U.S. Intelligence Efforts to Get Major Review

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 12, 2001; Page A03

President Bush has ordered a comprehensive review of the nation's intelligence capabilities, asking Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet to determine how the CIA and a dozen sister agencies are coping with rapid technological change and difficult new targets.

As the Pentagon nears completion of an internal review, Bush signed an order on Wednesday for Tenet to undertake a similar assessment by summer's end, with an eye toward consolidating programs, reducing bureaucratic rivalries and streamlining acquisitions in the intelligence community, which spends an estimated $30 billion annually.

Under the order -- titled National Security Presidential Directive 5 -- Tenet must name an internal panel of intelligence officials and an external panel from the private sector to conduct the review and make recommendations. The directive calls for Tenet to consult with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice in naming the external team.

"The president needs to make sure that the U.S. intelligence community is structured in such a way that serves him best and provides him with information he and other policymakers need," CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said yesterday. "It's a good time, at the start of a new administration, to make such a review."

The assessment comes at a time when the key intelligence agencies face structural issues that have been largely unaddressed since the end of the Cold War.

Intelligence experts inside and outside the government say the CIA is struggling to keep abreast of vast new repositories of "open source" information and to reorient its clandestine service to spy on elusive "transnational" targets -- terrorist organizations, drug traffickers and organized criminals.

The National Security Agency, responsible for eavesdropping on electronic communications around the globe, faces unprecedented challenges from powerful encryption software, hard-to-tap fiber-optic cables and an exploding volume of digital telephone traffic.

The National Reconnaissance Office, which deploys and operates the nation's spy satellites, is struggling to design a new generation of spacecraft at a time when high-resolution photographs from commercial satellites could be used to augment its own super-secret imagery.

"They're still not working as a community," said Mark M. Lowenthal, former staff director of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. "We still have internecine competition and bureaucratic waste."

During his confirmation hearing, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said he wanted to focus on "considerably improving our intelligence capabilities so that we know more about what people think, and how they behave, and how their behavior can be altered, and what the capabilities are in this world."

While Rumsfeld said close working relations with Tenet are a priority, he said a problem with the intelligence community is that it "is not a community, as you know; it is a set of organizations."

Former CIA director R. James Woolsey lauded Bush for ordering the review and asserted that two of the community's primary targets, Russia and China, have become considerably more nationalistic and aggressive since the end of the Cold War.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company