At the start of the second Bush administration, hawks—in Congress, the neocon think tanks, and the Pentagon—can point to two major achievements in their campaign to seize command of the government’s intelligence apparatus. First was the appointment of Porter Goss (R-FL), the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a longtime ally of Vice President Cheney, to head the CIA and direct its reform. Second was the nomination of John Negroponte as DNI.

The Negroponte and Goss appointments signaled the end of the CIA’s dominant position among the government’s 15 intelligence agencies. A diplomat with a four-decade history as a ruthless and highly effective foreign policy operative, Negroponte has most recently served as the ambassador to Iraq. Negroponte, who received quick Senate confirmation for his positions in Iraq and at the UN, can count on bipartisan support for his latest nomination.

Announcing the nomination on February 17th, President Bush said that Negroponte will be the official who ensures that “our intelligence officials work as a single, unified enterprise.” As a result of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act passed by Congress in late 2004, the newly created office of DNI—with a staff of 500—will exercise oversight over the budgets of the diverse intelligence agencies.

CIA’s Skeleton

The appointment of Negroponte brings to an end the 58-year history of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) as the presumed top intelligence chief. Since the creation of the CIA at the onset of the Cold War, the authority of the DCI has been unclear. The chief of the CIA has also been the government’s central intelligence director. Only on rare occasions (notably during Allen Dulles’ tenure from 1953-61) has he exercised control over the Pentagon’s intelligence agencies. The authority of most CIA chiefs hasn’t extended beyond the CIA itself, although the CIA director has—as DCI—been responsible for providing the president with his Daily Intelligence Briefing.

The DNI is the director of all intelligence offices, including the CIA and those under the purview of the State Department and Defense Department. According to the president, Negroponte in his new position will “report directly to me” and “will make our intelligence efforts better coordinated, more efficient, and more effective.”

Creating a unified and efficient intelligence apparatus will be a major challenge given the turf wars that proliferated during Bush’s first term. These interagency disputes ranged from the creation of new intelligence operations tightly controlled by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and other ideological allies among the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, including Stephen Cambone, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith), to the sidelining of the State Department and the CIA by the Pentagon, White House, and Vice President’s Office, and the alliance between congressional hawks and the Pentagon to successfully modify the intelligence reform bill so as to reduce the power of the DNI over the Pentagon.

Negroponte’s deputy will be Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, who directs the Pentagon’s National Security Agency—which is dedicated to satellite and other high-tech espionage. The Pentagon controls 80% of the U.S. government’s intelligence budget, which is estimated to exceed $40 billion annually. Presumably, Hayden’s new position at the DNI office will result in a further downsizing—and perhaps collapse—of the CIA’s own science and technology division. As an active-duty officer, Hayden will presumably help Negroponte ease the tensions that have kept the armed forces, the Pentagon’s civilian leadership, and the State Department at odds with one another, especially over Iraq policy.

Negroponte’s appointment came on the heels of Rumsfeld’s announcement that the Pentagon will allow the military to organize highly classified squads to collect intelligence overseas. The DOD will also use its newly gained congressional authority to recruit foreign agents in the field, thereby eroding the CIA’s own authority over human intelligence operations. The appointment of Negroponte as DNI comes at a time when new CIA chief Goss has signaled that he intends to rid the agency of those who do not fall into line with Bush administration policies in the Middle East and elsewhere, leading some high officials to leave the agency and to widespread morale problems. In the view of one former intelligence official, “The CIA is a wounded gazelle on the African plain. It’s a pile of bleached bones.” (18)

Negroponte Not a Neocon

Negroponte is not an ideologue, and certainly not a neoconservative. Since the 1960s Ambassador Negroponte has earned a reputation as a ruthless and determined political operative who always gets the job done—however “dirty” or undiplomatic. Unlike most of President Bush’s foreign policy team, Negroponte has no direct connections with the network of conservative policy institutes, think tanks, or foundations that have set the administration’s foreign and domestic policy agendas.

Not a theorist or strategist, Negroponte instead is commonly regarded as a pragmatic realist with decidedly hawkish inclinations. (19) Negroponte has throughout his career maintained a low public profile despite his high-profile positions—rarely writing or speaking about U.S. foreign or military policy, apart from diplomatically worded statements issued by his office. Ever the flexible diplomat, Negroponte has proved comfortable in adopting whatever foreign policy language—from idealist to realist—is deemed most appropriate and effective for the job he has been assigned.

Over the past four decades, Negroponte has moved around the globe doing whatever is required to further what successive U.S. administrations have defined as U.S. economic interests and national security—including such diverse roles as advising the puppet U.S. government in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, supervising the Reagan administration’s use of Honduras as its logistical center for the counterinsurgency and counterrevolutionary campaigns in Central America, ensuring good U.S.-Mexico relations during the NAFTA negotiations, managing relations with UN Security Council members in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, and overseeing U.S. operations in Iraq during the lead-up to elections in January 2005.

