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

12. Touching Gloves

99 chapter twelve Touching Gloves With only sixteen days until the election, the Senate could feel its leverage slipping away.Late on a Sunday afternoon,a pack of Senate staffers fumbled around southwest Washington, DC, looking for an obscure congressional building. Although only a few hundred yards from the Capitol, this patch of low-rise governmental offices was considered the boondocks. The Senate staff was looking for the auxiliary offices sometimes used by the House Intelligence Committee in the Ford House Office Building. The Senate was working on Sunday because with the elections looming there was barely enough time to reconcile all their differences with a reluctant House and pass a final bill for the president’s signature. So the Senate staff came in overwhelming force, toting books, bills, position papers, graphs, statutes, statements, and charts—one staffer even had a roller suitcase packed with documents.These twenty flooded into the office space temporarily occupied by the House staffers.It resembled a college fraternity house: there were pizza boxes strewn about and a muted TV showed an NFL game. The House staffers, casually dressed, seemed bemused by the invasion. With an air of detachment, the House staff called the meeting to order. Tweaking the Senate for showing up with a platoon of negotiators, the staff director of the House Intelligence Committee addressed the Senate throng: “The four of us you see here today are the only four staffers you’ll ever see in these negotiations.” He introduced the staff directors of the Judiciary, the Armed Services Committees, and the clerk of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and explained that they had been empowered to negotiate on behalf of the House Republican majority. While the Senate was eager to expedite negotiations, the House dashed their hopes. Negotiations were impossible tonight—“No one has read the 100 Touching Gloves Senate bill.”The House gently mocked the Senate for the delay in sending over a complete bill, which had been held up for eleven days as the Senate’s clerks tackled the laborious task of incorporating amendments accepted on the Senate floor into the final product. Two of the 9/11 families were so angered at the delay that they went to the Office of the Senate Clerk to press them to hurry up.1 Careful not to cede the moral high ground,the House negotiators named a strong DNI and NCTC as two of their prerequisites to a deal. They also insisted that there would be no declassification of the aggregate budget total for the Intelligence Community, and adding, “We can’t break something that works today.”2 The Senate asked one its staffers, Gordon Lederman, imported from the 9/11 Commission,to state their case: they wanted community-level leadership of the Intelligence Community and integration modeled on the law that had unified the armed services under a combatant commander reporting to the secretary of defense. The Intelligence Community had to be flexible and agile to fight networks of international terrorists—the DNI needed to be able to move people and money quickly without interference from other cabinet secretaries or from Congress. It needed to set standards and have the ability to manage the community. Above all, the DNI had to have institutional clout, and that would come through power of the purse, by receiving the intelligence appropriation directly from Congress. The DCI had “no idea” where the intelligence dollars were going. The DNI needed more authority. The House staff dismissed these arguments as “folklore” and demanded the Senate cite one example where the secretary of defense had unjustly thwarted the DCI by withholding intelligence dollars. If anything, the DCI’s role needed a check; institutional tension could be a good thing. After declaring that negotiations would be made difficult by this critical “factual disagreement,” the group agreed to reconvene the next morning. This exchange was the opening act in an opaque congressional process called“conference”—a process designed to allow the House and the Senate to reconcile their bills through negotiations. This conference would be a clash of world views; the Senate saw the Intelligence Community as one whole in need of a powerful manager, while the House sought to preserve a careful balancing of authorities between the DNI and the departments. It was an article of faith to the Senate that intelligence was already broken, Touching Gloves 101 whereas the House feared a solution in search of a...