Hearing of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee

August 16, 2004 Monday

HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE SENATE GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

SUBJECT: "REORGANIZING AMERICA'S INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY: A VIEW FROM THE INSIDE"

CHAIRED BY: SENATOR SUSAN COLLINS (R-ME)

WITNESSES: WILLIAM H. WEBSTER, FORMER FBI AND CIA DIRECTOR; R. JAMES WOOLSEY , FORMER CIA DIRECTOR; STANSFIELD TURNER , FORMER CIA DIRECTOR

LOCATION: 342 DIRKSEN SENATE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

SEN. RICHARD DURBIN (D-IL): Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I suppose the questions I'm about to ask reflect the fact that I've taken a lot more history courses than management courses, but I hope you'll bear with me. There's a legendary saloon-keeper in Chicago named Paddy Baller (sp). He ran an old saloon and was kind of a ward boss. So they had a reform candidate running against him. And they went up to Paddy Baller (sp) and said, "What do you think about this guy running against you?" He says, "This city ain't ready for reform." He was right. (Laughter.)

The question is whether the intelligence community is ready for reform. And the 9/11 commission, I think, has shaken us up, and they should. They did a great job, did a great service to this country. But if we are often accused of being guilty of fighting the last war, it appears that in the case for reforming the intelligence community we are basing it on the second-last war, because since 9/11 we've had another historic event, and that was the invasion of Iraq. And the invasion of Iraq, I think, made it clear to us in 2002 -- after I should say our vote in 2002, our invasion in 2003 -- that intelligence failed us a second time.

I wonder what a commission, an Iraq invasion intelligence commission, what their recommendations might be a year later, after 9/11. Would they be any different? Certainly I think it calls into question whether there's any power of self-healing within the intelligence community. We failed on 9/11. The intelligence community didn't do as good a job as it should have done. A year later, they were tested again. And by the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, they failed again. On 9/11 they looked at the whole world and figured out who our enemy was, and they didn't get it. They didn't get it right.

When it came to the invasion of Iraq, they had to look at one country and figure out what the danger was, and they didn't get that right either, which brings me to this point, and that is, whether or not, when we talk about this reform process here, whether changing name plates and changing e-mail addresses is really getting to the heart of the problem.

Judge Webster, 13-year-old mainframes at the FBI? I've been screaming bloody murder about this for three years. Why don't we have a Manhattan Project on intelligence technology? Why aren't we gathering the best and brightest in the academic and the private sector and the public sector, breaking through all of the federal red tape, and building a computer system to fight the war on terror? We haven't even decided to try that yet, and we're talking about moving name plates and who has budgetary authority and whether they're going to be part of the Cabinet.

Secondly, Mr. Woolsey, thanks for joining us again. I still am troubled by your repeated comments at these hearings that it sometimes isn't safe for these agencies to share information. There might just be another spy in one of these agencies, you said.

How are you going to get trusted communication that the 9/11 commission calls for if you start with that premise, if it isn't safe for the FAA to tell the FBI about dangerous people, if it isn't safe for the border crossing guards to take fingerprints and share them with the FBI?

So my point is this, going back to history as opposed to management. Is the intelligence community ready for reform? If it isn't ready for reform, are we kidding ourselves here? Are we going through a political exercise, moving name plates around, that really won't achieve the fundamental reform that Admiral Turner referred to when the president of the United States called him in and said, "We're going to do it differently, and you're in charge of doing it differently"? That's what bothers me. Jump ball. Anybody like to comment?

MR. WOOLSEY: Senator Durbin, two points; first of all, about pre-Iraq and a commission on that. And in a sense, there is one. The commission on the WMD estimates, co-chaired, I believe, by former Senator Robb and Judge Silverman, is holding hearings. I'm testifying before them, I think, next week on those issues. And it's a complicated set of issues, but nonetheless, just as there were about five post-Pearl Harbor commissions, there will doubtless be more than one post-9/11 and post-Iraq commissions. It seems to be kind of a constant here in Washington.

I think, on the sharing issue, the point I want to make is that the 9/11 commission essentially said "need to share" should replace "need to know." And it has a mechanism, a kind of an Internet, a trusted information Internet. My testimony is more thorough-my written testimony is more thorough than what I said here at the table on that point.

