"We have some way to go before we have a truly unified intelligence enterprise and culture," Charlie Allen told United Press International last week, after giving testimony about his new role to two House subcommittees.

He also told the committee, "We are obviously short of facilities," and lawmakers advised him to petition Congress for any additional resources he needed.

Allen, a 47-year veteran CIA official, had previously been a senior member of the community management staff -- officials who worked for the director of Central Intelligence in his capacity as nominal head of all 15 U.S. spy agencies.

As assistant director for collection, he had the unenviable job of coordinating the "tasking" of intelligence assets, technical and human -- striving to please both military and policy-making customers, while making the best use of limited resources.

It was a tricky task at which Allen, in the opinion of several current and former intelligence officials, excelled.

But no less daunting must be the job he came out of a brief retirement three weeks ago to do. As well as being Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's top intelligence adviser, Allen also must help define the department's role in the increasingly crowded field of U.S. intelligence agencies; and manage the department's eclectic collection of "non-traditional" intelligence-gathering operations -- like mapping trends in document forgery or other kinds of fraud by people trying to enter the country illegally.

Many of the 22 agencies, departments and offices that were merged into the department in March 2003 -- including the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, U.S. Customs and the Transportation Security Administration -- have intelligence operations of one kind or another.

The Border Patrol, for instance, has a small intelligence unit in each sector that analyzes data about gangs and others smuggling migrants across the border.

And there are also new intelligence-gathering elements in the department, to exploit what it says is a unique relationship with the private sector and with state and local governments and law enforcement agencies, all of which enables it to collect a great deal of so-called open source, or unclassified intelligence.

Officials in the department's infrastructure protection office, for instance, track reports from the private sector of suspicious or anomalous behavior at chemical plants and other potential terrorist targets; looking for patterns that might be signs of preparation for an attack.

Allen told lawmakers that the key issue was "how to bring together all these disparate components and the intelligence ... that they collect on a daily basis."

"They collect a lot of it," he added, "but there's a great amount of information that does not get fully disseminated or used as part of trends and patterns and threat streams."

Part of the problem, he told UPI later, was the absence of common standards, such as so-called reporting thresholds -- guidelines about what kind of data should be passed up the chain -- or common reporting formats, so that each element was producing materials that could be easily and accurately interpreted and understood by everyone else.

"It is a huge and big, big problem for all of us, and it has not been done," he concluded at the hearing, adding that his predecessors had exhibited "a lack of real focus" on the issue.

His most recent predecessor, who left more than seven months ago, retired Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, said that, overall, he thought Allen's assessment of state of play was "fair."

But he took issue with the idea that there had been no focus on integration.

"I don't think that's right," he told UPI. "We did make progress, but it was progress from zero."

He said that in 2004 he had instituted regular monthly meetings of the 10 intelligence heads, a process which Allen said he will now formalize as the Homeland Security Intelligence Council.

Hughes acknowledged that guidelines setting out common standards were "something we just never got to."

But he added that part of the problem had been the absence of guidance for the whole collection of fractious agencies dubbed the Intelligence Community. Without that, he said, guidelines set unilaterally by homeland security "would only have contributed to the problem" of multiple inconsistent or even contradictory standards and procedures.

Allen told UPI he would be working closely with the office of the new Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte on the guidelines issue, and in many ways, the challenges he face resemble those facing the new director, albeit on a department-wide, rather than government-wide level.

For instance, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, asked Allen how he could succeed in improving coordination and integration without budgetary and personnel authority over the 10 offices, which at the moment report to -- and are budgeted by -- the heads of their different home agencies within the department.

"I'm going to evaluate whether I need additional authorities," Allen responded, adding, "At this stage I think I have the needed authority," but promising to come back to congress if he found he needed more.

On the question of the department's role vis-a-vis other intelligence agencies, Allen told the hearing that another "of the things I found that has not been done" was the preparation of an intelligence community directive, defining the department's role, and the relationship of the chief intelligence officer to the new director of national intelligence.

Hughes said that under his leadership the department had produced what he called "beginning documents" on the issue, "a basis for the work to go forward."

One thing both men agreed on was that the physical infrastructure available to the department's intelligence operation leaves a lot to be desired.

"The physical facilities were inadequate," said Hughes, adding that this had also slowed down his efforts to ramp up the office's staffing, because there sometimes was not room to put people to work.

"We obviously are short of facilities," Allen told the hearing, "But I've submitted a plan to Deputy Secretary Jackson and I will press that."

Hughes said that "A plan has to factor in the limitations," pointing out that the whole department was cramped on its current campus, and that new buildings cannot be thorwn up overnight.

Fixing the facilities problem, he "is a matter of time and money, and I don't think enough time has elapsed or enough money has been applied."

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