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REORGANIZING AMERICA’S INTELLIGENCE

COMMUNITY: A VIEW FROM THE INSIDE

HEARING

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON 

GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

AUGUST 16, 2004

Printed for the use of the Committee on Governmental Affairs

(

(II)

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine, Chairman 

TED STEVENS, Alaska 

GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio 

NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota 

ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania 

ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah 

PETER G. FITZGERALD, Illinois 

JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire 

RICHARD C. SHELBY, Alabama 

JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut 

CARL LEVIN, Michigan 

DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii 

RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois 

THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware 

MARK DAYTON, Minnesota 

FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey 

MARK PRYOR, Arkansas

MICHAEL D. BOPP, Staff Director and Chief Counsel 

MICHAEL STERN, Deputy Staff Director for Investigations 

DAVID KASS, Chief Investigative Counsel 

JOYCE A. RECHTSCHAFFEN, Minority Staff Director and Counsel 

KEVIN J. LANDY, Minority Counsel 

AMY B. NEWHOUSE, Chief Clerk 

(III)

C O N T E N T S 

Opening statements: Page 

Senator Collins ................................................................................................. 1

Senator Lieberman ........................................................................................... 2

Senator Roberts ................................................................................................ 4

Senator Rockefeller .......................................................................................... 6

Senator Voinovich ............................................................................................. 31

Senator Levin .................................................................................................... 34

Senator Coleman .............................................................................................. 37

Senator Durbin ................................................................................................. 40

Senator Carper ................................................................................................. 43

Senator Dayton ................................................................................................. 46

WITNESSES 

MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 2004

Hon. William H. Webster, Former Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 

Former Director of Central Intelligence, Senior Partner, Milbank, Tweed, 

Hadley and McCloy, LLP ..................................................................................... 9

Hon. R. James Woolsey, Former Director of Central Intelligence, Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton .................................................................................. 13

Hon. Stansfield Turner, Former Director of Central Intelligence, Professor, 

School of Public Policy, University of Maryland ................................................ 18

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WITNESSES

Turner, Hon. Stansfield: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 18

Webster, Hon. William H.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 9

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 51

Woolsey, Hon. R. James: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 13

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 62

APPENDIX 

Robert M. Gates, Former Director of Central Intelligence, prepared statement ...................................................................................................................... 73

Questions and Responses for Mr. Webster from: 

Senator Voinovich ............................................................................................. 86

Senator Levin .................................................................................................... 89

Senator Durbin ................................................................................................. 94

Questions and Responses for Mr. Woolsey from: 

Senator Voinovich ............................................................................................. 97

Senator Levin .................................................................................................... 100

Senator Durbin ................................................................................................. 106

Questions for Mr. Turner from: (Responses to these questions were not received by press time.) 

Senator Voinovich ............................................................................................. 110

Senator Levin .................................................................................................... 112

Senator Durbin ................................................................................................. 116

(1)

REORGANIZING AMERICA’S INTELLIGENCE 

COMMUNITY: A VIEW FROM THE INSIDE 

MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 2004

U.S. SENATE, COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, Washington, DC. 

The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:35 a.m., in room 

SD–342 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Susan M. Collins, 

Chairman of the Committee, presiding. 

Present: Senators Collins, Lieberman, Voinovich, Coleman, 

Sununu, Levin, Durbin, Carper, and Dayton. 

Also present: Senators Roberts and Rockefeller 

OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN COLLINS 

Chairman COLLINS. The Committee will come to order. I want to 

welcome not only our witnesses today and the Members of the Governmental Affairs Committee who have rearranged their schedules 

to be here, which I very much appreciate in light of the urgency 

of our task, but I also want to recognize that we are joined today 

by the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the distinguished Senator from Kansas, Senator Roberts. And that we expect 

shortly the Ranking Member of that committee, Senator Rockefeller, to also join us. 

I felt that since the Senate Intelligence Committee has so much 

expertise in this area, and we are hearing from three former Directors of the CIA, that it would be appropriate for the Chairman and 

the Ranking Member of that committee to join us today, and I am 

very pleased that they have done so, and we welcome you, Senator 

Roberts. 

Today, the Governmental Affairs Committee holds its third hearing on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission calling for a 

restructuring of the Intelligence Community. At our last hearing, 

on August 3, we explored the National Counterterrorism Center 

proposal. The testimony that we heard from experienced intelligence officers and from key Commission staff will help us greatly 

on that component of our task. 

Today, we will focus upon the proposal for a National Intelligence Director. No other component of the Commission’s recommendations has received as much comment and debate as the 

proposed National Intelligence Director. There is considerable, but 

by no means unanimous, support for the notion that putting in 

place a National Intelligence Director will help strengthen our intelligence system. There is a considerable range of opinion, however, about the details of that position, including how it should be 

2

1The prepared statement of Mr. Gates appears in the Appendix on page 73. 

structured, where the Director should work and what authority 

this individual should have. 

It is the task of this Committee to draft legislation that would 

ensure that the NIDs of today, and for years to come, have sufficient authority to do the job effectively, while at the same time 

being subject to the restraints necessary, the oversight and accountability, to keep the position within the bounds of our constitutional system of checks and balances. In other words, we want to 

create a position with real, not just symbolic authority, yet not impose just another layer of bureaucracy nor grant so much power 

that we open the door to abuse. 

The details that we must fill in are many, and we have generated vigorous debate, as they should. These are among the questions we will ask. What powers does this new position need to be 

effective against the threat we face today and the threats we will 

face in the future? What safeguards should be included to ensure 

the independence of the National Intelligence Director? For example, where should this new office be located? Should the NID serve 

a fixed term, as does the FBI Director or serve at the pleasure of 

the President? Should the Director have deputies that are responsible for leading intelligence efforts elsewhere in government, including some who would answer not only to the Director, but also 

to a cabinet secretary, the so-called double-hatting question? From 

where will this new office get the top-notch staff that it needs? And 

perhaps most important, precisely what authority should the NID 

have over the entire Intelligence Community in terms of budget, 

personnel, technology standards, and the allocation of resources. 

The expertise and the insight of our distinguished witnesses 

today will help us in the difficult challenge of answering these 

questions wisely. Our witness panel brings together three former 

Directors of Central Intelligence from three different administrations. Their service spanned nearly three decades and witnessed an 

incredible variety of issues. They will provide us with the perspective of those who have grappled with the challenges facing our Intelligence Community while serving at the highest level. 

In addition, former CIA Director Robert Gates has submitted a 

very thoughtful written statement since he is unable to be with us 

today.1

Chairman COLLINS. Judge Webster, Mr. Woolsey, Admiral Turner, we are very pleased that you have taken the time to be with 

us today, and we look forward to hearing your testimony shortly. 

I would now like to call on the Ranking Member, my partner in 

this endeavor, Senator Lieberman. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LIEBERMAN 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. I 

join you in welcoming Senator Roberts and Senator Rockefeller to 

our Committee, and I thank the three witnesses today. It would not 

be stretching even Senatorial hyperbole to say that these are three 

wise men. They have served our country well and continue to do 

so in many capacities, and I say so, even knowing from advance 

3

texts, that they do not share exactly my reaction to all of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. 

The report of the 9/11 Commission represents an indictment of 

the status quo in our intelligence community and, in doing so, links 

the shortcomings the Commission has found directly to the horrific 

events of September 11. In my own reaction, I found the 9/11 Commission Report so convincing that I would say, not that my mind 

is totally made up, but that I would put the burden of proof on 

those who would argue with the major recommendations of the 

Commission. 

Madam Chairman, I thank you again for the pace that this Committee is setting in the consideration of the 9/11 Commission Report. We operate in a time of crisis. The specific ongoing information that we not only receive in classified briefings, but that the 

public receives in news announcements about continuing terrorist 

threats just reminds about how urgent it is that we act. Now, of 

course, we do not want to act so quickly that we do something 

wrong, but the issues that the Commission has framed are clear, 

and they are not uncomplicated, but the sooner we face them and 

thrash them out and hear opposing points of view, the sooner we 

are going to be able to act wisely. And I think the pace that the 

Committee has set and now that other committees have set, and 

we are now joined by the leaders of the Intelligence Committee of 

the Senate, is a very hopeful sign. 

This hearing focuses on the National Intelligence Director. Chairman Kean, Vice Chairman Hamilton before us said that they felt 

that of the 41 recommendations of the Commission, three were 

paramount. One was to create the one we are talking about today, 

the NID; second was the creation of the National Counterterrorism 

Center; third is the congressional reform, reform of our oversight. 

So we are focused on one of the top three here today. 

In the President’s announcement on this question a while back, 

it was not clear to me—in fact, it was too clear, and then in what 

Andy Card said afterward—that the President did not have in 

mind a strong National Intelligence Director, particularly with regard to budget authority. 

In statements made last week by National Security Adviser Rice, 

and in at least one of the newspapers that I read this morning by 

Commission Member John Lehman, who apparently has been 

speaking to the White House, there is some reason to believe that 

the White House may be prepared to clarify its position in the direction of a National Intelligence Director with stronger authority, 

particularly over the budget. If that is true, it is, in my opinion, 

a good development. I hope it is true, and I welcome it. But most 

of all, I look forward to a very open, informed, and beneficial exchange of ideas with these three witnesses who I thank, along with 

Bob Gates, for submitting a statement. 

Thank you very much. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. 

Senator Roberts, we are very pleased to have you here with us 

today, and I would invite you to make any opening comments that 

you would like to make. 

4

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PAT ROBERTS, A U.S. 

SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF KANSAS 

Senator ROBERTS. I would be happy to, Madam Chairman, and 

thank you for the invitation, and thank you for having our three 

witnesses here. I wish to thank you all for your service to our country, for your dedication for taking time out of your very valuable 

schedule to come and testify before us on such an important matter. The Hon. R. James Woolsey has already testified before our 

committee earlier, and he gave excellent testimony. 

I want to thank also, Senator Lieberman, your Ranking Member, 

for the opportunity to participate in today’s hearing. Senator 

Rockefeller and I have been very busy over the last 2 weeks or 3 

weeks with our 22 professional staff members to try to come up 

with something that makes sense. And, additionally, I want to 

thank you, Madam Chairman, for your leadership in this very crucial challenge and task as we work together to try to implement 

the goals of the 9/11 Commission. 

And I want to say a word about Senator Lieberman. It was Senator Coates, the former Senator from Indiana, and Senator 

Lieberman, who formed up an outfit, a subcommittee, if you will, 

under the Armed Services Committee, called the Emerging Threats 

and Capabilities Subcommittee. 

Now, not too many people know about that, but that subcommittee did warn, clear back in 1998 and 1999 of a tragedy very 

similar to what happened in regards to September 11. And it was 

the foresight in regards to Senator Lieberman that led to the formation of that subcommittee. He was a valuable member of that 

subcommittee, and I want to thank him for that, and I know with 

interest we have Senator Durbin, who is a very valuable Member 

of our Committee, and Senator Levin, who is also a Member of the 

Intelligence Committee, so we have some very good cross-referencing here in terms of advice and counsel. 

Let me begin by saying that Chairman Collins has invited the 

Senate Committee on Intelligence to provide input to this Committee’s work, and we will provide, Madam Chairman, a draft bill, if 

you will, for your consideration as of this week. We are also working with the 9/11 Commission. In that respect, I am referring to 

Mr. Zelikow. We are working with the administration. Senator 

Lieberman indicated that the administration is moving in a direction that I think most Members of the Senate would appreciate and 

would think would be positive. In the doing of this, we are doing 

it in terms of advice, and counsel, and suggestions, hopefully worthy of your consideration. We are not sitting still, we meaning the 

Congress. I know of at least seven hearings that have been conducted, possibly eight, and thirteen more prior to the Congress 

starting back in September. And so we are taking this very seriously. 

That draft bill that we are working with that Senator Rockefeller 

and I are working on is guided by the 9/11 Commission’s Report, 

which obviously contains some very important recommendations. 

Translating those important ideas, some of which are long overdue, 

into legislative language, however, is very complicated. As they 

say, the devil is in the details. 

5

In addition to the 9/11 Commission’s Report, and also the recommendations, the draft bill that will be provided to you is also the 

result of the discussion and debate over intelligence reform that 

has gone on over the last several decades. The products of that debate include the recent report of the Senate Committee on 

Intelligence’s U.S. Intelligence Community’s prewar assessments in 

regard to Iraq. Now, I do not think even the Members of the Committee who are here today that have the privilege of serving on the 

Senate Intelligence Committee could have ever predicted that despite our very strong feelings and our differences, that we would 

end up with a 17–0 vote in favor of a report that is 511 pages long, 

22 of our professional staffers and an interview of over 240 panelists. And we made about nine major recommendations, and it was 

bipartisan. As I said, it was a 17–0 vote. 

Those recommendations cried out for reform, and they are commensurate with the 9/11 Commission’s Report, and now we have 

turned that report over to Senator McCain, former Senator Robb 

and also Mr. Silberman for further action. 

It also includes the many legislative proposals such as Senator 

Feinstein’s bill and the bill introduced by Jane Harman over on the 

House side and the many commissions and investigations and studies that have been convened over the years. I am talking about the 

Bremer Commission, the Gilmore Commission, the CSIS study and 

also the Hart-Rudman Commission. 

The draft bill that will be provided to this Committee does provide for a National Intelligence Director or what we now call the 

NID. That person would be empowered with the authorities to really lead the Intelligence Community, as proposed in the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations. Those authorities include the ability to 

hire and fire, as well as the ability to exercise control over the 

budgets of those agencies. As Congress does move toward legislating the so-called intelligence reform, guided by the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report, and many of the other various 

proposals for change, Senator Rockefeller and I will keep in mind 

that we should first do no harm and avoid, as best we can, the law 

of unintended consequences. 

Now, for example, one of the key issues to be resolved is how 

much control the NID should have over the Department of Defense 

intelligence estimates. There has been 10 or 11 attempts, dating 

back to the 1940’s, to allegedly reform the intelligence community. 

In each and every case where we bumped into a real problem or 

a hurdle we could not jump, it has been in regards to the jurisdiction of the Pentagon and the Defense Department. I am not trying 

to perjure them by any means. They have many fine programs, and 

they have programs that should not be damaged in any way. 

There are many good things about the way the Department of 

Defense does conduct its intelligence operations that we must ensure are not undermined by the reform process. 

I want to give you an example. Take, for example, a special 

forces team that is supported by a military intelligence analyst. If 

that team is operating on the field of battle in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom, it seems very clear to me that the team’s intelligence specialist is a tactical asset that needs to be controlled 

by the local military chain of command. And the NID or the NaVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:30 Mar 02, 2005 Jkt 095507 PO 00000 Frm 00009 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\95507.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PHOGAN
6

tional Intelligence Director probably does not want or need to become involved. But move that same team to Afghanistan, outside 

the no-man’s land where Osama bin Laden is hiding, and I would 

argue the team’s intelligence specialist then has become a strategic 

national asset that may require the support and the leadership of 

the NID. 

Now, that line between the tactical and the strategic military operations gets blurred more and more every day, and it complicates 

the job of trying to define the NID’s authorities. I am confident 

that you will find, however, that the draft bill that we will provide 

to this Committee does contain some very innovative ways of addressing that problem. 

Sadly, many of the Intelligence Community problems described 

in the 9/11 Commission’s Report are not unique. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on prewar intelligence assessments in 

regard to Iraq also describes major problems in the Intelligence 

Community. The need for significant change is clear; that Congress 

should focus its efforts on fixing clearly identified problems in our 

Intelligence Community and not simply legislate change merely for 

the sake of change. As we consider reform of the Intelligence Community, I feel strongly we must also ensure that we institutionalize 

change as a continuous process in the Intelligence Community. 

I do not think we can make the mistake of rearranging the organizational chart to meet the current threat and simply stop there. 

Rather, we must leave in place a system that will continue to adapt 

to the new threats that we will face in our Nation. International 

terrorism is a serious threat to us and our allies, but I am confident it will not be the last threat that this Nation faces. Even 

today, we can see in the headlines and in the intelligence reports 

that Nations like Iran and like North Korea do continue to work 

very busily on their weapons of mass destruction programs. 

