Bush's New Intelligence Czar

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The son of a Greek shipping magnate, Negroponte was brought up amid privilege in New York City, attending boarding school at Exeter and college at Yale, where he played a mean game of poker and one of his classmates was CIA Director Goss, who will soon be reporting to him. After graduation, he joined the foreign service and was posted first to Hong Kong, then in 1964 to Vietnam. There he attracted the attention of a visiting Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger, who brought Negroponte to the National Security Council during the Nixon Administration, but the two fell out when Negroponte complained to his boss that the Paris peace talks had essentially sold out the South Vietnamese. As Secretary of State, Kissinger sent him next to the relative backwaters of Ecuador and Greece.

At the beginning of the Reagan Administration, Negroponte snagged what seemed to be a plum assignment in Honduras. As the base for U.S.-backed contra rebels fighting the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua, Honduras was vital to Washington's anti-communist policies in Central America. But if Negroponte and his wife hadn't ended up adopting five Honduran children, he would probably just as soon have forgotten his tenure there. The posting proved to be the black mark in his career. He was accused of turning a blind eye to human-rights abuses by the Honduran government; he says he saw no evidence of them. Just as the U.S. is being criticized for abusing and torturing suspects in the war on terrorism, critics are sure to try to make that period an issue in his confirmation hearings.

By the time the second Bush Administration came into power, Negroponte thought he had left public service for good. Having finished his career with stints on the NSC and in the Philippines and Mexico, he had moved on to earn a great deal more money as a vice president for global markets at publisher McGraw-Hill. But his restlessness with corporate life led him to reach out to his old boss at the NSC, Colin Powell, and soon he was representing the U.S. at the U.N., working to persuade members of the necessity of war against Iraq. His U.N. tenure may soon seem like a picnic compared with his next assignment. In part owing to the White House's reservations about making drastic changes, the bill establishing the DNI was written with more than enough ambiguity for Rumsfeld and Goss to exploit if they so choose. For instance, the White House resisted giving the new intelligence czar so-called tasking authority over the CIA director, according to one expert, meaning that in practice, Negroponte can't, say, order up CIA action.

While nominally handing massive new budget powers to the DNI, the law also makes clear that he will not "abrogate the statutory responsibilities" of any existing intelligence-related agency. That could be used by the Pentagon to justify holding onto the purse strings. Because of Rumsfeld's reluctance to challenge Bush's authority directly, it's unlikely Rumsfeld will openly take on Negroponte, but that does not mean he won't assert his will in more subtle ways, such as keeping him out of the loop on small budget issues or stonewalling him on information requests.