The big reveal is that Blair, the nominal overall intelligence chief, wants a much bigger role over the CIA’s drone strikes in Pakistan.

Since the CIA’s establishment in 1947, its officers have had a direct line to the National Security Council. No cut-outs, no go-betweens.  Blair and his deputies believed that the CIA’s National Clandestine Service was failing to provide a full picture of several of the agency’s largest covert collection and special activity programs. In particular, the DNI would often find out about CIA-initiated drone strikes in Pakistan well after the fact. The CIA was conscientious about briefing the National Security Council, but did not bother to loop in the DNI.

That won’t happen any longer. The CIA will keep its unfettered access to national security principals, and the DNI still doesn’t have the authority to order covert action programs, but the White House is now requiring the CIA to fully brief the DNI on all covert action programs and will seek from the DNI regular assessments of whether any program fits in with the nation’s intelligence strategy, which is set by Blair. Since Blair briefs Congress more often than Panetta does, it makes sense for Blair to know as much about covert action programs as CIA briefers would.

That might sound like bureaucratic box-checking. But for years, the DNI’s office — long before Blair took over — has quietly absorbed many intelligence analysts who look at long-term geopolitical questions, rather than analyzing the crises of the moment. Since the big question with the drone strikes is whether they ultimately enrage Pashtun Pakistanis by the civilian casualties they create — and therefore raise the question of whether the strikes are counterproductive — it’s not inconceivable that Blair’s office would take a more skeptical view of the program’s value than the CIA does.

But that’s not the only big piece of news Ambinder uncovers. Check this out:

The conflict became public earlier this year, after the CIA protested when the Director of National Intelligence appointed a senior National Security Agency representative to be the DNI’s representative in Kurdistan. Traditionally, the CIA’s chief of station had served as the foreign nation’s principal intelligence representative. But the NSA has a bigger footprint in Kurdistan, and the DNI decided that he would be better served by appointing an NSA officer to be his representative.

The conflict is not new. But the fact that it took place over Iraqi Kurdistan most definitely is. And the additional fact that Kurdistan is home to a National Security Agency presence is big big news. I would bet a lot of money that such a presence is geared toward some serious spying on nearby Iran.

“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, as well as the chairmen and ranking minority members of the relevant congressional committees receive briefings first.

“I have been told that the Director of National Intelligence is still committed to providing the full membership a briefing on the activities within the jurisdiction of this Committee. I believe that this will occur, and I will push to schedule a briefing before the end of this week.”

Just yesterday, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) postponed the Senate Armed Services Committee’s scheduled briefing on Fort Hood in accordance with President Obama’s request for Congress to await the results of military and law enforcement inquiries.

On November 6, 2009, I directed that an immediate inventory be conducted of all intelligence in U.S. Government files that existed prior to November 6, 2009, relevant to the tragic shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, especially anything having to do with the alleged shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, U.S. Army. In addition, I directed an immediate review be initiated to determine how any such intelligence was handled, shared, and acted upon within individual departments and agencies and what intelligence was shared with others. This inventory and review shall be conducted in a manner that does not interfere with the ongoing criminal investigations of the Fort Hood shooting.

The results of this inventory and review, as well as any recommendations for improvements to procedures and practices, shall be provided to John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, who will serve as the principal point of contact on this matter for the White House. Preliminary results of this review shall be provided by November 30, 2009.

Whether these were warning signs or false positives will be Brennan’s apparent purview. It certainly seems like an antidote to the drip-drip of press accounts about alleged mishandling of Hasan’s case.

Students of Hoekstra know that this kind of recklessness is nothing new. In 2006, when he chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the man actually wrote in The Wall Street Journal that unnamed members of the U.S. intelligence community were “perhaps” leaking classified information to the press to “help al Qaeda.” I confronted him about it back then, and here’s how that went:

I asked Hoekstra about his charge that certain members of the intelligence community seek to “help Al Qaeda,” he stood by it. But, curiously, he couldn’t finger any specific Al Qaeda sympathizers in the CIA. “If I were aware of anyone by name or by position that I believe at this point in time was there because their intent was to help those who might attack us, they wouldn’t be there,” he assured.