So I am hopeful that a National Intelligence Director will be able 

to focus more on running the entire Intelligence Community and 

thus will be able to spend more time ensuring that the Intelligence 

Community does continue to adapt to our future threats, otherwise 

it will fall again to Congress to conduct yet another attempt at reform. 

So I thank you, Madam Chairman, for the opportunity to speak. 

I apologize for the length of my statement, and I do want to thank 

my dear colleague and friend, Senator Rockefeller, for his help, his 

advice and his leadership. We both share the same goals. We have 

been very busy here the last 2 or 3 weeks with our professional 

staffers, and we should have that legislative draft to you at least 

by Wednesday. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. 

Senator Rockefeller, we are very happy to have you join us today, 

and I would call on you for any comments you might wish to make. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ROCKEFELLER IV, A U.S. 

SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF WEST VIRGINIA 

Senator ROCKEFELLER. Thank you, Chairman Collins and Ranking Member Lieberman. You are very nice to do this. You were 

given the authority of putting forward legislation, and as I explained to both of you in phone conversations we had, we want to 

7

be helpful and supportive. There is some cross-jurisdictional matters with the Intelligence Committee which we have to take very 

seriously, but I am very happy that you are doing it. This is not 

a work of turf. This is a work of national necessity. 

I find myself in agreement with most of the recommendations of 

the Commission. Some I have some questions about. Some I think 

need to be explained a little bit further before I would ‘‘render a 

judgment,’’ at least on my part. 

If the Congress and the President cannot reach a successful 

agreement on constructive reform this year, and I do not preclude 

a post-election session, we certainly will have failed the American 

people. It will take, I think, sort of the basic questions that we all 

face in Washington, but someone we all continue to tread along our 

separate ways, and that is what it is that makes it so difficult for 

the Federal bureaucracy and the U.S. Congress to, in fact, do what 

is in the national interests first and then think about what the effect is upon their particular committee or their particular agency 

second. 

It is kind of a basic civics lesson and one that we have never 

learned very well because, in a sense, it kind of defines who we are, 

it defines who they are, and when you compare that to the national, the fact that we are going to be dealing with this crisis on 

terrorism for the next 20 or 30 years or more, depending upon 

when we can get some kind of a message of calm and reconciliation 

out to the Islamic community, across the world, not just the Arab 

World, we really do have to take this and do it correctly. 

If we did this by the end of the year, and everybody wants to do 

that and I do, too, by the end of this particular session, if we can 

do that, great. I do not think any of us should be under the illusions that it would have stopped the long time and place planning 

on the part of al Qaeda to do what it did on September 11 or what 

it may yet do if one reads the intelligence and looks at the reports. 

But still that is not the question. Maybe it should be stated this 

way. What future failures could we avoid and how many lives could 

we save because we act relatively sooner and create a mind-set 

change in the Congress and in the bureaucracy, and particularly of 

course within our Intelligence Community? Nobody would disagree 

with the fact that we have a 57-year-old model. Its blueprints 

drawn up from the Cold War. It is not an ideal arrangement for 

attacking an enemy that does not wear a uniform and an enemy 

that exists outside the rule of international law, international obligations and an enemy which looks forward to slaughtering men, 

women, and children where they live and where they work and 

does so with a religious purpose, mixed in with a hateful purpose. 

So the threat to the changes to our country has obviously 

changed in the last decade. The intelligence community has evolved 

to be sure to meet that challenge, but the pace has been slow. And 

the question now is the pace has to be organizationally, and in 

terms of trained people, which takes a long time, 5 years to train 

an analyst, 10 years to train an analyst, 5 years to train a linguist, 

and we are talking, if we start now, some fairly long-term results 

in order to fight the global war on terrorism which, as I indicated, 

I think is with us for a long time. 

8

Now, the biggest impediment is that no single person—and 

Chairman Roberts and everybody else has pointed this out—no person has the responsibility and the budgetary and personnel authority and hands for managing the entire Intelligence Community. 

That is a very serious error—my point. The Director of Central Intelligence has this titular responsibility, but not the control of the 

budgetary strings. 

I asked George Tenet once, ‘‘If you wanted, if you felt like you 

needed to direct the Intelligence Community, would you,’’ and he 

said, ‘‘No, I will only direct what I have budget authority over.’’ 

And he said that publicly, and he said that privately, and I think 

that sums it up very well. 

As we know, it is the Secretary of Defense who controls the lion’s 

share of the intelligence budget, and that is going to be the great 

battle around here, and it is one which is already joined, and again 

national interest versus committee interest versus institutional interest, all of these things I think come into play there. 

Where else in government or corporate America would you find 

such a split arrangement as we have now. It is more akin to a custody settlement between divorced parents than an effective management plan for a 15-agency multi-billion-entity called the intelligence community. 

The President’s decision, as has been indicated by Senator 

Lieberman, to endorse the Commission recommendation to create 

a National Intelligence Director was a step in the right direction. 

His decision to deviate from the Commission’s recommendation to 

give this Director real budget and personnel authority was a bigger 

step, in my mind, backwards. And now worrying about how to 

make it stronger is not convincing to me until I see a real switch 

and a real willingness to invest authority in the National Intelligence Director for budget and for personnel and the rest of it. 

So we are going to have to break some china around here, otherwise we will fail. We will fail. We will do little bits and pieces, and 

we will be like Congress has so often been. The American people 

need real reform. They want our intelligence system to be effectively managed, and for that person and those who serve under 

him or her to be accountable, which is a Carl Levin favorite. Accountability is a major factor that we are going to have to deal 

with. Reforming the Intelligence Community is about protecting 

American soil, American lives, but it also should not be about protecting the turf at the Pentagon or at any of the intelligence agencies. This is about what is best for America, regardless of the players of the agencies. 

I call upon the President to endorse this essential element of the 

9/11 Commission’s plans so we can get about the business of reaching agreement. Chairman Collins and Ranking Member Lieberman, 

I thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you for your statement. 

It is now my pleasure to introduce my distinguished panel today, 

and I apologize for being distracted by the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. I have been having that experience with 

Senator Roberts for years now. [Laughter.] 

Chairman COLLINS. It is a new one for me. 

9

1The prepared statement of Judge Webster appears in the Appendix on page 51. 

Senator ROBERTS. It is my job description. 

Chairman COLLINS. It is a great pleasure to introduce today’s 

distinguished witnesses. In addition to each serving as Director of 

Central Intelligence, each of them has served our country with 

honor in such fields as the judiciary, law enforcement, diplomacy 

and the military. The views that they offer from the inside perspective, and from many different perspectives, will greatly assist this 

Committee. 

William Webster was Director of Central Intelligence from 1987 

to 1991, following 9 years as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His experience in heading both the CIA and the FBI 

gives him a unique perspective to help us answer many of the 

questions today. Earlier he served as a judge on the U.S. Court of 

Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Judge Webster has received numerous awards for public service, including the Presidential Medal of 

Freedom, and we welcome you. 

James Woolsey has served under four Presidents, most recently 

as Director of Central Intelligence from 1993 to 1995. He also 

served as the Ambassador to the Negotiation on Conventional 

Armed Forces in Europe from 1989 to 1991, as a delegate to the 

U.S. Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks from 1983 to 1986, and 

as Under Secretary of the Navy from 1977 to 1979. He has also 

been a Member of the National Commission on Terrorism and the 

Commission to Assess the ballistic missile threat to the United 

States. 

We welcome you, as well. 

Stansfield Turner was Director of Central Intelligence from 1977 

to 1981. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and was promoted to Rear Admiral in 1970 and to the rank of Admiral in 1975, 

when he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of NATO’s Southern 

flank. Admiral Turner has taught at Yale, at West Point, and at 

the University of Maryland Graduate School on Public Affairs. 

I want to thank each of you. You are very dedicated public servants who have given a great deal to your country. We look forward 

to hearing your testimony today as we fill in the details and, with 

your guidance, make the right decisions. 

Judge Webster, we will start with you and your statement. 

TESTIMONY OF HON. WILLIAM H. WEBSTER,1 FORMER DIRECTOR, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION; FORMER DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE; AND SENIOR PARTNER, MILBANK, TWEED, HADLEY & McCLOY, LLP 

Judge WEBSTER. Thank you, Senator Collins, Senator Lieberman 

and Members of the Committee, and also Chairman Roberts and 

Vice Chairman Rockefeller. 

Thank you for the privilege of appearing before you this morning 

to discuss some very important subjects. As I listened to the introductory remarks from your colleagues and from you, Madam Chairman, I was reminded of reading over the weekend from the extensive writings of Professor Darling, who recorded the first 5 or 6 

years of Central Intelligence as an official document, and you will 

perhaps not be surprised to know that many of the issues that you 

10

raised this morning were raised at the time President Truman had 

to make his ultimate decision on the balancing act between intelligence and the other departments of the government, but we do of 

course live in a different world today. 

Following an extensively documented and detailed narrative of 

the events leading up to September 11, 2001, the Commission concluded that coordination, amalgamation, and synthesis of intelligence collected by various components of the Intelligence Community were too loose, and in consequence, the dots were not connected in a way that the 9/11 plot could have been uncovered and 

prevented. The Commission addressed a new structure intended to 

reduce the likelihood of another catastrophic attack against the 

United States and its citizens. 

In my view, some of the omissions and errors in conclusions were 

attributable to human mistakes and misjudgments. Others were 

attributable in part to constraints, both legislative and administrative, that governed the interagency relationships in the period following the Church and Pike Committee Reports to the 2001 Patriot 

Act revisions on sharing intelligence. Various proposals for managing ‘‘need to share’’ and preserving ‘‘need to know’’ had to address the almost byzantine system of intelligence control that 

evolved during that three decade period. 

I liken the current status of the Director of Central Intelligence 

to that of den chief in terms of his ability to control resources and 

compel effective teamwork throughout the 15 agencies spread 

throughout the departments of our government. It is remarkable 

what has been accomplished by consensus building, friendly cajoling and a patriotic effort among so many agencies to make it work. 

But this is not enough to deal in a timely way with the complexities of the world in which we find ourselves. 

There is today a strong consensus that the authority of the Intelligence Community leader must be increased to do the job for 

which he must be responsible, to provide timely and useful intelligence upon which the President and policymakers can make 

sound decisions in the interest of our country. 

The Intelligence Community does not need a feckless czar with 

fine surroundings and little authority. That is the wrong way to go. 

Whether the Congress elects to create a true Director of National 

Intelligence, as the 9/11 Commission recommends, or to beef up the 

real—as distinguished from cosmetic—management authorities of 

the Director of Central Intelligence, as others have proposed, the 

designated leader must be clearly and unambiguously empowered 

to act and to decide on issues of great importance to the success 

of the Intelligence Community and to the country. 

There seems to be general agreement that additional authority 

should repose in the top leader of the Intelligence Community. 

These authorities, although widely assumed by the American public to exist already, in fact are imprecise, easily frustrated and not 

in regular use. They are: (1) management of the intelligence budget; (2) authority to name or at least approve the recommendations 

for presidential appointment of the top leaders of the Intelligence 

Community; and (3) performance review and evaluation of these 

community leaders. 

11

These authorities could be granted to (1) the Director of Central 

Intelligence, who is also Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; or (2) to a Director of Central Intelligence who is separate from 

and senior to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; or (3) 

a newly-created National Intelligence Director who would replace 

the present Director of Central Intelligence. 

The concept of a National Intelligence Director has the present 

support of the President, the Democratic candidate for President, 

and the 9/11 Commission. The NID would have authority to oversee national intelligence centers on specific subjects of interest 

across the U.S. Government and to manage the national intelligence program and oversee the agencies that contribute to it. It 

appears that the centers are expanded versions of centers which 

the DCI has created and operated in the past, but located elsewhere in other departments and agencies. 

Under the Commission model, the NID would manage the national intelligence program and oversee the component agencies of 

the Intelligence Community. The report envisages management 

through three deputies, each of whom would hold a key position in 

one of the component agencies. The Director of the CIA would head 

foreign intelligence. Defense intelligence would be headed by the 

Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. And homeland intelligence would be headed by the FBI’s Executive Assistant Director 

for Intelligence, or the Under Secretary of Homeland Security for 

Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection. The three deputies would have the job of acquiring the systems, training the people, and executing the operations planned by the National Intelligence Center. 

Control of the budget is essential to effective management of the 

Intelligence Community. The President, in his remarks, has used 

the term ‘‘coordinate,’’ which I understand to mean management. 

Others have suggested something less. There is obviously some 

sorting out to be done between the enhanced Intelligence Community organization and its leader and the Department of Defense 

and its Secretary. If this model is adopted, the Defense Department 

will need some assurances that tactical, military intelligence will 

not drift away from its military commanders. On the other hand, 

with respect to strategic intelligence around the world, defense 

agencies must be prepared to respond to the management initiatives of the National Intelligence Director. 

In all of this I would sincerely hope that this will not be just another layer of government. The Director of Central Intelligence position would simply segue to the new National Intelligence Director 

at the top of the table of organization reporting to the President. 

The number of new positions needed to manage the outreach and 

responsibilities of the NID should be carefully controlled. 

A key proposal is to expand the current Terrorist Threat Integration Center as a center for joint operational planning and joint intelligence, and staffed by personnel from the various agencies. 

While there are a number of questions to be thought through and 

answered, such as the role of the center in operational activities, 

I believe the concept has merit for a number of reasons. First, I 

think it offers a potentially effective vehicle for dealing with the 

growing threat of international terrorism with full participation 

12

and sharing by agencies across the community. Second—and this 

is not a pejorative observation—there is a risk that the Nation’s 

preoccupation with terrorism may cause important and significant 

collections and analytical responsibilities of a nonterrorist nature 

to be neglected. Challenges, for example, such as the Cold War, 

major economic changes among ‘‘have’’ and ‘‘have not’’ nations that 

cause wars, and other matters requiring our best collection and analytical efforts for the benefit of our policymakers must not be neglected nor subsumed. As we have all seen too painfully, sources 

that have been neglected after the fact can dry up and take years 

to redevelop when a new crisis emerges. This must not happen. 

The Director of Central Intelligence, as distinguished from CIA, 

has established a number of centers located for convenience at CIA 

Headquarters. These have made substantial community-wide contributions. I believe they should stay with the intelligence leader, 

be denominated at his discretion, not legislated, and located where 

he and his principal advisers think most appropriate. 

With respect to covert and paramilitary actions, the Commission 

would keep responsibility for clandestine and covert operations in 

the CIA, but place lead responsibility for paramilitary action in the 

military. I have some doubts about this model. The Commission acknowledged that the combined activities in Afghanistan worked 

well. I would prefer to keep that model on smaller, turn-of-the-dime 

activities with the CIA. Larger scale actions that are essentially 

troop engagements should be in Defense. 

With respect to relations with the President, while the leader of 

the Intelligence Community must be the principal adviser on intelligence to the President, he must work hard, very hard to avoid either the reality or the perception that intelligence is being 

framed—read ‘‘spun’’—to support a foreign policy of the administration. My predecessor, Bill Casey, had a different view of this. He 

served in the Cabinet and participated fully in the formulation of 

policy. When I became DCI I asked President Reagan not to put 

me in the Cabinet for the reasons I have noted to you. He told me 

that he thought about it and had come to the conclusion that I was 

right. I was very pleased, therefore, to see that President Bush had 

reached a similar conclusion. The head of the Intelligence Community does not need to be located in the White House, and to avoid 

these problems, I believe he should not be. The Director of Central 

Intelligence has had a small suite in the Old Executive Office 

Building through the years as a matter of convenience for meetings 

with White House officials and between appointments. I believe 

that is more than adequate, and that he should be housed where 

he has access to people with whom he most frequently needs to 

consult. 

