In our interview, Brennan discussed restructuring the intelligence community, renewing FISA and debating counterterrorism on the campaign trail. Edited excerpts follow. You can also access the transcript at National Journal’s Web site.

Q: Are we hearing a sufficient level of debate and distinction among the candidates of their various national security and counterterrorism positions?

Brennan: I think we are hearing some of that debate. And that debate is going to intensify as we get closer to the election.

There has been a fair amount of discussion, particularly on the terrorism front, about the different types of approaches. But I think it’s mainly at the strategic level.

The intelligence business is a very complicated one, and I think a lot of the nuances may be lost on people. It’s difficult in a presidential debate to really get into those intricacies.

I think there’s a real issue related to some of the approaches that the next administration will have toward some of those countries, in particular, that still pose national security challenges to us — for example, Iran, and whether or not there needs to be some initiative on the part of the United States to see whether there’s some way to bridge the gap, or whether we should maintain a confrontational posture toward Iran.

Senator Obama and Senator [Hillary Rodham] Clinton have expressed an interest in trying to reach out, even to our adversaries. There are differences between those two as to when the president should get engaged.

Q: As a counterterrorism professional, is there one path that you see as more productive?

Brennan: I think that what we need in our quiver are many different types of arrows. We certainly need to have a military arrow. We need to have an intelligence one. But we need to have a diplomatic one. We need to have foreign aid. There needs to be a comprehensive set of approaches. A lot of these issues, including counterterrorism, cannot be solved with kinetic force.

I am a strong proponent of trying to focus more of our efforts on the upstream phenomenon of terrorism. I make the analogy to pollution. We learned that pollutants kill us when they get into the water we drink or the fish we eat or the air we breathe. But I think we also learned that we have to go upstream to identify and eliminate those sources of pollution. Terrorism is a tactic, and we have to be more focused upstream. Since 9/11, understandably we’ve focused downstream, on those terrorists who might be in our midst or trying to kill us, the operators. I think there needs to be much more attention paid to those upstream factors and conditions that spawn terrorists.

We also have to have a full discussion about the appropriate techniques we’re going to use when individuals are captured or detained. But we have to be looking at what are those foreign policies, aid programs, international efforts that we need to be engaged in, that are going to try and stem the flow of those terrorists further upstream. I think a lot of our resources have been dedicated to that downstream phenomenon; I think the United States is a lot safer because we put in place the security filters to prevent terrorists from coming into our country. Now we have to look at the longer-term issues that are more difficult to deal with — why individuals are succumbing to a lot of the recruitment efforts on the part of terrorist groups.

Q: What is the appropriate government agency to handle that?

Brennan: This is an issue the government is grappling with. A lot of the issues right now fall between the Department of State and the Department of Defense and Commerce and others. I think as we deal with these transnational issues, we need to bring to bear those capabilities that exist in different agencies. The National Counterterrorism Center is a place that is trying to deal with the issue in a comprehensive fashion. They have a group there, the Strategic Operational Planning Group, which is trying to bring to bear the full instruments of U.S. national power, from the diplomatic front to the intelligence front to law enforcement and defense. I think we need to have more of these integrated efforts, because no single department can in fact address the issues.

Q: People like you have talked about the need to do this for some time. Why haven’t we seen this take hold as an ethos in government?

Brennan: There are a number of factors. One is, it’s really, really hard. It addresses legacy institutions and architectures and ways of doing business. In Washington, it’s difficult to rearrange how you do work. It would be overhauling, in many respects, the way we do government work. That requires legislation, a close interaction and coordination between the executive and legislative branches, and it also affects a lot of rice bowls.

Q: Then what will it take to finally push this through and make agencies feel compelled to change?

Brennan: It certainly isn’t something that should be done quickly or without appropriate thought. I’m an advocate of having a review of the U.S. governance structures that’s going to transcend administrations. It’s going to be something that people are going to get together and say, “What type of governance structures and changes need to take place so that we can deal with the challenges of 2015, 2020?” The Department of Defense went though the Goldwater-Nichols Act [which changed the military command structure], but I would argue reorganizing a department is easier than reorganizing how many agencies are going to interoperate. I think we still are struggling with that.

Q: Would it make sense then to make the Director of National Intelligence more like the FBI director, someone who’s not necessarily going to leave when the administration changes?

Brennan: I’m an advocate of having term appointments for the Director of National Intelligence. I think it makes sense. But the intelligence community is a subset of the broader national security establishment, which is a subset of the broader U.S. government. I would argue that the challenge for the next decade is how you’re going to ensure better interaction between the federal, state, and local elements, in terms of information sharing, knowledge, and expertise.

Q: In your estimation, where is the threat level of terrorism today versus where it was right after 9/11? How big is the threat domestically? How has it changed?

Brennan: There are two sides to that coin. Whenever you do a net assessment, you look at the threat and the vulnerability. Let me take the vulnerability side. A lot has happened in the past six years in terms of making the homeland a much less hospitable environment for terrorists to ply their trade. We should feel good that our borders are not as porous. There’s a much more substantial watch-listing effort. And a much better capability to detect terrorists and terrorist activity within our borders.

That said, on the threat side, while Al Qaeda, the organization, has been badly bloodied since 9/11, they still retain a potentially lethal capability. There has been a metastasis. Al Qaeda has manifested itself in a lot of different countries and communities, and it’s a movement that continues to be grown and fueled by a number of factors.

One, is, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we no longer have this bipolar world where you had the United States and the Soviet Union competing with each other and proxies lining up behind them. We now have basically a unilateral world with the United States as the sole superpower from a military and economic standpoint. But also, we’ve seen the fading away of a lot of competing ideologies: socialism, Baathism, Nasserism, communism and others. They have been discredited. You have in some respects Western capitalism on one side, and on the other side, maybe those religiously-driven forms of extremism. Islamic extremism has filled the void where in the past there were alternatives in terms of competing ideologies. We don’t have the same number of “-isms” out there. And so I think this [Islamic extremism] is going to continue to garner support and recruits in different parts of the world.

