is a terrorist suspect. "It allows relevant, commonsense information to be relayed" without requiring all police officers to pass security clearances, Kallstrom says.

The New York center is now available to nine other states in the region, and the FBI hopes to expand the program to every state. Of course, one has to wonder why a system can't be devised to allow the FBI database to be searched automatically so cops on the beat can find out what they need to know without compromising classified information.

While the FBI touts all kinds of numbers to show how its field operations have changed -- 1,047 more agents assigned to counter-terrorism (of 12,000 total FBI agents); more than 2,500 intelligence reports produced; 460 more analysts -- those numbers don't describe the quality of the intelligence or how much more the bureau now knows about the terrorist threat. The FBI also talks about the number of cases it has open on Al Qaeda -- more than 500. But "a case is not a case is not a case," notes one former FBI senior executive. "You can't measure success by saying, 'We have 500 cases.' " Instead, the former executive said, a better gauge would be the number of times agents have penetrated a Qaeda cell, or the number of terrorist attacks they have thwarted.

Because the 9/11 commission's staff did not return to the field to gauge the degree of change since last fall, it did not report on how much progress -- if any -- has been made in the past year. The 9/11 staff report does offer a baseline, though, from which to judge the FBI's future progress.

The one thing that's certain is that Director Mueller's external public-relations campaign has been an undeniable success. At least for now, official Washington will largely leave his bureau alone to restructure itself. Whether that's ultimately good for the nation will likely depend on whether Mueller can do a better job of selling his battle plan. ]]>

Frustrated intelligence reformers see window of opportunity

Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 -0400

No fewer than 40 studies of the U.S. intelligence infrastructure -- some of them dating back almost to the CIA's birth in 1947 -- have lamented that no single person really runs the nation's intelligence efforts and have declared that the lack of clear leadership is a huge problem with enormous consequences.

Now, reform advocates can push for restructuring without seeming to register a vote of no confidence in Tenet. The status quo no longer seems frozen solid. As Ronald Marks, who spent 16 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, puts it, "The ice has broken; I can hear it all around."

The reform proposal quickly catching fire is the idea of creating a director of national intelligence, who would wield far more power -- including budgetary authority -- than directors of central intelligence have had. Many reformers envision that the new intelligence czar would be at the helm of the entire 15-agency U.S. intelligence apparatus. He or she would be charged with designing and implementing an overall strategy for gathering, analyzing, and disseminating U.S. intelligence about security threats, both foreign and domestic. And, the thinking goes, this new director would be held accountable in the event of a major intelligence failure.

There would still be a CIA director, but no director of central intelligence. And the new superchief would oversee the CIA's director.

Reformers don't claim that having a director of national intelligence would avert future terror attacks on American soil. But they do see creating the post as a necessary precursor for the fundamental structural and policy changes that they think are crucial if the U.S. intelligence community is going to significantly improve its record on assessing threats and preventing attacks.

As criticism of the intelligence community's performance has escalated in recent months, so too have demands for tapping a DNI and putting that person fully in charge. In the weeks before Tenet announced his exit, National Journal began informally polling intelligence experts inside and outside government, "If there were a director of national intelligence, who should it be?"

The most frequently mentioned names were those of former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee and is now CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit organizationworking to reduce the global threat of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush and who, in the current administration, chairs the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; and Norman Augustine, former chairman of defense mega-contractor Lockheed Martin.

A number of longtime advocates of reform had thought that, surely, the 9/11 attacks would jolt the intelligence bureaucracy out of its post-Cold War lethargy. At best, that many-headed creature, which costs taxpayers some $40 billion per year, has been hitting the snooze alarm. Since 2002, the White House has been sitting on (at the Pentagon's behest, some insiders say) a ready-to-release report on how to improve U.S. intelligence.

Scowcroft headed the commission that wrote the report, which, according a panel member, recommends appointing something like a director of national intelligence. The bipartisan House-Senate inquiry into the 9/11 attacks echoed that recommendation. Meanwhile, several members of Congress, notably Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., have introduced legislation calling for the appointment of a DNI, but those bills have gained little traction on Capitol Hill thus far.

Less than 30 minutes after President Bush announced Tenet's resignation, Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, fired off a carpe diem press release calling for passage of her bill to create a DNI. "I have been critical of the prewar intelligence on Iraq's [weapons of mass destruction] and ties to terror, as well as failures leading up to the attacks of 9/11," Harman said in her press release. "With Tenet's departure, the president has the opportunity to fix these problems by transforming the job that Tenet held. We need a true director of the entire intelligence community -- all 15 agencies -- who has the necessary authority, responsibility, and accountability."

Those 15 include Air Force Intelligence; Army Intelligence; the CIA; Coast Guard Intelligence; the Defense Intelligence Agency; the Energy Department; the FBI; the Homeland Security Department; Marine Corps Intelligence; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (formerly the National Imagery and Mapping Agency); the National Reconnaissance Office; the National Security Agency; Navy Intelligence; the State Department; and the Treasury Department.

Earlier, Harman had said in an interview that the intelligence community has "a big problem, and we have a well-crafted, thoughtful answer."

Tenet's exit helps to depersonalize the debate over intelligence reform. A vacancy in the titular leadership post of the U.S. intelligence community offers a chance to redesign its power structure without making the process a referendum on Tenet, who happens to be a Bush family friend. Because the president won't likely want to endure the new round of second-guessing over intelligence-gathering that the Senate confirmation battle over a new CIA director would likely spark in an election year, a permanent replacement for Tenet probably won't be nominated until after Election Day.

In the meantime, the president is likely to feel pressure to join the growing chorus calling for intelligence reform. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is expected to soon release the results of its investigation into the intelligence failures behind the prewar assurances given to the White House that Iraq still had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and posed a real threat to the United States. Feinstein, a member of the committee, said in an interview that the report will advance the case for reform. The report of the highly publicized 9/11 commission is due to go to the White House by July 26 and very well might recommend creating the post of DNI. (The separate commission investigating U.S. intelligence failures in Iraq and elsewhere is not scheduled to offer its recommendations until next March.)

Whether to appoint a DNI could become an issue in the presidential campaign. Presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry has said that he would create the post. Bush has declared that he's open to various reform ideas, but he has not expanded on, or repeated, that statement since April.

The idea of reshuffling the deck in hopes of improving U.S. intelligence capabilities is anything but universally popular. The Pentagon has long balked at the idea of having its intelligence arm under the direct control of any presidential appointee other than the secretary of Defense. The military argues that shifting any of the control over its intelligence assets to someone outside the Pentagon would put its soldiers in grave danger and impair its ability to fight and win wars.

Nearly 30 years ago, as secretary of Defense in the Ford administration, Donald Rumsfeld bluntly shot down the idea of ceding control of intelligence satellites to the CIA. "If they're in my budgets, I'll run them," he said. Asked in 2002 about creation of a DNI-type post, Rumsfeld derided it as an effort to "move boxes and change lines" that was "probably not a great idea." He added his belief that such centralization would stifle innovation. Rumsfeld has a powerful ally in Vice President Cheney, himself a former Defense secretary.

Gen. William Odom, a former director of the National Security Agency, warns that if the Pentagon were forced to hand over control of the budgets for its intelligence assets, the NSA would "essentially collapse," because the Pentagon would likely retaliate by withdrawing the many military personnel who have been assigned to work for the agency. And Tenet has warned that failing to give a DNI control of his own "troops" -- as the director of central intelligence now has in his joint role as head of the CIA -- would make the new job weaker than the one Tenet is leaving.

Still, the CIA was born in 1947 over the military's vociferous objections. A similar fundamental power shift could happen again.

The Intelligence Wars

Since being created by the National Security Act of 1947, the CIA has been enmeshed in low-intensity conflict with the military. Advocates of creating a CIA wanted a separate, civilian-dominated agency charged with spying abroad, because they didn't want to trust the military with so much power. Opponents worried that a civilian agency would not make the military's intelligence needs paramount. One senator even wondered whether it was "a wholesome thing" to allow the CIA director to report to the president instead of to the military services. Even then-President Truman was lukewarm on the idea.

In the end, the decision was to establish a CIA whose head would be both the director of central intelligence and the director of the new agency. That person was to report to the president and, at least on paper, be responsible for coordinating and evaluating all U.S. intelligence. But the CIA could not infringe on any other agency's intelligence work, and the bulk of the intelligence budget would remain with the military services. Even as the CIA's role expanded as the Cold War grew hotter, the Pentagon always governed the gravitational pull of the intelligence budget.

"Though the CIA suggested dominance over all intelligence, that was really not so," says former Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo. "It's all about the power struggle with the Pentagon."

The Defense Department controls 80 to 90 percent of the intelligence budget, including some of its biggest-ticket items: the NSA, which focuses on intercepting and deciphering signals; the National Reconnaissance Office, which procures major space gadgetry, such as spy satellites; and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is in charge of mapping and other imagery intelligence. Those three absorb half of U.S. intelligence spending.

In Hart's view, what's desperately needed is a top-to-bottom examination of the National Security Act -- what works, what no longer does, and what never did. "The National Security Act was the statutory basis for the prosecution of the Cold War. The Cold War is over, and there has not been any comprehensive review of that act," said Hart, who co-chaired a pre-9/11 commission on what the nation was doing to defend itself against the threat of terrorism.

Although the Defense Department itself has undergone major restructuring since its creation in 1949, the intelligence community has never been fundamentally revamped. The most common explanation is that no president has deemed attempting to fix the intelligence community's problems worth the political capital that would need to be expended to overrule the Pentagon. And congressional leaders are loath to cross their powerful Armed Services committees.

"What history shows is that the windows of reform are few and fleeting," said intelligence expert Amy Zegart, a professor of policy studies at the University of California (Los Angeles). "And you've got to run through that window with as much as you can take with you."

The enmities among the intelligence community's various sectors make trying to more closely integrate them a daunting task. The NSA, for example, is much more hierarchical and militaristic than the CIA. Odom disdainfully says of the CIA's leadership, "They think power is being able to screw something else up. This is a residual from their 1950s thinking."

The primary impetus for creating the CIA was the desire to avoid another Pearl Harbor-style sneak attack on the United States. Yet Harman and many other reformers contend that the lack of an overall intelligence game plan is to blame for the United States' failure to anticipate some of the most significant events in recent decades, including not only the 9/11 terrorism attacks and the earlier attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa and on the USS Cole, but also the collapse of the Soviet Union. More-recent examples include the failure to accurately gauge the threat posed by Iraq.

The Iran-Contra scandal and the disintegration of the Soviet Union led to many of the same calls for intelligence reorganization that are being heard today. In 1987, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., introduced a bill to create a director of national intelligence with budgeting authority. Then-Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., later joined the push. In 1992, Sen. David Boren and Rep. Dave McCurdy, Oklahoma Democrats who chaired the Senate and House Select Committees on Intelligence, introduced similar bills to give a single person authority over all intelligence agencies, civilian and military. The Oklahomans would have pulled analysis from all the agencies together and left the CIA responsible solely for clandestine operations.

"The world has changed, and the intelligence community must change with it," Boren said at the time. "It's time to be bold." But neither Congress nor the Clinton White House acted.

Tenet began his intelligence work in the late 1980s. In 1988, he became Boren's staff director on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. From that vantage point, he witnessed both the intelligence community's identity crisis after the fall of communism -- an era in which the community lost more than 20 percent of its civilian workforce -- and its subsequent efforts to shift its attention to terrorist threats. Appointed deputy director of central intelligence in 1995, Tenet rose to the No. 1 job two years later. He frustrated advocates of structural change when he set a pace that he described to the 9/11 commission in April as "evolutionary," not "revolutionary."

Indeed, the commission's report on the CIA's pre-9/11 operations found that even though Congress tried in the 1990s to enhance the powers of the director of central intelligence, "the vision of central coordination ... has not been realized." Specifically, Tenet and his predecessors had never developed the kinds of management and administrative tools that are now standard in most federal agencies required to show what taxpayers are getting for their money.

Under aggressive questioning from the 9/11 commission members about whether the head of the intelligence community ought to control the entire intelligence budget, Tenet reiterated his opposition but added that any recommendations for major change really ought to come from outside. The reason: He's so besieged by crises that he does not have time to contemplate how the intelligence community might be differently organized. "The day I retire, I'll be a great person to sit on one of these things," he told the panel, triggering appreciative laughter.

31 Flavors

Not all directors of national intelligence would be created equal.

Almost everyone who advocates having a DNI says the person should be independent of the CIA and responsible for evaluating the big picture, forecasting trends, and allocating resources. The central point of disagreement centers on the wonkish question of how much budget authority the new director should have.

The uninitiated might see budgetary authority as a small detail, but those in the trenches of the intelligence wars say the success of structural reform hinges on it. Although some proponents of a DNI say that the director would need no more authority than what Tenet has had, most fall into two camps.

Those in what can be called the Scowcroft camp argue that giving one person full control over the budgets and personnel of all 15 intelligence agencies is central to having a successful DNI. "To make [a DNI] effective, he has to have authority over the budget," Scowcroft said. The military intelligence budget can remain, nominally, with the Pentagon, he said, "but the authority to spend would be with the DNI."

Also in that camp are former Deputy Defense Secretary and CIA Director John Deutch and a host of other former top CIA officers. Kerry agrees with them. According to Kerry's adviser for national security, Rand Beers, the DNI "would have responsibility for the budget, personnel, and tasking of the intelligence community." Others, including Hart, say that budget control is paramount but could be given to the director of central intelligence without changing the job's name.

The other camp is headed by Harman and Feinstein, who consider themselves pragmatists. Harman, whose bill has 17 co-sponsors in the House, would give her director of national intelligence enhanced "reprogramming authority." That power would allow the director to shift money around if he disagreed with how, say, the Defense secretary had slated it to be spent. To fight the reprogramming, the Defense secretary would have to appeal to the president.

