[Senate Hearing 108-755]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 108-755
REORGANIZING AMERICA'S INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY: A VIEW FROM THE INSIDE
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HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
AUGUST 16, 2004
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Governmental Affairs
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
95-507 WASHINGTON : 2005
_____________________________________________________________________________
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COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine, Chairman
TED STEVENS, Alaska JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut
GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio CARL LEVIN, Michigan
NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii
ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois
ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
PETER G. FITZGERALD, Illinois MARK DAYTON, Minnesota
JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey
RICHARD C. SHELBY, Alabama MARK PRYOR, Arkansas
Michael D. Bopp, Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Michael Stern, Deputy Staff Director for Investigations
David Kass, Chief Investigative Counsel
Joyce A. Rechtschaffen, Minority Staff Director and Counsel
Kevin J. Landy, Minority Counsel
Amy B. Newhouse, Chief Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Opening statements:
Page
Senator Collins.............................................. 1
Senator Lieberman............................................ 2
Senator Roberts.............................................. 4
Senator Rockefeller.......................................... 6
Senator Voinovich............................................ 31
Senator Levin................................................ 34
Senator Coleman.............................................. 37
Senator Durbin............................................... 40
Senator Carper............................................... 43
Senator Dayton............................................... 46
WITNESSES
Monday, August 16, 2004
Hon. William H. Webster, Former Director, Federal Bureau of
Investigation, Former Director of Central Intelligence, Senior
Partner, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy, LLP................ 9
Hon. R. James Woolsey, Former Director of Central Intelligence,
Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton............................ 13
Hon. Stansfield Turner, Former Director of Central Intelligence,
Professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland..... 18
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Turner, Hon. Stansfield:
Testimony.................................................... 18
Webster, Hon. William H.:
Testimony.................................................... 9
Prepared statement........................................... 51
Woolsey, Hon. R. James:
Testimony.................................................... 13
Prepared statement........................................... 62
APPENDIX
Robert M. Gates, Former Director of Central Intelligence,
prepared statement............................................. 73
Questions and Responses for Mr. Webster from:
Senator Voinovich............................................ 86
Senator Levin................................................ 89
Senator Durbin............................................... 94
Questions and Responses for Mr. Woolsey from:
Senator Voinovich............................................ 97
Senator Levin................................................ 100
Senator Durbin............................................... 106
Questions for Mr. Turner from: (Responses to these questions were
not received by press time.)
Senator Voinovich............................................ 110
Senator Levin................................................ 112
Senator Durbin............................................... 116
REORGANIZING AMERICA'S INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY: A VIEW FROM THE INSIDE
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MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 2004
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:35 a.m., in
room SD-342 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Susan M.
Collins, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Collins, Lieberman, Voinovich, Coleman,
Sununu, Levin, Durbin, Carper, and Dayton.
Also present: Senators Roberts and Rockefeller
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN COLLINS
Chairman Collins. The Committee will come to order. I want
to welcome not only our witnesses today and the Members of the
Governmental Affairs Committee who have rearranged their
schedules to be here, which I very much appreciate in light of
the urgency of our task, but I also want to recognize that we
are joined today by the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, the distinguished Senator from Kansas, Senator
Roberts. And that we expect shortly the Ranking Member of that
committee, Senator Rockefeller, to also join us.
I felt that since the Senate Intelligence Committee has so
much expertise in this area, and we are hearing from three
former Directors of the CIA, that it would be appropriate for
the Chairman and the Ranking Member of that committee to join
us today, and I am very pleased that they have done so, and we
welcome you, Senator Roberts.
Today, the Governmental Affairs Committee holds its third
hearing on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission calling
for a restructuring of the Intelligence Community. At our last
hearing, on August 3, we explored the National Counterterrorism
Center proposal. The testimony that we heard from experienced
intelligence officers and from key Commission staff will help
us greatly on that component of our task.
Today, we will focus upon the proposal for a National
Intelligence Director. No other component of the Commission's
recommendations has received as much comment and debate as the
proposed National Intelligence Director. There is considerable,
but by no means unanimous, support for the notion that putting
in place a National Intelligence Director will help strengthen
our intelligence system. There is a considerable range of
opinion, however, about the details of that position, including
how it should be structured, where the Director should work and
what authority this individual should have.
It is the task of this Committee to draft legislation that
would ensure that the NIDs of today, and for years to come,
have sufficient authority to do the job effectively, while at
the same time being subject to the restraints necessary, the
oversight and accountability, to keep the position within the
bounds of our constitutional system of checks and balances. In
other words, we want to create a position with real, not just
symbolic authority, yet not impose just another layer of
bureaucracy nor grant so much power that we open the door to
abuse.
The details that we must fill in are many, and we have
generated vigorous debate, as they should. These are among the
questions we will ask. What powers does this new position need
to be effective against the threat we face today and the
threats we will face in the future? What safeguards should be
included to ensure the independence of the National
Intelligence Director? For example, where should this new
office be located? Should the NID serve a fixed term, as does
the FBI Director or serve at the pleasure of the President?
Should the Director have deputies that are responsible for
leading intelligence efforts elsewhere in government, including
some who would answer not only to the Director, but also to a
cabinet secretary, the so-called double-hatting question? From
where will this new office get the top-notch staff that it
needs? And perhaps most important, precisely what authority
should the NID have over the entire Intelligence Community in
terms of budget, personnel, technology standards, and the
allocation of resources.
The expertise and the insight of our distinguished
witnesses today will help us in the difficult challenge of
answering these questions wisely. Our witness panel brings
together three former Directors of Central Intelligence from
three different administrations. Their service spanned nearly
three decades and witnessed an incredible variety of issues.
They will provide us with the perspective of those who have
grappled with the challenges facing our Intelligence Community
while serving at the highest level.
In addition, former CIA Director Robert Gates has submitted
a very thoughtful written statement since he is unable to be
with us today.\1\
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Gates appears in the Appendix on
page 73.
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Chairman Collins. Judge Webster, Mr. Woolsey, Admiral
Turner, we are very pleased that you have taken the time to be
with us today, and we look forward to hearing your testimony
shortly.
I would now like to call on the Ranking Member, my partner
in this endeavor, Senator Lieberman.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LIEBERMAN
Senator Lieberman. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. I
join you in welcoming Senator Roberts and Senator Rockefeller
to our Committee, and I thank the three witnesses today. It
would not be stretching even Senatorial hyperbole to say that
these are three wise men. They have served our country well and
continue to do so in many capacities, and I say so, even
knowing from advance texts, that they do not share exactly my
reaction to all of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission.
The report of the 9/11 Commission represents an indictment
of the status quo in our intelligence community and, in doing
so, links the shortcomings the Commission has found directly to
the horrific events of September 11. In my own reaction, I
found the 9/11 Commission Report so convincing that I would
say, not that my mind is totally made up, but that I would put
the burden of proof on those who would argue with the major
recommendations of the Commission.
Madam Chairman, I thank you again for the pace that this
Committee is setting in the consideration of the 9/11
Commission Report. We operate in a time of crisis. The specific
ongoing information that we not only receive in classified
briefings, but that the public receives in news announcements
about continuing terrorist threats just reminds about how
urgent it is that we act. Now, of course, we do not want to act
so quickly that we do something wrong, but the issues that the
Commission has framed are clear, and they are not
uncomplicated, but the sooner we face them and thrash them out
and hear opposing points of view, the sooner we are going to be
able to act wisely. And I think the pace that the Committee has
set and now that other committees have set, and we are now
joined by the leaders of the Intelligence Committee of the
Senate, is a very hopeful sign.
This hearing focuses on the National Intelligence Director.
Chairman Kean, Vice Chairman Hamilton before us said that they
felt that of the 41 recommendations of the Commission, three
were paramount. One was to create the one we are talking about
today, the NID; second was the creation of the National
Counterterrorism Center; third is the congressional reform,
reform of our oversight. So we are focused on one of the top
three here today.
In the President's announcement on this question a while
back, it was not clear to me--in fact, it was too clear, and
then in what Andy Card said afterward--that the President did
not have in mind a strong National Intelligence Director,
particularly with regard to budget authority.
In statements made last week by National Security Adviser
Rice, and in at least one of the newspapers that I read this
morning by Commission Member John Lehman, who apparently has
been speaking to the White House, there is some reason to
believe that the White House may be prepared to clarify its
position in the direction of a National Intelligence Director
with stronger authority, particularly over the budget. If that
is true, it is, in my opinion, a good development. I hope it is
true, and I welcome it. But most of all, I look forward to a
very open, informed, and beneficial exchange of ideas with
these three witnesses who I thank, along with Bob Gates, for
submitting a statement.
Thank you very much.
Chairman Collins. Thank you.
Senator Roberts, we are very pleased to have you here with
us today, and I would invite you to make any opening comments
that you would like to make.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PAT ROBERTS, A U.S. SENATOR FROM
THE STATE OF KANSAS
Senator Roberts. I would be happy to, Madam Chairman, and
thank you for the invitation, and thank you for having our
three witnesses here. I wish to thank you all for your service
to our country, for your dedication for taking time out of your
very valuable schedule to come and testify before us on such an
important matter. The Hon. R. James Woolsey has already
testified before our committee earlier, and he gave excellent
testimony.
I want to thank also, Senator Lieberman, your Ranking
Member, for the opportunity to participate in today's hearing.
Senator Rockefeller and I have been very busy over the last 2
weeks or 3 weeks with our 22 professional staff members to try
to come up with something that makes sense. And, additionally,
I want to thank you, Madam Chairman, for your leadership in
this very crucial challenge and task as we work together to try
to implement the goals of the 9/11 Commission.
And I want to say a word about Senator Lieberman. It was
Senator Coates, the former Senator from Indiana, and Senator
Lieberman, who formed up an outfit, a subcommittee, if you
will, under the Armed Services Committee, called the Emerging
Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee.
Now, not too many people know about that, but that
subcommittee did warn, clear back in 1998 and 1999 of a tragedy
very similar to what happened in regards to September 11. And
it was the foresight in regards to Senator Lieberman that led
to the formation of that subcommittee. He was a valuable member
of that subcommittee, and I want to thank him for that, and I
know with interest we have Senator Durbin, who is a very
valuable Member of our Committee, and Senator Levin, who is
also a Member of the Intelligence Committee, so we have some
very good cross-referencing here in terms of advice and
counsel.
Let me begin by saying that Chairman Collins has invited
the Senate Committee on Intelligence to provide input to this
Committee's work, and we will provide, Madam Chairman, a draft
bill, if you will, for your consideration as of this week. We
are also working with the 9/11 Commission. In that respect, I
am referring to Mr. Zelikow. We are working with the
administration. Senator Lieberman indicated that the
administration is moving in a direction that I think most
Members of the Senate would appreciate and would think would be
positive. In the doing of this, we are doing it in terms of
advice, and counsel, and suggestions, hopefully worthy of your
consideration. We are not sitting still, we meaning the
Congress. I know of at least seven hearings that have been
conducted, possibly eight, and thirteen more prior to the
Congress starting back in September. And so we are taking this
very seriously.
That draft bill that we are working with that Senator
Rockefeller and I are working on is guided by the 9/11
Commission's Report, which obviously contains some very
important recommendations. Translating those important ideas,
some of which are long overdue, into legislative language,
however, is very complicated. As they say, the devil is in the
details.
In addition to the 9/11 Commission's Report, and also the
recommendations, the draft bill that will be provided to you is
also the result of the discussion and debate over intelligence
reform that has gone on over the last several decades. The
products of that debate include the recent report of the Senate
Committee on Intelligence's U.S. Intelligence Community's
prewar assessments in regard to Iraq. Now, I do not think even
the Members of the Committee who are here today that have the
privilege of serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee could
have ever predicted that despite our very strong feelings and
our differences, that we would end up with a 17-0 vote in favor
of a report that is 511 pages long, 22 of our professional
staffers and an interview of over 240 panelists. And we made
about nine major recommendations, and it was bipartisan. As I
said, it was a 17-0 vote.
Those recommendations cried out for reform, and they are
commensurate with the 9/11 Commission's Report, and now we have
turned that report over to Senator McCain, former Senator Robb
and also Mr. Silberman for further action.
It also includes the many legislative proposals such as
Senator Feinstein's bill and the bill introduced by Jane Harman
over on the House side and the many commissions and
investigations and studies that have been convened over the
years. I am talking about the Bremer Commission, the Gilmore
Commission, the CSIS study and also the Hart-Rudman Commission.
The draft bill that will be provided to this Committee does
provide for a National Intelligence Director or what we now
call the NID. That person would be empowered with the
authorities to really lead the Intelligence Community, as
proposed in the 9/11 Commission's recommendations. Those
authorities include the ability to hire and fire, as well as
the ability to exercise control over the budgets of those
agencies. As Congress does move toward legislating the so-
called intelligence reform, guided by the recommendations of
the 9/11 Commission Report, and many of the other various
proposals for change, Senator Rockefeller and I will keep in
mind that we should first do no harm and avoid, as best we can,
the law of unintended consequences.
Now, for example, one of the key issues to be resolved is
how much control the NID should have over the Department of
Defense intelligence estimates. There has been 10 or 11
attempts, dating back to the 1940's, to allegedly reform the
intelligence community. In each and every case where we bumped
into a real problem or a hurdle we could not jump, it has been
in regards to the jurisdiction of the Pentagon and the Defense
Department. I am not trying to perjure them by any means. They
have many fine programs, and they have programs that should not
be damaged in any way.
There are many good things about the way the Department of
Defense does conduct its intelligence operations that we must
ensure are not undermined by the reform process.
I want to give you an example. Take, for example, a special
forces team that is supported by a military intelligence
analyst. If that team is operating on the field of battle in
Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom, it seems very clear to me
that the team's intelligence specialist is a tactical asset
that needs to be controlled by the local military chain of
command. And the NID or the National Intelligence Director
probably does not want or need to become involved. But move
that same team to Afghanistan, outside the no-man's land where
Osama bin Laden is hiding, and I would argue the team's
intelligence specialist then has become a strategic national
asset that may require the support and the leadership of the
NID.
Now, that line between the tactical and the strategic
military operations gets blurred more and more every day, and
it complicates the job of trying to define the NID's
authorities. I am confident that you will find, however, that
the draft bill that we will provide to this Committee does
contain some very innovative ways of addressing that problem.
Sadly, many of the Intelligence Community problems
described in the 9/11 Commission's Report are not unique. The
Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar intelligence
assessments in regard to Iraq also describes major problems in
the Intelligence Community. The need for significant change is
clear; that Congress should focus its efforts on fixing clearly
identified problems in our Intelligence Community and not
simply legislate change merely for the sake of change. As we
consider reform of the Intelligence Community, I feel strongly
we must also ensure that we institutionalize change as a
continuous process in the Intelligence Community.
I do not think we can make the mistake of rearranging the
organizational chart to meet the current threat and simply stop
there. Rather, we must leave in place a system that will
continue to adapt to the new threats that we will face in our
Nation. International terrorism is a serious threat to us and
our allies, but I am confident it will not be the last threat
that this Nation faces. Even today, we can see in the headlines
and in the intelligence reports that Nations like Iran and like
North Korea do continue to work very busily on their weapons of
mass destruction programs.
So I am hopeful that a National Intelligence Director will
be able to focus more on running the entire Intelligence
Community and thus will be able to spend more time ensuring
that the Intelligence Community does continue to adapt to our
future threats, otherwise it will fall again to Congress to
conduct yet another attempt at reform.
