Intelligence Report

The point of the months of work that went into reforming the nation’s intelligence community was that ultimately the community would yield better-coordinated, more-thorough information. A report this week that Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld has been running for two years an organization called the Secret Support Branch possibly without other agencies knowing of it runs entirely against the reform.

The Department of Defense said Sunday in response to a Washington Post story on the subject that, “There is no unit that is directly reportable to the Secretary of Defense for clandestine operations as is described” by the Post. But its spokesman observes, “It is accurate and should not be surprising that the Department of Defense is attempting to improve its long-standing human-intelligence capability.” There are enough qualifiers in the first statement to provide plenty of room for Congress to have questions.

According to the Post, Secretary Rumsfeld had under his direct control “small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.” A planning memo cited in the news story said the work of the Secret Support Branch would focus on gathering intelligence from places such as Yemen, Somalia, Indonesia and the Philippines. The work is said to be funded without congressional authority.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there are inherent tensions be-tween the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense, but the Post story reflected the need for the new position of director of national intelligence to oversee an overall strategy. Hearings for a director are expected soon, but the story suggests this wasn’t merely an instance of a lack of coordination. Instead, it sounds like a policy change within DoD to rely less on and contribute less to the total intelligence community.

Though the Senate had agreed in its reform to make a distinction between strategic and tactical intelligence oversight, it struggled with DoD and the House to include as much of Defense’s intelligence-gathering organization as possible in order to provide the greatest chance for analysts to see patterns, make connections and gauge risks. The new director can’t do that as well if human-intelligence resources are being diverted to operations outside even the awareness of Congress.

The public might not learn much from hearings on this issue, depending on how much is classified, but Congress should investigate the serious conclusions in the Post story. Sen. John McCain said the Armed Services Committee would be doing that; the Intelligence Committee should also want to be involved.