Fight Brews Over 9/11 Reform Plan

President Bush’s plans to reform the nation’s espionage community were criticized Tuesday as inadequate by lawmakers and members of the Sept. 11 commission, setting the stage for a struggle between the White House and Congress over how much power to grant a proposed intelligence czar and counterterrorism center.

The White House proposals were dissected during rare August hearings held by committees in both houses of Congress. Much of the criticism came from Democrats pushing for a more aggressive restructuring of the intelligence community.

Republicans also voiced concern that the administration had embraced half-measures -- particularly by endorsing the idea of creating a national intelligence director to “coordinate” the activities of the nation’s spy agencies but not giving the holder of the job authority over agency budgets or hiring and firing of senior personnel.

“If you don’t have the authority to pick the people, isn’t a national director just a shell game and a shell operation?” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), remarks echoed by a key Republican on the Sept. 11 commission.

Creating the new position “makes no sense at all unless it has the power to break up bureaucratic layers,” said commission member John F. Lehman, Navy secretary during the Reagan administration and rumored to be a candidate for CIA director in the Bush White House.

“This national intelligence director has to have hiring and firing power,” Lehman said during testimony before the House Government Reform Committee. “He has to have not just budget coordination power but budget and appropriations and reprogramming power.”

Without those authorities, Lehman said, the office “will become just another [bureaucratic] layer.”

In a hearing held by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the panel, evoked the fake villages designed to fool Russian royalty by saying the reform envisioned by the White House “would create a kind of Potemkin national intelligence director -- you know, where you see the facade but there’s not real authority behind it.”

The hearings came one day after Bush described his vision for restructuring the nation’s intelligence community, an undertaking vaulted to the front of the Washington agenda by a combination of presidential politics and the effect of the Sept. 11 commission’s final report.

The creation of a new intelligence director and a national counterterrorism center are the bipartisan commission’s two main recommendations. Both ideas are designed to foster better coordination and information-sharing among the CIA, the FBI and the 13 other agencies, mostly under the purview of the Defense Department, that make up the nation’s intelligence apparatus.

Although the CIA director is supposed to oversee the activities of all 15 agencies, experts agree the position lacks the clout to be effective in that role, largely because the Defense Department controls 80% of the intelligence budget.

The Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry, has endorsed all of the commission’s recommendations and has criticized Bush for being slow to make changes.

But there is a growing concern among national security officials about the rush to reform.

Appearing before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, a panel of high-ranking intelligence officials urged Congress to proceed carefully as it overhauled a system that had seen only modest changes since the 1947 National Security Act created the CIA and the National Security Council.

“Are the recommendations of 9/11 workable? Are they doable in totality? I don’t think they are,” said John Brennan, director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which was set up last year as a clearinghouse for terrorist data gathered by the CIA, the FBI and other agencies. “I don’t think we would do a service to this nation if we took these as they’re stated and ran with them with haste. I just don’t think there is sufficient engineering, design, consideration of all the complexities here.”

Congressional leaders have called on both committees that held hearings Tuesday to produce reform legislation over the next few months.