Presidents and intelligence

Arthur S. Hulnick

ABSTRACT

U.S. presidents are consumers of intelligence and managers of the sprawling U.S. intelligence system. The Founders believed intelligence was an executive function and so it has been through U.S. history, although in the modern era the Congress has played an increasingly significant role in controlling and funding the system. Intelligence played a key role in fighting the Cold War, but now the intelligence agencies have been forced to change their focus to grapple with the threats of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. If the U.S. intelligence system is going to be effective in its various new roles, presidents are going to have to spend some of their political capital to streamline and strengthen an intelligence community that was created in the last century and which has hardly changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

INTRODUCTION

There are many definitions of strategic intelligence. Some say that it is information that provides the basis for action: others claim it is information that adversaries, competitors and enemies don't want us to have. Still others remind us that intelligence may also involve stopping spies, terrorists, or other treats to national security. Finally, intelligence may drive secret operations designed to carry out foreign or defense policy using surreptitious or clandestine methods. Whatever the definition, it seems clear that for the presidents of the United States, intelligence is an important, sometimes critical factor in policy making. Some presidents have used intelligence wisely, some have ignored it foolishly, but in the modern era, no president has been able to function effectively without good intelligence.

The roots of American intelligence run deep, to the days when patriots and revolutionaries decided that they should no longer remain colonists of a distant power to whom they no longer wished to devote their allegiance. The various secret committees that supported the American Revolution were well regarded and used by the first national leaders, including George Washington, who often extolled the virtues of intelligence in his secret correspondence. (1) When he became the first president, Washington demanded and obtained a secret fund to carry out some aspects of hid foreign policy, understanding full well that the fledgling new nation could only prosper if it's enemies whether potential or real, were kept under careful observation.

Early presidents used secret operations and spies run right out of the newly-constructed White House to expand American power and territory, and while the Congress complained from time to time that it had not been informed about these operations on a timely basis, presidents usually were able to fend off congressional curiosity by citing the wishes of the Founding Fathers that intelligence remain an Executive Branch function. President Thomas Jefferson used secret operations to attempt the overthrow of the Pasha of Tripolitania, while sending Lewis and Clark on a spying mission in the unexplored west. (2) James Madison used secret agents to try to wrest southern territory from the Spanish; Andrew Jackson used an agent to try to bribe the rulers of Mexico to cede Texas to the United States.

When called upon to explain to the Congress the details of his predecessor's use of foreign funds and altered maps to settle a border dispute with Great Britain over the border between Maine and Canada. President James Polk refuse, claiming Executive Privilege and the need to keep secret agents and operations from public scrutiny so that their successes might be repeated. (3) It is a familiar argument that modern presidents have often cited.

President Lincoln, unlike some of his generals, was adept at the uses of intelligence in keeping the European powers from recognizing or supporting the Confederacy. (4) Unfortunately, the Civil War generals were equally inept, after the war, in learning about the Native Americans they were trying to subdue, extending the battles with the tribes into the early days of the Twentieth Century. But Teddy Roosevelt certainly understood the uses of intelligence as he manipulated events to create an American Empire after the Spanish-American War, and later support the independence of Panama so the United States could build the Isthmian Canal there. (5) Roosevelt, of course, denied that he had used secret agents at the time, but later admitted his involvement in an effort to bolster his failing third party run for another presidential term.

Woodrow Wilson expressed surprise and shock when he learned that German agents were spring in the United States as he sought to keep America out of the European war, but when the time came to get involved, Wilson had no qualms about leaking stories about German clandestine operations to the press to bolster his plans. (6) In terms of intelligence, the United States was ill prepared for combat in World War I, with only small intelligence units active in the armed forces. Stopping spies and revolutionaries, however, was a different manner. The Justice Department created a small bureau to investigate such matters and in the aftermath of the war, this grew into what became the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (7)

As the United States once again sought to stay out of conflict in Europe with the rise of Fascism and protect our interests at home against Communism, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI formed the leading intelligence element in the struggle, but did not impress President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who turned to this socialite friends for assistance. An informal intelligence unit called oddly enough "the Room" and made up of such people as Vincent Astor, was able to give FDR some insights into what was happening abroad. (8) This was entirely inadequate, however, in determining what the Japanese were doing in seeking hegemony in the Pacific. The Japanese surprise attack on Hawaii and made clear that the United States had to have better intelligence both within the military and to support policymakers in Washington. FDR turned to another member of his social circle, William "Wild Bill" Donovan, a WW I hero, to build an independent intelligence capability.