Harman hopes that her plan would mute Pentagon opposition enough to allow her bill to become law. "We don't blow up DOD," she says. "We have received some very positive informal comments from some senior DOD personnel."

But one person in the Scowcroft camp who has both defense and intelligence experience brands Harman's bill "fatally flawed." Although designed to appeal to the Pentagon and the Armed Services committees,"it emasculates the DNI," the critic contends.The reason:squishy budget authorityand a requirement that the deputy director of national intelligence report to the Pentagon as well as to the DNI.

Clearly, questions about the DNI's budgetary powers aren't the only ones about the theoretical position. Would the intelligence czar be a Cabinet member? Would the appointee have a fixed term or serve at the pleasure of the president? Would the director govern all intelligence agencies, including, for example, the Defense Intelligence Agency, or just those that don't report directly to a Cabinet department?

Harman's bill would not make the DNI a Cabinet member but would appoint the CIA director for a 10-year term. The DNI would have his or her own general counsel and inspector general, as well as several deputies. The DNI would also direct collection and analysis in all 15 intelligence agencies, including the FBI's Intelligence Office, but would not have to the power to hire and fire except in his or her immediate office.

Harman also goes beyond calling for a new director. Modeled on the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Department reforms of 1986, her bill would modify the incentives within the intelligence community to foster joint activities among the intelligence agencies, such as by basing intelligence promotions on whether an employee in one agency has worked in another one.

Feinstein's bill takes a foot-in-the-door approach by focusing solely on creating a DNI as a Cabinet-level position and says that, once appointed, the new director would be able to evaluate the intelligence community and decide whether additional changes were necessary.

"It's a first step," Feinstein says. "The intelligence agencies ought to be separated out from the control of the secretary of Defense. It ought to be a community [that] really reports to the president and the Congress.

She adds, "We've got to look at the massive amount of money that is spent on intelligence and see if it really is directed toward this new, non-state terror world that we seem to be in, as opposed to state-to-state intelligence."

Still, skeptics abound. If the Defense Department were to lose its control over much of the intelligence budget, predicts national security scholar Richard Betts of Columbia University, the Pentagon would just find a way to replace whatever it had lost. Betts doubts that the DNI would be allowed to exercise complete authority. "I suspect when the dust settled, there would be less change than meets the eye," he said.

There are also questions about whether appointing a DNI would treat the symptoms of the intelligence community's shortcomings, but not the causes. Most of the problems identified in decades of commission reports, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, point to lower-level difficulties -- dysfunctional agency management, or insufficient communication between the CIA and the NSA. "I think those problems are inherent in the existence of a CIA outside the Defense Department," Pike said. "You can relabel things all you want, but you're still going to be stuck" with the same old deficiencies.

Even advocates of having a DNI say that creating the job wouldn't magically make the intelligence community better able to collect or connect those infamous dots. But these proponents contend that having one top leader responsible for strategic thinking would provide a counterbalance to the military-dominated tactical orientation of today's intelligence community and, as a result, would lead to better long-term forecasting, especially for transnational threats, such as terrorism.

Overcoming Inertia

The difficulty of revamping the sprawling intelligence bureaucracy is evident in its 57-year history of inertia. But, especially since Tenet's exit announcement, intelligence reform is taking on an aura of inevitability.

Zegart sees the stars aligning for reform now that Tenet is departing. First, Tenet's opposition to instituting a DNI led to what she calls a "circle-the-wagons attitude" at the CIA, and she thinks that his resignation may cause the tide there to shift toward reform. Second, Zegart said, confirmation hearings for the next director, whether held this year or next, will give reformers a platform on which to advocate wholesale change. Third, she said, the Pentagon may be distracted by its struggle in Iraq and weakened by the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal and the alleged leaks of classified information to its now-fallen Iraqi golden boy, Ahmad Chalabi.

Up next is the 9/11 commission report. The panel is thought to be leaning strongly toward recommending some sort of DNI post. The panel has not been secretive about its interest in such a proposal; an October hearing focused almost exclusively on the idea. At least two commission members have a history of favoring appointment of a DNI: Vice Chairman Hamilton, and former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who also served on Scowcroft's panel.

Reform advocates are optimistic but don't expect any breakthrough until after Election Day. In the avalanche of criticism that followed the release of former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke's tell-all book, Against All Enemies, Bush displayed a new, if vague, openness to change. Bush told reporters on April 12, just a few weeks after the book's release, that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice "mentioned the other day something very interesting, and that is that, you know, that now may be the time to revamp and reform our intelligence services."

Bush has not spoken about intelligence reform publicly since then, not even after rumors that the White House might propose a DNI to pre-empt the 9/11 commission's expected recommendation. "The president has to take a much more vigorous leadership role," said Zegart, who is close to Rice. "Being open to reforms is not enough. A lot of successful change has to do with knowing that this is the president's priority. The president has moved forward on this, but he needs to do more, much more."

Meanwhile, Kerry's supporters say that, as president, the Democrat would make reform happen. "With the kind of presidential interest and leadership that Kerry could provide, I think we could see substantial reform," said Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who co-chaired the congressional joint inquiry into 9/11. And Hart, not surprisingly, says not to expect reform from Bush. "It would take a new and tough president to say to the secretary of Defense and the Pentagon, 'Your intelligence is now subordinate to the director of central intelligence,' " said Hart, who added that, if asked, he'd advise Kerry to make that declaration early.

Congress would have to buy the idea, too. Some Republican moderates, including Sens. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, have voiced support. But the key people to win over are Sen. John Warner, R-Va., and Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who chair the Armed Services committees.

And those who are wise to the ways of Washington warn against acting precipitously. Scowcroft said, "One of the things I worry about is that some kind of legislation will pass just as kind of a protest vote and that it will not be a carefully thought-out bill, and the administration will ignore it or veto it. Anything that comes out this [election] year will be bad."

Help Wanted

The help-wanted ad for a Director of National Intelligence would read something like this:

"Seeking giant with the capacity to inspire fear, awe, and allegiance. Needs bipartisan respect and a strong background in intelligence and the military. Excellent business management skills a must. Should enjoy a good tussle with Cabinet secretaries -- and know how to win. Dragon-slaying and cat-herding skills essential. Credibility with the information-technology set a plus. Congressional kiss-up capacity very helpful."

The job itself would be a greater challenge than launching a start-up. This director, whatever the title, would be replacing the director of central intelligence and trying to rebuild the community's coordinating capacity. So, the new czar would have to not only start a new operation but also combat being perceived, especially within the bureaucracy, as just another director of central intelligence with a new title and a few more aides.

The job would also require contradictory qualities, Graham said. An intelligence background is essential, but the new director also needs to be an honest broker who isn't seen as beholden to any particular agency. Similarly, the director must have the president's trust but must still be able to tell the White House what it doesn't want to hear.

Washington loves to name names, so long as those doing the naming don't get caught. So, National Journal coaxed names from prominent experts in and out of government, in exchange for the promise that no one would know whether they accurately predicted who will be the first DNI -- should there be one. National Journal whittled the prospects down to a baker's dozen.

And the nominees are:

Former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., who co-authored the Nunn-Lugar nuclear threat reduction program and is now CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a former national security adviser to two earlier presidents.
Norman Augustine, former CEO of defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., who chairs the House Select Committee on Intelligence.
William Perry, secretary of Defense during the Clinton administration and now a Kerry adviser.
National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden.
Bobby Ray Inman, who has served as NSA director and deputy CIA director.
Joan Dempsey, executive director of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
David Boren, a former Oklahoma senator who chaired the Select Committee on Intelligence and recommended intelligence-community restructuring in 1992.
Former Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., who co-chaired the Hart-Rudman Commission and is an adviser to Kerry.
Warren Rudman, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire who co-chaired the Hart-Rudman Commission.
FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Commanding the U.S. intelligence community is not a job for James Bond. It's a job for former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, or maybe someone who channels Alexander Hamilton. Although "director of national intelligence" is a pretty glamorous title, much of the work wouldn't be. If ever there was a high-stakes management job in Washington, this would be it. ]]>

FBI intelligence chief quietly beefs up agency's role

Gregg Sangillo and Siobhan Gorman — Mon, 24 May 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Although momentum is building for expanding the role of intelligence-gathering and analysis in national security policy, the covert component of intelligence has come under heavy criticism at times, most notably during the Church Committee's investigation into intelligence agencies' abuses of power in the mid-1970s. The checkered pasts of both the FBI and the CIA feed a lively debate about how much latitude should be given to intelligence officials.

The 9/11 commission has signaled its support for changing the way domestic intelligence is collected and analyzed, but the shape that a new intelligence shop might take -- a British-style MI5, a counterintelligence operation inside the FBI, or a domestic intelligence unit within the Homeland Security Department -- is not yet clear. Most experts view the traditional wall separating law enforcement and intelligence operations as a significant obstacle to effective counterterrorism.

Maureen Baginski, who heads the FBI's Office of Intelligence, is the agency's strongest antidote to those who say the country needs a new domestic intelligence agency. FBI Director Robert Mueller credits her with giving him a vision for the FBI's post-9/11 intelligence efforts. When Mueller testified before the 9/11 commission last month, Baginski was at his side.

"Many times we have asked the question: 'How is X going to get fixed? Who's going to do Y?' And often, very often, maybe too often for your comfort level, 'Mo Baginski' is the answer," Commissioner Jamie Gorelick observed in response to Mueller's testimony.

Baginski sees herself as "a teacher, a facilitator, a provider of resources," and she says her goal is to develop the "FBI brand of intelligence."

After 25 years at the National Security Agency, Baginski had planned to leave and perhaps go back to teaching Russian, which she calls "my first love." That was her first NSA assignment. A graduate of the State University of New York at Albany with a master's degree in Slavic languages, Baginski was focused on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union at the time of the Soviet collapse.

Her final charge at the agency was the most daunting: Create a Signals Intelligence Directorate from two separate organizations. The unit was to be in charge of breaking the codes in intelligence gathered through the interception of foreign communications or through the detection of electronic, radar, or infrared signals from military activities.

When Baginski, 49, joined the FBI in May 2003, her teaching background was of immediate value. "I had to learn a whole new vocabulary," she said. "I felt like Dorothy, clicking my heels together. And Toto and I were not going back to Kansas."

Known as "The Vision Lady" at the NSA, Baginski recalls her vision at the end of her first month at the FBI: The bureau must integrate intelligence collection and analysis into every division. So, she gathered representatives from every corner, and the group came up with the blueprint for integrating an intelligence ethos throughout the bureau -- for example, how to establish intelligence operations in the field. Some former senior FBI officials remain skeptical, but Bagniski insists the naysayers are wrong: "We are changing -- winning hearts and minds, as they say."

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War on terror eclipses homeland security effort

Siobhan Gorman — Tue, 04 May 2004 00:00:00 -0400

At the White House, Adm. Steve Abbot was reporting for his new assignment: leading Vice President Dick Cheney's task force on terrorism. At the National Security Council, the Deputies Committee was putting the finishing touches on its three-year plan to put Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network out of commission, ideally by winning the cooperation of Afghanistan's fundamentalist Taliban, which was harboring them. Over at Langley, the CIA counterterrorism center's first chief of strategic assessment was also starting his first day on the job. At the Justice Department, Attorney General John Ashcroft was rejecting -- for a second time -- the FBI's plea for a bigger counter-terrorism budget.

On that Monday, the Bush administration viewed terrorism as an "important but not urgent" threat to national security, according to not only then-White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke but also Republican former Sen. Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, co-chair of an anti-terrorism commission that had briefed key Bush aides in early 2001.

A look back at the United States' anti-terrorism posture in the final hours before the devastating attacks of September 11 also reveals an administration that did not view terrorism as a domestic matter. Rather, Bush officials saw terrorism as a foreign issue, one largely within the purview of the NSC, the Defense Department, and the CIA. Homeland defense meant missile defense.

Two and a half years after 9/11, the Bush administration is deeply enmeshed in its "war on terrorism," but remains primarily focused on the part of that fight it is waging abroad. When talking of terrorism, President Bush emphasizes the importance of staying "on offense." Bolstering homeland security -- domestic efforts to defend against another attack on American soil -- is Plan B.

That's a smart strategy, says James Carafano, a homeland-security and defense specialist at the Heritage Foundation. He compares the fight against terrorism to World War II. "The first priority was to defeat Germany. The president's strategy [today] is a similar thing. It's 'get the terrorists first,' " Carafano says. "The 'away' game is more important. You've got to spend some on defense, but offense wins the ballgame."

Yet, many other observers warn that the Bush administration's obsessive focus on fighting terrorism abroad is dangerously shortchanging domestic-security measures, despite the creation of a Homeland Security Department. "He's put most of his eggs -- virtually all of them -- into fighting the war on terrorism at its presumed source," says Stephen E. Flynn, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the forthcoming book America the Vulnerable. "The reality is, there are no fronts on the war on terrorism. The terrorists are in the first world. They use our stuff against us."

Trying to catch or kill terrorists before they reach this country -- or, as the Bush team likes to say, in Baghdad, not Boston -- sounds terrific. The unfortunate reality, though, is that intelligence experts suspect that terrorists or their active supporters are already embedded in American soil and are spread across perhaps 40 states. That likelihood, in the view of Flynn and like-minded critics, underscores that Bush's "the-best-defense-is-a-good-offense" approach is, at best, only half a strategy.

Sources who have worked for and with this administration say that the Homeland Security Department, which opened its doors just as Bush went to war in Iraq, gets second-class treatment from the White House. These observers contend that the administration's decision to relegate fighting terrorism within the United States to a secondary priority explains many of the problems that government officials are encountering in trying to make this country less vulnerable -- crossed communication wires, lack of any communication wires, confusion over who's in charge, turf battles among departments, infighting, and senior staff turnover. Citing fear of retribution, most of the sources with firsthand knowledge of these shortcomings spoke only on condition of anonymity.

