Spook Shakeup

April 19, 2004 | The American intelligence community is quickly becoming a dinosaur. It has to transform itself to combat new security challenges, such as terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and rogue states - now.

Just last week, the 9/11 Commission expressed serious concern about the intelligence community - the IC, as we say in the biz. Members are even thinking about issuing IC-reform recommendations before completing their final report. The commission's early work has raised major doubts about IC leadership, cooperation, communications and information-sharing.

Certainly, improvements have been made post-9/11. But Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet told the commission last week that it will take him five years to retool the intelligence community to deal with our new national-security challenges.

Who's got five years? According to Osama bin Laden's latest tape, his terrorist road show is now headed to a theater near you. Intelligence is our first line of defense in the War on Terror - but the intelligence community is badly in need of overhaul. Here's why:

*There are 15 intelligence agencies: The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, Departments of Energy and Treasury-and the list goes on and on. The result is a deeply fractured and parochial intelligence community. Turf battles and cross-agency communication problems abound.

Imagine if we were trying to fight the war in Iraq with 15 Pentagons? It's tough enough with just one.

*The director of Central Intelligence (DCI) isn't in charge of the IC. He's got the coolest title in town, but he's actually a bit player in the world of American spy-dom. The real big fish is the secretary of Defense, who owns 80 percent of the intelligence budget and 7 of 15 intel agencies. The DCI runs the CIA and is the president's senior intelligence adviser - that's it.

During the Cold War, it made sense for the secretary of Defense to own the most intelligence assets, because the primary threat to U.S. security was the military might of the Soviet Union. Today, the threat is different: It's al Qaeda, biological weapons, dirty bombs, North Korea and Iran- not a Soviet tank.

As The Donald would say: It's time for a little corporate reshuffling. Here's what needs to be done:

Establish a Director of National Intelligence: The intelligence community needs a single leader - not the several it has now. The president should appoint a cabinet-level DNI with real authority over all IC priorities, policies, budgets and personnel. It only makes sense to have one person in charge and accountable for the performance of the intelligence community. (The DCI should be left to run the CIA.)

Push Jointness: The intelligence community needs to work together more effectively and efficiently. The military term for such interservice teamwork is "jointness." It means that the services work together as a team, not as separate fighting forces.

The Pentagon achieved this in the 1980s under the landmark 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reform Act - the Defense Department's most sweeping makeover since it was established in 1947. We learned from some of our less stellar military operations in the early 1980s, such as the Iranian hostage rescue mission and the Grenada invasion, that the different military services weren't operating well together. Sometimes, different services couldn't even talk to one another because of incompatible communications gear. This was costing lives.

The services kicked and screamed over the push toward jointness, but Congress rightfully demanded change and, today, the military is more effective and efficient than ever. We need the same in the intelligence community.

Consolidate: To ensure unity of effort -and fewer seams in intelligence collection and analysis - we need fewer intelligence agencies, not (as some have suggested) more. We still need the capabilities of today's 15 agencies; we just don't need them sheathed in 15 bloated bureaucracies.

For instance, the CIA should be expanded to include the eavesdropping National Security Agency and the satellite-spying National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Along with its human-espionage capability, the CIA would be become a true "central intelligence agency."

Changing the intelligence community's structure won't be easy. But the president and Congress need to take strong action - and soon. Our intelligence community can do better. It must do better - if we're to prevent another 9/11.

Heritage Foundation Senior Fellow Peter Brookes spent some of his days at the CIA working on Central Asian issues. - heritage foundation

Cooking With Goss

The new CIA chief's shakeups are bad news.

By Fred Kaplan Posted Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2004,

What to make of Porter Goss and the turmoil at the Central Intelligence Agency? Slate's Jack Shafer has run down the press leaks and the bureaucratic back-biting. But what do these squabbles, dismissals, and resignations mean for the state of U.S. intelligence? What does Goss want, and is what he's doing the best way of accomplishing it?

First, it's odd to see so much fretting over the departure of the top two officials from the CIA's clandestine branch. These guys haven't exactly been racking up trophies lately. The agency has been notoriously unsuccessful at mounting covert operations or penetrating hostile governments and terrorist organizations-at doing the sorts of things that clandestine branches do. If John Kerry had won the election, it's a fair bet he too would have swept the broom at Langley.

In any case, the shake-up should have come as no surprise. As far back as 1998, just after the bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa, Goss-then chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence-said publicly what many insiders had long been whispering: that the CIA's directorate of operations (the official name for the clandestine shop) was too "gun-shy."

