TESTIMONY OF ADMIRAL INMAN AND GENERAL ODOM

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100230001-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 43
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 10, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: March 23, 1991
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
PROGRAM Senate Select Committee STATION C-SPAN
on Intelligence
DATE March 23, 1991 2:30 P.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
Testimony of Admiral Inman and General Odom
SENATOR DAVID BOREN: Our first witness this afternoon
is Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who needs very little introduction to
this committee. He is one of those that I think would be widely
described as a senior statesman of the intelligence community.
Serving as Director of Naval Intelligence in the mid-1970s,
Admiral Inman went on to become Director of the National Security
Agency, and in the early years of the Reagan Administration also
served as Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He
is currently a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board.
He has assisted the members of this committee on many
occasions, most recently as a member of the Jacobs Panel, a group
of distinguished leaders in our country with experience in the
intelligence field who have advised us about an approach to
improve our counterespionage capabilities.
It's difficult to think of anyone for whom we have
greater admiration and respect or whose advice we would value
more highly. Indeed, the successful evolution of the congres-
sional oversight process itself owes a great deal to the efforts
of Admiral Inman, who as Director of the National Security Agency
and later, as I said, as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence,
saw the need to make the Oversight Committees partners, rather
than adversaries, in this whole process of improving our intelli-
gence operation.
And I think the fact that we have this relationship of
trust and partnership now between the community and this
committee owes a lot to the legacy left by Admiral Inman.
Admiral, we're delighted to have you with us once again.
OFFICES IN: WASHINGTON D.C. ? NEW YORK ? LOS ANGELES ? CHICAGO ? DETROIT ? AND OTHER PRINCIPAL CITIES
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And I'd ask that you proceed now with your opening statements.
And we want to express our appreciation to you for taking time to
be with us today.
ADMIRAL BOBBY INMAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
In looking at the length of my notes. I'm afraid I may
be planning to talk too long. So I will look for signals from
you to speed it up.
Secondly, as you know, I have enjoyed my working
relationship with the committee for a great many years. Most of
that has been in what for me is the much more relaxed atmosphere
of talking about these issues in a closed session. So I'm going
to make a special plea today to the staff that's sitting around
the side. That is, sometimes as I get excited and get carried
away by the topic, I may drift over the line. So I'm going to
look for waving arms from them if I've begun to get over in the
classified arena, rather than trying to sort it out in my own
mind.
I have always come to the committee with candor, and I
will do so today. I'm not sure all of that will sit well with
other views that are here. When you're sitting several thousand
miles away from Washington and looking at these problems, you
come to look at them somewhat differently than when you're caught
in them each day. So I offer that not as an apology, but just a
fact.
And let me say that I have a real worry. Having gone
through several periods of budget drawdown, some long ones, an
occasional one of building -- I usually somehow manage to leave
just as the building phase was coming -- and having gone through
multiple reorganization efforts, including the major one at the
beginning of the Carter Administration, and as I look at this
incredibly changing world -- I had a great many remarks on that
world that I'm not going to repeat today because many of you have
already, in your remarks, touched on the incredible changes in
the Soviet Union and the whole range of new worries, the unre-
solved transition in China and where that's going to go, the
growing pace of economic competition in the international
marketplace which we shaped, how we think about East Asia, the
danger of seeing proliferation come into use in South Asia in a
conflict. The Middle East problems have been laid out before us
daily, but we're a very long way, in my judgment, from solving
our problems in the Middle East. We have a Europe that's moving
rapidly toward an integrated market, and at least for a brief
period the world's largest market. We have many changes in the
Western Hemisphere that could offer hope, a move to democracy, if
we also got economic progress.
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So again, in a great many of these areas the kinds of
problems that the country will have to worry about will be very
significantly different from the problems that have primarily
occupied us for the last four years. So my first plea is that as
we go into this process of looking where should the intelligence
community go, how should it be organized, how it should be
managed, the only certain foundation for that is a very careful
examination, country-by-country, what do we need to know and how
can that knowledge be derived.
I have substantial concerns that I do not see a long-
range planning effort in the Executive Branch that would look
out. We did one in '81 called "Intelligence Capabilities, '85 to
'90," which we shared with the committees, which helped guide the
buildup. My concern is a comparable, hopefully better, effort,
including priorities, before we start building down.
When we have reached broad agreement between these
committees and the Executive Branch -- and I carefully say the
Executive Branch here because I have a view that what we need to
know isn't derived just from the intelligence committee. They're
the ones who set out to do it. It's in very large measure the
articulation by State and Commerce and Treasury and Energy, if we
can get them to do it, and the National Security Council staff,
on what they believe their needs are going to be out at the end
of the '90s, not next year or the year after.
When we have that clearly agreed, the we ought to
proceed, having already studied the issue, with how we most
effectively and efficiently organize the community to carry out
that challenge.
There are so many shifting needs. And as I have tried
to think about ways to recommend for you to approach this
problem, I had not divided the effort in strategic and tactical.
I'll have to spend some more time thinking about that, and I will
respond back. But I've got a hunch that what looking at Desert
Shield/Desert Storm is going to tell us is that that isn't a
major problem. Having gone through a lot of crises before, you
being looking to CIA for the lead role in developing political
intelligence, which is often the heart of your strategic judgment
as events build. The other agencies comment on it, they provide
input, but you look to CIA for leadership in that role.
As you move to make a decision to commit forces that you
may use in combat, there begins to be a shift. And increasingly
in the Defense Intelligence activities, they begin to build up
steadily in how they look at can they support military operations
if they come. When you actually move to fight, the primary role
in thta process is in the Defense Intelligence support structure.
CIA watches, offers assistance, but they cease to be the princi-
pal point.
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And as soon as the fight stops, it shifts all the way
back. Because, again, it's largely political judgments that
determine whether you're going to win the peace or lose it.
And I think we -- I, therefore, have laid out a series
of problems, of thinking about how would you organize your
activity and go after it. Support for policymaking and diplo-
macy, where you're looking both to avoid conflict, on one side,
and, increasingly, how do you manage the economic competition, on
the other.
A second one that's going to be with us is how you
support the process of weapons system acquisition. Even as we
draw down our forces, the nature of the various threats against
which weapons may have to perform are going to be different. And
so support for weapons system acquisition., trying to get the
potential threats right, will continue to be important, though it
will be different.
The third one is support to military operations. And I
think there you have probably the greatest lessons to learn and
to observe from studying Desert Storm/Desert Shield. What
worked? Why did it work? Where were we already ready? Where
should we simply be grateful that we had five months to get ready
for the conflict that ultimately came?
There are a series of others that aren't new, but
they're in fact probably still growing, not diminishing.
Proliferation and the impact as one thinks about a whole
series of arms control agreements, on proliferation both of
delivery systems and the weapons of mass destruction.
Terrorism. Counter-narcotics. Counterintelligence.
And indeed, in this changing world, how we think about and what
we do with regard to covert action.
In trying to look forward, one of the things we need to
focus on are time lines for our intelligence needs. How quickly
do we need? What is the time line for the information that's
needed? For weapons system acquisition, it may be months that
you have to work on a problem. If we are right about the
changing situation in the Soviet Union, it may be at least weeks
to months, as opposed to hours or days. On the other hand, we've
seen dramatically that it may be, in the Middle East, the
location of Scuds and whether or not they're about to be fired.
It may be minutes, not even hours, that you're concerned about
for indications and warning in very different areas.
We had an indications-and-warning process focused on the
Soviet Union that I think, all in all, had become really superb.
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But the time lines and the systems to work at these problems in
other parts of the world are very different. And we really do
have to seriously look at how the intelligence community goes
about the process of indications and warning in a very different
world. And there, you are right that there is the strategic
warning and the tactical warning. And in those areas, I think
you're exactly on the right track already for zeroing in on how
you look at those.
But it's going to be warning of a very different
problem, not warning of what the Soviet Union does outside its
border, but what happens with an Iraq or others that we could all
list that might turn out to be aggressors outside their own
borders.
One thing that we learned out of this recent experience,
if we think about the new world order: How do we provide
intelligence support to international operations, to coalition
forces? As we look at the systems and the censors and the things
we've developed, which we often wrap in deep classification, how
-- how did we provide support for not just the British and the
French -- those are easier because of the NATO ties and other
long relationships -- but for the Egyptians and the Syrians and
the Saudis, who were in it? Is this instructive to us? As we
think forward in any kind of new world order, how will we provide
support for international military operations in which we may be
engaged.
My major plea, as you look going forward, is for
geographic breadth. As I look back at...
ADMIRAL INMAN: Geographic breadth. And I'm not sure
that's the right word, Senator Chafee, to describe what I'm
after. But as I look back at the drawdowns that began in '67,
when we set out to reduce official American presence abroad
because of gold flow, balance of payments issues, and we did the
greatest damage to our human intelligence capabilities because we
took out the political, economic, cultural affairs, commercial
attache, as well as the military attache, and the cover billets
for the clandestine service, in a process that ran all the way
from '67 to '81. And we gave up geographic coverage, any depth,
of the Western Hemisphere or Western Europe, of East Asia, much
of South Asia, even countries in the Middle East, including the
one with which we've most recently had our problem.
And I'm persuaded, in looking back at it, we do that
with great peril. And that's really what motivates my opening
remarks about focusing country-by-country, instead of letting it
go. And you're going to find I'm going to say: If you've got to
Li
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make some trade-offs and do reductions, if Senator Glenn's plea
for more, rather than cutting, isn't going to ultimately carry
the day, then I'm going to suggest to you some different ways to
look at the problem. Don't do the geographic cut again that we
did before. Keep some capa -- we don't know where the next
problems are that are going to trouble us. And they may be
military or they may be economic or they may be some mix. There
may even be human rights in the issue.
