ASHINGTON, March 13 — The C.I.A. officer who led the team that caught the Soviet mole Aldrich H. Ames is coming out of retirement to take charge of intelligence at the new Department of Homeland Security. Posted on 03/14/2003 12:20:24 AM PST by JohnHuang2
ASHINGTON, March 13 — The C.I.A. officer who led the team that caught the Soviet mole Aldrich H. Ames is coming out of retirement to take charge of intelligence at the new Department of Homeland Security.
The officer, Paul Redmond, the former chief of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, has been named assistant secretary of homeland security for information analysis, the White House announced today.
The appointment ends months of speculation in Washington about who would take charge of the newly created — and highly sensitive — intelligence unit in the department. Even now that Mr. Redmond has accepted the position, questions remain about just how his unit will interact with the C.I.A., the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies in the government's sprawling intelligence community.
"I'm very much looking forward to being back in the fray, facing all these challenges, having flunked retirement," Mr. Redmond said in an interview today.
As Mr. Redmond's appointment was announced, John Brennan, the newly named chief of another newly created intelligence unit, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, told reporters that he believed his center would be a hub in the government's efforts to integrate terrorist-related information gathered by the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Homeland Security Department and other agencies. Mr. Redmond's intelligence unit plans to work closely with the new Terrorist Threat Integration Center to help policy makers determine the level of the terrorist threat facing the United States, a spokesman for the security department said.
The creation of the domestic security intelligence unit and the Terrorist Threat Integration Center are part of a sweeping reorganization of the government's counterterrorist operations in the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The threat center, which will begin operations on May 1, will bring analysts from the C.I.A. and F.B.I. together to scrutinize intelligence on potential terrorist threats.
Both the intelligence agency and the bureau will also be moving their entire counterterrorism operations to the same site in Northern Virginia as that of the threat integration center to work more closely together. The move to a single location for both threat analysis and counterterrorism operations has led some outside experts to question whether the reorganization is a precursor to the creation of a new, independent counterterrorism agency separate from the intelligence agency and the bureau. The current plans call for the officials in the new counterterrorism operation to remain employees of either the C.I.A. or F.B.I.
But some officials have suggested that the decision to create the threat center and to move the counterterrorism operations of the F.B.I. and C.I.A. to a single site was a response to the bureaucratic pressures facing the intelligence community as a result of the creation of a potential rival power center, the Homeland Security Department.
In addition, the move to closer cooperation in counterterrorism between the bureau and the intelligence agency can be seen as a response to the calls for the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency along the lines of MI-5 in Britain.
Asked if the reorganization of the threat integration center and counterterrorism operations at the intelligence agency and the bureau would inevitably create an MI-5 in all but name, Mr. Brennan said he was not looking to foreign governments for a model of how to run his new center. But he added that the intelligence community needed to be willing to "continually evolve and grow," in order to keep up with the threats facing the United States.
"I've been in this job for 48 hours," he said, "and I'm still trying to get a handle on how the U.S. government does this, so I don't want to look at foreign governments necessarily and say that's the way to go."
Mr. Brennan added that while he expected his analytical unit to work closely with the operational side of the counterterrorism divisions of the intelligence agency and the bureau, he had still not worked out all of the procedures governing his center's relationships with other agencies. He said it had not yet been determined, for example, whether the threat center would take charge of putting together the daily terrorist threat matrix and other briefing materials provided to President Bush and other senior policy makers.
Questions about his unit's new role also face Mr. Redmond. Not only will the intelligence unit be in charge of processing and analyzing intelligence provided by the threat center and other agencies, it will also be responsible for processing intelligence collected by agencies within the Homeland Security Department, like the Coast Guard, Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service.
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