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REFORM OF THE UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE

COMMUNITY

HEARINGS

BEFORE THE

SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

AUGUST 18 2004 AND SEPTEMBER 7, 2004

Printed for the use of the Select Committee on Intelligence

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate

(II)

SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE

[Established by S. Res. 400, 94th Cong., 2d Sess.]

PAT ROBERTS, Kansas, Chairman

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV, West Virginia, Vice Chairman

ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah

MIKE DeWINE, Ohio

CHRISTOPHER S. BOND, Missouri

TRENT LOTT, Mississippi

OLYMPIA J. SNOWE, Maine

CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska

SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia

JOHN W. WARNER, Virginia

CARL LEVIN, Michigan

DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California

RON WYDEN, Oregon

RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois

EVAN BAYH, Indiana

JOHN EDWARDS, North Carolina

BARBARA A. MIKULSKI, Maryland

BILL FRIST, Tennessee, Ex Officio

HARRY REID, Nevada, Ex Officio

BILL DUHNKE, Staff Director

ANDREW W. JOHNSON, Minority Staff Director

KATHLEEN P. MCGHEE, Chief Clerk

(III)

CONTENTS

DAY ONE

Page

Hearing held in Washington, DC:

August 18, 2004 ................................................................................................ 1

Witness Statements:

Boyd, General Charles G., USAF (Ret.), President and CEO, Business

Executives for National Security ................................................................. 22

Prepared statement ................................................................................... 25

Kay, Dr. David, Senior Research Fellow, The Potomac Institute for Policy

Studies ........................................................................................................... 13

Prepared statement ................................................................................... 18

Zegart, Dr. Amy B., Assistant Professor, Department of Public Policy,

School of Public Affairs, University of California ...................................... 6

Prepared statement ................................................................................... 9

Supplemental Materials:

Fact Sheet: Key Bush Administration Actions Consistent with 9/11

Commission Recommendations .................................................................... 44

DAY TWO

Page

Hearing held in Washington, DC:

September 7, 2004 ............................................................................................ 81

Witness Statements:

Kean, Hon. Thomas H., former Chairman, National Commission on

Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States .................................................. 89

Hamilton, Hon. Lee H., former Vice Chairman, National Commission

on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States ............................................ 90

Lehman, Hon. John F., former member, National Commission on

Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States .................................................. 88

Prepared joint statement .......................................................................... 94

Supplemental Materials:

Letter dated September 7, 2004 from Bob Kerrey, President, New School

University ...................................................................................................... 88

CRS Report for Congress: Proposals for Intelligence Reorganization

1949–2004, September 8, 2004 .................................................................... 135

(1)

REFORM OF THE UNITED STATES

INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

DAY ONE

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 18, 2004

UNITED STATES SENATE, SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE, Washington, DC.

The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:41 p.m., in room

SH–216, Hart Senate Office Building, Hon. Pat Roberts (Chairman

of the Committee) presiding.

Committee Members Present: Senators Roberts, Hatch, DeWine,

Bond, Snowe, Hagel, Chambliss, Rockefeller, Levin and Mikulski.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. PAT ROBERTS

Chairman ROBERTS. The Committee will come to order.

Today the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence meets in open

session to continue our examination of intelligence reform issues.

Since the Congress adjourned on July 22, 11 committees have held

or intend to hold a total of 21 hearings on the topic on intelligence

reform. I welcome my colleagues on other committees as they begin

to examine the issues with which this Committee has wrestled for

over 27 years.

As anyone who is familiar with the intelligence community well

knows, it reaches across many government agencies and disciplines. So it is appropriate that other committees within the Senate and House take an interest in the facets that touch upon their

respective areas of responsibility. We agree with that.

There is, however, one committee whose jurisdiction and mandate encompasses every facet of this topic, and that is the Senate

Intelligence Committee. It is this Committee that must weigh not

only the interests of the national users of intelligence, but also the

military users. We must, by necessity, balance the needs of each

without presuming the primacy of either.

As this Committee has attempted reforms over the years, many

of which were intended to accomplish the same goals that we are

discussing today, we have found that other committees of jurisdiction often hold the keys to success. It is with that in mind that we

intend to work very closely with our counterparts on the other committees to ensure that they have the full benefit of this Committee’s long history and experience and also professional staff expertise.

As I stated publicly on Monday before the Government Affairs

Committee, we are working to draft legislation that we will share

2

with the appropriate committees when we have reached general

agreement among our own ranks. I believe we can accomplish that

within a relatively short, short period of time.

Our goal is to address the major concerns outlined by the 9/11

Commission to implement their goals as well as those of the joint

and Senate-House inquiry into 9/11, and our report on prewar intelligence on Iraq and this Committee’s experience over the past

two decades. Translating those important ideas, some of which are

long overdue, into legislative language is very complicated, however. As they say, the devil is in the details.

As members of this Committee well know, the missions of the intelligence community are as diverse as the 15 intelligence community members themselves. While counterterrorism rightly stands

foremost among our concerns, we must not legislate reform that

hardwires an intelligence community to fight a single threat, as we

did with the cold war.

Terrorism will not be the last threat that this Nation faces.

Therefore, we must provide a legal framework and provide ample

resources to allow the executive branch the flexibility required of

the demanding and changing threats. Congress should then be prepared to provide its required oversight. Our ability to do so effectively should also be examined closely, as recommended by the

Commission.

In this discourse on reform, many of the terms used to craft the

‘‘lanes in the road’’ and justify the missions of any particular agency are ambiguous, even to the experts, and some may even be obsolete. I would challenge anyone to clearly define the boundary between national intelligence and military intelligence or where the

strategic intelligence ends and the tactical intelligence actually begins.

The light infantry forces fighting us in Vietnam were a tactical

concern. The light infantry forces fighting us in Tora Bora in Afghanistan are of national interest in our global war on terrorism.

The small boat that killed 18 of our sailors on the USS COLE may

have been a tactical concern to the commander but it was of great

strategic concern to our national policymakers. How we consider

tactical elements both as consumers and collectors of intelligence,

and vice versa, for national entities is central to much of this debate.

We must also seriously discuss whether the constructs of the

past have any meaning for the future. By this, I am referring to

the primacy of the Department of Defense vis-a ́-vis the defense

agencies, such as the National Security Agency, the National

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Why would a national intelligence director with actual budget

and line authority over these agencies be any less responsive to the

needs of the Department of the Defense than the Secretary of Defense? They both must answer to the same President and achieve

jointly the same goals. I suspect the answer lies in realizing that

easy separations are no longer feasible. This will provide even further impetus to breaking down institutional structures, biases, and

cultures. We often refer to those as stovepipes.

3

These divisions exist not only between agencies, but between the

concepts of strategic versus tactical and national versus military.

Reflecting these ambiguities and divisions are intelligence budgets

which are often similarly very vague. The National Foreign Intelligence Program, or NFIP, funds all non-DOD intelligence activities

as well as four national entities that reside within the Department

of Defense.

The Joint Military Intelligence Program, or JMIP, funds the

DOD-level activities of interest to more than one service or the unified commands. The military services Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities, or TIARA, fund their individual intelligence activities. Yet JMIP and TIARA monies also help fund national agencies.

Budget lines are often as fuzzy as functional lines.

As we deliberate granting further NFIP budget authorities to a

national intelligence director, we must be certain to understand the

often-nuanced ramifications to the Department of Defense’s other

intelligence budgets, the JMIP and also TIARA. We must also

clearly understand what budget authority means and how we intend to distinguish it from the authorities already granted the Director of Central Intelligence in the National Security Act of 1947.

I would repeat that: already granted the Director of the Central Intelligence in the National Security Act of 1947.

Underlying actual statutory authorities is a bureaucratic and political dynamic and, as General Myers said yesterday before the

Armed Services Committee, a corporate culture that I believe we

will never be able to legislate away. In other words, we should be

realistic in what we can expect even if we make significant changes

and how long it will take for those changes to work their way down

to the working level, i.e., to the warfighter or that intelligence

agent or that intelligence analyst.

The fact that such changes will take time to effect is, however,

only more reason for Congress to act quickly. One thing is certain:

We are in a window of opportunity that should not be squandered.

Rarely does the President and the entire Congress focus on a single

issue with such intensity.

If the elected officials of the executive and legislative branches

of government are once again unable to change the bureaucracies

that they manage and oversee, respectively, we have done a grave

disservice to the people who bestowed this high honor upon us. I

hope that today’s hearings will illustrate that necessity and provide

further insights into these very difficult issues.

So today we welcome Dr. Amy Zegart, Dr. David Kay and General Charles Boyd. All have extensive backgrounds in national security and intelligence issues. All bring different experiences and

views of these same issues. Because none are currently serving in

the government, all are what we call disinterested parties with a

great deal of expertise.

The members have full bios for each in their binders. Those are

at tabs B, C and D, I would tell my colleagues.

Dr. Amy Zegart is currently an assistant professor at the UCLA

School of Public Affairs and author of the book, ‘‘Flawed By Design:

The Evolution of the CIA and the JCS and the NSC.’’

Dr. David Kay is a very well-known witness to this Committee,

as an expert on counterproliferation issues, most recently as the

4

head of the Iraq Survey Group. I should mention that both Dr. Kay

and Ms. Zegart were profiled by the National Journal as key experts in the ongoing debate for intelligence reform.

General Charles Boyd, United States Air Force, retired, brings

his valuable experience as the executive director of the Hart-Rudman Commission, as well as hard-won experience from 35 years of

active duty service, which included 2,488 days as a prisoner of war.

Let me say this on behalf of General Boyd. We’ve had the

Bremer Commission, we’ve had the Gilmore Commission, we’ve had

the CSIS study, we’ve had the Aspin-Brown Commission and we

have had the Hart-Rudman Commission. General Boyd somehow—

somehow—with a magical ability to bring people together, got Julian Bond, Newt Gingrich, Warren Rudman and Gary Hart all to

work together. This is no small achievement.

We thank our witnesses for being here today. Before I turn to

our witnesses for any opening statement they wish to make, I recognize my distinguished colleague and friend, Vice Chairman

Rockefeller.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My remarks will be brief and deal more with process.

I also welcome our witnesses today, one of them back for the

third or fourth time, and I honor their service and their experience.

Dr. Zegart, you were on the National Security Council, weren’t

you?

Dr. ZEGART. Yes.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. See, that’s not necessarily—if

you’re a UCLA law professor, people don’t make the quick jump to

NSC, but that becomes a very important part of your expertise, so

there’s some questions I want to ask you.

The Chairman I think has been very good in making sure that

we get started on this. We got started on this actually before we

went out of session, we had a hearing on reform. I think, like all

of my colleagues, we have looked over the 9/11 Commission book,

read it, looked at the reform proposals, and I think probably for the

most part agree with many of them, making up our minds about

some of them and listening to experts like yourselves to help us get

closer to the rest.

We’ve also looked at proposals offered by Senator Feinstein, Senator Snowe, Representative Harman, and others both inside and

outside the government. Our hearings and those held by other committees have been invaluable to looking at those relative merits in

terms of the 9/11 recommendations.

So in terms of process, as the Chairman has indicated, over the

days and weeks that are before us, I’ll be working with the Chairman, also with members on both sides, committee members, to pull

together what we achieved in our first report, which was a bipartisan consensus, which doesn’t happen very often around here, but

did happen on WMD, which was not necessarily an easy subject.

We had a 17-to-nothing vote because we just got together and decided we were going to put other interests above whatever small

disagreements we might have.

5

We have to restructure. We have to strengthen our intelligence

community. We know that.

I’ve already shared with the Chairman, for my part, my views—

written views—as well as my colleagues on the democratic side—

my views on what the 9/11 Commission’s are like: Do I say, ‘‘yes’’,

‘‘no’’, ‘‘maybe’’; yes, but modified; no, but modified, to list those out,

to give a sense of at least how I come down on some of them so

far.

I know that the Chairman also is in the process of writing or has

written either a bill or a list of principles and recommendations. I

look forward to getting those soon so that I can see where our

views are common and we can continue our discussion.

But it’s not just a discussion between the Chairman and the Vice

Chairman. It’s a question in that the Intelligence Committee has

general responsibility for oversight. It’s what do all of our colleagues think. This is a process that clearly, in order to achieve a

bipartisan consensus, we have to go through and take very seriously. The Chairman and Vice Chairman have certain things they

can do, but one of the things that we cannot do is make decisions

on behalf of our colleagues, and we don’t wish to because we want

to have a bipartisan consensus on this.

So we have to bring our collective expertise and judgment to the

ongoing reform debate in the Senate and to the Congress as a

whole.

The Senate leadership, as the Chairman pointed out, asked the

Government Affairs Committee to take the lead in drafting reform

legislation. I’ve talked with both Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman,

and pledged to them—twice, actually, now—and pledged to them

our assistance as this legislative process moves forward, because

we want to be helpful. We want to help shape the debate. We are

a part of the debate formally by resolution and also, obviously, by

the expertise of the Committee. Both agreed that our Committee

has a very strong place at the table during these discussions.

I’m hopeful, and I believe that the Chairman shares my hope,

that our Committee will be in a position to share with the Government Affairs Committee the fruits of what we collectively, as a

committee, think when the Senate reconvenes next month, or

shortly thereafter. That’s easier said than done. There’s a convention coming up. People are still away in some cases. So there’s a

lot of pressure on us to bring ourselves together.

I think it’s not going to be actually as difficult a process as I

would have expected. The Chairman and I agree on a great deal.

We’ve already found that out. I think that there will be a lot of

agreement, and then there will be some argument.

But the bipartisan consensus is very, very important to both the

Chairman and myself. It’s what allows things to stand out around

here. And tasking ourselves, you know, if the Congress and the

President can’t reach agreement on meaningful reform, then what

are we here for?

Some people say, ‘‘Well, we’re trying to make a show of it in August.’’ Yes, we’re making a show of it in August. But it’s more than

a show; it’s laying a predicate. When you take actions by holding

committee hearings, by inconveniencing folks like yourself to come

6

and testify before us, we prepare ourselves for this, we do our commission homework, which is basically what we’ve been doing.

I didn’t even go to our national convention, but just stayed home

and worked on the 9/11 Commission, because I thought it was—not

more important, I guess—but yes, more important, maybe, in that

the outcome in one is fairly certain and the outcome in the other

is relatively uncertain.

So we have to do our job or we will have failed the American people. That is not something that Chairman Roberts and I choose to

do.

I thank the Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. Let me just say that I want to thank my colleague. I think we burned the phone lines down in the last 2 weeks

and we’ve met individually. I appreciate his summary in regards

to what the 9/11 Commission has suggested and polling his membership. I’ve shared that with our side.

I might add that we are also working with the administration,

and that is a work in progress. Our national security director, Ms.

Rice, has indicated there will be mechanisms that will be made

public, and we’ve urged her to do that. We have shared sort of an

idea, in regards to what we both believe, with the administration.

We have done that with the leadership. As the Vice Chairman has

pointed out, we have done that with Senator Lieberman and Senator Collins and the Government Affairs members.

We’re also doing that in reaching out to the staff members of the

9/11 Commission and that of the families. While there are a lot of,

I guess I would say, players or moving parts here that have to

come together to fit what we hope is realistic and credible and

practical intelligence reform, we are reaching out as best we can.

We’re doing so because we know we have 22 excellent professional staffers and we have a history in regards to the prewar intelligence report on a 17–0 vote. We think we can get this job done,

and we think we can be a positive influence in this business.

With that, we would like to recognize first Dr. Zegart and then

Dr. Kay and then General Boyd.

Dr. Zegart, welcome to the Committee.

STATEMENT OF AMY B. ZEGART, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR,

DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC POLICY, SCHOOL OF PUBLIC

AFFAIRS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

Dr. ZEGART. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Rockefeller, distinguished members of the Committee. It is an honor to be here

today. This Committee has done extraordinary work in highlighting

critical problems in the intelligence community and in leading the

path toward reform.

I am an assistant professor at UCLA. I have been researching

and writing about the intelligence community for a decade now. I

have written one book on organizational problems in the CIA and

I am currently writing a book about why the intelligence community adapted poorly to the rise of terrorism after the cold war. As

Senator Rockefeller mentioned, I worked on the National Security

Council staff as a consumer of intelligence.

Mr. Chairman, I have submitted more extensive written remarks. Today I would like to briefly touch on three main points.

7

The first is, as you mentioned, the fleeting opportunities for reform,

the second is the need for structural overhaul, and the third is the

critical importance of cultural change. The bottom line is that

structural reform of the intelligence community is crucial, long

overdue and not enough.

Mr. Chairman, as you so astutely mentioned in your opening remarks, major overhauls to our national security apparatus are extremely difficult and rare. The National Security Act of 1947 took

4 years to pass and succeeded against overwhelming opposition and

great odds. The New York Times called it a brass-knuckle fight to

the finish.

Reforming the Pentagon, as you know, took nearly 40 more

years, despite the grave stakes we faced during the cold war and

the fact that critical organizations were well known. As Secretary

Powell once put it when I spoke to him, the performance of the JCS

before its reform in 1986 could only be described, and I quote, ‘‘as

barely adequate.’’

As you know, in the past 57 years, despite the great efforts of

this Committee and more than 40 different studies of the intelligence community recommending reform, no President and no

Congress has succeeded in overhauling our intelligence system.

History’s lesson is to make the most of reform opportunities

when they arise because they do not arise often and they do not

last long. We have one of those rare windows of opportunity now.

If the past is any guide, there will not be another chance for a generation. These realities mean that reforms should be sweeping, because they will be lasting. The choices you make will be with us

all for decades to come.

Mr. Chairman, let me turn briefly to structure. Stacks of intelligence studies over the past 50 years have examined a number of

diverse issues but have reached stunning consensus on one point:

The director of central intelligence needs help.

The National Security Act of 1947 gave the DCI two jobs, as we

know—running the CIA on the one hand and managing the entire

community on the other. But it did not give him the power to do

both of these jobs effectively. Now there has been great debate

about whether fixing this problem is best done by allowing the DCI

to keep his two hats and bolstering his power or by creating a new

director of national intelligence, separate from the CIA.

Let me put three thoughts on the table.

First, Mr. Chairman, as you mentioned, the devil lies in the details. For either approach, success hinges on giving either an empowered DCI or a new director of national intelligence much greater budgetary authority, greater personnel authority and the staff

and systems capabilities to make use of these legal authorities.

These are must-haves for reform.

Second, no organizational structure is perfect. Grappling with

the weaknesses inherent in each approach is crucial, not only for

selecting a new intelligence structure but for maximizing its effectiveness as well. Anticipating problems is one of the best ways of

avoiding them. Knowing that your car tends to veer off course

helps you keep it on the road.

In particular, I believe that separating the community head from

the CIA has drawbacks that may be less obvious than the benefits.

8

One concern is that a director of national intelligence who is not

tied to the CIA will be more likely to view intelligence needs and

assets through tactical lenses.

Now let me be clear. Tactical intelligence that supports the

warfighter should always be a priority; I think everyone can agree

about that. The question is, how much of a priority? Our system

has a natural gravitational pull toward providing tactical intelligence, a pull that has only grown stronger in recent years with

the marriage of intelligence and precision-guided weaponry as

we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But in light of our strategic intelligence failures related to 9/11

and Iraq, we need to consider seriously whether a DNI, a director

of national intelligence, will be able to strike the right balance between national intelligence and military intelligence.

A third consideration, and I believe this is an important one, is

that both of these solutions offer a vast improvement to keeping

the current flawed structure intact.

Let me turn briefly to culture. Organizational culture is the silent killer of innovation. Building new organizational arrangements

with more people and more power will not make us safer if intelligence officials still view the world through old lenses and hoard

information in old stove pipes. Fixing the cultural pathologies that

have crippled our system is hard, but it is not impossible. Legislation can help.

Two good first steps would be to change training and career incentives. The FBI faces a daunting cultural challenge: transforming

its crime-fighting culture into an intelligence one. Our nation’s

best-known law enforcement agency must somehow teach itself not

to think like one. Training programs are crucial in this effort.

Today, however, counterterrorism training constitutes only 2 weeks

out of the 17-week new agent course at Quantico. Now, that’s more

than it used to be, but it is still less time than new agents get for

vacation in their first year.

Then there is the unspoken 11th commandment of intelligence:

Thou shalt not share. Here, too, a large part of the problem is cultural. As this Committee knows well from its investigation of our

analysis in Iraq, reluctance to pass information across agency lines

is deeply ingrained, based more on habit and values than policy or

organization charts. Here, too, training is key. Creating a one-team

approach to intelligence requires developing trust and building informal networks between officials in different agencies.

Now, this is best done by cross-agency training programs early

in officials’ careers, before they become good and indoctrinated into

the stovepipes. By current policies, however, most intelligence professionals can spend 20 years or more without ever experiencing a

community-wide training program. Institutional bridges will always be hard to build and information always hard to share when

one side does not trust or understand the other.

Now, several past reform studies have recommended improving

information sharing by requiring the rotation of personnel across

intelligence agencies. This has not happened. Several years ago,

DCI Tenet issued a directive requiring that officials do a rotational

tour in another intelligence agency to get promoted. According to

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senior intelligence officials, every single agency in the community,

including the CIA, ignored that directive.

Taking temporary assignment in another agency is still viewed

as a career-limiting move. Here’s what one senior intelligence official told me: ‘‘I often think of writing a vacancy notice for temporary detailees to the agency that says only stupid people doing

unimportant work need apply.’’

Now, the 9/11 Commission has recognized the seriousness of

these problems, but has recommended a solution that I believe will

not solve them. It has proposed that the new director of national

intelligence set policies for education and training and facilitate assignments across agency lines. Now this is good in theory. In practice, however, it leaves too much work for a new official whose

other job responsibilities include advising the President, managing

the entire community, creating a unified intelligence budget and

overseeing new national intelligence centers. It does not take much

to see which duties will come first.

Instead, intelligence reform legislation should explicitly require

the establishment of community-wide training programs early in

officials’ careers and legislation also should make rotational assignments to other intelligence agencies a requirement for promotion.

I cannot stress this enough. As the 9/11 Commission and so

many others have concluded, a similar provision in the GoldwaterNichols Act transformed the culture of the Defense Department

from a service-first attitude to a truly joint outlook.

Mr. Chairman, successful intelligence reform must change more

than the organization’s structure. It has to change the minds of

those who work inside it.

Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Zegart follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. AMY B. ZEGART

Mr. Chairman, Senator Rockefeller, distinguished Members of the Committee, it

is an honor to be here today to discuss reform of our nation’s intelligence system.

My name is Amy Zegart. I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). For the past decade, I

have been researching and writing about the Intelligence Community. I have written a book about organizational problems in the CIA and other agencies called

Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford University

Press, 1999). I have worked as a consumer of intelligence on the National Security

Council staff. And I am currently writing a book about why the Intelligence Community adapted poorly to the rise of terrorism after the Cold War ended.

Mr. Chairman, my remarks cover three main points:

• The fleeting opportunities for reform;

• The need for structural overhaul; and

• The importance of cultural change.

The bottom line is that structural reforms are crucial, long overdue, and insufficient.

INTELLIGENCE REFORM OPPORTUNITIES ARE FEW AND FLEETING

Major overhauls of national security agencies are difficult and rare. The National

Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA, National Security Council, and unified

the military services under a single Department of Defense and Joint Chiefs of

Staff, took 4 years to pass and succeeded against great opposition and long odds;

The New York Times called the political battles between the military services a

‘‘brass knuckle fight to the finish.’’

Completing the job at the Pentagon took nearly 40 more years, despite the grave

stakes we faced during the Cold War and the fact that critical organizational problems were well known. Although Democrats and Republicans alike issued major

10

1 Howard Aldrich, Organizations Evolving (London: Sage Publications, 1999), p.262. 2See in particular Joel Aberbach and Bert Rockmart, In the Web of Politics: Three Decades

of the U.S. Federal Executive (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2000); James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 3 Eleanor Hill, ‘‘The Intelligence Community’s Knowledge of the September 11 Hijackers Prior

to September 11, 2001,’’ testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, September 20, 2002, p.6. 4 Herbert Simon, ‘‘Public Administration in Today’s World of Organizations and Markets,’’

John Gaus Lecture, American Political Science Association Annual Meetings, September 1, 2000,

reprinted in PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 33, No. 4 (December 2000), p. 753.

studies and repeated calls for reform, it took four decades of pressure and the convergence of a number of extraordinary circumstances—including a string of rapidfire operational problems in Iran, Beirut, and Grenada; the unprecedented push for

reform by two sitting JCS members; and a determined campaign by key Congressional champions—to win passage of the landmark Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986.

As you know, in the past 57 years no President and no Congress, despite the great

efforts of this Committee and more than 40 studies recommending reform, has succeeded in overhauling our intelligence system.

This is no accident. Problems in national security agencies are extremely hard to

fix, even when they are clear, stakes are high, and danger is imminent. Three reasons explain why.

(1) No Organization Changes Easily On Its Own

Even businesses, which are blessed with few management constraints and the

knowledge that they must adapt or die, fail to respond to shifting environmental demands at surprising rates. Nearly a third of the 5.5 million businesses tracked by

the U.S. Census over a 4-year period in the 1990’s did not survive.1 In the past 3

years, more than 200 major corporations have declared bankruptcy, including

United Airlines, K-Mart, Global Crossing, and Bethlehem Steel.

Government agencies are even less able to make internal changes. The Army kept

a horse cavalry until World War II. Compared to firms, government agencies have

more limited resources, less managerial discretion, and are hardwired to perform

routine tasks in standard ways rather than nimbly responding to changing demands.2 For example, this Committee’s Joint Inquiry learned that the CIA failed

to watchlist Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the September 11th hijackers, for 18 months

before the attacks, even though the agency suspected al-Mihdhar was an Al Qaeda

terrorist and knew he held a multiple entry visa to the United States.3 The simplest

explanation for this failure is that the CIA was not in the habit of watchlisting terrorists. For 50 years, Cold War priorities, thinking, and procedures were not geared

to keeping foreign terrorists out of the country. When the principal threat to American national security changed, the Intelligence Community was naturally slow to

change with it.

(2) Rational Political Interests Do Not Favor Reform

By rational political interests I do not mean coldhearted calculations or selfish intentions. Rather, the idea is that sober-eyed elected officials who want to maximize

the benefits they provide to their constituents do not have strong incentives to expend the enormous amount of time, energy and political capital that intelligence reform requires.

Presidents have good reason to consider the effectiveness of the Intelligence Community. The problem is that Presidents are short on time, have only so much political capital, few formal powers, and long agendas. In fact, no President since Truman has tackled major intelligence reform and only one, Eisenhower, ever took the

lead in seeking a major restructuring of the Pentagon. Instead, Presidents have

tried to mitigate the worst organizational problems they face in lower-cost ways, by

creating new agencies through unilateral Executive action. The National Security

Agency, and more recently the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, both were created in this fashion. Unfortunately, this approach may only make coordination problems worse. As Nobel laureate Herbert Simon noted, the more organizations there

are on the scene, the harder it is for the entire system to change. Tight coupling

between government agencies means that changes must occur in multiple places at

once to produce results.4

As you know far better than I do, legislators do not win landslide elections by

delving into the arcane details of intelligence agency design. Intelligence reform is

a burning issue for a dedicated few like yourselves. But the fact is, intelligence reform is not usually a burning issue for Congress as a whole. And in the past, it has

been stymied by opposition from members of the Armed Services Committees who

11

seek to defend their Committees’ jurisdictions and the autonomy and power of the

agencies they oversee.

Bureaucrats, finally, fight against changes even to agencies outside their own because they see reform as a zero-sum game for agency autonomy and power. There

is nothing quite like intelligence reform to trigger the antibodies of affected agencies.

(3) The Fragmented Federal Government Makes Reform Difficult

Ironically, some of the most cherished features of American democracy, such as

separation of powers, work against agency effectiveness. This is because the political

process requires compromise for legislation to pass, and compromise allows opponents to weaken agency design at the outset. These same features of the political

process make subsequent legislative fixes an uphill battle.

History’s lesson is to make the most of reform opportunities when they arise, because they do not arise often and they do not last long. We have one of those rare

opportunities now. If the past is any guide, there will not be another chance for a

generation. These realities mean that reforms must be sweeping because they will

be lasting; the choices you make today will be with us for decades to come.

STRUCTURAL OVERHAUL: THE DCI NEEDS HELP

Stacks of intelligence studies over the past 50 years have examined a number of

diverse issues but have reached a stunning degree of consensus about one thing: the

Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) needs help. The National Security Act of 1947

gave the DCI two jobs—running the CIA and managing the rest of the Intelligence

Community—but did not give him the power to do both jobs effectively. This is no

accident. The historical record shows quite clearly that when the CIA was created,

it was deliberately hobbled by existing intelligence agencies in the Departments of

State, Defense and Justice, which sought to maintain their own autonomy and

power. Together, these agencies worked diligently to strip the National Security Act

of provisions that would have created a truly centralized Central Intelligence Agency. The most lasting legacy of this design is the yawning gap between the DCI’s

wide-ranging responsibilities and his circumscribed power. The proposed remedies

to this problem have varied, but the diagnosis has not.

There has been great debate over the years about whether fixing this problem is

best done by allowing the DCI to keep his two hats and bolstering his power, or

by creating a separate Director of National Intelligence to oversee the entire Community. Let me put three thoughts on the table:

• First, the devil lies in the details. For either approach, success hinges on giving

an empowered DCI or a new Director of National Intelligence much greater budgetary authority, stronger personnel authority, and the systems and staff capabilities

to use such authorities effectively. These are must-haves.

• Second, no organizational structure is perfect. Grappling with the weaknesses

of both approaches is crucial—not only for choosing a new intelligence structure, but

for maximizing its effectiveness as well. Anticipating problems is one of the best

ways to avoid them. Knowing that your car tends to veer helps you keep it on the

road.

In particular, I believe that separating the Community head from the CIA has

drawbacks that may be less obvious than the benefits. One concern is that a Director of National Intelligence who is not tied to the CIA will be more likely to view

intelligence needs and assets through tactical lenses. Let me be clear. Tactical intelligence that supports the warfighter should always take priority. The question is

how much of a priority. Our system has a natural gravitational pull toward tactical

intelligence, a pull that has only grown stronger with the successful marriage of intelligence and precision weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq. But especially in light of

our strategic intelligence failings related to 9/11 and Iraq, we need to consider

whether a DNI will be able to strike the right balance, whether a level playing field

among the 15 intelligence agencies would create a level approach to intelligence.

• Third, both of these solutions offer a vast improvement to keeping the current

flawed structure intact.

Good structure is not a cure-all, but bad structure can have debilitating effects

on organizational performance. Structure is not about boxes. It is about power.

Structure determines who answers to whom, whose memo goes on top, and what

formal powers organizational leaders have.

CULTURE: THE SILENT KILLER OF INNOVATION

Although any meaningful reform must start with structure, structural changes

alone will not be enough. Building new organizational arrangements with more peoVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00015 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6621 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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ple and more power will not make us safer if intelligence officials still view the

world through the same old lenses and hoard information in the same old stovepipes. Organizational culture is a silent but deadly innovation killer.

Fixing the cultural pathologies that have crippled our intelligence system is hard

but not impossible. Two good first steps would be to change training and career incentives.

The FBI faces a daunting cultural challenge: transforming a crime-fighting culture that prizes slow and careful evidence gathering after-the-fact and works each

case separately into an intelligence culture that takes fast action and follows leads

across cases to prevent future tragedies. The nation’s best-known law enforcement

agency somehow must teach itself not to think like one. Training programs are crucial to this effort. Today, however, counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence training constitute only 2 weeks out of the 17-week required course for all new agents.

That is more than it used to be, but still less time than new agents get for vacation.

Then there is the unspoken 11th Commandment of intelligence: Thou Shalt Not

Share. Here, too, a large part of the problem is cultural. As this Committee knows,

the reluctance to pass information across agency lines is deeply engrained, based

more on habit and values than policy or official organization charts. And here, too,

training is key. Creating a ‘‘one team’’ approach to intelligence requires developing

trust and building informal networks between officials in different agencies. This is

best done by cross-agency training programs early in officials’ careers, before they

become indoctrinated in the stovepipes. By current policies, however, most intelligence agency professionals can spend 20 years or more without a single Community-wide training experience. Institutional bridges will always be hard to build and

information hard to share when one side does not trust or understand the other.

Several past reform studies have recommended improving information sharing by

requiring the rotation of personnel across intelligence agencies. This has not happened. Several years ago DCI Tenet issued a directive requiring that officials do a

rotational tour in another intelligence agency to get promoted to senior ranks. According to senior intelligence officials, every intelligence agency including the CIA

ignored him. Taking a temporary assignment in an agency outside one’s home is

still viewed as a career-limiting move. Instead of encouraging the best and brightest

within each agency to venture out and build institutional bridges, career incentives

encourage them to stay right where they are. The result is that while agencies post

openings for temporary detailees, these positions all too often get filled by weak performers. As one senior intelligence official lamented, ‘‘I often think of writing a vacancy notice [for temporary detailees to the agency] that says, ‘only stupid people

doing unimportant work need apply.’ ’’

The 9/11 Commission recognized the seriousness of these problems, but has recommended a solution that will not solve them: it has suggested that the proposed

new Director of National Intelligence set policies for education and training and facilitate assignments across agency lines. This is good in theory. But in practice, it

leaves too much work for a new official whose other job responsibilities include advising the President, managing the entire Intelligence Community, creating a unified intelligence budget, and overseeing new national intelligence centers. It does

not take much to see which duties will come first.

Instead, intelligence reform legislation should explicitly require the establishment

of Community-wide training programs early in officials’ careers. Legislation also

should make rotational assignments to other intelligence agencies a requirement for

promotion. I cannot stress this enough. As the 9/11 Commission and many others

have noted, a similar provision in the Goldwater-Nichols Act transformed the culture of the Defense Department from a ‘‘service first’’ attitude to a truly joint outlook.

Mr. Chairman, successful intelligence reform must change more than the organization chart. It must change the minds of those who work inside it.

Thank you.

Chairman ROBERTS. Dr. Zegart, thank you very much. Your full

statement will be made part of the record.

We welcome now Dr. Kay.

STATEMENT OF DR. DAVID KAY, SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW,

THE POTOMAC INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES

Dr. KAY. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I have submitted for the record a full statement. I will try to

briefly summarize what I think are the key points. I certainly

13

thank you and the Committee for the opportunity to appear before

you and to address the important issues of the future organization,

shape and role of the intelligence community.

