Senate Overhaul of U.S. Intelligence in the Works

In a rare show of bipartisanship, a Senate committee on Wednesday unanimously adopted a bill that would overhaul the nation’s intelligence system by creating a national intelligence director and a national counterterrorism center.

By a vote of 17 to 0, the Governmental Affairs Committee adopted a bill that its supporters said struck a balance between creating a strong intelligence director and preserving the military’s control over intelligence for battlefield use.

The Senate leadership intends to bring the bill to a floor vote by the end of next week. The bill’s co-authors, Governmental Affairs Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the committee’s top Democrat, acknowledged that the bill would face many challenges.

The House bill is expected to be unveiled as early as today.

Collins hailed the vote in her committee as “a great victory for reform.”

She said a single person, the new national intelligence director, would be “in charge and accountable for the nation’s intelligence operations.” The counterterrorism center, she said, “will ensure there is one place where all the information comes together and interagency plans are developed to protect our country against terrorism.”

She and Lieberman fended off efforts from both directions, by those pushing to give the intelligence director greater power and those fighting to limit the director’s reach over the Defense Department’s intelligence budget and personnel.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), a committee member who is also the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, offered 14 amendments to the bill during two days of debate. Many of his proposed amendments were aimed at preserving the military’s control over battlefield intelligence and at limiting the powers of the national intelligence director.

“A lot of Sen. Levin’s amendments reflected concerns put forth by the Department of Defense,” Collins said. Although some of Levin’s suggestions were incorporated, Collins said that all challenges to the national intelligence director’s authority were defeated.

But as the Governmental Affairs Committee acted, other senators raised concerns about what they said might be a hasty rush to complete the most sweeping overhaul of the nation’s intelligence system in more than a half a century. In the House, which has yet to act, as well as in the Senate, leaders of Appropriations and Armed Services committees, whose turf could be diminished by reforms, have reacted warily.

“We must not lose sight of how integral intelligence is to our national security, and we must be careful not to rush to failure,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said during a hearing of his committee.

Stevens and others said the increasingly partisan atmosphere in Congress in the weeks before national elections made this a dangerous time to try to institute broad reforms on intelligence.

Collins vehemently disagreed. The momentum for reform, she said, has never been stronger.

“If we wait till next year, I would bet you that nothing will happen,” Collins said. “Many of these reforms have been recommended time and time again. They go back decades. If we don’t act now, when will we have the willpower to act?”

Congress sprang into action in July, after the Sept. 11 commission issued its final report on the intelligence failures that preceded the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The bipartisan commission said it was not possible to mount a defense that might have prevented the attacks because the nation’s 15 military and civilian intelligence agencies failed to share information, and no one was in charge of overall intelligence gathering, analysis and operations.

The committee offered 41 recommendations for governmental reforms that would modernize the management structure for intelligence agencies that have operated largely unchanged since they were created to deal with the Cold War.

The White House, after initially resisting the commission’s creation, embraced many of its recommendations. It has sent its own proposals to Congress for a national intelligence director and a counterterrorism center. The House bill is expected to closely reflect the White House vision of intelligence reform.

The Senate bill would give the intelligence director hiring, firing and spending control over the CIA, the FBI’s office of intelligence, the Homeland Security Department’s intelligence directorate, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies.

But the Defense Department now controls about 80% of intelligence spending, and under the Senate bill it would keep its authority over tactical intelligence operations.

Levin, in an interview, said the proposed structure would “needlessly have a negative effect on the ability of the military to manage and implement missions which are so necessary to our war on terrorism.”