Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee - Proposals to Reorganize the United States Intelligence Community

Federal News Service

HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE SUBJECT: THE IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE AND MILITARY OPERATIONS OF PROPOSALS TO REORGANIZE THE UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

CHAIRED BY: SENATOR JOHN WARNER (R-VA)

WITNESSES: DR. JAMES R. SCHLESINGER, FORMER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, CHAIRMAN, THE MITRE CORPORATION; FRANK C. CARLUCCI, FORMER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, CHAIRMAN EMERITUS, THE CARLYLE GROUP; DR. JOHN J. HAMRE, FORMER DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

LOCATION: 216 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

BODY:
SEN. JOHN CORNYN (R-TX): Thank you, gentlemen, for being here today and for hanging in there --

SEN. WARNER: Senator Cornyn has been very patient.

SEN. CORNYN: Well, you were patient too to wait until we get all the way down to this end of the table for questions. I appreciate that very much. I especially appreciate all three of you talking, at the outset, about the fact that solutions must logically flow from problems identified. In other words, I trust that we will be on guard about a solution looking for a problem. And indeed, I was also interested to hear a number of references to the fact that the specific causes of 9/11, as identified by the 9/11 Commission, had very little to do with the issues that we are talking about when we talk about budget authority and particularly the role of the Defense Department in supporting the warfighter.

But I think this is a very constructive and important exercise and I commend the members of the 9/11 Commission from doing an outstanding job. But I think it's a difficult and complex subject. The one thing that I think cannot be overlooked is the fact that this administration and this Congress have not waited for three years for the 9/11 Commission to issue its report to act in many ways that I think have been very constructive and designed to solve the problems that we all know have existed. For example, we've talked some about the creation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, TTIC and the National Counterterrorism Center, which is one of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations-would indeed build on that to enhance the information sharing between the CIA and the FBI as appropriate under the law.

We also need to identify the fact that Attorney General Janet Reno and Attorney General John Ashcroft and others testified too at the hearing about the fact that it was the PATRIOT Act, sometimes maligned but frequently misunderstood, but was responsible for tearing down the wall between law enforcement and intelligence agencies and allowing the kind of sharing of information that has indeed, I believe, made America safer. And indeed, of course, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, billions of dollars being appropriated to first responders and to harden a variety of potential targets for terrorists.

But I believe, of the recommendations that have been made by the 9/11 Commission, the National Counterterrorism Center and certainly the legislative oversight reform which we have not talked about much here today other than to avoid the subject because it is not necessarily the role of this committee but certainly a matter of interest. But, to me, it seems less important, when we look at reform, to try to see how we can reorganize the wire diagram or the organizational chart.

Indeed, as I think has been alluded to several times, the kind of authority that some have proposed giving to the national director for intelligence already exists since 1997 when the Congress passed legislation which created a deputy DCI for community management and gave that person responsibility for coordination of all intelligence agencies. And I hope we would not give too much-we would not elevate the anecdote about DCI Tenet declaring war in 1998. We would not elevate that too much because indeed we all know it takes more than a declaration of war by the DCI to make things actually happen and that's really where the rubber meets the road.

But let me ask really a question that I think, Dr. Hamre, you alluded to but we haven't seemed to talk about very much. I don't think that the 9/11 Commission report really addresses this. In addition to the failure of human intelligence, which has literally made us blind to what happened in Iraq since 1998 and I fear-we won't talk about it here-but I fear that's not an isolated event.

Open source intelligence collection. We spend a lot of money on satellites and all sorts of interesting gizmos that indeed I think are very useful in terms of intelligence collection. But are you familiar with any effort in our intelligence community anywhere to have a systematic and comprehensive open source intelligence collection?

MR. HAMRE: Sir, there are procedures that the intelligence community uses to survey the thinking in the private sector on issues as they are trying to derive an assessment. For example, the National Intelligence Council will routinely go out and pull in the thinking of outsiders. It tends to be in the assessment phase. That's a little different from open source which is seen as a collection as well as an assessment activity.

I think you will find there is also a strategic study group that works for the agency which routinely goes out outside of government to try to augment its classified activities. But they tend to be bringing in perspectives more toward the tail end of an assessment as opposed to being seen as a routine source of information collection. And I think the advocates and I certainly do advocate wider use of open source is to use it as a collection modality as well, not just simply a second guess on the assessment phase.

SEN. CORNYN: Secretary Schlesinger.

