CIA reform plan draws critics

WASHINGTON – A key Republican’s proposal to break up the CIA and rearrange the Pentagon’s spy agencies under a national intelligence director met immediate and broad resistance Monday. A top Senate Democrat called it a “severe mistake” and the agency’s former director said it showed a “dangerous misunderstanding of the business of intelligence.”

Critics began aligning to fight the proposal that would represent the most significant overhaul of U.S. intelligence operations since the CIA’s 1947 inception – and the most sweeping plan offered in the post-Sept. 11 debate.

President Bush did not endorse the proposal by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan. Instead, the president said only that he was interested in finding “the best way to fashion intelligence so the president and his Cabinet secretaries have got the ability to make good judgment calls.”

Bush has supported the need for a national intelligence director but has yet to detail the powers he wants the office to have.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he hadn’t had a chance to see the restructuring proposal in writing.

“We do need to make significant adjustments in how we collect, communicate and dispense information,” Rumsfeld told an audience of about 1,300 troops at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, on Monday.

But he added: “We have to be careful about it. … You don’t want, in the middle of the war, to go tearing up the pea patch.”

Roberts surprised Republicans and Democrats alike when he announced on a Sunday morning talk show his proposal to remake the intelligence community by splitting the CIA into three separate agencies, pulling all or part of four defense intelligence agencies out of the Pentagon, and creating a new national intelligence director to oversee the National Intelligence Service he envisions.

On Monday, a defensive Roberts said, “If this proposal seems radical to some … my response would be: What should we do?”