It must answer questions about the center's role, if any, in the collection of domestic intelligence, and about the wisdom of expanding the role of the Director of Central Intelligence in domestic intelligence.

The administration needs to let the Congress know why the center's director should not be confirmed by the Senate. I am also interested in understanding what the center's role will be with respect to disseminating intelligence analysis to other Federal agencies and to State and local law enforcement, and how it proposes to collect information from them.

As the witnesses and my colleagues on the panel know, States local officials complain to each of us that they have not, up until this time, been kept in the loop by Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. And there are many questions about the proposed budget of the TTIC; the number of analysts it will have and the administration's timetable for getting it up and running.

I know that we have extraordinary witnesses, very able and experienced who can help us illuminate and answer some of these questions and as I say, Madam Chairman, I look forward to discussing them directly with the administration's representatives at the earliest possible date. But for now I thank you for holding this hearing and for moving as expeditiously as you have to examine what is clearly one of the most important issues we face in the near term in shoring up our homeland defenses. Thank you.

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Senator Lieberman. We will be having a second hearing at which administration witnesses will be called to testify. I, like you, look forward to hearing more from them on the details and the answers to the many important questions that your statement raised.

We are now going to move to our first panel. We are fortunate this morning to have two extraordinary public servants who have given a great deal of their time and energy and thought to analyzing our Nation's intelligence needs. We are very fortunate to be joined by former Senator Warren Rudman, and former Governor James Gilmore. I am fighting with Senator Sununu for the honor of introducing Senator Rudman. I, too, consider him to be a constituent since he does have a home in Maine. But I think that your claim, Senator Sununu, probably goes back further so I will yield to you to introduce Senator Rudman.

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR SUNUNU

Senator SUNUNU. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. It is an honor to serve in the Senate, and despite having served in the House for 6 years, as a new member of the Senate you come with some deal of trepidation. We all know that we walk in the shadows of our predecessors and we are prepared to deal with that, but it does not change the fact that sitting here in this Committee room for our first hearing I was a little bit surprised to hear Senator Rudman's name invoked a half a dozen times before I even got a chance to talk. And now we have a hearing scheduled, and of course he's here to provide his perspective on such an important topic.

But rather than be discomfited by this, I fully understand the reason. It is an honor to serve in his footsteps but it is also an

honor to be a part of this Committee and to be able to bring him forward to provide his wealth of experience.

He has served as a Korean War veteran, as Attorney General for the State of New Hampshire, as a U.S. Senator, and as a leader of this Committee during an important time in dealing with questions of intelligence, oversight, and foreign policy, that being the hearings on Iran-Contra.

He has remained dedicated to public service even, as Senator Lieberman has pointed out, after leaving the U.S. Senate. He has been a member of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, a winner of the Presidential Gold Medal for his service, in particular in acting as an adviser and a resource on questions of intelligence. The reason his perspective has been so important in that regard is because he has worked with local law enforcement in the process of gathering and providing intelligence from that grass roots level. He has, of course, worked in a great capacity in the U.S. Senate dealing with Congressional oversight and our role in understanding how intelligence is gathered and used to provide for national security. He has served in the executive capacity as well, offering advice on the consolidation, use of intelligence, and sharing of intelligence.

I cannot imagine someone who is more qualified to provide an important perspective on the challenge we now face, but I also cannot think of a challenge that is greater for the new Department of Homeland Security. Consolidating our intelligence resources, breaking down some of the cultural barriers that have existed to effective intelligence sharing in the past has been identified by this Committee and by others looking at the new Department of Homeland Security as one of the premier challenges this organization will face.

Being able to rely on the expert perspective of Governor Gilmore and my friend Warren Rudman is essential to us doing this right the first time. Warren Rudman has been a great friend to me and a great friend to my family. There is always a wealth of pride that comes from that kind of a long-standing personal relationship, but in New Hampshire he is also regarded as a great citizen and a great public servant and that is why it is really a pleasure to be able to introduce him here today. Welcome, Senator Rudman.

