Lawmakers Seek Cabinet Post for an Intelligence Director

The New York Times ^ | 12/07/2002 (for editions of 12/08/2002) | James Risen and David Johnston

[GeneD]

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — The Republican and Democratic leaders of the Congressional investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks plan to issue a final report next week calling for the appointment of a new cabinet-level director of national intelligence who would outrank the director of central intelligence, government officials say.

But the Congressional leaders have agreed not to assign blame to any individual government officials for the intelligence failures before Sept. 11, and instead will emphasize proposals for changes to make sure that such devastating attacks never happen again.

The final report, summing up the joint panel's nearly yearlong inquiry into the government's performance before Sept. 11, is based on evidence of missed signals at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies, and will include many of the findings that the panel's staff made public in a series of interim reports released at hearings this summer and fall.

The report is coming just days after President Bush signed legislation creating an independent commission to investigate the attacks. Mr. Bush named Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state, as chairman of the commission, which will pick up the case just as Congress is dropping it off. The independent commission is certain to plow through much of the same material already reviewed by the Congressional panel, which collected hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other agencies.

After extended private negotiations this week, the four top lawmakers on the joint inquiry agreed among themselves on the most important recommendations to include in the final report. They now tentatively plan to present a draft to the full panel for a vote as early as Tuesday. The four lawmakers — Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida; Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama; Representative Porter J. Goss, Republican of Florida; and Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California — are expected to confer again on Monday to review a written draft of the report that includes the recommendations they settled on this week.

Officials cautioned that it was unclear how their draft would be received by the committee's other members, or whether it would be revised as they sought a consensus.

If the full committee votes on the report on Tuesday, it may announce its final recommendations by Wednesday.

The leaders stopped short of endorsing one of the most contentious ideas for intelligence change being widely debated in Washington — the creation of an additional domestic intelligence agency like the British MI-5 — even as they recognized the F.B.I.'s weaknesses in conducting domestic counterterrorism operations. But they said they were open to further study of such proposals.

The idea of creating an American version of MI-5 has gained support as the Bush administration, Congress and outside experts have all tried to grapple with the difficulties of tracking terrorists once they are inside the United States. Widespread criticism of the F.B.I.'s performance before Sept. 11 raised questions about whether counterterrorism operations should be stripped from the bureau and turned over to an independent agency. Still, deep concerns over civil liberties and other constitutional issues have made both the administration and Congress reluctant to endorse the idea.

The proposal to create a director of national intelligence closely mirrors legislation introduced last summer by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California. Ms. Feinstein said in June that a director of national intelligence was necessary to "coordinate our intelligence and antiterrorism efforts" and to make certain that "the sort of communication problems that prevented the various elements of our intelligence community from working together effectively before Sept. 11 never happen again."

One person, the director of central intelligence, is supposed to have authority over the entire American intelligence community, including the C.I.A. In reality, however, the director of central intelligence is most directly responsible for managing the C.I.A., while other agencies within the vast intelligence community have day-to-day managers of their own. Many of those agencies are part of the Defense Department, and so the secretary of defense, not the director of central intelligence, controls their purse strings, drastically limiting the intelligence director's influence over them.

There have been many proposals from Congress and independent commissions in recent years for major changes in the role of the director of central intelligence. Some of those proposals have called for addressing one of the major complaints of central intelligence directors in the past: that they had responsibility for the entire intelligence community but lacked budget power over most of it.

A commission headed by the former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft recently recommended that the director of central intelligence be given real budget authority over the entire intelligence community. But that move has long been resisted by the Pentagon.

The proposal to create a director of national intelligence attempts to address many of the same problems by splitting the job in two.

The national intelligence director would have authority over the broad intelligence community, including the allocation of resources between agencies. The central intelligence director, meanwhile, would be responsible only for the C.I.A. itself. That would free the central intelligence director to concentrate only on whether the agency was doing the hard day-to-day work of counterterrorism.

