USA TODAY November 29, 2004
Intelligence impasse mainly a question of control
By John Diamond
WASHINGTON - Imagine this scenario: The CIA wants spy satellite coverage of Iran's suspected nuclear weapons complex. But military commanders in Iraq need an updated overhead image of battle-scarred Fallujah. The satellite is overhead for only so long and can do only so much. Which mission gets priority? Who decides?
Those are the kinds of questions that have stalled a bill to restructure the U.S. intelligence system. The legislation reached Congress with enormous political momentum from the 9/11 Commission but has met increasing resistance as the national security debate has shifted from how best to manage the open-ended war on terrorism to how to meet the day-to-day needs of frontline troops. (Related story: Bush pressed to break impasse)
At issue is whether a new civilian national intelligence director should share control of much of the most important intelligence-gathering with the Pentagon, which now controls about 80% of the U.S. intelligence budget. The 9/11 Commission said such a "czar" would help the nation's many intelligence agencies share information and eliminate blind spots that helped make the 9/11 attacks possible. In an unusual split between factions in the Republican-led Congress and the Bush administration, the Senate and the White House say yes to such a czar, but House Republicans and the Pentagon say no.
A formidable group of House Republicans, led by Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter of California and backed by Gen. Richard Myers and the rest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has two major arguments against giving up some of the Pentagon's control. One is that the czar's budget powers would affect which technologies get developed over the coming years, possibly at the expense of combat troops, who need the fastest and most technologically advanced satellite reconnaissance help they can get.
But Hunter's and his allies' chief argument is that sharing power with a civilian czar would undermine the military's ability to get intelligence to frontline troops - particularly satellite intelligence, such as communications intercepts and fresh photos of enemy positions.
"If the military is stripped of their ability to control their own intelligence lines, it can prove to be a deadly mistake," Hunter says. He warns that the White House-backed bill would create a situation in which troops on the firing line would be waiting for urgently needed tactical intelligence while the nation's spy satellites were tied up on strategic intelligence missions ordered by the new, more powerful intelligence director.
However, an examination of the current system shows that it already vests practical control of battlefield intelligence with field commanders in a way that is unlikely to change. Combat troops have their own sources of battlefield intelligence, including drone aircraft, U-2 spy planes and radar planes such as AWACS and JSTARS that can pinpoint enemy threats in the air and on the ground. In wartime, all these assets are controlled by field commanders.
And when it comes to the nation's most expensive and sophisticated intelligence-gathering devices - spy satellites - the current system already gives significant power over crucial intelligence decisions, even those nominally controlled by the Pentagon, to the head of the CIA in his role as director of central intelligence. Experience suggests that combat troops don't get shortchanged.
Greg Treverton, a senior intelligence analyst during the Clinton administration, offers a real-world example of the kinds of choices that are regularly made.
"When you ask, 'Why do we have so little intelligence on the weapons of mass destruction target in Iraq?' the answer was sometimes that we were so busy with force protection," says Treverton, who heads the intelligence policy center at Rand Corp., a non-profit research group.
The spy satellites over Iraq before the March 2003 invasion were heavily committed to keeping U.S. pilots safe by watching the Iraqi radar and missile sites that were a daily threat to the U.S. fighter jets enforcing Iraq's "no-fly zones" - areas where Iraqi military flights were barred. That meant the satellites couldn't adequately scrutinize all the sites where intelligence officials believed the Iraqis were making or storing chemical or biological weapons and working on a nuclear bomb program, Treverton says.
Supporters of the Senate version of the intelligence bill say the real issue motivating Hunter and Pentagon officials is protecting their control over intelligence spending.
"What you're seeing here is the forces that favor the status quo protecting their turf in the Congress and in the bureaucracy," says Rep. Jane Harman of California, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
Despite Hunter's assertions about the importance of preserving military control over military intelligence, the status quo that he is trying to protect already gives the civilian director of central intelligence a key role in the tasking of spy satellites.
Spy satellite images and communications intercepts come from an alphabet soup of agencies that are under Pentagon control because of their "combat support" role. The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) runs the spy satellites; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) determines what targets are to be photographed and analyzes the results; and the National Security Agency (NSA) maintains communications-interception equipment, some of it mounted on the same satellites.
But although the budgets of those agencies fall under Pentagon control and their chain of command leads up to the secretary of Defense, the director of central intelligence also plays a major role in what they do.
Decisions about which things on the ground are photographed by spy satellites are made by a group called Source Operations and Management at the NGA, according to NGA spokesman David Burpee. He says that group reports not to the Defense secretary but to the director of central intelligence, who also heads the CIA. If a spy satellite is passing over a section of the Middle East at a given time and the agency has seven requests for imagery but can meet only three of them, Source Operations decides what to photograph. Rarely do disputes over priorities rise to the level of the intelligence chief.
"It works pretty smoothly," Burpee says. As a practical matter, in wartime, field commanders generally get top priority.
"When lives are at risk, the interests of a combat commander and those in political power coincide," Burpee says.
Rand's Treverton agrees: "If people are fighting a war, they're going to get first claim no matter what."
John Pike of Globalsecurity.org, a non-partisan defense think tank, says the Pentagon is worried that "rather than just ordering things to be done, they're going to have to say, 'Mother, may I?' to this new intelligence chief, and they would just as soon not do that if they can get away with it."
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