A History of Counterinsurgency and Counterrevolution

Negroponte, 65, comes well prepared to his new position, after having served as a junior officer in Vietnam during the war, and as ambassador to the Philippines, Honduras, Mexico, the United Nations, and most recently Iraq. Negroponte has over four decades of experience in the Foreign Service and has mastered four languages: Vietnamese, Spanish, French, and Greek. The son of a Greek shipping magnate who emigrated to New York during the Second World War, Negroponte began his career during the Vietnam War—which he said was a “career-defining experience.” (20) From his early days as a political officer in Vietnam in the early 1960s, Negroponte quickly ascended to become an aide to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger by the end of the decade. In 1968 Negroponte became the liaison officer between the U.S. government and North Vietnam’s delegation at the Paris peace talks. In late 1970 Negroponte became head of the Vietnam office of the National Security Council staff. In February 1973 Negroponte broke with NSC Adviser Kissinger over the process of the peace negotiations, which Negroponte said did not guarantee the security of the government of South Vietnam. (21)

During the Reagan administration, he served as ambassador to Honduras, at a time when that country was serving as a central logistical center for U.S. support of the Contra war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. From his base at the vastly expanded embassy in Tegucigalpa, Negroponte also played a central role in the U.S. strategy to support counterinsurgency and anti-dissident operations in Honduras as well as in the neighboring countries of El Salvador and Guatemala. During his tenure, the U.S. military base in Palmerola, Honduras became a key logistical center for U.S. military, CIA, and civic military operations throughout the isthmus.

At the Cold War’s end, when NAFTA and free trade initiatives had become the major thrust of U.S. post-Cold War policy, Negroponte was appointed by President George H.W. Bush as ambassador to Mexico. Under Clinton, Negroponte became ambassador to Philippines, just as that country was undergoing a contentious democratic transition and the presence of the U.S. military in the former U.S. dependency was being negotiated.

In the late 1990s, Negroponte joined the private sector as an executive with McGraw-Hill. Like several other Reagan-era officials involved in Contra support operations in Central America, including illegal and highly unethical activities, the government career of Negroponte was resurrected by President Bush, who welcomed such unsavory figures as Elliott Abrams, John Poindexter, John Walters, and Otto Reich back into the executive branch.

As UN ambassador, Negroponte stage-managed the administration’s attempt to persuade the Security Council to support the invasion of Iraq. In 2004 President Bush named Negroponte as Washington’s first post-Saddam Hussein ambassador to Iraq, where he supervised what became (after the invasion) the largest U.S. embassy staff in the world, with more than 900 employees. While in Iraq, Negroponte gave Washington optimistic reports about the country’s progress toward democracy, and according to news reports he fiercely disagreed with the pessimistic CIA reports on the insurgency and the prospects for peace.

Death Squads and Cover-Ups

Time and again, John Negroponte has demonstrated his willingness to use his diplomatic status to cover up crimes and misdemeanors. These tendencies—including his role in covering up the crimes of the Contras and the vigilantes of the Honduran armed forces as well as his silence about gross human rights abuses and corporate scandals in Iraq—are worrisome in light of his nomination to become the first Director of National Intelligence.

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) observed: Negroponte is the “right man for the job but for the wrong reasons.” (7) While he was ambassador to Honduras during the Reagan administration, he at the very least turned a blind eye toward the illegal flow of arms and other U.S. governmental and nongovernmental aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. Under his watch the Honduran military and associated paramilitary squads committed a multitude of human rights abuses and executions. After leaving Honduras, Negroponte became Deputy National Security Adviser at the White House. Working together with Undersecretary of State for Latin American Affairs Elliott Abrams, Negroponte succeeded in halting U.S. investigations into Honduran military officials involved in drug trafficking. (8) (9)

Over the past two decades, Negroponte has repeatedly told the media and congressional committees that it was a myth perpetrated by U.S. critics that death squads operated in Honduras or that the government was guilty of gross human rights abuses. A 1997 CIA Inspector General investigation concluded, however, that “the Honduran military committed hundreds of human rights abuses since 1980, many of which were politically motivated and officially sanctioned” and “linked to death squads.” (22)

In a 1995 investigative report published by the Baltimore Sun, reporters Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson revealed how the CIA-trained Battalion 316 in Honduras tortured its captives during interrogations, some of whom were killed and buried afterwards in unmarked graves. A former Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, told the Baltimore Sun of Negroponte and other U.S. officials: “Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed.” Negroponte’s predecessor as Honduras ambassador, Jack Binns, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, said that when he left Honduras, he briefed Negroponte on the escalating human rights abuses. (23)

For its close cooperation with the Reagan administration’s aggressive foreign policy in Central America, the Honduran government was generously compensated with a huge influx of military and economic aid. Military aid increased from $4 million in 1980 to $77 million in 1984, while economic aid increased from $52 million to $229 million. Had Negroponte informed Congress that the military was engaged in human rights abuses, these aid flows would have been jeopardized. No report of such abuses was allowed to interfere with the U.S. destabilization of Nicaragua. When Negroponte was named UN ambassador, Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch had this to say: “When Negroponte was ambassador [in Honduras] he looked the other way when serious atrocities were committed. One would have to wonder what kind of message the Bush administration is sending about human rights.”