Jan. 5, 2007 – 8:53 p.m.
A Depression-era Texas congressman who traded in his gavel as Speaker of the House to join President Roosevelt on the 1932 Democratic ticket, Garner famously said the “worst damnfool mistake I ever made was letting myself be elected vice president of the United States.”
“The vice presidency,” he famously said, “ain’t worth a pitcher of warm piss” (bowdlerized ever since as “spit”). After two terms, Garner went back to Texas.
Negroponte is going home, too, in a sense, since he spent his career at the State Department helping run wars in South Vietnam, Central America and most recently, Iraq, where he was the American ambassador for all of 10 months during 2004-2005.
Brought back to Washington to head up the new Directorate of National Intelligence, Negroponte turned out to have little appetite for exploring the caves of the vast U.S. intelligence bureaucracy while other, far junior officials, made policy.
He never had much stomach for the DNI’s post-9/11 raison d’etre: to bring the notoriously independent spy agencies under his control. Instead, he added yet another layer to an already bloated intelligence empire.
Congress soon complained that Negroponte was trying to be a diplomat in a job that called for a bureaucratic bone-crusher.
But Negroponte had little power to order people around, especially at the Defense Department, which controls 80 percent of the intelligence budget and shows little sign of ceding a penny of it.
The only palpable perk Negroponte had was personally delivering the intelligence community’s morning newspaper to the Oval Office. Even then he sometimes turned over the chore to others, reliable sources said.
“Negroponte got restless in a non-job,” says Melvin A. Goodman, who spent 41 years at the CIA, including as a senior analyst and a division chief. “Briefing Bush every day probably wore thin.”
Negroponte’s signal accomplishment, producing a National Intelligence Estimate in September that said what had been obvious for three years — that the invasion of Iraq had sparked a worldwide Islamic uprising against the U.S. — fell on deaf ears where it counted the most: in the White House.
Negroponte “was never happy being in charge of intel,” says a former top operative and staffer at several intelligence agencies, in an assessment shared by many informed observers.
“He was not viewed as moving fast enough with reform,” added the source, who now studies information-collection and analysis for Congress.
“He never understood the potential capabilities of DHS and FBI intelligence” in particular, the source added.
Negroponte failed, he said, “partly because he did not put the time into understanding the substance of intelligence, and partly because the leadership of both organizations are more concerned with empire-building than focusing on core products and services.”
Retired CIA official Goodman, now a sharp critic of the CIA and the war in Iraq, echoed the consensus that Negroponte would much rather be second fiddle at State than lead the discordant band of U.S. intelligence agencies.
“Condi needs help, lots of help,” Goodman said, “and Negroponte believes that he is the smartest man in D.C.”
Quitting the DNI may be proof of that, but many in Congress were startled by Negroponte’s walk away from the government’s most important, unfilled mandate stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks.
The selection of retired Navy Admiral Mike McConnell to succeed Negroponte drew some early positive reviews, tempered by worries over yet another military man taking control of U.S. intelligence.
McConnell, at present senior vice president at defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, held a high public profile as the Joint Chiefs’ top military intelligence official during the first war with Iraq, in 1990-1991. After that he slipped behind the curtains as head of the National Security Agency.
Daniel J. Gallington, who held several high-level national security and intelligence policy positions going back to the Reagan administration, calls McConnell a “very good choice; a smart man who will be the first intelligence professional to be DNI — about time.”
“I think he is a real professional,” Clinton White House national security adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger added by e-mail.
Other former intelligence officials were quoted calling McConnell “a consummate professional, even “an exceptionally gifted leader.”
“At the end of the day,” notes Penrose “Parney” Albright, a former top Defense Department scientist who was an assistant secretary of Homeland Security in 2003-2005, “the DNI needs to have a robust planning, programming, and budgeting process that he runs and that reaches across the entire” intelligence community.
To that end, McConnell’s main asset may be that he set up a unified intelligence command within two weeks after Saddam Hussein’s tanks rolled into Kuwait.
