Apart from the issue of more bureaucratic layers, of course, are questions of bureaucratic loyalties, lines of authority and responsibility, and overlapping duties. The new legislation mandated the creation of "national centers" to work on high-priority topics like terrorism and proliferation, and then placed these in the ODNI. As Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the CIA, recently asked, where do the new National Counterterrorism Center's responsibilities begin, and those of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, in existence since 1986, end?

Negroponte has also now asked that CIA station chiefs abroad report to his office as well as to their superiors at the CIA, which carries the potential of getting ODNI involved in operational matters. Pillar succinctly summarized the situation for the Washington Spectator when he said that the implementation of the 9/11 Commission's plan was "not really a consolidation or unification of the intelligence community but rather the grafting of what amounts to a new agency on top of existing ones." Ironically, the problems long attributed to the impossible job of being DCI may be in the process of being replicated in the DNI.

CIA TAKES A BACK SEAT—The flip side of the intelligence reorganization, in many ways, has been the demotion of the CIA into just another agency. As U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, a reorganization critic, pointed out in a March 24 speech in Washington, while the "names of government agencies often don't mean a lot," there was "a special significance to the word 'Central' in the CIA's name." The agency was meant to be the hub of the intelligence community, not just a spoke, the place where data collected by all the other agencies was sifted and integrated before being presented to the White House.

The CIA's fall from grace would be difficult to manage under the best of circumstances. But it is suffering a double-whammy under the directorship of Porter Goss, an undistinguished CIA case officer for ten years before he ran for Congress in 1988. In its nearly 60-year existence, the agency has never seen the kind of turmoil it has experienced in the 18 months since Goss took over.

The former Florida congressman, who chaired the House Intelligence Committee for seven years, has run the agency with a bevy of inexperienced aides—derisively referred to as the "gosslings"—that he brought with him from Capitol Hill. Goss is viewed internally as the most partisan CIA director ever, brought in to discipline an unruly agency that has failed to toe the administration line, notwithstanding appearances, on Iraq. As a direct result, the senior ranks have been decimated during Goss's short tenure. Twenty of the highest posts in the clandestine service have been vacated by career officials, largely because they believed they were being "disregarded or mismanaged," according to a February article in U.S. News & World Report. An earlier account, in the American Prospect, estimated that as many as 90 senior officials have exited, agencywide.