With respect to the FBI and Homeland Security, the FBI should 

be as it has in the past, a part of the efforts to coordinate national 

intelligence collection efforts with international activities. This is 

more in the nature of putting the information together, completing 

the dots and other efforts to avoid information gaps. I think it is 

important that operationally the FBI should take its guidance from 

the Attorney General on its dealings with U.S. persons, and the 

manner in which it collects information in the United States. This 

has been an important safeguard for the American people, should 

13

1The prepared statement of Mr. Woolsey appears in the Appendix on page 62. 

not be destructive of effective operations, and avoids the risk of receiving vigilante type instructions, whether from the Intelligence 

Community or the White House. While, as Justice Jackson once 

wrote, ‘‘the Constitution is not a suicide pact, the Constitution and 

the rule of law are at the top of our core values and must be safeguarded and respected.’’ 

With respect to the trusted information network, the Commission 

recommends an overhaul of our information system to better process, share and protect intelligence across the agencies. This has 

considerable merit and will require more work in some agencies 

than others. As long ago as 2001, I headed a Commission on FBI 

Internal Security, and we provided four classified appendices to our 

report dealing with the infirmities of the FBI mainframe, now 13-

years-old. Inability to rapidly identify and capture information of 

value to other agencies aggravated the circumstances leading to the 

September 11 tragedy. 

The 9/11 Commission has issued a special challenge to the Congress to overhaul its oversight systems for dealing with the Intelligence Community. If acted upon, it will materially increase the effectiveness, not only of oversight, but of the performance of the 

company in its relationship to the Congress. I am told that over 88 

separate committees and subcommittees now oversee the Homeland Security Department. This is really intolerable, not to say 

nonsensical. Consideration should be given to a joint committee on 

intelligence, selected with care, and including a nonpartisan, highly 

respected membership. 

At this moment in our history I believe we have passed the moment of great fear which often produces unhappy solutions, and we 

have not yet entered a period of indifference, where it is difficult 

to take the forward steps that are needed. We need to act, but we 

must act with great care. The many thousands of dedicated men 

and women in the Intelligence Community, many of whom have 

put their lives on the line for the safety of our country, count on 

you. I know you will not let them down. 

Thank you very much, Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Judge Webster, for an excellent 

statement. Mr. Woolsey. 

TESTIMONY OF HON. R. JAMES WOOLSEY,1 FORMER DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE; VICE PRESIDENT, BOOZ 

ALLEN HAMILTON 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Thank you. Madam Chairman, Senator 

Lieberman, Members of the Committee, Senator Roberts, Senator 

Rockefeller, it is an honor to be able to testify before you today. 

Let me say at the outset that—if I could have my whole statement submitted for the record, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Without objection. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. I will use it as an outline to speak from, far more 

briefly. 

At the outset let me say that I believe the Commission’s Report 

is quite well written. It is an excellent history of much of what 

went wrong over the years. We will doubtless see amendments to 

14

it, but it is a fine job, and particularly for an official government 

document written by a large number of people. It is excellent prose. 

Its first 300 plus pages I think are an outstanding example of work 

of a commission of this sort, and I am a veteran of five of these 

national commissions. 

Of the 41 proposals for reform recommendations that it makes in 

its final two chapters, I agree fully with 35 of them; five, I think, 

should be adopted in a partial or amended form; one, the proposal 

to transfer all cover paramilitary work to the Department of Defense, I could not disagree more with. 

Let me say a word about the scope of the Commission’s Report 

as a whole. It titles Chapter 12, where it makes the bulk of its recommendations, ‘‘A Global Strategy.’’ This may be a case of having 

a misleading headline on an otherwise perfectly reasonable press 

story, but I want to stress that this chapter, and indeed the 9/11 

Commission Report as a whole, does not present a global strategy 

for the war in which we are engaged. This Commission’s tasking, 

as I read it from the congressional legislation and from its own 

foreword, is far more like those commissions that assessed Pearl 

Harbor during World War II. They did not seek to establish a 

grand strategy for the fighting of World War II, and this Commission neither should seek, and it certainly does not succeed, in establishing a global strategy for the war that we are in. 

For example, the recommendations do not deal at all with Iran, 

Iraq, Syria, or our oil dependence on the Middle East, and I think 

it is important to realize that its focus is pretty much exclusively 

on how to keep an organization like al Qaeda from attacking the 

United States again the way it did before. This is an understandable focus. That is what it was charged to do. But the next part 

of a war is not always like the previous part of a war and we 

should not assume that this report states a global strategy. 

Just a word about its recommendations in Chapter 12. There are 

four sensible recommendations about how to deal with terrorist 

sanctuaries in other countries, five about essentially alleviating 

root causes of terrorism, seven are essentially technical, dealing 

with things like biometric entry/exit screening, and four dealing 

with first responders’ needs. A number of these, or all of these, I 

think, are quite sound, but none of those 21 really reaches the level 

of dealing with strategic matters. 

Then there are three recommendations that essentially say we 

should show balance (e.g. share information while safeguarding privacy, and enhance Executive Branch power only when necessary). 

These are perfectly reasonable recommendations, but they are also 

quite vague, and they do not give us much help in deciding issues 

that are important and right now before the country, such as 

should the Federal Government require birth dates from air passengers in order to better utilize databases to identify individuals 

who might be terrorists, or should police continue to be barred by 

local ordinances, as they are in many municipalities, from inquiring of Immigration authorities about the immigration status of 

someone they have arrested for a State or local offense. 

I want to call particularly to Senator Roberts’ and Senator 

Rockefeller’s attention, that the next two and a half pages of my 

testimony, on pages 3, 4, and 5, I wrote before I knew they were 

15

going to be here today. They essentially constitute praise, as I offered before the Senate Select Committee, of the analysis which the 

Senate Select Committee did of the relationship between al Qaeda 

and Iraq. I think that it is far more nuanced and far sounder than 

what we have from the Commission. I also believe it is important 

for us to understand that we face not just one totalitarian enemy 

in the Middle East, we face at least three: The secular Ba’athists 

who are essentially fascists, modeled after the fascists of the 1920’s 

and 1930’s; the Islamists from the Shi’ite side of Islam, run and operated, whether they are Hezbollah or Moqtada al Sadr, out of Teheran; and the Islamists from the Sunni side of Islam, such as al 

Qaeda, its underlying economic sustenance fueled by the oil money 

of the Gulf, and its ideology fueled by the hatred put forth by the 

Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. 

I think it is important that we should understand that these 

three totalitarian groups hate each other, stem from different roots, 

criticize each other, kill each other from time to time, but still are 

capable here and there of cooperation against us, just as Hitler and 

Stalin surprised the world in 1939, including most of the world’s 

intelligence analysts, by forging the Hitler-Stalin Pact. So I believe 

it is important to pay attention to what the Senate Select Committee says in Chapter 12 about the rather extensive connections, 

not operational, but connections, particularly with respect to training, between al Qaeda and the Ba’athists of Iraq. 

Moving on to page 5, Madam Chairman, and the recommendations of Chapter 13. I concur with the Commission’s most publicized recommendation essentially to split the current responsibilities of the Director of Central Intelligence and set up a separate 

individual to manage the Intelligence Community and serve as the 

President’s chief adviser on intelligence from the individual who 

would be the head of the CIA and responsible for management of 

it. I also concur with the establishment of the National Counterterrorism Center reporting to the new NID. 

Just a quick word about Senator Rockefeller’s interesting analogy 

to a custody arrangement for the current relationship between the 

DCI and much of the community. It is in a sense a custody settlement, but the Director of Central Intelligence under the current 

system is the party who gets only very rare and brief visitation 

rights. It is a very weak position currently from the point of view 

of managing either the personnel or the money within the Intelligence Community. And I do believe that it is a job, the current 

DCI job, that should be divided. It is not impossible for one person 

to do this job under the current circumstances if that person has 

a close working relationship with the President, the general support of the Congress, and close working relationships with eight 

members of the Congress, the four chairmen of the two intelligence 

committees and the ranking members, and the chairmen of the Defense Appropriation Subcommittees and their ranking members. 

But in my case, I did not have a bad relationship with the President I served, I just did not have much of one at all. And with respect to the committee chairmen and ranking members, I had 

seven good relationships and one bad one, as my testimony summarizes. What that meant was, because of those two circumstances, 

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ments on Capitol Hill—more than one a day for the time Congress 

was in session. Much of that was because of what has been publicized a number of times, my disagreements with the chairman of 

the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, Senator DeConcini, 

over a range of issues, terminating satellite programs, terminating 

computers for NSA, terminating funds for Arabic and Farsi language instruction, closing large numbers of CIA stations around 

the world, transferring all overseas penetration of foreign intelligence services to the FBI, and so forth. Some of these disputes I 

won, some I lost, but it took a very substantial amount of time. 

Should some future DCI, under the current structure, have to 

spend that type of time and resources dealing with congressional 

oversight, I think it is easy to see how it would be very difficult 

for him or her to have enough hours in the day also to manage the 

CIA. I do think it is important to focus on the precise responsibilities of the new NID, and I favor, over the original White House 

formulation and over the Commission’s formulation, the formulation in Representative Jane Harman’s original bill. In her original 

bill she made the appointments and personnel process for defense 

intelligence agencies, such as NSA, a joint matter between the NID 

and the Secretary of Defense, and joint responsibility, of course, 

with respect to counterterrorism work at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, joint with the Department of Justice. 

Her bill also gave responsibility for budget execution essentially 

to the NID, but left the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General, in appropriate cases, much more of an opportunity to contest 

some such decisions before the President than I see in the Commission’s bill. I believe the Commission’s bill leans, frankly, a bit too 

heavily toward Czardom, and if there is one term I would like to 

see if we could get out of this debate, it is in fact ‘‘intelligence 

Czar.’’ As far as I am concerned, a number of centuries of stupidity, 

rigidity and authoritarianism, followed by the victory of Bolshevism, is not a good model for the management of American intelligence. 

With respect to information sharing, sharing is fine as long as 

one is not sharing with the Walkers, Aldrich Ames, Robert 

Hanssen, or some blabbermouth who likes to talk to the press 

about the fact that we have broken bin Laden’s satellite telephone 

communications. The problem is that we do not just need to share, 

we need to share wisely. And the more one knows about intelligence sources and methods for a particular piece of intelligence, 

frequently the better one is able to interpret it, and the better job 

of analysis one is able to do. That is why the President’s daily brief 

has a lot of material in it about sources and methods and why 

sources and methods are guarded as carefully as they are. 

I think the NID needs to have different approaches toward different parts of the intelligence process with respect to the degree 

of uniformity he or she requires, with respect to the degree of sharing, with respect to the degree of permitting competition and even 

freelancing. For example, at the front end of the process, development of new collection methods can benefit from competition between agencies. We were competitive at the CIA with the Defense 

Department in 1993. That is how we developed the Predator. 

17

In tasking collection, customers should be consulted, not just the 

operators of the collection systems. That is important because it is 

one reason why we need to move away from the stovepiping that 

we now see. In processing data also we need to move away from 

stovepipes. 

In analyzing data and producing intelligence, some competition 

is not a bad thing at all. It is a good idea to have competitive analysis. And in dissemination, I would prefer a system whereby ‘‘need 

to know’’ is constantly reviewed and enforced technically, rather 

than one in which, as the Commission suggests, need to know 

should always take second place to need to share. 

Let me close, Madam Chairman, with just one word about paramilitary action being transferred to the Pentagon, which I believe 

is an extraordinarily bad idea. Covert paramilitary operations are 

only occasionally necessary for the United States. Covert should 

connote keeping them secret or denying them, plausibly or otherwise, not only before but after the fact. It was because covert action 

generally, including covert paramilitary operations, came into question in the mid 1970’s that Congress, for good and sufficient reason, 

decided to place such covert action under the requirement for having presidentially signed findings and submission to the Intelligence Committees of the Congress. I think that was a wise decision, and for covert action, that process should be continued, 

including paramilitary covert action, which we deny, plausibly or 

otherwise, after the fact. Sometimes that is necessary. Sometimes 

one needs to save the face of an enemy as well as that of friends 

and allies. 

But the Pentagon does not do that now. The Pentagon does conduct clandestine military operations which are kept secret ahead of 

time or which involve deception ahead of time, and that is as old 

as warfare, considerably older than the Trojan horse. I think it is 

important that we not move to a situation whereby the Pentagon, 

because it has responsibility for covert paramilitary operations, 

also gets brought under the machinery of findings and the rest, 

under which the CIA covert action now operates under. I think 

that could cripple our Special Forces in the war against terrorism, 

and I think it is a very bad idea. 

In conclusion, let me just say that as stated above, I think it is 

quite likely, because of the limited nature of the charge they were 

given, that is the reason the Commission did not come up with 

anything approximating a global strategy. But we should not assume that they did so. 

Second, since so much attention is being paid to foreign intelligence in the Commission’s Report, it may be natural for some to 

draw the conclusion that with respect to 9/11 foreign intelligence 

is what principally failed. Many aspects of our government, of our 

country failed with respect to September 11. 

But we should at least note that most of the preparations for 

September 11 took place in two countries, Germany and the United 

States, where the foreign intelligence operation of the United 

States does not really collect intelligence. Satellites are going to tell 

us very little about terrorists, signal intercepts are going to tell us 

very little, particularly if we talk about what signal intercepts we 

are obtaining. And so foreign intelligence reforms generally may 

18

have only a modest effect on the war on terrorism. It may be much 

more important whether there is a municipal ordinance that bars 

checking out a tip from a citizen about, say, what a Saudi visitor’s 

immigration status is. 

And finally, even within the field of foreign intelligence reform, 

some substantive reform, such as whether we use Non-Official 

Cover officers far more than we do now, and rely less on official 

cover, to my mind probably would make more difference than 

issues such as the establishment of the NID. But within the framework of the Commission’s recommendations and within the framework of this Committee’s deliberations, I would support the establishment of an appropriately designed office of NID, and I thank 

you again, Madam Chairman and Members of the Committee for 

your attention. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you very much. Admiral Turner. 

TESTIMONY OF HON. STANSFIELD TURNER, FORMER DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE; PROFESSOR, SCHOOL OF 

PUBLIC POLICY, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND 

Admiral TURNER. Madam Chairman, Members of the Committee, 

Chairman Roberts, and Vice Chairman Rockefeller, I much appreciate this opportunity to be with you, and the honor of being here. 

I come at this issue of whether we want a National Intelligence 

Director from the point of view of someone who was a guinea pig 

National Intelligence Director from 1977 to 1981. President 

Carter’s concept of how our intelligence apparatus should operate 

was very similar to the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission 

that we are talking about today. At my very first meeting with the 

President, before he had actually designated me as his nominee for 

Director of Central Intelligence, he gave me oral instruction that 

if I took this job I was to concentrate on being the Director of Central Intelligence, not on being the head of the CIA. As a result, I 

delegated 80 percent of the responsibilities for the CIA to the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. 

For instance, I would come before committees of the Congress 

and testify on the overall intelligence budget. Frank Carlucci, the 

deputy, would then follow with a detailed explanation of the CIA’s 

portion of that budget. This freed me up to concentrate on operating, and managing, the Intelligence Community. In particular, it 

freed me up to participate very actively in the analytic portion of 

the intelligence process, which of course, leads to estimates, which 

are one of the key products of intelligence. The analytic process deserves the personal attention of the Director of Central Intelligence. Moreover, unless the Director personally participates in 

the analytic process, it is not going to be as good as it should be. 

Only the Director can adjudicate the differences between the various analytic agencies. So his or her participation is the only way 

to avoid having consensus intelligence by committee. If he or she 

does not give that leadership, it will not be there. 

President Carter’s oral directive to me to concentrate on the community, not only freed me up to help manage it, but he also gave 

me specific authorities in a Presidential Executive Order. The first 

one we have discussed a lot today was over budgets. We still had 

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munity, but in accordance with President Carter’s Executive Order 

there was only one vote on the committee, mine. 

This way we could develop a budget that had a theme to it. We 

could ensure that the budget covered all the bases we wanted to 

cover with the priorities we wanted to cover. We established a deputy for budgets. The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, 

and others could, and did, dispute my choices for the budgets of 

various of their agencies. They took their disputes to the President 

in an annual meeting we had to review the budgets. Sometimes 

they won, sometimes they lost, but nonetheless, there still was a 

theme to the budget even with small perturbations to it. 