The more important question is what Goss will do with the agency's analytical branch, the directorate of intelligence. That's the branch where integrity and independence are vital. That's where the Bush administration's prime movers-Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld-stuck their fingers in the run-up to the war in Iraq, pressuring analysts to drop the maybes and on-the-other-hands from their reports about Saddam's possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connections to al-Qaida.

The personnel shufflings haven't yet spread to the analytical shop. But signs are starting to point to a broad shake-up, charged by political motivations. And it's in this context that Goss' actions take on a darker tint.

Today's New York Times, in a story headlined "New C.I.A. Chief Tells Workers to Back Administration Policies," reports on a leaked memo that Goss circulated on Monday within the CIA "to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road," as the new director put it. The pertinent passage is this: "As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies."

This directive reinforces a general uneasiness about Goss, who after all auditioned for his current job by doing political hackwork for the president. In June 2003, when Sen. Kerry-who was clearly running for president already-gave "a major speech" on national-security issues, the Bush-Cheney campaign tapped Goss to write the official critique. And he wrote a blazer, denouncing the speech as "political 'me-tooism' " and complaining that Kerry "neglected the president's historic achievements" and "remarkable progress" at combating terrorism.

Goss also helped Bush during the early days of the Joseph Wilson-Valerie Plame scandal. As chairman of a House oversight committee and as a former CIA case officer himself, Goss should have been dismayed that a White House aide might have exposed the identity of an undercover agent as an act of political retaliation against the agent's spouse. But, although the Justice Department took the reports seriously enough to mount a grand-jury probe, Goss dismissed them as "wild and unsubstantiated" and added, as a jab at the Democrats, "Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an investigation."

It was because of such incidents, among others, that John D. Rockefeller IV, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, confided to aides last August-after Bush named Goss to be CIA director-that Goss was "too political" for the job.

This background to Goss' appointment is what lends credence to the warning cries from the pros of Langley. Ordinarily, such cries might be suspect. Ensconced bureaucrats always panic when an outsider roars into the sanctuary, espousing radical change. When Robert McNamara took over the Pentagon in 1961 and started cutting weapons programs that didn't pass his cost-benefit analyses, the uniformed military went berserk. Just as Goss brought along some arrogant young staffers from the House, McNamara brought in some arrogant young "whiz kids" from the RAND Corporation. Alain Enthoven, the 29-year-old whom McNamara made the assistant secretary of defense for systems analysis (a job that hadn't existed before), told one senior Air Force officer who started lecturing him on a fine point, "General, I don't think you understand. I didn't come for a briefing. I came to tell you what we have decided." To another, who started to argue with Enthoven about nuclear-war plans, he said, "General, I have fought just as many nuclear wars as you have."

McNamara and Enthoven turned out to be right. The military services had been wildly extravagant about the way they'd been buying weapons. Maybe Goss and his whippersnappers will turn out to be right on whatever it is they're trying to do, too.

But there's a big difference. McNamara and his whiz kids didn't work in John F. Kennedy's election campaign. They'd never publicly lashed out against JFK's opponent, Richard Nixon, or made snide comments about his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower. They weren't political people.

President Bush's second-term Cabinet is shaping up to be not a collection of separate agencies but a political arm of the Oval Office. Bush's appointments so far-Alberto Gonzalez at Justice, Condoleezza Rice at State, and today Margaret Spellings at Education-all come from his White House staff. This is a legitimate, if narrowly confining, style of leadership. But the CIA is different: Its success depends above all on whether its director can provide the president with disinterested analysis. So far, Porter Goss does not seem to be such a director.

Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. - slate.com

US intelligence shake-up meets growing criticism

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | January 2, 2005 WASHINGTON -- President Bush is expected to name the nation's first director of national intelligence as early as this week -- the crowning change won by critics of America's spy services who fought a bruising political battle to centralize spy activities and create a clearinghouse for terrorism reports after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But a growing number of current and former intelligence officials and spies are concerned that the organizational changes that were requested by the Sept. 11 Commission, backed by victims' families, and adopted by Congress, could be drawing attention away from more-serious shortcomings in the national security net that need to be addressed.

''I feel sorry for these 9/11 families who thought passing this intelligence bill will improve things," said retired Air Force General William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, the nation's largest spy organization. ''They have been swindled. The more I think about it, the more awful it is. It's tragic."

