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

13. Dirty Bombs

106 chapter thirteen Dirty Bombs Duncan Hunter conducted his business in the Member’s Dining Room, a small enclave downstairs from the floor of the House of Representatives. The room had been constructed in the late 1950s; a fresco by Constantino Brumidi, originally located in the House Chamber, peered down from the wall, and there were majestic columns and beautiful curtains flanking the room. Hunter was a regular in the dining room and had his own table. His daily dish was a medium-rare rib-eye steak,and with a knife in his left hand, he oversaw a parade of staff that rotated through to receive tasks. A veteran of many conferences with the Senate, he had a simple congressional strategy: pursue everything he cared about with unrelenting gusto. This tenacity had allowed him to rise in the House and into the position of chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee.Hunter understood how to maximize leverage in congressional negotiations. Seeing that the greatest vulnerability for the House was the Senate’s and White House’s refrain that the House plan’s budget authority was weak, Hunter sought to introduce a new argument: the Senate’s budget language would be harmful to troops in the field. The House budget-authority language most important to Hunter and most disliked by the Senate and White House was the requirement that money appropriated by Congress travel“through the heads of departments”on its way to the intelligence agencies in the Defense Department. By seeming to bypass the DNI, the House’s arrangement would hurt the DNI’s ability to assert any measure of control over defense intelligence agencies. Advocates of a strong DNI believed that if the DNI were“writing the checks, ”the intelligence agencies would have to be responsive. This was exactly Hunter’s argument: the defense intelligence agencies’first duty was to assist the troops Dirty Bombs 107 in the field, and that was placed at risk by a DNI who enjoyed primacy over the secretary of defense. Early in the conference negotiations, Collins, Lieberman, Harman, and Hoekstra appealed directly to Hunter.“The Big Four Spoke with Duncan Hunter but failed to move him.”1 “Hunter sees himself as the last defender of the common soldier’s ability to get adequate and timely intelligence.” Reportedly, “Senator Collins characterized the discussions as ‘extremely frustrating.’”2 To bolster his case, Hunter needed someone from the Pentagon to speak out against the Senate’s budget language. This would be a difficult proposition ; the Defense Department worked for the president, who was their commander in chief, and Defense was under strict orders from the White House not to contradict the president’s strong DNI position. Hunter was not much for formal process.“His style was just to pick up the phone and call a sergeant or the vice president”when he needed something done.3 Hunter hit the phones. He first tried Secretary Rumsfeld, asking Rumsfeld to go public in his opposition to the Senate’s budget approach and endorse Hunter’s formulation. Rumsfeld had been under fire because of reports that his intelligence lieutenant, Steve Cambone, had been making the rounds on the Hill to lobby against the Commission’s recommendations. The exchange at the military operations briefing with Senator Warner—where the secretary seemed to confirm his misgivings about the 9/11 recommendations—had gotten around. The White House suspected that the Defense Department was quietly working against the president’s strong-DNI position. A public endorsement of the House budget position was a bridge too far for the secretary.“I cannot and will not contradict the president on this thing,” Rumsfeld told Hunter.4 Hunter accepted his answer. “He was the president’s guy [and] needed to be a loyal trooper.”5 Hunter then decided to go after the next best thing—the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, the principal military advisor to the president, the National Security Council, and the secretary of defense. The chairman’s duties included strategic plans for the armed forces, and, as the top uniformed official in the Defense Department, he represented the service branches in meetings of the National Security Council. Weekly, he and Secretary Rumsfeld met with the president privately in the Oval Office. Hunter would remind him that the law gave the chairman of the Joint Chiefs an obligation to render his professional military judgment 108 Dirty Bombs...