So I thank you, Madam Chairman, for the opportunity to
speak. I apologize for the length of my statement, and I do
want to thank my dear colleague and friend, Senator
Rockefeller, for his help, his advice and his leadership. We
both share the same goals. We have been very busy here the last
2 or 3 weeks with our professional staffers, and we should have
that legislative draft to you at least by Wednesday.
Chairman Collins. Thank you.
Senator Rockefeller, we are very happy to have you join us
today, and I would call on you for any comments you might wish
to make.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ROCKEFELLER IV, A U.S. SENATOR
FROM THE STATE OF WEST VIRGINIA
Senator Rockefeller. Thank you, Chairman Collins and
Ranking Member Lieberman. You are very nice to do this. You
were given the authority of putting forward legislation, and as
I explained to both of you in phone conversations we had, we
want to be helpful and supportive. There is some cross-
jurisdictional matters with the Intelligence Committee which we
have to take very seriously, but I am very happy that you are
doing it. This is not a work of turf. This is a work of
national necessity.
I find myself in agreement with most of the recommendations
of the Commission. Some I have some questions about. Some I
think need to be explained a little bit further before I would
``render a judgment,'' at least on my part.
If the Congress and the President cannot reach a successful
agreement on constructive reform this year, and I do not
preclude a post-election session, we certainly will have failed
the American people. It will take, I think, sort of the basic
questions that we all face in Washington, but someone we all
continue to tread along our separate ways, and that is what it
is that makes it so difficult for the Federal bureaucracy and
the U.S. Congress to, in fact, do what is in the national
interests first and then think about what the effect is upon
their particular committee or their particular agency second.
It is kind of a basic civics lesson and one that we have
never learned very well because, in a sense, it kind of defines
who we are, it defines who they are, and when you compare that
to the national, the fact that we are going to be dealing with
this crisis on terrorism for the next 20 or 30 years or more,
depending upon when we can get some kind of a message of calm
and reconciliation out to the Islamic community, across the
world, not just the Arab World, we really do have to take this
and do it correctly.
If we did this by the end of the year, and everybody wants
to do that and I do, too, by the end of this particular
session, if we can do that, great. I do not think any of us
should be under the illusions that it would have stopped the
long time and place planning on the part of al Qaeda to do what
it did on September 11 or what it may yet do if one reads the
intelligence and looks at the reports. But still that is not
the question. Maybe it should be stated this way. What future
failures could we avoid and how many lives could we save
because we act relatively sooner and create a mind-set change
in the Congress and in the bureaucracy, and particularly of
course within our Intelligence Community? Nobody would disagree
with the fact that we have a 57-year-old model. Its blueprints
drawn up from the Cold War. It is not an ideal arrangement for
attacking an enemy that does not wear a uniform and an enemy
that exists outside the rule of international law,
international obligations and an enemy which looks forward to
slaughtering men, women, and children where they live and where
they work and does so with a religious purpose, mixed in with a
hateful purpose.
So the threat to the changes to our country has obviously
changed in the last decade. The intelligence community has
evolved to be sure to meet that challenge, but the pace has
been slow. And the question now is the pace has to be
organizationally, and in terms of trained people, which takes a
long time, 5 years to train an analyst, 10 years to train an
analyst, 5 years to train a linguist, and we are talking, if we
start now, some fairly long-term results in order to fight the
global war on terrorism which, as I indicated, I think is with
us for a long time.
Now, the biggest impediment is that no single person--and
Chairman Roberts and everybody else has pointed this out--no
person has the responsibility and the budgetary and personnel
authority and hands for managing the entire Intelligence
Community. That is a very serious error--my point. The Director
of Central Intelligence has this titular responsibility, but
not the control of the budgetary strings.
I asked George Tenet once, ``If you wanted, if you felt
like you needed to direct the Intelligence Community, would
you,'' and he said, ``No, I will only direct what I have budget
authority over.'' And he said that publicly, and he said that
privately, and I think that sums it up very well.
As we know, it is the Secretary of Defense who controls the
lion's share of the intelligence budget, and that is going to
be the great battle around here, and it is one which is already
joined, and again national interest versus committee interest
versus institutional interest, all of these things I think come
into play there.
Where else in government or corporate America would you
find such a split arrangement as we have now. It is more akin
to a custody settlement between divorced parents than an
effective management plan for a 15-agency multi-billion-entity
called the intelligence community.
The President's decision, as has been indicated by Senator
Lieberman, to endorse the Commission recommendation to create a
National Intelligence Director was a step in the right
direction. His decision to deviate from the Commission's
recommendation to give this Director real budget and personnel
authority was a bigger step, in my mind, backwards. And now
worrying about how to make it stronger is not convincing to me
until I see a real switch and a real willingness to invest
authority in the National Intelligence Director for budget and
for personnel and the rest of it.
So we are going to have to break some china around here,
otherwise we will fail. We will fail. We will do little bits
and pieces, and we will be like Congress has so often been. The
American people need real reform. They want our intelligence
system to be effectively managed, and for that person and those
who serve under him or her to be accountable, which is a Carl
Levin favorite. Accountability is a major factor that we are
going to have to deal with. Reforming the Intelligence
Community is about protecting American soil, American lives,
but it also should not be about protecting the turf at the
Pentagon or at any of the intelligence agencies. This is about
what is best for America, regardless of the players of the
agencies.
I call upon the President to endorse this essential element
of the 9/11 Commission's plans so we can get about the business
of reaching agreement. Chairman Collins and Ranking Member
Lieberman, I thank you.
Chairman Collins. Thank you for your statement.
It is now my pleasure to introduce my distinguished panel
today, and I apologize for being distracted by the Chairman of
the Intelligence Committee.
Senator Lieberman. I have been having that experience with
Senator Roberts for years now. [Laughter.]
Chairman Collins. It is a new one for me.
Senator Roberts. It is my job description.
Chairman Collins. It is a great pleasure to introduce
today's distinguished witnesses. In addition to each serving as
Director of Central Intelligence, each of them has served our
country with honor in such fields as the judiciary, law
enforcement, diplomacy and the military. The views that they
offer from the inside perspective, and from many different
perspectives, will greatly assist this Committee.
William Webster was Director of Central Intelligence from
1987 to 1991, following 9 years as Director of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. His experience in heading both the CIA
and the FBI gives him a unique perspective to help us answer
many of the questions today. Earlier he served as a judge on
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Judge Webster
has received numerous awards for public service, including the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, and we welcome you.
James Woolsey has served under four Presidents, most
recently as Director of Central Intelligence from 1993 to 1995.
He also served as the Ambassador to the Negotiation on
Conventional Armed Forces in Europe from 1989 to 1991, as a
delegate to the U.S. Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks from
1983 to 1986, and as Under Secretary of the Navy from 1977 to
1979. He has also been a Member of the National Commission on
Terrorism and the Commission to Assess the ballistic missile
threat to the United States.
We welcome you, as well.
Stansfield Turner was Director of Central Intelligence from
1977 to 1981. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and
was promoted to Rear Admiral in 1970 and to the rank of Admiral
in 1975, when he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of NATO's
Southern flank. Admiral Turner has taught at Yale, at West
Point, and at the University of Maryland Graduate School on
Public Affairs.
I want to thank each of you. You are very dedicated public
servants who have given a great deal to your country. We look
forward to hearing your testimony today as we fill in the
details and, with your guidance, make the right decisions.
Judge Webster, we will start with you and your statement.
TESTIMONY OF HON. WILLIAM H. WEBSTER,\1\ FORMER DIRECTOR,
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION; FORMER DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL
INTELLIGENCE; AND SENIOR PARTNER, MILBANK, TWEED, HADLEY &
McCLOY, LLP
Judge Webster. Thank you, Senator Collins, Senator
Lieberman and Members of the Committee, and also Chairman
Roberts and Vice Chairman Rockefeller.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Judge Webster appears in the Appendix
on page 51.
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Thank you for the privilege of appearing before you this
morning to discuss some very important subjects. As I listened
to the introductory remarks from your colleagues and from you,
Madam Chairman, I was reminded of reading over the weekend from
the extensive writings of Professor Darling, who recorded the
first 5 or 6 years of Central Intelligence as an official
document, and you will perhaps not be surprised to know that
many of the issues that you raised this morning were raised at
the time President Truman had to make his ultimate decision on
the balancing act between intelligence and the other
departments of the government, but we do of course live in a
different world today.
Following an extensively documented and detailed narrative
of the events leading up to September 11, 2001, the Commission
concluded that coordination, amalgamation, and synthesis of
intelligence collected by various components of the
Intelligence Community were too loose, and in consequence, the
dots were not connected in a way that the 9/11 plot could have
been uncovered and prevented. The Commission addressed a new
structure intended to reduce the likelihood of another
catastrophic attack against the United States and its citizens.
In my view, some of the omissions and errors in conclusions
were attributable to human mistakes and misjudgments. Others
were attributable in part to constraints, both legislative and
administrative, that governed the interagency relationships in
the period following the Church and Pike Committee Reports to
the 2001 Patriot Act revisions on sharing intelligence. Various
proposals for managing ``need to share'' and preserving ``need
to know'' had to address the almost byzantine system of
intelligence control that evolved during that three decade
period.
I liken the current status of the Director of Central
Intelligence to that of den chief in terms of his ability to
control resources and compel effective teamwork throughout the
15 agencies spread throughout the departments of our
government. It is remarkable what has been accomplished by
consensus building, friendly cajoling and a patriotic effort
among so many agencies to make it work. But this is not enough
to deal in a timely way with the complexities of the world in
which we find ourselves.
There is today a strong consensus that the authority of the
Intelligence Community leader must be increased to do the job
for which he must be responsible, to provide timely and useful
intelligence upon which the President and policymakers can make
sound decisions in the interest of our country.
The Intelligence Community does not need a feckless czar
with fine surroundings and little authority. That is the wrong
way to go. Whether the Congress elects to create a true
Director of National Intelligence, as the 9/11 Commission
recommends, or to beef up the real--as distinguished from
cosmetic--management authorities of the Director of Central
Intelligence, as others have proposed, the designated leader
must be clearly and unambiguously empowered to act and to
decide on issues of great importance to the success of the
Intelligence Community and to the country.
There seems to be general agreement that additional
authority should repose in the top leader of the Intelligence
Community. These authorities, although widely assumed by the
American public to exist already, in fact are imprecise, easily
frustrated and not in regular use. They are: (1) management of
the intelligence budget; (2) authority to name or at least
approve the recommendations for presidential appointment of the
top leaders of the Intelligence Community; and (3) performance
review and evaluation of these community leaders.
These authorities could be granted to (1) the Director of
Central Intelligence, who is also Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency; or (2) to a Director of Central
Intelligence who is separate from and senior to the Director of
the Central Intelligence Agency; or (3) a newly-created
National Intelligence Director who would replace the present
Director of Central Intelligence.
The concept of a National Intelligence Director has the
present support of the President, the Democratic candidate for
President, and the 9/11 Commission. The NID would have
authority to oversee national intelligence centers on specific
subjects of interest across the U.S. Government and to manage
the national intelligence program and oversee the agencies that
contribute to it. It appears that the centers are expanded
versions of centers which the DCI has created and operated in
the past, but located elsewhere in other departments and
agencies.
Under the Commission model, the NID would manage the
national intelligence program and oversee the component
agencies of the Intelligence Community. The report envisages
management through three deputies, each of whom would hold a
key position in one of the component agencies. The Director of
the CIA would head foreign intelligence. Defense intelligence
would be headed by the Under Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence. And homeland intelligence would be headed by the
FBI's Executive Assistant Director for Intelligence, or the
Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Information Analysis
and Infrastructure Protection. The three deputies would have
the job of acquiring the systems, training the people, and
executing the operations planned by the National Intelligence
Center.
Control of the budget is essential to effective management
of the Intelligence Community. The President, in his remarks,
has used the term ``coordinate,'' which I understand to mean
management. Others have suggested something less. There is
obviously some sorting out to be done between the enhanced
Intelligence Community organization and its leader and the
Department of Defense and its Secretary. If this model is
adopted, the Defense Department will need some assurances that
tactical, military intelligence will not drift away from its
military commanders. On the other hand, with respect to
strategic intelligence around the world, defense agencies must
be prepared to respond to the management initiatives of the
National Intelligence Director.
In all of this I would sincerely hope that this will not be
just another layer of government. The Director of Central
Intelligence position would simply segue to the new National
Intelligence Director at the top of the table of organization
reporting to the President. The number of new positions needed
to manage the outreach and responsibilities of the NID should
be carefully controlled.
A key proposal is to expand the current Terrorist Threat
Integration Center as a center for joint operational planning
and joint intelligence, and staffed by personnel from the
various agencies. While there are a number of questions to be
thought through and answered, such as the role of the center in
operational activities, I believe the concept has merit for a
number of reasons. First, I think it offers a potentially
effective vehicle for dealing with the growing threat of
international terrorism with full participation and sharing by
agencies across the community. Second--and this is not a
pejorative observation--there is a risk that the Nation's
preoccupation with terrorism may cause important and
significant collections and analytical responsibilities of a
nonterrorist nature to be neglected. Challenges, for example,
such as the Cold War, major economic changes among ``have'' and
``have not'' nations that cause wars, and other matters
requiring our best collection and analytical efforts for the
benefit of our policymakers must not be neglected nor subsumed.
As we have all seen too painfully, sources that have been
neglected after the fact can dry up and take years to redevelop
when a new crisis emerges. This must not happen.
The Director of Central Intelligence, as distinguished from
CIA, has established a number of centers located for
convenience at CIA Headquarters. These have made substantial
community-wide contributions. I believe they should stay with
the intelligence leader, be denominated at his discretion, not
legislated, and located where he and his principal advisers
think most appropriate.
With respect to covert and paramilitary actions, the
Commission would keep responsibility for clandestine and covert
operations in the CIA, but place lead responsibility for
paramilitary action in the military. I have some doubts about
this model. The Commission acknowledged that the combined
activities in Afghanistan worked well. I would prefer to keep
that model on smaller, turn-of-the-dime activities with the
CIA. Larger scale actions that are essentially troop
engagements should be in Defense.
With respect to relations with the President, while the
leader of the Intelligence Community must be the principal
adviser on intelligence to the President, he must work hard,
very hard to avoid either the reality or the perception that
intelligence is being framed--read ``spun''--to support a
foreign policy of the administration. My predecessor, Bill
Casey, had a different view of this. He served in the Cabinet
and participated fully in the formulation of policy. When I
became DCI I asked President Reagan not to put me in the
Cabinet for the reasons I have noted to you. He told me that he
thought about it and had come to the conclusion that I was
right. I was very pleased, therefore, to see that President
Bush had reached a similar conclusion. The head of the
Intelligence Community does not need to be located in the White
House, and to avoid these problems, I believe he should not be.
The Director of Central Intelligence has had a small suite in
the Old Executive Office Building through the years as a matter
of convenience for meetings with White House officials and
between appointments. I believe that is more than adequate, and
that he should be housed where he has access to people with
whom he most frequently needs to consult.
With respect to the FBI and Homeland Security, the FBI
should be as it has in the past, a part of the efforts to
coordinate national intelligence collection efforts with
international activities. This is more in the nature of putting
the information together, completing the dots and other efforts
to avoid information gaps. I think it is important that
operationally the FBI should take its guidance from the
Attorney General on its dealings with U.S. persons, and the
manner in which it collects information in the United States.