Second, the President’s Executive Order gave me the authority to 

direct the priorities for the agencies collecting intelligence. We had 

a deputy here also. When we needed intelligence on some certain 

problem, the deputy would get together representatives of the various agencies that collect, NSA, NRO, the DO of the CIA, and he 

or she would say who can help in this aspect of this problem that 

we have? And then the deputy for collection would assign priorities 

to these various agencies, including roughly what amount of assets, 

what kind of resources are we going to give to this problem. 

This also was very useful because as they sat around the table 

looking at individual problems, there was an exchange of intelligence about what they were finding. The clue that a photograph 

might tell you led to focusing an intercept capability, which led to 

putting a human agent at the scene. 

A third authority the President’s Executive Order gave was to 

task the analytic agencies. This was not a question of what their 

answers were going to be. It was a question of what topics they 

analyzed. We tried always to have two, or maybe three, analytic 

agencies working on the same problem independently and separately until they came up with their opinions. Then we would attempt to fuse them, but we encouraged bringing the diverse views 

forward. 

The 9/11 recommendations are really, in my view, a reincarnation of President Carter’s program, and they are not nearly as big 

a change as people are talking about, and I am not worried about 

a huge bureaucracy. We have a bureaucracy out there that the DCI 

has today to manage the Intelligence Community. We are just 

going to change the name on the door. 

The worst result that could happen from this though, in my opinion, is that we create a National Intelligence Director and not give 

him or her authority. Such a National Intelligence Director without 

authorities and without specific control of the CIA—and I very 

much encourage the separation of the National Intelligence Director from the CIA—but without the CIA and without new authorities, this is a job that is going to be impotent. 

I would also like to suggest quickly that there are a couple of 

other authorities that it would be useful for you to ensure are given 

to the new National Intelligence Director. The report does cover 

hiring and firing, but I would suggest that should not go as far as 

the 9/11 Commission Report suggests. The heads of the analytic 

agencies, the DIA in the Defense Department, the INR in the State 

Department, the DI in the CIA, they should not be subject to the 

National Intelligence Director’s appointment, hiring and firing. The 

20

secretaries of those departments deserve to have their own intelligence adviser in whom they have personal confidence. If you insist they take somebody they do not like, they would just create a 

new intelligence operation of their own on the side. I think those 

are departmental responsibilities. 

Second, I think it is very important that we define what is national intelligence, what is in the national intelligence budget. It is 

ridiculous today that some 80 percent of the intelligence budget, if 

I understand it, is in programs like the tactical TIARA program or 

the Joint Military Intelligence program. One of the ways the Defense Department countered President Carter’s having designated 

me as in charge of budgets, was to begin to take things out of my 

budget and put them into these tactical budgets. I would like to 

draw a line here. The line is that it is tactical if it is tasked only 

by a commander in the field. 

Third, we need to be sure that new legislation should authorize 

the National Intelligence Director to direct the dissemination of intelligence. Today individual agency heads, in the name of protecting sources and methods, have all kinds of devices for controlling who receives the intelligence they have. It is perfectly reasonable to try to protect sources and methods, but there has to be a 

national balance between the importance to the country of exchanging that information, at least on some limited basis, and protecting 

sources. And the person to make that judgment in the national interest is not the head of the agency who is very concerned with the 

sources and method. It is the National Intelligence Director we are 

going to create. 

Finally, the key point whether we should increase the authority 

of the National Intelligence Director at the expense of the Department of Defense is one that only you in the Congress can address 

at this time. If we are going to act soon, it seems very clear that 

adjudicating within the Executive Branch and getting the Department of Defense to give up territory, and getting the CIA to accept 

being separated from direct access to the President is just going to 

be bureaucratically too difficult. 

And I would finally suggest to you, please, if we are serious 

about the war on terrorism, we have to appreciate that while it 

was all right in many ways for the Defense Department to control 

our intelligence operations to the high degree that it has since 1947 

during a Cold War, when the threat to this country was a military 

threat, that has changed. And if it has changed, we deserve to 

change who controls our intelligence so that it is done not in the 

military interest but in the national interest. 

Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Admiral Turner. 

Judge Webster, the 9/11 Commission documents very well the 

failure to share information between the FBI and the CIA, and the 

Commission documents the legal and cultural barriers that prevented that information sharing, and that is one reason that the 

Commission has proposed that the National Intelligence Director 

have authority over both the domestic and foreign side of intelligence. 

In his written statement submitted to the Committee, former 

DCI Robert Gates raised some serious concerns about vesting in 

21

the new intelligence director the authority over both domestic and 

foreign intelligence, and he talks, as you did briefly in your statement, about President Truman’s fear that if those two areas were 

under one person you might create an American KGB, I believe 

Truman said. Dr. Gates has suggested that we need to put some 

safeguards, and that one such safeguard might be to restrict the 

NID to receiving domestic intelligence only with respect to certain 

categories of threats like terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, 

and international drug trafficking. 

Since you have served as both head of the FBI and the CIA, I 

would very much like to get your assessment of what safeguards 

if any we need to include if we are going to give the new Director 

authority over the foreign and domestic divide? 

Judge WEBSTER. Madam Chairman, Dr. Gates’s suggestion of 

categories is an interesting one and deserves further consideration 

by the Committee. 

My earlier remarks had to do with operations, primarily with operations, getting the intelligence and how to get the intelligence, 

and making sure that we are dealing with U.S. citizens. We did it 

in a manner that comported with our requirements, our values, 

and sometimes I liken that to the investigation of the assassination 

of President Lincoln, when we arrested 2,000 people, all the cast 

of My American Cousin, did a whole range of things which were 

commensurate with the forensic skills and capability at the time. 

We now have other means of getting information. Some of it requires warrants. Some of it does not. I prefer that the Attorney 

General be involved in the process of determining how information 

is obtained and whether or not it requires a warrant or requires 

whatever restrictions. The Patriot Act liberated a lot of the frustrations with respect to getting, focusing on telephones rather than on 

individuals in matters of that kind. It has been roundly criticized, 

but most of those changes, I think, were constructive ones. 

There has to be a relationship between international intelligence 

and domestic intelligence which recognizes the need at the domestic level to provide information to those who are concerned with the 

overall international aspects. A major problem—and this goes beyond your question a little, but I think it is so fundamental—and 

that is to pay attention to the information gathering techniques 

that we have today and how they were constructed. A 13-year-old 

mainframe simply does not work today to do what you would like 

to see done. They are trying to improve it. The past jobs, Congress 

has voted some money for Trilogy and others, still very limiting. 

The ability to make sure that the information collected in a particular way by the FBI can be transmitted on responsible demand 

from the NID or whoever has the authority to request that information, can in fact be done and done in a timely way is badly lacking now. I think a lot of those dots could have been connected had 

they had the ability to respond. They now have the charter to respond. 

Bottom line: We could do a lot more. We need better equipment. 

We need the will. The message is out there. I think that the focus 

of the Congress should at least be on how the information is collected. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. 

22

Mr. Woolsey, a major issue facing this Committee in drafting the 

bill is how much authority the National Intelligence Director or the 

Director of the National Counterterrorism Center should have in 

tasking the collection of information by the various intelligence 

agencies. I raised a scenario in a previous hearing of what if you 

had a satellite that was over Iraq and DOD wanted it to stay over 

Iraq, the CIA wanted it to be shifted to Afghanistan? In your experience, how are those conflicts resolved, and should the Director 

have tasking authority? 

Mr. WOOLSEY. I think that the Director should have more 

tasking authority than is now implemented, Madam Chairman. 

The history of this is that going back, there was more collective 

tasking than there is now. There used to be a committee called 

Comirex that tasked the satellites, for example, in which the whole 

community participated. 

When I was the head of a panel for Bob Gates in the summer 

of 1992, looking at restructuring the National Reconnaissance Office, we came up with something they called the needs process, 

which was relatively straightforward. We had a very experienced 

intelligence officer analyst make the rounds of the customers, not 

just the people who operated collection systems, but the customers, 

including Treasury, State, and so forth, and come back with us 

with a judgment about what their needs were and whether they 

were being balanced properly by the official process. I tried to keep 

something like that going when I was Director of Central Intelligence, but things like that often get bureaucratized rather quickly. 

The problem is that today the SIGINT people tend to task 

SIGINT and the satellite people tend to task satellites, and I think 

one important positive reform that could come from having the 

NID or a NCTC Director under him or her is that you could have 

a process whereby intelligence consumers could have more influence, again, filtered through the balanced judgment of some professionals, but nonetheless, more influence than they have now. So I 

would regard that as one positive outcome of having the NID or a 

CTC. 

And I must say, with respect to the question that Judge Webster 

answered, I think another reason to have a NID is that, with the 

restrictions he mentioned, which are very important, it is a better 

idea to have someone other than the head of the CIA be the person 

to whom someone with responsibility in the Justice Department or 

the FBI reports. I go into this some in my statement, so I will not 

go into it any further here, but I would much prefer the NID to 

have some type of limited joint authority over CIA or foreign intelligence and domestic intelligence rather than the individual who is 

the head of the CIA. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. 

One very quick final question that I would like all three of you 

to answer, and we will start with Admiral Turner. Should the NID 

serve at the pleasure of the President or have a term? Admiral 

Turner. 

Admiral TURNER. Absolutely at the pleasure of the President. 

Chairman COLLINS. Mr. Woolsey. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. I agree. 

23

Chairman COLLINS. Judge Webster. 

Judge WEBSTER. I agree, and I do not think you can do anything 

about it. People cite the FBI 10-year term as a model. If you read 

the statute it says not more than 10 years. It was a reaction to 48 

years of one director. The Constitution protects the Executive authority to hire and to fire, and I do not believe that—if you had a 

quasi-legislative thing like the Federal Reserve Board or something 

like that, yes, but I think constitutionally it would be very difficult 

to do. They tried to do it with the FBI and concluded they could 

not do that. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Lieberman. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks, Madam Chairman. 

I liked your answer, Judge Webster, that progress sometimes is 

limiting a term that went 41 years to only 10 years, and we move 

forward. Somebody said to me about those terms—and it is a relevant point as we think about this office—that fortunately we had 

recent experience with this, that you can have somebody in a term 

that goes beyond the term of the President, but what happens if 

the President loses confidence in that individual and simply does 

not talk to him? That is as bad or worse than the fear of them getting too close. 

I thank you all for your testimony. I found it very helpful. 

Senator Rockefeller said something in his opening statement I 

want to quote, which is that we are operating in a system now in 

the intelligence community that is fundamentally 57 years old, and 

it was created during a very different time in world history, when 

we were facing the rising threat of the Soviet Union. Of course it 

has been changed here and there, but fundamentally it remains the 

same. 

Admiral Turner, you said that at the end of your statement in 

terms of the balance of authority between the intelligence director 

and, for instance, the Secretary of Defense, and I think we really 

have to keep that in mind. 

To me it all comes down to the fact that in the war on terrorism, 

intelligence, which of course has always played a critical role in 

warfare, plays an even more critical role because we are dealing 

not with armies massed on a field or navies at sea. They may 

strike, they may surprise, but then you have the opportunity to 

come back. These are people who are prepared to kill themselves 

to kill us, and they will strike in an isolated way as they have continued to do. So intelligence becomes even more critical as a way 

to stop the attack before it happens, and that is why we are focusing all this attention on our intelligence system and community. 

I do want to ask you about the relative balance between Department of Defense and the proposed National Intelligence Director, 

because obviously, as others have said, this is going to be a critical 

and most difficult part of our work here. The Defense Department, 

indicated by some testimony offered last week on the House side, 

does appear to be concerned about the recommendation that the 

new intelligence director be given control over intelligence budgets, 

arguing that might reduce ultimately the intelligence available to 

combat commanders. They have expressed the fear of exactly what 

Senator Collins’ hypothetical example that NID would favor using 

national assets like satellites to provide more strategic intelligence 

24

to policymakers on terrorism rather than more operational or tactical intelligence to military commanders. 

But I think the 9/11 Commission is saying that is exactly why 

we need one person with the budget authority to make those judgments, because it may well be more in the national interest to 

make those assignments to the war on terrorism as opposed to the 

Department of Defense. And some at the Defense Department have 

said that they were going to carry on this fight because they had 

to do it on behalf of the warfighters, although Commissioner Hamilton said he thought it was unimaginable that military intelligence 

would not continue to be a very high, if not the highest, priority 

for our Intelligence Community. 

I wonder if each of you would give me a response to whether you 

think the balance of authority here, assuming for a moment that 

we adopt something like the Commission proposal of the NID with 

budget authority, whether the balance of authority now has to, not 

shift away from the Pentagon, but to shift to somebody on top, who 

as you fascinatingly were during the Carter Administration, who 

has the authority to make judgments between intelligence, war on 

terrorism, and the Pentagon. Admiral Turner, why don’t you start? 

Admiral TURNER. Senator Lieberman, one other aspect of the 

Carter Executive Order was that we would periodically rehearse 

the transfer of tasking authority over the collection elements from 

the Director of Central Intelligence to the Secretary of Defense. 

This was for the possibility that we would one day be in a really 

active war, where intelligence was absolutely vital to the Defense 

Department, and therefore you would not want the Director of Central Intelligence, a nonmilitary person normally, to make those 

judgments. 

And so from time to time, for a week or something like that, say, 

my deputy for collection tasking would take his instructions from 

Harold Brown over in the Defense Department, rather than from 

me. This gave the Defense Department a fall-back position. They 

could go to the President and say, ‘‘Sir, we think the time has come 

under this crisis that we are in right now, that we ought to take 

this away from Admiral Turner out there and do it ourselves.’’ That 

was I think a good compromise. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. There is some language in the 9/11 Commission Report that suggest that they see the same kind of dispute 

resolution mechanism here either through the National Security 

Adviser or obviously ultimately the President. Mr. Woolsey. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Senator Lieberman, I believe one of the older statutes already essentially permits transfer of tasking authority in 

wartime to the Defense Department. To my mind, tasking is readily dealt with through Executive Order. You do not need legislation 

about tasking, I do not think. I think that the NID ought to have 

more authority than the DCI has now, and it ought to be more collectively done with an eye toward consumers, including the Defense 

Department, and I think that is one thing that we have learned 

from the 9/11 Commission Report and from the war on terrorism. 

Particularly important though, is fusing foreign and domestic 

tasking and intelligence. That is really what is new, and I do not 

think the 9/11 Commission Report or anything else that I have 

seen demonstrates that the Defense Department is the principal 

25

problem with what went wrong with respect to September 11. We 

have had also some important successes over the course of the last 

two decades in utilizing not just tactical systems, but national systems, directly and immediately on the battlefield, and that has had 

a lot to do with the Secretary of Defense’s hand in managing many 

aspects of the defense agencies in intelligence. 

To go back to Senator Rockefeller’s analogy about the child custody, which I am intrigued by, I think the most important thing is 

not to have a divorce between the Secretary of Defense and the 

NID. When I was DCI, I had excellent relations with first Les 

Aspin and then with Bill Perry as Secretaries of Defense, and we 

worked together on things quite collaboratively. We had a single 

baseball cap with ‘‘Chairman’’ on it, and we would co-chair meetings, and sometimes I would put it on and sometimes he would put 

it on. We just worked it out. 

So I think the Harman formulation, frankly, is superior to both 

that of the Commission and that of the original version I heard 

from the White House, because I think it strikes a balance requiring joint appointments of individuals such as the Director of NSA, 

and it gives the Secretary of Defense a word in budget execution, 

although it leaves the principal authority to move money around in 

the hands of the NID. I think that is a better solution than what 

I have heard from either the Commission or initially from the 

White House. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you. Judge Webster. 

Judge WEBSTER. I think I am largely in agreement with that. 

With 80 percent of the budget in defense, the elephant is in the 

room, and how you create a relationship between the NID and the 

Secretary of Defense becomes very important. There has always 

been a principle of reclama on serious issues of disagreement, and 

they worked well in my 41⁄2 years at CIA. The Secretary of Defense 

only exercised that one time, and that provided two of us in chairs 

in the Oval Office with the President, and he made the decision. 

I agree that this problem did not affect the missing of the dots. 

I see nothing in there to think that was the problem. 

During the Gulf War, we pulled satellites that were dedicated to 

watching the Soviet Union closely and moved them into the Middle 

East and worked closely with them. That worked very well. 

We had one unexpected issue which was, again, resolved by the 

deliberative process with the National Security Adviser acting at 

the instruction of the President, where our analysts disagreed with 

what we saw about the number of tanks that had been destroyed 

and scud launchers that had been destroyed, which was the key to 

the President’s authorization to begin the land war. Those things 

do not happen very often, but I think, in retrospect, looking back 

on it, while I think that CIA was right, it would have been better 

for the military to have had that choice and made that final judgment. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you. And my time is up. Can I ask 

for one answer from all of you? I am following the Chairman’s 

precedent. 

I am curious whether you briefed the President yourself personally, and if not, generally speaking, how often you spoke to him? 

We have just come through a period where the Director, and now 

26

the Acting Director of CIA, is giving the President daily intelligence briefings. 

Did you do that, Judge Webster? 

Judge WEBSTER. Yes, I did, Senator, most days. I had a briefer 

there ever morning, so I did not feel an obligation to it, but this 

was the first time in a long time that the President, then-President 

Bush, took his briefing directly from CIA. It had previously been 

through the National Security Adviser. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Mr. Woolsey. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. A handful of times early in the administration, 

President Clinton had me and the briefer in. Normally, thereafter, 

he almost always read the daily briefing. Other than that, I had 

two substantive meetings with him in 2 years—one a year. 

Admiral TURNER. President Carter preferred to read the President’s daily brief. I had a half-hour session with him three times 

a week for the first several years to bring him up on other intelligence aspects. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. That is very interesting. Thank you all very 

much. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. 

Senator ROBERTS. Yes. Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

I would like to cut to the chase again like everybody else has. We 

hear the idea of having a NID is good only if it comes with some 

greater power than currently resides in the Office of the DCI. If we 

do not, it is argued we run the risk of really creating an intelligence czar and causing more harm to the community than good. 

In other words, you have two hats, and you shift the deck chairs 

on the ‘‘Good Ship Intelligence,’’ and then we are back again in 6 

months having, I guess, more hearings. 

But at any rate, I think I hear from you all three saying that 

you agree that if a NID is created, we must empower it; that you 

agree that greater control over DOD NFIP budgets—that is the National Foreign Intelligence program—should be included in these 

broader powers. 

Well, here is the question, and here is the question that faces or 

the challenge or the frustration that faces Senator Rockefeller, Senator Durbin, and Senator Levin and myself. As you have said before—I think Admiral Turner said it—that the Defense Department 

controls 80 percent of the funding, and the Intelligence Committee 

then controls 20 percent. That adds up to 10 percent of the total 

DOD funding in regards to the money that they control. And then 

we try to make some sense out of the difference, and pardon these 

acronyms, but the Intelligence Community absolutely devours 

them, and then they change them every once in a while. 

One is TIARA. When you are talking about TIARA, other than 

the one that we are going to give to the distinguished Chairman, 

that is tactical. Everybody pretty well figures out where the four 

services is with the Department of Defense and that commander in 

the field would have that capability. One is called JMIP. Now, that 

is the satellites. That is the collection. That is tremendously important, where we have to maintain our technology, and then there is 

the NFIP, which is what I have explained, the National Foreign Intelligence Program. That is the strategic and the counterterrorism. 

27

The whole idea is how do you meld these together under a NID so 

that it works. 

Right now, under the Defense Department, you have the Defense 

Intelligence Agency, you have NSA, the NRO, and NIMA. I am 

sorry. They have changed that acronym. It is NGIA. And then you 

have the four services. Nine of the 15 are controlled literally by the 

Defense Department. 

Now, this leads to something that I have called ‘‘torn between 

two masters.’’ Let me give you two examples: 

When we had an urgent need, at the request of many Senators, 

more especially Senator Levin, who was an absolute tiger on this, 

when the Iraq Survey Group went to Iraq to look for the weapons 

of mass destruction, there was an effort all communitywide to say, 

‘‘OK, who has experience in regards to Iraq?’’ And the State Department, they have a small arm of intelligence, and the request 

came to the State Department—I won’t get into the number that 

was requested—Secretary Powell said, ‘‘No, I am sorry, you cannot 

go. I am shorthanded. I need you here.’’ 

David Kay, from orders on high, said, ‘‘No, we need you with the 

Iraq Survey Group.’’ Does that analyst that has 20 years of experience and possibly a Ph.D., who does he work for or who does she 

work for? Does he or she work for Secretary Powell or does he or 

she work for the new NID or does he or she work for the Secretary 

of Defense? 

Let me give you another example. There is the Defense Intelligence Agency, obviously under the Secretary of Defense. The NID 

says, ‘‘You know, we have got a real problem in surge capacity in 

Colombia. We need 300 DIA agents now. Move them, please.’’ 

And the Secretary of Defense says, ‘‘No, I am sorry, we still need 

them in regards to Afghanistan. We are about to have an election 

there if we possibly can. We are not going to do it.’’ 

Now, if you are torn between two masters, it seems to me that 

is the problem. I am assuming that all three of you indicate that 

the NID must be empowered, must have greater control over the 

DOD budgets. Where we get into problems is do you move all nine 

of these agencies? You would not move nine. You would not move 

the services, I am sure. That is tactical. But there are five others 

here. Would you move them over to the NID’s authority or would 

you not or would you try to work out something in which case the 

Under Secretary for Intelligence for Defense, Steve Cambone now, 

would meet with, say, a four-star, if that is the way to do it, or 

some kind of intermediary functionary to try to work this out on 

a better basis. That seems to me to be the big problem or challenge 

as we have as trying to forge a bill. 

Would any of you have any comments? 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Mr. Chairman, I think that this is one where the 

Washington version of the Golden Rule that whoever has the gold 

makes the rules will apply. If budget execution authority is given 

to the NID, he will or she will have a much better ability to say 

to the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense, ‘‘Look, I sympathize. I understand. I know this fluent Arabic language linguist 

is a very rare asset, but you did not hear me. I really need her or 

him.’’ 

28

I do not think one needs to, in legislation, or perhaps even Executive Order, get into the business of precisely who assigns. The Intelligence Community works in a collaborative way a lot of the 

time, but the hardest cases are precisely the ones you mentioned 

because experienced and talented people are much harder to find 

than dollars or just bodies to fill slots, and so I am not surprised 

that Secretary Powell or the Secretary of Defense in other circumstances would struggle against having one of their very best 

people detailed. I think this will follow reasonably from a solution 

generally in favor of what the NID needs, will follow from the NID 

having the kind of enhanced budget authority that is being talked 

about, even if it is not total budget authority of the sort that is in 

the Commission bill or Commission recommendations. 

Senator ROBERTS. Admiral Turner, do you have anything to say? 

Admiral TURNER. I would just come back to my comment that we 

have to make up our minds is terrorism No. 1, or is it not? And 

if it is, then the NID should have the ability to say, ‘‘I am sorry, 

Secretary Powell, I really need that group of people or whatever it 

is in this other capacity.’’ 

Judge WEBSTER. My former deputy, Richard Kerr, made an interesting observation the other day that is worth repeating, that intelligence is really a service industry, a service to many other departments, fields and needs. And I think that the NID, as a head of 

that, has a duty to listen, and he has to listen understandably. And 

then he has a duty to decide. And if the Congress wants to put a 

reclama provision in there or to suggest that if the Department is 

not satisfied, he can take it up higher, that would be fine. It tends 

not to work that way very often in that nobody wants to do that 

until they really think they need it. So I think that kind of a system can still work. 

Senator ROBERTS. My time has expired, Madam Chairman, and 

I thank you for the time, but I think that is one of the very crucial 

decisions we have to make is, I think, one of the witnesses said 

something about breaking the china. I can assure you there is another committee in the Congress upon which I am privileged to 

serve who has quite a bit of feeling about this. They are having 

hearings this afternoon and tomorrow, which I will attend. 

And I think the decision, Madam Chairman, is do we really 

transfer all of those agencies over to the NID or is there some kind 

of transformational authority whereby—I do not want to say force, 

but that they certainly work together in better fashion than they 

do now, and that is an absolute and very important question. 

I thank you for your time. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Rockefeller. 

Senator ROCKEFELLER. Thank you, Madam Chairman. I want to 

ask kind of a generic or philosophical question. Throughout all of 

the hearings that have taken place so far, there has been this undercurrent of nervousness about the so-called 80/20 relationship, 

and that cannot help but feed into the strength of the personality 

of the Secretary of Defense, the strength of the personality of the 

Vice President, who was Secretary of Defense, and perhaps a tendency of Condoleezza Rice to lean a bit in that direction. 

Now, it could be that we are making ourselves walk around too 

many corners or twisting ourselves up on all of this unless there 

29

is some absolute reason that a Secretary of Defense has to have 

budget authority. In other words, if the NID has budget authority, 

that becomes a direct threat to the Secretary of Defense and, thus, 

the committees begin to fight, and the bureaucracies begin to fight, 

and the press begins to take sides, and it is not healthy. Because, 

as Admiral Turner said, what counts is the national interests. 

You have 15 different intelligence agencies. We have just created 

another one, homeland security, and you could, I suppose, let us 

say, take out NSA, NRO, the National Geospatial Intelligence 

Agency, you could take some of those out and say, well, let the Secretary of Defense and the CIA or the NID work that out on a common basis. You remember when George Tenet was testifying before 

the 9/11 Commission, and he was asked about his relationship with 

Rumsfeld, Secretary Rumsfeld, and the answer was, well, it is terrific, and things in Washington do depend upon relationships, as 

well as laws or Executive Orders or whatever. The problem was, 

I think we all had the feeling at that time that Director Tenet was 

not going to be around a great deal of time, so his answer did not 

make much difference, that he got along well with the Secretary 

of Defense. 

Now, you can do this whole cloth. You can NID it and give absolute budget authority, period. You can do it in a partial manner 

that you can share on NSA, NRO, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, etc., but if you do that, you have already changed 

the game. And in a town where rules are rules, what President 

Carter said to you was just fascinating. Senator Lieberman and I 

were whispering about it. It is fascinating that he said go ahead 

and do this, go ahead and do this. Run the Intelligence Community 

and then if there are problems we will work them out. 

I think that was then. This is now. As Senator Lieberman said, 

intelligence is now the tip of the spear. It comes first. It comes before war fighting, unless it is a sneak attack, and then it still 

comes before war fighting because it is meant to anticipate that. 

My question is, is this just a kind of a traditional fight in Washington where the Secretary of Defense has what the Secretary of 

Defense has, and the CIA is tasked to do three different things, but 

can only do one of them, in fact—well, he has a relationship with 

the President or she has a relationship with the President—but it 

is not clear. 

So, what I am saying is this—some people give up on this legislation, on the 9/11 Commission legislation, because they say it will 

never work. One of you said it a moment ago because it will not 

happen. Congress will not pass it. The city will not allow it. The 

cultures will not allow it. I want to hear that I am wrong on that, 

but I would like your views. 

Admiral TURNER. I am a military professional, and I think I understand the military’s obsession with being sure they have access 

to the best intelligence. Every military commander wants every 

asset under his control that he or she needs to prosecute whatever 

assignment he or she is given. It is a natural tendency. 

I keep coming back to the fact that military defense is not the 

primary priority for the country today, but we do want to have a 

system that ensures that that military commander gets the best 

support we can possibly afford to give within the limits of also putVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:30 Mar 02, 2005 Jkt 095507 PO 00000 Frm 00033 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\95507.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PHOGAN
30

ting No. 1 priority on terrorism. I do not know that you can write 

that into a law. I think that has to be ironed out by Presidents and 

Secretaries of Defense and National Intelligence Directors as to 

how they balance that out individually. But the overall national interest is to err on the side of giving the National Intelligence Director more authority rather than less. 

Senator ROCKEFELLER. So you would come down on the idea of 

doing something about it in law rather than depend upon the wellmeaning nature of those who protect us? 

Admiral TURNER. There are well-meaning people in our government at all levels, but the bureaucracies tend to keep them from 

doing well-meaning things frequently. 

Senator ROCKEFELLER. Yes. Thank you, sir. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Senator Rockefeller, you may be right. The personalities involved here may be one issue, but I have known reasonably well every Secretary of Defense since Mel Laird, and none 

of them is a ‘‘Casper Milquetoast.’’ The job tends to attract reasonably strong-willed people and understandably so. 

I think there are three issues for the NID, and I have not looked 

into which of these needs to be sorted out in legislation and which 

could be done by, let us say, report language which suggests an Executive Order working with the White House—whatever—but it 

seems to me there are three issues. 

First is tasking; second is the power of appointment over the defense agencies, such as the Director of NSA; and the third is budget execution. 

I think with respect to tasking, the NID needs to exercise more 

authority than he or she now does and than the DCI now does. We 

need to move toward this business of taking intelligence consumers’ 

judgments into account much more than just having these individual agencies that have these individual collection assets decide 

what to do with them. I think that is the first thing. 

How that is accomplished—how the NID is given that higher degree of authority—I have not made a careful enough study to know. 

With respect to appointment, I believe that it would be a major 

step up over what the DCI now have for the NID to be given joint 

appointment authority with the Secretary of Defense for let us say 

the Director of NSA or the Director of the NRO—not all of these 

service appointments and perhaps not DIA. But I think that would 

work. 

With respect to budget execution, exactly where the appropriation goes, whether it goes to the Secretary of Defense or the NID, 

I think is less important than the fact that the NID needs more 

authority than the DCI now has over moving money around, reprogramming, and so forth. But I think Congresswoman Harman’s 

position is the correct one, that the Secretary of Defense needs 

some type of outlet there; he needs a reclama; he needs the ability 

to say the NID has moved too much away from this data link that 

is vital to our combatant forces in such-and-such place, and if they 

cannot work it out, the President needs to decide it. 

So I think that is a reasonable increase in authority over what 

the DCI now has in those three areas, but I do not have any good 

suggestion to the Committee about what parts of those need to be 

done by legislation and what parts can be accomplished otherwise. 

31

Senator ROCKEFELLER. Judge Webster. 

Judge WEBSTER. I made reference at the beginning of my testimony to Professor Darling’s rather thick and fulsome account of the 

first 5 years. It is interesting that this issue that you are asking 

about now, he defined as how it ‘‘raged’’ before President Truman 

finally decided it. 

I would make a plea on the side of shifting the presumptions so 

that the NID is presumed to have the authority, and the burden 

is on those who want to dispute it to make the effort. 

The same thing follows from having a role in selecting the key 

people in the intelligence community. And I would like to see performance review done by the NID, because in some quarters, whoever writes the report card is the one who gets the attention, just 

to shift that presumption of where the authority is and then let the 

others come to legitimately question it—because these are human 

beings that we are talking about. 

Senator ROCKEFELLER. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Madam 

Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Senator Rockefeller. Senator 

Voinovich. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR VOINOVICH 

Senator VOINOVICH. Again, thank you for your service to our 

country and thank you for being here today. 

[The prepared statement of Senator Voinovich follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR VOINOVICH 

Thank you, Madam Chairman, for holding this morning’s hearing. I look forward 

to hearing the views of the three former Directors of Central Intelligence who are 

with us today concerning the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, and I thank 

each of them for their service to our nation and for testifying before this Committee. 

Congress faces enormous challenges as we seek to reform the national security establishment to better protect the United States from any and all threats. 

While the Bush Administration has broadly accepted the two recommendations 

being considered by this Committee; the first to establish a National Intelligence Director and the second to establish a National Counterterrorism Center, there is 

great uncertainty at this point as to how these recommendations would be implemented. I hope these hearings will help guide this Committee as we seek to fill in 

the details. 

