Citing the dual circumstances of the
end of the Cold War and a strained national fiscal environment, the chairmen
of the Senate and House intelligence committees in February 1992 introduced
companion bills (1) emblematic of the pressures to reduce and reorganize
U.S. intelligence activities. Neither bill was enacted, but the proposals
continue to define and limit the debate on the future of U.S. intelligence.
The existence of the bills pushed the
Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and the Defense Secretary into making
structural adjustments in areas under their control, in an effort to forestall
more sweeping legislative action. Additionally, aspects of the proposals
made their way into the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1993,
(2) after the Administration negotiated wording which reduced the impact
of the changes on intelligence structures.
There are several levels of concern
inherent in these circumstances. At a basic level, there is a question as
to the results that might be anticipated from the proposed changes. There
is also an issue with regard to timing. The post-Cold War world may prove
to be less globally dangerous than the era that preceded it, but it will
also be less predictable. Encouraging stability and managing change in a
worldwide context will be major considerations for U.S. policy into the
next century.
We can assume that informed decision making will remain a necessity and that accurate intelligence is needed for the complex political, economic, and military decisions U.S. leaders will face. Given the importance of structures to outcomes, we need to focus on what intelligence should be doing in this new world before we lock into law radically altered bureaucratic structures. At yet another level, there is a question as to whether the legislative branch should be the force driving functional and structural change in intelligence matters. Do Congress' fiscal and oversight powers make it an equal partner to the executive branch in determining how intelligence is going to be conducted within the bounds of available resources?
That the texture, content, and structure
of U.S. national security policy will change in the coming years is certain;
the nature of that change is in doubt. Here, the legislation serves as a
lens through which to survey the changes being discussed for the U.S. intelligence
structure; it is suggested that better diagnostic efforts are needed before
surgery begins.
The baseline legal foundation governing
U.S. intelligence is the National Security Act of 1947. (3) The Act established
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as the leading U.S. governmental entity
to gather, process, and disseminate intelligence. It also created the position
of DCI and gave it the tripartite responsibilities of chief intelligence
advisor to the President, coordinator of U.S. intelligence activities, and
head of the CIA. At the same time, the CIA was placed under the control
of a new White House entity, the National Security Council (NSC).
Before establishing the 1947 structure,
President Truman and his advisers had to come to terms with the root question
of whether a centralized peacetime intelligence structure was needed
in this country. The answers to this question involved compromises in 1947,
and the results have been played out over time as a continuing series of
bureaucratic and political compromises. The question has yet to be definitively
answered and remains integral to today's debate on the nature of the U.S.
intelligence establishment.
The National Security Act did not establish
a rigidly centralized American intelligence structure. It was expected that
departments and agencies with ongoing collection and analysis activities
serving their specific needs would continue such efforts. At most, the formation
of the CIA and the NSC created a framework for an intelligence community
within which the DCI would be the President's chief intelligence officer
and would coordinate U.S. intelligence activities. (4)
It is instructive that in the fifteen
years following the legislative founding of the CIA, three new, large intelligence
agencies were created, none of which was included explicitly in existing
or additional legislation. The National Security Agency (NSA), the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
were established by executive or departmental action. The first two of these
agencies came under the direct command authority of the Secretary of Defense.
In the latter case, the new agency represented a negotiated solution to
a continuing dispute between the CIA and the Air Force over control of systems
and budgets associated with the nation's growing satellite reconnaissance
program.
Since the mid-1970s, Presidents Ford,
Carter, and Reagan have put the Intelligence Community on a more formalized
basis by specifying its composition in a series of Executive Orders. Executive
Order No. 12,333, issued by President Reagan in 1981, (5) continues in effect.
It defines the Intelligence Community as: CIA; NSA; DIA; "offices within
the Department of Defense for the collection of specialized national foreign
intelligence through reconnaissance programs" (NRO); State Department's
Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR); intelligence elements of the
Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
Department of the Treasury, and Department of Energy; and staff elements
of the DCI.
