meant the need to spend more on satellite systems at the expense of human
efforts. In addition, denial and deception became more effective as targets
learned from public sources what our intelligence agencies were doing. There
were comprehensive reform proposals of the intelligence community, such as
those offered by Senators Boren and McCurdy. That said, Congress still took
too little action to address institutional weaknesses.
defense Les Aspin and later by former secretary of defense Harold Brown exam-
ined the intelligence community's future. After it issued recommendations
addressing the DCI's lack of personnel and budget authority over the intelli-
gence community, the Intelligence committees in 1996 introduced implement-
ing legislation to remedy these problems.
actively support these changes. Relatively small changes made in 1996 gave the
DCI consultative authority and created a new deputy for management and
assistant DCIs for collection and analysis.These reforms occurred only after the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence took the unprecedented step of
threatening to bring down the defense authorization bill. Indeed, rather than
increasing the DCI's authorities over national intelligence, the 1990s witnessed
movement in the opposite direction through, for example, the transfer of the
CIA's imaging analysis capability to the new imagery and mapping agency cre-
ated within the Department of Defense.
Congress as a whole, like the executive branch, adjusted slowly to the rise of
transnational terrorism as a threat to national security. In particular, the grow-
ing threat and capabilities of Bin Ladin were not understood in Congress.As the
most representative branch of the federal government, Congress closely tracks
trends in what public opinion and the electorate identify as key issues. In the
years before September 11, terrorism seldom registered as important. To the
extent that terrorism did break through and engage the attention of the Con-
gress as a whole, it would briefly command attention after a specific incident,
and then return to a lower rung on the public policy agenda.
and national security issues after threats are identified and articulated by the
administration. In the absence of such a detailed--and repeated--articulation,
national security tends not to rise very high on the list of congressional prior-
ities. Presidents are selective in their use of political capital for international issues.