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Foreign Affairs
The Limits of Intelligence Reform
Helen Fessenden
Summary: The shock of September 11 focused long-overdue attention on the failings of the U.S. intelligence system. But less than a year after the passage of a landmark intelligence reform bill, the prospects for real change are increasingly remote. Bureaucratic self-protection and insider squabbling have thwarted sound policy yet again, and the consequences for national security could be dire.
HELEN FESSENDEN, a former Senior Editor at Foreign Affairs, is Washington Editor of the Eurasia Group. The views expressed here are her own.
BATTLE ROYALE
If the attacks of September 11, 2001, changed everything, then it is also true that some things changed more quickly than others. Within a year and a half, the United States fought one war and prepared for another, and Congress passed two sweeping bills, the U.S.A. Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act, to address the war on terrorism's domestic front. But it took more than three years, a best-selling report, and a bruising fight on Capitol Hill for Congress to pass a bill addressing the issue of intelligence failure. That legislation, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, was signed by President George W. Bush in December 2004 and hailed by many intelligence reform advocates as a major victory. Its core innovations included the creation of a new director of national intelligence (DNI) and the charter of a national counterterrorism center, two recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that sought to remedy insufficient information sharing within the long-fractured intelligence community and establish more coherence in setting and meeting priorities.
This transformation owed much to the 9/11 Commission and the victims' families who backed it. Its gripping report concluded with a set of proposals for overhauling not just the spy agencies but congressional oversight as well. Rather than disbanding after issuing its report, the commissioners kept the heat on Congress and the White House through the summer and autumn of 2004. The momentum of the report, combined with a unique convergence of political forces, paved the way for a set of reforms that had previously lacked the traction to succeed in getting implemented.
This achievement is all the more remarkable given that between the end of the Cold War and the September 11 attacks, no fewer than six independent commissions and three government reviews tackled intelligence reform -- all to no avail. One long-standing concern was that the CIA director also served as the titular head of the 14 other agencies in the intelligence community, most of which are in the Pentagon, even though he effectively lacked control over their budgets or personnel. This "dual hatting" meant that no one was really in charge of the intelligence community. Other experts warned that spy agencies had not successfully reconfigured themselves to meet the amorphous challenges of the post-Cold War world, terrorism chief among them.
The September 11 attacks threw these issues into bold relief while also highlighting the need for better human intelligence and tighter cooperation among agencies -- especially between foreign intelligence collection and domestic counterterrorism efforts. Congress finished its own September 11 inquiry in 2003 with a bipartisan report that called for, among other things, an end to the CIA director's dual hatting through the creation of a more powerful DNI. Yet once again, efforts responding to these recommendations languished in the Republican-controlled Congress, stymied by quiet resistance from the White House, the Pentagon, and the Pentagon's allies on Capitol Hill. Since the Defense Department's intelligence agencies get the biggest piece of the pie -- around 80 percent of the total intelligence ...