Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents,
with more than four decades as a reporter
and writer, he recently concluded an assignment
as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell
at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
WASHINGTON - A bad idea for fixing American intelligence failures is gaining traction in Washington.
The same folks who gave us Homeland Security - the idea that you can weld a clutch of competing, inefficient and largely dysfunctional government agencies into a Cabinet-level super-agency that adds up to more than the sum of its parts - now want to give us a czar of national intelligence.
There is no question that our intelligence system, which costs us more than $40 billion a year, is broken. It has been broken for years, decades really. Broken at least since the 1970s, when then-director Stansfield Turner turned human intelligence capabilities in the Central Intelligence Agency into a stepchild and lavished most of the attention and money on what are called "national technical means," which means spy satellites.
Today's Keyhole 12 satellites can read the license plates of cars and Mercury satellites can eavesdrop on cell phone calls, but they can't seem to find Osama bin Laden.
Such high-tech capabilities are vital, but we need much more to fight a global war on terrorism. We need spies - people who can be recruited by al Qaeda and Hamas and the other crazies. We need to get inside.
High tech worked on the terrorists for a while, until they figured out we were listening to their satellite phone calls. Now they've gone back to sending couriers with written messages and using an ever-changing buffet of Web sites and e-mail addresses.
Would our nation be safer, our leaders better informed and democracy shored up by the creation of a national intelligence czar, under the White House or the Pentagon, with authority to direct, budget, man and task the separate spy agencies in our government? Probably not.
The parts of the system that do work - CIA field agents working to recruit, train and run human intelligence sources, station chiefs who aren't afraid to report the truth and quiet little analytical agencies like the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research that sometimes get it right when the big boys get it wrong - would likely be hampered or choked in any such reorganization.
The stuff we don't need right now - such as a proposed $50 billion plus new super-secret satellite spy system - would likely get built because more is better in the budget wars.
The Department of Defense, which already has authority over nearly 80 percent of the intelligence money spent today, would like authority over the whole enchilada. That means the people in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who didn't trust the intelligence they were getting from CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency on Iraq and created their own outfit to tell them what they wanted to hear.
What they wanted to hear, and heard, was that post-war Iraq would be a cakewalk; that the liberating Americans would be welcomed with cheers; that they could begin withdrawing American military forces with six months.
As the late Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana famously remarked of the founder of Time Magazine: "Henry Luce reminds me of a man what buys himself a shoe store and then stocks shoes that only fit himself."
One-size shoe stores and one-answer intelligence agencies are both likely to be disastrous investments.
A certain amount of competition and independence is a good thing in the intelligence world. A centralized super-agency would almost certainly impose a top-down demand for information and analysis that met the expectations of a president or secretary of defense.
Rather than rushing to create a huge new super-bureaucracy in the spy world, it would seem to make more sense to begin working incrementally to fix what is broken.
Here are a few modest suggestions:
Shift at least a part of the resources and manpower from national technical means so valuable during the Cold War to human intelligence that is so indispensable in a war on terrorism.
Give the director of central intelligence, who is already titular head of the intelligence community, authority to coordinate the effort and control the budget among the various agencies.
Finally, don't do anything until after the November election. Fixing our national intelligence system is far too important to be undertaken in a season of political warfare.
