It took only a couple months and about 100 CIA operatives and Special Forces troops, supported by U.S. air power, to chase the Taliban out of Kabul in 2001.
Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee has
found that at least some of the spy agencies under DNI's purview have not been reporting their true numbers of employees.
The revelation is buried in a new
report from the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2010, examined adroitly Wednesday by my CQ colleague
Tim Starks.
"The legislation grants several DNI requests for flexibility to move personnel, and an explanation of the bill expresses an inclination to support the removal of a DNI personnel ceiling," Starks
wrote.
Of course, the DNI has all sorts of rationales for removing the ceiling, among them one of official Washington's favorites: It will actually save money.
"Exercise of this authority should result in an actual reduction of the number of contract personnel and not a shift of resources to hire other contract personnel," the bill says.
Right.
Starks noted that the DNI is claiming a 3 percent reduction in intelligence contractors last year, and its claims that it will lop off another 5 per cent this year.
The idea, I guess, is that hiring more people will result in firing more contractors.
But it's hard to take the DNI's estimates seriously: Some of the spy agencies lie about how many people they have on the payroll.
Buried deep in the Senate Intelligence Committee's report is this eyebrow-raising sentence.
"During consideration of the fiscal year 2008 request, the congressional intelligence committees learned that practices within different elements of the Intelligence Community on the counting of personnel with respect to legislatively-fixed ceilings were inconsistent, and included not counting certain personnel at all against personnel ceilings."
They were hiding people, in other words, from the DNI's bean counters.
Doh! That's what they're supposed to do when they're spying in foreign countries, not when they're counting noses for budgets.
In an
interview with me three years ago, Rep. Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican (and former FBI agent) on the House Select Intelligence Committee, called the DNI "a big beast."
"I'm disappointed in where DNI is going," Rogers said. "I've yet to see value added to what they're doing."
Rogers bemoaned the hundreds of new intelligence bureaucrats at the DNI and elsewhere, who have grown by the hundreds since we talked.
"Did they add any case agents, operations overseas?" he asked. "I don't see how they're helping catch one terrorist."
It's even harder to see that now.
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