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WASHINGTON: Retired Vice Adm. John M. “Mike” McConnell will
replace John Negroponte as director of national intelligence, with a
shuffling of Negroponte to a high-level post at the State
Department.
McConnell, who was director of the secretive
National Security Agency from 1992 to 1996, will become Bush’s
daily intelligence briefer and oversee the vast intelligence
operations of the government.
Negroponte, a career Foreign Service officer and
former ambassador, will become deputy secretary of state when the
Bush administration is reassessing its strategy for the war in Iraq.
The White House said that Bush next week will announce a new
strategy in Iraq, and that he spoke at length with Iraqi Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki by teleconference on Thursday.
“They talked about the importance of having
sufficient force in Baghdad to maintain security,” said Tony Snow,
the White House spokesman, when asked if Bush and the prime minister
had discussed an expected deployment of additional US troops. “The
president did not unveil a new way forward.”
According to a senior administration official,
the shuffling of the director of national intelligence is part of a
carefully calculated move by Bush to bolster both intelligence and
diplomatic operations. Yet some are expressing dismay with the move
less than two years into the reorganization of an intelligence
community that was chastised by a presidential commission for
“systemic weaknesses” in 2005.
“I am deeply troubled by the timing of this
announcement and the void of leadership at the top of our
intelligence community,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from
West Virginia, said. “Director Negroponte has not had a confirmed
deputy since May 2006 when Gen. Mike Hayden left to head the CIA. It
is not acceptable for the top two jobs to be vacant at the same
time.”
But by tapping McConnell the White House is
wasting no time filling the director of national intelligence post.
McConnell must be confirmed by the Senate.
The director of national intelligence post was
created after the Robb-Silberman Commission in March 2005 reported
on the “systemic weaknesses” of the nation’s 16 intelligence
agencies, calling them “not a community in any meaningful
sense.”
Bush maintains confidence in Negroponte, who
provides the president’s daily intelligence briefings, according
to a senior administration official, but personally asked Negroponte
to fill a vacancy left at the State Department by the departure of
former deputy Robert Zoellick, who left in July for Wall Street.
McConnell is well known to other key figures in
the intelligence and defense community. He served as NSA director
when Robert Gates, now secretary of defense, was director of the
CIA. And he will oversee the work of CIA Director Hayden, who also
ran the NSA, the top surveillance agency.
McConnell, a native of Greenville, South
Carolina, served Navy tours in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf as an
intelligence officer before becoming senior military intelligence
adviser to then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and then for the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell, during the
Gulf War. Former President George H.W. Bush nominated him to run the
NSA in 1992.
--MCT
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