Late at night on July 22, as the Senate prepared to close up shop for its August recess, Republican and Democratic leaders huddled together to decide who would lead the Senate's effort to put the recommendations of the independent Sept. 11 commission into a bill.
There was no argument, according to leadership aides familiar with the discussion.
Majority Leader Bill Frist and Minority Leader Tom Daschle agreed: Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine and chairwoman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, would guide the chamber through the creation of a national intelligence director and a centralized counterterrorism operation.
It was not just a matter of committee jurisdiction that put Collins at the helm of the proposed overhaul. Her soft-spoken, deliberate public speaking style belies a tenacity and investigative focus she has shown with top national security officials, whether as committee chairwoman or as a lower-ranking member of Armed Services, where she grilled Army generals about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
Collins is at the center of this intelligence overhaul because she runs a committee that has already taken on major government reorganization with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and because she appears to hold no parochial allegiances to the intelligence agencies that have been targeted for a shake-up. As a moderate voice in a very divided Senate, she has friends on both sides of the aisle, and her position on very tight votes is always closely watched. Legislation that comes out of Governmental Affairs should have a strong head of steam because it has the firm imprint of Collins and the panel's ranking Democrat, moderate Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut.
Her committee is expected to approve some kind of intelligence legislation by the leaders' deadline of Oct. 1. But it remains to be seen just how closely it will hew to the commission's call for an intelligence czar with real authority over personnel and the estimated $40 billion intelligence budget — now divided unevenly between the Pentagon and the CIA.
Collins is venturing into a political and bureaucratic swamp, bogged down by the institutional resistance of the intelligence community, turf wars among committee chairmen and a White House that is hesitant to make sweeping changes that would create a truly powerful intelligence chief.
"The stakes are very high, the issues are complicated, and people resist reorganization," Collins said in an interview. "I do not discount in any way how very difficult this is going to be. . . . These are individuals who fiercely resist having their authority taken away, but we can't just let it doom any reform."
Collins has already held two hearings on the federal reorganization, during which she and other senators on her panel agreed that a new intelligence chief should have budget authority. But on Aug. 2, President Bush announced that while he hopes Congress will create such a position, he opposes giving a national intelligence director such broad powers.
The administration is expected to unveil a proposal the week of Aug. 9 that calls for the national intelligence director and the Defense secretary to share authority over defense intelligence programs, a Republican congressional aide said. The White House also will announce plans to roll out in the coming weeks specific legislative proposals and executive orders dealing with intelligence reform, the aide said.
On Capitol Hill, a total of nine committees have scheduled a dozen hearings throughout the month — a sign that members are politically sensitive to the Sept. 11 commission's call for change. But the number of panels involved underscores another problem highlighted by the independent commission: Too many committees claim jurisdiction over the intelligence community, resulting in shoddy oversight. The commission has urged Congress to reorganize itself by giving intelligence committees more powers and creating permanent Homeland Security committees in both chambers. That is a tall order in that it would involve forcing powerful chairmen to give up coveted oversight and budgetary prerogatives. (Turf battles, p. 1908)
History does not favor Collins' prospect for changing how the closely guarded spy world conducts its business. A look at the past 50 years of efforts to overhaul the intelligence structure reveals a trail of failed and forgotten initiatives. Her colleagues say the challenge she faces is matched only by the urgent need to fix the intelligence community. (Box, this page)
"This is a situation that cries out for acting in the national interest," said Lieberman. Referring to the task that has fallen on Collins' shoulders, he said, "This is a test."
Groomed for the Job? Collins is the least senior head of a standing Senate committee and has not had as high a profile in national security issues as lawmakers such as John W. Warner, R-Va., chairman of Armed Services, or Pat Roberts, R-Kan., head of Select Intelligence. In many ways, however, Collins has been groomed for the job of overhauling the intelligence structure for nearly 30 years, dating back to her days as an intern for then-Rep. William S. Cohen of Maine (House, 1973-79; Senate, 1979-97) during the summer Watergate hearings in 1974.