This has been an important safeguard for the American people,
should not be destructive of effective operations, and avoids
the risk of receiving vigilante type instructions, whether from
the Intelligence Community or the White House. While, as
Justice Jackson once wrote, ``the Constitution is not a suicide
pact, the Constitution and the rule of law are at the top of
our core values and must be safeguarded and respected.''
With respect to the trusted information network, the
Commission recommends an overhaul of our information system to
better process, share and protect intelligence across the
agencies. This has considerable merit and will require more
work in some agencies than others. As long ago as 2001, I
headed a Commission on FBI Internal Security, and we provided
four classified appendices to our report dealing with the
infirmities of the FBI mainframe, now 13-years-old. Inability
to rapidly identify and capture information of value to other
agencies aggravated the circumstances leading to the September
11 tragedy.
The 9/11 Commission has issued a special challenge to the
Congress to overhaul its oversight systems for dealing with the
Intelligence Community. If acted upon, it will materially
increase the effectiveness, not only of oversight, but of the
performance of the company in its relationship to the Congress.
I am told that over 88 separate committees and subcommittees
now oversee the Homeland Security Department. This is really
intolerable, not to say nonsensical. Consideration should be
given to a joint committee on intelligence, selected with care,
and including a nonpartisan, highly respected membership.
At this moment in our history I believe we have passed the
moment of great fear which often produces unhappy solutions,
and we have not yet entered a period of indifference, where it
is difficult to take the forward steps that are needed. We need
to act, but we must act with great care. The many thousands of
dedicated men and women in the Intelligence Community, many of
whom have put their lives on the line for the safety of our
country, count on you. I know you will not let them down.
Thank you very much, Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Thank you, Judge Webster, for an
excellent statement. Mr. Woolsey.
TESTIMONY OF HON. R. JAMES WOOLSEY,\1\ FORMER DIRECTOR OF
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE; VICE PRESIDENT, BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON
Mr. Woolsey. Thank you. Madam Chairman, Senator Lieberman,
Members of the Committee, Senator Roberts, Senator Rockefeller,
it is an honor to be able to testify before you today.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Woolsey appears in the Appendix
on page 62.
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Let me say at the outset that--if I could have my whole
statement submitted for the record, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Without objection.
Mr. Woolsey. I will use it as an outline to speak from, far
more briefly.
At the outset let me say that I believe the Commission's
Report is quite well written. It is an excellent history of
much of what went wrong over the years. We will doubtless see
amendments to it, but it is a fine job, and particularly for an
official government document written by a large number of
people. It is excellent prose. Its first 300 plus pages I think
are an outstanding example of work of a commission of this
sort, and I am a veteran of five of these national commissions.
Of the 41 proposals for reform recommendations that it
makes in its final two chapters, I agree fully with 35 of them;
five, I think, should be adopted in a partial or amended form;
one, the proposal to transfer all cover paramilitary work to
the Department of Defense, I could not disagree more with.
Let me say a word about the scope of the Commission's
Report as a whole. It titles Chapter 12, where it makes the
bulk of its recommendations, ``A Global Strategy.'' This may be
a case of having a misleading headline on an otherwise
perfectly reasonable press story, but I want to stress that
this chapter, and indeed the 9/11 Commission Report as a whole,
does not present a global strategy for the war in which we are
engaged. This Commission's tasking, as I read it from the
congressional legislation and from its own foreword, is far
more like those commissions that assessed Pearl Harbor during
World War II. They did not seek to establish a grand strategy
for the fighting of World War II, and this Commission neither
should seek, and it certainly does not succeed, in establishing
a global strategy for the war that we are in.
For example, the recommendations do not deal at all with
Iran, Iraq, Syria, or our oil dependence on the Middle East,
and I think it is important to realize that its focus is pretty
much exclusively on how to keep an organization like al Qaeda
from attacking the United States again the way it did before.
This is an understandable focus. That is what it was charged to
do. But the next part of a war is not always like the previous
part of a war and we should not assume that this report states
a global strategy.
Just a word about its recommendations in Chapter 12. There
are four sensible recommendations about how to deal with
terrorist sanctuaries in other countries, five about
essentially alleviating root causes of terrorism, seven are
essentially technical, dealing with things like biometric
entry/exit screening, and four dealing with first responders'
needs. A number of these, or all of these, I think, are quite
sound, but none of those 21 really reaches the level of dealing
with strategic matters.
Then there are three recommendations that essentially say
we should show balance (e.g. share information while
safeguarding privacy, and enhance Executive Branch power only
when necessary). These are perfectly reasonable
recommendations, but they are also quite vague, and they do not
give us much help in deciding issues that are important and
right now before the country, such as should the Federal
Government require birth dates from air passengers in order to
better utilize databases to identify individuals who might be
terrorists, or should police continue to be barred by local
ordinances, as they are in many municipalities, from inquiring
of Immigration authorities about the immigration status of
someone they have arrested for a State or local offense.
I want to call particularly to Senator Roberts' and Senator
Rockefeller's attention, that the next two and a half pages of
my testimony, on pages 3, 4, and 5, I wrote before I knew they
were going to be here today. They essentially constitute
praise, as I offered before the Senate Select Committee, of the
analysis which the Senate Select Committee did of the
relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq. I think that it is far
more nuanced and far sounder than what we have from the
Commission. I also believe it is important for us to understand
that we face not just one totalitarian enemy in the Middle
East, we face at least three: The secular Ba'athists who are
essentially fascists, modeled after the fascists of the 1920's
and 1930's; the Islamists from the Shi'ite side of Islam, run
and operated, whether they are Hezbollah or Moqtada al Sadr,
out of Teheran; and the Islamists from the Sunni side of Islam,
such as al Qaeda, its underlying economic sustenance fueled by
the oil money of the Gulf, and its ideology fueled by the
hatred put forth by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia.
I think it is important that we should understand that
these three totalitarian groups hate each other, stem from
different roots, criticize each other, kill each other from
time to time, but still are capable here and there of
cooperation against us, just as Hitler and Stalin surprised the
world in 1939, including most of the world's intelligence
analysts, by forging the Hitler-Stalin Pact. So I believe it is
important to pay attention to what the Senate Select Committee
says in Chapter 12 about the rather extensive connections, not
operational, but connections, particularly with respect to
training, between al Qaeda and the Ba'athists of Iraq.
Moving on to page 5, Madam Chairman, and the
recommendations of Chapter 13. I concur with the Commission's
most publicized recommendation essentially to split the current
responsibilities of the Director of Central Intelligence and
set up a separate individual to manage the Intelligence
Community and serve as the President's chief adviser on
intelligence from the individual who would be the head of the
CIA and responsible for management of it. I also concur with
the establishment of the National Counterterrorism Center
reporting to the new NID.
Just a quick word about Senator Rockefeller's interesting
analogy to a custody arrangement for the current relationship
between the DCI and much of the community. It is in a sense a
custody settlement, but the Director of Central Intelligence
under the current system is the party who gets only very rare
and brief visitation rights. It is a very weak position
currently from the point of view of managing either the
personnel or the money within the Intelligence Community. And I
do believe that it is a job, the current DCI job, that should
be divided. It is not impossible for one person to do this job
under the current circumstances if that person has a close
working relationship with the President, the general support of
the Congress, and close working relationships with eight
members of the Congress, the four chairmen of the two
intelligence committees and the ranking members, and the
chairmen of the Defense Appropriation Subcommittees and their
ranking members.
But in my case, I did not have a bad relationship with the
President I served, I just did not have much of one at all. And
with respect to the committee chairmen and ranking members, I
had seven good relationships and one bad one, as my testimony
summarizes. What that meant was, because of those two
circumstances, in 1993 Congress was in session 195 days, and I
had 205 appointments on Capitol Hill--more than one a day for
the time Congress was in session. Much of that was because of
what has been publicized a number of times, my disagreements
with the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the
time, Senator DeConcini, over a range of issues, terminating
satellite programs, terminating computers for NSA, terminating
funds for Arabic and Farsi language instruction, closing large
numbers of CIA stations around the world, transferring all
overseas penetration of foreign intelligence services to the
FBI, and so forth. Some of these disputes I won, some I lost,
but it took a very substantial amount of time.
Should some future DCI, under the current structure, have
to spend that type of time and resources dealing with
congressional oversight, I think it is easy to see how it would
be very difficult for him or her to have enough hours in the
day also to manage the CIA. I do think it is important to focus
on the precise responsibilities of the new NID, and I favor,
over the original White House formulation and over the
Commission's formulation, the formulation in Representative
Jane Harman's original bill. In her original bill she made the
appointments and personnel process for defense intelligence
agencies, such as NSA, a joint matter between the NID and the
Secretary of Defense, and joint responsibility, of course, with
respect to counterterrorism work at the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, joint with the Department of Justice.
Her bill also gave responsibility for budget execution
essentially to the NID, but left the Secretary of Defense and
the Attorney General, in appropriate cases, much more of an
opportunity to contest some such decisions before the President
than I see in the Commission's bill. I believe the Commission's
bill leans, frankly, a bit too heavily toward Czardom, and if
there is one term I would like to see if we could get out of
this debate, it is in fact ``intelligence Czar.'' As far as I
am concerned, a number of centuries of stupidity, rigidity and
authoritarianism, followed by the victory of Bolshevism, is not
a good model for the management of American intelligence.
With respect to information sharing, sharing is fine as
long as one is not sharing with the Walkers, Aldrich Ames,
Robert Hanssen, or some blabbermouth who likes to talk to the
press about the fact that we have broken bin Laden's satellite
telephone communications. The problem is that we do not just
need to share, we need to share wisely. And the more one knows
about intelligence sources and methods for a particular piece
of intelligence, frequently the better one is able to interpret
it, and the better job of analysis one is able to do. That is
why the President's daily brief has a lot of material in it
about sources and methods and why sources and methods are
guarded as carefully as they are.
I think the NID needs to have different approaches toward
different parts of the intelligence process with respect to the
degree of uniformity he or she requires, with respect to the
degree of sharing, with respect to the degree of permitting
competition and even freelancing. For example, at the front end
of the process, development of new collection methods can
benefit from competition between agencies. We were competitive
at the CIA with the Defense Department in 1993. That is how we
developed the Predator.
In tasking collection, customers should be consulted, not
just the operators of the collection systems. That is important
because it is one reason why we need to move away from the
stovepiping that we now see. In processing data also we need to
move away from stovepipes.
In analyzing data and producing intelligence, some
competition is not a bad thing at all. It is a good idea to
have competitive analysis. And in dissemination, I would prefer
a system whereby ``need to know'' is constantly reviewed and
enforced technically, rather than one in which, as the
Commission suggests, need to know should always take second
place to need to share.
Let me close, Madam Chairman, with just one word about
paramilitary action being transferred to the Pentagon, which I
believe is an extraordinarily bad idea. Covert paramilitary
operations are only occasionally necessary for the United
States. Covert should connote keeping them secret or denying
them, plausibly or otherwise, not only before but after the
fact. It was because covert action generally, including covert
paramilitary operations, came into question in the mid 1970's
that Congress, for good and sufficient reason, decided to place
such covert action under the requirement for having
presidentially signed findings and submission to the
Intelligence Committees of the Congress. I think that was a
wise decision, and for covert action, that process should be
continued, including paramilitary covert action, which we deny,
plausibly or otherwise, after the fact. Sometimes that is
necessary. Sometimes one needs to save the face of an enemy as
well as that of friends and allies.
But the Pentagon does not do that now. The Pentagon does
conduct clandestine military operations which are kept secret
ahead of time or which involve deception ahead of time, and
that is as old as warfare, considerably older than the Trojan
horse. I think it is important that we not move to a situation
whereby the Pentagon, because it has responsibility for covert
paramilitary operations, also gets brought under the machinery
of findings and the rest, under which the CIA covert action now
operates under. I think that could cripple our Special Forces
in the war against terrorism, and I think it is a very bad
idea.
In conclusion, let me just say that as stated above, I
think it is quite likely, because of the limited nature of the
charge they were given, that is the reason the Commission did
not come up with anything approximating a global strategy. But
we should not assume that they did so.
Second, since so much attention is being paid to foreign
intelligence in the Commission's Report, it may be natural for
some to draw the conclusion that with respect to 9/11 foreign
intelligence is what principally failed. Many aspects of our
government, of our country failed with respect to September 11.
But we should at least note that most of the preparations
for September 11 took place in two countries, Germany and the
United States, where the foreign intelligence operation of the
United States does not really collect intelligence. Satellites
are going to tell us very little about terrorists, signal
intercepts are going to tell us very little, particularly if we
talk about what signal intercepts we are obtaining. And so
foreign intelligence reforms generally may have only a modest
effect on the war on terrorism. It may be much more important
whether there is a municipal ordinance that bars checking out a
tip from a citizen about, say, what a Saudi visitor's
immigration status is.
And finally, even within the field of foreign intelligence
reform, some substantive reform, such as whether we use Non-
Official Cover officers far more than we do now, and rely less
on official cover, to my mind probably would make more
difference than issues such as the establishment of the NID.
But within the framework of the Commission's recommendations
and within the framework of this Committee's deliberations, I
would support the establishment of an appropriately designed
office of NID, and I thank you again, Madam Chairman and
Members of the Committee for your attention.
Chairman Collins. Thank you very much. Admiral Turner.
TESTIMONY OF HON. STANSFIELD TURNER, FORMER DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL
INTELLIGENCE; PROFESSOR, SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY, UNIVERSITY OF
MARYLAND
Admiral Turner. Madam Chairman, Members of the Committee,
Chairman Roberts, and Vice Chairman Rockefeller, I much
appreciate this opportunity to be with you, and the honor of
being here.
I come at this issue of whether we want a National
Intelligence Director from the point of view of someone who was
a guinea pig National Intelligence Director from 1977 to 1981.
President Carter's concept of how our intelligence apparatus
should operate was very similar to the recommendation of the 9/
11 Commission that we are talking about today. At my very first
meeting with the President, before he had actually designated
me as his nominee for Director of Central Intelligence, he gave
me oral instruction that if I took this job I was to
concentrate on being the Director of Central Intelligence, not
on being the head of the CIA. As a result, I delegated 80
percent of the responsibilities for the CIA to the Deputy
Director of Central Intelligence.
For instance, I would come before committees of the
Congress and testify on the overall intelligence budget. Frank
Carlucci, the deputy, would then follow with a detailed
explanation of the CIA's portion of that budget. This freed me
up to concentrate on operating, and managing, the Intelligence
Community. In particular, it freed me up to participate very
actively in the analytic portion of the intelligence process,
which of course, leads to estimates, which are one of the key
products of intelligence. The analytic process deserves the
personal attention of the Director of Central Intelligence.
Moreover, unless the Director personally participates in the
analytic process, it is not going to be as good as it should
be. Only the Director can adjudicate the differences between
the various analytic agencies. So his or her participation is
the only way to avoid having consensus intelligence by
committee. If he or she does not give that leadership, it will
not be there.
President Carter's oral directive to me to concentrate on
the community, not only freed me up to help manage it, but he
also gave me specific authorities in a Presidential Executive
Order. The first one we have discussed a lot today was over
budgets. We still had a committee to review the budgets of the
entire Intelligence Community, but in accordance with President
Carter's Executive Order there was only one vote on the
committee, mine.
This way we could develop a budget that had a theme to it.
