EXPERT INTERVIEWS — The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) marks an anniversary today — 20 years since its creation as the top oversight entity within the U.S. intelligence community (IC).
The ODNI was born in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and the flawed intelligence that led to 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and given a mandate to correct “single-threaded intelligence reporting and analysis” and better integrate intelligence collected by the rest of the IC. It was tasked with other roles: a convening authority to bring the IC’s disparate agencies together to confront challenges; the preparation of the Presidential Daily Brief; the determining of the overall intelligence budget; and acting as a public voice for the IC writ large.
Two decades later, as the Trump Administration has vowedto “overhaul” the IC, supporters of the ODNI say it has helped make America safer, by knitting together IC entities that had too often operated as silos.
“If we're not connecting the dots or not bringing intelligence together, then we may actually miss the next 9/11,” Avril Haines, who served as Director of National Intelligence in the Biden Administration, told the Council On Foreign Relations during her last weeks on the job. “We're going to have a situation where we're not going to see what the threat picture is, not provide the kind of indication warning that's needed, not be as successful at countering the national security threats that we face today.”
The ODNI’s detractors say that it doesn’t actually collect intelligence or solve problems, and adds an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy to the IC’s work.
Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski spoke with four veterans of the ODNI – former directors Ambassador John Negroponte and Lt. Gen. James Clapper; Lyn Brown, who served as the ODNI's Senior Attorney Advisor, Office of General Counsel; and Benjamin Powell, a former General Counsel for the ODNI – as well as Bernard Hudson, a former CIA Chief of Counterterrorism. The interviews covered questions about the reason for the ODNI’s creation, the value it has provided over the past 20 years, the various critiques of the organiation, and what might be missed – were it to cease to exist.
These conversations have been edited for length and clarity.
THE EXPERTS
Why the ODNI exists
Clapper: Having labored in the position [of Director] for six and a half years, I believe that the overarching requirement for a DNI is to have a full-time champion advocate for integration, collaboration, coordination, and cooperation. I think that is the value added of the ODNI, which is to get all the disparate components – now 17 in addition to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence itself – to play as a coordinated orchestra, getting the components to play together, to take maximum advantage of the complementary capabilities of each of the components.
I do think there is a need for an overarching leader for the entirety of the intelligence community. You can use any number of metaphors: symphonies, football teams, whatever metaphor you want to use, where you have people or organizations of different capabilities, different authorities to act together in a coordinated way. It's the old saw about the sum being greater than the parts. And that's certainly true in the Intelligence Community.
Negroponte: I would say the ODNI is a manager and every team needs a manager. There were a lot of functions that were in the CIA in the old setup, where the head of the CIA was responsible for overseeing these different agencies and the budget and everything else. But when you're running a paramilitary effort in Afghanistan and another one in Iraq and you've got all these operational responsibilities, it's not always that easy to maintain a good watching brief over the intelligence community as a whole. So I think there is a place for someone at a high level to be exclusively devoted to this management function.
It was, after all, a startup [in 2005]. They were rather vague about what the authorities were, and the extent of power or influence that the ODNI would have. So I think basically what I was being told was, it's going to be what you make of it. And above all, it's going to be a function of your relationship with the president. I felt I had a very good personal relationship with the president. He wanted to see me every day and be there for the intelligence brief. And we got along just famously. So I think it was very dependent on that.
Hudson: The ODNI was a rushed marriage inside the U.S. government. The parties didn't really know each other very well before the document was signed. Its mission has grown over time on paper. They took the responsibility from the CIA to manage the President's Daily Brief (PDB), and it's now their responsibility.
That's probably their most important role, managing the PDB, because that gives you access to the president and the 20-40 other people who read that document. It's the document that drives a lot of the conversation inside government. I would suggest, however, that the PDB is not as much of a driver today of policy as it used to be, in a world where the attention economy includes Senators and cabinet secretaries who read tweets that may dominate their work cycle that day. The PDB, while it's the most important function for the DNI because it really helps drive the president's thinking, competes in a very crowded space in the attention economy.
Brown: There was tremendous concern about relevant information, particularly what the war fighter needed, which was sometimes buried in interagency stovepipes. [The 9/11 Commission recommendations had] an emphasis on trying to connect the dots better, and that we needed systemic change and perhaps a centralized management system through the creation of the DNI — to bring those various entities together and to facilitate the information that was needed to better protect the American people from another catastrophic terrorist attack.
