CIA Analyst: 'Whole Bureaucracy' Opposes Bush Agency

Critics from inside the intelligence community tell Newsweek that post-9/11, despite the Bush administration's establishment of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) to remedy U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies' failure to communicate, everything the various intelligence agencies learn is still not being shared.

"The whole bureaucracy is against TTIC," says one CIA analyst. "They've got the long knives out for it."

Launched last May, the TTIC is an independent body manned with analysts from more than a dozen agencies, including the CIA, FBI, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the National Security Agency, the Coast Guard, Homeland Security and the Secret Service, reports senior editor Michael Hirsh and investigative correspondent Mark Hosenball in the April 5 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, March 29).

Each day TTIC analysts are supposed to share whatever they hear about potential threats and produce reports that go to the White House, Pentagon and other major "customers."

But the CIA's Operations Division, otherwise known as the "Clandestine Service," is said to be reluctant to surrender its most tightly held information, principally for fear of compromising the identity of its sources.

There is also a degree of bureaucratic jealousy of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence. "When 'customers' are being briefed by CIA in the morning, the briefer will give them the TTIC stuff," says the CIA analyst.

"Then he'll say, 'But here's better stuff from our counterterrorism center'." Some CIA officials are also resisting a transfer of the agency's top-secret bin Laden unit to TTIC.

TTIC is run by John Brennan, a senior CIA official who tries to pull together threat intel from all U.S. agencies at a secure vault at Langley (in May, TTIC will move to its own building at an undisclosed location in the Washington area).

Brennan acknowledges that TTIC is having teething problems, but tells Newsweek that he has been given "unparalleled access" to 14 networks of classified information as well as sensitive databases. "There has never been a case when I need information that we haven't been able to get it," he says.

Editor's note: