Four days after rumors began swirling about Barack Obama's surprise pick of Leon Panetta for CIA director, the buzz has become official.
At a press conference on Friday morning Obama announced the nominations of Panetta, retired Adm. Dennis Blair for National Intelligence director and former CIA official John Brennan -- who withdrew from consideration for CIA director in November after opposition from liberal bloggers -- as White House homeland security adviser and deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism.
Some Bush administration officials will remain to work with the incoming intelligence team. Current DNI Mike McConnell will offer counsel on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and Michael Leiter will continue as head of the United States National Counterterrorism Center.
Panetta has served as a congressman from California, Office of Management and Budget director, and White House chief of staff to President Clinton, but he has no direct intelligence experience. The unexpected pick has already triggered criticism both in Congress and the media, and will likely generate tough questioning at Panetta's confirmation hearing.
Obama wasted no time pre-emptively defending the pick. After listing Blair's credentials, the president-elect said Blair's experience "will be exceptionally complemented" by Panetta. "Let me be clear," Obama stressed. "In Leon Panetta, the agency will have a director who has my complete trust and substantial clout."
Panetta also received an unequivocal seal of approval from Blair in his remarks. "I couldn't have asked for a better leader for the CIA," Blair said, as he turned to Panetta. "With your background and perspective, the agency is in superb hands."
Panetta, who took to the podium after Blair, stressed the need for a strong intelligence team. "I commit to consulting closely with my former colleagues and the Congress to form the kind of partnership we need to win the war on terror," he said.
John Brennan, President-elect Obama's intelligence adviser and the person many thought would head the CIA, has formally withdrawn his name from consideration "for a position within the intelligence community." (Read his letter to Obama here)
Why is this important?
Liberal/Left/Pinko bloggers and others on Obama's left flank have been furious over the idea that Brennan might get a senior post because he has been associated with some of the Bush administration's harshest intelligence tactics, including waterboarding, overseas detention and domestic surveillance.
As the intensity of criticism increased, team Obama seems to have decided it was best for Brennan to stand down.
This is an important victory for the left base, which was still feeling the sting of Obama's decision earlier this year to vote for enhanced surveillance powers.
In an interview with National Journal earlier this year, Brennan revealed that he differed with Obama over the thorny issue of immunity for companies that assisted the government with warrantless surveillance of Americans.
In the wake of that interview and other reporting on Brennan's policy positions, Liberal/Left/Pinko bloggers launched a Web-wide campaign to scuttle his nomination.
In the NJ interview, conducted eight months before the election, Brennan distanced himself from some of the Bush policies and struck a pragmatic pose on surveillance policies:
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the threshold [for gathering intelligence about terrorist suspects], quite frankly, was low, because we didn't know the nature of the threat we faced here in the U.S. Every effort was made by the government to try to get as much understanding and visibility into what else might be out there that's going to hurt us again. Now that a number of years have passed, we need to make sure the calibration is important. But maybe in a period of heightened threat you have to recalibrate that based on new information you have -- new intelligence that's going to give you a better sense of where to aim your magnet.
According to an Obama transition spokesperson, Brennan will remain on the team as an adviser during the transition period.
British SAS have a motto; "who dares, wins." An example of how this doesn't work can be found in the American CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).
Over the last three decades, the CIA has come under a lot of criticism for not being able to do their job. They have done that by not taking chances.
The most spectacular recent example was the failure to spot the terrorist operation that led to the September 11, 2001 attacks.
While much blame was justifiably heaped on the FBI, it was the CIA that had first detected the plotters, and was already under orders to stop al Qaeda attempts to make more attacks on the United States.
All this began a decade earlier, when al Qaeda damaged New York City's World Trade Center in 1993 bombing. The 2001 attacks did not come out of nowhere. But the CIA had problems at the top (where decisions about what leads to pursue, how, and to what extent all this is shared with the FBI), and at the bottom (and the inability to infiltrate al Qaeda.)
At the same time, other intelligence agencies, like Britain's MI-6 and the Israeli Mossad are much better at gathering information at ground level. They, like most nations, recognize that intelligence operations can get dirty. It's all a matter of how important the intelligence is.
The British attitude is that, if you need to do this, do it right. So Britain does have agents with a "license to kill" and, more importantly, laws protecting these men and women from any later prosecution for dirty deeds they were asked to do for Queen and Country.
But in the United States, the CIA was held to a higher moral standard, and still expected to get the job done. This approach did not work.
Despite all the post-911 talk about "more aggressive intelligence operations" to prevent more attacks, the atmosphere inside the CIA discouraged any such thing. All this was largely the result of the CIA being put into a sort of semi-hibernation in the late 1970s.
This was an after effect of the Church Committee, an investigative operation sponsored by Congress, that sought to reform the CIA. The reforms were mainly about eliminating CIA spying inside the United States, and doing stuff for the president that Congress did not approve of.