Odom and more than a dozen other intelligence professionals interviewed by the Globe said the changes, hailed as the most sweeping overhaul of America's intelligence system in a half-century, do not address the system's biggest problems: a lack of accurate intelligence coming in from the field and a shortage of skilled analysts to synthesize the data collected.

''It does little to address analytic and collection capabilities," said Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center. ''I am not optimistic the so-called reforms are going to lead to quality intelligence. It does nothing to remedy the poor source information we have had."

Truly reforming America's spy capabilities to prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11 attacks or avoid the kind of faulty analyses that clouded the decision to go to war in Iraq will ultimately depend on who Bush taps to be his intelligence czar, according to Odom, Cannistraro, and others. They say it also will depend on whether he or she is willing to use the power of the new office to change the culture of the clandestine services and ensure that the intelligence services stay out of politics.

''It is mainly a question of the style and clout that the director has," said David MacMichael, a former CIA analyst who worries the changes will not improve intelligence activities without a strong personality to take full advantage of the historic opportunity.

The White House has been mum about who will get the top post, but several administration and intelligence officials said a leading candidate is John Lehman, a Republican member of the Sept. 11 Commission and a former Navy secretary.

''It has to be somebody who has stature and the political clout to make real changes," MacMichael said. ''The basic thing here in terms of a better functioning intelligence is that you [must] get a person with independence and integrity," he said. ''He has to be willing to say, 'I will put my resignation on the president's desk if I'm thwarted one more time' " from making independent and painful overhauls.

The new national intelligence director will eclipse the head of the CIA as the president's primary intelligence adviser and will manage the budgets and priorities of the nation's 15 spy agencies. Advocates say a central manager will go far in making the intelligence community more efficient.

''Our vast intelligence enterprise will become more unified, coordinated, and effective," Bush said in signing the intelligence reform bill on Dec. 17. ''It will enable us to better do our duty, which is to protect the American people."

In a November memorandum to new CIA director Porter Goss, Bush acknowledged the CIA needs to hire more Arabic speakers and infiltrate more terror groups in the Middle East, as well as strengthen its analytic capabilities.

But the intelligence reform legislation mandates few changes in how spy agencies collect and analyze intelligence, and the structural changes it put into motion are stealing momentum from the fundamental changes needed, critics say.

Already, insiders say much of the effort within the intelligence community is focused on clearing away legal hurdles to ensure that the new intelligence structure works smoothly -- not on addressing the nation's ability to gather and analyze intelligence. ''The lawyers are making sure statutes are not overlapping or not workable," said an intelligence official involved in executing the changes and who asked not to be named.

''It's a sham," Mel Goodman, another longtime CIA analyst, said of the new structure. ''I don't think it changes anything."

Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA's clandestine service, said of the changes: ''They add an extra layer. But the problem is not a structural one." McGovern said that because the Sept. 11 Commission declined to blame individuals for the intelligence failures, it had to find fault somewhere else. ''The commission concluded, therefore, that 'it must have been the system, it must be something with how we organized ourselves,' " he said. ''That is 90 percent wrong. It is the people, stupid."

Goss, who has cleaned out much of the CIA's top management since taking over in September, also is talked about as a possible intelligence czar. But Goss has received mixed reviews inside the intelligence community and in Congress. While replacing or forcing into retirement nearly a dozen top officials in both the CIA's operations directorate and most recently the analysis branch, he has weeded out much of the top layer of the CIA that presided over the Sept. 11 and Iraq war intelligence failures.

But former officials such as Cannistraro said they worry that those changes are not intended merely to bring in new blood to restore confidence in the agency's mission among policy makers and the public -- but rather, also are politically motivated and directed by the White House. - boston.com/

Negroponte '60 to head intelligence

Yale Grad is third alum in a top intelligence post

BY KAT HUANG Staff Reporter

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte '60 was nominated by President Bush yesterday to serve as director of national intelligence, a new position legislated by Congress last December as a key component in the restructuring of the nation's intelligence system.

The position was created in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, which stated the need for a centralizing figure to coordinate information sharing among the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI. If confirmed by the Senate, Negroponte will oversee the country's 15 intelligence agencies, as well as direct the $40 billion intelligence budget annually.

"I appreciate your confidence in choosing me for what will no doubt be the most challenging assignment I have undertaken in more than 40 years of government service," Negroponte told Bush at White House press conference.

