Is it possible, at this point, to go backward in counterterror intelligence?

Not drift, mind you, or tread water or make little progress over the past year, but to regress?

A little-noticed survey published last week by by the National Governors Association (NGA) found that 60 percent of state homeland security directors are unhappy to one degree or another with federal intelligence programs.

No surprises there, but here’s what else the NGA found: “These numbers represent a sharp increase from the combined dissatisfied/somewhat dissatisfied percentages from the previous year, when 39 percent fewer respondents took a dim view of the specific nature of federal intelligence.”

Let’s go to the napkin: By my math, that means there are about three times as many homeland security directors unhappy with the quality of federal intelligence programs as there were surveyed last year at this time.

If Michael Chertoff were the head of programming for NBC instead of DHS, he’d be looking for a job.

The NGA’s numbers arrived amid a slump in homeland security performances. One government report said the FBI and the Coast Guard don’t know who’s in charge of port security. Another said emergency response officials in the Washington, D.C., area are still figuring out what plan they might use when the inevitable terror attack comes.

But I digress.

The United States has far, far more intelligence agencies and programs than it has ever had. It’s a wonder the spooks don’t trip over each other on the way to the phone booth.

While everybody knows there’s the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, the FBI, the armed services’ intel shops and the DHS and its own alphabet soup sub-agencies, from the Secret Service to Customs to the Border Patrol and so on, there’s a whole ’nother grid down at the state, local and regional levels that mirrors those agencies and adds some of their own — Joint Terrorism Task Forces and the like.

For all this, according to the NGA survey, 55 percent of state homeland security directors “are dissatisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with the actionable quality of the intelligence they receive from the federal government.”

In other words, it’s junk, at least in the eyes of more than half the homeland security directors. It’s not news they can use.

So states, and large metropolitan areas, have been turning inward, putting together their own intelligence “fusion centers” to gather, process and act on reports of terrorist activity. No surprise they are finding fusion centers as useful in monitoring immediate threats, from hurricanes to illegal methamphetamine labs and gangs.

Seven out of 10 homeland security directors surveyed by the NGA rated the establishment of fusion centers “a top priority.” A House Homeland Security subcommittee headed by Rep. Rob Simmons, R-Conn., has also taken a liking to them, approving legislation (HR 5002) on March 29 that would give fusion centers their own place at DHS.

To put flesh on the numbers, I called up J. Eric Dietz, Indiana’s homeland security director.

Dietz spent 20 years in the Army, mostly as a specialist in chemical and biological warfare. As a veteran of the 1991 Gulf war, when U.S. troops threw the Iraqi army out of Kuwait in less than 100 hours, Dietz might be expected to be more than a little impatient with DHS.

There is “lots of chaos in the information-sharing arena,” said Dietz, 43, who started his job a year ago this month. “In time it will work out, but a number of us have concerns.”

Dietz, like many state and local homeland security officials, is not fond of DHS’ Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN), which was established to do what its name implies — circulate intelligence and infrastructure protection information outside Washington.

In fact, two senior homeland security officials have told me that Indiana was so unhappy with the HSIN that it was returning $800,000 in DHS grant money because it came with too many strings wiring it to the network.

Dietz said he “wasn’t aware” of anything like that, but he also sounded like a man on the verge of throwing DHS out of his house, so to speak.

“The problem with the HSIN is it’s ill-defined . . . We are trying to figure out what it takes to comply [with their guidelines],” he said. “They are not clear or succinct.”

A year and a half ago Dietz and other state officials ran out of patience and established their own fusion center, the Indiana Alert Network (IAN). DHS refused to provide grant money for it until a few days ago, he said.

“It did everything HSIN did, but within the state,” he said, wiring together state, local and city officials in an efficient information-sharing network.

Now Dietz is feeling pressure from DHS to replace it with something else more to agency specifications, something that will rope him into DHS’ network.

Scuttling the IAN or radically altering it to fit DHS guidelines, he predicts, means he would probably have to hire “20 people . . . just to comply with federal grant” rules.

“I can foresee the day when it costs more than it’s worth,” he said.

For six months Dietz pinged Washington for “a clarification on whether we can continue” the IAN, he said.

“It took six months to get an answer,” he said, which turned out to be that Indiana has to drastically change or entirely fold up the IAN — something that works.

“We didn’t know what all the things are right now,” he said.

Not that there aren’t people from DHS to ask. There are more than enough of them in Indiana, walking around like the undead.

“There are all kinds of folks from DHS here, but there’s no coordination,” Dietz said. “They’re not known to state officials, and state officials aren’t known to them.”

All he needs, he said, is somebody from DHS to talk to. One person would work quite nicely. “To me it’s key, because without it, there’s no coordination.”

Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke was remarkably upbeat in the face of such commentary and the NGA numbers.

Secretary Chertoff and other DHS officials had been relentlessly touring the country to talk with state and local officials and solve just these problems, he said.

Chertoff “has clearly identified the need to strengthen partnerships” with them, Knocke said, adding that Chertoff has “an unequivocal commitment” to solve such problems.

Knocke praised parallel initiatives by Charlie Allen, the CIA official brought in to be the department’s first intelligence officer, and George W. Foresman, a highly regarded former Virginia homeland security official recently made undersecretary for preparedness.

“If you take a survey a year from now,” Knocke said by telephone Friday afternoon, “you’ll see vastly different results.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.