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Guest Commentary June 7, 2002
Reorganizing the U.S. Intelligence Community
The Honorable Dianne Feinstein
Whatever the other lessons of the inquiry into the September 11th attacks, one thing is perfectly clear, as President Bush himself has declared, we need to better coordinate our intelligence and anti-terrorism efforts.
The President's proposal announced yesterday focuses mostly on homeland security and I am concerned that it does not do enough to address the structure of our intelligence community.
The critical policy and resource decisions which the President's proposed Homeland Defense Agency will only be as good as the intelligence which informs those decisions. Put bluntly, without good intelligence our Homeland Defense will likely fail.
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Over the past months, I have become increasingly concerned that the fundamental structure of the intelligence community is deeply flawed and that we need legislation to repair that structure.
In particular, the lack of a strong, effective and independent head of the Intelligence Community, unencumbered with other duties, has resulted in an intelligence community that is fragmented and uncoordinated and, as a result, not as effective as it can and must be.
The legislation I will be introducing will create a new Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to lead the Intelligence Community and a Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DCIA) to serve as head of the CIA.
This would remedy what I believe to be a fundamental problem in the organization of our Intelligence Community: one person is, under current law, expected to perform two jobs: head of the Intelligence Community, and head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
I do not believe it possible for one person to perform these two functions at the same time and do them well. As a practical matter, the demands on the time and attention of any person, no matter how skilled in management, are necessarily overwhelming. Running the intelligence community and running the CIA are both important enough to be full time jobs.
Structurally, there is an inherent conflict between the two roles, for what is good for the intelligence community is not necessarily good for the Central Intelligence Agency, and vice versa.
Finally, even if one person could handle both jobs and reconcile the inherent conflicts, there would remain the perception that he or she is favoring either the community or the Agency.
This proposal should not be seen as a criticism of the current head of both the Intelligence Community and Central Intelligence Agency -- the problem is not George Tenet; it is the positions which he occupies.
I believe the solution is relatively simple -- enact legislation that would require the head of the Intelligence Community and the head of the CIA to be two different people.
Changes such as this have been proposed and debated for years. The events of September 11 underscore the urgency for such changes.
Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, is a U.S. Senator from California. The above column has been adapted from a statement Sen. Feinstein issued, June 7, 2002. To contact her, Click Here.
The above column has been distributed by PoliticsOL.com.
