Valerie Plame for DCI?

Jed Babbin thinks we could do worse:

Valerie Plame should be the next Director of Central Intelligence, not Gen. Mike Hayden. Now that the CIA's Praetorian Guard has -- with the connivance of National Intelligence Director John Negroponte -- rid itself of Porter Goss, the CIA is confidently preparing to march back into the intelligence dark ages that preceded 9/11.

Gen. Hayden -- former head of the National Intelligence Agency and most famous for his strong defense of the NSA terrorist surveillance program -- is slated to be nominated for the DCI post today. Hayden, now Negroponte's deputy and choice for DCI, will face tough questioning in his confirmation hearing about the warrantless interception of phone calls and e-mail traffic between known terrorist connections in the United States with their pals overseas. Nevertheless he will be confirmed and take his place at CIA or, rather, the place that the CIA bureaucracy has prepared for him.

The entrenched CIA Praetorian Guard has announced its plan for Hayden's tenure. In two Sunday Washington Post stories (here and here), another in the New York Times and a Times editorial, CIA sources got their media pals to argue that the greatest concern for the future of our primary intelligence agency is how Gen. Hayden will conduct their turf war against the Defense Department. In the two WaPo stories, the CIA's turf battle against Donald Rumsfeld is mentioned five times. The NYT story is relatively mild in mentioning it only once, but the editorial makes up for that by making the attack on Rumsfeld's partial control of intelligence its central theme. The CIA sources who pushed these stories care only about their power and privileges. The essential transformation of the intelligence agencies to make America safer is not on their minds. The CIA Praetorians prepare for Hayden's arrival by questioning his ability, in the words of one Post story, "to be independent from Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld." Which means that the CIA leaker brigade will attack Hayden as a failure unless he allows the CIA bureaucrats to control what he does. If that is Hayden's future at CIA, it would be better just to appoint one of the Praetorians to the job or to make Valerie Plame Wilson, their consort, the CIA chief.

The CIA remains a dysfunctional agency. That results from the failure to remove the Praetorians and from the Congressional rush to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. In August 2004, Loose Canons said, "We don't need another layer of bureaucracy such as the 'national intelligence director' the 9/11 Commission recommended. We need -- as Director of Central Intelligence -- a real leader and reformer with the stature and vision to force jointness upon the intel community as it was forced upon DoD by the Goldwater-Nichols legislation of the 1980s." What we got was precisely what I said we didn't want.

The Director of National Intelligence, as Congress created him, is just another bureaucratic layer that disperses our national intelligence apparatus in precisely the manner that can most damage the gathering and analyzing of intelligence information. John Negroponte, the DNI, has tried to shift a large part of the CIA's intelligence analysis staff to his own office, splitting the function that must be forced together and joined in a central organization. Porter Goss fought against it, and is now being blamed for resisting transformation and for stepping on too many toes. Against him were both Negroponte and the other agencies that were given new responsibility for intelligence analysis after 9/11. Goss quit when Negroponte won the battle to shift some analysis out of the CIA and into DNI.

What Negroponte should be doing is just the opposite. CIA intelligence analysis is inadequate and splitting it up is no answer. All the fuss about the Defense Department's growing intel apparatus is misplaced. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon are fighting a war and to do that they need accurate intel and lots of it. The DoD is only trying to create what it must have because it doesn't get it from CIA, DNI, or anywhere else. It's the fastest solution to an urgent national security problem. The problem only grows worse outside DoD.

Langley is a complete disgrace. Like the Colin Powell-led State Department, it is a completely dysfunctional organization the leadership of which spends more time backstabbing other government officials in Washington than getting the job done abroad.

We are at war, and military intelligence (such as targeting information for the Iranian nuclear sites) has to be our highest priority. We should completely subordinate the broken CIA to its military counterparts for the duration. As CIA produces little of value these days, this will cripple only the leak machine the Democrats have set up in Langley at the expense of American national security.