Intelligence reform: keeping your eye on the ball

One of the important stories largely eclipsed by news of the natural disaster in South Asia is that of progress toward meaningful intelligence reform. While Sen. Susan Collins’ success in securing passage of the Collins-Lieberman intelligence reform bill was impressive, the proof of the pudding will be, of course, in the implementation. If the administration and the Congress don’t get it right, we may be worse off than we would have been without the new legislation. And soon the process will have to absorb the findings of the commission studying intelligence failures in connection with the Iraq war.

It is worth pausing over the fact that, as reported in The New York Times of Jan. 7, the inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency has criticized sharply the agency’s performance on terrorism intelligence prior to Sept. 11, 2001. Going much further than the 9-11 Commission’s findings, the CIA internal investigation reportedly lays responsibility squarely at the feet of former DCI George Tenet and his Deputy for Operations. Presumably the inspector general’s report will include specific recommendations for addressing internal organizational weaknesses toward the obvious goal of sharply improved performance in the future.

We must hope the Congress will study the inspector general’s report carefully and support in every way possible the agency’s effort to clean up its own act. Meanwhile, it should be reassuring for those who may have questions about the integrity of process at the CIA to see that the agency’s inspector general and his staff, career professionals who were on the scene way before DCI Porter Goss showed up with his broom, understand how to go about self-examination and are prepared to do so without pulling punches.

In this context, it is unhelpful, to put it mildly, that the president chose to award George Tenet the Medal of Freedom. That he could do so in light of the 9-11 Commission’s devastating findings regarding weaknesses in the intelligence system over which Tenet presided, and while investigations continue into serious intelligence failures in connection with the costly and highly debatable Iraq war, can be seen only as an effort somehow to legitimize decisions based

on intelligence clearly flawed

and-or manipulated.

The rush to passage of legislation on a matter as important as intelligence reform was debatable. Now that the deed is done, it is critical that the key provision of that legislation, the creation of a director of national intelligence (DNI), be implemented wisely. The prospects for meaningful intelligence reform ride on the selection of the first incumbent of that position. It must be a person of extraordinary wisdom and integrity. It must be a person whose allegiance is only to ensuring the country possesses the best and most cost effective intelligence system possible. It must be a person whose strength of character transcends party politics and any sense of personal loyalty to any president.

The DNI should be as unfettered as we presume the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board to be and should be appointed for a term of office independent of the four-year presidential electoral cycle. Of the names thus far bandied about as possible appointees, only that of 9-11 Commissioner John Lehman would appear to fit the bill. 9-11 Commission Chair Thomas Kean might be an even better choice. The highly political and now particularly controversial DCI Porter Goss would be an extremely poor one.

Robert Sargent is a former U.S. diplomat whose overseas assignments included Belgium, Bulgaria, Tunisia, Turkey

and Vietnam. He lives in Sargentville.