Powell: The intelligence issues after 9/11 in terms of intelligence information sharing, integration of the community, and then later the issues with the Iraq intelligence, understanding the sourcing of that intelligence and how policymakers were presented with that intelligence – I think President Bush would have said it was both of those, not just 9/11, but also issues related to the Iraq intelligence provided to policymakers [that led to the ODNI’s creation].
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Over two decades, measuring the value of the ODNI
Clapper: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the DNI personally can do a great deal to ensure that the dots are connected and that there is inter-agency communication.
One of the things that the intelligence community does widely now is rotational assignments. People are brought out of their home base and do an assignment elsewhere. And that's actually required now to progress into the senior ranks. The other thing that's really changed the sociology of the intelligence community a great deal, which promotes intra- and inter-agency communication, are deployments overseas. In the heyday of Iraq and Afghanistan, we had hundreds of IC employees, civilian employees, who deployed. This is in stark contrast to my war, which was Southeast Asia. I went to Vietnam in 1965 and ‘66 as a young intelligence analyst in the Air Force. Rarely did you see a government civilian, particularly in intelligence. That's very different now. And when civilian employees have that experience, the same privations, the same risks and hazards as their military counterparts, that has marked a profound sociological change in the personality of the intelligence community and its workforce.
Negroponte: The era of technology, and some of this information technology, really came into its own during the time of the formation of the ODNI, and benefited the intelligence community enormously. Think of it this way: Pre-9/11, if the FBI collected any information that was of intelligence value, it was usually on yellow legal pads and locked away in cabinets somewhere in the regional offices of the FBI. They had no system to even centralize and integrate the kind of intelligence they collected. There was a world of difference after we brought them more into the intelligence community, and I think that was one of the significant accomplishments — to involve them more in intelligence collection and integration. And that, combined with the advances in computer technology and the ability to integrate all these sources of information and these flows of intelligence into one integrated product, which is something that was developed during that decade from 2001 to 2010, made the intelligence community much more efficient and effective.
One example: [U.S. Army Gen.] Stan McChrystal, who really embodies the knowledge and understanding of what the new intelligence could do, he could get flows of intelligence from about 10, 15 different sources all integrated into one stream, and then use that information for targeting purposes and so forth. So the record of our being able to target high-value terrorist targets was just a heck of a lot better, let's say by 2010, than it had been at the beginning of the century. It was a period of giant strides in the effectiveness of the intelligence community.
Powell: One of the key issues is the integration of foreign and domestic intelligence to make sure we're matched up. And of course, a key part of the 9/11 Commission findings was a lack of imagination about a foreign threat on U.S. domestic soil. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), for example, where you have integrated foreign and domestic intelligence – prior to the DNI being stood up, it is not clear where you could have located NCTC, given our concerns about CIA and NSA, with the radar tuned to look at the foreign threats and producing the foreign intelligence, and FBI of course being the premier focus on domestic intelligence.
There are a number of other examples where the DNI was given that mandate to bring those pieces together. I think that was a defect that people were trying to solve for, where you had organizations that could really bring an integrated picture to the policymakers who sometimes were essentially the integrators of the foreign and domestic picture, which was, I'd say, highly frustrating to the top customer and some of the most senior policymakers.
Brown: It's also important to go back and remember the structure as it existed pre-ODNI. One of the criticisms after 9/11 was that the FBI and CIA didn't share information. That was part of what ODNI and the National Counterterrorism Center and the Terror Screening Center were designed to facilitate – that communication and coordination between relevant IC elements, defense elements, home and security, and of course law enforcement. But that required a significant shift in agency culture. It's very difficult, and we saw this play out over a number of years, to go from a restrictive information sharing, need-to-know based regime to an obligation to provide. And that took time.
The creation of the DNI really did help to facilitate that and create a much more collaborative environment. We're better working together than separately. And I think that the proof has been in how the country has been relatively safe since the terrorist attacks on 9-11.
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The critics: Not relevant? One more layer in a bloated bureaucracy?
Hudson: I think [the ODNI] is in a loveless marriage within the IC. It is a we-vacation-separately marriage, where people have come to terms with it. But in my entire career, I never once ever heard anybody say, What's the DNI think about this? They don't have an operational role, so they don't drive covert action execution. They don't drive human operations. They have a convening authority within the IC that they can use. So they could call a meeting on anything and you are compelled to attend.
