Ex-security adviser: Tough job for Negroponte
 |  Richard Falkenrath, a former White House homeland security adviser. |
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|  VIDEO |
 President Bush picks John Negroponte to be intelligence chief.
 CIA Director Porter Goss says a new U.S. terror attack is likely.
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush on Thursday nominated career diplomat John Negroponte, the American ambassador to Iraq, to be the top U.S. intelligence official.
CNN anchor Daryn Kagan discussed the appointment Thursday with Richard Falkenrath, a former deputy homeland security adviser to the president.
KAGAN: All right. You're not in the White House. So you can give us your honest opinion on this choice.
FALKENRATH: Well, I left a few months ago. But I think John Negroponte is a very highly respected diplomat. He's a man of high integrity, of good judgment and discretion. And those are values that really resonate with the president.
His problem is he's really not familiar with the intelligence process. He's never managed an intelligence agency. So he has a lot to learn in that area, and he will find that he's going to have a very ambiguous mandate to implement.
His job is really not straightforward, as the president said. The bill is subject to many different interpretations and confers many responsibilities that he actually doesn't have the authority to implement.
KAGAN: Did you think it was interesting today that the president said in his news conference that John Negroponte will set the budget?
FALKENRATH: Yes. I think it is interesting he said that because it's unlikely to be completely true.
Many people set the budget, and setting a budget requires a lot of staff to help you with very detailed work. And he simply doesn't have the staff.
The staff will be at the Department of Defense or the CIA or OMB [Office of Management and Budget]. And until he actually gets a huge budget office to manage that, he has no possibility of actually controlling that budget.
KAGAN: All right. So let's talk about how they [got] to this choice.
A lot of praise coming from around Capitol Hill and from around Washington today, but isn't John Negroponte actually a compromise selection? That there were others that were approached first -- that when they looked at some of the ways that this position was being set up, said, "Thanks but no thanks?"
FALKENRATH: Yes, it's reported that Bob Gates, who is the former DCI [director of central intelligence], turned the job down. That's the only name I think that had actually been talked about as someone who was approached by the White House for the job.
Clearly, [Negroponte] is a compromise candidate. And the thing that distinguished him from anyone else who was considered is that he was willing to take it. And that's important. It's important for the White House.
I also think the White House is looking for someone who knows that their job is to smooth things over and to make things work and not cause a huge war in the intelligence community by fighting for authority and power. And John Negroponte, as a diplomat, knows how to work through very difficult issues and to get to some level of consensus.
KAGAN: Those diplomacy skills might come in more handy than they ever have in this 40-year-long career.
I want to talk about the point [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi brought up, and that is that John Negroponte is leaving a lot of job openings in his wake. The Bush administration still has to name a U.N. ambassador and now a very important position who takes over as ambassador to Iraq.
FALKENRATH: That's right, and it's a very important job. He's done a very good job in Iraq, and there's still a lot of diplomatic work that needs to be done in Iraq.
In some ways, that job is more important to the president's ultimate legacy than DNI [director of national intelligence]. And so they will look hard for a very skilled diplomat for that job.
