The mysterious Mr. Negroponte

Posted by Philip Barron at 8:30 AM on January 4, 2007.

If you wanted to sum up the brief and obscure tenure of John Dimitri Negroponte as the United States Director of National Intelligence - an office he's now preparing to vacate - you could do worse than to quote the shadowy apparatchik himself:

Intelligence is not a panacea -- far from it.

If your response to that is anything other than a baffled shrug, perhaps you're in a position to explain why Negroponte has stepped down to what certainly looks like a lower-rung job as deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Josh Marshall, a smart guy and author of Talking Points Memo, is a bit puzzled over the apparent comedown. The move is particularly notable because the job Negroponte's taking is one that Rice apparently couldn't even give away for months. Indeed, it looks as though Rice had been courting Negroponte for some time, and the intelligence czar took his sweet time deciding. Was it indeed a promise of eventually sitting in the number one chair, assuming that Rice would resign herself in search of elected office? As murky as events surrounding Negroponte usually are, at least the viability of that possible rationale will make itself clear with time.

While waiting for the fog to lift, we can occupy ourselves by wondering how history will remember the Negroponte era of national intelligence (setting aside for the moment Negroponte's earlier roles as UN ambassador and as a proconsul/ambassador who, at best, ignored human rights abuses in Honduras). For most people, nothing much of Negroponte's latest stint of service will come immediately to mind, though you may have a few vivid memories if your name is Porter Goss:

The sudden and unexpected resignation of Porter Goss as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency on Friday highlights a long bureaucratic battle that's been going on behind the scenes in Washington. Ever since John Negroponte was appointed Director of National Intelligence a year ago and given the task of coordinating the nation's myriad spy agencies, he has been diluting the power and prestige of the CIA. From day one, he supplanted the CIA Director as the President's principal intelligence adviser, in charge of George W. Bush's daily briefing. Other changes followed, all originating in the law that created the DNI — and all traumatic for CIA fans. Then...in a little noticed move, Negroponte signaled that he would be moving still more responsibility from the CIA to his own office, including control over the analysis of terrorist groups and threats.

Negroponte was a formidable bureaucratic infighter chosen for that strength by the White House; the suddenly friendless Goss soon found himself overnmatched. Interestingly, Negroponte apparently found it more difficult to manhandle the Pentagon in like manner, protected as that entity was by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Such turf battles with various intelligence agencies make up the bulk of what most folks know about Negroponte's work as head of DNI - unless you count his attempts to delay the release of thousands of Saddam-era documents that some conservatives hoped would be the Holy Grail of WMD evidence (and thus a rationale for blood and treasure spent in Iraq), but which intelligence experts say refer only to material already removed years ago by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

He's a rather elusive guy, our Mr. Negroponte, the kind of constant gardener who always seems to prosper in times of war and strife. There is one account, though, that does somewhat humanize him.

On many a workday lunchtime, the nominal boss of U.S. intelligence, John D. Negroponte, can be found at a private club in downtown Washington, getting a massage, taking a swim, and having lunch, followed by a good cigar and a perusal of the daily papers in the club’s library.

“He spends three hours there [every] Monday through Friday,” gripes a senior counterterrorism official, noting that the former ambassador has a security detail sitting outside all that time in chase cars. Others say they’ve seen the Director of National Intelligence at the University Club, a 100-year-old mansion-like redoubt of dark oak panels and high ceilings a few blocks from the White House, only “several” times a week.

We can imagine that Negroponte's new position will dictate a similarly rigorous schedule.

Tagged as: terrorism, john negroponte, national intelligence

Philip Barron is a St. Louis writer and author of the blog Waveflux.