Q: Compare our ability to counter ideologies versus our tactical capabilities to collect more intelligence, to share it, to do more sophisticated things with it.

Brennan: I think unfortunately we have been way behind the curve as far as the public relations campaign — making sure the image of the United States is seen in a more positive light. When I first went to the Middle East, I studied in Cairo in 1975, and the U.S. was viewed as the sponsor and supporter of Israel. But when I was in Egypt, I was regularly befriended by people, because Americans were still looked upon in a very positive way. Unfortunately, the U.S. image now is not the same as it was several decades ago. The Iraq situation, unfortunately, was viewed as military adventurism on the part of the United States. We need to repair that image. We need to make sure we convey to the world the types of things the United States is committed to. That is very difficult. Focusing on the downstream effort is, in some respects, easier because it’s more tangible. You can go after those high-value targets; you can go after those training camps.

Q: In the 2004 campaign, it seemed you had on one hand President Bush talking about downstream efforts, and then John Kerry articulating something more like the public diplomacy approach. It became a partisan division: that if you were for public diplomacy, you were weaker and identified with Democrats, and if you were on the Republican side, then you were with the president and fighting the fight. It seems not that pronounced this time, and that the candidates are talking more about combating ideologies. Is there still a divide between hard war and soft war?

Brennan: I think there is a divide. Obama is a good example in terms of the different approaches between the parties. In the articulation of the public effort, there needs to be the companion discussion about the need to act forcefully to ensure that U.S. lives and property are protected. I think some of the statement you see coming out from the Democratic side is to reassure the American public that although public diplomacy is going to be a major part of that foreign policy approach, it’s not going to be at the expense of ensuring that we’re going to be able to utilize military and other measures to take action against the threats.

Q: Assess the debate in Congress and with the administration over reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. [Democratic lawmakers allowed the temporary extension of that law, the Protect America Act, to expire, over the vehement objections of the White House.] Why has it come to this point where politics has arguably pulled things off the rails?

Brennan: There is this great debate over whether or not the telecom companies should in fact be given immunity for their agreement to provide support and cooperate with the government after 9/11. I do believe strongly that they should be granted that immunity, because they were told to do so by the appropriate authorities that were operating in a legal context, and so I think that’s important. And I know people are concerned about that, but I do believe that’s the right thing to do. I do believe the Senate version of the FISA bill addresses the issues appropriately. [Director of National Intelligence] Mike McConnell, I think, did a very good job trying to articulate the distinctions between the old FISA law, the FISA understanding under the Protect America Act, and then the House and Senate versions.

There are many types of scenarios for signals [for example, telephone calls and e-mails] to be accessed. But whenever this happens, there needs to be some substantive predicate, a probable cause, that someone is being targeted appropriately. There is an important issue about timeliness. And even though you can go through the FISA process, particularly when you’re dealing with terrorism issues, there needs to be an understanding that intelligence agencies can move quickly if certain predicates are met. We shouldn’t be held hostage to a complicated, globalized [information technology] structure that puts up obstacles to that timely collection. I think there are some very, very sensible people on both sides of the partisan divide trying to make this happen. And it’s unfortunate that it’s become embroiled now in a partisan debate in some quarters. But I think that’s expected in any election year, especially one like this.

Q: So how do we get to the point where the public has reasonable assurances that what an intelligence agency does to determine probable cause, or that predicate, is based on sound technique?

Brennan: Maybe there needs to be a system of executive, legislative and judicial representatives who are going to oversee and ensure that this moves along the right path. It really takes those three legs of government to make sure there aren’t advertent or inadvertent abuses.

You can have FISA judges and representatives from Congress, not to routinely review those individual requests [for surveillance], but the process, the criteria, and to make sure it’s being followed in a strict fashion.

Q: You know that one big debate about FISA is the question of balancing security and privacy and civil liberties. Speaking as someone who has spent your life in counterterrorism, what do the terms “privacy” and “civil liberties” mean to you, and what is that balance?

Brennan: First of all, privacy and civil liberties mean so many different things to different people. There are people on one end of the spectrum that don’t want to have any government interference or insight into what you’re doing.

To me, I think the government does have the right and the obligation to ensure the security and safety of its citizens. If there is probable cause, reasonable suspicion, about the involvement of a U.S. person in something, the government needs to have the ability to understand what the nature of that involvement is. The threshold for that type of government access can be high or can be low, and it needs to be somewhere in the middle.

It really gets back to that issue of what is the substantive predicate. … If we know there’s a terrorist overseas that has been involved in activities, but he’s also an import-export dealer, and he reaches out to Shane Harris because you happen to be an importer of stuff — you’re a U.S. citizen — and we can see there’s contact going on there, well, is that sufficient to give us reasonable suspicion that Shane Harris is involved in something? And Shane Harris happens to be in touch with somebody in his neighborhood that has a past record in engagement in some type of things. So there is going to be a judgment call here.

And what I think is important is that there needs to be an airing of this issue, public hearings that Congress can hold. You can’t explain the issue in such rich detail that you can say exactly where that line is going to be drawn. But there needs to be an articulation of those triggers that the American people overall feel, yes, that’s the right thing for the government to do.

You don’t want to just troll and with a large net just pull up everything. There are technologies available to pulse the data set and pull back only that which has some type of correlation to your predicate.

Q: Is this the difference between the government controlling information, locking it down, and having controlled access to certain data sets which do exist?

