Intelligence Voices Blend Into One

Negroponte Dominates Threat Briefing to Senate Panel

Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte (left) takes the reins at the threat assessment hearing. (By Andrea Bruce -- The Washington Post)

Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte showed yesterday that he could certainly dominate what the leaders of the primary U.S. intelligence agencies say at a public hearing -- even if members of Congress have questioned whether he can control how those leaders do their jobs.

In his first time presenting the annual worldwide threat assessment to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Negroponte took an hour and a half to deliver his 25-page prepared statement, while CIA Director Porter J. Goss; FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III; Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, Defense Intelligence Agency director; and other intelligence officials sat silently beside him.

By the time Negroponte finished, at about noon, almost half the committee members who turned up for the session had left, and the subsequent question-and-answer session with the remaining senators ended at 1:45 p.m.

In previous years, no single official would deliver the global threat briefing. The CIA director, in his old capacity as director of central intelligence, would summarize in 15 minutes or so his formal paper, to be followed by similarly short summaries of longer statements by the FBI director, the Defense Intelligence Agency director and the director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Yesterday, Negroponte's paper was prepared by the staff of the National Intelligence Council, with each intelligence agency supplying its views and the final product representing material to which they all agreed.

Ironically, the old system exposed listeners to the differences, however subtle, among the agencies -- a quality the authors of intelligence-reform legislation that created Negroponte's office just over a year ago wanted to emphasize. Those differences were not on display yesterday, however.

"That was the new, seamless intelligence community," Goss said with a smile in answer to a reporter's question after the hearing.

-- Walter Pincus