At the same time, we must not lose sight of the internal operations of the agencies 

and structures we seek to reform. I have many questions in this regard. First and 

foremost, are we adequately compensating our people in these critical national security positions? Are there enough employees at agencies such as the FBI which have 

been given new missions since 9/11? Is the security clearance process, which can 

take up to a year and is handled by several different agencies, organized as efficiently as possible? How damaging is it to our national security that people have 

to wait for months to start working in critical positions because they have not yet 

been cleared, or because agencies conduct their own investigations of individuals 

who have already been cleared by other agencies? And as the 9/11 Commission 

noted, the process by which the Senate approves nominees for key national security 

positions simply takes too long—it must be improved. 

I look forward to hearing the testimony of today’s witnesses and addressing these 

and other questions with them. Thank you, Madam Chairman.

Senator VOINOVICH. It is interesting that there is a consensus 

among you. Mr. Woolsey, you are talking about the fact that we 

have secular Baathists, we have Shi’ites, we have Islamic Sunni. 

I would like to refer to this as the ‘‘fourth world war.’’ We had the 

Third World War—the Cold War—and this is the Fourth World 

War. It is really important for us to understand that this is a difVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:30 Mar 02, 2005 Jkt 095507 PO 00000 Frm 00035 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 C:\DOCS\95507.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PHOGAN
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ferent kind of war than we have ever fought before in this Nation’s 

history. Would you agree with that, that this is a different type of 

war that we are not accustomed to? 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Very different in many ways. It has some more 

parallels to the Cold War, I think, Senator, than it does toward 

World War I or World War II, because we fought sometimes in the 

Cold War but not the whole time, and in the Cold War, eventually, 

ideology turned out to be extremely important. We won in no small 

measure because we convinced people like Lech Walesa and Vaclav 

Havel and Andrei Sakharov that we were on the same side. We 

have to do that with hundreds of millions of good and decent Muslims in the world, I think. 

Senator VOINOVICH. So intelligence and, I would also say, diplomacy has become paramount in terms of waging this fourth world 

war that we find ourselves in; would you agree with that? 

Mr. WOOLSEY. In a lot of ways—diplomacy of a very difficult sort, 

more difficult in a way than it was during the Cold War. 

Senator VOINOVICH. I would like to get to the issue of the authority of the NID. Mr. Woolsey, you were saying that you thought that 

the issue of the appointments in NSA and others, these intelligence 

agencies, should be a shared responsibility. Who is going to be held 

responsible for the director of NSA—is it the Secretary of Defense? 

Would the NID go to the Secretary of Defense and say, ‘‘Whoever 

it is you have over there is not getting the job done’’? Who is going 

to conduct performance evaluations? Should it be the NID? 

Mr. WOOLSEY. This is a somewhat complex idea, but I would 

have to say that my experience was one of very close collaboration 

with the Defense Department, and I think the NID and the Secretary of Defense could work this out. I think both should probably 

write performance evaluations. I think if either wants an individual dismissed, they would go to the President—it would be a 

Presidential appointment in many cases, anyway—and it would 

produce perhaps a conflict and a disagreement which the President 

would have to determine. 

But the way the situation works now for, say, the Director of 

NSA is that the Secretary of Defense really does the appointment, 

and if the DCI has some reason to object—and normally, they are 

not going to because this is a career military officer that they probably have not known or worked with before—the DCI can object. 

But in fact the Director of NSA believes that he reports to the Secretary of Defense, and that needs to get adjusted in a way so that 

the NID, the head of the Intelligence Community, has something 

on the order of half the responsibility and authority over the Director of NSA. Exactly how to arrange that, I know it is a somewhat 

different concept, but it seems to me to reflect reality much better 

than having the NID have full authority over the Director of NSA, 

since a huge share of what NSA does is work for battlefield commanders. 

Senator VOINOVICH. On the issue of the budget, would they work 

out the budget issue, too? In other words, the NID looks at the 

whole national intelligence budget , and says ‘‘We are going to rearrange the way these things are being funded’’ and ends up having 

a battle with the Secretary of Defense over the amount of resources 

that are going to be put in there? 

33

Mr. WOOLSEY. In the Executive Branch, you are always working 

on three budgets simultaneously. You are working on the one you 

are putting together to submit to OMB in the fall. You are working 

on the one that Congress is holding hearings on now. And you are 

working on the one that you are executing. 

The DCI under the current system has some substantial authority, at least in theory, over what is being put together and submitted, but in practical terms, since he has so little real power outside the CIA, he is sometimes listened to and can sometimes influence what goes on. As I said, the way I did this was I had a cap 

made up that said ‘‘Chairman,’’ and when the Secretary of Defense 

or the Deputy Secretary of Defense and I would co-chair meetings, 

if we thought we were going to have a disagreement, we would step 

out and resolve it. We kept the hat between us most of the time 

and worked on these things together. 

Senator VOINOVICH. But you would give the NID the power 

under this reorganization in terms of the budget with the understanding that their interpersonal relationships would have something to do with how it finally got worked out? 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Theoretically, I had more power with respect to 

the budget being assembled, and he had more power with respect 

to the budget that was being executed. In the real world, the DCI 

has rather little power over money as a whole outside the CIA. I 

think the NID needs a bit of a leg up. 

Senator VOINOVICH. The NID in the budgetary process would be 

working with OMB and saying, ‘‘Hey, this is what I need to do to 

get the job done.’’ So you think it would be given a higher priority 

than it might under the current situation—or should be given it? 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Well, yes. This gets very involved in the way the 

classified budget is put together. Back in the mid-nineties during 

my tenure, there was not a so-called passback to the Intelligence 

Community. The money all went back to the Defense Department, 

and frankly, I preferred it that way because I thought I would be 

hit with much deeper cuts if the intelligence budget were separate. 

I regarded the defense budget in those times as something of a 

sanctuary that would require that I be cut less than the big cuts 

I was already seeing. 

So during my tenure, I was delighted to be under the envelope 

of defense with respect to dealing with OMB, because I thought—

and I think I was right—I would have gotten fewer cuts as part 

of the defense budget. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Under the new set-up, if we agree that the 

fourth world war is different than the Third World War, or the 

First or Second World War, it seems that there should be a different allocation of resources. However, you may bump into the 

typical lobbying that is done in the Defense Department for hardware and all the other stuff that is supported by every lobbyist in 

this country and every defense manufacturer. It seems to me that 

if we are going to have the money to get the job done in the diplomacy and intelligence area, we may have to cut back on some of 

the other things that we have been supporting here that seem to 

be sacrosanct, if we are going to be responsible in terms of these 

resources. 

What is your comment on that? 

34

Mr. WOOLSEY. Well, Senator, the way I see it, in the early 1960’s 

in the Kennedy Administration, before Vietnam, the country was 

spending about 9 percent of GDP on defense and intelligence together. That would be the equivalent today of an approximately 

trillion-dollar defense and intelligence budget—on the order of double what we are spending now. 

Now, admittedly, in those days, old people were not taken care 

of through government funding, through Medicare and Medicaid, 

etc., so that domestic part of the government has grown. But that 

is a decision within society about whether to take care of old people 

in their own homes or through the government. 

As far as resources allocated to national security, we are at about 

half the level of burden today than we were during the Kennedy 

Administration. 

Now, I am an old Scoop Jackson Democrat—I do not mind spending money. I think it is fine for us to fund whatever we need—indeed, imperative to fund whatever we need—on national security, 

and we ought to do some decent things on the domestic side, too, 

and I am willing to pay the taxes to do it. 

Anyway, for better or for worse, those would be my judgments. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Admiral or Judge Webster, do you want to 

comment on that? 

Judge WEBSTER. I cannot comment on that; I think I agree. But 

one thing I would like to mention, because I have not heard it, is 

that the problem today in reprogramming is enormous. Under existing authorities, it takes about 5 months to move money around 

in the Intelligence Community. 

Mr. Turner. No comment. 

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. Senator Levin. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LEVIN 

Senator LEVIN. Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

I would like to just pick up where Senator Voinovich left off, relative to the budget first of all. Under the current law as I read it, 

the power to develop and present the annual budget to the President is in the DCI, so already, the DCI does the developing and 

presenting of the budget under the existing law. That would presumably not change under the proposal of the 9/11 Commission, except that there would be a new DNI—but putting that aside. 

Second, the issue then becomes supervising the execution of the 

defense budget. That is where the issue, it seems, becomes the real 

one. And currently, that supervising of the execution of that budget 

rests basically in the Defense Department. 

However, under the Carter Administration, as I understand you, 

Admiral Turner, that was with the DCI rather than with the Defense Department. Is that correct? 

Admiral TURNER. Yes, sir. 

Senator LEVIN. Which means that with the stroke of a pen—an 

executive pen, an Executive Order—that shift could go back to the 

DCI, and that does not require legislation. Would that be correct, 

Admiral? 

Admiral TURNER. I believe so, yes, sir. 

35

Senator LEVIN. Because we have to sort out what requires legislation and what can be done by Executive Order, and that is a very 

key issue, because the difference in terms of execution of the budget, which includes reprogramming, is one which can be addressed 

by Executive Order, clearly, and does not need to be addressed 

through legislation, because history has shown that it has been addressed through Executive Order rather than legislation. 

Now, in terms of the intelligence failures—first, would all of you 

agree with what Admiral Turner just said? 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Senator Levin, I have not made a—— 

Senator LEVIN. I am not talking about wisdom. I am talking 

about whether that can be done. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. I have not made a study of whether that can be 

done by Executive Order or would require legislation. This is kind 

of the arcana of budget execution. It certainly, in my time, was in 

the hands of the Defense Department. And also, Congresswoman 

Harman’s bill, I think, may leave some aspect of execution authority in the hands of the Secretary of Defense but give the NID a lot 

more authority over reprogramming. 

These are just details of the way this works that I am a bit stale 

on. 

Senator LEVIN. All right, but these are critical issues. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Certainly. 

Senator LEVIN. Judge, would you agree with Admiral Turner on 

that? 

Judge WEBSTER. That an Executive Order can do it? 

Senator LEVIN. That we can go back to the Carter approach in 

terms of budget execution, which was an Executive Order approach. If you do not have an opinion, that is fine. 

Judge WEBSTER. I do not have an opinion. 

Senator LEVIN. All right. Now, the question of execution of budget authority has been raised, and it is an important one obviously 

for us. The question in my mind is what is the relationship between that location of budget authority execution and the intelligence failures before September 11 and before Iraq. We had major 

intelligence failures prior to September 11 and prior to Iraq. The 

reports of the Intelligence Committee in the Senate showed that. 

The joint intelligence committees of the House and Senate report 

showed that, and surely, the 9/11 Commission Report showed that. 

Now, what is the relationship—do you have examples, for instance, from your experience, of where the issue of budget execution made a significant difference, because I do not see it in the report. I do not see in the report how the issue over budget execution 

relates to the failures which were so dramatically laid out by the 

9/11 Commission. 

Can you help us on that? Judge Webster, we will start with you 

and go down the line. 

Judge WEBSTER. I think you are correct, Senator. In broad generalities, what the 9/11 Commission Report says is that agencies 

were going their own way, and information was not finding itself 

in a place where the warning and the danger would be clear. 

The conclusion of the report was that the leader of the Intelligence Community should be held responsible and given the authorities to make sure that did not happen again. Now, that is 

36

broadly stated. So I think that is really the connection, and he 

needs to have the authorities as well as be called the leader. 

Senator LEVIN. Then, after September 11, we created the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, where presumably, we brought together all of the intelligence so that we did not have intelligence 

that was not shared, and we could connect the dots. And I think 

that is an important change, and I am not sure that this new center which is being proposed, the National Counterterrorist Center, 

does much different in terms of coordination than we have already 

done with TTIC, except for these additional authorities which are 

handed to the center. 

But my question is the budget execution issue. Do you see any 

relationship between where that was located prior to September 11 

or prior to Iraq and the failure of intelligence prior to September 

11 and prior to Iraq? 

Mr. Woolsey. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. I do not really see that there is a substantial relationship, Senator Levin. There were failures within the foreign Intelligence Community, but I do not see those as principally having 

been communication between elements in the foreign intelligence 

community—some were, but most were not. Most of the failures 

were legal limitations such as Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of 

Criminal Procedure that prohibited the FBI, if they obtained material pursuant to grand jury subpoena, from sharing it with the Intelligence Community. There were policy limitations, some within 

the Justice Department. There were policies that had been adopted, for example, in late 1995—and I do not hesitate to stress that 

I resigned in early 1995—in the CIA to limit the ability to penetrate groups by recruiting people with violence in their background. 

There were FAA policies about cooperating with hijackers. 

There were a lot of things that contributed to this, but I do not 

see that the heart of the matter is this budget execution authority 

vis-a-vis defense and DCI now, or perhaps in NID in the future. 

Senator LEVIN. Can I interrupt you there, because I have got to 

get to Admiral TURNER. Mr. WOOLSEY. Yes. 

Senator LEVIN. Do you have anything more to add on that, Admiral Turner? 

Admiral TURNER. Very quickly, I think there is a connection, 

Senator. 

Senator LEVIN. OK. 

Admiral TURNER. We are now saying that we did not have 

enough HUMINT, and that was one of the reasons we failed. Well, 

if the NID has budget execution authority, he or she could move 

money into HUMINT or SIGINT or wherever. 

Senator LEVIN. Was there any effort to do that which was 

thwarted? 

Admiral TURNER. I do not know. 

Senator LEVIN. All right. The final question—and I think, Judge, 

you have commented on this issue. The 9/11 Commission recommends establishing the National Intelligence Director in the Executive Office of the President. My own concern about that is that 

the individual then would be so close to the President and his policy advisors that it could make it even more difficult for the NaVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:30 Mar 02, 2005 Jkt 095507 PO 00000 Frm 00040 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 C:\DOCS\95507.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PHOGAN
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tional Intelligence Director to be independent of the policy pressures of the White House, thus increasing the risk of intelligence 

being shaped to support policy, as appears to have been done prior 

to the war in Iraq, rather than keeping the intelligence objective 

and independent, and also—and this part has not really been discussed publicly as much—that it might make it more likely for executive privilege to be invoked or suggested, thus making effective 

congressional oversight more difficult. 

Judge, you have commented on this issue in your testimony, and 

you have indicated that you believe that it is important in order 

to avoid the reality or the perception of intelligence ‘‘being framed, 

read ‘spun’ ’’ to support a foreign policy of the administration, that 

position be outside of the Executive Office of the President. 

I need a quick answer from the other two witnesses. Do you believe that the National Intelligence Director should be inside or 

outside the Executive Office of the President? 

Mr. Woolsey—inside or outside—because I am out of time. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. I think the key thing is that they report to the 

President. I care much less about whether they are inside or outside the Executive Office than that it be an individual who is willing to be the skunk at the garden party. 

Senator LEVIN. Thank you. Admiral Turner. 

Admiral TURNER. I agree wholly with Jim. 

Senator LEVIN. Thank you both for very helpful answers. 

Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman Collins. Thank you. Senator Coleman. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR COLEMAN 

Senator COLEMAN. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Thank you, 

gentlemen, for extraordinary testimony, and thank you for your 

service to our country. 

Director Woolsey, you raised an issue about the focus of this report, and the reason I want to raise this is whatever we do, whatever we put in place now, has to suffice not just to respond to what 

happened yesterday but to what may happen tomorrow. It is kind 

of like you take a poll, and you are always getting somebody’s opinion on yesterday, yet the issue may be tomorrow. 

We know that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that has missile capacity. We know that there are deep concerns about the Iranians developing nuclear capacity and what they will do with that. 

We have deep concerns about Syria funding terrorism. 

So my concern is as we look at this report, and we look at the 

concept of a National Intelligence Director, and we look at the 

Counterterrorism Center, I will quote a comment that appeared in 

a series of thoughts in the August 1 edition of The Washington 

Post, asking a number of folks—Admiral Turner, I think you responded to this—for their reflections on where do we go with the 

report. This comment came from John Deutsch, former Director of 

Central Intelligence from 1995 to 1996. 

