Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (20 page)

“These won’t demand too much of your time, but pay attention to them,” I said.

I then told Negroponte that the top tier of agencies comprised six massive organizations that were defined by their intelligence-collection focus: CIA (human intelligence), NSA (signals intelligence), NRO (space-based collection), FBI (domestic intelligence), NGA (imagery), and DIA (military intelligence).

“Get those six right,” I exhorted, “and everything will fall into place. Get them wrong, and nothing else will matter.”

With the language of the new legislation, I assumed that CIA, shorn of its community duties, was on the same line as the other five. I was wrong. Within six months as PDDNI it was clear to me that CIA was unique, still special, still central.

Only CIA conducted covert action, and it ran the most sensitive human collection. It had the only stable of analysts not attached to the interests of a cabinet secretary. It also had the largest stable of all-source analysts in the government, by far. CIA’s station chiefs were our face to every intelligence service in the world.

CIA’s success or failure affected the whole more than any other organization’s performance. Get CIA right, I began to think, and everything will be OK. Get it wrong and the rest won’t matter. Too important to fail, I concluded.

And that was months before I had any inkling that my next stop would be Langley.

The law actually seemed to recognize that the most important relationship within the IC was the one between the DNI and the director of CIA. It was so important, in fact, that the law said that the DNI would nominate the DCIA to the president, the
only
agency head so identified.

But in the history of the DNI, a DCIA has been nominated by a sitting DNI only once. John Negroponte actually suggested me to President Bush, but then I served as CIA director under the ambassador for only about six months before he moved on to
his
dream job—deputy secretary of state. In 2008 DNI-designate Blair played no role in selecting Leon Panetta to be the new administration’s DCIA. Dave Petraeus’s appointment was a product of White House maneuverings. And John Brennan’s personal relationship with the president ensured that he would be issued to Jim Clapper as Petraeus’s replacement if Brennan wanted the job (which he did).

Implementing the ODNI structure was always going to be hard, but steps like this clearly made it harder than it should have been.

We weren’t helped by external events, either. Folded into the first fourteen months of the new structure were three of the most controversial leaks in the history of US intelligence. In November 2005, Dana Priest began the Pulitzer parade with an exposé of CIA’s detention and interrogation program, the notoriously labeled “black sites.” Little more than a month later the
New York Times
hit the streets with another Pulitzer winner by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen on NSA’s Stellarwind program. Then the following June three national dailies reported that American intelligence had been mining the international financial transaction database called SWIFT to identify terrorist movement of money.

These were all big stories, and they sucked a lot of energy and attention from the new DNI leadership even as the enterprise was being constructed. That was the bad news.

The good news was that the president was turning to the newly minted DNI to handle these crises. Negroponte was unarguably the point man
for the administration’s response, and he had full access to the president in crafting the way ahead. George Bush had read the legislation.

Still, there were unresolved questions over the DNI’s authorities, and these were thrown into sharp relief in January 2008 when the NSC staff recommended that Executive Order 12333 be updated and amended to strengthen the DNI’s hand. EO 12333 was a Reagan-era document that outlined the roles, responsibilities, authorities, and limitations of US intelligence. It in no way, of course, reflected the new legislation or even the existence of the DNI.

The White House was betting that friendship among the key players—Secretary of Defense Gates, DNI McConnell, Jim Clapper (who now headed up defense intelligence), and me—would cut through entrenched bureaucratic interests.

We tried. But sometimes goodwill isn’t enough. There were lots of issues in redrafting the EO, but the key one was the virtual veto for the secretary of defense (and therefore for all cabinet officials with elements of the IC within their departments) created by Section 1018 of the 2004 intelligence reform act. The section itself seemed to give an opening to at least limit the provision’s impact, since it specifically called on the president to issue implementing guidance. That had never been done, and the rewrite of EO 12333 was a perfect opportunity to remedy that. The original draft of the new EO that DNI McConnell proposed boldly proclaimed that the DNI, in carrying out his responsibilities under the EO or under the law, should be
presumed
not
to be abrogating the authorities of the various department heads. That would have tilted tough issues in the direction of the DNI. Cabinet officials would have to be the ones appealing to the White House if the DNI decided to act boldly (and without consensus).

I argued strongly for the proposition, since it was consistent with the original intent of the statute: strengthen the leader of the community. As director of CIA, though, I wasn’t wholly altruistic, since ours was the only agency not “protected” by a cabinet official’s prerogatives, and absent that kind of presumption, the DNI and especially his staff would focus more and more on CIA for the worst of all reasons—because they
could. And this under a law that was designed to weaken the DNI’s direct supervision of Langley while strengthening it everywhere else.

I argued strongly, but (except for McConnell) mostly alone. After all, the room was filled with cabinet officials.

The final version of the EO sharpened some aspects of the DNI’s writ, but not on this key issue. It pointedly directed that, in carrying out his responsibilities under the EO or under the law, the DNI
shall respect and not abrogate
the authorities of the various department heads. The impact of Section 1018 had not been softened; it had been hardened.

Well below the level of an EO, other issues continued to linger. One of these was beyond trivial. It was stupid. But sometimes in Washington, it is over just these kinds of questions that battle lines are formed.

Early on as Negroponte’s deputy, I had the staff draft a message saying that CIA station chiefs around the world would also function as the DNI’s personal representative to the local intelligence service. It seemed little more than a tracking change to align our foreign representation to our new structure (the station chief had been the DCI representative).

The first hiccup was CIA challenging our ability to even do that. Then the complaints began to roll in from other big agencies. What about us? Why can’t our rep in a foreign capital where our relationship is particularly strong be the DNI representative?

