Remarks of Sen. Robert Kerrey on secrecy and intelligence budget disclosure

Congressional Record: July 19, 1999 (Senate)
Page S8777-S8796


 INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2000--MOTION TO PROCEED

[...]

  Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, the Senator from New Mexico has done a
very good job of outlining an urgent need to change our law governing
the Department of Energy. I have high praise for him and Senators
Warner, Murkowski, Kyl, and, on our side, Senators Levin, Bingaman, and
Lieberman, who have worked to try to fashion a piece of legislation, a
law that will balance our need for secrecy and our need for security.
  I appreciate very much, I say to the Senator, his leadership on this
and the sense of urgency that he has brought to the need to change our
law. My hope is that we, at the end of the day, at the end of this
debate--I do not think there is going to be very much objection to
moving to this bill--my hope is that we can get a very large majority,
if not a unanimous vote in support.
  I know the Senator from Michigan, Mr. Levin, has some amendments he
wants to offer. He has talked to me a little bit about them. We will
have a chance to talk about those, I guess, tomorrow when we come to
it.
  But there is no question that the laboratories have been a tremendous
source of pride and a tremendous source of discovery and a tremendous
success story as far as delivering to the United States of America
things that have made the United States of America more secure and more
prosperous.
  Likewise, there is no question that over the years--over the last 20
years or so--since the Department of Energy was created, there has been
sort of a gradual buildup of layers of bureaucracy that make it more
and more difficult for any Secretary of Energy, whether that individual
has the requisite skills or not, to know what is going on in the
laboratories and to have the authority needed to manage those agencies
so those laboratories, as Senator Rudman, chairman of the PFIAB says in
the title of his report, can get both the best science and the best
security simultaneously. We unquestionably have the best science. I am
quite certain the Senator from New Mexico believes the same way I do.
In visiting the labs, in particular the lab that is under question, Los
Alamos, most of the people I have met there described themselves as
being very conservative to extremely conservative on the question of
security and expressed their concern that their reputation for keeping
the United States of America safe has been damaged. Of all the people
who are anxious to get the law changed so that the lab's reputation for
being the world's finest both for science and security can be restored,
there are no more powerful advocates of that than at Los Alamos
Laboratory from Dr. Brown on down.
  This is an unusual opportunity because normally the intelligence
authorization bill goes through almost with unanimous consent. Since I
have had the opportunity a few years to come here with the chairman,
with usually about 15 minutes' worth of conversation and without a lot
of interest, the bill goes through. The good news this year is that it
will not go through quite so quickly. It is good news because it gives
us an opportunity to examine what it is this bill does and what it is
this bill does not do.
  Unfortunately, current law does not allow us to tell the people of
the United States of America either how much we spend on all of our
intelligence collection, analysis, or dissemination efforts, or does it
allow us to tell what the individual components of that are. I say
"unfortunately" because I do believe quite strongly that we would be
better off changing the law so the public did know both of those
things. I believe that unless the people of the United States of
America support what it is we are doing with our intelligence
efforts, it is very difficult, over a long period of time, to sustain
that effort. I myself am very much concerned that at the moment the
general public does not either understand what it is we do on the
intelligence side, or as a consequence of some very highly publicized
failures are they terribly confident that we are doing a very good job
of collecting intelligence, analyzing that intelligence, producing that
intelligence, and then disseminating that intelligence to either
warfighters or to national policymakers.

  I have had the good fortune of watching the men and women who do this
work for a number of years. I am not only impressed with their skills,
but I am impressed with their patriotism and impressed with their
successes, most of which I cannot talk about on the floor this
afternoon.
  Let me make the case, first of all, for secrecy. I think there are
times when it is absolutely vital and needed. When we have warfighters
on the field, as we recently had in Kosovo, we obviously can't provide
the target list to the public and let people know where it is that
these pilots are going to be flying. We cannot obviously provide
battlefield information. Otherwise, we are going to increase the risk
to these warfighters. It is always difficult in an environment where it
is just the United States, let alone where there are 18 allies, to
contain that intelligence and not have a terrible example of something
where intelligence information got to our enemies, and as a
consequence, they were better prepared, and as a consequence either we
were not as successful as we wanted to be or there were casualties as a
consequence.

