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That attitude seemed only to feed the commission's growing appetite for reform. "We've been struck," said Lehman last week, "by a real difference between our interaction with the FBI and our interaction with the agency. The bureau ... has fundamentally admitted they're an agency that is deeply dysfunctional and broken ... whereas the attitude we kind of get from the CIA is ... 'Hey, you know, we're the CIA,' ... kind of a smugness and arrogance toward deep reform."
IS AN INTEL CZAR NEEDED?
Wherever the commission is headed--it is expected to issue a unanimous report in July--it's not clear that the Bush team is in a mood to go along. A handful of congressional Republicans called for the resignation of commission member Jamie Gorelick after Attorney General John Ashcroft in his testimony blamed her for erecting the infamous "wall" between intelligence and criminal investigations when she was Deputy Attorney General under Clinton. As it turns out, Gorelick had simply distilled case law going back to the early Reagan Administration, and Ashcroft's Justice Department abided by the same policy for a time even after 9/11. Commission Republicans were--to a person--privately steamed at Ashcroft for his move, and Democrats thought they saw the hand of the White House hidden in the gambit.
Even in this environment, some changes are certain, particularly at the FBI. House Republican Wolf is preparing legislation that would create what he calls a "service within the service" at the FBI to focus on intelligence gathering, not law enforcement. It would be staffed with its own corps of spies recruited from college campuses, the CIA and other agencies. According to his allies in Congress, Mueller is leaning toward this idea himself. Meanwhile, support is growing on the Hill for a plan drafted by two-time National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft that would create a new intelligence czar with budget and program authority over the CIA and nearly a score of other intelligence units now under the Pentagon's control.
The change is long overdue. When the CIA was created in 1947, the Director of Central Intelligence was supposed to become head of all the intelligence networks, government-wide. But over the years the Pentagon created its own intelligence arms, and it now commands the lion's share of intelligence budgets, much of them spent on satellites. CIA directors have complained of this split-screen arrangement for years, noting that they can hardly be responsible for solid intelligence if they don't control the purse strings. Two years ago, Scowcroft, acting as chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, proposed to fix that disconnect once and for all.