There is great diversity of function,
primary interest, organizational size, amount of budget, and relative bureaucratic
power included within the Intelligence Community. Perhaps the single greatest
obstacle over time to the DCI's assuming a stronger role in managing the
Intelligence Community has been the situation where more than eighty percent
of the $30 billion a year intelligence budget has been under the control
of the Secretary of Defense. (6) However, since 1976, the DCI has had the
responsibility of developing and presenting the National Foreign Intelligence
Program (NFIP) budget to the President and Congress. (7) At present, the
DCI reviews and approves requests for reprogramming within the NFIP and
monitors its implementation, but cannot reprogram such funds on his own
authority.
The proposed legislation is animated
by two core concepts: centralized control of the Intelligence Community
and a restructuring of intelligence organizations along functionally specific
lines. The bills also evidence a sweeping view of the role of the legislative
branch in the national security process generally and the intelligence process
in specific.
A. Centralized control:
The legislation envisages the creation
of an intelligence "czar," separate from the CIA and with strengthened
authorities. The new head of the Intelligence Community--the Director of
National Intelligence (DNI)--would exercise the DCI's responsibilities as
the President's principal intelligence advisor and coordinator of the Intelligence
Community. In essence, the DNI would assume the role of a unified commander
in the military. Individual agencies would retain command of the "assets"
of intelligence but would be budgetarily subject to the DNI's authority.
The DNI would develop the NFIP budget and allocate, obligate, expend, and
reprogram all NFIP funds. The legislation also provides for the aggregate
dollar amount of the NFIP to be made public; the details would continue
to be classified.
Two deputy directors would assist the
DNI. The two offices together would constitute a new entity to be called
the National Intelligence Center. Both positions seem to be projected as
dual staff and line management jobs.
A Deputy Director of National Intelligence for the Intelligence Community would have under his authority a new entity called the Office for Warning and Crisis Support. This office centralizes at the national level activities involving "indications and warning" intelligence, which are now scattered among civilian and military agencies. The coordinating role analytically for this function is handled on the current National Intelligence Council by the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Warning.
B. Function-based organizational structure:
The second core concept involves a restructuring of intelligence into "vertically integrated" function-based organizations or, in the current jargon, functional "stovepipes." Essentially, there would be a national agency for human collection (which would retain the capability for covert action), another for collection of signals intelligence, a new agency for imagery collection, a separate agency for baseline analysis work, and another body for "higher-level" estimative analysis.
Baseline analysis work would be headed
by the second of the DNI's two deputies--the Deputy Director of National
Intelligence for Estimates and Analysis. An Office of Intelligence Analysis
would include the analytical units now in the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence
and other (unspecified) analysis entities.
The legislation gives the Defense Department
jurisdiction over national imagery programs. It creates a new bureaucratic
entity--the National Imagery Agency--within the Defense Department, under
a director appointed by the Defense Secretary. The agency is given responsibility
for tasking imagery collectors, exploiting and analysizing the results of
imagery collection, and disseminating the product. The Senate bill also
gives the new agency sole responsibility for procurement and operation of
overhead reconnaissance systems.
The National Security Agency (NSA)
is given a statutory basis. The barebones establishment wording affirms
NSA's role as the nation's preeminent signals intelligence (SIGINT) and
codemaking organization. In addition, the Senate bill gives NSA the charter
as the sole agent for procuring and operating signals intelligence-related
overhead systems. The House bill confines this mandate to "defining
the technical specifications," with procurement and operation of such
systems resting with the Defense Department's Reconnaissance Support Activity.
The bills seem to close out the development, engineering, and operational
role that the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) has
played almost from the inception of the high-tech era in intelligence collection.
The CIA would continue to exist as
a separate agency, under a Presidentially appointed Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency (DCIA). The agency's activities are, however, limited
to human source intelligence (HUMINT) collection, coordination of the efforts
of HUMINT collectors elsewhere in the government, and the conduct of approved
covert action operations.