In rethinking management, let me remind you of how we
have, as a community, in the past, or at least back in the years
when I served, 22 years, thought about managing the primary
functions of the intelligence community. We had as a basic
guideline, reconfirmed in the '77 Carter reorganization effort, a
single-manager approach for managing collection. In actual
execution, we had the single manager, Director of the National
Security Agency, to manage our signal-intelligence collection
operation. We had the Deputy Director of Operations of CIA
managing the clandestine human collections. We never addressed
how we got all the overt human collection. And we left the
imagery area to be done by a committee, do the process.
Processing, we usually always have shorted in funding.
If something becomes expensive we cut back on processing.
And for analysis, the primary guideline was competitive
analysis, reconfirmed in the Carter year study. And that was
because of, looking back, the worries about budget, intelligence
out of the Pentagon to support weapons system. The CIA was
viewed as the one to keep the Pentagon honest about the judgments
by competitive analysis on military issues. We never really
focused on how did we get competitive analysis to make sure the
assumptions weren't weak in the economic side.
I&R did a very good job with a very small organization
to at least bring some cross-check in judgment to CIA's political
analysis.
Thinking forward. When you put a system in space, you
can't go up very readily and change it. So my plea is that as
you think about collection systems that you are going to place
remotely, you go for the widest aperture you can, a design that
will give you the potential to use in as many ways and against as
many targets as you may need to do. Even though that may make
what you put in space more expensive. And that if you are under
very constrained circumstances, you limit what you decide to
process, the investment in the processing.
You can always add the processing capability on the
ground, albeit at time and at cost. But you can't go back and
add access to what you have put in space.
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I spoke to this committee in a closed arena last year,
and I have to the committee in the House. I would simply
reiterate in this open forum that I believe there is a need for a
very detailed examination going forward of our reconnaissance
needs, looking very carefully at what we have in space and what
we have that's air-breathing, whether manned or unmanned, and
that looks across the range from imagery through signals
intelligence.
Certainly, the most recent experience in the Middle East
has told us that our needs are not diminishing, and there have
been some second thoughts about some of the earlier actions.
I think this is a critical area. It's probably the
single most expensive area of investment, in the aggregate. But
in looking at that very carefully and deciding what's in the
national foreign intelligence budget -- and you, mandatorily,
must also look at what's in the tactical budget.
And Senator Glenn has already put his finger on a
specific issues that's worried me in the process, the ability to
do the tactical reconnaissance necessary. They can be in the
Reserve force or the National Guard. I don't consider their
organizational assignment a problem. What's the problem is the
competence and the capability of the equipment to respond if you
need them.
Before you make an investment, there should be a clear
decision, shared between the Executive and the Congressional
Branches, that you're prepared to use that, even in a crisis
situation short of conflict, to gain information, even if there
may be those who would be queasy about diplomatic protest about
the use of a platform. If you don't believe you're ever going to
use the platform if there's any potential for diplomatic protest,
then you ought to look for some other way to obtain the informa-
tion than proceeding to put your investment in that arena.
Turning to -- let me dwell further on the issue of
analysis. I've been one of the great sponsors of competitive
analysis over time. But as I've thought about this problem far
away from Washington, and what I hear the Chairman and Vice
Chairman saying is a reality of some budget reductions, I would
come down ultimately and take risks that assumptions might lead
you astray in analysis, opposed to giving up geographic coverage.
So, if I had to make an ultimate judgment, which I'd
rather not, I would end up looking at how you spread the analy-
tical effort that's done in CIA and DIA and the services and
State to make sure you didn't leave any countries uncovered, that
you weren't doing some ongoing activity, as opposed to making
sure you had competitive analysis, as against potential budget
intelligence.
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I think the overall pressures on the defense budget are
probably going to take care of the worries in 1958 and '59 about
a missile gap, which helped put in concrete the way we thought
about redundant analysis in the past -- competitive analysis in
the past.
Looking at organization itself, starting at the top of
the system, I would -- I can envision three different models for
how you organize and execute the problems.
One is a model where you have the Dep -- essentially the
model we have now, organizationally: a Director of Central
Intelligence and a Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, who
both try to manage the functions that are necessary, broader than
the Agency itself, and also give CIA detailed the management
attention it deserves and needs.
Let me remind you that the -- if you think back to the
years from '47, Director Helms and Director Colby had some
functions that were broader than CIA. Certainly the estimative
function, that's been there since '47, remains a critical one.
The responsibility for looking at other sort of common-user
services. But it really was not until 1976...[technical
difficulties] ...and Executive Order, a committee to do it. And
then in the '77 Executive Order, the responsibility was given
specifically to the DCI.
We had up through Director Colby, your congressional
interaction was with a few chairmen and vice chairmen in informal
session. And if one simply looks at the requirements that we
have put in place, collectively, for oversight and for budgeting,
the number of committees and the number of hearings, to do those
roles properly and make sure they're done properly, requires a
lot of time and attention. And there continues to be the need to
insure the President has, himself, the best available intelli-
gence support in the most timely way, even as a large agency is
being effectively managed.
So, looking at the first model -- a DCI, a Deputy DCI,
both trying to discharge those functions and do manage CIA --
there is a requirement first for breadth of experience across all
the community functions for those two individuals, and a require-
ment for an intelligence community staff that is very vital, very
visible, extraordinarily well staffed and independent in its
manning. And I believe, personally, there's also a need for an
executive director within CIA who can provide the detailed
supervision of that agency's operation. Because if the DCI and
DDCI are going to be spreading across all the functions, as they
can, there needs to be an individual who can be held accountable
who is supervising all of CIA's activities on a daily basis.
ll-1
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That model has been tried from time to time in the past.
But in candor, even as I run through the other model, you can't
separate any of these options from personalities. And the
personalities and the experience of the individuals, including
the executive director, if you use that model, and a Director of
Intelligence Community Staff, are important in how well these
work and now vigorous.
The second model is essentially the model we tried for a
year in '76-77: a Director of Central Intelligence who has two
deputies in the law, one who runs CIA and the other who runs the
intelligence community efforts.
You can draw on witnesses who went through that, Admiral
Murphy and Mr. Nokke (?), Joe Walters, who had some experience
with it. There are pluses and minuses to the process. It does
say that there is no alternate to the DCI who has the full broad
picture. You've given up some of that breadth that you have in
the first model if the DCI is traveling or away. On the other
hand, you do have much more detailed attention to the community
problems, as opposed to being in an ad hoc model.
The third role is one we looked at briefly in the late
'70s. That is, to create a separate Director of National
Intelligence, Director of Central Intelligence, whatever title
you want to give, but an individual whose primary responsibi-
lities: intelligence, report to the President, the President's
intelligence officer; resource allocation to the community;
primary spokesman to the Congress for all the functions; and the
manager of those activities where you must draw together all of
the agencies -- i.e., the intelligence estimative process
primarily, but some other common-user functions as well. In that
case, you would do a Director, a Deputy Director, and you would
at least put what's now the National Intelligence Council and the
intelligence community staff as the structure.
There are weaknesses to all of these structures, as well
as advantages. I suspect if you query the former Directors of
Central Intelligence, none will support the third model, because
they all remember the support they got, primarily from CIA, for
carrying out their missions. And they worry, without that, that
they would not be effective in the city. I've even heard the
phrase used that they would be like the drug czar.
Well, you heard from my definition that you don't
consider that option unless you're going to give them very
substantial supporting staff and structure to do those functions.
So this in fact -- that comparison is not a valid one, in my
view.
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Having leapt through that, let me simply reinforce. I
think you ought to hold with a single-manager approach to
collection. But let me make a change. Let's move on away from a
committee to manage the imagery collection. I believe what you
will learn in looking at Desert Storm/Desert Shield is that DIA
did a very creditable job in managing for the community the
imagery collection.
So I'm prepared to move forward, that as we -- just as
we assign the Director of NSA the job to manage all the SIGINT
collection activities, and the DDO, certainly responding to the
DCI, to do all clandestine HUMINT, it's time to get on and assign
DIA the responsibility, not a committee, to do the management of
the imagery collection, with the clear understanding that in
peacetime, if there's a dispute, the DCI decides; and in wartime,
if there's a dispute, the Secretary of Defense decides.
So, you don't change the structure or how you do it, you
just change the referee as you move from peace to war.
On analysis, ultimately I think you have to look at the
shifting needs and make sure that as you look at the analytical
efforts, someone has the responsibility, clearly, to deal with
all of these problems that we've outlined going forward; again,
that you can have accountability.
I have been, if not the most visible, at least one of
the most visible spokesmen for taking the intelligence budget out
of the defense budget and doing it separately.
Let me make sure everyone understands clearly what I
have in my mind and my motivation, because the attractiveness of
my proposal may recede significantly as you contemplate, as
members of Congress, how could you actually make that work.
What brought me to that proposal was having lived
through the drawdowns in the '70s -- Vietnamization, et al. --
and having seen the intelligence agencies not only go through the
planned reductions, but then take another five percent cut as the
Appropriations Committee made their last-minute efforts. In my
proposal to pull the budget out, absolutely implicit is that
these two committees, in their wisdom, would reach agreement on
authorization, and the Congress would fence that budget. And if
in fact is a budget taken out of DOD is going to be subject to
the vagaries of getting cut like every other departmental or
agency budget in the Congress without consideration of it, I
frankly would rather take my chances inside Defense, of being
able to make the case with the Secretary of Defense on why you
needed to be spared, than to be given to the tender mercies of
those who may know almost nothing about it. He will at least
have to know something about the process.
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If you can fence it, then I do think taking it out and
doing it separately -- and I'm even -- I'm certainly prepared to
unclassify the total amount and defend that to the public why 10
percent of our total defense effort spent for both national and
tactical intelligence is not a bad goal at all. Just as I don't
think 11 or 12 percent of the budget for research and development
is a bad goal at all for the country.
But if you can't fence it, then I think my idea that
I've been pushing, of taking it out, may not be a sound one. And
it may be better to leave it in Defense.