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Senator Sununu.

Our other panelist, James Š. Gilmore, served as Governor of Virginia from 1998 to 2002. Since 1999, he has been the chairman of the Congressional advisory commission on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, which everyone calls the Gilmore Commission. In December 2002, the Gilmore Commission issued its fourth report which focused in part on the creation of an intelligence fusion center. The Gilmore Commission recommended the creation of a national Counter Terrorist Center as a stand-alone agency outside of the FBI, CIA, and DHS. It also recommended that this entity be an independent agency with a leader appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

Gentlemen, I am very grateful to have you join us this morning. I look forward to hearing your opening statements. I would ask that you limit them to about 10 minutes and your longer written

statement, if any, will be submitted for the record without objection.

Senator Rudman, we will start with you. Again, thank you for being here.

TESTIMONY OF HON. WARREN B. RUDMAN, CO-CHAIR, U.S. COMMISSION ON NATIONAL SECURITY/21ST CENTURY

Mr. RUDMAN. Good morning, Madam Chairman, Senator Lieberman. First, let me thank my friend John Sununu for that very gracious introduction. I must tell you, though it is very elevating to be back in this hearing room where I spent so much time, it is a bit depressing to look at Senator Sununu and realize that he was 16 years of age when he and his father and I campaigned against each other in a Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. That tells me how young he is and how old I am, and that is a bit depressing. I am also delighted to see my old friend, Senator Lautenberg, and glad to meet for the first time, Senator Coleman.

Madam Chairman, you and the Ranking Member have really asked a number of questions that are the questions that have to be answered. I doubt very much either Governor Gilmore and I can answer all of those questions because, although I am very familiar with this proposal and how it has come to be, it is still very much an embryonic proposal. I think one of the reasons you do not have administration witnesses here today is they wanted to be prepared to answer those very searching questions which I think are key.

I think maybe the most important question that you both referred to in your opening statements is simply this: We are all very familiar with the Homeland Security Act. Senator Hart and our commission proposed that department and testified many times here before the House and the Senate. It finally evolved in pretty much the shape that we had hoped it would, but I have never really quite understood how the intelligence function within the Department of Homeland Security will be discharged. I am even confounded more with the creation of this new department, or this new joint venture if you will, which I fully support, but there has to be some sort of sharp delineation between the mission of the intelligence unit mandated by the Congress within the Department of Homeland Security and this new threat integration center which will be an all-source, all-agency unit.

If you are not careful you will start having some crosstalk here between these two agencies, and the last thing you need in either collection or analysis is not only competition but confusion. So I hope that when the administration comes here, and I am sure they will, they will set out for you precisely what that is. I tried to find out for the last several days by talking to some of my friends and, frankly, I do not think that has clearly evolved, and that is understandable. This proposal was only evolved about a month or so ago, presented by the President in the State of the Union. I think when you finally have those witnesses here you will probably get a clear understanding. But I think that is one of the most important ques

tions.

When I look back at my 9 years on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and chairing the board and looking at all sorts of all-source, raw, sophisticated, non-sophisticated, signals

and human intel, two things occur to me. That the massive intelligence that is received by both U.S. foreign intelligence agencies and the FBI and domestic intelligence is daunting. The amount of reporting-I sometimes think we have too much reporting, not not enough.

A good example, for those of you that have had experience on the Intelligence Committee, or in the Armed Services Committee, is the amount of information received by the National Security Agency. The amount of signal intel received there, and how it gets analyzed, and how it get compartmentalized, and how it gets separated is truly a daunting task. Now we are faced with a new issue, which is why I think this proposal has been made.

We have two distinctly different kinds of intelligence that this government receives. One, foreign intelligence based on threats that are non-terrorist, that are state-sponsored as opposed to nongovernmental organizations which are terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and many others. It is very easy, or easier, to target state-sponsored terrorism, or if you will, state-sponsored military action, which is what the CIA and the NSA and all the other agencies have done well over a long period of time.

