An End to Spy Versus Spy?

Like the title characters in the movie “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” the FBI and CIA have been an outwardly happy couple that are actually in perpetual combat. The reforms that President Bush signed on to last week could at least theoretically end the warfare, resulting in agencies better able to focus on core missions. The job of persuading, or forcing, them to do so falls to the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte.

With the president at his back, he might even succeed.

Despite FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III’s best efforts to resist change, his agency is the decided loser -- and the CIA the winner -- in the reorganization of the 15 agencies that have something to do with intelligence, as recommended by a presidential commission.

The panel left the CIA mostly intact, and its leadership is already cobbling out an agreement over territory with the Pentagon’s even larger intelligence apparatus.

The CIA is a winner here, as well -- as coordinator of all use of human spies, including by the Pentagon. The commission’s report focused its fire on the abysmal performance of the FBI, which has repeatedly been drubbed for its 9/11 failures and, most recently, for an expensive computer upgrade program that has proved a total bust.

The result is that Negroponte gets direct authority over new national security divisions at the FBI and the Justice Department, including budgetary power and appointments.

The FBI is smarting over the humiliation, but it could prove a boon for the bureau. Historically, the FBI’s record on countering espionage plots, whether during World War II or the Cold War, is one of futility. It’s a basic misfit -- of cops who catch bank robbers trying to chase spies. Establishing a separate office in the FBI that answers to Negroponte as well as Mueller will at least allow the rest of the FBI to get on with what it does best, tracking down domestic criminals.

What’s more, Negroponte won’t be able to complain that he has powers only in name, not substance.

Congress tried and failed to persuade President George H.W. Bush in 1991 to appoint a director of national intelligence and reorganize the spy agencies. Even President Truman’s Cold War invention of the CIA from the remains of World War II’s elite spies was supposed to bring intelligence under a powerful single chief.

Negroponte, known as a ruthless policy operative, understands that history of failure. Unless he flexes the new muscles of his agency, he will end up as part of just another sequel.