That doesn't say you can't address the issue of
revealing what is the total expenditure. That's a different
issue. And I think we can build public support for why a very
significant expenditure in trying to understand the outside world
saves money and saves lives over the long term.
Finally, three quick actions -- three quick areas.
Covert action. This committee knows I've not been one
of its greatest fans, though I accept that every Administration
comes to it at some time, usually on recommendations of Assistant
Secretaries of State because diplomacy isn't working and they
want some help. So I think we have to face the reality that
that's going to be there. But I'm prepared to build in an
institutional barrier to say: I believe CIA can do more compe-
tently than any part of the government political action, propa-
ganda, if we decide we need to do it.
I'm not persuaded they can do paramilitary operations
better. And I would the institutional barriers and institutional
change, that if one's going to undertake support for paramilitary
operations clandestinely, it would be done by the Special Forces
of the Department of Defense. And you have a handle. And I
would suggest to you that will at least cause the decision to be
made very carefully, both on those handing off and those
receiving. And it won't be something that you slide into
casually in the process.
On charters. We considered them in '79, '80, for the
other intelligence agencies, legislative charters. I still think
it's a good idea. But what we did wrong before was to try to
make them too detailed. So as we turn to the issue, do them
sparely, do them leanly, do the things that are critically
important, the things that make it easy moving between admin-
istrations, even when they're still from the same party, as
what's driving it.
Senator Glenn really preempted almost what is my last
item in the process: human resources.
E
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I think this, to me, is the second-most critical area
after what we need to know. How do we attract and retain and
promote the competent talent that we're going to need for the
challenge out ahead of us. And that won't happen accidentally.
And why I bring this to this specific committee and to your
counterpart in the House is that when you start budget drawdowns,
there will be intense pressure, particularly within Defense, to
reduce the number of general and flag officers, to reduce the
senior civilians. And unless these committees look carefully to
protect the flow of talent and the promotion, you will not have
the leadership that you need.
And as you set out through this process, you're going to
look at a lot of people who are there now whom you will find did
extraordinarily well in providing the leadership that was needed
through Desert Storm/Desert Shield. That's not an accident.
It's a result of a focus on career development and a promotion
system guaranteed in the law for some but not for others. And I
have great worries that, as I look across the military services,
there are not viable career patterns on to general rank for all
the intelligence officers we need. There aren't the guarantees
of promotion to the general or flag officer ranks even for those
we get through the 0-6 level.
Both for the military and the civilian, a focus on
career developent and training to give them the breadth and the
depth for the problems is going to be absolutely critical, the
language training. And in a budget drawdown, those are fre-
quently the first things given up.
So, as you look the process, may I make a special plea
for a focus in protecting those areas, because that's going to
determine the competency of the leadership when we have the next
round of crises early in the 21st century.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
SENATOR BOREN: Thank you very much, Admiral Inman.
So that we can go around the table and have all members
have an opportunity to ask questions, I'm going to suggest we
have a round of questions in which we limit ourselves to three
minutes each. And then we will have a second round, if we need,
before going on to our next witness, General Odom, who's also now
here.
You've listed the three models, the three major organi-
zational models for us, specifically focusing on the role of the
Director of Central Intelligence, whether that person should also
have the Agency responsibility, along with responsibility for
giving direction to the entire community, and also direct advice
Hil
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to the President. In listing those three models, you didn't
state an explicit preference for any one of the three models.
Is there a preference, in your view, for the model that
we should now follow?
ADMIRAL INMAN: If we had lots of resources in a
building mode, I think Option 3 would probably be my preference.
Equitability among the agencies, the depth of cross-check against
what's being produced, the avoiding of mistakes, the additional
buffers to make sure you're doing things in the most effective
and efficient way.
In a time of while you are drawing down, Option 2 is one
where you can bring the focus and the detailed attention to the
interaction on the resource allocation process.
If you're very lean and very thin, I think the structure
we're in may be the better one, provided you've been very careful
at how you stamp the functions that have to reach across the
agencies and community.
I deliberately have not talked to anyone who's now the
head of an intelligence agency and I have avoided some efforts to
come and brief me on current accomplishments by various organi-
zations. I should have said at the outset the views you're
getting today are absolutely my views, and not those of anyone
else, including -- I've not discussed this with any of my
colleagues on the Foreign Intelligence Strategy Board.
I worry when I see too many ad hoc groups put together
to deal with problems. That says we don't have the clean lines.
Or if we don't -- you know, if the intelligence community staff
isn't now doing wha we want, then we look -- have that staff
functions from the people who are there.
I don't have any problem with an occasional ad hoc
committee. I did it myself on occasion. But the bulk of the
functions [unintelligible] I drove through the intelligence
community staff functionally. And as I listen, I hear about an
awful lot of ad hoc groups looking at problems, and it simply
causes me worry that either we don't have the right people or we
don't have the right structure, one or the other.
SENATOR BOREN: What about the whole question of getting
the policymakers to look far ahead, in terms of what their needs
are, in terms of the kinds of questions that they're going to
need answers to, and therefore the kinds of resources we're going
to have to put into place?
I think as we look back, for example, at the situation
in the Persian Gulf, there was not early enough on a tasking of
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the community to provide the resources that were necessary for
that area of the world. I don't think the policymakers
themselves were anticipating that this was an area where we
really needed resources.
Then there was the second failure, then, within the
community itself to not really provide early enough warning a
year, two years out, with enough lead time to give the President
options.
But how do you -- is there any organizational or
structural pressure that can be brought to bear, whether it's on
the diplomatic community, whether it's the policy community in
other areas, whether it's economic policy, energy policy, as well
as what we think of as normal diplomatic activity, are there any
organizational structures we could put in place that would really
require our policymakers to focus on their needs earlier, and
therefore to give the kind of guidance to the community that it
needs to develop the resources that need to be called on?
ADMIRAL INMAN: Mr. Chairman, we've tried a variety of
approaches. Sometimes they've been called key intelligence
requirements. They've been called various intelligence require-
ments. Shifting different DCIs, different administrations.
Those, in fact, tend to be primarily a reflection of what the
intelligence community believes the requirements are, 'cause
they're the only ones who will spend any time on it
The only time that I'm aware of, at least in the last 20
years, when we managed to break out of that was when we did go to
a separate effort in putting together intelligence capabilities,
'85-to-90. The first part of that, the first, most critical
part, tasking from the Assistant to the President for National
Security Affairs, tasking that a capabilities plan be developed
that looked at not just -- it wasn't a budget thing. It leaped
beyond that, to look out to the last half the decade, five to ten
years away.
We also got a memorandum to the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs, and the Joint Chiefs sending up to the Secretary of
Defense, that this needs to be looked at.
So, we got together first a significant group of users
and made them work for about 3 1/2 months, provided staff
support, but made them define from their departmental views what
did they think they need. They call complained, and they all
ultimately did a pretty good job in coming up with much more
in-depth look at problems.
We kept the intelligence agencies away from that
entirely. Once we had that statement and got them to agree to
L1
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it, that they all signed up, this was a broad view of what they
thought they needed to know, we then turned to the intelligence
agencies and said, "What can you do now? What else could you
do?" And that part was done well.
What we didn't do worth a hoot was priorities. We got
what everybody could do, but we didn't manage to put together
what's the priority with which you go down that list and try to
do it.
Lest I give too grand a response to intelligence
capabilities '85-to-90, I think that's how you have -- then you
do that again in about three or four years. You don't do that
every year. You do it on a four-year or five-year cycle. But
you've got to reach out to some different way to pull dedicated
people from the user community in to really work at that issue.
It won't happen on just looking at a list of requirements and
making changes.
SENATOR FRANK MURKOWSKI: Admiral, two brief questions.
The first is accountability. And maybe I'm hung up on it, but I
find it extraordinarily lacking as a quality of intelligence, in
the sense of when something does go wrong, it's pretty hard to
find out who had the responsibility for the security breach, that
didn't do an evaluation of the appropriate backgrounds, and as a
consequence we had somebody in a position where -- clearly, had
somebody looked at it, made a value judgment -- we had a great
deal of exposure.
We've all gone through the hindsight of the Moscow
Embassy fiasco. You've experienced with frustration, as well.
It's an exposure that you have when working with other people.
But clearly, we look to a little better quality when we deal, at
least under a supposition, [with] people who are involved in the
intelligence community. Yet we do not seem to be able to
maintain this oversight balance that I think is absolutely
mandatory.
I mean you can sit down with an organizational chart and
see who bears the responsibility. But some of these horror
stories, the fingers point a dozen ways.
I'd appreciate a few comments you might make on...
ADMIRAL INMAN: I'll try to be brief, Senator Murkowski.
It's a topic on which I could go on a long time.
First, one of the problems -- you always have a problem
whe you have multiple departments or agencies involved. Unless
you get it spelled out right from the beginning exactly who has
responsibility for which function, you can be almost certain that
it will be very hard down the way to find accountability.
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I never had any doubt at all about accountability and
responsibility when I was Director of the National Security
Agency. The line was very clear. Everybody knew who to blame,
occasionally to praise, in the process.
It was less clear at the Defense Intelligence Agency
because you worked for both -- where I did spend a year as the
Vice Chairman -- where you worked for both the Secretary of
Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
A little easier to assign directly to a Director of
Central Intelligence. But again, when you suddenly begin to
share between the roles the Secretary of Defense has, particu-
larly in the resource allocation and what's in the tactical
budget and what's in the national, in all of those, if you don't
define very clearly at the outset, you're going to have a
problem.
But let me put one other twist on it.
Some people seek responsibility. Others try to avoid
it. They can both get promoted in the process. And that sort of
factors in my focus on the human resources and insuring you end
up producting the leaders who seek the responsibility and who are
willing to do the accountability.
You just listen to the briefings that come before you
and you can tell pretty quickly who's got a bureaucratic approach
and who's prepared to tackle a problem and take responsibility
for it.
