Another big failure in communications

One result of that dust-up was that many in the CIA concluded that Adm. Blair was not their friend. But a more serious consequence was that Blair came out looking weaker than Panetta, his subordinate (at least on paper). For a director of national intelligence to wield authority across the entire intelligence community, he needs the visible backing of the president on major decisions — and Blair didn't have it.

Last week, when finger-pointing broke out all over Washington, Blair's critics were quick to strike. Sources who refused to speak on the record pointedly told reporters that the CIA's job was merely to provide information to Blair's NCTC. If information didn't get where it was supposed to, that was the NCTC's fault, not the CIA's. Some even began to whisper that Blair's head would be the one to roll.

The organization chart isn't the only issue. Technology exists that could connect all the intelligence the government collects. But, amazingly, it hasn't been put in place.

A succession of government reports over the last five years have warned that the work of linking the intelligence agencies' databases and creating a system that would automatically detect connections — for example, between a Nigerian radical's name, his U.S. visa and his airline reservations — has lagged. An independent task force funded by the nonprofit Markle Foundation has publicly urged both presidents Bush and Obama to make the issue a higher priority.

“The fervor to achieve information-sharing has flagged,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former CIA official in the Clinton administration who worked on the Markle Foundation project. “There has been a lack of emphasis. As time went on and there was no attack [after 9/11], it just didn't have the same sense of urgency.

“There are hard issues here, but they are soluble,” he said. “You need someone with horsepower and a presidential imprimatur to bang heads and make this happen.”

The Obama administration agrees in principle, he added — but hasn't been forced, until now, to give the problem its full attention. In that sense, the failed Christmas plot was a good thing. By shining light on organizational dysfunction that's hard to dramatize, the attempted bombing has highlighted a problem that desperately needs to be solved. It might even generate the political will to come up with a fix — and, this time, to make it stick.

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