Bush Expected to Oppose Creating Intelligence Czar

Faced with a succession of scathing reports on prewar intelligence on Iraq, President Bush is likely to endorse centralizing authority within the spy agencies but oppose creating a single national intelligence czar, according to a senior Republican strategist familiar with White House planning.

In the weeks ahead, the strategist said, the administration is likely to support proposals to encourage more coordination by providing the director of central intelligence, who heads the CIA, with increased authority over the budgets of the 14 other intelligence agencies.

But the strategist said the president “in all likelihood” would oppose measures embraced by many legislators to create a national director with authority over all intelligence agencies.

Bush’s emerging stance would put him somewhere between those who favor creating a new Cabinet-level position to oversee the intelligence community and those who would leave the organization chart as is. No matter how the debate comes out, the intelligence community faces potentially its biggest shakeup in decades.

The idea of creating a director of national intelligence has been endorsed by a series of blue-ribbon panels that have studied U.S. spy agencies, including the joint congressional committee that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. Though the Central Intelligence Agency’s director is nominally in charge of coordinating the other agencies, critics say the agency chief lacks the time or the clout to be effective in that aspect of the job.

More than 80% of the intelligence community’s budget is controlled by the Pentagon, and the CIA director does not have the authority to hire and fire the heads of other agencies. As a result, congressional inquiries have concluded that the CIA’s directions to other agencies are sometimes ignored.

But there are also high-profile critics of the idea of creating an intelligence czar, including the outgoing CIA director, George J. Tenet, who testified before Congress that it would be a mistake to add a new layer of bureaucracy between the president and the agency that provided his daily intelligence briefing and carried out clandestine overseas operations.

The heightened attention on an overhaul is likely to be only one of several ripples sent into the presidential campaign by last week’s Senate Intelligence Committee report excoriating the prewar intelligence on Iraq.

One key political question in the weeks ahead may be whether Bush and his allies can focus the debate on prospective intelligence community changes, or whether Democrats can maintain a spotlight on the flaws in the intelligence used to justify the war.

Although some of the panel’s specific findings could help Bush defend himself against charges of manipulating intelligence, the report’s overall finding of no credible evidence that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction or collaborating with Al Qaeda on terrorist attacks could sharpen doubts about whether the threat from Saddam Hussein justified the war.

“What Bush has to hope for is that things do not go badly in Iraq over the next month or so,” said Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, an independent polling organization. “If the justification is low and the costs are high, that’s a bad equation for Bush.”

James P. Rubin, a senior foreign policy advisor to Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said the American people felt the administration misled them into war. “Do you think Bush’s talking about reforming the CIA is going to fix that problem?” Rubin said. “Not likely.”

Another way Bush may try to shift the focus from past problems to future revamping is to nominate a permanent CIA director before the November election to succeed Tenet, whose last official day on the job is today.

“The president’s attitude all along has been, ‘I want a director,’ ” the senior GOP strategist said. “We’re at war. This is one of the principal agencies in our war.”

Bush has spoken in general terms for months about the need to overhaul the intelligence community, which sprawls over 15 agencies with an estimated budget of $40 billion. Last February, he appointed his own commission -- headed by former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb of Virginia and retired federal appeals court Judge Laurence Silberman, a Republican -- to study the prewar intelligence failings. That report is due next March, and advisors say the president may be careful about specifying too much of his agenda before then.

Still, the senior strategist familiar with administration planning said that after the Senate committee report and the release later this month of the results of the investigation by the independent commission studying the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Bush “will become more explicit about some of these items.”

“I know he will endorse reform, but I also think he wants to be measured about this,” the strategist added.

He said the president “will probably support” providing the CIA director “greater control over the intelligence budgets for other agencies,” which would let the director “rationalize the use of resources” by obtaining more say in how money is divided among the agencies.

But the strategist said Bush “in all likelihood wouldn’t favor” proposals from many legislators to create a director of national intelligence with complete control over all the spy agencies.

Proponents of a director of national intelligence, including Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) argue that centralizing authority in a single director would help solve one of the clearest problems identified in the report by the Sept. 11 commission and other studies: a lack of coordination between the intelligence agencies.

“Without a single head for the entire intelligence community, our various agencies have evolved with different rules, cultures and databases,” Harman wrote recently in The Times. “As a result, they do not always coordinate their efforts at collecting raw intelligence or analyzing it.”

But the strategist said the White House feared that creating a national director would create unnecessary distance between the president and the CIA director -- who would still be responsible for the vast majority of intelligence available to the administration.

Kerry has endorsed the idea of establishing a national director of intelligence. But in a wrinkle that leaves him closer to the ideas Bush is considering, Kerry has said he believes that official should also be the CIA director.

Kerry aides said they were eager to debate overhauling intelligence and to question why Bush hadn’t moved more quickly to address the issue. But it’s also clear that the campaign wants to keep the debate focused more on how Bush used intelligence in the months leading up to the war than on the more esoteric question of how the intelligence agencies should interact in the future.

The committee saved for a later report, not due until after Election Day, the politically explosive question of whether the White House misused or publicly mischaracterized the intelligence it received from the CIA.

And although several Democrats dissented, the committee report cleared the administration of another incendiary charge, “that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.”

The Kerry campaign’s initial response focused on the need for revamping intelligence. “Right now, the view is that Kerry has to focus on his policies, his approaches to the way he would win the war on terror and the way he would finish the job in Iraq and leave it to the rest of the party to explain the flaws in the Bush administration,” said one Democrat.

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Times staff writer Greg Miller contributed to this report.