So, to some degree we're dealing with a human-nature
problem. But we can work on it in working all those resources.
But it's -- the toughest part is to nail it down when you get
several agencies or departments in. Unless you define right at
the outset who's responsible, you're not ever going to be able to
get the accountability later.
SENATOR MURKOWSKI: We'd appreciate it, since the record
will be open, if you'd give that matter some thought. Because
it's just not good enough to put it out up front as you initiate
an organization. But as you say, when you get the dual involve-
ment, then the overlap and the accountability goes away. And I
just wonder if you could make some very specific suggestions to
this committee on how you would -- not necessarily at this time,
but how you would suggest that we address this.
We're not requesting an organizational responsibility
oath, but something short of that might be necessary.
ADMIRAL INMAN: Just one other quick thought on it. And
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that's, you know, I have an aversion, from all the years in
government, to committees. You need some and there are some
things you need to coordinate. But committees tend to be a way
to, again, spread the blame, as opposed to get on with doing
things.
SENATOR MURKOWSKI: Last question, because I'm out of
time and I respect my colleagues here.
During the Gulf War, we had the phenomena of observing
activities in real time. People would, you know, say, "I've got
to get home to watch the war." The significance of what that
meant implies an application of intelligence that needs a step
out. Because, you know, the intelligence community had the
information at the same time that the rest of the public did.
That doesn't imply we don't need, you know, the specifics of
background and so forth, but it implies a new, more definitive
outreach.
And I wonder if you'd just generalize very briefly on
what this kind of real time means to changes that -- you know,
whoever had the responsibility of providing the Intelligence
Committee with real-time information wasn't needed in that
particular sense, because we had that.
ADMIRAL INMAN: I may appear more relaxed on this topic
than I really am, Senator Murkowski. But again, it's the
experiences.
My first night working in the intelligence community was
the night of the Iraqi coup in 1958, and our first knowledge of
that coup was FPIS, and as I went through my first assignment
as a briefer for the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh
Burke. I would venture that more than half of the crisis we run
across, our first tip in intelligence was from the AP or UPI or
Reuters or the FPIS.
So, the fact that television has now leaped dramatically
beyond -- in those days, if you didn't have one of those prin-
ters, you didn't know it. But if you had a printer, you knew it.
Now, if you've got a television set, you know it.
I think sometimes my colleagues in the intelligence
community get nervous that, somehow, they're being scooped. It's
another sour -- wonderful, overt source in the process.
What you do, what it does force you to do is to, instead
of rushing around to make sure you put out your three-hour
summary so they know they're hearing from you, it's already been
covered and they know it. Don't worry about it. Don't drown
them in more paper they don't need. Give them information that
they can't get from turning on their television.
Li
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SENATOR MURKOWSKI: Thank you.
SENATOR HOWARD METZENBAUM: Admiral Inman, I think you
indicated that you would support the idea of making public the
total amount that we spend in intelligence activities. Am I
correct in that?
ADMIRAL INMAN: You are correct, Senator Metzenbaum.
SENATOR METZENBAUM: How much beyond that can we go in
sharing with the American people information concerning our
intelligence expenditures without jeopardizing the national
security?
ADMIRAL INMAN: I had started on a road of saying I
thought we could do it by organization without a problem. We are
in a public session here and we have the reality that we have
some intelligence organizations, that their existence is classi-
fied. So I suddenly ran into a great big problem when one of the
larger elements in the budget is an organization we can't talk
about in an unclassified setting. And maybe we need to go back
and revisit where that really needs to be classified. That's a
different issue, and I have my own views on that one. But there
are several different intelligence activities that show up as
budget entities for which appropriations are made, authoriza-
tions, that we do not acknowledge their existence.
So, that's now made me a little gun-shy about -- I don't
have any problem with the total DIA budget being public or the
total CIA budget or the total National Security Agency budget.
I, frankly, think that the public at -- at least as I spend most
of my -- a lot of my time now away from the Washington Beltway,
the general perception I find in most of the country is that we
ought to be spending whatever we need to know what's happening
elsewhere in the world. We ought not to be constantly surprised.
And so the total amount spent isn't, I'm persuaded, for the bulk
of the public a major factor.
Our worry has been a different one: that, somehow, if
we released those figures, it was going to help foreign intelli-
gence services figure out where to go, burrow in, and conduct
effective counterespionage. And I have increasingly had diffi-
culty in saying where just the total figures were going to let
them do that.
SENATOR METZENBAUM: Apropos your comment concerning
American people want to spend whatever we think we need, that's
possibly because they don't have any idea wha twe do spend. And
if they knew, there might be a totally different approach.
It just seems to me that in a democratic society, that
it's totally inappropriate to withhold from the American people
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what's being spent, unless there are some -- or any other form of
activities, such as everything that we classify, the overclassi-
fication in government, unless there are some actual security
reasons. But instead of that, we take a broad brush, we say no
information at all with respect to expenditureal, and every
document gets the classified stamp, regardless of how necessary
or unnecessary that may be.
I have no further questions.
SENATOR WARREN RUDMAN: Admiral Inman, you've probably
looked at more security, classified security documents and
evaluations and analysis than everybody in this room put to-
gether, with the possible exception of some of your colleagues
who are going to testify. And I was struck by the Vice Chair-
man's talking about accoutability, and one of your answers in
which you described committees as a place to spread the blame. I
suppose the reverse side of that would be it's a place to diffuse
responsibility as much as you can.
Having said that, and you look at the organizational
chart which the staff kindly prepared for us, one of the things
that has struck me since I've been in the Senate, and has struck
me even more in the short time I'm on this committee, are the
number of people that, for the sake of competition, are involved
in analysis; a fewer number of those, but still many, involved in
collection.
I'm really directing my comments to strategic intelli-
gence, not tactical intelligence.
I get the impression, over the last ten years, that in
terms of what that competition produces, I don't see too much
evidence it produces much, except maybe at the margins. And
certainly in this recent experience, in the briefings that we
had, and there were many, the community differential on analysis
was at the margins.
My question is: Are we structurally set up in such a
way, in the name of competition -- and I wonder, really, whether
that isn't really a Trojan Horse for something else. But the
history of setting up all of these competitive agencies that
compete in these areas, in doing precisely what the Vice
Chairman's asking you about -- and that is, not only spreading
the blame, but rather than coming up with hard analysis which
might be wrong, coming up with a bureaucratic diffusion of
answers which essentially answers nothing.
That's my question.
ADMIRAL INMAN: Let me refer you to a classified
document, that's probably now 20 years old, in the publication
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that CIA used to call -- Walter, help me. It's the studies
it's the in-house sort of professional...
[Inaudible remarks]
ADMIRAL INMAN: "Studies in Intelligence," of a young
analyst named Robert Gates, who wrote a scathing article on the
general approach to avoiding having to make hard judgments, just
reporting history and not going out. And I think it answers more
eloquently the question you've raised than I could do. But I
remember it from many years. It was first drew him to my
attention.
There's a -- so it doesn't have to necessarily even be
different agencies in doing it. First, there's the mind-set.
How risky is it to make judgments, as opposed to just sort of
reporting history, in the process? How demanding are each layers
above in saying, "You're the expert," you know. "Make a judgment
on what you think's going to happen." And you have to stand by
that.
Let me give you the risk on the other side. The very
persuasive, loquacious analyst or intelligence officer, or
something, who comes and gives you a very clear and disturbing
picture, which is based largely on emotion and very little fact.
And that most often happens when you've got highly charged issues
and not much hard data.
And I've heard over the years a lot of people make great
cases for what's there and they seem to know so much about it and
they sweep people along, and then you go back later and you find
out there wasn't much hard fact, but they were awfully good at
articulating judgments on that process.
So, I'm not sure this is an organizational issue as much
as a quality-control issue, and what you lay out that you expect.
I was not a fan of competitive analysis as a lieutenant,
lieutenant commander, when I was the Soviet Navy analyst and
didn't understand why we needed to have somebody from CIA doing
the same thing. Honesty compels me to tell you that there were
occasions when they challenged some of my assumptions and I
rethought them and decided I was wrong, and I came out differ-
ently in the fragmentary pieces.
And the heart of the problem here is, in this intelli-
gence business you rarely have the whole picture. You're dealing
with bits and pieces of information. And your own assumptions
can often drive how you put those pieces together. And you look
at it and you just simply see it differently.
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So there is a risk, if you move away from the competi-
tive analysis, that nobody will challenge the assumptions and you
could be misled. I think that's a risk I would rather take than
giving up coverage at all of parts of the world in the drawdown
out in front of us.
SENATOR RUDMAN: I thank you for your answer.
I just get the feeling that if we're going to have
problems with money, then we ought to concentrate on quality, the
kind of thing that General Powell talks to us about when he talks
about we're going to have a smaller armed force. I mean maybe
it's going to be smaller, but let's make sure it's better, with
better people, better training, better equipment.
There was a sense that I have that it's become so
bureaucratic and so big in so many places, that maybe we're
spending too much money on too many things that maybe aren't
good. We might spend less money on better things and better
people, and get better intelligence, maybe, with less competi-
tion, I expect.
When you talk about reorganization, Mr. Chairman,
whether we ever get to that or not, you're essentially talking
about whether or not you keep the structure as it is. I dare say
that if you were going to start a superpower someplace up in the
Arctic next week, a new nation, this is not the structure that
you would probably adopt for intelligence, this group.
The question is, you can't go back to square one. It's
too late. But how do you get maybe back to square 99? And I
think that may be all we can accomplish.
ADMIRAL INMAN: And how do you make sure that positions
aren't taken to protect institutions, as opposed to how do you
try to solve a problem or get on in giving the best answer.
SENATOR RUDMAN: We know something about decisions taken
to protect institutions around here, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you.
SENATOR CHAFEE: Mr. Chairman, I have a statement I did
not put in earlier. I'd like to put it in there.
