Transcript of Speech Delivered by Richard A. Posner

But failure in a democratic society demands a scapegoat. And because the CIA is a much less popular agency than the military services or the FBI, it is the designated scapegoat for the failure to prevent 9/11 and for the subsequent failure to detect Saddam Hussein's abandonment of his program of weapons of mass destruction (though we may not have heard the last of that). And failure in a democratic society also demands a response that promises, however improbably, to prevent future failures. The preferred response is a reorganization because it is at once dramatic and relatively cheap. And so the 2004 legislation and its subsequent implementation.

There were flaws in the organization of our intelligence system on the eve of 9/11, and this gave some plausibility to the idea that we needed to reorganize the system. There were in fact three organizational problems in need of solution. The first was the stacking of too many responsibilities on the Director of Central Intelligence, with insufficient statutory powers. The second was the Defense Department's ownership of the national intelligence agencies (NSA, NRO, and NGA). And the third was the FBI's control of domestic intelligence, or in other words the absence of a U.S. counterpart to Britain's MI5 or Canada's Security Intelligence Service.

The DCI was the head of the CIA, a full-time job because of the size of the agency and because of the sensitivity of many of the missions of the Directorate of Operations. He was also the President's senior intelligence advisor, also a full-time job, at least for Presidents such as George W. Bush who want to meet frequently with their senior intelligence advisor. And he was the coordinator of the 15 (actually more) U.S.

intelligence agencies, which should also be a full-time job, especially since the DCI had limited (probably too limited) statutory powers, especially over the Defense Department's intelligence agencies, and thus had to operate by cajoling and politicking rather than by command. All this was much too much for one person, given the enormous challenge (greater than the challenges that the Cold War had posed for the intelligence

community) presented by Islamist terrorism in the era of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The DCI and DCIA jobs should have been split and the DCI's powers strengthened, but not to the point of making him the actual administrator, or "czar," of the intelligence community. The DCI's job should have been reconceptualized as that of the coordinator or board chairman of the intelligence community, much as in the British intelligence system. The DCIA would have remained the President's chief intelligence adviser and thus responsible for preparing the President's Daily Brief; those two jobs would be more than enough for one person.

Congress in the 2004 Act separated the DCI and DCIA jobs, renaming the DCI the DNI (a cosmetic change, but perhaps justified by a sensible desire to give him domestic intelligence authority without suggesting continuity with the CIA), but went much further, as I am about to explain (and complain). At the same time, Congress did nothing about the Defense Department's control of the national intelligence agencies, and nothing about the FBI's control of domestic intelligence either. I will return to these omissions, which seem to me unfortunate.

The "much further," as we know, was to make the DCI, now DNI, not merely a coordinator or board chairman but the President's chief intelligence advisor and the presiding deity of a new bureaucracy, the Directorate of National Intelligence, which may, though I will not, engulf many of the responsibilities of the CIA and demote the agency to little more than a spy service, like MI6. The military is making inroads into the CIA as well, and the FBI is trying to. The CIA is embattled -- and decentered.

The names of government agencies often don't mean a lot. But there is special significance to the word "central" in the CIA's name. The agency was meant to be the center of the U.S. intelligence system. It would have most of the spies and most of the analysts, along with significant technical capabilities (and remember that NRO and NGA were once part of the CIA, not of the Defense Department); it would integrate intelligence data obtained by other agencies and present its assessments to the President and other high officials. This still seems to me the right system. It implies for example that the National Counterterrorism Center should be inside the CIA (where it began, as the Terrorist Threat Integration Center) rather than inside the Directorate of National Intelligence, both to minimize friction with the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and to keep the analysts close to the operations officers. Returning NCTC would give the CIA a significant domestic role, but one of analysis not operations; and I do not recall that people were much disturbed that the formation of the TTIC put the CIA in the domestic intelligence business. And likewise the new National Counter Proliferation Center seems to me to belong in the CIA, if it belongs anywhere -- if it should exist -- for the proliferation of centers may be another example of the bureaucratic hypertrophy that may eventually strangle the intelligence community. There is also a danger that intelligence tasks that do not fall within the scope of some center will be slighted, and the further danger that centers will survive after the need that gave rise to them has waned.

My analysis further implies that the head of the CIA should be the President's senior intelligence adviser, not the DNI; hence that the Directorate of National Intelligence does not require an analytical capability.

The DNI's staff is climbing toward 1000; it may have reached or exceeded that number, for all I know, and be en route to 2000. It has become a new bureaucracy layered on top of the intelligence community, a new agency on top of the 15 or so previously existing agencies. The DNI finds himself tasked with coordinating the intelligence system, serving as the President's senior intelligence advisor, and managing his own intelligence service. The reorganization may have replicated the main organizational flaw (an overburdened DCI) that it sought to rectify, while, as I said, doing nothing to rectify the other two organizational flaws that existed before the reorganization (DoD's possession of the national intelligence agencies and the FBI's control of domestic intelligence). I gather that the DNI has ceded the main coordination role to General Hayden, his principal deputy, producing (to exaggerate slightly) a strange inversion: the number

2 man is the CEO, the number 1 man the presidential advisor.

I am not clear what successes the reorganization has had in its first year, about to be concluded. The intelligence community is very bad at getting out its message, a striking example being Ambassador Negroponte's virtual silence during the debate over the NSA non-FISA surveillance program, which has stirred up such a storm. But that is a story for another day. (Note the failure of the intelligence community to obtain any credit from the general public and the opinionmakers for its contribution to our victory in the Cold War -- an extraordinary failure of public relations.) I am sure that there have been successes, because of the high quality of the persons hired by and detailed to the Directorate of National Intelligence. But I remind of my earlier point that the critical question is not what successes have been achieved, but what successes would not have been achieved without the reorganization.