The original vague wording of the National
Security Act of 1947 regarding covert action is made marginally more explicit
in the proposed legislation. The DCIA is given the responsibility for "performing
such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national
security as the President or the National Security Council may direct, including
the carrying out of such covert actions as are authorized by the President.
. . ." (8)
Beyond including the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) in their lists of the proposed new Intelligence Community,
neither bill addresses the function, organization, or role of counterintelligence
within the U.S. intelligence structure.
Although the supporters of intelligence
reorganization tend to point to the end of the Cold War as a major reason
for change action at this time, the current debate is grounded in decades-old
arguments.
A. Centralized control:
The idea of an intelligence czar was
clearly considered--and rejected--prior to the creation of the CIA in 1947.
One of its most consistent recent proponents may be Stansfield Turner, President
Carter's DCI. Turner requested that Carter give the DCI "full management
and operating authority over all the agencies operated by the Defense Department
for collecting national intelligence. . . ." (9) Like presidents before
and since, Carter chose not to go down the centralization road, opting instead
to use the DCI as coordinator of the diverse components of the Intelligence
Community.
Earlier, the Church Committee had studied
the idea of an independent DCI to serve as a central force in American intelligence.
This reflected the committee's concern about possible conflict between the
DCI's broad community role and his more specific role as head of an operating
agency. The committee considered creating the equivalent of a DNI separate
from any agency affiliation or responsibility, but dropped the idea. It
decided that such a move would create a disembodied head, deprived of independent
support and lacking the bureaucratic clout to operate effectively. (10)
In its present incarnation, the DNI
concept includes the expectation that the position would manage the national-level
intelligence analysis now performed in the CIA and elsewhere. This potentially
addresses the problem of bureaucratic isolation identified by the Church
Committee. However, it runs counter to the clear trend for presidents to
seek to have at their disposal multiple intelligence inputs and to keep
the authority over intelligence activities dispersed throughout an interlocking
bureaucracy coordinated through the office of the DCI and the NSC.
Despite a clear bias in favor of centralized
control of the Intelligence Community, the legislation also shows some ambivalence
on the part of the authors toward that concept. For all the emphasis on
DNI control of the intelligence budget, the proposals exempt from the NFIP
and, therefore, from the DNI's direct authority those intelligence activities
belonging to the Defense Department's Tactical Intelligence and Related
Activities (TIARA) program. The TIARA budget, which comprises more than
a third of total intelligence funding, would continue to be managed as a
separate program by the Defense Secretary. The line dividing national and
tactical intelligence is not always clearcut, and the Defense Secretary's
authority to define what is tactical intelligence could have significant
impact on the scope of the DNI's authority.
In addition, the proposed legislation
leaves the National Security Agency under the operational control of the
Defense Secretary, places the newly created National Imagery Agency within
the Defense Department, and gives legislative cachet to the existence of
the Defense Intelligence Agency. The latter organization was widely regarded
as a target for termination even before the current fiscally constrained
environment became the focal point for change in the Intelligence Community.
B. Function-based organizational structure:
The concept of creating "vertically
integrated" or functionally based intelligence organizations ("stovepipes")
is seen by its supporters as simplifying and consolidating intelligence
entities and, thereby, eliminating duplication of effort among them. The
goal is greater efficiency.(11) There are a number of practical and philosophical
problems with this approach.
