Intelligence Community

WASHINGTON - The fight over President Bush's nomination of Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton to represent the United States at the United Nations has proved to be less about the nominee than it is about Mr. Bush and his security policies. To be sure, in Mr. Bolton's hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Monday, critics took him to task for some of his now-famous skepticism about the United Nations and its disappointing role over most of the 60 years since its founding.

WASHINGTON - Two years after President Bush invaded Iraq to rid the world of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the commission he appointed to find out why we didn't know they weren't there hasn't minced words. Of all the assessments made by the U.S. intelligence community, the commission's report says that "not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over" in what was "one of the most public - and most damaging - intelligence failures in recent American history." The report spreads the blame widely among all the elements of that community, which "collected precious little intelligence for the analysts to analyze, and much of what they did collect was either worthless or misleading."

The United States' intelligence community had "high confidence" in early 2003 that Iraq was manufacturing and hiding biological weapons inside a fleet of mobile laboratories, as then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told the United Nations in a speech six weeks before the war began. Powell's source was a former Iraqi chemical engineer, nicknamed "Curveball," who had offered detailed accounts of the program. But Curveball was a liar - a "fabricator," according to the intelligence report released by the White House yesterday - and doubts about him had surfaced within the CIA months before Powell delivered his speech to the United Nations.

WASHINGTON - A commission that reviewed U.S. intelligence capabilities called on President Bush yesterday to "force widespread change" in the nation's spy network, issuing a scathing report that found that intelligence agencies were "dead wrong" about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs and "still know disturbingly little" about those of other U.S. adversaries. The bipartisan panel, formed by Bush last year after he initially resisted its creation, warned that the intelligence community is poorly coordinated, largely in the dark about emerging threats, and stuck in a Cold War-era posture ill-suited to modern security challenges.

WASHINGTON - President Bush paid a rare visit to the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Va., yesterday in an effort to boost morale at an agency that will have a diminished role after a restructuring of the U.S. intelligence community. Bush said the purpose of the trip was to reassure agency employees that the CIA would continue to play a primary role in the collection and analysis of intelligence on terrorism and other threats. "Obviously, one of the reasons I came here is because I know there's some uncertainty about what this reform means to the people of the CIA," Bush said.

Dragon Development Corp. announces new executives Chris Prestel joined Columbia-based Dragon Development Corp. in September as the president and chief operating officer. He is charged with creating and managing an aggressive growth strategy to expand the company's customer base. Ed Grimes has been hired as the company's senior vice president of Maryland intelligence programs, responsible for serving customers in the Fort Meade area. Prestel served as senior director for federal and healthcare professional services at Sybase Inc., where he managed a $40 million business unit.

WASHINGTON - President Bush named John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and a former United Nations envoy, to be the first national intelligence director, tapping a trusted diplomatic hand yesterday to fill a thorny post. Bush also selected Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the National Security Agency, as Negroponte's deputy, adding a seasoned intelligence official to the new team. Bush made the announcements after a months-long struggle to find someone who would accept the new position as head of the nation's spy network.

WASHINGTON - John D. Negroponte, President Bush's surprise choice to oversee the nation's sprawling intelligence community, is a veteran diplomat who in a career spanning portions of five decades has served in international trouble spots ranging from Saigon during the Vietnam War to Baghdad today. He was at Henry A. Kissinger's side at the Paris peace talks to end the war in Vietnam, immersed in supporting the Nicaraguan contras from Honduras during the Reagan years, the nation's point man at the United Nations as Bush pressed for action against Saddam Hussein and, now, the first U.S. ambassador to post-Hussein Iraq.

WASHINGTON -- The person President Bush will soon name the nation's top spymaster should have his visible support, experience in dealing with the intelligence community, managerial expertise and the ability to go toe-to-toe with the Pentagon in turf battles, specialists in intelligence issues say. Bush is expected to reveal his choice for the new post of director of national intelligence any day now. The White House has carefully guarded the selection process...

CONGRESS HAS SO FAR failed to pass legislation reflecting changes in the intelligence community that were recommended by the 9/11 commission, but that may not be all bad. The legislation before Congress reflects the frustration this nation has had with the inability to act on the clues that were present before Sept. 11, 2001. If they had been properly collated and interpreted, they might have led to the detection and neutralization of the al-Qaida cell that attacked New York and Washington.