Clinton Creates Post to Protect Nation's Secrets

[An Metet]

By JAMES RISEN
 

ASHINGTON, Jan. 4 Ñ President Clinton has issued an order reorganizing the government's counterintelligence efforts, creating a new czar with a broad mandate to identify potential security threats and vulnerabilities, administration officials said today. 

The directive, signed in the waning days of Mr. Clinton's administration, creates a National Counterintelligence Executive charged with bringing a forward-looking, post-cold-war mentality to counterintelligence. Officials say the post is designed as the counterintelligence equivalent to the nation's drug czar. 

The executive's central task will be to try to determine which secrets held by the government or the private sector are so valuable that they need to be protected from the nation's adversaries. The czar will also try to assess which secrets are of special interest to other nations, and then bring together the F.B.I., C.I.A. and other agencies to determine whether those countries are making efforts to obtain them. 

A spokesman for the Bush transition team referred all questions about the plan to the White House and declined to say whether transition officials had been consulted. Once in office, Mr. Bush could decide to change the plan without Congressional approval. 

But the reorganization and the newly created post have the strong backing of F.B.I. Director Louis J. Freeh, who is staying in his post into the Bush administration, and Central Intelligence Director George J. Tenet, whose tenure also may overlap. 

Administration officials and others familiar with the plan say that the czar will not be in charge of managing individual spy cases and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation will retain its lead role in counterespionage investigations. The C.I.A. will also retain its own counterintelligence center, which conducts investigations within the agency. 

But officials said that the new office of the counterintelligence executive would replace the existing National Counterintelligence Center, which was created after the 1994 arrest of Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who pleaded guilty to spying for Moscow for nine years. 

On paper, the existing agency also had a broad mandate to coordinate government efforts to identify counterintelligence threats, but several officials said that it had failed to live up to that role. Some critics in the government say that the counterintelligence center never had the stature or influence to command cooperation between government agencies. 

The Clinton administration may name a counterintelligence czar before the president leaves office, officials said today. Although it unclear whether the administration had consulted the transition team, Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the leading Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has been generally supportive of the reorganization effort, a Shelby aide said. 

The counterintelligence overhaul comes in the wake of the furor over the government's handling of the case of Wen Ho Lee, the scientist fired from his job at Los Alamos National Laboratory and charged with mishandling classified information. Although he pleaded guilty to one count related to downloading and copying nuclear data from Los Alamos, other charges were dropped. Officials say that Mr. Freeh advocated the reorganization in response to the flaws in the way that case was handled. 

"This should solve a lot of the shortcomings we have in the present environment," said one senior law enforcement official. 

Officials say that the key to the reorganization will be that the leading counterintelligence official in the government would no longer be simply responding to an investigation of an individual spy case, but would rather be focused on broad efforts to determine what secrets might be most tantalizing to other countries. Those secrets could be at the Pentagon or at a high-tech corporation, and the czar will be able to go to the F.B.I., C.I.A. and other agencies and begin to develop plans to make sure those secrets are secure before any spies have gotten to them. 

The czar's job will be to "identify the universe of stuff that it would be unthinkable if we lost," one official said. 

"This job is to figure out what must be protected. The person in this job, I would think, would spend the first year going around to everybody in the government and business asking what people believe we absolutely have to protect, and then coming up with a judgment about what really are the nation's crown jewels, as opposed to just costume jewelry. Part of the disconnect we have today in the government is that we don't even know what it is that it's unthinkable for us to lose as a nation." 

The reorganization plan has support among intelligence policy experts on Capitol Hill, many of whom say the government is usually on the defensive, simply reacting to the latest spy case. The government has "been spending an inordinate amount of time looking in the rear view mirror," said Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat and member of the Senate intelligence committee who has been pushing for a counterintelligence reorganization. As a result, "we didn't look to see what was coming at us in the future."

Several officials acknowledged that it was still too early to determine whether the czar will have the clout to manage such a sweeping change in the way counterintelligence is managed. That clout will be largely determined by the executive's relations with his office's four- member board, composed of the F.B.I. director, the deputy director of Central Intelligence, the deputy secretary of defense, and a representative of the Attorney General. The czar will also report directly to the deputies committee at the National Security Council and will have access to all secrets related to counterintelligence cases, officials said. 

The power of the czar "is going to depend on who they put in the job," said one Republican congressional aide.