Suggestions on fixing intelligence

Though judgment is difficult without having seen more of a congressional committee’s report on intelligence failures in connection with terrorist incidents of Sept. 11, 2001, it appears the lawmakers did a creditable job. Let’s hope they hold the feet of the executive branch to the fire in pursuit of the committee’s recommendations, most of which probably have merit.

The president’s appointment of a blue ribbon commission to review the congressional report can serve only to delay action on congressional findings and recommendations painstakingly developed over the course of almost a year. George Mitchell and Henry Kissinger already have thought better of it, each for his own reasons. The Congress should not accept any executive branch assertion that action must be deferred until an independent commission has done its work.

From the fragments of the congressional report we have seen to date, it seems the investigators truly zeroed in on cases. For example, they apparently highlighted lapses in the FBI’s handling of the case of Zacarias Moussaoui. We sense also that they focused on the CIA’s reported failure to share with the FBI highly actionable information collected in early January 2000 on Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, those who piloted American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on Sept. 11. That the committee chose to defer to the respective agencies to assign individual blame, and to take suitable administrative action, seems appropriate.

The congressional committee’s recommendation to create a Cabinet-level intelligence position is on the mark. While the National Security Act of 1947 provides for such a position, that of the director of Central Intelligence, it also provided that the DCI should double as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, also created by the 1947 legislation. In the years since 1947, it has become clear it was unrealistic to expect that arrangement to work effectively in the long run. For one thing, as intelligence technology has evolved, the lion’s share of the intelligence budget has come under the control of the Department of Defense, leaving the DCI on the outside looking in.

More important, the DCI seldom has enjoyed easy, frequent and influential access to his boss, the president of the United States. Indeed, the only DCI who ever has enjoyed sustained, effective access to the president, for better or worse, was William Casey, during the Reagan administration. Here the trick will be for the president, any president, to have the courage and good sense to appoint an independent DCI who has the scope, integrity and leadership qualities to manage properly an extremely complex portfolio and who enjoys the confidence of the Congress and the president.

At present, one person qualified for this extraordinarily challenging job is William S. Cohen, former U.S. secretary of defense, U.S. senator and co-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Robert M. Sargent of Sargentville is a former U.S. diplomat. His overseas assignments included Tunisia and Turkey.