Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (19 page)

Rumsfeld did not want to put that at risk, so he pushed back hard on legislation designed to strengthen the “center” and give the DNI more say over the current operations and future direction of the intelligence community.

The Armed Services Committees in Congress agreed and had already acted boldly on Rumsfeld’s behalf in 2003 when they created the under secretary of defense for intelligence. The new post—effectively a senior DOD official
between
the nation’s intelligence chief (then DCI, now DNI) and several of his big collection agencies—was reluctantly accepted by George Tenet but revealingly was inserted into the Defense Authorization Bill by the Armed Services Committees without the participation of either chamber’s Intelligence Committee. George confided to me at the time that he thought that it was all about “control.”

So it was no surprise that the 2004 intelligence reform act was gutted as it made its way through Congress. Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, inserted language in Section 1018 of the bill that nothing therein would abrogate the prerogatives and authorities of cabinet secretaries. Read that to mean that the secretary of defense had the final word on four of the biggest organizations in the American intelligence world: NSA, NGA, NRO, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The way this was playing out, we were going to reorganize, but the guy at the center was probably going to be weaker than George Tenet was at the end of his term.

This guy better be a hell of a choice, I mused at the time. At a minimum, when the president finally walked out to introduce the new DNI, most of America couldn’t be saying, “Who is that guy with George Bush?”

A lot of Americans should have recognized John Negroponte when President Bush introduced him in mid-February 2005. Negroponte was a respected career diplomat with recent stints in Iraq and at the United Nations. He didn’t know much about intelligence except as a consumer, but he was politically savvy and bureaucratically smart. His quiet style and unassuming personality were exactly what was needed. He also brought a personal gravitas to the job. Reactions from intelligence professionals and from the Hill were universally positive.

The law gives the DNI a Senate-confirmed principal deputy—the PDDNI—and recommends that either the DNI or his deputy be someone with military experience. I fit the bill and was announced at the same press conference where Negroponte was introduced. The
New York Times
story on the event, in its one-sentence mention of me, said that my choice—after having been at NSA since 1999—underscored the “seriousness” with which President Bush viewed the new ODNI.

I was honored to have been selected. I had been at Fort Meade for six years, then the longest tenure in the agency’s history. I was ready for a change. Porter Goss had floated the idea of my being his number two at CIA, but I wasn’t anxious to swap out the director post at the country’s largest intelligence agency for a deputy position elsewhere, even at CIA. The deputy DNI job was different. It meant a fourth star, but also a great challenge, since we were being dealt a tough hand trying to make a structure I considered badly flawed function effectively.

Prior to this, I had known Negroponte only by reputation. We hit it off. He was generous with me to a fault. We became good friends.

Good thing. Even without the responsibility of running CIA, the law gives the DNI two massive tasks: acting as senior intelligence advisor to the president and ensuring the smooth functioning of the whole intelligence community. Each is monumental. Together they are more than any one man can manage effectively. The morning briefing and other policy
meetings downtown can easily consume the DNI, so it falls to the principal deputy to play Mr. Inside and routinely check the plumbing.

I enjoyed that. I’d walk around the new ODNI spaces, enter an office, and ask, “So what do you do around here?” I got some interesting answers. I could also hold confession and counsel various office chiefs as tensions with new and untried relationships surfaced.

Negroponte and I were blessed with a very strong senior staff. Good people were interested in the new enterprise. The chief of staff was David Shedd, a career intelligence officer who had shaped the administration’s position on the intelligence reform legislation while at the NSC. David had been in Mexico with Negroponte; he later would become the deputy director and then the acting director of DIA. His deputy was Mike Leiter, a veteran of the commission that had looked into the Iraq NIE debacle and later head of the National Counterterrorism Center. Head of administration was Pat Kennedy, a career State Department officer who had held a similar post in Baghdad for Negroponte; Kennedy later became the under secretary of state for administration, a post he held under two administrations. The deputy for analysis was Tom Fingar, former head of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Major General Ron Burgess, later head of DIA, headed our customer-facing office. Head of collection was Mary Margaret Graham, a career CIA case officer.

That was a powerful group, and we all used our contacts to put other strong people in key posts for human resources, research, and the like.

Negroponte also pulled in a bunch of the young folks who had worked for him in Baghdad. Looking over this crew one day, I told Larry Pfeiffer, my talented chief of staff, “In addition to taking care of me, would you make sure these children don’t break anything?” Turned out they were all quite talented, loyal, and incredibly hardworking.

But we made a mistake in filling out the rest of the staff. We were in too much of a hurry and transferred the entirety of the DCI’s old Community Management Staff to the ODNI. That was the small staff George Tenet had used in his intelligence community governance role. It had
pockets of real talent, but folks there had been habituated in the old structure to act as coordinators and even as supplicants to the big three-letter agencies around town. We weren’t going to find many disruptive forces there. We imported a conservative culture at a time when we would have benefited from aggressively recruiting some new blood. An unforced error.

One more unforced personnel error: I was PDDNI for only thirteen months before moving on to CIA. The position was vacant for ten months after I left, and indeed, by the time Stephanie O’Sullivan, a career CIA officer, was confirmed in early 2011, the position had been vacant for half of the preceding six years.

Bad mistake. Even if he had had the time, John Negroponte did not have the background to take on many of the inside tasks that had devolved to the deputy position.

