The Sept. 11 commission's major recommendation for the creation of a powerful new national intelligence director gained momentum on Monday, with an influential Republican senator suggesting that he was willing to oppose the White House and offer legislation providing the new intelligence director with broad budgetary and personnel authority over the nation's 15 intelligence agencies.
"That person would be empowered with the authority to really lead the intelligence community," said the lawmaker, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee. "These authorities include the ability to hire and fire, as well as the ability to exercise control over the budgets."
Roberts said a draft bill, written with his committee's ranking Democrat, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, would be presented to Senate colleagues this week and would be built around the recommendations of the final report of the Sept. 11 commission.
The commission's report, which has created a whirlwind of unusual midsummer activity on Capitol Hill, documented intelligence and law-enforcement failures before the Sept. 11 attacks and called for a shake-up of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, including appointment of a national intelligence director to oversee all spy agencies, including those within the defense department.
While Roberts did not say so explicitly, his description of the powers of the national intelligence director made clear that his bill would go far beyond what the White House and the Pentagon have said they are ready to accept. A spokesman for Roberts, Sarah Little, said later that the bill would definitely "go beyond what the White House is talking about."
US President George W. Bush has said he supports the Sept. 11 panel's recommendation for a national intelligence director, who would replace the director of central intelligence as the nation's chief spymaster, but the White House proposal would not provide the post with the broad authority that the bipartisan commission wants.
Pentagon officials have suggested that a more powerful national intelligence director, by taking away power now held by defense department intelligence agencies, might interfere with military operations.
The White House proposal has been criticized by members of the commission, who say that the national intelligence director needs full budgetary and personnel control in order to end the turf-battles and miscommunication that plague the government's intelligence agencies.
Rockefeller, appearing with Roberts at a hearing of the Senate governmental affairs committee, praised Bush's decision to support the creation of a national intelligence director. But he said that the president's "decision to deviate from the commission's recommendation to give this director real budget and personnel authority was a bigger step, in my mind, backwards."
He said Congress was going to have to "break some china around here" and "invest authority in the national intelligence director for budget and for personnel and the rest of it."
His remarks came at a hearing at which three former directors of central intelligence testified that if Congress created a national intelligence director, the job must have clear authority, including control over the intelligence community's estimated US$40 billion annual budget.
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