Just a couple of points that I'd like to make which
pertain to what we're discussing here. And that is, I believe
we're going to become increasingly dependent upon intelligence as
we look to the future. If you look at the plans for our armed
services in the next five years, it calls for a cut of 10 of the
Army's 28 divisions -- that's a 36 percent cut; 10 of the Air
J
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Force's 36 tactical fighter wings -- that's a 28 percent cut;
over a hundred of the Navy's 545 combat ships -- that's a nearly
20 percent cut. So we've got some big cuts coming.
Now, the next point I'd like to make is -- and I think
that intelligence has got to take its share, some portion of the
cuts. But I think increasingly intelligence is going to be
important.
And the next point I'd like to make: Several people, on
their opening statements, have referred to the Goldwater-Nichols
Act. I'd just like to put that in context, if I might. The
Senate Armed Services Committee held its first hearing on the
organization of the Defense Department in 1982, and it wasn't
till 1986, 3 1/2 years later, after 25 hearings, eight task
force meetings, ten mark-up sessions, that the Senate passed the
legislation that we now applaud and give some credit for being of
major assistance out in the Gulf.
Now, the point I'm making, Mr. Chairman, is that I'm for
looking at the intelligence community. I think it's worthwhile.
But I think we ought to pursue with deliberate speed if we want
to arrive at a prudent result. And we shouldn't say that if we
don't complete it in this calendar year or next calendar year,
that we're failures.
The next thing I'd like to point out is something that
Admiral Inman stressed, and it's something that Admiral Moorer
used to tell us often. When things go wrong, it isn't always the
structure that's wrong. Sometimes you ought to change the
people.
And it seemed to me that you were pointing out that
don't always look at the structural setup, but look at the people
you've got in it.
The question I'd like to ask: As I understood your
testimony, Admiral, you said your number one plea was that there
be geographic breadth. Now, as I understood what you meant by
that, is don't have vertical cuts. Don't say you're not going to
cover -- have anybody in Country A...
ADMIRAL INMAN: You've got it exactly right.
SENATOR CHAFEE: ...because you're going to -- that's
unimportant.
Now, it seems to me that -- am I correct in saying that
there's some countries that, and maybe in Europe, that you don't
need such coverage for? And I hate to use names here, because
then it'll go out that we're not spying on such a nation, or we
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should spy more. But there are some that, it seems to me, if
you're in the geographic area, you're doing pretty well.
Is that right?
ADMIRAL INMAN: You really trigger me for a point I
didn't make clearly enough earlier. And then I'll zero in on...
SENATOR CHAFEE: Have we got time?
[Confusion of voices]
SENATOR CHAFEE: Chalk it up to Senator Warner.
ADMIRAL INMAN: Thank you.
The issue, Senator Chafee, that I was trying to get at,
when we talk about human intelligence, is that a vast amount of
the human intelligence that's available to us is not clandestine.
It's overt, overtly available. The issue is, do you have the
competent observers, be they political officers, economic
officers, cultural officers, commerical attaches, science
attaches, legal ataches, military attaches, assigned to the State
Department, as well as the variety of official and unofficial
cover clandestine, that says you really track broadly the
information that's available?
But in this context, that you also think about in this
evoling world, your interest in a lot of countries is going to be
in their economic decision-making process and where are they
headed toward trade barriers or constaints, as opposed to the
military issues, and political ones, that have driven us in the
past. I think as we move to a common market, as we move to
understand what are the pressures that tear on the alliance
structure, what are the things that are different between a
Western European Union and an EC and a NATO, that we need to
understand substantially better what's happening in those
countries and have ongoing analytical efforts.
That does not mean it has to be a clandestine agent, in
the terms that we think about spies. But it does say that you've
got to have overt observers who understand the language, who read
it, who are competent, not just count on it being done in
English, and that in fact you regularly flow and look at those
problems to say: Are there things happening here that we ought
to flag to the policymakers that they ought to get on?
. That's what I really have in mind when I talk about the
geographic coverage.
SENATOR CHAFEE: Would you think that those people
should be on the payroll of one of the intelligence agencies?
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ADMIRAL INMAN: No. I don't at all. And this is the
problem, and I went too fast through it earlier. We've never
gotten it right. How do we insure -- how do we stand up here and
insist that the Foreign Service get manned and staffed at a level
of more than consular officials and administrative officers in
the process?
I watched the same thing slip in under budget pressures,
to recommend the President sign a letter that says he wants lean
emassies. If you go back and read every letter from '67 to '81
signed by Presidents to an ambassador, there was almost a full
page on how you reduce the official American presence. Not once
was there anything in there: What do you know about the country
where you are? Where ae the places we might be surprised, even
if it's a friend today, in where they're going to go?
So, it's a tough challenge I'm giving you, because a lot
of that doesn't end up in the -- shouldn't, in my view, be in the
intelligence budget. But yet I go back to my days as a briefer.
And getting ready for that morning brief, frequently the diplo-
matic reporting and the FPIS reporting took up a very substantial
part of what I decided Admiral Burke ought to know in that ten
minutes. Not things which came from the classified intelligence-
collection activities. And I'm afraid that's where we're losing
a lot of the coverage that we need.
So, when we think about human intelligence collection,
we need to think about it very broadly.
I've lobbied my colleagues at the DDO that they ought to
set up an advocacy office that, in fact, advocates everywhere
that information can be collected overtly. And when they struck
out getting and spending other people's money to get the
information, then they set out to do it clandestinely.
SENATOR CHAFEE: Okay. Fine. Well, thank you very
SENATOR BOREN: Thank you very much, Senator Chafee.
And Admiral Inman, thank you very much for being with
us. We appreciate...
ADMIRAL INMAN: My apologies to General Odom and Mr.
Latham for taking up so much of their time.
SENATOR BOREN: We appreciate the thoughts that you
shared with us very much. And there may well be some of these
subjects we'll want to pursue with you later on in the process of
our hearings in private conversation, as well.
Appreciate your being with us.
Jil __.l
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Our next witness, also no stranger to this committee, is
Lieutenant General (Retired) William E. Odom. General Odom has
testified before us on a number of occasions, though usually in
closed session, in a different setting than we have today.
As all of you know, General Odom served as Director of
the National Security Agency in the mid-1980s, and prior to that
he was Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence in the Depart-
ment of the Army. He also saw duty during his career at the
National Security Council, and previously served also as Defense
Attache in Moscow.
So, he's had a very broad-ranging career, vantage
points, various vantage points from which to view the intelli-
gence process. He brings a wealth of experience to bear on the
subject of today's hearing. .He is always a stimulating person,
one who causes us to think, one who speaks very directly. And
that's valued by the members of this committee. It's helpful to
us. He has a keen mind and a very creative mind.
So, General Odom, we're very appreciative of your taking
time to be with us. I know you're continuing to stimulate minds,
as I hear from students and colleagues at my alma mater, where
you're now doing some teaching, and I'm getting wonderful reports
on your teaching there and what you're sharing with the students.
And we appreciate your bringing your prespectives to bear with
us today.
[Asides about time constraints]
LT. GEN. WILLIAM ODOM: Mr. Chairman, I do find it an
honor to appear before the committee again today. And I realize
that time is short, and I will try to be brief. But I think in
order to get a basis for discussion -- and some of the points I
have in the discussion bear directly on the questions raised
earlier, I do need to elaborate a couple things.
I commend your attention to organizational process
issues. I think that's long overdue. I can only paint in very
broad strokes some of the solutions.
I think, first, we have to have an approach. And the
first step in that approach is to understand that we will talk
only nonsense about organization and structure unless we have a
commonly accepted paradigm of what intelligence is supposed to
do, for whom, and how it is to do it.
Second, we need a similar paradigm for managing
resources within the intelligence community. That is, we need a
scheme for relating the resource inputs to intelligence outputs.
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Now, third, if we have those paradigms, we can judge
where we are today against the present structure.
That's very simple to say. But my experience with the
intelligence community has been that there is no doctrinal
paradigm, that there are several here and there. On other
places, there are none whatsoever. And some are made up
day-to-day, depending on contemporary bureaucratic interest.
Let me offer the broad outlines of one, since there's an
absence. It's one that I don't claim any originality in. You
can trace it back to Elihu Root's reforms in 1902 in the Depart-
ment of War, when he created the Army staff organization.
Intelligence, in that approach, is broken into two
functions. The first is the staff function for analysis and
production, and the second is the collection and collation
funtion. Collation is a buzzword now called processing.
Production. Let's talk about that one, then talk about
the collection function. This function has to be done in close
interaction with the operational process or the policy process.
The staff intelligence officer must head it. At the lowest
tactical levels, that's the S-2 in a battalion, G-2 in a
division, the J-2 at the joint staff. It's I&R in State. It's
the Intelligence in the Treasury Department. Whatever.
It has to have intimate involvement with the Cabinet
officer or the commander or whoever runs the operations all the
way down, or it will fail. That point is critical. the very
head of the intelligence production process can't be separate
from the institution and the policymakers it supports. In other
words, a separate intelligence institution doesn't make any
sense.
Elihu Root offered -- accepted the findings of several
studies in Europe which showed if you didn't put intelligence on
a coequal level with the operators, that the operations staff,
which in the German case subordinated the intelligence, tended to
override it. It did the same thing to logistics. And the result
was not very good.
The key point, I think, to remember is that the
intelligence officer at the staff drives this whole process, just
as the plans officer out for General Schwarzkopf wrote the plans
which he signed out as orders to tell the Air Force to do one
thing, the Seventh Corps to do another, and the 18th Airborne
Corps to do another. There should be an equivalent order
directing process for intelligence.
Now, let's review the second function, collection of
intelligence.
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And by the way, let me make in that point that almost
every institution in the government, if you look, has such an
intelligence officer. There is an absence of that staff function
in some places. For example, there was in the FAA when we began
to look into intelligence support for that organization. It is
not true, however, that all those intelligence staffs understand
the community or know how to get into the intelligence collection
business.