A number of former Bush administration officials volunteered a similar anti-terrorism picture: an administration focused largely on the "away" game but ardently protective of its image on homeland security. Indeed, one source said the White House has given Homeland Security a "no headlines" mandate this year -- and told it to refrain from announcing any goals that must be met before the election. That run-out-the-clock approach is risky if the White House truly believes, as Bush has said, that this election year is an extremely tempting time for terrorists to strike.

The root of the frustration reluctantly voiced by these Bush administration alums is their sense that things didn't have to be this way. They describe the administration's progress on homeland security as a bell curve. The curve peaked when the White House acknowledged that someone ought to be in charge of domestic security and decided to back proposals for a Department of Homeland Security, but the rate of progress has been declining ever since the department opened for business on March 1, 2003. One Bush administration veteran says the White House's announcement of the new department marked the start of an "era of great promise," but added that an "era of retrenchment" began as soon as the department actually came into existence.

Defenders of Bush's post-9/11 record on homeland security stress that his administration is undertaking enormous tasks and that, understandably, much remains to be done. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card describes the government-wide effort to enhance domestic security as uneven. "It's maturing," he recently told National Journal. "It's probably kind of in the teenage [stage] right now. Some of the teenagers are a little obstreperous, and some are not. And some are really sucking up to do a good job, and others are hoping they can sleep until 10 o'clock in the morning. But we are working hard to have all of these entities understand the paramount responsibility that they have."

Yet, the administration's overseas fight against terrorism is undeniably more focused, more sustained, and better funded than the fight at home.

Important, Not Urgent

Homeland security made a cameo appearance early in George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign. In a September 1999 address on military policy, the Texas governor mentioned threats posed by "biological, chemical, and nuclear terrorism." He reminded his audience at the Citadel, "These weapons can be delivered not just by ballistic missiles, but by everything from airplanes to cruise missiles, from shipping containers to suitcases."

In his general election campaign, though, Bush pared back his message to differentiate himself from his Democratic rival: Homeland defense became missile defense.

A foreign-policy adviser to the 2000 Bush campaign now says, "I think both campaigns missed it when it came to terrorism." Candidate Bush warned of "rogue regimes" that might get their hands on unguarded nuclear material that they could turn into warheads and fire at the United States. Republicans hoped that this focused message would set Bush apart from what his campaign saw as Democrat Al Gore's "kitchen sink" approach, which defined everything from AIDS to the environment as national security issues. Neither campaign talked much about terrorist networks.

On Election Day, the country had little interest in foreign affairs -- even though the USS Cole had been attacked by terrorists just a month earlier. In a presidential election focused on children left behind and Social Security lockboxes, only 5 percent of voters cited foreign policy as the most important factor in their vote. In the summer of 2000, the nation's 50 largest newspapers printed 512 articles about shark attacks, according to professor Amy Zegart of the University of California at Los Angeles. By comparison, in the three years immediately before the 9/11 attacks, the Hart-Rudman Commission's warning about the threat of terrorism sparked just 47 stories in top papers.

After the election, former Sens. Rudman and Gary Hart, D-Colo., completed their commission's third and final report, warning of the high likelihood of a terrorist attack in America. They urged the government to work to thwart such an attack by merging border-control and emergency-management agencies into a new homeland-security agency.

Before releasing their report in February 2001, commissioners briefed three key members of the new administration: National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The Hart-Rudman panelists also sought to meet with Vice President Cheney, but were turned down.

"We did everything we were asked to do," Rudman recalls, "and the ball was in their court." He added that, to the Bush team, terrorism, "as Richard Clarke said, was 'important but not urgent,' and that's probably as accurate a description as you're going to get."

The two former senators worked the halls of Congress, too. In early May 2001, as the Senate prepared for three days of hearings on terrorism, Bush pre-empted the legislative branch. He directed Cheney to establish a task force to look into terrorism and asked Joe M. Allbaugh, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to assess national preparedness.

At that time, U.S. border-control agencies were not focused on preventing terrorism -- and were not expected to be. The Immigration and Naturalization Service was a management mess, and Bush had brought in James Ziglar, who had presided over reorganizations in the federal government and at brokerage firm Paine Webber, to clean it up.

At the Justice Department, May 2001 guidelines for the coming budget season listed the attorney general's top priorities as reducing gun violence and curbing drug trafficking. Former FBI counter-terrorism chief Dale Watson "told us he almost fell out of his chair when he saw the memo," according to a staff report from the Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, known as the 9/11 commission, which is investigating the government's actions leading up to the attacks. At the FBI, the security focus was on damage control in the wake of agent Robert Hanssen's arrest for selling secrets to the Russians.

Then, in the summer of 2001, intelligence "chatter" warning of impending terrorist strikes put much -- but not all -- of the federal government on high alert. CIA Director George Tenet, Rice, and Clarke, as well as then-acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard, all say that they warned colleagues and underlings in July of the increased chatter coming in over the CIA transom.

But Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has said he knew nothing about the alerts. And FBI field agents -- from Washington to Miami -- got no warnings, according to the 9/11 commission. Meanwhile that summer, an FBI agent in Phoenix drafted a memo to warn the bureau's leaders of "the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden" involving suspected terrorists taking flying lessons. That memo drew no response.

Bush was warned of possible hijackings in the now-famous August 6 President's Daily Brief, which referred to the FBI's "70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related." The president says he did not ask anyone to follow up because he considered the PDB a "historical" document. John MacGaffin, who spent 31 years at the CIA and later was a senior adviser at the FBI, says Bush ought to have directed Rice to have the NSC's Counterterrorism Support Group look into bin Laden's activity in the United States. "I think that's a real failure," MacGaffin says. "It was, after all, the CSG's responsibility to direct the FBI to follow up. But it was August, and we don't work very well in August."

While much of Washington took the month off, the FBI's Minneapolis field office learned of a flight school student -- a French citizen of Moroccan descent named Zacarias Moussaoui -- who was behaving suspiciously. The INS detained him while the FBI launched an investigation and quibbled over whether it was an intelligence case or a criminal one. At the same time, a few FBI, CIA, and INS agents knew that two suspected bin Laden operatives had entered the country. A search for them began, but no one alerted the upper echelons of the CIA or the FBI. On September 11, the two men were among those who flew a jetliner into the Pentagon.

Governing by Improvisation

Bush met with the attorney general on September 12 and gave him an order: "John, you make sure this doesn't happen again." Ashcroft left the meeting and immediately declared that preventing terrorism was the new No. 1 priority for the Justice Department and the FBI. In other words, Ashcroft told the FBI to suddenly shift gears from fighting crime to preventing it.

Ashcroft asked Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh to come up with a plan of action. The result was a dual-pronged approach: 1) preventing terrorism through prosecution, which meant the government was to use any legal means to lock up suspected terrorists; 2) shifting the hearts and minds of law enforcement officials toward prevention by enhancing their investigative powers. Those new powers were written into the USA PATRIOT Act, which Bush signed into law just six weeks later.

The PATRIOT Act covers the law enforcement landscape, from breaking down the wall between criminal and intelligence investigations to bolstering the Border Patrol. The act exponentially increased "our ability to detect and deter terrorism," says Dinh, who likens the effect of the act to patching holes in a net. The administration also reorganized both the FBI and the INS to make them more effective at patching those holes.

Immediately after 9/11, Bush had also huddled with his staff to determine how the White House could quickly get a handle on the newly perceived need for enhanced domestic security. Thrust into the role of both mourner- and protector-in-chief, he began building America's first homeland-security system. His administration had an incredibly steep learning curve to climb. But the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was a period of high energy, enormous productivity, and strong public support for the president -- and he capitalized on it.

As the administration prepared to attack Al Qaeda by striking Afghanistan, officials looked for a way to synchronize the work of 100-plus federal agencies on domestic security -- without creating a new bureaucracy. Seizing on the NSC model, Bush created a White House Office of Homeland Security. And on September 20, he appointed then-Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania to head the council, as the president's homeland-security adviser.

Ridge assumed that post on October 8 amid an anthrax scare. A Florida man had already died after opening a contaminated letter. Then, anthrax-laced letters arrived in the offices of then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. The resulting governmental chaos produced a first-class public health and public-relations disaster. Ridge and the Justice Department took to jointly issuing vague threat warnings. Governors began freelancing: California's Gray Davis warned on November 1 of a terrorist threat to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson had been working on bioterrorism strategy since his first day on the job, but he hadn't fixed the broken chain of command that allowed officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to bypass him and speak directly to the public. The embarrassment of the anthrax confusion prompted HHS to build a command center, over the objections of the CDC, to try to ensure that agencies cleared information with department leaders before tossing it out to the public.

"If you ever want to see Tommy Thompson go through the ceiling, it's finding out something [from the CDC] on CNN," said Jerry Hauer, who advised Thompson on bioterrorism.

HHS also expanded its stockpiles of vaccines for potential bioterrorism agents. But Bush's plan to vaccinate health workers for smallpox bombed, because the Office of Management and Budget wouldn't cover liability against possible lawsuits.

Back at the White House, Ridge quickly realized that he lacked real authority to orchestrate the activities of all the departments and agencies with a hand in homeland security. For the moment, he settled for asking nicely that they all cooperate.

Homeland Ascent

December 21, 2001, was not Ridge's best day. Sitting in the White House's Roosevelt Room with the Cabinet secretaries responsible for pieces of homeland security, he described the problems of coordination at the borders and declared that all border-control agencies ought to be merged. But each secretary claimed to have responsibility for ridding the country of terrorists. None of them wanted to give up jurisdiction. Ridge's proposal was scrapped.

"It was classic," complains Card, who attended the meeting. "It lived down to my expectations." Meanwhile, pressure for a department of homeland security was mounting within both parties. If the White House didn't act, Congress would -- and embarrass Bush in the process. So Card decided to circumvent the turf wars and develop a new plan -- in secret. In the President's Emergency Operations Center, he gathered OMB Director Mitchell Daniels; Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Bolton; the Vice President's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby; and Ridge.

Eventually, that secret task force crafted a proposal for merging 22 federal agencies into one new department. Congress welcomed the plan.

But as the 2002 midterm elections neared, the political parties clashed over the level of civil service protections for the new department's employees. The administration demanded "managerial flexibility." Congressional Democrats sided with labor. The administration won by steamrolling the Democrats.

But as the administration solved one problem, another emerged.

The FBI had come under fire for mishandling both the Phoenix agent's warning and the Moussaoui investigation. In May 2002, Director Robert Mueller unveiled a plan to refocus the FBI on terrorism by shifting 518 agents from garden-variety criminal cases to terrorism, centralizing oversight of field offices, and bolstering the FBI's intelligence-analysis capacity.

This reorganization repositioned the FBI to lay claim to domestic responsibility for terrorism prevention. At a lunch with reporters in January of this year, Mueller was asked, "Who's in charge?" His answer: "If [something] is in the U.S. and it is related to terrorism somehow, we are." But, in fact, federal law now gives that responsibility to the secretary of Homeland Security. Questions within the administration over who's really in charge have yet to be resolved. As one person close to the administration noted, "The president doesn't do that kind of conflict resolution."

If anything, Bush has blurred the lines of responsibility. For example, in his 2003 State of the Union address, less than two months before the Homeland Security Department was to open for business, he announced the creation of yet another terrorism-fighting entity: the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. TTIC (pronounced "tea-tick") was to be -- and now is -- a joint venture of the CIA, the FBI, the Homeland Security Department, and state and local law enforcement, with a mandate to fuse and analyze terrorism-related threat information. Folks at the soon-to-be Homeland Security Department were confused by Bush's announcement: Wasn't that supposed to be their job?

Homeland Security was being dismantled even as it was being built.

Who's in Charge?

On offense, there's no question who's in charge of coordinating the post-9/11 war on terrorism: Condoleezza Rice. But one new department, two new fusion centers, one PATRIOT Act, and countless agency reorganizations later, no one's clearly in charge of defense.

Supporters of the administration, like Frank Cilluffo, who was a top aide to Ridge at the White House, say the White House is giving the department what it needs "to fulfill its mission," but they acknowledge that the war in Iraq and the president's re-election campaign are sapping some White House energy.

Ridge often likens his department to the product of a major corporate merger. Management gurus say that in the first year after a merger, it's important for leaders to focus on a few clear priorities. Within the federal government, it's OMB's job to ensure that that happens. It didn't happen at Homeland Security.

Homeland-defense and management experts, such as Randall Yim of the General Accounting Office, say the administration's overriding charge to the department should have been to identify the nation's greatest vulnerabilities. That assignment would have focused every subdivision of the department on one task and forced them to cooperate. Now, more than a year after its debut, the department promises to have finally completed an assessment of the nation's most serious vulnerabilities by December -- just after the election.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security's authority continues to erode. First, TTIC and the FBI encroached on its turf. Now the Transportation Department is asserting itself on highway and rail security. The Defense Department has launched its own domestic intelligence wing, and its U.S. Northern Command is building up many of the same capabilities, including vulnerability assessments, as Homeland Security -- with little if any consultation between the two.

Homeland Security is fractured into warring fiefdoms -- a competition that's hindering internal intelligence-sharing, between, the Customs and Border Security agency and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement counterpart, for example. And FEMA often freelances without telling top department management what it's up to. The department hasn't even been able to establish an integrated network of field representatives, because each undersecretary already has representatives out there and doesn't want to give them up.

Meanwhile, the White House has thrust upon the department a number of Bush loyalists who have no background in security issues or management, according to several people who work closely with the department. Staff turnover has been debilitating. The deputy secretary left after less than a year. The chief financial officer quit. Since November, the office responsible for the National Capitol Region has had no leader. The top intelligence officer at the Transportation Security Administration left early this year.

Ridge has fervently argued in previous interviews with National Journal that his department is making good progress and that it is more important to do things right than to do them quickly. And Ridge's ex-aide Cilluffo says, "I do think the department is moving along."

