[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 116 (Thursday, September 23, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9555-S9557]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          INTELLIGENCE REFORM

  Mr. GRAHAM of Florida. Mr. President, this is the fourth floor 
statement I have made on the subject of intelligence reform. I have 
spoken previously about the history of our intelligence community, how 
did we get to where we are today. I have talked about the failures of 
the intelligence community to adapt after the end of the Cold War. And 
I have talked about the unfortunate lethargy with which both the 
current administration and, I must say, the Congress, have responded to 
the needs for much-needed reform of our intelligence agencies.
  I must also express my gratitude for the excellent work of the 
independent 9/11 Commission. This Commission has built upon other sets 
of recommendations going back to the mid-1990s for the overhauling of 
our intelligence structure.
  Today, I would like to spend a few minutes discussing the shape that 
I believe the organizational reform should take, and I would like to 
begin by briefly recalling the history of our modern Department of 
Defense.
  The Defense Department evolution can be divided into three historic 
phases: first, pre-1947; second, 1947 through 1986; and, finally, 1986 
until today.

  In the first phase, the pre-1947 phase, practically going back to the 
birth of our Nation, we had independent services which had little 
coordination one with the other. The Navy had its own Cabinet level 
Secretary. The Army had its own Cabinet level Secretary.
  The Army Air Corps, which was a product largely of the Second World 
War, was about to be spun off from the Army and almost certainly would 
have had its own bureaucratic structure. What avoided that from 
occurring was that Congress, at the insistence of President Harry 
Truman, stepped in, in 1947, with the National Security Act. This act 
created, among other things, the Department of Defense with a single 
civilian at the top and service chiefs reporting to that single 
Secretary at the top. That action did not end all rivalries and 
competition for budget dollars and prestige, but it helped.
  However, there were dramatic instances of operational failures, 
including the botched attempt to rescue hostages in Iran and the 
bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon and the problems which 
plagued the invasion of Grenada. All of these in their own way pointed 
to weaknesses in the structure that existed in the period from 1947 to 
1986.
  By 1986, Congress moved to address these concerns, the concerns that 
the services were not communicating well together or coordinating their 
activities toward common missions.
  The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 decentralized the military 
establishment and created joint operation commands based upon 
geography. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were given responsibility for 
planning and advising the civilian command structure on strategy. The 
joint commands have become very familiar to us all, and I might say, I 
am proud to say that three of these are based in my home State of 
Florida: the Southern Command in Miami, the Central Command, and the 
Special Operations Command in Tampa.
  Goldwater-Nichols gave our Nation a much more effective mission-
oriented warfighting machine. It is well recognized that this could not 
have happened had it been conducted under the centralized form of 1947.
  The challenge today is, it took 39 years for the military to evolve 
from the centralized system of 1947 to the decentralized system of 
1986. Using this analogy of our military command structure, I would 
suggest that our current intelligence community, the community of 2004, 
is in the pre-1947 state. I would further suggest that if this is the 
year to be ``the 1947 for intelligence,'' we cannot wait 39 years to 
get it right with our intelligence community, that we cannot centralize 
the leadership of intelligence agencies under a new director of 
national intelligence and then wait for decades until we enact the 
equivalent of Goldwater-Nichols legislation for the decentralization of 
intelligence.
  Given the threats we face around the world, it is urgent that in the 
same act that brings the intelligence agencies together--which are 
defined around functions--under a new director of national 
intelligence, that in that same legislation we need to lay out the plan 
for the most effective management of intelligence and collection and 
analysis in order to achieve the missions responding to the threats we 
have today.
  At the very least, we should plant the seeds for the next necessary 
step--decentralization, jointness of effort among our intelligence 
agencies and personnel, and a mission-based orientation.
  I would propose, as has the 9/11 Commission, that we empower the 
director of national intelligence to establish centers which are built 
not around regions of the world, as are our military commands, but 
around the threats to which our intelligence community must better 
understand and equip us to respond.
  The 9/11 Commission recommended one such center, a center on 
counterterrorism. In the legislation that is currently being considered 
by the relevant committees in the Senate, there is a statutorily 
directed counterterrorism center. I am pleased that President Bush has 
now begun to provide, belatedly as it is, the creation of such a center 
by statute.
  Other centers which should be authorized in this legislation but not 
specifically identified are those that focus on other challenges, 
challenges that we face today, challenges that we may face in the 
future.
  For instance, I do not believe anyone in this Chamber would question 
the fact that we need to have a national intelligence center which 
focuses on how we are going to counter and combat the proliferation of 
weapons of mass destruction. We will probably also find that we need to 
have a center which focuses on financing, the financing of rogue 
states, the financing of terrorist organizations.
  It is entirely possible that we will need to create centers to 
respond to threats that are defined by national boundaries or regions, 
such as the specific dangers posed by regimes in North Korea and Iran.
  But most of the threats we now face do not lend themselves to 
geographic definitions. Just look at how al-Qaida has rejuvenated 
itself into so many decentralized parts of the world with such a 
flexible, nimble organizational structure, that we failed to wipe it 
out in Afghanistan, diverted our attention to Iraq, and have now 
allowed the enemy to become much more violent and effective.
  The analogy that I have used is to that of a puddle of mercury. If 
you slam your fist into the mercury, it does not disappear. It becomes 
a thousand tiny blobs scattered over the tabletop. That is essentially 
what we have done to al-Qaida. We have slammed our fist into the puddle 
of mercury and now we are faced with literally hundreds of droplets 
around the world.
  The key to this mission-based decentralization of intelligence, in my 
opinion, is that we must give the director of national intelligence the 
statutory authority to manage the community with flexibility and 
nimbleness so he or she can quickly establish new centers or modify 
existing centers as future threats emerge, just as Goldwater-Nichols 
has given that authority to the Secretary of Defense.
  Again, there is an analogy in the Defense Department since Goldwater-
Nichols. Originally, the countries of Syria and Lebanon were assigned 
to European Command because they were thought to be more relevant to 
European defense issues than the Middle East.
  Recently, there has been a reorganization for those two countries, 
recognizing the fact of the threat they pose through such things as 
providing sanctuary to some of the major international terrorist 
groups, that it would