So, I think there's a paucity of understanding about how
they ought to function and how they could best draw on the
collection systems.
Now, there are essentially three intelligence disci-
plines: signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, and human
intelligence. We could talk about counterintelligence and
others, but let me put that aside.
All institutions have an organic capability, of one kind
or another, to collect their own intelligence. At the battalion
level or the company level in the Army, it's a rifle squad that
goes out on reconnaissance. It's a political officer in an
embassy that tries to answer a question, one way or another,
through overt sources. And so forth throughout any other agency.
The staff intelligence officer has to be able to direct
them, in the name of the chief, or they're wasted resources. But
that's not enough. He has to be able to go out to the flanks and
pass the imagery column, the signals-intelligence collection
column, and the imagery [sic] column.
The much larger collection capability, in particularly
the technical services, is found at the national and the depart-
mental level. These are not going to function very coherently
unless they're managed from top to bottom in a coordinated
fashion. And they have to have a myriad of communications from
their functional discipline -- signals, imagery, or human
intelligence -- out to these literally thousands of potential
demands. So you have to have one enormous distribution system.
There should be a link between the collection discipline
structures, linked from tactical to national. And if there is
not, there will be a breakdown in the utility or the use of
collection assets; and many questions will go unanswered, not
because you couldn't answer them, but because the right mix of
collection at lower and higher levels is not brought together.
Now, the nature of each of these disciplines is so
different and so the skills required in each are so specialized
that I think a single-discipline organizational structure is
imperative for each. And I was pleasantly surprised to hear
Admiral Inman come fairly close to that a bit earlier.
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SENATOR BOREN: You're saying, in other words, one boss,
if you want to put it at that, for...
GENERAL ODOM: Per disicipline.
SENATOR BOREN: For imagery collection. One boss for
signals collection.
GENERAL ODOM: Absolutely.
SENATOR BOREN: And one boss for...
GENERAL ODOM: Human intelligence.
SENATOR BOREN: ...HUMINT collection. That can be then
clearly -- each one can be staffed by whoever's above that.
GENERAL ODOM: Right. Next point...
[Inaudible remarks]
GENERAL ODOM: Absolutely. We're going to get back to
accountability, your question. Your question is a very key one.
I think there's great forward answers. We just don't want to
give 'em to you.
[Laughter]
GENERAL ODOM: The national level doesn't have to own
everything under the collector. In other words, doesn't have to
be the commander of it. He must have, however, what's known in
the joint command structure over in the Pentagon, operational
control. In other words, it takes its operational directions
from this collection manager.
The Naval forces in the Gulf and the Army forces and the
Air forces had their own component commander. They were com-
manded by that component commander. But the operations orders
came out of the J-3 in CENTCOM. And that's precisely an arrange-
ment you can set up. It's one that is already fairly extant in
the signals intelligence community, but not so much in the rest.
Now, the intelligence -- each one of those chiefs must
get his directions from these intelligence analytic staff
officers of the production function. He can't be out there
seeking information to answer questions nobody asked him. So he
has to be subordinate. He has to be driven by them, or again the
accountability issue comes up. He can't sit there and prioritize
on his own.
But once he has been given priority in collection, then
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he needs to have the latitude to mix his collection assets any
way he wants to and collect.
Now, if you have this operation that way and you allow
every element which has a G-2 or an S-2 in staff intelligence
collection -- or, rather, production and analysis section to link
into these vertical collection disciplines, then you can, I
think, solve most of the management, in terms of operations and
supply of intelligence to people who need them. And you won't
end up answering a lot of questions that nobody asked you, and
failing to answer the questions that were desperately in need of
an answer.
Now, let me turn to the second issue, relating re-
sources, input resources intelligence to output resources. Many
of these resources in all the disciplines -- SIGINT, HUMINT,
IMINT -- are found at every level. The program responsibilities
for these means, if it is to be carried out responsibly, must be
placed so that duplications at various levels don't occur, so
that dysfunctional mixes are avoided, and so that the obsolete
means can be identified and modernized.
Now, if the imagery national manager has to answer to
every command level for failures in delivering imagery, he's
likely to have a good idea about what new or different kinds of
collection resources are needed. If cuts in imagery are to be
made, it is clearly -- he is clearly the only person who can find
out where to make those cuts best. This is equally true for
SIGINT and HUMINT. And it is also true for the production
function.
Now, let me just make a point about that.
SENATOR CHAFEE: Mr. Chairman, unfortunately, I have to
But I did sneak ahead in your testimony here. And you
-- I just want this one thing. You say we have serious struc-
tural problems. Do you provide an answer for that in here?
GENERAL ODOM: No, because I was asked to paint in broad
strokes and because this is an unclassified hearing. No. But
I'm quite prepared to provide fairly explicit answers. I'll give
you one right now which...
SENATOR CHAFEE: Well, I don't want to interrupt the
flow here. And I'm interrupting only because I have to go.
But, Mr. Chairman,...
[Confusion of voices]
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SENATOR CHAFFE: I mean we've got a very distinguished
witness, and I hope -- and he can help us on the solution to
these matters, too.
GENERAL ODOM: Well, just let me end right here by
saying that if we have -- if we can agree on these two paradigms,
the one for operations and the one for resources, the fellow
responsible for intelligence output is responsible for coming
over here to the Congress and getting the money, then I think
you'll know who to hold responsible. And until that happens,
nothing's going to -- you're not going to have responsibility.
Let me just make one point which might be of interest to
you here if you did look at it. I would encourage you to read
the part where I said, "What about the management of resources
and relating them to output?" Here the intelligence community
has serious inadequacies.
When I was the Director of NSA and I went to the
National Foreign Intelligence Council meetings, I was the only
person there who could talk sensibly about what -- where cuts in
resource inputs would affect resource -- intelligence outputs.
The person at that meeting who had the largest program budget
hadn't the slightest idea about that because he had no responsi-
bility for intelligence outputs. The DCI was very frustrated
because he didn't get any answers. It shouldn't have been
strange. There wasn't anybody there who had the information to
give him the answers. We were organized to be sure that you
couldn't relate inputs to outputs. Back to Senator Murkowski's
point.
Now, I think if you take these two paradigms -- I don't
think you'll get much of anywhere in discussions here about what
you ought to do until you can get people in the community and
among yourselves to agree on these basic doctrinal principles.
Once they've agreed on them, then I think you can go lining them
up against particular activities, and you'll begin to get some
answers.
Now, let me just end by an example. You discussed here
earlier competitive analysis. You discussed here earlier, in
answewr to Senator Chafee, why do we have duplication in CIA,
DIA, and various other places in the name of competition? Well,
I don't think we need that. And let me tell you why.
The DDI at CIA is not owned by anybody who's an oper-
ator. The Secretary of Defense does not own him. The Secretary
of the Treasury doesn't own him. Therefore he's not going to pay
much attention to what he puts out. He will depend on the
intelligence analysis done by his staff officer who's in charge
of intelligence, whom he knows and trusts, and whom he knows
knows the questions he wants answered. And I have seen precious
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little money ever moved in the government, anywhere, as a result
of most of that analysis. Most of the so-called competitive
analysis in the community merely achieves bureaucratic paralysis
and keeps a very sporting game of intermural warfare going on
within the intelligence community.
If you want critical analysis, or something that's
a functional equivalent for it, you need something that's
equivalent to what I have to do at Yale. I have to grade papers
and I have to point up inadequate assumptions, wrongheaded
assumptions, and poor analysis. And when things come out the
wrong way, you -- the real competition in the intelligence
analysis should be with events and of adversaries, not vis-a-vis
institutions within the intelligence community.
And just let me end with that.
SENATOR BOREN: You've really given us a lot to think
about, and I think you've set forth the problem in a very clear
way.
Now, we have -- if you separate the collection side of
it, we have HUMINT, obviously, we have SIGINT, we have imagery,
are the three major areas. Clearly, SIGINT is clearly deline-
ated, more than any other, pretty clearly delineated.
GENERAL ODOM: Yes. It's in the best shape, as far as
management, as any others.
SENATOR BOREN: You have one, really, one central
manager, in essence, through NSA.
Where would you place the management responsibility for
imagery, and where would you place the management responsibility
for HUMINT?
GENERAL ODOM: I would place the imagery responsibility
in a National Imagery Agency. I would create an analog organi-
zation to NSA and I would give it national responsibility for
that. You can debate about whether it ought to be in the Defense
Department or outside the Defense Department. I would come down
on the side of it being in the Defense Department, because
otherwise it will go out and develop its own bureaucratic turf.
Could you, in essence...
GENERAL ODOM: But I would take the elements, which are
largely right now in CIA, DDSNT, in the NPIC, and in the ser-
vices, and mix them all together and say, You now have to work
out a structure that supports, national, all departmental
requirements, as well as General Schwarzkopf's tactical require-
ments.
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SENATOR BOREN: Would it be possible, when you look back
at the tasking of imagery -- at least in this latest conflict,
DIA really began to have the large role. Would it be possible,
in essence, by somewhat reconstituting DIA, to make DIA, in
essence, that single manager?
GENERAL ODOM: I was very puzzled by Admiral Inman's
comment on that. I don't see why that would make any sense at
all.
If you stick to my paradigm here, DIA, if it is
anything, it is the J-2 for the Secretary of Defense and the
Chiefs...
SENATOR BOREN: ...HUMINT.
GENERAL ODOM: Pardon?
SENATOR BOREN: Well, it's also HUMINT collection.
GENERAL ODOM: Well, it does. I say -- but as I say in
my testimony, it's an agency which, understandably, has schizo-
phrenia. It doesn't know whether it has a staff function or its
a collection. It does have a piece of collection. And I would
split its HUMINT collection out away from it entirely and make --
there would be a J-2...
SENATOR BOREN: Make them the analytical agent for the
Department.
