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Revisiting intelligence reform.

Article Excerpt
As the Bush administration winds up nearly seven years of intelligence fiascos, a quiet revolution has been going on at the Pentagon, which controls more than 80% of America's $60 billion intelligence budget. Since taking over from Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense in winter 2006, Robert Gates has greatly scaled down the Pentagon's footprint on national security policy and intelligence. Working closely with Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Michael McConnell, he has slowly begun to assert civilian control over the key spy agencies funded by the defense budget and halted the Pentagon's efforts to create its own intelligence apparatus independent of the CIA. The recent intelligence assessment of Iran's nuclear ambitions, in contradicting early administration assertions, is perhaps the most significant sign of this newly won independence.

Those are significant actions. Under Rumsfeld, the Pentagon had become the dominant force in U.S. intelligence, with vast new powers in human intelligence and counterterrorism, both at home and abroad. By 2005, it was deploying secret commando units on clandestine missions in countries as far afield as the Philippines and Ecuador, sometimes without consulting with the local U.S. ambassadors and CIA station chiefs. At some point, President George W. Bush and his national security team apparently decided that the genie had to be put in the bottle, and sent Gates--a former ClA director who had worked closely with Vice President Dick Cheney during the first Bush administration--to put the kibosh on Rumsfeld's private intelligence army.

But these efforts by Gates and McConnell to demilitarize U.S. Intelligence will never succeed until Congress, with the support of the next administration, removes the three national collection agencies--the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)--from the Pentagon's command-and--control system and places them directly, like the ClA, under the control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

That consolidation was one of the key recommendations made by the 9/11 commission that investigated the role of U.S. spying agencies prior to the terrorist attacks of 2001. This consolidation was supposed to happen under the 2004 intelligence reform bill that grew out of the commission's deliberations. At the last minute, however, pro-military lawmakers supported by Rumsfeld stripped the language that would have done the trick out of the bill. Until Congress restores that provision, the bulk of intelligence spending--and therefore the critical decisions about how to deploy spying assets--will remain under military control.

Three National Collection Agencies

The NSA, the NGA, and the NRO are the crown jewels of America's vast intelligence system and make up the most powerful surveillance and eavesdropping system on the planet. Together, the three agencies are responsible for about half of the $42 billion the government spends every year on its National Intelligence Program, which also includes the CIA and...

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