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ing any oversight or operational authority and is not part of any operational
entity, other than reporting to the director of central intelligence.
2
The government now tries to handle the problem of joint management,
informed by analysis of intelligence from all sources, in two ways.
· First, agencies with lead responsibility for certain problems have con-
structed their own interagency entities and task forces in order to get
cooperation. The Counterterrorist Center at CIA, for example,
recruits liaison officers from throughout the intelligence community.
The military's Central Command has its own interagency center,
recruiting liaison officers from all the agencies from which it might
need help.The FBI has Joint Terrorism Task Forces in 84 locations to
coordinate the activities of other agencies when action may be
required.
· Second, the problem of joint operational planning is often passed to
the White House, where the NSC staff tries to play this role. The
national security staff at the White House (both NSC and new Home-
land Security Council staff) has already become 50 percent larger since
9/11. But our impression, after talking to serving officials, is that even
this enlarged staff is consumed by meetings on day-to-day issues, sift-
ing each day's threat information and trying to coordinate everyday
operations.
Even as it crowds into every square inch of available office space, the NSC
staff is still not sized or funded to be an executive agency. In chapter 3 we
described some of the problems that arose in the 1980s when a White House
staff, constitutionally insulated from the usual mechanisms of oversight,
became involved in direct operations. During the 1990s Richard Clarke occa-
sionally tried to exercise such authority, sometimes successfully, but often caus-
ing friction.
Yet a subtler and more serious danger is that as the NSC staff is consumed
by these day-to-day tasks, it has less capacity to find the time and detachment
needed to advise a president on larger policy issues. That means less time to
work on major new initiatives, help with legislative management to steer
needed bills through Congress, and track the design and implementation of the
strategic plans for regions, countries, and issues that we discuss in chapter 12.
Much of the job of operational coordination remains with the agencies,
especially the CIA.There DCI Tenet and his chief aides ran interagency meet-
ings nearly every day to coordinate much of the government's day-to-day
work. The DCI insisted he did not make policy and only oversaw its imple-
mentation. In the struggle against terrorism these distinctions seem increasingly
artificial. Also, as the DCI becomes a lead coordinator of the government's
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