University President Richard Levin said he supports Negroponte's appointment.

"He's a member of my council on international activities at Yale and he's a person I have great respect for in his distinguished career as a diplomat," Levin said.

Negroponte is the third Yale alumnus to be appointed to a high-profile role in national intelligence over the past year; CIA director Porter Goss '60 was appointed to his position last September and Stephen Hadley LAW '72 was chosen in November to replace Condoleezza Rice as National Security Adviser. During a visit at Yale in 2002, Negroponte credited his Yale education for its contribution to his career.

"I majored in political science at Yale, and I still remember my professors," Negroponte said. "They were an excellent help to me."

Although Negroponte does not have experience in the intelligence field, it will not hinder his ability in his new role, said Assistant Director of International Security Studies Minh Luong, who teaches the course "Espionage and Economic Intelligence."

"In order to be successful, you have to be a diplomat," Luong said. "If there's one person who has a shot with dealing with [Donald] Rumsfield, Condoleezza Rice and Porter Goss, it's Negroponte, who has spent literally a career as a diplomat, who brokered all the disagreements between [Colin] Powell and Rumsfeld with his type of behind-the-scenes diplomacy."

After graduating from Yale, Negroponte went on to fulfill a four-decade tenure in Foreign Service, including an eight-month tenure as ambassador to Iraq and service as the country's U.N. ambassador. But it was his service as U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s that caused some to question his role in promoting the efforts by the Contras against the leftist government of Nicaragua.

"That was a highly politicized time with tremendous Washington battles between those who did not want us to fight communism in Central America and those who felt it was necessary," said Diplomat-in-Residence Charles Hill, who worked with Negroponte as chief of staff at the State Department. "It will be interesting to see if the Senate will make something out of this."

History professor emeritus Gaddis Smith said he disagreed with the course of action in Nicaragua but does not fault Negroponte for his role.

"I was personally very critical of that," Smith said. "I thought our policy was misguided, but he carried out the policy of the Reagan administration very effectively. Nicaragua is probably a better place as a result of the bringing down the Sandinistas." There has been debate over the extent of power accorded to the position, especially with regard to the Pentagon's intelligence-gathering functions. The post, relegated to that of a coordinating role, is not invested with all the authority suggested by the 9/11 Commission. It remains a open question whether the position has enough power to exert control over intelligence agencies subsumed by the Pentagon.

At least part of the difficulty arises from the legislation, which was "passed in a hurry" and "not done correctly," Hill said.

"It's a sloppy piece of legislation, and the blanks will have to be filled," Hill said. "The position will be defined by the way the president and Negroponte actually carry it out, so it's extremely important that the person be the right person for the job. He can't consult what has been put down on paper for him; he'll have to define it as he goes along. This springs from the necessity to keep policy distinct from intelligence and analysis; if the two get mixed up, it could be a very bad situation."

Though the CIA will still be responsible for collecting intelligence information, Negroponte's authority will supersede that of Goss, who will no longer be the president's principal intelligence adviser. - yaledailynews

US intelligence shakeup prompts concerns

ISN SECURITY WATCH (14/01/06) - A member of the powerful US Senate intelligence committee is calling for an inquiry into the "early removal" of the head of the intelligence agency that interprets satellite photos and draws maps for the US military.

James Clapper, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is to leave 13 June, three months earlier than he had wanted, David Burpee, the agency's head of public affairs, confirmed to ISN Security Watch.

Burpee said that Clapper, a retired U.S Air Force general, had arrived in 2001 on a three-year contract, with two one-year extensions possible.

The NGA - one of the 15 agencies that make up what US officials call the "intelligence community" - is part of the Department of Defense, and its director is appointed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who also had authority over whether to extend Clapper’s contract and for how long.

As the end of his fourth year approached in the summer of 2005, Clapper applied for a second one year extension, Burpee told ISN Security Watch. "It came back for just nine months. That's it," he said.

Burpee downplayed reports that Clapper's departure followed a rift with Rumsfeld. "We always knew it could be a little bit more or a little bit less" than the full five-year term, Burpee said.

But Democrat Barbara Mikulski of Maryland called on Thursday for investigative hearings by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into what she referred to as Clapper's "early removal".

The Baltimore Sun, which first reported the news about Clapper, cited an unnamed "former senior government official familiar with the matter", as saying that "Rumsfeld acted out of anger over Clapper's testimony to Congress in 2004".

