Washington is not a town that finds downward mobility easy to understand. The news that John Negroponte will leave his post as the first Director of National Intelligence to take up the lower-ranking job of deputy to Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, has provoked a storm of speculation.

The weakest conjecture is that this means that the State Department’s fortunes are rising as policy on Iraq shifts from the military to the diplomatic. There is a bit of truth in that, but it is easily overstated; Rice herself has struggled to have a discernible voice in the cacophony of suggestions about how the US should get out of its predicament.

The stronger one is that the White House’s plan to pull all the intelligence agencies together is in a mess. Negroponte, a lifelong diplomat, may have been prompted only by a desire to return to his old patch, but he has picked a good time to leave a job that often seemed barely worth the name.

Rice has taken six months to fill the post, and not for want of trying. Negroponte’s predecessor, Robert Zoellick, who left to join Goldman Sachs, focused on China and trade issues when Deputy Secretary of State. That reflected his expertise, from his four years as US Trade Representative, but also the latitude that the deputy secretary has traditionally enjoyed to shape the job around his own interests.

Negroponte, who has been Ambassador to Iraq as well as Honduras, Mexico and the Philippines, and the US’s senior envoy to the United Nations, may help Rice to broaden the reach of the State Department. Its influence has grown as the Administration has recognised the failure in Iraq of the tactics of Donald Rumsfeld, finally sacked by President Bush as Secretary of Defence after the November congressional elections.

In one of the now generally agreed mistakes of the invasion, Rumsfeld had set aside the State Department’s detailed plans for rebuilding Iraq after the conflict, preferring to put more weight on the gratitude that he presumed Iraqis would feel towards the US.

If the US does begin to talk more to Iraq’s neighbours, to contain the conflict and Iran, then the State Department’s diplomatic resources will be more in demand.

But Rice, who has always stuck close to Bush’s views, has been constrained in developing clear positions by the sheer unattractiveness of the options available to the US on Iraq and Iran. In any case, in the coming year, the Administration is bound to continue to focus most on military questions because that is where the most pressing decisions lie.

Negroponte looked more awkward in the newly created intelligence job. Robert Gates, the new Defence Secretary, is one of those who challenged the need for a single supervisor of all the US intelligence agencies from the start; his scepticism might have made the post even more uncomfortable for Negroponte had he stayed. But many in Congress who argued that the post was essential for national security are furious that Negroponte has gone before the end of the Administration.

The 9/11 Commission blamed US intelligence agencies, including the FBI and CIA, for failing to communicate. It is possible, the commission concluded, that if they had done so the plot to hijack aircraft would have been uncovered, although it acknowledged that there were few warning signs and that detection would always have been hard.

But the job of director of national intelligence bore all the responsibility of preventing another terrorist attack, and yet given the size of the US intelligence operation, and the number of different arms, it had only cumbersome tools with which to try to achieve that.

Reports last night quoted an unnamed official as saying that Michael McConnell, a retired vice-admiral who ran the National Security Agency in President Clinton’s first term, was expected to succeed Negroponte. With more background in intelligence, he might find it easier to run a machine whose parts have never been properly put together.

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