I don't believe that under the current arrangement, the DNI produces meaningful original intelligence outside of the PDB. And that itself is reliant on the collection of others.
Some have suggested, and I think they’re correct, that the value of the DNI should be effectively and neutrally grading the value of everybody's collection. Just how much value does the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency bring to the IC? How much does the director of operations and CIA bring, how much does the FBI CT division bring? Just being able to assess the accuracy, timeliness, and thoroughness of how everybody else is doing. Creating some better analytical process.
This is where the DNI could bring value, but it would have to be as the “skeptic in chief.” It would tend to make the DNI unpopular, and the person who is the DNI fairly unwelcome. But I think that its ability to look into what everybody's doing – its time would be better spent serving that role than trying to be a second layer of analysis.
Clapper: You can always make an accusation about any bureaucracy, whether it's too much, too big, whatever. Intelligence is inherently manpower intensive. Now we have these tools like artificial intelligence, which the intelligence community badly needs because of the torrents of data that the intelligence community has to deal with. You can always make an accusation about intelligence communities – it is big, it's huge. If you look at the programmatic aggregation, in terms of manpower and money, the intelligence community is larger than all but three of the cabinet departments, and bigger than the GDP of a lot of countries. So the United States spends a lot of resources on intelligence, and I would argue, rightfully so.
Negroponte: I think people who make that criticism also tend to be unduly critical of ODNI. They say that we've mushroomed into a giant organization. I think it's around 2,000 people. And I seem to remember that's what it was when we started. We took the pieces that Congress gave us, and if you added all that up, it came close to 2,000 people back then. So I don't know what on earth they're talking about.
Powell: I think we had about 20 people in a small office in the new executive office building when I first heard the “massive bureaucracy” comment — and I looked around, and I was searching for the bureaucracy.
If the ODNI ceased to exist, would it be missed?
Clapper: I think you'd slip back to the way things were. If you say do away with the ODNI, will there be any coordinator, overseer of the IC or not? And then I guess it's to each his own. And then you get a lot of bureaucratic competition, which to some extent is healthy – but if unbridled, where there's no tempering influence and no unifying voice, [while] some disaster won't happen by closing business tomorrow, over time that could be very damaging and wasteful.
Hudson: No. Here's the sad truth: only two things would happen. State and the CIA would fight over who gets to do the President's Daily Brief. The CIA would probably win that fight. The ODNI struggles for relevancy.
Powell: What I would ask people is, where do the organizations that are in the DNI go? Where does NCTC get located with its authorities? Where do a variety of other organizations get located? You'll have to solve for that problem.
You would also have to solve for who is the manager and the director of the intelligence community, and who's the principal intelligence advisor for the president. And maybe your answer is we go back to the system where the CIA director has three hats — Director of Central Intelligence Agency, which is a huge job with a global footprint every day; that same person is then the president's principal intelligence advisor, a huge job in and of itself with the PDB every morning and answering the taskings there; and then finally, the third job leading the intelligence community, a massive enterprise in itself.
If you say we'll just go back to the way it was and say it all worked fine, then you're going to have to read all of the findings of the commissions, and reject them or fix them in other ways.
Brown: I don't necessarily like the word “overhaul,” but I do think, 20 years out, it would be a wise thing to take a look at what was created, how has it evolved, and are there efficiencies that can be achieved in the current environment, in terms of looking for duplication of effort, looking for redundancies, are there economies of scale that we can achieve by consolidating certain functions? I think those are all fair game. The word “overhaul” makes me a little uneasy because I think it connotes dramatic change. And I think, overwhelmingly, that the functions as presently constituted are working. Can they be tweaked and enhanced? Of course. That that's a good thing to take a look at. But I don't think that we need radical change right now. I think the community is functioning pretty well in terms of coordination and collaboration and protecting the American people.
Negroponte: The ODNI may not be around much longer, because I think quite a few people have their sights on getting rid of it, but we'll see what happens.
Going forward, I do not think that the status of the ODNI is yet firmly established within the U.S. government, and I think people have their sights on it. And there could well be some kind of move to diminish the ODNI or even abolish it. I don't think the Central Intelligence Agency has ever been happy about that reform. I think they've put up a sort of a resistance to it fairly consistently ever since the law was passed. I don't think the permanence of the ODNI is assured.
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