A new spymaster—and a powerful one

Feb 17th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

President Bush has chosen John Negroponte, currently ambassador to Iraq, as America’s first director of national intelligence. The choice of Mr Negroponte indicates that the newly created job will have real power

JOHN NEGROPONTE is tough. There can be no doubt that the man George Bush has chosen as America's first director of national intelligence is a survivor and a fighter. Mr Negroponte, whose nomination was announced by Mr Bush on Thursday February 17th, has been accused of abetting torture and murder in Central America during the 1980s. He was ambassador to the United Nations during the run-up to the Iraq war and is currently America’s ambassador to a violence-torn Iraq. To many he is a tarnished figure—but his critics have been able only to watch him rise through the ranks from one hard job to another.

He will need to draw on all his experience of fighting—both the diplomatic and the literal sort—for his hardest job yet. Legislation passed in December created the post. America’s 15 intelligence agencies were seen as competing rather than co-operating, and the special commission that investigated the September 11th 2001 attacks determined that better coordination might have been able to forestall the tragedy. Congress, under pressure from the commission and the September 11th victims’ families, duly created the powerful post of the DNI.

This did not happen without controversy, however. In Washington, power is often measured by control of money and personnel. But many fought the creation of a DNI with these powers. Most notable among them were Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and his department, which consumes around 80% of the intelligence community’s $40 billion budget. Mr Rumsfeld’s congressional allies managed to squeeze a provision into the intelligence-reform law requiring that the new director’s job not “abrogate” the statutory responsibilities of the defence secretary. This seemed to indicate that the new DNI would be a figurehead, a nominal co-ordinator without the crucial power to allocate money between intelligence agencies.

The selection of Mr Negroponte, and Mr Bush’s comments at his nomination, seem to indicate otherwise. Though the DNI will not sit in the cabinet or be physically located in the White House, Mr Bush made it clear that Mr Negroponte would have his ear. He will replace the CIA’s boss, currently Porter Goss, as the president’s primary daily intelligence briefer.

Moreover, Mr Bush reiterated that Mr Negroponte would have the authority to allocate money to all the intelligence agencies and direct how it was spent. When asked directly what would happen if Mr Negroponte comes into conflict with Mr Rumsfeld, Mr Bush sought to downplay the notion that the two would necessarily disagree, whatever press reports might indicate. But when pressed, Mr Bush said directly, “Ultimately, John will make the decisions on the budget,” thus seeming finally to settle the ambiguity.

However, Mr Bush also stated that the military chain of command would remain intact. This could refer to the tasking of satellites, many of which are controlled by military intelligence. If Mr Negroponte and Mr Rumsfeld do not agree on where they should go, the question may be referred to the National Security Council and perhaps ultimately decided by the president.

A controversial past

Mr Negroponte served in America’s foreign service from 1960 to 1997, with assignments in Europe, Asia and Latin America. His most prominent posting was as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. While there, he was a key figure in the Reagan Administration’s war against the leftist Sandinist government in neighbouring Nicaragua. Honduras is where the American-backed, anti-Sandinist rebels, the Contras, were trained. Human-rights groups say that the Contras used their base in Honduras to torture prisoners and that this was done with Mr Negroponte’s knowledge. The remains of 185 corpses were discovered there in 2001. In addition, Mr Negroponte is said to have abetted the creation of Battalion 316, a death-squad used by Honduras’s right-wing government (and trained by the CIA) to crush dissidents in Honduras. Mr Negroponte has repeatedly denied such accusations.

Mr Negroponte went on to work at the State Department in Washington, and then as ambassador to Mexico and the Philippines. In 2001 he was Mr Bush’s surprising pick to be America’s ambassador to the UN. In his confirmation hearings some congressmen complained that he was an inappropriate choice, saying he had misled Congress during his tenure in Central America. But he was nonetheless confirmed, and served until mid-2004. Though he was America’s UN envoy during the run-up to the Iraq war, he was largely off of the stage at that time, due partly to a successful fight with prostate cancer. It was Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, who made the case to the UN for Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, not Mr Negroponte.

He remained relatively quiet in his next job as the first American ambassador to post-Saddam Iraq, in sharp contrast to Paul Bremer, who had been America’s proconsul before the handover of sovereignty in June last year. When pressed on what America’s vision for Iraq was, Mr Negroponte has repeatedly said that he is merely a diplomat, and that the choice of policies is up to the sovereign Iraqi authorities.

Now he will be not a diplomat, but a powerful adviser and boss. But boss of what, exactly? The intelligence-reform law gives him the power of advice and veto over the heads of the various intelligence agencies’ chiefs. At the highest levels, he will be respected and possibly even feared as a formidable player in the national-security apparatus. But he will personally command no battalions, control no field agents. Will this mean that he is too close to the president and too disconnected from the spies and analysts who do the actual intelligence work? Many believe that intelligence was politicised in the run-up to the Iraq war, with the “correct” answers handed from the top down, not from the ground-troops up. How well Mr Negroponte spans the gap between listening to the myriad agencies and deciding what to tell the president will be crucial to his success.

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