I think I agree very strongly with Amy. This is a chance that

comes along largely once a generation. If you don’t get it right now,

we will live with the consequences until the next disaster.

I also understand that in the minds of many outside this room,

the subject boils down to creating a national intelligence director.

Maybe the only open question is what powers that person should

have. There have been at least 20 that I know of commissions, panels, studies in the last 20 years of the intelligence community. They

have almost all been uniform in their conclusion of the necessity

of reform, of the shortcomings and the failures. Yet, by and large,

nothing has happened.

Indeed, as Chairman Porter Goss, before his nomination for CIA

director, said, ‘‘Nobody in their right mind would create the architecture we have in our intelligence community today. It’s a dysfunctional community.’’

Therefore, there is little wonder that many would say it’s time

for a czar, or more, in my Texas dialect, off with the heads, in the

face of such inaction over the years.

This may be the right answer, although, if so, it would be the

first time in the history of the U.S. Government that the creation

of a czar to deal with organizational failures and inadequacies has

been successful. This is a record that is very much without sustained success.

I therefore remain agnostic on the wisdom of creating a national

intelligence director in the absence of knowing five things. First, do

we agree on the failures and shortcomings that the post should address; the power of the post itself, and power in considerable detail

that is to have the wider executive branch national security structure within which that post is to operate; the legislative oversight,

authorization and budgeting appropriation structure that will vitally determine whether such an individual actually has the authorities and endurance to be successful; and finally, I would really

say most importantly, a demonstrated willingness by both the Congress and the executive branch to hold people and organizations responsible when they massively fail to live up to their responsibilities. I think that is the single greatest failing that sustains the inadequacy of the system today.

I should add that my agnosticism does not reflect in any way a

lack of the enduring grief that I know the families of 9/11 and the

Nation feels for the failures to prevent 9/11 from occurring. It certainly doesn’t reflect any lack of appreciation that I have for the

outstanding work of the 9/11 Commission.

I am concerned, however, that simply creating a national intelligence director, even one that seems to have and we think has real

powers, realizing that in Washington we exist somewhere between

10,000 and 100,000 feet in looking inside bureaucracies and we

think budget and personnel authority is real power, we will not end

up addressing the real problems that led to the long string of failures that conclude with 9/11 and the WMD findings in Iraq. I think

this is particularly true if we continue to say everyone is at fault

and therefore no one is at fault.

14

Let me turn to what I know best, although I must say I know

this Committee knows probably better than I do the reasons we

failed to adequately assess the actual State of Iraq’s WMD program. Let me do it very quickly, just in headline form. I think

there were nine principal failings here.

There was a broken culture and management within the CIA.

There was a breakdown in CIA analytical tradecraft;

The lack of any U.S. human clandestine collection after 1998—

and damn little before 1998;

A failure to seriously examine and question non-American-controlled sources of information on WMD, which we came to rely on;

Abuse of the control over information to prevent others even in

the CIA, and certainly many outside the CIA from seeing the real

problems with the available data concerning conclusions the CIA

reached and assertions as to the current status of Iraq’s WMD program;

A real absence of scientific, analytical capability within the Directorate of Intelligence, and a refusal to even use the scientific excellence that existed in other parts of the CIA and certainly that

existed in other parts of the U.S. Government to understand the

existing status of Iraq’s WMD program;

Multiple security systems and information systems that both

within the CIA restricted access to vital elements of information,

and certainly outside the CIA did this;

A complete lack of competitive analysis that led to stale data and

findings being passed completely unchallenged to policymakers, to

you in the Congress and ultimately to the American people as

being the product of current, up-to-date collection and knowledge;

And, finally, a national intelligence collection process that was

unproductive of real assessments and had, quite frankly, misled

rather than informed, and misled the executive branch, the Congress and the American people.

The remarkable thing, as I examine this record and read the outstanding 500-plus pages of this Committee’s report on Iraq, is that

the origin of most of these factors lies within the CIA itself. Iraq

was an overwhelming, systemic failure of the Central Intelligence

Agency. Until this is taken onboard and people and organizations

are held responsible for this failure, I have real difficulty seeing

how a national intelligence director can correct these failings.

Indeed, I would argue that, unless the newly appointed director

of central intelligence takes on as his first responsibility correcting

the obvious failures that you have so thoroughly documented, that

the national intelligence director has no hope of success.

If you will indulge me in something that is not in my statement—I’ve spent a lot of time before this Committee—there have

been a lot of pointed questions. But there’s one question that no

one ever asked me, and that is what was my most frustrating moment in Iraq. If you don’t mind, Mr. Chairman, I’d like to share

that with you.

There was a period after I was here in October and testified before you and I went back. I had been back about a week and I had

one of the CIA lead analysts come into me and say, ‘‘David, the analysts are really unhappy and some are thinking of going home.’’

15

Of course, the thought crossed my mind, what have I now done to

destroy morale.

She quickly said, ‘‘No, no, it’s not anything you’ve done. We’ve

just learned that the performance bonuses given for the analytical

work done in the CIA before, in the lead-up to the war, have given

way more money to the nuclear team than it has to the chem-bio

analysts.’’

At that point, I was glad my Glock was unloaded, because let me

tell you, we had discovered that the nuclear team, as you have documented more thoroughly than has been done any place else on the

public record, that is a record of abuse of authority, a failure to use

expertise. There is nothing in that record that deserves a performance bonus. Nor in fact, quite frankly, was there much to deserve

a performance bonus in the chemical and biological area.

Instead of holding people responsible, we reward them for failure. Unless you change that part of the culture, organizational

shuffling of deck chairs has no hope of being successful.

Mr. Chairman, having started out declaring my agnosticism, I

would like to conclude by sharing with you what I believe, if you

go ahead with the creation of a national intelligence director, are

the essential 10 elements that must be included in the powers and

related to that authority if there is to be any hope of success.

First of all, I think you explicitly have to place all 15 of the intelligence organizations under the authority of a national intelligence

director. You have to define that authority to include the design

and monitoring of national intelligence strategies, responsibility for

the execution of those strategies and all other powers deemed necessary to carry out and ensure the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence

activities.

Secondly, giving the director of national intelligence not just

budget approval authority, which is largely meaningless, but the

real budget power, which is detailed budget formulation, approval,

release and reprogramming authority for each of the 15 agencies.

Without that, saying that I have or anyone has the right to approve the final budget at a final day is saying I have no power. If

you look at the history of past czars, you’ll see that it’s uniform

across those.

Thirdly, giving the national intelligence director not just the responsibility for approving the heads of the 15 intelligence agencies—this is largely a meaningless power—but the responsibility

for ensuring that the personnel policies and practices, some of

which Amy, I think, has ably, both in her testimony here and in

her other writings pointed to, ensuring that these practices across

all the intelligence agencies operate in a manner that support the

effective execution of the national intelligence strategies and the

responsibility and power to remove personnel at all levels who do

not adequately perform.

Fourthly, I think the National Intelligence Council must be

moved from the authority of the DCI to the national intelligence director and charged with ensuring that all the resources of the intelligence agencies are brought to bear in a way that provides the Nation with the best possible analytical products.

I also think the responsibility for what is now called the PDBs,

the Presidential daily briefings, should be moved to this reformed

16

National Intelligence Council operating under the national intelligence director, and it should have the responsibility and access to

all the collection and analytical assets of the community in briefing

the President.

It is vital to this Nation that we ensure that diverse analytical

views within the intelligence community are allowed to contend on

a level playing field, and that policymakers understand the differences in conclusions and views of various agencies.

The national intelligence director, and particularly a reformed

National Intelligence Council, has that responsibility and must be

held to task for that responsibility, ensuring that diversity of views

are encouraged and that the diverse views that occur are in fact

brought to the attention of the Congress and of policymakers.

Now, while diversity in analysis—and I would say not just diversity. I revel in contention when analysts disagree. We need to encourage that and create an atmosphere where that occurs. But I

think we need much more than we have had in the past, and certainly than we have now, common, shared and more efficient collection agencies.

Collection, after all, data is what is the feedstock of analysis,

even when the analysts may reach different conclusions. I think

you need to place the national intelligence director in charge,

charged by you, Congress, with ensuring that all of the collection

assets of this government work to support the national intelligence

strategies and priorities.

A post that allowed in the past individual collection agencies to

identify their own customers and ignore directives of the DCI—and

this is, I think, well documented in the 9/11 Commission report, as

well as those of us who have spent any time in the system have

seen at first hand—must be stopped.

I would say also, by the same token—and I think this is something that the oversight powers of Congress have spent less time

on than they should have—we’ve allowed the national collection

agencies in their various forms to set their own technological acquisition agenda without any relation to a common strategy.

The result has been that we have acquired technologies that are

not always relevant to agreed strategies and goals and problems we

face as a nation. That must stop. There’s not enough money and,

more importantly, we will not get the collection we need if we allow

that to continue.

Let me say, seventhly, even if perfect collection, and that’s a goal

that I’ve never seen achieved, it may have and someone may know

of it, an excellent analysis is worthless unless it is effectively disseminated, both within the communities and between the agencies.

The 9/11 Commission has adequately documented, as has your own

report, the failure to do this, including abuse of authority in the

nuclear area, certainly. You know, we have called attention at least

since 1992, with the Aspin-Brown panel, called attention to this

glaring weakness. Yet, nothing has been done.

The national intelligence director must be given the authority,

the responsibility and held accountable for ensuring that this chaos

ends. We need to ensure that the ultimate responsibility, particularly for security systems, e-mail, data base, the whole schmear,

operates in a way that supports collaboration across everyone inVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00020 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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volved in intelligence and the customers that intelligence is designed to serve.

Eighthly, we must charge the national intelligence director with

providing the President and Congress, I think, within 12 months

of its creation, and every 3 years after that, with analysis and recommendations of the adequacy of the organizational structure and

the resources necessary to support national intelligence needs.

Let me say, I believe 15 agencies are way too many. It’s a product of the cold war, a different environment. But as you are probably more aware of than I am, the difficulty of getting rid of agencies once created is far greater than the problem of even creating

new agencies. That needs to be addressed. It is a flaw in the system that daily impedes effective collection and analysis across the

system.

Ninthly, you’ve got to recognize that unless Congress puts its

own house on a footing to support and provide the essential oversight of the performance of the intelligence community, the powers

of the national intelligence director will ultimately be carved up.

The Senate and the House must find ways that do not allow diverse authorizers and appropriators to carve up and undermine

this authority.

I hope you can come up with that scheme. I confess—and it’s

probably a product of my age—I continue to be drawn back to the

early days of the Joint Atomic Energy Commission, which in fact

was responsible for creating, when we did create, the essential

undergridding of our deterrent strategy in the nuclear area and

performed, I think, outstandingly, certainly in its early years.

Finally, and probably most contentious of all, or at least will get

me in greatest trouble, let me say, just as I believe Congress needs

to reshape its oversight structure if a new national intelligence director is to have any chance of success, so must the President with

regard to his own national security structure.

The dog that did not bark in the case of Iraq’s WMD program,

quite frankly in my view, is the National Security Council. Where

was the National Security Council when apparently the President

expressed his own doubt about the adequacy of the case concerning

Iraq’s WMD weapons that were made before him?

Why was the Secretary of State sent out to the CIA to personally

vet the data that he was to take to the Security Council in New

York and ultimately left to hang in the wind for data that was at

least misleading, and in some cases absolutely false and known by

parts of the intelligence community to be false? Where was the

NSC then?

Now, presidents over time have had various ways to run their

truth tests. When I first came to Washington, which really is dating myself, the President tended to rely on informal consultations

with Members of Congress, even Supreme Court judges, and probably worst of all, journalists and academics. Those times have gone.

In more recent times, he’s had to depend on the National Security

Council. But the one thing I think you will all understand, the

President must have the ability to run truth tests on information

that is brought to the Oval Office, across all areas of the government.

18

This is true of welfare reform, agriculture, environmental policy,

as it is true of foreign and domestic policy. I do not believe that

it is appropriate that the national intelligence director be sucked

into the political process of the White House. I think that would

be a disaster.

But equally, it is true, we must recognize that the President

needs his own ability both to express his requirements and his direction and his policy with regard to intelligence and broader national security policies and to run those truth tests. I think that is

absent. I think we ignore that at our own risk.

Mr. Chairman, as I know you no doubt have concluded, that in

view of my expressed agnosticism about the creation of a national

intelligence director, it hasn’t stopped me from sharing in some detail, and I suspect you are quietly now saying a Marine’s prayer

that you’re glad that I wasn’t enthusiastic about creating the national intelligence director, because I really would have gone on at

great lengths.

But I share with many the views that the U.S. intelligence community is in a crisis. This crisis is so grave that it weakens an essential underpinning of both our diplomatic and our national military security capabilities and their ability to support U.S. national

interest.

If this crisis is to be resolved, it will require an effort at least

as great as that that went into creating the intelligence community

in the most dire part of the cold war. Remedying this crisis cannot

be simply achieved by naming a national intelligence director.

What is necessary is vision and an unswerving commitment to

serving the Nation beyond the political and policy interests of any

one particular administration, an ability to listen, to communicate,

to lead and to execute, and probably most importantly of all, an

ethical center that recognizes and understands the values of truth

and the values of speaking truth to power.

This task will be neither easy nor will it be quick. It’s actually

more of a journey, in my view, than a one-step solution. It will certainly not be, and we should not mislead anyone, a quick fix.

Let me conclude by this, because it actually is, I think, for me

the most essential point. Intelligence reform without accountability

will not achieve the objective we all share—that is, avoiding the

clearly avoidable tragedies of 9/11 and the equally avoidable tragedies of a botched assessment of Iraq’s WMD capabilities.

If you are to go ahead with the creation of a national intelligence

director—and I believe you will—I think that you must ensure that

such a structure is vested with all the powers necessary to be successful and that the Congress and the President have the organizational capabilities and acceptance of responsibility to ensure that,

as new structure moves forward, accountability goes hand in hand

with reform.

Mr. Chairman, I thank you and the Committee for letting me go

on at the length about what to me is a very important topic.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Kay follows:]

19

1Senior Research Fellow, The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. The views expressed in

this statement are solely the responsibility of the author.

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DAVID KAY1

Mr. Chairman, I thank you and the Committee for the opportunity to address the

important issues related to the future shape, organization and role of the U.S. intelligence system that you are focusing on in this series of hearings.

I understand that in the minds of many outside this room the subject boils down

to creating a National Intelligence Director, and the only open question is what powers such an individual should have. At least 20 Commissions, panels and other bodies over the last 20 years have reviewed the intelligence system, documented serious

shortcomings, called for reforms, examined intelligence failures and generally concluded, as Representative Porter Goss has recently said, ‘‘Nobody in their right mind

would create the architecture we have in our intelligence community today. It’s a dysfunctional community.’’ After so many warnings and so little action it is little wonder that many would say it’s time for a Czar, if not, ‘‘off with their heads’’.

This may be the right answer although, if so, it would be a first in the U.S. Government’s many attempts to address organizational and performance failures by

anointing czars endowed with symbolism and little real power and even less enduring executive or Congressional support. I remain agnostic on the wisdom of creating

a National Intelligence Director in the absence of knowing:

• Whether we agree on the failures and shortcomings the post is to correct,

• The power of the post itself,

• The wider executive branch national security structure within which it is to fit,

• The legislative oversight, authorization and budgeting structure that will vitally

determine its authorities and endurance, and

• Most importantly a demonstrated willingness by both the Congress and the

President to hold people and organizations responsible when they massively fail to

live up to their responsibilities. [The Committee might ask the Congressional Research Service to provide a report on the total number of officials ever ‘‘fired’’ by

all the previous ‘‘Czars’’ that have been pushed forward to deal with other organizational failings in the U.S. Government.]

I should add that my agnosticism does not reflect in any way a lack of enduring

grief for the shared tragedy of the families and the Nation that resulted from the

failure of the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement system to prevent the disaster

of 911. And it certainly does not reflect a lack of appreciation for the outstanding

work of the 911 Commission.

I am concerned, however, that simply creating a National Intelligence Director,

even one with what may seem like real powers—and we should all recall that at

the 100,000 feet level that we generally address such questions in Washington this

boils down to budgets and very senior personnel—will end up not addressing the

real problems—particularly if we continue to say ‘‘everyone is at fault therefore no

one can be held responsible’’—that led to the long string of recent intelligence failures that concluded with 911 and the failure to find Iraqi WMD.

Let me turn to what I know best—although probably not as well as this Committee itself—the reasons we failed to adequately assess the actual State of Iraq’s

WMD program. In headline form, I would identify the major factors that contributed

to this failure as:

1. A broken culture and poor management within the CIA;

2. A breakdown in CIA analytical tradecraft;

3. The lack of any U.S. clandestine human collection against the Iraq WMD target

after 1998;

4. A failure to seriously examine and question the accuracy of data and reports

that came from non-U.S. sources;

5. Abuse of control over information to prevent others in the CIA and other parts

of the intelligence community from seeing the real problems with the available data

concerning Iraq’s WMD and consequently the CIA’s assertions as to the status of

Iraq’s WMD program;

6. A real absence of scientific analytical capability within the CIA’s Directorate

of Intelligence and a failure to use even the scientific excellence that existed elsewhere in the CIA much less elsewhere in the U.S. Government to understand the

current State of Iraq’s WMD program;

7. Multiple security systems and information systems that both within the CIA

and between the CIA and other parts of the intelligence system restricted access to

vital elements of information necessary for accurately understanding Iraq’s WMD

program;

20

8. A complete lack of competitive analysis that led to stale data and findings passing completely unchallenged and being offered up as if they were based on current

collection and knowledge;

9. A National Intelligence Council process that was unproductive of real assessments and that misled, rather than informed, the policymakers, the Congress and,

ultimately, the American public.

The remarkable thing to me as I re-examine my own experience and look at the

excellent report of this Committee on Iraq’s WMD is that the origin of these factors

is almost entirely within the CIA. Iraq was an overwhelming systemic failure of the

CIA and until this is taken on board and people and organizations are held responsible for this failure I have real difficulty seeing how more far reaching reforms have

any chance of real success. It really should not take a National Intelligence Director

to correct these failings. Indeed, I would argue that if the next DCI does not take

on board as his first task the renovation of the CIA beginning with ensuring that

these failings are finally effectively addressed then a National Intelligence Director

has little hope of success.

Mr. Chairman, having started out by declaring my agnosticism on the creation of

a National Intelligence Director let me conclude with what I feel are the essential

powers and conditions that, at a minimum, must be given to a National Intelligence

Director if this new ‘‘czar’’ were to have a decent chance of not sliding into the irrelevance of our other ‘‘czars’’. At a minimum these are:

1. Explicitly placing all 15 intelligence organization under the authority of the National Intelligence Director and defining that authority to include design and monitoring of intelligence strategies to support the national security of the United States,

responsibility for the execution of that strategy and all other powers deemed necessary to ensure the effectiveness of all U.S. intelligence activities;

2. Giving the National Intelligence Director not just budget approval authority,

but the real budget power which is detailed budget formulation, approval and release and reprogramming authority for each of the 15 intelligence agencies;

3. Giving the National Intelligence Director not just the responsibility for approving the heads of the 15 intelligence agencies—a largely meaningless power—but the

responsibility for ensuring that the personnel policies and practices of all the intelligence agencies operate in a manner to support the effective execution of the national intelligence strategies and the responsibility to remove personnel at all levels

who do not adequately perform.

4. Move the National Intelligence Council from the DCI to the National Intelligence Director with the charge of ensuring that all the resources of the intelligence

agencies are brought to bear in providing the Nation with the best possible analytical products. Responsibility for production and briefing of the PDBs should be

moved to this reformed National Intelligence Council, and it must have access to

all the collection and analytical resources of the U.S. intelligence community.

5. It is vital to the Nation to ensure that diverse analytical views within the intelligence community are allowed to contend on a level playing field and that policymakers understand these differences. The National Intelligence Director, and particularly a reformed National Intelligence Council, must have this as one of its highest responsibilities.

6. While diversity and even contention is to be prized in analysis, a much more

common, shared and more effective system is required in the collection of intelligence data—the common feedstock for even differing analytical views. The National Intelligence Director needs to be charged by Congress with ensuring that all

of the collection resources of the U.S. intelligence community work to support the

national intelligence strategies and priorities. A past that allowed individual collection agencies to ignore the priorities of the DCI and follow their own understanding

of the priority needs of ‘‘their’’ customers must come to an end. By the same token

the past practice of letting collection organizations establish their own technology

requirements and investment plans independent of overall Nation intelligence strategies or requirements must end. The National Intelligence Director must assume

the responsibility for ensuring that the various collection services meet the information needs of the intelligence community, and this means setting collection priorities

and strategies and ensuring that investment resources are used wisely.

7. Even perfect collection—a goal almost never reached—and excellent analysis is

worthless unless it is effectively disseminated, first within and among intelligence

agencies but even more importantly to the ultimate users throughout the Government. Too many examples of failures in communication abound in the cases of 911,

Iraq’s WMD and almost every other of the multitude of recent intelligence failures.

Incompatible e-mail systems and data bases within agencies and between agencies

have been tolerated when almost every study since at least 1992 has called attention to this glaring weakness. The National Intelligence Director must be given the

21

authority and requirement to end this chaos. In the same token, the myriad security

systems and authorities no longer add to security—in fact they detract from it—and

serve more to protect turf and prevent determinations of accountability. The National Intelligence Director must be given by Congress the ultimate responsibility

for security systems through out the intelligence community and be held responsible

for shaping a security system that truly protects what is vital while allowing information to be shared and accountability to be assessed.

8. Charge the National Intelligence Director with providing the President and the

Congress within 12 months of its creation and every 3 years afterwards with analysis and recommendations on the organizational and resource requirements necessary to support the intelligence requirements to ensure U.S. national security. Fifteen intelligence organizations—and there are actually more—is surely the wrong

number and reflect more the needs of the Cold War and the will documented difficulty of the Government to eliminate organizations after the requirements that led

to their creation has passed.

9. Recognize that unless Congress puts its house on a footing to support and provide the essential oversight of the performance of the intelligence community and

the National Intelligence Director this innovation is doomed to failure. The Senate

and House must find a way that does not allow diverse authorizers and appropriators to carve up and undermine the authority of the National Intelligence Director.

10. Just as Congress needs to reshape its oversight structure if a new National

Intelligence Director is to have any chance of success, so must the President’s national security apparatus. The dog that did not bark in the case of Iraq’s WMD is

the NSC. When the President apparently expressed concern about the adequacy of

the briefings he was receiving on WMD where was the NSC? Why was the Secretary

of State left to spend several days reviewing CIA data of Iraq’s WMD and ultimately

left to twist in the wind when the data he went forward with to the U.N. Security

Council proved false and misleading? Where was the NSC process that ensures that

data being given the President and other senior decisionmakers represent what it

is said to represent? The National Intelligence Director should not be in the Executive Office of the White House or in the Cabinet. Intelligence must serve the Nation

and speak truth to power even if in some cases elected leaders chose, as is their

right, to disagree with the intelligence with which they are presented. This means

that intelligence should not be part of the political apparatus or process. On the

other hand, no President can with regard to intelligence—or any other field of government—safely assume that everything that comes to the Oval Office is what it

is said to represent. Presidents have developed various means, as befits their personalities and the times, to run their truth tests. When I first came to Washington,

it was common for a President to check informally with Members of Congress , individual judges on the Supreme Court and, believe it or not, even journalists and academics on the views presented them by their own Cabinet officers. In more recent

Administrations, the NSC assumed this role with regard to foreign affairs and defense policy. Regardless of how you do it, it should be clear that it must be done.

The National Intelligence Director must not be sucked into the political apparatus

of the White House, but on the other hand the President needs to have a mechanism for both conveying his priorities and concerns and for ensuring that he has

confidence and an understanding of what the intelligence community is telling him.

The NSC seems to be the most logical place to center this role.

Mr. Chairman, as you no doubt have concluded my agnosticism concerning the

National Intelligence Director has not stopped me from sharing with you, in some

detail, my views as to the shape such an office should take. I suspect that you are

saying a Marine’s silent prayer that I was not unreservedly enthusiastic as then my

comments might really have been lengthy.

I share with many the view that the U.S. intelligence system is in crisis and that

this crisis is so grave as to weaken an essential underpinning of both our diplomatic

and military capabilities to support U.S. national interests. If this crisis is to be resolved, it will require an effort at least equal to the effort that led to the intelligence

community’s creation and rise to strength in the most dangerous phase of the Cold

War. Remedying this crisis cannot simply be achieved by naming a National Intelligence Director. Vision; an unswerving commitment to serving the Nation beyond

the political and policy interests of any one Administration; an ability to listen, communicate, lead and execute; and an ethical center all must be brought to bear. The

task ahead will be neither easy or quick and will be more a journey than a onestep solution. It will certainly not be a quick fix.

I believe that intelligence reform without accountability will not achieve the objective we all share to avoid repeating the clearly avoidable tragedy of 911 and the

equally avoidable failures in analysis that marked the Iraq WMD program. If you

are to go ahead with the creation of a National Intelligence Director—and I believe

22

you will—I think that you must ensure that such a structure is vested with all the

powers necessary to be successful and that the Congress and the President have the

organization, capabilities and acceptance of the responsibility to ensure that, as this

new structure moves forward, accountability goes hand-in-hand with reform.

Mr. Chairman, I thank you and the Committee for this opportunity to share my

views with you.

Chairman ROBERTS. Dr. Kay, we thank you for a very comprehensive statement. It is somewhat unique, I think, to have an

agnostic list 10 Commandments in behalf of a proposal that he is

agnostic about.

[Laughter.]

Dr. KAY. Senator, we Baptists are all unusual in that regard.

Chairman ROBERTS. If we include the 10 Commandments, perhaps we can have you baptized, and you can see the light in behalf

of the national intelligence director.

General Boyd.

STATEMENT OF GENERAL CHARLES G. BOYD, USAF, RETIRED,

PRESIDENT AND CEO, BUSINESS EXECUTIVES FOR

NATIONAL SECURITY

General BOYD. Sir. Senator Roberts, Senator Rockefeller, distinguished members, I will give you back some of the time that David

took. I feel toward David like Frank Sinatra felt toward Sammy

Davis, Jr. He said, ‘‘I’d hate to follow him on.’’

I’ve been asked specifically to discuss with you the Hart-Rudman

Commission, of which I was the executive director, in the context

of intelligence reform. I will summarize briefly that effort, and then

let your questions guide the discussion that follows. Nothing like

as comprehensive a view as Dr. Kay has just given you, but there

might be a gem in here somewhere.

By way of refresher, the Hart-Rudman Commission was chartered to try to determine what kind of a world we’re going to live

in over the next quarter of a century; to devise a national security

strategy appropriate to that world; and finally, to examine the

structures and the processes by which the Nation formulates and

executes its national security policies, and recommend adjustments

and restructuring as appropriate.

Fourteen prominent Americans served as commissioners, with

analytical, research and support staff numbering approximately 50

people. We devoted 21⁄2 years to this effort. I believe there’s common agreement that it was the most comprehensive review of our

Nation’s security apparatus to be conducted since 1947.

The Hart-Rudman Commission is primarily identified now in the

aftermath of 9/11 for its specific work on homeland security, and

in retrospect, it is the piece of work for which I am the most

pleased. But for our purposes today I will ignore that, except where

it relates to intelligence, as well as the 40 other major recommendations that dealt with other aspects of national security,

and stick with the section that pleases me the least, that having

to do with intelligence.

With our conviction that terrorism would be the method of choice

for most of the early 21st century enemies came the dawning notion that the military component would decline in relative importance in the national security calculus; the economic, diplomatic

and communication components would increase in relative value;

23

and some, though not all, concluded that ultimately this type of

conflict could not be won with the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. Although their role would be important, such conflict

would be won with other components—with law enforcement and

with, most of all, intelligence.

The debate about intelligence at this moment is about organization. But that was not the centerpiece of our work on this subject.

Ours was on process and priorities.

We concluded then, as had others, that the intelligence community had lost its focus when the Berlin Wall came down. To that

point, since the Nation had no effective systematic process for establishing new national security objectives and strategies and was

floundering in its attempt at reorientation, it followed that the intelligence community had nothing solid on which to realign its own

orientation and priorities.

The two had to be inseparable processes. So in some of the most

important work we did, we developed models for both. I commend

them to your attention.

The second major area we dealt with had to do with HUMINT,

specifically the paucity of it. We put very strong emphasis on this

capability, well before the bandwagon for it began to roll. We did

take note of the role Congress had played in the dissolution of

much of that capability and the restrictions on the kind of people

that could be involved. But I think we’re beyond that now, and I

hope we stay beyond it.

Finally, we dealt with the issue of economic intelligence commensurate with the emphasis we had placed on economics as a component of our national security arsenal, along with science and technology, as a much higher priority focus area.

We had two dogs that didn’t bark. I’ll talk to those. If there’s

value here, here’s where it’ll be.

To the first: It’s the powers of the DCI and the professionalization of the billet. In the first case, it’s not that we didn’t address it, only that in the end, we could not find agreeable common

ground.

Since you invited me here today and not the rest of the commissioners, I’ll tell you what my position was and is. If the DCI, or

now the NID or the DNI or whatever we’re going to call him, and

if indeed that’s our fate, to have one, if that person is truly to be

the director of this Nation’s intelligence apparatus, then he or she

must be able to direct those elements on which the broad user community is dependent.

Here’s where I would break with David. By the way, I think only

broad user community. I’ll talk to that a bit more. By direction, I

mean, resource allocation, budgets, and, the way Dr. Kay defined

them, manpower requirements.

At the time we struggled with this issue, the DCI, of course, already controlled the CIA. But our analytical team thought he needed more control over that portion of the budget that resided in

DOD. Therein, of course, came the rub. The argument then was

based on the notion that the non-DOD user community was increasing for some DOD products, especially those of NSA. In the

world we saw coming, that fraction would only continue to increase.

24

The argument is even more obvious today. I would probably

transfer control of NGA and the NRO, as well as NSA, to the NID.

Purely departmental organizations, such as DIA, INR in State, and

service intel organizations, et cetera, should stay right where they

are.

These were the only organizational fixes we contemplated, and

frankly I don’t believe now that reorganization will by any means

fix what’s wrong with our intelligence community. I agree with Dr.

Faulkenrath’s comment recently, and echoed here by Dr. Kay, that

our recent failures are due to performance, not organization.

My last issue is a tough one, and has not to my knowledge appeared in the current debate. In fact, I may be the only one who’s

worrying about it, though I think others may if they start to think

about it. That is the professionalization of the President’s principal

intelligence adviser.

The President’s chief military adviser is a military professional,

standing at the very top of the entire profession of arms. We put

only professionals in that position, and in fact our law requires

that only one who has served as a service chief, vice chairman or

commander of a unified or specified command can hold the position. Not so for the person who stands at the top of the intelligence

profession and serves as the principal adviser to the President for

intelligence.

After 1947—and Dr. Zegart can elaborate on this, I’m sure—as

a professional intelligence service began to be developed, professionals were placed in charge. The first few were military professionals, since there were no intelligence professionals at the time.

When Eisenhower came to office, the first civilian was appointed,

who, though not a professional, had senior leadership experience in

a wartime ad hoc intelligence organization. In the years since, with

an occasional exception, a trend of placing nonprofessionals in the

position has evolved—lawyers, businessmen, academics, congressional staffers, politicians and the like.

Indeed, there is nothing in law that requires professionalism or

even national security experience. The President can choose whomever he wants and, though your consent is required, I am not

aware of any occasion when the Senate objected to a nominee on

the basis of lack of professional credentials. But should you?

It is not just because the intelligence discipline, the science, the

art, indeed the craft of it, are so specialized and complex that, like

the military, begs for depth of particular knowledge in the one who

is to lead. But it is also the special ethos of the professional that

helps that person stand apart from the political considerations that

inevitably surround every Presidential policy choice.

Those who serve at the pleasure of a President for an expected

term limited to his, who comes to office precisely because of shared

politics and political reliability, come, I should think, under enormous pressure or temptation to give the President what he wants

rather than what he doesn’t want, but needs. When that servant

is responsible for selecting the intelligence analysis to give his

President, I think I’d prefer a professional to a political appointee

with as much independence and job security as possible.

25

It is without impugning anyone who has ever held the DCI billet

or is about to that I advance this idea. I will develop it further in

the question and answer period if you wish.

I’d be happy to take your questions.

[The prepared statement of General Boyd follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF GENERAL CHARLES G. BOYD, USAF (RET.), PRESIDENT

AND CEO, BUSINESS EXECUTIVES FOR NATIONAL SECURITY

Senator Roberts, Senator Rockefeller, Distinguished Members of this Committee,

it’s always a special honor to be asked to participate in the important work of any

congressional committee. My contributions, however modest, are offered with the

highest sense of purpose.

I have been asked, specifically, to discuss with you the Hart-Rudman Commission—of which I was executive director—in the context of intelligence reform. I will

summarize briefly that effort, and then let your questions guide the disscussion that

follows. I will also give you a couple of personal perspectives derived from decades

spent as a user of intelligence in the hope they will be of some use. I will leave spaghetti charts and wiring diagrams to others with more current organizational familiarity.

By way of refresher, the Hart-Rudman Commission was chartered to try to determine what kind of world we are going to live in over the next quarter century, then

develop a national security strategy relevant to that world, and finally to examine

the structures and processes by which the Nation formulates and executes its national security policies, and recommend adjustments or restructuring as appropriate. Fourteen prominent Americans served as commissioners, with analytical, research, and support staff consisting of approximately 50 people. We devoted over

21⁄2 years to what was the most comprehensive review of our Nation’s security apparatus to be conducted since 1947.

The first phase of our work led us to a conclusion none held at the outset: that

the security phenomenon our Nation would face in the early 21st century, and the

one for which we were least prepared, would be terrorism—in a variety of forms—

ranging from small scale disruption to—quite possibly—mass casualty catastrophe

of a magnitude that could change the very nature of the way our society works and

interacts with the rest of the world.

After that understanding had begun to settle into our consciousness, it affected,

to a prevailing degree, how we would think about securing the base camp—our

homeland—and then the effect that would have on all other aspects of national security, to include of course, intelligence.