[[Page S8783]]

  It is a life-or-death matter that we keep these secrets. We have
asked men and women to put their lives at risk, and we have to protect
their interests. Otherwise, we will find it very difficult to find
volunteers to go on these missions.
  It is needed for military operations. It is needed for some covert
operations as well, where the President has signed a finding. He has
asked that certain things be done, again, in the interest of the United
States, overseen by the Congress. Today, I have very high praise for
this administration in that regard. Since the Aldrich Ames spy incident
where Aldrich Ames, traitor to his country, not only gave up U.S.
secrets, he gave up secrets that led to the deaths of many men and
women who were working on our behalf, this administration has
increasingly come to the oversight committees, one in the House and one
in the Senate that were created in 1976, with what are called
notifications of errors, notifications of problems and mistakes that
were made on a weekly basis.
  We are receiving information that the executive branch thinks we need
to know in order for us to make judgments about what it is we think the
United States of America ought to be doing. So there is a lot more--in
fact, it feels like a fire hose at times--notifications that are
occurring in both the House and the Senate committee.
  Indeed, our committee was notified about this particular incident in
1996, and I think we responded appropriately to it at the time. We
pushed back and asked for additional counterintelligence. When I say
"this particular incident," I am talking about the notification of
the possibility that the Chinese had acquired what we now know in
published accounts to be details about a weapons system known as the W-
88, our most sophisticated nuclear weapon, that the Chinese had
acquired that through espionage in the 1980s.

  We were notified of that in 1996, 11 years after it was suspected to
have happened. I think the committees were properly notified, and I
think the committees properly responded and measured the relative
threat to other things in the world and pushed back and responded, I
thought, in an appropriate fashion. There was much more that we
probably could have done. I will let history judge whether or not we
did enough. The point is, there are secrets. As a consequence of those
secrets, under law, under a resolution we have created, the Senate
Committee on Intelligence and the House has done the same. Those
committees have congressional responsibility for hearing these secrets
and making judgments, first, about what kind of structure, what kind of
budget, and what kind of operations we are going to approve.
  I make the case that secrecy is needed in order to maintain our
security both for military and for our operations. There are sources
that we use, there are methods we use, both of which must be kept
secret in order for us to continue to recruit and in order for us to
continue to operate with a maximum amount of safety for, again, the men
and women who have chosen, as a result of their patriotic love of their
country, to serve their country in these missions. We need to make
certain we provide them with the secrecy needed for them to conduct
their operations.
  However, there are times when secrecy does not equal security. It is
a very important point for us to consider as we both debate this bill
and try to think about how we want to write our laws and think about
how we are going to do our operation. Sometimes secrecy can make
security more difficult.
  There is a recently declassified report called the Venona Report that
describes the acquisition of information about spies inside the United
States during the post-World War II era. In that report, there is a
very interesting moment when General Omar Bradley, who at that time was
in charge of intelligence, made the decision not to inform the
President of the United States that Klaus Fuchs and others were spies
for the Soviet Union. The President was not informed. Secrecy was
maintained. General Bradley liked President Truman; he was an Army man
like himself. But he made a judgment that secrecy had to be maintained,
that the commanding officer of all our forces, that the President, duly
elected by the people, didn't have a need to know. So a judgment was
made to preserve secrecy.
  I believe, as a consequence, policies didn't turn out to be as good
as they should have and security was compromised as a consequence. I am
not blaming General Bradley. I see it from time to time. Indeed, what
caused me to talk about this was my belief that we should change the
law and allow the people of the United States of America to know how
much of their money we are allocating for intelligence and how much in
the various categories is being allocated. I fear that all the public
has are bad stories about mistakes that are being made, the most recent
one being a mistake in targeting inside of Belgrade.
  The Chinese Embassy was mistakenly hit one block away from another
target that should have been hit. A great deal of examination of that
has already been done. It caused us a great deal of trouble with the
Chinese Ambassador. Under Secretary of State Pickering had to make a
trip to China. This all occurred at a very delicate time when we were
trying to get the Chinese to agree to some changes in their policy to
ascend to the WTO. It was a big embarrassment.

  I get asked about it all the time: What kind of so-and-so's are over
there? Are we getting our money's worth? Are we wasting our money?
Couldn't they just have spent $2 on a map that was readily available to
show where the Chinese Embassy was? Why spend billions of dollars on
all these folks if they don't even have good enough sense to use a
commercially made $2 map?
  There are questions about the failure to predict the detonation of a
nuclear weapon in India over a year ago, which was followed by a
detonation by Pakistan. A third item I hear a lot is that the CIA
failed to predict the end of the Soviet Union, and anybody that can't
predict that doesn't deserve to get a lot of U.S. tax dollars.
  It is unfortunate that only the bad stories get out. First of all, on
the targeting of the embassy, it was a mistake, but we were in a war,
for gosh sakes. We are being asked to deliver targets, asked to
identify the targets, and the operation's requirement was to minimize
the casualties to the United States and our allies. Not a single
American or single ally was killed during that entire operation. I
consider that a mark of tremendous success. That did not occur by
accident. There is no shelf of books with one saying "T" for targets
in Belgrade and Kosovo. We had to develop those targets on our own and
relatively late. We didn't expect the bombing operation to go on that
long. We had--when I say "we," I mean the administration--the
impression that possibly it would be over quicker, based upon the
experience of 1995.
  In short, it was a tremendous success. Not only were we able to
conduct that operation without a single allied casualty, but, in
addition, we reversed the trend of modern warfare in the 20th century.
Modern warfare in the 20th century has seen an increasing fraction of
casualties that are noncombatants. I believe, in this case, except for
the casualties produced by the Serbian army and their military police
and their paramilitary units in Kosovo, there was also success in
minimizing civilian casualties in this effort.
  We could not, for example, have implemented Dayton. One of the untold
stories is the success of the intelligence operations. At that time, it
was General Hughes who organized the takeover authority in December of
1995. It was a United Nations operation, transferred over to NATO. They
worked night and day to set up a communications system that allowed us
to know who was and who wasn't abiding by the Dayton agreement--a very,
very complicated agreement. The people who were in charge of developing
our intelligence operation read it, knew it, and disseminated it down
the ranks. Everybody understood what had to be done. It was impressive
that, in a very small amount of time, we were able to put together an
intelligence collection and dissemination effort that enabled us to
implement the Dayton agreement.
  There are many other examples, such as the Indian detonation of a
nuclear weapon. In fact, we had the intelligence collection that
predicted and prevented one about 18 months earlier.

[[Page S8784]]

 Nobody should have been surprised. We don't really need to have
intelligence officers collecting and predicting a detonation of nuclear
weapons in India when the successful party in an election promised, and
made a part of their campaign a promise, to detonate if they were
elected, to test a nuclear weapon.
  Anyway, I think it is very important for me, as somebody who has been
given by my leader the opportunity to sit on this committee and to
observe what is going on, to attempt to correct things I thought were
wrong, make decisions about how much taxpayer money to allocate, about
how to respond to mistakes made and intelligence errors that occur, how
to respond and correct those errors--it is very important for me to say
to taxpayers that my view is that you are getting your money's worth.

  According to published accounts, we spend $28 billion a year. I wish
I could provide that number as well as some additional details, but if
that is the current dollar amount, according to published accounts, in
my view, just watching what is done, the American people are getting
their money's worth. There are tremendous threats in the world that our
intelligence agencies collect against. They supply that intelligence to
our warfighters, to our military people. Imagine what it would be like
to be in charge of U.S. forces in South Korea. You have the most
heavily militarized area in the world between North and South Korea.
There are about 37,000 young men and women in South Korea defending
against a possible attack from North Korea, and the question to their
commanding officer is: What are North Korea's intentions? What are they
doing? They need an answer.
  It is an extremely hard target to penetrate and to know what is going
on. Those warfighters need to know that information. They can't operate
in the dark. Our intelligence collection operators do that time in and
time out, day in and day out, try to collect, process, produce, and
disseminate intelligence to warfighters and the national policymakers
and decisionmakers, in order that the United States of America can be
as safe as it possibly can be. My view is that they have achieved a
substantial success. They are not perfect; none of us are. But their
substantial success deserves a very high amount of praise.
  Mr. President, a related problem we have with intelligence is that
many people presume that the Director of Central Intelligence, who
manages the CIA and other national intelligence efforts, controls it
all. Not true, though the Brown commission report that was assembled
after the Aldrich Ames betrayal recommended that increased authority be
given to the Director of Central Intelligence to budget and select
personnel for these other areas. For many reasons, these authorities
were not granted the Director. The current Director, Mr. Tenet,
controls far less than they realize, under law.
  I don't believe that is a healthy situation. We were successful 2
years ago in getting the Director, under statute, some additional
authorities. But my view is that it is not enough to match authority
with responsibility. We have not done that. We are holding the Director
responsible for intelligence failures in many areas over which he has
no real direct budget authority or personnel authority.
  So the distinguished Senator from New Mexico has properly identified
a problem at the laboratories, as a result of the structure of the law
that governs the Department of Energy, that needs to be fixed. The
concern is that through some set of facts--today, we don't even know
what the set of facts are--the Chinese probably acquired information
about our nuclear secrets, and, as a consequence, they may have the
capacity to build and deploy very dangerous weapons. They stole
secrets from us, and, as a consequence, we are concerned about how to
increase the secrecy of these labs.

  I underscore with this statement that secrecy does not in all cases
equal security. There are times when secrecy will make security more
difficult to achieve. My own view is that the failure under law to let
the public know what our expenditures are, and how those moneys are
spent, decreases our security because, unless I am mistaken in just
sensing citizens' attitudes toward our intelligence agencies, they do
not have a sufficient amount of confidence that they are getting their
money's worth. As a consequence of that lack of confidence, I think we
are having a difficult time acquiring the resources necessary in a
world that is more complicated and a world that, in many ways, is more
dangerous than it was prior to the end of the cold war.
  My hope is that this debate about the Department of Energy can occur
relatively quickly, that we can get to it tomorrow, that we can resolve
the remaining conflicts, and that we can get this intelligence
authorization bill passed. Both the chairman and I see the year 2000 as
a watershed year. We were successful last year in increasing the
resources given to our intelligence checks and analysis and production
and dissemination efforts. We need to continue that trend.
  We have been downsizing in the 1990s. I believe very strongly that
that downsizing must stop if we are going to be able to honestly say
yes to the American people, that we are doing all we can to keep them
as safe as possible against a real range of threats which are still out
there in the world.
  The United States of America is the leading nation on this planet. We
have the strongest economy. We have the strongest military. We have the
longest running democracy. We tend to take sides on issues, whether it
is in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, or someplace else on the
planet. We clearly take sides when it comes to fighting for individual
freedom--for the freedom of people in China, for the freedom of people
in Russia, and throughout this planet. We put our resources and our
reputation and our lives on the line.
  In 1996--it has been so long ago--Americans stationed in Saudi Arabia
after the gulf war, flying missions and supporting missions in the
southern area, were killed. We suspect a variety of possibilities as
perpetrators. But they were killed not because they were in Saudi
Arabia by accident; they were in Saudi Arabia defending U.S. interests,
and they were killed because they were targeted by people who didn't
want them in Saudi Arabia.
  We take sides, and, as a consequence, we are targets. We are targets
as well because we have been successful. There is jealousy and hatred
towards the people of the United States of America.
  We understand the interconnected nature of our economy and of our
diplomacy throughout the world. A problem in Angola can be a problem in
Omaha, NE relatively quickly.
  So we forward-deploy our resources. We don't just have missions in
NATO or missions that involve the United Nations. We are forward-
deployed throughout the world in an attempt to make the world more
peaceful, more democratic, and more prosperous. It is a mission the
United States of America has selected for itself. I thank God that it
has. It is a mission that has resulted in enormous success.
  I don't know how the rest of my colleagues felt at the time, but I
remember quite vividly and was very moved for moments during Joint
Sessions of Congress--not that Presidents haven't moved me with their
State of the Union Addresses. But far more moving to me was Vaclav
Havel, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, and Kim Dae-jung of South Korea.
  All four of these men came to a Joint Session of Congress and said to
the representatives of the people of this country: Thank you; you have
put your lives on the line for our freedom; you put your money on the
line for our freedom; you stayed the course, and we are free.
  Since Kim Dae-jung of South Korea gave that address, if I ever ran
into a man who fought in the "forgotten war" in South Korea in the
1950s, I am quick to say this. I know there are many criticisms of that
war. Many people wondered whether or not it was worthwhile. Let me tell
you, on behalf of the President of South Korea and the people of South
Korea, that that war was worth fighting.
  All one has to do is look at the difference between living in freedom
in South Korea--an imperfect democracy, as many are; but, nonetheless,
the people of South Korea are free; their standard of living is higher;
they have the liberty to practice their religion, to speak on the
streets--and North Korea, which is a nation of great suffering and
great anguish. Large numbers of people

