VOICE OF AMERICA
SLUG: 5-55598 U. S. Intelligence
DATE:
NOTE NUMBER:
DATE=7/14/04
TYPE=BACKGROUND REPORT
TITLE=U.S. INTELLIGENCE
NUMBER=5-55598
BYLINE=GARY THOMAS
DATELINE=WASHINGTON
CONTENT=
VOICED AT:
HEADLINE: U.S. Intelligence Agencies Face Crisis of Confidence
INTRO: A recent Senate report on the prewar intelligence on Iraq has painted a bleak picture of the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies. Analysts and politicians agree that the intelligence system crucially needs reform. But, as correspondent Gary Thomas reports from Washington, little real change is likely to come before the U.S. presidential and congressional elections in November.
TEXT: John McLaughlin became interim chief of the CIA after the resignation of its former chief, George Tenet, took effect on Monday. President Bush has indicated he will not name a new director until after the election. But calls continue for Mr. Bush to appoint a new director of central intelligence to take over the reins of an intelligence community reeling from a scathing Senate report on the CIA's performance on Iraq.
The report says the intelligence analyses on Iraq, which were used by President Bush to make the case for going to war, were deeply flawed and not supported by hard evidence.
David Kay, the former special adviser to the director of Central Intelligence on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, says the president should not wait to appoint a new permanent director. In a telephone interview, he says new leadership is needed now to get reform under way at the CIA.
/// KAY ACT ///
"What we need to have is immediately a new director of central intelligence, someone who is quite frankly willing to get up to his kneecaps in blood as he tears the agency apart and puts it back together again with a new culture."
/// END ACT ///
But Stansfield Turner, who was director of central intelligence under President Carter, urges patience. Also interviewed by phone, Mr. Turner says appointing a new director now will not fix the problems at the CIA. He says the career intelligence bureaucrats will simply wait to see if there will be a new president and a new director after November, just as happened to him in 1980, when Jimmy Carter ran unsuccessfully against Ronald Reagan.
/// TURNER ACT ///
"But I found out that four or five months before the election in 1980, the professionals were just saying, 'well, yes, that's nice, and we'll study it and be back in touch with you' and so on. In short, they were stalling me because they didn't want to start on a new program and find that I wasn't going to be there if President Carter wasn't re-elected."
/// END ACT ///
Bush administration officials have said Mr. Tenet's resignation has nothing to do with the findings of the Senate committee or the commission investigating the 9-11 attacks, which has also been critical of U.S. intelligence performance. But Mr. Tenet is reported to have told President Bush that the intelligence estimate that Iraq had banned weapons was, in his words, a "slam dunk" - a sports metaphor meaning that it was absolutely sure.
Mr. Kay says Mr. Tenet oversold his case. Nothing, he says, is sure in intelligence.
/// 2nd KAY ACT ///
"There's really nothing in the intelligence world that's a slam dunk. It's a world of ambiguity, a world of shadows and mirrors. And to use a poor, and rather hackneyed, sports cliché to reassure a president who's about to take a nation to war is really inexcusable."
/// END ACT ///
But former director Turner says Mr. Tenet was trying to reassure the president, and made an unfortunate choice of words.
/// 2nd TURNER ACT ///
"I think that what he was trying to say was, "the evidence here is very strong, Mr. President." And that's all right. It just happens that he was wrong, and didn't have that strong evidence. That was clearly a bad mistake on his part. And I feel sorry for him. He's going to live with those words for a long time to come."
/// END ACT ///
The CIA director is also titular head of the entire intelligence community, as the loose grouping of government agencies that deal in intelligence is called. However, he has no real authority over other agencies' budgets or activities except to include -- or exclude -- their views from a National Intelligence Estimate on any given subject. (Signed)
NEB/GPT/KL/FC
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