The OSS and Post-War Intelligence

Donovan's Office of Strategic Services (OSS), while nominally a military intelligence unit under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in fact mostly a civilian organization made up of a few career soldiers, a series of academics, business people, and those oddly talented professionals who should carry out espionage, secret operations, and analyze the activities of our enemies. (9) Because Donovan had a direct line to FDR when he needed it, the OSS had a certain independence that military intelligence units lacked. The OSS was active in the European Theater, but in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur isolated the OSS into minor operations on the Asian mainland, while J. Edgar Hoover made sure that the OSS stayed out of Latin America and domestic activity. Nonetheless, as the war wound down, FDR asked Donovan to design an intelligence system for the post war period.

Donovan's plan, which called for a civilian-run independent intelligence service reporting directly to the president, was derailed by Hover, who leaked it to the press, claiming it would establish a Nazi-style secret police in the United States. (10) After FDR's death in 1945, President Truman, no friend of Donovan or the OSS (Oh So Social, according to some) rejected the plan and after the Japanese surrender, disbanded the intelligence organization. But this did not last long. By January, 1946, Truman realized that he needed an intelligence capability independent of the other parts of government and he created both the post of Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and a small analytic unit, the Central Intelligence Group(CIG) to support the White House.

Under the second DCI, General Hoyt Vandenberg, the CIG was expanded and became in 1947 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). While Donovan received no credit for this transformation at the time, the CIA was clearly based on the Donovan's original plan, and his portrait, in military uniform and wearing only the ribbon of his Medal of Honor, adorns to this day the wall of the CIA where all the DCI's portraits are hung. Donovan's portrait is the first in the long line.

The Cold War

In the early days of the Cold War, the role of the CIA expanded to include not only espionage and analysis, but also covert operations and counterintelligence. But, the failure by both CIA and military intelligence to detect the North Korean surprise attack on South Korea in 1950 made it clear that the U.S. intelligence system still needed work. President Truman tackled the problem by making General Walter Bedell "Beetle" Smith DCI and charging him with fixing the CIA. In subsequent years, under President Dwight Eisenhower, the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency were added to what was becoming the US Intelligence "Community," a conglomerate grouping of agencies, nominally run by the DCI, but in fact mostly military intelligence units controlled by the Secretary of Defense.

This ungainly creation, now expanded after the end of the Cold War to include 14 agencies, proved inadequate to protect the US against the terrorists attacks of the 1990's, culminating in the al Qaeda strike against New York and Washington on September 11, 200l. While the Intelligence Community did play a key role in the Cold War, many questions were raised during this period about the utility o covert operations, the adequacy of human intelligence for espionage, and the possible politicization of intelligence analysis.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the death of world communism reduced those questions to academic queries and the occasional bureaucratic overhaul. The Congress, through the Oversight Committees it had established in both the House and Senate in the 1970s, weighed in, from time to time, but their suggestions and attempts at micromanagement failed to change what had become a bloated, inflexible, expensive conglomerate with weak leadership and little clear direction. The events of 9/11 made it all quite clear that change was needed and that it had to come from the president.

THE PRESIDENT'S BIFURCATED ROLE

This brief history illustrates the bifurcated role the president plays in regard to intelligence. He is both a customer of intelligence and its most important manager. He has to use intelligence and at the same time direct intelligence strategy. It was the role the Founders thought the president should play, although they could not have envisioned the complexities that face modern presidents. Just as in the early days of the republic, if the president fails to take charge of intelligence, the Congress will seek to control the system. As Alexander Hamilton and John Jay noted in the Federalist Papers, nothing could be kept secret under such management. (11)

Modern presidents have a mixed record in regard to fulfilling their dual role in intelligence and these experiences illustrate how complicated this issue really is. In 1948, President Harry Truman decided to use CIA resources to keep the Italian Communist Party from taking control of the government. At the same time, Truman realized that he needed a daily intelligence briefing to keep on top of world events. This began a tradition that continues to this day. The idea was to have CIA provide the kind of inside information that embellished, corrected, or expanded the daily news Truman obtained from the usual media sources.

The Daily Brief

The idea of a daily intelligence briefing was nothing new to President Dwight Eisenhower who, as an army general, was used to having such a service provided by his intelligence staff. In fact, the daily intelligence brief has been common within military organizations dating back to Roman times. In order to operate the system that provided such briefings, the military as well as the civilian agencies began to develop 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week operations centers to gather and collate material from whatever sources were available. The idea was to piece together fragments from human sources, communications intercepts, photo intelligence, and media reports so that senior leaders could be advised of developments as they occurred. If the intelligence analysts were doing their jobs properly, they might even be able to anticipate events and warn officials in time to take action to forestall a crisis. Thus, these centers, located within key military commands as well as civilian agencies became known as "Indications and Warning" centers. Of course, such a center was created within the White House itself, housed in the basement, but with access to the president as needed.

