INTELLIGENCE Senator offers reform plan

The proposal would reorder the CIA, the lawmaker from Kansas said.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Officials reacted warily to a proposal by key Republican senators to transfer the nation's major intelligence gathering from the CIA and the Pentagon to control by a new director.
The warmest response, in fact, came from the camp of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. His national security adviser, Rand Beers, welcomed the plan and described it as very similar to Kerry's.
But even Beers said the proposal needed bipartisan support and leadership from President Bush, whom he said was "resisting any real changes."
The White House was less committal about the proposal, announced unexpectedly Sunday by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., on CBS' "Face the Nation."
"We look forward to reviewing the details of Senator Roberts' proposal," said White House spokesman Brian Besanceney. "We have taken nothing off the table."
Intelligence officials, speaking anonymously because of the political sensitivity, called the plan a step back from greater interagency cooperation. One said that rather than eliminating barriers between agencies, "it smashes them apart."
Roberts offered the most sweeping reorganization proposal by anyone since the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks called for major changes. He acknowledged that details had yet to be shared with the White House or Senate Democrats.
"We didn't pay attention to turf or agencies or boxes" but rather to "what are the national security threats that face this country today," Roberts said of the proposals supported by eight Republicans on the intelligence committee. "I'm trying to build a consensus around something that's very different and very bold."
Debate
But Roberts immediately ran into resistance from a committee Democrat, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, interviewed with him. "It's a mistake to begin with a partisan bill no matter what is in it," Levin said.
The Sept. 11 commission called for a new national intelligence director with power to force the nation's many agencies to cooperate.
So far, the debate has focused on how much power to give that official, rather than on retooling existing agencies.
Most Democrats support the commission's view that the new director should have authority over hiring and spending by the intelligence agencies. Bush has endorsed creating the position but has not said what powers it should have.
Roberts would put the CIA's three main directorates -- Operations, which runs intelligence collection and covert actions; Intelligence, which analyzes intelligence reports; and Science and Technology -- into three new, separate and renamed agencies, each reporting to a separate assistant national intelligence director. It also would remove three of the largest intelligence agencies from the Pentagon.
Although the measure would essentially dismantle the CIA, Roberts said in a paper he released: "We are not abolishing the CIA. We are reordering and renaming its three major elements."
"No one agency, no matter how distinguished its history, is more important than U.S. national security," the paper said.
Changes
Last week, acting CIA Director John McLaughlin, a career agency employee, urged Congress to move carefully and argued there had been dramatic improvement since Sept. 11 in the sharing of information by intelligence agencies.
A congressional aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there would be no CIA director in the new structure.
Equally drastic changes were proposed for the Pentagon.
The nation's largest spy agency, the National Security Agency, which intercepts electronic communications around the world, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes satellite pictures, would be removed from the Pentagon and put under direct control of an assistant national intelligence director for collection.
Separate agencies
The Defense Intelligence Agency's human intelligence collection activity and CIA's former directorate of operations would become two separate independent agencies reporting to the same assistant national director for collection.
This assistant director also would have direct line control over FBI counterintelligence and counterterrorism units, although they would continue within the FBI administratively and would still be subject to attorney general guidelines.
The Pentagon's huge National Reconnaissance Office, which operates spy satellites, would work under an assistant national intelligence director for Research, Development and Acquisition. That same assistant would also run the CIA's former directorate of science and technology as an independent agency.
Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld urged caution in restructuring intelligence.
"We would not want to place new barriers or filters between military combatant commanders and those agencies when they perform as combat-support agencies," he said.
Perhaps mindful of that warning, Roberts' plan would create a separate assistant national intelligence director for military support and a four-star director of military intelligence who would run Defense Department tactical intelligence units and report directly to the defense secretary.