WASHINGTON: For the US intelligence community, the warning lights are blinking red. A reorganization that was supposed to bring greater coordination has instead produced a layering of responsibilities and bureaucratic confusion. A demoralized CIA that needed professional management is chafing under a Republican former congressman who has proved to be the most political and ineffective director in the agency’s history. Look at the organizational chart of the new Office of the Director of National Intelligence and you wonder if America has become a Third World country with a rival intelligence agency for each patch of turf. At last count, there were 16 different spy units under the DNI’s umbrella — a number that puts even Syria to shame. In theory, this flotilla of spy agencies is being supervised by a deputy responsible for ‘customer outcomes’, whatever that means, and three other deputy directors. The organization chart gives each of the four a peppy two-word mission statement: “Want it,” “Know it,” “Get it” and “Build it.”

I’d like to suggest a new mission for John Negroponte, the man who sits atop this intelligence ziggurat: “Fix it.” One year on, the intelligence reorganization isn’t working. It has overanalysed the little problems without solving the big ones. It hasn’t succeeded in coordinating the various agencies, and it has allowed the biggest problem of all — the disarray at the CIA — to get even worse. I’m told that several foreign intelligence services have recently observed a decline in CIA performance, which should scare us all.

The intelligence mess is serious enough that it has triggered a quiet investigation by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a secretive blue-ribbon panel that advises the White House. The group’s new chairman is Stephen Friedman, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs and former White House economic adviser. Other luminaries on the 16-member panel are former senator Charles Robb, former representative Lee Hamilton and retired admiral David E. Jeremiah.

I’m told the intelligence board has summoned a series of top current and former officials in recent weeks to get a handle on the problems at the CIA and DNI. “They are trying to get a sense of what is really going on and how bad it is,” says one intelligence insider.

The Bush administration, unfortunately, is a big part of what’s wrong. From the start, officials close to Vice-President Cheney viewed a moribund, risk-averse CIA as an obstacle to their goals. Certainly the CIA made mistakes, especially in its assessment of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but that’s not why it was punished. It became a political whipping boy for the right wing largely because it tried to tell the truth on two key issues: alleged Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Niger and alleged Iraqi operational links with Al Qaeda. On both, CIA analysts repeatedly warned the administration that the evidence didn’t support its conclusions, yet the vice-president’s office kept coming back and telling them to take another look. The CIA issued a secret paper in January 2003 saying that there was no Iraqi authority, control or direction over Al Qaeda. Yet the political pressure continued.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service