that our adversaries might want to learn and then begin to ask how do we defend those against attack. It also has a heavy emphasis on what I would call benchmarking, trying to ask what are the best practices in the Intelligence Community in things like use of polygraphs to try to enhance our defenses against espionage.

Do you have any comment about that initiative?

General ODOM. I do. The intelligence study that was cited, which you have, that I did in 1997, is being published as a book at Yale Press. It will come out in January. It's been de-acronymized so it's a little more accessible to the public.

I bring up this point and try to clarify what I think is a serious muddle in that kind of proposal. I said earlier counterintelligence is information about the other person's intelligence capabilities and what they are seeing of you. Security is not an intelligence responsibility. Let me put this in a practical case that I lived through.

Most of you remember the Soviet bugging of the Moscow Embassy. My agency had a lot to do with discovering that. I had subordinates who thought they got their instructions from God, protecting the crown jewels, and they were going to go down and make George Shultz shape up, clean up the embassy in Moscow. I had to explain to them that we could make the information available that the KGB was reading his mail. It was his authority to decide whether or not he cared. NSA couldn't do anything about that. But I had really—people were deeply convinced that we needed to do something.

Some were down here lobbying staffs and Members of the Congress on trying to force the Secretary of State to do what he might or might not want to do. My point was, the President hired him and the President's finally responsible for the security. If he wants the Secretary of State to fix the Moscow embassy properly, he should order him to do it. The intelligence people can't do that. A counterintelligence service cannot protect the secrets. Security is a manager's responsibility. He buys the locks and puts them on the doors. He hires the guards.

The intelligence guys, the fellow goes out and finds information. And I've run into these well-meaning people who confuse the security role with the counterintelligence role. And unless you sort that out you will find yourself with organizational muddles you wish you had never gotten in.

Chairman GRAHAM. Thank you, General.

Senator Shelby.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. General, we're not picking on you. We appreciate all three of you and we appreciate Judge Webster too. As a matter of fact, I read again today your article I had read it back in June that was published in the Wall Street Journal. I thought it was very interesting and maybe perhaps instructive.

The British have what we call or what they call MI-5, right? How does MI-5 work in the U.K.?

General ODOM. I don't claim to be a great expert on MI-5, but I can tell you what my impressions are. It does counterintelligence, only counterintelligence.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. Nothing else, does it?

General ODOM. Nothing else. It's not a law enforcement agency. It turns to Scotland Yard to arrest people. But it's different from my proposal.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. That's what I wanted you to get into.

General ODOM. It stands out there alone and is a competitor. In my proposal the national counterintelligence service would be under the DCI, just like CIA would be. Number two, MI-5 I do not believe can look into the counterintelligence picture held by MI-6. In other words, MI-6 in its offensive operations will inevitably get into counterintelligence. They'll learn about the other guy's spies. So everybody's going to be doing some counterintelligence.

But this agency which does only counterintelligence needs to look in there so he can see whether there's a gap, whether his agency is being played off against the other one. And I would have-I don't think MI-5 looks into any counterintelligence activities in the Ministry of Defense in Britain. I could be wrong about that.

But what I propose is there would not be counterintelligence operations run in the military services that were not coordinated with the national counterintelligence service. So the national counterintelligence service could look down every one of these closed holes and see what the overall picture looks like. If you can't do that, you're not going to have a comprehensive picture.

It's not to exaggerate. If I were a foreign intelligence service I would love to run against the FBI and the counterintelligence capabilities here. You've just got big gaps welcoming you to come through.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. They've done quite well, haven't they, against the FBI? Why would you want to-and I'm not saying it's good or bad; it's just your proposal-to put this under the DCI or central intelligence as opposed to a freestanding entity?

General ODOM. I want it to be freestanding, away from the CIA. I want it under a Director of Central Intelligence who is not the director of CIA.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. So what we've been talking about is like creating, as Lee Hamilton mentioned, a CEO, a chairman of the board of the Intelligence Community.

