By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 14, 2006; Page A11
The 16 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community are "taking a bit more direction" from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, created last year to oversee and coordinate their work, and criticism of the new agency in Congress and elsewhere is "more about velocity and not about direction," its second-in-command, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, said yesterday.
"I have confidence in this enterprise," said Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence, who met with reporters in an unusual, on-the-record, two-hour session with eight of his senior associates to discuss the agency's first year.
After the intelligence failures over the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, now held by John D. Negroponte, to be the president's principal intelligence adviser. The office was charged with supervising the intelligence budget, ensuring that agencies coordinate their activities and share information, and ensuring that reports to policymakers and Congress are objective and timely.
Although most of the reporters focused their questions on Iran's nuclear program, Hayden and his team wanted to discuss the processes they have established and to answer criticisms that the office's growing staff has become a new layer of bureaucracy that slows intelligence decision making.
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