Brennan: Right. And I would argue for the latter. Private sector companies can do things the government is unable to do, for marketing to their clients. I would argue the government needs to have access to only those nuggets of information that have some kind of predicate. That way the government can touch it and pull back only that which is related. It’s like a magnet, set to a certain calibration. That’s what I think we need to go to.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the threshold, quite frankly, was low, because we didn’t know the nature of the threat we faced here in the U.S. Every effort was made by the government to try to get as much understanding and visibility into what else might be out there that’s going to hurt us again. Now that a number of years have passed, we need to make sure the calibration is important. But maybe in a period of heightened threat you have to recalibrate that based on new information you have — new intelligence that’s going to give you a better sense of where to aim your magnet.

These are things that need to be discussed openly — not to the point of revealing sources and methods and giving the potential terrorists out there insight into our capability — but to make sure there is a general understanding and consensus that these initiatives, collections, capabilities, and techniques comport with American values and are appropriately adjusted to deal with the threat we face.

Q: How does the next president go about doing that?

Brennan: It’s going to be a real tough job. Even though people may criticize what has happened during the two Bush administrations, there has been a fair amount of continuity. A new administration, be it Republican or Democrat — you’re going to have a fairly significant change of people involved at the senior-most levels. And I would argue for continuity in those early stages.

You don’t want to whipsaw the [intelligence] community. You don’t want to presume knowledge about how things fit together and why things are being done the way they are being done. And you have to understand the implication, then, of making any major changes or redirecting things. I’m hoping there will be a number of professionals coming in who have an understanding of the evolution of the capabilities in the community over the past six years, because there is a method to how things have changed and adapted. My advice, to whoever is coming in, is they need to spend some time learning, understanding what’s out there, inventorying those things, and identifying those key issues or priorities that they have — FISA or something else. They need to make sure they do their homework, and it’s not just going to be knee-jerk responses.

Q: In other words, don’t come in and do a housecleaning?

Brennan: Right — not just in terms of people, but also programs. You don’t want to create upheaval, because it will create a disruption in the system. There are still a lot people who say we have to implement all of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. I have problems with some of those, because they’re not really anchored in reality. Sometimes a superficial understanding of a problem leads one to making superficial decisions.

Q: It seems unlikely that any of the leading candidates would come in and dismantle things. They’re fairly savvy to the kinds of things you’re talking about. Is that the case, or is there still a risk there will be a political calculation, in that the next president will need to make a demonstrable effort to wipe the slate?

Brennan: I don’t think anybody’s going to come in and just make wholesale changes. But there’s going to be a learning curve… at a time when you’re still faced with national security challenges. So they have to be learning as they go, but at the same time managing all these issues and making sure they don’t drop any balls at all. It’s going to be challenging, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of America’s enemies didn’t see if they could take advantage of that transition, and to see whether or not they can do things that are going to be confrontational and provocative to test the new administration.

Published in National Journal.

“You will be disappointed,” Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told a gathering of journalists in Washington on November 13. U.S. spy agencies were putting the finishing touches on a National Intelligence Estimate about Iran’s nuclear intentions and capabilities, which included new leads that the agencies had been vetting since spring. But departing from recent practice, McConnell said, “I do not intend to release unclassified key judgments” of the NIE, those heavily edited yet potentially telling morsels of analysis that might ultimately show how close the United States is to a war with Iran.

“We have probably done a thousand of these” NIEs, he said. “We have done unclassified key judgments for maybe three. So we created an expectation that we do this, because we did it previously.” And that was a bad idea, McConnell said, with some passion.

For starters, even the “sanitized” version of an NIE could compromise vital sources and methods, he said, because the target of the estimate is, of course, going to read the document. Second, “I don’t want to have a situation where the young analysts” — whom McConnell guards with particular devotion because he was once one of them — “are writing something because they know it’s going to be a public debate or political debate. They should be writing it to call it as it is.”

McConnell, whom a longtime colleague describes as having “not a political or manipulative bone in his body,” also stated he would “make every effort” to prosecute anyone who leaked the NIE. Then, he vowed (twice) to resign if the intelligence was “cherry-picked in an inappropriate way” by government officials.

Things changed dramatically in the three weeks after McConnell’s public denunciation of leaks and declassification. On December 3, McConnell and his aides reversed that decision and released the unclassified key judgments of the NIE on Iran. Try as McConnell might to keep the lid on the new estimate, his lieutenants were influenced by the political realities of intelligence these days.

“They thought it would leak and be distorted, and they thought they’d get ahead of that,” said one former senior intelligence official close to the deliberations. “They decided it was better to put out a clean set of key judgments.” Vice President Cheney went so far as to say that officials expected to lose control of some classified material. “There was a general belief — that we all shared — that it was important to put it out, that it was not likely to stay classified for long, anyway,” Cheney told The Politico on December 5. “Everything leaks.”

The leak-prevention strategy was a stark departure from the guidelines that McConnell had set out, both in November and a month earlier, when he issued this official policy: “The possibility that the [key judgments] or other positions of an estimate will be leaked is not a sufficient reason for preparing unclassified [key judgments].” In a briefing with reporters after the NIE was released, a senior intelligence official acknowledged that declassification “obviously represents a departure from [McConnell's] guidance.”

The banner headline of the key judgments — “that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program” — put the intelligence community precisely where McConnell didn’t want it to be: in the middle of a ferocious political and policy debate in which sources and methods of the intelligence on Iran, as well as the analysis, are being openly discussed, exposed, debated, and, yes, cherry-picked to suit a range of agendas. Indeed, even though the NIE does not say that Iran poses no nuclear threat, the key judgments on areas besides the weapons program have had to compete with the dramatic top-line assessment.

Because the new estimate upends its predecessor, made in 2005, and has undercut any nuclear-related pretext for a U.S. bombing of Iran, the political and ideological dispositions of the analysts who wrote the NIE are, predictably, under scrutiny. Within days of the key judgments’ release, former Bush administration officials and neoconservative icons mounted a full-scale attack on McConnell’s lieutenants, some of whom had long careers in the State Department and have, the critics contend, historically underestimated Iran.

