A more independent national intelligence chief, they argue, would control the budgets and day-to-day operations of the Pentagon's intelligence agencies, and could do a better job of redeploying them to address more pressing concerns like terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons instead of the military and its preoccupation with enemy armies.
Tenet serves at the pleasure of the president, and has devoted much of his energy to cultivating that relationship. His ties to Bush may be closer than those between any previous intelligence chief and president, current and former intelligence officials say, but some also say that a director who could not be removed from office by the president might be in a better position to challenge the White House when necessary and make hard intelligence calls.
Still, the record of past inquiries suggests that such changes are more readily proposed than carried out. After the Sept. 11 attacks, a joint congressional inquiry by the Senate and House Intelligence Committees issued a long list of recommendations for changes within intelligence operations, including the creation of a director of national intelligence.
Few if any of those recommendations were adopted. This time, though, at least to judge from comments made by members of Congress and others in the past week, it may be that the glaring nature of intelligence failures on Iraq produce more appetite for change.
That is part of the reason that intelligence agencies remain uncomfortable about the potential for recriminations that is part of any review. Among those most on the line, to the extent that the inquiry will focus on Iraq, are officials within the CIA's most secretive branch, the directorate of operations, whose collection of human intelligence on Iraq, beginning in the mid-1990s, has been widely judged to be inadequate.
In a sign of the continuing defensiveness within intelligence agencies, senior intelligence officials even this past weekend were refusing to acknowledge that the CIA and others were wrong when it came to Iraq and its stockpiles of illicit weapons, days after David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector, drew that conclusion in public.
But the attention that the inquiry will get may bring other help, like bigger budgets for agencies whose spending has soared since the Sept. 11 attacks but that plead for still more money for spies, satellites and other means of collecting intelligence.
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