In a letter to the committee's chairman, Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, Mikulski wrote that she was "troubled by reports that Secretary Rumsfeld's decision was in retaliation for Clapper's 2004 testimony to the Congress regarding NGA's relationship to the Department of Defense".

The NGA's relationship with the department, and indeed the broader question of the Pentagon's role in the intelligence community was the subject of fierce - and at times bitter - debate during the summer and fall of 2004, as lawmakers drafted a bill reorganizing US spy agencies in line with the recommendations of the Sept. 11 Commission.

Rumsfeld and his allies in Congress fought a rearguard action against the appointment of a single, powerful official, the director of national intelligence, to manage all 15 agencies - including those, like the NGA, which are part of the Department of Defense.

They argued that the creation of the office would interfere with the military's chain of command and jeopardize the ability of the Pentagon's intelligence agencies to provide the support needed by troops on the ground in combat.

Clapper's testimony to Congress that year was given in a special classified session, an intelligence official told ISN Security Watch, but his public statements on the issue made clear that he did not oppose the establishment of the post.

Mikulski wrote she was "disappointed" that Rumsfeld had not denied the reports.

"If such an able official and leader of one of America's most important intelligence agencies is being punished for giving his honest judgment to the Congress, what kind of signal does this send to other heads of intelligence agencies and to all those working throughout our intelligence community?" she asked. "What does it imply about their obligation and duty to speak truth to power?"

She said that hearings would give Rumsfeld "an opportunity to explain publicly his basis for removing Clapper at such a critical time”. _ www.isn.ethz.ch

Wall Separating Intelligence and Police Is Down: Now What?

Jim Kouri March 12, 2006

Historically, intelligence and law enforcement agencies have operated largely in separate spheres. Law enforcement agencies were concerned with criminal activity inside the United States, while intelligence agencies concentrated on the plans and capabilities of foreign governments.

As criminal activity has become more global in nature, however, and as more US criminal statutes have been given extraterritorial application, law enforcement agencies have become increasingly interested in information about criminal enterprises outside of the United States. At the same time, collection and analysis of information about global crime also has become a priority for the intelligence community.

Increasingly overlapping interests in the same foreign groups and activities have caused conflicts between the two communities. Tensions result, in part, from their very different missions, goals, and legal authorities.

The mission of intelligence agencies is to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence to their consumers. Human sources and technical collection systems can be developed only over long periods of time and often at great cost. They are easily compromised and, when compromised, often cannot be replaced. Accordingly, intelligence agencies are by nature reluctant to permit consumers, including law enforcement agencies, to use intelligence in any way that might result in the loss of a source or collection method.

The mission of law enforcement agencies, in contrast, is to investigate and prosecute individuals who violate US laws. Like intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies want information about global crime, but as a means to a different end: the arrest and conviction of criminals. Law enforcement's need for intelligence may not always be compatible with the methods of the Intelligence Community.

There are a number of specific areas of conflict between the two communities. Three stand out. First, there remains a mutual reluctance to share sensitive information. Law enforcement agencies, especially the FBI, have complained that intelligence agencies, citing the need to protect intelligence sources and methods, do not disseminate important intelligence reports or, more often, disseminate them with such onerous restrictions on their use that they are valueless to investigators and prosecutors.

Similarly, intelligence agencies complain that law enforcement organizations refuse to share information about terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and organized crime activities collected in the course of domestic investigations. With largely unfettered access inside the United States and armed with enforcement powers, law enforcement officials often can collect information about individuals involved in global criminal activities more easily than intelligence agencies operating clandestinely overseas. Much of this information is potentially useful to the Intelligence Community, but law enforcement agencies are reluctant to share it lest it leak or be used in a way that would taint the prosecution's case.

A second source of conflict involves the intelligence agencies' refusal to accept direct collection tasking from law enforcement agencies. CIA and NSA interpret their legal authorities as permitting them to engage in intelligence collection only for a "foreign intelligence" purpose. While they invite law enforcement agencies to request information about specific targets, NSA and CIA will only go forward with the collection if they independently determine that the requested collection has a valid -- in the view of NSA -- a "foreign intelligence" purpose.

In almost all instances, requests for information about specific individuals involved in terrorism, narcotics trafficking, organized crime, and weapons proliferation are deemed to have foreign intelligence value. The intelligence agencies' refusal to accept direct collection tasking, however, makes them appear to be unresponsive to the needs of law enforcement agencies and makes law enforcement reluctant to make further requests.