Hart-Rudman Commission is primarily identified now, in the aftermath of 9/11,

for its’ specific work on homeland security, and in retrospect it is the piece of work

with which I am the most pleased. For our purposes today, however, I will ignore

that, except where it relates to intelligence, as well as the 40 other major recommendations that dealt with other aspects of national security, and stick with the

section that pleases me the least—that having to do with intelligence.

With our conviction that terrorism would be the method of choice for most of our

early 21st century enemies, came the dawning notion that the military component

would decline in relative importance in the national security calculus. The economic,

diplomatic and communication components would increase in relative value, and

some—not all—concluded that, ultimately, this type of conflict could not be won

with the army, navy, marine corps and air force. Although their role would be important, such conflict would be won with the other components, with law enforcement, and with the most important element of all—intelligence.

The debate about intelligence, at this moment, is about organization, but that was

not the centerpiece of our work on the subject. It was on process and priorites. We

concluded then, as had others, that the intelligence community lost it’s focus when

the Berlin Wall came down, and, to that point, since the nation had no effective,

systematic process for establishing new national security objectives and strategies,

and was floundering in its attempt at re-orientation, it followed that the intelligence

community had nothing solid on which to realign its own orientation and priorities.

The two had to be inseparable processes, so, in some of the most important work

we did, we developed models for both. I commend them to your attention.

The second major area we dealt with had to do with humint, specifically the paucity of it. We put very strong emphasis on this capability, well before the bandwagon

began to roll. I might add, much of the reason for the dissolution of that capability,

and restrictions on what kind of people could be involved, came from the U.S. Congress. You’ve gotten over that now, I think, and I fervently hope you stay over it.

26

Finally, we dealt with the issue of economic intelligence commensuate with the

emphasis we had placed on economics as a component of our national security arsenal, along with science and technology as a much higher priority focus area.

There were two dogs that didn’t bark: the powers of the DCI, and professionalization of the billet.

To the first—it’s not that we didn’t address it, only that in the end we could not

find agreeable, common ground. Since you invited me here today, and not the rest

of the commissioners, I’ll tell you what my position was—and is: if the DCI, or now

the NID or the DNI, if that is to be our fate, is truly to be the director of this Nation’s intelligence apparatus, then he/she must be able to direct those elements on

which the broad user community is dependent. by direction, I mean: resource allocation—budgets—manpower—requirements.

At the time we struggled with this issue, the DCI of course already controlled

CIA, but our analytical team thought he needed more control over that portion of

the budget that resided in DOD. The argument then was based on the notion that

the non-DOD user community was increasing for some DOD products, especially

those of NSA, and in the world we saw coming that fraction would only continue

to increase. The argument is even more obvious today, and I would probably transfer control of NGA and NRO, as well as NSA, to the NID. Purely departmental organizations such as dia, inr at state, service intell organizations, etc should stay right

where they are.

My last issue is a tough one, and has not, to my knowledge, appeared in the current debate. In fact, I may be the only one who is worrying about it, though I think

others may if they start thinking about it, and that is the professionalization of the

President’s principal intelligence advisor.

The President’s Chief Military Advisor is a military professional, standing at the

very top of the entire profession of arms. We put only professionals into that position, and in fact our law requires that only one who has served as a service chief,

vice chairman, or commander of a unified or specified command can hold the position. Not so, for the person who stands at the top to the intelligence profession, and

serves as the principal advisor to the President for intelligence.

After 1947, as a professional intelligence service began to be developed, professionals were placed in charge. The first few were military professionals since there

were no intelligence professionals at the time. When Eisenhower came to office the

first civilian was appointed who, though not a professional, had senior leadership

experience in a wartime ad hoc intelligence organization.

In the years since, with occasional exception, a trend of placing non-professionals

in the position has evolved: lawyers, businessmen, academics, congressional staffers,

politicians, and the like, and indeed there is nothing in law that requires professionalism, or even national security experience. The President can choose whomever

he wants, and though your consent is required, I am not aware of any occasion

when the Senate objected to a nominee on the basis of lack of professional credentials. Should you?

It is not just because the intelligence discipline, the science, the art, indeed the

craft of it are so specialized and complex that, like the military, begs for depth of

knowledge in the one who is to lead, but it is also the special ethos of the professional that helps the person stand apart from the political considerations that inevitably surrounds every Presidential policy choice. Those who serve at the pleasure

of a President, for an expected term limited to his, who come to office precisely because of shared politics and political reliability, come—1 should think—under enormous pressure or temptation to give the President what he wants and not necessarily what he doesn’t want but needs; and when that servant is responsible for

selecting the intelligence analysis to give his President, I think I’d prefer a professional to a political appointee—with as much independence and job security as possible.

It is without impugning anyone who has ever held the DCI billet, or is about to,

that I advance this idea. I will develop it further in the question and answer period

if you wish.

I’ll be happy to take your questions.

Chairman ROBERTS. General Boyd, we thank you very much for

your statement.

Senator Rockefeller.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Thank you all very much. I want

to make a sort of a general observation as a way of using up my

time, at which point I’ll ask a question.

27

There is, I think, a tendency as I’ve been to hearings and I’ve listened to them on C-SPAN and read about them in the papers and

talked with colleagues about them, to refer to the 30, 40, 50 attempts to reform the intelligence community over the years. Then,

having done that, and since none of that was successful, then people say, ‘‘Well, there isn’t the will to do it’’ or, ‘‘Dr. Zegart, you have

this wonderful phrase, ‘There is nothing quite like intelligence reform to trigger the antibodies of affected agencies.’ ’’ I love that.

But we’ve never been in a situation like this. Intelligence was

barely paid attention to for years, even during the cold war and the

post-cold war period, except by those who needed to do it—certainly

not the media or the public in general. You were probably thinking

about it, you were all living it.

Because it hasn’t worked before, it’s considered to be sort of an

undoable task. Because it’s considered to be an undoable task, then

if somebody suggests the idea of a national intelligence director, it’s

considered too simplistic, and it’s sort of a way out, as opposed to

something that might just possibly work, which is what I happen

to believe, provided that that person has the budget authority and

the powers and the tasking and all the rest, the follow-up that goes

along with it.

I want to make that point, that I think there’s a natural instinct

for some people to say, ‘‘Well, it can’t work because it hasn’t

worked before’’ and what you’re suggesting is put one person in

charge of everything, that’s what everybody does when there’s a

crisis and you’ve got to get a quick answer.

Well, No. 1, we don’t have to have a quick answer. We have to

have a right answer. That will take the time that it takes. We’re

gathered here in August as sort of a statement of intensity, but

probably not as a statement of refinement of position, because that

will take debate, conferences back and forth between the executive

and the legislative branch and the services, and all the rest of it.

I just want to make that point.

Another shibboleth, from my point of view at least, is the fact

that somehow—and it has been said by several recently, and accepted, therefore—that if you have intelligence reform—and it’s

called intelligence reform, just the word intelligence reform—that

by some reason the interest of the warfighter is compromised. I

want to go into that and ask each of you your views on that.

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the creation of the

national intelligence director with unified budget authority, would

have the unintended consequence of depriving the warfighter of

tactical intelligence. Now, that’s accepted by a lot of people, because it’s said by the people who would be affected by it.

First off, it’s important, I think, to remember that the 9/11 Commission recommends that the Secretary of Defense keep control, as

Chairman Roberts has pointed out, of the military intelligence programs contained in the Joint Military Intelligence Program, or

JMIP, which is substantial, and the tactical intelligence, the

TIARA budgets, which is the service intelligence capacity, which is

in and of itself.

So those immediately are not included in the equation and therefore, are doing nothing but helping the warfighter. They are left

out of the national intelligence director’s realm.

28

Now, the 9/11 Commission is recommending giving the national

intelligence director budget executive authority only over those

military intelligence programs currently in the national—and I repeat that—in the National Foreign Intelligence Program budget.

This shift of authority would not affect the Secretary of Defense’s

current control over tactical and joint military intelligence programs. I can say that 10 times in a row. It’s the truth, if we do

it, if we choose to do it.

Now, the argument is that a national intelligence director could

control national intelligence systems and personnel in a way that

might be detrimental to the best interests of the warfighter.

There’s always the question of what’s going to affect the warfighter.

As you indicated, that is the priority. The question is, at what level

of priority. I think everybody agrees it is the priority, like you do.

But on the other hand, that potential exists today in our current

system. The dispute that might arise between the current DCI, the

director of central intelligence, and the Secretary of Defense would

have to be escalated today, were there to be such a disagreement,

up toward the President, through the National Security Council—

in the later round of questioning I want to talk about that, Dr.

Kay, what you said about that—to see if it could be resolved, and

if it couldn’t be resolved at the national security level, it would be

taken to the President for a decision.

In the Government Affairs testimony that Chairman Roberts and

I went to the other day, Acting DCI McLaughlin replied, and I

think he’s been there 30-plus years, that he could not recall this

escalation ever occurring.

So evidently, something gets worked out. Now, it may be because, as George Tenet said, I have a really good relationship with

Don Rumsfeld, even as we understood that he was not necessarily

going to be around forever. So it depends on personal relationships.

But there’s always the way out now, much less under what we are

talking about. So this avenue of appeal would still exist if the NID

and Secretary of Defense were at odds under organizational restructuring proposed by the 9/11 Commission.

So, two questions for our witnesses, each of you.

First, do you believe that a national intelligence director would

be unsympathetic to the legitimate intelligence needs of the

warfighter? Would they be unsympathetic? Is there something

about a DCI director that would make him or her unsympathetic?

For that matter, has the DCI historically been insensitive to military requirements, particularly in times of war?

Second and last question: If the ultimate decision on pressing

matters of national security resides with the commander in chief,

as it does today and it would under this system if adopted, is there

really a danger of a national intelligence director forcing his will

on a Secretary of Defense in a way that would deprive the

warfighter of the tactical intelligence that he and she need?

Dr. ZEGART. Senator, these are both crucial questions.

I do not believe that a national intelligence director would be unsympathetic to the warfighter. It’s no surprise that the Secretary

of Defense has made this argument. No sitting Secretary of Defense since 1947 has taken kindly to the idea of intelligence restructuring.

29

In fact, that natural protection of the Defense Department was

in part what led to the flawed design of our intelligence community

that we’re dealing with today. It was exactly that attitude that

stripped the DCI of the authority to actually manage the community that he was charged to do by statute.

So that’s an argument that we’ve seen for quite some time. I understand where it comes from, but I do not believe that there is

any indication that the DCI in history or that a national intelligence director in the future would compromise the warfighter.

Quite the contrary, actually. What keeps me awake at night,

among other things, is the idea that we will place too little emphasis on strategic intelligence, the kind of long-term assessments that

we saw so lacking, with no national intelligence assessment on terrorism from 1997 to September 11th; with no collectors on the

ground in Iraq after 1998. Those are strategic intelligence questions, and I believe that the danger is that we give so much attention to tactical intelligence that we end up not providing the type

of intelligence support that allows the President to make policy decisions about whether to send troops in harm’s way to begin with.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Who is it who appoints the national intelligence director?

Dr. ZEGART. The President appoints, with the confirmation of the

Senate.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Right. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. Dr. Kay and General Boyd, do you have any

comments?

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Yes, my apologies.

Dr. KAY. I can be very brief on this one, because I essentially

agree with Amy. I think the real danger is not that tactical intelligence will be devalued. In fact, the history of the last decade is

tactical intelligence has gained at the expense of strategic intelligence. Chairman Roberts has started these hearings by saying we

don’t have to just deal with terrorism, there will be other threats.

There will indeed be other threats, and those are the ones that

strategic intelligence must address.

I would add, Senator Rockefeller, it’s hard for anyone to argue,

I would think, that the present system serves the warfighter well.

I don’t know of any combatant commander who has suffered so

poorly from knowledge about the tactical deployment of Iraq’s

weapons of mass destruction as Tommy Franks.

If you read his book, he’s very vocal about that. He put people

in harm’s way by going to Mach–4 gear because he believed and

had been told that there were weapons of mass destruction out

there that were not out there. So the present system doesn’t serve

the warfighter that well.

What you’ve got is I think what Amy refers to, these antibodies

against reform.

Chairman ROBERTS. General Boyd.

General BOYD. Easy, no and no.

But I’ll add a comment; I’m old enough to have some perspective.

I remember as a young fighter pilot going to North Vietnam with

10-year-old target photos on my knee, when every day, U–2s and

SR–71s were collecting strategic intelligence not available to the

likes of me, shared with other intel guys, I guess.

30

I can remember very recently, as an active duty four-star, being

deluged with tactical intelligence far beyond any possible ability to

consume it, use it effectively.

I believe, if anything, what the other two respondents have said,

and that is that I worry more now about neglecting the strategic

sphere, something that certainly wasn’t the case when I was a

young fighter pilot.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Hatch has to leave for a prior commitment. I’m going to recognize him. We are under a 5-minute

timeframe.

Senator HATCH. Well, first of all, let me thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman, and our Vice Chairman,

Senator Rockefeller, for holding these important hearings today. I

also like to thank the Committee staff for their hard work. They’ve

worked very, very hard over the recess for this hearing and working on proposed legislation that we’ve been chatting about.

I know that when we return, the Chairman intends to hold the

confirmation hearings for Porter Goss, with whom I met this morning. Of course, he’s had about 10 years inside experience with the

CIA and I believe he would be an excellent DCI. So he certainly,

I think, knows where the bodies are and certainly knows how to

correct some of the difficulties. We’ll certainly try to help him at

every step of the way.

But I’d just like to ask a question. Is it Dr. Zegart? Dr. Zegart.

Then have the other two respond, too.

I want to personally thank you, Dr. Kay, for the service that

you’ve given. You’ve appeared before this Committee before, and I

thought your testimony was really tremendous then, as it is today.

General, I just can’t begin to tell you how much we appreciate

you and the service you’ve given, the 35 years in the military plus

the service you’ve given in these areas.

But let me just ask this question. I’d like all three of you to answer. That is that your testimony indicates that the 9/11 Commission doesn’t go far enough in guaranteeing that there will be a

broad cross-fertilization of personnel in the intelligence community.

Now, it’s my sense that communication is dramatically improving

across agencies, but I also recognize your concern that unless these

initiatives are formalized in legislation and become a routine part

of professional development, that these efforts will be lost in the

shuffle. So I’d like you to comment on that, and all three of you

comment. I don’t want this to become another bureaucracy or another worthless bully pulpit with no authority. If we’re going to do

this, it ought to be done right.

But those two things are matters of great concern to me.

Dr. Zegart.

Dr. ZEGART. Senator, I agree with you. I think that culture, first

of all, is a very difficult thing to change. We know that.

There are three levers that you can use in legislation to change

culture. The first is, change how people are hired. The second is,

change how they’re trained. The third is, change how they’re promoted, I think an issue that David brought up eloquently in his

testimony. You have to reward good performance and punish bad

performance.

31

Now, there is a balance to be made, obviously, between writing

too much detail into legislation that limits discretion of the community to change, but I think we’ve erred on the opposite side. So I

do think there are opportunities for legislation to make inroads in

making cultural changes throughout the community.

As I mentioned, the two that I know the most about and that I

think would be good places to start are age-old ideas and that is

training programs and incentives for rotations.

Let me just add one other thing, which is that I am struck by

how the challenges that we are discussing today are not so much

about developing new capabilities; they are about fixing old problems.

Washington is littered with stacks of studies of commissions past

and governmental studies past, and many of them have reached

consensus about these issues. Training is one of those issues and

promotion incentives.

Senator HATCH. Thank you.

General.

General BOYD. I believe the issue of culture is indeed at the

heart of the matter, and professionalism. I’m not sure how much

legislation you can do to fix that. I think you can put emphasis on

it in ways and help emphasize the kind of person that gets the job

of the NID and so forth, that can have a lot to do with it.

Over time, it’s education, exactly professional education, it’s inculcating these professional values and performance standards, a

meritocracy approach that you get passed over twice, you’re out of

here buddy, you know? Upward mobility, accelerated for the high

performer, and the slow performers go home. That’s the way you

change behavior. That has nothing whatsoever to do with organization.

Dr. KAY. Senator Hatch, I think you’re quite right in saying that

there’s evidence with regard to both terrorism and, in my immediate case, Iraq WMD. Some of the collector barriers have been broken down, the cultural barriers, and people are communicating.

That’s what usually happens in a system when you’re in a crisis,

you throw out the rule book and if you’ve got good people, you try

to get things done.

I think all of our concern is—and I’ve seen this personally—as

the crisis is passed and things turned back to normal, the old habits, the old culture, the old barriers impede themselves.

I will say twice in my career, with regard to Iraq, I’ve benefited

from collection systems and collectors across the government and

across agencies that have done tremendous jobs. I will say with

Iraq—and it really is both the terrorism and Iraq in the current

case—there are unheralded heroes out there who deserve it. At the

top of my list is Charlie Allen, who I have seen Charlie Allen do

absolutely marvelous things with collection systems across this

government that people said were impossible to do. They served my

interests greatly.

I would like to make that the norm, and not the exception. I

think I’d like to see people like Allen rewarded, and people who

don’t perform that well punished and their career impeded. The

system now doesn’t do that.

32

Charlie stands out because he is such a golden exception in this.

He does it under crisis. He would be the first to tell you, in areas

that you can’t break the rules, because there’s a crisis brewing,

things work their usual way, and that’s not very well.

Senator HATCH. Dr. Kay, you mentioned that the President—I

think your 10th point you made of the 10 major points that you

made in your remarks earlier—is that the President should have

the ability to run truth tests. Can you tell us a little bit about how

he or she might be able to do that?

Dr. KAY. I think explaining that to a politician as astute as you

is like telling my grandmother how to suck eggs.

Senator HATCH. We’re giving you a good chance here.

Dr. KAY. That was never a good chance with my grandmother,

sir.

Look, it is foolish in the extreme to believe that just because you

sit in any office, and that includes the Oval Office, that everyone

who comes through that door is committed fully to serving your interests and only your interests, and what they tell you is the full

truth. Every President who has been successful, at least that I

know of in the history of this republic, has developed both informal

and formal means of getting checks on whether people who tell him

things are in fact telling him the whole and full truth.

I think this is particularly crucial and difficult to do in the intelligence area. The recent history has been a reliance on the NSC

system to do it. I, quite frankly, think that has not served this

President very well.

I think we need to think long and hard about how it might. My

personal, if I were emperor for a day and not director of national

intelligence, would be to see that there be a special assistant to the

President for national intelligence, and indeed I think he should be

a professional, or someone with professional knowledge, who in fact

can run those truth tests, but is part of the President, the Executive Office of the President, not part of the NID structure. He

serves the President and the President’s interests while he’s in that

job.

Senator HATCH. I think that’s a good suggestion.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. We thank you, Senator.

Senator Mikulski.

Senator MIKULSKI. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

First of all, I want to thank you and the Vice Chairman for holding this series of hearings on reform—before we broke, the Feinstein hearing, today and the ones that we will keep on doing. I

think we’re all committed to reform.

When one reads the 9/11 Commission, they made 41 recommendations. Sixteen the President can do through Executive

Order. Nine the President needs our help by putting money into

Federal checkbook, and 16 fall squarely in our lap. So I look forward to working with you.

Yesterday I was with the Government Ops Committee to hear

from the families, 60 of whom were from Maryland who perished

on that day, and of course here today, and you call us back any

time you want and I’m ready to be here.

33

Mr. Chairman, before I ask our very able witnesses something,

I want to bring something to the attention of the Committee that

I think was a breach of security. Since it’s in public document, I

can do it here.

In all my intel reading over the weekend, I thought to myself,

why be on the Committee; all I need is a subscription to Newsweek. When I read the August 16 issue of Newsweek—and I commend it to my colleagues, called ‘‘Target America’’—there was this

article about the arresting of a man by the name of Khan. That

provided detailed information about his role in al-Qa’ida, how the

United States intelligence services would use him to find and capture other terrorists, including those in the United States. The arrest and capture of Khan was a major step in penetrating the alQa’ida communication network.

He was the switchboard for bin Ladin. Reading from Newsweek:

‘‘Khan had access to handwritten notes delivered by secret relays

that came from the caves of bin Laden himself.’’

This is the intelligence find of a lifetime. Agents live for this

time. We had the man. We had the computer. We had his address

book. We were using his address book to e-mail operatives.

According to what Newsweek did, they gave details about how

we e-mailed operatives in the United States, the United Kingdom,

and other places around the world. He was outed on August 2nd,

to go to the news on August 3rd, while we captured 13 more alQa’ida networks, then everything shut down.

Dear friends, his arrest could have been the intelligence breakthrough of a lifetime. It’s a wasted opportunity. All of our people

working in the field, many of you know the kind of work that’s

done—our Committee knows, too—dangerous, requiring great risks

and sacrifices. So what do we have now? So what do you think the

guys in the cave think now? Where do you think they’re communicating? We had in him the ability to do this.

So I believe that the first reform needs to be no leaks. I really

believe that we need to find a way to institutionalize this and then

take strong accountability.

Colleagues, you need to know I’m writing a letter to the President, asking the President to investigate this and find out who

made the Khan information—not only his arrest, but the information—so public that the guys in the cave know now what we’ve got

and what we’ve got a hold of. I believe going with the recommendations of Dr. Kay and General Boyd and Dr. Zegart, performance,

and it needs to be accountability. I think we need to find out who

did this, and I think they should be fired.

I really commend to the Committee and its leadership, particularly Senator Roberts and Chairman Rockefeller, read this, because

it’s not just your regular arrest here, the arrest of a lifetime, and

the information we knew, to see if the Committee wants to take

any other action about it.

Chairman ROBERTS. We’ll be happy to work with you. I am familiar with the article, as is Senator Rockefeller. It is a matter of extreme concern. I thank the Senator for making her views public.

We will work with you on this matter. As you know, we have been

plagued—and I’m using the editorial ‘‘we’’ here, including the ComVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00037 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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mittees of the Congress and the agencies and everything else about

leaks.

But this is especially egregious. We will work with you on this

topic.

Senator MIKULSKI. Well, Mr. Chairman, that’s exactly right.

My letter to the President is not a confrontational letter, nor is

it a partisan letter. It’s an American Senator’s letter. I know you’ve

taken this. But I think our Committee, both its members, then

what also happened in the Congress and so on, I really do think

we need—our entire government really needs to come to grips with

the consequences of what leaks mean.

I thank you for your indulgence. Perhaps during a second round

I can ask our very able witnesses about their testimony.

Chairman ROBERTS. I thank the Senator.

Senator DeWine.

Senator DEWINE. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much.

Well, this has been a very enlightening and interesting hearing.

Let me if I could, just briefly summarize. General Boyd, your

comment was that it’s performance, not organization, in regard to

this whole proposal about a national intelligence director.

Dr. Kay, you’re agnostic about the whole thing, in your own

words.

Dr. Zegart, you have a little different perspective. If I could quote

from a transcript from National Public Radio, you state, ‘‘While a

proposal for a director of national intelligence is the most popular

reform proposal right now in Washington, what that would essentially do is separate the CIA director from the job of running the

community. I am probably in the minority here in thinking that

that’s not the way to go.

‘‘I believe that the problem with the current DCI’s position is not

that the job is too big, but that his powers are too weak. We need

to have a head of the community who has the heft of an agency

behind him in order to run the entire community.’’

I want to ask you in a moment to explain that a little bit further.

Then in your written statement and also in your oral statement,

you said: ‘‘In particular, I believe that separating the community

head from the CIA has drawbacks that may be less obvious than

the benefits. One concern is that a director of national intelligence

who is not tied to the CIA will be more likely to view intelligence

needs and assets through tactical lenses.’’

Then you go on to explain that a little bit.

I’m not sure I understood why that would be true. So my second

question would be would you explain that statement. Why would

that person who’s not tied to an agency, not tied to the CIA, be

more likely to look at things from a tactical and not the big picture?

Dr. ZEGART. Senator, whether to create a new national director

of intelligence or to, on the other hand, bolster the power of the

DCI, is something that I’ve grappled with for quite some time, and

I don’t think it’s an easy call.

Senator DEWINE. A lot of us have.

Dr. ZEGART. Right.

On balance, however, let me make two points. First is that my

greatest concern is that there be no structural change whatsoever.

35

I think either solution offers a dramatic improvement to what we

have today. I’m concerned that we can get distracted into debating

which is the perfect solution, when neither is perfect and both are

better than what we have.

That said, I do think——

Senator DEWINE. That we understand, we appreciate. Thank

you.

Dr. ZEGART. But I do fall in favor of bolstering the DCI’s power,

for four reasons, some of which you expressed.

The first is that I do believe that there’s a strong case to be made

that the job is not too big, the powers are too weak. We’ve never

had a DCI with the kind of powers that we’re talking about giving

the national intelligence director. Now, there are arguments that

disagree with that.

The second is that, in general, in organization theory, simpler is

better. The fewer moving parts in a machine, the easier it is for

the machine to work well. The fewer phone calls the President has

to make to find out what’s going on in intelligence, the better off

we are—provided that one-stop shopping does not mean one view,

which David alluded to is a critical problem of tradecraft today.

Third reason actually has to do with this Committee’s report on

weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. What I see, and I agree with

David, in that case what I see is more of a tradecraft failure than

a structural failure.

It’s not so much that the director of the CIA cannot run the community. The problem was that the CIA failed to make appropriate

use of its unique position in the community to provide the dissenting views and the nuance, and to provide one-stop shopping

that informs and improves policy decisionmaking in the White

House.

So the CIA was created to bring together different elements of

the intelligence community. It’s the same idea behind the National

Counterterrorism Center. Whenever you try to fuse intelligence in

one place, you run the risk of providing only one perspective. I see

it as fundamentally a failure of tradecraft rather than a failure of

organization.

Finally, to get to your point, your question about tactical versus

strategic intelligence, I think that all agencies are not created

equal, and that the vast majority of agencies in the community are

housed in the Pentagon and have a Pentagon perspective.

My concern is that we actually need to empower whoever runs

this community with the ability to think about long-term intelligence analysis. I think there’s a real danger that, absent the

backing of our premiere strategic analysis outfit in the CIA, that

there’ll be a tendency not to do that enough.

Senator DEWINE. Well, are you saying then that there is a builtin Pentagon bias, then?

Dr. ZEGART. I think there’s a natural gravitational pull.

Senator DEWINE. A natural gravitation that way?

Dr. ZEGART. Yes, I think there’s a natural gravitational pull. In

any endeavor that we do, there are certain things we put on postits that get to the top of the pile, and supporting the warfighter

and providing that intelligence always gets to the top of the pile.

36

The challenge is to make sure that the things at the bottom of

the pile don’t get ignored, the long-term intelligence assessments

that are critical for our national security.

Senator DEWINE. Any comments by the other two witnesses?

[No response.]

Senator DEWINE. OK. My time is up. Thank you Mr. Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Bond.

Senator BOND. Thank you Mr. Chairman.

I appreciate the testimony of all three of you. We’ve certainly had

an opportunity to become very well acquainted with Dr. Kay and

as usual, Dr. Kay, I appreciate your comments and suggestions. I

welcome General Boyd and Dr. Zegart.

Dr. Zegart, you mentioned the fleeting opportunity for reform,

we’re only going to get one bite at the apple. I think it’s really important that we take that bite well. One of the things I’m concerned about is that we rush into doing something just so we can

show that we’ve done something before November rolls around.

But I really think there’s a problem. Since we are at war, we

have to present our intelligence community with an improved system while they’re fighting a war, while that system has to continue

to function, as we continue to perform what may be major transplantation surgery.

I am concerned that Congress not do so much that we interfere

with the ongoing, the tactical, if you will, as we prepare for the

strategic.

Several things that you said about the failure of tradecraft lead

me to the question: Are there things that are being proposed for

Congress to do that we ought not to be doing, that ought to be

done?

As you said, powers were there that were not exercised. Can you

help us draw a distinction where we ought to keep our nose out of?

While you do indicate that we should, for example, provide community training and cross-jurisdictional transfers, are there things

that we are talking about doing that we ought not to do?

Dr. ZEGART. Senator, let me just say that I share your concern

that, on the one hand, Congress act with urgency; on the other

hand, Congress act with care. I know it’s a difficult balance between the two. I fall on the side of urgency, in my mind, rules the

day.

Are there things that Congress should keep its nose out of? Yes.

That is legislating too far into the weeds about how the agencies

should operate.

For example, while I think it would be certainly beneficial to require a rotation to other intelligence agencies, I think legislating

the details of how long those rotations should be, where they

should be specifically, those kinds of things should be left to the intelligence community to sort through, things that require professional judgment to sort out.

But I err on the side of thinking that Congress actually can do

great by providing more specific direction to the community rather

than less.

Senator BOND. I would like the comments of the others, but to

General Boyd, you’ve done an excellent job of laying out the problems, that Congress inhibited the effective collection of HUMINT.

37

I’ve long been a believer in better HUMINT. But I’m worried that

we may try to get too far into legislating what kind of HUMINT.

Can you give us some guidance on that and the other question I

asked more generally?

General BOYD. I don’t know. I don’t have a clear enough grasp,

sir, of how far you really plan to go or you think you’re headed in

giving power to the NID. If I had a better grasp of that, I think

I could answer your question better.

I think that, if you’re going to stand this guy alone, give him

these national agencies, expect of him significant analytical capability, you’re either going to gut the CIA to give him their analytical capabilities or else you’re going to duplicate them, and that all

gets squirrelly.

Now, if you can help me understand—if on the other hand, what

you have in mind is, if I can be just so simple, remember I’m a

fighter pilot; it’s got to be simple if I’m going to understand it—if

you’re going to change the DCI’s name to NID and give him some

significant power that he does not now exercise over those national

agencies only, but leave him right there, if that’s what you’re going

to do——

Senator BOND. Excuse me, General. I’m about to get the red

light, and I wanted to have Dr. Kay add his 2 cents worth. Also

I’m fascinated to know, which of the 15 we ought to be looking at

to get rid of? That one, I just find too juicy to pass up.

You could always slip us a note——

Dr. KAY. I probably should pass up, as well.

Let me, Senator Bond, let me emphasize, the thing about urgency that worries me is that we will assume that we have really

solved the problem when we do something quickly. This is a journey; it’s not a quick fix. We didn’t get in this State in 1 year; we

got in this State because of well over a decade of the system simply

going awry and not being well-managed.

Now, I come down—although Senator Roberts has appropriately

tweaked me for being an agnostic that has commandments—I come

down to this simply because I too don’t know whether we have

agreement in the executive branch and in Congress about what are

the powers and the problems that the national intelligence director

should address.

If I understood that, and that we weren’t simply interested in another symbolic czar, I think we could all answer that question better. That’s what these hearings I know are designed to help you

elucidate.

I must say, I guess in balance, and it’s on the last two pages of

my written statement, I come down recognizing that we’re going to

have an NID one way or the other. I mean, I grew up as a poor

kid on the east side of Houston, and our favorite game was walking

rail tracks. I survived because I understood when to get off the

tracks when the train was coming at an appropriate time and not

stay on it.

I know there’s a train coming down there. I just want to be sure

that we take the steps to make this an effective and a real reform

and don’t blow this opportunity and do something that is quick and

self-satisfying for the moment, but not effective over the next decade.

38

Senator BOND. Thank you.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Chambliss. Who has left the premises, who evidently caught the train.

Senator Hagel.

Senator HAGEL. Mr. Chairman, thank you. I wish to also thank

our three witnesses for splendid testimony and important insight

into a great challenge that we have before us, as you each have articulated so clearly.

I was intrigued with the three of you addressing this intelligence

community reform with heavy emphasis on performance, professionalization and culture. As the three of you know, and I think we

all appreciate here, you don’t legislate any three of those. That

comes from a whole different agenda, history, tradition, leadership,

vision.

Now, with that in mind—and incidently, I happen to agree with

you on those points—and in the interest in time, I would be very

interested in getting the three of your brief comments on these

questions: One, do we need an NID? Two, if we do, then what authority should you give the NID—budget, policy, line-management—and over which of the 15 agencies?

We’ve not talked today in much detail about domestic versus foreign intelligence. We appreciate the integration of those and understand the critical nature of those. We’ve talked about tactical

versus strategic. Any way we come at this, it is difficult.

The third part, if we could address this, what in your opinions,

without getting into great detail, by virtue of the President’s Executive Order power could he do now, would he have the power to

do by Executive Order?

Why don’t we start in the same sequence of the testimony we

heard, and Dr. Zegart, you would be first, thank you.

Dr. ZEGART. It’s not often I get to go first rather than last. I appreciate that.

Do we need an NID? Yes, Senator, I believe we do. I think I part

company with David a little bit on this. While I believe that performance matters and culture matters, structure matters, too.

Structure is not about moving boxes on a chart; structure is about

power. It’s about who can tell someone else to do what and whose

memo goes on top.

What I see in looking at the national intelligence community now

is that we have someone who’s supposed to run it who cannot

match resources against priorities. That’s a recipe for failure, I

think. We’ve seen that recipe played out over 50 years. So I think

reforming the structure so that whoever runs the intelligence community actually can match those resources against priorities gives

us a leg up. Will it solve the problem? No way. But it gets us a

large step closer.

Your second question, what authority specifically should we give

such a director? I am not a lawyer, happily, but I am an organization theorist, and so I can tell you what I think that person needs

to have on the ground, and I think there are three things.

The first is the ability to match funds against priorities and to

be able to move those in a fluid manner. It’s the equivalent of the

CEO who can actually devote the resources in the company to the

divisions that need it. Whether that’s through appropriations auVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00042 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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thority or whether that’s through reprogramming authority, I don’t

know enough to be able to say.

The second thing, I think, that——

Senator HAGEL. Excuse me. But make it clear, if this is your

point, budget authority, if we have this person, is critical.

Dr. ZEGART. Absolutely, absolutely.

The second critical power is personnel authority. It’s all about

money and people in organizations, as you know, and the ability

to hire and fire and to transfer personnel across agencies in a

seamless way—again, to match resources, in this case people—

against critical priorities, to be able to move them around.

The third component is actually to have the capability to make

those authorities real. It’s one thing to have them in law; it’s another thing to exercise them in practice.

What that means is, the computer systems actually operate together, so that there aren’t different financial accounting systems

for each agency in the community, and the personnel and the staff

to make use of that information. There’s an old saying in management: ‘‘You can’t manage what you can’t measure.’’ You have to be

able to measure these things in order to manage them.

Senator HAGEL. Thank you.

General? Or I guess we went to Dr. Kay, that’s right.

