While the media
focus attention on congressional turf battles associated
with intelligence reform, US President George W Bush is
taking steps - largely under the public's radar screen -
to create his own hidden "army" of covert spies.
Before getting into what the White House is
doing, it's necessary to examine what Congress is doing
and not doing about intelligence reform as a result of
the collapse of the House-Senate conference attempting
to bridge differences between the bills passed by each
chamber.
Ostensibly, the core problem is the
line of tasking authority for three "national" agencies
currently within the Defense Department: the National
Security Agency (communications and electronic
intercepting and analysis), the National Reconnaissance
Office (designs, builds and operates signals and imagery
satellites), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence
Agency (formerly the National Imagery and Mapping
Agency). Because of advanced communications electronics,
these "combat support" organizations are able to
transmit to tactical commanders (division and below)
near-real-time information (eg, images and locational
data on friendly and enemy forces, terrain, or groups of
fleeing refugees) that could influence decisions and
outcomes.
The real barriers, however, lie
elsewhere. The principal impasse concerns turf in both
the executive and legislative branches. In the former,
under the Senate plan, the three "national" combat
support agencies would fall under the new national
intelligence director for budget formulation and
execution and for determining work priorities in
responding to the intelligence collection requirements
of intelligence users from the president down to
tactical commanders. Shifting these three agencies from
the Defense Department is not a new idea; the
"Scowcroft" commission recommended in November 2001
moving them under the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
director in his capacity as director of central
intelligence.
In the legislative branch, the two
armed-services committees would lose oversight of these
agencies and their budgets - which consume about half of
the total intelligence community funds - to the
intelligence committees. That this is the main obstacle
seems confirmed by suggestions from House negotiators
that their Senate colleagues add the Senate Armed
Services Committee chairperson to the Senate's conferees
- pressing that the chairperson would oppose losing
oversight. Moreover, if media reports are accurate,
beyond this turf battle is a short-term public relations
hurdle: the House leadership wants to have a clear
majority of Republicans vote for the reform bill so they
can claim credit for intelligence community reform -
even though the bill would pass now because enough
Democrats would join with Republicans to secure a
positive outcome.
While this unseemly wrangling
about political power makes headlines, the White House
has set in motion by presidential fiat other, more
questionable changes to existing intelligence
structures. For example, Bush has directed a study that
will propose ways to increase the Defense Department's
role in covert operations, a realm that heretofore was
the domain of the CIA's Directorate of Operations. The
study, due in February, is exploring the feasibility of
turning over control of paramilitary operations to the
50,000-strong United States Special Operations Command
(USSOCOM) based in Florida. (Again, this was recommended
by the 9-11 Commission.) Given USSOCOM's much larger
size, the obvious concern is that a president would be
tempted to initiate many more covert operations - and as
commander-in-chief, do so without informing the relevant
committees of Congress as the CIA director must do now.
Conceivably, this would give the executive branch a
"private army" for pursuing its policy of preventive
war.
Also in February, the CIA and Federal
Bureau of Investigation must inform the White House
about steps they have taken to improve their performance
in the "war on terror". The impetus for these reports
lies in the poor human-intelligence performance - both
collection and analysis - of the agencies prior to
September 11, 2001. In the CIA's case, reducing or
eliminating paramilitary operations would shift the
agency's center of activity.
The other,
unremarked factor in the mix is the Pentagon's
transformation effort, especially its view of future
threats - all based on intelligence - and its
corresponding responses. Moving further from the Cold
War-era concentration on traditional war plans to
counter the Warsaw Pact, military planners are
developing responses to what they call "irregular" (eg,
Afghanistan and Iraq), "catastrophic" (nuclear,
chemical, biological weapon use), and "disruptive"
(unanticipated advances in manipulating cyberspace)
scenarios. If this is to be more than a public-relations
effort, it will require great attention from Pentagon
civilians, attention they can ill afford to waste on a
turf struggle.
The White House, which was never
enamored of the 9-11 Commission or its recommendations,
may simply ignore Congress and press its own "remedies"
through presidential directives. That would relegate
"intelligence reform" to the same category that wags
assign "military intelligence": an oxymoron.
Dan Smith is a military affairs
analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus, a retired US Army
colonel and a senior fellow on military affairs at the
Friends Committee on National Legislation.
