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Intelligence Community to Reshape Personnel Practices
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The Sept. 11 commission determined that poor information sharing between agencies led to missed opportunities to track some of the hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.
Ronald Sanders, McConnell's personnel chief, said the program would be implemented by July 1 and would apply to everyone above a level equivalent to GS-13 in the civil service.
The government has widely acknowledged its failure to recruit those who understand the languages and cultures of the Middle East and Asia, as well as its inability to provide timely security clearances for those it has recruited. The FBI reported in October that just 1 percent of its 12,000 agents knew even a handful of Arabic words and the Iraq Study Group last year found only six fluent Arabic speakers among 1,000 employees at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
"If you examine the rules, nothing prohibits" intelligence recruitment of a "first generation native" from elsewhere, McConnell said. But what he called a "cultural bias" and fears of divided allegiance had restricted the number of recruits and delayed clearances.
The goal is to reduce the time required to evaluate foreigners to the current average of 120 days for U.S. natives with no foreign connection. McConnell, Sanders said, wanted to see all vetting done in a matter of weeks, rather than months.
Thomas Fingar, McConnell's deputy director for analysis, said the next 100 days would also bring community-wide standards for intelligence reports and identification of sources and their reliability. "We want the logic spelled out" so that analysts know as much as possible about what collectors provide, and they will have to explain how they reached their conclusions, he said.
Within the same period, several new technological information-sharing tools will be launched, including "A-space," loosely modeled on MySpace, the popular social-networking Web site.
"A-space," Fingar said, will allow any intelligence official with the right clearance to read into and contribute to ongoing analysis in different subject areas. "It's not unlike a blog, and there is no anonymity," he said. "It will demonstrate how good you are or if you're an idiot."