Dr. KAY. Let me try to be very quick. I think we need organizational reform. I could imagine a situation where it could be——

Senator HAGEL. Does that mean we need an NID?

Dr. KAY. Well, let me get to that. I think I can imagine a situation when the appropriate answer might have been we just need

to increase the authority and power of the director of the Central

Intelligence Agency.

I really don’t believe that now, because of the reasons this Committee documented itself. The failure of the CIA in Iraq was so persuasive and indicative of large-scale failures in analytical and collection tradecraft that it is a full-time job repairing that agency. It

must be a priority. It is the crown analytical jewel of our system.

So I actually think that right now, for better or for worse, as agnostic as I am, that in fact we need to create an NID.

That gets me to your second point, one I devoted, actually, most

of my written statement to—the authorities necessary to make that

NID effective. The worst thing that could happen, in my view, is

a reorganization that creates an NID that is feckless, that looks

like the drug czar or the cancer czar or the other multitude of czars

that are on the ashcan of Washington history.

That is fundamentally budgets, personnel, strategies and holding

people responsible for execution even though they may exist in

other organizations, as undoubtedly they will in some of these 15

or other numbered agencies that we have.

Senator HAGEL. Authority over all 15?

Dr. KAY. I think you have authority over all 15. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all 15 have to report fully and directly to the

NID. I think there are creative ways to do this that preserves the

interests of DOD and the warfighter but at the same time ensures

that we get actual reform.

40

The danger is you will skew in a way that in fact accommodates

and guts the czar. That’s what we’ve done before in almost every

other czar.

Senator HAGEL. Thank you.

General.

General BOYD. You need—I don’t care what you call it, you need

an empowered DCI. If you want to call him an NID, that’s OK with

me. I would like for him to stay right where he is. I would like to

have him have the powers that we’ve just been discussing.

Senator HAGEL. When you say that, excuse me, you mean at CIA

without a new job, without a new title, or without another box?

General BOYD. It doesn’t matter. The title really doesn’t matter.

Maybe it shows—I mean, you know, it shows something new. But

what’s important is he ought to have those agencies that truly have

broad user requirements, and that means the ones we talked about

earlier—NSA, NGA, NRO and, of course, he’s already got the CIA.

He ought to have those absolutely. He ought to have them in budget, in manpower, just as you’ve heard, in requirements development.

He ought to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Coast

Guard’s intelligence. I mean, they’ve got peculiar little requirements that they—and he’s going to waste his time doing that.

So the 15, I would give him the authority over one that he already has, three more, with real authorities, and let it go at that.

That’s a consolidation of collection. I would keep everybody else’s,

and let the departments draw on him, on that collection pool, as

their departmental needs require.

Senator HAGEL. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, thank you.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Snowe.

Senator SNOWE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank our

witnesses, most especially for your honest appraisal regarding the

challenges before us, and particularly the creation of a director of

national intelligence.

You know, obviously, the experience of this Committee, the recent experience has, of course, been our investigation on the issue

of whether or not we had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction

in Iraq.

That’s basically what prompted me to support the creation of the

director of national intelligence. Because it was clear, and abundantly clear, there was so much that went wrong, fundamentally

wrong within the agency and across the intelligence community.

For example, as you all know, the lack of information sharing.

I mean, almost 3 years later, it actually would have been even earlier than that, because of the time period in which this began and

the aftermath of 9/11, information sharing was a lesson not

learned, not the sharing of the credibility of our sources that we

use for certain analysis like biological weapons and chemical weapons, as we so painfully learned.

It wasn’t shared from the CIA with the other analysts and the

other agencies. Dissenting opinions didn’t sort of filter up to the top

to the leadership of the CIA with respect to the aluminum tubes

until very late in the process.

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In fact, it might have been 2 years since the time they first

learned of the conflicting opinions. Probably all of this is very familiar to you, Dr. Kay, on some of these issues.

The question is, it’s not just change for the sake of change. I

think we have sort of reached, you know, a turning point. It’s a watershed moment, because we are in transformational times. Something has gone clearly wrong, I think, within the intelligence community.

I happen to thank that it’s, frankly, too much for one person, the

day-to-day management of the CIA, at the same time being the

principal intelligence adviser to the President of the United States

who is not informed, by the way, of all of the dissenting opinions,

conflicting opinions in which to inform the President of the United

States. I mean, that is seriously troubling.

Then, of course, having responsibilities of the intelligence discerned and things from the other agencies. We need a strategic,

macro vision of the entire community, someone who’s going to—ultimately, it’s not just organizing and creating a bureaucratic chart

that’s different, but to force integration. There is nothing now to

break down these barriers and these stovepipes to work in a horizontal fashion. I think that’s what this is all about.

So I would appreciate your response, Dr. Kay, and General Boyd

and Dr. Zegart, about the whole issue of the weapons of mass destruction.

We know what went wrong. Could it have been a very different

product? Could we have had a very different product in the NIE,

for example, if we had had changes organizationally that we’re

speaking of?

Dr. KAY. It could have been a very different product, in my judgment. It would not just be organizational changes. The failures you

documented so thoroughly were not just failures of organization.

They were failures of tradecraft, failures of culture, failures of

management, conscious mismanagement of the information flow.

So these could have been quite different, if you addressed those.

I agree, and the reason I ultimately come down, holding my

breath in saying that NID is probably the thing to do, is because

I believe the reformation of the CIA is a priority task and is a fulltime job in and of itself.

But let me say, again, this is—we all speak about we’ve got to

get it completely right, because we have just one chance. I think

that is where we’re wrong. This is a journey, not a quick step.

But to ensure that we have more than one chance—and Senator

Hagel I think correctly held our feet to the fire by saying a lot of

what we’ve talked about can’t be legislated—the thing that you can

do is the full exercise of your oversight capability to ensure that

this is a journey and not a step that stops as soon as you pass

whatever legislation you’re going to pass next month.

I think that, in many ways, is probably the most important thing

you can do. There, again, remember, I believe the failure to hold

people responsible for poor performance over a decade is at the root

of what you have uncovered and what I unfortunately had to deal

with.

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Senator SNOWE. I couldn’t agree with you more on that score. I

think that we need to have strong legislative oversight and accountability as well.

Dr. KAY. That gives us more than one chance. There’s a good

news side of that story.

Senator SNOWE. General Boyd.

General BOYD. Directly to your question of WMD, I don’t think

it had a thing to do with the way we were organized.

I think that, and I covered this in my statement very briefly, the

most important work of all I think that the Hart-Rudman Commission did had to do with devising processes for the formulation of

policy and for then managing the requirements of and

prioritization of the intelligence community. It’s the marriage of

that process that is absolutely critical.

I think that, in the case of WMD, we decided that for a whole

variety of reasons, it was important to do Iraq, and that weapons

of mass destruction was going to be the justification for it. When

we did that, then all of the analysis and what have you that could

be extracted from countervailing argument were marshaled to support that policy objective.

This goes to the issue of having a professional running that place

and in developing a professional, truly professional, culture there,

which is a big, big job. You can help that with the legislation, but

not this kind.

You can help immediately in the way we organize with those four

national agencies. But beyond that, I wouldn’t fool with it. I would

worry about that big professional cultural problem and the way

policy is formed and integrated into intelligence prioritization.

Senator SNOWE. Thank you.

Dr. Zegart.

Dr. ZEGART. Senator, this Committee and my fellow——

General BOYD. Can I tell your staff to go look for recommendation number 14 and number 30 in the Hart-Rudman Commission

and read just not just the recommendation but the analysis supporting both of them.

Senator SNOWE. We will. Thank you.

General BOYD. Sorry.

Dr. ZEGART. That’s OK.

I think General Boyd and Dr. Kay and this Committee have far

more expertise about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than I

do, but I’ve read this Committee’s great report, and from my perspective, I do agree with David. I think it is much more a failure

of tradecraft and culture than it is of structure.

I’d look at the conclusions that this Committee made—for example, the reluctance to pass information on, the reluctance to include

dissent, which is critical for informing judgments about how much

stock to put in the judgment of an intelligence analyst.

Those kinds of things are about culture and about how people

view the world, more than organizations. I think about the

counterfactual. What if these organizations had been crashed together in one giant organization. Would we solve these problems?

I think the answer is likely not.

Even if we create the national intelligence director, which I believe we should do, these cultural problems will take a long time

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to fix. I think David is quite right, it is a journey. But we can start

the journey on the right foot, with the right legislation.

Senator SNOWE. Thank you. Thank you all very much.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Chambliss.

Senator CHAMBLISS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The one overriding thing I hear from all of you is that—and

you’re exactly right—we can do all the reorganizing, recommending

and legislative changes, but if you don’t have the right personnel

in place, and the morale of those personnel is not what it ought to

be, we’re going to continue to have a very, very difficult time in our

intel community.

Mr. Chairman, first of all, before I ask any questions, there’s

been put together a side-by-side of the 41 recommendations of the

9/11 Commission, and 39 of those 41 recommendations have either

been addressed by the administration or there is under consideration changes or reactions to those recommendations that may

have been ongoing long before the Commission report.

The only two that have not been addressed are the two relative

to the restructuring of Congress. I would ask that this copy of that

side-by-side be placed in the record.

Chairman ROBERTS. Without objection.

[The information referred to follows:]

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Senator CHAMBLISS. Thank you.

The one thing that has really brought me 180 degrees toward

supporting the national intelligence director is the fact that I have

seen so many stovepipes because of my keen interest in this information-sharing issue over the last several years that simply today

I think have not been broken down.

I don’t know how you’re going to break down these stovepipes

within the various institutions where everybody is of a mind to do

whatever they can to win the war on terrorism. But it is just a natural fact that people tend to try to want to do their thing and,

when they find something they think may be good, just naturally

not to share it out there, and we have to get rid of that.

The one way I think that can happen is to have somebody outside, a CEO, to look down and say, ‘‘OK, all of you guys are responsible for getting together every day and getting your heads together, getting your department heads together at whatever level,

and making sure that all of that information goes into that funnel.’’

I think unless we have somebody at the top—and the DCI simply

can’t do that, he has too many other things he has to do—but

somebody has to be there to make sure that that information is

analyzed properly and shared in real time.

Unless we create that position, Dr. Kay, as you say, with full

power and authority budget-wise, the ability to move people

around, the ability to take somebody who is not doing their job and

either get rid of them or move them to another position, again,

we’re not doing anything.

I’m curious. Yesterday we had Secretary Rumsfeld and General

Myers and John McLaughlin. John McLaughlin, who I have such

great respect for, he’s been a tremendous asset. I know you’ve

worked very closely with him.

I asked him the question about the change that will be required

in the position of the director of central intelligence with a restructuring and the creation of a national intelligence director, and with

the fact that all of a sudden, the chief intelligence officer in the

country is not going to be the DCI, he’s going to be chairman of—

the director of Central Intelligence Agency reporting to a national

intelligence director and what’s that going to do to the morale of

the CIA officers out in the field.

John was quick to say he thought it would have a negative impact. I’d be curious, Dr. Kay, about your reaction to that question

also.

Dr. KAY. I quite frankly don’t think the morale’s so great right

now. The morale’s not great because of concern about NID. It’s the

result of failures and a recognition that those failures have not

been addressed, and the feeling of people in the field and in the

guts of the CIA that no one is being held responsible at the levels

that, in fact, led to the breakdown in tradecraft for the mistakes

that were being made.

I think if the new CIA director comes in and is committed to reformation and reform, he will find a supporting and moralized, motivated staff, regardless of whether there’s an NID or not.

What they’re concerned about is the corruption and failure—and

it didn’t take place in a year. This is a result of several decades

of decay and poor direction.

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If you do that, I don’t think morale is a problem. The morale is

a problem when people don’t think anyone cares about what they’re

doing, or they’re going in the wrong direction.

So I think it is certainly something we ought to be concerned

about, but I actually think if you get the right person in there, it’s

not going to be a problem.

Senator CHAMBLISS. The more I’ve thought about it, too, the

more I think it’s an opportunity to rebuild that morale and have

somebody as a DCI who focuses on the CIA and the real job of the

CIA. Right now, from a HUMINT standpoint, we’re in serious trouble.

The next DCI has got to be focused on making sure that the

HUMINT side is rebuilt, giving them the authority to take risks

that they haven’t been taking for any number of reasons over the

last several years.

One other thing, Dr. Kay. I was following your scenario of structure that you were talking about, and I did not hear you mention

TTIC and the NCTC. Tell me your thoughts on what we would do

relative to TTIC and your thought about the establishment of

NCTC.

Dr. KAY. This is an area that I agree very strongly with the

9/11 Commission. I think TTIC and that type of process is an interesting innovation that needs to be followed up, because it offers an

opportunity both for focusing on new problems in interesting ways

and collaboration across organizational boundaries.

My one concern is that we don’t get into the situation—I think

15 agencies are too many. I would hate to come back—well, actually, I would love to come back before you, Senator Roberts, 10

years from now, but I would hate to come back and discover that

in addition to the 15, we’ve now got 25 TTICs, including some that

relate to problems that are no longer seen as a No. 1 priority.

The creation of special functional organizations works in business. It really does work. But it works because there is a vicious

bottom line that ensures that you don’t let them exist beyond the

point at which they’re adding value to your process. So I think we

need to emphasize that. Government is not very good about execution in the sense of getting rid of things and people, once created.

Senator CHAMBLISS. Mr. Chairman, can I have one more question

although my time has expired?

Chairman ROBERTS. Yes, I think so. I think you can have one

more.

Senator CHAMBLISS. Thank you.

General Boyd and Dr. Zegart, one issue that has come out of this

discussion, particularly over the last couple of days, is the issue of

the fact that the leadership in the intelligence community thinks

that the competition from an intelligence-gathering and analyzing

standpoint is good.

I have some doubts about that. But I would be curious to know

your thoughts about the thinking that we ought to promote competition within the intelligence community from a gathering standpoint as well as an analyzing standpoint. Does that tend to move

us in the direction of more stovepipes as opposed to trying to break

those down?

General BOYD. Do you want me to go first?

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Dr. ZEGART. It’s up to you.

General BOYD. I can address that, Senator, I think a little better

in the context of military service. The same question, of course, has

been on the table for years about the competitiveness of our services and trying to dampen that.

I’ve never understood that really, in a society that puts such a

great premium on competition. It goes to the very core of our values of success. But when it came to military services, we were

somehow supposed to not be competitive and that would make us

better. I don’t think that’s right. It’s probably not right in the intelligence community either.

I would foster—as a matter of fact, it’s buried, but in the HartRudman Commission, there is a recommendation that we enhance

competition through budget reward. You have to have winners and

you have to have losers. That would work at the problem of the defense budget going in steady fractions to the services over the last

quarter of a century. But it would foster something, I believe, that

would be of huge benefit.

If you can do X task better than service B, C and D, then you’re

going to get it. You’re going to get the money that goes with it. I

think the same thing, the same principle, I would try to apply to

the extent that there is competitive approaches to collection, for example.

Dr. ZEGART. Senator, I think that competition in theory is a good

idea. The question is, how can we harvest the benefits of competition while avoiding the dysfunction of competition. I think that

we’ve seen in intelligence that’s very hard to do.

So, while I in theory like the idea of competitive collection and

competitive analysis, I think the challenge for this community is to

figure out how to channel that competition into a useful product for

policymakers. That is, I think, one of the key conclusions I drew

from this Committee’s report.

Senator CHAMBLISS. Thank you for your patience, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Levin.

Senator LEVIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me add my

thanks to our panelists.

First, I’d like to just briefly support Senator Mikulski’s request,

I guess, by an implication that the Chairman and Vice Chairman

be supportive of her request to the President. I don’t know if she

was explicit in asking for that. But it seems to me this leak is so

egregious that it has got to be followed up.

What is doubly troubling to me is that if the USA Today article

is correct, that the leak was—I shouldn’t say the leak here, but

that the name may have been disclosed on background; that’s not

technically perhaps a leak, but it’s just as illegal. That would be

unthinkable to me. I’m not going to go into the name of the party

named here in the article. But it seems to me, Mr. Chairman, that

it is important that this Committee follow up this leak for the reasons that Senator Mikulski mentioned.

But there is a secondary issue here too, which is not just a leak,

but apparently an acknowledgment, alleged reported acknowledgment by a named key official that a name had been disclosed to

reporters in Washington ‘‘on background.’’ That, again, is just as illegal as a leak, as far as I know, unless the person to whom it’s

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told has the clearance to receive the name. That would be up, obviously to you and the Vice Chair as to whether or not you take that

action or not. But I want to join in that request.

Let me ask our panelists a couple of specific questions about the

powers of the NCTC head and the NID, the director of the proposed NID. There’s been a number of recommendations of the 9/11

Commission report relative to those powers and I want to be specific on those powers.

First, on NCTC, the 9/11 Commission says that the NCTC should

have the power to assign operational responsibilities to combatant

commands. Do you have any thoughts on that, Dr. Zegart?

Dr. ZEGART. Senator, I think in general the 9/11 Commission recommendations are excellent. I think the idea of having a national

counterterrorism center that fuses not only analysis with collection

but also with operations is something that we sorely need.

I understand that there’s concern about the chain of command.

But my understanding, based on the history of the Joint Chiefs of

Staff, is that in the military they’ve solved that problem, that there

is a chain of command that runs from the President to the combatant commanders. The Joint Chiefs of Staff fulfills a very useful role

and doesn’t interfere with that command. I think that was the

thinking behind this idea, and I think——

Senator LEVIN. Except they’re all inside the Defense Department.

Dr. ZEGART. They are.

Senator LEVIN. They are in a chain of command. The NCTC is

not in the chain of command, as proposed, and yet that is one of

the recommended powers, that the NCTC should have—the head

of it—the power to assign operational responsibilities to a combatant commander. You agree, disagree, or you don’t know?

Dr. ZEGART. I do agree with it.

Senator LEVIN. OK, thank you.

General Boyd.

General BOYD. I can’t imagine it, sir.

Senator LEVIN. Thank you.

Dr. Kay.

Dr. KAY. I basically agree with it. I think it’s workable. I think

inside the NITC you well could have a military officer serving,

maybe as the head, certainly, maybe as the deputy, so in fact you

don’t violate the chain of command.

Actually, as you know, that’s essentially what we did with regard

to ISG. I had some directional responsibilities over military officers

serving, but I had Keith Dayton there to ensure that the chain of

command was respected. We actually do it all the time.

Senator LEVIN. OK. I will save the time for all the answers, but

General Boyd, why can’t you imagine that?

General BOYD. The tasking, if you’re going directly from essentially everybody to any commander, and that has command authority behind it, he could be overwhelmed, it would seem to me, in

such a way that it would just be impossible to serve. If there’s some

mechanism by channeling it into a chain of command, then sure.

But that’s not what I see and understand. That’s why I cannot

imagine it.

Senator LEVIN. Well, OK. I’m just reading from the 9/11 report.

I think my time is up.

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Chairman ROBERTS. Senator DeWine for a second round.

Senator DEWINE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First, let me just start with just a brief statement. It seems to

me as we analyze this that it really is all about the money. My experience in 30 years of government is that policy always flows from

money.

It seems to me what you all are saying, and at least certainly my

belief, is that as we structure the language in this legislation the

key is that this person has to control the budget, not just the writing of the budget, not just the drafting, not just the planning of the

budget, but to me it has to be the execution of the budget. That’s

a lot easier said than done. The devil is in the details. The task

of this Congress is going to be to draft this legislation so it works.

I think that’s going to be very, very difficult. I think it’s going to

be very, very challenging.

But to me it is the money. It’s all about the money and who controls that money.

That said, let me ask a more specific question, and it may be a

narrow question, but we all understand that the DCI, one of his

jobs today is to brief the President and the CIA’s job is to prepare

that report for the President every day.

If we create this NID, whatever you want to call it, that is separated from the CIA, what are the ramifications of that as far as the

daily brief of the President and the fact that this person with this

new title, NID, will then, I assume, become the person who is the

chief adviser to the President or the chief briefer to the President

in regard to intelligence issues, not national security, but intelligence, since it was not actually security, but intelligence issues.

What will that mean? Does it have any significance at all?

Dr. KAY. It does indeed. That’s one reason I suggested among my

10 Commandments that in fact the NIC, the National Intelligence

Council, be transferred to the new director of national intelligence,

and that they assume the responsibility, among other things, for

the preparation of the PDB and the daily briefing of it.

One of the problems of the director of central intelligence providing the daily briefing to the CIA is quite frankly that a number

of other intelligence agencies never thought they got a fair shake.

Senator DEWINE. So you would look at this as a positive change?

Dr. KAY. Absolutely.

Senator DEWINE. As a positive.

General Boyd, how do you see this change, proposed change or

hypothetical change?

General BOYD. If he’s going to be stand-alone and be effective,

you’ve got to transfer a lot of resources to him.

I was asking myself a little earlier, do you mean you’re going to

give the whole analytical capability of the—you got the analytical

capability of the CIA with this guy. Does that make any sense?

You’re going to have redundant capabilities—David’s got an option

here—but I think the vast resources that have got to really be refined then into that daily presentation to the President has to be

essentially under his operational control.

If you leave him where he is—he’s got all that—and enhance his

power with these other three national agencies that we’ve been

talking about—I mean, it seems to me that’s the simplest fix, withVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00073 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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out creating new capabilities and giving him a lot more effectiveness than he now has.

Senator DEWINE. Dr. Zegart.

Dr. ZEGART. Senator, I think there’s an awkwardness to this solution, because it’s a difficult problem to solve. The downside that

I see, just in the interest of putting it on the table, is that, imagine

the next terrorist attack. Who does the President call and where

does he get his information? Is it the director of the national

counterterrorism center? Is it the head of the CIA? Is it the national intelligence director?

The answer is probably all three. I think that can be confusing.

I think particularly in times of crisis, the more people you need to

draw on to get basic information, the more difficult decisionmaking

can be. So that is one of my concerns.

Senator DEWINE. I see my time is almost up, but it seems to me

that is a challenge and a problem that this Congress has to face.

You always want someone who is accountable. You always want

someone—it seems to me in this particular case, you want someone

who is the principal adviser to the President, where the buck is

going to stop. You know, after the Bay of Pigs, there was someone

who was accountable. Right or wrong, there was someone who was

accountable, and that was someone who had been in the government for many, many years and who was highly respected.

It just seems to me that this is a challenge, and it’s not clear to

me who that someone is going to be under this new proposal. They

got something that Congress will have to be pretty well sure of before we embark down this path.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Levin.

Senator LEVIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The next question I wanted to ask all of you had to do with clandestine and covert operations, the proposal being that the lead responsibility go to the DOD for both.

I want to start with you, Dr. Kay. Do you agree with that?

Dr. KAY. Senator, I don’t, as formulated. It’s one that troubled

me the most. There are both legal as well as practical implications

of asking American military officers to carry out things that have

been traditionally carried out by CIA covert operations.

I do not think that was really thought through, although I appreciate the argument they made that we couldn’t afford both and we

ought to do it in one and make that a very professional organization. I just think that’s going to require a great deal of thought before, I think, you walk down that particular path.

Senator LEVIN. I couldn’t agree more.

But General Boyd.

General BOYD. There’s a problem, I think, just stated, but there’s

a problem with carrying out covert operations in an area of responsibility that are not coordinated with or not under the command of

a regional commander who’s trying to fight a war. I would be more

comfortable having those covert operations executed under a combatant commander, and it would break the link between the guy

that’s supporting the policy and doing an operation in the field.

Senator LEVIN. OK. Thank you.

Dr. Zegart.

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Dr. ZEGART. Senator, this is one of the areas where someone in

my field as an outside academic I think can’t credibly comment as

well as my colleagues.

Senator LEVIN. Thank you.

On the budget issue, currently under law, it is the director of intelligence that puts together the budget, presents the budget to the

President. When it comes to the execution of the budget, that’s

where the issue really comes. The big heart of that goes to the reprogramming question. But when it comes to the production of the

budget, that is, by law, now in the DCI’s hands.

So, when people talk about we’ve got to give the intelligence director, the NID, the legal power to do something theoretically, at

least—and Dr. Zegart’s point is good, because what goes on in reality can be very different from the theory—but nonetheless the

law now puts that in the lap of DCI.

But I think where the difference is going to come, really, is in

the execution issue. There it is, an Executive Order which puts the

execution into the lap of the Department of Defense now. Apparently under President Carter is was in the hands of the DCI. When

I say ‘‘in the hands,’’ there’s obviously consultation, coordination

and so forth, but the responsibility is given to them.

Do any of you have an opinion on the question of whether or not

we could have a joint recommendation required for any reprogramming, by either an Executive Order or if necessary, I guess, by law,

so that both the NID and the Department of Defense, when it

comes to reprogramming, would have to join in the reprogramming

request? Do any of you see pluses, minuses in that approach?

Dr. KAY. Senator Levin, I see minuses. I think to the extent that

you carve up and undermine and share out, these responsibilities

are going to be so hard to give to a NID, you essentially undermine

him and make him look like another czar.

Senator LEVIN. Even though he has the veto?

Dr. KAY. Look, as Secretary Rumsfeld found out early on, you

have the responsibility for appointing the combatant commanders

and those officers who are promoted to various flag ranks. If all

you do is approve the recommendations that come to you, you don’t

get it done.

One of the major renovations of Secretary Rumsfeld in the Department of Defense is saying, now, a want a much broader task.

I just don’t believe—I’m leery of that solution.

Senator LEVIN. Then you would put that in the NID?

Dr. KAY. In the NID.

Senator LEVIN. Into the NID. OK.

General Boyd. I think you probably have addressed this

issue——

General BOYD. You already know.

Senator LEVIN. You would leave that where it is.

Dr. Zegart, you would put that in the NID, as well?

Dr. ZEGART. Yes, I would.

Senator LEVIN. OK.

Any problem with that being done by Executive Order, being

shifted by Executive Order? Since it’s in the hand of the DOD now

by Executive Order, any problem that you see by just having that

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done through Executive Order back to the way it was under the

Carter administration?

Dr. KAY. Well, the one problem I see resides here on the Hill, if

you’re talking about reprogramming authority. That is a responsibility that, regardless of where you are in the executive branch, you

don’t exercise without congressional oversight and agreement.

Senator LEVIN. Right. That’s not affected by what I’m talking

about. It’s still there.

Dr. KAY. It could be affected if, in fact, it’s currently under the

Armed Services Committee, for example, and the NID has to suddenly discover he’s going to——

Senator LEVIN. If the Executive Order addresses where the reprogramming is.

Dr. KAY. That’s correct.

Senator LEVIN. General Boyd, do you have any thoughts?

General BOYD. I don’t.

Senator LEVIN. OK. Dr. Zegart?

Dr. ZEGART. Senator, I do. One quick point, which is that I think

that the problem with Executive Orders in this is, if reprogramming authority is that important, in my mind it needs to be in legislation. It should not be left to the discretion of individual Presidents to move it in or out of the NID.

Senator LEVIN. Thank you. My time is up. Thank you.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Snowe.

Senator SNOWE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Just an additional question. Dr. Kay, one of the arguments

against the creation of a director of national intelligence is the idea

that somehow it will stifle competition of ideas and analysis within

the intelligence community. In fact, that was one of the witnesses’s

testimony before this Committee in July.

Could you speak to that, as to whether or not you think it would

encourage or discourage competitive analysis? Obviously, what we

discovered in our investigation is there was no competition of

thought and group think was the entire approach, essentially, on

the NIE and on the weapons of mass destruction stockpile in Iraq.

Dr. KAY. Well, I mean, you’ve essentially given my answer. Certainly, the present system does not encourage diversity of analysis

or competitive analysis. I think the NID actually encourages it, because he represents the whole. Everything is under him. In fact,

the reason you encourage competition when you’re at the top is because you want the best possible outcome that will make you and

the Nation look the best possible.

So, in fact, I think if you get the right person there and you create the right authorities, it should encourage it. Here again, I come

back to oversight. I think having discovered that, this Committee

has a right to demand that there be competitive analysis. I actually

think the proper place to foster that is the National Intelligence

Council moved to the NID, who has that responsibility, because it

is broader than any one agency.

It is very difficult, as you showed, to get competitive analysis out

of a system whose leader is viewed as a partisan leader of a single

agency within a broader system.

Senator SNOWE. Yes. I appreciate that.

Dr. Zegart, do you have any comments?

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General Boyd, on that question?

Dr. ZEGART. I agree with what Dr. Kay said.

Senator SNOWE. General Boyd?

General BOYD. I do, as well.

Senator SNOWE. Thank you.

One final question of you, Dr. Kay. As head of the Iraqi Survey

Group, obviously you were a user of tactical and strategic intelligence that had to be disseminated to both the operators and the

policymakers. What was your experience based on that? Did you

have difficulties at all in any way?

Dr. KAY. Did I ever have difficulties. Look, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA use incompatible reporting systems,

isolated communication systems. The DIA officials could not go in

CIA spaces. You could not directly easily reach from a CIA computer. In fact, what you did, is you created multiple CPUs within

the same space.

The format of reporting, of disseminating intelligence is entirely

different. The DIA one looks like the old fashioned telegraph, all

caps, very hard to read, not edited. The CIA one is, actually, a

much more polished and policy-friendly one.

Look, there are multiple systems. There is one of the collection

agencies that I lost count of how many e-mail systems they have,

and that’s NSA, because they could not reach from one to the other

themselves. When I had to ask for information, there again, Charlie Allen more often than not saved my bacon because he could figure it out back here because he was at the heart of the collection

system.

This is a serious problem. It seems silly for anyone who’s existed

in the commercial world, but it exists to, in my view, protect turf

and deny accountability and responsibility or assessing accountability and responsibility.

Senator SNOWE. Thank you very much.

Thank you all. I appreciate your willingness to testify here today.

Thank you.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Rockefeller.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Quick ones. In the Balkans and

Afghanistan, in Iraq and North Korea, you know, you start adding

up all the possibilities, we’re stretched thin on the military side.

We’re also stretched thin on the intelligence side. If it does take 5

to 10 years to really train an analyst well—and 10 may be excessive, but 5 isn’t—you could, I would think, have an intelligence reserve corps, which actually made itself available right after 9/11.

People who’d retired some years ago came roaring back and the

number of applications went up tremendously. Well, that’s not

quite a reserve corps, but it gets close to it.

But I like the idea of institutionalizing that for surges, because

I think 9/11 has created a sense that we’re in this for a long period

of time and that the stakes are very high, and that people have to

be able to or want to be able to sacrifice their time for their country. An intelligence reserve corps attracts me. I just wanted to say

that. I know you all agree.

Secondly, one of the things that I disagree with in the 9/11 Commission—and Carl’s referred to it already, but I want to do it, beVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00077 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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cause I feel strongly about it—is the cessation of paramilitary activity by the Central Intelligence Agency.

What everybody points to is the Northern Alliance experience.

Some people say it was a good one. Some people say it was a bad

one. But it was, in my judgment, a very good cooperative effort between the CIA and the Defense Department.

There have to be times when you have plausible deniability,

when you’re doing things which are not entirely the most publicly

relatable in the world. You have to have people who aren’t in uniform who do have a kind of I won’t say an entrepreneurial spirit,

but you understand what I mean, who would get out there and get

it done.

They’re either going to be our people who look like their people

or they’re going to be our people who are their people, and they do

it well. They do it in ways that are different. They do it in ways

that are outside, I believe, the DOD culture.

So, to me, the idea should be jointness, that you allow each to

do what they do best, and that that be allowed to continue. If you

want to respond.

Dr. KAY. I agree.

General BOYD. So do I.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. That was just an observation

about the general discussion going on, classic Washington. Somebody comes up with a reform idea, and I go back to that brilliant

‘‘triggers the antibodies of affected agencies.’’

Dr. ZEGART. I’m going to make sure to use it in my book.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Put it right on the front cover. It’s

classic behavior. We have a 20, 30, 40—I don’t know how long it’s

going to take us to connect with the Islamic world and other radical groups, and then Africa will come in for a whole different set

of reasons, of poverty and hatred, and hatred of their government,

and then South America, China, who knows what.

But we’re in for a long one. We keep looking. We get the picture.

Let’s say 9/11 comes together, and they do spend a good amount

of time putting together a commission. We find holes in it. Then

we go right after those holes and say, ‘‘See? Can’t do what they

say.’’

Denying the possibility that America is full of people, even some

in Congress, who are capable of rational and pro-national security

thought, and who would plug those holes and would see things that

should not be done or change of command that could not work will

not happen. I mean, this isn’t the Bible.

Where’s your copy, Carl?

Senator LEVIN. A copy of what?

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. The report.

This isn’t the Bible. It’s just a rather closer one on intelligence

matters than we’ve had in some time on the scope that it takes on.

So I would just say I hope that, as we go through this process, we

will not sort of pick out that thing which affects an agency which

we may be working with in a way which detracts from it and then

decides that the whole thing is going down the wrong track. It’s so

easy to do.

You say, I’m not capable of doing that. Then you do it. I think

that the people gathered around this table and other tables are caVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00078 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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pable of making right decisions which are in the best interests of

national security, which protects from mistakes that may come out

of this. There are a number of things which this didn’t address.

There are things which they addressed, I think wrongly, saying

that I don’t agree with the fact that the NID should be inside in

the White House. I think it should be outside the White House.

So what? We make that decision. You know, it’s a matter of looking at the whole question, of the next 40 years, of the terror, and

angst, and budget expenditures, and homeland security, 90 percent

of which goes to aviation security and only 10 percent to everything

else, and saying, ‘‘We’ve got a big job to do and we’ve got to do it

as well as we’ve can.’’

So if you legislate a NID, does that mean that you close down

the system because one person isn’t perfect or will be biased? You

make the assumption. You’re telling me that there aren’t somewhere in the United States of America 15 to 25 people who could

do this job absolutely brilliantly? Of course there are.

I think that ought to be our approach. Then we work what has

to be worked out. That’s what we’re for.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Levin, did you have an epilogue?

Senator LEVIN. No, just a few more questions, if I could, Mr.

Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. Certainly.

Senator LEVIN. Dr. Kay, you made reference that the national intelligence director should not be in the Executive Office of the

White House or in the cabinet because intelligence must serve the

Nation and speak truth to power.

Dr. KAY. Yes, sir.

Senator LEVIN. What in your experience prompts you to make

that very vital point? You made a similar point here today, that

some of the problems that we had with this intelligence was there

was a conscious mismanagement of information flow.

