HOW SHE SEES IT Competition is crucial in intelligence gathering

By PHYLLIS OAKLEY
WASHINGTON POST
You can't talk about a national intelligence director, or intelligence czar, without understanding the structure beneath such a job or where the money for intelligence goes. In my experience in government, people pay attention only to people who control resources with real, not nominal, authority.
Our national intelligence structure was set up to be competitive -- to encourage independent analysis from different agencies in hopes such competition produces better judgments about how to act on the intelligence we have. So, for example, the work of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) would compete with the CIA's or Defense Intelligence Agency's. Professionals from each agency would note differences in analysis and, by investigating and resolving them, come to a better understanding. When they aren't worked out, differences must be explained, all the way to the very top, and not papered over. With an intelligence czar and a unified intelligence center, the system would lose the competitiveness that's been an important element of its successes until now.
What works
Not everything about the present situation is bad. On the question of whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, INR did better than everyone else. It's just that no one listened. Whatever structure is set up, the principle of competitive analysis, as well as a system in which people can argue and disagree, must be preserved. And those people need to be heard by the national security adviser or the president. The relationship between an intelligence czar and a president needs to be a personal one. Look at President Clinton's first CIA director, James Woolsey. He never saw Clinton, which made it difficult for intelligence to inform policy.
It may seem paradoxical, but the only thing we need as much as competitiveness among agencies is coordination, especially if we go along with the commission plan to maintain separate agencies. The 9/11 commission's report made it clear that coordination was strikingly lacking three years ago, and that was at the root of our intelligence failure. For example: Before Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA had information about some of the hijackers, but they weren't on the Immigration and Naturalization Service watch list for visas. Having a joint coordination center might have helped, but having a Cabinet-level overseer wouldn't have solved that problem. Real coordination isn't going to come from the top -- it has to be encouraged at a lower level.
All these things need to be thought about -- and urgently. But there ought to be real discussion about how any reconfigured intelligence structure would work. The thought that the president is just going to adopt all these things -- especially in an election year -- is just wacky.
XOakley, former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, spent a quarter century in the U.S. Foreign Service.