National intelligence in good hands

John Negroponte is a good choice to serve as our first director of national intelligence. Privileged to have served with John at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Vietnam in the 1960s, I am confident that the young man I knew then, now one or our most seasoned foreign affairs specialists, possesses the intellect and strength of character to bring wisdom and common sense to the management of what should be the world’s most effective intelligence system.

Nothing could prepare a person better to moderate and rationalize the functioning of an unduly complex national intelligence structure than service as U.S. ambassador in one or more posts overseas. As one of the most important consumers of intelligence on matters related to his or her country of assignment, the ambassador learns quickly to distinguish between intelligence which is relevant and timely, and that which serves little useful purpose beyond justifying the existence of a given intelligence stream.

Since the mid-1960s, U.S. missions abroad have operated under the little known but well-established country team concept which clearly affirms the ambassador’s responsibility for ensuring that all of the missions’ operations, overt and otherwise, are conducted in a manner consistent with the U.S. national interest. On a regular basis, the ambassador is called upon to judge cost-risk vs. gain on initiatives proposed by senior representatives on the scene of a full spectrum of U.S. agencies including the Defense Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and, yes, the Central Intelligence Agency.

Occasionally, such initiatives, advocated energetically by experienced agency representatives on behalf of their headquarters, are redundant, in conflict with one another, or otherwise contrary to the U.S. national interest. In these cases, it falls to the Ambassador to adjudicate and moderate. Having served as U.S. ambassador in four different countries and the United Nations, Negroponte now is called upon to adjudicate and moderate the same competing interests at the national level.

Negroponte brings to the table important experience in working with the Congress and the potentially daunting interagency scene in Washington. I’m betting he will not be daunted. His latest appointment affords Negroponte an opportunity to lead and oversee the repair of an intelligence machine that has been in need of fixing for some time. Surely he has the courage to take strong positions and to stick to them in the interest of increasing the quality and cost-effectiveness of national intelligence programs.

It is extraordinary that our country?s senior intelligence officer should speak four foreign languages (Vietnamese, French, Spanish and Greek). It is important that he be non-ideological as I believe must be the case with Negroponte. Finally, it can only be helpful that our senior intelligence officer possess a keen sense of humor as was the case with the John Negroponte I knew 40 years ago.

Robert Sargent, of Sargentville, is a former U.S. diplomat whose overseas assignments included Belgium, Bulgaria, The Netherlands, Tunisia, Turkey and Vietnam.