Frankly, there weren’t many places where that would be true, and even then the CIA station chief would always remain the senior intelligence advisor to the ambassador. Why confuse ourselves
and
our allies?

Besides, the very law that created the DNI specifically carved out foreign intelligence relationships as the province of CIA. Acting DCI McLaughlin, when the law was being debated, managed to have the Hill recognize that the director of CIA (not the DNI) would “coordinate the relationships between elements of the intelligence community and the intelligence or security services of foreign governments.”

Henry Kissinger routinely gets credit for observing, “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” Ditto this one for
the intelligence community, as the DNI rep question became a manhood issue for many, and especially for CIA.

This is the kind of thing that never needs to be written down. In the abstract, who could question the right of the DNI to name his own representatives, even if a few were not from CIA? Negroponte and I didn’t do it that way, but not because we lacked the power to do it.

For the reasons stated above I thought it would always be a bad idea
in practice
, but the number of circumstances where the contrary view was even arguable were
so
few that if they ever became a question, the issue could be handled as a one-off in quiet phone discussions with affected ambassadors and agency heads.

Formally codifying the right would rouse a lot of ghosts, especially at a CIA that felt its traditional position threatened by just about every aspect of the intelligence reform act. Even Steve Kappes, my deputy who was thoroughly CIA but also thoroughly thoughtful, once described this as a “nuclear red line” at a ODNI session.

When I got to CIA, my senior staff urged me to take the issue out of the intelligence family to someone in the West Wing. They didn’t say it, but they wanted me to trade on my relationship with Steve Hadley or Josh Bolten, the chief of staff. I was quick to point out that if the issue got to that level, we would lose. There was no way that the White House could
not
back the DNI on such a question. Whatever the merits of our underlying arguments, I predicted that they would pale in comparison to the overarching issue of DNI authority.

Privately, I had told the new DNI, Mike McConnell, that I had to fight him tooth and nail on this one. But I added that I knew that the final decision was his. I said that if it came to it, I would die like a man for my cause. He smiled. He knew the position I was in, and he understood what I was telling him.

This was almost resolved at a meeting of what the DNI called his EXCOM, the heads of all the intelligence agencies. We rotated venues, and this one was being held at Fort Meade around the NSA director’s
massive conference table, which looks like it was ripped off the set of
Dr. Strangelove
.

I had just about made up my mind to concede the issue, contingent on the understanding that what we were talking about here was the DNI’s
abstract
powers. I was sitting near the center of the U-shaped table and McConnell began at the far right. Keith Alexander, the head of NSA, was the first to speak. He made a strong case that he actually wanted to fill some of these positions with NSA officers and do it now. Bob Murrett, a navy admiral who was head of NGA, made a similar argument.

It was suddenly clear to me that we were not talking about a theoretical matter. If I agreed to the proposition, we would have begun discussions as to which posts would go to other agencies. As I said, I thought this was a bad idea. And I certainly didn’t want to spend the next months arguing about specific positions. By the time McConnell got to me, I was recommitted to opposing the proposition and argued that—based on the law—foreign intelligence relationships were under my purview as the DCIA. Period.

McConnell snapped back that the law also said I would do that under his direction, but then he let the matter drop.

That was as close as we ever got to resolving this. We (I) should have done better. Mike McConnell and I had known each other for years, were friends, and between us had nearly three-quarters of a century of intelligence experience. We should have buried this. We didn’t.

Although the issue remained unresolved, McConnell did not force it. We were like two kids throwing a baseball back and forth for the rest of our terms. As long as we didn’t let the ball hit the ground, this would not cause any damage. We kept the ball in the air until January 2009 and passed this on to our successors.

I know that this all sounds trivial. I’ve already said that it was. But it ultimately led to the first forced dismissal of a DNI in history.

President Bush, taking a page from his father, recommended to the incoming president that both McConnell and I stay on for a while. We weren’t asked to.

Denny Blair, President Obama’s choice for DNI, came to the job with energy, commitment, and some clear ideas of what he wanted to do. He selflessly picked a deputy, Dave Gompert, with deep policy experience to cover many of the high-profile meetings downtown so that he could carve out more of his own time for the lower-profile, tedious, and often thankless task of running the intelligence community.

But even Blair’s best-motivated steps had him digging out of a political hole. His selection of Chas Freeman—an iconoclastic career diplomat with controversial views on just about everything, especially Israel, China, and Saudi Arabia—to be the head of the National Intelligence Council was designed to stir up the analytic community. It succeeded only in stirring up several lobbying groups and ultimately the White House.

Another public tempest was created by Blair’s quite accurate memo to the intelligence community that, whatever his personal discomfort with enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), the use of those techniques on several al-Qaeda leaders had led to valuable intelligence. And his testimony to the Hill that the “High Value Detainee Interrogation Group” should have questioned the December 2009 Detroit underwear bomber forced the president’s press team to hurriedly explain that the administration had not actually gotten around to setting up that group yet.

Blair’s distance from the president and his team was the product of more than just his being periodically off message (which, by the way, is not a vice for an intelligence official). The president and Blair did not know each other and did not meet frequently during the transition. I mentioned to someone close to the administration that there seemed to be a real gap in the administration between the “campaign guys” and those (like Blair) who came later. My contact corrected me. “Not the campaign guys,” he said. “The pre-Iowa guys.” Blair would never be in that group.

In the news more than he wanted or needed to be, not having a close relationship with the president or his close staff, Blair now had to establish a working relationship with his most important agency head—the director of CIA. And Leon Panetta was politically deft—a former
congressman—and personally close to Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, who had been with Panetta in the Clinton White House.