We could ensure that the budget covered all the bases we wanted
to cover with the priorities we wanted to cover. We established
a deputy for budgets. The Secretary of State, the Secretary of
Defense, and others could, and did, dispute my choices for the
budgets of various of their agencies. They took their disputes
to the President in an annual meeting we had to review the
budgets. Sometimes they won, sometimes they lost, but
nonetheless, there still was a theme to the budget even with
small perturbations to it.
Second, the President's Executive Order gave me the
authority to direct the priorities for the agencies collecting
intelligence. We had a deputy here also. When we needed
intelligence on some certain problem, the deputy would get
together representatives of the various agencies that collect,
NSA, NRO, the DO of the CIA, and he or she would say who can
help in this aspect of this problem that we have? And then the
deputy for collection would assign priorities to these various
agencies, including roughly what amount of assets, what kind of
resources are we going to give to this problem.
This also was very useful because as they sat around the
table looking at individual problems, there was an exchange of
intelligence about what they were finding. The clue that a
photograph might tell you led to focusing an intercept
capability, which led to putting a human agent at the scene.
A third authority the President's Executive Order gave was
to task the analytic agencies. This was not a question of what
their answers were going to be. It was a question of what
topics they analyzed. We tried always to have two, or maybe
three, analytic agencies working on the same problem
independently and separately until they came up with their
opinions. Then we would attempt to fuse them, but we encouraged
bringing the diverse views forward.
The 9/11 recommendations are really, in my view, a
reincarnation of President Carter's program, and they are not
nearly as big a change as people are talking about, and I am
not worried about a huge bureaucracy. We have a bureaucracy out
there that the DCI has today to manage the Intelligence
Community. We are just going to change the name on the door.
The worst result that could happen from this though, in my
opinion, is that we create a National Intelligence Director and
not give him or her authority. Such a National Intelligence
Director without authorities and without specific control of
the CIA--and I very much encourage the separation of the
National Intelligence Director from the CIA--but without the
CIA and without new authorities, this is a job that is going to
be impotent.
I would also like to suggest quickly that there are a
couple of other authorities that it would be useful for you to
ensure are given to the new National Intelligence Director. The
report does cover hiring and firing, but I would suggest that
should not go as far as the 9/11 Commission Report suggests.
The heads of the analytic agencies, the DIA in the Defense
Department, the INR in the State Department, the DI in the CIA,
they should not be subject to the National Intelligence
Director's appointment, hiring and firing. The secretaries of
those departments deserve to have their own intelligence
adviser in whom they have personal confidence. If you insist
they take somebody they do not like, they would just create a
new intelligence operation of their own on the side. I think
those are departmental responsibilities.
Second, I think it is very important that we define what is
national intelligence, what is in the national intelligence
budget. It is ridiculous today that some 80 percent of the
intelligence budget, if I understand it, is in programs like
the tactical TIARA program or the Joint Military Intelligence
program. One of the ways the Defense Department countered
President Carter's having designated me as in charge of
budgets, was to begin to take things out of my budget and put
them into these tactical budgets. I would like to draw a line
here. The line is that it is tactical if it is tasked only by a
commander in the field.
Third, we need to be sure that new legislation should
authorize the National Intelligence Director to direct the
dissemination of intelligence. Today individual agency heads,
in the name of protecting sources and methods, have all kinds
of devices for controlling who receives the intelligence they
have. It is perfectly reasonable to try to protect sources and
methods, but there has to be a national balance between the
importance to the country of exchanging that information, at
least on some limited basis, and protecting sources. And the
person to make that judgment in the national interest is not
the head of the agency who is very concerned with the sources
and method. It is the National Intelligence Director we are
going to create.
Finally, the key point whether we should increase the
authority of the National Intelligence Director at the expense
of the Department of Defense is one that only you in the
Congress can address at this time. If we are going to act soon,
it seems very clear that adjudicating within the Executive
Branch and getting the Department of Defense to give up
territory, and getting the CIA to accept being separated from
direct access to the President is just going to be
bureaucratically too difficult.
And I would finally suggest to you, please, if we are
serious about the war on terrorism, we have to appreciate that
while it was all right in many ways for the Defense Department
to control our intelligence operations to the high degree that
it has since 1947 during a Cold War, when the threat to this
country was a military threat, that has changed. And if it has
changed, we deserve to change who controls our intelligence so
that it is done not in the military interest but in the
national interest.
Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Thank you, Admiral Turner.
Judge Webster, the 9/11 Commission documents very well the
failure to share information between the FBI and the CIA, and
the Commission documents the legal and cultural barriers that
prevented that information sharing, and that is one reason that
the Commission has proposed that the National Intelligence
Director have authority over both the domestic and foreign side
of intelligence.
In his written statement submitted to the Committee, former
DCI Robert Gates raised some serious concerns about vesting in
the new intelligence director the authority over both domestic
and foreign intelligence, and he talks, as you did briefly in
your statement, about President Truman's fear that if those two
areas were under one person you might create an American KGB, I
believe Truman said. Dr. Gates has suggested that we need to
put some safeguards, and that one such safeguard might be to
restrict the NID to receiving domestic intelligence only with
respect to certain categories of threats like terrorism,
weapons of mass destruction, and international drug
trafficking.
Since you have served as both head of the FBI and the CIA,
I would very much like to get your assessment of what
safeguards if any we need to include if we are going to give
the new Director authority over the foreign and domestic
divide?
Judge Webster. Madam Chairman, Dr. Gates's suggestion of
categories is an interesting one and deserves further
consideration by the Committee.
My earlier remarks had to do with operations, primarily
with operations, getting the intelligence and how to get the
intelligence, and making sure that we are dealing with U.S.
citizens. We did it in a manner that comported with our
requirements, our values, and sometimes I liken that to the
investigation of the assassination of President Lincoln, when
we arrested 2,000 people, all the cast of My American Cousin,
did a whole range of things which were commensurate with the
forensic skills and capability at the time.
We now have other means of getting information. Some of it
requires warrants. Some of it does not. I prefer that the
Attorney General be involved in the process of determining how
information is obtained and whether or not it requires a
warrant or requires whatever restrictions. The Patriot Act
liberated a lot of the frustrations with respect to getting,
focusing on telephones rather than on individuals in matters of
that kind. It has been roundly criticized, but most of those
changes, I think, were constructive ones.
There has to be a relationship between international
intelligence and domestic intelligence which recognizes the
need at the domestic level to provide information to those who
are concerned with the overall international aspects. A major
problem--and this goes beyond your question a little, but I
think it is so fundamental--and that is to pay attention to the
information gathering techniques that we have today and how
they were constructed. A 13-year-old mainframe simply does not
work today to do what you would like to see done. They are
trying to improve it. The past jobs, Congress has voted some
money for Trilogy and others, still very limiting. The ability
to make sure that the information collected in a particular way
by the FBI can be transmitted on responsible demand from the
NID or whoever has the authority to request that information,
can in fact be done and done in a timely way is badly lacking
now. I think a lot of those dots could have been connected had
they had the ability to respond. They now have the charter to
respond.
Bottom line: We could do a lot more. We need better
equipment. We need the will. The message is out there. I think
that the focus of the Congress should at least be on how the
information is collected.
Chairman Collins. Thank you.
Mr. Woolsey, a major issue facing this Committee in
drafting the bill is how much authority the National
Intelligence Director or the Director of the National
Counterterrorism Center should have in tasking the collection
of information by the various intelligence agencies. I raised a
scenario in a previous hearing of what if you had a satellite
that was over Iraq and DOD wanted it to stay over Iraq, the CIA
wanted it to be shifted to Afghanistan? In your experience, how
are those conflicts resolved, and should the Director have
tasking authority?
Mr. Woolsey. I think that the Director should have more
tasking authority than is now implemented, Madam Chairman. The
history of this is that going back, there was more collective
tasking than there is now. There used to be a committee called
Comirex that tasked the satellites, for example, in which the
whole community participated.
When I was the head of a panel for Bob Gates in the summer
of 1992, looking at restructuring the National Reconnaissance
Office, we came up with something they called the needs
process, which was relatively straightforward. We had a very
experienced intelligence officer analyst make the rounds of the
customers, not just the people who operated collection systems,
but the customers, including Treasury, State, and so forth, and
come back with us with a judgment about what their needs were
and whether they were being balanced properly by the official
process. I tried to keep something like that going when I was
Director of Central Intelligence, but things like that often
get bureaucratized rather quickly.
The problem is that today the SIGINT people tend to task
SIGINT and the satellite people tend to task satellites, and I
think one important positive reform that could come from having
the NID or a NCTC Director under him or her is that you could
have a process whereby intelligence consumers could have more
influence, again, filtered through the balanced judgment of
some professionals, but nonetheless, more influence than they
have now. So I would regard that as one positive outcome of
having the NID or a CTC.
And I must say, with respect to the question that Judge
Webster answered, I think another reason to have a NID is that,
with the restrictions he mentioned, which are very important,
it is a better idea to have someone other than the head of the
CIA be the person to whom someone with responsibility in the
Justice Department or the FBI reports. I go into this some in
my statement, so I will not go into it any further here, but I
would much prefer the NID to have some type of limited joint
authority over CIA or foreign intelligence and domestic
intelligence rather than the individual who is the head of the
CIA.
Chairman Collins. Thank you.
One very quick final question that I would like all three
of you to answer, and we will start with Admiral Turner. Should
the NID serve at the pleasure of the President or have a term?
Admiral Turner.
Admiral Turner. Absolutely at the pleasure of the
President.
Chairman Collins. Mr. Woolsey.
Mr. Woolsey. I agree.
Chairman Collins. Judge Webster.
Judge Webster. I agree, and I do not think you can do
anything about it. People cite the FBI 10-year term as a model.
If you read the statute it says not more than 10 years. It was
a reaction to 48 years of one director. The Constitution
protects the Executive authority to hire and to fire, and I do
not believe that--if you had a quasi-legislative thing like the
Federal Reserve Board or something like that, yes, but I think
constitutionally it would be very difficult to do. They tried
to do it with the FBI and concluded they could not do that.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Senator Lieberman.
Senator Lieberman. Thanks, Madam Chairman.
I liked your answer, Judge Webster, that progress sometimes
is limiting a term that went 41 years to only 10 years, and we
move forward. Somebody said to me about those terms--and it is
a relevant point as we think about this office--that
fortunately we had recent experience with this, that you can
have somebody in a term that goes beyond the term of the
President, but what happens if the President loses confidence
in that individual and simply does not talk to him? That is as
bad or worse than the fear of them getting too close.
I thank you all for your testimony. I found it very
helpful.
Senator Rockefeller said something in his opening statement
I want to quote, which is that we are operating in a system now
in the intelligence community that is fundamentally 57 years
old, and it was created during a very different time in world
history, when we were facing the rising threat of the Soviet
Union. Of course it has been changed here and there, but
fundamentally it remains the same.
Admiral Turner, you said that at the end of your statement
in terms of the balance of authority between the intelligence
director and, for instance, the Secretary of Defense, and I
think we really have to keep that in mind.
To me it all comes down to the fact that in the war on
terrorism, intelligence, which of course has always played a
critical role in warfare, plays an even more critical role
because we are dealing not with armies massed on a field or
navies at sea. They may strike, they may surprise, but then you
have the opportunity to come back. These are people who are
prepared to kill themselves to kill us, and they will strike in
an isolated way as they have continued to do. So intelligence
becomes even more critical as a way to stop the attack before
it happens, and that is why we are focusing all this attention
on our intelligence system and community.
I do want to ask you about the relative balance between
Department of Defense and the proposed National Intelligence
Director, because obviously, as others have said, this is going
to be a critical and most difficult part of our work here. The
Defense Department, indicated by some testimony offered last
week on the House side, does appear to be concerned about the
recommendation that the new intelligence director be given
control over intelligence budgets, arguing that might reduce
ultimately the intelligence available to combat commanders.
They have expressed the fear of exactly what Senator Collins'
hypothetical example that NID would favor using national assets
like satellites to provide more strategic intelligence to
policymakers on terrorism rather than more operational or
tactical intelligence to military commanders.
But I think the 9/11 Commission is saying that is exactly
why we need one person with the budget authority to make those
judgments, because it may well be more in the national interest
to make those assignments to the war on terrorism as opposed to
the Department of Defense. And some at the Defense Department
have said that they were going to carry on this fight because
they had to do it on behalf of the warfighters, although
Commissioner Hamilton said he thought it was unimaginable that
military intelligence would not continue to be a very high, if
not the highest, priority for our Intelligence Community.
I wonder if each of you would give me a response to whether
you think the balance of authority here, assuming for a moment
that we adopt something like the Commission proposal of the NID
with budget authority, whether the balance of authority now has
to, not shift away from the Pentagon, but to shift to somebody
on top, who as you fascinatingly were during the Carter
Administration, who has the authority to make judgments between
intelligence, war on terrorism, and the Pentagon. Admiral
Turner, why don't you start?
Admiral Turner. Senator Lieberman, one other aspect of the
Carter Executive Order was that we would periodically rehearse
the transfer of tasking authority over the collection elements
from the Director of Central Intelligence to the Secretary of
Defense. This was for the possibility that we would one day be
in a really active war, where intelligence was absolutely vital
to the Defense Department, and therefore you would not want the
Director of Central Intelligence, a nonmilitary person
normally, to make those judgments.
And so from time to time, for a week or something like
that, say, my deputy for collection tasking would take his
instructions from Harold Brown over in the Defense Department,
rather than from me. This gave the Defense Department a fall-
back position. They could go to the President and say, ``Sir,
we think the time has come under this crisis that we are in
right now, that we ought to take this away from Admiral Turner
out there and do it ourselves.'' That was I think a good
compromise.
Senator Lieberman. There is some language in the 9/11
Commission Report that suggest that they see the same kind of
dispute resolution mechanism here either through the National
Security Adviser or obviously ultimately the President. Mr.
Woolsey.
Mr. Woolsey. Senator Lieberman, I believe one of the older
statutes already essentially permits transfer of tasking
authority in wartime to the Defense Department. To my mind,
tasking is readily dealt with through Executive Order. You do
not need legislation about tasking, I do not think. I think
that the NID ought to have more authority than the DCI has now,
and it ought to be more collectively done with an eye toward
consumers, including the Defense Department, and I think that
is one thing that we have learned from the 9/11 Commission
Report and from the war on terrorism.
Particularly important though, is fusing foreign and
domestic tasking and intelligence. That is really what is new,
and I do not think the 9/11 Commission Report or anything else
that I have seen demonstrates that the Defense Department is
the principal problem with what went wrong with respect to
September 11. We have had also some important successes over
the course of the last two decades in utilizing not just
tactical systems, but national systems, directly and
immediately on the battlefield, and that has had a lot to do
with the Secretary of Defense's hand in managing many aspects
of the defense agencies in intelligence.
To go back to Senator Rockefeller's analogy about the child
custody, which I am intrigued by, I think the most important
thing is not to have a divorce between the Secretary of Defense
and the NID. When I was DCI, I had excellent relations with
first Les Aspin and then with Bill Perry as Secretaries of
Defense, and we worked together on things quite
collaboratively. We had a single baseball cap with ``Chairman''
on it, and we would co-chair meetings, and sometimes I would
put it on and sometimes he would put it on. We just worked it
out.
So I think the Harman formulation, frankly, is superior to
both that of the Commission and that of the original version I
heard from the White House, because I think it strikes a
balance requiring joint appointments of individuals such as the
Director of NSA, and it gives the Secretary of Defense a word
in budget execution, although it leaves the principal authority
to move money around in the hands of the NID. I think that is a
better solution than what I have heard from either the
Commission or initially from the White House.
