Competitive Intelligence

Do We Need a NID?: Negroponte Nominated for National Intelligence Director

President Bush thinks he's found his man for the job of National Intelligence Director, last week nominating ambassador John Negroponte for what will surely be a challenging job with limited authority - the LA Times sums up:

As U.S. ambassador to Iraq for the last eight months, John D. Negroponte deftly maneuvered between warring factions, deadly ambushes and dubious allies in a brutal combat zone.

Negroponte will need those skills and more for the bureaucratic wars he will face in Washington if he is confirmed as the first director of national intelligence.

President Bush's nomination of Negroponte on Thursday ended two months of speculation about who would finally agree to oversee America's demoralized spy services.

But the surprise choice of a veteran diplomat who speaks five languages — but has no known experience working in the shadowy world of espionage — also refueled concerns that the high-profile post entailed vast responsibilities but limited authority and that it may do little to increase the nation's security.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said she warned Negroponte in a telephone conversation Thursday that he would be leaving the relative safety of the heavily guarded embassy compound in Baghdad for the uncertainties of Washington politics.

"I said, 'You're leaving the Green Zone for the red zone,' " said Harman, who was a strong proponent of the intelligence reform bill that created the job.

Negroponte supporters argued that his access to the president — and his diplomatic skill in getting incompatible agencies to work together — could outweigh his weak intelligence background.

But a Bush administration official who has worked with the easygoing diplomat described the early stages of the amorphous job as "impossible: no office, no staff, no budget."

"John doesn't have a political bone in his body," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He's never worked the political angles. But in this kind of job, he'll need political backing. This isn't just diplomacy anymore."

The official added: "Where's his political backing? In Congress? No. From the Republican Party? No. He's not in the Cabinet. Are Cabinet officers really going to report to him on anything?"

The challenge is immense. For starters, Negroponte would have to balance two often-competing roles. He would be the president's chief intelligence advisor and the leader of a sprawling spying community that is required by law to remain independent of politics.

Moreover, Negroponte must assert control over the disparate leaderships, budgets and priorities of the nation's 15 often-fractious intelligence agencies to force their entrenched bureaucracies — and an estimated 200,000 employees — to work together to prevent attacks.

Once in office, Negroponte would create his job from scratch. The law requires a report on the rewired intelligence system within a year.

He would be expected to prepare a consolidated intelligence budget, overhaul security and technology policies, coordinate priorities for strategic planning and covert operations, monitor agency performance, report to Congress, advise the president and interact with foreign governments.

He would have to mediate a growing turf battle between the CIA and the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has expanded foreign intelligence-gathering activities by the military, including the use of clandestine teams, that were traditionally undertaken by the CIA.

More important, Negroponte must work with Rumsfeld to decide how and where the estimated $40-billion annual intelligence budget is spent.

About 80% of the money is hidden within the Pentagon's budget, and the two officials must share control of Pentagon-based intelligence agencies. It's far from clear how that would work.

Also unclear is how much power Porter J. Goss, the current CIA chief, must relinquish.

Ever since the CIA was created in 1947, the CIA boss also served as director of central intelligence and was nominally in charge of all other spy services. Although he did not occupy a Cabinet position, he reported to the president. In the future, he would report to Negroponte.

Goss, who was initially considered a strong candidate to become the first national director, said Thursday that he welcomed Negroponte's nomination as a "critical step" to "create even better-coordinated working relationships and communications" between intelligence agencies.

The style Negroponte would bring to thorny problems in Washington has been apparent to many who deal with him in Iraq.

Negroponte's nomination surprised staffers at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, one of the largest U.S. missions in the world, with 3,500 employees — many of them security personnel, a testament to the danger of the posting.

Unlike his predecessor in Iraq, civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III, Negroponte has drawn high marks for his competence and low-key style. His tenure, from his arrival in June as sovereignty was returned to the Iraqis to the United Nations-sanctioned election last month, is viewed far more favorably than Bremer's, despite the widening insurgency.

Frankly, the current mission charter as illustrated by the 911 Commission that created the position is not one for a bureaucrat, but rather for a sort of "meta-analyst" that can bring together all of the resources available to the NID and connect the dots to see the larger trends in the challenge-space.

Coincidentally, I read AlterNet's interview with Dame Stella Rimington, the first woman to head the British intelligence agency MI5, offering some interesting advice for whomever ultimately assumes the new role:

A diplomat's wife in New Delhi, bored with thrift sales and amateur dramatics, Rimington wandered into MI5 as a part-time clerk typist and found herself in the middle of the Cold War. When she joined the secret service, women could only hope to be assistants. When she later became the first woman to head MI5 and the first one whose name was publicly announced, her friends and neighbors were stunned.

"All of a sudden the neighbors realized this quiet lady who lived on their street might present a bit of risk, " she laughs. "I remember one neighbor telling me I wish you wouldn't go to work just when I am taking my children to school."

The danger at the time for her and her neighbors came mostly from the threat of IRA attacks. But in the middle of the Cold War the first order of business was espionage. The advantage her generation had, says Rimington, was they knew where their enemy lived. "We knew where the KGB headquarters were, we knew what they were trying to do. Now who knows where the (terrorist) headquarters are."

It's an extremely tough challenge for today's intelligence officers. "The best intelligence comes from human beings, sources deep in the heart of organizations," says Rimington. Today, intelligence services seem to be fishing in the dark for reliable sources, ending up with embarrassing episodes like the faulty warning about a ring of Chinese nationals smuggling a dirty bomb into Massachusetts.

"I was surprised that was made public seemingly before it had been fully investigated," says Rimington. She fears that hasty warnings can backfire, making people paranoid with constant orange alerts.

Ironically, such misconceptions on questions of authority are exactly why so many Competitive Intelligence officers ultimately fail to understand the true nature of their roles... Their real job isn't to be an adminstrator or even really an astute advisor to managerial decision-makers, but to increase their organization's capability for pattern recognition of threats and opportunities as they develop, in real-time and on-demand.

Somehow, I think Bush gets it even if many others don't - "John will make sure that those whose duty it is to defend America have the information we need to make the right decisions," Bush said at the White House. "We're going to stop the terrorists before they strike."

- Arik