HOW HE SEES IT Should we fear a Master Spy?

By JOHN HALL
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who did not like the idea of an all-seeing intelligence czar, warned that Congress was creating the most powerful post in government -- perhaps in the world -- next to the presidency. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., associated himself with that concern as the intelligence reform bill went to the White House last week.
The bill was a step that a few old national security and intelligence hands took with trepidation but knew could not be postponed. The 9/11 Commission made such an effective case for the consolidation of all intelligence-gathering resources under one tent that saying "no" was not an option.
Still, a Director of National Intelligence will need to be chosen and watched with more vigilance than any other presidential appointee, Stevens and Warner agree.
Stevens, the Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, said he knows of no other government in the world with an intelligence chief who will have such an array of geo-strategic powers than those that will be at the new DNI's fingertips. And Warner, the Armed Services chairman, promised legislation to cut the new director's powers if he abuses them.
Turf protection
Official Washington was blowing all this off as turf protection as the two powerful committee chairmen maneuvered to protect the Pentagon from losing any further ground to the new spymaster, yet to be named. Although the intelligence bill is 500 pages long, many of the details are left to be worked out in day-to-day practice and a lot will depend on the personality and drive of the new director.
Who it could be has set tongues wagging all over the Washington cocktail circuit. The list ranges from outsiders like former Gov. Tom Keane of New Jersey, the Republican moderate who was co-chairman of the 9/11Commission, to the current CIA director, former Rep. Porter Goss of Florida. Even Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., has been mentioned.
Bush has filled other super-jobs, like Homeland Security secretary and the ambassador to Iraq, with relatively soft-spoken people -- Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania and former U.N. ambassador John Negroponte.
The concern being raised by some spy experts is exactly opposite raised by Warner and Stevens. The nation may be adding another layer of intelligence bureaucracy at the top that will isolate the new director and make him a hollow spymaster, raised above the real work of tracking Al-Qaida and the terrorist networks.
Who knows how it will work out? But it's hard to see how anyone with this much money to spend will be an empty shell for very long.
The DNI will be in charge of a $40 billion budget divided among 15 agencies, which include the CIA, the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine and Coast Guard intelligence services, Homeland Security and Treasury intelligence services, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.
Those represent a lot of dossiers and files on firms, groups and individuals here and abroad.
The assets at the new spy czar's command include communications intercepts and eavesdropping, as well as satellite imagery and clandestine intelligence. Unlike the existing CIA director, he will have all this work product at his fingertips in a concerted effort to make sure that 9/11 never happens again. In addition, the bill creates a new FBI domestic intelligence office that in time will generate more files.
Blunders
This is an enormous concentration of resources. The commission and its supporters intended it to be so. There have been blunders. The intelligence community failed to connect the dots that would have exposed the 9/11 plot before it happened. Then the CIA led the country into the war in Iraq on the false pretense of weapons of mass destruction.
Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat and a calm voice of moderation on the 9/11 Commission, argued effectively that the model for the intelligence bill was the Goldwater-Nichols bill which brought the nation the concept of unified commands for the military. Instead of 15 separate "stovepipes" for each spy agency of the United States, the commission decided there should be just one.
So this new Master Spy -- the DNI -- has been created. Unification of intelligence is a work in progress. The hope is that the cure is not worse than the disease.
X John Hall is the senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.