DEEP DIVE – The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is a relatively recent addition to the institutional architecture of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), born in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. And in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, the ODNI is getting a lot of fresh attention.
The President-elect has vowed to remake the IC. “We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, he said during the campaign. “The departments and agencies have been weaponized will be completely overhauled.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s nominee for Director of ODNI, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, has drawn scrutiny for a 2017 meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, her statements echoing Kremlin positions on the war in Ukraine, and – more broadly – questions about her qualifications to manage a large intelligence organization. Gabbard’s supporters cite her military record and willingness to challenge the status quo; the latter would seem to fit with Trump’s wish to bring change to the IC.
“If you turn the Titanic 90 degrees, people are going to fall out of their bunks, chandeliers and beautiful plates are going to get broken,” Elbridge Colby, who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the first Trump administration, said of the coming disruption to the IC. “But that’s where we are... President Trump ran against the system.”
The ODNI’s original mandate listed a need to correct “single-threaded intelligence reporting and analysis,” and a more effective integration of intelligence from the rest of the IC. It was given several specific roles: a convening authority to bring the IC’s disparate agencies together to confront challenges; the preparation of the Presidential Daily Brief; determining the overall intelligence budget; and serving as a public voice for the IC writ large.
Those who support the ODNI say it has helped knit together IC entities that had too often operated as silos prior to 9/11, and made the “sum” of the IC agencies “greater than the parts,” as former Director of National Intelligence Lt. Gen. James Clapper told The Cipher Brief.
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. In this view, the ODNI should either be downsized or – as some supporters of Donald Trump have suggested – disbanded altogether.
The Cipher Brief spoke with twoexperts with extensive IC experience, who happen to have different views and perspectives on the value of the ODNI: Gen. Clapper, who served as the DNI from 2010 to 2017, and sees the ODNI as key to ensuring “that the dots are connected and that there is inter-agency communication”; and Bernard Hudson, a former Chief of Counterterrorism at the CIA, who says the ODNI “struggles for relevancy.” The two interviews follow below.
Our conversations have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: What does ODNI do and why does it exist?
Clapper: The Office of Director of Intelligence, institutionally, and the position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) came out of the 9-11 Commission study, which concluded that what the intelligence community needed was an overseer or leader of the entire IC. That was the genesis of the ODNI, which was embedded in law in what's called the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which President Bush signed into law on the 17th of December, 2004. It stood up the following April.
Having labored in the position 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 Director of National Intelligence itself – to play as a coordinated orchestra. My experience is getting the components to play together, to take maximum advantage of the complementary capabilities of each of the components.
[There is] some contrast to the prior arrangement where the director of the Central Intelligence Agency had a second hat, as what was called the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). My observations of about 20 years worth of DCIs, CIA directors, acting as Director of Central Intelligence, was that sooner or later, and mostly sooner, the person in that position got consumed with agency-centric missions and agency-centric issues. And I can understand that. I was a director of two of the agencies for almost nine years. And those jobs in and of themselves are all-consuming, 24-7 jobs, particularly with an organization like the CIA, which is large, globally dispersed, and with a very complex mission. So I do think there is a need for having an overarching leader for the entirety of the intelligence community.
The Cipher Brief: You use a musical metaphor – that the ODNI job is like that of a conductor?
Clapper: Yes, 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.
The Cipher Brief: You referenced 9/11 in the creation of ODNI. So much was made then of a failure to connect dots.
Clapper: There is some truth and some validity to that. 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. So 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, I think that has marked a profound sociological change in the personality of the intelligence community and its workforce.
The Cipher Brief: We have no shortage of crises right now. One critique of the ODNI is that it’s one more layer of bureaucracy that didn't need to be there. How do you feel about that?
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 they have to deal with. If you look at the programmatic aggregation, in terms of manpower and money, the intelligence community is larger than all but, say, 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.
The Cipher Brief: What would be the consequences were the ODNI to go away?
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.
The Cipher Brief: How would you define the ODNI, to those who don’t know it?
Hudson: In the aftermath of 9/11, the IC and the government was under pressure to show some sort of bureaucratic change that they could point to, that says we have reduced the chance of strategic surprise. And we do that reflexively as Americans by centralizing things, which is what all governments tend to do. So 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). That's probably their most important role 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.
The Cipher Brief: You said the creation of the ODNI was a rushed marriage. In your view, how has the marriage gone?
Hudson: I think it is 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.
I remember famously when we were looking at [Osama] Bin Laden, and trying to determine whether he was he in the Abbottabad, [Pakistan] compound. The ODNI’s contribution to this was to come up with a different percentage of potential truth of our assessment, which was, “It's 50-50.” Well, thanks for going out on a limb, 50-50 that he's there. I don't think people take it very seriously.
And I say that because agency heads who have to be political, will do a head nod to the DNI and say, Oh yeah, we have a great relationship. I've never met anybody in OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] policy at the Pentagon, I've never met anybody in the Bureau's counter-terrorism division, I've never met anybody in CIA's ops or even their analytical unit, whoever said, Boy, I was just down at DNI and they had a great idea or they executed a great thing.
The Cipher Brief: In your assessment, has the ODNI been effective?
Hudson: War, paramilitary, intel is a messy business. You actually want some overlap. If you are at the most senior levels in government, you want a little bit of competition, you want a little bit of overlap. That's to your benefit as a senior leader as opposed to a just in time, just enough collection strategy. Conflict and nation-state competition doesn't lend itself, in my opinion, to just-in-time management philosophies and a mania on efficiency.
Some have suggested, and I think they’re correct, that the value of the DNI should be effectively and neutrally grading the homework on the value of everybody's collection. Just how much value does the National Geospatial Agency bring to the IC? How much does the director of operations and CIA bring, how much does 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 gets to the skepticism piece. I've always maintained that the most important trait in the senior intelligence service, especially if you are an agency head, is skepticism. There have been more problems from credulity in the American IC than there ever have been from skepticism. Believing in things that just ain't so is a bigger risk than completely missing something or undervaluing its threat.
Of course, 9/11 is a really excellent example of underestimating a threat. But when you look at some of the biggest and most serious IC failures — Iraq WMD in some ways, not being able to make a judgment about where the efforts in Syria are going, the catastrophic and consistent failure to tell the truth about the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq — this is where the DNI could bring value, but it would have to be 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 convening authority, its ability to look into what everybody's doing, I think it's time would be better spent serving that role than trying to be a second layer of analysis.
Since 9/11, there's this really impressive exchange that goes on among the agencies where the DOD has got people over in CIA, CIA's got people over in Commerce, Commerce has got people at the FBI, Treasury's got people everywhere. The idea is, hey, it'd be good to have an FBI person in your office space or a Treasury because they know who to reach back to. It makes things go faster. A lot of that already happens.
But I do think as an American taxpayer and, more importantly, if I was a president's advisor, I'd say that entity, if you got to boil it down to a few sentences, they need to be grading everybody's homework and making sure that the things that need to be covered are, and that you aren't coming to dangerously wrong conclusions about things, which in the American context is more often that we overvalue a threat, then we undervalue it.
The Cipher Brief: If ODNI were to go away tomorrow, would the United States miss it?
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.
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