Following President Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence, Bob Bauer asks Avril Haines, who held the position during the Biden administration, to explain the history behind the establishment of the Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the role of the director as leader of the intelligence community. They also discuss why the law requires nominees for the director to have “extensive national security experience” when there is no such requirement for the director of the CIA; the significance of ODNI appointments for U.S. cooperation with allies on intelligence intelligence gathering and collaboration; and the importance of the position in congressional oversight of the intelligence community.
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “Executive Functions Chat.” You can listen to the full conversation by following or subscribing to the show on Substack, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Bob Bauer: Good afternoon, this is Bob Bauer at Executive Functions and I’m pleased today to have as our guest Avril Haines. Avril Haines was the Director of the Office of National Intelligence in the United States government in the Biden administration and has had a series of senior posts in the national security and intelligence establishment.
She has been deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. She has also served as the legal advisor to the national security advisor and in fact also has experience on Capitol Hill earlier in her career as a member of the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
And I’m pleased to say I did work with Avril when she was in the Obama White House in one of those roles and I welcome her to here today. At the moment she is a fellow with the Institute for Global Politics at Columbia University, as well as a visiting fellow at All Souls College in Oxford. So Avril, it is really good to see you.
Avril Haines: It’s wonderful to see you too, Bob.
So I asked you to be on today and you graciously agreed—because it’s late where you are at the moment—to talk a little bit against the background of today’s news about the office that you once headed, that is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As you know, the prior occupant in the current administration resigned and today President Trump made an acting appointment to that post. I think in the background are questions about the role that this office plays within the intelligence community and I want to focus on the role, how it relates to other agencies within that community, the significance of the position to which that acting appointment has been made. So let’s begin.
Where does it come from? Why is it called the ODNI?
Yeah, it’s a great question and it’s not an easy thing to understand. The ODNI is this kind of relatively small agency effectively that sits above the intelligence community which is made up of, including ODNI, 18 different elements.
And half of those (nine of them) are actually in the Department of Defense. Then there’s the CIA, there’s ODNI, and then there are others that are in other departments and agencies such as State, Treasury, the Department of Energy, DHS, you know, you name it.
It came into being essentially after 9/11. There was the 9/11 Commission, which looked back at sort of, in effect, what lessons we could learn, why did we miss this. And one of the recommendations coming out of the 9/11 Commission was the production of the National Counterterrorism Center and that sort of grew into ODNI as it was ultimately passed.
So part of the the reason for it was because of this idea that we needed to be able to connect the dots, which is sort of how it’s described more generally. This is to say that there was information at FBI, there was information at CIA, we hadn’t properly connected that information to produce a comprehensive threat picture, and as a consequence, the idea was you need an ODNI to be able to look across the intelligence community to ensure that you’re ultimately integrating information across the IC to provide a better more comprehensive threat picture.
But there are a lot of other things that were happening in the statute even at the time — and when you look at the statute it sort of makes it clear there’s kind of three basic roles.
There’s the first piece, which is really managing the intelligence community: You’re the head of the intelligence community (as it said in the statute itself).
And then the second piece is really being the principal advisor for intelligence matters related to national security. And here you’re ensuring that timely, objective, independent national intelligence is provided to the president of the United States, to the National Security Council members, to the Homeland Security Council, to Congress, to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and so on. And that’s a crucial role that you play that sort of manifests probably most obviously in the president’s daily brief and in principals’ meetings and deputies’ meetings and so on.
And then the third role is really about managing the budget. You’re supposed to manage the national intelligence budget, which is the budget that is responsible for largely funding all of these different elements of the intelligence community and part of the concept behind that is really that you are ultimately ensuring that the intelligence community is working as one community, that it’s sort of mutually reinforcing, that you’re a good steward of resources, they’re not all independently doing the same thing, you know, in these different spaces and that they’re actually focused on national priorities as opposed to the priorities of the particular agency or department that they’re closest to.