At first, the daily brief was called the President's Intelligence Check List (PICL), but the acronym was an unfortunate choice, so it eventually became known as the President's Daily Brief (PDB). Of course, the other intelligence agencies could not permit the CIA to be the only presidential briefer, so both the State and Defense Departments developed their own sensitive intelligence publication just for the White House. One of these, the State Department's Morning Summary, was considered by many who saw it to be perhaps more authoritative and policy-relevant than the PDB.

Forecasting the Future

President Truman had clear orders for DCI General Beetle Smith, after the surprise of the North Korean invasion of the South, to shake up intelligence to prevent surprises. Smith created an Office and Board of National Estimates to try to forecast future events by producing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) with inputs from all the intelligence agencies. (12) This was a much different task for intelligence than warning or current intelligence. While it is relatively easy to add intelligence value to an analysis of on-going events, it is much harder--some would say impossible--to forecast the future. Nonetheless, this was the mandate Truman gave Smith. Looking back, it seems clear that the results were quite mixed.

Over at the years, a variety of long-range intelligence estimates have become public, but unless one could see all of them, it would be hard to make a judgment about how well the estimates actually assisted policy officials. Often these estimates have only become public in the wake of an intelligence failure or charges that the estimates have been politicized to suit the president's politics. Considering the difficulties and the high level of uncertainty in predicting the future, the NIEs have, in general, been quite good, but it would be hard to prove this. One must also take into account that even accurate forecasts are of little use if decision makers ignore them.

IGNORING INTELLIGENCE

General MacArthur, warned by CIA that the Chinese would enter the Korean War, rejected that forecast, preferring to listen to his own intelligence advisors who consistently told MacArthur what he wanted to hear. Both Presidents Johnson and Nixon ignored intelligence analysis that indicated the futility of bombing the North during the Vietnam War. In typical fashion, both presidents dismissed the analysis and the briefers who carded the messages as "disloyal" and "obstructionist."

The Office of National Estimates was accused of failing to warn the White House that the Soviets would invade what was then Czechoslovakia in 1968, although the record, if it were to be made public, would show adequate warning. When he became DCI, career professional William Colby decided to change the system for creating estimates by getting rid of the Board of National Estimates, which had become a haven for elderly senior intelligence professionals, and replacing it with a National Intelligence Council (NIC) made up of senior officers and academics. Nonetheless, the complaints continued.

The Carter White House charged that it had not been given predictions of the collapse of the Shah's government in Iran, the fall of Somoza in Nicaragua, or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A careful examination of the record would show that in each case, the estimates, while not predicting exactly what was to happen, gave the White House at least a general consideration of the possible scenarios that might take place. Although the U.S. Embassy in Teheran tried to maintain an upbeat view of the Shah's increasingly desperate situation, eventually the impending disaster could not be ignored. Similarly, the White House was given months of warning about Somoza. In Afghanistan, there were serious disagreements about what the Soviets might do, but an invasion was clearly one of their options. (13)

Perversely, the perception remains that the Intelligence Community had failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, although the record is mixed. Several studies have been done on this issue, and while none are conclusive, it appears that the Intelligence Community's record in this regard is much better than critics have said. Of course, as Professor Richard Betts has long argued, intelligence failures may be inevitable and some will turn out to be policy failures. (14) When Charles Allen, the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Warning, advised senior officials at State, Defense, and the White House that Iraq would invade Kuwait, no one took him seriously until it was too late. Policy makers then charged another intelligence failure, but the record is clear.

The 9/11 Terrorist Attack

Studies of what happened before 9/11 have yet to be made completely public because of security concerns, but the Intelligence Community's inability to detect the al Qaeda terrorist plot has been called the greatest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor by the press and members of Congress, but not by President George W. Bush, who has steadfastly defended the intelligence system. Critics have blamed a lack of human agents, because of restrictions on recruiting spies put in place during the Clinton administration, reduced intelligence budgets beginning during the late 1980s, a failure to share intelligence between FBI and CIA, and bureaucratic inertia for the perceived failure.

Could the intelligence system have predicted the al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington? As facts began to emerge, the record is again a mixed one. Journalists who have been digging away at the issues have developed two main theses. One suggests that the intelligence system was trying to get close to Osama bin Laden and his key aides, but with limited success and was hampered by limited resources, bureaucratic infighting, and failure to share data. Policy officials were also interested in possible terrorist attacks, but were stymied by the shift from the Clinton administration to a George W. Bush White House, in which antiterrorist plans developed by Clinton's people had to be re-evaluated by the new staff. (15)

The George W. Bush White House was accused of politicizing intelligence in order to gain support for the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime in 2003. Opponents of the President called for an investigation and public release of intelligence estimates which allegedly concluded that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although none were found when U.S. troops actually invaded Iraq. While the President may have overstated the case against Hussein, his use of intelligence was little different from several of his predecessors.