One problem is the assumption that
"efficiency" will produce better intelligence. Even as strong
a proponent of separating the position of head of the Intelligence Community
from that of CIA head as former-DCI Stansfield Turner opposes trying to
centralize analysis. He argues that analysis requires "competition,
freedom to express iconoclastic views, and independence from the influence
of policy." (12)
Former-DCI and Defense Secretary James
R. Schlesinger went even further in testimony to the Senate intelligence
committee. He noted that competition and duplication can be useful in the
world of intelligence and that their elimination might mean the loss of
"potentially fruitful differences of opinion." Schlesinger warned
that: "The single-minded pursuit of efficiency will not have the sought-after
effect. . . . Rather, it will result in the accepted, winked-at or under-the-table
diversion of resources to intelligence activities that will inflate the
actual, if not the nominal, bill for intelligence." (13)
In the same vein, a former NSA Director,
Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, told the committee that military leaders and policymakers
need their own in-house analysts in order to ensure that their specific
questions are being answered. (14)
Concern also exists that the consolidation
of activities envisaged by the legislation would disrupt existing synergistic
cross-functional relationships. This is particularly the situation between
the CIA's human-source collectors and analysts. Some experts argue that
there is a need to keep the analytic side close to the covert collection
function. Both are needed to, in effect, keep the other one honest, and
separating them invites trouble on both sides. The interacting and dynamic
relationship between the two often antagonistic components, which has developed
over the forty-six years of the CIA's existence, would be lost if the CIA's
analysts were displaced into a separate, standalone organization in the
interest of providing clearly defined functional separations among intelligence
organizations.
It is in the area of defining the new
functionally differentiated Intelligence Community that the bills show their
greatest deficiency: They omit any consideration of where counterintelligence
and the agencies engaged in that function fit within the proposed structure.
This is a serious omission, and is difficult to understand for several reasons.
One reason is that the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence has been studying the counterintelligence problem
for some time. In 1989, the Committee created a special panel (the "Jacobs
Panel") to examine the conduct of U.S. counterintelligence activities.
In May and July 1990, the Committee took testimony from panel members and
others on ways to improve U.S. counterintelligence measures. (15)
A second reason why attention to the
intelligence-counterintelligence meld might have been expected is related
to changes made recently in the Defense Department's counterintelligence
structure. Assets responsible for counterintelligence, security programs,
and information systems security have been brought together under the office
of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Command, Control, Communications
and Intelligence). The move places counterintelligence in an organization
that deals with intelligence and intelligence policy. It signals the emergence
of a new concept that recognizes the need for counterintelligence and intelligence
to be moving in the same direction and working together if civilian and
military decisionmakers are to have effective support. (16)
C. President versus Congress:
It is instructive as to the current
state of relations between the legislative and the executive branches that
Congress is forcing the pace of post-Cold War retrenchment and restructuring
of U.S. intelligence, an area once regarded as almost the exclusive province
of the executive. It can, in fact, be argued that the current pressures
from Congress to reorganize the Intelligence Community are substantially
fueled by the ongoing struggle between the executive and the legislative
branches over primacy in the broader foreign policy arena. (17)
The very existence of the proposed
legislation suggests that the Congressmen are acting on the basis of a conception
of the role of the legislative branch that places that branch on a par with
the executive branch in the making of decisions concerning the intelligence
process. Taken as a package, the proposals are the forerunners of a level
of legislative involvement in intelligence matters that would represent
a further evolution in the concept of "intelligence oversight"
by Congress.
There is no real question that Congress
"can" force massive changes in the Intelligence Community, if
it so desires; the power of the pursestrings certainly makes this well within
the institution's reach. The central question, however, becomes a normative
one of whether the President or Congress should be the governmental
branch taking the lead in organizing and managing the Intelligence Community.
At a time when "change" is
the watchword on all sides of the political spectrum, there is little doubt
that change is inevitable for the U.S. Intelligence Community. If for no
other reason, this is the case because the absence of an overarching direct
threat to the country's security combined with a towering national fiscal
deficit leaves little support for continuing the level of funding for intelligence
activities that was the hallmark of the Cold War and particularly of the
1980s. (18) The root question, however, is, "What kind of change?"
And secondarily, there is the question addressed in this paper, "Is
the change represented by the two bills before Congress the kind that is
needed?" The answer to this latter question is basically "no."