It is far more difficult to try to direct intelligence, both signals and human intel, against people who you do not know who they are sometimes. They do not have an address. We do not know where they live. We do not know how they are organized. So first you have to figure that out before you know how to collect.

So what they are now going to do, from what I understand, is to take and put together a joint venture, to put it in corporate terms. This is not going to be a new department or a new agency. It is going to be a joint venture of the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and all of the Defense Department intelligence agencies, from the NSA to the NRO, and all of them. They will be all located together and their job will be not collection-they will have nothing to do with collection. They will depend on traditional collection, foreign from CIA and all of the DOD agencies; domestic from the FBI, and all of their resources around the country. What they will do is to analyze in one place and collect in one place all the reporting on terrorism as opposed to the myriad of other things that the CIA does.

Now one thing that has to be clearly understood by the public is that there seems to be an attitude out there that the CIA and the FBI are only concerned now with terrorism. That is hardly the case. There are a lot of issues in this world involving Asia, Europe, involving the Middle East that the CIA must report to policymakers on important intelligence. So this is not the only thing they have to do. The problem we have had is that it has all been amalgamated in one place even though the Director of the CIA and the Director of the FBI have labored mightily through the creation of Counter Terrorist Centers and joint terrorism centers to try to get it consolidated. Although that has worked, it probably has not worked well enough, so this proposal is before you.

As I understand this proposal will be a group of individuals that will be solely charged with being the focal point for gathering collection, both foreign and domestic, on all matters of terrorism. Now

curiously, although the number is classified I can tell you this, that the overwhelming amount of collection on domestic terrorism is collected overseas, which I think, Madam Chairman and Senator Lieberman, is probably the reason that the administration has decided, and I think wisely, that the Director of the CIA should be the person to whom the head of this new joint venture reports, because they will be dealing in the main with foreign intelligence. The domestic intelligence will be collected by the FBI, but since most of our adversaries in the area of terrorism are located overseas, although we certainly have some of them in this country, it is not surprising that the overwhelming amount of intelligence that is gathered on domestic terrorism is not gathered within the continental United States, Hawaii, or Alaska. It is collected in other places.

So I think the structure is good. The problem will be, as someone once said, the devil is in the details, and I do not think any of us have enough detail now to be able to comment with any real accuracy on how it is all going to come together. My sense is that they have staged it about right. They are going to start small, and they believe they have anywhere from a 2 to a 4-year time line to get it fully functional, although it will be functioning as early as later this year. It will have representatives from the Bureau, from the Agency, State, and all of the DOD agencies. Their information technology will be unique in that it will connect with everyone else that is in this business. The Department of Homeland Security will do some collection through the Coast Guard, through the INS, or through the Border Patrol. It will also, I expect, report in to this unit.

So I think that all I will say in this opening statement is that there are more questions right now than there are answers. I think the concept is very sound. I think we need a single place, not located at the FBI or the CIA, but a group of people from various parts of this government who form a team to analyze the kind of information that the Chairman referred to, which may have slipped through the cracks in the past. I think it is a sound proposal and I support it, but there are a lot of questions you are going to have to ask when you get the administration before you.

Thank you.

Chairman COLLINS. Thank you, Senator Rudman. Governor Gil

more.

TESTIMONY OF HON. JAMES S. GILMORE, III,1 CHAIRMAN, ADVISORY PANEL TO ASSESS THE CAPABILITIES FOR DOMESTIC RESPONSE TO TERRORISM INVOLVING WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

Mr. GILMORE. Thank you, Madam Chairman, Senator Lieberman, and Members of the U.S. Senate. Thank you for the opportunity to be here to carry out our advisory function on your behalf.

I am the chairman of the advisory panel to assess domestic response capabilities with terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction. This is a panel that was created by law, by statute of the U.S. Congress at the initiation of the U.S. Congress.

1The prepared statement of Mr. Gilmore appears in the Appendix on page 76.