Intelligence

Marc Ambinder has a seriously detailed curtain-raiser on a turf war that’s roiled the intelligence community for months. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, and Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, have clashed over who controls the top U.S. intelligence officer in various foreign countries. But Ambinder goes way deeper to provide a [...]

A statement released by Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:
“Due to the high visibility of the issues surrounding the tragic event at Fort Hood, the President has instructed the National Security Council to assume control of all informational briefings. The NSC has directed that the leadership, [...]

Just released by the White House press office, a memorandum from President Obama. His top intelligence/counterterrorism/homeland security adviser at the White House, former CIA official John Brennan, will direct an investigation that will wrap up at the end of the month to determine what U.S. intelligence knew about “warning signs” from alleged Fort Hood shooter [...]

Check out Rachel Maddow going hard on Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) for publicly revealing that the U.S. intelligence community is intercepting the communications of al-Qaeda-sympathetic cleric Anwar Aulaqi, a former U.S. preacher now in Yemen whom Fort Hood murder suspect Nidal Malik Hasan apparently contacted before the shooting.

Last month, on a conference call with reporters, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair stated that the total budget for U.S. intelligence activities — an unsurprisingly murky total; and until recently a classified one — is $75 billion. As I later clarified, Blair meant the total for both military and non-military intelligence activities — as [...]

The White House just announced the leadership of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board: former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a big Obama supporter, and former Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.), a former intelligence committee chair and mentor of disastrous ex-CIA Director George Tenet. Their reactions, as per a White House release:
“I appreciate the privilege and opportunity that [...]

David C. Gompert, a former RAND Corporation vice president and longtime nonpartisan State and National Security Council official (Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Elder), has been nominated to be the principal deputy to Adm. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence. He’s testifying before the Senate intelligence committee right now, and in pre-written answers to [...]

The Wall Street Journal has a wonderful story on the role of the CIA’s drones in harassing al-Qaeda in Pakistan, and it includes, at the bottom, this paragraph that explains why the efficacy of the drone strikes has reportedly increased:
At the same time, U.S. intelligence collection in Pakistan has vastly improved, officials say. Western intelligence [...]

I don’t have any more yet, but the early speculation on the cable networks is that Iran’s very belated disclosure of its nuclear facility under construction near Qom came after western intelligence services closed in on the structure. Less than five years ago, the Silberman-Robb commission on WMD intelligence castigated the U.S. intelligence community for [...]

To add some clarity and context to Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair’s disclosure this morning that the U.S. intelligence budget is $75 billion, it’s helpful to distinguish between two budget lines: the national intelligence program and the military intelligence program, with their inevitable NIP and MIP acronyms. Congress ordered recently that the NIP, but [...]