Access to the President

Because access to the president is a key role for the DCI, the officials who have served as DCI have often been concerned about maintaining ties to the Oval Office. DCI Allen Dulles never had to worry about this during the Eisenhower administration because he was part of the inner circle headed by his brother John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State. His successor, John McCone, who came in after the Bay of Pigs debacle during the Kennedy administration, was not a White House insider.

Kept on by Lyndon Johnson, McCone eventually quit because of disputes over Vietnam. (16) Johnson's first choice for DCI, Admiral "Red" Raborn, was a close friend of LBJ but a disaster as DCI, and was replaced by Richard Helms, the first CIA career professional to serve as Director. During the Nixon era, Helms worried about his access to the President and found that Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Advisor, wanted to act as an intermediary between Helms and the White House. In order to establish his access to the President, unfiltered by Kissinger or other senior officials who surrounded and protected Nixon, Helms sent a briefing team to Nixon's pre-inaugural headquarters in New York City to provide the PDB to the incoming president, and in the process, educate him about the intelligence resources that would be at his command. This process proved so successful that it has been replicated with each incoming new president, albeit with mixed results. (17) President Jimmy Carter was still skeptical about the intelligence system, even after briefings in Plains, Georgia, and President Bill Clinton failed to take advantage of the intelligence system until late in his presidency.

President Carter's first choice for DCI, Ted Sorensen, never even made it to congressional hearings before his nomination was dropped, but his second choice, Admiral Stansfield Turner, an Annapolis classmate of the President, was confirmed without trouble. Carter was an avid reader of intelligence, but the forecasts that predicted the collapse of the Shah in Iran, the ouster of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua in favor of the leftist Sandinistas, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan never seemed to translate into policy until it was too late.

President Ronald Reagan came into office with a reputation for being a manager who did not like detail and who had no patience for reading lengthy reports. Those intelligence officials who were close to Reagan paint an entirely different picture, however. Reagan read intelligence material in great detail and obtained even more intelligence from his DCI, William J. Casey, a personal friend and OSS veteran. Some intelligence officials at the time and later complained that the intelligence judgments were being politicized by Casey's Director of Intelligence, Robert M. Gates, to fit White House strategy, but a careful reading of the material would likely show that the CIA and other agencies were calling the shots as they then saw them. When Casey suffered a fatal brain tumor, Reagan turned to Gates as a possible replacement, but the turmoil surrounding Casey's alleged role in the Iran-Contra affair washed over onto Gates and he was forced to withdraw his nomination. The new DCI, Judge William Webster, the outgoing FBI Director, brought some stability to the system after the scandals.

Even President George H. W. Bush, who had served a brief period as DCI and who probably understood the intelligence system as well as any modern president, failed to accept predictions that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet system were on the way out, in part because Bush liked the Soviet leader and wanted him to survive the transition. Nonetheless, Bush was eager to have his daily briefing. Gates, who had moved to the White House to serve as deputy to Bush's National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, returned to the intelligence community as DCI, but not before contentious Senate hearings in which several former CIA colleagues accused Gates of once again politicizing intelligence, but he was eventually confirmed. (18)

The Clinton Years

President Clinton, as compared to his predecessors, was not interested in intelligence and was therefore not well served by it. This was due, in part, to his focus, at least in his first term, on domestic issues. His choice for DCI, R. James Woolsey, had no experience in intelligence, although he had been active in arms control issues. But, Woolsey was not part of the Clinton inner circle and had only limited access to the President. The daily PDB briefings fell by the wayside and thus there was no feedback loop between Clinton and the intelligence system. Frustrated by these developments, Woolsey resigned.

Clinton had a tough time recruiting a new DCI, since everyone knew the position carried little importance in the Clinton White House. Eventually, John Deutch, Undersecretary of Defence, was pressed to accept the position. Deutch, an academic by background, knew little of intelligence when he took the post, brought in assistants who knew less than he did, and found himself without support from above or below. In one of his most controversial moves, Deutch imposed restrictions on the recruitment of sources who might have been guilty of violating human rights or conducting illegal activity. Deutch did not seem to understand that in going after terrorists, such "bad guys" can be invaluable if unpleasant agents. In the wake of 9/11, these restrictions have often been cited as one of the reasons for the intelligence failures in detecting the looming attack.

George Tenet as DCI

When Deutch decided to return to academe, after suffering repeated criticism both from the media and from the intelligence community, Clinton was again without a DCI. He turned to a mid-level Washington intelligence insider, George Tenet, who had served as a staffer on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was as Intelligence Coordinator in the White House. This proved to be a fortuitous choice both for the President and for the intelligence community. Tenet established a good working relationship with Clinton and with intelligence professionals. He pushed the President to resume daily briefings and eased some of the restrictions on source recruitment.

