Via Laura Rozen, here’s the link to an article in today’s New York Sun that suggests that John Negroponte has already agreed to let the DOD take covert operations from the CIA. This, and the other issues discussed in this article, is a pretty big deal. And it is far from what the Congress called for in the 2004 intel reorganization.
Here’s one passage from the article …
The pending appointment of General Michael Hayden as director of the Central Intelligence Agency will pave the way for the agency’s emasculation and for the Pentagon to assume full authority over paramilitary operations.
A senior intelligence community official yesterday said the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, has indicated “he is willing to give up covert operations to the Pentagon.”
The source also pointed out that the Pentagon has requested increased budget authority to prepare for the acquisition of the CIA’s targeted military operations. The intelligence overhaul of 2004 envisioned that they would remain under the purview of the CIA.
The authority to commission and plan these secret military operations has been a point of contention since 2004 when Congress and the White House began reorganizing the intelligence community.
The proposed change would give the Pentagon unfettered authority to plan and conduct these operations without consulting an intelligence bureaucracy its civilian leaders have deemed hostile to the president’s war policy.
This contradicts what we just told you Steve Clemons is saying. And I’m not sufficiently plugged in to the story to tell you who’s right and who’s wrong. But this stuff is genuinely worrisome on a few different levels.
First, our whole intelligence infrastructure is being chopped apart and cobbled back together in ways that Congress never envisioned and doesn’t appear to be having a chance to sign off on. More immediately troubling is the fact that all our forward-leaning intelligence capacity is being taken over by the Pentagon when it’s still being run by Don Rumsfeld, a guy who just about everyone seems to agree now is a demonstrated failure at the job, someone who should already have been fired.
In this universe, as opposed to the alternative Bush loyalist universe, who’s screwed more stuff up recently, the political appointees at the Pentagon or the CIA? CIA’s far from perfect. But I don’t have much trouble answering the former. Yet we’re handing over a big chunk of the what the CIA does to those guys.
I don’t want to romanticize the intel community status quo ante. But you really have to wonder whether all these changes aren’t doing far more harm than good to our intel capacities and our national security. Again, particularly because Don Rumsfeld appears to be the one implementing what Congress mandated. Really, that sentence says it all.
Late Update: TPM Reader LG responds …
Re the DNI to turn over covert ops to DoD meme…keep in mind that there is a very big
difference between clandestine and covert ops. Covert ops (the paramilitary stuff) has almost always relied on heavy DoD suppport, training, funding, etc. with very little DoD oversight. The DO fair-haired
children do clandestine ops. I think it actually makes sense for the Pentagon to be running the covert
ops, especially since the Director of the CIA is no longer the DCI, just another Agency head that answers
to the DNI.
This is a decent point. But making the decisions without clear congressional authorization still seems like a big problem, and having Rumsfeld in charge of implementing them even bigger.
