Covert board called crucial to presidents

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By Bill Gertz

Presidents need to rely on a little-known group of intelligence advisers that since the 1950s has helped guide policies and oversee the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy, according to a report by former intelligence officials.

The book-length report to be released today is an exhaustive historical study of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which was created during the Eisenhower administration and has been used by presidents in different capacities ever since.

"In some instances, the Board has played a central role in advising the president and the intelligence community on crucial issues of substance or procedure and has made a significant contribution to the country's national security," the report says.

"In other instances, the Board has been ignored and treated as a dumping ground for rewarding political cronies."

The report, sponsored by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, a Washington-based research group, represents the first major study of the secretive body that under President Bush has been renamed the President's Intelligence Advisory Board.

Most of the board's work is secret, but one of its most public investigations involved the loss of U.S. nuclear secrets to China from the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the 1990s.

"This investigation uncovered a twenty-year history of security and counterintelligence problems at the Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories," the report said of the loss of nuclear secrets.

"Clearly, it is in the interest of future presidents, not to speak of the nation, to make the best possible use of the PFIAB for two reasons," the report said.

The first is that the board is a "political fact of life," noting that "presidents have little latitude to abolish or ignore the board."

President Carter tried to ignore the board and "paid a political price for doing so in the 1980 election." President George H.W. Bush at first ignored the board as set up by his predecessor, President Reagan, and found that by 1990 he had to rely on the board for some intelligence-related advice.