When George W. Bush assumed the presidency in 2001, one of his first moves was to retain Tenet as DCI, thus serving to depoliticize the position, as it so often had been in the early days. Tenet quickly moved to cement his relationship to the new team at the White House and was able to retain his position even after the 9/11 disaster. As is usual after intelligence failures, cries went out for an overhaul of the system, but Tenet, with the backing of the President, kept the intelligence system on an even keel. This highlights one of the key roles the DCI plays on behalf of the president: designing and implementing intelligence policy. This role is not well recognized in the literature, but is critical in managing an intelligence system that costs in the neighborhood of $35 billion or more annually.

MANAGING INTELLIGENCE POLICY

Again, a look at developments in the Cold War period provide insights into this aspect of the relationship between the White House and the intelligence community. At first, the DCI was really only the manager of the CIA, with very few responsibilities in regard to the other intelligence agencies. The dialogue among agencies was fostered by a standing committee of agency heads called the U.S. Intelligence Board, later the National Foreign Intelligence Board. The board met to approve National Estimates and other issues of common concern, but it was hardly a management or strategy group. This all changed with the development of the so-called "spy satellites" for intercepting communications and overhead photography. Since the agencies had to share the use of these systems, some inter-agency mechanism was needed.

In 1976, the Congress established the Oversight Committees; among the demands the committees made of the intelligence community was the submission of a unified budget, combining the various agency budgets into one National Foreign Intelligence Program. The DCI was to manage the budget arrangement in terms of funding levels and priorities. The need to share collection systems, the budget demands, and the increasing interest in inter-agency analysis made it clear that some sort of community management system was needed. The DCI had to develop some kind of planning system to develop strategies for the intelligence community and this could only be done in coordination with the White House. This led to the creation of an intelligence community staff, later called the Community Management Staff, made up of intelligence professionals with a mandate to help the DCI manage his responsibilities as nominal head of the intelligence community.

The role the president plays in intelligence planning and management varies from administration to administration. In fact, when one speaks of the president, what is really meant is the president and his close advisers. These aides usually include those members of the Cabinet who make up the National Security Council, the political advisers who surround the president, the National Security Advisor, the White House Intelligence Coordinator, and the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. The latter group is usually made up of retired senior military officers, former ambassadors, business leaders, and anyone else the president chooses.

This board would, on the face of it, seem to be an ideal mechanism for assisting the president in dealing with intelligence policy, but in reality it is reminiscent of FDR's informal group "The Room." Members of the board serve without pay, usually spend relatively little time working on intelligence issues, expect when there is a crisis, and rarely reveal anything about their work. Thus, the president may hear from them, but intelligence professionals rarely do, so whatever lessons the board may learn do not really translate into intelligence policy.

Using Independent Commissions

Another mechanism for developing intelligence strategy for the White House is the independent commission. Ever since the Eisenhower administration, such commissions have been established to investigate or review aspects of intelligence, including the structure of the intelligence system and the ways in which it operates. The theory is that the commission's advice will eventually translate into policy, but this only happens when both the White House and Congress agree, which is usually a rare event.

In 1995, the White House and Congress agreed to establish a joint commission to review and overhaul the intelligence system. The commission, made up of senior officials already in government and served by a paid professional staff, labored for about a year to deal with 19 key issues, including the community structure, the uses of intelligence, the quality of analysis, and the need for secret operations. This joint committee was chaired by former Defense Secretary Les Aspin, but when he died during its deliberations, another former Defense Secretary, Harold Brown, took over. The commission was thus known in Washington as the Brown Commission. It made a series of recommendations for intelligence overhaul, but almost none of them were implemented. (19) The one major move that came out of the effort was the establishment of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) to consolidate the various imagery analysis units scattered throughout the intelligence community. This might well have happened anyway, without the commission's recommendations, since it was already in the works.

Several other studies focused generally on intelligence for the Twenty-first Century were also published in 1996, including one from the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence and another from the Council on Foreign Relations, a private think tank. Many of the people who contributed to the Brown Commission Report also made inputs to the other studies, but nothing of substance came of any of them. When President George W. Bush took office, he commissioned yet another study on restructuring the intelligence community, this one was headed by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft.

The Scowcroft Commission began its work well before the events of 9/11, but when the al Qaeda terrorists struck, it had not yet completed the report. A similar internal intelligence study attempting to restructure the community was headed by Joan Dempsey, who was DCI George Tenet's Deputy Director for Community Management. After 9/11, the Dempsey study was shelved so that its members could concentrate on battling terrorism. At the end of 2001, the Scowcroft Commission's main findings were leaked to the press. They called for moving all the intelligence collection agencies--including the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and NIMA--under the direct control of the DCI. (20)

Problems in Reorganization

From a management perspective, such a move would have given the DCI control of all the intelligence collection assets of government, including the clandestine collection unit of the CIA, the communications and electronics assets of NSA, and the two imagery agencies (NRO and NIMA). It was clear from the first press story that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would never agree to give up most of the intelligence collection assets of the Department of Defense embodied in NSA, NRO, and NIMA. This veto was apparently upheld by President Bush, who never said anything about the issue, but who never contradicted Rumsfeld either.