These critics characterized the NIE as the lieutenants’ way of cutting off Cheney and the president on their presumed path to war with Iran — a contention that wasn’t refuted by senior intelligence officials’ repeated assertions that Iran’s decision to stop its program in 2003 and to keep it shuttered resulted directly from international pressures and sanctions. Indeed, intelligence officials have been careful not to assert that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the key motivator for Iran’s change of plans. Whether McConnell’s aides meant to pre-empt the White House or not, the conclusion is undeniable: The intelligence community is at odds with President Bush’s forceful rhetoric on Iran.

Since the NIE was released, McConnell has been notably absent from the public fracas. His deputy, Donald Kerr, a veteran nuclear weapons expert, has given the intelligence community’s only two on-the-record statements about the estimate. McConnell was out of the country when the key judgments were released.

Around Washington, rumors persist that McConnell threatened to resign over the issue. It’s not clear, however, whether he staked his tenure on the NIE being released or withheld, or whether he saw any cherry-picking by the White House, but the gossip is one more measure of just how political the release of this document has become. Observers point out that in the month preceding the NIE, Bush warned that Iran’s nuclear ambitions could lead to “World War III,” and Cheney, four days later, gave a bellicose speech reminiscent of the run-up to war with Iraq over its weapons programs. The White House already knew by then, at a minimum, that the intelligence community was vetting potentially groundbreaking intelligence on Iran that could change the NIE.

Perhaps under pressure to back up their bold new claims on Iran, senior officials have gone further, giving on-background press interviews in which they catalog the streams of intelligence that led the analysts to change their nuclear conclusions — purloined laptop computers loaded with weapons diagrams; notebooks and intercepted phone calls from high-ranking officials; and, as reported by the Los Angeles Times this week, a clandestine operation called “Brain Drain,” in which the CIA helped mid- and top-level Iranian nuclear experts flee the country.

Unless officials are trying to affect the Iranian government’s actions through a massive disinformation campaign, it would seem that the intelligence community has set aside McConnell’s concerns about sources and methods. “I’m shocked by the level of public discussion,” said a former senior intelligence official who worked on Iranian issues for many years, adding, “I don’t see much good that comes from releasing NIEs.”

Kerr has said that the release “was coordinated in discussion with senior policy makers,” but that the intelligence community “took responsibility for what portions … were to be declassified.” Officials weighed “the importance of the information to open discussions about our national security” against protecting sources and methods, he said, and “felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available.”

Still, only a dramatic turn of events would have led McConnell to abandon his policy of not making NIEs public, several former officials who know him said. One former high-ranking official involved in clandestine operations said that in more than 30 years in the intelligence business, he had never seen a key judgment change so dramatically so fast — indicating that the new intelligence that officials picked up amounted to a veritable “smoking gun.”

“Keep in mind, this thing had been built up, which is somewhat unusual for an NIE,” said another former senior official, who has also worked on Capitol Hill. The document was months behind schedule, widely anticipated, and focused on one of the top foreign-policy issues of the moment. “I think this was an extraordinary circumstance,” the former official said.

Expressing concern over the public airing of sources, a Senate staffer said that the NIE “has certainly been sucked into a political debate,” and that McConnell is clearly concerned about the effect that the fallout might have on analysts. “For that, we will have to wait and see,” the aide said. “I still think that he simply had no choice. There was no way this would stay secret, and he didn’t want to be accused of trying to bury it. I think he held his nose and let it go.”

Many intelligence professionals concur. And in the NIE’s release, they see signs not of an outright insurrection against the Bush administration but of a reassertion by the intelligence community of its ability to influence policy — public or otherwise. McConnell’s team is hardly backing down in the face of the neocon onslaught. Last Saturday, Kerr shot back at the NIE’s critics in an unusual and terse public statement. Labeled “In response to those questioning the analytic work and integrity of the United States intelligence community,” Kerr’s statement said that the agencies’ “task … is to produce objective, ground-truth analysis. We feel confident in our analytic tradecraft and resulting analysis in this estimate.”

So there.

Published in National Journal.

I interviewed Jackson in May about his efforts to prepare DHS for the upcoming presidential transition. The department has been plagued by turnover at the senior most levels, a fact that Jackson acknowledged, and experts worry that this makes the department especially vulnerable in the normally rocky hand-off from one administration to another.

“We’ve had a significant turnover,” Jackson said. “And that turnover has been below the top-level jobs as well.”

Some of Jackson’s other quotes about DHS’ personnel issues seem rather ironic now, in light of his decision to leave.

• “We’re trying to nurture a cadre of owners. I am the part-time help at DHS.”
• “I won’t blow smoke at you and say everything is nailed down and perfectly fixed. The day that someone in my department tells you that about DHS is the day that person should get out of his job.”
• “If a day goes by and I don’t use up some of my brain cells focusing on this [transition] problem, it’s a very unusual day.”

Jackson insisted that the transition was “not something I feel anxiety about.” But employees and DHS watchers are likely to feel a mix of anxiety and maybe some relief with this changing of the guard. On the one-hand, Jackson was managing the sprawling department day-to-day, along with an army of lieutenants. His exit leaves an important vacancy at the very top, which officials will, presumably, scramble to fill.

But others might welcome the change. Some of Jackson’s critics have accused him of micro-managing decisions, and not yielding enough authority to his subordinates. Those critics say that DHS could operate more efficiently with a lighter touch.

Regardless of how Jackson’s departure is greeted, though, one thing is sure: This puts DHS in a precarious position. The department desperately needs strong leadership, and its hierarchical structure necessitates that it come from the top. The new deputy may change that, but for now, it’s the way things are.

As an aside, political strategists will likely see no coincidence between the timing of Jackson’s departure and the nomination of Michael Mukasey to be attorney general. When Alberto Gonzales announced his intention to resign, the early betting was on DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff to replace him. Presumably, had Chertoff become AG, Jackson would have moved up to secretary at DHS. I don’t know what financial concerns were behind Jackson’s decision to depart, but many will presume that when it was clear he wasn’t being promoted, that fact figured into his calculus.