[[Page S9556]]

be more appropriate to assign them to Central Command which has 
responsibility for the Middle East and Central Asia. I am very pleased 
that such an approach has a growing number of advocates within the 
intelligence community.
  As an example, Flynt Leverett, a former senior analyst at the CIA and 
later Senior Director for Middle Eastern Affairs at the National 
Security Council from 2002 to 2003, is now a visiting fellow at the 
Brookings Institution. He wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times 
in July of this year. In that article, Mr. Leverett said the following:

       Clearly, structural reform needs to go beyond the creation 
     of a freestanding intelligence ``czar'' who would oversee the 
     entire American spy network. We need to develop a model of 
     ``jointness'' for the intelligence community, analogous to 
     that which Goldwater-Nichols Act did for the uniform military 
     18 years ago . . .
       Before Goldwater-Nichols, too many modern military missions 
     were characterized by disaster . . .
       Since Goldwater-Nichols required the armed services to 
     collaborate, we have seen the successes of Panama, Operation 
     Desert Storm, and the outstanding battle performance of our 
     forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
       This model should be applied to American intelligence.
       This means moving away from the current organizational 
     structure, [which is] defined primarily along disciplinary 
     and agency lines . . .
       Instead, we should organize and deploy our resources 
     against high priority targets, including terrorism, weapons 
     of mass destruction, China, and the problem states in the 
     Middle East.
       Focused on a particular target, each group would draw on 
     people and resources from across the intelligence community. 
     . . . Existing agencies would function primarily as providers 
     of personnel and resources, much as the individual military 
     services function in relationship to the combatant commands.
       It is clear that our intelligence agencies cannot move 
     towards partnership on their own. The post-9/11 battles among 
     the counterterrorist center, the new Terrorism Threat 
     Integration Center, the F.B.I., and the Department of 
     Homeland Security over primacy in assessing the terrorist 
     threat strongly suggest that we have regressed in our efforts 
     to integrate . . .
       It is going to require strong presidential and 
     Congressional leadership to achieve genuine reform.

  I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Leverett's entire article be printed 
in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, July 9, 2004]

                      Force Spies to Work Together

                          (By Flynt Leverett)

