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Adm. Dennis Blair

Former Director of National Intelligence (since May 2010)

(Linda Davidson/TWP)

Why He Matters

When Blair was overseeing U.S. military affairs in the Asia-Pacific region, he kept a close eye on China and North Korea. By making the retired Navy admiral the director of national intelligence, President Barack Obama banked on the fact that dealing with the obstinate regimes in Beijing and Pyongyang was the perfect training ground for running - and reforming - U.S. intelligence agencies.

Blair was in charge of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, which are prone to contentious turf wars and infighting over everything from division of authority to budgets to information-gathering policies to personnel issues. As the nation's top intelligence official, Blair had unusually close access to Obama and was often the first person to greet him in the mornings. That special access placed him at the center of Obama's national security inner circle on issues such as torture, terrorism and the war in Afghanistan.

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Background

At a Glance

Career History: Institute for Defense Analyses
Birthday: Feb. 4, 1947
Hometown: Kittery, Me.

Alma Mater: United States Naval Academy, 1968
Spouse: Diane

Path to Power

A sixth-generation naval officer, Blair graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1968. After a stint on a guided-missile destroyer, a Rhodes Scholarship took Blair to Oxford University, where he focused on Russian studies.

Back in the states, Blair was a White House fellow from 1975 to 1976. He would go on to hold a number of prestigious Washington posts, including the Pentagon's top liaison to the CIA and director of the Joint Staff. He held a list of senior Navy jobs in various budgeting and policy-development posts, as well as operational commands. In a story famous in defense circles, Blair attempted to water ski behind the USS Cochrane (DDG-21) when he was that ship's commanding officer.

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After becoming Pacific Command chief in February 1999, Blair was considered among the upper echelon of American generals. During President George W. Bush's first term, some defense insiders considered him a top contender to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking position possible for an American general. His chances to be named chairman, however, were derailed when he clashed with then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on a number of issues.

For instance, Blair, as Pacific Command chief, came to view China as less of a strategic threat than did many Bush administration officials. He once told Chinese officials he was "not worried about you taking Taiwan because, even if you get across the straits, you can't maintain it, you can't protect it," according to a witness in the room. That, along with some of the initiatives he pushed as Pacific Command chief, put him on the outs with Rumsfeld, who felt the Bush team could not trust a man who studied with President Clinton at Oxford. After failing to secure the chairman's post, Blair soon retired from the Navy.

He went on to run the non-profit Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), which focuses primarily on issues related to national security, and does a lot of work for the Defense Department. But in mid-2006, Blair left IDA under a cloud of controversy.

IDA conducted for the U.S. Air Force a business-case analysis that showed a service procurement plan would generate $225 million in savings. But some accused Blair of a conflict of interest because he held stock options in EDO Corp., a subcontractor on the F-22 fighter program. Blair also sat on EDO's board of directors.

In a July 26, 2006, letter to Senate Armed Services Committee leaders, Blair defended his work for the Air Force, saying "it was an important research project, and I received routine reports of its progress but did not play any active role in its conduct or review." Despite those efforts, Blair ultimately left IDA.

In 2009, Obama tapped Blair as Director of National Intelligence. But during hisa tenure a string of intelligence failures led to some very public near-misses. The media reported that Blair planned to resign in May 2010.

The Issues

The list of intelligence management and reform issues facing Blair was daunting. And the content of that list often looked different, depending on which experts you consulted.

One goal was nearly universally agreed upon: the need to streamline U.S. intelligence agencies. The DNI's office was established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to do just that, but experts reported mixed results as the George W. Bush administration came to a close.

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Early in his term, Blair focused on developing better communication across agencies or, in his words making sure "we really do connect the dots." He slowly tried to streamline the organization (with a scalpel, he said) and pushed for integration, ensuring that different agencies were communicating regularly with each other.

Terrorism

One of Blair's biggest challenges came on Christmas 2009, when a Nigerian man with ties to Al Qaeda tried to blow himself up on a plane to Detroit. The attempted terrorist attack engulfed Washington in a blame game and led President Obama to demand a report on what went wrong.

Over the next several days, it was revealed that the intelligence community knew al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was planning an attack in the U.S., but did not piece together the information they had. In a Jan. 7, 2010 memo, Blair wrote that the attempted attack "was a failure of the counterterrorism system."

In response, Blair announced four major changes - assigning clear lines of responsibility for investigating leads on high-priority threats; distributing intelligence reports more quickly; applying more rigorous standards to analysis of raw datea; and improving the criteria for adding people to the no fly list.

Torture

During Senate confirmation hearings at the end of January 2009, Blair said that the interrogation of terrorist detainees by the CIA should be governed by the Army Field Manual which explicitly bans several harsh interrogation condoned by the George W. Bush adminstration.

Obama signed several executive orders on Jan. 22, 2009, that pledged to close the detention center in Guantanamo Bay within a year and closed secret CIA detention centers around the world while preventing coercive questioning techniques.

Cyber Security

One of the biggest challenges for Blair was developing the cyber infrastructure to protect the U.S. from an increasing number of online attacks. President Obama himself said that the U.S. was unprepared to fend off a large-scale attack.

Blair had begun to develop plans to address this. One strategy was the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, which aims to develop cutting edge technologies for the intelligence community.

He also supported international agreements on cyber-security.

The Network

During his time abroad and in Washington, the retired four-star general has crossed paths and worked with many political power players. While studying for his naval career in Annapolis, Md., he was a classmate of Sen. James Webb (D-Va.), Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and retired Marine Corps Gen. Michael Hagee, a former U.S. Marine Corps commandant. While studying at Oxford, Blair was a classmate of former President Bill Clinton.

Blair has worked with many senior military officials, including Mullen and retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, Obama's pick for national security adviser. In fact, Blair and Jones both worked on the Project on National Security Reform, which recently issued a report that called for a number of sweeping reforms to the national security apparatus and policies.

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