A third source of tension is an increased effort by law enforcement agencies, principally the FBI, to expand their activities overseas, both to engage in liaison with foreign law enforcement agencies, and to develop independent sources of information about global criminal activities that can be used more easily by investigators and prosecutors. Law enforcement agencies are hesitant to provide details about these overseas activities to intelligence and State Department officials because of concerns about leaks and possible tainting of their investigations.

In addition to the FBI, other police agencies may assign officers overseas. For instance, the New York City Police Department has officers assigned to several countries such as Britain. In fact, immediately following the July 7, 2005 bombings in London, NYPD detectives were on the scene of the blasts.

Since September 11, 2001, the intelligence and law enforcement communities have taken a number of significant actions to resolve their differences. A Joint Intelligence Community-Law Enforcement working group was formed to devise solutions to the specific flashpoints between the two communities. Composed of experienced lawyers and other officials from all of the affected agencies, the working group has been meeting on a weekly basis and appears to have made significant progress in addressing problems.

A separate task force has been addressing the relationship between intelligence and law enforcement representatives stationed overseas, specifically focusing on the appropriate division of duties, guidelines for keeping each other informed, and mechanisms to resolve differences that may arise. At the same time, the Departments of State and Justice have negotiated a Memorandum of Understanding to govern the relationship between US Chiefs of Mission and law enforcement officials posted overseas. - commonvoice.com/

NSA EAVESDROPPING: Senate deal with White House violates Constitution Warrantless spying

Tribune Editorial - 03/10/2006

When the Bush administration launched its secret, warrantless eavesdropping program on communications between the United States and foreign countries, it briefed eight members of Congress.

None of them raised public objections to this obvious threat to Americans' civil liberties under the Fourth Amendment.

Now, Senate Republicans have cut a deal with the White House. In exchange for avoiding a full Senate inquiry into the eavesdropping, the White House has agreed to inform two seven-member "terrorist surveillance subcommittees" of Congress about the details of how the program works.

We don't see that this is much of an improvement. Before, there were eight members of Congress in the loop. Now there will be 14. True, the so-called "Gang of Eight" didn't get the details about what the nation's electronic spies at the National Security Agency were doing. Supposedly, the new subcommittees will. They also can bring members of their staff into the process.

In addition, the Bush administration reportedly has agreed to seek warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court whenever possible.

Apparently, however, the NSA could conduct surveillance for 45 days without a warrant of any kind. If it decided to go beyond that period, the attorney general would have to certify that the warrantless snooping was necessary to protect the country and explain to the subcommittees why a warrant has not been sought. The attorney general would have to update this information every 45 days.

This is not reassuring. Remember, this would be the same same attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, who argues that Article II of the Constitution, which makes the president commander in chief of the armed forces, combined with the congressional resolution to fight the war on terror, is all the authority President Bush needed to launch warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States.

We don't buy that insupportable argument, and we don't believe any American who treasures civil liberties and the separation of powers should, either. Besides, the Constitution requires that warrants be obtained from the courts. We do not see how informing congressional committees that the NSA is violating the Fourth Amendment solves anything or holds the executive branch to the letter of the Constitution.

It is the courts, not Congress, that decide probable cause and whether the law has been broken.

That's in the Constitution, too. - Salt Lake Tribune

Allen Leaves CIA to Lead Homeland Security Intelligence Shakeup

March 15 (Bloomberg) -- Charlie Allen, the 47-year CIA veteran now charged with organizing the Homeland Security Department's intelligence service, says the job is daunting: People who are supposed to be on the same team don't even talk to each other.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff wooed Allen from the CIA to Homeland Security in August to meld nine separate intelligence operations into one cohesive unit to avoid overlap and coordinate better with local law enforcement agencies.

``The challenges are a little more difficult'' than any he faced at the CIA, Allen said in a recent interview. The Homeland Security Department is a forced marriage of 22 agencies that Congress mandated following the Sept. 11 attacks. Allen said the intelligence efforts still aren't coordinated and time is running out.

``We have miles to go,'' he said. ``We've got to move rapidly.''

The department's intelligence services stumbled within weeks of Allen's arrival. In October, they publicly contradicted New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, saying his warnings of a potential attack on the city's subways were overblown. Then, later that month, there was trouble coordinating with the FBI on a possible threat to Baltimore's tunnels.

