White House Is Said to Reject Panel's Call for a Greater Pentagon Role in Covert Operations

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/28intel.html?th&emc=th  (must register to view original article)

By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: June 28, 2005

WASHINGTON, June 27 - The White House has decided to reject classified recommendations by a presidential commission that would have given the Pentagon greater authority to conduct covert action, senior government officials said Monday.

The decision is a victory for the Central Intelligence Agency, which has long been the principal architect and instrument of the secretive operations. The agency has been struggling to retain its authority in the power structure headed by John D. Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, especially as the Pentagon has pressed for a greater role in intelligence operations.

The White House will also designate the C.I.A. as the main manager of the government's human spying operations, even those conducted by the Pentagon and the F.B.I., the officials said.

The decisions are part of a detailed White House response, expected to be announced later this week, to the 74 recommendations issued in March by the commission, headed by Lawrence Silberman and Charles Robb, that examined the role of intelligence agencies in detecting and countering the international spread of illicit weapons. The plan for covert action was the only major recommendation explicitly rejected by a White House team headed by Fran Townsend, the president's homeland security adviser, the officials said.

The decision marks the second time in a year that the White House has rejected a high-level recommendation to transfer some C.I.A. powers to the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 commission recommended that the agency's special paramilitary unit be transferred to the Pentagon, but the White House decided in November to maintain that capacity at the C.I.A., while also moving to strengthen the Pentagon's paramilitary capacities.

Under Mr. Negroponte, who took office in April as part of the biggest intelligence overhaul in four decades, the C.I.A. no longer has the pre-eminence it commanded for decades. The director of central intelligence, Porter J. Goss, no longer regularly attends either the daily morning briefings for President Bush or regular meetings of Mr. Bush's principal foreign policy advisers.

But in addressing the commission's recommendations, the White House appears to have decided to maintain the C.I.A.'s predominance in both covert action and human spying, the areas in which the agency has most rigorously defended its turf.

Under law, covert actions may be carried out only with presidential authorization and Congressional notification, and those operations are devised so that American government involvement is disguised and meant never to be acknowledged.

In its report, the commission said covert action "may play an increasingly important role" as the United States steps up efforts to counter terrorism and the spread of illicit weapons, because it can serve as "a more subtle and surgical tool" than diplomacy or the use of military force.

Its recommendations about covert action were deleted from the public version of the 601-page report, but senior government officials said they would have allowed the Pentagon a larger role in carrying out intelligence, reconnaissance or sabotage missions more secretive than the operations already carried out by American Special Operations forces, which are defined as clandestine - a shade less secret than covert.

The commission's recommendation, the government officials said, was based on a conclusion that military forces were often better trained and equipped than the C.I.A. to carry out missions that might be a part of a covert action. But the officials said they believed that the White House had concluded it would be preferable to leave covert action in the hands of the agency, to maintain a sharp legal and operational distinction between its paramilitary operations and those carried out by the military.

Both the Pentagon and the F.B.I. have moved in recent months to assert a greater role in spying operations, particularly those related to terrorism and weapons proliferation. The C.I.A. has retained overall authority over such operations, but with Mr. Goss now reporting to Mr. Negroponte, some agency officials had feared that Mr. Negroponte's office might also assert its right to coordinate human spying operations and that the Pentagon might demand a co-equal role in covert action.

Spokesmen for the C.I.A., the White House and the Pentagon all declined to comment on the White House decisions. The senior government officials who described them came from several different agencies, but insisted on anonymity because the commission's recommendation on covert action remains classified, and because the other decisions have yet to be announced.

Among the dozens of commission recommendations to be endorsed by the White House, the officials said, are one calling for the establishment of a National Nonproliferation Center, to manage actions to combat the spread of illicit weapons. As a small coordination unit, the new center will join the National Counterterrorism Center in reporting directly to Mr. Negroponte.

Another recommendation had called for the creation of a new human intelligence directorate at the C.I.A. to encourage new approaches to human spying operations. But action on that measure is to be postponed until further review by the agency, a plan it welcomes. Officials there had been concerned that such a step would undermine the existing directorate of operations, which oversees the agency's clandestine networks of case officers and spies.

An additional recommendation has already led to the drafting of an executive order that would allow the Treasury Department to penalize companies that do business related to the weapons programs in North Korea, Iran or Syria, administration officials said Monday. The draft order, they added, would give the Treasury Department the authority to pursue and freeze the offending companies' assets, in the United States or abroad.

The new responsibility is similar to the authority the Treasury Department was given after the Sept. 11 attacks to seize the assets of companies and other organizations that are believed to have aided terrorists. The existence of the draft executive order was first reported in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

Joel Brinkley contributed reporting for this article.