In order for Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte to turn intelligence fiefdoms into a truly integrated community, he will need one critical ingredient: the president's backing, says a Duke University public policy professor.
"President Bush must be personally involved in the initial stages of the reform effort, on the DNI's right hand, or reform fails," said Ted Treibel, a former Pentagon national security official and current professor in Duke's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy.
The Senate confirmed Negroponte on Thursday as the country's first director of national intelligence.
"Bush will need to personally step in and side with Negroponte when things get sticky, as they inevitably must. He has been reluctant to do this in the past," Triebel said. "If he sits on the sidelines, Negroponte will not be able to do what the 9/11 commission and Congress envision, and intelligence capability will suffer."
For his part, Negroponte must quickly take the reform reins and proceed to implement the law in a way that ensures needed culture change, he said.
Triebel noted that in the recently passed Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, the intelligence director was instructed to "design and deliver" a consolidated intelligence budget, giving him the monetary control necessary for authentic reform.
However, the law also says that "authority of cabinet secretaries" -- such as Secretary of Defense, who now controls the great majority of people and assets -- should be upheld. Notably, the DNI lacks the power to fire the head of any of the existing intelligence agencies.
"This muddies the water and has the potential of seriously diluting the authority needed to ensure cooperative intelligence sharing," Triebel said.
The intent of creating "an 800-pound gorilla in the world of intelligence" is to get cooperative information-sharing and to bring civility into an adversarial supra-organization, Triebel said. "There will be no intelligence 'dot-connecting' until this happens and, despite 9/11, it has not yet happened.
"The danger is that Negroponte and his staff of hundreds will become the top bureaucratic layer that filters reports to policymakers, including the president, based simply on inputs from the various intelligence chiefs," Triebel said.