Rational Grounds

Kenneth Pollack, in The Persian Puzzle, talks about the Clinton Administration using this Swiss back-channel with the Khatami crowd towards the end of its tenure. I should definitely ask Pollack about this when he visits SIPA next week.

Drum also links to a David Ignatius column on intelligence reform results:

Unfortunately, though, there are plenty of others who share responsibility: the Kean Commission that recommended a bureaucratic solution to our intelligence problems in the first place, a Republican congress that fiddled around and made things even worse, and a craven Democratic caucus that almost unanimously voted for a bad bill for fear of being called weak on terror. The bottom line is that this has been a mess all around, and there's no sign that anyone has the spine to go back and try to fix it.

Juicy. One of his gripes is that part of this mess has been an inability (or unwillingness) to stand up to Rumsfeld and DOD on control of their intelligence agencies. (When this was all proposed there was a major turf war over whether the new DNI would have budgetary control over all the intelligence agencies, a key determinate in how powerful the position would be.) As another article argues, Rumsfeld won out on that.

We actually had someone from DNI here a week or two back, and I asked them specifically about this (and about the DIA/CIA HUMINT turf battle). The DNI rep assured me that Negroponte does have budgetary control over the whole intelligence community, DOD agencies included, and they explained that the DIA HUMINT initiative was folded into the National Clandestine Services under the CIA. The NCS claim does seems to pan out, at least in theory. The budget picture is much murkier:

The Pentagon, which absorbs some 80 percent of the classified intelligence budget, has been another tough spot. House Intelligence Committee members watched unhappily as Negroponte ceded budget authority over certain classified satellite programs to the Pentagon.

"We gave the DNI a lot of authority ... and yet Negroponte has been reluctant to use it to force change," Harman said.

Senate Homeland Security Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, remains concerned about a Pentagon directive that made clear three of its agencies -- including the National Security Agency -- work for the Pentagon.

She saw that as a snub to Negroponte, despite assurances otherwise from Negroponte and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Congressional Quarterly puts this a little more directly, quoting transcripts from Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearings:

“For example,” Feinstein continued, “military databases of suspicious activity reports . . . by the (domestic military) counterintelligence field activity, or CIFA; and, secondly, a Pentagon program to secretly pay Iraqi newspapers to run pro-American articles.

“Were these activities subject to your approval and oversight?”

Negroponte’s answer was short-circuited by an unidentified voice, according to the CQ transcript, quite possibly his deputy, former Air Force general and NSA chief Michael Hayden.

“Ma’am, I don’t believe that either of those activities would fall into Mr. Negroponte’s area. They are Department of Defense programs, I believe.”

“Now, let me raise this problem then,” Feinstein continued.

“Now, I know how tough it is. But if you didn’t know and you didn’t give a go-ahead [to domestic military spying], it indicates to me that, for 85 percent of the budget, which is defense-related, that you’re not going to have the controls that you should have,” Feinstein said.

On the other hand, as this Baltimore Sun article states (and our DNI visitor mentioned), the 2007 budget will be the first one that Negroponte has a real hand in. So this is a question that will ultimately be answered in the coming months.