But questions remain over just how powerful a new director of national intelligence would really be. In their report, the leaders of the joint inquiry plan to propose that the new national intelligence director would review and approve budgets for the intelligence community, but it is unclear whether that would reduce the secretary of defense's budget authority over military intelligence agencies.

Officials at the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. said they had not yet seen the recommendations proposed by the Congressional leaders, and so could not comment.

While the Congressional inquiry is now about to be overshadowed by the new Kissinger commission, its staff clearly laid the framework for all future investigations of Sept. 11. The joint inquiry's public hearings held in the summer and fall produced riveting moments and surprising revelations. At one hearing on Oct. 17, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, testified that the threat of a terror attack was as serious a year later as it had been in the months immediately before September 2001.

The Congressional investigation yielded new evidence about lapses at the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. before the attacks. In a series of public hearings that ended in October, the committee's staff produced reports that accused both agencies of having made mistakes before the September 2001 attacks.

In several interim reports, the committee's staff said the agencies had failed to pursue leads that might have led them to unravel the plans for the hijackings. The inquiry staff accused the agencies of failing in the 1990's to comprehend the ominous rise of Osama bin Laden and his Qaeda network, operating from its sanctuary in Afghanistan.

In a report on Oct. 17, the panel's staff concluded that there were a number of indicators of an impending terrorist attack in the spring and summer of 2001. The information was never specific about the time, place or nature of the attack, but intelligence agencies accumulated information suggesting that there might be an attack with a large number of casualties.

The committee's staff concluded in the October report that the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. had not adequately shared the information they collected, had not assessed the warning signs as a whole and were slow to react to the significance of the intelligence they had obtained about the possibility of an attack. The committee concluded that the F.B.I. had failed to grasp the significance of a July 2001 communication sent from an agent in the bureau's Phoenix office that identified a pattern of Middle Eastern men, some with extreme anti-American beliefs, who were receiving pilot training at flight schools in the United States.

It also said the F.B.I. did not connect the Phoenix communication with the arrest in August 2001 of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was later indicted for complicity in the hijackings, and that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. did not assess the potential threat posed by Mr. Moussaoui in light of the heightened fears of a terrorist attack in the summer of 2001.

Specifically, the panel's staff criticized the C.I.A. for failing to alert other agencies about the terrorist connections of two men, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who had been in Malaysia and who lived in San Diego a year before they took part in the hijackings.

In private, F.B.I. and C.I.A. officials complained bitterly about the committee's staff, led by Eleanor Hill, a former inspector general at the Pentagon. Antagonism between the intelligence agency and the joint inquiry flared in September when Mr. Tenet sent an angry letter to the panel's leaders, protesting the treatment of a senior agency officer who had testified before the committee.

Mr. Tenet's letter was in response to a disclosure that the joint committee staff had predicted in a briefing book to committee members that the officer, Cofer Black, formerly the chief of the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center, would "dissemble" in his testimony.

Mr. Tenet said the disclosure revealed that some members of the committee staff were motivated by "bias, preconceived notions and apparent animus."

The panel's staff also jarred the F.B.I. with some of its findings. A draft report by the committee accused Saudi Arabia of failing to cooperate with the Sept. 11 inquiry and concluded that the F.B.I. had failed to investigate aggressively a series of payments the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States made to a man who had met with Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi when they living in the United States.

Government officials said that the F.B.I. had fully investigated the matter, but the accusations sent shock waves reverberating through the capital. The disclosures also led the Saudi government to tighten controls over Saudi charities in the United States and prompted lawmakers in both parties to criticize what they called the Saudi government's tolerance of extremism within its own borders while failing to cooperate with American investigators.

"No one will ever know whether more extensive analytic efforts, fuller and more timely information sharing or a greater focus on the connection between these events would have led to the unraveling of the Sept. 11 plot," one staff report said. "But it is at least a possibility that increased analysis, sharing and focus would have drawn greater attention to the growing potential for a major terrorist attack in the United States involving the aviation industry."

[txhurl]

Wow.