Nov. 23, 2005 – 6:41 p.m.
Unless you work in Washington, it defies explanation that the Department of Homeland Security is still getting its intelligence act together, considering that one of the mains reasons DHS was set up more than two and a half years ago was to prevent another al Qaeda attack here.
Prevention, of course, comes from good intelligence, which is the fancy word for information that is gathered mostly by stealth (an al Qaeda code book, say). But trench coats and spy satellites aren’t the only tools that can pick up good dope, especially when it comes to the 22 DHS agencies that are the last, best hope for catching al Qaeda operatives who have already eluded U.S. agents overseas.
For such last-ditch defenders, gathering critical intelligence can amount to just staying alert: a Border Patrol agent detecting a flaw in a passport, a customs inspector noting an odd lading bill for Chinese cargo, a Coast Guard cutter captain retrieving a piece of a new rubber raft from the wintry waters off Long Island Sound near a nuclear plant.
But all such flotsam and jetsam needs to be shipped to a central place to be matched with other odd data lurking in files — a police report, say, of three nervous Yemeni “students” ticketed for speeding a few weeks back on the Long Island Expressway — sorted out, compiled in intelligence reports, and routed to relevant homeland security and other federal, state and local agencies.
The problem is, the Homeland Security Department still does not have a centralized integrated database of its own intelligence. It doesn’t know what it knows.
The public hasn’t heard much about DHS intelligence woes, if only because so many other intelligence woes have held the spotlight, starting with the infamous failure to “connect the dots” of al Qaeda activity before Sept. 11, continuing with Iraq pre-war intelligence, on through the creation of a whole new uber-bureaucracy to make the CIA, FBI and Pentagon spy agencies play better together.
Indeed, DHS intelligence seems to be an afterthought in a number of important places. At a conference inside the FBI last month, a top counterterrorism official waxed warmly for 20 minutes on the bureau’s “seamless” new relationship with other federal, state and big-city intelligence organizations — and left DHS out entirely.
The man coaxed out of retirement to hammer together DHS’s intelligence shop, and get it some outside respect to boot, is Charlie Allen, whose 47 years at the CIA may have amounted to practice for the job at hand. True to his CIA heritage, he arrived with no notice in September.
“An eccentric workaholic,” in one representative sobriquet, Allen was a legend around the CIA’s forested grounds, where he often toiled through the night on his assignments, didn’t hesitate to challenge superiors, and was waist-deep in some of the era’s most controversial clandestine programs, including the Reagan White House’s secret “continuity of government” plans and arms sales to Iran in the early 1980s, the creation of the agency’s bin Laden unit after the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa and the tasking of Predator drones’ Hellfire missiles against al Qaeda.
But the episode that may have best prepared him for DHS was his role in a little-known, closely held effort by CIA in the 1990s to reform U.S. intelligence and herd its scattered agencies into a coordinated counterterrorism effort.
The problems were similar to ones he now faces, from the lack of an inventory control of reports and tasking orders to disparate e-mail systems and security badges, according to an exhaustive 2004 piece in U.S. News & World Report. Until 1995 the CIA lacked a chief information officer.
The effort to integrate the intelligence agencies under CIA leadership failed. “[C]ontrolling intelligence was more important than using it,” Joan Dempsey, one of Allen’s three teammates, told the magazine. Failure was attributed to CIA Director George J. Tenet’s alleged retreat from the effort.
Allen’s first win at DHS was an upgrade of his billet to chief intelligence officer, the department’s first, reporting directly to Homeland boss
“What is unclear, however,” said Rep.
Indeed, according to a senior DHS consultant on intelligence issues, Allen is already bumping up against powerful DHS fiefdoms, such as the Office of State and Local Government Coordination, the department’s main interface with state homeland security directors, and managers of the Homeland Security Information Network, existing intelligence channels that “remain firmly in the grip of the Homeland Security Operations Center” run by retired Marine Corps Gen. Matthew Broderick.
“There are evidently some sparks flying there,” said the source, who requested anonymity because of his ongoing relationship with DHS leaders.
Absent budget control over the 10 DHS agencies with intelligence shops, Allen “has to have the full support of Chertoff, and Chertoff has to have the president’s full support,” said Rand Beers, who worked with Allen on classified programs for more than 25 years as a White House or State Department official in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
And “he’s going to have to have good relations with [John D.] Negroponte,” who heads the new Directorate of National Intelligence, Beers said. The directorate is yet another rival for the role DHS was supposed to have as the chief analyst and dispenser of domestic threat information.
“I really don’t know how he’s going to do over there,” Beers said of Allen. “The question is whether he is susceptible to the ideas of others. When the inevitable alternatives [to his own ideas] are offered . . . I don’t know how he’ll answer to that.”
He’ll also have to account for his performance in public — spinach for CIA officials. Allen got a taste of that last month at the hands of Democratic Rep.
“Are you on that? Are you on that call each day?” Markey demanded.
“I’m not every day, but my senior officials are. And as I said earlier — ”
“Who do you require — in the absence of a common database — who do you require to be on that call each day?
“We do not —
“By the way, is there a call each day to all 10?”
And so on.
DHS spokeswoman Michelle Petrovich disputed the idea of resistance to Allen’s agenda from DHS units, saying the state and local office under its acting chief Chet Lunner, a former Transportation Security Administration official, “was completely integrated into Mr. Allen’s office.”
Likewise, Petrovich said, relations with Gen. Broderick’s Operations Center were good “and this positive relationship is a key element in assuring that the sharing of operational information is closely integrated with DHS intelligence activities.”
Petrovich also said Allen’s reputation was drawing top people from the CIA and other intelligence agencies to DHS.
He may be off to a good start, but he’s got a long ways to go to his ultimate goal of making DHS intelligence “a true peer of the other . . . agencies, with all the rights, responsibilities, and the respect, that entails.”
That prospect might draw chuckles right now at the FBI and some other quarters of U.S. intelligence, but there have been stranger turnarounds in Washington reputations.
Just not very often.
Sighted: John Sopko, former top investigator for House Homeland Security Committee Democrats, now running the Operations Division of the Homeland Security Institute, a DHS think-tank contractor . . . Staff departures from the Democratic side of that committee, as well as the House Intelligence Committee, are not over, said a former staffer who stays in close contact.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.