And that’s another key aspect of what the statute was intended to sort of address, because I find in my own experience in working with intelligence communities around the world one of the challenges is that often you have parts of their intelligence community that are focused on the Department of Defense or the sort of equivalent of that versus other parts of the community and they’re usually focused on the sort of tactical urgent issues as opposed to what the leader of the country wants them to be focused on.
So just to follow up, in summary is it fair to say out of this complex intelligence committee establishment, the director of ODNI is the intelligence community leader in the sense of overriding responsibility for coordination among the agencies and for advice given to the president?
Yeah, it’s a great way to say it. And it’s just it’s hard to — if you think of it as you’ve got 18 different elements, right, 18 different offices or departments that are spread out throughout the U.S. government and they’re all doing their work right in different spaces — but the fact is you really can’t get a full intelligence picture without all of them participating in the work that gets done to produce that for, you know, the president of the United States and the National Security Council.
It becomes obvious why you need somebody who’s there, who’s capable of actually bringing that together and ensuring that the right questions are being asked and answered so that the president and the National Security Council gets the indication of warning that they need, gets the intelligence that they need to address, decisions that they’re making every day that are of crucial importance to the country.
So in that sense I think probably many people have just asked who’s running the show in the intelligence community, they might answer director of the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, but in fact it sounds to me like the role of the director of national intelligence is the leadership role.
Yeah, so you’re right, prior to ODNI’s existence the director of the CIA was called the director of central intelligence. That I’m sure does not sound all that different but it is the different acronym, it was DCI as opposed to DCIA, right, and it was basically, you know, the director of central intelligence was considered, prior to ODNI, to be the leader of the intelligence community effectively but had no power with which to actually operationalize that.
In other words, the director of central intelligence could tell other agencies and departments you should do X, Y, and Z but there was no stick that they had to use and so when ODNI was created that was part of the rationale of actually having the director of national intelligence manage the budget for the different agencies and departments, it kind of gave you a stick.
So that’s a part of the rationale, you know, built into the system but it’s also true that, you know, the director of central intelligence or now the CIA director is still a crucial obviously leader within the intelligence community and when we establish the National Security Council every president sort of in their first presidential directive identifies who’s supposed to be sitting around the table and, you know, for President Biden and for President Trump, the director of national intelligence is their statutory member but the director of the CIA has also been added into the overall National Security Council for them.
As somebody who’s no doubt familiar, not obviously with your own experience, only with your own experience but with how that office has been managed by others, has there been any difference in the definition, uses, practical application of the role from administration to administration? Are there differences that have developed over time depending on who the president is?
Yeah, there are some. I mean, it has, I think over time ODNI has really sort of grown into its own — you know, every young agency sort of goes through frankly growing pains as you’re trying to organize yourself appropriately. And so one thing that’s happened over time is that it’s just become more stable in many respects, and the role itself I think has as a consequence also become more developed in the way in which it’s operationalized.
So when John Negroponte was the first director of national intelligence, one of the things that he did was to be in the office, in the Oval Office delivering the president’s daily brief with a briefer from ODNI, and its my understanding and he sort of classically took that role on as being among the most important aspects of it.
Then as you see over time ODNI develop your models like Director James Clapper who obviously very well experienced with the intelligence community and somebody who really built out effectively the capacity of ODNI to manage the intelligence community very effectively. And the principal deputy under Clapper was Stephanie O’Sullivan, who was also a long-time member of the intelligence community, who spent a lot of time on those issues.
And he wasn’t in the Oval every day, although he came every so often to provide the president’s daily brief, but you see a little bit of emphasis in different spaces as a consequence of the role that’s being played and then of course the dynamic with the CIA and with DOD.
To be honest, most people focus on the dynamic between the Director of National Intelligence and the Director of the CIA because as you’re pointing out, you know, when DNI was developed it was basically taking power away from the CIA to some extent and saying, okay, now you’re in charge of the intelligence community.