Cohen "was a freshman Republican standing in judgment of his party's president," Collins recalls.
Collins also carries with her the spirit of a long line of savvy yet independent Maine politicos. Her father and mother were both mayors of the down-eastern town of Caribou, and four generations of ancestors served in the Maine Legislature.
Maine politicians tend to see themselves as outsiders — hearty individuals who distrust big government and the national party line. That explains Collins' two role models, former Maine Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (House, 1940-49; Senate, 1949-73), who was among the first to question the anti-communist investigations of Republican Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin (1947-57); and Cohen, a moderate Republican who served as secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration.
Collins' tenure as staff director of the Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management in the 1980s whetted her appetite for investigations and for holding the bureaucracy accountable, according to associates and friends. According to Robert Tyrer, a longtime associate who ran Collins' 1996 Senate campaign and is now president of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm run by Cohen, Collins spent many hours investigating the painstaking details of Social Security disability laws.
After years of working in non-elected positions, she ran for office for the first time at age 41, becoming a candidate for governor of Maine in 1994. She lost to Angus King, an independent, in a close three-way race, but the statewide name recognition from the gubernatorial race paved the way for her 1996 run for the Senate. One of her few critics, Democratic activist L. Sandy Maisel, said she is a "show horse" who makes politically savvy moves to gain power.
"She is very good at getting publicity and being the front person," said Maisel, who directs the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine.
As a moderate Republican willing to oppose her party's conservative wing, Collins is often wooed by both sides in the evenly divided Senate. Collins opposed her party 22 percent of the time on party line votes in 2003, and voted against the Bush administration 14 percent of the time last year, according to CQ vote studies. In 2002, she voted with her party 57 percent of the time. (2003 Almanac, p. B-5, B-9, 2002 almanac, p. B-11)
She was a swing vote on the bill that created the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 (PL 107-296), as she held out for greater protections for government union workers in the legislation. She won some concessions from the Bush administration but did not get the labor rules that she and many Democrats had wanted. Collins voted in favor of the final bill. (2002 Almanac, p. 7-8)
Collins' tenacity and independence were on display late last year, when she demanded extra information from administration officials about what type of intelligence was flowing to the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, a newly formed intelligence analysis unit. The officials eventually provided the information six months later — but only after Collins prodded them with several letters. She became the first lawmaker to visit the center, known as TTIC, so she could see first-hand how the unit was working.
At a May hearing in Senate Armed Services on the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, Collins demonstrated her ability to zero in on the heart of a question. In an exchange with Gen. John P. Abizaid, Collins got the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East to acknowledge that there were several contradictory doctrines for prisoner interrogations in Iraq that had opened the way for mistreatment of prisoners.
Collins also has shown that she does not let bureaucrats off the hook under questioning. At the Aug. 3 hearing on intelligence changes, Collins asked a CIA official: "Who makes the final call in an intelligence dispute" between agencies? The official, Philip Mudd, deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, gave a lengthy answer about agencies working together, concluding that they are "quite cooperative." Collins interrupted, demanding once again, "Who makes the call? Who decides?" She never got a firm answer, which fed her conclusion that there should be a top intelligence chief with real powers to referee intelligence disputes.
Supporters say she will be no pushover when it comes to mandating real change in intelligence, despite opposition from high-ranking military and CIA officials. Any thoughts that Collins' committee might be the place to soft-pedal intelligence legislation are quickly dismissed by those who know her.
"When Susan gets interested in something, you can abandon the idea that the issue will go away," said Tyrer. "People who don't know her do not understand how tenacious she is."
King, her former opponent, believes that Collins' independent streak makes her a natural in such a complicated and controversial policy area as an intelligence overhaul.
"Those chairmen [of other committees] have vested interests," said King, who served as governor from 1995 to 2003. "They were there when there were problems [with intelligence]. She's the right person in the right place at the right time."
