WASHINGTON – A key Republican’s proposal to break up the CIA and rearrange the Pentagon’s spy agencies under a national intelligence director met immediate and broad resistance Monday. A top Senate Democrat called it a “severe mistake” and the agency’s former director said it showed a “dangerous misunderstanding of the business of intelligence.”
Critics began aligning to fight the proposal that would represent the most significant overhaul of U.S. intelligence operations since the CIA’s 1947 inception – and the most sweeping plan offered in the post-Sept. 11 debate.
President Bush did not endorse the proposal by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan. Instead, the president said only that he was interested in finding “the best way to fashion intelligence so the president and his Cabinet secretaries have got the ability to make good judgment calls.”
Roberts surprised Republicans and Democrats alike when he announced on a Sunday morning talk show his proposal to remake the intelligence community by splitting the CIA into three separate agencies, pulling all or part of four defense intelligence agencies out of the Pentagon, and creating a new national intelligence director to oversee the National Intelligence Service he envisions.
The commission’s vice chairman, Lee Hamilton, told the House Financial Services Committee on Monday that he wasn’t ready to endorse Roberts’ plan because he hadn’t seen the details.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said in a statement Monday that Roberts’ proposal departs significantly from the commission’s blueprint, eliminating the CIA while it is embroiled in the war on terror.
Although he had not seen the bill’s details, Rockefeller said, “Disbanding and scattering the Central Intelligence Agency at such a crucial time would be a severe mistake.”
Former CIA Director George Tenet, in his first public statement since retiring last month, also moved to discredit Roberts’ proposal, saying it “reflects a dangerous misunderstanding of the business of intelligence.”
Roberts rejects suggestions that he is abolishing the CIA, saying agency employees would still go to work in the same offices. However, he and his aides conceded there would be nothing left called the CIA, nor would there be a CIA director.
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