Big Story

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at theheart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analystsemployed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.
They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation's security.
"There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that - not just for the CIA , for the secretary of defense - is a challenge," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with ThePost last week.
In the Department of Defense , where more than two-thirdsof the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called SuperUsers - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, thereis simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.
"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration.
"I wasn't remembering any ofit," he said.
Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.
"I'm not aware of any agencywith the authority, responsibility or a process inplace to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity ofthis system defies description."
The result, he added, is thatit's impossible to tell whetherthe country is safer becauseof all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably resultsin message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether itis making us more safe."
The Post's investigation is based on government documents and contracts, jobdescriptions, property records, corporate and social networking Web sites, additional records, and hundreds of interviews with intelligence, military and corporate officials and former officials. Most requested anonymity either because they are prohibited from speaking publicly or because, they said, they feared retaliation at work fordescribing their concerns.
The Post's online database of government organizationsand private companies was built entirely on public records. The investigation focused on top-secret work because the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track.
Today's article describes thegovernment's role in this expanding enterprise. Tuesday's article describes the government's dependence on private contractors. Wednesday's is a portrait of one Top Secret America community. On the Web, an extensive, searchable database built byThe Post about Top Secret America is available at washingtonpost.com/topsecretamerica.
Defense Secretary Gates, in his interview with The Post, said that he does not believethe system has become too big to manage but that getting precise data is sometimes difficult. Singling out the growth of intelligenceunits in the Defense Department, he said he intends to review those programs for waste. "Nine years after 9/11, it makes a lot of sense to sort of take alook at this and say, 'Okay, we've built tremendous capability, but do we have more than we need?' " he said.
CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was also interviewed byThe Post last week, said he's begun mapping out a five-year plan for his agency because the levels ofspending since 9/11 are not sustainable. "Particularly withthese deficits, we're going tohit the wall. I want to be prepared for that," he said."Frankly, I think everyone inintelligence ought to be doingthat."
In an interview before he resigned as the director of national intelligence in May, retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair said he did not believe therewas overlap and redundancyin the intelligence world."Much of what appears to be redundancy is, in fact, providing tailored intelligencefor many different customers," he said.
Blair also expressed confidence that subordinatestold him what he needed to know. "I have visibility on all the important intelligence programs across the community, and there are processes in place to ensurethe different intelligence capabilities are working together where they need to," he said.
Weeks later, as he sat in thecorner of a ballroom at the Willard Hotel waiting to give a speech, he mused about The Post's findings. "After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism,