National intelligence making strides in first year

  • Published
  • By Master Sgt. Mitch Gettle
  • Air Force Print News
WASHINGTON (AFPN) --  Although the idea for a single person or agency that oversees the efforts of the intelligence community has been around since the 1950s, it wasn't until after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that the move was made toward this intelligence reform.

The executive branch and Congress began to look at the intelligence community structure and the idea of reorganizing by appointing one individual as the director of national intelligence, said Gen. Michael V. Hayden, principal deputy director of national intelligence.

This led to a 2004 law that created of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, on April 22, 2005. Ambassador John D. Negroponte was appointed as director with General Hayden as his principal deputy director.

Making this decision "wasn't about failure, but about shortcomings in the intelligence area -- primarily interagency communication," the general said. "We needed a little more coherence, unity of effort and collaboration inside the intelligence community. We worked very well together but some agencies were a little too autonomous and independent."

Sixteen agencies within the U. S. government have an intelligence-gathering mission, but the information thus obtained may be needed on a grander scale than just inside a particular agency. This is where the ODNI comes in. National intelligence is that intelligence needed by or useful to more than one cabinet department or someone who is ranked above those departments, like the president, General Hayden said.

The law gives ODNI two priorities: act as senior intelligence adviser to the president and National Security Council, and govern the intelligence community.

In the adviser capacity, the director works with policy-makers and commanders to decide what the priorities are for the nation's intelligence gathering. He also is responsible for briefing the president and the National Security Council on current threats.

General Hayden listed the priorities facing the intelligence community today: counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation (spread of weapons of mass destruction) with a heavy focus on Iran and North Korea, and preventing surprise.

The general explained the focus on preventing surprise in more detail.

"It was hard for us to conceive the attacks we saw on the 11th of September," General Hayden said. At the time of the attacks he was serving as director of the National Security Agency. "We knew they were bad people, we knew they were plotting; we just weren't ready to accept evil on such a broad scale."

Through the lessons learned, the ODNI has an "outside the box" mentality when it comes to improving the quality of intelligence analysis.

"You don't take the facts as we get them and put them into familiar ruts," the general said. "You have enough discipline to look at intelligence and say 'Maybe it makes better sense if I line them up this way' and you draw a different conclusion. We want more of an active scrum among different analytical theories so that we put the facts together in different ways and then decide which one best explains reality or what will happen to the nation. This is one area I think we are doing pretty well.”

General Hayden noted that Iran has received a lot of media attention in the past few months and the situation there from an intelligence standpoint is ambiguous.

"Keep in mind this is hard work and intel people deal with ambiguities," General Hayden said. "However, taking the data we have and lining it up however you want, our best judgment tells us Iran is headed toward developing a nuclear weapon and that is the counsel we are providing the senior policy makers."

The general noted that since its inception last year, the ODNI has done a very good job in providing quality analysis to its customers, but the more difficult job is governing the intelligence community.

The ODNI oversees the intelligence missions for the 16 agencies and more than 100,000 people who make up the intelligence community. General Hayden likened the governing task to that of a successful pro sports team.

"Some (teams) are consistent winners and some seem to never win or break a .500 season. And yet, you would think they all start out equally, so what’s the difference? It can’t just be the players, because the players are transient, so it must be the organization," the general said.

" We’re not going to go out there and take pictures or interrogate prisoners, or intercept a communication. But if we (at ODNI) do our job well, we will create a structure where we really have unity of effort, that our direction isn’t artificially controlling the parts but actually liberating them and enabling them to be more than they would otherwise be," General Hayden said. "That is our task."

General Hayden believes that moving into the 21st century the intelligence career field will need more people who are culturally sensitive and use cultural intelligence, relying on language training.

"The war today is more subtle and requires a deep understanding of how the enemy thinks," he said. "This requires a cultural knowledge to understand. There is no better way you can have a tactile sense for a foreign civilization than to see and learn it through their language."