He noted that, ‘‘Moreover, the proposal for the civilian-led, unified, joint command for counterterrorism works better for 

counterterrorism than for managing intelligence regarding other 

security issues that may arise in the Taiwan Straits, in the Palestine-Israel conflict, or the Indian subcontinent.’’ 

38

So my question becomes for all of you gentlemen—the structures 

that we are talking about now that are reflected in this 9/11 Commission Report—a National Intelligence Director, a Joint 

Counterterrorism Center—do you have a sense of confidence that 

this structure relates to some of the other concerns about terrorism, some of the other concerns about Hezbollah, about Iran, 

about Syria? 

That would be one question, and the second is if not, if we are 

missing something in this report and these recommendations to 

deal with those emerging issues, what would it be? 

Admiral Webster—excuse me—Judge Webster. 

Judge WEBSTER. Thank you. I was never more than lieutenant, 

senior grade, sir. 

The Intelligence Community leader has as his responsibility 

knowing what problems there are in the world, not just what is on 

the mind of a department head or on what seems to be for the moment a particular problem, and strategically, what problems are 

out there. I mentioned ‘‘have’’ and ‘‘have not’’ countries can create 

wars. We need to be on the alert for that, and we should not give 

up that responsibility because of the inadequacy of the authority of 

the community leader. That is my first point on that. Maybe I can 

come back. 

Senator COLEMAN. Director Woolsey. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Senator Coleman, I would say that, yes, tomorrow’s threats may be very unlike this one. We could have a crisis 

in the Taiwan Straits and be looking at a serious confrontation 

with China, for example. And we do not want to structure our intelligence in such a way that the Secretary of Defense’s ability to 

have a major hand in our intelligence resources is taken away. 

I do not think the Secretary of Defense is the main enemy here 

as we try to figure out what went wrong before September 11 and 

fix it. And I also think that the 9/11 Commission’s Report, in its 

recommendations and really in its discussion, has almost nothing 

to say about threats like Hezbollah in Iran and Syria. That was not 

its focus. Its focus was al Qaeda’s attack on September 11. And I 

think we want to be very careful that we not structure the Intelligence Community and its reforms in such a way as to fight only 

that war. We have a lot of worldwide responsibilities, and the Department of Defense is a major player in how we respond. 

Senator COLEMAN. My hope would be—and that is my concern—

Chairman Roberts talked about wanting to make sure we did not 

do something that had unintended consequences. There are other 

threats out there, and I think, Director Woolsey, you said that you 

have been through five of these commissions, and if, God forbid, 

something terrible happens, there is going to be a sixth or seventh 

commission. So if there is something that, as we look to the future, 

we do here that you think would limit our ability to deal with those 

responses, I would hope that you would bring it to our attention 

and put it in the record. 

Admiral Turner. 

Admiral TURNER. I am a little concerned, Senator, at the diagram I see in the report where, on the one hand, we have a National Counterterrorism Center, and then, down at the bottom 

right-hand corner of the chart, we have a whole group of individual 

39

threat centers—I forget their exact title. I worry that we are going 

to find that those are the only places we are focusing our intelligence effort, and that there will be another one we’ll develop that 

we have not thought of. I am nervous about this. I have not fully 

understood those charts. 

Senator COLEMAN. I share your nervousness. One of the issues 

that I have raised in the past is, being a former chief executive and 

mayor, you really want and need that skunk at the party; you need 

some dissenting voices. Is it your sense—and I would appreciate all 

of your responses—that the structure that is being proposed here 

with the National Intelligence Director and with the Counterterrorism Center that we have—is that going to allow for dissenting voices to get to the President, to get to the Commander in 

Chief? 

Director Woolsey. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Senator Coleman, I think that is largely a matter 

of individual propensity. I have known the men on my right and 

left for many years, each of them, and they both call it absolutely 

straight. I do not think when they were in the job, or now, or ever 

have they been in a position of trying to tell people on something 

important what they want to hear. And I think that comes down 

not so much to the organizational relationship—even whether 

somebody is in the Cabinet, although I generally agree with Bill on 

keeping the NID out of the Cabinet—I think the key thing is the 

individual. You have to have people who do not want too much to 

be liked. 

Senator COLEMAN. Admiral Turner. 

Admiral TURNER. I would agree with Jim on that very much. 

Senator COLEMAN. Judge Webster. 

Judge WEBSTER. I agree. 

Senator COLEMAN. The question about the relationship with the 

President—and we have had discussion—I take it that all of you 

gentlemen agree that this position should not be in the Cabinet. I 

think Judge Webster said that, and Admiral Turner is shaking his 

head. 

Judge WEBSTER. Yes. 

Admiral TURNER. Yes. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Yes. 

Senator COLEMAN. Help me understand how we structure this. 

There has been some discussion about whether it is in the Office 

or out. The bottom line is that the ability to do the job depends on 

the confidence of the President. I take it we all agree on that. Is 

there any disagreement with that? 

Judge WEBSTER. I agree. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. I agree. 

Admiral TURNER. Agreed. 

Senator COLEMAN. So this issue of having terms beyond the 

President’s term, I think from my perspective, would not be a good 

idea if your power is going to depend on your relationship with the 

President. Can we structure that, or is this something that we have 

to leave to—we elect a President, and they are going to lead us in 

the direction—Director Woolsey, perhaps in a direction that you as 

head of intelligence say we should not go, but our country is going 

to go where the President says we go. Is this something that we 

40

can structure, or do we simply have to leave it to the—not the 

whims, but the realities of human relationships and strength coming from that relationship. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. I think there is no guarantee, Senator Coleman, 

and I think there should not be any greater difficulty in having a 

NID who is willing to speak independently and to reflect his analysts’ views and his own views than there is for having a DCI. And 

generally, over the years, I think DCIs have called it pretty 

straight, sometimes to the extent of not pleasing the boss. But I do 

not see how these changes make that problem any harder than it 

is now. 

Judge WEBSTER. I agree. I think that anything you can do, anything in the culture that gives the leadership in the Intelligence 

Community the intellectual independence to call it the way it is 

seen by the experts and the analysts—setting forth alternative 

points of view if necessary. Their job is not to influence a policy or 

to make a policy happen. And again and again I repeated to everyone, said it publicly, said it to the Cabinet, we will do our very best 

to give you the best intelligence and analysis of that intelligence 

that we can have. Then, it is up to you. You can use it, you can 

ignore it, you can tear it up and throw it again. The one thing you 

cannot do or ask us to do is change it. And I think we have held 

to that. Then, the job of defining the policy that flows from that 

is up to other people. 

Senator COLEMAN. Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Durbin. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR DURBIN 

Senator DURBIN. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. 

I suppose the questions I am about to ask reflect the fact that 

I have taken a lot more history courses than management courses, 

but I hope you will bear with me. 

There is a legendary saloon keeper in Chicago named Paddy 

Bauler. He ran an old saloon and was kind of a ward boss. So they 

had a reform candidate running against him, and they went to 

Paddy Bauler and asked him, ‘‘What do you think about this guy 

running against you?’’ 

He said, ‘‘This city ain’t ready for reform.’’ He was right. 

The question is whether the intelligence community is ready for 

reform. And I think the 9/11 Commission has shaken us up, and 

they should. They did a great job, did great service to this country. 

But if we are often accused of being guilty of fighting the last war, 

it appears that in the case for reforming the Intelligence Community, we are basing it on the second last war, because since September 11, we have had another event occur, and that was the invasion of Iraq. I think the invasion of Iraq made it clear to us in 

2002—after, I should say, our vote in 2002, our invasion in 2003—

that intelligence failed us a second time. 

I wonder what an Iraq invasion intelligence commission’s recommendations might be a year later, after September 11; would 

they be any different? Certainly, I think it calls into question 

whether there is any power of self-healing within the Intelligence 

Community. We failed on September 11. The Intelligence Community did not do as good a job as it should have done. A year later, 

41

they were tested again and, by the report of the Senate Intelligence 

Committee, they failed again. On September 11, they had to look 

at the whole world and figure out who our enemy was, and they 

did not get it—they did not get it right. When it came to the invasion of Iraq, they had to look at one country and figure out what 

the danger was, and they did not get that right, either, which 

brings me to this point, and that is whether or not, when we talk 

about this reform process here, whether changing nameplates and 

changing e-mail addresses is really getting to the heart of the problem. 

Judge Webster, 13-year-old mainframes at the FBI—I have been 

screaming bloody murder about this for 3 years—why don’t we 

have a Manhattan Project on intelligence technology? Why aren’t 

we gathering the best and brightest in the academic and the private sectors and the public sector, breaking through all of the Federal red tape, and building a computer system to fight the war on 

terror? We have not even decided to try that yet—and yet we are 

talking about moving nameplates and who has budgetary authority 

and whether they are going to be part of the Cabinet. 

Second, Mr. Woolsey, thank you for joining us again. I am still 

troubled by your repeated comments at these hearings that it 

sometimes is not safe for these agencies to share information. 

There may just be another spy in one of these agencies, you said. 

How are you going to get trusted communication that the 9/11 

Commission calls for if you start with that premise—if it is not safe 

for the FAA to tell the FBI about dangerous people; if it is not safe 

for the border crossing guards to take fingerprints and share them 

with the FBI? 

So my point is this—going back to history as opposed to management—is the Intelligence Community ready for reform? If it is not 

ready for reform, are we kidding ourselves here? Are we going 

through a political exercise moving nameplates around that really 

will not achieve the fundamental reform that Admiral Turner referred to when the President of the United States called him in and 

said, ‘‘We are going to do it differently, and you are in charge of 

doing it differently’’? That is what bothers me. 

Would anybody like to comment? 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Senator Durbin, two points. First of all, about preIraq and a commission on that. In a sense, there is one. The commission on the WMD estimates, co-chaired, I believe, by former 

Senator Robb and Judge Silberman, is holding hearings. I am testifying before them, I think, next week on those issues. And it is a 

complicated set of issues, but nonetheless, just as there were about 

five post-Pearl Harbor commissions, there will doubtless be more 

than one post–9/11 and post-Iraq commission. It seems to be kind 

of a constant here in Washington. 

I think on the sharing issue, the point I want to make is that 

the 9/11 Commission essentially said that ‘‘need to share’’ should 

replace ‘‘need to know.’’ And it has a mechanism, a kind of an 

internet, a trusted information internet. My written testimony is 

more thorough than what I said here at the table on that point, 

but the key issue seems to me to be that we should not give up 

on ‘‘need to know.’’ We ought to try to continually adjust who needs 

to know what. We ought to make sure that a person, regardless of 

42

what agency they are in—if they are a DIA analyst, and they are 

one of the two or three best people in government to look at a particular issue, they ought to be given access to a CIA directorate of 

operations blue border report, as long as they are trusted and security-cleared and so forth. 

I am not suggesting that we should stay within the stovepipes. 

It is the numbers that bother me, because insofar as one widely 

disseminates material, one could have a Robert Hanssen, who 

turned out to be a pretty clever computer operator—— 

Senator DURBIN. Mr. Woolsey, Governor Kean and Congressman 

Hamilton sat in those chairs and told us we have got to be more 

creative, we have got to be more imaginative. We cannot keep putting things in these neat little drawers of expectations. We have 

got to think more broadly on the war on terrorism. And what you 

are arguing for, even though it may be stovepipes with a few holes 

in it, is to make sure that the holes are directed in the right ways. 

How do you get creativity and imagination out of that? 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Well, Senator, the victors in World War II used 

intelligence very creatively, and one way they did so, particularly 

with respect to the very sensitive signals intercepts and decrypting 

that we were doing of the Japanese codes and the British in Enigma were doing of the German codes, was to radically restrict the 

numbers of people who did the analysis and had exposure to those 

technologies but to make them the very best. 

Whenever I see, as I saw back in 1998, headlines in the press 

saying we are listening to bin Laden’s satellite telephones, and we 

know immediately thereafter he stops using them—— 

Senator DURBIN. That was a leaked story in The Washington 

Times which killed the source for us. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. It strikes me that once I see leaks like that, I 

think there are too many blabbermouths in the government who 

are being given access to signals intelligence. The person who 

leaked that, I think, has as much blood on his or her hands as anyone with respect to September 11. 

So it is impossible to always disseminate only to the right people, 

and I do think we need to disseminate across agency lines, but we 

also, I think, should not think that we are going to do something 

effective just by broadcasting and sharing very widely without attention to precisely whom this sharing is going to. That is my only 

point. 

Senator DURBIN. I have only a few seconds left, but I would really like it if either of the other two witnesses could comment, 

Madam Chairman, on this whole question about whether we can 

create a climate of reform in agencies which do not appear to be 

open to that climate. 

Admiral TURNER. Senator, I tried to say in my comments that 

the biggest problem today is how we analyze these situations. 

Henry Kissinger has a piece in The Washington Post today saying 

analysis, interpretation, is the real problem here. Changing these 

boxes will help some, but it is not the solution. 

The solution is with you. Are you interrogating the intelligence 

committees? 

Senator DURBIN. I am on that, too. 

43

Admiral TURNER. OK, sir. Are you interrogating these people 

when they come up and finding out if they really can back up what 

they are saying. 

Senator DURBIN. Admiral, we have 22 staff members on the Senate Intelligence Committee shared by the members for 15 different 

intelligence agencies. I think you can answer that question yourself. We cannot get into the level of depth that we should with the 

current situation on Capitol Hill. The 9/11 Commission is right—

we have failed at oversight. We have to accept some responsibility 

here. 

Admiral TURNER. And there is the PFIAB and the whole bureaucratic structure. I mean, are the Secretaries of State asking these 

questions? Are the Secretaries of Defense asking these questions? 

We have just got to encourage a much more inquiring approach to 

intelligence. 

Judge WEBSTER. Are we ready? I think we are always ready if 

a good reason is presented and a good objective is understood, and 

then, people will go to work and find it. That is true in the FBI, 

it is true in the CIA, and it is true in the other elements of the 

Intelligence Community. 

But when we think about how intelligence is collected, as Admiral Turner pointed out, and then we think what do we do with that 

intelligence, where does it go—using my FBI example, there is an 

extraordinary amount of information that is in those files. Getting 

it out depends on architecture of the system, and the architecture 

of the system had something else in mind when it was created. 

I do not think it needs a Manhattan Project, but it sure needs 

some attention and a willingness to invest in what creates that capability to share but share with protection. 

Senator DURBIN. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. Senator Carper. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER 

Senator CARPER. Senator Durbin, who was the saloon keeper in 

Chicago that you spoke of? 

Senator DURBIN. Paddy Bauler. 

Senator CARPER. Paddy Bauler. And Paddy Bauler said, ‘‘This 

city ain’t ready for reform’’? 

Senator DURBIN. Yes. 

Senator CARPER. One could also look at the intelligence community and conclude that, given the unanimous recommendations of 

the 9/11 Commission, the Select Committee on Intelligence’s unanimous recommendations, the countless commissions that have existed over the last 30 or 40 years recommending changes, maybe 

the Intelligence Community ‘‘ain’t ready for reform,’’ either. 

I would go a bit further and say my guess is that the committees 

on which we serve here in the Senate and in the House ‘‘ain’t ready 

for reform.’’ 

You have testified since the 1970’s, some of you, before countless 

committees of the House and Senate, and you have a pretty good 

idea how this place works and sometimes does not work too well. 

And I am not going to ask you to help us today think through how 

we might want to restructure our committees in the House or the 

Senate, but I do want to remind us all that in the 9/11 Commission 

44

Report, while there are a lot of recommendations with respect to 

changes in the Executive Branch, there are quite a few recommendations with respect to how we operate here on our side of 

this government. 

There are discussions and suggestions that we wait before we 

change our Committee structure, until we figure out how we are 

going to restructure the Executive Branch, before we move forward 

with the 9/11 Commission’s intelligence recommendations. Setting 

aside what responsibilities we invest in this director with respect 

to budget and personnel and so forth, should we be thinking this 

year about making changes in our approach with respect to oversight, the number of committees that we have? 

