Overhauling Intelligence

Mike McConnell

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007

Summary:  Sixty years ago, the National Security Act created a U.S. intelligence infrastructure that would help win the Cold War. But on 9/11, the need to reform that system became painfully clear. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is now spearheading efforts to enable the intelligence community to better shield the United States from the new threats it faces.

Mike McConnell is Director of National Intelligence of the United States.

INTELLIGENT REFORM

Before World War II, the United States' defense, intelligence, and foreign policy apparatus were fragmented, as befitted a country with a limited role on the world stage. With U.S. entry into the war, interagency collaboration developed out of crisis-driven necessity. Wartime arrangements, although successful, were ad hoc. And after the war, President Harry Truman and Congress realized that the United States could not meet its new responsibilities without a national security structure that rationalized decision-making and integrated the intelligence and military establishments. It was against this background that on July 26, 1947 -- 60 years ago this summer -- Truman signed the National Security Act, a seminal piece of legislation for the U.S. intelligence community that laid the foundation for a robust peacetime intelligence infrastructure.

With the proper tools and public support and the help of allies, the United States built the world's premier intelligence establishment. It put spy planes in the sky, satellites into space, and listening posts in strategic locations around the world. It also invested in its people, developing a professional cadre of analysts, case officers, linguists, technicians, and program managers and trained them in foreign languages, the sciences, and area studies.

But by the time the Cold War ended, the intelligence establishment that had served Washington so well in the second half of the twentieth century was sorely in need of change. The post-Cold War "peace dividend" led to a reduction of intelligence sta/ng by 22 percent between fiscal years 1989 and 2001. Only now is sta/ng getting back to pre-Cold War levels. The National Security Act mandated that information be shared up the chain of command but not horizontally with other agencies. At the time of the act's passing, little thought was given to the need for a national-level intelligence apparatus in Washington that could synthesize information from across the government to inform policymakers and help support real-time tactical decisions. That reality, coupled with practices that led to a "stovepiping" of intelligence, arrested the growth of information sharing, collaboration, and integration -- patterns that still linger.

All these shortcomings have made the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (IRTPA) and the creation of the post of director of national intelligence (DNI) timely and appropriate but, by themselves, insufficient. Indeed, these measures must be only the beginning of a larger reform. The state-sponsored terrorist groups that threaten the United States are accompanied by an ever larger number of nonstate actors moving at increasing speeds across geographic and organizational boundaries. These new actors blur the traditional distinctions between foreign and domestic, intelligence-related and operational, strategic and tactical. To respond, Washington must forge a collaborative approach to intelligence that increases the agility of individual agencies and facilitates the effective coordination and integration of their work.

BRINGING DOWN WALLS

The post of DNI was created in 2005 to transform and modernize intelligence institutions, rules, and relationships to meet today's intelligence needs. Since 1947, new threats to U.S. national security have appeared, new missions have been developed, and new intelligence agencies have come into existence. A national intelligence authority was needed to focus, guide, and coordinate all the United States' 16 intelligence agencies to better provide timely, tailored intelligence support to a wide range of users with different, and often competing, requirements. The National Security Act sought to unify U.S. military and foreign intelligence efforts, but it did not envision or provide for today's requirement to integrate intelligence and law enforcement. Our main challenge in doing this is to strike the right balance between centralized direction and decentralized execution so that the O/ce of the DNI does not just end up being another layer of bureaucracy on top of the existing structures.

Ensuring the integration of foreign and domestic intelligence collection and analysis, as the 9/11 Commission recommended, is one of the most important responsibilities given to the O/ce of the DNI -- and a vital component of striking that balance. How to do this while respecting and protecting the rights Americans hold dear has been among the most difficult challenges facing the intelligence community. The difficulties have been compounded by the need to operate under the rigid barriers put in place by the National Security Act. Under the act, U.S. intelligence capabilities involve four distinct areas of responsibility: supporting the president, engaging in clandestine activities abroad in support of national policy goals, protecting the United States against Soviet penetration, and supporting strategic military operations. The director of central intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are given responsibility over the first two, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) over the third, and military intelligence units over the fourth.

Today, sticking rigidly to these historical distinctions would be a serious impediment to protecting U.S. national security. The United States has enemies who seek to acquire and detonate weapons of mass destruction on U.S. soil. This is a constant and significant threat, and the intelligence community's work to thwart it must not be constrained by policies of the past. U.S. intelligence agencies started to integrate domestic and foreign intelligence operations after the first World Trade Center terrorist attack in 1993 and the follow-on attacks on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, and the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. The work took on even greater urgency after the tragedy of 9/11. As a result, Americans today benefit from the combined intelligence work of the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI's National Security Branch -- an office that brings together the bureau's counterintelligence, counterterrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and intelligence components. The DHS and the FBI are providing a more integrated approach to intelligence in order to protect the United States from foreign and homegrown terrorists.

But even as the wall between domestic and foreign intelligence collection was coming down, a wall between foreign intelligence and law enforcement remained standing. In 1981, for example, the Drug Enforcement Administration was taken out of the intelligence community because of concerns that it would improperly mix intelligence and law enforcement. But that commingling was absolutely necessary: with its large law enforcement presence abroad, the DEA is able to contribute unique narcotics information and overseas experience. Hence, last year, the DNI helped the DEA establish its O/ce of National Security Intelligence. This newest member of the U.S. intelligence community brings access, insights, and experience in foreign and domestic narcoterrorism.