Intelligence intransigence

One year after Congress authorized the creation of a czar to oversee and reform intelligence agencies, the CIA, the FBI and other services remain largely the same, bound by ingrained bureaucratic process and culture, intelligence officials say.

Interviews with numerous senior U.S. intelligence and security officials show a system that still lacks qualified personnel and resists new operating methods necessary to confront domestic and foreign security threats.

Key reforms in the past year have included a new national intelligence office to replace the formerly CIA-dominated Office of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and the creation of a National Counterterrorism Center — an interagency coordination group designed to conduct analysis and operations.

At the CIA, the DCI function has been removed from the mission of Director Porter J. Goss and given to John D. Negroponte, a career diplomat who was appointed the first director of national intelligence last February. Mr. Goss was previously both the CIA director and the DCI, and nominally the head of all U.S. intelligence agencies.

According to several high-ranking officials, a major problem since has been opposition to restructuring and reform from bureaucrats within the DNI, CIA and FBI.

Incremental change

The most important intelligence-gathering sections of the CIA and FBI remain largely the same, despite claims by senior intelligence managers who say major changes are under way within those sections of those agencies.

Information sharing among agencies, identified as a key failure that led to the September 11 terror attacks, continues to be impaired by competition among agencies and intelligence centers.

For example, despite the fact that the new National Counterterrorism Center is housed in the same Tysons Corner office building in suburban Virginia as the CIA Counterterrorism Center and the Pentagon’s Joint Intelligence Task Force-Counterterrorism, the centers do not easily share information among themselves, the officials said.

However, in the aftermath of investigations of September 11 and the commission that examined intelligence agencies related to assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, intelligence collection — spying and espionage — has been a major focus of reform efforts.

The WMD commission, headed by former Sen. Charles S. Robb, Virginia Democrat, and Appeals Court Judge Laurence H. Silberman, examined U.S. intelligence from top to bottom and found that on Iraq, the failure to adequately assess Iraq’s arms programs was “a major intelligence failure.”

That assessment was unwelcome news to many career intelligence officials who feel there were no failures and thus no need for changing agency structures or procedures.

Between Congress and the commissions, President Bush endorsed more than 90 recommendations for reforming intelligence and security agencies.

Structure lacking

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