NYT: Despite Terror Risk, Washington Is Unlikely to Press Reform of C.I.A. This Year

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/world/reach-war-outlook-despite-terror-risk-washington-unlikely-press-reform-cia-this.html

July 11, 2004

Despite Terror Risk, Washington Is Unlikely to Press Reform of C.I.A. This Year

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, July 10 -- Despite a scorching Senate report that describes a profound breakdown of the American intelligence system at a time of increasing terror threats, both White House officials and Congressional leaders say the political calendar will prevent any serious action until after the November elections.

President Bush's staff is already sorting through a series of proposals that he is likely to endorse but not spell out in detail when he appoints a new director of central intelligence, probably in the next two weeks. Mr. Bush, senior officials said, will probably wait until after the release of a second report, expected to be equally searing in its criticism, about the intelligence failures surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks.

One senior administration official characterized the two reports as almost mirror-image descriptions of a deeply dysfunctional intelligence apparatus, with Friday's report describing, in this official's words, "a system that assumed the presence of threats that didn't exist," and the second report detailing "a system that failed to see threats that were coming at us."

Yet any major changes would require far-reaching legislation, and some of the proposals now being considered inside the White House do not directly address what the Senate Intelligence Committee described Friday as a system marked by the "lack of information sharing, poor management and inadequate intelligence collection."

One such proposal is the designation of an intelligence czar who could have control over the $40 billion intelligence budget now dominated by the Pentagon. Senate leaders like John D. Rockefeller IV, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, and intelligence experts said the need for action was urgent given the list of imminent threats facing the country -- from reports that Al Qaeda may be planning attacks on the nation before the election to a race by North Korea and Iran to speed their nuclear programs.

But even if the reform proposals now being debated at the White House and in Congress were enacted immediately, the senators and experts said, it would take years to change a culture that the Senate committee report said had failed to put much emphasis in penetrating Iraq with human spies, had relied too much on foreign intelligence systems and had made claims about Iraq's weapons capability that were "not supported by the intelligence."

Mr. Bush said Friday that his goals included improving human and technical intelligence collection abilities. He discussed no specifics, however, and several officials who advise the White House on intelligence policy said they doubted that the president would risk beginning a prolonged debate about reforming the system now.

"The president hasn't decided how deeply he wants to take this on now," said one senior official involved in the internal debate. "Everyone knows that serious reform is going to be strongly opposed by the Pentagon and the armed services committees," which could lose some of their budgetary control.

"And the fact is that no one in Washington -- not the president, not the Congress -- will have the time to take this on until next year," the official said.

Given the unpredictability of politics in an election year, however, the Democrats will probably force the issue to the forefront of the political agenda.

If it becomes a significant issue, Mr. Bush could be forced to act, just as political forces pressed him to action in creating both the Department of Homeland Security and the Sept. 11 commission.

Arguing over such reforms during a campaign against Senator John Kerry, Mr. Bush's political advisers said, might remind Americans about the specific charges that both Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made almost weekly about Iraq's alleged nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs.

The Senate committee report on Friday confirmed what has been known for months -- that many of those charges were "not supported by the intelligence." The report went further, however, saying that the assumptions that Saddam Hussein must have revived those programs were fueled by a "group think" dynamic.

Though Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the information was based on current, reliable intelligence, the committee concluded that "the intelligence community appears to have decided that the difficulty and risks inherent in developing sources or inserting operations officers into Iraq outweighed the potential benefits."

Congress has been urged by several commissions in the past decade to act on the intelligence structure, but it has quickly become mired in committee politics and rivalries between the intelligence agencies.

But several Congressional leaders said the debate would not even begin until Mr. Bush declares his own views on several critical issues, including separating the job of running the C.I.A. from the job of overseeing the nation's intelligence operations.

The Senate committee charged that George J. Tenet, the departing director of central intelligence who was to leave his post on Sunday, had confused the two roles, tailoring his advice to Mr. Bush about Iraq to fit the C.I.A.'s views and giving far too little credence to doubts raised by other intelligence agencies.

"We cannot get an answer about what ideas they like and what they can't stand," said Representative Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and co-author of one of several bills calling for a reorganization of the intelligence system that would include a new director of national intelligence.

Her proposal, however, would not be as radical as one recommended to Mr. Bush by the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which would give far greater authority to the new intelligence czar.

That is one of several proposals, submitted by the board and developed inside the National Security Council that have been on Mr. Bush's desk for nearly two years.

Most of the proposals that Mr. Bush is expected to discuss with his senior aides, according to officials involved in the debate, have met with little enthusiasm within the White House. Mr. Bush has not decided on even the least controversial ones, like giving a new director of central intelligence a term of five to seven years, similar to the decade-long term for the F.B.I. director.

Such a fixed term, the theory goes, would insulate the intelligence director from political pressures, though the Senate panel concluded there was no evidence that politics had led to the intelligence community's over-estimation of Iraq's weapons programs.

In conversations among one another, several of Mr. Bush's top national security officials have expressed concern that a prolonged reorganization could disrupt intelligence operations inside the Pentagon, which controls nearly all of the nation's intelligence agencies except for the C.I.A., and smaller units at the State and Energy Departments.

And there is still disagreement within the intelligence community about whether the Senate committee put together the right diagnosis.

On Friday, John E. McLaughlin, the soft-spoken and scholarly career analyst who takes over on Sunday as the acting director of central intelligence, argued that the agency's errors were largely in how it presented intelligence, not in a fundamental failure to gather it.

Mr. McLaughlin said "one significant error" was in publishing an executive summary of the intelligence estimate about Iraq "without sufficient caveats and disclaimers where our knowledge was incomplete."

Yet referring to Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, he said: "I think Senator Roberts called this an 'assumption train.' If it was an assumption train, we were not the engine. I'm not even sure we were the coal car. I don't know where we were on it, but people all around the world made the assumption that this country had weapons."

Others say the Iraq experience is already engendering more caution, perhaps too much caution.

They cite as an example a recently produced, highly classified assessment of North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

When international inspectors were ordered out of the country 18 months ago, the assessment said North Korea possessed enough plutonium to produce six or eight weapons. Yet the new report hedges on the question of how many nuclear weapons the country produced, giving a range for the number of weapons that one official said was "so big as to be almost entirely useless."

Within hours of the release of the Senate committee's report on Friday, White House officials were sending e-mail messages to one another citing specific conclusions that they read as exonerating Mr. Bush's top aides for the president's claim that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Africa.

For weeks last summer, C.I.A. officials argued that the White House had ignored warnings that the intelligence was suspect.

In private conversations, White House officials paging through the report expressed anger at what one official called "remarkably sloppy work" by the C.I.A., insisting that Mr. Bush never uttered claims about Iraq's weapons that had not first been vetted by the agency.

"You could argue it's the same kind of group think that led them to miss the fall of the Soviet Union and the India-Pakistan nuclear tests," the official said.