Is this why Bush's intelligence-czar plan is so half-hearted?

President Bush has only tepidly endorsed the 9/11 commission's proposal for a new centralized director of national intelligence, and now we have an explanation for his half-heartedness. It seems that back in 1992, when he was secretary of defense, Dick Cheney virulently opposed an uncannily similar notion.

The House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee were considering bills that would have created a director of national intelligence who would have statutory authority over programs, personnel, and budgets across the entire "intelligence community"—much the same as Thomas Kean's panel is urging now, 12 years (and at least as many intelligence failures) later.

On March 17, 1992, Cheney wrote a letter of protest to Rep. Les Aspin, the House committee's Democratic chairman at the time, saying he would urge the president—George Bush's father—to veto the entire defense authorization act if it contained this "unnecessary" and "severely flawed" structural change.

The letter—unearthed by Open Source Solution and reprinted this week on Steven Aftergood's invaluable Secrecy News Web site—makes for particularly poignant reading. If Cheney hadn't successfully blocked the measure (his letter moved Aspin to drop it), one of the 9/11 commission's most urgently advanced proposals might have been in place for over a decade before the terrorist attacks.

Yet the letter is also a pertinent document in today's debate, as it illustrates the bureaucratic mountains that must be moved if anyone decides to take the idea seriously.

Cheney first simply stated the obvious. The bills, he said, "would unwisely create an 'intelligence czar.' " True, "czar" is an apt description. As for "unwisely," Cheney goes on: "The roles of the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence have evolved in a fashion that meets national, departmental, and tactical intelligence needs." The bills "could seriously impair the effectiveness of this arrangement by assigning inappropriate authority to the proposed Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who would become the director and manager of internal DoD [Department of Defense] activities that in the interests of efficiency and effectiveness must remain under the authority, direction, and control of the Secretary of Defense."

To decipher this gobbledygook, it is worth noting that the secretary of defense at the time controlled—and still controls today—about 80 percent of the intelligence budget. The bills before the congressional committees in 1992—like the recommendations by the 9/11 commission today—called for stripping away a great deal of his power and probably around $30 billion in budget authority.

So, when Cheney wrote Aspin that the "roles" of the defense secretary and the CIA director "have evolved in a fashion" that meets "departmental" needs, he meant that the DoD and the CIA long ago reached an understanding about how to divvy up the money and the power. And when he wrote that the bills "could seriously impair the effectiveness of the arrangement," he meant that this understanding would fall apart—and bureaucratic war would break out—if some new guy were to get control over both agencies.

A supplemental letter to Aspin, by Chester Paul Beach, the Pentagon's acting general counsel at the time, stated the matter more clearly. The bills, he wrote, would give the new DNI "far more extensive authority and responsibilities for program and budget matters than is now exercised by the DCI [the director of the CIA]. The proposals would remove the Secretary of Defense from the process, although DoD resources represent about four-fifths of the [national intelligence budget]."

The suggestion is unmistakable: Pass this bill, and you've got a riot on your hands at the Pentagon and at Langley.