WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 (UPI) -- The man expected to be tapped as the next Pentagon intelligence chief instituted a controversial and ultimately failed reorganization at the Defense Intelligence Agency when he led it in the 1990's.
Retired U.S. Air Force Gen. James Clapper has not been formally named as the nominee to the undersecretary of defense for intelligence post, but a senior staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee told United Press International that Clapper had been approached last year, and that his nomination was "in the works."
But Clapper, who has not faced Senate confirmation since he took over the Defense Intelligence Agency under then-Defense Secretary Richard Cheney in November 1991, may face questions about changes he made there.
One senior official working in the agency at the time called the changes "disastrous," and even Clapper's defenders acknowledge they were mistaken, but say he learned from the experience.
If confirmed by the Senate, Clapper will be only the second person to hold the new Pentagon intelligence post, which was created by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2003. He will replace Steven Cambone, a close ally of Rumsfeld who oversaw several controversial expansions of military intelligence activities.
Clapper left his post as head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency -- which interprets satellite photos and draws maps for the U.S. military -- last June, several months earlier than he had wanted, after clashing with Rumsfeld over his support for the idea that the nation's new spy chief, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, should have authority over the five major U.S. intelligence agencies inside the Department of Defense.
That earned Clapper credit with lawmakers, angry at Rumsfeld about the rearguard action he waged to limit the powers of the new spy chief over military intelligence.
But they may also want to ask Clapper about the major reorganization of analysts he initiated at the Defence Intelligence Agency.
Retired Army Col. Pat Lang, who was a senior official at the agency at the time, and left after clashing with Clapper over the reorganization, called it "disastrous ... extremely destructive."
According to several people there at the time, the reorganization divided analysts into so-called functionally oriented groups, focused on particular kinds of weaponry for instance, as opposed to the traditional structure, with analysts divided into desks covering geographical regions.
Clapper "had no interest whatsoever in the (agency's) national-level role in developing strategic intelligence for policy-makers," said Lang, and instead organized analysts "strictly to support the military-technical side of things," like assessing the capabilities of weapons systems.
"When (the analysts) found out they were supposed to know technical minutiae about anti-aircraft weapons, rather than say, Jordanian politics," said Lang, a Middle East specialist, "they started leaving in droves."
Jeffrey White, who was also a senior official at the agency at the time, told UPI that "In my opinion (the reorganization) was a mistake."
"Wars happen on geography and it is vital that (analysts in the DIA) are organized in such a way that you can understand that geography politically as well as militarily," he said.
But he added, "To Clapper's great credit he recognized that and reversed himself" moving the agency back to a more regionally-orientated structure.
"That is one of his major pluses," said White, "He is very flexible. He believes you have to keep thinking about how to do these (intelligence) jobs."
White said he was "a Clapper fan," calling him "a creative thinker," who had to confront big questions about the role of military intelligence at a time of shrinking budgets. "He used to say, 'They're running out of money, we have to keep thinking,'" said White.
He said Clapper was focused on breaking free of the Cold War mindset that still pervaded the agency in 1991.
"He had to confront the question of how to refocus the agency away from the Cold War, Soviet-era paradigm ... he was motivated by the need to break that Cold War mold in intelligence."
Two other officials familiar with the reorganization, but who would not agree to be quoted by name because they still do work for the government, agreed that the reorganization was an attempt to confront big, almost existential, questions about the future of military intelligence after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War.
One official who worked there at the time, described Clapper's efforts as a "break-all-the-China approach to get synergy between analysts working on different regions" by re-drawing the agency's organizational chart.
"It was the end of the cold war and people were asking big questions about the future," said the official.
But there was a lot of resistance to the changes, and there were "literally fist-fights" in the building over desk-space as a tightly scheduled series of moves went ahead.
The official called it "a good faith effort" that "didn't go well," but added that Clapper had "learned lessons from it that he was able to apply," when he later took charge of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
Another official, a veteran of military intelligence who held a very senior position at the agency after Clapper had left, told UPI that the reorganization "wasn't entirely successful," but said that such false starts were an unavoidable feature of trying to re-orient a large agency.
"Anything new, anything innovative, has to be tried out. You have to make adjustments as you go along." He said Clapper had "begun the process of improving (the agency's) analytical capacity. Perhaps the final result wasn't how he'd imagined it would be, but that is totally normal.
The first official said that Clapper had also ruffled feathers by trying to expand his control as DIA head over military intelligence. "The DIA had a vague sort of budgetary responsibility for many parts of the military's intelligence program, but it was a real management mess ... a soup sandwich."
Clapper "was asking 'Is anybody really in charge of this?' It was good government, but nobody liked it."
The official added that the reaction to Clapper's moves had been predictable. It was "just like nobody liked Cambone trying to exert his authority."
The official said the position was, in some ways, a no-win situation. "Congress left that control (of Pentagon intelligence) specifically within the military chain of command ... But as soon as (Cambone) sets out to try and create some real management over there, people call it a land grab."
