US Agency Woes DCI v DDP

[Shanet Clark]

Bit of a flap, evidently...

they are comparing it to Stansfield Turner or the Angleton Purges:

There is major news; the gridlock has broken and the House Republicans have dropped their opposition to the new National Intelligence Director.

I have very mixed feelings on all this, based on the primary research (see 1970s thread) I posted on the Intelligence reform tradition, some themes and lessons. Foreign Affairs type political history of the late seventies intelligence community reform effort. (Shanet Clark Thread/JFK)

Porter Goss, DCI, brought in staffers from his Congressional Committee as top operational managers and started a revolt.

CIA is leaking like a sieve, no report stays classified, all bad news, strange days at the information hole. A director of operations and plans, whose name is known, has left and another deputy director of plans , name withheld, a top agent running case officer senior executive, has left.

Directorate of Operations and Plans is in a chickenfight with the Director of Central Intelligence, the former congressman Porter Goss from Florida has antagonized everyone with a shake-up.

This complicates the process of forcing co-operation onto the Fifteen Agencies,

the Big three, FBI, NSA and CIA, will be sharing more. The recent Vanity Fair outlines the extent of the petty feuding between the bureau and the agency.

In my May piece I predicted Appropriations and Armed Forces Congressional Committee chairs would join the military to evade civilian control. Oversight.

It was against the law for any CIA operative to even be in Iraq, they missed India, Pakistani weapons, and they fired the gay Arabic translators. The record is clear that the National Security Advisor(s), who are supposed to be the

National Intelligence Director -- if they would do their jobs, the president has been ill served. Or has a system of checks and balances and fragmented authority helped duplicate civilian representative norms? Either way, the Brezhinski material sheds light on the Pentagon's overwhelming power to dominate civilian control.

To concentrate this new power may make for co-operation, but with it, risks.

The NID era will end a period of checkerboard fiefdoms in intelligence, when nobody showed the other teams what they had (and I doubt if that is fair, State and Agency shared through the ambassodors, chief of mission and the CIA chiefs of station, among other ways). True, the FBI and CIA relations were bad leading up to september eleventh, but the important questions about future technology competitions are clouded by secrecy.

The Colby admissions, Nelson Rockefeller's committee and classified reports, the attempts by Carter to re-charter the 1947 agency system, are in my 1970s thread.

Edited December 10, 2004 by Shanet Clark