EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW – The Office of the Director of National Intelligence – the ODNI - was born twenty years ago this month, in response to recommendations made by the 9/11 commission, and a concern that the United States intelligence community (IC) needed a way to ensure the better integration of intelligence reporting and analysis. Put differently – as many said in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks - the aim was to better connect the dots, and ensure that future threats to the nation would not be missed.
On April 21, 2005, Ambassador John Negroponte was sworn in as the country's first Director of National Intelligence. Amb. Negroponte had gotten the call from the White House while serving in Baghdad, as the top U.S. diplomat in Iraq, at a moment when an insurgency against U.S. forces in that country was in high gear.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the ODNI, The Cipher Brief spoke with Amb. Negroponte about the ODNI's mission, his own tenure, about how the threat picture has changed, and the way forward for the institution.
“I would say the ODNI is a manager and every team needs a manager,” Amb. Negroponte said. “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.”
Amb. Negroponte spoke with Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You can watch the full interview at the Cipher Brief YouTube channel.
The Cipher Brief: 20 years ago, you got a call or an email – or how did you first find out that the president wanted you to have this job?
Amb. Negroponte: I was ambassador to Baghdad, Iraq when I got a phone call, just about the beginning of Mr. [George W.] Bush's second administration. I got a phone call from Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, asking me if I would like to be the first Director of National Intelligence. And I was interested, but I knew I wanted to consult with my wife Diana first. So I said, well, let me think about it overnight and I'll talk to my wife. She wanted desperately that I come home anyway. And so she just said, take it – with a slight note of desperation in her voice. And I guess we saw it as a way to get back home.
And I came back then to consult with the president. He formally asked me to take the job, and then we went out of the Oval Office and talked to the press pool and he explained to them that he was going to nominate me to be Director of National Intelligence. And I remember famously he said, “John will control the budget.” I remember that very well because that turned out not to be the case as time progressed. But I only found that out later.
The Cipher Brief: Well, aside from the ticket home, how did you understand the mandate of the ODNI? Certainly it was daunting. Did you have concerns going in?
Amb. Negroponte: I was a fairly experienced government official. I'd had more than 40 years of government service, and I think I pretty much could handle just about anything they could throw at me in terms of cabinet level positions in the government. I didn’t have unique insight into intelligence or anything like that, although as a result of having been a diplomat for some 40 years, I'd had a lot of exposure to the intelligence community. They'd been on my embassy teams, and I'd worked with intelligence officers right from the beginning of my career going back to Hong Kong and Vietnam. So I was comfortable working with intelligence issues and particularly with the analytical side of the house. I was not an expert on intelligence collection.
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The Cipher Brief: There was an assessment made, after your nomination, by the Council on Foreign Relations about what lay ahead for you. This is one excerpt: “He must manage the sprawling US intelligence bureaucracy, oversee the nation's counter-terrorism strategy, replace the CIA director as the president's primary advisor on intelligence, and with the Secretary of Homeland Defense and the head of the FBI take responsibility for preventing another scale terror attack on U.S. soil, and at the same time control the budgets of the nation's 15 intelligence agencies.” It sounds not just daunting, it sounds like a nightmare – but is that about what it entailed? You mentioned that the budget turned out to not be the way it was presented.
Amb. Negroponte: I mentioned the budget because the president had said publicly that I'd be in charge of the budget. And it turned out that the budget formulation process was the usual free-for-all that happens every year when we try to come up with a budget — everybody's got a hand in it and they're all clamoring for their share. The different agencies go up to the Hill around the back of whoever's supervising them to advocate for their own line items in the budget. I encountered that quite a bit. So that turned out to be different than what the president himself expected.
I think we should narrow down the different activities you mentioned. Probably the first thing is that the president did not want to have another intelligence fiasco. You mentioned the 9/11 commission, but there was also a report after that on the weapons of mass destruction fiasco that happened [involving Iraq]. It was a study run by former senator Chuck Robb and Judge [Laurence] Silberman, and they published their report right around the time I was taking over the job and had some very specific recommendations, I think about 75 or 80 in all, which turned out to be prescient. I adopted them as my guidelines for my work.
But I felt that the first thing was to work on ensuring that we don't have the kind of analytic failures that we had leading up to the Iraq War. This idea that we produced a national intelligence brief on Iraq WMD that said it was “a slam dunk” – and that of course turned out to be totally incorrect. And we even sent poor [Secretary of State] Colin Powell – my boss, really, when I was ambassador to the UN – up to the meeting of the Security Council of the United Nations to make the case that there were WMD in Iraq. And it turned out that he had been given faulty intelligence and we didn't want to see that happen again. So I think that was probably the most important part of the mandate.