Dr. KAY. Quite frankly, on that particular issue, I was drawing

on what I think is an extraordinarily good piece of work done by

the Committee with regard to the aluminum tubes, which I saw

from the other side, but I must say you have details that I didn’t

have knowledge of, of how that was mismanaged and the expertise

and the data was kept away from people who had superior expertise and should have been involved.

Senator LEVIN. Who was not speaking truth to power and why?

Dr. KAY. The why is the more interesting and more difficult, and

I look forward to your second report in that regard.

Senator LEVIN. But what’s your opinion? Do you agree with the

general, what he said here today?

Dr. KAY. My experience is always to agree with a general.

Look, I think what happened here is that it’s a combination of

things. I think the most important issue that led to the distortion

of our opinion about Iraq WMD is that, for about 14 years, the essential thing that kept a—and this crosses administrations—the essential thing that kept a coalition together, allowed us to keep a

coalition, that kept sanctions in place, was Iraq WMD.

Therefore, data and information that might indicate there was

not a WMD program there had such a high bar that it had to pass

before it was considered useful or should be passed, whereas inforVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00079 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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mation that supported the argument that there was WMD seemed

to have almost no bar to jump over, and we got into what the Committee calls ‘‘group think’’ and a train moving ahead in which everyone jumped on board.

Now, in my view, the responsibility for ensuring that does not

happen in an intelligence community is the ethical center, and honesty, and the desire to manage that system so, regardless of what

the issue, that does not occur. The closer you are to power—and I

think we should speak frankly here on this regard, and if you don’t

mind, I will.

The most recent director of central intelligence came in after two

disastrous DCIs, one of whom never met the President of the

United States. In fact, the joke around Washington is the small

plane that crashed into the White House was Jim Woolsey trying

to get an appointment with the President of the United States.

John Deutsch had much the same experience.

The decision was, manage the relationship, understand the customers—and this, quite frankly, actually, if you look at the history

of the CIA, and Amy’s done a far better job about this, more thorough than I have, you will see the creeping in during the Bob

Gates era, in which the decision is, we’ve got to serve our customers, we’ve got to keep our customers happy.

I think, quite frankly, that is the greatest falsehood to penetrate

the intelligence community. The job of the intelligence community

outside the tactical arena, but in the strategic arena, is not to serve

the customers by telling them what they want. It’s to tell the customers what you see, what you believe, what your collection and

analytical systems see are the problems, objectives. I think we lost

that perspective and it took about two decades to lose that and believe we’ve got to serve the customers.

That is, I think, if you move forward on NID legislation, is going

to be the hardest thing to communicate, that the NID must serve

the Nation and the national security objectives of the Nation, and

he serves whoever is the President best by giving him the unvarnished truth, which will often not be welcomed.

Senator LEVIN. Well, that’s frankly what I’m most interested in,

in this legislation. The details are obviously important. We’re going

to work through them. Everybody’s interest is the same, to add to

the security to the Nation. I don’t think there’s one member of the

Senate that does not have that as their goal.

A lot of talk about turf, but I think everybody is equally sincere.

I have to attribute the same sincerity to everybody else that I hope

and feel I have, that that is the goal of everybody, is to try to come

up with a structure and responsibilities that add to the security of

the Nation.

But I’ve got to tell you, what you just said resonates with me,

what the general has said in his testimony here today, and in his

written testimony, as well, resonate very, very much with me.

When the general says that we have people who are in the current

intelligence structure that are under enormous pressure or temptation to give the President what he wants and not necessarily what

he doesn’t want, but needs.

We’ve got to talk about independence of that person. When I read

in a book of Bob Woodward that we had a director who said someVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00080 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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thing was a ‘‘slam dunk’’ when it wasn’t a slam dunk, let me tell

you, folks, that to me is more important than structure, as important as structure is. But I’ve got to try to figure out if there are

ways that we can promote that independence and that objectivity

and that unvarnished opinion that you just talked about, Dr. Kay.

One way, surely, is not to put this person, if we create a new position, in the Executive Office of the President. My time is up, but

would you all comment as to whether you agree?

Dr. KAY. I agree completely.

Senator LEVIN. General.

General BOYD. I love what you just said.

Senator LEVIN. Pardon?

General BOYD. I love what you just said.

I think it is hugely important. I talk to people, like David has

just mentioned, and they talk to me the coin of the realm being access to the President and social events and so forth. The coin of the

realm ought to be his distance from the President, his independence of the President, his professionalism and be respected as such.

George Marshall corrected his President when his President tried

to call him George and said, ‘‘Call me General Marshall.’’ He didn’t

want any personal relationship with his President. He wanted to

be treated like a professional. He wanted to give professional advice and not any buddy-buddy relationship with his President, and

not be tempted to tell his President what the President wanted and

what he didn’t need.

You can do this. I mean, you can write that legislation. You

wrote it in the legislation that appoints the chairman of the Joint

Chiefs. He’s got to be a professional. You don’t allow it otherwise.

What would you think if the President of the United States appointed a congressional staffer as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs

if we didn’t have that law? What would the military think? How

could they be professional? How could they have this ethic without

that? I mean, it’s inconceivable to me.

I realize how hard it would probably be to get a President to

agree, but at the very core, this is—I’ve been dealing with these

guys my whole life and particularly the senior part of my life. The

professionalism in the CIA is not even close to what it is in the

military.

Now I think there’s a direct connection to being led by amateurs,

having their analyses torqued to please a President’s policy objectives. I think that’s crucial in the development of where we are. If

you’re going to change it, you’re never going to have a better time

to change it than right now.

Senator LEVIN. Dr. Zegart, do you have anything to say on that?

Dr. ZEGART. Yes, I would just add one thing, which is that I

think we typically think of independence and trust as mutually exclusive when it comes to the head of the intelligence community.

I think one actually serves the other. The more the head of the

community has independence and is seen as speaking truth to

power, the more trust he will earn from the President. So, I don’t

think they’re mutually exclusive at all.

Senator LEVIN. Thank you all.

In defense of our staff here, by the way, I must say that we do

have many staffers who do speak truth to power regularly, tell us

78

what we don’t want to hear, and we are usually grateful for that.

I don’t want to say always grateful, because that may unleash

something here which would be unfair to our Chairman and our

Vice Chairman.

Thank you all.

Chairman ROBERTS. Well, sometimes the pressure is really just

overwhelming.

General Boyd, were the members of the Hart-Rudman Commission, even though they were politicians in the finest sense of the

word, former Members of Congress, were they professional?

General BOYD. Not professional in the sense that we’re talking

about. But they rose to, not at the beginning, but over time, they

rose to a standard of non-partisanship that was truly remarkable.

I think it occurred as they saw and thought more about the gravity

of the problem they were dealing with. They were out of office, and

they weren’t being pulled by a lot of the pressures that would have

otherwise, I suppose, affected them.

Chairman ROBERTS. So, a former Member of Congress would

have a tendency then to have less political pull and be more independent and more professional perhaps?

General BOYD. I think that the professionalism has to do with a

lot of other things. It has to do with a lifetime of service in that

profession, an accumulation of that kind of special knowledge and

esoteric expertise that goes with something like the intelligence

profession or the military profession.

I don’t think you get that from some very early service in the

Army as a sergeant and then most of your productive life serving

in the Congress. Does that mean he’s not a good man or he’s not

honest or he’s not—that doesn’t have anything to do with that. But

it has to do with how he will ultimately be viewed as a professional

by other professionals.

You can get used to dealing with amateurs as your boss if you

have to do it forever, but it’s going to affect your own attitudes

about professionalism.

Chairman ROBERTS. Kean, Kerrey, Lehman and Hamilton. Now

they’re—at least one is not, but the other three are Members of

Congress, former Members of Congress, politicians. It was Mark

Twain that said, ‘‘there is no criminal class in America, except, of

course, the Congress.’’

The reason I’m bringing this up, and I’m being sort of a pest

about it, is that we had somebody who’s been testifying quite a bit

and is one of the method actors on television who is an expert on

intelligence who made the comment that he didn’t think any Member of Congress could be professional, or independent, or somehow

rid themselves of the partisanship that, I guess, comes along with

the job.

I took umbrage at that. That this Committee voted 17-0 with

strong differences of opinion to issue a report that I’m very proud,

occasionally, we do rise to the occasion. I thought it was lumping

everybody in the same category, much as some people in this country lump, unfortunately, people of color, or people of sex, or people

of gender, or people of age, or people of geography or whatever.

I just have a feeling that, you know, when the right time comes,

when we have an opportunity like this, I think, despite our difVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00082 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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ferences, I think despite all of the Committee jurisdiction, I think

despite the fact that the Administration hasn’t come forth with the

specifics yet because they’re still working through it, I think despite the 9/11 emotionalism, which is perfectly understandable, I

think we can get this done.

I really do think we can get this done. We have to get it done

because the status quo is unacceptable. Now, you can either go full

NID, half NID, 75 percent NID, put independence or whatever, and

you’ve all three made excellent suggestions, but I really do think

we can get it done, despite the fact that we are ‘‘politicians.’’

I thank you all for coming. The hearing is adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 5:35 p.m., the hearing adjourned.]

(81)

REFORM OF THE UNITED STATES

INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

DAY TWO

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2004

UNITED STATES SENATE,

SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE,

Washington, DC.

The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:38 p.m., in room

SH–216, Hart Senate Office Building, Hon. Pat Roberts (Chairman

of the Committee) presiding.

Committee Members Present: Senators Roberts, Hatch DeWine,

Lott, Snowe, Hagel, Chambliss, Warner, Rockefeller, Levin, Feinstein, Wyden, Durbin and Mikulski.

STATEMENT OF HON. PAT ROBERTS

Chairman ROBERTS. The Committee will come to order. The Select Committee on Intelligence meets in open session to continue its

discussion of intelligence community reform.

To explore this issue, we have a very distinguished panel. Our

witnesses today are three members of the National Commission on

Terrorist Attacks upon the United States: Chairman Thomas H.

Kean, who is president of Drew University and former Governor of

New Jersey; Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, who is president of

the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and former

chairman of the House Committee on International Relations; and

also Commissioner John F. Lehman, who is Chairman of the J.F.

Lehman and Company and former Secretary of the Navy.

Gentlemen, the Committee thanks you for your service to this

country and for being here today.

Three years ago this week, on September 11, 2001, America was

attacked by 19 terrorists who were financed and trained by Usama

bin Ladin’s al-Qa’ida network. Armed with knives and box cutters

and mace and pepper spray, these terrorists successfully hijacked

four airplanes. Two were flown into the twin towers of the World

Trade Center, one was flown into the Pentagon, and one was forced

down in a western Pennsylvania field after its passengers very heroically attempted to retake the aircraft.

Nearly 3,000 Americans died on that fateful day. There would

have been more were it not for the heroism of those in that flight

over Pennsylvania. I might add that some of us here sitting on this

dais might well not be here.

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The al-Qa’ida network was well-known to American intelligence

prior to 9/11. It had a track record of prior attacks, including the

1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombings of the

U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the attempted attack

known as the ‘‘Millennium Plot,’’ the October 2000 attack on the

USS COLE, also involvement in regards to Somalia.

Consequently, after the attacks of 9/11, a stunned American public rightfully asked why our government and specifically the intelligence community had been unable to detect and also deter this

plot. To address this question, the Senate and House Intelligence

Committees launched an investigation which became known as the

Joint Inquiry. Following a year-long investigation, the Committees

determined that systemic failures were the primary causes which

did prevent the intelligence community from detecting and deterring these attacks.

To further the work of the Joint Inquiry and to examine the governmentwide performance related to the attack, in 2002 Congress

passed legislation establishing the 9/11 Commission. Ably led by

Chairman Kean and Vice Chairman Hamilton, on July 22nd the

Commission did release its comprehensive report on the failures

that hindered our ability to discover and stop the 9/11 disaster.

On behalf of the Committee, I would like to thank Chairman

Kean, Vice Chairman Hamilton, Mr. Lehman and all the members

of the 9/11 Commission for setting aside partisan differences and

releasing a unanimous report. Senator Rockefeller and the members of this Committee and I know how difficult that can be.

The report does provide a historic examination of the terrorist

threat to the United States and makes recommendations for intelligence community reforms to help prevent any future terrorist attack. The release of the Commission’s recommendations also combined with this Committee’s recently released report on the intelligence community’s flawed pre-war assessments on Iraq—more especially the WMD programs—have created a unique window of opportunity for enactment of real and lasting reform.

This, however, is not the first time that intelligence reform has

been tried. Back in 1949, only 2 years after the 1947 National Security Act actually created the Central Intelligence Agency and the

position of the Director of Central Intelligence, Congress also then

created a commission to consider the question of intelligence reorganization and reform. Since then, intelligence reform has been the

subject of literally dozens of additional congressional and executive

branch commissions and reviews. Since the 1950’s, many of those

reform efforts have focused on increased authority and responsibility for the director of the intelligence community.

It is no surprise that the creation of a strong central leader of

the intelligence community with increased budget and personnel

authority was recommended by both the joint inquiry and the 9/11

Commission.

Three years after September 11th, a decade after the end of the

cold war, and over 50 years since the enactment of the National Security Act of 1947, we can no longer wait to implement lasting reforms of the intelligence community. The time to act is now. Simply

put, the structure of the U.S. intelligence community is defective.

The so-called Director of Central Intelligence, or the DCI, lacks auVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00086 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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thority, in statute and in practice, to effectively manage the intelligence activities of the United States.

The organization of the intelligence community, with a substantial portion falling under the direct control of the Secretary of Defense, prevents the DCI from exercising even those authorities

granted under the National Security Act.

The DCI does not effectively control the creation of the National

Foreign Intelligence Program budget. He lacks the ability to transfer or dismiss intelligence community personnel. He cannot unilaterally direct the transfers of National Foreign Intelligence Program

funds. He cannot mandate intelligence sharing, data fusion or the

creation of a community-wide information technology infrastructure.

This flawed design has contributed greatly to past intelligence

failures and prevents responsible parties from being held accountable.

We know what the problems are. However, fixing them has always been a bridge too far. The Joint Inquiry, the 9/11 Commission

and numerous Members of the Congress have now submitted proposals. I expect that the President will also submit a reform proposal to compliment the Executive Orders which were promulgated

just this past month.

Drawing on my 8 years of experience on this Committee, there

are a number of principles which I believe we must adhere to if we

are to have real reform of our intelligence apparatus. These principles include: a setting aside of turf battles and institutional interests in favor of our national interests; the creation of a strong, empowered national intelligence director who is separated from the

day-to-day management of the Central Intelligence Agency; the creation of a structure that does accommodate the diverse activities of

the various agencies and gives direct responsibility and control of

the primary intelligence disciplines and corresponding agencies to

a truly empowered national intelligence director and his assistants;

the realignment of agencies and their elements to create clear

chains of command within the primary intelligence disciplines;

statutory creation of a national counterterrorism center with operational planning responsibilities; the ability to create other national intelligence centers to direct collection, analysis and operations in other mission areas, such as counterproliferation and

counterintelligence; the creation of an inspector general and an

analytic review unit which will mandate the use of mechanisms

such as red-teaming, a concept that is championed by the distinguished Vice Chairman, so that we can ensure that intelligence

analysis is objective and competitive and independent of political

considerations and hold agencies and individuals accountable for

failures; and finally, reform of congressional oversight of intelligence activities.

I believe that these principles address both the counterterrorism

concerns of the 9/11 Commission as well as the significant flaws

which this Committee has uncovered during its Iraq inquiry and its

27-year history of oversight.

If we are willing to set aside turf battles and organizational selfpreservation and focus on what is best for our nation’s security, we

can truly reform our intelligence community in the bold manner

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which has been required for over 50 years. Taking on entrenched

and bureaucratic and jurisdictional interests is not easy. It is hard

work. It is, however, what we must do.

If we fail, I fear the result will be incomplete half measures

which will result in the perpetuation of an already dysfunctional

intelligence community. If we don’t make the hard choices now, I

fear that after yet another series of intelligence failures we may be

right back in this hearing room listening to the national intelligence director testify that he still lacks real authority to control

budgets, to manage personnel, to transfer funds and mandate intelligence-sharing procedures and technology for our nation, which

will be at war with Islamic terrorists for the foreseeable future.

This is an unacceptable outcome. We need to do real reform, and

we need to do it now.

I look forward to hearing the testimony of our witnesses on these

issues. But, before we do so, I would like to recognize the Intelligence Committee’s very distinguished Vice Chairman for his remarks.

Senator Rockefeller.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Actually, one of the great challenges of the day is to figure out

how to thank you for your service to this country and to the world,

in fact, in ways that others have not chosen to try to do that. It’s

impossible to do it. So let me just simply say that what the Chairman has said, what people have said all over this Capitol Hill and

all over the country, that your work is extraordinary, and that the

time that you’ve given up, what it has done to your personal lives,

I can’t even imagine. But what it’s doing for America, I think I can

imagine and I can see. I think it’s great. I thank you very much

for that.

The Senate leadership wants very much to set a target of October 1 for the passage of legislation on our part. I just wanted to

say that that may not leave us enough time to both complete all

of the action that we need to on the floor, but also, most importantly, to conference with the House on a very delicate matter, as

the Chairman said, ‘‘complicated matter’’, and then adjourn before

the election.

I just want to say right out front, hoping that others will hear,

that I’m very worried about this. September has to be devoted entirely to intelligence reform. We cannot get into other issues if

we’re going to do the right thing for our country. The Chairman

said, ‘‘This is too important to delay’’. Of course, he is right.

Like my colleagues and others that have spoken at you before

giving you a chance to talk to us, I’ve very, very carefully read several times, all of your materials. On August 22nd, I wrote Senator

Collins and Senator Lieberman as the Committee having jurisdiction in this matter. I outlined seven principles that I consider essential to reforming our intelligence system. Most of them comport

with what the 9/11 Commission has recommended and some do

not. Part of what I say will be a predicate for questions, which will

follow.

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First, as the Chairman indicated, we should establish the national intelligence director. That’s easily said, but that’s been suggested so many times and not done so many times, and also, separated from day-to-day management of the Central Intelligence

Agency and with the authority over the budget and the personnel,

which is all important, the all-important consideration of intelligence reform that comprise our national intelligence program.

Second, I think the national intelligence director should have

deputies to oversee the foreign, domestic and defense intelligence

agencies. These individuals should be dual-hatted. Those individuals would be the director of the CIA, as you indicate in your report, the intelligence director of the FBI and the Undersecretary of

Defense for intelligence.

Third, we should create a national counterterrorism center, as

you’ve suggested, to bring together all U.S. counterterrorism efforts, foreign and domestic. The head of this center should have authority to bring to bear all capabilities, whatever is necessary—intelligence, law enforcement, diplomatic, homeland security and,

with certain restrictions, military resources—to counter the terrorist threat, which is all-consuming for us. I think this is absolutely critical, that they have this capacity.

Merging foreign and domestic efforts in the national

counterterrorism center is a monumental change from the way

we’ve done business in the past. We are not England, which has

gotten accustomed because of the IRA, Northern Ireland problems,

to being videoed and everything all day long. We’re very different.

We’ve taken CIA, you’re overseas; FBI, you’re internal, but you

shall never meet.

What we’re doing, and what you’ve suggested—and I think properly so—is the merging of the foreign and the domestic efforts in

the national counterterrorism center. We have drawn artificial distinctions in the past. But I don’t want to suggest I think this is

going to be an easy thing for the American people to accept. But

I do want to suggest that I think it’s a very important matter for

our people to understand that if this is going to work, in that terrorists are transnational, don’t respect borders, there’s no such

thing as domestic or international to them, that we have to organize ourselves to fight them and to understand them in the same

way.

So I’m hopeful that Americans will recognize and accept the need

for this change. I think it’s a superb, bold, strong idea on your part,

and I congratulate you for it.

Fourth, we should establish the national intelligence centers that

the Chairman also spoke of to focus and coordinate both on collection and analysis of intelligence on other important national security issues. You mentioned counterproliferation. It could be something on China, something on North Korea, Iran. Whatever it is

that’s out there, we have to be aware of what that’s going to be.

These centers, like the national counterterrorism center, will

break down the intelligence collection stovepipes that now drive the

system and inhibit the effective sharing of information and also,

frankly, which hold back the ability of people to look out into the

future, because everything is of the moment. Well, everything isn’t

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of the moment until it becomes of the moment. If you can look out

ahead, that’s what this will do.

Fifth, I think we have to take steps to ensure independent objectivity, accountability in the intelligence community. Not to say that

it’s not there, but we have to make sure that it always will be.

We can do this in a variety of ways. I recommend establishing

an ombudsman and an inspector general for the intelligence community and creating a permanent red team group to conduct what

I would call contrarian analysis under the national intelligence director, to look at all major reports, to make sure that national intelligence estimates, all of this, that everything has been—that the

intelligence group, which isn’t as large as some of the bigger ones

but had very contrary views on very important subjects, where they

have real expertise, that they’re heard, and so that these things are

honestly brought together.

I also must say that I oppose placing the national intelligence director and the head of the national counterterrorism center inside

the Executive Office of the President. I won’t discuss this at length.

But I think it’s not really so much a question of structure. I think

it’s more a question of how are these two men or women or man

and woman, how are they going to get along. What is the chemistry

going to be? I don’t think the bureaucratic structure will dictate the

relationship between the President and the NID.

I think the bureaucratic structure could, however, tie the NID

too closely to the policymaking process—I worry about that enormously—and risk further, I would say, politicizing of intelligence.

Sixth, we must reform ourselves, which you strongly took on, and

the intelligence oversight process. We absolutely must remove the

term limits on Committee members. We must also find ways to

streamline the process for authorizing and appropriating the intelligence budget and declassifying the aggregate budget, something

the President, in fact, could do without legislation, would be an important first step. We should organize our own Committee much

better in relevant subcommittees so that we can be more cogent.

Finally, recognizing the intelligence community will continue to

face unanticipated crises, surges, we should create, in my judgment, and intelligence community reserve corps.

I was amazed after 9/11 at the number of people who were applying from the Silicon Valley, people who had retired from the CIA

and other intelligence agencies a number of years ago but still had

the analytical tools, et cetera, who simply came back, walked in the

door and said, ‘‘We’re here. We want to help.’’

I think we need this on a permanent basis, because there will be

surges. The military is stretched thin. The intelligence community

is stretched then. It will continue to be stretched thin. Then under

the war on terror, it will be stretched the most thinly. So I think

we now have to rely on an intelligence community reserve corps as

we rely on the National Guard and Reserves in the military.

Now, these are concepts that I consider essential to any comprehensive efforts. I think one can say why have they never been

adopted. I think the answer is that there has never been a 9/11 before.

These ideas have been suggested for years. But they came together in this brilliant compendium that you put in your 9/11 ComVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00090 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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mission. I think now it’s the vehicle, it’s the gold standard. It

doesn’t mean we have to agree with everything. But we have that

now. We have the momentum. We can’t lose the chance.

It’s a very complicated matter, also, which the Chairman indicated. People think it’s a sort of an easy thing to fix and it isn’t.

The nuances involved in it are just extraordinary.

The reason that most of the intelligence collection is done by

agencies within the Defense Department, which the Chairman

mentioned, is because the military has always been the largest consumer of intelligence. They use intelligence to guide everything

they do now, from deciding what weapon systems to buy, where

troops should be deployed, to planning, executing specific combat

operations, carrying them out.

But now it’s different. It’s beginning to be different and will become much more different. The greatest threat facing our Nation

is not from another country’s military, but it’s from amorphous

groups of international terrorists who don’t wear uniforms and

don’t particularly have allegiance to any one country or another,

who have no respect for human life, operate around the world without regard for national borders, and they’re not deterred by military might. They’re not afraid of military might.

It’s time to realign our intelligence, I think, our structures to

deal with the threat.

Now, final point. As we make these changes, we cannot shortchange the needs of our military forces, and this is one point in

which I would disagree with what the Commission has suggested.

I propose a structure where the national intelligence budgets, personnel and tasking are controlled by the national intelligence director and tactical programs that support the troops on the ground are

controlled by the Secretary of Defense.

Under this structure, the Secretary becomes co-equal as a manager with the NID of the national intelligence assets within the Department of Defense during wartime—during wartime. When the

men and women of our armed forces are involved in combat, the

Secretary should carry sufficient weight on intelligence matters—

and that’s what I’m talking about, intelligence matters—to fulfill

his responsibility.

We can’t take the chance of not having the Secretary be able to

do that, and then if there’s a conflict, take it up through the NSC

and the President. But, as John McLaughlin said, in his 32 years,

he’d never heard of anything that had gone up there.

So that is something I think is very important. We have to find

a way to ensure that the Secretary of Defense has an appropriate

voice in these programs, and I would suggest in that fashion.

I disagree on the paramilitary thing, but I’m not going to go into

that because my statement has become too long. But I do think

that the CIA has to continue to do that simply because it’s a very

discreet, extremely covert as opposed to clandestine operation. You

want to have plausible deniability. That’s a harder thing for the

military to do; it’s something that the CIA does do.

Mr. Chairman, again thanking the three commission members

before us, I think we’re ready to go ahead on this and debate it,

if we will do it. I hope we will.

Thank you.

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Chairman ROBERTS. I thank the Vice Chairman. Before we turn

to our witnesses, I want to mention, we invited Senator Bob Kerrey

to join his fellow commissioners here today. Senator Kerrey is obviously a very well-known and a very respected former member and

vice chairman of this Committee.

Unfortunately, due to prior commitments as the New School University’s president, he is not able to be with us today. He did, however, write a letter expressing his regrets and some additional

thoughts on the issues before us. I ask unanimous consent that it

may be made a part of the record.

Without objection, it is so ordered.

[The information referred to follows:]

NEW SCHOOL UNIVERSITY,

New York, September 7, 2004.

Hon. PAT ROBERTS, Chairman,

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,

211 Hart Senate Office Building,

Washington, DC 20510-6475

DEAR SENATOR ROBERTS: I regret I am not able to testify in person today before

you, Senator Rockefeller and other members of the Intelligence Committee. As a

former member of the Committee, I would have liked to have been able to be

there—were it not for the conflict, which prevents my attendance. Had I made the

trip, I would have needed to leave early and you know how much fun leaving an

important meeting can be in our nation’s capitol.

As to the details of your bill, I will leave all such questions to our Chairman and

Vice-Chairman. Governor Kean and Congressman Hamilton are by far the best witnesses the 9–11 Commission has to offer.

I write to present one observation which might be useful to the Committee:

If you fail to unite behind a single committee bill, the national intelligence

community as a whole will be weakened. You are their most important advocate

and ally. As we learned again with your recent attempt to put language in the

intelligence authorization bill, which would make this Committee permanent,

the SSCI has, by Senate Resolution, been weakened relative to the Armed Services Committee.

Senator Spector and I learned that lesson well in 1996 following the Aldrich Ames

spy case. With Congress and the American people up in arms and demanding

change, we thought the relatively small changes recommended by the Aspin-Brown

Commission would be a piece of cake to pass. We were wrong.

After passing out of the SSCI easily, the bill was sent to the Armed Services Committee. All the changes, which strengthened the Director of Central Intelligence relative to the Secretary of Defense, were stripped from the bill. The only reason we

were able to give the DCI new authorities was that we were willing to have the

SSCI take the Defense Authorization bill on sequential referral from the Armed

Services Committee. This action—which meant we were threatening to prevent final

passage of the Defense Authorization bill just as final passage of this year’s Intelligence Authorization bill has been jeopardized—was our only means of enacting

very modest change.

The 9–11 Commission is asking Congress to make much more substantial changes

in the laws that govern our national intelligence agencies. I know how hard fought

this battle will be. I know the opposition will be just as determined.

It is with knowledge of this reality clearly in mind, that I express my hope that

the Committee will rally behind a single bill. Your bill is an excellent first step. I

hope that the Committee will find a way to take the necessary remaining steps to

ensure that the bill arrives on the floor of the Senate as a unified proposal.

Thank you for the opportunity to express my perspective via letter.

Very truly yours,

ROBERT J. KERREY.

Chairman ROBERTS. Governor, please proceed. Know that you

can summarize your statement and every golden word, sir, will be

made part of the permanent record.

We welcome you. And we thank you, again.

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STATEMENT OF HON. THOMAS H. KEAN

Governor KEAN. Thank you very much, Chairman Roberts, Vice

Chairman Rockefeller. Thank you both for very articulate, forceful

and constructive statements. That was very, very helpful, and I

want to thank you both.

Distinguished members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, we are honored to appear before you today. We want to

thank you and the leadership of the U.S. Senate for the very

prompt consideration that you are giving to the recommendations

of the Commission, and we thank you all very much for your support.

The Commission’s findings and recommendations were, as you

know, strongly endorsed by all commissioners, even though we

come from very different backgrounds, even though we’re five Republicans and five Democrats. But we do share a unity of purpose,

and we hope that the Congress and the Administration will display

the same spirit of bipartisanship as we collectively, together try to

make our country and all Americans safer and more secure.

I want to begin by reviewing briefly the road we’ve traveled since

July 22nd, and that was the day that we as the Commission presented you our report. We believe we’ve made very important

progress. From the outset, we have had statements of support from

the President and from Senator Kerry. We’ve testified now 16

times during the summer recess. We appreciate how unusual it is

for Congress to hold hearings in the month of August, and we welcome the opportunity to speak with respect to the whole array of

recommendations that we have made. We thank the Congress, because it’s given us an opportunity to explain our report to the

American people.

Mr. Chairman, we recognize that several Senators and Committees are now working to draft legislation to address commission

recommendations, and we are deeply grateful for their work.

Mr. Chairman, you put forward a proposal a few weeks ago entitled ‘‘The 9/11 National Security Protection Act.’’ We commend you

for your leadership. You have reflected on the work of the Commission. You have been unflinching in your own examination of the intelligence community. We commend you for preparing a far-reaching, ambitious proposal for reform.

Mr. Vice Chairman, you have conveyed your own views on reform

to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. We have studied

your suggestions. We have found them to be important, thoughtful

and constructive. We see a clear convergence in these proposals toward the creation of a powerful national intelligence director with

control over the budget and with hire-and-fire authority, the creation of a national counterterrorism center, and the creation of additional national intelligence centers.

Both you and we find the status quo unacceptable. We’ve studied

the 9/11 story. We explained in chapter 11 of our report the significance of management issues, both large and small. Our basis

premise is that good strong management of an enormous enterprise

so central to countering terrorism is absolutely necessary.

Good management opens the way for many particular reforms,

including improved collection of human or signals intelligence and

certainly improved analysis. The results of good management canVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00093 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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not be specified with precision in advance. Innovation and creativity can’t always be legislated, but good legislation can create

the conditions where better things can happen.

You have the benefit not only of our work but also the superb

report of this Committee on intelligence assessments of weapons of

mass destruction in Iraq. We saw your work on Iraq, actually, and

read it before we completed our report. It reinforced our conviction

that this is a time for fundamental change.

We know that there are some differences between the Commission’s proposals and some of those that you put forward. We’ll be

glad to discuss some of those specifics with you. We welcome the

refinements of the legislative process. But what impresses us most

is at this point we believe there is a consensus for change. We want

to work with you. About once in a generation comes the opportunity for real reform. I suspect that this is it.

We know that organizational changes are not a cure-all. The

quality of the people is more important than the quality of the wiring diagrams. Good people can overcome bad structures. But why

should they have to? Americans should not settle for incremental,

ad hoc adjustments to a system designed generations ago and designed for a world that simply does not exist anymore.

On August 27th, the President issued four Executive Orders and

two homeland security Presidential directives. President Bush has

come a long way. As the White House said, these orders ‘‘have

strained the limits’’ of Presidential authority. The White House has

stated plainly that its actions on intelligence reorganization and on

the national counterterrorism center can thus only be interim

measures and that they await further reports and further work by

the Congress.

For example, in its briefings on August 27th, the White House

spokesman emphasized, in very strong terms, that the national intelligence director must be an office separate from the head of the

CIA, but only Congress can take that step.

We appreciate the hard work that is now the task of you all in

the Congress. We appreciate that the Commission did not address

every detail, that the Commission does not have a position on every

question. Some of your questions will go beyond, I suspect, what

the Commission has decided. Several matters, of course, we have

to leave to your discretion and your good judgment. But we want

to return to some key themes. We want to make clear here what

we support and what we don’t support. For that, I’d like to turn

now to my friend and mentor, Lee Hamilton.

STATEMENT OF HON. LEE H. HAMILTON

Mr. HAMILTON. Thank you very much, Governor Kean, Chairman

Roberts, Vice Chairman Rockefeller, distinguished members of the

Committee, it’s been a high privilege of course to work with Governor Kean whose extraordinary leadership has enabled us to have

the impact I think we’ve had. It’s a pleasure to be with one of our

very distinguished commissioners, John Lehman.

We strongly believe that the national intelligence director should

be created by statute, should be a Senate-confirmed position. The

Executive Order strengthening the current Director of Central Intelligence, in our view, is not sufficient for the task.

91

We believe that the national intelligence director should not be

the head of the CIA. It’s an impossible task for any single individual to run effectively both the CIA and the agencies of the intelligence community. The head of the CIA should report to the national intelligence director as one of his deputies.

The national intelligence director must have clear legal authority

over budget, personnel, information technology and security procedures within the intelligence community, as I spell out in more detail in the statement. We cannot solve the problem of information

sharing within the intelligence community unless there is a national intelligence director with legal powers to compel sharing and

to create the structures so that sharing can take place.

The national intelligence director needs these authorities if he is

going to be able to transform the intelligence community to meet

the challenges of the 21st century. If the national intelligence director does not have these strong authorities, then we oppose the

creation of such a position.

We believe strongly that the director of the national counterterrorism center should be a Presidential appointee, confirmed by

the Senate. The Director should be a high-ranking official at the

Deputy Secretary level, executive level 2.

We do not believe that the national counterterrorism center can

carry out its mission successfully if it is part of the CIA or part of

any existing Cabinet department. In this regard, we believe the Executive Order making NCTC subordinate to the CIA is a mistake.

The responsibilities of the national counterterrorism center include

actions across the government. They are not confined to any single

agency.

The director of the national counterterrorism center should report directly to the national intelligence director on everyday issues

and intelligence matters. On policy matters beyond intelligence, the

director would report to the President and the NSC.