Order of Battle Still, Collins cannot control what happens outside her committee. And in a Senate filled with larger-than-life, battle-tested figures, Collins will be challenged as never before on the intelligence shake-up.
The opinions of the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committee members — whose constituencies have the most to lose in an overhaul — will carry enormous influence once the debate reaches the Senate floor.
"We must stay clear of political pressure and resist the urge to move boxes around when in fact there are complicated issues," warned Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., a member of Senate Intelligence. "We have to be careful not to push up against some artificial deadline, like the end of the year."
Roberts, who, as Senate Intelligence chairman may yet produce his own restructuring legislation, also sounds a note of caution. "I need to know exactly what kind of authority the [director of national intelligence] would have over the budget, and over hiring and firing," he said.
Meanwhile, a wide range of officials from the intelligence community also have picked apart the various proposals laid out by the Sept. 11 commission.
John McLaughlin, the acting CIA director, opposes the creation of a national intelligence director. And John O. Brennan, the director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, has called some of the Sept. 11 commission recommendations for a new intelligence hierarchy "unworkable."
Under the current system, the director of central intelligence is head of the CIA and serves as the titular head of the entire 15-agency intelligence community. In practice, however, the CIA director cannot command operations at organizations like the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency, both of which are under the Pentagon. And he does not have much budgetary power: Requests to reprogram money within the intelligence community can take months to be approved.
As things now stand, the Defense Department commands at least 80 percent of the intelligence budget — an authority the Pentagon will be loath to relinquish to a national intelligence director.
Amid such strong institutional resistance, some officials have come before Collins' committee to support the idea of giving an intelligence czar real budgetary power. "A central authority and control over some of the budget process is vital," said retired Army Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, now assistant secretary for information analysis at the Department of Homeland Security. "I think the national intelligence director can have budget authority, and the intelligence organizations . . . can effectively operate."
Collins and Lieberman, after listening to these mixed reaction from intelligence officials at the Aug. 3 hearing, agreed that the national intelligence director should have strong budgetary powers as well as operational control over intelligence collection and analysis, whether it is happening in Langley or at the Pentagon.
Seizing Opportunities After a restless August of politically charged hearings, the real work will begin in committees some time after Labor Day. While House panels may continue work on legislation, the spotlight will remain on Collins' panel. Her task is to produce a measure that wins over enough Democrats and Republicans to create overwhelming support on the Senate floor, rather than a bill that just squeaks by without a strong political mandate.
With so much at stake, Collins is already being pressured both publicly and privately about restructuring the intelligence world. Witnesses at her hearings have warned her that recommendations that sound good in a commission report or in legislative language may not automatically translate into better intelligence gathering and analysis.
"It's one thing to sketch [intelligence management changes] on a board; it's another thing to implement it on a day-to-day basis," said Brennan, the director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which will be absorbed into the new National Counterterrorism Center, if it is created. "The system today is working much better than it ever was before."
Brennan's comments underscore the challenge that any intelligence overhaul faces. The officials who have testified before Congress universally agree that better human intelligence, better analysis and better information sharing are necessary to prevent another terrorist attack. But they worry about giving an outsider too much operational or budget control.
"We need to keep structures that allow us to operate with speed," said the CIA's Mudd.
Since she decided to scrap her August recess and start hearings July 30, Collins says she also has received calls from several senators and top intelligence officials — and not all of them have been supportive of the plan to create a national intelligence director with significant budget powers.
She would not say exactly who had called, but she says she is not intimidated by the resistance to change in a community that cherishes its privileged standing on Capitol Hill, its considerable budget and, perhaps most importantly, its secrecy.
"Some believe the commission's findings are ill-founded and don't want legislation. And some want a minor tweak" to existing law, Collins said.
"My hope is to produce a bill by Oct. 1."
Helen Fessenden and Joseph C. Anselmo contributed to this report.