Senator Lieberman. Thank you. Judge Webster.
Judge Webster. I think I am largely in agreement with that.
With 80 percent of the budget in defense, the elephant is in
the room, and how you create a relationship between the NID and
the Secretary of Defense becomes very important. There has
always been a principle of reclama on serious issues of
disagreement, and they worked well in my 4\1/2\ years at CIA.
The Secretary of Defense only exercised that one time, and that
provided two of us in chairs in the Oval Office with the
President, and he made the decision.
I agree that this problem did not affect the missing of the
dots. I see nothing in there to think that was the problem.
During the Gulf War, we pulled satellites that were
dedicated to watching the Soviet Union closely and moved them
into the Middle East and worked closely with them. That worked
very well.
We had one unexpected issue which was, again, resolved by
the deliberative process with the National Security Adviser
acting at the instruction of the President, where our analysts
disagreed with what we saw about the number of tanks that had
been destroyed and scud launchers that had been destroyed,
which was the key to the President's authorization to begin the
land war. Those things do not happen very often, but I think,
in retrospect, looking back on it, while I think that CIA was
right, it would have been better for the military to have had
that choice and made that final judgment.
Senator Lieberman. Thank you. And my time is up. Can I ask
for one answer from all of you? I am following the Chairman's
precedent.
I am curious whether you briefed the President yourself
personally, and if not, generally speaking, how often you spoke
to him? We have just come through a period where the Director,
and now the Acting Director of CIA, is giving the President
daily intelligence briefings.
Did you do that, Judge Webster?
Judge Webster. Yes, I did, Senator, most days. I had a
briefer there ever morning, so I did not feel an obligation to
it, but this was the first time in a long time that the
President, then-President Bush, took his briefing directly from
CIA. It had previously been through the National Security
Adviser.
Senator Lieberman. Mr. Woolsey.
Mr. Woolsey. A handful of times early in the
administration, President Clinton had me and the briefer in.
Normally, thereafter, he almost always read the daily briefing.
Other than that, I had two substantive meetings with him in 2
years--one a year.
Admiral Turner. President Carter preferred to read the
President's daily brief. I had a half-hour session with him
three times a week for the first several years to bring him up
on other intelligence aspects.
Senator Lieberman. That is very interesting. Thank you all
very much.
Chairman Collins. Thank you.
Senator Roberts. Yes. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
I would like to cut to the chase again like everybody else
has. We hear the idea of having a NID is good only if it comes
with some greater power than currently resides in the Office of
the DCI. If we do not, it is argued we run the risk of really
creating an intelligence czar and causing more harm to the
community than good. In other words, you have two hats, and you
shift the deck chairs on the ``Good Ship Intelligence,'' and
then we are back again in 6 months having, I guess, more
hearings.
But at any rate, I think I hear from you all three saying
that you agree that if a NID is created, we must empower it;
that you agree that greater control over DOD NFIP budgets--that
is the National Foreign Intelligence program--should be
included in these broader powers.
Well, here is the question, and here is the question that
faces or the challenge or the frustration that faces Senator
Rockefeller, Senator Durbin, and Senator Levin and myself. As
you have said before--I think Admiral Turner said it--that the
Defense Department controls 80 percent of the funding, and the
Intelligence Committee then controls 20 percent. That adds up
to 10 percent of the total DOD funding in regards to the money
that they control. And then we try to make some sense out of
the difference, and pardon these acronyms, but the Intelligence
Community absolutely devours them, and then they change them
every once in a while.
One is TIARA. When you are talking about TIARA, other than
the one that we are going to give to the distinguished
Chairman, that is tactical. Everybody pretty well figures out
where the four services is with the Department of Defense and
that commander in the field would have that capability. One is
called JMIP. Now, that is the satellites. That is the
collection. That is tremendously important, where we have to
maintain our technology, and then there is the NFIP, which is
what I have explained, the National Foreign Intelligence
Program. That is the strategic and the counterterrorism. The
whole idea is how do you meld these together under a NID so
that it works.
Right now, under the Defense Department, you have the
Defense Intelligence Agency, you have NSA, the NRO, and NIMA. I
am sorry. They have changed that acronym. It is NGIA. And then
you have the four services. Nine of the 15 are controlled
literally by the Defense Department.
Now, this leads to something that I have called ``torn
between two masters.'' Let me give you two examples:
When we had an urgent need, at the request of many
Senators, more especially Senator Levin, who was an absolute
tiger on this, when the Iraq Survey Group went to Iraq to look
for the weapons of mass destruction, there was an effort all
communitywide to say, ``OK, who has experience in regards to
Iraq?'' And the State Department, they have a small arm of
intelligence, and the request came to the State Department--I
won't get into the number that was requested--Secretary Powell
said, ``No, I am sorry, you cannot go. I am shorthanded. I need
you here.''
David Kay, from orders on high, said, ``No, we need you
with the Iraq Survey Group.'' Does that analyst that has 20
years of experience and possibly a Ph.D., who does he work for
or who does she work for? Does he or she work for Secretary
Powell or does he or she work for the new NID or does he or she
work for the Secretary of Defense?
Let me give you another example. There is the Defense
Intelligence Agency, obviously under the Secretary of Defense.
The NID says, ``You know, we have got a real problem in surge
capacity in Colombia. We need 300 DIA agents now. Move them,
please.''
And the Secretary of Defense says, ``No, I am sorry, we
still need them in regards to Afghanistan. We are about to have
an election there if we possibly can. We are not going to do
it.''
Now, if you are torn between two masters, it seems to me
that is the problem. I am assuming that all three of you
indicate that the NID must be empowered, must have greater
control over the DOD budgets. Where we get into problems is do
you move all nine of these agencies? You would not move nine.
You would not move the services, I am sure. That is tactical.
But there are five others here. Would you move them over to the
NID's authority or would you not or would you try to work out
something in which case the Under Secretary for Intelligence
for Defense, Steve Cambone now, would meet with, say, a four-
star, if that is the way to do it, or some kind of intermediary
functionary to try to work this out on a better basis. That
seems to me to be the big problem or challenge as we have as
trying to forge a bill.
Would any of you have any comments?
Mr. Woolsey. Mr. Chairman, I think that this is one where
the Washington version of the Golden Rule that whoever has the
gold makes the rules will apply. If budget execution authority
is given to the NID, he will or she will have a much better
ability to say to the Secretary of State or the Secretary of
Defense, ``Look, I sympathize. I understand. I know this fluent
Arabic language linguist is a very rare asset, but you did not
hear me. I really need her or him.''
I do not think one needs to, in legislation, or perhaps
even Executive Order, get into the business of precisely who
assigns. The Intelligence Community works in a collaborative
way a lot of the time, but the hardest cases are precisely the
ones you mentioned because experienced and talented people are
much harder to find than dollars or just bodies to fill slots,
and so I am not surprised that Secretary Powell or the
Secretary of Defense in other circumstances would struggle
against having one of their very best people detailed. I think
this will follow reasonably from a solution generally in favor
of what the NID needs, will follow from the NID having the kind
of enhanced budget authority that is being talked about, even
if it is not total budget authority of the sort that is in the
Commission bill or Commission recommendations.
Senator Roberts. Admiral Turner, do you have anything to
say?
Admiral Turner. I would just come back to my comment that
we have to make up our minds is terrorism No. 1, or is it not?
And if it is, then the NID should have the ability to say, ``I
am sorry, Secretary Powell, I really need that group of people
or whatever it is in this other capacity.''
Judge Webster. My former deputy, Richard Kerr, made an
interesting observation the other day that is worth repeating,
that intelligence is really a service industry, a service to
many other departments, fields and needs. And I think that the
NID, as a head of that, has a duty to listen, and he has to
listen understandably. And then he has a duty to decide. And if
the Congress wants to put a reclama provision in there or to
suggest that if the Department is not satisfied, he can take it
up higher, that would be fine. It tends not to work that way
very often in that nobody wants to do that until they really
think they need it. So I think that kind of a system can still
work.
Senator Roberts. My time has expired, Madam Chairman, and I
thank you for the time, but I think that is one of the very
crucial decisions we have to make is, I think, one of the
witnesses said something about breaking the china. I can assure
you there is another committee in the Congress upon which I am
privileged to serve who has quite a bit of feeling about this.
They are having hearings this afternoon and tomorrow, which I
will attend.
And I think the decision, Madam Chairman, is do we really
transfer all of those agencies over to the NID or is there some
kind of transformational authority whereby--I do not want to
say force, but that they certainly work together in better
fashion than they do now, and that is an absolute and very
important question.
I thank you for your time.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Senator Rockefeller.
Senator Rockefeller. Thank you, Madam Chairman. I want to
ask kind of a generic or philosophical question. Throughout all
of the hearings that have taken place so far, there has been
this undercurrent of nervousness about the so-called 80/20
relationship, and that cannot help but feed into the strength
of the personality of the Secretary of Defense, the strength of
the personality of the Vice President, who was Secretary of
Defense, and perhaps a tendency of Condoleezza Rice to lean a
bit in that direction.
Now, it could be that we are making ourselves walk around
too many corners or twisting ourselves up on all of this unless
there is some absolute reason that a Secretary of Defense has
to have budget authority. In other words, if the NID has budget
authority, that becomes a direct threat to the Secretary of
Defense and, thus, the committees begin to fight, and the
bureaucracies begin to fight, and the press begins to take
sides, and it is not healthy. Because, as Admiral Turner said,
what counts is the national interests.
You have 15 different intelligence agencies. We have just
created another one, homeland security, and you could, I
suppose, let us say, take out NSA, NRO, the National Geospatial
Intelligence Agency, you could take some of those out and say,
well, let the Secretary of Defense and the CIA or the NID work
that out on a common basis. You remember when George Tenet was
testifying before the 9/11 Commission, and he was asked about
his relationship with Rumsfeld, Secretary Rumsfeld, and the
answer was, well, it is terrific, and things in Washington do
depend upon relationships, as well as laws or Executive Orders
or whatever. The problem was, I think we all had the feeling at
that time that Director Tenet was not going to be around a
great deal of time, so his answer did not make much difference,
that he got along well with the Secretary of Defense.
Now, you can do this whole cloth. You can NID it and give
absolute budget authority, period. You can do it in a partial
manner that you can share on NSA, NRO, the National Geospatial
Intelligence Agency, etc., but if you do that, you have already
changed the game. And in a town where rules are rules, what
President Carter said to you was just fascinating. Senator
Lieberman and I were whispering about it. It is fascinating
that he said go ahead and do this, go ahead and do this. Run
the Intelligence Community and then if there are problems we
will work them out.
I think that was then. This is now. As Senator Lieberman
said, intelligence is now the tip of the spear. It comes first.
It comes before war fighting, unless it is a sneak attack, and
then it still comes before war fighting because it is meant to
anticipate that.
My question is, is this just a kind of a traditional fight
in Washington where the Secretary of Defense has what the
Secretary of Defense has, and the CIA is tasked to do three
different things, but can only do one of them, in fact--well,
he has a relationship with the President or she has a
relationship with the President--but it is not clear.
So, what I am saying is this--some people give up on this
legislation, on the 9/11 Commission legislation, because they
say it will never work. One of you said it a moment ago because
it will not happen. Congress will not pass it. The city will
not allow it. The cultures will not allow it. I want to hear
that I am wrong on that, but I would like your views.
Admiral Turner. I am a military professional, and I think I
understand the military's obsession with being sure they have
access to the best intelligence. Every military commander wants
every asset under his control that he or she needs to prosecute
whatever assignment he or she is given. It is a natural
tendency.
I keep coming back to the fact that military defense is not
the primary priority for the country today, but we do want to
have a system that ensures that that military commander gets
the best support we can possibly afford to give within the
limits of also putting No. 1 priority on terrorism. I do not
know that you can write that into a law. I think that has to be
ironed out by Presidents and Secretaries of Defense and
National Intelligence Directors as to how they balance that out
individually. But the overall national interest is to err on
the side of giving the National Intelligence Director more
authority rather than less.
Senator Rockefeller. So you would come down on the idea of
doing something about it in law rather than depend upon the
well-meaning nature of those who protect us?
Admiral Turner. There are well-meaning people in our
government at all levels, but the bureaucracies tend to keep
them from doing well-meaning things frequently.
Senator Rockefeller. Yes. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Woolsey. Senator Rockefeller, you may be right. The
personalities involved here may be one issue, but I have known
reasonably well every Secretary of Defense since Mel Laird, and
none of them is a ``Casper Milquetoast.'' The job tends to
attract reasonably strong-willed people and understandably so.
I think there are three issues for the NID, and I have not
looked into which of these needs to be sorted out in
legislation and which could be done by, let us say, report
language which suggests an Executive Order working with the
White House--whatever--but it seems to me there are three
issues.
First is tasking; second is the power of appointment over
the defense agencies, such as the Director of NSA; and the
third is budget execution.
I think with respect to tasking, the NID needs to exercise
more authority than he or she now does and than the DCI now
does. We need to move toward this business of taking
intelligence consumers' judgments into account much more than
just having these individual agencies that have these
individual collection assets decide what to do with them. I
think that is the first thing.
How that is accomplished--how the NID is given that higher
degree of authority--I have not made a careful enough study to
know.
With respect to appointment, I believe that it would be a
major step up over what the DCI now have for the NID to be
given joint appointment authority with the Secretary of Defense
for let us say the Director of NSA or the Director of the NRO--
not all of these service appointments and perhaps not DIA. But
I think that would work.
With respect to budget execution, exactly where the
appropriation goes, whether it goes to the Secretary of Defense
or the NID, I think is less important than the fact that the
NID needs more authority than the DCI now has over moving money
around, reprogramming, and so forth. But I think Congresswoman
Harman's position is the correct one, that the Secretary of
Defense needs some type of outlet there; he needs a reclama; he
needs the ability to say the NID has moved too much away from
this data link that is vital to our combatant forces in such-
and-such place, and if they cannot work it out, the President
needs to decide it.
So I think that is a reasonable increase in authority over
what the DCI now has in those three areas, but I do not have
any good suggestion to the Committee about what parts of those
need to be done by legislation and what parts can be
accomplished otherwise.
Senator Rockefeller. Judge Webster.
Judge Webster. I made reference at the beginning of my
testimony to Professor Darling's rather thick and fulsome
account of the first 5 years. It is interesting that this issue
that you are asking about now, he defined as how it ``raged''
before President Truman finally decided it.
I would make a plea on the side of shifting the
presumptions so that the NID is presumed to have the authority,
and the burden is on those who want to dispute it to make the
effort.
The same thing follows from having a role in selecting the
key people in the intelligence community. And I would like to
see performance review done by the NID, because in some
quarters, whoever writes the report card is the one who gets
the attention, just to shift that presumption of where the
authority is and then let the others come to legitimately
question it--because these are human beings that we are talking
about.
Senator Rockefeller. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Madam
Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Thank you, Senator Rockefeller. Senator
Voinovich.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR VOINOVICH
Senator Voinovich. Again, thank you for your service to our
country and thank you for being here today.
[The prepared statement of Senator Voinovich follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR VOINOVICH
Thank you, Madam Chairman, for holding this morning's hearing. I
look forward to hearing the views of the three former Directors of
Central Intelligence who are with us today concerning the
recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, and I thank each of them for
their service to our nation and for testifying before this Committee.
