Blinking Red: Crisis and Compromise in American Intelligence after 9/11

8. The Devil in the Details: NSC Consideration of a DNI and an NCTC

67 chapter eight The Devil in the Details NSC Consideration of a DNI and an NCTC As the public debate focused on the DNI and budget authority, two of Rumsfeld’s generals were privately making the rounds. General Michael Hayden, described by one reporter as “diminutive and bookish in appearance ,”1 was one of them. General Hayden later wrote, Many of us felt that if we were going to take direct control of the CIA away from the new head of the community, we really had to make sure that the legislation dealt the new office a very powerful hand and that it did it formally and specifically. . . . That’s why Jim Clapper and I warned the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in late summer of 2004 that a“feckless”DNI would actually make matters worse.2 General Clapper, the head of the NGA, and General Hayden, the head of the NSA, favored what General Clapper later called “something akin to a Department of Intelligence.”3 In 2003, after the creation at the Pentagon of an undersecretary of intelligence, Clapper recalled that he and Hayden sometimes got conflicting guidance from their two bosses—the USDI and the DCI. Clapper called it “dueling banjos.”4 Years earlier, Clapper held the view that without a strong leader of the Intelligence Community, left to itself, it “cannot and does not make meaningful trades between and among collection disciplines”because it was “like piggies who came up to the trough.”He explained,“Rather than going to three or four or whatever stovepipes, three different places to get your customer’s satisfaction, you go to one place. You’d have one institution that would be responsible for collection.”5 Hayden’s view, similar to John McLaughlin’s, was that the 9/11 Commission had gotten it wrong in underrating the DCI’s management of the 68 The Devil in the Details community. As head of the NSA, Hayden viewed George Tenet as a“booming personality” who frequently was called to directly manage the heads of the national intelligence agencies within the Department of Defense.6 McLaughlin, Hayden, and Clapper began meeting to coordinate positions and quietly to work the Congress and the White House.Clapper and Hayden also went to the White House and had a secret meeting with Fran Townsend. The meeting was“off the calendar”and held in the executive private dining room off the White House Mess.7 The precautions were taken to prevent Secretary Rumsfeld from discovering that they were seeing the president’s staff behind his back. John McLaughlin, as acting DCI, had no such restrictions on what he could advocate to the White House. In a letter to the president that August, he argued that “a significantly empowered director of central intelligence could fulfill the spirit of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations.”8 But once the president had endorsed the creation of a DNI,McLaughlin argued that as long as the president was “going to do this, don’t do it halfway.”9 McLaughlin advocated to President Bush that the president should“give [the DNI] command and control authority over core national intelligence agencies —the CIA, NSA, NGA, and NRO. ”10 As noted, McLaughlin worried that the 9/11 Commission’s DNI “would be creating a layer of bureaucracy that if not empowered will just be a creator of work, not an enabler of work.”11 Loss of the defense intelligence agencies to the DNI was a doomsday scenario for Secretary Rumsfeld and his USDI,Steve Cambone.And because of the volatile pre-election political environment, there was some cause for concern that support could build for this approach. As noted, there was some support for a “Department of Intelligence” approach in the Senate. Public disclosure that General Hayden and General Clapper dissented from Secretary Rumsfeld’s view and favored removing their agencies from the Department of Defense would have made huge news and given additional momentum to efforts to maximize the authorities of the new DNI. Finally,word got back to Rumsfeld.Clapper and Hayden were at the Wye River Plantation in Maryland speaking to a group of newly promoted senior intelligence officers. They repeated their support for movement of their agencies to a DNI. Someone in the audience called back to the Pentagon to relay Clapper and Hayden’s remarks, and before they were back in the The Devil in the Details...