Reforming the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the National Intelligence Community (IC) is a strategic imperative for the 21st century.
Part 1 introduced the idea of reforming the ODNI and the IC and offered a top-level plan.
Some may not be convinced this is necessary or may believe that in spite of the intelligence failures mentioned in part 1 that included just three major ones, this is too radical a step to take now.
Consider that with the new government fiscal year (that started 1 Oct 2024 for those keeping track at home-a date more known as marking the annual congressional budget pearl clutching, histrionics and reindeer games than anything rational,) 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the ODNI.
How has this construct worked out for America? You have to judge the performance of the ODNI based on its mission, which according to their website is the following:
The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which began operating in 2005. By statute, the DNI is the principal intelligence adviser to the President, and determines and manages the National Intelligence Program (NIP) budget of more than $50 billion, the U.S. government’s total intelligence spending aside from military intelligence. The DNI is also tasked with integrating the efforts of the 17 elements of the Intelligence Community (IC).
Not to play Simple Simon or Stump the Chump here, but if you had a principal advisor for something like your stock portfolio and you experienced devastating returns 3 times in just a few years, you would get yourself another advisor.
The president doesn’t have that luxury. With the establishment of the ODNI (and Space Force) we now have 17 intelligence producing agencies. The ODNI aggregates and assimilates and reduces all those inputs into digestible issues for the president and the National Security Council led by the National Security Advisor.
There is a binary problem ongoing with our IC right now. Either the ODNI is simply not up to the task-which seems obvious when you consider the magnitude of these failures-and it doesn’t matter the reason (which should be the focus of the effort.)
Or the IC agencies whose homework the ODNI relies upon to aggregate positions to advise and inform the president do not have the tools, skills, knowledge and abilities to produce the quality of intelligence necessary to meet the mission requirements and to avoid failures.
The truth is that both instances above represent the failure of the ODNI-not the office, but the concept-to lead the IC in its principal advisor mission.
We can suffer failures while spending a hell of a lot less than the >50B a year that it currently costs American taxpayers.
The perhaps worse truth is that both of the above potential problems are likely true, and it indicts the concept, as evidenced by what the ODNI has become: a failure in our time, proof that a series of compromises often dooms the most noble of ideas and can never produce the horse that is needed vice the camel that results.
In an increasingly politicized IC where currying favor for the person/personality/party in charge is rewarded far and away in excess of doing the true “nug work” of intelligence that oftentimes requires “carrying the message to Garcia,” we have incentivized and elevated the political above the practical and gravely suffered for such an act.
To fix what I believe ails the ODNI and the IC requires a little “tale of the tape” review of how we got here since the idea first came up back in 1955 when it was becoming increasingly apparent that leading the “community” as the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI,) while dual-hatted leading the “premiere IC element” as Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director, was a bit too much for one gentleman.
The period from 1945 through the 1950s was a calamitous one where brush fires as a residue of mostly pre-WWII local disputes were exacerbated by the failure to settle what many would describe as colonial aspirations mixed in with a communist push that spread slowly throughout the world, particularly the near and far east.
The iconic term of the “Iron Curtain” descending over Europe and a cold war playing out set the tone for nearly four decades of strife, political jockeying and brinksmanship diplomacy.
China smoldered and simmered and emerged as a force to be reckoned with as communism under Mao Zedong prevailed in 1949 after a near 30-year civil battle that saw Nationalists flee to Taiwan.
The new concept of the United Nations was immediately tested in the Middle East with the Israel and Arab War in 1948 and also shortly thereafter led by the US as they went to conflict in Korea to fend off an invasion from the north increasingly fed by the Chinese.
The French became re-entangled in Vietnam and would be defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
The Suez Crisis in July 1956 was a serious threat to world petroleum supplies and represented a stern test of the emergent American leadership that struggled due to a combination of world distractions and a failure of our intelligence services to ferret out a British and French plot to maintain their domain over the Egyptian resources represented by the Canal.
There followed in succession Sputnik, Castro, the downing of Francis Gary Powers U-2 that scuttled a planned Khrushchev and Eisenhower Nuclear Summit-that was likely the result of a CIA “military-Industrial Complex plot” to cancel what they considered an ill-advised initiative. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Coup in Vietnam that resulted in the murder of President Diem and his brother by the CIA supported Vietnamese military, the Berlin Airlift and the assassination of JFK.