MR. SCHLESINGER: I think, Senator, if you look at the fusion methods of the Special Operations commands down in Tampa that they have brought together or have attempted to bring together open source information, in part because the part of the world that they deal with, you have basically more open source information than you have secret information. A problem-it is a long historic problem of the CIA or the-has been that if something is good, it's got to be secret and sometimes we just get the gems out of open source.

SEN. CORNYN: I have sometimes joked among my colleagues that I have learned in classified briefing sessions since I've been in the Senate as much by reading the New York Times and Washington Post and watching cable news. And I wonder whether we are missing opportunities as hundreds of new newspapers and news sources arise in places like Iraq and all around the world, gleaning systematically information we could obtain from non-classified public sources of information and do that on a more systematic and rigorous basis.

MR. SCHLESINGER: We should.

MR. CARLUCCI: Well, if I may comment --

SEN. CORNYN: Secretary Carlucci.

MR. CARLUCCI: We, of course, have FIVUS (ph) where we monitor all the radio broadcasts --

SEN. CORNYN: I'm sorry, could you get a little closer to your microphone?

MR. CARLUCCI: We have the FIVUS system where we monitor radio broadcasts around the world and CIA has had a domestic collection division for some time. But more fundamentally, what you describe is a basic responsibility of embassy reporting. It is up to the embassies around the world to deal with open source information, to tell the Department of State what the press is doing in country X and country Y, what the politicians are saying. That's why we have political sections in our embassies.

SEN. CORNYN: My time has expired. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

SEN. WARNER: Did you wish to follow up on Secretary Carlucci's response to you?

SEN. CORNYN: Are we going to have another round, Mr. Chairman?

SEN. WARNER: Yes. We'll each --

SEN. CORNYN: I'll reserve any other questions at that time. Thank you very much.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

SEN. CORNYN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just have one final area of questioning and that has to do with the dangers of consolidation in the intelligence community. The best analogy I can think of is how much different your world view would be each day if you only read one newspaper and it was the Washington Post and how much different it would be if every day when you got up, instead of the Washington Post, you read the Washington Times.

And I worry that if we are consolidating all of our intelligence collection and analysis and routing it up without the caveats perhaps as it goes through each layer, we present a nice pretty package and we claim we have now consolidated the authority in one person, the national director of Intelligence. But in effect, we are limiting the range of information that the policy makers really need in order to make the best possible decisions. Is that a poor analogy or is that something that --

MR. CARLUCCI: Exactly right. It's a good analogy. You don't want-too much uniformity in the intelligence business is bad.

SEN. CORNYN: Well, it strikes me that there is some benefit to having the competition or the diversity of voices. I know sometimes people wonder how in the world can you find out what's happening in Washington or anywhere else. I always say, well, you need to read a lot of different newspapers. You need to read several different news magazines. You need to look at several different Internet news engines like Google or Yahoo or whatever and maybe then, you will have some concept of what in the world is going on. But if you limit yourself to one source, that seems like that is fraught with danger.

So I just hope that during the debate and discussion as you have counseled us already that we look for those things that are going to provide us better intelligence and not just claim that, yes, we have redrawn the organizational chart. We have created somebody with a new title and we pat ourselves on the back under the misimpression that we've actually made America safer.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

SEN. WARNER: Thank you, Senator. But if I might just take an observation from your very important observation you made, the one thing that goes through this report that struck me is the word "imagination". Is not imagination the direct product of competition of differing intelligence views, Dr. Schlesinger?

MR. SCHLESINGER: Yes. Unquestionably. Look, there were balls that were dropped here and was given Manila-the episode in Manila, given the seizure of the French aircraft that was supposed to fly into the Eiffel Tower. Our problem was a failure of imagination, sir, not to be cured, not to be cured by restructuring. In Manila, it was said-whoever the name, I've forgotten-he said that we were going to take an aircraft and drive it into Langley headquarters of the CIA. I would think that that would really get the attention of the CIA.

SEN. WARNER: I think it would too. But it is the product of competitive intelligence analysis. And again, going back as I did with my colleagues on the Intelligence Committee in looking at the problems, the DIA was very skeptical as was the Energy Department about certain aspects of the findings in the Central Intelligence Agency. Again, is not imagination a product, Dr. Carlucci?

MR. CARLUCCI: Yes, yes. It's a problem. I think the report performs a useful service in pointing that out. But the report also points out that the policy makers do not act on warning, which is another issue we haven't discussed today that's beyond the ken of just pure intelligence. But the interaction between the intelligence community and policy makers is very important.