[[Page S8785]]

are dying as a consequence of malnutrition. The country is arguably in
the worst condition of any country on the face of this Earth.
  That didn't occur by accident. The world marketplace didn't get that
done. I am a big fan of the marketplace and a big fan of what business
can do. The intervention that liberated the people of South Korea was
not the intervention of Sears & Roebuck; it was the intervention of
American forces, American will, American blood, and American money. The
people of South Korea are free as a consequence.
  We didn't make a decision based on the shape of their eyes or based
on the color of their skin or based upon their religion. We didn't do
it based upon a desire to own territory or a desire to own wealth or a
desire to establish a colony. We did it based upon a desire to fight
and to keep the people of South Korea free.
  When you take a stand such as that, as the distinguished occupant of
the Chair knows--he has been in politics a very long time, an
outstanding public servant--you know when you take a stand, especially
on a controversial subject, you are apt to provoke some enemies; you
are apt to get people organized against you. They don't agree with the
position on this, that, or the other thing.
  The United States has enemies as a result of taking a stand and as a
result of our having taken a stand throughout the world in general on
behalf of freedom.
  We provoke animosity in many ways. We are at risk, as a consequence,
not just from nation states--that is the older world where nation
states were the No. 1 threat--today, it is nonnation state actors such
as Osama bin Laden and other terrorists who organize themselves away
from the normal powers and structures of government. Cyber warfare,
biological and chemical warfare--all of these things we have discussed
at length are real and present dangers to the people of the United
States of America.
  It is certainly true that our diplomats at the State Department and
our diplomats in other areas of Government have to try to use our
intelligence and produce diplomatic successes, as well as to reduce
threats. But the State Department, the Department of Justice, the
Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Department of
Agriculture--throughout Government--the Congress, and the President of
the United States regularly receive analysis that has occurred after
checks have been done, after analysis has been done, after production
has occurred, and then it is disseminated to people who make decisions
all the time and, hopefully, make better decisions as a consequence of
the intelligence delivered to them.
  My view is that this budget decline we have experienced in the 1990s
needs to stop. I hope that this intelligence authorization bill will be
passed by the Senate, that we can go to conference quickly with the
House, and get it to the President for his signature. I have no doubt
that the President, subject to our not putting things on here that the
President can't support, will sign the bill.
  One of the things that I think undercuts our ability to do that is
the continued belief we have to keep from the American people how much
money is being spent. I have said that often enough now. I am not going
to offer an amendment. I can count votes. I know that amendment would
not succeed. But I intend to continue to make the point and try to
persuade, especially my friends on the other side of the aisle, that we
will increase the Nation's security by making this information publicly
available to the American people.
  Again, the point here is that 100 percent secrecy does not always
equal 100 percent security. Sometimes 100 percent secrecy can actually
decrease the security, as a consequence of the right people not getting
the information. As a consequence of discussions not proceeding subject
to compartmentalization that prevented one key person from talking to
another key person, and, as a consequence, neither one of them knew
what the other was doing, the result is that a bad decision was made.
  I also would like to discuss an issue that, to me, is extremely
important. I don't know if the Senator from New Mexico has additional
things he wants to say.
  Does the Senator from Michigan desire to speak? Since I will be
assigned to sit down for a long period of time, Senators may want to
move on. I think I will have plenty of time to talk about this bill.
  Mr. President, I presume they would like to speak. I yield the floor.