Finally, in July 2002, Rumsfeld let it be known that he intended to create the post of Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. One of the people who might have been named to the post told a reporter that Rumsfeld wanted "only one dog to kick" in regard to intelligence, rather than the "kennel of dogs" he already had. After the position was created and filled, it became clear that the Secretary of Defense did not intend to give away intelligence capability, but rather, wanted a more senior officer to take charge of all his intelligence functions. (21) The Undersecretary has become, in effect, a director of military intelligence, outweighing the DCI in terms of positions and budget. Again, the President remained silent on the issue, but it seemed unlikely that Rumsfeld's move was made without coordination with the White House.

The president's role in intelligence management was made even more clear by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the wake of the 9/11 attack. The new department included an intelligence unit that would receive raw intelligence from the collection agencies and create warning analysis on terrorism. The new unit is the conduit for passing intelligence to state and local governments, something the federal intelligence agencies have never done, except in such unusual circumstances as protecting the Olympic Games when they were held in the United States. Some pundits even suggested that the FBI and CIA, the alleged culprits in the 9/11 intelligence failure, should be incorporated in DHS, but instead yet another new organization--the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC)--was created to serve as the focal point for all incoming intelligence on terrorism. The TTIC has representation from all the intelligence agencies, including officers from DHS. As far as intelligence on terrorism in concerned, the president is likely to get it whether the new units function or fizzle. For intelligence users at the working level, however, intelligence on terrorism may not reach them if DHS and the intelligence community cannot make the system work.

The President and Counterintelligence

The president's relationship with the leadership of the FBI presents a somewhat different story and it has little to do with counterintelligence. J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary FBI Director apparently kept secret files on Washington politicians, some of whom were hiding sexual relationships or financial dealings that would have been embarrassing if these peccadillos were revealed. Hoover, of course, denied that he had such files, but no one wanted to challenge hi and discover that his or her political career was in ruins. This situation gave Hoover a kind of untouchable status, but President Franklin F. Roosevelt realized that he could deal with the irascible Hoover by working around him.

After World War II, Hoover tried to derail the creation of the CIA, hoping that he could become the chief intelligence officer of the government, but the FBI was not really an intelligence agency and the scheme failed. While both President Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon would have liked to get rid of Hoover, the FBI's cooperation in trying to find foreign roots in the anti-Vietnam War movement induced both presidents to avoid a confrontation with the FBI chief. As it turned out, the anti-war movement was an indigenous operation, although the Nixon administration did not believe it.

The FBI after Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover died in office in 1972 and this changed the relationship between the president and the FBI quite markedly. President Nixon's first FBI chief, L. Patrick Gray, became involved in trying to have the CIA join in the cover-up of the Watergate scandal, in which burglars hired by the White House broke into Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex near the Kennedy Center in Washington. The ensuing scandal eventually forced Nixon to resign the presidency.

A second leadership scandal developed at the FBI when Judge William Sessions took over the agency after Judge William Webster, the FBI leader for nine years, moved to become DCI in 1985. Webster had been seen as clean and incorruptible, but Sessions used the office for personal benefit, encouraged in part by his wife Alice, who was even worse than the judge. President Clinton asked Sessions to resign, but the FBI Director refused. The situation became so intolerable that President Clinton was forced to phone Sessions directly and order him to leave FBI Headquarters immediately. (22) It was yet another blow to the morale and leadership of an agency that had at one time been among the most respected in government.

President Clinton's choice for FBI Director, Louis Freeh, appeared on the surface to be an ideal candidate. Freeh had been an FBI street agent, a prosecutor, and a judge with a reputation for honesty and toughness. Freeh, however, was no innovator and failed to bring the FBI into the modern computer era. This was well illustrated when FBI agent Robert Hanssen was arrested on charges of spying for the Soviet Union and its Russian successors. Hanssen had been able to manipulate a creaky FBI computer system, which was well behind the state of the art, before he was betrayed by a Russian turncoat. Freeh's stubborn refusal to reorganize and modernize the FBI led to his resignation in 2001, just before the terrorist attack on the US. It was only after Robert S. Mueller III was appointed to the post of FBI Director that the full extent of the FBI's problems were revealed.

