Bush Signs Intelligence Reform Bill

President Now Must Find an Experienced Hand to Guide 15 Agencies

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) hugs 9/11 Family Steering Committee member Beverly Eckert after President Bush signed the bill. (Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)

President Bush signed into law yesterday the broadest reorganization of the nation's intelligence community in more than half a century, overhauling a sprawling system that failed to head off devastating terrorist attacks three years ago and then misjudged the threat posed by Iraq a year later.

The new law, which grew out of this summer's report by the national commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, erects a new architecture for U.S. intelligence gathering designed to end the bureaucratic infighting and miscommunication that preceded the attacks.

Under the new system, the 15 separate intelligence agencies will be brought together under a single command structure headed by a director who will largely control their budgets and report to the president. The measure creates a national counterterrorism center, bolsters border and aviation security, and establishes a civil liberties board to serve as a check on excesses in the fight against terrorism. And it will change such things as the way Americans get driver's licenses and the way foreigners get visas.

Bush, who initially opposed creation of the 9/11 commission and later resisted some of its recommendations, hailed the resulting legislation yesterday as a historic step toward heading off future terrorist attacks.

"A key lesson of September the 11th, 2001, is that America's intelligence agencies must work together as a single, unified enterprise," he said at a ceremony at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, the same hall where President Harry S. Truman signed the treaty creating NATO in 1949. Bush added, "The many reforms in this act have a single goal: to ensure that the people in government responsible for defending America have the best possible information to make the best possible decision."

The president gave no indication whom he might pick to fill the new position of director of national intelligence. Newly installed CIA Director Porter J. Goss, once considered the favorite, has been ruled out, according to senior administration officials, who said he never wanted the new job. Goss probably would have faced tough questioning at confirmation hearings about his conflicts with senior CIA officials who have left the agency rather than work for him.

With Goss remaining at Langley, Bush faces the challenge of finding someone of equal or greater public stature with "extensive national security expertise," as required by the law. The measure indicates that Congress wanted either the director or his principal deputy to be an active or retired military officer.

Among the names floated are retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who commanded troops in Afghanistan and Iraq; Adm. William O. Studeman, a former deputy CIA director now serving on a Bush panel studying the intelligence failures on Iraqi weapons programs; Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, head of the National Security Agency, which handles electronic eavesdropping; Frances Fragos Townsend, the president's homeland security adviser; John F. Lehman, a former Navy secretary who served on the Sept. 11 commission; Richard L. Armitage, outgoing deputy secretary of state; and James R. Clapper Jr., director of the National Geospatial Agency, which does imagery intelligence.

The chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 commission, former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton, who were at Bush's side yesterday, have been mentioned as candidates, but Bush advisers noted that they might not have the national security experience required by the statute.

"Legislation alone won't make us safer," Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), one of the chief negotiators of the intelligence bill, said in a statement. "We also need effective leadership. The president should pick a strong manager who will speak truth to power."

The president plans other changes to the intelligence structure in coming weeks. Bush plans to replace most of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and make it a more "activist" body again, a Bush adviser familiar with thinking in the White House said. The board, while still meeting, has not been asked to undertake new studies since its outgoing chairman, Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser for Bush's father, broke with the current president over Iraq.

The changes enacted yesterday add up to the most substantial restructuring of U.S. intelligence since Truman signed the National Security Act in 1947. Bush embraced the concept of investing budgetary authority with the new director of national intelligence, an idea he originally did not endorse. And he said the CIA will report only to the new intelligence director.

Still, he emphasized that the CIA "will retain its core responsibilities for collecting human intelligence [and] analyzing intelligence from all sources" and will undertake tasks "at the direction of the president," not the new intelligence director. And in a nod to critics who nearly held up the bill out of concern about diminishing the military's ability to use intelligence during wartime, Bush emphasized that the new law "will preserve the existing chain of command" for Pentagon agencies. "Our military commanders," he added, "will continue to have quick access to the intelligence they need to achieve victory on the battlefield."

The relatives of Sept. 11 victims who led the effort to push the law through Congress called it a necessary wake-up call to a government that did not protect their loved ones. "It's a sea change," Beverly Eckert, who lost her husband in the World Trade Center, said in an interview after the ceremony. "It's an infusion of oxygen into this really calcified system we have in Washington. If it took our energy and our grief to make it happen, so be it."

Others considered the effect of the new law uncertain. James Lewis, who heads the intelligence project at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, said the measure "has a lot of fuzzy language" that can be implemented however Bush wants. By itself, he added, it might simply result in changes in the organization chart. "All the problems Porter Goss faces, the new guy faces," he said. "All it does is shift the responsibility a little bit."

Moreover, the legislation left many recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission still unfulfilled, including restructuring congressional oversight as well as broader strategic efforts to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Nor did it address commission recommendations to rethink U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia or to expand diplomatic efforts to win friends in the Muslim world.

In addition to Kean, Hamilton, Harman and Goss, Bush was joined at the ceremony by Republican and Democratic legislators who crafted the bill and relatives of Sept. 11 victims. Among those on hand was Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) but not House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who was in Europe for a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge.