Is Bush Serious About a New Spy System?

Here is an indisputable fact: the United States needs a single, unified computer network that contains--at the very least--all the available information on the world's bad guys. This was the primary recommendation of the 9/11 commission. The FBI needs to know what the CIA knows about, say, the mythical terrorist Mahmoud Shimon O'Hara, and vice versa--and both agencies need to be alerted immediately if O'Hara tries to enter the country or has a phone conversation overheard by the

National Security Agency (NSA). Everyone from the President to the customs cops stamping passports at LAX agrees this is a necessity.

We are probably not going to build that system anytime soon. Congress has tried to do it twice in the past two years, and failed both times. First, it created the Department of Homeland Security, which included a whole new bureaucracy--the office of Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection--to build the system. But IAIP was almost immediately mugged by the CIA, which backed a new Terrorist Threat Integration Center to do much the same thing. The Pentagon and the FBI ignored both efforts, in the classic passive-aggressive manner of turf-obsessed bureaucrats.

The second attempt, now comatose, was the National Intelligence Reform Act--the brisk congressional response to last summer's findings of the 9/11 commission. The bill would have created a National Intelligence director to ride herd over the CIA, NSA, parts of the FBI and assorted other intel agencies. The czar would have had budgetary authority and also the power to "design" and "implement" the unified computer network. But two House Republican committee chairmen decided to croak the bill on the weekend before Thanksgiving--in large part because the reform was opposed by the Pentagon, which controls 80% of the intelligence budget. An effort is being made to revive it, but don't hold your breath.

And perhaps be grateful: even though the goals of the reform bill were the right ones, I'm not convinced that it would have gotten the job done. It could easily have become a familiar legislative charade--a "reform" is passed, there's a nice bill-signing ceremony in the Rose Garden, various pols (including the President) get to take credit, but nothing really changes ... except for the accretion of another sedimentary layer of semi-powerless bureaucracy. In truth, it is impossible for Congress to reorganize the inner workings of the Executive Branch without the full support of the President, and I'm not so sure George Bush really favored either one of the attempted reforms.