But it also took power away from DOD because the budget, for example, many elements of the community that are within the Department of Defense was actually handed over to the ODNI as a consequence. So both are kind of key relationships that you’re developing and the roles adjust based on who’s in each of those positions.
Let me ask you a question. I didn’t realize that there was this difference until earlier today. The enabling statute, the statute that created the ODNI, calls for the appointed nominee — not in this case the acting appointment that occurred today — but normally, in a normal case where someone is nominated for Senate confirmation to the post, that person as nominated is required to have “extensive national security experience.”
That is not a requirement for the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, at least not as written in the statute. Why the difference?
Yeah, I don’t know exactly what led to that. I don’t have the actual, you know, hard evidence in terms of what the legislative process was and history was. But here’s kind of the characteristic explanation within the communities and so on.
The Director of the CIA had not always, but historically there’d been a number of folks who had been appointed as the director who had not had experience within the Central Intelligence Agency and who really — the sort of key characteristic was that they had access to the president.
And while they did have national security experience, usually it wasn’t necessarily intel experience and they could be political operators. There were some who didn’t even have, you know, sort of classic national security experience.
The distinction that’s been made between that role and ODNI and why ODNI might, you know, be required to have national security experience is, was largely described to me as based on the idea that the CIA is a very robust office. It’s basically about 10 times or more the size of ODNI. And as a consequence, the deputy director, for example, typically was a career person in those roles, somebody who knew how to manage the building and the officers who were housed in the CIA would essentially do their business and know their business in effect.
And so having somebody at the top of the agency who was a political appointee who is, based on access to the president, selected for the job, was a reasonable sort of way to approach the CIA. But for ODNI, you really have a very small office. You’re intended to do oversight of an inordinate number of intelligence elements.
And your understanding of the intelligence community and how it works is sort of crucial to really understanding how you’re coordinating among these different agencies, giving you the capacity to be the broker when disputes arise and so on. And then also ultimately to provide oversight over them in a way that hopefully is respected within the community and in national security.
But I mean, the reality is, of course, if you have a relationship with the president, it makes you more effective and particularly in the context of the president’s daily brief or another analytic work that you’re doing, where you’re really trying to make sure that you’re bringing to the table the right intelligence.
Again, on the other hand, it’s also incredibly useful, in my view, to have national security experience that enables you to understand the sort of traditions, the tradecraft, the work that the analysts do, so that when you’re presenting analysis to the president, as is reflected in the statute, you’re actually focused on timely, objective, independent analysis and that that’s going to be the work that you’re bringing to the table to help, frankly, you know, national security experts make the hard decisions as well as the president.
Let me ask you one question about the international sort of intelligence relationships that we establish. And again, I’m going to ask a question that a general newspaper reader would ask, maybe somewhat informed by my experience in government, not nearly as extensive as yours. One reads that it does matter to those that we work with among our allies on intelligence gathering, cooperation in various areas that are informed by intelligence.
They pay close attention to and have to work closely with the leadership of our intelligence community. And I suppose now in this instance, we’re talking specifically about the leader of the intelligence community at ODNI. Is that correct?
Does it affect, does that relationship to the appointments that are made in the structure of our intelligence community have an effect on how well we work with our allies on intelligence gathering and intelligence-related collaboration?
Yes, without question. I mean, it’s a crucial role. The CIA is typically sort of at the forefront of your kind of day-to-day interactions with other countries’ intelligence services in many respects.
But ODNI — what basically you can do from the ODNI perch, in addition to sort of your regular bilateral communications with other leaders of intelligence services in other countries, is to support the kind of interaction that you know is necessary in order to be able to share intelligence appropriately with allies and partners.