GENERAL ODOM: Right. And then I would have an indepen-
dent, separate agency for imagery.
SENATOR BOREN: All right.
GENERAL ODOM: Let me add one more reason why. It's a
very technical activity, and you will never have the skills with
the density of competence in DIA to manage the modern, highly
technical imagery world.
SENATOR BOREN: Well, now, let's assume -- and I suppoe
HUMINT -- would HUMINT probably be largely the CIA side of
operations?
GENERAL ODOM: Right now, if you wanted to, if the DDO
wanted to be, he could be the national imagery agency and manage
-- I mean the national HUMINT manager and manage it just like --
and technically, he has the same kind of operational control over
non-CIA assets that I, as the Director of NSA, had over non-NSA
signals assets. But it would require a kind of cooperation
between Defense and CIA for which there's absolutely no prece-
dent.
1liLJ
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SENATOR BOREN: So just to carry this -- I understand
what you're saying -- to carry this out. Now, let's suppose that
we have a national HUMINT collection agency, a national imagery
agency, a national SIGINT agency, in essence. You have in each
major area, whether it's Defense, whether it's State diplomacy,
whether it is Energy, or whatever, Commerce for economic intelli-
gence, you have, in essence, your analytical arm, if you want to
call it that, in the various policy areas. You've got a State
Department analytical. They take the product from these three
branches, they analyze it, they inform the Secretary of State.
Or the intelligence analytical people at the Department of Energy
pull from these three sources and they give their advice to the
Secretary of Energy. And in that sense, you don't have the kind
of competing analysis that we talked about a while ago.
Now, what then happens when you get to the presi-
dential level? In other words, this is the one place where the
President must be informed, not only in terms of what perhaps the
Energy Department will want to know, the kinds of intelligence
they'd gather, or what the Defense Department would need in terms
of what the Secretary of Defense or the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs would need, but a much broader element of analysis across
the board that really gets into various policy areas; plus, also,
an ability to question whether or not when the Secretary of
Defense or the Secretary of State come in. Sometimes you might
get some competing analysis there by flowing into the President,
at least, with the Secretary of State arguing vociferously, "My
analysts feel this way." And we've seen this happen before.
GENERAL ODOM: Absolutely.
SENATOR BOREN: And Defense saying, "My analysts feel
this way."
Now, would you then organize? Who would be the intelli-
gence adviser, so to speak, to the President? Would that be the
National Security Adviser, or would that be an additional
national intelligence officer? And would he, in essence, have a
staff that would to some degree bring together the various
elements of analysis to inform the President?
That's one decision. The other thing is, who makes the
budgetary decisions?
I think you're quite right. When it comes to SIGINT, no
one knows better, in fact, than the SIGINT collector. When it
comes to imagery, no one's going to know better than that manager
for imagery. When it comes to...
GENERAL ODOM: ...holding them accountable for the
output, it will...
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SENATOR BOREN: Exactly.
GENERAL ODOM: ...quicken his sense of...
SENATOR BOREN: Exactly. He will set his priorities.
He will know where his money's best spent. But there still comes
the problem. of how you decide how much should go to HUMINT
versus how much should go to SIGINT versus how much should go to
imagery.
We have two functions, at least at the presidential
level: Who, in essence, is the OMB for Intelligence -- if you
want to call it that -- up to the President? And two, who, in
essence, becomes the intelligence adviser or analyst for the
President, at that level?
GENERAL ODOM: Let me answer the last, 'cause it's easy.
The real intelligence adviser to the President is the National
Security Adviser and the set of staffers he has. They will drive
the demand for intelligence by the White House.
SENATOR BOREN: So the NSC staff and the National
Security Adviser.
GENERAL ODOM: And you can't insure that the President's
going to have a first-rate NSC staff. Some have, some don't.
But there's not much we can do about it. You can just make it
available.
I also think that a DCI, the chief of the community,
probably needs some residual piece of what is now DDI. And I
think he needs it not to compete with the rest of the community,
but to reach ahead and see, anticipate certain kinds of problems
and to task, organize to go after them as they come up. It does
not need to be big.
My rule in the production/analysis world is that ten
dumb analysts will never beat one smart analyst. We do not need
more people in the analytic function. We need fewer. And I
would even suggest that if you cut by 50 percent and just kept
the requirements very hot on the [unintelligible], you'd get
better output. But there's just no relationship between numbers
of people and insightful analysis.
So, I don't need a lot. But I think he should have that
task force so he could go after particular problems.
Let me give you an example of one that I think ought to
be gone after in an unclassified, open way. We've always been
relatively ignorant of the politics of the 15 republics and some
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other lesser nationalities inside the Soviet Union. The ple-
thora, the deluge of intelligence, of just open information
coming out about these republics is astounding. Why don't we
just set up an open institution down here with 15 chiefs, one for
each republic, and they start cataloging and getting the data in?
I would be willing to be in no time at all that would beat all of
the best intelligence analysts in town on that issue.
So, you do need a capability there to go after particu-
lar kinds of problems. Energy sometimes becomes a big issue. I
remember, being in the Carter White House, the Soviet oil
production analysis was very important. And a CIA analysis on
that turned out to be critical, and it was very helpful.
So, those kinds of issues. But that doesn't have to be
big. The resource issue...
SENATOR BOREN: The budget. Well, let me stop you right
there before you go into the budget issue.
On the intelligence issue, then, you, in essence, would
have, just like you'd have in the equivalent of the head of I&R
in the State Department, collect -- draw from these three
collections, then analyze for the Secretary of State. The real
intelligence analyst, as you see it, for the President would be
the National Security Adviser, ultimately.
GENERAL ODOM: Well, he's the person who's going to be
next to the President daily and knows what's going on.
SENATOR BOREN: Of course. And in the midst of a
crisis, and so on. But he would be assisted by...
SENATOR BOREN: ...a DCI who would preside over a much
stripped-down -- because the DDO, in essence, would become really
a separate agency.
GENERAL ODOM: Right. Right.
SENATOR BOREN: The DCI would probably be smaller than
the DDO, because it would be smaller than the HUMINT collection
agency. It would be a small sort of backup staff that could be
reconfigured as it needed to be as we went along, considering the
problem areas; a sort of lean, mean analytical adjunct resource.
And in essence, the DCI would, in a sense, work for the National
Security Adviser, in a way, if you wanted to look at it that way,
in terms of the...
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GENERAL ODOM: That'll work out on a personal basis. I
don't think you can put that in the statute.
SENATOR BOREN: Now describe who adviserse the Presi-
dent, who comes forward with the comprehensive budget resources
and how we share our dollars between the various collection --
the three collection agencies and anything else in the community.
GENERAL ODOM: You heard Admiral Inman talk about the
evolution of that toward -- from a small role for the DCI to a
larger role. I think it has to be the DCI. I think the DCI
needs a resource and a requirements staff. I think he needs four
functions under this resource staff. He needs an intelligence
requirements and evaluation staff that goes around and finds out
what people need. You heard Admiral Inman talk about doing this,
go out and ask the policymakers what they need. Well, that needs
to be routinized.
I couldn't have run the National Security Agency if I
hadn't gotten the national SIGINT's requirement list every year
prioritized. Somebody's got to do that. What they don't do is
go see if we ever answered the mail, or if the user ever really
needed what you sent him. So I put the evaluation function in
there.
Another function needed is the basic programming
function, which the DCI staff always has. You're going to have
to have that. That's highly routinized by law, regulation,
precedent, etcetera.
Then I think he needs a counterintelligence and
securities staff section to handle that.
And he needs a science and technology staff assistance.
And the reason he needs this, he must have somebody who keeps him
aware of the cutting edge of all scientific intel -- tactical
developments in the world.
It should not be a big organization. It'd be extremely
small. And if the community will not spend R&D monies for things
that the DCI thinks they ought to in the way of high risk into
the future, I would be prepared to give that small staff sort of
a skunk works funding with a sunshine law, or a sunset rule on
it. Give you three years or five years to go prove that this
stuff will or won't work.
SENATOR BOREN: Right.
So, in essence, you boil down -- and I won't go on any
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longer, and turn it to the Vice Chairman. But in essence, the
role -- I understand it's a really very direct, and it goes to
what Senator Murkowski said awhile ago about accountability and
the people who have the greatest knowledge about the program
really setting up the methods of which they do their missions.
These three collection agencies -- of course, there's some other
things that have to be fit in...
GENERAL ODOM: Sure. There are a bunch of...
SENATOR BOREN: But then you have the National Security
Adviser playing the principal role of intelligence adviser to the
President. And you would have a very much stripped-down DCI
function, in terms of size, numbers...
GENERAL ODOM: It's stripped down in terms of size, but
it's not stripped down in terms of clout.
SENATOR BOREN: No. Because it would, in essence -- he
would, in essence, remain the OMB for Intelligence.
GENERAL ODOM: He owns the money.
SENATOR BOREN: He owns the money. He's going to have
the staff that enables him to decide for resource distribution,
an also an adjunct analytical staff to take on special problems
as they're given additional tasks by the National Security
Adviser and the President direct to the DCI.
Well, it's a very interesting concept. It's a very
clear one and it's a very logical one. And I appreciate your
sharing it with us.
SENATOR MURKOWSKI: To keep this, General, on the plane
that you have set, which I think is a clear understanding of the
concept of accountability, let's ask why it can't work that way,
under the realization that the National Security Adviser to the
President is the responsible agency, or agent, for that communi-
cation and intelligence coming in. One would generalize that,
why isn't all this accomplished by an executive order?
GENERAL ODOM: It can be.
SENATOR MURKOWSKI: I know. It can be.
GENERAL ODOM: I don't advocate legislation. I don't
think anything I've recommended here can be done by executive
order [sic].
SENATOR MURKOWSKI: You say anything can be done?
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GENERAL ODOM: Everything that I have recommended can be
done by executive order. I see no imperative for legislation.
