Overhaul of U.S. spy agencies unveiled

The nation’s intelligence director announced broad changes at U.S. spy agencies Wednesday, including an expedited effort to improve collaboration and speed up the screening of job applicants who speak Arabic or have other crucial skills.

Retired U.S. Navy Adm. J. Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, outlined what he described as a 100-day plan to fix problems that have persisted in the nation’s spy community despite a host of reforms since the Sept. 11 attacks.

McConnell said that the Sept. 11 plotters “were able to take advantage of our structures and processes” and that the Al Qaeda terrorist network remains committed to launching further strikes on U.S. soil.

“The intent is clear, and the planning is still going in,” he said.

McConnell said his top priority is to improve collaboration among U.S. spy agencies. Several changes he outlined are modeled on reforms made by the U.S. military in the 1980s to encourage the separate armed services to work more closely together. Among the changes is a plan to require senior intelligence officials to have served tours at multiple agencies before being eligible for high-level promotions.

The CIA and other agencies also continue to be hindered by screening processes that make it difficult to obtain security clearances for U.S. citizens who are immigrants or whose parents were born abroad.

“It’s a cultural bias, and we need to move beyond that cultural bias,” McConnell said, referring to the long-standing reluctance by spy agencies to hire applicants with close relatives overseas.

Foreign-born applicants have aroused concerns that they could be susceptible to pressure from family members abroad or that they might not be loyal to the United States.

Intelligence agencies have been under pressure to boost their hiring of Arab Americans.

The plans outlined Wednesday call for spy agencies to speed up their security screenings of qualified job applicants. The process now takes an average of 120 days, and officials said intelligence reform legislation passed two years ago requires that the timeframe be cut in half.

To reach that goal, officials said they are overhauling background checks, searching for ways to assemble information more quickly and bypassing processes that have required investigators to take such time-consuming steps as interviewing applicants’ neighbors.

Officials also described initiatives designed to improve information sharing among agencies, including a new classified computer system.

The proposed changes are the first that McConnell has discussed publicly since assuming the top spy post nearly two months ago.

Before rejoining the nation’s intelligence community, McConnell had been a senior partner at the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.

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greg.miller@latimes.com