So, you know, things like the infrastructure that you’re building behind it, the fact that you work with different international organizations like NATO, others that are crucial in that work. And there’s just a very important role that you play in ultimately facilitating those kinds of relationships, but also in ensuring that you’ve got what you need in order to be able to conduct the kind of intel sharing that you think is necessary to support the policy positions that, you know, any administration is taking.
Okay. That’s very, that’s very helpful and very interesting. Let me ask you one more question, which is the relationship between ODNI and the Congress. What kind of relationship does the ODNI have to establish or is generally expected by the Congress of ODNI—communications, closed or open testimony? What role does it play in informing Congress so the Congress can discharge its own responsibilities in the intelligence sphere?
Yeah. I mean, I think this is incredibly important largely because the intelligence community is operating in secret. And as a consequence, you’re not subject to the same sort of accountability mechanisms that many different parts of the government are subject to.
And Congress really is in the shoes of the American people in that scenario, basically providing oversight and accountability for the work that, we do in the national security community. And as a consequence, we’ve really, in my experience, the kind of oversight that you engage in, in the intelligence community is far more — for example, than what I experienced when I was at the state department or in other places — where you’re providing daily information to Congress and consistently working with them on a really wide range of issues.
You know, some from the most detailed kind of questions to the really large issues that we’re managing and for ODNI kind of to get to the specifics of your question, typically I would be doing closed door briefings.
So those were the ones that were most frequent. And closed door testimony for classified issues that you’d be providing, annually at the very least, and we would do an annual threat assessment. And that was a public hearing. That was something that, in my experience, both the chairs and rankings of House and Senate intel committees felt that was very important — in part to help the understand what the intelligence community saw as the major threats of our day.
And of course to make sure that there was sort of some transparency around the work that we would do.
I would testify not only before the intel committees, but also, for example, with the armed services committee. So, you know, there were other committees that had interest and we would kind of go around and it was not just me.
It was other heads of intelligence components like the CIA director, the director of NSA, the director of the FBI with director of INA at one point, you know, INR rather. And so you have a whole series of hearings that are like that. And then we would do a few others.
Like I did one that was open on election security and, you know, a few other topics that the committees decided were important enough to have a public hearing on. But almost all of our hearings, even the ones that were public essentially would have a classified component to them.
Yeah. And I can’t resist a follow-up question. So many people think of public hearings of the Cabinet officials as essentially kind of, how would I call it — high volume affairs, uh, somewhat political in nature, members giving sort of speeches in the form of questions. But am I wrong to say that the threat assessment hearing, some of these other public assessment hearings have a quality of informed participation on both sides of the podium?
Yes. I think that’s accurate. And in my experience, honestly, it’s — you know, there’s no question that you end up with some political theater associated with some of these events.
I mean, that’s sort of part of the course on some level, but two things are worth knowing. I think one is that the closed door hearings, the classified hearings, are really serious. I mean, people have serious questions. They are asking questions.
They don’t know the answer to that they want the answer to, you know, it’s not simply theater in many respects. And on both sides of the aisle, I found people that were serious about their oversight role and the importance of what they were doing. And the second thing is that they actually did workforce interviews with chairs and rankings of our committees at different times so that people could see just how much we work together across the aisle.
And when we briefed the Hill, we made a very concerted effort from the intelligence community perspective to always brief both Republicans and Democrats at the same time so that we were able to show them that they were getting exactly the same information from us. And we were not, you know, distinguishing essentially information based on party or politics. I just, I think that’s crucial in this context.
I mean, there’s really nothing more serious than the kind of work that we do in the intelligence community. And it is imperative that we actually focus on what’s important to the country and not on the politics.
I couldn’t agree from my experience in government and somebody who continues to follow these issues closely. I couldn’t agree with you more Avril. It was really kind of you to join us today and thank you very much.
This has been really informative and I’m very grateful that you agreed to do it.
Thank you so much, Bob. And thanks for everything that you’ve done over the years. I’m anyway, as you know, a huge fan.
We are members of a mutual admiration society. We can say that.
