'DNI' could be most powerful job in government

WASHINGTON -- If you have to guess, John Negroponte will be a one- armed spymaster -- all foreign, no domestic. Perhaps they will call him "Control," but he will only talk to James Bond's bosses, and it will be hard to imagine him speaking to the declasse types at the FBI.

Overseas is where Negroponte's experience, his career and his interests lie as he is nominated to become the nation's first director of national intelligence (DNI). His newly named deputy is Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, who now heads the code-breaking National Security Agency.

Negroponte is the ambassador to Iraq and its de facto chief during the transition from U.S. occupation to democracy. If confirmed, he would take a job that -- on paper at least -- will be one of the most powerful in government.

But it could work out differently. The lines of authority for the new director and the 15 existing agencies he will control can look like a pretzel if you stare at them too long. Several people were approached about the DNI slot, including former Central Intelligence Director Robert Gates, and reportedly turned down the job as a potential quagmire.

Even if Negroponte manages to win swift Senate confirmation and field a workable management bureaucracy over the next few months, it's doubtful he will be very effective without President Bush's full backing. While Bush vowed to give him full control over all the agencies' budgets, it isn't clear how much Bush is willing to invest of his own political capital. The intelligence shake-up that created this job was more or less forced on the president by the 9/11 commission.

The commission set out to unify the entire alphabet soup of national intelligence -- including CIA, FBI intelligence, defense intelligence, NSA -- and get them to work in harness under a common budget without duplicating each other.

Washington's multiple intelligence agencies -- in time-honored fashion -- were tripping over each other performing the same tasks. Four separate offices, for instance, have assembled inter-agency, government task forces to analyze terrorist threats -- two in the CIA, one at the Pentagon and one at the new Homeland Security Department. All perform virtually the same mission.

The commission argued the whole brainpower of the government should be concentrated in one room, not four.

That could be the hidden challenge of Bush's second term. If Negroponte could get all the energy devoted to terrorism pulling together, he may go down as a success.

The betting is that Negroponte will be lucky just to be able to set up an office, get some computers running and establish phone connections with his 15 agency chiefs. Then, he will need a translator for the Coast Guard, immigration and transportation security. They talk cop. He talks diplomat.

Someone with a bigger hat -- perhaps a veteran of elective politics -- might have filled the DNI job better than Negroponte. But he was dependable and workmanlike both as U.N. ambassador and in the dangerous Baghdad assignment. Loyalty was what Bush needed.

Budgets are tight and getting tighter because of the war and fiscal excesses. Negroponte will be fighting a battle for the spotlight against the administration's vast plans for Social Security personal accounts, as well as other high priority international issues -- the march of freedom and democracy and the new attention to Iraq, Iran and now Syria.

Some of the edge has gone from the war on terrorism, the hunt for Osama bin Laden, homeland security and -- as it becomes a more distant memory -- the 9/11 attack.

An "intelligence czar" is what everyone calls the new DNI. It's hard to think of Negroponte that way. He seems to be a quiet man who makes no waves and was happy to stay in the background in Iraq while the new civilian Iraq authorities took control, awaiting the elected government.

Negroponte has already been screened at earlier confirmation hearings about a trail of problems, and if has any serious trouble at this one, it would be a surprise.

John Hall is the senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service. E-mail: jhall@mediageneral.com.

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