New intelligence director selects key staff members

WASHINGTON — Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte has picked his key staff members and begun to design the role he and his new organization will play in managing the 15 agencies that make up the nation's intelligence community.

One visible first step was Negroponte taking over, starting last week, as the top-ranking intelligence official sitting in on President Bush's morning national security briefing, replacing CIA Director Porter Goss. Another was choosing to locate temporarily his headquarters and staff, which will ultimately grow to include 500 to 700 people, away from the CIA's Langley, Va., campus in a new Defense Intelligence Agency building here at Bolling Air Force Base.

Negroponte and his principal deputy director, Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, have decided on an organizational structure and turned to the State Department and the CIA for four of their top five aides. Congress created Negroponte's position last year as part of a reorganization to integrate and coordinate efforts of the CIA and intelligence agencies at the Pentagon, State Department, Energy Department and the FBI.

Friday, officials said Thomas Fingar, head of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, will become Negroponte's deputy director for analysis and chairman of the National Intelligence Council. The intelligence reorganization legis- lation gives Fingar responsibility and authority for setting standards and coordinating objectives for U.S. intelligence efforts, although it leaves the analysts at their respective agencies with the goal of allowing them to present independent views. Fingar will also have what a senior intelligence official involved in the process described to reporters Friday as "governance" over the President's Daily Brief, the summary of most important items given to Bush daily.

Mary Margaret Graham, a CIA clandestine officer who once was the agency's associate deputy director of operations for counterintelligence, will become deputy director for collection. She will daily coordinate all the agencies' human, technical and open-source collection. She will also supervise tasking and when necessary determine priorities among competing demands for collection by different intelligence agencies.

Ambassador Patrick Kennedy, a career foreign service officer who served at the United Nations with Negroponte, will be deputy director for management. He will supervise intelligence community policies on personnel, training, acquisition and budget.

The job of chief of staff for Negroponte goes to David Shedd, another former CIA clandestine officer who at one time was chief of the agency's congressional liaison and since 2001 has been assigned to the National Security Council staff.