Daily Threat Briefing to End

President Bush will no longer get a separate daily intelligence report on terrorist threats, ending a practice that began after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials who outlined changes affecting analysts at the nation’s spy agencies Tuesday.

Instead, the most important elements of the so-called President’s Terror Threat Report will be incorporated into the daily briefing Bush gets from Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte, the officials said.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the consolidation as part of a broader effort to streamline intelligence reports for top government officials while also taking steps to prevent the sorts of analytic failures that contributed to erroneous prewar assessments on Iraq.

Several changes are aimed at improving what is known as the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified report that summarizes major international developments tracked by the nation’s spy agencies.

Although previously drafted by the CIA, the President’s Daily Brief has “become a community product” prepared by Negroponte’s staff. It routinely includes input from other agencies in the nation’s intelligence community, said one of the two officials who briefed reporters Tuesday.

Both officials are senior officers on the National Intelligence Council, a panel that reports to Negroponte and is increasingly serving as a clearinghouse for the work done by analysts at the CIA, State Department, Defense Intelligence Agency and the 12 other members of the intelligence community.

The National Intelligence Council has traditionally served as an in-house think tank for the intelligence community. It is best known for producing the National Intelligence Estimates -- reports that are meant to convey a consensus view in the intelligence community on issues confronting policymakers.

But in another significant shift, the officials said the intelligence council would no longer be focused on building consensus among analysts at various agencies and instead would call attention to disagreements on crucial topics. When disagreements emerge, the plan is “not to smooth them out but to highlight them,” one official said.

The change is in response to criticism of prewar analysis on Iraq, in which dissenting views were relegated to footnotes in reports that reached erroneous, sweeping conclusions that Iraq had stockpiles of banned weapons.

The officials declined to discuss intelligence community assessments on specific topics. Other government officials said the National Intelligence Council had recently completed several high-level estimates on Iran that reflected a new emphasis on acknowledging uncertainty in intelligence reports.

Unlike prewar assessments on Iraq, the estimates on Iran “are very upfront about what they know, what they don’t know and what level of certainty they have in their judgments,” said a government official who has read the Iran reports.

One of the recent reports expressed relatively high confidence in describing Iran’s uranium enrichment program, said the official, who requested anonymity. “But what it’s for, what their intentions are -- there is less confidence in those areas,” the official said.