Officials Debate Idea of Spy Czar

The acting director of the CIA said Sunday that it was unnecessary to create a new level of bureaucracy to oversee U.S. intelligence functions and that his agency had taken steps to reform itself since Sept. 11 -- even disrupting a number of terrorist plots targeting the United States that were in the early stages of planning.

John McLaughlin acknowledged that “a good argument” could be made for establishing a single Cabinet-level position overseeing the 15 agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community. The idea is expected to be among the chief recommendations in the final report of the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, which is to be released Thursday.

But McLaughlin told “Fox News Sunday” he was concerned that creating such a position would result in a layer of needless bureaucracy.

“With some modest changes in the way the CIA is set up,” he said, “the director of central intelligence could carry out that function well and appropriately.”

His view was disputed by two members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which on July 9 released a scathing report on intelligence failures connected to both the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Iraq.

“The current situation is untenable,” Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “We need a new leadership, a new vision and reform in intelligence immediately.”

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), on the same program, said he was open to the idea of an “intelligence czar.” But he also called for a permanent CIA director to be chosen soon.

“We need to go ahead and have a new CIA director,” he said. “If John [McLaughlin] is going to be the permanent director, then fine, let’s move in that direction. But if we’re going elsewhere, I think we just need to get it done.”

George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence for seven years, left his post July 11 and was replaced on an interim basis by McLaughlin, a career CIA analyst who had been deputy director.

The Senate committee report said the CIA was partly to blame for intelligence overstating Iraq’s alleged biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs that was used by the Bush administration to justify the onset of hostilities last year.

The staff of the Sept. 11 commission has also faulted the CIA and the FBI for failing to recognize the emerging Al Qaeda threat and aggressively act upon it -- themes that are expected to figure in the commission’s final 500-plus-page report.

McLaughlin, who has been speaking out in recent days in an effort to shore up flagging public support for his agency, asserted that “the intelligence community of today is not the intelligence community of 9/11.”

He said the agency had bolstered its anti-terrorism capabilities over the last three years and had disrupted Al Qaeda plots against U.S. interests, including “maritime plots, air plots, plots against infrastructure,” which were “in the early planning stages.”

McLaughlin noted that while he took pride in the CIA’s successes against Al Qaeda, he did not want to be “falsely reassuring.”

“We can be successful 1,000 times and these people have to be lucky only once,” he said. “So this is still a serious fight we’re in.”

McLaughlin also said that while “about eight” of the Sept. 11 hijackers may have passed through Iran as they were preparing for their deadly mission, “we have no evidence that there is some sort of official connection between Iran and 9/11.”