Scowcroft's Vanishing Plan

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 15, 2002; 8:01 AM

Four months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President Bush issued an order mandating "independent, but parallel reviews" of the U.S. intelligence community by internal and external panels with an eye toward assessing capabilities and recommending major reforms.

Now that Bush has moved on to homeland defense, this initiative seems all but forgotten. While both reviews were supposed to have been completed by the end of September, 2001 Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet abandoned the internal study shortly after Sept. 11 because those assigned to work on it suddenly had more urgent duties.

The external panel, led by retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, quietly presented its recommendations to the National Security Council in March, but nothing has happened since then.

Scowcroft favors removing the three largest defense intelligence agencies--the National Security Agency which intercepts electronic intelligence, the National Reconnaissance Agency which builds spy satellites, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency which analyzes spy satellite photos--from Pentagon control. Scowcroft would transfer authority over these agencies to a newly empowered DCI who would have actual budget and administrative control over them.

But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld opposes such a move, which may explain why the Scowcroft plan doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Maybe the House-Senate intelligence committee will do better when it comes to actually reforming the community, although its recent decision to postpone public hearings into Sept. 11 intelligence failures is hardly confidence inspiring.

I've never been one to blame the intelligence agencies for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But I do believe the intelligence community needs to be shaken up, the way Rumsfeld is shaking up the Defense Department with his relentless emphasis on military "transformation."

And I think rigorous public hearings, not by the joint intelligence committee, but by an independent commission or select committee, is probably the best way to jump start intelligence "transformation." If Rumsfeld had become DCI instead of defense secretary, which almost happened, a lot of china would have been broken already at CIA headquarters.

Intelligence Reform by Rumsfeld

As the joint intelligence committee dithers and the Scowcroft plan languishes, Rumsfeld is moving ahead with his own intelligence reform. The Pentagon chief is pushing Congress to approve a new position for an under secretary of defense for intelligence. The Senate's version of the fiscal 2002 defense authorization bill includes a provision creating the post and stands a good chance of adoption.

Richard Haver, Rumsfeld's special assistant for intelligence issues, recently explained Rumsfeld's thinking about the need for a new under secretary for intelligence. Speaking at a conference at the Joint Military Intelligence College Haver quoted his boss as saying: "I want one dog to kick, but when it comes to intelligence, I have to go down to the pound!"

In an interview last week, Haver said Rumsfeld gets intelligence reports from so many people that he finds it difficult understand what's going on. As for Haver's own powers of coordination, he said he lacks both the staff and the authority over the defense intelligence agencies to do the job from his current perch.

"I'm just a gadfly," Haver said. "I have no office under me. If you're going to do this [new under secretary's] job, you probably need several dozen people to keep track of events."

Haver said creating the job would not create more intelligence bureaucracy, since Rumsfeld wants to return all of the intelligence officials now scattered throughout the Pentagon on special assignment back to their home agencies.

"There's a dog's breakfast of players here," Haver said. "I think the boss believes they could more practically be put to work on this problem that they presently are."

Rumsfeld wants to give the intelligence agencies within the Pentagon more authority and autonomy, not less, Haver said, so they can be more responsive, both to the defense secretary and the director of central intelligence.

Spy Satellites Over Peoria

The thought of U.S. spy satellites zooming over the United States with their cameras turned on may be troubling to many in America.

But James R. Clapper Jr., a retired Air Force lieutenant general who now heads the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), told the Defense Writers Group last month that Congress must now redefine the heretofore inviolate boundary between foreign and domestic intelligence gathering. He wants NIMA to start helping the homeland defense effort.

"You have foreign intelligence resources that are appropriated by the Congress for doing exactly that," Clapper said. "The issue is, how can you use those same capabilities that we have built up and acquired over many, many years and made a lot of investment in and apply it to a domestic contextÖI would predict some changes [will occur] in the basic policies and laws that govern how we have always done business."

Clapper said NIMA has already created a homeland defense unit to provide domestic satellite imagery, maps and three-dimensional computer terrain simulations to the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Tom Ridge's homeland security office.

The need for "geospatial information" by police departments, fire departments and local medical personnel, Clapper said, is "every bit as demanding and exquisite and specific as, say, the special ops forces."

At this year's winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Clapper said, NIMA sent a group of mapping and imagery specialists who provided computer-generated simulations to help police plan security operations and understand "what the range might be, if there were a sniper on top of a building and how to plan for that."

Purchasing high-quality commercial satellite imagery from companies like Space Imaging, Clapper said, provides one way around thorny legal issues presented by the production and distribution of classified, super high-resolution satellite imagery of objects in the United States.

But Clapper questioned NIMA's decision to purchase all of the satellite imagery of Afghanistan produced by Space Imaging during the first 60 days of the war on terrorism. That imagery was purchased, he said, to fill gaps in coverage by U.S. spy satellites and deny access to al Qaeda and other adversaries.

Any future attempt by NIMA to exercise "checkbook shutter control, as some have called it," Clapper said, "would be on an extremely limited basis. I think doing so frankly does have a chilling impact on the industry and those who might choose to invest in it."