For his part, Chertoff had this to say about his departing colleague in a press release.

Michael will leave this department having made an enduring impact on our homeland security. At this department, he was fundamental in invigorating our operating components, fusing our intelligence capabilities, building a new FEMA, and managing the response to the disrupted airline plot of August 2006. He brought tremendous focus, discipline and planning to department-wide operations, budgets and polices, and he significantly advanced the integration of our component agencies. Michael kept an open door for all 208,000 employees, and was relentless in building with them a common department culture. His work has earned him wide respect throughout the Congress, with state and local officials and among international allies.

Our homeland is more secure and better prepared as result of Michael’s tireless service, and on behalf of all Americans, I offer him our deep gratitude. I respect and admire his difficult decision to move on, and I look forward to our continued friendship.

Wertheimer’s squishy and unassuming title only hints at some vague, general notion of what he actually does for a living. Particularly for the uninitiated, the moniker buries a sense of authority beneath a pair of prefixes (assistant deputy) and offers an unsatisfying buzzword descriptor (transformation), whose etymology points to some consultant’s pocket glossary. The title screams “middle management” and thus reassures, “This guy is not a threat.”

That message is especially ironic, because to thousands of powerful career employees in the American intelligence community, Wertheimer is, in fact, very threatening. He threatens to upend their world, to change the way they work, and to foist on them the values of a younger generation of spies, who happen to outnumber them. He also threatens to change the way that policy makers use intelligence to reach decisions, and so to “transform” the intelligence agencies’ role in the government. All of this makes Mike Wertheimer very dangerous to people who oppose his basic assumptions. And he knows that. He also knows that, to many thousands more in the intelligence field, he is something of a savior.

To understand the origins and purpose of Wertheimer’s office, of which he is the first occupant, it helps to refer to a document that also bears a lengthy title, the report by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Better known as the WMD commission report, it provides a painstaking explanation of how 15 intelligence agencies collectively failed to discover that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction.

The contrary assertion that he did have those weapons — and thus was a threat to the Middle East and a potential benefactor for terrorists — was, of course, the Bush administration’s chief casus belli for the Iraq war. The claim was backed up at the highest levels of the intelligence community in a National Intelligence Estimate released to Congress in October 2002. The WMD commission, which published its findings in 2005, echoed the sentiments of many intelligence professionals, including some who had participated in and blessed the flawed prewar analysis, by pronouncing the episode “one of the most public — and most damaging — intelligence failures in recent American history.”

Wertheimer’s job is to prevent any more such failures and to make sure that the intelligence agencies can accurately predict a host of catastrophic events, including terrorist attacks and disease outbreaks. The commission laid much of the blame for the bad call on Iraq at the feet of analysts, whom it called “the voice of the intelligence community.” Although the problems begin with the failure to collect the right information in the first place, the commission particularly faulted the analysts’ inability to make sense of intelligence, and to present their judgments to decision makers. During his time in government, Colin Powell was widely regarded among professionals as a decision maker who understood this inherently murky process. He would say to his intelligence officers, “Tell me what you know, tell me what you don’t know, and then tell me what you think is most likely to happen.” When that analysis breaks down, as it did with Iraq, “the consequences can be grave,” the commission wrote.

To be sure, many career analysts object to the “flaws” the commission cited in their tradecraft, regarding both Iraq and another notorious intelligence failure: the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But very few argue with the substance, or the roots, of these breakdowns. The “intelligence community,” as the agencies are collectively known, hardly operates as one, and this lack of coordination and — especially — collaboration among analysts means that agency leaders and their clients often don’t know what the analysts don’t know. The disconnect also means that contrary analysis — of which there was a significant amount in the run-up to the Iraq war — may find no quarter in analysts’ final judgments. It is a disastrous situation for policy makers, who are increasingly turning to nongovernment experts and the news media for rapid, cogent analysis that the intelligence agencies can’t always provide.

The WMD commission identified the fix: “Integrate the community of analysts.” That’s easier said than done, of course, but Wertheimer and others who understand how very un-integrated the analysts are today know that it is prescriptive advice that they can’t afford to reject.

The Threat Within

“Post-9/11, we coined a term, the ‘asymmetric threat,’ ” Wertheimer says. “That’s a fancy way of describing a future in which the targets for intelligence, the things that we will focus on, are built, designed, and operate completely differently than the way we do.” Transformation, that fuzzy word in his title, means “removing that asymmetry.”

Before the attacks, the intelligence community was “like a power builder — very muscular but not very fast,” Wertheimer says. Today, the agencies need to be swift. They need to analyze more information faster. But analysts also need new ways to connect to one another, to benefit from one another’s knowledge. If a specialist on sub-Saharan Africa at the Defense Intelligence Agency is studying terrorist inroads into tribal communities, shouldn’t a CIA expert in Africa studies know that? Might she have something useful to contribute to the inquiry?

Collaboration isn’t an especially novel concept, and the WMD commission wasn’t the first to suggest that analysts do more of it. But Wertheimer is the first official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — the “czar” of the community — to make collaboration a full-time job. Gen. Michael Hayden, the former principal deputy director of national intelligence who is now the CIA director, created the position after talking with Wertheimer two years ago about how to change the way the community operates. The new intelligence director, Mike McConnell, has forcefully backed the transformational efforts, as has his deputy in charge of analysis, Tom Fingar, a career analyst who used to run intelligence at the State Department. Fingar, who is essentially the only official layer between Wertheimer and McConnell, is the political muscle in this endeavor. Wertheimer is the idea man, “my philosopher of transformation,” as Fingar recently put it.