But critics say the department's bureaucracy is already calcifying, making real change even more difficult. "The department is sliding" backward, contends one administration insider. "What will happen is, if there's a huge [terrorist] incident, they'll find the department does not have the authority to accomplish the mission they had assigned to it. That'll be the [subject of the] next 9/11 commission."

National Journal asked a dozen outside experts to assess the progress of the department's key anti-terror programs. The ad hoc panel gave its highest marks to aviation security and the PATRIOT Act. Nuclear plant security and efforts to merge border agencies got respectable grades, too. Programs to merge government "watch" lists got much-worse grades, though, as did efforts to secure chemical plants and railways.

At the FBI, Mueller has established a clear anti-terrorism game plan, but there's no real evidence to suggest that the troops in the field are following it. And the FBI's top technology project, the Virtual Case File, which is a glorified word-processing program that computerizes agency records, is over budget and more than a year behind schedule. Even as the FBI touts its new ability to produce homeland-security intelligence reports, National Security Council officials still see the FBI as "an information black hole," according to one source close to the NSC. And the FBI is on its fourth counter-terrorism chief since the 9/11 attacks.

Insiders are quick to identify bright spots within the generally bleak homeland-defense picture. They point to Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security James Loy, who oversaw a successful overhaul of the Coast Guard and is respected throughout the department, and to the FBI's Maureen Baginski, who heads the bureau's new office of intelligence.

But many observers fear that the Bush administration has simply spread American resources -- and its own attention -- too thin in the aftermath of 9/11. Flynn, for example, worries that the White House will find it impossible to simultaneously monitor security problems in Iraq and back home. And a number of homeland experts point to the $123 billion that the United States has already spent on the war with Iraq and wonder what that "war on terrorism" money might have bought had it been spent closer to home. Would we now be able to thoroughly inspect air cargo or shipments to U.S. seaports? Would federal agencies be working from a unified list of suspected terrorists? Would Qaeda cells still be embedded in the United States? No one can know for sure how the defense side of the war on terrorism might have been strengthened if the Bush White House had had different priorities.

One thing is clear, though. At the highest levels of this administration, terrorism continues to be perceived as a problem to be fought primarily "over there."

Alexis Simendinger contributed to this report.

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Homeland Security still seeking to define, measure performance

Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Cynics reacted to Bush's change of direction by saying that he was merely trying to upstage a bad news day for his administration. Others applauded the announcement, saying that Bush was responding correctly to the beating that he'd taken from Congress for not having given Tom Ridge, then director of the White House Office of Homeland Security, a "real job," as Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., had indelicately phrased it.

A real job he most definitely got. As secretary of the department that marked its first birthday on March 1, Ridge is responsible for -- as Bush described the duties -- "securing the homeland of America and protecting the American people." But the department, the rest of the executive branch, Congress, and, for that matter, the American public still have only the sketchiest idea of what those tasks entail. The department has yet to determine precisely where the nation is most vulnerable to terror arracks or to make protecting those Achilles' heels the department's top priority.

Ridge, in an interview with National Journal, focused on momentum. "We're picking up speed and moving fast," he said. "We are about change, and change hopefully not only to make us safer and more secure, but also a better country."

In a speech marking the department's first anniversary, Bush, flanked by dozens of department workers in uniform, told employees, "You've passed every single test." And he awarded the department "a gold star for a job well done."

To be sure, the 180,000-employee department with a $29.4 billion budget for fiscal 2004 can point to first-year successes. They include the creation of the US-VISIT border-security system, which registers all foreigners as they enter the United States.

Shortly before celebrating its first anniversary, the department, created by melding 22 federal agencies, spotlighted what it considers the major successes of its inaugural year. Among them were strengthening border and port security checks, improving the analysis of threats, educating the public about emergency precautions, requiring a background check on every prospective U.S. citizen, directing a record amount of federal aid to state and local "first responders," posting sensors in major cities in an effort to detect bioterror attacks, and seizing 68 tons of cocaine.

And the department recently spelled out seven priorities for its second year: fully integrating border and port security; ensuring that the emergency radios of police and fire departments can communicate with each other; improving the quality of local emergency preparedness; creating a better mechanism for state and local officials to send information to the department; coordinating the efforts of private industry, such as chemical companies, to secure their portion of the nation's infrastructure; moving to a merit-pay system for Homeland Security employees; and speeding the processing of immigration applications.

In his February 23 speech announcing those priorities, Ridge said, "A year from now, I invite you to come back. Grade us. See if performance met the goals."

Still, progress aside, a lingering challenge for the department is to figure out how to define success. Right now, in the absence of a more sophisticated equation, there is a sort of binary calculation: Attacked equals failure; not attacked equals success. But does the absence of another 9/11 necessarily mean that the billions of tax dollars spent in the name of homeland security have actually averted attacks? And is it realistic to expect the new department to keep the United States from ever being hit by another major terror strike?

Ridge is perhaps best known as the official now responsible for raising and lowering the level of the nation's color-coded terrorism alert system, which now stands at yellow, or "elevated." According to him, "The public will measure our success generally by that very visible notion that we either have been attacked or not." He said he also hopes that Americans will judge his department in part on their personal experiences with it through, say, airport security or when crossing back into this country from Canada or Mexico.

Still, with no agreed-upon way to gauge whether the department's efforts are actually making the nation safer, and if so, by how much, assessments of its initial progress could be expected to vary widely -- and they do.

"I'm exceptionally impressed at how much has been accomplished and how much has been built in such a short period of time," declared Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., who chairs the House Select Committee on Homeland Security. But Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who pushed for a new department long before the president was keen on the idea, expressed disappointment: "Is the country safer today than it was before September 11? Yes. Is the country as safe as we had hoped it would be at this point? No.

"The fact is," Lieberman added, "we have not yet seen the kind of focused leadership, nor the resources, needed to fulfill the promise of the Homeland Security Act as we envisioned it two years ago."

For their part, House Democrats celebrated the department's birthday with a 135-page report chronicling America's "security gaps" in 13 areas, including intelligence analysis, the securing of nuclear material, biodefense, port security, and chemical plant security. "I think that we should have seen greater progress in closing some of these security gaps," said Rep. Jim Turner of Texas, the ranking Democrat on Cox's committee.

National Journal took a look back at Bush's June 6, 2002, announcement and, after interviewing administration officials and lawmakers involved in Homeland Security's creation, came up with a list of the top five goals for the department at its inception. We then attempted to assess the department's progress in each of those areas. The goals:

Establish adult supervision and accountability for homeland security.
Connect the so-called dots.
Orchestrate all relevant federal agencies, so that they begin to sing from the same security song sheet.
Cajole state, local, and private entities into coordinating with the federal effort.
Create a smart, svelte, cost-effective 21st-century bureaucracy.

As Homeland Security advances from Version 1.0 to Version 2.0, this progress report highlights areas that are in need of some re-engineering. Though bumpy, the department's trajectory is favorable for achieving federal harmony as well as better coordination with state and local government and private industry. But both insiders and outside experts raise serious questions about the department's direction in terms of creating true accountability, connecting the dots, and being a model bureaucracy.

In its first year, Homeland Security succeeded in keeping much of the nation, including congressional appropriators, focused on improving the nation's ability to protect itself from terrorism. But the department still struggles to put its stamp on the domestic side of national security while simultaneously responding to crises -- such as whether a given international flight ought to be canceled again today -- and attempting to develop long-term strategies for safeguarding a society whose hallmark is its openness.

One of Homeland Security's greatest challenges is managing the public's expectations. Created when a grief-stricken nation was in shock over the nearly 3,000 people killed on American soil on 9/11, the department was seen -- and sold -- as a cure-all for the country's vulnerabilities. Policy makers were wringing their hands over why potentially lifesaving information (such as a memo from an FBI agent in Phoenix warning of would-be terrorists taking flying lessons) had failed to work its way up the chain of command, and why no single department was responsible for securing our borders, skies, and ports.

Before anyone could even diagnose all of the security problems, adding a new department to the Cabinet was expected to somehow magically fix them. "Instead of saying, 'Ready, aim, fire,' we said, 'Ready, fire, aim,' " Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., said of the department's creation. "We still need to aim."

Adult Supervision

Convinced at the outset that a giant new bureaucracy was most certainly not the answer to America's post-9/11 security woes, Bush had instead created an Office of Homeland Security within the White House, appointed Ridge to head it, and charged him with gathering the right people around the table to ensure domestic security. But eventually, the table became overcrowded and the lines of authority hopelessly tangled. With lawmakers shouting for the president to give someone real authority over domestic efforts to avert a repeat of 9/11, the White House reluctantly handed Ridge his own department, built largely out of standing agencies, such as the old Immigration and Naturalization Service -- long the butt of jokes because of its unresponsiveness.

So it's not surprising that Homeland Security's efforts at accountability have produced mixed results. While some lines of authority are clearer, Ridge can't reasonably be held responsible for the elements of homeland security that he doesn't control. When sworn in as secretary of the fledgling department, Ridge, by law, became accountable for preventing, protecting against, and responding to terrorist attacks. "Tom is the operational commander for the homeland security of the country," said John Gordon, who holds Ridge's former job at the White House. Yet only 60 percent of the federal government's homeland-security budget goes to the department.

Ridge, nevertheless, has unquestionably established himself as the national face of homeland security, especially in times of crisis. "I don't think we would have focused our attention on homeland security but for [the existence of] a department like the Department of Homeland Security," said Randall Yim, managing director for national preparedness at the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. "It's like a punching bag. At least you're focused on a target."

But Ridge doesn't command all of the assets involved in preventing, protecting, and responding -- especially preventing. By his own admission, Ridge is merely a "consumer" of intelligence and must depend on the intelligence-gathering arms of the FBI, the CIA, and the Defense Department to serve as his earliest-warning network about potential terrorist strikes. What's more, the new intelligence-analyzing operations that have sprung up since 9/11 -- the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and the Terrorist Screening Center -- are based outside Ridge's department, too.

"How could Ridge be accountable?" asks James Carafano, a security analyst at the Heritage Foundation. "There's never going to be one guy you can point to and say, 'That's Mr. Homeland Security.' "

This issue of true accountability is not theoretical. After 9/11, Congress pilloried the State Department for having given visas to the 19 terrorists involved in that day's attacks. The State Department, in turn, pointed a finger at the CIA for not having shared information about those men until after they had entered the country.

The Department of Homeland Security now sets the rules governing eligibility for visas. But the State Department still vets visa applicants. Authority over the federal government's bioterrorism program is similarly divided. Homeland Security is in charge of Project BioShield, a program intended to encourage new research into mitigating various bioterror threats, but Health and Human Services manages it day to day.

And, in Ridge's view, the burden of accountability also ought to extend beyond his department: "Our primary responsibility is to lead the country, but that doesn't mean we have exclusive responsibility to prevent an attack."

Connecting the Dots

One legacy of 9/11 is America's quest for "dots" -- bits and pieces of information that, properly linked, might enable federal agents to save a skyscraper or a jetliner or a city. Collecting and connecting suspicious information became the focus of all terrorism-thwarting efforts in the wake of that day.

In the months leading up to 9/11, the FBI and CIA had failed to piece together and share with other agencies crucial bits of terrorist information that might have prevented the attacks. In the FBI's Phoenix office, analyst Kenneth Williams had written a memo expressing concern about Islamic fundamentalists taking flying lessons, but the memo never reached the FBI director's desk. And as whistle-blower Rowley, who worked in the Minneapolis office, later testified, bureau officials had blocked efforts to search the computer of alleged Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui, who'd been arrested in August 2001 while a flight student in Minnesota.

When Bush announced the creation of the Homeland Security Department, he designated it as the pre-eminent connector of all homeland-threat-related dots. The hope was that the new department would be able to force the hyperterritorial FBI and CIA to cooperate more with one another and other agencies. That message was clear at departments such as Justice, home of the FBI, former Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh recalled. "The Homeland Security Department promised to be a bridge between traditional law enforcement, counter-terrorism [efforts], and the traditional foreign-intelligence [operations]," he said.

But that bridge has yet to be built. In fact, instead of fusing intelligence efforts now that Homeland Security exists, the government has scattered its capabilities more than ever before. And that scattering inadvertently dilutes the government's already limited pool of first-rate analysts. "We tell each other it's working, but it's not," said one of Homeland Security's dot connectors.

Knowledgeable sources complain that the president's new Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which reports to CIA Director George Tenet rather than to Ridge, has created more of a moat than a bridge. TTIC, as the 10-month-old center is called, pulled together representatives from the CIA, the FBI, and Homeland Security and housed them beside the counter-terrorism units at the CIA and the FBI -- far from the Homeland Security Department. TTIC now produces a top-secret daily report on threats to the nation but isn't required to share with Ridge and his key lieutenants the intelligence on which its conclusions are based.

So, how is Ridge really supposed to know whether a flight needs to be canceled, a nuclear reactor ought to temporarily double its guards, or the national threat level should rise back to Code Orange? His department's Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Division was expected to merge threat and vulnerability information to answer such questions and close security gaps. But last September, Bob Liscouski, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection, admitted to Congress that the IAIP might not complete a threat-and-vulnerability assessment for another five years.

The ability to spot the nation's weakest points was going to make Homeland Security different, recalled one person involved in the decision to set up TTIC. But now, the person said, "that whole effort has been gutted by the White House creation of TTIC, [which] has served little more than to give the appearance of progress."

Similarly, the Terrorist Screening Center, which was originally envisioned as an effort to combine terrorist watch lists across government agencies, was established within the FBI. And there, the TSC is developing not one unified watch list, but a complicated system in which agents from various parts of the government check only their own agency's database when a query comes in about a possible terrorist.

If the search produces a "hit," that information stays within the agency rather than producing a government-wide alert. So, for example, the FBI could be told to be on the lookout for a suspected terrorist, but Homeland Security border-control agents wouldn't necessarily be told that person had been trying to enter the country.