The national counterterrorism center needs strong authority to

influence relevant intelligence collection. It should have primary

responsibility for net assessment and warning. The operational

planning responsibilities of the center should not be limited to

broad strategic plans. They should extend the daily oversight of

particular joint operations and explicit authority to monitor implementation of joint plans.

Vice Chairman Rockefeller’s letter to Senators Collins and

Lieberman offered a constructive suggestion, to be sure, that the

Secretary of Defense retained his proper place in the chain of command for military operations. The Vice Chairman’s suggestion is

consistent with the Commission’s approach.

The national counterterrorism center should have authorities

giving it influence over budget planning and leaders of the government-wide counterterrorism effort. The national counterterrorism center should be able to hire its own personnel and not be totally dependent on detailees from other agencies. We believe the

creation of the national counterterrorism center must rest upon a

firm legal foundation, and new legislation is necessary for that purpose.

Our report emphasized that no single agency can construct the

network capabilities needed to bring all of the agencies together

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and extend information sharing beyond the Federal Government.

We commended the work of the Markle Foundation Task Force,

which has recently offered suggestions to this and other committees

about how to translate these ideas into legislation. We also wish

to re-emphasize that our recommendations for intelligence reorganization will enable action on this front as well.

Mr. Chairman, we strongly believe that the overall budget of the

intelligence community, as well as the top-line budget numbers for

the component agencies of the intelligence community, should be

declassified. Making these numbers public will improve accountability. There is much skepticism, even cynicism about the intelligence community among the American people. Declassifying the

budget is a step toward increased public understanding of the challenges facing the intelligence community and the manner in which

they are addressed. We believe making these numbers public will

help the Congress in its oversight responsibilities.

Oversight doesn’t get any harder than it does on the question of

intelligence. Nobody else has access to the information. You do not

have the media to help you. You don’t have watchdog organizations. Opening the door, even a little, will help spark public interest, engagement and support for you and the difficult work you

must conduct. Opening the door will also enhance the kind of hardheaded cost-benefit analysis that is necessary to ensure that the intelligence community uses its resources effectively.

For the balance of the statement, I turn to Commissioner Lehman.

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN F. LEHMAN

Mr. LEHMAN. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Vice Chairman, distinguished members, thank you for including me in this important

testimony this afternoon.

As you know, we on the Commission were very critical of congressional oversight in our report. In fact, we all feel that it is of

equal importance to reform in the executive branch. But let me

make it clear, this criticism is by no means directed at this Committee. You, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Vice Chairman, and the members

of this Committee have labored very long and seriously with a

great background and experience that you bring to these issues,

and no one could fault the effort that you have put in over these

past years to making us safer.

But the system under which you work, we feel, is as dysfunctional as the system that we have criticized in the executive

branch. You need a better environment within which to work. We

have recommended two models—the Joint Committee on Atomic

Energy, model, which frankly many of us would recommend as our

first choice; and, if that is not practical, then the model of unifying

appropriations and authorization in each house.

We feel very strongly that oversight is not just overlooking and

checking what the executive branch does; it’s a partnership. Senator Warner well knows, and other members, like Senator Feinstein and Senator Levin, that the oversight that was provided during my tenure as Secretary of the Navy was really a partnership.

I had an analysis done of the time I spent when I was in Washington during the 6 years I was Secretary. For the first half of each

93

year, 35 percent of all my time was spent up here on the Hill. It

was in a very coherent, although I didn’t always think so at the

time, system of oversight with the Armed Services Committee, having a Sea Power Subcommittee, and the Appropriations Committee

having a cadre of naval expertise. So there was a real pattern to

this partnership.

The result of our naval program during that period was as much

the product of the dialog up here on the Hill, both in formal committee hearings and as important in the back hidey-holes in the

Capitol and in the Senate offices. Frankly, this was one of the most

satisfying parts of my responsibilities. It was successful. It worked

the way the founding fathers envisioned it.

We certainly have not seen that same kind of oversight, by any

means, in the investigations that we conducted over 20 months.

This Committee does not have the power, the longevity and the direct coupling with the appropriations that would enable a true

partnership with the executive branch intelligence community in

making and carrying out successful policy on intelligence.

While, as our Chairman has said, ‘‘good people can make any

system work’’, I think that the attitude that has emerged over the

years in the intelligence agencies calls that into question, because

the general attitude has been that if the intelligence agency can’t

get the right answer they want out of this Committee, they have

only to go shop to other committees to undo.

Our examination of your record of legislative initiative has

shown that you have done impressive work, innovative work, imaginative ideas and reallocations of emphasis. Yet, there seems to

have been only a random record of these ideas reaching final implementation at the end of the legislative process.

So we urge you to put as much emphasis in the changing of the

oversight, of totally reforming the way you conduct this oversight

here in Congress, as you do to the already good initiatives, excellent initiatives you’ve undertaken in a very short period of time to

carry out our recommendations in the other sections.

Finally, let me just conclude by saying and re-emphasizing we’re

under no illusion that by moving around these boxes on your organization charts or the executive branch organization charts that

this will solve the problem. Our purpose in making these organizational recommendations is really a secondary purpose. It’s to create

an environment that will enable good people to be creative, to take

risks in intelligence analysis and recommendations and collection,

and to carry out their responsibilities free of the underbrush that

binds them to layers of bureaucratic process, the stovepipe of obstacles of originator control and compartmentalization and all of the

barnacles that have attached to our intelligence hull over these

many decades.

The time for reform is now and I think that you’ve made an excellent start, but we want to emphasize what is done up here to

change the way you conduct oversight is just as important as what

you do to the executive branch.

Thank you very much. We’d be happy to take your questions

now.

[The prepared statement of Governor Kean, Mr. Hamilton and

Mr. Lehman follows:]

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PREPARED STATEMENT OF GOVERNOR THOMAS H. KEAN, VICE CHAIR LEE H.

HAMILTON AND COMMISSIONER JOHN F. LEHMAN, NATIONAL COMMISSION ON

TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES

Chairman Roberts, Vice Chairman Rockefeller, distinguished members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: We are honored to appear before you today.

We want to thank you and the leadership of the U.S. Senate for the prompt consideration you are giving to the recommendations of the Commission. We thank you

for your support.

The Commission’s findings and recommendations were strongly endorsed by all

Commissioners—five Democrats and five Republicans. We share a unity of purpose.

We call upon Congress and the Administration to display the same spirit of bipartisanship as we collectively seek to make our country and all Americans safer and

more secure.

REVIEWING THE PAST SEVERAL WEEKS

We want to begin by reviewing briefly the road we have traveled since July 22nd,

the day the Commission presented its report.

• We believe we have made important progress. From the outset, we have had

statements of support from the President, and from Senator Kerry.

• We testified 16 times during the summer recess. We appreciate full well how

unusual it is for Congress to hold hearings in the month of August. We welcome

the opportunity to speak with respect to the whole array of recommendations we

have made.

• We thank the Congress for the opportunity to explain our work to the American

people.

LEGISLATIVE EFFORTS

Mr. Chairman, we recognize that several Senators and Committees are now working to draft legislation to address Commission recommendations, and we are deeply

grateful to them for their work.

Mr. Chairman, you put forward a proposal a few weeks ago entitled the ‘‘9–11 National Security Protection Act.’’ We commend you for your leadership. You have reflected on the work of the Commission. You have been unflinching in your own examination of the Intelligence Community. We commend you for preparing a farreaching, ambitious proposal for reform.

Mr. Vice Chairman, you have conveyed your own views on reform to the Senate

Governmental Affairs Committee. We have studied your suggestions. We found

them to be important, thoughtful, and constructive.

We see a clear convergence in these proposals toward:

• The creation of a powerful National Intelligence Director, with control over the

budget, and with hire-and-fire authority;

• The creation of a National Counterterrorism Center; and

• The creation of additional National Intelligence Centers.

Both you—and we—find the status quo unacceptable. We studied the 9/11 story.

We explained, in chapter 11 of the report, the significance of management issues

both large and small.

Our basic premise is that good, strong management of an enormous enterprise so

central to countering terrorism is necessary. Good management opens the way for

many particular reforms, including improved collection of human or signals intelligence and improved analysis. The results of good management cannot be specified

with precision in advance. Innovation and creativity cannot be legislated. But good

legislation can create the conditions where better things can happen.

You have the benefit not only of our work, but also the superb report of this committee on intelligence assessments of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We saw

your work on Iraq before we completed our report. It reinforced our conviction that

the time has come for fundamental change.

We know that there are some differences between the Commission’s proposals and

those you have put forward. We will be glad to discuss some of those specifics with

you. We welcome the refinements of the legislative process. What impresses us most

is that there is a consensus for change. We want to work with you to seize this opportunity for reform.

We know that organizational changes are not a cure-all. The quality of the people

is more important than the quality of the wiring diagrams. Good people can overcome bad structures. But why should they have to?

Americans should not settle for incremental, ad hoc adjustments to a system designed generations ago for a world that no longer exists.

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EXECUTIVE ORDERS AND DIRECTIVES

On August 27th, the President issued 4 Executive Orders and 2 Homeland Security Presidential Directives.

President Bush has come a long way. As the White House said, these orders have

‘‘strained the limits’’ of the President’s authority. The White House has stated plainly that its actions on intelligence reorganization and on the National

Counterterrorism Center can thus only be interim measures, and that they await

further work by the Congress. For example, in its briefings on August 27, White

House spokesmen emphasized, in very strong terms, that the National Intelligence

Director must be an office separate from the head of the CIA. But only Congress

can take that step.

We appreciate that the hard work ahead is now the task of the Congress. We appreciate that the Commission did not address every detail, and that the Commission

does not have a position on every question. Some of your questions will go beyond

what we as a Commission decided. Several matters we must leave to your discretion

and good judgment.

We want to return to some key themes. We want to make clear here what we

support, and what we do not support.

THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE DIRECTOR

We believe strongly that the National Intelligence Director should be created by

statute, and should be a Senate-confirmed position. An Executive Order strengthening the current Director of Central Intelligence is not sufficient to the task.

We believe that the National Intelligence Director should not be the head of the

CIA. It is an impossible task for any single individual to run effectively both the

CIA and the agencies of the Intelligence Community. The head of the CIA should

report to the National Intelligence Director as one of his deputies.

The National Intelligence Director must have clear legal authority over budget,

personnel, information technology, and security procedures within the intelligence

community.

• He must have the authority to prepare and execute budgets.

• He must have reprogramming authority.

• He must have hire and fire authority over the key senior officials within the

Intelligence Community.

• He must have the authority to set uniform standards for security and classification.

• He must have the authority to create common standards and the application

of new network capabilities to foster information sharing.

We cannot solve the problem of information sharing within the Intelligence Community unless there is a National Intelligence Director with the legal powers to

compel sharing and create the structures so that sharing can take place. The National Intelligence Director needs these authorities if he is going to be able to transform the Intelligence Community to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

If the National Intelligence Director does not have these strong authorities, we

oppose the creation of such a position.

THE NATIONAL COUNTERTERRORISM CENTER

We believe strongly that the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center

should be a Presidential appointee, confirmed by the Senate. The Director should

be a high-ranking official at the Deputy Secretary level (Executive level II).

We do not believe that the National Counterterrorism Center can carry out its

mission successfully if it is part of the CIA or part of any existing Cabinet Department. In this regard, we believe the Executive Order making the NCTC subordinate

to the CIA is a mistake. The responsibilities of the National Counterterrorism Center include actions across the government; they are not confined to any single agency.

The Director of the National Counterterrorism Center should report directly to

the National Intelligence Director on everyday issues and intelligence matters. On

policy matters beyond intelligence, the Director would report to the President and

the National Security Council.

The National Counterterrorism Center needs strong authority to influence relevant intelligence collection. It should have primary responsibility for net assessment and warning.

The operational planning responsibilities of the Center should not be limited to

broad strategic plans. They should extend to daily oversight of particular joint operations and explicit authority to monitor implementation of joint plans.

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Vice Chairman Rockefeller’s letter to Senators Collins and Lieberman offered a

constructive suggestion to be sure that the Secretary of Defense retained his proper

place in the chain of command for military operations. The Vice Chairman’s suggestion is consistent with the Commission’s approach.

The National Counterterrorism Center should have authorities giving it influence

over budget planning and leaders of the governmentwide counterterrorism effort.

The National Counterterrorism Center should be able to hire its own personnel and

not be totally dependent on detailees from other agencies.

We believe the creation of a National Counterterrorism Center must rest upon a

firm legal foundation. New legislation is necessary to achieve this purpose.

DESIGNING NETWORK CAPABILITIES FOR INFORMATION SHARING

Our report emphasized that no single agency can construct the network capabilities needed to bring all the agencies together and extend information sharing beyond the Federal Government.

We commended the work of the Markle Foundation task force, which has recently

offered suggestions to this and other committees about how to translate these ideas

into legislation.

We also wish to reemphasize that our recommendations for intelligence reorganization will enable action on this front as well.

DECLASSIFYING BUDGET NUMBERS

Mr. Chairman, we strongly believe that the overall budget of the intelligence community—as well as the top-line budget numbers for the component agencies of the

intelligence community—should be declassified.

Making these numbers public will improve accountability. There is much skepticism, even cynicism, about the intelligence community among the American people. Declassifying the budget is a step toward increased public understanding of the

challenges facing the intelligence community, and the manner in which they are addressed.

We believe making these numbers public will help the Congress in its oversight

responsibilities. Oversight doesn’t get any harder than it does on the question of intelligence. Nobody else has access to the information. You don’t have the press to

help you. You don’t have watchdog organizations. • Opening the door—even a little—will help spark public interest, engagement

and support for you in the difficult work you must conduct. • Opening the door will also enhance the kind of hardheaded cost-benefit analysis

that is necessary to ensure that the intelligence community uses its resources effectively.

CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT

Mr. Chairman, we have been critical of the Congress on the question of oversight.

Let us be clear here. You, the Vice Chairman and Members of your Committee have

worked hard and long on intelligence questions, with great devotion to the nation’s

security. The current structure of Congressional oversight has made your work more

difficult.

We believe that the Congress needs to change its structures so that they help you,

not hinder you, in the conduct of oversight.

We are encouraged by the creation of a bipartisan working group on congressional

reform by the Senate leadership, and we commend them for that important step.

We believe that the Intelligence Committees need to be strengthened considerably

in the performance of their oversight work. We suggested the option of a joint

Senate-House Committee. We also suggested, as an alternative, the unity of the authorization and appropriation process for the Intelligence Committees. We note that

Senator Rockefeller endorsed this option in his recent letter.

The point here is a straightforward one: Whatever course the Congress chooses,

we believe the committees of Congress charged with oversight of the Intelligence

Community must be made stronger, with power over the purse strings.

Each of you knows that the Intelligence Community resists providing you information. Each of you knows that when the Intelligence Community doesn’t like the

answer they get from you, they go to another committee for another answer.

We advocate a strong National Intelligence Director. We believe that stronger executive branch powers must be balanced by stronger Congressional oversight. The

case for stronger Congressional oversight—already powerful—becomes overwhelming once a new National Intelligence Director is created.

The Commission is asking the Congressional Committees to do a lot to make the

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sight in order to improve management and analysis. We are asking you to provide

oversight over the improvement of human intelligence, especially the development

of a diverse workforce with knowledge of the regions, language and cultures that

we must understand.

We recognize that you cannot do the many things we ask you to do, unless you

have the tools to do the job. The committees charged with oversight of the Intelligence Community need, above all, control over the money. If you control the

money, then we believe you can get the job done.

CLOSING COMMENTS

Mr. Chairman, we do not want to get too fixated on charts, on boxes or the location of boxes. We believe that the creation of a National Intelligence Director and

a National Counterterrorism Center are important. Indeed, our testimony this afternoon is about why these reforms are so important.

Yet reforms of executive branch structures, in the absence of implementing the

other reforms and recommendations in our report, will have significantly less value

than the value of these reforms as a complete package.

Reforms in Congress, as well as the many recommendations we did not present

in detail this morning—on foreign policy, public diplomacy, the cooperative threat

reduction program, border and transportation security, and national preparedness—

can make a significant difference in making America safer and more secure.

In short, we welcome each step toward implementation of our recommendations.

But no one should be mistaken in believing that solving structural problems in the

executive branch addresses completely, or even satisfactorily, the current terrorist

threat we face.

The first part of our recommendations dealt with substantive policy—the ingredients of a global strategy. We hope those suggestions will get some fraction of the

attention that has understandably been given to our ideas to reorganize the government. Our purpose in reorganizing the government is so that we can implement the

ambitious, long-term substantive agenda spelled out in our Report.

We thank you again for the opportunity to testify before this distinguished Committee.

We should seize the moment and move forward on reform.

With your counsel and direction, we believe that the Nation can, and will, make

wise choices.

We would be pleased to respond to your questions.

Chairman ROBERTS. We wish to thank the panel.

Mr. Lehman and Mr. Hamilton, more especially Lee, I want to

thank you for coming before the Committee and asking for our very

frank and candid advice and counsel on how we can improve our

oversight capabilities and responsibilities.

We have been very favorably impressed that you have basically

recommended a lot of what we told you. I think you recognized at

that time the frustration that the Vice Chairman, myself and the

members of the Committee have in regards to your recommendation that the Intelligence Committee should be the one that, at

least in terms of congressional oversight, be the most independent,

have the most clout and the most power in recommending policy.

Yet, because of the fractionalized way that Congress finds itself

evolved into, if that’s the proper way to put it, we are the least.

So there’s a great deal of frustration on the members of this Committee, who work very hard in achieving what you achieved in the

17–0 vote in reference to our pre-war intelligence. We’d like to

think that we spend a great deal of time—I know we do—on these

matters with a sense of responsibility.

So I want to thank you for coming to the Committee and asking

first, and at least agreeing with us on a great many issues. I could

get into that and I think I’ll pound my gavel in regards to the fact

that many of our recommendations end up on the cutting room

floor or are simply ignored, and then we simply do the business by

supplemental appropriations. The Vice Chairman and I have made

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many speeches on that, I shouldn’t be making one now, but thank

you for your comments.

I am now going under regular order, and turn to Senator Rockefeller for a first round of questions.

Senator Rockefeller.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. To be limited to 5 minutes, Mr.

Chairman, right?

Chairman ROBERTS. That is correct.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. I just want to take advantage of

Vice Chairman Hamilton’s statement to sort of see if I can nail this

one down. Because it is one that I worry about, and that is the perception that the emphasis on intelligence is going to somehow put

the warfighter at risk.

We know from your document and your report that you leave the

Joint Military Intelligence Program and the tactical intelligence intact and others under the control of the Secretary of Defense and

his intelligence Undersecretary. But I think people worry—and it

may, in fact, be one of the reasons that this kind of reform hasn’t

passed in past years, is the worry of the military that somehow

they’re being moved in on, and their powers are being taken away.

Now, one of the things—and Vice Chairman Hamilton spoke to

it and I thought he spoke to it in a favorable and accepting way,

but I don’t want to take anything for granted.

You want, I think, to give the Secretary of Defense, when you are

in a situation of being at war, a joint position, an equal position

to the national intelligence director, on all matters of intelligence.

Technically, if they disagreed, as I indicated in my opening statement, they could take that to the NSC and to the President. But

you don’t want that to happen.

You’ve got a group of insurgents coming up one side of the hill

and we’re coming up the other side of the hill, you don’t have time

for that. John McLaughlin said this never happened.

But I want to try to pin down that there is still a concern that

the NID might manage the national intelligence systems in a way

that could be detrimental to the warfighter. We don’t want that to

happen in times of war. We do not want that to happen.

So is the idea of making the Secretary of Defense co-equal to the

NID and that they would agree on approaches on reflecting intelligence matters in time of war, is that one upon which you look favorably?

Mr. HAMILTON. Senator Rockefeller, we do not think that’s inconsistent at all with what we have recommended in the Commission

report. I want to be very clear here that we never suggested, for

one moment, diminishing support for the warfighter. We agree

with the Vice Chairman on the importance of that support. We

think in the organizational structure that we have put forward,

that support is assured.

There is another equity here that has to be looked at. I don’t

think anybody wants to reduce the quality of intelligence that goes

to the warfighter. We all recognize the importance of that. The

other equity is the American people. The American people have to

be protected too against a 9/11-type attack. You do that by providing effective, strong intelligence, national intelligence, strategic

intelligence to the national intelligence director.

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I believe the way we have structured it, and I think it’s consistent with what you have said, the Deputy National Intelligence

Director, who would be the Under Secretary of Defense, would certainly be sitting at that table to be alert to every possible bit of information that would be helpful to the warfighter going to the war

fighter. And we fully support that.

What you have suggested kind of reinforces that. I think it’s consistent with what we say.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Thank you, Vice Chairman Hamilton. My time is virtually up.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Warner.

Senator WARNER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, I wish to join my colleagues in commending each

of you for your further public service. Really, in my judgment,

there is a long history of Presidential commissions and congressional commissions. I think you have reached the new high watermark and bring credibility to that procedure. I commend each of

you.

Secretary Lehman, I remember well when we worked together,

when you were Secretary of the Navy, and I want to commend you.

You remember the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which many have referred to as a precedent for what we are undertaking here in the

Congress today. I remember you were very active in that piece of

legislation.

Gentlemen, my first question comes to the Chairman, the distinguished Chairman. There’s been some speculation that with Executive Orders and what took place prior to the issuance of your report, that, of the 41, a very high percentage of your recommendations have been implemented, are being implemented. Do you have

any base of fact there as to your own opinion of where we are today

in connection with the implementation of those 41?

Governor KEAN. There’s no question we’ve made progress on

some of them, and some of them even before we came out with the

report.

What we would call the major recommendations have not yet

been dealt with.

Senator WARNER. Not one.

Governor KEAN. There are a whole series of recommendations involving things like transitions and emergency response and public

foreign policy, a whole series of things that we still think we have

to work on.

Senator WARNER. Now, Congressman Hamilton, I’m going back

to your testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.

You indicated the Commission’s understanding of the importance of

tactical military intelligence, and you used these words, I believe,

had ‘‘evolved since the report was published and that some of the

Commission’s thinking on this subject needed to be refined.’’

Can you amplify on that, I think, very perceptive observation on

your part?

Mr. HAMILTON. Well, I think, Senator, we’ve learned as we’ve

gone along, and making a sharp division between tactical and strategic, which I think we did in the report, the clear bright line may

not be as clear and as bright as we thought. There are a number

of intelligence assets that can have both a military and a strategic

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value to them. So I do think our thinking has been refined, as we

have talked with our friends in the Defense Department and in the

CIA, with regard to this.

I believe, as a pragmatic matter, it can be worked out. It helps

me to think in terms of specifics. You take an asset like the U–2.

The U–2 clearly has military applications, but likewise it gives us

important political information.

Senator WARNER. I think that’s helpful.

I want to refer to your chart here. My concern is, and I go back

to one word that you had, which I found very interesting in the report, the lack of imagination. To me, imagination is the direct product of competitive analysis in many respects.

Where in here is the ability of the President to receive views

other than that held by the national intelligence director? For example, Secretary Lehman, we put in Goldwater-Nichols the ability

of any member of the Joint Chiefs to have access to the President.

Do you envision that the President will receive differing views from

many of the substructure here? Or how does he receive the differing views?

Mr. HAMILTON. Senator Warner, first of all, we want to see competitive analysis. We’re not against competitive analysis. We think

our proposal, and I’ll spell this out, gives us more competitive analysis.

We think the status quo did not give us competitive analysis, not

only with regard to 9/11, but with regard to the report this Intelligence Committee made the other day on weapons of mass destruction. So we think the status quo fails to foster competitive analysis.

But beyond that, the whole concept we have is sharing information

across the various agencies of the intelligence community.

The more you share information, the more ideas, the more competition for ideas you’re going to have.

Senator WARNER. I agree with that. I’m thinking in that Oval Office, when that NID comes in and states a proposition to the President, does the President have the benefit of other views?

Now, presumably, the Deputy NID for defense intelligence can

energize the SecDef. Likewise, the Deputy NID for homeland can

exercise that Cabinet officer. I’m not sure exactly how the survivor

of the CIA gets in there and the DIA. That’s what concerns me

here. As we work through it, I can assure you this Senator is going

to make certain that there is some ability for others to have access

to the President——

Mr. HAMILTON. All of the departments of government we don’t

make any change. State has their intelligence. Energy has theirs.

Treasury has theirs. Each of the armed services has their intelligence. None of that is changed. So that competition from those

areas would be the same as it has been in the past. We think there

are other steps we’ve taken that strengthen that competition.

I think the point you are raising is enormously important. You

and all of us need to be satisfied that whatever we have permits

a maximum amount of competitive analysis.

Senator WARNER. Last, a group of us have been invited—I think,

basically the Chairman and Ranking Mmember of the several committees involved in the intelligence business, to go and visit at the

White House tomorrow, presumably given the opportunity to exVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00104 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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press our views and to receive perhaps their initial thinking on

draft legislation that will be coming to us eventually.

Do you have any pre-knowledge of what the disposition is for the

White House as to the legislation? If not, in the course of that legislative proposal being made available to the Congress, are you in

a position and will you comment on it such that the Congress can

have the benefit of your ideas on such White House proposals, legislatively, as would be forthcoming?

Governor KEAN. We’ve had no communications from the White

House as to what their proposals may be. We would be glad to

work with this Committee as you consider them in any way which

you deem appropriate.

Senator WARNER. My time is up, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.

Mr. HAMILTON. May I observe, Senator, that I think the Executive Orders of the President have been a constructive step forward.

Senator WARNER. As do I.

Mr. HAMILTON. When they say that they’ve gone as far as they

can go with an Executive Order, I think that’s about right. Now,

they don’t go as far as we recommend, as you recognize.

We think there are some important changes. But the Executive

Orders support the national counterterrorism center. They support

a national intelligence director. They believe in strengthening the

management of the intelligence community. They believe that more

sharing has to take place. All of these things are positive and constructive. We want to build on them.

Senator WARNER. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Lott. Senator Lott is no longer here.

Senator Wyden.

Senator WYDEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First question is for you Mr. Hamilton. The report of the Commission documents extensive intelligence and aviation security failures. You talk about the failure to put dangerous people on the

watchlist, to take the Phoenix memo seriously, the failure to get

the warrant against Mr. Moussaoui. The list goes on and on.

Yet, no one was ever reprimanded, demoted, transferred or fired

anywhere in our government because of the mistakes that contributed to the attacks.

Now, I’m not saying that the attacks could have been prevented.

But I am very troubled about the lack of accountability in the intelligence community. I’m struck by how different it is with the military community. For all practical purposes, in the military community, there is strict liability. When something goes wrong, somebody gets held accountable. It doesn’t seem to be that way in the

area of intelligence.

I’d like you to say what you all found as you looked to the question of why nobody was reprimanded, demoted, transferred or in

any way faced any consequences because of the failures that you

take—you all take almost 10 pages to document the management

failures. They go from around 350 to 360. Why, in your view, was

nobody ever held accountable?

I ask that of you, Mr. Hamilton.

Mr. HAMILTON. Senator Wyden, you can look back and you can

find mistakes that were made. This person didn’t check the passVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00105 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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port carefully enough. That person didn’t look at the visa applicant

carefully enough. The ticket-taker at the airport wasn’t careful

enough about people boarding the airplane. You can go on and on

and on. We can list 50 of those people.

But we really saw no value to pointing out one person here, one

person there and giving you a list of 25 people or 50 people. What

good is that going to do?

The fundamental problem we saw was systemic, not personal.

That’s what we focused on.

Senator WYDEN. Well, I share your concern. But it also seems to

me that no organization can succeed if, at some point, failure isn’t

acknowledged and people held accountable. So we’ll have further

discussion about this. But I will tell you, I’m struck by how different intelligence is from the military area where there really is

strict liability.

Mr. HAMILTON. One of the things we did find was that the military did do, after 9/11, after-action reports. That has not yet been

complete, as we understand it, in the CIA. The Justice I.G. has

completed a report. So some of this is being done.

Senator WYDEN. Governor Kean, my next question’s for you. Senator Lott and I have introduced comprehensive legislation to overhaul the way government documents are classified.

It seems to me that a problem that was serious years ago has

gotten more and more so. You said during the course of your review, this is a quote from you, ‘‘Three-quarters of what I read that

was classified shouldn’t have been.’’

I can tell you, Senator Lott and I are going to use that as exhibit

A for making the case for our legislation, but I’m interested in having you amplify a bit on why you found that to be the case, and

in particular whether an official faces any repercussions at all with

respect to overclassifying a document.

It seems to me what we have is a system where somebody just

sits there with a big old stamp and marks ‘‘Secret,’’ and there are

never any consequences. I and Senator Lott would like to shake

that up. I’m very pleased that one of our sponsors, Senator Snowe,

is here as well. If you could tell us why you found that to be the

case, I think that would be very helpful.

Governor KEAN. Well, congratulations, Senator. You and Senator

Lott, unlike my two colleagues here and most of the other members

of the Commission—I had never seen a classified document before.

So this was my first time, and so I was very eager to read after

I got my security clearances.

What amazed me, I remember the first time document I read, it

was about 300 pages from the FBI. I read the whole thing very

carefully, and I looked at my watch, turned to the FBI agent that

was there and said, ‘‘I know all of this. I’ve read it in the newspapers. Why is it classified?’’ He said, ‘‘But you didn’t know it was

true.’’

Now, that is not a reason for classification. As I read more and

more documents, there were more and more things that I already

knew, and things frankly the American people deserve to know. I

mean, they weren’t anything to do with sources or methods or anything which in my mind as a citizen jeopardized the security of

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America or the lives or occupations of any of the people who work

so hard in the security area.

It happened to me again and again and again and again. I think

all of my fellow commissioners shared exactly the same feeling.

You talk about incentives, the incentive is the other way around.

So I talked to a number of people, and they said, ‘‘the incentive is

you don’t get into any trouble if you put that stamp on it. You’re

safe’’.

It’s the other way around. If you don’t put the stamp on it,

maybe there’s some way you can get in trouble. So I congratulate

you on that.

Senator WYDEN. Mr. Chairman, can I ask one other question on

this classification matter? I know my light is on.

Chairman ROBERTS. Certainly.

Senator WYDEN. Thank you, and I’ll be very brief.

For Mr. Lehman, as you know with respect to your proposal that

the overall amount of money being appropriated no longer be kept

secret, I’d be interested in having you tell us how you’d respond to

critics who say that declassifying that information is in some way

going to harm national security. We’ve been hearing people say

western civilization is going to end if somehow this overall number

is printed.

It seems to me you’re right, they’re wrong. But how would you

respond to the critics on that question with respect to declassification?

Mr. LEHMAN. Well, frankly I think the biggest damage that

would be done would be the shock that our enemies would have at

seeing how irrational we are at allocating resources, if they really

knew how little we spend on translators and on human intelligence

sources compared to what we spend on hardware, redundant hardware and so forth.

Obviously there’s a level of granularity that needs to be protected. We don’t want to tell them exactly how much we’re spending on infrared satellites or particular SIGINT assets.

But the American public would be shocked if they knew the

misallocation of resources between HUMINT and other aspects of

our intelligence budget. They need to know that. How can you

carry on a debate on the floor of the Senate without talking about

those kinds of gross numbers?

So we feel very strongly that certainly the top line and the rough

allocation of resources between different parts of the community,

not necessarily in fine, and certainly not down to the problematic

level—but we have not heard a compelling argument for maintaining overall classification. It’s silly that you, when you go out and

speak, have to quote Tom Clancy and can’t discuss in a rational

way.

Senator WYDEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. I’m not sure we all quote Tom Clancy. There

are other people we could quote.

[Laughter.]

Chairman ROBERTS. Let me just say that the Committee is taking very seriously the proposal by Senator Wyden, Senator Lott,

and others. It is a matter of the highest priority.

Senator DeWine.

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Senator DEWINE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Let me just thank the three of you for a magnificent job on the

Commission. All of us appreciate it very, very much.

Mr. Secretary, thank you for your very perceptive and eloquent

comment about the institutional problem this Committee has in

doing oversight. I don’t think I’ve heard it expressed any better. I

think you have touched on a real problem that we have, and I hope

we can change that.

Let me talk a minute, and then ask a question about a reform

challenge I think that we face that affects both our branch of government as well as the executive branch. That has to do with the

supplemental budget and the fact that we rely more and more to

fund our intelligence community on the supplemental budget.

It seems to me that this is a problem. I guess you could look at

it from a positive point of view. Thank heavens we have had the

supplementals. I don’t know where we’d be without them, as far as

funding the intelligence community for the last few years. But it

is a problem. It makes, I would think, for executive branch and for

the different agencies planning very, very difficult.

They never know from one year to the other whether they are

going to have the supplemental. What will happen some year if we

don’t have a supplemental? This really needs to be made a part of

the permanent budget, needs to be part of the baseline budget. It

presents a problem, I think, for Congress as well, because, as has

already been pointed out here today, when the money is in a supplemental, it really doesn’t go through this Committee and we don’t

have the opportunity to have any say about it, or any effective say.

So I wonder if I could get your comment about this, because it

seems to me that when we’re talking about reform—and you’ve

talked about many things in regard to reform—this is one area of

reform that we’re going to have to face up to.

If I could start with Congressman Hamilton.

Mr. HAMILTON. Senator DeWine, I agree with you. The supplemental appropriation process shuts you out of the game and it

shuts out most of the other Senators. In the House of Representatives, which I know a little better, it shuts out most everybody except a very few people, not all of whom are elected members. A few

key staff people and a few key appropriation players, they’re the

only ones in the game.

We all know how supplementals work around here. The fact of

the matter is they work in such a way that ordinary members of

the Senate and the House cannot impact it.

The other point you make I think is terribly important. From the

standpoint of the intelligence community, it’s an awful way to run

the institution. They don’t know what their budget is going to be,

oftentimes until well into the fiscal year. They cannot plan ahead.

So I think from your standpoint and from the executive branch

standpoint, supplementals are just awful. They’re an abomination

in terms of process. They seriously undercut deliberation, seriously

undercut contributions that other members can make.

What do you do about it? Well, one of the things we suggest, I

think you probably are going to have to have to restructure the intelligence budget and maybe have a separate intelligence budget—

today it’s part of the defense budget—and try everything you can

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to avoid the supplemental process. But I very much agree with

your observations.

Senator DEWINE. Governor.

Governor KEAN. I couldn’t agree more. Everything I know, which

is about a quarter of what Lee Hamilton knows or less, makes me

agree very much with your point.