Transformation has less to do with changing procedures than with changing people. A key pillar is a suite of new information-sharing and collaborative technologies that look and feel a lot like Google, Wikipedia, and MySpace, the networking and search tools that younger analysts grew up using at home and in their dorm rooms. These newcomers have been baffled to find that these 21st-century staples aren’t widely used within the intelligence community.

The first of the new intelligence tools came online recently. Analysts can now log on to Intellipedia, a collaborative knowledge base that they can use to swap leads and examine one another’s work. (Officials say that Intellipedia helped one group of analysts create a helpful report on Iraqi insurgents’ use of chlorine gas to increase the lethality of improvised explosive devices.) Later this year, Wertheimer’s team will launch A-Space (“A” for analyst), modeled after MySpace and the popular website Facebook. Officials hope the new site will help analysts create social networks outside established channels.

In addition to the new tools, Wertheimer and his colleagues have created unusual training programs. One sends analysts to a monthlong retreat at a classified location where they work alongside private-sector experts to investigate complex intelligence topics. Another takes young analysts out of their assigned jobs for two years and puts them through an intensive training program where they learn the tradecraft but also such on-the-ground spy skills as defensive driving and weapons handling. Agencies will ultimately deploy these analysts to global hot spots to support spies in the field.

It’s no accident that Wertheimer and his team are aiming these new tools and programs at the younger crowd. Sixty percent of U.S. intelligence analysts have five years of experience or less on the job. In the larger intelligence community of about 100,000 employees, which includes clandestine operatives and support staff, those young workers are about 40 percent of the rolls. America’s spies are decidedly green, and they’re not comfortable — or particularly useful — working in bureaucratic silos without Internet browsers, instant messaging, and social networking sites on their desktops.

In his quest for transformation, Wertheimer is playing to this youthful workforce that finds collaboration neither newfangled nor threatening. For these analysts, networking is just the way information moves. But to the intelligence establishment, information is power, and relinquishing it means losing that power, as the WMD commission and many other critics have repeatedly lamented. It seems illogical to the generation of electronic socializers, but when information moves around, and becomes known to people who don’t have the “need to know,” veteran members of the community view it as no longer special because it’s no longer secret. Too much collaboration also threatens to reveal the sources and methods by which agencies obtain information — secrets they must zealously guard lest those sources dry up or get killed.

Sharing and secrecy are opposing forces. So this is Wertheimer’s task: Transform the massive intelligence bureaucracy into a collaborative network, in which loose lips are, in a way, encouraged; introduce technologies that many seasoned analysts neither understand nor trust; and build a cadre of young, ambitious rookies, who just can’t believe they’re not allowed to check their personal e-mail at work, into the future of the business.

The opposition is fierce. When The New York Times wrote about A-Space recently, analysts commented about the piece, and about Wertheimer, on a private intelligence community blog. Some recorded their dramatic dissent. “I guarantee,” one intelligence employee wrote, “Mike Wertheimer will cause people to get killed over this.”

“I am threatening the status quo,” Wertheimer says. “And that’s a hard pill to swallow for anybody.”

Taking the Blame

Wertheimer, 50, is a mathematician who earned his master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He spent 21 years as a cryptologist at the National Security Agency, and rose to become the agency’s most senior technical leader. On paper, he fits the stereotype captured in an old joke among NSA hands: “How can you tell an extroverted analyst? He’s the one who looks at your shoes when he’s talking.”

But Wertheimer defies typecasting. When he speaks, he looks people in the eye, but often from above — he is 6 feet, 1 inch tall. He has arching eyebrows that signal when he’s listening but also serve as a warning for when he’s about to descend with an impassioned argument or an analogy that he thinks perfectly captures what he’s up against. (In a recent conversation, Wertheimer compared the government’s attempts at collaboration to the Borg, the supremely villainous race of cyber-aliens on Star Trek: The Next Generation who “assimilate” whole societies by stripping people of individual character traits and turn them into one giant collective.) If you spotted Wertheimer in a room, or even better, watched him work a room, you might wonder why he hasn’t sought his fortune on the motivational speaking circuit.

When he speaks, you get the feeling that he’s talking to you. He reveals a lot about himself, which might be unsettling if he weren’t so earnest about connecting his flaws and fears to his intelligence work. At a recent conference on analytic transformation in Chicago, Wertheimer confessed to a crowd of more than 400 people that after the 9/11 attacks he felt personally responsible for not anticipating Al Qaeda’s strike. He became depressed, he said, and was inconsolable until his father snapped him out of it. “I don’t blame you for this,” Wertheimer’s dad told him, and then warned, “You’re scaring your kids,” who thought that whenever their father had to rush back to the office, something very bad was about to happen. Wertheimer briefly left government in 2003 to work as a technology consultant but returned two years later.

Wertheimer is like a number of other veteran intelligence officials who were involved in the global hunt for terrorists before 9/11. They feel that their own actions — more precisely, their inactions — allowed the disaster. Wertheimer says he blames himself and his colleagues. He thinks he personally failed and, accepting his part in a broken system, he seems to have no qualms about tearing it down and rebuilding.

“It is something that he can appreciate as being absolutely critical to the future of this country and the protection of the country, and when you hear him speak, you get caught up in that emotion,” says Tim Sample, a former analyst and staff director of the House Select Committee on Intelligence who knows Wertheimer well. Sample is president of the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance, which co-hosted the Chicago conference with the intelligence director’s office.

In large measure, Wertheimer’s charisma comes from his willingness to defy tradition. “We are going to share more,” he said in his Chicago speech. “We are going to take risks.” Directing his remarks at those who would rather preserve the status quo, he said, “For the first time, the challenge is not why we can’t do it; it’s how you’re going to find a way to secure this.” Rather than appeasing members of the intelligence community who blanch at collaboration and its attendant security risks, Wertheimer lays the burden on their shoulders and tells them that if collaboration doesn’t happen, they’ll take the blame.

