Bob Graham is a low-key, soft-spoken senator who is starting to show up everywhere. Graham, who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has become a fixture on American television news shows explaining the United States’s war on terrorism.

And he has traveled to Central Asia to visit the front lines of America’s battle with al Qaeda and assess the nation’s preparation for future battles with other terrorist groups.

In an interview in his small, hideaway office at the U.S. Capitol, Graham rejected the assertion that last fall’s terrorists attacks are the exclusive fault of the American intelligence community.

“I think Sept. 11 was a gigantic failure of a number of institutions in our society of which intelligence was one,” he said. “But it would be unfair to put exclusive blame on the intelligence agencies,” he added.

Graham works closely with the leaders of the intelligence community, including George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, but said he is not a cheerleader.

“I’m not an advocate. I try to help explain developments and put events in context. The intelligence community can’t always explain itself in public. Obviously, director Tenet can’t hold press conferences every day and discuss these things,” he said.

Graham, 65, is a veteran Democrat who is a dominant force in his home state of Florida and a respected leader in national politics.

His father was a wealthy dairy farmer who was a Florida state senator in the 1930s and 1940s and ran for governor in 1944. Graham’s half brother, Philip, was the publisher of The Washington Post before he committed suicide in the early 1960s. Philip’s widow, Katherine Graham, took control of the paper and ran it for many years.

Sen. Graham has an undergraduate degree from the University of Florida and a law degree from Harvard. He served in Florida’s House of Representatives for two terms and the state Senate for two terms before winning election as governor.

Graham was Florida’s governor from 1979 to 1987 and was elected to the Senate in 1986. Now in his third term, he has worked actively on issues of particular interest to Florida, such as securing federal funds to clean up the Everglades.

Since 1974, he has made it a practice to work for a day at ordinary jobs with his constituents. He has spent more than 300 days working as a policeman, fisherman, factory laborer, busboy, garbage man, journalist and other professions.

As a device to stay organized and disciplined, Graham carefully records his activities and observations about daily life. Over the last quarter century he has filled more than 4,000 notebooks that are color coded by season to describe his appointments, meals, activities and the people he encounters.

A moderate senator with a penchant for calm, often wry, understatement, Graham was a serious candidate to be the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1992 and 2000.

Graham has been a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for nine years. He became its vice chairman in January 2001 and was elevated to the chairmanship last summer when Democrats regained control of the Senate.

As chairman of the Senate panel, Graham’s words are parsed by journalists, politicians and diplomats as they try to determine which observations are based on personal opinion, which are based on meetings with top-level intelligence officials, and which may contain nuggets of intelligence information.

“I try to be very careful about what I say . There are a lot of things I can’t talk about,” he said.
Graham works closely with his fellow Floridian, Porter Goss, who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. They have been friends for several decades even though Graham is a Democrat and Goss is a Republican.

The Senate and House Intelligence panels were created in the mid-1970s after Congress grew alarmed at a host of CIA-related scandals and decided that more oversight was needed.
The two congressional Intelligence panels monitor the American intelligence community that comprises more than a dozen agencies with an annual budget of about $30 billion.

Graham was a strong proponent of the Counterintelligence 21 initiative that President Bill Clinton signed in December 2000 and that President George W. Bush has pledged to continue. It calls for a methodical approach to identifying and safeguarding the most sensitive information of the U.S. government. He has also taken a lead in reforming America’s counter-terrorism efforts.

He is an aggressive proponent of substantial intelligence reforms. He said there are clear and unsettling weaknesses in the U.S. intelligence system that must be fixed.

“For 40 years, our intelligence agencies focused on one big target: the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. The world today is much more complicated, and we have to adjust,” he said.

Graham said American intelligence agencies have not adapted quickly enough to address new threats and a changed strategic and technological environment. He said there are four areas that need to be overhauled, adding that legislation passed last year should begin the effort.

First, more money is necessary to upgrade human intelligence, the National Security Agency, analytical capability, and research and development programs, he said.

