A Fight Against Terrorism -- and Disorganization

The Overlaps Persist

In the lead-up to this year's Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, eight of the 16 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community independently produced assessments of possible terrorist threats to the Games. The "finished intelligence products," a counterterrorism official said, all concluded exactly the same thing -- that the threat was minimal.

"They posted them internally to their own organizations and sent them out to share" with other community members as the authoritative bottom line, the official said. "They would all argue, 'We had to do it for our principal, our Cabinet member' or whatever." Watching the competing agencies, he said, "is like watching 7-year-olds play soccer -- you've got 20 kids all following the ball."

Avoiding such duplication and wasted effort, he said, "was the whole point" of setting up the NCTC as the sole provider of integrated intelligence analysis. Yet neither congressional mandates nor presidential directives have been enough to eliminate the overlap.

Before the Intelligence Reform Act, the CIA was in charge of bringing together "all-source" intelligence and analyzing it for the larger intelligence community, the White House and policymakers. It was the CIA that chaired the daily interagency meeting at 5 p.m. to discuss real-time terrorism information and what to do about it. The agency drew up the daily "threat matrix" and the CIA director briefed the president each morning.

But the Sept. 11 commission found that long-standing tensions within and among the CIA, the FBI and the rest of the community, along with institutional firewalls constructed during the Cold War, meant that "information was not shared" and "analysis was not pooled" that might have warned of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

The CIA's responsibilities for integrating and analyzing all-source intelligence have now been transferred to the DNI and the NCTC. All members of the intelligence community -- including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and other Defense Department agencies and the FBI -- are restricted to analyzing only what they need to accomplish the "tactical missions" specific to their own assignments. For the CIA, that means concentrating on building the clandestine network and human resources that Congress and a series of outside studies have found lacking, especially in the Middle East.

But the DNI-NCTC structure remains vastly outweighed in power, personnel and tradition by the growing bureaucracies it hopes to tame. While the number of NCTC analysts is scheduled to double to 400 by 2008, the FBI alone has tripled its analytic staff since 2001 to more than 2,700. The DIA has nearly 8,000 employees collecting and analyzing intelligence, and the CIA has twice that many.

On July 11, Negroponte signed an internal document titled "Analytic Framework for Counterterrorism" for distribution among the 16 agencies. In a cover note, he pointedly wrote that while he recognized each "must continue to support its agency leadership and unique operational activities, as well as to provide a robust analytical capability and reliable steam of diverse viewpoints," both Congress and the president had given him the authority and "fully empower the NCTC" to "reduce unnecessary duplication of effort."

The framework, said one counterterrorism official, directs operational agencies such as the CIA "to focus their analytical resources" on "penetrating and eliminating known terrorist organizations," leaving the NCTC to provide comprehensive threat analyses for the government as a whole.

Although Hayden's appointment as CIA director in May is likely to hasten the agency's acceptance of what is known in the community as "the lanes in the road," intelligence officials have not been shy about expressing skepticism and resentment.

Many see themselves as demoted to mere intelligence-gatherers, stripped of their rightful roles as strategic analysts and forward-looking policy advisers. An internal CIA study, declassified last month a year after it was written, criticized the NCTC model as promoting "watered-down analysis, duplication, confusion, and misuse of scarce resources." Separating those who collect intelligence from those who analyze it would result in a weaker product, the study said, and was likely to lead to more strategic failures like those in Iraq.

The addition of new non-operational layers to integrate, analyze and share information "has made the organizational picture more, not less, confusing," Paul R. Pillar, a former national intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia, said recently. The question of "who's in charge of intelligence, when it comes to counterterrorism, is harder to answer now than it was before."