WASHINGTON – The House voted Tuesday to overhaul a national intelligence network that failed to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The bill will combine control of 15 spy agencies, intensify aviation and border security and allow more wiretaps of suspected terrorists.
But many question whether that will help prevent another terrorist attack and make the improvements promised by supporters.
The House voted 336-75 to send the legislation to the Senate today.
Former Washington Sen. Slade Gorton, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, called the bill a 9 on a 10-point scale and said it included most of the executive branch reforms he and other commission members recommended.
“It’s a real reward to us to have had this success,” Gorton said in Seattle. “Primarily, we’re pleased because this will improve the security of the United States and improve the structure of the war against terrorism.”
The bill doesn’t guarantee success, Gorton said. “It doesn’t guarantee good people. It will enable good people” to do their jobs.
But intelligence veterans have a litany of concerns about what will amount to the largest intelligence overhaul since the creation of the CIA in 1947. They question whether more bureaucracy is what the nation needs, and whether the new structure is well-suited to stop terrorists.
Above all, some doubt whether the bill will bring together the nation’s intelligence apparatus.
“Big picture, I think it is a step in the right direction,” said David Kay, who was the CIA’s lead weapons hunter in Iraq until January. But “if you think this bill is going to solve all the intelligence problems in the last 50 years, that is the ultimate in naivete.”
The centerpiece of the legislation is the creation of a national intelligence director, who will set up a new office and staff to oversee huge swaths the intelligence community.
The new director is intended to have strong budget authority and will have new powers over the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies in the Pentagon.
But the new director is not directly in charge of any operations – not military operations, covert actions, the CIA station chiefs around the world, the army of analysts whose job is to connect the dots or the operators of high-tech collection systems that contribute to finding and disrupting terrorist plans.
“Have they created a stronger, central, senior person in charge? It is not clear to me that they have,” said Winston Wiley, a former senior CIA official and terrorism expert. “It’s not that budgets and personnel are not important, but what’s really important is directing, controlling and having access to the people who do the work. They created a person who doesn’t have that.”
President Carter’s CIA director, Stansfield Turner, supports creation of a national intelligence director, but only if the position comes with strong control over intelligence budgets, collection and analysis.
“If the authorities given to the new national intelligence director are not adequate, it will be a setback,” said Turner, who had yet to read the final legislation, which was made public Tuesday evening.
Senior intelligence officials and even some legislators who supported the legislation are not sure how the long-delayed measure will work in practice.
“It’s a black hole we’re looking into,” said one U.S. intelligence official.
However, the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, whose members come from diverse backgrounds but sometimes still work on contract for intelligence agencies, supported the changes.
“The feeling really is you can’t wait. It’s like having a sick patient. You need to do it now,” said Elizabeth Bancroft, the group’s executive director. “We think the patient will be much better for it.”
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