But if Wertheimer succeeds, it probably won’t be by convincing his intransigent opponents. Rather, he will work with that younger generation at whom transformation is aimed. By and large, these newer members of the community are optimistic and, like him, believe that the intelligence community is dangerously broken.

“It’s Huge”

Sean Wohltman, a 25-year-old counter-terrorism analyst with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, embodies the kind of optimistic disillusionment that Wertheimer wants to harness. Two years after defending his master’s thesis in geographic information science at Virginia Tech University, Wohltman joined the government “following a call for patriotism,” he said. He encountered “disappointment and disillusionment” in his first three months on the job, however.

As Wohltman explained to the Chicago conference, “When I first logged on to what I expected to be a terminal from 24’s [counter-terrorist unit] command center, I was instead driven to my agency’s home page, which flashed information about an upcoming picnic and links to fill out my health insurance. And not only that, it launched in Netscape.” Those in the audience who laughed understood that Netscape is an obsolete Internet browser.

Later, Wohltman explained why it mattered to him that the intelligence agencies were so far behind the technological curve. In 1999, when the popular and controversial music file-sharing system Napster debuted, he pointed out, Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca” and other corporately manufactured pop hits topped the Billboard charts. Only artists from big record labels got mass recognition, and listeners were cut off from the bounty of independent and innovative artists who excelled in a variety of musical styles. But that year, Napster’s collaborative technology allowed fans of lesser-known artists to share songs, which in turn boosted their recognition, fanned their popularity, and led to greater awareness of the wider music scene. It also fueled the market for independent music and challenged the record companies’ dominance of the industry.

Taking Wohltman’s analogy, Wertheimer says that the intelligence agencies could be compared to the record companies. Information is filtered through a hierarchical process that culminates in senior executives choosing what intelligence to disseminate to customers. Similar to Napster, tools such as Intellipedia and A-Space — known as “disruptive technologies” — bypass this process and get more information out to a wider audience.

But will collaboration guarantee better analysis? Did Napster improve music quality? Did it benefit the industry as a whole? Recording artists and companies sued Napster for copyright infringement, and the network shut down in 2001, eventually to be reborn as a pay-for-service system.

Napster did pave the way for other innovative technologies, which adapted to customers’ demands to buy music a la carte, rather than having to pay for an entire album. Today, Apple’s iTunes sells songs for 99 cents and threatens the record companies’ control of their own products. Collaboration, in a sense, won out, and customers’ demand for more music, delivered in new ways, has opened the market to more artists. “Will this lead to better music?” Wertheimer asks. “I can’t believe that it will not.”

Wertheimer and other transformation proponents often point to iTunes, and the hugely successful iPod music player, to support their theory that collaboration can fundamentally change and improve people’s lives. And they reason that A-Space, Intellipedia, and other innovative services will create demand in the intelligence community and overwhelm the transformation naysayers.

Wertheimer channels the enthusiasm of Apple’s CEO and co-founder, Steve Jobs, whose rousing keynote speeches, known as “Stevenotes,” command more press coverage and world attention than speeches by most members of Congress. But as with Jobs, some skeptics question both the substance and the goal behind Wertheimer’s zeal.

Early in Jobs’s career, a co-worker coined the term “reality distortion field” to describe the aura that the Apple prophet cast over his spellbound audiences. The term could easily apply to Wertheimer’s enthusiastic showmanship. Wikipedia describes RDF as “the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, exaggeration, and marketing. RDF is said to distort an audience’s sense of proportion or scale. Small advances are applauded as breakthroughs. Interesting developments become turning points, or huge leaps forward.” (The phenomenon has been applied to other leaders, as well.)

Wertheimer does, in fact, applaud certain advances as breakthroughs that others — particularly those outside of government — might find underwhelming. For instance, one planned transformation program, the Library of National Intelligence, would be a repository of all the documents produced by all of the agencies. Eventually, Wertheimer hopes, analysts will search the library for key terms, and an automated system will help to judge who should have access to classified materials. He calls this program “huge.”

Why is it huge? Some observers would have a hard time believing that the agencies didn’t already have such a resource, the kind that most large organizations take for granted. LexisNexis, for example, contains copies of every article published in most of the country’s periodicals. Following basic business practices, most companies compile and retain their internal documents for research and for legal purposes.

Wertheimer is careful to put things in perspective. “It’s big,” he says of the library. But then he quickly follows up: “For us, it’s huge.” And he’s right. Much to the consternation of the WMD commission and others, this is a giant leap for the intelligence community, a kind of moon-landing moment.

But do collaborative libraries — and wikis, blogs, networking websites, and special training — make transformation worthwhile?

Change Without End

Mark Lowenthal retired in 2005 as the assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production. Among seasoned intelligence officials, he is considered one of the most knowledgeable authorities on analysis, the agencies’ shortcomings in that regard, and the education of young analysts in the ways of the tradecraft. So in Chicago, when Lowenthal stood up to question why Wertheimer and the DNI’s office are expending so much energy on transformation, people listened intently.

“You are urging this transformation for an end that I do not understand,” he told Wertheimer. “Collaboration is not an end in itself, to my mind. You want to do this, I think, … to make analysis better. What does that mean? It means it would be faster? It would be more comprehensible? It would be more accurate more often? I don’t think you have a way of knowing at the end of the day when you get there.”

Lowenthal doesn’t dismiss collaboration out of hand, and he has spent a sizable part of his career trying to create a true intelligence community. But his remarks reflected a palpable skepticism among those who think that it is impossible to know whether Wertheimer’s ideas will actually fix intelligence. Lowenthal told him, “I think, unfortunately, a lot of this is pandering to a bunch of commissions that have no understanding of what we do for a living, or the nature of our work, and to a workforce. And I don’t think that’s a sufficient ground for a transformation. And so I’m left here wondering, what’s the end state? For what reason?”

