Commission Vice Chair Lee Hamilton shared with the Senators his frustration at the answer he got when he kept asking intelligence community officials who is in charge. "The President," they said. Hamilton branded this "not a very satisfactory answer," adding, "no one would say that the Director of Central Intelligence is in charge."

It need not be so. During my 27-years at the Central Intelligence Agency I served under nine directors and worked closely with four of them. They were in charge.

One of them, Admiral Stansfield Turner, came to the C.I.A. from his post as commander of the 6th Fleet with a keen appreciation of the need for the authority necessary to carry out his responsibilities. Recognizing that his authority over the intelligence community was largely ad referendum to the president, he went to President Carter and obtained what was needed. Writing in Sunday's Washington Post, Turner recounted that Carter issued a presidential executive order giving DCI Turner authority over all 15 intelligence agencies "to reallocate funds and people among them and to set priorities for both collecting and analyzing intelligence." Turner notes, "This enabled a far greater degree of coordination than we have today."

So if today "no one is in charge," it does not have to be that way. Hamilton's comment notwithstanding, it is a completely satisfactory answer that the president is in charge, and that he need only empower the DCI by executive order to enable him to get the job done.

Did the commission fail to solicit Admiral Turner's views during its long investigation?...or fail to take them into account? It is difficult to believe that it is a totally new concept to the commission that, as Turner puts it, "the recommended position of National Intelligence Director (NID) already exists...It is the Director of Central Intelligence created by the National Security Act of 1947, with responsibility for coordinating the nation's 15 intelligence agencies."