Allen ``has to solve the internal problem of getting 22 units working together,'' said Loch Johnson, a political science professor at the University of Georgia who has written often about the CIA. ``It's a job probably for three people.''

Needed Skills

Mike Rogers, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and a former FBI agent, said Allen's stark assessments and organizational skills are just what the Homeland Security intelligence operation needs.

``If I had to trust anybody with that mission, it would be Charlie,'' said Rogers, a Michigan Republican.

Allen's performance in his new job will be critical. Intelligence experts said the 2005 London bombings by home-grown Islamic radicals plus taped messages released last month by Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda's leader, and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, show the threat of attack is still strong. Allen, 71, had a hand in some of the CIA's greatest achievements and cleaned up some of its biggest messes. In 1990, he forecast Iraq's invasion of Kuwait -- a prediction that was largely ignored -- and in 1998 then-CIA Director George Tenet asked him to settle turf wars within the agency after it failed to anticipate five underground nuclear tests by India.

Nixon's Briefer

Allen has spent most of his career warning of threats or defusing them. He prepared daily intelligence briefings for President Richard Nixon, and in 1985, then-CIA Director William Casey tapped him to become one of the CIA's top counterterrorism officials.

Allen was sitting in the operations room at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in 1998 when he received word of al-Qaeda's bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The simultaneous attacks killed more than 224 people and brought Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network to the world's attention. Allen was immediately assigned to head up the effort to collect more information on al-Qaeda.

An independent commission's report on the Sept. 11 attacks, while criticizing the CIA and FBI, in general praised Allen as ``indefatigable'' in his efforts to round up information on bin- Laden and his network.

Allen also was not tarred with the agency's failures leading up to the war on Iraq.

Iraq Report Ignored

Author James Risen in his 2006 book ``State of War'' said Allen oversaw a program to contact relatives of Iraqi scientists to learn whether the country was developing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Allen discovered that Saddam Hussein had abandoned these weapons programs. His superiors ignored this information, according to Risen. They ``refused to even disseminate the report from the family members to senior policy makers in the Bush administration,'' Risen wrote. The CIA's Directorate of Operations saw Allen's program as stepping onto its turf, shut it down and criticized its results, Risen wrote.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment.

Allen's willingness to challenge common wisdom has earned him respect in the intelligence hierarchy. In a speech last month at Georgetown University, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte called Allen ``the most experienced intelligence professional in the U.S. government.''

Work Ethic

Former co-workers said Allen's success is based on an ability to challenge superiors without alienating key supporters in the hierarchy, a knack for grooming young talent and a marathoner's work ethic. While Allen has been willing to challenge conventional wisdom, he's also been careful not to embarrass superiors, said Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst.

Allen is a white-haired, gracious man whose country-doctor gentility hints at his North Carolina roots. But Johnson said he can be blunt behind the scenes.

``He's cranky with people who he thinks don't know what they're talking about,'' Johnson said.

According to the Sept. 11 commission report, Allen described as a ``ridiculous'' turf battle an argument between senior Defense Department and CIA officials over who should fund the Predator, an unmanned drone used to spy on and assassinate al- Qaeda's leadership.

Congress formed the Homeland Security Department in 2002 by combining 22 agencies that had been under different Cabinet secretaries and never worked together. Bringing unity to this hodgepodge will be difficult, said Lee Strickland, a professor of information studies at the University of Maryland who worked for the CIA for 30 years.

`Change-Resistant'

``The intelligence community is probably the most change- resistant organization in the world,'' Strickland said.

Allen heads an operation that includes Coast Guard officers feeding information on waterborne threats, federal air marshals keeping suspicious plane passengers under surveillance, Customs and Border Patrol workers scanning overseas letters and Secret Service agents tracking down threats to the president and foreign dignitaries.

In addition to organizing itself from within, the operation must figure out how to coordinate with local authorities and the other federal intelligence agencies, Allen said.

C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the department's comments during the New York subway scare undercut Bloomberg and made national and local officials seem ``like they were competing with each other.''

The mayor is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.

Local Relations

Allen said that, seven months into the job, he and several subordinates are traveling around the country to foster better relations with New York and other municipalities. They've also worked to improve communications within the department by creating a council made up of two deputies, the heads of the nine intelligence operations and him that meet to share information. Allen said he's also beefing up training and recruitment of intelligence employees.

He'll need to do that if he hopes to sustain any changes he's making after he retires, Lowenthal said. ``The brain drain of that one man walking out will be staggering,'' he said. - bloomberg.