April 28, 2006 – 9:32 p.m.
In a Congress full of up-from-nothing stories, Rep.
Davis, 55, grew up in a trailer in Gloucester, a farm town in the flat Tidewater territory of eastern Virginia. Her father, who died in 1987, was a bus driver. He and his wife, “Shorty,” played in a bluegrass group. Sunday mornings in the Davis household, as she describes them, sound like a scene from Coal Miner’s Daughter, with the guitars and banjos and fiddles and mandolins going.
When she first left home, Davis spent one day in college — and then packed up.
“I was homesick,” she said in an interview.
She went on to a very successful career in real estate around the Tidewater area before running for an open House seat that has been a Republican monopoly for decades.
Because her district, stretching from Hampton Roads to Fredericksburg, is crammed with military bases and intelligence facilities, it was nearly automatic that she’d be given seats on Armed Services, International Relations and Intelligence.
But it is her chairmanship of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism/Human Intelligence, Analysis and Counterintelligence that makes her a player beyond her district.
She’s one of the key people on Capitol Hill who are supposed to be keeping a close watch on the spy agencies’ progress in the global battle against al Qaeda.
Congress has had little stomach for such oversight, Sen.
“Where’s the outrage?” he asked, according to Hearst Newspapers.
There’s no outrage in Davis, a very conservative anti-abortion, pro-military Republican. But she is disquieted by the slow pace of intelligence reform, especially with regard to information sharing among the spy agencies.
Davis voted against the creation of the uber-spy Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI), which is headed by longtime diplomat John Negroponte.
“I did, and I still stand by that,” Davis said proudly. “I am very concerned about more bureaucracy — and the more bureaucracy you have, the less chance you have of communicating the way we need to do it.”
The DNI has hired upward of 1,200 intelligence bureaucrats since it was created in 2004, which has put it in the crosshairs of many critics, Republicans and Democrats alike.
Rep.
Davis says she thinks Negroponte is one head-cracker too many.
“I personally believe that the director of Central Intelligence should be just that,” Davis said. “Why do you need another? Now, I have nothing against Director Negroponte — I think he’s a great guy. But I just see this bureaucracy growing the way DHS has.”
Along with mission creep, she said, there has been a lack of intelligence priorities. The spies are collecting “too much” information.
“I think what has happened is that our collectors have just tended to flood the community with everything,” Davis said. “Whether you like the DNI or didn’t like the DNI, one of his jobs is setting our priorities, making sure the collectors are collecting what is relevant, and giving that to our analysts.”
Could she name anything special that needn’t be collected?
“Not off the top of my head.”
But she continued, “ the CIA collects everything, but do they need everything right now?
“When you’ve got all these collectors shoving it all into our analysts and it’s not what we need, then we’re overburdening them when we need to be zeroing in on the war on terrorism.”
And the CIA is afflicted with an “aging, graying” workforce that is retiring in droves, she said, with rookies rushed in to fill the gaps. When she was in Pakistan, she said, she was “amazed how young they are.”
How are we doing on analysis? Are the CIA, FBI and Pentagon spy agencies finally connecting the dots?
“I think they’re doing as well as they possibly can with the resources they have — which is not enough,” she said. “I’m talking about everything — people, money, everything. And that’s scary to me. It’s not their fault, we haven’t given them what they need.”
The CIA, in particular, was blamed for most of the analytical failures surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks and what turned out to be Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
There has hardly been a calm day since. Scores of senior CIA officers have been forced out or fled since
Goss threw more gas on the fire April 21 when he dismissed a longtime agency employee after concluding that she was a source of leaks to The Washington Post about secret CIA detention facilities around the world. The woman, who has not been charged with any crime, denies being the source of the stories.
Despite all this, Davis thinks Goss is “doing a good job.”
“I think that if the shakeup needed to be shook up, then I’m glad they did it.”
Why does she think Goss is doing a good job?
“A; because Porter was in the CIA. B; because he served in Congress. And C; because he was on the Intelligence Committee for years and years and understands the problems there.”
What, exactly are the CIA’s problems?
“I don’t know,” she said, then added, “I’ve only been on the Intel committee a year and a half now. I assume when Porter went over there, he knew what was wrong and started to fix it.”
The CIA’s problems won’t be solved soon, she said, “but I think he’s pushing to do that, to clean it up and get it right.”
The FBI’s problems, meanwhile, which she first heard about as a member of the House Government Reform Committee a few years back, are equally serious, she said.
She was “amazed” by FBI officials’ recounting of its failed, $170 million effort to build an information technology network.
“I think I sat there with my mouth wide open. And I don’t know how much closer we are on that today, and that was three, four years ago.”
Speaking of the FBI, I told her I had begun asking intelligence officials and relevant members of Congress a question that FBI counterterrorism officials had difficulty answering last summer.
The question: Did she know the difference between Sunnis and Shia, the two main branches of Islam, at war for control of the Middle East and beyond for more than 1,500 years, not to mention giving us royal headaches for the past 35 or so?
Shia mobs ran the United States out of Iran a quarter of a century ago, and their successors, who the United States and Western Europe believe are hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons, rule Tehran now.
Saudi Arabia and al Qaeda are backing Sunni rebels against the United States in Iran. Iraq is funding Iraqi Shia.
I wasn’t looking for a theological answer, I said. Just the basics, from someone who heads a House Intelligence Subcommittee.
So did she know which was which?
“Do I?” she asked me. A look of concentration came over her face.
“You know, I should,” she said, “because I have it on International Relations, I have it on Armed Services, and I have it on Intelligence.”
She took a stab at it.
“It’s a difference in their fundamental religious beliefs,” she said. “The Sunni are more radical than the Shia.”
“Or vice versa,” she added. “But I think it’s the Sunnis who’re more radical than the Shia.”
Did she know which branch al Qaeda was?
“Al Qaeda is the one that’s most radical, so I think they’re Sunni. I may be wrong, but I think that’s right.”
Did she think that it was important, I asked, for members of Congress charged with oversight of the intelligence agencies, to know the answer to such questions, so they can cut through officials’ puffery when they came up to the Hill?
“Oh, I think it’s very important . . . because al Qaeda’s whole reason for being is based on their beliefs. And you’ve got to understand, and to know your enemy.”
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.