Congress faces enormous challenges as we seek to reform the national
security establishment to better protect the United States from any and
all threats.
While the Bush Administration has broadly accepted the two
recommendations being considered by this Committee; the first to
establish a National Intelligence Director and the second to establish
a National Counterterrorism Center, there is great uncertainty at this
point as to how these recommendations would be implemented. I hope
these hearings will help guide this Committee as we seek to fill in the
details.
At the same time, we must not lose sight of the internal operations
of the agencies and structures we seek to reform. I have many questions
in this regard. First and foremost, are we adequately compensating our
people in these critical national security positions? Are there enough
employees at agencies such as the FBI which have been given new
missions since 9/11? Is the security clearance process, which can take
up to a year and is handled by several different agencies, organized as
efficiently as possible? How damaging is it to our national security
that people have to wait for months to start working in critical
positions because they have not yet been cleared, or because agencies
conduct their own investigations of individuals who have already been
cleared by other agencies? And as the 9/11 Commission noted, the
process by which the Senate approves nominees for key national security
positions simply takes too long--it must be improved.
I look forward to hearing the testimony of today's witnesses and
addressing these and other questions with them. Thank you, Madam
Chairman.
Senator Voinovich. It is interesting that there is a
consensus among you. Mr. Woolsey, you are talking about the
fact that we have secular Baathists, we have Shi'ites, we have
Islamic Sunni. I would like to refer to this as the ``fourth
world war.'' We had the Third World War--the Cold War--and this
is the Fourth World War. It is really important for us to
understand that this is a different kind of war than we have
ever fought before in this Nation's history. Would you agree
with that, that this is a different type of war that we are not
accustomed to?
Mr. Woolsey. Very different in many ways. It has some more
parallels to the Cold War, I think, Senator, than it does
toward World War I or World War II, because we fought sometimes
in the Cold War but not the whole time, and in the Cold War,
eventually, ideology turned out to be extremely important. We
won in no small measure because we convinced people like Lech
Walesa and Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov that we were on the
same side. We have to do that with hundreds of millions of good
and decent Muslims in the world, I think.
Senator Voinovich. So intelligence and, I would also say,
diplomacy has become paramount in terms of waging this fourth
world war that we find ourselves in; would you agree with that?
Mr. Woolsey. In a lot of ways--diplomacy of a very
difficult sort, more difficult in a way than it was during the
Cold War.
Senator Voinovich. I would like to get to the issue of the
authority of the NID. Mr. Woolsey, you were saying that you
thought that the issue of the appointments in NSA and others,
these intelligence agencies, should be a shared responsibility.
Who is going to be held responsible for the director of NSA--is
it the Secretary of Defense? Would the NID go to the Secretary
of Defense and say, ``Whoever it is you have over there is not
getting the job done''? Who is going to conduct performance
evaluations? Should it be the NID?
Mr. Woolsey. This is a somewhat complex idea, but I would
have to say that my experience was one of very close
collaboration with the Defense Department, and I think the NID
and the Secretary of Defense could work this out. I think both
should probably write performance evaluations. I think if
either wants an individual dismissed, they would go to the
President--it would be a Presidential appointment in many
cases, anyway--and it would produce perhaps a conflict and a
disagreement which the President would have to determine.
But the way the situation works now for, say, the Director
of NSA is that the Secretary of Defense really does the
appointment, and if the DCI has some reason to object--and
normally, they are not going to because this is a career
military officer that they probably have not known or worked
with before--the DCI can object. But in fact the Director of
NSA believes that he reports to the Secretary of Defense, and
that needs to get adjusted in a way so that the NID, the head
of the Intelligence Community, has something on the order of
half the responsibility and authority over the Director of NSA.
Exactly how to arrange that, I know it is a somewhat different
concept, but it seems to me to reflect reality much better than
having the NID have full authority over the Director of NSA,
since a huge share of what NSA does is work for battlefield
commanders.
Senator Voinovich. On the issue of the budget, would they
work out the budget issue, too? In other words, the NID looks
at the whole national intelligence budget , and says ``We are
going to rearrange the way these things are being funded'' and
ends up having a battle with the Secretary of Defense over the
amount of resources that are going to be put in there?
Mr. Woolsey. In the Executive Branch, you are always
working on three budgets simultaneously. You are working on the
one you are putting together to submit to OMB in the fall. You
are working on the one that Congress is holding hearings on
now. And you are working on the one that you are executing.
The DCI under the current system has some substantial
authority, at least in theory, over what is being put together
and submitted, but in practical terms, since he has so little
real power outside the CIA, he is sometimes listened to and can
sometimes influence what goes on. As I said, the way I did this
was I had a cap made up that said ``Chairman,'' and when the
Secretary of Defense or the Deputy Secretary of Defense and I
would co-chair meetings, if we thought we were going to have a
disagreement, we would step out and resolve it. We kept the hat
between us most of the time and worked on these things
together.
Senator Voinovich. But you would give the NID the power
under this reorganization in terms of the budget with the
understanding that their interpersonal relationships would have
something to do with how it finally got worked out?
Mr. Woolsey. Theoretically, I had more power with respect
to the budget being assembled, and he had more power with
respect to the budget that was being executed. In the real
world, the DCI has rather little power over money as a whole
outside the CIA. I think the NID needs a bit of a leg up.
Senator Voinovich. The NID in the budgetary process would
be working with OMB and saying, ``Hey, this is what I need to
do to get the job done.'' So you think it would be given a
higher priority than it might under the current situation--or
should be given it?
Mr. Woolsey. Well, yes. This gets very involved in the way
the classified budget is put together. Back in the mid-nineties
during my tenure, there was not a so-called passback to the
Intelligence Community. The money all went back to the Defense
Department, and frankly, I preferred it that way because I
thought I would be hit with much deeper cuts if the
intelligence budget were separate. I regarded the defense
budget in those times as something of a sanctuary that would
require that I be cut less than the big cuts I was already
seeing.
So during my tenure, I was delighted to be under the
envelope of defense with respect to dealing with OMB, because I
thought--and I think I was right--I would have gotten fewer
cuts as part of the defense budget.
Senator Voinovich. Under the new set-up, if we agree that
the fourth world war is different than the Third World War, or
the First or Second World War, it seems that there should be a
different allocation of resources. However, you may bump into
the typical lobbying that is done in the Defense Department for
hardware and all the other stuff that is supported by every
lobbyist in this country and every defense manufacturer. It
seems to me that if we are going to have the money to get the
job done in the diplomacy and intelligence area, we may have to
cut back on some of the other things that we have been
supporting here that seem to be sacrosanct, if we are going to
be responsible in terms of these resources.
What is your comment on that?
Mr. Woolsey. Well, Senator, the way I see it, in the early
1960's in the Kennedy Administration, before Vietnam, the
country was spending about 9 percent of GDP on defense and
intelligence together. That would be the equivalent today of an
approximately trillion-dollar defense and intelligence budget--
on the order of double what we are spending now.
Now, admittedly, in those days, old people were not taken
care of through government funding, through Medicare and
Medicaid, etc., so that domestic part of the government has
grown. But that is a decision within society about whether to
take care of old people in their own homes or through the
government.
As far as resources allocated to national security, we are
at about half the level of burden today than we were during the
Kennedy Administration.
Now, I am an old Scoop Jackson Democrat--I do not mind
spending money. I think it is fine for us to fund whatever we
need--indeed, imperative to fund whatever we need--on national
security, and we ought to do some decent things on the domestic
side, too, and I am willing to pay the taxes to do it.
Anyway, for better or for worse, those would be my
judgments.
Senator Voinovich. Admiral or Judge Webster, do you want to
comment on that?
Judge Webster. I cannot comment on that; I think I agree.
But one thing I would like to mention, because I have not heard
it, is that the problem today in reprogramming is enormous.
Under existing authorities, it takes about 5 months to move
money around in the Intelligence Community.
Mr. Turner. No comment.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you.
Chairman Collins. Senator Levin.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LEVIN
Senator Levin. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
I would like to just pick up where Senator Voinovich left
off, relative to the budget first of all. Under the current law
as I read it, the power to develop and present the annual
budget to the President is in the DCI, so already, the DCI does
the developing and presenting of the budget under the existing
law. That would presumably not change under the proposal of the
9/11 Commission, except that there would be a new DNI--but
putting that aside.
Second, the issue then becomes supervising the execution of
the defense budget. That is where the issue, it seems, becomes
the real one. And currently, that supervising of the execution
of that budget rests basically in the Defense Department.
However, under the Carter Administration, as I understand
you, Admiral Turner, that was with the DCI rather than with the
Defense Department. Is that correct?
Admiral Turner. Yes, sir.
Senator Levin. Which means that with the stroke of a pen--
an executive pen, an Executive Order--that shift could go back
to the DCI, and that does not require legislation. Would that
be correct, Admiral?
Admiral Turner. I believe so, yes, sir.
Senator Levin. Because we have to sort out what requires
legislation and what can be done by Executive Order, and that
is a very key issue, because the difference in terms of
execution of the budget, which includes reprogramming, is one
which can be addressed by Executive Order, clearly, and does
not need to be addressed through legislation, because history
has shown that it has been addressed through Executive Order
rather than legislation.
Now, in terms of the intelligence failures--first, would
all of you agree with what Admiral Turner just said?
Mr. Woolsey. Senator Levin, I have not made a----
Senator Levin. I am not talking about wisdom. I am talking
about whether that can be done.
Mr. Woolsey. I have not made a study of whether that can be
done by Executive Order or would require legislation. This is
kind of the arcana of budget execution. It certainly, in my
time, was in the hands of the Defense Department. And also,
Congresswoman Harman's bill, I think, may leave some aspect of
execution authority in the hands of the Secretary of Defense
but give the NID a lot more authority over reprogramming.
These are just details of the way this works that I am a
bit stale on.
Senator Levin. All right, but these are critical issues.
Mr. Woolsey. Certainly.
Senator Levin. Judge, would you agree with Admiral Turner
on that?
Judge Webster. That an Executive Order can do it?
Senator Levin. That we can go back to the Carter approach
in terms of budget execution, which was an Executive Order
approach. If you do not have an opinion, that is fine.
Judge Webster. I do not have an opinion.
Senator Levin. All right. Now, the question of execution of
budget authority has been raised, and it is an important one
obviously for us. The question in my mind is what is the
relationship between that location of budget authority
execution and the intelligence failures before September 11 and
before Iraq. We had major intelligence failures prior to
September 11 and prior to Iraq. The reports of the Intelligence
Committee in the Senate showed that. The joint intelligence
committees of the House and Senate report showed that, and
surely, the 9/11 Commission Report showed that.
Now, what is the relationship--do you have examples, for
instance, from your experience, of where the issue of budget
execution made a significant difference, because I do not see
it in the report. I do not see in the report how the issue over
budget execution relates to the failures which were so
dramatically laid out by the 9/11 Commission.
Can you help us on that? Judge Webster, we will start with
you and go down the line.
Judge Webster. I think you are correct, Senator. In broad
generalities, what the 9/11 Commission Report says is that
agencies were going their own way, and information was not
finding itself in a place where the warning and the danger
would be clear.
The conclusion of the report was that the leader of the
Intelligence Community should be held responsible and given the
authorities to make sure that did not happen again. Now, that
is broadly stated. So I think that is really the connection,
and he needs to have the authorities as well as be called the
leader.
Senator Levin. Then, after September 11, we created the
Terrorist Threat Integration Center, where presumably, we
brought together all of the intelligence so that we did not
have intelligence that was not shared, and we could connect the
dots. And I think that is an important change, and I am not
sure that this new center which is being proposed, the National
Counterterrorist Center, does much different in terms of
coordination than we have already done with TTIC, except for
these additional authorities which are handed to the center.
But my question is the budget execution issue. Do you see
any relationship between where that was located prior to
September 11 or prior to Iraq and the failure of intelligence
prior to September 11 and prior to Iraq?
Mr. Woolsey.
Mr. Woolsey. I do not really see that there is a
substantial relationship, Senator Levin. There were failures
within the foreign Intelligence Community, but I do not see
those as principally having been communication between elements
in the foreign intelligence community--some were, but most were
not. Most of the failures were legal limitations such as Rule
6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that prohibited
the FBI, if they obtained material pursuant to grand jury
subpoena, from sharing it with the Intelligence Community.
There were policy limitations, some within the Justice
Department. There were policies that had been adopted, for
example, in late 1995--and I do not hesitate to stress that I
resigned in early 1995--in the CIA to limit the ability to
penetrate groups by recruiting people with violence in their
background. There were FAA policies about cooperating with
hijackers.
There were a lot of things that contributed to this, but I
do not see that the heart of the matter is this budget
execution authority vis-a-vis defense and DCI now, or perhaps
in NID in the future.
Senator Levin. Can I interrupt you there, because I have
got to get to Admiral Turner.
Mr. Woolsey. Yes.
Senator Levin. Do you have anything more to add on that,
Admiral Turner?
Admiral Turner. Very quickly, I think there is a
connection, Senator.
Senator Levin. OK.
Admiral Turner. We are now saying that we did not have
enough HUMINT, and that was one of the reasons we failed. Well,
if the NID has budget execution authority, he or she could move
money into HUMINT or SIGINT or wherever.
Senator Levin. Was there any effort to do that which was
thwarted?
Admiral Turner. I do not know.
Senator Levin. All right. The final question--and I think,
Judge, you have commented on this issue. The 9/11 Commission
recommends establishing the National Intelligence Director in
the Executive Office of the President. My own concern about
that is that the individual then would be so close to the
President and his policy advisors that it could make it even
more difficult for the National Intelligence Director to be
independent of the policy pressures of the White House, thus
increasing the risk of intelligence being shaped to support
policy, as appears to have been done prior to the war in Iraq,
rather than keeping the intelligence objective and independent,
and also--and this part has not really been discussed publicly
as much--that it might make it more likely for executive
privilege to be invoked or suggested, thus making effective
congressional oversight more difficult.
Judge, you have commented on this issue in your testimony,
and you have indicated that you believe that it is important in
order to avoid the reality or the perception of intelligence
``being framed, read `spun' '' to support a foreign policy of
the administration, that position be outside of the Executive
Office of the President.
I need a quick answer from the other two witnesses. Do you
believe that the National Intelligence Director should be
inside or outside the Executive Office of the President?
Mr. Woolsey--inside or outside--because I am out of time.
Mr. Woolsey. I think the key thing is that they report to
the President. I care much less about whether they are inside
or outside the Executive Office than that it be an individual
who is willing to be the skunk at the garden party.
Senator Levin. Thank you. Admiral Turner.
Admiral Turner. I agree wholly with Jim.
Senator Levin. Thank you both for very helpful answers.
Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Senator Coleman.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR COLEMAN
Senator Coleman. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Thank you,
gentlemen, for extraordinary testimony, and thank you for your
service to our country.
Director Woolsey, you raised an issue about the focus of
this report, and the reason I want to raise this is whatever we
do, whatever we put in place now, has to suffice not just to
respond to what happened yesterday but to what may happen
tomorrow. It is kind of like you take a poll, and you are
always getting somebody's opinion on yesterday, yet the issue
may be tomorrow.
We know that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that has
missile capacity. We know that there are deep concerns about
the Iranians developing nuclear capacity and what they will do
with that. We have deep concerns about Syria funding terrorism.
