FIVE YEARS AFTER the most devastating terrorist attack in U.S. history, all our worst intelligence deficiencies remain. Intelligence is spread across 16 agencies that operate as warring tribes more than a team. The CIA is in disarray. And the FBI's information technology is stuck in the dark ages.
There are more intelligence agencies to coordinate than ever but still no one in firm charge of them all. In 2004, Congress established the post of director of national intelligence. Rather than integrating intelligence, however, the job's creation has triggered huge turf wars. For the last two years, while the office of the intelligence director has been fighting over who briefs the president and who staffs assignments, the Pentagon has quietly expanded its intelligence activities at home and abroad.
This is bad. Pentagon units now duplicate such intelligence activities as conducting secret counter-terrorism operations, collecting information abroad and monitoring Americans inside the U.S. without warrants, presidential authorizations or meaningful supervision by the director of national intelligence and Congress.
One little-known Pentagon unit, the Counterintelligence Field Activity, began in 2002 to protect U.S. forces from terrorist attacks, but has since grown into a sprawling counter-terrorism agency with wide-ranging duties and authority over 4,000 active and reserve military investigators.
Information sharing among intelligence agencies has improved -- but that's not saying much. The poster child of intelligence reform is a new agency called the National Counterterrorism Center, where officials from different agencies sit in the same room and draft collective reports. The center has even developed a classified website that provides synthesized terrorism intelligence for government officials.
Sounds good. But because analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center have varying levels of security clearances and come from different intelligence agencies, they see different pieces of information. Intelligence still isn't shared even when the rules allow it. Information is stored on nearly 30 incompatible networks. To access them all, analysts must use six computers.
"It's a little scary," Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), who sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said during the confirmation hearing for Gen. Michael Hayden as CIA director. "It's like we have duct-taped our systems together. Surely we can do better than this."
