South by Southwest: The "big guy" for national intelligence is a mystery man

What has John Negroponte been up to? One of the key players in the entire U.S. national intelligence game is Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte (his website is title-linked above).

His work since taking office has remained rather a puzzle to me, so I decided to check out what he has been doing since being appointed and confirmed. With a little digging I found a few items:

General information on the DNI's job and his work so far came from the LA Times (5/6/06) :
Negroponte's job is to coordinate the work of 16 intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the giant National Security Agency — which eavesdrops on international communications — as well as the Energy Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The post was created in 2005 in response to charges — made most tellingly by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — that the federal government's intelligence effort was uncoordinated and needed central direction.
When Negroponte took office in April 2005, the veteran diplomat moved quickly to exert his authority over the CIA. He took over the job of giving President Bush his daily intelligence briefing, a task that once allowed CIA directors to bond with the presidents they served. He took a central role in briefing Congress on intelligence issues. He transferred some CIA officers to new joint intelligence centers. And when it appeared that Goss was not fully on board, officials said, Negroponte and his deputy, Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, quietly complained to the White House — apparently contributing to Goss' decision to resign Friday.
Negroponte and Sec'y of Defense Rumsfeld are in a turf battle. Quoting further from the May story in the LA Times:
By Doyle McManus and Peter Spiegel, May 6, 2006. WASHINGTON — After a little more than a year in his newly created job, John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, has won an initial battle to establish authority over the vast U.S. intelligence community — Porter J. Goss, who resisted Negroponte's moves to limit the autonomy of the CIA, is gone.
But Negroponte faces a larger and much more difficult challenge: a struggle with Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, which runs more than 80% of the nation's intelligence budget and is busy expanding its role even further. . .
But Negroponte, who once worked as an aide to former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, has been much more cautious in confronting the Pentagon, officials and members of Congress have said. (Kissinger once complained that Rumsfeld was the toughest bureaucratic warrior he had ever met.)
When Negroponte has sought to push through changes at the Defense Department, "they told him to take a flying leap," said one U.S. intelligence official who said he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. "If you get the shove from DOD, where else can you go?"
The Pentagon has said it is cooperating with Negroponte. But even before the intelligence director's job was created, Rumsfeld made it clear that he thought its power should be limited, and he lobbied successfully in Congress to curtail much of Negroponte's clout over personnel and budgets. Rumsfeld explained at the time that he did not want to weaken the Pentagon's ability to deliver tactical military intelligence to soldiers in the field by involving a new authority outside the military.
Negroponte was not happy with Porter Goss as the head of the CIA. Quoting from a Slate Magazine story by Michael Brus (his links),
A former GOP congressman, Goss was CIA director for only a few months before Bush effectively demoted him by making Negroponte his boss. Negroponte, not Goss, now gives the president his daily intelligence briefing, and Goss' resistance to Negroponte's turf encroachment is cited as the ostensible reason for his departure. (The Post notes that Goss and Negroponte were once frat brothers at Yale.)
But the real reason, as revealed in dozens of criticisms and backhanded compliments in both the Post and NYT, is that Goss was a terrible manager. "Goss could not overcome a reputation as a partisan politician who worked congressional hours and appeared disinterested in his overseas intelligence
counterparts," writes the Post. Around a dozen senior agency officials either resigned in protest or asked for reassignment under Goss' leadership. The
LAT adds that Goss left the running of the agency largely to his former
congressional aides.
U.S. Representative Hoekstra is not happy with Negroponte either. The Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra and the DNI have also gotten crossways. Quoting from a more recent story in the Washington Post,(6/30/06), reporter Walter Pincus begins,
The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), yesterday wrote Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte to strongly complain about a background briefing for reporters on June 21 organized by Negroponte's staff. The conference call allowed reporters to question four intelligence officials on declassified key points of a study, produced by the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), on hazards to troops in Iraq of old chemical shells and rockets, about 500 of which had been discovered since 2004.(Pincus quotes Hoekstra's letter to the DNI):
Because this call was organized by your office, I assume that you authorized and were familiar with its content. I would appreciate an explanation and correction of these inaccurate and misleading assertions.
Second, I am concerned . . . your office provided a transcript of the call to the committee with the names of the briefers removed. . . . You should be trying to stop anonymous discussion of classified information by persons unwilling to associate their names with their assertions rather than sanctioning and promoting it. . . .
Third, I have additional concerns regarding classified matters that I will raise in a classified format.
I look forward to your response.
This analysis of Negroponte's tenure in public life (by Joe Kay-5/17/06) is called, "John Negroponte and the Latin Americanization of US politics." Quoting from WSWS,
Is it not possible that the US government is spying on the American people for the express purpose of gathering names and information on potential or actual political opponents, is using the “war on terrorism” as an excuse to lay the foundations for the roundup of thousands of individuals because of their views in opposition to the war or other aspects of the policy of the American ruling class? To even raise this question would be denounced as a conspiracy theory, if it were not so studiously ignored.
The actual purpose of the administration’s actions, however, is evident in considering the individuals who have been tasked with carrying it out. In particular, it is worth reexamining the record of John Negroponte, the current Director of National Intelligence, who is in charge of centralizing and coordinating the various different American spy agencies. Negroponte has emerged as a critical figure in the vast expansion of US domestic surveillance. . . Is it not possible that the US government is spying on the American people for the express purpose of gathering names and information on potential or actual political opponents, is using the “war on terrorism” as an excuse to lay the foundations for the roundup of thousands of individuals because of their views in opposition to the war or other aspects of the policy of the American ruling class? To even raise this question would be denounced as a conspiracy theory, if it were not so studiously ignored.