[...]

  Mr. KERREY. Madam President, this bill doesn't normally get a lot of
attention, but because of the concern over the loss of secrets through
our laboratories at the DOE, we are going to have a debate about an
amendment to restructure the Department of Energy.
  I want to make a point that I made earlier, which is that secrecy and
security are not the same thing. Sometimes secrecy equals security.
Sometimes secrecy can make security more difficult, harder for us to
accomplish the mission

[[Page S8790]]

of keeping the United States of America as secure as we possibly can.
  I am not going to offer an amendment to this bill, because it has
been defeated pretty soundly in the past--although I must say I am
tempted to do so--to disclose to the American people how much is spent
on intelligence gathering. Right now, under law, we cannot do that. I
want to call my colleagues' attention to what is happening. Our first
vote is on cloture. I think cloture will be invoked pretty easily. Our
leader is not going to hold anybody up from voting for cloture. Maybe
we can go right to the bill.
  Listening to Senators Domenici and Levin earlier, I think they may be
able to solve their differences. The vote may end up being unanimous,
which is my wish. I hope we can continue to move closer together on
that piece of legislation, an important piece of legislation on which
Senator Domenici and others have been working.
  I want to call my colleagues' attention to what we do every year
basically, and that is, the authorization of appropriations for the
intelligence bill is very small, as a consequence of not being able to
disclose to the American people what is in the bill. The House bill
contains six titles. The Senate bill, which will be offered as a
substitute for the House bill, also contains six titles. The first two
titles are identical. Titles I and II in the House bills are identical.
Then there are general provisions, and then each bill has additional
things in there.
  But you can see the problem we have getting public support for
intelligence collection. That is one step in the process of
intelligence. We collect with imaging efforts, we collect with signals
intercepts, we collect with human intelligence, and we have measurement
intelligence. We have all sorts of various what are called INTs that
are used to gather raw data.
  Then somebody has to take that data and analyze it. What does it
mean? What does this data mean? What is the interpretation of it?
Oftentimes secrecy can be a problem because one compartment may not be
talking to another.
  This administration and others have worked to try to bring various
people together so there is more consultation than there has been in
the past. But oftentimes decisions have to be made very quickly.
Sometimes interpretations of public information are made, and an
adjustment is made.
  Let me be very specific. About 80 percent, in my view, of the
decisions that most elected people make in Congress having to do with
national security are made as a result of something they acquired in a
nonclassified fashion in a TV report, in a radio report, in a newspaper
report, or a published document. Staff analyze it and come and say:
This is what we think is going on--about 80 percent of the information
that we process.
  I would say that would probably be on the low side. It may be even
higher than that. Indeed, the President may be in a similar situation.
He may be making a decision on a very high percentage of publicly
accessible information as opposed to classified information.
  That is quite the trend. The trend is both healthy and at times
disturbing because more and more information is being made available to
the public that was not available in the past. The good news is
citizens have more information. They process that information. We have
a lot of independent analysts out there.
  In a couple of years, when metering satellite photographs are
available, we are going to see competing analyses being done over
images. This is what I see when I take that photograph.
  I say this because I think it is true that it is very difficult, for
any length of time for the Congress and the President to do something
the public doesn't support, especially when it comes to spending their
money.
  In this case, I just hazard a guess. I never polled on this. But
certainly I take a lot of anecdotal stories on board from citizens who
question whether or not they are getting their money's worth. Is all
the money we are spending worthwhile when we aren't able to tell where
the Chinese Embassy is in Belgrade? A $2 map would have told us where
it was. When we were unable to forecast a class of facility, when we
were unable to foresee that India was going to test a nuclear weapon
following an election, during which the party that was successful
campaigned, and their platform said, if we are elected and we come to
power, we are going to test a nuclear weapon? Many failures, in short,
are out in the public, and the public acquires the information. I think
it has caused them to lose confidence that they are getting their
money's worth.
  It is a real crisis for us. It is a real challenge for us because,
again, if you look at the document we will be voting on sometime in the
next couple of days--usually this thing goes through very quickly and
we don't have much time to consider it. In an odd way, I thank the
Senator from New Mexico for bringing so much attention to the
Department of Energy's need for restructuring because it has given us
some time to pause and look at this piece of legislation.
  As I said, the two most important titles, the ones you will see in
almost every intelligence authorization bill, is title I and title II.
Title I has five sections. It authorizes appropriations. It give us
classified schedule authorization, personnel ceiling adjustment
authorization, community management account authorization, and
emergency supplemental appropriations. That is in the House bill. The
Senate bill has four titles. It is quite revealing when you go into
title I.
  Again, normally, if this is a Department of Defense authorization,
each one of these titles would provide the detailed and specific number
of how much is being spent, all the way down to the very small
individual accounts that would be disclosed to the public. There would
be a great debate going on. The committee report comes out. The budget
comes out. The bill is reported by the Armed Services Committee.
Editorials are written. Journalists and specialists say we are spending
too little; we are spending too much; we need to build this weapons
system, and so forth. A great public debate then ensues when the
committee brings the bill up and reports it out for full consideration
by the Senate.
  I think that debate is healthy. The public participates and helps us
decide what it is we ought not be doing. Sometimes we still put things
in we shouldn't and some things we should. We still make mistakes. That
public debate helps us.
  Under this authorization, what you see in section 101 is the
following: The funds are hereby authorized to be appropriated for
fiscal year 2000 for the conduct of intelligence and intelligence-
related activities of the following elements of the U.S. Government:
the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Defense Intelligence Agency,
the National Security Agency, the Department of the Army, the
Department of the Navy, the Department of Air Force, the Department of
State, the Department of Treasury, the Department of Energy, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Conference Office, and
the National Imagery and Mapping Agency--11 different Government
agencies are named but no dollar figure is included. The only dollar
figure in this entire budget comes in section 104 where the public
learns we are authorizing $171 million to be appropriated for the
Community Management Act of the Director of Central Intelligence. We
have that piece of information.

