WASHINGTON – After five months of wrangling over power and money, the House of Representatives Tuesday approved a sweeping reorganization of the nation’s intelligence gathering practices, leaving it to the Senate to give final passage to a set of reforms designed to significantly change the way U.S. spy agencies detect and track the nation’s enemies.

President Bush supports the measure and has said he will sign it into law once it wins Senate approval, which was expected Wednesday. But the measure’s success may well depend on the person Bush names as his new director of national intelligence – a job created by the act.

The skill that person exerts in wresting control of the 15 government intelligence agencies, some of which have grown accustomed to operational autonomy, will determine whether the reforms will work, or whether they will become just another bulky layer of bureaucracy in a system already addled by dysfunction.

The House approved the bill by a vote of 336-to-75. It would create a new national intelligence director, tighten U.S. border controls and establish a counterterrorism center.

“This legislation is going to make a real difference to the security of our country,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, one of the bill’s chief sponsors. “It is going to improve the quality of intelligence provided to our military, and it will help to keep civilians safer here at home.”

Intelligence veterans, though, said that change would be difficult for the government’s intelligence community.

“These are mature bureaucracies,” said Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). “These are organizations in which their internal processes, because of bureaucratic politicking, budget justification …, are more important than the work is.”

The bill proposes a number of significant changes, including the creation of a 500-employee government office to watch over all of the other intelligence agencies. It would include those already doing that work with the CIA-run community management staff.

But the chief controversy has been over how much control the new intelligence director would exercise over three Defense Department offices that conduct electronic and satellite eavesdropping.

That fight, which for several weeks held up passage of the bill in the House, was resolved Monday. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., agreed to a phrase added to the bill that he said would preserve the chain of command from the president to the defense secretary, essentially bypassing the new intelligence chief.

Hunter argued that the military is the primary user of three Defense Department intelligence offices: the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Though the budgets of those agencies are classified, the Pentagon receives about 80 percent of the estimated $40 billion annual intelligence budget.

Budget control has been a central theme throughout the intelligence reform debate, which began in July when the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks recommended that Congress reform the nations’ intelligence gathering practices.

Proponents argued that only an intelligence chief with control over department budgets would be effective, a position that Bush eventually backed.

“We create a strong director of national intelligence,” said Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., who with Collins drafted the bill. “Someone will be in charge of our national intelligence community in the broadest sense, overseeing the billions of dollars of American taxpayer money invested in intelligence in an age of terrorism.”

The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 does indeed give the new director of national intelligence substantial control over budgets, allowing the director to “develop and determine” spending in a “National Intelligence Program,” which is based on budget proposals submitted by intelligence agency heads.

The intelligence chief will also be able to monitor how the money in each of the 15 agencies is being used, and is required to report to the president within 15 days if money isn’t being used for the stated intent. And the new intelligence boss can transfer up to $150 million from one agency to another with the approval of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the heads of the departments affected by the transfer.

In many ways, the new director of national intelligence (DNI) would assume many of the powers now held by the director of central intelligence, a job that includes both running the Central Intelligence Agency and coordinating the work of the government’s other intelligence offices.

The big difference, though, is that the DNI will not be in direct charge of the CIA. That job will be left to a deputy, who is recommended by the DNI to the president.

The DNI will also have a separate principal deputy DNI to help coordinate work among the agencies, and a host of other high-level assistants, including a general counsel, civil liberties protection officer, a counterintelligence executive, a science and technology director and an inspector general.

Additional power will come from the DNI’s ability to move people between intelligence agencies. The provision is intended to promote the sharing of knowledge and techniques among both intelligence operatives – those who collect information and oversee foreign spies – and analysts, the people who cull the gathered information and present it to the president and other government policy makers.

But Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, called the personnel swapping authority, “a terrible idea.

“It treats the whole intelligence process as if it’s one product for one set of consumers, and it’s not,” Richelson said. “It’s something that caters to different consumers that have different needs. This centralized planning didn’t work for the Soviet Union, and I don’t think it will work well here.”

Richelson and other experts, though, admit that it’s still too early to tell just how the new intelligence superstructure will shape up. The bill requires the new director and president to meet a series of milestones over the next year for developing better methods of information sharing among the agencies, as well as enhanced intelligence analysis.

At the director’s discretion, a series of intelligence centers can be formed around emerging issues, and centers for counterterrorism and weapons non-proliferation will exist from the start.

Most of the reforms are intended to achieve a single goal: improved intelligence sharing among all of the agencies. The failure to share intelligence on terror suspects was a key failing raised by the Sept. 11 Commission.

While information is easily shared in the outside world, it often grinds to a halt in the cloistered, security-conscious environment of the CIA, FBI, DIA, National Security Agency and other government intelligence organizations.

“Sharing is all about information management,” said Lee Strickland, a former CIA senior analyst who now teaches at the University of Maryland. “It’s not about technology. We really have to come to grips and understand the information architectures at the various agencies, and then engineer a plan for sharing.”

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(c) 2004, Chicago Tribune.

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