"You're still not getting all the data in one place," complained a Homeland Security source. "It's not happening. It's not even slated to happen." That is because members of the law enforcement intelligence community still don't trust each other's agencies, much less the new Homeland Security Department. And Ridge is in no position to force them to behave in trusting ways.

Chairman Cox insists that he's not too concerned about current shortcomings, because he sees TTIC and the TSC as ways to incubate new intelligence capabilities that in the future can be tucked under the wing of the secretary of Homeland Security. Yet even within the department, intelligence is fragmented. At least seven divisions each have an intelligence office, none of which is connected to the others. The IAIP, which ought to be the department's premier intelligence unit, is skeletal, with a mere 60 employees in its information-analysis wing and 300 employees total -- less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the department's gigantic workforce. And insiders say IAIP's analytical tools are no more sophisticated than a basic Internet search engine.

When interviewed for this story, Ridge said, "We accept the notion that we're not where we need to be. I'm not sure I accept the criticism that we could do it faster." He added that it is "better to do it right than quickly," and he cited IAIP as a division to watch for progress over the next six months, as hiring expands and vulnerability assessments improve. (The president's 2005 budget request includes funding for 750 employees in the whole division.) Ridge said that his department is also building a system that should allow state and local officials, as well as the private sector, to more easily share tips with Homeland Security, and vice versa.

Frank Cilluffo, who was an aide to Ridge at the White House, contends that considerable progress has already been made in gathering and analyzing specific threat information. So instead of tying the national threat level to the volume of "chatter" being picked up, the department now links the level to information involving, say, specific flights or plans for "dirty-bomb" attacks in specific cities or on specific days.

By May 2004, the department plans to unveil its National Infrastructure Coordination Center, which will allow companies to share strategies for securing plants or pipelines and to tell the government their weakest spots. But that will contribute only a small piece to an overall national threat and vulnerability assessment, which the department now promises to complete in its second year.

The Same Song Sheet

The Immigration and Naturalization Service was Washington's poster child for dysfunctionality long before 19 foreign terrorists attacked the United States on 9/11. Soon afterward, Congress overflowed with proposals to reform or dismantle the beleaguered agency. Ridge was eventually given the dubious honor of turning the unloved INS and 21 other federal stepchildren into a makeshift orchestra playing a single tune: Protect the United States from terrorism. Notably, the department appears to have made the most progress in the area of merging border-security duties.

The clearest sign of the department's success on this front is the creation of the directorate of Border and Transportation Security. Within that directorate, the former employees of the INS and the Customs Service -- both now defunct -- as well as some former Agriculture officials and, later, air marshals, have been reorganized by duties, not uniforms: They were split into those responsible for border security and those assigned to internal law enforcement. While the transition has not been entirely smooth, and some insiders report low morale in the internal-enforcement bureau, those problems appear to be relatively minor.

A less visible example of the department's maturation was its response to warnings that in December led to the most recent orange alert. When the CIA told Homeland Security that terrorists might be interested in hijacking a European airliner, the department demanded more information from the FBI and then designated a single team to work on both protective and investigative measures, all while the department made disaster preparations in case an attack couldn't be staved off. "You could really see the department step up, take the reins, call the shots, and get real tactical control of what we were trying to do," said the White House's Gordon.

But gaping holes still mar Homeland Security's efforts to merge the nation's emergency-response squads. Many of the deaths of the firefighters trapped inside the World Trade Center have been blamed on the inability of New York City's police and fire two-way radios to communicate with each other. More than two years later, Homeland Security has yet to coordinate radio-interoperability initiatives -- three within the department and one at Justice -- into one project. The department predicts that the merger will happen within the next year, when it establishes national standards for "first-responder" radio equipment and ties federal assistance to meeting those standards.

Reaching Out

The department, Ridge said, has "redefined a new federalism" by reaching out to state, local, and private-sector officials. Those efforts seem to be progressing, though haltingly. When the federal government decided to lower the alert level to yellow on January 9, state homeland-security directors heard about it in stereo: from CNN and from Josh Filler, director of the department's Office of State and Local Government Coordination. The state directors were on a conference call as they watched the same news unfold on television. They pressed for details about which industries or regions would remain at a heightened alert level, but, according to one director who was on the call, Filler refused to say more than that the national level was being lowered. He wouldn't confirm or deny the added specifics that CNN was reporting.

The department's regular conference calls with state directors are clearly evidence of progress. Yet, Arizona Homeland-Security Director Frank Navarette has mixed emotions: "At least we now have a single focal point. There's still a sense that we're not getting information in a timely fashion or as much information as we could get, in some cases."

Ideally, Navarette said, he would get strategic guidance, information about potential threats, and a sense of the reliability of the intelligence supporting it, so that he could make prudent decisions for his state. Much of the information he gets now isn't specific enough to be useful, he said.

One state homeland-security adviser reports that state officials are becoming so frustrated with how little information they are getting that their regularly scheduled conference calls with Filler have degenerated into squabbling with the federal department over whether it is being too secretive.

Local officials, such as Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, give the department higher marks. "They have worked closely to try to get the money into the hands of cities, particularly ones that have threat and vulnerability issues," he said. His main complaint is that cities don't yet play a real advisory role to Homeland Security. The department does, however, plan to set up a program called the Homeland Security Information Network, which will allow state and local officials to feed information to the department.

The private sector has shown considerable satisfaction with the department's new private-sector advisory groups. Still, insiders say that Alfonso Martinez-Fonts, special assistant for the private sector, has little internal clout. And critics such as Rep. Turner contend the reason that companies like the department is that it isn't requiring them to do anything to safeguard their facilities. The department has urged businesses to voluntarily establish security measures, and it now promises to establish standards within the coming year for protecting critical industries.

A 21st-Century Department

Virtually forced to create a new bureaucracy, the Bush White House wanted that bureaucracy to boldly go where no bureaucracy had gone before in terms of efficiency. In his June 6, 2002, address announcing the new department, Bush vowed that Homeland Security would not bloat government but rather "increase its focus and effectiveness." He was adamant that the department would not add to the cost of government, because he believed that combining various agencies' backroom operations -- technology, personnel, and procurement systems -- would improve efficiency.

The department has taken small steps toward those management goals, but people familiar with its inner workings say it's nowhere near the finish line and might never get there. Beyond wasting money, the department's tangled information systems and administrative breakdowns continually interfere with its struggle to make the nation more secure.

"There are parts of the department that have made great strides, but management is not one of them," said a source familiar with departmental operations. "The cost savings have yet to be realized, and I don't believe they're on track to realize them."

In a speech at Harvard Business School in mid-February, Ridge declared, "We're building a department that strikes out to create the model agency for the new century. Nothing less will do." The department followed up his remarks by issuing a list of management accomplishments that included folding all 22 agencies into the department without disrupting payroll operations; going from 19 financial-management systems to 10 and from 13 contracting offices to eight; and saving $96 million through smarter purchasing of software.

But, as one knowledgeable source complained, the department's financial-management systems are still separate and have all just been relocated to 10 different places. And a meaningful analysis of that many management systems is virtually impossible. The insider said that the same logic applied to the contracting offices and called the software savings "quick, low-hanging fruit." The insider then detailed several other management problems plaguing the department. Procurement: "a mess." Information systems: "have not been integrated." Facilities: "stovepipe-managed from Washington." Personnel: "multiple systems with multiple rules."

Calling the information-technology merger "a critical piece of what we do," Ridge said that additional consolidation efforts are already under way, again adding, "I think there's concern that we do it right," as opposed to quickly. The department, which at the White House's insistence does not give its workers the same job protections as other civilian departments, intends to implement a merit-pay system in the coming year and begin transferring employees more freely. Those plans have come under fire from federal employee unions. The department also aims to continue consolidating its technology, financial, and payroll systems. Taking the long view about creating a streamlined department, Ridge said, "We've made progress, but this could take years."

Yet, the GAO's Yim says, "many of us believed it was unrealistic or overly optimistic to expect that the department's consolidation of agencies would save money in the near term or immediately create new government efficiencies."

The Honeymooners

Who said building a Department of Homeland Security would be easy? It's tough to know what color to make the national threat level if your phone lines can't call the CIA because they're not yet secure. Those days, at least, are now over -- mostly, anyway. The 1-year-old department has maintained and in some cases enhanced the effectiveness of its component agencies. The whole is indeed greater than the sum of its original parts. But the problem is that the sum of the component parts wasn't very impressive.

No one could fairly expect the department to reach every goal, or even make significant progress toward them all, in its first year. In fact, the Heritage Foundation's Carafano argues that the nature of homeland security requires the department to do many things well, but none of them perfectly. If one screening mechanism doesn't spot a terrorist, another will, as long as the department layers its host of protections on top of one another. Or, that's the devout hope, anyway.

But progress and new layers of protections are no guarantee of trapping terrorists intent on exploiting the nation's vulnerabilities. And tempering assessments with Year One expectations can't obscure the need for significant improvement in critical areas that experts on the inside and outside are shining warning lights upon -- accountability, intelligence-gathering and analysis, and management.

"They're being given a honeymoon period," Rep. Shays said of the department. "I think they're going to have it until we have another event."

Still, Ridge sounds anything but blissful and content. "I don't think we expected a honeymoon period. Certainly, we haven't been on a honeymoon," he said. "This is a mission that will never end."

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Homeland security a back burner issue in 2004

Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 19 Dec 2003 00:00:00 -0500

What happened next? Not much. The debate shifted back to Iraq. In fact, Iraq dominated the discussion to such a degree that even the Democratic front-runner and leading critic of Bush's Iraq policy, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, complained of an excessive fixation on the issue. So he riffed on the rising cost of college tuition.

Homeland security may have dominated the 2002 midterm elections, but it is AWOL in the battle to win the hearts and minds of voters in Campaign 2004. Democrats are using the security issue only as part of a broad critique of Bush -- that he's a reckless leader who can't be trusted to protect the country -- or as a defensive maneuver against what they believe to be assaults on their patriotism. "I don't think homeland security is really an issue in the election," says Jeremy Rosner with the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.

Certainly much has happened since the 2002 elections, most notably, the Bush administration's decision to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Homeland-security issues, in voters' minds, have been folded into the larger war on terrorism. Still, the recent capture of Saddam Hussein has boosted Bush in the polls and reduced the value of Iraq as a Democratic issue. And in the first presidential election since the September 11 attacks, pollsters and political observers are surprised by the Democrats' apparent lack of interest in homeland security. An unrealized, high-value target, homeland security potentially offers a way for Democrats, who are still trailing Bush on security issues by at least 16 percentage points in the polls, to close that gap and connect with voters on an emotional level. Moreover, the security issue plays to their natural domestic policy strengths.

"It does seem a bit surprising that [homeland security] hasn't emerged as an issue," says Carroll Doherty, editor for the Pew Research Center. "That would be a logical issue for the Democrats to raise." Even if polls show terrorism fading from the public consciousness, Doherty says, "I still think it's a very important issue. It's the fundamental dynamic now." Former Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado, a Democrat who headed the Hart-Rudman Commission on terrorism, describes the lack of debate more bluntly: "It's crazy. This is about life and death."

Meanwhile, Republicans are salivating. "Our plan is viewed positively, largely because they have no plan of their own," says Republican pollster David Winston. The absence of a homeland-security plan tarnishes the Democrats' overall public standing on security, he says, perhaps previewing an upcoming Republican campaign strategy. "The way they haven't engaged on this issue has reinforced in the public's mind that they don't understand the issue at all," he says. Winston's polls show that, by a difference of 55 percent to 31 percent, voters have more confidence in Republicans than in Democrats when it comes to homeland security.

Is homeland security a politically important issue? Look no further than the Republican National Convention planned for September 2004 in New York City, home of Ground Zero. "If I were a Republican, I would want the public to be scared into November, in order to focus the public on homeland security," says one former aide to President Clinton.

Behind the scenes, former Homeland Security Department aides have migrated to the offices of Bush political guru Karl Rove and first lady Laura Bush. Administration officials say privately that they see great potential in Mrs. Bush as a persuasive public face for security at home. She is a logical choice to appeal to the soccer moms who have morphed into "security moms" -- a group that both Doherty and Winston say is real. These security-focused moms make up between 11 percent and 14 percent of the electorate, Winston says, and they're up for grabs.

Politically, however, Democrats haven't figured out how to capitalize on homeland security. They aren't proposing much that's markedly different from what Bush is already trying to do -- whether it's dealing with first responders or port security. And the plans are scattered, which makes them difficult to articulate on the campaign trail. In fact, the most frequently discussed domestic security issue in the campaign is -- Attorney General John Ashcroft. A frequent refrain of every Democratic candidate is his or her innovative plan to fire Ashcroft.

Recently, three candidates, retired Gen. Wesley Clark, Dean, and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, have seized on the war on terror as a new way to indict Bush for his actions in Iraq. They propose an alternative course, based on international cooperation. But some Democrats worry that that type of rhetoric doesn't connect with security concerns at home. "That just doesn't sell in Peoria. What people care about in Peoria is, are my kids safe, are they getting an education, and do I have a job?" said David Heyman, a homeland-security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who worked at the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Clinton. "They are missing an opportunity."

Learning From 2002

In 2002, homeland-security issues helped fell at least two Democratic senators -- Max Cleland of Georgia and Jean Carnahan of Missouri. Their opponents, aided by a forceful hand from President Bush, painted them as soft on security because they opposed Bush's Homeland Security Department proposal. A television ad against Cleland likened him to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Cleland called the ad character assassination. Cleland lost.

For politicians, the big homeland-security lesson from 2002 is: Have an alternative plan. Cleland responded to Republicans' negative onslaught by denouncing their charges that he was unpatriotic -- but he didn't explain his own plan for homeland security. "The problem in 2002 was, [Democrats] had half an argument," said pollster John Zogby. "Are you better off now than you were two years ago? The answer was no. But they couldn't come up with anything better."