JFK was so appalled by the scheming, collusion and double-dealing of the CIA that he reportedly threatened to “splinter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Shorter Wikileaks version.
In short order we had the Gulf of Tonkin charade that triggered full participation in the Vietnam Conflict, the 1967 Arab-Israel so-called Six Day War, the assassinations of RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X, the North Korean capture of the USS Pueblo, the Tet Offensive debacle, Ohio National Guard shooting students at Kent State, a coup d’etat against Salvador Allende in Chile-although the “official version” is that he took his own life (winky, winky,) the aftermath of the Vietnam War protest counterintelligence scandals in the US, which later led to the Church Commission, the Palestinian massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Berlin hosted Olympics, an era of hijackings, gas lines in the US, Watergate, the 1973 Yom Kipper War, the resignation of President Nixon, the Carter Administration, the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets and the Iranian Hostage Crisis.
This trip down memory lane is not meant to be exhaustive but is somewhat instructive from the standpoint of what many of us experienced over the years and what makes it somewhat difficult to point to a period in our lifetimes when political world chaos was not a “thing” and when information and or intelligence failures were not somewhat the “norm.”
We could go further back or provide more details, but my simple point is that incidents of all shapes, types and sizes brought us to the conditions that have shaped the world we live in now.
In terms of magnitude, the Berlin Wall came down and we seemingly lost our “Rocky Balboa” foe for life as the Soviet Union delaminated.
Fast forward to 1995 and we get to the period of interest from the standpoint of reformation of the IC, where there was a tremendous political row caused by a politically motivated ballistic missile report issued by the CIA.
The 1995 CIA National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Ballistic Missile Threats to the US was what we call a real “turd buster.” Cranky democrats (are there other kinds) smarting from 8 years of Reagan’s National Missile Defense–Strategic Defense Initiative-so-called Star Wars program-were itching to get their meat hooks into the residue of those dollars in the wake of the fall of the wall, and the topic du jour of a peace dividend from the fall of the Soviet Union.
This was code for military budget cuts repurposed for social giveaways to secure domestic popular support. The NIE delivered in every way imaginable, reducing the potential threat to just five already nuclear capable countries-but not considering a number of issues germane to proliferation, such as a country incentivized to procure rather than develop an organic capability.
Representative Curt Weldon (Pa) was incensed over what he termed the “political nature of the key judgements” that he believed failed to consider a number of reasonable and plausible alternatives that would have been unfavorable to the conclusions, thereby undermining democrat objectives.
This resulted in the “Gates Panel” headed by former CIA Director Robert Gates, who found no politicization of judgement, but some relatively minor procedural issues.
This did not satisfy Weldon and subsequently led to the Rumsfeld Commission that spent a lot more time and came to different judgements. A story for a different day, but this is where Dr. Stephen Cambone first surfaced to national attention as one of the commission leaders that would ultimately lead to him joining the government and eventually becoming the first USD-I.
The IC-in particular the CIA-reached somewhat of a low point under the Clinton administration, suffering budget cuts and an inability to replace the workforce, never mind grow as the Soviet Peace dividend fervor spread through the administration and congress at a time when it was increasingly evident that the challenge for American intelligence was growing.
Things had gotten so bad under CIA Dir James Woolsey, culminating in the Aldrich Ames spy scandal that led to his resignation, that when a small airplane landed on the White House lawn, the joke quickly spread that it was “DCI James Woolsey trying to get in to see President Clinton.”
I know what you are thinking: what in the name of Jethro Bodine does this have to do with the current ODNI?
Somewhat shortly thereafter the above, or actually in the middle of it, given how long it took to play out, a vacancy suddenly appeared in the CIA and DCI position vacated by John M Deutch 14 December 1996 that the Clinton Administration seemed to be deadlock certain would be filled by Anthony Lake.
That did not work out as planned and what played out as President Clinton tried to fill the position with an administration “friendly” is instructive in the overall theme of the need to ensure that the nation’s top IC elements managed by the ODNI need to be focused on providing exquisite intelligence to the president and congress in order to do the nation’s business without political overtones.
Max Dribbler
13 February 2025
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