The other was coordination of the agencies, but that was fairly easy to pick areas where coordination made sense. For example, I would once a month or so get all of the six or seven major intelligence agencies, CIA, DIA, NSA, FBI and so forth together to talk about issues of common interest. And I guess those were probably two of the most important activities. The other was we had the National Counter-Terrorism Center, which was probably the jewel in the crown of the ODNI, which provided the daily analysis of all the information that was coming in about potential terrorist threats. It ended up being a little less daunting than the description that you read.
The Cipher Brief: The phrase “connect the dots” was used so often back then, in the case of the 9/11 attacks, as something that hadn't been done. Was that a part of how you understood the job too – in terms of the integration of intelligence?
Amb. Negroponte: Yes, and the fact of the matter is that 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.
And so it was much easier to oversee that kind of process. Just 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.
The Cipher Brief: What was your feeling when you left the job, in terms of what the ODNI had been set up to do? Did you think it was the right institution for what had been set forth in terms of the mission?
Amb. Negroponte: This is an interesting question, because I was not one of the individuals who was involved in the debate running up to the adoption of the legislation, whereas many of my senior intelligence officer counterparts or colleagues — people like [former CIA Director] Mike Hayden, [former Air Force Lt. Gen. and later ODNI Director] Jim Clapper — had been in the debate. I was in downtown Baghdad, enjoying myself and running the American Embassy there. So actually the first time I ever read the law and the reforms that had been undertaken was when I was asked to take the job. The first thing I did when Andy Card called me was to go print out the law — which was very long, 300 pages long — the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act.
That’s when I first learned about it all. So I didn't feel I had a dog in that fight. As it relates to how I felt when I left, I think we did a good, credible job setting up the organization. It was, after all, a startup. I got a lot of help from General Mike Hayden, who was my deputy. He was preselected for me. I was told, Oh, by the way, your deputy will be Mike Hayden, the head of NSA. And yes, I think we did OK, number one, in setting up a viable organization. Secondly, in exercising a good close watch over the intelligence product that we were producing every day as a community. And thirdly, I thought we developed a relationship of confidence with President Bush. And after all, one of the jobs listed was that the director is the principal intelligence advisor to the president, just like the chairman of the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] is the principal military advisor to the president.
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The Cipher Brief: Let's come to the present moment. Avril Haines, who just left the job as DNI, in a kind of exit interview, said that “if we're not connecting the dots or not bringing intelligence together, then we may actually miss the next 9/11.” And you mentioned James Clapper – he told us last year that when it works, the ODNI is like a conductor in an orchestra. It makes things "greater than the sum of its parts." Do you agree with those assessments?
Amb. 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. So basically I had the old community management function – that's what they called it when the CIA had that function – plus I ran a few selected intelligence centers, the National Counter-Terrorism Center, the President's Daily Brief, and so forth. Nothing operational, mind you, and I avoided interfering in operations like the plague. I wanted to be aware of what was going on, and no one ever denied me that information. I was in all the meetings that the CIA had with the president about their operational activities, but I tried not to interfere in that at all.
The Cipher Brief: The ODNI had then, and still does, its detractors, in terms of its relevancy, and also a criticism that it just added an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. How do you respond to that criticism?
Amb. Negroponte: I think people who make that criticism 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. I mean, we took the pieces that Congress gave us, the community management staff, the National Counter-Terrorism Center, National Counterintelligence Center, two or three others, 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. One critic, a former CIA director, we got into a debate in front of a bunch of other people about whether we'd become a bloated bureaucracy, and I recognize bloated bureaucracy when I see it and don't particularly like it.
And I said, but you're wrong. I gave him the facts, and he said, look, all you have to do is look at the ODNI website. How can you tell anything about the size of an organization by looking at its website? You can't. And he didn't.
The Cipher Brief: Let's say the ODNI did not exist today, and it was broached as a concept, would you advise a president today to create it? And if so, would you do it any differently?
Amb. Negroponte: Well, a couple of things. I was surprised Mr. Bush went for the reform, because his father had been the head of the CIA and he didn't really respond to 9/11 family pressures. In fact, I think he sort of fended them off. It was only after the WMD fiasco and the fact that it was revealed right in the middle of a presidential election campaign in 2004 —that the information about WMD in Iraq was based on faulty intelligence and that we'd fallen for a phony source — that [President Bush] felt he had to support the movement to reform the intel community. He was also reacting to the fact that John Kerry had espoused reform and he was the Democrats’ candidate. So I think it was a reluctant thing on his part.
The resulting legislation was a bit – well, when I was briefed by one of the White House lawyers on the legislation, at the end of the briefing, he looked at me and he said, John, it's a bit of a dog's breakfast. I knew that there were quite a few provisions that were not very precise. 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.
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 I think 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. There was someone embittered by it, and 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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