Office of the Director of National Intelligence
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The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is the coordinating layer placed above the American intelligence agencies in 2004. John Kiriakou's position is that it should not exist.

Why it was created

He gives the origin as a reaction to a single man's failures: it was created "because George Tenet, who is the DCI, director of central intelligence, essentially the director of the entire intelligence community, fell on his face with 9/11 and the Iraq war and they needed to have an adult in the room. And so they just created this ODNI thinking if we put one more layer of of oversight, it's going to make everything better. And all it did was make everything more confusing and fatter."

The growth

Kiriakou says he agrees with one thing Trump has said about it, that it is bloated, inefficient and full of fat, and gives the numbers: "When when I was still in the CIA and they created ODNI, they had 16 employees. 16 employees. Now they have about 24,000 employees. Why? What are they doing?" He allows for the transfer of the President's Daily Brief from the CIA, "okay, there's there's two dozen people right there", but not for the rest, and asks in particular why CIA operations against Iran, Iraq, Russia or China are run from the ODNI when "it's CIA case officers collecting the information, CIA analysts analyzing the information, CIA budgets that are financing the information." His answer: "It it was just a power grab."

Authority it does not have

The structural objection is that the director of national intelligence does not direct national intelligence. Almost all of the agencies technically under the ODNI "are actually DoD agencies", the NSA and the DIA belong to the Defense Department, as do army, navy, air force, marine and coast guard intelligence, all of them nominally ODNI components while falling under the Pentagon. "So what does the DNI do with all of these other organizations? It controls only the budget. Nothing but the budget. So why bother why bother having it in the first place?"

Two directors, one job

Kiriakou describes the relationship between the two offices as formally settled and practically not. "The CIA director technically falls underneath the DNI, but in reality, on a day-to-day basis, that''s just not true." Cabinet rank is discretionary and rotates by administration: "presidents can choose, for example, among CIA director, DNI, and ambassador to the United Nations, who gets a cabinet position."

The office''s founding purpose was coordination of all eighteen intelligence agencies, which "for all practical purposes" meant control of the budget. Kiriakou identifies the structural limit on that: "don''t forget that fully half of those intelligence agencies are actually parts of the Pentagon. And so in the end the DNI doesn''t have authority over those, the Secretary of Defense has authority over those."

Within the space that remains, he says, the office has grown steadily. "Over the last 20 years more and more authority has been absorbed by the DNI. The President''s Daily Brief used to be a CIA-only publication; now it''s a DNI publication. Major operations, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, China, used to be solely the domain of the CIA; now they fall under the DNI. So it''s almost as though we have two CIA directors who are competing with each other for primacy." His summary of the boundary: "there''s no clear division between DNI and CIA. It''s just something that is fought out on an ad hoc basis."

See also

- George Tenet
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Bill Pulte
- Tulsi Gabbard