The need is for a flexible and responsive
intelligence structure working against targeted agendas driven by clearly
defined national security requirements. An agenda drawn up today might include
issues of regional instability, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,
terrorism, narcotics, and economic competition. Standing alone, however,
that agenda would be inadequate. The immediate future will be a time of
uncertainty when the threats the nation faces will lack the clarity of the
East-West confrontation.
Thus, the problem to be confronted
in creating an Intelligence Community for the twenty-first century is larger
than efficiency alone. We must first identify what it is we need from our
intelligence organizations and, then, move forward to effect structural
changes keyed to those needs. This can best be done from within the executive
branch, with the encouragement of Congress through its searching evaluation
of budgets and programs presented by the President and the DCI.
1. Congress, Senate, To amend the National Security Act of 1947 to reorganize the United States Intelligence Community to provide for the improved management and execution of United States intelligence activities, and for other purposes, 102d Cong., 2d Sess., S. 2198; and Congress, House, To Reorganize the United States Intelligence Community, and for other purposes, 102d Cong., 2d Sess., H.R. 4165.
2. Public Law 102-496, signed by President Bush on October 24, 1993. See L. Britt Snider, "Assessing the 1992 Intelligence Reorganization Legislation," National Security Law Report 15, no. 5 (May 1993): 1, 3.
3. National Security Act, U.S. Code, vol. 50, secs. 401-405 (1988).
4. "[T]he principle of federation prevailed over the concept of tight centralization in shaping the structure of the intelligence community." Henry Howe Ransom, The Intelligence Establishment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 81.
5. President, "Executive Order No. 12,333," Federal Register (1982) vol. 46, p. 59941, reprinted in National Security Act, sec. 401.
6. One estimate of the FY 1992 intelligence budget gives the following agency/activity breakdown in a $29.318 billion total: NRO $6.2; NSA $3.9; Defense Reconnaissance Support Program $0.536; DIA $0.582; Air Force intelligence $1.5; Army intelligence $1.5; Navy intelligence $0.5; TIARA $11; CIA $3.2; Intelligence Community Staff $0.1; State Department $0.05; Department of Energy $.15; and FBI $0.1. Patrick E. Tyler, "The Task: Slip Spies Into the New World Order," New York Times, 19 May 1991, sec. 4, p. 5.
7. The NFIP consists of the programs of the CIA, the Consolidated Cryptologic Program, the General Defense Intelligence Program, and the NRO; other programs designated by the DCI and the agency head as national foreign intelligence or counterintelligence activities; and activities of staff elements of the DCI. Tactical military intelligence activities are specifically excluded from the NFIP. E.O. 12,333, Sec. 3.4(g)(1)-(5).
8. S. 2198, sec. 202(a); H.R. 4165, sec. 142(3) (emphasis added).
9. Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1985), 262. Since leaving the DCI position, Turner has continued to argue the merits of a DNI. See Turner, "Intelligence for a New World Order," Foreign Affairs (Fall 1991): 150-166.
10. Scott D. Breckinridge, The CIA and the U.S. Intelligence System (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), 315.
11. According to Senator Boren, "our goal must be a better product at a lower cost." Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 22 February 1992, 416.
12. Turner, "Intelligence,"165-166.
13. Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 22 February 1992, 416.
14. Ibid.
15. Congress, Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence, S. 2726 to Improve U.S. Counterintelligence Measures: Hearings Before the Select Committee on Intelligence, 101st Cong., 2d sess., 23 May and 12 July 1990.
16. Nina Stewart, "In Transition: Counterintelligence and Security Countermeasures in the Information Age," American Intelligence Journal 13, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 11.
17. See Russell J. Bruemmer, "Intelligence Community Reorganization: Declining the Invitation to Struggle," Yale Law Journal 101 (January 1992): 867-891.
18. The reduction in the Fiscal Year 1993 intelligence authorization was six percent below the President's request. Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 31 October 1992, 3489-3490.
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