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29 chapter FOur Revolution Is Coming The 9/11 Commission’s hearings from 2003 to 2004 gained a national following . The 9/11 Families attended all their hearings and in frequent media appearances echoed the Commission’s demands for a full and thorough investigation.Sparring with the Commission had become a political liability for the White House, forcing it to give access (albeit limited) to the president ’s daily intelligence briefing (PDBs) to the Commission and arrange for an interview with President Bush. The Commission was gaining clout and its hearings in the spring of 2004—which featured a duel between Richard Clarke, a former White House staffer for Presidents Clinton and Bush, and Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security advisor, on whether President Bush had done enough to protect the country from terrorism before 9/11—dramatically increased its profile. Tenet’s deputy,John McLaughlin,now acting DCI,embarked on a mission to salvage the CIA director’s role as head of the Intelligence Community from the“coming revolution”promised by 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman. “We get it, ”John McLaughlin announced to the press assembled at CIA Headquarters in Langley. The Senate Intelligence Committee had just released a report that debunked the CIA’s analytical assessments of Iraq’s WMD programs . The Senate called the CIA’s analytic tradecraft weak and faulted the Intelligence Community for“groupthink. ”It derided the CIA for not explaining to policymakers the uncertainties in the intelligence presented. The CIA had demonstrated“serious lapses”in relying on a German intelligence source,code-named Curveball,who had falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein had mobile biological-weapons labs.1 This criticism came on the heels of a tumultuous series of reports and hearings about the CIA’s performance on 9/11.The agency’s standing on the Hill was as weak as it had been in decades. 30 Revolution Is Coming “We were being beaten like little baby seals on the beach,” McLaughlin recalled.2 Since the Congressional Joint Inquiry on 9/11 had recommended the creation of a director of national intelligence with “the full range of management, budgetary, and personnel responsibilities”3 to govern the Intelligence Community, the idea of a DNI garnered a base of support in Congress. After the Senate Intelligence Committee WMD report, the coalition in favor of a DNI broadened to include conservative Republican SSCI member Trent Lott, who called Senator Feinstein’s bill to create a DNI a “fundamental reform of the Intelligence Community.”4 An SSCI staffer remembered,“Everywhere we drilled down on the Iraq WMD intelligence we found problems. It was a staggering wake-up call to the Members.”5 The Senate Intelligence Committee WMD Report and the 9/11 Commission’s “indictment” had been a one-two punch to the CIA. One reinforced the other, leading to the conclusion that the Intelligence Community was hopelessly dysfunctional. McLaughlin had a delicate task. He needed to blunt the coming“revolution ”by acknowledging that the Intelligence Community had fallen short but was well on its way to fixing the problem. He expected that the 9/11 Commission’s report could call for separating the CIA from the central management of the Intelligence Community,thereby downgrading the CIA’s centrality in intelligence. So McLaughlin chose to take the idea of a DNI head on.Iraq and 9/11 were not,insisted McLaughlin,reflective of a“broken system and a community in disarray”but were the result of“specific,discrete problems that we understand and we are well on our way to addressing or have already addressed.”6 The agency “could have done better,” but the answer was not“additional layers of command or bureaucracy”in the form of an intelligence czar apart from the CIA. McLaughlin argued that it was better to modernize existing practices and increase the powers of the DCI to manage the community.With some“modest changes in the way the CIA is set up, the director of central intelligence could carry out that function well and appropriately.”7 The CIA was willing to concede the need for a single place“where foreign intelligence and domestic information could be put together and analyzed quickly.”8 But not wholesale structural changes. The CIA’s argument was that bureaucratic power in Washington flows from a strong institutional base. With the exception of Stansfield Turner, President Carter’s DCI,9 all of the former DCIs had strongly opposed divorcing the community-management functions from the CIA. In 1978 former...

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