Spy Chief Faces Huge Burdens, Meager Authority

By Bob Drogin

Feb. 18, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — As U.S. ambassador to Iraq for the last eight months, John D. Negroponte deftly maneuvered between warring factions, deadly ambushes and dubious allies in a brutal combat zone.

Negroponte will need those skills and more for the bureaucratic wars he will face in Washington if he is confirmed as the first director of national intelligence.

President Bush’s nomination of Negroponte on Thursday ended two months of speculation about who would finally agree to oversee America’s demoralized spy services.

But the surprise choice of a veteran diplomat who speaks five languages -- but has no known experience working in the shadowy world of espionage -- also refueled concerns that the high-profile post entailed vast responsibilities but limited authority and that it may do little to increase the nation’s security.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said she warned Negroponte in a telephone conversation Thursday that he would be leaving the relative safety of the heavily guarded embassy compound in Baghdad for the uncertainties of Washington politics.

“I said, ‘You’re leaving the Green Zone for the red zone,’ ” said Harman, who was a strong proponent of the intelligence reform bill that created the job.

Negroponte supporters argued that his access to the president -- and his diplomatic skill in getting incompatible agencies to work together -- could outweigh his weak intelligence background.

But a Bush administration official who has worked with the easygoing diplomat described the early stages of the amorphous job as “impossible: no office, no staff, no budget.”

“John doesn’t have a political bone in his body,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He’s never worked the political angles. But in this kind of job, he’ll need political backing. This isn’t just diplomacy anymore.”

The official added: “Where’s his political backing? In Congress? No. From the Republican Party? No. He’s not in the Cabinet. Are Cabinet officers really going to report to him on anything?”

The challenge is immense. For starters, Negroponte would have to balance two often-competing roles. He would be the president’s chief intelligence advisor and the leader of a sprawling spying community that is required by law to remain independent of politics.

Moreover, Negroponte must assert control over the disparate leaderships, budgets and priorities of the nation’s 15 often-fractious intelligence agencies to force their entrenched bureaucracies -- and an estimated 200,000 employees -- to work together to prevent attacks.

Once in office, Negroponte would create his job from scratch. The law requires a report on the rewired intelligence system within a year.

He would be expected to prepare a consolidated intelligence budget, overhaul security and technology policies, coordinate priorities for strategic planning and covert operations, monitor agency performance, report to Congress, advise the president and interact with foreign governments.

He would have to mediate a growing turf battle between the CIA and the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has expanded foreign intelligence-gathering activities by the military, including the use of clandestine teams, that were traditionally undertaken by the CIA.

More important, Negroponte must work with Rumsfeld to decide how and where the estimated $40-billion annual intelligence budget is spent.

About 80% of the money is hidden within the Pentagon’s budget, and the two officials must share control of Pentagon-based intelligence agencies. It’s far from clear how that would work.

Also unclear is how much power Porter J. Goss, the current CIA chief, must relinquish.

Ever since the CIA was created in 1947, the CIA boss also served as director of central intelligence and was nominally in charge of all other spy services. Although he did not occupy a Cabinet position, he reported to the president. In the future, he would report to Negroponte.

Goss, who was initially considered a strong candidate to become the first national director, said Thursday that he welcomed Negroponte’s nomination as a “critical step” to “create even better-coordinated working relationships and communications” between intelligence agencies.

The style Negroponte would bring to thorny problems in Washington has been apparent to many who deal with him in Iraq.

Negroponte’s nomination surprised staffers at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, one of the largest U.S. missions in the world, with 3,500 employees -- many of them security personnel, a testament to the danger of the posting.

Unlike his predecessor in Iraq, civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III, Negroponte has drawn high marks for his competence and low-key style. His tenure, from his arrival in June as sovereignty was returned to the Iraqis to the United Nations-sanctioned election last month, is viewed far more favorably than Bremer’s, despite the widening insurgency.

Bremer’s relationship with the military and the longtime commander in Iraq, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, was said to be badly strained. They both failed to act on early warnings of abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib detention facility, a scandal that stained the U.S. effort in Iraq.

Negroponte has had far closer relations with Army Gen. George W. Casey, who is in charge of the 170,000 multinational troops under U.S. command in Iraq, including more than 150,000 Americans.

Negroponte and Casey have adjoining offices in the embassy annex -- formerly Saddam Hussein’s palace -- and the two are said to meet or talk frequently.

“When the president convenes a [National Security Council] meeting, Negroponte and Casey are side by side” on the video link, a U.S. official said. “You never saw Bremer and Sanchez side by side.”

Times staff writers Doyle McManus and Greg Miller in Washington and Patrick J. McDonnell in Baghdad contributed to this report.