  Later in the bill that we will be voting on, we learn $27 million is
available for the National Drug Intelligence Center. Then later, a
third time we get another number. We learn $209.1 million is authorized
to be appropriated to the Central Intelligence Agency's retirement and
disability fund for fiscal year 2000.
  That is all the public learns. That is all the public knows. The
public does not know how much we spend in each one of these agencies,
nor how much the committee is recommending in this authorization bill,
nor the total amount of dollars being spent.
  We have had debates about this before. There are good arguments
usually filed against it: This is going to deteriorate our national
security; we need to maintain, in short, a secret in order to preserve
national security.
  I have reached the opposite conclusion, that this is a situation
where the preservation of a secret deteriorates our national security
as a consequence, first of all, of not having a public debate about
whether this is the right allocation but, most importantly, as a

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consequence of deteriorating citizens' confidence that we are
authorizing and appropriating the correct amount.
  In short, keeping this secret from the American people has caused
difficulty in retaining their consensus that we ought to be spending an
amount of money they do not know in order to collect, analyze, produce,
and disseminate intelligence. I think that is a problem for us.
  Again, I have not done any polling on this, so I don't know. I
typically don't poll before I make a decision, to the consternation of
my staff and supporters. But my guess is, just from anecdotes, there is
a deterioration of confidence.
  It bothers me because my term on the Intelligence Committee--thanks
to the original appointment by our former Democratic leader, George
Mitchell, from the great State of Maine, and also Leader Daschle's
confidence in retaining me on this committee--over time my confidence
has increased.
  Indeed, the argument in my opening statement about this bill is that
we have drawn down intelligence investments in the 1990s as we have
drawn down our military from roughly 2 million men and women under
active duty uniform to 1.35 million. We have also drawn down our
intelligence efforts to a point where I don't believe we can do all of
the things that need to be done either today or in the future.
  As I said, I have to collect intelligence. I have to analyze the
information. I have skilled people who can analyze it. These images
delivered from space very often mean nothing to me when I look at them.
It requires somebody who is not only skilled but can process it in a
hurry and can make something of it in a hurry.
  In the situation with India, where we had difficulty warning the
President that a test might occur, again, according to published
accounts, the Indians were aware that we, first, were able to identify
a year earlier they were about to test, and we warned them not to test,
as a result of overhead imaging. And they took evasive measures in the
future.
  These are very difficult things to tell. You have to hire skilled
people to do it. That is the analysis. The next piece is the
production. It is getting very exciting but also very complicated.
There is a lot of competition with the private sector to do this
production work.
  Back in the ice age when I was on the U.S. Navy SEAL team, we were
given a map if we were going to do an operation in an area in Vietnam.
We would look at a map and say: This is the area we will operate in.
The map might be 10 years old. Then we would supplement that with human
intelligence. Somebody would say: There are some changes here that
aren't quite the same as the map.
  Today an image is used. It is enhanced. It is remarkable how quickly
we can deliver very accurate pictures of theaters of operation to the
warfighter to disseminate differently, produced in a much different
way, and enable that warfighter to have a competitive edge on the