Second, he believes it is important to remove legal shackles on intelligence agencies that have prevented the effective flow of information. Graham said some laws limit the sharing of information between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and this hampers the ability of intelligence agencies to perform surveillance.

Third, there has been a failure to respond to diverse threats, the senator said. The intelligence community has become increasingly risk-averse, Graham said, adding that the United States must sometimes work with people from other nations who are “non-choirboys.”

Fourth, the intelligence community has an outdated organizational structure that makes the CIA director “more of a supplicant than a commander of resources,” he noted.

He said the CIA director has less power than many Americans realize, adding that the secretary of defense actually has considerable power over intelligence personnel and budgets.

“I hope we give greater control over the intelligence community to the director of Central Intelligence. That might sound obvious, but it’s true and necessary,” he said.

Graham said the two congressional Intelligence panels may hold joint hearings on the Sept. 11 attacks, probably beginning this spring.

The hearings, he said, must protect classified information while providing an explanation to the American people about what the government did or didn’t do to deter, detect and disrupt the al Qaeda network’s terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.

Graham and Goss have resisted efforts to create an independent panel to investigate the terrorist attacks. Some lawmakers who want an outside investigation—declaring the congressional Intelligence panels would be inclined to defend the intelligence community—are opposing them.
Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman and Republican Sen. John McCain have proposed an independent panel of non-government officials to investigate the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attacks. Two other senators, Democrat Robert Torricelli and Republican Chuck Grassley, are pushing a different commission proposal that would include some members of Congress in the probe.

“I think we [the Intelligence committees] can do a good and credible job. There are a lot of models we can and will drawn on,” Graham said.

Graham is a strong proponent of boosting protection of the U.S. homeland. The nation has many points of vulnerability that need to be better safeguarded, he noted. There are more than 40 federal agencies that have counter-terrorism as one of their missions, he added.

Graham praised President Bush for creating an Office for Homeland Security but doubts the director, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, has sufficient authority and bureaucratic clout to effectively perform his job.

To be successful, Ridge must be first in line for relevant information, have direct access to all senior government officials, be the gatekeeper in the budget and personnel process, have a permanent staff that is loyal to him, play a central role in the selection of appointees at the agencies, and be involved in management reviews of the homeland defense establishment, Graham said.

Graham said the overall system needs to be better organized and strengthened. The senator has introduced legislation that would create a National Office for Combating Terrorism. The senator was a driving force behind a measure passed last year by Congress to improve security at the United States’s various deepwater ports.

“I have personally been long concerned about the security of our maritime borders, especially at our seaports,” he said.

He noted that every year nearly 7 million passengers and 7.5 million cargo containers enter the United States through its seaports. He said estimates show that 95 percent of the cargo entering the United States from noncontiguous nations comes through seaports.

The new law authorizes an expanded Coast Guard security program, port vulnerability assessments, cargo identity and tracking measures, and more rigorous customs procedures.

The initiative calls for spending more than $1.1 billion over six years, including grants to local port authorities and another $3.3 billion in loan guarantees for local port authorities to finance security improvements.

But Graham argues that the United States must not just hunker down and hope the terrorist threat passes.

“We cannot play defense with terrorists. The only way to win this war is at the source, and that is what we are doing in Afghanistan and will be doing on a global basis in the months ahead,” he said.

“We need to destroy terrorist networks, not just build up our defenses. We cannot stay in the mode of attack and respond. We have to be proactive. The definition of victory is the elimination of the last of those global terrorist groups. Nothing short of that will meet the standard the president has set,” he added.

Graham said the Sept. 11 attacks were a historic watershed that must compel the United States to adjust its thinking and prepare for a long struggle.

“Terrorism is not a crisis. It’s a cancerous condition. It’s a condition that all Americans must come to terms with as we try to return to our normal lives,” he said.

John Shaw is a regular contributor to The Washington Diplomat.