It would be easy to draw a straight line between the alleged “intelligence failures” of the last six months and Dennis Blair’s resignation. Let in the Underwear Bomber and the Times Square bomber, and heads should roll, right?
Well, not so fast my friend.
Any alleged failing on Blair’s part is a minor reason for his departure. If Faisal Shahzad was the reason, we’d have expected Mark Leiter — head of the National Counter Terrorism Center, NCTC, which falls under the DNI’s purview — to go first.
Blair left because of power, authority and personality conflicts with the White House. More specifically, the DNI position has little power or authority, and Blair got outmaneuvered personally by savvy bureaucratic operators like CIA Director Leon Panetta and White House counter terrorism advisor John Brennan.
Politico reported on Blair’s struggles back in January:
“One reality is Blair is really not political; he is really not good on the Hill,” said one former counterterrorism official. “He doesn’t know how to build coalitions on the Hill. He is really just out there swimming on his own, and he is not doing a very good job for the people who might have pushed expanding the DNI’s power to get behind him on this.”
On the one issue where Blair really chose to take a stand — appointing Chiefs of Station at CIA offices abroad — the White House sided with Panetta. And then there’s the big elephant in the room — budget authority.
Despite being the nominal Director of all 16 US intelligence agencies, the DNI doesn’t control their individual budgets or personnel, except for those under NCTC. That’s a big problem, causing the “boss” to be subject to the machinations of his de facto subordinates. Sure, the DNI has the authority to facilitate collaboration between those individual agencies, but if those agencies’ heads retain enough authority to run their own little fiefdoms, that creates uncomfortable tensions. And Blair didn’t seem politically savvy enough to navigate that mine field.
So, on the personality front, Blair, though a highly respected professional, seems to have been a bit of a fish out of water in this job. Then again, is the DNI job too small a fish in a big ocean?
Defining the DNI’s role from a budgetary point of view should be the next intelligence community reform.
Photo credit: Robert Huffstutter / CC BY-NC 2.0