Then why make the claim?

“You have to hold that out as a possibility,” Hoekstra explained. “I mean, every day–not every day, but on occasion, and more frequently than what we would like–we find out that the intelligence community has been penetrated, not necessarily by Al Qaeda, but by other nations or organizations that we are spying on. And so to rule out the possibility that there are people in the intelligence community that are doing this to help Al Qaeda, I think, would be naive.”

Hmm. So then it’s naive to rule out the possibility that Hoekstra, now in the business of leaking classified information to the press about al-Qaeda sympathizers being surveilled, is “doing this to help al-Qaeda.” Good to know.

Well, today is the day! From Blair’s office:

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair released today the fiscal year 2009 budget figure for the National Intelligence Program (NIP).  The Director disclosed that the aggregate amount appropriated to the NIP for fiscal year 2009 was $49.8 Billion.

OK, then, per Blair’s September disclosure, that means the MIP, last year, totaled $25.2 billion. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder tweeted that he thinks Blair was “lowballing” and the real intel budget is around $130 when you take into account “IT spending, DARPA intel stuff, infrastructure, shared costs” and “half of [the Department of Homeland Security]’s activities (even enforcement ) serve intelligence purposes, domestic or otherwise.”

“I appreciate the privilege and opportunity that President Obama has given me to co-chair the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board,” said Senator Hagel. “I look forward to working on behalf of our country to help build a more secure America.  I am particularly grateful to participate in this effort with former Oklahoma Senator and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David Boren.  His distinguished record of accomplishment and experience will provide strong and enlightened leadership for the Board.  Working with Senator Boren and the other impressive members of the board we will make every effort to provide thoughtful, informed and independent advice to the President and his team.”

“I am honored by the president’s appointment to co-chair the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board,” said Senator Boren. “I appreciate the opportunity the president has given me to help in the effort to strengthen our national security.  I’m especially pleased that former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, for whom I have great respect, will serve as the other co-chair.  It is my hope that together, with the other members of the board, we can give candid, thoughtful, and nonpartisan advice, which will be helpful to the country. This part time advisory role, which is uncompensated, will in no way alter my plans to remain as president of the University of Oklahoma.  I see this appointment as a chance to perform my duty as a citizen to serve our country.”

Real talk: this board typically does nothing. George W. Bush appointed Brent Scowcroft, a confidante of his father’s, to the position, which offers advice about the quality and usage of intelligence, and then ignored him. It’s an ignorable job! The most important intelligence adviser in the White House, where these guys won’t even typically be — Boren, as he says, will remain focused on beating the University of Texas in football — will doubtlessly remain John Brennan. But we’ll see what President Obama does with it, since these things rise and fall on the strength of their connections to the president, and Hagel certainly has Obama’s trust.

Gompert sounded some familiar notes about limiting notification of sensitive programs to the so-called Gang of Eight — the political leadership in Congress and that of the intelligence committees — rather than the full House and Senate intelligence panels:

[C]ongressional notification must be made to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters. This does not limit the obligation to keep the intelligence committees informed but rather provides the Administration a degree of latitude in determining how and when to bring extremely sensitive matters to the committees’ attention. I agree with Director Blair that limited notification should occur only in the most exceptional circumstances…

I believe that timely and complete congressional notification to the full intelligence committees should be provided and the “Gang of 8″ limitations should be used only when consistent with standards set forth in the statute.

House Democrats wanted to do away with the Gang of Eight restrictions, but President Obama threatened to veto an intelligence bill that would have forced him to do that.

Meanwhile, there isn’t much in Gompert’s background that deals with intelligence. But he was part of a well-intentioned and tirelessly designed program to disarm and integrate the militias of powerful Iraqi factions aligned with the United States in 2003 and 2004. Alas, the Iraqis gutted Gompert’s work, but life is sometimes like that.