I think with respect to the Department of Homeland Security 

alone there are, I have heard, as many as 80 committees and subcommittees that have some piece of jurisdiction over homeland security. 

What would be your recommendations with respect to sequencing 

for structural changes on the legislative side? 

Admiral TURNER. My view is this all ought to go ahead concurrently. I do not see why changing the congressional structure needs 

to wait until you decide whether it is a DCI or a NID. It is not all 

that big a change, in my opinion. And in any event, your structure 

needs change just as the rest of it does. We ought to get on with 

it. 

I happen to have been the DCI who had to be there when the 

committees were formed—actually, not the Senate committee—I 

was 6 months late—but I was really the DCI who had to figure out 

how we adjusted to dealing with the Congress, because the Intelligence Community had almost no contact I believe before that. 

I must say that in looking back on it, I am disappointed in the 

Congress’ performance over these many years and the things that 

have gotten by, like Iran-Contra. I think it is really time for an 

introspection by the Congress. Your role is so vital here in trying, 

within the limitations of the size of your staffs and all, to introduce 

a real inquisitiveness into this situation as to whether they are 

looking at all the aspects of it and not getting ‘‘group-thinked.’’ 

Senator CARPER. Thank you, Admiral Turner. Judge Webster. 

Judge WEBSTER. Senator, when we talk about completing the 

dots, what about those 80 committees? How many dots failed to get 

completed because of the spread in responsibility and authority 

throughout the Congress? And how much better might it have been 

if this Committee or the SSCI had full knowledge of all the regulation that was going on? It is an argument for consolidation, just as 

we are hearing that the Intelligence Committee needs to consolidate and control its information. 

Senator CARPER. Thank you. Mr. Woolsey. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Senator, I come at this from a particular perspective. In the early seventies, when I was still in my twenties, I was 

General Counsel to the Senate Armed Services Committee for Senator Stennis, and one other staff member and I together with one 

Appropriations Committee staffer were the three cleared staffers in 

the Senate that worked on the intelligence budget, among other 

things—we all had other duties as well. 

45

When I returned some 20 years later as DCI to testify before the 

Congress on intelligence and realized I was dealing with four committees, a substantial number of staffers—for example, several of 

my many trips to Capitol Hill in 1993 were to try to turn around 

the decision of the Senate Select Committee’s expert on satellite design, because he had a different idea about the way satellites 

should be designed than our experts in the National Reconnaissance Office—I came to the view that some consolidation with respect to oversight on Capitol Hill would be a pretty good idea. And 

I am pleased that the Commission recommended it. I think far and 

away the best approach would be a single committee, a joint committee along the lines of the old Joint Atomic Energy Committee. 

I do not think that the appropriations process, at least in my experience, is broken, and I do not see anything particularly necessary 

to fix it. 

But I think the biggest problem is the time limitation, the term 

limitation, on the members of the House and Senate Select Committees, because it really helps a lot to have members of the committees who have seen issues come around again and again. They 

can provide an institutional memory the way the members of a 

number of other congressional committees do, rather than having 

to be educated afresh with respect to what this satellite does or 

that NSA program does every time one comes before them. 

So I do think that getting rid of term limits and, hopefully, having a single committee for authorization would be very positive 

steps and, like Stan and Bill, I do not think it needs to await 

whether you have a NID or a DCI. 

Senator CARPER. Good. Thanks. 

I would just say to you, Madam Chairman, and to my friend and 

colleague Senator Lieberman, this has been an extraordinary 

panel. I have sat here, and I have learned a lot, but I have also 

been struck by how fortunate we are as Americans that each of you 

has served our country and still does. You make me proud, and I 

am sure I speak for all of us in saying that. 

One of the values of having a diverse panel like this, one made 

up of people with rich experience, is to have them tell us at the 

end of the hearing where they agree, where they see the consensus, 

because we can go in a million different directions coming out of 

these hearings. But where do you see consensus among yourselves 

that you would really urgently urge us to pursue? 

Admiral TURNER. I think it is empowering somebody to run a 

roughly $40 billion a year operation. We just do not have that, and 

we need to have it—a CEO. So the real issue is just how much authority you give that CEO and still protect the Department of Defense. And I, as a military officer, would err on the side of giving 

it to the National Intelligence Director. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. And I, as a lawyer, now a management consultant, who only spent 2 years in the uniformed military, would err 

a little bit more on the side of protecting the interests of the Secretary of Defense. But generally speaking, I think Stan and Bill 

and I are headed in the same direction, and I would agree with establishing the NID, I would agree with enhancing their authority 

over tasking, budget, and personnel, but I would like to essentially 

require a collaborative relationship between that individual and 

46

the Secretary of Defense over that some 80 percent of the national 

intelligence programs. 

Senator CARPER. Judge Webster. 

Judge WEBSTER. I do not have much to add except that giving 

the intelligence leader, whatever he may turn out to be, the kind 

of authorities that he is thought to have but really does not and 

making them work in that way, as—Jim calls it an adjustment—

I would say shifting the initiative, resumption of authority—all of 

those things can only work for a more effective Intelligence Community. 

Senator CARPER. Thanks. That was great. 

Admiral TURNER. Could I add one point? I do not worry about 

the Defense Department much because it is so powerful. It has all 

kinds of ways of protecting its interests, and will. 

Senator CARPER. Thanks for that clarification and for your excellent testimony. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Senator Carper. 

And last but not least, the ever patient Senator from Minnesota, 

Senator Dayton. Thank you for staying. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR DAYTON 

Senator DAYTON. Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

I have moved from 100th in seniority to 89th, and it is not at 

all clear to me exactly what difference that makes in the scheme 

of things—except that I guess I get to be in the same time zone 

as the Chairman as opposed to being off the deep end here. 

It is an excellent hearing—I would say the same thing—and very 

worthwhile. I thank you all for your service and also your expertise 

here. 

To paraphrase Senator Ben Nelson in the Senate, if it has not 

been asked by everyone, it has not been asked, and I am not sure 

what is really left here. 

We talk a lot at the top of organizations. What about in the 

midsections and so forth? These eight various entities under the 

Department of Defense. Each branch—Marines, Air Force, Navy, 

Army—has its own separate intelligence. Are we making more of 

these 15 different entities’ or agencies’ dispersion than it really involves, or are we talking about very separate entities here that 

ought to be consolidated, merged, in order to be more efficient? 

Admiral TURNER. Twenty years ago, I wrote a piece in The Washington Post that recommended removing Army, Navy, Air Force, 

Marine Corps, and Coast Guard, from the national Intelligence 

Community. Their job is tactical. Navy intelligence, for instance, 

does not need to inform the chief of the Navy about the strategic 

picture, what is going on in the rest of the world; he or she has 

the Defense Intelligence Agency to provide all that to him or her. 

I think we ought to hive them off and put them into the tactical 

field; let them know that is where they stay. They should not be 

bothering to study the strategic picture anyway. We have too much 

duplication there. 

Mr. WOOLSEY. I think over the years, at least as of the time that 

I was DCI 9 years ago, the roles and functions of the military service intelligence operations have shrunk and consolidated. I think, 

although their membership on some bodies may be a bit out-ofVerDate 0ct 09 2002 09:30 Mar 02, 2005 Jkt 095507 PO 00000 Frm 00050 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6601 C:\DOCS\95507.TXT SAFFAIRS PsN: PHOGAN
47

date, their real function and what they really spend their time on 

is material that is directly and immediately relevant to their own 

service. Also, people add up all the numbers, but the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research generally does a good 

job—it has 100 or so analysts working for the Secretary of State. 

There are several of these agencies that are not large and I think 

do not create any particular problem or confusion. The big ones 

with respect to money, other than the CIA, are the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National 

Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. And each of those has an important function. It is not going to 

be that hard for the NID to deconflict them. I do not think it is 

necessary to have any massive reform of them. I think there are 

some adjustments and changes that can be made, and I think the 

NID, working with a Secretary of Defense, can do it. 

To my mind, the hard problem here is melding domestic and foreign intelligence on the terrorist threat. That is new; it is tough. 

It gets into civil liberties issues, sometimes real civil liberties 

issues, sometimes ones that are perceived to be such. To my mind, 

that is why we need to move to a NID, so he or she can coordinate 

and pull together what is happening domestically with respect to 

terrorist groups, embassies here that might directly or indirectly 

help fund terrorist-friendly groups and so on, on the one hand, and 

foreign intelligence about what is going on overseas on the other. 

It is the foreign-domestic lash-up that seems to me to be right 

at the heart of the new NID’s job, and it is one of the reasons why 

I keep coming back to the fact that I do not think the Secretary 

of Defense is the main problem here. I think we ought to just work 

something that the Defense Department can live with, and that is 

going to work. It works reasonably well now. I think the big problem is in this new world of having to look at foreign and domestic 

together. 

Senator DAYTON. The four entities you mentioned, other than the 

CIA, are within the Department of Defense. So you have those four 

entities, and then you have the CIA, and then you have the domestic side, where I assume you are talking about primarily the FBI 

or some of these others—again, we have Homeland Security, Treasury, and Energy. Again, what are the big entities here—are we 

talking about the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and 

these four subsidiaries under them? Going back to your management expertise, how do you pull this together? How do you have 

somebody who is NID who is then directing four subsidiaries under 

the Secretary of Defense? 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Well, they have different functions. The NRO designs, launches and operates the satellites. The National 

Geospatial Intelligence Agency takes that data and makes maps 

and photos and integrates it and gets it to the combattant forces. 

NSA does signals intercepts and decryption. 

There are areas where they need to work together, but it is not 

as if you have a lot of people actually doing the same thing. 

Senator DAYTON. But whom do they report to? Are you saying 

they report to the new NID? Then, why are they in the Department 

of Defense? 

48

Mr. WOOLSEY. They have grown up—NSA was originally a Defense Department agency. The National Reconnaissance Office for 

many years was, and still in a lot of ways is, a joint venture, essentially, between the CIA and the Department of Defense. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency grows out of a merger of the 

Defense Mapping Agency and the CIA people who were doing photo 

interpretation—and my successor, John Deutch, made that a Defense Agency. The Defense Intelligence Agency has grown up over 

time with varied jobs, but it is not really duplicative. For example, 

they manage the attaches; they run certain specialized collection 

operations with different types of aircraft and so forth. 

So these different agencies, the defense ones, really report, for all 

practical purposes, to the Secretary of Defense. The DCI under the 

current system can have some influence over the direction they go, 

but I think not enough to really pull them together in the way that 

you are suggesting they should be pulled together. 

I think the Secretary of Defense and the NID, working together, 

could get these rationalized fine. I do not think it is the major problem. I think the major problem is domestic and foreign, pulling 

that together. 

Senator DAYTON. Is the way Admiral Turner described the arrangement under President Carter going to do it here? Is that what 

we are talking about here, where that one person, whether by fiat 

or whatever, has that authority, then, despite being out of the organizational chart loop—is just inserted and told, OK, you are going 

to run the show? 

Mr. WOOLSEY. I think the big problem is not necessarily that one 

needs to move the budget execution authority. The big problem is 

that one needs to radically simplify and enhance the role of the 

DCI under the current system, or the NID under a new one, for 

reprogramming. 

I think Bill Webster is right on the money when he said, literally 

and figuratively, that it is almost impossible now, and there are 

massive delays involved, in a NID—or a DCI today—moving money 

from one of these programs to another. The Secretary of Defense 

needs to be heard and be able to reclama that to the President if 

need be. But you need more ability to reprogram. That is the flexibility that, I think, a NID needs that a DCI does not really have. 

Senator DAYTON. My time is up. Thank you very much, Madam 

Chairman, for an excellent hearing. 

Thank you all again. 

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you. I want to thank our witnesses 

for being with us today. Each of you added a great deal to our consideration of these important issues. 

We have a heavy responsibility to produce a reform bill and to 

do so in a relatively short amount of time, and being able to call 

on people with your experience, expertise, and judgment certainly 

facilitates our task. I hope we can continue to call upon you during 

our deliberations, and I thank you very much for being here today. 

The hearing record will remain open for 5 days. 

I want to thank my colleagues again for their efforts to be here. 

I think it is a sign not only of the compelling testimony that we 

have, but the importance of our task, that so many Members have 

49

come back from their home States and have stayed throughout the 

hearing. So I thank you. 

Senator Lieberman, did you have any closing comments? 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks, Madam Chairman. 

Just to join you in thanking the three witnesses. This has been 

a very valuable hearing. We have actually learned something from 

you, and we appreciate it. [Laughter.] 

Chairman COLLINS. I find that less shocking than does my Ranking Member, Senator Lieberman. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Well, it may come more at other hearings 

than on you, but anyway, I appreciate it. When I called you ‘‘three 

wise men’’ at the beginning, you have not let us down. 

I think it is very important that the three of you have in different ways said that the status quo is no longer acceptable with 

regard to the Intelligence Community. You are all for a stronger 

National Intelligence Director. There may be some disagreement 

about the details. 

Admiral Turner, your story from the Carter Administration was 

fascinating to me, and it does show that what a lot of us are calling 

for could be done without statute change. On the other hand, a 

statute is permanent and does set a standard, so we need to act 

quickly. 

The final thing I would say is that I agree with Mr. Woolsey that 

we have got to stop ever using the word ‘‘czar’’ to describe a 

strengthening of position, and for the moment, I like your comment 

that the NID is meant to be a CEO, it is meant to be a chief executive officer. 

Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

Senator DAYTON. Madam Chairman. 

Chairman COLLINS. Yes, Senator Dayton. 

Senator DAYTON. Tomorrow morning, I know you have made 

some considerable effort to reconcile your timetable with that of the 

other committees on which we both serve. What is your intention 

tomorrow with regard to the witnesses and proceedings, because 

the next committee starts, I think, an hour and 15 minutes later. 

Chairman COLLINS. Which is highly unfortunate. We have 

changed our hearing time twice to accommodate the Armed Services Committee, and then, unfortunately, the Secretary had an appointment that he could not change. 

Our hearing will begin at 9 o’clock now, and I would encourage 

Members who are on both committees to just go back and forth. 

We will be hearing from a very compelling panel of family witnesses, those who lost loved ones on September 11. As they were 

the driving force behind the creation of the Commission, and they 

have followed its work very closely, so I think it is an important 

hearing, but I certainly understand that Members are going to 

have a lot of conflicts—but we will begin at 9 o’clock. 

Senator DAYTON. Which is why I regret that. I guess I would just 

respectfully ask if we could have the opportunity to have the panel 

begin its remarks as soon as is practical tomorrow morning. 

Chairman COLLINS. We will. 

Senator DAYTON. That would accommodate those of us who do 

need to be at both simultaneously. 

Chairman COLLINS. Exactly. 

50

Senator DAYTON. Thank you. 

Chairman COLLINS. That is why we moved it up to 9 o’clock. Senator Voinovich. 

Senator VOINOVICH. We are talking about moving very quickly on 

this whole issue. The statistic that Congress was in session 195 

days, and Mr. Woolsey was on the Hill 205 of those days testifying 

indicates—— 

Mr. WOOLSEY. Some of those were meetings. 

Senator VOINOVICH [continuing]. Meetings—indicates that we 

ought to move as quickly as we possibly can to shape up our shop. 

In other words, we ought to have this on both tracks, and I would 

recommend to you and also to Senator Lieberman, and to our leadership, that they ought to get on with this whole issue, because we 

cannot keep going the way that we are going. This whole Committee structure is not put together in a way to respond to the 

threats that we have today, and it is incumbent on us to fix it. 

Chairman COLLINS. I think you are absolutely right. 

Senator Lieberman and I have been assigned the reorganization 

of the Executive Branch, not the Legislative Branch, but I know 

that our Senate leaders are moving forward with that vital recommendation as well. 

And you are certainly correct that Mr. Woolsey’s testimony about 

the number of commitments on the Hill that he had to answer—

certainly, while oversight is very important, we ought to be able to 

do it in a more efficient manner so that we are not taking up all 

of the Executive Branch’s time testifying before Congress. 

So thank you for those comments as well. 

Thank you. This hearing is adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 12:40 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.] 

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