The camel, so the old story goes, was supposed to be a horse. Except that a committee designed it. Why am I telling you this? Because it has been just over a year since the Congress redesigned America's intelligence community. Today, I can report that there are more layers of management than ever before between the spies and the spy bosses. And I can also report that the folks in charge of implementing the redesign, smart people all, are also for the most part cautious, conventional types who eschew out of the box thinking and reflexively lean toward preserving the status quo.

Let me put it another way. The Congress had the chance to create a lean, aggressive, responsive thoroughbred of an intelligence apparatus, peopled with the sorts of eccentric but creative personality types General William Donovan recruited for OSS during World War II. And what did Congress actually do? Congress listened to the lobbyists, the professional bureaucrats, and the defenders of mediocrity and gave us a brand new, top-heavy, molasses-slow, behind the curve Pushmepullyou intelligence community.

This is par for the course. When Congress had the chance to create a brand new quick-reacting, agile cabinet-level department to safeguard the United States, what we got was the Department of Homeland Security. Which is run by lawyers. And we all remember how nimble DHS was during Hurricane Katrina.

So, it's been about a year since Congress took a lot of the marbles away from the Director of Central Intelligence, placed an Intel Czar Director of National Intelligence above the DCI, and told him to fix the intelligence mess. (Oh, yeah, right. As if the missile czars, energy czars, inflation czars, drug czars, and AIDS czars who came before this one were able to solve their particular problems toot sweet with a simple, powerful snap of the fingers.) Anyway, the man the president appointed to do the czaring was Ambassador John D. Negroponte. I know Negroponte and I like him. He's bright, incisive, and loyal to subordinates; a strong personality who is a talented and sometimes inspiring leader.

But here is what Czar John the First is not. He's not a spook. And he certainly doesn't think like one either. Ambassador John Negroponte thinks exactly like what he is: a career diplomat and gifted office politician.

Which, one might argue, is all right, just so long as the ambassador surrounds himself with the sorts of acolytes who can fill the spook-think vacuum. My Utopian vision of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is a cadre of brilliant, ruthless, streetwise operators who like to play dirty tricks on our adversaries; cunning, inventive, hard-nosed manipulators who are always coming up with crazy but productive ideas about how we can penetrate and neutralize our enemies. "The sorts of shrewd, scheming characters who need constant adult supervision," one former stratosphere-level CIA official told me a couple of weeks back. "They're the ones you want running your spies."

Except that hasn't happened. Negroponte has filled his executive suite with the personality types with whom he is most comfortable: other career diplomats and a smattering of mild-mannered CIA staffers who manifest the reserved demeanor common to Foggy Bottom and the embassy cocktail party circuit. His deputy director for management is Ambassador Patrick Kennedy, who served with Negroponte at the United Nations. Kennedy is a nice enough guy. But nowhere in Kennedy's background is there any experience that would prepare him for managing an intelligence apparatus, which presents unique demands because of the unconventional nature of the intelligence community's mission.

Negroponte's chief of counter-proliferation is another career diplomat, Kenneth C. Brill. Brill served as ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna where, according to published reports, he worked diligently to torpedo the Bush administration's hard line approach to making sure countries like Iran and North Korea don't develop nuclear weapons. Brill's diplomatic technique at IAEA was based on appeasement and concession. Brill is a bizarre choice for a position that demands grit, backbone, and the will to confront rogue nations.

The Intel Czar's top assistant and chief of staff is a former CIA clandestine officer named David R. Shedd. According to a former CIA colleague, Shedd "is a career staff type who has moved up the ladder because of his bureaucratic skills, not his operational skills." That news is not encouraging. Still, the colleague says that Shedd "also works hard (to what end I am not sure), and he means well. I suppose that should count for something."

The DNI's top spy is Mary Margaret Graham, a career CIA clandestine service officer whose background and temperament are unfortunately similar to Shedd's. Graham was, I was told, once appointed base chief in Stamford, Connecticut (that's where the Soviet UN mission had a weekend retreat). She also worked counterintelligence, and pulled a tour at the National Security Agency. But Graham's 'corridor file' at CIA has never included the phrase "brilliant, aggressive, risk-taking operations officer," and so it is questionable whether she will provide Negroponte with the sorts of ingenious, inventive original thinking that Bill Casey got from his cadre of clandestine service mavericks in the 1980s.

Do you note any personality-profile patterns emerging here among the people with whom John Negroponte has selected to surround himself? I do. And it's ominous. The fact is that the State Department's operational culture -- keeping everything moving along quietly, diplomatically, and flap-free -- is antithetical to the intelligence-gathering ethos, which often depends on obtaining information through subterfuge, deception, and plain old-fashioned theft. As one veteran operations officer put it to me recently, "If I'm not breaking the laws of the country to which I'm posted, I'm not doing my job. Ambassadors don't always like that."

The rationale that one hears to justify the spook-think vacuum at ODNI is that no one there is actually going to do any spying. The DNI, one is reminded, was envisioned as the nation's intelligence czar: managing the intelligence community, coordinating all its myriad agencies, focusing intelligence priorities, setting budgets, implementing a cohesive, responsive national intelligence strategy, and adjudicating differences between competing fiefdoms. Of course, the way Congress designed ODNI, it's going to take something like a thousand people to do all that managing, coordinating, focusing, budgetizing, implementing, and adjudicating, at a cost of, well, let's just say it ain't gonna be cheap.

But wait a second. Wasn't there already someone in the government tasked to coordinate intelligence activities? The answer is yes. He was known as the Director of Central Intelligence, and he didn't need a staff of a thousand-plus middle managers and other functionaries, or a big new headquarters building, or an eight-to-nine-to ten-figure budget to get the job done. Y'know, I think we owe it to the Congress to write and "thank" them for building us another...camel.

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I received a fair amount of email about my column on the Army JAG officer who told a sniper sergeant that she didn't work for him. So here's a clarification about one of the anecdotes in that column. According to U.S. Army Colonel Lyle Cayce, an active duty Staff Judge Advocate, "While the press reports that a JAG vetoed a Hellfire attack on Mullah Omar have grown to near urban legend status, those reports are false.  In fact, the JAG never told the CENTCOM commander that it was illegal to strike the convoy.  Rather, the JAG advised that Mullah...

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