The director of the new office, as head of a National Clandestine Service, will instead be responsible primarily for setting standards and rules designed to minimize conflicts between the agencies, whose human spying operations in the United States and abroad have been expanding rapidly and are expected to continue to do so, the officials told reporters at a briefing.
In written statements issued Thursday, both John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, and Porter Goss, the CIA director, said the new arrangements would improve the quality of American human spying.
But Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described the changes as ''a negotiated settlement'' between the various agencies. Roberts expressed reservations about what he called ''this latest reorganization,'' saying he would have preferred that Negroponte, who took over the new post in April under a law enacted last year, exert his authority to ''manage human intelligence collection worldwide.''
The limited power to be granted to the new coordinator underscores the degree to which the Pentagon, the FBI and the CIA have retained considerable autonomy even under the new system headed by Negroponte, whose job as director of national intelligence was created as part of an effort to impose more central control over intelligence agencies.
''We won't tell the FBI how to do their business, and we don't tell the DOD how to do their business,'' one of the two senior intelligence officials said of the role to be played by the CIA.
A second senior intelligence official said Negroponte's office would limit its role in overseeing human spying operations to broad, strategic direction, rather than taking operational control.
Negroponte and his deputies did not anticipate ''getting into the weeds of tactical day-to-day operations,'' said that second official, speaking at a briefing at CIA headquarters. The two officials were from the CIA and Negroponte's office, respectively, but the briefing at CIA headquarters was provided to reporters on condition that they not be identified by name.