What's odd about the Democrats' inability to articulate their plan for homeland security in 2002 is that the Democratic Party has served as Bush's homeland-security brain trust. Clinton established the first National Infrastructure Protection Center. Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., wrote the first bill to establish a homeland-security department. Then after the anthrax attacks, Lieberman sponsored a bioterrorism bill aimed at creating incentives for the private sector to develop vaccines. Bush stole both ideas. The first became Bush's proposal for the Department of Homeland Security, and the second became his Project BioShield. They are Bush's only two big homeland-security initiatives to date.

But in 2002, Lieberman, who was then contemplating a presidential bid, helped sink the Democrats' prospects for capturing the homeland-security issue. He led the charge against the White House's efforts to pare back civil service protections in the Homeland Security Department, stalling the measure through the election. He held press conference after press conference with Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and other colleagues. The events featured New York firefighters displaying charred firefighter helmets from the World Trade Center -- never mind that the civil service protections in the bill would have no impact on firefighters in New York.

Meanwhile, off the campaign trail, the White House homeland-security operation continued to sell the country on the department. Heading the effort was Susan Neely, creator of the "Harry and Louise" commercial that helped kill President Clinton's health care proposal. The Bush administration's message was that the department would make Americans safer. Neely, now assistant secretary for public affairs at the Homeland Security Department, called the 2002 election "a clear example that we were successful in communicating that."

The White House's ability to steal Democratic ideas and then use them to club their opponents has even earned some grudging respect among Democrats. "These guys are good," said Democratic strategist Dane Strother. "They've made it pretty difficult for the Democrats to make homeland security our issue -- to put our hands around it."

And there's already a faint sense that history has begun to repeat itself. The Republican National Committee launched an ad last month featuring the message: "Some are now attacking the president for attacking terrorists." The Democratic National Committee countered with an anti-Bush ad. Democratic candidates railed against the RNC ad, calling it "morally reprehensible" and an effort to "distract Americans" from Bush's foreign-policy failures. Dean launched a campaign on his Web site with the goal of raising "$5,000 for every hour they are going to lie to the American people with their ad."

On Security

A couple of weeks after the RNC ad debuted, Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., traveled to a police station in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to announce his homeland-security plan. He pledged to put $20 billion a year for the next five years into a Homeland Security Trust Fund. That money would be dedicated to first responders, with $2 billion each year devoted to hiring and training. In his speech, Gephardt went into great detail on Bush's shortcomings on homeland security. "The failures of this administration are the road map for my proposed solutions," he said.

To be sure, the Bush administration has yet to address some major gaps in the homeland arena. Gephardt named several unmet needs: Establish a terrorist watch list; beef up the information-analysis wing of the Homeland Security Department; secure chemical plants; and manage the Transportation Security Administration. But when asked for the details of Gephardt's road map, his aides had little to offer. How would this $100 billion homeland-security fund be spent? "He doesn't say what they have to spend the money on, but it is specifically for states and local communities," said spokeswoman Kim Molstre, though she added that Gephardt would also establish a terrorist watch list. How did he come to the $100 billion figure? No response.

While Democrats are quick to use domestic-security issues to critique Bush -- challenging his leadership, his trustworthiness, his relationships with Big Business interests -- the alternatives they offer are quite thin. And where their plans overlap with Bush's, it's not clear what would make their efforts fare better than his. In a recent Pew poll, 68 percent of Democrats were undecided on which Democratic candidate is best equipped to handle terrorism. Among those who have decided, Clark leads the pack nationally in terms of whom voters trust to fight terrorism, followed by Kerry, Lieberman, and Dean.

Among the candidates, Edwards stands out for his plan to create a domestic intelligence agency, within the Department of Homeland Security, whose director would be a member of the nation's larger intelligence community. He would start by staffing the agency with FBI agents but would also add analysts with outside experience. "The agency wouldn't have new powers, and there would be a variety of new constraints," said one Edwards aide, such as requiring the agents of this agency to "get clearance" before engaging in surveillance of religious or political activity. (Under Ashcroft, the FBI is now allowed to attend any meetings open to the public, including religious services.)

Lieberman accuses Bush of being too slow and too stingy, but he does not offer a plan that is fundamentally different from what Bush is trying to do -- probably because Bush has already cribbed most of Lieberman's homeland-security ideas. One of Lieberman's new ideas is to establish a National Homeland Security Academy, which he calls a "West Point for domestic defense." He would also train and equip first responders, buy them better communications systems, and give state and local law enforcement officials access to terrorist watch lists. He would boost funding for port security and border security, and he'd call on the National Guard to step up its homeland-security contributions.

Kerry's plan features many of the same components as Lieberman's. One unique element is a proposal that would gather patient data nationwide to identify emerging bioterror threats. Kerry would also establish standards for port security. He'd establish an "independent intelligence capability" for domestic intelligence.

Like Gephardt, both Clark and Dean focus on funding issues. Clark would establish a $40 billion two-year Homeland and Economic Security Fund that would pay for such things as equipping first responders, protecting chemical and other toxic facilities, securing research facilities, and bolstering the Coast Guard. But like Gephardt's aides, Clark's campaign couldn't explain how he came up with his dollar figure or specifically how he would spend the money. Taking on the USA PATRIOT Act, which expanded government surveillance powers, Clark would re-examine the provisions that allow searches of library records and searches of a terror suspect's home without his knowledge.

Dean, similarly, proposes to create a Homeland Defense Trust Fund, of an undetermined amount, which he would fund with part of the windfall from reversing Bush's tax cuts. He describes his plan as one of concentric circles, which bear the same labels as the Homeland Security Department's themes: response, protection, and prevention. To bolster response, Dean would spend $5 billion on first-responder needs, such as equipment and training. For protection, he would offer "adequate funding" for more technology and people at our borders. Dean's prevention plan ties homeland security to operations abroad through stronger intelligence, police, and military efforts -- built on cooperation with other countries. On civil liberties, he would "seek to repeal the portions of the PATRIOT Act that are unconstitutional," and allow other controversial elements of the act to sunset.

This idea of connecting foreign policy with terrorism and security is the Democrats' Next Big Thing. If there's a convergence of ideas among the Democratic candidates, it's that any plan for going forward will require international cooperation on terrorism. Dean outlined his vision for a "new anti-terrorist alliance" in a December 15 speech heavy on multilateralism but light on detail. He did offer one specific proposal: a $30 billion program to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

After Dean's speech, adviser Franklin Kramer, a former assistant secretary for Defense under President Clinton, said Dean wants "a more comprehensive security approach" that merges domestic and international security. Domestically, Kramer said, the National Guard would be the "backbone" coordinator among federal, state, and local entities, especially on intelligence. Asked for details to distinguish Dean's approach from Bush's, he acknowledged, "We don't have specific proposals here."

While all the leading Democrats have begun to touch on this theme, perhaps the most extensive plan so far has come from Kerry, who in a December 3 speech criticized Bush for making the world less safe by failing to establish security in Iraq. Kerry laid out his vision for fighting the international war on terrorism. He would carry a message of multilateralism to heads of state around the world; persuade the United Nations to take on a major role in Iraq; reduce drug trafficking in Afghanistan; improve relations with Iran; adopt a tough-love policy with Saudi Arabia; enlist all countries in the fight against terrorist funding; and engage in the Middle East peace process. "To succeed at home, we must succeed abroad," he said.

Why haven't Democrats focused on homeland security? "The Bush administration has ignored it," Dean adviser Kramer said. Still, a Kerry aide acknowledged that all of the Democratic candidates should put greater focus on strengthening homeland security. "I wish all the candidates would speak about it more," he said. With that, he launched into a detailed discussion of the president's failure to set priorities in homeland security, and the need for a national threat assessment and a budget based on priorities. Comprehensive proposals, but they don't appear in Kerry's plan.

When the candidates do talk about homeland security, no one listens, Kerry's aide lamented. He cited Kerry's recent visit to a seaport to talk security -- an event that earned all of one line in an Associated Press story. The aide said homeland security doesn't make good copy because it's so diffuse, especially compared with violence in Baghdad or even in Afghanistan.

Other Democrats argue that the candidates really aren't trying. "I don't think the Democrats get homeland security, for the most part," said John Cohen, a former cop who worked at the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the Clinton administration and is now a homeland-security consultant. "Since they don't get it, they've abdicated it."

A Game Plan

Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., was the first to drop out of the presidential race, but he was also the first to critique Bush on terrorism, with the memorable line, "Osama bin Forgotten." As the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who oversaw the Sept. 11 inquiry, Graham said he was running for president to fight terrorism. While his message didn't gain much momentum when he was on the campaign trail, it's catching on now. Perhaps that's not a coincidence. Graham has been advising many candidates informally. "They're being very generous with their time and, I hope, are receptive to some of the ideas I'm suggesting," he said last week in an interview.

Now, Graham is advocating a two-pronged approach to focus the debate on terrorism and connect Democrats' foreign-policy criticisms with homeland security. "For a long time, and to some degree still today, we were fighting about whether it was a wise decision to vote to go to Iraq at all," he said. "Now the question is, what do we do from here forward? What we need to do from here forward is to get serious about an offense, where the terrorists are -- and to get serious about defending ourselves here at home."

Graham didn't get specific, but Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, fleshed out a Democratic home-front response, which notably takes the funding debate off the table. "It's important for the Democrats to establish they have better ideas and not cede it in any way to this president," he says. "Making spending levels the issue would play into Karl Rove's hands and allow Republicans to argue [that] Democrats are using homeland security for pork-barrel spending."

Marshall offered a four-point proposal that he said would be both good politics and good policy -- and digestible for voters. The first point is intelligence. Marshall urges Democrats to argue that the administration "doesn't have the stomach" to stand up to the FBI, which he says is not set up for counter-terrorism operations. Democrats need to advocate for "an independent analytical center without law enforcement powers." But the key to Marshall's first point is that candidates should avoid getting caught up in arguments over where such a center should be located, but should focus instead on how to assemble an effective domestic-intelligence apparatus.

Second, he says, they should highlight Bush's failure to complete a comprehensive assessment of threats and vulnerabilities in America -- and then promise to complete one in a timely fashion and to use it to set budget and policy priorities.

Marshall's third priority is a comprehensive terrorist watch list. While the FBI has started to merge the various government watch lists, the job is far from finished. So, candidates need to tell voters why they can make that crucial task happen more quickly than the current occupant of the White House can. Marshall also thinks Democrats should push for a program of "smart ID cards" or driver's licenses that incorporate a biometric identifier, such as a fingerprint.

Fourth, he points to the ever-present topic of first responders. But Marshall says that Democrats should not limit first-responder proposals to funding for training and equipment but should also call for bolstering local public health systems, linking law enforcement information systems, and beefing up the local emergency-response system. With that kind of approach, first responders would be better able to fight terrorism, and also to more effectively reduce crime, detect disease, put out fires, and respond to natural disasters. Communities would then see first-responder efforts paying off, whether or not there's a terrorist attack.

Two wild cards remain on homeland security: whether the nation suffers another terrorist attack, and how Bush handles immigration policy. The jury is out as to whether another attack would help or hurt Bush politically. Most political prognosticators say it would depend on the nature of the incident and whether the public believed the federal government could or should have prevented it.

And last week, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge tipped the administration's hand on immigration policy by highlighting illegal immigration as a significant security risk. Bush later acknowledged that the administration has been working on a proposal to rationalize the country's immigration enforcement policy. How that issue shakes out will depend largely on what Bush proposes, and how the Democratic candidates respond. But pollster Zogby says a serious policy debate on homeland security may have to wait until the general election season. Currently, he says, the Democrats are in a scramble to win the primaries by revving up their party's base, so the domestic security focus is John Ashcroft. "Right now, you will hear about the PATRIOT Act on the hustings," Zogby says. Plus, polls show that voters in the key primary and caucus states -- New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina -- don't feel directly threatened by terrorism, which has historically targeted large cities. But, Zogby said, come general election time, the Democrats are going to need something to counter Bush's list of security accomplishments on the home front.

In view of Bush's tendency to appropriate their ideas, Democrats might want to take public ownership of their latest ones before Bush does.

-- Staff Correspondent Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. contributed to this report.

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Homeland Security chair proposes performance deadlines

Siobhan Gorman — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 00:00:00 -0500

"It's very important for Congress to measure the department's progress," Cox said. "As we enter the department's second year, we're in a new phase. It is our first opportunity to take stock of what has been accomplished and also to prioritize the remaining tasks."

Because some projects may take many years to complete, he said it is important to set interim deadlines or "milestones."

Different deadlines would apply to every division of the department. Among projects that might see new deadlines are: setting up the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection division, the newest wing of the department; container security; air cargo security and the air marshals program.

Cox said his goal was to allow for midcourse corrections at the department rather than evaluating it years from now.

While he said hearings would not get under way until early next year, Cox said he wants to begin a discussion with the department and with colleagues on Capitol Hill to help decide how to prioritize the many projects at the department, how to set goals for key projects and how to measure progress toward those goals.

Cox said he has been in discussions with department officials, including Homeland Secretary Tom Ridge, for the past six months. Still, one department official said, "This announcement has taken the department by surprise."

Cox and his aides already are discussing with House leadership aides what sorts of "milestones" to establish for the department. An agency spokesman said, "We look forward to working with the committee on this as well as other important topics."

The spokesman added the department already adheres to a number of congressionally mandated deadlines for the US VISIT border security program, as well for air travel security. House Homeland Security ranking member Jim Turner, D-Texas, declined to comment until he had seen the proposal.

With his deadlines, Cox said he hopes to avoid "the slapdash urgency of the original deadlines imposed on the [Transportation Security Administration]." He emphasized his approach would be more deliberative.