So my concern is as we look at this report, and we look at
the concept of a National Intelligence Director, and we look at
the Counterterrorism Center, I will quote a comment that
appeared in a series of thoughts in the August 1 edition of The
Washington Post, asking a number of folks--Admiral Turner, I
think you responded to this--for their reflections on where do
we go with the report. This comment came from John Deutsch,
former Director of Central Intelligence from 1995 to 1996.
He noted that, ``Moreover, the proposal for the civilian-
led, unified, joint command for counterterrorism works better
for counterterrorism than for managing intelligence regarding
other security issues that may arise in the Taiwan Straits, in
the Palestine-Israel conflict, or the Indian subcontinent.''
So my question becomes for all of you gentlemen--the
structures that we are talking about now that are reflected in
this 9/11 Commission Report--a National Intelligence Director,
a Joint Counterterrorism Center--do you have a sense of
confidence that this structure relates to some of the other
concerns about terrorism, some of the other concerns about
Hezbollah, about Iran, about Syria?
That would be one question, and the second is if not, if we
are missing something in this report and these recommendations
to deal with those emerging issues, what would it be?
Admiral Webster--excuse me--Judge Webster.
Judge Webster. Thank you. I was never more than lieutenant,
senior grade, sir.
The Intelligence Community leader has as his responsibility
knowing what problems there are in the world, not just what is
on the mind of a department head or on what seems to be for the
moment a particular problem, and strategically, what problems
are out there. I mentioned ``have'' and ``have not'' countries
can create wars. We need to be on the alert for that, and we
should not give up that responsibility because of the
inadequacy of the authority of the community leader. That is my
first point on that. Maybe I can come back.
Senator Coleman. Director Woolsey.
Mr. Woolsey. Senator Coleman, I would say that, yes,
tomorrow's threats may be very unlike this one. We could have a
crisis in the Taiwan Straits and be looking at a serious
confrontation with China, for example. And we do not want to
structure our intelligence in such a way that the Secretary of
Defense's ability to have a major hand in our intelligence
resources is taken away.
I do not think the Secretary of Defense is the main enemy
here as we try to figure out what went wrong before September
11 and fix it. And I also think that the 9/11 Commission's
Report, in its recommendations and really in its discussion,
has almost nothing to say about threats like Hezbollah in Iran
and Syria. That was not its focus. Its focus was al Qaeda's
attack on September 11. And I think we want to be very careful
that we not structure the Intelligence Community and its
reforms in such a way as to fight only that war. We have a lot
of worldwide responsibilities, and the Department of Defense is
a major player in how we respond.
Senator Coleman. My hope would be--and that is my concern--
Chairman Roberts talked about wanting to make sure we did not
do something that had unintended consequences. There are other
threats out there, and I think, Director Woolsey, you said that
you have been through five of these commissions, and if, God
forbid, something terrible happens, there is going to be a
sixth or seventh commission. So if there is something that, as
we look to the future, we do here that you think would limit
our ability to deal with those responses, I would hope that you
would bring it to our attention and put it in the record.
Admiral Turner.
Admiral Turner. I am a little concerned, Senator, at the
diagram I see in the report where, on the one hand, we have a
National Counterterrorism Center, and then, down at the bottom
right-hand corner of the chart, we have a whole group of
individual threat centers--I forget their exact title. I worry
that we are going to find that those are the only places we are
focusing our intelligence effort, and that there will be
another one we'll develop that we have not thought of. I am
nervous about this. I have not fully understood those charts.
Senator Coleman. I share your nervousness. One of the
issues that I have raised in the past is, being a former chief
executive and mayor, you really want and need that skunk at the
party; you need some dissenting voices. Is it your sense--and I
would appreciate all of your responses--that the structure that
is being proposed here with the National Intelligence Director
and with the Counterterrorism Center that we have--is that
going to allow for dissenting voices to get to the President,
to get to the Commander in Chief?
Director Woolsey.
Mr. Woolsey. Senator Coleman, I think that is largely a
matter of individual propensity. I have known the men on my
right and left for many years, each of them, and they both call
it absolutely straight. I do not think when they were in the
job, or now, or ever have they been in a position of trying to
tell people on something important what they want to hear. And
I think that comes down not so much to the organizational
relationship--even whether somebody is in the Cabinet, although
I generally agree with Bill on keeping the NID out of the
Cabinet--I think the key thing is the individual. You have to
have people who do not want too much to be liked.
Senator Coleman. Admiral Turner.
Admiral Turner. I would agree with Jim on that very much.
Senator Coleman. Judge Webster.
Judge Webster. I agree.
Senator Coleman. The question about the relationship with
the President--and we have had discussion--I take it that all
of you gentlemen agree that this position should not be in the
Cabinet. I think Judge Webster said that, and Admiral Turner is
shaking his head.
Judge Webster. Yes.
Admiral Turner. Yes.
Mr. Woolsey. Yes.
Senator Coleman. Help me understand how we structure this.
There has been some discussion about whether it is in the
Office or out. The bottom line is that the ability to do the
job depends on the confidence of the President. I take it we
all agree on that. Is there any disagreement with that?
Judge Webster. I agree.
Mr. Woolsey. I agree.
Admiral Turner. Agreed.
Senator Coleman. So this issue of having terms beyond the
President's term, I think from my perspective, would not be a
good idea if your power is going to depend on your relationship
with the President. Can we structure that, or is this something
that we have to leave to--we elect a President, and they are
going to lead us in the direction--Director Woolsey, perhaps in
a direction that you as head of intelligence say we should not
go, but our country is going to go where the President says we
go. Is this something that we can structure, or do we simply
have to leave it to the--not the whims, but the realities of
human relationships and strength coming from that relationship.
Mr. Woolsey. I think there is no guarantee, Senator
Coleman, and I think there should not be any greater difficulty
in having a NID who is willing to speak independently and to
reflect his analysts' views and his own views than there is for
having a DCI. And generally, over the years, I think DCIs have
called it pretty straight, sometimes to the extent of not
pleasing the boss. But I do not see how these changes make that
problem any harder than it is now.
Judge Webster. I agree. I think that anything you can do,
anything in the culture that gives the leadership in the
Intelligence Community the intellectual independence to call it
the way it is seen by the experts and the analysts--setting
forth alternative points of view if necessary. Their job is not
to influence a policy or to make a policy happen. And again and
again I repeated to everyone, said it publicly, said it to the
Cabinet, we will do our very best to give you the best
intelligence and analysis of that intelligence that we can
have. Then, it is up to you. You can use it, you can ignore it,
you can tear it up and throw it again. The one thing you cannot
do or ask us to do is change it. And I think we have held to
that. Then, the job of defining the policy that flows from that
is up to other people.
Senator Coleman. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Senator Durbin.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR DURBIN
Senator Durbin. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.
I suppose the questions I am about to ask reflect the fact
that I have taken a lot more history courses than management
courses, but I hope you will bear with me.
There is a legendary saloon keeper in Chicago named Paddy
Bauler. He ran an old saloon and was kind of a ward boss. So
they had a reform candidate running against him, and they went
to Paddy Bauler and asked him, ``What do you think about this
guy running against you?''
He said, ``This city ain't ready for reform.'' He was
right.
The question is whether the intelligence community is ready
for reform. And I think the 9/11 Commission has shaken us up,
and they should. They did a great job, did great service to
this country. But if we are often accused of being guilty of
fighting the last war, it appears that in the case for
reforming the Intelligence Community, we are basing it on the
second last war, because since September 11, we have had
another event occur, and that was the invasion of Iraq. I think
the invasion of Iraq made it clear to us in 2002--after, I
should say, our vote in 2002, our invasion in 2003--that
intelligence failed us a second time.
I wonder what an Iraq invasion intelligence commission's
recommendations might be a year later, after September 11;
would they be any different? Certainly, I think it calls into
question whether there is any power of self-healing within the
Intelligence Community. We failed on September 11. The
Intelligence Community did not do as good a job as it should
have done. A year later, they were tested again and, by the
report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, they failed again.
On September 11, they had to look at the whole world and figure
out who our enemy was, and they did not get it--they did not
get it right. When it came to the invasion of Iraq, they had to
look at one country and figure out what the danger was, and
they did not get that right, either, which brings me to this
point, and that is whether or not, when we talk about this
reform process here, whether changing nameplates and changing
e-mail addresses is really getting to the heart of the problem.
Judge Webster, 13-year-old mainframes at the FBI--I have
been screaming bloody murder about this for 3 years--why don't
we have a Manhattan Project on intelligence technology? Why
aren't we gathering the best and brightest in the academic and
the private sectors and the public sector, breaking through all
of the Federal red tape, and building a computer system to
fight the war on terror? We have not even decided to try that
yet--and yet we are talking about moving nameplates and who has
budgetary authority and whether they are going to be part of
the Cabinet.
Second, Mr. Woolsey, thank you for joining us again. I am
still troubled by your repeated comments at these hearings that
it sometimes is not safe for these agencies to share
information. There may just be another spy in one of these
agencies, you said. How are you going to get trusted
communication that the 9/11 Commission calls for if you start
with that premise--if it is not safe for the FAA to tell the
FBI about dangerous people; if it is not safe for the border
crossing guards to take fingerprints and share them with the
FBI?
So my point is this--going back to history as opposed to
management--is the Intelligence Community ready for reform? If
it is not ready for reform, are we kidding ourselves here? Are
we going through a political exercise moving nameplates around
that really will not achieve the fundamental reform that
Admiral Turner referred to when the President of the United
States called him in and said, ``We are going to do it
differently, and you are in charge of doing it differently''?
That is what bothers me.
Would anybody like to comment?
Mr. Woolsey. Senator Durbin, two points. First of all,
about pre-Iraq and a commission on that. In a sense, there is
one. The commission on the WMD estimates, co-chaired, I
believe, by former Senator Robb and Judge Silberman, is holding
hearings. I am testifying before them, I think, next week on
those issues. And it is a complicated set of issues, but
nonetheless, just as there were about five post-Pearl Harbor
commissions, there will doubtless be more than one post-9/11
and post-Iraq commission. It seems to be kind of a constant
here in Washington.
I think on the sharing issue, the point I want to make is
that the 9/11 Commission essentially said that ``need to
share'' should replace ``need to know.'' And it has a
mechanism, a kind of an internet, a trusted information
internet. My written testimony is more thorough than what I
said here at the table on that point, but the key issue seems
to me to be that we should not give up on ``need to know.'' We
ought to try to continually adjust who needs to know what. We
ought to make sure that a person, regardless of what agency
they are in--if they are a DIA analyst, and they are one of the
two or three best people in government to look at a particular
issue, they ought to be given access to a CIA directorate of
operations blue border report, as long as they are trusted and
security-cleared and so forth.
I am not suggesting that we should stay within the
stovepipes. It is the numbers that bother me, because insofar
as one widely disseminates material, one could have a Robert
Hanssen, who turned out to be a pretty clever computer
operator----
Senator Durbin. Mr. Woolsey, Governor Kean and Congressman
Hamilton sat in those chairs and told us we have got to be more
creative, we have got to be more imaginative. We cannot keep
putting things in these neat little drawers of expectations. We
have got to think more broadly on the war on terrorism. And
what you are arguing for, even though it may be stovepipes with
a few holes in it, is to make sure that the holes are directed
in the right ways.
How do you get creativity and imagination out of that?
Mr. Woolsey. Well, Senator, the victors in World War II
used intelligence very creatively, and one way they did so,
particularly with respect to the very sensitive signals
intercepts and decrypting that we were doing of the Japanese
codes and the British in Enigma were doing of the German codes,
was to radically restrict the numbers of people who did the
analysis and had exposure to those technologies but to make
them the very best.
Whenever I see, as I saw back in 1998, headlines in the
press saying we are listening to bin Laden's satellite
telephones, and we know immediately thereafter he stops using
them----
Senator Durbin. That was a leaked story in The Washington
Times which killed the source for us.
Mr. Woolsey. It strikes me that once I see leaks like that,
I think there are too many blabbermouths in the government who
are being given access to signals intelligence. The person who
leaked that, I think, has as much blood on his or her hands as
anyone with respect to September 11.
So it is impossible to always disseminate only to the right
people, and I do think we need to disseminate across agency
lines, but we also, I think, should not think that we are going
to do something effective just by broadcasting and sharing very
widely without attention to precisely whom this sharing is
going to. That is my only point.
Senator Durbin. I have only a few seconds left, but I would
really like it if either of the other two witnesses could
comment, Madam Chairman, on this whole question about whether
we can create a climate of reform in agencies which do not
appear to be open to that climate.
Admiral Turner. Senator, I tried to say in my comments that
the biggest problem today is how we analyze these situations.
Henry Kissinger has a piece in The Washington Post today saying
analysis, interpretation, is the real problem here. Changing
these boxes will help some, but it is not the solution.
The solution is with you. Are you interrogating the
intelligence committees?
Senator Durbin. I am on that, too.
Admiral Turner. OK, sir. Are you interrogating these people
when they come up and finding out if they really can back up
what they are saying.
Senator Durbin. Admiral, we have 22 staff members on the
Senate Intelligence Committee shared by the members for 15
different intelligence agencies. I think you can answer that
question yourself. We cannot get into the level of depth that
we should with the current situation on Capitol Hill. The 9/11
Commission is right--we have failed at oversight. We have to
accept some responsibility here.
Admiral Turner. And there is the PFIAB and the whole
bureaucratic structure. I mean, are the Secretaries of State
asking these questions? Are the Secretaries of Defense asking
these questions? We have just got to encourage a much more
inquiring approach to intelligence.
Judge Webster. Are we ready? I think we are always ready if
a good reason is presented and a good objective is understood,
and then, people will go to work and find it. That is true in
the FBI, it is true in the CIA, and it is true in the other
elements of the Intelligence Community.
But when we think about how intelligence is collected, as
Admiral Turner pointed out, and then we think what do we do
with that intelligence, where does it go--using my FBI example,
there is an extraordinary amount of information that is in
those files. Getting it out depends on architecture of the
system, and the architecture of the system had something else
in mind when it was created.
I do not think it needs a Manhattan Project, but it sure
needs some attention and a willingness to invest in what
creates that capability to share but share with protection.
Senator Durbin. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Senator Carper.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER
Senator Carper. Senator Durbin, who was the saloon keeper
in Chicago that you spoke of?
Senator Durbin. Paddy Bauler.
Senator Carper. Paddy Bauler. And Paddy Bauler said, ``This
city ain't ready for reform''?
Senator Durbin. Yes.
Senator Carper. One could also look at the intelligence
community and conclude that, given the unanimous
recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, the Select Committee on
Intelligence's unanimous recommendations, the countless
commissions that have existed over the last 30 or 40 years
recommending changes, maybe the Intelligence Community ``ain't
ready for reform,'' either.
I would go a bit further and say my guess is that the
committees on which we serve here in the Senate and in the
House ``ain't ready for reform.''
You have testified since the 1970's, some of you, before
countless committees of the House and Senate, and you have a
pretty good idea how this place works and sometimes does not
work too well. And I am not going to ask you to help us today
think through how we might want to restructure our committees
in the House or the Senate, but I do want to remind us all that
in the 9/11 Commission Report, while there are a lot of
recommendations with respect to changes in the Executive
Branch, there are quite a few recommendations with respect to
how we operate here on our side of this government.
There are discussions and suggestions that we wait before
we change our Committee structure, until we figure out how we
are going to restructure the Executive Branch, before we move
forward with the 9/11 Commission's intelligence
recommendations. Setting aside what responsibilities we invest
in this director with respect to budget and personnel and so
forth, should we be thinking this year about making changes in
our approach with respect to oversight, the number of
committees that we have?