Wertheimer responded that he didn’t have a satisfactory answer. The best he could offer, he said, were anecdotes. He has spent the past two years talking to analysts and trying to figure out what those who achieved real breakthroughs — overcoming “hard problems,” he said — had in common.

The few successes were not enough to prove a theory, he admitted. But the one trait these breakthrough-makers shared was — perhaps not surprisingly — collaboration. These were analysts who challenged old assumptions, re-examined evidence that had been set aside as useless, and shared information beyond normal channels. They also, Wertheimer said, ignored their bosses’ admonitions that such inquiries — going back to ground that had been plowed unproductively before — were “career killers.” Bucking authority is another of Wertheimer’s recurring themes. He says that a colleague once told him, “You will have succeeded when you become really hard to manage.”

Wertheimer, however, plays down the notion of analysts as revolutionaries. “I don’t like the thought that transformation is changing something from the past to something new,” he says. Rather, transformation is about “creating an environment in which more things could happen than could happen in the past. It’s liberating. Let’s call it ‘analytic liberation.’ “

Wertheimer seems perfectly comfortable working in this gray area, where there is no obvious way to know whether his ideas are working and where concepts change on the fly (transformation becomes liberation) and the end goal isn’t defined at the outset. Were it not for the DNI’s backing, such a nebulous, high-risk approach to preventing another intelligence disaster might never take flight. Wertheimer might still go down in flames, but taking that risk appears to suit him just fine. “We can’t afford the kinds of mistakes that we’re making based on the way we’re doing business today. It’s just the bottom line,” he said. Riffing off the intelligence blogger’s comments, he added, “If I’m the first one to get killed, so be it.”

The Hard Sell

Bravado may obscure Wertheimer’s pragmatic streak. He is provocative and excitable, and sometimes brash. But those who know him well say that he is also humble and self-deprecating.

He frets that he will become too personally associated with his cause. “I’m a little worried about this being too personality-driven,” he says. “This has got to be about ideas. We have to sell people on the ideas.”

Wertheimer knows that the reason his pitch isn’t resonating with enough people his own age is because he has failed to demonstrate how middle managers and veteran analysts — the people who are feeling most threatened — can take part in this grand enterprise, how they can be “liberated.” Wertheimer, the realist, has promised to find a place for them. But he does not apologize for embracing young analysts and for assaulting the culture that reared him. “We don’t allow our people to reach their full potential,” he told the audience in Chicago. “This is a society, this is a community, that tamps down potential.”

“We treat [analysis] like a guild,” Wertheimer said later, a society of apprentices who study at the feet of masters. “This is like making a fine violin or studying opera. That [approach] makes a lot of sense at the scale that you build violins or have opera singers. But we’re talking about massive [numbers] of young people coming in…. They learn on their own. They don’t read the rule book. They don’t read the owner’s manual,” he said. “They click buttons and investigate, and if they get bored, they do something else.”

If the two sides of this generational divide are irreconcilable, Wertheimer doesn’t seem worried, because the rookies have the clear majority. “It’s simply a matter of time,” he said. “Now, the question we all have in our minds is, how much time can we afford? We can’t afford another day.”

Several younger colleagues once asked Wertheimer to name his greatest career achievement at the National Security Agency. At one time, he said, he was the world’s leading expert on a certain cryptographic technology, the smartest man alive on that one subject. But “that’s not what makes me so accomplished,” he said. “It’s that I’m no longer the No. 1 expert, and that the experts are in this room, because I taught them. And they exceeded everything I could have done on my own.”

That’s one way Wertheimer judges success: Someone comes along and does it better. It doesn’t quite answer his critics’ concerns that his ideas might be flawed to begin with. But Wertheimer is a strong believer in the “wisdom of crowds.” He and his bosses are betting that collaboration is the way to fix what’s broken with intelligence and, by extension, to keep people from dying. If they are right that transformation, in all its forms, is the key to stopping another terrorist attack, or to avoiding another catastrophic intelligence failure, then it seems a decent bet that the next generation of analysts will follow Wertheimer’s lead.

“If I can just start something for which a handful of folks better and smarter than me take over,” he said, “if you could put that in my epitaph, I would die a happy man.”

Published in National Journal

Senior Homeland Security Department employees left their jobs over the past two years at rates significantly higher than the average for other Cabinet-level departments, according to a report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office.

Attrition rates for Homeland Security’s Senior Executive Service positions or those requiring presidential appointment were 14.5 percent in 2005 and 12.8 percent in 2006, the report (GAO-07-758) stated. That’s more than twice the average attrition at all Cabinet-level departments of 7 percent and 6 percent during the same years.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen a procession of stories about leadership woes at DHS, which are intensified by the pending transition of power from the Bush administration to the next president, in January 2009. I wrote about this issue in National Journal last month. Then Congress and the Washington Post noted the preponderance of vacant posts in DHS’ upper echelons.

Katherine’s story on this latest GAO report sheds even more light on the problem. In the past two years, more than half of the senior employees at DHS headquarters in Washington “either resigned or transferred to another department,” she reports. In light of employee satisfaction surveys that put DHS at or near the bottom in most categories, one can imagine that a good number of these employees left not just because they got new jobs, but because they wanted out of DHS. “Executives at headquarters, the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency had the highest attrition rates,” Katherine reports. Those three organizations, perhaps more than any others in the department, have suffered from low morale, bad publicity, and frequent turnover at the top.

Turnover was also higher than the government average among career, non-senior DHS employees–8.4 percent in 2005 and 7.1 percent in 2006. The overall average for federal agencies was 4 percent. Most of these numbers were accounted for by security screeners at airports, who make up more than one-third of the total DHS workforce. Factoring them out, DHS’ numbers for non-senior employees’ attrition fell below the federal average. Of course, the fact that there’s so much turnover among the people charged with keeping terrorists and bombs off of airplanes might give overseers some pause.