A Fight Against Terrorism -- and Disorganization

Teamwork at the NCTC

Three times each day -- at 8 a.m., 3 p.m. and 1 a.m. -- representatives from across the intelligence community meet to update the nation's threat matrix. The meetings -- held most days via videoconference -- are chaired at NCTC headquarters, a nondescript, unlabeled office building in Northern Virginia, around a massive, football-shaped wooden table. The table, designed as neutral ground, has 16 seats, pop-up computer terminals and ceiling-mounted screens that can show al-Jazeera broadcasts as well as highly classified graphics.

Participants include representatives of the CIA and FBI; the Defense Intelligence Agency and others under the Pentagon umbrella; the departments of State, Homeland Security, Treasury and Energy; and other subsidiary agencies such as the Drug Enforcement and Transportation Security administrations. Topics include individual suicide bombers, movements of groups and people, potential targets, reliability of information on specific threats, and actions being planned or already taken.

Material for the meetings is gathered by the 24-hour operations center deep within the ultra-secure building. The room is dark, with a high ceiling, drop-down video screens and sound-muffling walls; its carpeted floor is covered with desks where integrated intelligence teams examine and share incoming data from their separate agencies in 12-hour shifts. At opposite ends of the room, the CIA and FBI counterterrorism divisions have satellite offices representing their own headquarters.

The thrice-daily meetings are the substantive and symbolic core of NCTC's melding of the intelligence community. But most of the center's activities take place in offices and cubicles where officials plumb 28 databases of raw and processed intelligence from across the community.

The analysts turn out reports, adding context and information about response actions already taken, that are disseminated to more than 5,500 policy and intelligence officials with the security clearances required to read them.

Even within the NCTC, however, access to information is not easy. Most desks are stacked high with half a dozen or more computer processing units connected to various intelligence agencies that still cannot, or will not, communicate with one another electronically.

Negroponte deputy Dale Meyerrose, a retired Air Force major general and expert in creating and integrating communications systems architecture, is charged with breaking down the technological barriers among what he calls intelligence "tribes" with a built-in reluctance to divulge their secrets.

Meyerrose, a recent addition to the DNI's office, does not dispute or defend the slow pace of information-sharing. "My government's had five years," he acknowledged in a recent interview behind a code-locked door inside the high-security DNI headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base. "I'm very sympathetic to that. But you know what? I've had four months, and there's nothing I can do about the 4 1/2 years that went before me."

Technology is important, but "it's the transparency of the process that people are griping about," Meyerrose said. Feuding intelligence agencies don't argue about a lack of computer interface, he said, they talk in terms of "The FBI wouldn't tell me this." Rather than imposing new computer systems from the top down, he has started from the human end, bringing representatives from different agencies to the same table to work on specific intelligence issues.

The NCTC operates on the same principle of "co-location," fashioned under the 2004 intelligence reforms, that pulled the branches of the armed forces into a combined structure designed to end decades of destructive and expensive rivalry.

The Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 created unified regional commands under a single general or admiral directly answerable to the nation's civilian leadership and named the chairman of the Joint Chiefs the principal military adviser to the president. By making assignments to the joint staff from across the military a prerequisite for most high-level promotions, it created a cadre of senior officers with perspectives beyond the narrow confines of their individual branches.

Negroponte, a former Foreign Service officer who most recently served as ambassador to Iraq and to the United Nations, is the intelligence community's equivalent of the chairman, and the NCTC is his joint staff. NCTC Director Redd is a retired vice admiral, and everyone else in the structure is on temporary duty from somewhere else in the intelligence community, usually for two-year stints. "Everybody still belongs to their other agency," a senior official said. "We're trying to tell them that the NCTC is them ."

The idea is that familiarity will breed cooperation and that personal relationships formed through shared tasks will carry through once individuals return to their home offices. "We are diverse cultures, working to form habitual relationships," the official said. "It takes time."

Staff writers Walter Pincus, Spencer S. Hsu, Dan Eggen and Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.