There was also a desire to avoid any CIA connection with foreign unpleasantness (like using unsavory people as spies or informants). This led to a growing list of restrictions on what the CIA could do overseas, and at home.
Congress was out to make sure no future president (the CIA works for the president) could use the CIA as had been done during the Vietnam war, and before.
The CIA interpreted this as "no more James Bond stuff," just use your spy satellites and write up your reports. The Church Committee insured that the CIA became a much less interesting place to work. A lot of the most capable people got out over the next two decades. Recruiting became difficult. Word got around that the daring need not apply.
But after September 11, 2001, the CIA was tossed a huge pile of money and told to staff up and get going. The Church Committee restrictions were largely, if not completely, discarded. Recruiting efforts were greatly expanded, and since September 11, 2001, several hundred thousand applications were received. The agency has had a hard time keeping up with that.
This created some interesting personnel problems, especially in the operations division (the people who go to foreign countries and, well, sometimes do James Bond stuff.) There were few people left in the agency that remembered how to do field ops the old school way.
By late 2001, many recently retired field ops guys were being lured back to active duty. You now had a situation where the field ops population was like a cross between a college fraternity and retirement community. There are few people in the middle, age and experience wise. It's almost as bad in the analysis division (where the data is studied and reports prepared.)
The area of the CIA that has flourished in the last three decades has been the geek side of things. These folks were always flush, thanks to a Congress that felt safer with spy satellites, than with spies on the ground.
But those days are over. Much of the new technology is going to the analysts (better computerized tools to dig quickly through information) and the field operatives (like Predator UAVs, at four million bucks each.) A lot of money is going into training (learning Arabic, Pushto, Farsi and Dari are encouraged, and sometimes demanded) and the use of consultants (often former CIA operatives who would not come back full time.)
But after a few years, the Church Committee atmosphere returned. The major issue was the use of torture to extract information from terrorist suspects. It suddenly became the conventional wisdom that torture didn't work. This was absurd, as a cursory glance at the history of World War II, and every war before or since, would reveal.
Pundits pointed out that tortured people will tell you anything. Again, this displayed an amazing ignorance of intelligence tradecraft. While some people will tell you anything when tortured, a lot of people will also provide useful information that can be double checked. It's not like the movies, where everything depends on the painful pronouncements of one tortured individual.
The reality was that using "vigorous interrogation" brought forth much useful information, always has, and always will. Intelligence is all about putting together lots of small pieces. That's why U.S. operatives are taught how to resist torture. Yes, there are individuals who can outsmart, or outlast, torture. But they are always a minority. It's a war of numbers, and something that doesn't make for exciting soundbites.
The new Church Committee like restrictions outlawed things like the use of contractors for interrogations (even if there were no other source of manpower to do the job in time), the use of foreign nations to provide the "vigorous interrogation", the detention of foreigners without giving them access to the U.S. criminal justice system, and many more items that most CIA officials know, from their own experience, will only get Americans killed.
So how does the United States gather needed intelligence? It does it in secret (from many in Congress and, most of all, the media). The other intelligence agencies, like the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) are being allowed to run with these operations. Of course, everyone understands that they could still be hung out to dry down the road.
But there are more bosses in the DIA (compared to the CIA) that are willing to back up their operatives (some of whom will get screwed down the road, which is accepted as a risk of the job).
Another solution is to outsource many intel operations. The men and women who work for contractors are working without a net (of full U.S. government backing, both diplomatically and militarily). Not all these operatives are even American, but they will do it for a combination of money, adventure, personal beliefs and some assurances that America will provide some support if things get nasty (if only to retrieve the information the agents have obtained.)
The CIA lost its soul, it's heart, and most of its guts, in the late 1970s. Lots of brains are left, with big budgets to buy all manner of neat technology. But the bosses live fear of grandstanding politicians and headline hungry journalists.
While the British, the Israelis, and most other nations, have managed to capture and retain the ability to do street level intelligence, the CIA has not. It now serves mainly to draw fire, while other organizations get the job done.
The CIA is having a growing problem with their analysts and spies being recruited away by corporations. One unpleasant, for government intelligence agencies, development of the last few decades has been the growing popularity of "competitive intelligence" (corporate espionage.) It's a really big business, with most large (over a billion dollars of annual sales) corporations having separate intelligence operations. Spending on corporate intel work is over $5 billion a year, and is expected to more than double in the next four years.
The corporate recruiters have a pretty easy time of it, as they can offer higher pay, better working conditions and bonuses. The U.S. government is fighting back, at least on the bonus front. The big innovation is an old corporate one, "performance-based compensation." Government employee unions usually fight this sort of thing, because it makes too many union members look bad. But there is no union at the CIA, and most other intel agencies. So the Director of National Intelligence is implementing a number of new personnel practices, in order to make it more difficult for corporate intelligence operations to recruit government operatives.
Four days after rumors began swirling about Barack Obama's surprise pick of Leon Panetta for CIA director, the buzz has become official.