President George W. Bush found himself in the unenviable position of having to defend the FBI and its new leader in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack, when it was clear that the Bureau had made some serious errors in handling data on the terrorists before they struck the United States. The full extent of the problems may never be revealed, but enough had appeared in the press to make it clear that a total overhaul of the FBI was needed. Some former intelligence officers even called for the creation of an internal security service, modeled on the British MI-5, instead of making changes in the FBI. (23)

In order to fend off critics and preempt any effort to create a new agency, Director Mueller set out to fix the FBI's many problems, including the creation of an internal security and analysis unit within the Bureau. Whatever gets done, it seems clear that the relationship between the president and the FBI has changed. The extent of this change will have to be reexamined in the years to come, but it now seems clear that the White House can no longer remain aloof from the FBI.

Presidents and Covert Action

The last aspect of the relationship between the president and intelligence concerns what used to be most controversial, but the controversy has diminished since the end of the Cold War. This involves covert action, the use of intelligence resources to carry out the foreign and security policy using clandestine methods. It was a role quite familiar to early presidents, as Professor Stephen Knott has so carefully documented. In fact, before the creation of the CIA in 1947, presidents had nowhere else to turn to run secret operations and were forced to run them right out of the White House. When the CIA was created, the 1947 law that established it was quite vague, noting only that the agency was to "carry out such other duties related to intelligence and the President and the National Security Council might, from time to time, direct."

The role of CIA in covert action was made clear, however, in 1948 when President Truman decided that he could not allow Italy, France, or Greece to slip into the growing Soviet empire, as had happened in Eastern Europe. The Communist Party of Italy (PCI) was vying for control of the Italian legislature with the Christian Democrats and stood a good chance of gaining enough seats to form a government. When that had happened in Czechoslovakia, the Communists had quickly taken control of the government and established a Communist dictatorship.

To stop this possibility, Truman ordered the DCI, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, to use CIA resources to make sure the good guys won the Italian election. "Hilly," as he was called, turned to his Legal Counsel, Larry Houston, to see if this directive fell within the 1947

law. When Houston said it did not, Hilly declared that the CIA would follow Truman's order anyway. (24) The CIA, in turn, set up a secret operation to buy radio time, newspaper space, and votes for the Christian Democrats, methods that would have been familiar to some big city politicians in the United States. In the end, the Communists were defeated, and the role of the CIA in covert action was established.

A Weapon of Choice

During the Eisenhower administration, the CIA became one of the weapons of choice during the growing Cold War, aided by the fact that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles could count on the cooperation of his brother Allen, the DCI. While some of the discussion about covert action probably took place informally, the Eisenhower White House set up an executive committee to plan and oversee covert action operations. Such committees, under a variety of titles and euphemistic names, has existed ever since. The committee usually consists of senior officials below cabinet rank, including a senior officer from the CIA's Clandestine Service, but excludes the direct participation of the president so as to create a situation called "plausible deniability." If the covert action became public, the president could deny that he knew about it or endorsed it.

One result of this arrangement was that it appeared that CIA was a "secret government," planning and carrying out government overthrows, assassinations, or support for secret armies without the knowledge of either the White House or the Congress. None of this was true, as the Church Committee investigations revealed in the 1970s. The post-World War II presidents may not have known all the details of the covert actions, but certainly they had some inkling of the undertakings. Key members of Congress knew as well, since they had to provide the secret funding for the operations, but some said they did not want to know the details of the operations.

After the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in Chile, which appeared at first to have been aided and abetted by the CIA, Senator Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, set up his landmark investigation. Church thought the CIA was a "rogue elephant running amok." His hearings, however, revealed just the opposite. All covert actions had been ordered by the White House and funded by the Congress. The elephant had been under careful control.

Congressional Oversight of Intelligence

Nonetheless, the Church Committee investigation, along with a similar set of hearings in the House of Representatives, led to the creation of the Intelligence Oversight Committees in both House and Senate. Under the new rules, the president had to sign a written finding that a covert action was needed and the action had to be briefed by the committees. Plausible deniability was dead, as was ostensible congressional ignorance of covert action.

With the end of the Cold War, the utility of covert action was once again called into question. The kinds of clandestine activity that had been seen as a key element in fighting the Soviet Union, with its own brand of "active measures," as the KGB intelligence service called it, seemed no longer necessary or even wise. Under the Clinton administration, cutbacks in intelligence budgets and personnel were the order of the day. White there was still support for some kinds of espionage, the CIA's resources for overseas operations had been reduced to the point that ruled out many of the more exotic activities that had been common during the Cold War.

Covert Action After 9/11

The events of 9/11 have changed this situation remarkably, but perhaps a bit too late. After the terrorist attack on the United States, there were calls from both the Congress and the media to use intelligence resources to strike back at al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, the self-acknowledged author of the attacks. Indeed, CIA officers were dispatched, along with regular military and special operations forces to oust the Taliban government in Afghanistan and one CIA operative was killed in the fighting. This led to a lengthy debate in the press, as well as within the government, about the utility of covert action in the war against terrorism. That debate is likely to continue because it is not yet clear that clandestine resources, rather than military force, can be effective against close-knit terrorist cells.