And there was so much to be done. We were essentially managing a start-up. We didn’t even have an organizational chart, at least not until we started taping butcher paper to the walls of a temporary office in the Old Executive Office Building and marking up options. We had to spend time deciding the right shade of blue on the DNI shield and how many stars should be in the outer corona. More important was debating where we wanted the permanent ODNI to be and if we could tolerate a river between us and the White House.

Early on I created a list of some big things that we should try to accomplish in our first year. I wanted people to see that there was a new sheriff in town. Maybe I was thinking of Voltaire’s rationale for killing an admiral from time to time: “
Pour encourager les autres
.” My list included: 1) kill a program, somewhere, anywhere; 2) move some money from one account to another—it didn’t have to be a lot; 3) question (but not necessarily reject) a Pentagon personnel choice. Those were certainly stretch goals as far as the language of the law was concerned, but I was trying to leverage the bow wave of support we had at our launch. Negroponte was forever the diplomat and in effect said, “I hear you, Mike, but I’m not here to pick fights.”

We did manage in that first year to kill an element of a satellite program called FIA (Future Imagery Architecture). But this was little noticed; it was a troubled program anyway. We essentially shot the wounded and the stragglers.

There were other wins. One was creating the National Security Branch inside the FBI and getting the bureau to establish an intelligence discipline and intelligence branch. The events of 9/11 had shown the need, and Congress had mandated domestic intelligence in the 2004 legislation, but domestic intelligence has never sat easy in the United States. Indeed, other English-speaking democracies have domestic intelligence services—MI5 in Britain; CSIS in Canada; ASIS in Australia; NZSIS in New Zealand—but our culture is different, and none of our friends have put their intelligence service inside their federal police force.

This was difficult in 2005. It still is. We wanted FBI agents to gather information in the spaces between cases and develop data without a criminal predicate, but it took until the last months of the Bush administration to get the attorney general to issue guidance on exactly how to do this.

The handoff of the President’s Daily Brief to the DNI was seamless. Negroponte was good at it, and we involved the community beyond CIA in its production. CIA still did the most, but others got some daylight.

This was progress, but CIA was a recurring problem, and it absorbed more and more of our time. Even with perfect goodwill, calibrating the new ODNI-CIA relationship would have been challenging. The law put the ODNI at the center of the American intelligence community. History and tradition and many current operations still put CIA there, and CIA’s collective culture was
very
reluctant to admit otherwise.

Porter Goss had been DCI, the head of the community, for seven months before being “demoted.” When he showed up on a videoconference I was having with several agency heads, I quietly called him afterward and asked him to send his deputy to future sessions. It made me genuinely uncomfortable, and there was no need to rub this in.

There were other issues. Some folks at the agency were directing a nasty rearguard action, denying the ODNI goods and services and
transportation while trying to countermand DNI directives. A lot of it was pure petulance, like a four-year-old acting out. It made us wonder if anyone at Langley had read the law. Negroponte and Goss were Yale classmates, and they dealt with this as best they could.

I had to deal with the CIA staff and finally just asked to come to Langley to talk to the senior leadership. The meeting lasted more than an hour. I knew most of the people in the room. They were grumpy, tired, and a little beaten down.

I listened to their concerns and then gave the best explanation I knew of how we could make this work. Using military references, I suggested that CIA and the ODNI were on or near the same “grid reference.” The only way for us to prevent fratricide was to separate in altitude. The ODNI would work at the higher altitudes: set policy, give overall direction, de-conflict. CIA should work the lower: coordinate, conduct, operate. That seemed to help. But they were still grumpy.

CIA was having its own internal problems. In September 2005, as we were all struggling with this major adjustment, the number two officer in CIA’s Directorate of Operations very publicly and very suddenly resigned. Rob Richer was a tough, outspoken former marine who had served at the agency for thirty-five years, was a respected case officer, and wasn’t shy about telling colleagues (who then spoke to the press) that he was leaving because he had lost confidence in the agency’s leadership. And this was on top of the number one and number two officers in the DO leaving under similar circumstances less than a year before.

A lot of wheels were flying off in the midst of a global counterterrorism fight, two insurgencies, and us in the ODNI still getting settled.

When the Richer story hit, I immediately picked up the secure line and called Jose Rodriguez, the head of the National Clandestine Service and Richer’s boss. Jose had stepped up to that post from head of CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, where he had been a tough presence. He had been a career Latin America officer and put his experience dealing with corrupt regimes in murky legal environments to good use at CTC. A lot of our counterterrorism stars came from the Latin America or Africa divisions.

“Jose,” I began, “you’re not thinking of making any life decisions today, are you?” He assured me that he wasn’t. Good, since we were already hemorrhaging talent.

CIA was a growing problem, but in truth, I was getting some of this wrong too. When I explained the American intelligence community to John Negroponte for the first time, I broke the sixteen agencies into three tiers. Those five in the bottom tier, the intelligence efforts of the military services and the Coast Guard, needed little attention, since they were largely departmental. Irreverently I told him, “Invite them to the Christmas party. They’ll be happy enough.”

Here’s the code for some of the obscure ones: Defense Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Drug Enforcement Administration, State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

The next tier was different. They were all small, but they did things for him that nobody else could do, like the deep, thoughtful analysis of State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research or the unrivaled nuclear expertise of the Department of Energy. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s human intelligence skills were second to none, and there was a growing nexus between drugs and other intelligence targets. The Department of Homeland Security was still trying to define, let alone master, homeland security intelligence but was sitting on a trove of information from immigration, customs, border control, and other DHS elements that could have great intelligence value. Treasury’s intelligence shop was the gateway to the precision-guided weapon of the twenty-first century: targeted sanctions.