But the key issue seems to me to be that we should not give up on "need to know." We ought to try to continually adjust who needs to know what. We ought to make sure that a person, regardless of what agency they're in-if they're a DIA analyst and they're one of the two or three best people in government to look at a particular issue, they ought to be given access to a CIA directorate of operations, blue-border report, as long as they are trusted and security-cleared and so forth.

I'm not suggesting that we should stay within the stovepipes. It's the numbers that bother me, because insofar as one widely disseminates material, one could have a Robert Hanssen, who turned out to be a pretty clever computer operator --

SEN. DURBIN: Mr. Woolsey, Governor Kean and Congressman Hamilton sat in those chairs and told us, "We've got to be more creative. We've got to be more imaginative. We can't keep putting things in these neat little drawers of expectations. We've got to think more broadly in a war on terrorism." And what you're arguing for, even though it may be stovepipes with a few holes in it, is to make sure that the holes are directed in the right ways. How do you get creativity and imagination out of that?

MR. WOOLSEY: Well, you know, Senator, the victors in World War II used intelligence very creatively. And one way they did so, particularly with respect to the very sensitive signals intercepts and decrypting that we were doing of the Japanese codes and the British and Enigma were doing of the German codes, was radically to restrict the numbers of people who did the analysis and had exposure to those technologies, but to make them the very best.

Now, whenever I see, as I saw back in 1998, headlines in the press saying, "We are listening to bin Laden's satellite telephones and we know immediately thereafter he stops using them" --

SEN. DURBIN: That was a leaked story in the Washington Times, which killed a source for us.

MR. WOOLSEY: It strikes me that once I see leaks like that, I think there are too many blabbermouths in the government who are being given access to signals intelligence. The person who leaked that, I think, has as much blood on his or her hands as anyone with respect to 9/11.

And so it's impossible to always disseminate only to the right people. And I do think we need to disseminate across agency lines. But we also, I think, should not think that we're going to do something effective just by broadcasting and sharing very widely without attention to precisely whom this sharing is going to. That's my only point.

SEN. DURBIN: I only have a few seconds left, but I really would like if either of the other two witnesses could comment, Madam Chair, on this whole question about whether or not we can create a climate of reform in agencies which don't appear to be open to that climate.

MR. TURNER: Senator, I tried to say in my comments that the biggest problem today is how we analyze these situations. Henry Kissinger has a piece in the Post today saying analysis, interpretation, is the real problem here. Changing these boxes will help some, but it's not the solution. The solution is with you. Are you interrogating-I'm sorry, the intelligence committees.

SEN. DURBIN: I'm on that, too.

MR. TURNER: Okay. Sorry, sir. (Laughs.) Are you interrogating these people when they come up and finding out if they really can back up what they're saying?

SEN. DURBIN: Admiral, we have 22 staff members on the Senate Intelligence Committee, shared by the members, for 15 different intelligence agencies. I think you can answer that question yourself. We can't get into the level of depth that we should with the current situation on Capitol Hill. The 9/11 commission is right. We have failed at oversight. We have to accept some responsibility here.

MR. TURNER: And there's the PFIAB. And there's the whole bureaucratic structure. I mean, is the secretary of State asking these questions? Are the secretaries of Defense asking these questions? We've just got to encourage a much more inquiring approach to intelligence.

MR. WEBSTER: Are we ready? I think we're always ready if a good reason is presented and a good objective is understood, and then people will go to work and find it. That's true in the FBI. It's true in the CIA, and it's true in the other elements of the intelligence community. But when we think about how intelligence is collected, as Admiral Turner pointed out, then we think, what do we do with that intelligence? Where does it go?

Using my FBI example, there's an extraordinary amount of information that's in those files. Getting them out depends on the architecture of the system. And the architects of the system had something else in mind when it was created.

I don't think it needs a Manhattan Project, but it sure needs some attention and a willingness to invest in what creates that capability to share, but share with protection.

SEN. DURBIN: Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair.
SEN. COLLINS: Thank you. Senator Carper.

SEN. THOMAS CARPER (D-DE): Senator Durbin, who was the person, the saloon-keeper in Chicago that you spoke of?

SEN. DURBIN: Paddy Baller (sp).