AMERICAN.COM

Today President Obama will sign into law the fiscal 2010 intelligence authorization bill. Never mind that the fiscal year to which it applies ended a week ago. I’d like to say this bill is better late than never, but the truth is, never might have been the better solution. That’s not to say that more oversight by Congress is not welcome. It has been six long years since Congress has passed an intelligence authorization bill, a situation that severely weakened the two intelligence committees. In this bill, congressional Lilliputians—with the help of an administration that has demonstrated its own diminutive appetite for playing offense in our dangerous world—have attached a series of constraints that weaken our nation’s intelligence capabilities and may spell the end of covert action. The intelligence community has two ways to protect us. One is defensive—collecting intelligence. The other is offensive—covert action, or taking the fight to our adversaries. At House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s insistence, the entire membership of both intelligence committees will now be notified of presidential “findings” launching covert actions, instead of limiting notifications to the “Gang of Eight” congressional leaders as in the past. Now, unless the administration files a report in writing that doing so would harm national security, 41 members of Congress will receive formal notification of covert action findings in a porous two-step process that is tantamount to public announcement, given the unlikelihood of 41 people—and untold staff—keeping a secret. All it takes is one dissenter to reveal it and the cat is out of the bag. Anyone who has been involved in this issue knows that public revelation is the death knell of a covert action. In addition, the House Speaker insisted that the Government Accountability Office for the first time be given access to the intelligence community. Large numbers of additional people outside the intelligence community will gain access to our nation’s secrets, and, as a result, instead of our national security being strengthened, it will be further imperiled.

But the real damage is in the covert action notification. This was a classic deal with the devil made by intelligence authorizers with Pelosi. The price is weakening our national security by severely limiting, if not killing, covert action. From the perspective of those who think we should not have spies that do anything but collect intelligence and should unilaterally give up this valuable capability, it’s a signal achievement. For the rest of us, tying one hand behind our back in a dangerous world is folly.

Gardner Peckham is managing director of the Prime Policy Group, was a member of the National Commission on Terrorism in 2000, and has served as a consultant to the CIA.

With the departure of Dennis Blair as Director of the Office of National Intelligence, Washington can once again engage in one of its favorite activities: rearranging the deck chairs in the intelligence community. The president’s Intelligence Advisory Board recently reported that it was “sharply critical” of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) performance, concluding that it was overstaffed and dysfunctional. And last week, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence identified 14 intelligence failures leading up to the attempted Christmas bombing aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit. In the wake of these discouraging reports—which undoubtedly contributed to the president’s decision to fire Blair—Senator Joseph Lieberman, an author of the bill that created the ODNI, now wants to see if the authority of that office should be strengthened, perhaps by combining the 16-plus agencies of the intelligence community (IC) into a new cabinet level department.

How did we get to this level of paralysis and dysfunction? The answer: it took a long time. At the heart of this answer is another question: Is the intelligence community there to support policy makers or the military? For decades, the IC has been a pendulum that swung serenely in both directions. In times of peace, the IC provided analysis and assessments to the president and other policy makers. In times of war, it became more responsive to urgent military needs. But then came advancements in technology, including smart weapons that require vast amounts of satellite-produced geospatial positioning data for targeting. Other advancements made it possible to provide in near real-time high-resolution photos to military units in combat. Since the Gulf War in 1991, the military appetite for intelligence resources has grown exponentially. In addition, we now find ourselves in a constant state of war for the last eight years—and the foreseeable future—with vastly greater and more complicated overseas military deployments than the intelligence system has ever had to support. The pendulum has swung severely in the direction of military support and is stuck there.

Further complicating this issue is a new, third dimension. The pendulum now needs to swing on a second axis. Since 9/11, there is a need to vastly step up counterterrorism efforts and include domestic and law enforcement agencies in the process. The necessity of involving many components of the new Department of Homeland Security and the FBI in this process has resulted in vastly more complexity. The result has been a precipitous decline in the quality of information and analysis to the president and the policy makers as other urgent priorities squeeze them out.

So, does the magnitude of the problem and the sheer size of the intelligence community merit the creation of a new government department? And, will this result in better information to inform policy makers? Absolutely not.

No one should be happy with the performance of the ODNI. It was born of compromise and expediency and predestined to fail miserably. The understandable outrage of the families of the victims of 9/11 and a surge of national sympathy on their behalf spawned the 9/11 Commission, whose report and recommendations then heavily influenced the substance and urgency of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which carried Congress by large margins. Who could vote against it?! Rewiring the intelligence community was going to solve all our problems. Whatever misgivings President Bush had, he got the message—and he got out of the way. The bill created a new layer of bureaucracy called ODNI that hangs over the IC like the alien doomsday ship in the movie Independence Day. The Senate wanted the DNI to control the intelligence community. The House wanted the DNI to coordinate activity in the IC. Under current circumstances, the DNI can do neither.

So, is the answer to create a Department of Intelligence? In the annals of terrible ideas, this one gets a special place. First of all, in our system, cabinet-level departments are headed by appointees of the elected president and these appointees are policy makers. We don’t give the career military a seat at the policy-making table because the military is a support organization. In short, we may want their opinion during policy formulation, but at the end of the day, policy makers decide and the military branches take their orders and march, sail, or fly. By the same token, the intelligence community is a collection of support organizations populated by careerists. If we elevate them to departmental policy makers, they will have a vested interest in the outcome of policy deliberations and will skew information to support their policy preferences. Who will provide unbiased information to the president, his Cabinet, and Congress upon which decisions are to be made? Nobody will, and that would be a tragedy for our democracy, for good governance, and for our national security. However flawed the concept of a DNI may be, we need it to be successful. So the first order of business is to ensure that the next DNI should be someone who understands that the purpose of this office is to support the president and the functions and operations of the president’s cabinet-level departments.

Gardner Peckham is managing director of the Prime Policy Group, was a member of the National Commission on Terrorism in 2000, and has served as a consultant to the CIA.