"We want to make sure these are intelligent, sensible approaches," Cox said. "What we don't want to do is force arbitrary deadlines on programs that ultimately impair their effectiveness."

While these deadlines will be debated during an election year, Cox said they would probably not kick in until 2005, so they should escape being used as "election fodder."

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Homeland security chair calls for restraint in first responder spending

Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 00:00:00 -0500

At hearings, he has peppered Homeland Security Department officials with questions about the department's intelligence operations and capacity. So, when it came time to write his first major bill as chairman, Cox predictably focused on intelligence.

His goal is to get Washington to be smarter about the way it distributes homeland-security money for so-called "first responders" and to stop treating those funds as just the latest form of pork-barrel spending.

Cox's proposal, unveiled last month, would require the Homeland Security Department to award its first-responder grants solely on the basis of how likely a given location is to be attacked by terrorists. Cox wants to merge information about known threats -- terrorist groups' capabilities and desires -- with data about critical infrastructure's vulnerability to an attack. He would then have the department use the results to produce a list of priorities for its first-responder spending.

But the Homeland Security Department balked at Cox's Faster and Smarter Funding for First Responders Act. That conflict is increasing the strain on the already-difficult relationship between the department and the committee. "The purpose of the Homeland Security Department, and its mission, is to prevent terrorism and protect us from its consequences when it occurs," Cox said. "It is not to give every state a fixed percentage of Washington pork." He noted that the Defense Department uses no such formulas and said that unless homeland security is less important than national security, the Homeland Security Department should not either.

Spending money in proportion to the actual level of risk sounds like common sense. Risk management is standard operating procedure in the corporate world. But, by and large, that's not the case in homeland security. From a practical standpoint, it's very hard to assemble a comprehensive national analysis of threats and vulnerabilities. Politically, it's tough to tell any community it doesn't deserve as much protection -- or as many federal dollars -- as others are getting.

Since Sept. 11, the federal government has handed out $6 billion to first responders. Most has been distributed using a formula that guarantees each state at least 0.75 percent of the money and takes states' populations into account.

Wyoming, hardly anyone's idea of the state most in danger of a terrorist strike, tops the list of federal per capita homeland-security spending for first responders, having received $35.31 per resident. California is in last place, with $4.68 per person. And New York doesn't do much better, with just $5.05 per person.

This month, with great fanfare, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced that $2.2 billion would be made available for first responders in fiscal 2004. That money is controlled by the standard formula. Another $725 million is for "urban-area security grants," which go to 30 large cities roughly in accordance with the security risk that each faces.

The department sent Cox its own proposal, which largely maintained the current allocation system. "It did not represent a real effort," Cox said. "It is simply a skimpy ratification of the pre-9/11 status quo." But the department, which inherited its state formula from language that Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., wrote into the USA PATRIOT Act, says the current funding system works well.

As one senior Homeland Security official put it, "We believe there needs to be a baseline capability in the country to prevent, respond to, and recover from a terrorist attack and other hazards. To do that, all areas need to receive a certain amount of money."

The department wants up to 50 percent of its first-responder money to be distributed on the basis of risk assessments.

Yet outside of Washington, Cox's idea has considerable backing, especially in big cities, which stand to gain the most. "He has my support," said Noel Cunningham, chief of police for the Port of Los Angeles, who recently met with Cox about port security.

Producing an accurate risk analysis poses an enormous technical challenge. It requires what former CIA Associate Deputy Director for Operations John MacGaffin calls "a four-dimensional matrix" that weighs the relative importance of protecting a given asset; vulnerabilities; terrorists' capabilities and motives; and the current security effort. While the task is clearly difficult, Cox says he thinks it's time for the department to take off the training wheels and actually make risk assessments, drawing on the resources of national research laboratories, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

Today, even the department's urban grants are largely based on population. Cities that apply for these grants are given scores according to population, vulnerability, and threat. Then, each city's population score is multiplied by 9, its vulnerability score by 6, and its threat score by 3. And the higher the total score, the larger the grant.

Meanwhile, the department's initial steps toward comprehensive risk assessments have not been reassuring to outside observers. Nationwide, the department has identified 180 key elements of infrastructure. The department has identified 4,000 chemical facilities of concern, and it plans to evaluate a dozen other infrastructure industries.

But just 20 states have sent the department the reports it requested on critical infrastructure. State officials filling out the department's questionnaire wonder what information federal officials hope to glean. Homeland-security consultant John Cohen, who recently completed Massachusetts's report, said that the questions are quantitative, not qualitative. They mostly ask the states to count up potential threats, Cohen said, but don't ask how they reached their conclusions.

Clifford Ong, who oversees Indiana's homeland-security effort, worries that the department isn't consulting with states on what constitutes "critical infrastructure." For example, he said, Homeland Security isn't taking food-processing facilities into consideration in evaluating agricultural infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack.

Despite Cox's best intentions, tying homeland-security grant money to a given locale's actual risk could create a set of perverse incentives. It could reduce funds for localities that have spent their own money to heighten security, for example, or those that have spent their initial federal funds most wisely. Basing grants on perceived need could also be a very time-consuming process.

"The system would literally screech to a halt," warned one senior Homeland Security official, who predicted that under Cox's bill, thousands of grant applications would flood the department's information-analysis wing, which isn't prepared to review grant applications.

On Capitol Hill, Cox has some allies, but it's hard to tell how many. Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., another advocate of bolstering the department's intelligence capacity, is on board. Cox's Democratic counterpart on the committee, Rep. Jim Turner of Texas, says he strongly supports Cox's push for real security risk assessments, and he's working with Cox to merge the ideas in his own bill with those in Cox's.

Turner said, "I think he sees the wisdom of much of what is in our bill." Turner's proposal would establish minimum homeland-security standards for every locality and commit the federal government to helping communities reach those levels, even though the money needed to achieve those standards might be greater in New York City than in Turner's district in East Texas.

According to one congressional observer, Cox's proposal "hasn't been massaged or scrubbed in such a way that you would get buy-in from the cardinals on the Appropriations Committee. It's a political town, and you only get elected if you bring money home. What I'm hearing is, they didn't coordinate within their own party."

Nor has Cox coordinated with the Senate, where Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is proposing to maintain the minimum allocations to states but make 40 percent of the money subject to risk analysis. "Terrorists are going to constantly evaluate our vulnerabilities. And they are going to seek to probe the weakest point," Collins said. "If we exclude some states altogether from receiving homeland-security funding, we will create vulnerabilities."

Yet Cox and his aides think they can prevail. "Basing funding on threat and vulnerability is right. And how do you argue against that out of anything but parochial politics?" asked Vincent Sollitto, communications director for Cox's committee. "How do you vote for parochial politics and against homeland security? That's how we're going to sell it."

Some critics of Cox's legislation dismiss it as merely an effort to justify the existence of the select committee. Congress is slated to decide the panel's fate next September. And some congressional observers predict that Cox's bill will get caught up in the battle over whether to make the committee permanent. "This particular committee needs to put its foot down and say, 'We're the authorizers,' " said one congressional aide. "There's a fight within a fight here."

And next year's presidential election could make Cox's push for new funding formulas more difficult. If the White House weren't on the line next year, Cox and Turner might have collaborated from the outset. Turner has gone out of his way to establish his as the Democrats' bill, with 147 Democratic co-sponsors.

Cox may find it impossible to both rewrite the first-responder funding formulas and force the Homeland Security Department to seriously begin doing risk assessments. If so, one longtime observer suggests that Cox focus first on the risk assessment mandate and on building up the department's ability to gauge threats and vulnerabilities. Then in a separate bill, perhaps after the election, Cox could take another pass at linking first-responder money to risk. But even then, he'd likely have to figure out a way to make members feel that first-responder spending contains something for everyone -- regardless of need.

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Agencies urged to set homeland security standards

Siobhan Gorman — Tue, 14 Oct 2003 00:00:00 -0400

Yim, a native of California and an environmental lawyer by training, came to the nation's capital in 1998 to assume an only-in-Washington title: principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for installations, logistics, and environment. Within three months, he became deputy undersecretary of Defense for installations. He went on win earn the Defense Department's Medal for Distinguished Public Service in January 2001. Working with the GAO while still at the Defense Department, Yim caught the eye of GAO Comptroller General David Walker. Impressed by Yim's intellect, Walker wooed him to the GAO. Yim reported for duty in August 2001 and began to tackle defense and environmental projects. Two weeks later, terrorists slammed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

That day, a crusader was born. "I'm making the classic lawyer mistake," Yim confessed to National Journal. "I had friends and colleagues killed in the Pentagon attack. Because of that personal connection, I feel a sense of urgency to go forward." As "homeland security" emerged as a top federal priority, Walker asked Yim to lead an informal task force to give the GAO a handle on the issue. Next, Yim became the first national-preparedness director within the agency's homeland-security team.

Placing a newcomer in such a high-level role was unusual for the GAO, but the move was part of Walker's effort to infuse new blood into the staid government watchdog agency. "Randall is very bright. He's very creative," Walker says. Colleagues describe the self-effacing Yim as "an intellectual," "a visionary," and "a consensus builder."

What keeps Yim awake at night is his worry that the nation's approach to homeland security is unsustainable. Policy makers at all levels, he frets, think of homeland security as merely a "bolt-on" program. He disdainfully compares their attitude to that of the auto industry when it decided not to fundamentally rethink car designs in the 1970s after Ford Pintos started to explode when they were rear-ended. Automakers instead chose to simply bolt on bigger bumpers. Yim's PowerPoint presentation to local officials even features a slide of a Pinto. His alternative: embedding homeland-security principles into all elements of public policy-from energy regulations to building codes. His challenge: persuading the governmental powers-that-be, especially those in Congress, to make it happen.

While the GAO is careful to maintain its standing as an objective outside evaluator of government endeavors, Yim's work takes the agency into a new role-that of ideas broker and pitchman. Policy advocacy is "unusual for GAO," Yim acknowledges. The GAO's advocacy role on homeland security-coming on the heels of the agency's lawsuit against Vice President Cheney to try to force him to divulge details of the meetings that led to the administration's energy policy-suggests that Walker intends to make the government's chief accountability agency a more potent force.

Although the bulk of the GAO's work consists of responding to congressional requests, Walker wants 10 percent of his agency's efforts to be on major initiatives of its own. Walker described them as dealing with "more-strategic, complex, crosscutting, and longer-range issues."

Walker is determined to sell Congress on the GAO's conclusions about long-range solutions to what it sees as significant problems. Walker says that his "client"-Congress-is understandably preoccupied with short-term, localized issues because of lawmakers' focus on winning re-election. But, he adds, the tendency of Congress and the executive branch to think small makes devoting some of the GAO's energy to thinking big all the more important.

The old reliable GAO seems well suited to thinking about the massive problem of homeland security in the post-9/11 world. It also seems suited to delivering harsh messages about what the nation must do to try to protect itself. In Yim's view, at least, there's a crying need for the government to adopt a take-your-medicine-and-eat-your-vegetables approach. As Yim patiently outlined the GAO's master plan for homeland security-flow charts and all-during two hour-long sessions in his office, he took a page from the environmental chapter of his life. In the 1970s, environmentalists began establishing standards aimed at ensuring that the government and companies were good stewards of Earth's resources. Similar standards, he says, are needed for homeland security. For example, Yim would like to see a standard for ensuring that financial markets have the technology in place to withstand a variety of terrorist attacks.

Currently, the Department of Homeland Security, Congress, and the private sector are haphazardly trying to establish standards for various aspects of homeland security. But Yim worries that unless these efforts become more unified and standardized, dangerous gaps are inevitable.

Thinking Big

Randall Yim isn't content to just tinker. "One of the concerns I have about homeland security," he said, "is, we have to begin addressing the core issues." He quickly ticks off several: Who is in charge? What should be done, and who should be doing it? Who should pay for these changes, and how? How do you hold people accountable? How do you track progress?

As homeland-security strategies proliferate at all levels of government, Yim is dismayed to see that they are rarely connected to cost considerations-or to one another. He wants to bring the high-flying talk of strategies down to ground level, where planners could focus on such issues as how much it costs states, localities, and private businesses when the federal government raises the national terrorism threat level to, say, Code Orange-where it was for nearly nine weeks this year.

After getting a better sense of costs, the planners' next step would be to assess what homeland-security precautions are being taken and whether they are actually making the nation safer. Right now, Yim said, federal money is flowing out, and there's no way to know whether it's doing any good. Just last week, President Bush signed the $31 billion Homeland Security appropriations bill, which he declared "a major step forward" in efforts "to make our nation more secure." But no one yet knows how much added security the $31 billion will really buy.

Some $4 billion of the total will go toward resolving the myriad complaints of so-called first responders. Billions of dollars are being spent on first responders, not because the Department of Homeland Security has determined that the country's greatest needs include ensuring that firefighters nationwide have hazmat suits, but rather because public officials were eager to heed the demands of the heroes of September 11. Plus, lawmakers all have large numbers of firefighters and police officers in their districts.

Among the difficult post-9/11 questions is whether spending money on first responders is the best way to enhance local security. If beefing up first-responder squads is a wise way to spend federal homeland-security funds, are hazmat suits needed more than upgraded walkie-talkies? And are they needed more than computer access to a terrorist watch list?

To begin intelligently answering these questions and weighing one demand against another, Yim said, the GAO should establish standards that detail what government and the private sector must do in order to assure a minimum level of security. There could, for example, be a standard for ensuring that a ship's cargo is not tampered with en route from Singapore to New York City.

Yim is not alone in seeing the creation of homeland-security standards as crucial. John Cohen, a cop-turned-homeland-security consultant, has helped states and localities, including Massachusetts and Detroit, draw up homeland-security strategies. How important is standardization? "It's critical," Cohen said. "You have got to get everybody talking the same language."

