Former senior members of the intelligence community say John D. Negroponte faces a range of initial challenges, from needing President Bush to clarify the powers of the director of national intelligence (DNI) to working out arrangements with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to deciding such simpler things as choosing his staff and where his office will be located.
There will be time for some issues to be worked out because it will be mid-April before Negroponte will have his confirmation hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, according to administration and congressional sources. In the interim, he will be winding up his activities as ambassador to Iraq and working on problems associated with the director's job. He will consult with Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, picked to be deputy director of national intelligence and currently head of the National Security Agency.
"There can't be any doubt about Negroponte's authority," said William H. Webster, a former CIA and FBI director. "I am increasingly anxious about the bill that passed Congress in a hurry that left gaps and ambiguities."
Webster recalled that when he was director of central intelligence in the late 1980s and early '90s, he had problems with then-Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney because of "blurred authority in the budget field."
"He has got to become a serious senior-level player," said Rand Beers, who worked on terrorism in the White House for Bush and President Bill Clinton and was national security adviser to Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) during Kerry's bid for the presidency.
Beers and others with White House experience suggested the law's ambiguities could be fixed by a Bush executive order, avoiding the necessity of going back to Congress, where legislative changes could be tied up for months.
Describing the Pentagon as the "800-pound gorilla" when it comes to U.S. intelligence, Beers said Rumsfeld will be the major figure with whom Negroponte will have to negotiate.
Former deputy CIA director Richard Kerr said the only way for Negroponte to establish his authority with the Defense Department is to "early on make decisions that have a major impact," such as changing allocation for a costly satellite collection program run by one of the Pentagon agencies.
Kerr said Negroponte would be respected only if he did not have to go to the president to get it done. He said he knew of only two CIA directors who were able to exercise that kind of power: William Casey, President Ronald Reagan's director of central intelligence, and John McCone, director under President John F. Kennedy.
"Casey got things done, and people outside the agency did what he wanted and did not buck him," Kerr said.
Another issue facing Negroponte is getting control of clandestine and covert operations, whether done by the CIA, the FBI or the Pentagon, Kerr said. The new restructuring law gives the DNI authority only to set priorities and goals for human and technical collection of intelligence and the ability to monitor such operations.
"He cannot have someone between him and those operations because he is going to get all the blame if they go wrong," Kerr said.
Another change needed, according to several top CIA veterans, is to give the DNI operational control over the National Counterterrorism Center. Under the law, the center's director, a presidential appointee, is given authority to report directly to the president on clandestine or covert counterterrorism operations. "That should be delegated to the DNI," Beers said, "since it is a major management function."
Richard Stolz, a former CIA deputy director in charge of clandestine operations, agreed that "the first thing [for Negroponte] is to clean up the law." Former CIA director Robert M. Gates noted that the legislation makes Negroponte responsible for the nation's 15 intelligence agencies obeying the law but does not give him operational control over clandestine or covert actions, which are the most likely to get into legal trouble.
