Associated Press
August 6, 2004

Cheney Opposed Intelligence Post in '92

by Deb Riechmann, Associated Press Writer

As defense secretary, Dick Cheney urged a presidential veto of legislation that would have given a national intelligence director budget authority over spy agencies run by the Pentagon.

The letter Cheney wrote in 1992 addresses an issue now being debated: how much authority a national intelligence director should wield over budgets and personnel at America's 15 spy agencies. About 80 percent of the country's intelligence budget is controlled by the Defense Department.

The bipartisan Sept. 11 commission says the director should have full budgetary authority. President George W. Bush says the director should be able to "coordinate" the budgets, but not necessarily have the final say on how much agencies receive or how the money is spent.

Back in 1992, when both the Senate and House were considering bills to create a national intelligence director, Cheney told Congress that he would advise then-President George H.W. Bush to veto them as written.

Setting up a national intelligence director post would "seriously impair" the relationship between the heads of the Pentagon and the CIA, Cheney said in the letter obtained by the Federation of American Scientists.

It would assign "inappropriate authority to the proposed director of national intelligence who would become the director and manager of internal DOD activities that, in the interest of efficiency and effectiveness, must remain under the authority, direction and control of the secretary of defense," Cheney wrote on March 17, 1992 to Les Aspin, then chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

In another letter written the same day, Chester Paul Beach Jr., the Pentagon's acting general counsel, further outlined the Pentagon's opposition to changing the budgetary authority.

Beach said the Defense Department opposed provisions of both bills that "dramatically revise current programing and budgeting for DOD intelligence activities and give the director of intelligence far more extensive authority and responsibility for programs and budget matters than is now exercised" by the CIA director.

Kevin Kellems, spokesman for the vice president, said Cheney does not discuss his conversations with the president. Kellems said that "in general, I would caution against making the leap of equating one historical point in the past to a different point in the present or future."

Copyright 2004 Associated Press