Senator DEWINE. Mr. Secretary, you have had a lot of experience

in budgeting on Capitol Hill and being up here.

Mr. LEHMAN. Well, you know, when I was Secretary of the Navy,

we used to view that, in those years that it got crowded, as a mixed

blessing because it basically freed us up from any oversight. We

could do whatever we wanted.

Senator WARNER. And you did it too.

[Laughter.]

Mr. LEHMAN. I have reformed, Senator.

But I couldn’t have said it better than Lee. It is just really totally

disruptive and frustrating of the whole process.

Senator DEWINE. Well, I just think it’s just a huge, huge problem

that we really have not concentrated enough on or thought about

enough or talked enough about. You know, the average American

obviously doesn’t have a clue about this and wouldn’t be expected

to understand all the intricacies of this.

But you lose, it seems to me, the input of the people who Congress expects on a daily basis to be paying attention—lose their

input. But equally important, as Congressman Hamilton said, you

lose the ability, it seems to me, for each agency to have the assurance that this is in the baseline, that they can plan ahead, that

they have the assurance that they’re going year to year to year to

year.

Government budgeting is tough enough the way we do it every

year, anyway, coming in later and later, and all the problems. We

get the feedback from every agency.

But to have so much tied up in the supplemental year after year,

it seems to me, it would just be a horrible, horrible way to have

to do business in an area that is so vital, so vital to the defense

of this country and to the protection of the American people. We

just have to do something about it.

I thank the Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Chambliss.

But I might point out before the distinguished Senator starts,

that the Senate has passed the Defense Appropriation Act, which

includes money for the intelligence community, but has yet to pass

the Intelligence Authorization Act. I’m not quite sure what to call

it, but that’s not the way that we want to run the railroad.

Senator Chambliss.

Senator CHAMBLISS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Lee, those supplementals also tend to get loaded up with members projects, as you well know, and we spend too daggone much

money on them.

One of the recommendations of the Committee is to move the

NID into the Executive Office of the President. There are several

of us who have already noted publicly that we have some concern

about that from a political standpoint.

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I tend to look at the national intelligence director—I think which

we all are basically agreed on now we need to move toward—that

that individual ought to be more in the form of a CEO of a major

corporation who is overseeing the whole intelligence community

and separate them as much as we can from the political atmosphere and the political world. How integral is that recommendation

to your committee’s overall recommendations?

Mr. HAMILTON. I think we’ve learned from our contacts with you.

It’s my understanding that that’s not a well-received recommendation for the very reason you stated. We accept your judgment about

it.

We think that the authority is much more important than the

box. We really do think the authorities of the national intelligence

director are crucial. But where you put him in the White House or

as a freestanding office I don’t think is crucial.

Mr. LEHMAN. Frankly, one of the reasons why we recommended

the Executive Office of the President was we are all very sensitive

to not creating another bureaucratic layer. Exactly the example

that you use of a well-run large corporation with a very small CEO

staff with real powers is what we wanted. The Executive Office of

the President already has the administrative bureaucracy, the

treasurer, if you will, and the human resources person and the

admin side.

So we thought it would be much easier, probably a good way to

reduce some of the billets that would be needed for the NID, if we

just used the existing bureaucracy. But it is not really essential,

and the objections to it that have been raised in this Committee

are very legitimate ones. So I think we all agree that that’s fine,

to take it out of the EOP.

Mr. HAMILTON. Senator Chambliss, if I may add, our concern

would be that the NID, the national intelligence director, not be

subordinate to a Cabinet person. The reason for that is that the national intelligence director is going to be not only collecting all of

the information, intelligence information, but is also in charge of

operational planning to deal with counterterrorism.

Now, what that means is you’ve got to be able to work with all

of the departments of government that have a role in counterterrorism strategy. That’s almost everybody. It’s diplomacy, it is military, it’s CIA, it is Treasury. It is all of them.

So we think it would be a mistake to put the national intelligence director under somebody, because he or she is going to have

to be giving orders to a lot of other people in a lot of different areas

of government. You cannot have an effective counterterrorism

strategy unless you integrate many departments and agencies of

government. It takes all of it to be effective. You’ve got to have

good diplomacy. You’ve got to have the Treasury working to stop

the financing. You’ve got to have good law enforcement. You’ve got

to have good military. You’ve got to have good covert action. You’ve

got to have good public diplomacy. It goes on and on. The importance then is that the national intelligence director has to oversee

all of that.

Senator CHAMBLISS. Looking at the combat support agencies

within the Department of Defense, your recommendation is that

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man’s proposed legislation that he has out there now moves those

three agencies out of the Department of Defense and reorganizes

them by function.

I think there are good points and bad points to both of them,

both those particular concepts. But does the Committee feel strongly about the fact that those agencies ought to remain within the

Department of Defense, answerable to the Secretary of Defense, as

opposed to being answerable directly to the NID?

Mr. HAMILTON. We did not consider those changes that the

Chairman put into his bill. We do believe that the national intelligence director has to control the budgets of the NSA and the NGA

and the NRO. They have to obviously work very closely with the

Secretary of Defense to do that.

We did not pull those agencies out of the Defense Department.

We didn’t recommend that. We do agree with the view expressed

in the Roberts bill that the deputy for military support has the responsibility of making sure that the needs of the warfighter are

met, but we did not consider the changes that the Chairman recommended.

Senator CHAMBLISS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Levin.

Senator LEVIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I thank our witnesses for their major contribution to the security of this country.

Their personal commitment of time and energy is really outstanding. It’s a role model for citizens in this country.

The debate over intelligence reform is a critical debate, obviously,

but whatever we do in terms of moving around boxes on an organizational chart, whatever authorities we decide to give to a national

intelligence director, I believe that we cannot ignore one of the fundamental problems that we see with intelligence, and that is the

shaping of intelligence to support policy.

We saw it in the Vietnam war when McNamara cited secret intelligence to support the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. We saw it in

Iran-Contra, when intelligence was misused by a CIA Director, according to the Iran-Contra report, to achieve a policy goal.

This is what the Iran-Contra Committee said about this issue.

It’s an issue which I think is a critical issue and one which is not

directly addressed by your report, but which is impacted by your

report, because you create a more powerful national intelligence director.

Before I’m comfortable creating a more powerful national intelligence director, I’ve got to be comfortable that we are taking steps,

significant, real steps, to achieve objective, independent intelligence

assessments. Too often in the past, that has not been the case. It

was not the case before Iraq. This Committee had a 500-page report that showed the failures of intelligence prior to Iraq.

Although we haven’t gotten to phase two relative to the use of

intelligence, every single case that was pointed out in that report

where the public statement about what the intelligence showed by

the CIA Director differed from the classified information, it was

pointing toward a greater, more sharp, threat on the part of Iraq,

which clearly had but one impact, which was to support a policymakers’ direction.

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Now, whether you agree with that or not, I would hope that we

would all agree that we have got to take steps to assure that we’re

going to get independent, objective intelligence.

Would you agree with that? Governor?

Governor KEAN. Yes.

Senator LEVIN. OK. Is there any disagreement that we have got

to take steps, whether we create a more powerful NID, or do it in

some other way, to the steps that we’re able to take to make sure

we get the most objective independent assessments of threats from

the intelligence community?

Mr. HAMILTON. Senator Levin, I obviously agree with what you

have said. Organizational structures don’t politicize intelligence;

people politicize intelligence. I don’t know of any organizational

structure that you can draw that would give you assurance.

Senator LEVIN. We’ll be proposing some changes in law which

will help to promote that goal, if you agree with the goal. I’m not

asking you to comment on them now because we’re working on

them. The question is the goal.

Senator LEVIN. Secretary Lehman, you agree with that?

Mr. LEHMAN. I agree completely, and it’s closely related to an

earlier question about maintaining competitive analysis.

Senator LEVIN. I think it does, it does indeed.

Mr. LEHMAN. That’s crucial.

Senator LEVIN. Let me just read one thing from the Iran-Contra

Committee report: ‘‘The gathering and reporting of analysis should

be done in such a way that there can be no question that the conclusions are driven by the actual facts rather than by what a policy

advocate hopes these facts will be.’’

Let me go to a second question, which relates to the budget

power. Under current law, the CIA Director does have the authority to present the budget. I believe, in the exact words of the law,

he’s responsible to develop the budget for the entire intelligence

community and to present it to the President. So the power to put

the budget together already exists in the CIA Director.

I think what the issue is is when it comes to budget implementation once there’s an appropriation, what power do we want to give

to various people to seek reprogramming in that area? I think

that’s what the real issue is.

But we’ve got to be careful about controlling the budget, those

kind of words. Because right now, under law, the CIA Director has

the power, the responsibility, as a matter of fact, to present and develop that budget.

My question to you relates to the budget. It’s similar to Senator

Wyden’s question about personnel and holding people accountable,

but slightly different because I’m asking about budget. Did your

commission find evidence that Director Tenet tried to change the

CIA budget when he presented it and developed it, in ways in

which he was thwarted?

Mr. HAMILTON. My only recollection there—and I don’t know if

it’s responsive—Director Tenet complained to us about his inability

to reprogram the money in the budget.

Senator LEVIN. Well, then, I’ll ask the same question. Do you

have examples of—if none of you have examples of where he tried

to come up with a different budget going forward, then let me ask

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you on the reprogramming side. Do you have specific examples of

where Director Tenet sought to reprogram money where he was

thwarted from doing so?

Mr. HAMILTON. Well, we had a report in the paper just the other

day——

Senator LEVIN. No. I mean in terms of the Commission report.

Mr. HAMILTON. Well, I cannot recall one in the Commission report. But the news reported just a few days ago that Acting Director McLaughlin came before Senator Collins and complained that

it took him 5 months to reprogram money because of congressional

restrictions.

Senator LEVIN. I was there when he made that statement. This

has to do with congressional restrictions on reprogramming, not

who has the executive authority to put together the request.

But your report doesn’t have, as I understand it, any. If I could

ask one last question, Mr. Chairman, I think I may be over as well.

I’m over. I’ll withhold. Thank you.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Snowe.

Senator SNOWE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Again, I want to

thank our witnesses here today for the extraordinary work and

leadership that they’ve provided on the issue of national security

to our country, and taking the Commission report one step beyond,

a major step beyond, and that is galvanizing action on the part of

the President and Congress and not only testifying on 16 different

occasions, which is exceptional in and of itself to withstand that before the U.S. Congress, but also traveling the country to ensure

that action is taken on the Commission’s report and recommendations.

To that point, on the question of timeliness, as you know, there

has been somewhat of an undercurrent questioning whether or not

Congress should take action this fall on these initiatives and any

others that have obviously been recommended, because it would result in ill-considered measures.

Not that that doesn’t have merit, that some people conclude

rightfully, and we have given ample credence to that, that we can’t

be both thoughtful and timely, but I think in this instance it’s an

important issue to address, because there have been a number of

reports over time to recommend changes. Of course, we just concluded our investigation on the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and came to many of the same conclusions that

you have reached with respect to the intelligence community, that

it does, in fact, require a major transformation to provide the catalyst for change.

How important is it that this change occur this fall before we adjourn? I say this because as you well know, in the deliberation

part, if we say we need more deliberation then it becomes a prescription or a rationale for procrastination.

Governor KEAN. This, obviously, has been of tremendous worry

to us on the Commission. If we don’t act now, does it go over into

a lame duck? Does it go over past January? When does action happen? Because our concern is that we’re not the first commission

who has made thoughtful recommendations in this area. I mean,

this has been going on for 25, maybe 30 years.

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A number of the recommendations we’ve made have synthesized

things from people like Scowcroft and a number of others who have

made similar recommendations. Those recommendations have not

been implemented.

We believe that if our recommendations are not implemented in

a timely fashion that the American people won’t be safe, that our

recommendations are designed, each and every one of them, to

make people safer, and that, God forbid, you know, something happens again, and we’re 6 months from now and recommendations

that could have made the American people safer have not been implemented.

That is our great worry, and that is our concern as commissioners. That’s why we recognize we want due consideration, we

want thoughtful consideration; that’s what the Senate is all about.

But we also want timely consideration. That’s why we were so

happy with the hearings that were scheduled in August. We think

the sooner these recommendations or the variation of them that the

legislature in its wisdom chooses to make, the sooner that’s done,

the safer our constituents are going to be.

Mr. LEHMAN. In the 1947 Act, there were at least three major

fine-tunings in the subsequent years. The basic framework was

passed as one package, but it was recognized there was more that

needed to be done or refining what was done in the original Act.

So I think we all feel strongly that it’s important to have the intellectual debate about the framework. If we can get the framework

passed, then the flesh can be put on the bones further down the

road.

There are some things, for instance, which and how many of the

national intelligence centers—nonproliferation and Middle East

and whatever—that should await an NID getting his feet or her

feet on the ground and help, working with Congress over the next

couple of years, to flesh out the organization.

But if we don’t put the framework in place now, it is, I think,

undue delay that extends our vulnerability without question. Because al-Qa’ida is not going to give any further due deliberation.

They know what they’re doing.

Mr. HAMILTON. We believe it’s urgent that these recommendations or a variation thereof be adopted.

Now, you have a long list of problems in front of you. It may be

a bit presumptuous of us to say this is the most important. From

our perspective, we think it’s the most important thing on your

agenda. But you have a lot of very tough problems to resolve, in—

I read in the paper this morning—19 days or so before the election.

So we put it before you as an urgent matter. You’re the policymakers, and I think you have to make the judgments.

Senator SNOWE. Congressional reform, I know, Secretary Lehman, you referred to that, and I know the recommendations within

the report said it was equally important. How critical is it for that

congressional reform to be in tandem with the executive branch reform?

Mr. LEHMAN. I think it’s absolutely critical, because it’s one hand

clapping if you only do the executive branch this year.

Senator SNOWE. Thank you.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Hatch.

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Senator HATCH. Well, I want to thank all three of you and the

whole Commission for all of the very heavy lifting you have done.

This has been not only time-consuming, but intellectually exhausting as well. Then of course, you have had so many hearings and

so many people you have chatted with.

But let me just more specifically ask you just a couple of questions. What parts of any of these reforms specifically will improve

our ability to understand, penetrate and neutralize armed groups?

I mean, just add a little bit to that, is an organizational redrawing

of the community enough to address our weaknesses in facing

these armed groups?

Just one other aspect, what needs to be done to strengthen or rehabilitate our capabilities in the field? Do any of these bills address

our needs in those areas?

What further initiatives can be proposed by Congress that in

your opinion do not rely on organizational fixes?

Those are four questions that I think relate to each other; that’s

why I ask them all together.

Governor KEAN. To give you a very brief answer, Senator, we believe that good management will enable everything else, that if you

don’t have good management over the agencies or structures that

are a problem, then all the other things you want to do in the area

of intelligence are going to be problematic, and have been. I think

a lot of the failures are because of those problems.

There are a number of recommendations in our report, some of

them outside intelligence. For instance, we know that the terrorists

are most vulnerable when they travel. Well, that’s why we have a

whole series of recommendations in that area about biometric——

Senator HATCH. There’s a lot of people that argue that we have

had good management in the past and what changes to make this

so much more effective. I personally believe you are right, but I

just would like to—

Mr. LEHMAN. See, that’s the illusion, if I could just interject. We

talked earlier about the CIA director having authority to put together the budget. That’s not true at all. I mean, it’s true in form,

and people believe that that’s the case, but it’s not true in substance. All the DCI does is collate the submissions of 15 different

agencies and put it together—put it on top of the stack and move

it forward.

Senator HATCH. He doesn’t even do that, does he?

Mr. LEHMAN. Somebody does.

Senator HATCH. You’ve got maybe some consideration over 20

percent of the budget in the CIA Director. A lot of people didn’t

know that.

Mr. LEHMAN. The problem here is—and you are putting your finger on the key—it’s operations.

Why didn’t we penetrate these cells, not only in Afghanistan, but

here? It’s because process and bureaucracy has superseded output

and human initiative and judgment. Time and again during our investigations, we found that the response—why didn’t you, or why

wasn’t this carried out or why wasn’t that carried out?—it was because they had to get a legal brief, a legal document to allow them

to enter into discussions, et cetera, et cetera. It’s form over substance.

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Senator HATCH. There is a lot of interagency conflict, too.

Mr. LEHMAN. A lot of interagency conflict with nobody to arbitrate, with nobody to have the authority to say, ‘‘OK, we’ve heard

from CIA and DIA and we’ve heard from NSA, but here’s how we’re

going to do it’’ and removing the obstacles that we talked about

that were raised earlier about over classification and compartmentalization and nobody has the authority to do it. It links very

closely to the question of why nobody was held accountable, because there was nobody to hold them accountable. The FAA, you

could make a case that a dozen people should have been sacked

there, but who was going to sack them? There was nobody to provide that central accountability and authority, and hence the NID

is the missing link.

Governor KEAN. There are so many cases, Senator, we find in our

report. Moussaoui is maybe the most famous, because that information came up, discovered by the FBI, found out by the CIA, Director Tenet figured it was an FBI matter, so he did nothing. It never

got up to the head of the FBI, and we ran out of time.

Another example is 1998 when Director Tenet got it. He said,

‘‘All of a sudden, these people are really after us’’, and he declared

war in a statement. He declared war on bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida

and nobody knew it. Nobody knew it in any other intelligence agency. Nobody knew it even inside the CIA.

Senator HATCH. That was only one illustration.

Mr. Chairman, if I could just ask one other short question?

Chairman ROBERTS. Surely.

Senator HATCH. Section 301 of Chairman Roberts’ bill is an idea

that has been promoted by our colleague, Senator Feinstein, and

that is having an intelligence university where we train people outside of these respective agencies, perhaps, but nevertheless where

we have a training ground to begin to train our agents in the new

doctrines and practices to combat armed groups in particular.

Shouldn’t we do more than just ask for a study on this idea of

an intelligence university? What are your feelings on that?

Governor KEAN. Obviously, that’s a good idea. We didn’t talk

about it in the Commission, but it’s a good idea. I believe, frankly,

as a university president that as you all look in the education area,

we’ve got to encourage people to train people in other languages,

in other cultures.

When you can’t find people who speak Arabic, when you can’t

find people who understand the cultures in these various regions

when you’re trying to hire them, that doesn’t help us very much.

We’ve got such a wonderfully diverse population.

Senator HATCH. We do that now, but by having a university you

could really coordinate that.

Governor KEAN. I think a university is a good idea, but we already have a number of great universities and I think spending a

little money pushing some of these areas that are so important

would be helpful.

Senator HATCH. Well, thank you all. I appreciate your responses

today.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Feinstein, who will now speak on

behalf of her university.

[Laughter.]

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Senator FEINSTEIN. Not quite, but thank you very much, Mr.

Chairman. Thank you very much for your service, commissioners.

I wanted to react to something you said, and maybe in my reactions, then ask you to comment. The first was this timely consideration in view of the fact we have 19 legislative days left. We’re in

the heat of a Presidential election. Our President has taken a very

specific view on this subject, which you describe as ‘‘coming a long

way.’’

Be that as it may, Senator Hagel wrote an op-ed piece, with

which I very much agree. I think we have one chance to do this,

one moment in time, and we had better get it right. It would be

worse to rush and get it wrong. I have been with this idea of a national intelligence director for a long time—actually, the first one.

Every year I learn more. Every year I see more. Every year I realize how much more complicated it is.

You have brought the Congress along, and in that respect you

are really to be congratulated because it was a very lonely world

for a long, long time.

Something, Congressman Hamilton, you said, in reaction to Senator Warner’s inquiry about the organization chart, I don’t agree

with, respectfully—and I have great admiration for you—and that

is that the Deputy NID for defense is not inconsistent with the

ability to directly report to the President.

I don’t see that in your organization chart. I don’t see that line

of authority at all. It raises the question that, if we were to go with

the three Deputy NIDs, whether it would make sense to take the

Deputy Defense Intelligence NID out of that box, put him in a separate box, and draw it more clearly to the Secretary of Defense.

My concern has been the Secretary of Defense controls 80 percent of the budget. The head of the intelligence community, whoever that is, DCI, NID, whatever you want to call him, has to deal

with that consistently. Therefore, reprogramming, by its very nature in that structure—and we’re talking structure—is made much

more difficult.

So my thinking, just looking at this and just listening to you,

would be to take that one position outside that box, so you have

foreign intelligence, you have homeland intelligence, and you have

the direct link between the Secretary of Defense and the defenserelated agencies.

Now, let me tell you why. Senator Levin, I thought very eloquently, pointed how, you know, policy and intelligence follows.

The defense intelligence agencies weren’t wrong about virtually

anything in this that I can pinpoint, but the human intelligence

structure, wherever there was a conflict, they took position over the

land, so to speak. I think that organizationally is a big, big problem.

Now, I also think the only way you’re going to have an NID that

is not beholden to the top of the chart is if that individual has a

long-term appointment, and that’s something we have to come to

grips with, because whether it’s Gates, or McNamara, or Tenet,

they all are subject to the owner of intelligence, who is the President of the United States.

It’s a very powerful thing. I talked to enough people now to know

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rate that unless you have a completely separate identity, in my

view.

So I think, also, the best—this is just my view—the best chance

for a bill is, frankly, if this Committee can come together with a

bill. You’ve got chairman of the Defense Committee, the ranking

member of Armed Services, ranking member of Armed Services.

That’s a real problem. If you have Armed Services vote against any

bill, you’re not going to get a bill through.

Under the surface of this thing, there are a lot of tides and eddies running, and we all know that. I think we’ve got to handle this

question of defense, the Secretary of Defense and the defenserelated agencies in a different way than you have on this organizational chart.

Mr. HAMILTON. Senator Feinstein, the chart before you indicates

that the Deputy NID for defense intelligence does report up to the

national intelligence director. What the chart doesn’t show is that

the Deputy for defense does have a direct line to the Secretary of

Defense. That person is dual-hatted, in effect, and that’s the very

thing that Senator Rockefeller had suggested.

Senator FEINSTEIN. Well, let me ask you, then, could I request

that you submit—because there are more dual hats—could you

submit a new organizational chart, as you would see that?

Mr. HAMILTON. I understand how you might be misled just by

looking at this chart, because this chart just explains the national

intelligence director and the deputies under him and so forth.

But our intent would be that the Under Secretary of Defense for

Intelligence would serve as the Deputy National Intelligence Direc.

He or she would report to the National Intelligence Director, but

also report to the Defense Secretary as well.

Mr. LEHMAN. This is a precedent that has worked well in my experience in the Navy Department, as Senator Warner would attest.

The director of naval reactors is always a four-star admiral, since

Admiral Rickover’s time. He’s also a line Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy. The dual-hatting has worked very well for safety

issues, for nuclear waste, for quality control, for training.

He reports directly in a not dotted but solid line to the Secretary

of Energy. But 98 percent of his time and his responsibilities are

to the Secretary of the Navy. That is what we envisioned here with

this recommendation. The Deputy for Defense Intelligence would

be spending most of his time doing his defense responsibilities and

implementing the agreed national policy on intelligence, and the

NID would rule by exception. It’s a distinction that is an important

one, but the precedents are there and can work very well, we believe, in this case.

Senator FEINSTEIN. Then I would respectfully request that you

submit an organizational chart——

Mr. HAMILTON. Very good point.

Senator FEINSTEIN. That properly reflects this, because if I might

say this, respectfully, it is not believed by a lot of members.

Mr. HAMILTON. That’s a very good point. Thank you.

Mr. LEHMAN. That’s a very good point.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Mikulski.

Senator MIKULSKI. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

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To the members of the Commission, I too want to thank you for

your service and that of the staff. As we come up, now, on the anniversary or commemoration of September 11th, I think about my

own Marylanders who passed away that day. Sixty from Maryland

died that day, mostly at the Pentagon. The people of Virginia suffered far greater losses.

In my own state, 24 came from one county, Prince George’s

County. They were primarily African-American and primarily

women who happened to be in a financial clerical service unit that

day. So we think about them, and we think about what we could

do differently.

Your report, I just have to say, you did it with integrity, independence and intellectual rigor. Your staff and the way they wrote

the narrative, is compelling. The fact that you’re No. 1 on the New

York Times best seller list says how much the American people

want to know something about this and do something.

Now, I’ve looked at the 41 recommendations, and what I could

see is there are 16 the President can do right now by Executive

Order. Nine the President can do with funding through appropriations, like aid to Pakistan, stabilize Afghanistan.

When the President meets with his team and the Congress tomorrow, we can work on our appropriations now and do that. Of

the 16 that require congressional action, I think we can do it.

Senator Rockefeller and Senator Feinstein asked many of my

questions about the organization chart. I’m going to go to congressional reform since they did that pretty much on the lines I would

ask. If we would take the organizational chart—and, colleagues,

this goes to congressional oversight. I know Frist and Daschle have

appointed a committee, but they’re going to appoint a committee

when they don’t know what the executive branches are going to be.

If you don’t know what the executive branches are going to be, you

don’t know where it’s going to go in authorizing.

So my recommendation would be along these lines.

One, whatever is adopted through the executive branch, we then

say whatever has been adopted now becomes the Intelligence Committee. We just take this, and this becomes us. Are you with me?

That’s the diagram on page 412 with the amplification that Senator

Feinstein recommended.

This then goes to money. You had two recommendations: atomic

agency or giving us also appropriations. I’m an appropriator. I

know the senior leadership in appropriations. Just like DOD would

resist, so would the appropriators.

Mine might be a third way, which is that we have a subcommittee on intelligence in appropriations to reflect the authorizing. We have 13 subcommittees. We have one on the District of

Columbia. We have one for agriculture. Certainly, we could have a

subcommittee on intelligence, many of which would also be from

the authorizing committee itself.

There is precedent. For example, the State Department is under

Commerce, State, Justice. But Foreign Ops has its own subcommittee. So all of the foreign aid has its own subcommittee even

though we fund State differently. Right now, as we all know, this

goes through DOD, some slivers in State, Justice, Commerce, here

and there with the FBI.

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I can tell you, over there in appropriations, there is one person, while they’re working on $400 billion or $300 billion, looking at

this. So you have one staffer with all that other responsibility going

on at DOD Approps, which is enormous, and then there is this.

So we’re like microchips to them. So I wonder what you think of

the idea, perhaps, of exploring a subcommittee on appropriations,

that the authorizing committee reflect whatever changes are made.

Let’s just say for conversation, it’s this diagram. That, then, becomes the Intel Committee, and then there’s an Intel Appropriations.

Governor KEAN. I think that would be very much, in my mind,

within the spirit of our recommendations. What we’re after, basically, and we recommend ways to do it, but you know better than

we do, and that is to centralize authority within the Congress so

you get real oversight, so that the people who are looking at intelligence have the knowledge and the power to do it properly.

It’s the only area—you know, everybody else is overseen, because

of the press. They keep the pressure on. They’re part of the oversight. Intelligence, the press can’t get in on it. So you are the only

game in town. You’re the only real oversight the intelligence area

has. I think the kind of recommendation you make is very much

in the spirit of what we’re saying, ‘‘centralize it and give it power.’’

Senator MIKULSKI. Well, and then, failing that, for it to become

part of this Committee, it would be unprecedented. But I think I

was shocked when I came on the Committee—and I came on specifically as a reformer when signals intelligence, which is in my

state, the National Security Agency, often didn’t get very much attention—that 80 percent was in DOD and that we had very little

to say. And it was a shock.

So anyway, that would be one of the third ways that I would

have that we could accomplish reform. But failing that, I would

think that we would have to really consider some other way that

this Committee would exercise greater control over the appropriations to deal with many of the issues that were raised by Senator

DeWine. So that was that recommendation.

I see my time is up.

But, you see, what we want to do is provide oversight and not

get stymied in our own turf and entangled in it. You know, the reforms that fail the most are the ones of ourselves.

But thank you again. Because the three Rs that come out of the

Commission: Let’s reform, let’s put the money in the Federal checkbook with resources and then, let’s be relentless about it. Am I

right?

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Hagel.

Senator HAGEL. Mr. Chairman, thank you.

Gentlemen, I wish to add my thanks to you and the Commission

for the excellent work that you have done, the contributions you

have made to our country, which will be lasting. We recognize that,

as you have heard today and you have heard many times up here

on the Hill, how much we appreciate it.

I believe we do need to seriously restructure our intelligence

community. Your additions to this debate, recommendations, have

been important and will continue to be as we craft something here

meaningful, relevant and realistic. I know you have thought

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through this carefully, but actions always produce reactions, and

they also produce unintended consequences.

That’s why my colleague, Senator Feinstein, noted my op-ed in

The Washington Post a couple of week ago about caution, because

this is too critical to allow it to become hostage to a political process, to the momentum of politics. I know you all share that.

I think you also believe, as I do, that as serious as an organizational structure is, as accountable and important as it is, just moving around an organizational structure and boxes is not going to

make America safer.

Now, with that as the prelude, I have three specific questions,

specific to your recommendations. I would like to hear, first, how

much consideration you gave when you produced your recommendations to the culture and professionalism that is really the

essence of any organization. Management is important, absolutely.

Structure is important, absolutely.

But you don’t put top professionals in place overnight. You don’t

just create them. You produce them. You develop them, as all of

you know. So culture, professionalism, people, budgets to work

that, it takes years. Very important.

Second, as you have thought through this, at a time when our

intelligence is as important to this country than at any time since

World War II, if we go ahead and implement radical, fundamental

changes in our intelligence community, what impact will that have

on the day-to-day responsibilities of our intelligence gathering,

sharing, analysis that we must rely on every second of the day?

Will it inhibit it? Will it hurt it? will it jeopardize it?

The third area that I want to ask you about in regard to the previous comment: Terrorism is a very important dynamic of our intelligence process today, but it is not the only part of our intelligence

process. It is still vitally important to the security interests of this

country for our intelligence people to understand what’s going on

in all corners of the world, in geopolitical areas, military, economic,

energy.

Terrorism is a big part of it, but it is not the only part. So how

much consideration did you give that when you were thinking

about restructuring and coming forward with recommendations?

Thank you very much.

Governor KEAN. I’ll take a crack at a couple of them and then

my fellow commissioners will give more intelligent answers. We

gave a lot of thought to the culture and professionalism and talked

a little bit in the report about the need for that, particularly

human intelligence, the need to develop.

I was appalled, as an outsider in a sense looking at this for the

first time, when Director Tenet testified before us and told us it

would take 5 years to rebuild the CIA. You know, then you think

immediately, do you have 5 years? But we recognize how difficult

that is.

We believe that under our reforms the CIA, for instance, that

giving the CIA Director that job, instead of the other two jobs that

he now has to do as well, will enable that to happen faster. We’ll

have a better CIA because of it.

We considered the culture a lot and worried about the culture because some of the culture in these agencies is a culture of secrecy

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and a culture of secrecy even among agencies. So the fact that the

impulse was not to share, rather than share, was part of the culture.

We worried very much about the culture of the FBI, because the

old Edgar Hoover culture was break down doors. In law enforcement, you know, it wasn’t the kind of thing we need now from the

FBI, in addition to what they do already, which is really trying to

do investigations to disrupt these terrorist plots, and we worried

and talked about that on the Commission.

We believe that there will be some disruption when you make

changes. But we also believe, as a commission, that what is really

unacceptable is not to make changes, because what we have got

going now is not satisfactory in my mind and anybody’s point of

view.

We interviewed, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people who

have some expertise in this area. Nobody was satisfied with the

status quo. Everybody said you had to do change. You can argue

a little bit about what some of those changes ought to be. But everybody wants change. Nobody wants to keep the status quo.

The third point was——

Mr. HAMILTON. Well the third point—I can remember one. You

remembered two, Mr. Chairman.

The third point is other threats, other than terrorism. Of course,

that’s why we create these other centers. You have a national

counterterrorism center. We think the big national security threat

for a long time is terrorism. We put a lot of attention on that.

But we also recognize that the need for sharing of information,

the need for operational planning exists with regard to weapons of

mass destruction, narcotics and whatever the President and the

National Security Council would identify as the major threats to

the United States.

If I may make a comment on the culture, that’s a very tough one

and a very important one. I was thinking, as you were asking your

question about the intelligence community. There you really need

to emphasize diversity. We talk all of the time about the importance of human intelligence. I think all of us agree on the need to

strengthen that. But in order to penetrate the al-Qa’ida cells,

you’re going to have to have a totally different kind of intelligence

agent.

You cannot send a fellow from Nebraska or Indiana and expect

him to penetrate Usama bin Ladin’s cell. No matter how fluently

you might speak Arabic, you can’t do it. Those cells are too small.

They are too disciplined, family related and all of the rest of it.

So the culture has to change in many ways. It has to become

more professional. But it also has to become more diverse.

When I went to college, people studied German and French, and

then, a little while later, they studied Russian. Well, those languages aren’t going to do us any good with regard to al-Qa’ida.

You’ve got to speak 15 or 20 other kinds of languages. We need

people who can speak those languages fluently and penetrate those

cells. So culture is enormously important and we have to think of

it in different ways.

Mr. LEHMAN. The third, the one of disruption or your second

issue, yes, there will be some disruption, but we’re not talking

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about firing everybody in the intelligence community. People will

continue to do their jobs every day. The satellites will still go

around, the take will come down, and the analysts will continue to

analyze.

But people will be, you know, thinking about who is their next

boss, what new opportunities there are, because the purpose of this

is to create a new culture, a culture of more entrepreneurial rather

than more bureaucratic approaches to intelligence. Bureaucratic

approaches lead to group-think. A more entrepreneurial environment creates a culture of more creativity, imagination, the imagination that was lacking for 9/11.

So, yes, there will be disruption, but I think, net, it will be good

disruption, the kind of disruption that will create positive ferment.

Senator HAGEL. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, thank you.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Durbin.

Senator DURBIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Again, thank you all for joining us. I won’t repeat all of the lavish praise; just trust that it was part of the record before and remains my feeling that you have done a great service for the American people.

This long march of the members of the 9/11 Commission before

17 different venues on Capitol Hill is proof positive of two things—

your endurance and the enduring commitment of Congress to create overlapping, often muddled oversight when it comes to important issues like intelligence.

Secretary Lehman, I think you were right on when you suggested

that if we set about this awesome task of reforming the executive

branch and ignore reforming our own Congress and the way we

deal with oversight, it is one hand clapping. We’ve ignored the obvious. We’re pretty good at recommending changes for another

branch of government. We’re not quite as good at recommending

our own branch of government be reformed. So I hope we can meet

that task.

