Office created for overseas intelligence
WASHINGTON -- The White House has decided to establish an office to manage and coordinate all US human intelligence collection overseas, whether carried out by the CIA, the Pentagon, or the FBI, one of dozens of recommendations made in March by a presidential commission on intelligence, according to current and former senior intelligence officials.
The administration is scheduled today to announce the new office and other intelligence changes arising from recommendations by the commission, which was headed by Judge Laurence Silberman and former senator Charles Robb, Democrat of Virginia. The office will be modeled after a commission recommendation to establish a Human Intelligence Directorate within the CIA that would be in a position superior to the Directorate of Operations, which now runs the agency's clandestine operations abroad, officials said.
As antiterrorism efforts have required more spying abroad, there have been clashes among CIA, FBI, and Pentagon clandestine operatives, a situation that the president's commission said in its report ''heighten(s) the risk that intelligence operations will be insufficiently coordinated."
The intelligence restructuring law, which passed Congress in December, established the director of national intelligence to supervise all intelligence activities but specified that the director of central intelligence would ''provide overall direction for and coordination of collection of national intelligence outside the United States."
The new human intelligence office is an extension of that provision and is scheduled to be announced today along with other changes at the White House by Frances Fragos Townsend, President Bush's homeland security adviser, who oversaw the administration's review of the findings.
CIA Director Porter Goss and his agency, whose role diminished within the intelligence community with the arrival of John Negroponte as director of national intelligence, would solidify control of overseas spying under the system. In addition, the change would ''elevate human intelligence above analysis and science and technology within the agency," a former senior CIA official said yesterday.
The office will be headed by an assistant director of central intelligence, said officials who described the steps to be taken on the condition of anonymity because a formal announcement had not been made. In addition to coordinating overseas spying operations, the office will develop common spy tradecraft training for all agencies and supervise development of human intelligence collection techniques for the entire intelligence community, they said.
Although the new lines of authority are not yet clear, it appeared that the human intelligence office would fall under the new deputy director of national intelligence, Mary Margaret Graham, who was an associate CIA deputy director for counterintelligence operations.
Among other commission recommendations expected to be put into effect is the establishment of a national nonproliferation center that would act as a relatively small coordinating body for analysis and collection but would not become involved in strategic planning for such activities.