In the war against Iraq in 2003, CIA and military Special Forces units played a key role in preparing for the incursion of U.S. forces, in finding leading members of Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime, and in the perplexing and difficult hunt for the weapons of mass destruction that intelligence sources had claimed were in Hussein's arsenal before the war. This melding of covert action and military unconventional warfare may prove to be a new method of carrying out covert action in the future, but it will require continuing close coordination between the civilian-run CIA and the military services.

REBUILDING INTELLIGENCE CAPABILITY

Meanwhile, President George W. Bush called for rebuilding intelligence capability and intelligence budgets soared to Cold War levels. The CIA began a "full court press" to recruit new officers along with the FBI and the other intelligence agencies, but so are with limited success. Even when new people are hired, it will take years before they are capable of the kinds of sophisticated and dangerous operations required to go after terrorists. At least, there seems to be common understanding that America's intelligence resources need to be rebuilt, although intelligence professionals and political leaders differ on how to do it.

Future presidents are going to be faced with an intelligence dilemma that won't go away. The American intelligence system, cobbled together to fight the Cold War, is bound by a structure that seems incapable of change, with too many agencies, under limited control and leadership, and hounded by critics in the Congress, the media, and academe. Modern presidents have shied away from weighing in on this dilemma, preferring to have their subordinates fight the bureaucratic battles, while they pontificate from the sidelines. If changes are to come, the presidents are going to have to spend some of their political capital to make them.

At the same time, future presidents, like their predecessors, are going to need superior intelligence gathering and sophisticated and insightful analysis to stay on top of world events. Like most consumers, presidents will get what they are willing to pay for. Presidents must make clear what they want to know and must be prepared to accept not only the judgments they prefer, but also bad news they may not want to hear. Presidents must be active participants in the intelligence process, as the Founders of the United States well understood. That lesson should not be lost on future residents of the Oval Office.

Clearly, the American intelligence system was built without an architect or designer. That is the main reason why the system is so complicated and unwieldy. The best one might say about President Truman was that, as a general contractor, he was ready to turn the work over to his DCI to complete and asked only that he be kept advised of his progress. Subsequent presidents were content to allow the DCI to build on to the structure Truman had ordered and the result was the system we have today, still geared to a Cold War that has been over for more than a decade. The intelligence system is not a "tear-down" that can be rebuilt from the bottom up.

Future presidents may be content to be remodelers of intelligence, tearing out bits and pieces of the system to rebuild on the foundation already laid. It would be a lot better, however, if they served as architects to design and engineer a new system more responsive to the demands of the Twenty-first Century. Modern presidents have always been reluctant to invest a great deal of political capital in American intelligence. They probably see themselves as consumers and not managers. Yet, if future presidents want a system that suits their needs, they need to do more than peer over the shoulders of the DCI or other intelligence managers as

Plans are set out on the drawing board. Presidents have to be involved in both the design and the building phase of intelligence if they wish to be satisfied with the edifice their contractors deliver.

NOTES

(1) Stephen F. Knott, Secret and Sanctioned: Covert Operations and the American Presidency (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 13-14.

(2) Ibid., pp. 67-69; 72-79.

(3) Ibid., pp. 125-127.

(4) Ibid., p. 124.

(5) Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001), pp. 270-294.

(6) Barbara Tuchman, The Zimmerman Telegram (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), pp. 171-175.

(7) Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002), pp. 9-11.

(8) George J.A. O'Toole, Honorable Treachery (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991), pp. 347-349.

(9) Ibid., pp. 404-405.

(10) Ibid., p. 425.

(11) Knott, pp. 45-46.

(12) O'Toole, p. 444.

(13) Douglas MacEachin, Predicting the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: The Intelligence Community Record (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA, 2002).

(14) Richard K. Betts, "Analysis, War and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable," World Politics 31 (1978).

(15) "They Had a Plan," Time (Aug. 12, 2002), pp. 28-39.

(16) John Helgerson, Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952-1992 (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA, 1995), p. 77.

(17) Ibid., pp. 79-83.

(18) Ronald Kessler, Inside the CIA (New York: Pocket Books, 1992), pp. 247-250.

(19) Preparing for the 21st Century, Report of the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the U.S. Intelligence Community (Washington, DC: GPO, 1996).

(20) Vernon Loeb, "Scowcroft's Vanishing Plan," Washington Post (July 15, 2002).

(21) James Risen and Thom Shanker, "Rumsfeld Moves to Strengthen His Grip on Military Intelligence," New York Times (Aug. 3, 2002), p. A1.

(92) Kessler, pp. 298-300.

(23) William Odom, Fixing Intelligence for a More Secure America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 167-184.

(24) Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yales University Press, 2003), pp. 51-52.

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