But a long time Pentagon intelligence official scoffed at McConnell’s primacy in Desert Storm, the 100-hour battle that drove Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
“He may have been the titular head , but that’s all,” the official said on the basis of anonymity lest he be fired for being candid. “That had been in the works a long while by all the services.”
W. Patrick Lang, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Middle East analyst at the time, was brutally frank about McConnell’s performance as J-2, the Joint Chiefs’ top intelligence officer, during Desert Storm.
McConnell, Lang said, “was a very specialized kind of person, a Navy intelligence officer, who didn’t know anything about what we were doing in the Gulf War, so he was a hell of a nuisance getting into this stuff.”
Others who worked for McConnell, speaking only anonymously, called him “very turf conscious.”
“He didn’t back his analysts up” in fights with commanding Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf over competing estimates of Iraqi military strength,” said one.
“He’s not the kind of guy who’s going to stand up for anything on principle,” said another.
As is customary for presidential nominees, McConnell is not making public comments.
With McConnell tapped to run the DNI, with former Air Force Gen.
Some worry that the trio will salute and take orders from the White House, rather than provide it with an independent analysis.
Robert M. Gates, the former CIA and White House official who just became the Pentagon’s new boss, had to face similar suspicions when he was nominated to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld.
“Clapper and McConnell are worrisome choices because they are known in the intelligence community as guys willing to give their customers what they want,” says former CIA intelligence officer Larry C. Johnson, who was also deputy director of the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993.
“Unlike Negroponte, who took a pretty tough analytical stance dismissing the imminence of an Iranian threat, Clapper and McConnell will be more than willing collaborators in making a case that Iran is a serious, immediate threat” Johnson wrote on his Web Site. “If you want to cook the books then these guys can be master chefs.”
If past is prologue, Clapper will continue Rumsfeld’s intelligence power grab at the expense of the CIA — and win this time.
As chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s, Clapper made a failed bid to seize military-related intelligence programs from the CIA. He also wanted to create the new position of chief of military intelligence, with him as its boss, according to multiple accounts.
But CIA Director R. James Woolsey beat him back.
“He is a very self obsessed guy, and it gets in the way of doing things, in my opinion,” said Lang, who worked for Clapper.
“He doesn’t want to listen to people, and doesn’t want to learn from people who work for him or anything like that.”
During a subsequent reign as chief of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency from 2001 to last June, Clapper spent “a lot of money” on technology that wasn’t immediately useful to ground troops in Iraq, said the Pentagon intelligence official.
One item was digital reconnaissance imagery, downloadable from a classified Web site.
And the problem with that?
“Ask the troops where their paper maps are,” the official said. “The NGA says a paper map is out of date by the time it’s printed. But so are digital images.
“Headquarters officers and Washington analysts have first class computers,” the official added, “but the squad leaders don’t. And they’re the ones who need them.”
“The pukes in Washington or at headquarters,” added the official, a former soldier himself, “aren’t out there fighting the war. Can you imagine the stupidity of a squad leader having to carry around a 17-inch screen laptop computer on the battlefield? Well, apparently NGA can’t.”
Clapper is not commenting on his impending nomination (which in any case had not been made official by the end of the week), said NGA spokesman David H. Burpee.
A spokesman for DFI Government Services, a consulting firm where Clapper is currently employed as chief operating officer, could not reach Clapper for comment late Jan. 5.
All this, and possibly even more dangerous material, sources say, awaits McConnell and Clapper when they arrive for confirmation hearings at radically reoriented Capitol Hill.
No one is safe, suggests former Pentagon and White House official Gallington, now ensconced at the conservative Potomac Institute.
Going on six years after the 9/11 attacks, the ability of U.S. intelligence to recruit secret agents in the Middle East and elsewhere is still dismal.
“There is much house-cleaning left to be done at CIA,” Gallington says, “if we are really serious about fixing HUMINT,” the business of human intelligence.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.