I agree with the jist of the article. The idea of a super-DCI bothers me. The problem pre-911 was not that our intelligence was insufficiently centralized, the problem wasn't that too much information was getting through to the Commander in Chief, so the new structure is solving a problem that wasn't the problem.
The problem is that we didn't have a war-time military, and we didn't have a war-time CIA. We've solved the first problem, and watching the guys go to work in Afghanistan, I thought maybe we were going to solve the second. But the super-DCI concept makes me wonder.
We've been at war with muslim radicals for thirty years. I'll admit that we weren't too worried about Saudi-supported and Pakistani-supported radicals until after 911, but that should have made infiltrating them even easier. Al Qaeda and the Taliban should have been riddled by guys like John Walker Lindh, except working for us. Its tough to find guys that are willing to go live in the dirt for 2 or 3 years just to get close to being in position, with almost no communication home, missing Christmas vacation with their families, but these are the kind of guys they needed to be recruiting.
And maybe they were, but I had the distinct impression that they had very few assets on the ground in Afghanistan, and despite everything very little on the ground in Saddam's Baghdad.
The little episode around Joseph Wilson and the Niger uranium mines is a classic indicator of two problems; no assets in Niger to monitor French uranium smuggling (we only found out when Khadafi confessed), and a politicized CIA that was leaking information in an effort to throw an American election.
Real espionage is illegal. Its not only illegal in the target country, its illegal under US law. You aren't going to be effective unless you create an agency that is off-the-books, under-the-radar. An "OSS" within CIA would be illegal, and if you are hiring guys who give a rip about that, if they can be prosecuted in court, or dragged in to testify before congress, if you aren't going to stand behind them when things go wrong, you aren't going to have an effective service.
We need to go back to the "no-such-agency" philosophy. No one should know the name of the DCI. No one should ever have "ex-CIA" on their public resume.
I wonder if you read Tom Clancy's "The Teeth of The Tiger". As literature, its very average. But he brings in a few ideas, as always, that are very good. He describes something that you might like: a "private" company (a brokerage firm in the daylight -- an intelligence/operations in black) headed by a retired senator that takes on the enemies while government agencies have complete deniability. The company is unofficially supported by some key figures in the official agencies. And if something really goes wrong, they have blank pre-signed presidential pardons made-up by Clancy's favorite spook/President -- Jack Ryan.