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Deutch encourages such admiration by spreading himself thick across the corridors of power. His squash partner is Clinton's Oxford classmate and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. Deutch likes playing hardball. William Perry, the Secretary of Defense, is not only Deutch's ex-boss at the Pentagon but also his former business partner. Deutch knows how to make stone-faced Secretary of State Warren Christopher laugh. At the Prime Rib, a tony Washington restaurant, he swaps spy stories with Senator Specter. Says Talbott: "The first words that come to mind when you interact with John: energy, enthusiasm, focus." All that helps shore up support for what Deutch truly wants: a concentration of intelligence-gathering power never possessed by the DCI.
Today the intelligence community employs some 100,000 people operating as a loose guild in agencies that waste billions of dollars in redundant services. Five organizations buy or run spy satellites, while eight process and analyze their photos. In addition to the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard have their own intelligence services. The Energy and Treasury departments, FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have intelligence units as well.
The job of DCI was established in 1946 so that one person would oversee these unruly organizations. In the decades since, however, no director has had the inclination or clout to rein in these agencies. Deutch is doing just that. Instead of becoming bogged down in CIA business, as past chiefs have, Deutch has left the day-to-day operation of the agency to his executive director, Nora Slatkin, so he can spend most of his time overseeing the rest of the community.
Gregarious and invariably rumpled, Deutch, 57, appears capable of literally getting his arms around any problem. A bear of a man, 6 ft. 3 in. tall, he dominates almost any room he walks into, wrapping his thick arm around a shoulder to cajole or bully a colleague into giving him what he wants. Given virtual carte blanche by the White House to reform the agency, he has cultivated the congressional intelligence committees that are also demanding change. But most important have been his ties with the Defense Department.
Upon his appointment, Deutch immediately cleaned out the entire CIA top management and replaced it with a team of ex-Pentagon and congressional staff members. In June 1995, a month after settling into the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, he summoned the Pentagon's top intelligence chiefs to his office for a grilling on their fat budgets. "It reminded me of when I took my orals for my master's degree," says retired Lieut. General James Clapper, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. With Perry's help, Deutch next set up a Joint Space Management Board to control how billion-dollar spy satellites are built. He then proposed a new National Imagery and Mapping Agency to consolidate the organizations that process satellite photos. He is also pushing the CIA to tailor more of its intelligence to what the military needs, and to share more of the secrets it collects on drug traffickers and organized crime with law-enforcement agencies.