General ODOM. It's closer. I think Congressman Hamilton wants more executive budget execution authority than I do. But otherwise I think we overlap enormously. Also, this was my point to Senator Feinstein, that if you're trying to force these people in the room together and you've got the DCI in control of both of them, he can cause them to do that. Counterintelligence is intelligence. They are more closer kin in their skills, their cultures, et cetera to the rest of the Intelligence Community than they are to law enforcement. Vice Chairman SHELBY. General, how would the other agencies, assuming this counterintelligence agency or entity was created as you would envision, how would the other community, how would they share their information? You know, they would have some information dealing with some counterintelligence, would they not? It's just cross-fertilization.

General ODOM. Absolutely. It's call multidisciplinary as opposed to counterintelligence. They will be a user of the national imagery agency collection. They will be in a position to task the national im

agery. The FBI, if it wanted to, could do that today under the way the system is organized.

We're talking about a homeland security department. With the present Intelligence Community system, maybe it isn't run very well-I don't know-but when I was there I got a list from all kinds of agencies and I had to put the priorities up there and give those agencies the priority that the DCI put his stamp on. And the homeland security would get it. If FBI-I actually did a lot of support for FBI. That was not the problem.

The problem tends to be where it's a human intelligence kind of activity and CI gets limited entirely, almost entirely, to human intelligence approaches in the FBI. And if it were centralized it would use signals, imagery, the whole thing.

Vice Chairman SHELBY. Mr. Chairman, I know my time is up, but one quick second. You point out, and I think you do it well, General, that there's a heck of a difference between counterintelligence and law enforcement and the methods that you go about it, because you're dealing with a different type of people and you have to have different approaches to it. I commend you for that. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Vice Chairman GRAHAM. Thank you very much, Senator Shelby. Senator Rockefeller.

Senator ROCKEFELLER. One quick one but important to me. Congressman, you've talked about no corporation would run this way. You've got to have somebody at the top. Mr. Hitz, I'm not quite sure where you stand on that. But I'm just covering the base here with you and I thought I'd find out, and I suspect you lean in that direction, and, General, you too to some degree-accountability.

Throughout a lot of discussions that we've had, both open and closed it has often rattled around the back of my mind that the ultimate consumer on behalf of all of this and the one who has the most to gain and the most to lose if the system isn't operating properly and the one who has the most power, albeit it not legislative but in effect can have an enormous effect on that too, is the President of the United States.

And it mystifies me that when we meet we talk about what kind of legislation can we get passed when all of these commissions that Eleanor Hill talked about this morning put in their two years of work and put out terrific reports and then nothing happens, it's because you're addressing that, in a sense, to the world at large but sort of generally to us and to a fairly elite community that would be interested.

If anybody after 9/11 has to be interested, it's the President of the United States. And if anybody has the power to make certain kinds of changes through executive authority, executive directives, through jawboning, through calling people in and saying I think intelligence, the business of intelligence is one of the three or four most important things that happens in the country today, it is the President. In terms of the survival of the nation along with a good fighting force, intelligence has to be it.

And so therefore what could be more important to him or to her than that? So my question to you is, why is it that the President somehow never comes into our discussions? You know, I gave an interview-it was probably a little bit naughty of me that, with

all due respect, the President has a lot of authority as to what gets passed and what doesn't get passed in the House of Representatives, on certain subjects. I'm not talking about intelligence but energy and a lot of other things, and taxes and things of that sort. And that defines the power. That's his right.

If he feels strongly about something, that's what he's meant to do. He's the only person elected by everybody and now it's to protect us. So what is it that he could be doing about this?

Mr. HITZ. Senator Rockefeller, that's where I am on the answer to your first question. At the end of the day, the President of the United States has the principal interest, I would say, in getting the intelligence information that he needs to do his job, and on the terrorist side to stay in business. And the difficulty with him being made accountable in the sense that you all are seeking it here is that you don't have the same kind of ability to reach him as you would one of his cabinet officials in terms of calling him up to testify.