battlefield.
  Indeed, anybody who is thinking about becoming an enemy of the United
States of America knows we have tremendous capability on the
intelligence side. We get warnings, and those warnings are delivered
when threats begin to build. Oftentimes a mere warning enables the
heading off of a potential threat that could have erupted into a
serious conflict and would have resulted in a loss of lives.
  The effort to collect, analyze, produce, and disseminate to the right
person at the right time, and to make a decision, is not only
complicated, but it is also quite expensive. It is not done
accidentally.
  I hope this year is a watershed year and we are able to authorize
additional resources for our intelligence agencies. If we don't, at
some point we will have a Director of Central Intelligence in the
future deliver the bad news to Congress that there is something we want
to do but we can't because we cannot accomplish the mission we want to
accomplish--not just because of resources but also because it is
getting harder and harder to do things we have in the past taken for
granted, such as intercept signals, conversations, or communications of
some kind between one bad person and another bad person with hostile
intent against the United States.
  Increasingly, we are seeing a shift in two big ways away from nation
states. In the old days, we could pass sanctions legislation or do
something against a government that was doing something we didn't like.
What do we do if Osama bin Laden starts killing Americans or
narcoterrorists or cyberterrorists say they hate the United States of
America and are going to take action against us? It is very difficult--
indeed, it is impossible--for diplomacy to reduce that threat. We need
to intercept and try to prevent it and, very often, try to prevent it
with a forceful intervention.
  Not only is it shifting away from the nation state, making it harder
both to collect and to do the other work--the analysis, the processing
and dissemination, or production of dissemination--the signals are
becoming more complex and difficult to process, and they are becoming
more and more encrypted.
  I have had conversations with the private sector, people in the
software business, who say we have to change this export regimen that
makes it difficult for these companies to sell encryption overseas.
This administration has made tremendous accommodation within the
industry to try to accommodate their need to sell to companies that are
doing business all over the world.
  Don't doubt there is a national security issue here. There is
significant interception, both on the national security side and the
law enforcement side. That encryption at 128 bits or higher is actually
deployed. We will find our people in the intelligence side coming back
and saying: Look, I know something bad happened, and do you want to
know why I didn't know? I will tell you why I didn't know. I couldn't
make sense of the signal. We intercept, and all we get is a buzz and
background noise. We cannot interpret it. We can't convert it.

  In the old days, we converted with a linguist or some other
technological application. In the new world, we are being increasingly
denied access to the signals. As described by the technical advisory
group that was established on the Intelligence Committee, it was
described as number of needles in the haystack but the haystack is
getting larger and larger and harder, as a result, for the intelligence
people to do the work they need to do.
  The chairman is moving to the floor. I know he will make a brilliant
and articulate statement.
  Earlier, the Senator from New Mexico offered a statement on his
amendment that he hopes to offer tomorrow. Senator Levin was here as
well. I believe there is reason to be encouraged that we will move this
bill quickly tomorrow, and reasonably encouraged, as well, that the
differences which still exist on this bill can be resolved, and we can
get a big bipartisan vote and move this on to conference.
  I yield the floor.