John Negroponte:
High Spy

MARK GONGLOFF / Wall Street Journal 17feb2005

President Bush nominated former United Nations Ambassador John Negroponte to be the first U.S. national intelligence director, who will ride herd over Byzantine bureaucracies in an effort to avoid the costly intelligence failures of recent years. Is he being asked to do the impossible?

The post was created at the urging of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, which said poor communication between intelligence agencies contributed to the attacks. The intelligence failures surrounding the Iraq war only heightened the outcry for change. "If we're going to stop the terrorists before they strike," Mr. Bush said at the press conference introducing Mr. Negroponte, "we must ensure that our intelligence agencies work as a single, unified enterprise." The Senate must approve Mr. Negroponte's nomination, and the details of his job -- including the scope of his budget-setting authority -- must still be worked out.

Some critics might wonder whether Mr. Negroponte, who has no experience in the intelligence community, is right for the job. And his Senate confirmation will almost certainly raise again the allegations, which he has denied, that he looked the other way while right-wing Hondurans and Nicaraguans committed human-rights abuses when he was ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s. But he has four decades of government service and has been confirmed by the Senate twice in the past four years, most recently to serve as top U.S. agent in Iraq. And his lack of ties to the intelligence community might be a plus when dealing with the turf pride of 15 different agencies.

But he would still face a Herculean task. Analysts have described the intelligence system as dangerously bloated, with communication-deadening hierarchies that should have been gutted before (or instead of) appointing Mr. Negroponte to rule over them. "If you believe," said Charles Pena, director of defense policy studies at the CATO Institute, "that the problem of communication was exemplified by the FBI field agent who had trouble pushing up the chain of command the fact that he was seeing [suspected terrorists] taking flight lessons -- that doesn't change just because John Negroponte is now the national intelligence director."