But at the end of the day it's the President of the United States who has to make sure that the Director of Central Intelligence, the Director of the FBI, the SecDef, all of them cooperate to do the best job.

Senator ROCKEFELLER. But if there were a conflict that he saw between, as we've talked about today, the 85 percent budget authority for the Defense Department and the 15 percent left over for the Central Intelligence Agency and he found that not helpful to his national security purposes and national intelligence purposes, he would be in a position, I would think, to be able to do something about that. We aren't.

General ODOM. I said earlier to someone's question what do you do, how do you get reform. And I pointed out, I brought the President's name up. The President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, if they want to change this, they could change it. They are the users, and for the very reasons you said, they are the source of change if you're going to have it.

But let me point out that intelligence is a support function and it's a specialized kind of activity for an overall operation. When you say there is no corporation in the U.S. that doesn't have a single person in charge, personnel operations are going on everywhere, but we don't have a commander of personnel. And the OPMS runs sort of the federal personnel service but it doesn't hire and fire in all the departments. They do that. So you're dealing with something that is a support function.

And if you begin to differentiate it out too much to where you have budget execution, et cetera, then you really get in trouble with it. But the place where the President can't change this, I think, without your support over here is with the FBI counterintelligence, because that is a statutory agency with certain authorities and I don't think he could write an executive order that takesmaybe he could write an executive order that takes the counterintelligence role away from the FBI.

Senator ROCKEFELLER. But he can encourage us to.

General ODOM. Pardon?

Senator ROCKEFELLER. He could encourage us to do that.

Senator ROCKEFELLER. But he could be helpful in that process. My time is up. I thank you all. I apologize to the Chairman.

Chairman Goss [presiding]. Thank you, Senator, very much.

I have delayed my questions primarily because I have been summoned in and out a number of times on other matters and I wanted to apologize to you because I think the value added from the contributions are all have made, Judge Webster included, has helped us very much.

We have an extraordinary amount of wisdom in front of us and we have an extraordinary amount of experience, and we take that not lightly. And I'm glad we're able to apply it to the future, the solutions. A lot of good ideas-just the list that Eleanor Hill read of all of the blue ribbon commissions that we've had sort of wrestling with this, using as a benchmark maybe the fall of the Wallsince that time the number of ways we've gone at this question of what is an Intelligence Community and how do we make it work and what's the purpose of it and so forth.

We're in, in my view, a totally expected part of the Washington cycle in this sense, that we've had some extraordinarily good wisdom from some extraordinarily knowledgeable people over the years on what to do about the Intelligence Community, and the threat and the nature of the globe today, and that the sky was going to fall unless. And the record is replete with that. And as we get our very capable staff to go through it we see time and time again, including people in front of me, who have said if you don't get a hold of this one bad things are going to happen. And of course the bad things happened.

So I have two questions. The first question is, how do we get an audience? How do we get an audience? We certainly have the message. We certainly understand the problem and we certainly have some good ideas for fixes. The question is, how do you get that audience. And I don't know and I am just as frustrated as everybody else, because I'm there too thinking I failed, I wasn't able to get that message across either in my time. Even though I saw it, I just couldn't sound the warning. And I feel a lot of us on these oversight committees are feeling that these days and a lot in the Intelligence Community as well, to be sure.

The second question goes to the media question that was brought up-that I think Congressman Hamilton mentioned-of the good old days when there was a very different relationship between the Intelligence Community and the media, and that was basically the twain shall never meet. "No comment" was about as long as a sentence ever got. I remember how far oversight has come since my days in the Agency in the late '50s and '60s, when oversight was a very different thing than the formalized function that it is now. But the whole problem we have is we're in that Washington cycle where we didn't get our audience so now we've done what we always do; we've gone to the public. And we said intelligence matters, it really does, and we need to have the right kind of capabilities. In order to go to the public, we've had to go to the media, and that of course is dangerous because everybody has a little different slant on it.

So what you see is a phenomenon in front of you that while we understand with some particularity the threat, understand some