I think with respect to the Department of Homeland Security
alone there are, I have heard, as many as 80 committees and
subcommittees that have some piece of jurisdiction over
homeland security.
What would be your recommendations with respect to
sequencing for structural changes on the legislative side?
Admiral Turner. My view is this all ought to go ahead
concurrently. I do not see why changing the congressional
structure needs to wait until you decide whether it is a DCI or
a NID. It is not all that big a change, in my opinion. And in
any event, your structure needs change just as the rest of it
does. We ought to get on with it.
I happen to have been the DCI who had to be there when the
committees were formed--actually, not the Senate committee--I
was 6 months late--but I was really the DCI who had to figure
out how we adjusted to dealing with the Congress, because the
Intelligence Community had almost no contact I believe before
that.
I must say that in looking back on it, I am disappointed in
the Congress' performance over these many years and the things
that have gotten by, like Iran-Contra. I think it is really
time for an introspection by the Congress. Your role is so
vital here in trying, within the limitations of the size of
your staffs and all, to introduce a real inquisitiveness into
this situation as to whether they are looking at all the
aspects of it and not getting ``group-thinked.''
Senator Carper. Thank you, Admiral Turner. Judge Webster.
Judge Webster. Senator, when we talk about completing the
dots, what about those 80 committees? How many dots failed to
get completed because of the spread in responsibility and
authority throughout the Congress? And how much better might it
have been if this Committee or the SSCI had full knowledge of
all the regulation that was going on? It is an argument for
consolidation, just as we are hearing that the Intelligence
Committee needs to consolidate and control its information.
Senator Carper. Thank you. Mr. Woolsey.
Mr. Woolsey. Senator, I come at this from a particular
perspective. In the early seventies, when I was still in my
twenties, I was General Counsel to the Senate Armed Services
Committee for Senator Stennis, and one other staff member and I
together with one Appropriations Committee staffer were the
three cleared staffers in the Senate that worked on the
intelligence budget, among other things--we all had other
duties as well.
When I returned some 20 years later as DCI to testify
before the Congress on intelligence and realized I was dealing
with four committees, a substantial number of staffers--for
example, several of my many trips to Capitol Hill in 1993 were
to try to turn around the decision of the Senate Select
Committee's expert on satellite design, because he had a
different idea about the way satellites should be designed than
our experts in the National Reconnaissance Office--I came to
the view that some consolidation with respect to oversight on
Capitol Hill would be a pretty good idea. And I am pleased that
the Commission recommended it. I think far and away the best
approach would be a single committee, a joint committee along
the lines of the old Joint Atomic Energy Committee. I do not
think that the appropriations process, at least in my
experience, is broken, and I do not see anything particularly
necessary to fix it.
But I think the biggest problem is the time limitation, the
term limitation, on the members of the House and Senate Select
Committees, because it really helps a lot to have members of
the committees who have seen issues come around again and
again. They can provide an institutional memory the way the
members of a number of other congressional committees do,
rather than having to be educated afresh with respect to what
this satellite does or that NSA program does every time one
comes before them.
So I do think that getting rid of term limits and,
hopefully, having a single committee for authorization would be
very positive steps and, like Stan and Bill, I do not think it
needs to await whether you have a NID or a DCI.
Senator Carper. Good. Thanks.
I would just say to you, Madam Chairman, and to my friend
and colleague Senator Lieberman, this has been an extraordinary
panel. I have sat here, and I have learned a lot, but I have
also been struck by how fortunate we are as Americans that each
of you has served our country and still does. You make me
proud, and I am sure I speak for all of us in saying that.
One of the values of having a diverse panel like this, one
made up of people with rich experience, is to have them tell us
at the end of the hearing where they agree, where they see the
consensus, because we can go in a million different directions
coming out of these hearings. But where do you see consensus
among yourselves that you would really urgently urge us to
pursue?
Admiral Turner. I think it is empowering somebody to run a
roughly $40 billion a year operation. We just do not have that,
and we need to have it--a CEO. So the real issue is just how
much authority you give that CEO and still protect the
Department of Defense. And I, as a military officer, would err
on the side of giving it to the National Intelligence Director.
Mr. Woolsey. And I, as a lawyer, now a management
consultant, who only spent 2 years in the uniformed military,
would err a little bit more on the side of protecting the
interests of the Secretary of Defense. But generally speaking,
I think Stan and Bill and I are headed in the same direction,
and I would agree with establishing the NID, I would agree with
enhancing their authority over tasking, budget, and personnel,
but I would like to essentially require a collaborative
relationship between that individual and the Secretary of
Defense over that some 80 percent of the national intelligence
programs.
Senator Carper. Judge Webster.
Judge Webster. I do not have much to add except that giving
the intelligence leader, whatever he may turn out to be, the
kind of authorities that he is thought to have but really does
not and making them work in that way, as--Jim calls it an
adjustment--I would say shifting the initiative, resumption of
authority--all of those things can only work for a more
effective Intelligence Community.
Senator Carper. Thanks. That was great.
Admiral Turner. Could I add one point? I do not worry about
the Defense Department much because it is so powerful. It has
all kinds of ways of protecting its interests, and will.
Senator Carper. Thanks for that clarification and for your
excellent testimony.
Chairman Collins. Thank you, Senator Carper.
And last but not least, the ever patient Senator from
Minnesota, Senator Dayton. Thank you for staying.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR DAYTON
Senator Dayton. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
I have moved from 100th in seniority to 89th, and it is not
at all clear to me exactly what difference that makes in the
scheme of things--except that I guess I get to be in the same
time zone as the Chairman as opposed to being off the deep end
here.
It is an excellent hearing--I would say the same thing--and
very worthwhile. I thank you all for your service and also your
expertise here.
To paraphrase Senator Ben Nelson in the Senate, if it has
not been asked by everyone, it has not been asked, and I am not
sure what is really left here.
We talk a lot at the top of organizations. What about in
the midsections and so forth? These eight various entities
under the Department of Defense. Each branch--Marines, Air
Force, Navy, Army--has its own separate intelligence. Are we
making more of these 15 different entities' or agencies'
dispersion than it really involves, or are we talking about
very separate entities here that ought to be consolidated,
merged, in order to be more efficient?
Admiral Turner. Twenty years ago, I wrote a piece in The
Washington Post that recommended removing Army, Navy, Air
Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard, from the national
Intelligence Community. Their job is tactical. Navy
intelligence, for instance, does not need to inform the chief
of the Navy about the strategic picture, what is going on in
the rest of the world; he or she has the Defense Intelligence
Agency to provide all that to him or her. I think we ought to
hive them off and put them into the tactical field; let them
know that is where they stay. They should not be bothering to
study the strategic picture anyway. We have too much
duplication there.
Mr. Woolsey. I think over the years, at least as of the
time that I was DCI 9 years ago, the roles and functions of the
military service intelligence operations have shrunk and
consolidated. I think, although their membership on some bodies
may be a bit out-of-date, their real function and what they
really spend their time on is material that is directly and
immediately relevant to their own service. Also, people add up
all the numbers, but the State Department Bureau of
Intelligence and Research generally does a good job--it has 100
or so analysts working for the Secretary of State. There are
several of these agencies that are not large and I think do not
create any particular problem or confusion. The big ones with
respect to money, other than the CIA, are the National Security
Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National
Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence
Agency. And each of those has an important function. It is not
going to be that hard for the NID to deconflict them. I do not
think it is necessary to have any massive reform of them. I
think there are some adjustments and changes that can be made,
and I think the NID, working with a Secretary of Defense, can
do it.
To my mind, the hard problem here is melding domestic and
foreign intelligence on the terrorist threat. That is new; it
is tough. It gets into civil liberties issues, sometimes real
civil liberties issues, sometimes ones that are perceived to be
such. To my mind, that is why we need to move to a NID, so he
or she can coordinate and pull together what is happening
domestically with respect to terrorist groups, embassies here
that might directly or indirectly help fund terrorist-friendly
groups and so on, on the one hand, and foreign intelligence
about what is going on overseas on the other.
It is the foreign-domestic lash-up that seems to me to be
right at the heart of the new NID's job, and it is one of the
reasons why I keep coming back to the fact that I do not think
the Secretary of Defense is the main problem here. I think we
ought to just work something that the Defense Department can
live with, and that is going to work. It works reasonably well
now. I think the big problem is in this new world of having to
look at foreign and domestic together.
Senator Dayton. The four entities you mentioned, other than
the CIA, are within the Department of Defense. So you have
those four entities, and then you have the CIA, and then you
have the domestic side, where I assume you are talking about
primarily the FBI or some of these others--again, we have
Homeland Security, Treasury, and Energy. Again, what are the
big entities here--are we talking about the FBI, the CIA, the
Department of Defense, and these four subsidiaries under them?
Going back to your management expertise, how do you pull this
together? How do you have somebody who is NID who is then
directing four subsidiaries under the Secretary of Defense?
Mr. Woolsey. Well, they have different functions. The NRO
designs, launches and operates the satellites. The National
Geospatial Intelligence Agency takes that data and makes maps
and photos and integrates it and gets it to the combattant
forces. NSA does signals intercepts and decryption.
There are areas where they need to work together, but it is
not as if you have a lot of people actually doing the same
thing.
Senator Dayton. But whom do they report to? Are you saying
they report to the new NID? Then, why are they in the
Department of Defense?
Mr. Woolsey. They have grown up--NSA was originally a
Defense Department agency. The National Reconnaissance Office
for many years was, and still in a lot of ways is, a joint
venture, essentially, between the CIA and the Department of
Defense. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency grows out
of a merger of the Defense Mapping Agency and the CIA people
who were doing photo interpretation--and my successor, John
Deutch, made that a Defense Agency. The Defense Intelligence
Agency has grown up over time with varied jobs, but it is not
really duplicative. For example, they manage the attaches; they
run certain specialized collection operations with different
types of aircraft and so forth.
So these different agencies, the defense ones, really
report, for all practical purposes, to the Secretary of
Defense. The DCI under the current system can have some
influence over the direction they go, but I think not enough to
really pull them together in the way that you are suggesting
they should be pulled together.
I think the Secretary of Defense and the NID, working
together, could get these rationalized fine. I do not think it
is the major problem. I think the major problem is domestic and
foreign, pulling that together.
Senator Dayton. Is the way Admiral Turner described the
arrangement under President Carter going to do it here? Is that
what we are talking about here, where that one person, whether
by fiat or whatever, has that authority, then, despite being
out of the organizational chart loop--is just inserted and
told, OK, you are going to run the show?
Mr. Woolsey. I think the big problem is not necessarily
that one needs to move the budget execution authority. The big
problem is that one needs to radically simplify and enhance the
role of the DCI under the current system, or the NID under a
new one, for reprogramming.
I think Bill Webster is right on the money when he said,
literally and figuratively, that it is almost impossible now,
and there are massive delays involved, in a NID--or a DCI
today--moving money from one of these programs to another. The
Secretary of Defense needs to be heard and be able to reclama
that to the President if need be. But you need more ability to
reprogram. That is the flexibility that, I think, a NID needs
that a DCI does not really have.
Senator Dayton. My time is up. Thank you very much, Madam
Chairman, for an excellent hearing.
Thank you all again.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. I want to thank our witnesses
for being with us today. Each of you added a great deal to our
consideration of these important issues.
We have a heavy responsibility to produce a reform bill and
to do so in a relatively short amount of time, and being able
to call on people with your experience, expertise, and judgment
certainly facilitates our task. I hope we can continue to call
upon you during our deliberations, and I thank you very much
for being here today.
The hearing record will remain open for 5 days.
I want to thank my colleagues again for their efforts to be
here. I think it is a sign not only of the compelling testimony
that we have, but the importance of our task, that so many
Members have come back from their home States and have stayed
throughout the hearing. So I thank you.
Senator Lieberman, did you have any closing comments?
Senator Lieberman. Thanks, Madam Chairman.
Just to join you in thanking the three witnesses. This has
been a very valuable hearing. We have actually learned
something from you, and we appreciate it. [Laughter.]
Chairman Collins. I find that less shocking than does my
Ranking Member, Senator Lieberman.
Senator Lieberman. Well, it may come more at other hearings
than on you, but anyway, I appreciate it. When I called you
``three wise men'' at the beginning, you have not let us down.
I think it is very important that the three of you have in
different ways said that the status quo is no longer acceptable
with regard to the Intelligence Community. You are all for a
stronger National Intelligence Director. There may be some
disagreement about the details.
Admiral Turner, your story from the Carter Administration
was fascinating to me, and it does show that what a lot of us
are calling for could be done without statute change. On the
other hand, a statute is permanent and does set a standard, so
we need to act quickly.
The final thing I would say is that I agree with Mr.
Woolsey that we have got to stop ever using the word ``czar''
to describe a strengthening of position, and for the moment, I
like your comment that the NID is meant to be a CEO, it is
meant to be a chief executive officer.
Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Senator Dayton. Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Yes, Senator Dayton.
Senator Dayton. Tomorrow morning, I know you have made some
considerable effort to reconcile your timetable with that of
the other committees on which we both serve. What is your
intention tomorrow with regard to the witnesses and
proceedings, because the next committee starts, I think, an
hour and 15 minutes later.
Chairman Collins. Which is highly unfortunate. We have
changed our hearing time twice to accommodate the Armed
Services Committee, and then, unfortunately, the Secretary had
an appointment that he could not change.
Our hearing will begin at 9 o'clock now, and I would
encourage Members who are on both committees to just go back
and forth.
We will be hearing from a very compelling panel of family
witnesses, those who lost loved ones on September 11. As they
were the driving force behind the creation of the Commission,
and they have followed its work very closely, so I think it is
an important hearing, but I certainly understand that Members
are going to have a lot of conflicts--but we will begin at 9
o'clock.
Senator Dayton. Which is why I regret that. I guess I would
just respectfully ask if we could have the opportunity to have
the panel begin its remarks as soon as is practical tomorrow
morning.
Chairman Collins. We will.
Senator Dayton. That would accommodate those of us who do
need to be at both simultaneously.
Chairman Collins. Exactly.
Senator Dayton. Thank you.
Chairman Collins. That is why we moved it up to 9 o'clock.
Senator Voinovich.
Senator Voinovich. We are talking about moving very quickly
on this whole issue. The statistic that Congress was in session
195 days, and Mr. Woolsey was on the Hill 205 of those days
testifying indicates----
Mr. Woolsey. Some of those were meetings.
Senator Voinovich [continuing]. Meetings--indicates that we
ought to move as quickly as we possibly can to shape up our
shop. In other words, we ought to have this on both tracks, and
I would recommend to you and also to Senator Lieberman, and to
our leadership, that they ought to get on with this whole
issue, because we cannot keep going the way that we are going.
This whole Committee structure is not put together in a way to
respond to the threats that we have today, and it is incumbent
on us to fix it.
Chairman Collins. I think you are absolutely right.
Senator Lieberman and I have been assigned the
reorganization of the Executive Branch, not the Legislative
Branch, but I know that our Senate leaders are moving forward
with that vital recommendation as well.
And you are certainly correct that Mr. Woolsey's testimony
about the number of commitments on the Hill that he had to
answer--certainly, while oversight is very important, we ought
to be able to do it in a more efficient manner so that we are
not taking up all of the Executive Branch's time testifying
before Congress.
So thank you for those comments as well.
Thank you. This hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:40 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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