I want to address two issues, one which is somewhat self-critical

and the other which I believe may raise a question about the Commission and the way it handled its business.

Let me ask you about, first, the softer side of this report. People

have really focused on the wiring diagrams and the hard business

of fighting terrorism, but there is another side of this report which

I think has been genuinely downplayed and often overlooked, and

it should be taken very seriously.

You understood your mission and directive. It included some discussion of diplomacy, what the United States needed to do in the

world. One of the areas that you talked about was how we are

viewed by the Arab and Muslim world, and you were very specific.

Though we’ve seen in the last week that the face of terrorism in

Russia includes people who may or may not be associated with alQa’ida, you say in your report: ‘‘The enemy is not just terrorism,

some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is a

threat posed by Islamist terrorism, especially the al-Qa’ida network, its affiliates and its ideology.’’

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Then you talk about, to use a metaphor here, how we should

focus not only on draining the swamp but in trying to make certain

that less water is flowing into the swamp, that there are fewer terrorists being recruited in other parts of the world. How do we do

this? There have been some suggestions.

Now, let me ask you about your commission’s work, though. Because you had 19 public hearings and 160 public witnesses identified in your book here. The best we can establish, of the 160, only

three witnesses who appeared before the 9/11 Commission could be

characterized as either Arab or Muslim. Now that you have focused

it in and said that our terrorist threat is an Islamist threat, do you

feel you should have been more open to hearing from the Arab community and the Muslim community about the real challenge that

we face?

Governor.

Governor KEAN. We could always have heard from more people.

I believe if you take the whole list of people we interviewed, including people we interviewed in Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, that the numbers of people who

are Muslim or of Arab nationality will increase dramatically. I

would have to look at all the witness lists because we interviewed

over 1,000 people.

But your point is very well taken. We’ve got to study these people, we’ve got to understand them. The point we made that is so

very important is that—and Secretary Rumsfeld made it, actually.

He said, ‘‘You know, we can’t do it with the military,’’ he said, ‘‘not

if we’re creating these people faster than we can kill them.’’ In

order not to create them we’ve got to change, we believe, the way

the United States is viewed. We’ve got to change a number of our

policies.

We have to use public diplomacy in a much more realistic way.

We have to start educating our own citizens, particularly those,

again, who are going to deal in this area.

Senator DURBIN. Well, again, I’m not being overly critical.

Governor KEAN. No. I think your point is well taken.

Senator DURBIN. I think the burden falls on the Commission as

well as Congress to understand that in the world of using intelligence as our first line of defense against terrorism, we have to

view Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans as potentially our

most important allies instead of assumed adversaries from the

start. I think that that is a message which comes through in your

recommendations.

Governor KEAN. Senator, I just want to comment, because I told

this story to somebody else today. I had a cab driver in New York

who recognized me and started talking about the problem. He was

more articulate than most of the witnesses we had had from government, because his family had been Afghan immigrants 16 years

ago, believed in this country, loved this country and was frustrated

because he didn’t think we understood Afghanistan and moving in

the right way. We have those assets. We are the most diverse country in the world. We’re not using them.

Senator DURBIN. Our Chicago cab drivers are pretty good experts, too.

[Laughter.]

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Senator DURBIN. Now, since the Chairman is not listening, I’m

going to try to sneak in another question here, if I might.

One of the things you talked about——

Chairman ROBERTS. Without objection.

Senator DURBIN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I knew

you would be there.

One of the things you talked about here were civil liberties,

which is the other side of this balance sheet, to give government

the power it needs to protect us, but no more power than necessary. You, I think, strike the right balance, saying it’s the burden

of the government to establish why we should give up our freedoms.

Now, the President in one of his Executive Orders has created,

on August 27, a board on safeguarding American civil liberties. The

board is housed at the Justice Department, chaired by the Deputy

Attorney Ggeneral, the vice chair being the Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary and members of all high-ranking

government officials, the vast majority of them political appointees.

Let me ask you, the obvious criticism is why would we take people within government who are being given this authority, or using

this authority which may go too far in infringing on our civil liberties, to be the referees or officials to determine whether or not

the government has gone too far? Does this meet the spirit of your

recommendation of, as you say, a board within the executive

branch to oversee adherence to the guidelines we recommend and

the commitment the government makes to defend our civil liberties?

Governor KEAN. What the President did is inform a response to

the Commission’s recommendations, but we said in the report we

didn’t believe the board should be comprised exclusively of administration officials drawn from the agencies the board was created to

oversee.

Instead, we envisioned a board with members appointed directly

by the President, with the aim of including outstanding individuals

who can provide a more disinterested perspective, perhaps, on that

vital balance. Such a board may also, by the way, need explicit authority to obtain access to relevant information, including, by the

way, an understanding of classified information and the ability to

look at it. But we left a lot of the details, obviously, up to you to

structure.

Senator DURBIN. I understand why you did. Your broad recommendations are very important. I would just say, in follow-up,

that I think there should be more independence on this board, so

that instead of having as its chairman someone who is in the Justice Department and may be the subject of some review, it should

be a more independent source.

Thank you again for all that you’ve done. Thank you.

Governor KEAN. I don’t think we have any argument with that,

Senator.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Warner.

Senator WARNER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Does the Chair

wish to have a few questions in here?

Chairman ROBERTS. I’m going to mop up.

Senator WARNER. Well, I think we have had a very good hearing.

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Chairman ROBERTS. I thank the gentleman. I thank the distinguished chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Senator WARNER. Thank you, sir.

I want to just sort of ask a couple of questions here against this

background. We’re fortunate as a Nation not to have experienced

anything approaching the catastrophic consequences of 9/11, so you

have to assume that what’s in place today is doing a reasonable

job. The mission before the legislative branch, the Congress, and

the executive branch is to try and make improvements without degrading what’s working correctly. Is that a basic assumption, gentlemen?

Governor KEAN. Absolutely.

Senator WARNER. I think each of you have said that the President—and you have joined myself and many others in commending

him for taking the steps with Executive Orders and implementing

a number of things even before your commission report came out.

So the exclusive branch is moving out.

Now it falls upon the Congress. It’s far too early to discern any

consensus. We’ve got the Chairman’s bill, you’ve got other bills that

will be coming in. So we’re going to have quite a lot of activity

here, but in due course, you begin to get a synthesis of views.

But I’d just kind of in simplistic terms like to ask my old friend

and colleague, Secretary Lehman, what’s left if you take away all

the budget authority from DOD, all the hiring and firing authority,

and yet he is the largest consumer of intelligence—he or she, whoever the Secretary of Defense may be. Is the Secretary of Defense

left as just a payroll clerk?

Mr. LEHMAN. We’re recommending that, first of all, the budget

authority be done in conjunction with the Secretary of Defense for

the department——

Senator WARNER. It’s a partnership, much like it’s being done

now? I mean, from the way in which it’s being done now——

Mr. LEHMAN. Well, yes, it’s not that big a change from what the

theory of what’s being done now is, but the practice is very different. I mean, in theory, the DCI is submitting the budget and

doing the budget for the whole——

Senator WARNER. Correct.

Mr. LEHMAN. But that has never in my memory been the actual

case. What happens is that his clerks in the community management staff go around and collect up the books and stack them up

and send them to the Hill. There is virtually no real give and take

and argument about priorities and so forth. We are not by any

means recommending that budget authority and certainly not execution be taken away from the defense agencies. We’re talking

about sharing so that there is real——

Senator WARNER. Would the word be partnership?

Mr. LEHMAN. Partnership that if there is a real disagreement, it

goes to the President. Similarly for dual-hatting. While you were

gone, I used the example of your relationship with Admiral Rickover and mine with his successors as a condominium. I think probably the successors are a better example for my case.

Senator WARNER. I’m not going to get on that, because all my

time would be gone.

Mr. LEHMAN. That’s a dual-hatting.

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Senator WARNER. You don’t intend to leave the SecDef just as a

payroll clerk?

Mr. LEHMAN. No. Certainly not.

Senator WARNER. So there’s a strong voice in the budgeting.

Now how about the hiring and firing?

Mr. LEHMAN. Hiring and firing, the Secretary of Defense must

agree—they must agree on a new candidate, but we would recommend that either one can fire. Both are needed to hire, each separately to fire, but it is a definite sharing of——

Senator WARNER. Now let’s shift, then, to the CIA. I must say,

I am like you. When I came into the building 30 years ago that was

my initiation with the CIA. I have a very high personal regard for

their work through the years. You know as well as I that those

agents in various places in the world are taking risks commensurate with any individual in uniform in terms of the execution of

their missions.

I am for, frankly, strengthening the director of the CIA so that

it can be another voice in here that the President can hear if, for

some reason, he wants to get views other than the NID. So we’ll

see how that works out.

But under the current proposition that you put forward, what’s

left of the director? He’s clearly downgraded in his role within the

greater intelligence circles. Am I not correct?

Mr. LEHMAN. He is, first of all, not really downgraded. We are

recommending he stay as a level two, not be downgraded to level

three, that we believe and it’s our very strong view that the job of

revivifying both analysis and collection covert operations and the

trade-craft of intelligence of recruiting and training, which the

most recent DCI said would take another 5 years, that’s a full-time

job.

To try the to manage the rest of the community just doesn’t

make sense. So it’s a very important job. I think it would make a

lot of sense to put what you put in for the chiefs and the service

secretaries, the right of access to the President.

Senator WARNER. Thank you for mentioning that, because I am

contemplating doing that. I think there has got to be direct access

to the President when the second tier, as it is in your chart, feels

very strongly about a point. I’m going to look into that.

Lastly, gentlemen, each of you have a familiarity with government. We cannot give here in this opening hearing the total numbers of people involved in intelligence, but it’s well over 100,000.

I think we all recognize that. Eighty percent of that now is in the

DOD. Eighty percent of those people are actually on the Secretary

of Defense’s payroll.

If you start moving them around, that’s a lot of churning in

terms of the individual lives, getting adjusted to a new reporting

system, new framework of management. At the same time, this Nation is actively engaged in war with the overall terrorist network,

specifically in Iraq, specifically in Afghanistan, and we hopefully

will maintain such peace as we have on the Korean Peninsula.

But we cannot have too much internal turbulence at the same

time that this country has got to keep moving along. Now, how

would you like to see this phased in, over what period of time?

Maybe you, Congressman Hamilton.

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Mr. HAMILTON. Well, we think the big risk is if you keep it like

it is, because keeping it like it is didn’t work.

Senator WARNER. I don’t come from that standpoint. Let’s take

that off the table, keeping it like it is.

Mr. HAMILTON. Yes.

Senator WARNER. We are going to move toward—well, the President has already taken a number of initiatives. I’m confident the

Congress will be able to. Hopefully within this short legislative session, we can do some things.

I have always felt we can achieve some things in the balance of

this Congress, and we may have to leave to the next Congress

other parts of it.

Mr. HAMILTON. I think the line we want to try to draw, Senator,

is that the Secretary of Defense should have control, budget, personnel, over all of the intelligence that is necessary for the military. But he should not have control over national or strategic intelligence. Now, I understand that the line between those two is

not always clear.

Senator WARNER. It never will be. It’s not that someone is trying

to fuzz it.

Mr. HAMILTON. No. I think where we come down on the report

is that, in looking back, we feel that the Defense Secretary has control over an awful lot of intelligence that is not really military intelligence just because of his budget control and the personnel control that he has.

So in a sense, we want to try to balance that a little better. It’s

not just a matter of protecting the military—that’s terribly important—but we feel that the American people were not protected as

well as they should have been because of the way we have structured our intelligence community. We did not get to the policymaker the kind of intelligence the policymaker needs to protect the

American people. I think we want to be reasonable about this. We

recognize it’s a genuine problem and a difficult one. But that’s our,

at least, broad point of view.

With regard to the transition, the change, any time you make

major changes, you create some risks. We are at war, so we have

to be very, very careful in creating change. But we also have to be

careful that we not be frozen and not make any changes that are

necessary.

Senator WARNER. Can this be a two-stage process, stage one

within this Congress and a new Congress comes in this January

to——

Mr. HAMILTON. We have put forward a huge number of very important recommendations. I would be surprised, frankly, if it were

all done in one sweep.

Senator WARNER. I thank you for that. I share that view.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Rockefeller.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just

wanted to get you on record about three quick things and then ask

one more question.

I mentioned the intelligence reserve corps, and I don’t want to

just leave it hanging out there. We are in a position in the intelligence community where we have to shift people from South AmerVerDate 03-FEB-2003 12:10 Jul 13, 2005 Jkt 020731 PO 00000 Frm 00128 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6601 D:\DOCS\20731.TXT SSC1 PsN: SSC1
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ica, or Afghanistan, or whatever, to go suddenly to do another job.

The intelligence reserve corps, I think, is a very sensible suggestion

of having a back-up in time of surge needs. I would just be interested if the Commission would be willing to consider that.

Mr. HAMILTON. Well, Senator, we didn’t address it. The idea,

frankly, is new to me. I can only give you a personal feeling. My

personal view is that both that and the university idea make a lot

of sense.

Mr. LEHMAN. This is one of the reasons we’ve strongly recommended that the NID have overall personnel policy authority,

because if you look at the services, for instance, Naval intelligence

reserve covers virtually all of the stateside command centers on

weekends. They augment whenever there is a fleet exercise. There

are many of them working in the intelligence centers over in Iraq

today. They bring a leavening. They bring a different background.

There are doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs that are constantly coming in and fertilizing and taking new ideas. They have

a different attitude.

Every service chief, service secretary, would tell you that the intelligence reserves have been tremendously valuable to the service

intelligence effort. It makes all of the sense in the world to do the

same thing in the civilian intelligence community. Open the windows up. Bring more lateral entry. Bring more scholars and Silicon

Valley people in for 1-year, 3-year, 5-year, short tours——

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Or people who have simply recently retired.

Mr. LEHMAN [continuing]. ——to join the reserve corps and do

their weekends like they do in the military reserve.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Right.

Mr. LEHMAN. It makes a lot of sense.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Thank you. My second had to do

with the question I know Senator Levin is interested in, and that

is trying to make sure that independence, lack of politicization really is implanted—not just a theory, but is implanted.

That, my suggestion would be, would be through an ombudsman.

We know in the CIA that that ombudsman indicated that the pressure that was put upon analysts who came to him in the buildup

to the prewar WMD and all of that was greater than anything he

had seen in his 32 years.

So an ombudsman obviously is somebody that people will go to

and say, ‘‘I am being pressured, or I am being asked to change, or

I am being whatever,’’ or say, ‘‘Look, you just go back and do your

job and be strong and don’t give in,’’ depending upon what the nature of the request was.

But the ombudsman is important. It’s somebody who is objective,

who people can go to, to protect objectivity and the integrity of the

intelligence-gathering and intelligence-analyzing process. Is that

something you would be willing to consider?

Governor KEAN. Again, we didn’t talk about that.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. I know.

Governor KEAN. It’s in the spirit of our recommendations. Nothing, though, can substitute for the character in the individual who

is appointed to this position. Because if it’s not somebody of real

stature, everybody on down isn’t going to be that much——

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Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. That would have to be assumed.

Governor KEAN. Yes. So that’s why we wanted it Senate-confirmed, that’s why we wanted it such an important position, because your consideration of that individual and a really thorough

confirmation process may be the best guarantee of all——

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Excellent.

Governor KEAN [continuing].——of avoiding the kind of

problems——

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Excellent.

The last is the idea of the permanent red team, and that just

strikes me as important, again, on the business of it’s really important for the national intelligence estimate, frankly, it’s really important to make sure that the State Department’s INR or the

DOE’s intelligence gets in on aluminum tubes or whatever it might

be, and they’re left out because it’s controlled by a CIA process.

A red team, which would be used generally under the NID to

have a contrary view, not to be negative, but to have a contrary

view, to question, to say, ‘‘Well, what did the State Department say

about it? What did INS say about that?,’’ would that idea be something which you could contemplate?

Mr. HAMILTON. We always have to draw the distinction here between what the Commission did and did not consider, and what it

did and did not recommend. The Commission did not consider the

question of a red team.

The Commission is very sensitive, I think, to the question of

politicization and is open to recommendations like the red team or

the ombudsman which try to institutionalize the nonpoliticization

of intelligence. It makes sense from that standpoint.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Thank you. My time is up.

Chairman ROBERTS. Senator Levin.

Senator LEVIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to go back to the question of accountability because to me

it’s critical. We had the situation that you investigated and that

the Joint Intelligence Committees looked at, the pre-9/11 failures.

We saw that the CIA people failed to notify the INS or the FBI

that two al-Qa’ida people, that they knew were al-Qa’ida and they

knew had attacked the USS COLE and that they had tracked to

an al-Qa’ida meeting had entered the United States.

That is just clearly a failure inside of the CIA by CIA personnel.

When I challenged the CIA Director at a public meeting, if anyone

was going to be held accountable here, his answer was, ‘‘I bear responsibility,’’ which means nobody bears responsibility. It’s very

rhetorical, but it doesn’t mean much.

Now, that’s not a problem of one part of the intelligence community not doing—the failure to have one person on top of the intelligence community take action; that’s a failure inside the CIA.

Same with the FBI. In the Moussaoui case, the report goes to the

national headquarters that is supposed to be tracking al-Qa’ida,

tracking bin Ladin. The desk—I don’t have to tell you, folks, you

just wrote it up. We wrote it up. You have the Phoenix folks sending memos to the national office. Nothing happens. They fall in a

crack. That’s not a problem of nobody’s there to impose accountability on the failures of people to do their job. That’s inside their

own agency. That’s the point which Ron Wyden was making.

127

So we can talk about having someone in charge who can impose

accountability. We have someone in charge of the FBI. There has

been no accountability. We have someone in charge of the CIA. Inside their own agency there has been no accountability.

So it’s fine to do what you’re proposing. I don’t have any great

problem in giving greater powers, by the way, to a director of national intelligence. I don’t have any systemic problems or any big

issues with it if we do it right, if we take the time to do it right.

But I do have problems when you say that it’s the failure to have

that person in place that resulted in the people who didn’t do their

jobs before 9/11 being held accountable. I can’t buy that. I just

don’t buy it. If anything, we can make it worse, because if you have

one person above the FBI Director or CIA Director to whom they

can buck the issue of accountability, you can actually duck responsibility.

See, I hold the CIA Director for holding accountable the people

inside his agency who didn’t do their job. I can look right at him,

and I did in public. I said, ‘‘No one has been held accountable in

your agency.’’ And I did the same thing with the FBI Director.

But if you have someone above them to whom they can buck the

issue, I’m not sure that you focus accountability particularly. But

nonetheless, I disagree with the implication that you’ve got to have

someone above them to hold folks accountable where it’s inside an

agency where the failure to hold people accountable is.

Mr. LEHMAN. Since I made the statement, could I withdraw it?

I think you said it much better.

Senator LEVIN. Well, thank you.

On the budget issues, too, nobody’s been able to identify where

the inability to control the budget led to the failures before 9/11.

No one’s been able to do that. I know that Tenet said we’re at war.

Well, according to law, he develops the budget. Now you can say

that that’s not the practice, all they do is staple things. That’s pretty discouraging when you tell lawmakers that all people do is staple someone else’s budget when we’ve assigned him by current law,

the CIA Director, the responsibility of developing the annual budget for the National Foreign Intelligence Program.

That’s his responsibility. If he wants more money for HUMINT

or anything else, he can make that argument. I don’t know how

you can write a law clearer than that. You folks want to give a national intelligence director the budget power. He at least has it

when it comes to producing it at this point, unless we add the

words, ‘‘We really mean it.’’

Mr. HAMILTON. Senator, on your first point, you drafted our statute. You gave us the mandate. The mandate was to do two

things—No. 1, tell the story of 9/11; and No. 2, make recommendations for the future.

Senator LEVIN. Right.

Mr. HAMILTON. In the mandate was not the question of holding

individuals accountable.

Senator LEVIN. Except that accountability was pointed out in

your report as a critical issue.

Mr. HAMILTON. We followed the mandate that was given to us by

the statute.

Senator LEVIN. All right.

128

Mr. HAMILTON. If you had wanted us to make a list of the——

Senator LEVIN. No, we don’t, we don’t.

Mr. HAMILTON. Well, that’s what I’m hearing from you.

Senator LEVIN. No, no. That nobody’s been held accountable is

important. We’re not saying you should say who should be held accountable. The fact that there has been no accountability, it seems

to me, is critically important.

Mr. HAMILTON. No accountability of people?

Senator LEVIN. Yes, anyone being held accountable. It’s not up

to you to say who should be held accountable.

Mr. HAMILTON. OK. Well, we’re in agreement there, then.

Governor KEAN. Senator, we asked some of the same questions

you’re asking, and we were told that senior management is still

looking at the IG findings.

Senator LEVIN. Thank you. Well, the FBI is done with theirs,

though.

There is one other issue, and that’s the NCTC, and I want to get

to that issue, because under your recommendations, you propose

that the national counterterrorism center not only should perform

joint planning, but in your words the plans would assign operational responsibilities—operational responsibilities—to lead agencies such as State, CIA, FBI, Defense and its combatant commands.

I’ve got real problems with that. I think Senator Warner raised

this issue earlier today, although I wasn’t able to listen very carefully, and I wish I had, to what his statement was. But I think he

made reference to this.

Whether he did or not, I have real problems with any national

intelligence director being able to assign an operational responsibility to a combatant commander. That is an act of war. An operational responsibility could be we want you to capture somebody or

kill somebody in a foreign country. That is a huge change in our

law.

Mr. HAMILTON. That is not just a military question, however. If

the order is to capture Usama bin Ladin or to kill him, it certainly

has military implications to it. But it is a huge question with regard to counterterrorism policy overall.

Senator LEVIN. I agree. I agree with you.

Mr. HAMILTON. It is a decision that ought not to be made just

by the military authorities. That is a political decision of the highest order.

Senator LEVIN. I couldn’t agree with you more. That’s where it

is now. It’s a political decision of the highest order right now. But

under your proposal, you would give the head of the national

counterterrorism center the power to assign an operational responsibility. It’s not just planning you’re talking about. It’s an operational responsibility to a combatant commander, and I think

that’s way beyond——

Mr. LEHMAN. Well, it’s more to an agency rather than a specific

element of the agency.

Senator LEVIN. It says ‘‘and its combatant commands.’’

Mr. Lehman. Well, the combatant commands, of course, would be

under the command of the Secretary of Defense. There is no effort

to undermine the authority over that combatant commander of the

Secretary of Defense.

129

One of the cases that was in mind was, of course, the issue of

the armed Predator, where it was a hot potato being tossed back

and forth. Neither Defense nor CIA wanted it. They didn’t want to

pull the trigger. They didn’t want trigger authority. There was nobody there to say, ‘‘You’ve got responsibility for the armed Predator.’’ It’s that kind of case. Everything that we’re recommending

here is to be done under the existing authorities of Title 10 and

Title 50.

We certainly don’t want an NID going to war with an operational

commander. That is not the intention.

Thank you.

Mr. HAMILTON. Remember that the operational plan is developed

by the national intelligence director, but the chain of command, of

course, goes to the President. The President would approve those

things. The execution of the plan would remain, in your case, with

the Defense Department.

Senator LEVIN. It was the assignment of responsibility.

Mr. HAMILTON. I understand that. That’s part of the overall operational planning. I can see your difficulty there. But I am pointing

out that that’s not the final level. It goes up.

Mr. LEHMAN. Yes, and it’s also the analogy to the Joint Staff. I

mean, the Joint Staff kind of decides to recommend to the Secretary of Defense who is going to be the operational commander.

This is not line authority by any means. This is planning authority.

Senator LEVIN. It sounds like more than planning authority. But

thank you for clarifying.

Mr. LEHMAN. Well, it could be clarified, certainly.

Senator LEVIN. Thank you.

Chairman ROBERTS. Has the Senator finished?

Senator LEVIN. Yes. Thank you very much.

Chairman ROBERTS. I have about four questions that I think either person can answer. Rather than going down and doing a question, then you respond, I think I’m just going to make this a rambling rose and then you can make any comment that you might.

I think this idea about the Director of Central Intelligence and

authority has provided some confusion. I said in my opening comment, simply put, ‘‘the structure of the U.S. intelligence community

is defective’’. The so-called Director of Central Intelligence—not

CIA Director—lacks authority, in statute and in practice, to effectively manage the intelligence activities of the United States. The

organization of the intelligence community, with a substantial portion falling under the direct control of the Secretary of Defense prevents the DCI from exercising even those authorities that are

granted under the National Security Act.

Now, I’m not trying to perjure anybody here, whether it’s the Department of Defense or whether it is the Director of Central Intelligence. But he does not effectively control the creation of the National Foreign Intelligence Program. He lacks the ability to transfer

or dismiss the intelligence community personnel. He cannot unilaterally direct any transfer of National Foreign Intelligence Program

funds. He cannot mandate intelligence sharing, data fusion or create a community-wide information technology infrastructure.

I think this is a flawed design. Now, you’ve recommended keeping the day-to-day control of the intelligence community agencies

130

right where they are today, in the heads of the agencies that will

continue to report to the same Secretaries the day after the reorganization is initiated.

The only operational agency that would change in terms of leadership is the CIA. In a management layer on top of the agencies,

the Commission places dual-hatted deputies designed to mirror

where or how intelligence is gathered and processed. This comes

under domestic and foreign and defense.

Now, I think that the distinctions between the domestic, foreign

and defense intelligence just do not exist as of today’s world. In

fact, I think these concepts sometimes cloud what the real dividing

line in the world of intelligence is, and that’s national intelligence

and tactical intelligence or, put another way, military intelligence.

Now, under your recommendation, the control of national intelligence, other than budgetary and personnel decisions, would fall to

the same entities and reinforce the alleged distinctions between domestic, foreign and military intelligence. I would just say if you’re

not in charge you’re not going to have any accountability.

Would organizing the intelligence community along functional

lines—you take collection, you take analysis, you take research and

acquisition, and, yes, you take tactical—under a national intelligence director who not only controls the budget and personnel of

the community but also control the day-to-day operations of agencies through empowered assistants also meet your recommendations for a strong national intelligence director?

Obviously, I would hope the answer would be yes. Now, I said

I was going to ask, after this rambling rose, you to respond. That’s

one of the questions you might want to respond to.

Now, if the national intelligence director is given full budget authority from budget creation to execution but he cannot control the

actual operations of the National Security Agency, the National

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office

and other intelligence elements, will he be able to effectively exercise that budget authority?

By the way, the NSA and the NGA and the NRO only have really one consumer, and that is the military. They are going to

produce for that consumer, regardless, in regards to the line authority that they have.

I’m concerned because this Committee’s history of oversight suggests that without real operational control over the intelligence

agencies, the national intelligence director will have budget authority that can only be exercised on an annual basis.

How do we give the new national intelligence director real authority and control over the intelligence agencies without really

giving him actual line management and control? That is basically

the same question I asked you as No. 1, so really that’s just the

same question.

If a national intelligence director does not have authority to actually direct the day-to-day operations of the CIA, the National Security Agency and the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism Divisions or other intelligence collection agencies, who is in

charge of implementing the tasking orders of the National Counterterrorism Center?

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If the National Counterterrorism Center and the national intelligence director must rely on the heads of the intelligence community agencies to implement their decisions to task collection and

analysis as well as execute operation, is budget and personnel control the only means by which they can control operations? How is

this different from the current management construct where the

DCI must ‘‘beg, borrow and steal’’ to ensure that his directives and

his policies are implemented?

That’s why we planted the flag in regard to a bill that has been

deemed by some as radical and others as bold, not as many bold

as radical, but we’re gaining on it.

You do it by function. You do it by collection, by analysis and

also by the research and the acquisition and then by tactical.

Under the tactical you obviously have the Under Secretary of Defense to be the Secretary’s person to safeguard that tactical intelligence. Then you have a four-star to be the liaison with the NID.

So all of those questions are more or less the same. My real concern is, if you just give it budget control and authority without the

operational control, you are dual-hatting again, and we are right

back in the same situation.

Now, feel free to take that rambling rose and snip it off at the

head and see what’s wrong with it. Because the NID train is coming. It’s on the track. It’s what kind of a NID that we have. Now,

I don’t know if it’s going to Fulsom Prison or it’s an orange-blossom

special.

[Laughter.]

Chairman ROBERTS. It better be an orange-blossom special for

full control of the NID, or you’re not going to get the control to

make the decisions that we’re trying to get that NID to make.

Mr. HAMILTON. Well, Mr. Chairman, you have raised some very

difficult questions, and I guess my plea would be that we have an

opportunity to look at them a little more carefully. You create here

the assistant national intelligence directors along functional lines.

Chairman ROBERTS. That is correct.

Mr. HAMILTON. You described it yourself. It’s a very bold move.

It’s a lot bolder than we made in the Commission.

Chairman ROBERTS. When we did that, I said—and pardon the

interruption. You know, I never really thought we would go right

up to the vote, but that’s what we are doing at 5:30. I apologize,

especially for your patience and your perseverance, But I asked

people to step back from the forest. I said, ‘‘all right, don’t pay any

attention to agencies. Don’t pay any attention to turf. Don’t pay

any attention to committees. Don’t pay any attention to boxes.’’

What is wrong, then, with trying to create a national intelligence

service by function?

Those people who do the collection, you’re under straight-line authority. Those people who do the analyzing, same thing. Those people who do the research and acquisition, same thing. Those people

on tactical, obviously, that stays over in the Defense Department.

I might add with a $400 billion budget, that certainly gives the

Secretary of Defense more authority than being a payroll master.

By function, those that do it best, and time after time, they have

come before this Committee and said, ‘‘We do not have the authority,’’ or ‘‘We need the priority changes that we really ask you for.’’

132

Because of the fractured way that we operate up here those don’t

happen until you get a supplemental. So why not then go by function and let the very best people who do collection do that, the very

best people who do the analytical job do that and also the research

and the acquisition, and then do what the Secretary of Defense

does best in terms of tactical, but under an assistant NID that does

give them full-line authority?

Mr. HAMILTON. I understand the point. You pull out all of these

agencies from the DOD, and you stick them under the national intelligence director.

Chairman ROBERTS. To serve the DOD and enable them to do the

job better in doing it. The same thing with the CIA. We are enabling the CIA to do a better job than they are currently constructed. We don’t demolish the CIA, we enhance their ability, the

people that work for the CIA, God bless them, to do a better job,

because then they have the authority they have been asking for

ever since I have been on the Committee.

Mr. HAMILTON. Maybe the question is how much change can the

system tolerate. I don’t know whether it’s correct to say consciously, but we certainly kept in mind throughout that we wanted

our recommendations to be achievable and pragmatic.

Now, you instructed your staff in a very different manner, ignoring a lot of these turf questions, as it were, according to your comments a moment ago. The quick answer is, we simply didn’t consider the kinds of changes that you put into your bill with regard

to the National Security Agency and the NGA and the NRO and

all the rest of them. We just didn’t look at it that boldly.

What we said was that the NID needs to control the budget of

these groups, and we thought that that was sufficient. We did not

recommend pulling these agencies out of the DOD because we

thought that was too much of a change.

Chairman ROBERTS. But at the same time, I think the public

statements by General Clapper and General Hayden, indicating

they would not be ill-served by a national intelligence director and

that basically their product will go to the basic consumer, which is

the DOD, all we’re doing is re-ordering from an organizational

standpoint line item authority that everybody has been asking for

for 8 years and hasn’t got it.

I’m afraid if you just give it budget authority, you’re only halfway there. It’s going to be dual-hatted, and we’re going to be right

back here, I don’t know what timeframe, saying how come this

doesn’t work.

Now obviously, I am making strong views because we decided to

move the debate, if we could, over to what I think is real reform.

But that is also subject to a lot of debate and a lot of maybe definition.

I don’t see anybody else. Senator Rockefeller, do you have anything else to say after my rambling rose?

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. I can’t top it.

Chairman ROBERTS. I think the answer was no.

I don’t know if anybody else wants to respond to my comments

or not. If not, we want to thank you for your patience, your perseverance and your leadership. We’re going to persevere; we’re going

to get this done.

133

I might add that this bill that we’re going to introduce, you

know, myself and the other seven, it is not written in stone. Nobody’s coming down from, you know, ‘‘Mount Intelligence’’ with a

tablet saying that this is written in stone. We are very flexible, and

we are working with the Governmental Affairs Committee and the

Armed Services Committee and the administration, and we want

to work with you as well.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Mr. Chairman.

Chairman ROBERTS. Yes.

Vice Chairman ROCKEFELLER. Can I just ask one last request of

the three distinguished panelists in front of us?

More than anything—and the Chairman and I have discussed

this, and he agrees with me on this and I agree with him—more

than anything, what I really feared when I opened up my statement saying I hope we get right down to it in September, I fear

that because of the season that we’re in, that we’re going to have

a series of what I would call dilatory constitutional amendments

and votes on you know what which are going to take up our time

in September. You know, in October we get out. Seventeen more

legislative days to go. This can be done.

It is very interesting to me that when you said that—I think it

was you, Chairman Kean, when you said that people have a right

to decide how they’re going to vote—let’s make it just generally—

based upon what the Congress does, that’s going to have a lot to

do with what it is that we’re spending our time on in September.

I just say we had better be spending our time on intelligence reform, not on rehashing constitutional amendments and things and

votes which we’ve taken many times.

Chairman ROBERTS. I might only add in regards to Mr. Lehman’s

comment on one hand clapping—sounds like a rap song or something—we’ve got a 22-member task force to try to figure that out.

Now, I’m not sure 22 senators could even decide when to adjourn

let alone do this.

You’re talking about a sheep-and-cattle war. You’re talking about

Zane Grey, to the last man. You’re talking about authorizers and

appropriators. You pull that string on the Appropriations Committee, Lee can tell you, wow, that’s really something. I hope we

can fix this, and I do thank you for asking us prior to your report

on what we think.

But we have 22 people working on that. Jay and I have promised—pardon me—the distinguished Vice Chairman and I have

promised that we will try to make this Committee, which under

your recommendation is supposed to be the most independent,

strongest voice for congressional oversight on intelligence, but

which now has the least amount of power, a player. We thank you

for that.

Governor KEAN. Thank you.

Mr. HAMILTON. Thank you.

Mr. LEHMAN. Thank you very much.

[Whereupon, at 5:33 p.m., the hearing adjourned.]

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