Several commissions have recommended the adoption of homeland-security standards. Most recently, the Council on Foreign Relations, in a project with former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H., advocated national standards for first responders as the council lamented what it saw as their general lack of preparedness. The Gilmore Commission, headed by former Virginia Gov. James Gilmore, also strongly advocated standards in its December 2002 report.

Scattershot Standards

No longer the exclusive territory of bean-counters, the wonkish topic of homeland-security standards has come into vogue on Capitol Hill in recent weeks. Lawmakers are targeting their standardization efforts at emergency workers. Meanwhile, various tentacles of the Homeland Security Department are grappling with the creation of an assortment of standards. Private industry may be the furthest along.

Several members of Congress, relative newcomers to the standards debate, have quickly found religion. "We are told Moses traveled in the desert for 40 years because he didn't have a plan," Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said at an October 2 press conference announcing legislation to establish national standards for first responders. "What we're trying to do with this bill is to get a plan, get standards, so that we know where we are and where we are going."

In late September, Rep. Jim Turner of Texas, who is the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, started the standards stampede by introducing the PREPARE Act. Turner's bill, which has attracted a host of Democratic co-sponsors, would require the Department of Homeland Security to establish a task force to recommend first-responder equipment and training standards. Then, the secretary would be required to submit a plan for getting states and localities to adopt the voluntary standards. (Federal funds would be tied to compliance.)

Turner's initiative was followed by the introduction of a similar bill sponsored by Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., the chairman of a Government Reform Committee subcommittee, and Maloney, the head of the House Democrats' Homeland Security Task Force.

And on October 9, California Republican Christopher Cox, who chairs the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, unveiled part of a comprehensive homeland-security bill that includes a range of proposals-from aligning funding for state and local responders with a given locale's vulnerability, to bolstering the Homeland Security Department's intelligence arm. Cox said in an interview that first-responder standards are "something that will be covered in our legislation," adding that he will work with Turner, Shays, and Maloney. Cox said he plans to mark up his bill before the end of the month.

At the Department of Homeland Security, Alfonso Martinez-Fonts, chief liaison to the private sector, and Frank Libutti, undersecretary for information analysis and infrastructure protection, have been reaching out to private-sector groups to discuss new safety standards for the financial and telecommunications sectors, among others. Other officials at the department are working on physical-security standards for chemical plants and cargo containers. Still others are forging ahead on standards for emergency-response equipment.

In the private sector, ASIS International, a trade group for the security industry, has been developing standards since June 2001. Earlier this year, it published guidelines to help companies perform a terrorism risk assessment, said Don Walker, who co-chairs ASIS's guidelines commission and is chairman of Securitas Security Services USA. "There's bits and pieces of work being developed by lots of organizations," he said. ASIS will soon release guidelines for how private industry should respond to announced changes in the national threat level. The trade group is also working on guidelines for hiring and training private security guards. And Walker says his commission has listed 30 priority areas in which it wants to develop homeland-security guidelines.

Still, Yim complains that the efforts to establish homeland-security standards aren't comprehensive. And the focus on training and equipment for first responders isn't even enough to prepare them adequately for emergencies. Capt. Michael Grossman of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, who heads his county's emergency operations bureau, warns that people from different parts of the government have difficulty understanding one another. He recalled that during the 1992 Los Angeles riots triggered by the beating of motorist Rodney King, the local police responded to a domestic-dispute call and were accompanied by marines for backup. As one of the police officers approached the house, he yelled, "Cover me," meaning "Watch my back." To the marines, "Cover me" meant "Lay down fire," so they fired more than 200 bullets toward the house. Fortunately, no one was hit.

ISO: In Search of a Plan

Creating standards, Yim insists, is the best way to figure out who's responsible for each aspect of homeland security. Again, he looks to the environmental realm for a positive example: the International Organization for Standardization. It's known as ISO, which was derived from the Greek isos, meaning "equal." The group's American corollary is the American National Standards Institute. Yim and his colleagues want to translate what ISO has done for international environmental policy and apply it to U.S. homeland security.

Launched in 1947, ISO aimed to blend private and public demands for cost control and quality control, so that a company would not be put at a competitive disadvantage for producing a high-quality product. The organization has since established more than 13,700 voluntary standards in business and environmental management that apply to everything from the size of a screw thread to proper procedures for recycling aluminum cans. ISO has two series of standards: ISO 9000 rules deal with general management specifications; ISO 14000 rules specify what a company must do to minimize environmental damage. By defining how things are to be done, these standards clarify both who's in charge and what they should be doing.

Yim sees promise for homeland security in following the lead of the environmental-standards efforts, which began with rules for toxic-waste cleanup and expanded to include such details as how much radiation a computer screen is allowed to emit. ISO 14000 was among the reforms inspired in the late 1970s by the Love Canal pollution disaster. And as ISO 14000 evolved, it became recognized essentially as common law, so that a company hit with a lawsuit can be held responsible, in court, for failing to meet those standards. For business, Yim said, the selling point was "increased reliability, decreased liability." That is, companies can feel assured that if they are meeting the standard, they won't be held accountable for not doing more.

In the realm of homeland security, Yim sees endless opportunities for crafting standards. To name a few: container security; protocols for assessing a city's vulnerabilities; power-grid protection; building codes; evacuation capacity for main thoroughfares; airline screening procedures; and, of course, emergency-response teams. There could also be standards for a hospital's capacity to triage patients or for a communications system's ability to operate despite a power outage. (During the Northeast's massive blackout this August, the 911 emergency communications systems failed in Detroit and New York City.)

Yim argues that, over time, homeland-security standards would transform the way the government and industry protect the nation. "It's a strategic approach that links theory to action and, I think, would significantly advance where we need to go as a country in homeland security," he says. "And it would give us a measure of whether we're making progress in being better prepared." Establishing standards would help ensure that there are no weak links in the "homeland-security supply-and-demand chain," he added. That should make the nation get more for its homeland-security dollar.

Standards would also provide a basis for gathering uniform data on what is or isn't effective, and for performing cost-benefit analyses. Plus, involving the business sector at the outset would ensure that these standards "are not blind to costs," Yim said.

Industry standards that the government sees as voluntary could end up being mandated by insurers offering terrorism coverage. And, Yim said, citizens would probably be willing to pay more for a government service-their local 911 system, for example-if they had the assurance that the system met a national standard of quality.

Developing homeland-security standards wouldn't be quick or cheap, Yim admitted, but he argues that it's time for homeland-security policy to become less panic-driven. He foresees government and industry working together to craft each individual standard, and he thinks that the GAO should form the teams to design each one.

Since the GAO is the investigative arm of Congress, Congress is its top client, of course. For Yim and his team, the key to success will be whether they can sell the Hill on their homeland-security vision. Although currently fixated on first responders, lawmakers such as Shays and Maloney are open to the idea of standards for other homeland-security arenas as well. Maloney said she's particularly open to standards involving cargo, power grids, water, and nuclear plants.

In fact, perhaps a homeland-security bill already in circulation will turn out to be just the vehicle Yim and his team need. With that in mind, they have been quietly buttonholing lawmakers in both parties. Yim's hope is to incorporate a broad notion of homeland-security standards into legislation before Congress adjourns for the year. His immediate window of opportunity will soon close, he fears: Thinking big homeland-security thoughts is unlikely to top many lawmakers' agendas in an election year.

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House homeland chair seeks to overhaul first responder funding

Siobhan Gorman — Thu, 09 Oct 2003 00:00:00 -0400

The first piece of his four-part plan focuses on emergency responder funding. Other proposals in the works and planned for later release will address homeland security intelligence reform, smaller-scale changes to Homeland Security Department activities and technical corrections.

This bill is the first major legislation developed by the committee, established at the beginning of this year to rationalize homeland security policy on Capitol Hill. Cox's bill represents an effort to draw the lines around the jurisdiction of the new committee at a time when other members are questioning whether it will become permanent next year.

Describing the bill as amending the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which established the department, Cox said in an interview, "This is squarely within our jurisdiction."

The emergency response piece, called the "Faster and Smarter Funding For First Responders Act," would establish a new grant system for homeland security activities.

That money would be dispersed based solely on the terrorist threat level faced by the locality.

Grant applications initially would be ranked by the Homeland Security Department's information analysis wing, instead of its state and local office.

"We want to make sure first responders get the funding they need, when they need it, and we want to establish a grant-making system that meets homeland security objectives rather than political objectives," Cox said.

Cox's bill also would preserve all the pre-9/11 grant programs for the group now known as "first responders," such as the popular community policing program, COPS.

"We still have forest fires. We still have burning buildings. We still have floods and earthquakes. And we still have murders and rapists," Cox said. "We don't want first responders to be taffy-pulled between their homeland security responsibility and their original missions."

The second component, the "Homeland Security Enhancement Act of 2003," will address the department's intelligence capacity, which has come under fire at a number of the committee's hearings.

Although beefing up intelligence gathering is still under discussion, Cox said the proposal's focus will be "providing the necessary resources and underlining the existing statutory responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security as the fusion center of homeland security intelligence."

The third part, the "Homeland Security Implementation Act of 2003," Cox said, will offer more than a dozen smaller "improvements" to the functioning of the Department, such as establishing congressional reporting requirements on major department initiatives.

The final piece, the "National Homeland Security Authorization Act of 2004," makes nonsubstantive adjustments to the 2002 law.

The bill comes in response to two other homeland security bills now in circulation. One is sponsored by Homeland Security ranking member Jim Turner, D-Texas, whose "PREPARE Act" would prioritize first-responder funding, establish quality standards for their training and equipment and revise the threat advisory system.

Turner's bill sports an extensive list of co-sponsors-all Democrats.

Another bill, sponsored by Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., also would establish standards for emergency responders.

Cox called his bill "more ambitious" than Turner's because it is broader in scope.

"I think we'll be able to incorporate the lion's share of what is in the Democratic bill," he said.

Turner adopted a cooperative tone.

"I'm pleased Chairman Cox has introduced the legislation," he said. "We stand ready to work with them to incorporate the best of their bill and the PREPARE Act into a final version."

Although the bill comes at the end of the first session of the 108th Congress, Cox said he was confident he could hold hearings and complete a committee markup by the end of the month.

"Whether it makes it to the floor in the first session would depend on the House being in session for longer than is presently anticipated," but he said he believes it would come to a floor vote "before the snow melts in New Hampshire."

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Response to blackout exposes homeland security weaknesses

Siobhan Gorman — Fri, 29 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0400

New York City's 911 emergency system failed. Then the computer-aided dispatch system for its fire department and rescue squads crashed. The fire department had to monitor its trucks and personnel manually because the computer tracking system couldn't boot up. During the Blackout of 2003, the scene in New York was calm, yet-from a security perspective-anything but confidence-inspiring.

Anyone who saw the Aug. 14 photos of stranded New Yorkers streaming out of the city can easily imagine a plot to cut the city's power and then blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, killing hundreds or thousands of pedestrians. While federal, state, and local officials heralded their responses to the blackout as proof of how far they've come since Sept. 11, some homeland-security experts say the blackout was yet another warning siren.

"As we're approaching the second anniversary of Sept.11, the past weeks have shown that our efforts to prepare for the next catastrophic attack have in many respects been a miserable failure," declared John Cohen, a homeland-security consultant who is preparing Detroit's post-blackout report. "If we can't handle a major blackout, what's going to happen if and when we do have a catastrophic emergency with a large number of injuries?"

Detroit also lost its 911 system. The Motor City's government phone network collapsed, as did its brand-new Nextel cellphone system, which had been billed as capable of weathering a terrorist attack. When Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge needed to reach Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick the day after the blackout began, a Ridge assistant called Cohen, who runs a Maryland-based consulting firm that counts Detroit as a client. Cohen called the mayor's emergency operations center and left word for Kilpatrick to call Ridge's aide. Cohen was dumbfounded that the department needed him as a go-between. "In the case of Detroit," he lamented, "not a whole lot of useful information came from the department to the city."

State-level homeland-security officials also complain that they were out of the federal loop. On Aug. 14, 40 of them were in Indianapolis for a powwow. The security chiefs first found out about the crisis from colleagues back home, not from the department, even though its No. 2 official for state outreach was attending the gathering.

"None of us received any talking points or information [from the department] as to why and how they deduced it was not terrorism," said Clifford Ong, Indiana's director of homeland security. He heard nothing from the department until a regularly scheduled conference call the following week.

Homeland security directors from the affected states fared better on the communication front. Pennsylvania's Keith Martin first learned about the outage from his emergency crew at home, but then heard from the department three times the day of the blackout. "I do have a direct inside line into the Homeland Security Department," he said. "They can find me anywhere, at any time." In a speech last week to the Heritage Foundation, Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Gordon England characterized his department as "the communications hub" during the blackout.

Part of the new department's charge is to determine whether an emergency was caused by terrorism. And the blackout threw a harsh spotlight on a decision-making process that might charitably be described as needing work.

Josh Filler, the department's top liaison to state and local governments, happened to be on the phone with an aide to New York Gov. George E. Pataki when the lights flickered out. Filler rushed to the department's emergency center and had everybody rifle through their Rolodexes and start calling contacts in the electricity industry, local government, and the intelligence agencies. Top officials at the North American Electric Reliability Council received multiple calls. When department leaders gathered enough information to conclude that the outage was probably the result of a system overload, they ruled out terrorism. One insider characterized the process as "rampant ad hocery."

Just five hours into the blackout, President Bush declared, "The one thing I think I can say for certain is that this was not a terrorist act." Four days later, Ridge tempered that assessment, telling governors, "At least to date, there is no indication whatsoever that there was any kind of terrorist involvement at all. Obviously, it is still under investigation."

England further softened the claim on Aug.20, telling the Heritage Foundation, "At this early stage in the investigation, we have found no evidence of terrorism."

When did Indiana's Ong become convinced the blackout wasn't terrorism? "I'm still not there," he said. "Until they can give me an affirmative response [identifying the cause], why would we rule out anything?"

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