At the same time, U.S. intelligence collection in Pakistan has vastly improved, officials say. Western intelligence services have had more success penetrating al Qaeda groups lately, according to Richard Barrett, the United Nations’ coordinator for monitoring al Qaeda and the Taliban. “There’s many more human sources being run into the groups,” Mr. Barrett, a former official with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, told an audience at a Washington think tank last week.

Whether CIA or Pakistani intelligence sources are the ones responsible, that’s a very promising sign, since it indicates that there are internal fractures in the groups sheltering al-Qaeda that intelligence agencies are able to exploit.

The New York Times’ follow-up has a good description of how this new data point is influencing the Obama administration’s strategy review:

That idea has its critics, including General McChrystal and other officials who do not overlook the value of such operations — indeed, General McChrystal used to head the Joint Special Operations Command, which was responsible for many of those operations. But they say they depend on a significant troop presence on the ground to provide intelligence and restrict the space where Al Qaeda can operate. They argue that defeating Al Qaeda requires fighting the Taliban, too, and warn of the difficulties in managing the relationship with Pakistan, which has often bristled at American drone attacks on its territory.

But the question is why the U.S. is able to reap actionable intelligence against its main enemy, al-Qaeda, where there are no U.S. troops, or even really Pakistani troops, but it couldn’t do the same thing against its subsidiary enemy, the Taliban, if it capped U.S. and NATO troop levels at 68,000. Perhaps the circumstances really are different — the Taliban, as Pashtuns, have a much closer relationship to Afghanistan than the mostly Arab upper echelon of al-Qaeda does to Pashtun Pakistan — but if the argument really is that counterinsurgency is a prerequisite for intelligence gathering, the Pakistani case needs to be further explored, because it really does look like a counterexample.

But sources having recent conversations with top American officials on Iran policy say they are not convinced that is the sequence in which things occurred. Some wondered if Iran’s disclosure of the facility to the IAEA may have confirmed western suspicions that had previously been unconfirmed.

Not so, says a U.S. intelligence official who would only speak on background. “This was a major intelligence success,” the official said, but would not elaborate — yet. More information as I acquire it, to either flesh out that claim or refute it.

Marc Lynch, pocketing the assumption that the Iran disclosure referenced by Presidents Obama and Sarkozy and Prime Minister Brown was prompted by such an intelligence success, analyzes:

It also demonstrates to the Iranians the quality of Western intelligence and the difficulty of deception and denial — especially in the atmosphere of (quite warranted) mistrust of their intentions.  That may reduce their reasons to oppose the intrusive inspections and monitoring regime which Gary Sick argues is the most likely reasonable negotiated outcome.  Such an outcome would be far more in the interests of the U.S., Iran, and Iran’s neighbors than any plausible outcome of a military strike, and has to be the target of the engagement process.

Michael Birmingham, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, clarified that Blair was talking about both figures, together, to make up the $75 billion total. And indeed, on the call in a different context, Blair spoke of no longer bifurcating military intelligence and national intelligence, saying that was no longer an appropriate distinction. Birmingham said that the national intelligence budget had not increased from last year’s $47.5 billion*. If not there has been no NIP increase — and, by law, the director of national intelligence must disclose the budget line in October — that means that the Military Intelligence Program is budgeted at $27.5 billion.

Birmingham emphasized that the MIP total is not a classified number, but ODNI doesn’t put it on its Website, because its not “required by law” to do so. (It does put the national intelligence program figure on the site.) But Steve Aftergood, an intelligence analyst with the Federation of American Scientists who knows more about the intelligence budget than most anyone who isn’t inside the intelligence community, says the MIP number is certainly obscure. There are “no solid numbers on MIP,” Aftergood said in an email. “We knew it was more than $10 [billion] — but not how much more. So the 75B figure is quite interesting.”

Did Blair mess up by implicitly revealing that total? “No, absolutely not,” Birmingham said.

Clarification: Birmingham reiterates that the National Intelligence Program budget line hasn’t increased from $47.5 billion to $75 billion, but the actual total for this year’s NIP won’t be made public until October.

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