You know, I will keep an open mind. Maybe there are some needs
which I haven't anticipated here. But...
SENATOR MURKOWSKI: Well, let me interrupt because that
brings us to the focus of the reason for this committee to be
holding a public hearing on reorganization of the intelligence
community. If it can be done by executive order, what do we need
to legislative body involved, other than to bring it to the
attention of the Executive Branch that clearly there is a need
for improvement? They come up with budget requirements that are
necessary, in the sense of having the capability, if you will, to
do the job necessary to protect our national security interests.
But they have -- is it that they don't have the time attention?
Or is the bureaucracy so -- how would you generalize why they are
not taking this initiative now, under the obvious authority that
they have?
GENERAL ODOM: Well, obviously, you and Senator Boren
are probably in a better position to judge the merits of this
hearings approach. And I will demur to your...
SENATOR MURKOWSKI: Yeah, but you've got more objecti-
vity than we do.
GENERAL ODOM: But to your last question, about why
don't they go do it themselves, I think there are two reasons
there. First, I don't think there is within the policy community
a clear concept or paradigm, as I've used the word here, or
doctrine. And without a kind of elementary understanding of such
a paradigm in some of the leadership positions, they don't see
anything wrong. They don't know whether it fits or doesn't fit.
And the commuity does remarkably well.
You know, all the things I've said here should not lead
one to detract from the intelligence community's capabilities. I
have said frequently that I think the overwhelming dominance of
the the U.S. surveillance regime explains a lot in the world,
that people fail to grasp, in maintaining the peace, putting us
on the right policy course, etcetera. And you should take my
remarks purely in that context.
I'm talking about a company that's earning money, but
you've asked me, "Could we increase the factor or productivity
and earn more." And I said yes. And you say, "How would you do
it?" This is the way I would do it.
SENATOR MURKOWSKI: All right.
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My last question, and I think it paraphrases. You
stressed that intelligence must work for and respond to policy-
makers
GENERAL ODOM: Right.
SENATOR MURKOWSKI: The policymakers. I assume you
would, of course, include the President, the State Department,
the Department of Defense. But therein lies the problem. What
policymakers do the CIA analysts basically work for? Now, they
work towards the National Security Adviser and the President, but
the conglomeration is where it gets -- it gets fuzzy and gets
lost, and accountability's gone.
GENERAL ODOM: We're one of the few countries in the
world that has such a creation. And I think if you want to
understand it, you have to go back to William Donovan, go back to
Donovan's time and the 1947 transition and his fetish for
national intelligence estimates.
A lot of people think national intelligence estimates
are important. I must say I've never seen the government do
anything because of one.
SENATOR BOREN: [Laughter]
GENERAL ODOM: I've never seen it move a dollar -- let
me just make a point on that. I've never seen an NIA move a
dollar anywhere. But I'll tell you, when I was Chief of Army
Intelligence, if I had adjusted the assessment of the frontal
glacis on a T-80 tank, I could have killed or supported a
multibillion-dollar 120-millimeter tank gun program. That moves
dollars. You know, 10-20 millimeters. That's where the money
is. It's not in these somewhat vapid national intelligence
estimates.
Now, I used to think we should not have them. But I
think we should have them. And they perform a very important
function within the intelligence community. It is an arcane
organization with little analytic sections all over the place,
and that process forces these otherwise isolated people to talk
to one another and to get all their evidence on the table. And I
think that function is so important that it really doesn't make
any difference if the NIAs don't have a highly critical role. We
still need them and we still need to go through that process.
SENATOR MURKOWSKI: I commend you, General, on your
ability to keep your comments related to the bottom line.
GENERAL ODOM: Thank you.
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SENATOR MURKOWSKI: I hope that the professional staff
takes note.
[Laughter]
SENATOR BOREN: I'm not sure we're able to take on board
such direct, clear -- clear, logical advice.
[Laughter]
SENATOR BOREN: Let me say it is very refreshing to hear
you express these thoughts in the way you have, and very, very
helpful to us.
SENATOR WARNER: Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman....
General, you've been up here a good deal recently and
testifying, and we're glad to have you. Thank you for taking the
time to do this valuable work.
But although I've missed some of your testimony here,
I'd just like to ask a fundamental question. You've had the
unique assignments, career assignments, to allow you to look at
the intelligence organizations throughout the world. Do you know
of any nation that has a better one than the United States?
GENERAL ODOM: I said just before you came in, sir, that
I'm talking about -- I think the United States intelligence
system is overwhelming vis-a-vis any other system in the world.
I'm talking about a company that's making money. The issue today
is whether you want to increase the profit level.
SENATOR WARNER: I understand that. That's a fair
analogy.
GENERAL ODOM: It's absolutely a dramatic edge that it
has.
SENATOR WARNER: That's always been my view.
Some of the suggestions that you've made here, have you
ever written those down before and tried to push them within the
Administration when you were on active duty?
GENERAL ODOM: Only verbally. You know, I can afford to
not worry about the turf now. Some of these ideas make people
terribly nervous because turf boundaries would be moved rather
dramatically.
SENATOR WARNER: I'm very familiar with that.
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GENERAL ODOM: And it's not wise for one to do that
while still in there dividing the budget. Let me say, though,...
SENATOR WARNER: So, in other words, for self-survival
and that of your organization, you've held these close to your
chest for some time.
[Laughter]
GENERAL ODOM: Let me say about them, though, as an
advertisement for them, if people saw them through, I think
they'd discover that almost everybody would still have a seat at
the table when my reorganization is over. And I think if they
were willing to stick to the transition, they'd like the new
context much better. They'd have a much clearer notion of the
relation of what they did personally to product output.
SENATOR WARNER: Well, it would move the deck chairs
around a good deal, your recommendations. But that's the type of
testimony that the Chair and the Vice Chair and the members of
this committee have invited and wish to receive.
Admiral Inman had a reorganizational structure which, if
I understand it, was to create a single czar, so to speak, for
the Intelligence Committee [sic], and then give him the budget
authority. And those of us who've served in the Executive Branch
in Washington know that the power goes with the budget authority.
Where do you see a fault in that concept versus yours?
GENERAL ODOM: I'm not sure that -- I missed part of his
presentation when he was clarifying these three models. It may
turn out that one of mine almost entirely overlaps.
I see, as I said just before you came in, I see the DCI
still very much in charge of the community, the way he is now.
It seems to me has power, through program management and bud-
getary control, which no DCI has ever used very vigorously.
And...
SENATOR BOREN: I think what you're saying -- and I
think Senator Warner was gone through part of that testimony too.
But the third model that Admiral Inman talked about is very
consistent with exactly what you're saying. In other words, one
of the reasons why perhaps the DCI now doesn't really effectively
use this strong control of resource distribution, or this sort of
what I would call the OMB function within the intelligence
community, is that he's also so bogged down with a lot of other
managerial responsibilities that are partly operating, and
collecting responsibilities.
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And I think what you're saying is, by freeing him to
really concentrate on the resource allocation role principally,
and having the collection responsibilities in these other three
agencies, you really make him, in essence, in some ways, that
kind of -- function in that kind of way.
It would look like it would be very con -- in other
words, they're very similar proposals.
SENATOR WARNER: Mr. Chairman, I would hope that General
Odom would have a chance to look over the transcript of the
Admiral's viewpoints and then supplement the record with such
additional views as you may have. Because I think both of you
have served with great distinction within this community and
you've earned the right not to be principal critics of how we can
improve it.
Thank you.
GENERAL ODOM: Thank you very much, sir.
SENATOR BOREN: Thank you very much, Senator Warner.
And let me say also that I -- what General Odom has said
in terms of the ability of the Executive Branch to do a lot of
this by executive order, I think, is certainly true. And I, for
one, don't begin with the assumption that we have to legislate it
all. I think whatever we do has to end up being in partnership.
In other words, this committee -- it would be absolutely useless
for this committee or our counterparts in the House to pass
legislation that the President didn't agree to, did not accept,
that the Administration was not prepared to implement. First of
all, it'd never be signed into law. And if it were reluctantly
signed into law, it wouldn't be vigorously implemented in a way
that would make a difference.
So, this has to be -- I see as our function -- and I've
discussed this with the President personally and with General
Scowcroft and with others. I see our function is to highlight
these areas for consideration, and then to really try to work in
partnership, so that much of this maybe can be done by executive
order. Other will have to be backed up by our shifting of
budgetary priorities in a cooperative way, and the rest of it.
But I really do see this as a joint effort with the Executive
Branch and a way to to perhaps, really in a partnership way,
highlight things for them to consider that in the midst of their
other responsibilities it's difficult for them to do.
GENERAL ODOM: Mr. Chairman, let me respond by saying
that, you know, in my written testimony I want to underscore that
I really commend this effort. It doesn't matter, in my view,
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whether it leads to legislation. What's most important is it
crystallizes the discussion.
This discussion's 10 years overdue, maybe 15 years
overdue. And I don't think there can be any harm in raising
these issues and trying to sharpen the focus. And it well may be
that this forum is a political advantage to the Executive Branch
in carrying through some reforms.
SENATOR MURKOWSKI: I would certainly agree with that.
SENATOR BOREN: Well, I appreciate your comments very
much and I appreciate your testimony. And I can assure you that
the other members of the committee who had to go back and forth
to the floor will read your testimony and that it is certainly
going to leave us with a lot to ponder. And I would think you're
going to find your ideas resurfacing all through the course of
our deliberations. And we're undoubtedly going to want to impose
on your time to come back and be with us and inform us further.
We appreciate very much your being here.
SENATOR MURKOWSKI: And please do not hesitate to
continue to address the practicality of what we're attempting to
accomplish. Because oftentimes around here we get carried away
with the euphoria that somehow this thing is much more compli-
cated because it's got an intelligence ring to it than it has to
be.
GENERAL ODOM: Sure.
That you very much.
SENATOR BOREN: Thank you very much, General Odom.
t -1
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