       Washington.--Today, the Senate Intelligence Committee is 
     expected to release its report on the prewar intelligence on 
     Iraq. The document is likely to make clear that America's 
     intelligence network, particularly the Central Intelligence 
     Agency, badly needs repair.
       The Senate report will also show that America's 
     intelligence shortcomings aren't going to be addressed simply 
     by changing C.I.A. directors. As the report should make 
     clear, our spy services both failed to do a thorough enough 
     job watching Iraq's weapons programs and played down evidence 
     that challenged the prevailing assumptions that the programs 
     were active. In addition, analysts did not critically 
     evaluate their sources of information; instead, they 
     marshaled the available evidence to paint the picture that 
     policymakers wanted to see.
       And how will President Bush and his administration respond 
     to these findings? It's unlikely that they will do much of 
     anything. After all, every independent panel that examined 
     American post-cold-war intelligence--including President 
     Bush's own Scowcroft commission--recognized that fundamental 
     structural changes were needed in our intelligence services. 
     Yet, the White House has remained steadfastly passive as 
     critical problems have gone unaddressed. Meanwhile, 
     administration loyalists have argued repeatedly that 
     structural change is not needed to improve the community's 
     performance, providing a politically comfortable rationale 
     for the White House's inaction.
       In theory, the argument against radical reform might seem 
     plausible. The director of Central Intelligence today has 
     sufficient authority on paper to address many of the issues 
     that will be identified in the Senate report, like the 
     failure of collectors and analysts to share information about 
     sources.
       But in practice, the C.I.A. has had a hard time breaking 
     free from its culture of mediocrity. During my years in 
     government at the C.I.A. and elsewhere, I was repeatedly told 
     that the problems now publicly identified in the Senate 
     report were going to be fixed. I remember years of discussion 
     about the desirability of ``co-locating'' analysts and 
     operations officers working on the same target--seeing to it 
     that they had the equal access to information about their 
     sources. But in the end, nothing was done to change old ways 
     of doing business, setting the stage for the Iraq fiasco.
       The story, it seems, hasn't changed much. In February, for 
     example, Jami Miscik, the agency's deputy director of 
     intelligence, told C.I.A. analysts in a speech that the 
     problems with information-sharing would be fixed within 30 
     days. It's July, and nothing has happened.
       Clearly, structural reform needs to go beyond the creation 
     of a freestanding intelligence ``czar'' who would oversee the 
     entire American spy network. We need to develop a model of 
     ``jointness'' for the intelligence community, analogous to 
     what the Goldwater-Nichols Act did for the uniformed 
     military 18 years ago. That legislation made the chairman 
     of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the principal military 
     adviser to the president. It also mandated cross-service 
     commands, defined regionally and functionally, as the 
     operational chains of command for American military 
     forces.
       This change produced real improvement in military 
     performance. Before Goldwater-Nichols, too many modern 
     military missions were characterized by disaster: the botched 
     attempt to rescue hostages in Iran, the bombing of the Marine 
     barracks in Lebanon, the operational problems that plagued 
     the invasion of Grenada.
       Since Goldwater-Nichols required the armed services to 
     collaborate, we have seen the successes of Panama, Operation 
     Desert Storm and the outstanding battlefield performance of 
     our forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
       This model should be applied to American intelligence. This 
     means moving away from the current organizational structure, 
     defined primarily along disciplinary and agency lines. (The 
     C.I.A.'s directorate of intelligence, for example, is 
     responsible for all-source analysis; the directorate of 
     operations is responsible for human intelligence collection; 
     the National Security Agency is responsible for 
     communications intelligence. Turf is sacred.)
       Instead, we should organize and deploy our resources 
     against high-priority targets, including terrorism, weapons 
     of mass destruction, China and problem states in the Middle 
     East. Focused on a particular target, each group would draw 
     on people and resources from across the intelligence 
     community. These new target-based centers would report to a 
     new national intelligence director, not to heads of 
     individual agencies. Existing agencies would function 
     primarily as providers of personnel and resources, much as 
     the individual military services function in relation to the 
     combatant commands.
       Certainly, there have been some tentative steps toward 
     collaboration. The Counterterrorist Center and the Weapons 
     Intelligence, Proliferation and Arms Control Center, both of 
     which report to the director of Central Intelligence, reflect 
     some of the logic of such cooperation. While the 
     counterterrorist center wasn't inclusive enough to bring 
     together information that might have stopped the 9/11 
     attacks, at least its analysts and operators are focused, in 
     an integrated way, on their target.
       Still, it is clear that our intelligence agencies cannot 
     move toward partnership on their own. The post-9/11 battles 
     among the counterterrorist center, the new Terrorist Threat 
     Integration Center, the F.B.I., and the Department of 
     Homeland Security over primacy in assessing the terrorist 
     threat strongly suggest that we have regressed in the effort 
     to integrate. For its part, the arms control center was not 
     independent enough of C.I.A. views to avoid being led toward 
     a flawed analysis of the Iraqi arsenal.
       It is going to require strong presidential and 
     Congressional leadership to achieve genuine reform. 
     Thoughtful members on both sides of the aisle in both houses 
     of Congress are already working on serious reform proposals, 
     though nobody has yet had the courage to devise a Goldwater-
     Nichols Act for our spy agencies. In this context, the Bush 
     administration's lack of initiative is inexplicable and 
     unconscionable.
       There are those who argue that intelligence reform should 
     not be taken up during a political season. They are wrong. 
     This kind of reform can take place only in a political 
     moment. We need a thorough discussion of the issue in the 
     context of the current presidential campaign so that whoever 
     is inaugurated in January has a mandate to break 
     organizational pottery in order to save American lives.

  Mr. GRAHAM of Florida. The broad goal of ensuring that the Goldwater-
Nichols model is applied to the intelligence community should be the 
top priority as we shape the organizational reforms in our pending 
legislation. It is my intention next week to speak to some specific 
organizational reforms which should be included in order to achieve 
this broader objective of a decentralized, joint, and nimble 
intelligence community, capable of responding to our emerging threats.
  Let me repeat Flynt Leverett's conclusion: It is going to require 
strong Presidential and congressional leadership to achieve genuine 
reform.
  That is our challenge. Next week, we will be tested as to whether we 
will be able and worthy to meet that challenge.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

[[Page S9557]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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