Many CIA veterans and their friends in Congress are generally groaning over the choice of Leon Panetta over an "intelligence professional" to run the nation's premier spy agency.

"The message is, 'I don't want to hear anything out of the CIA. Make it go away. No scandals. Keep it quiet,'" a former senior CIA manager told Laura Rozen for her new  Foreign Policy.com blog.

"They put over there a guy who is a political loyalist, who will keep everything nice and quiet, but who won't know a good piece of intelligence from a shi**y piece of intelligence, and wouldn't know a good intelligence officer" from a bad one."

Lamented another former top CIA officer, one who was hoping to get Obama's nod: "So much for a professional at the top."

"I find the choice of Leon Panetta to head the CIA a curious one," another former spy told Wired's Noah Shachtman at the Danger Room. 
 

"On the one hand, if you are looking to pick a nation's top spook, it is generally a good idea to pick someone with more than a cursory exposure to the intelligence business. It is also more than a little annoying that we can't seem to find a CIA chief that hasn't spent all of their adult life playing politics."

Speaking of which, my CQ colleague Tim Starks drew frosty responses about Panetta from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the incoming chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the man she is replacing, John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV of West Virginia.

 "I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA director. I know nothing about this, other than what I've read," she said in a written statement in response to a query from Starks. "My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time."

Likewise, Rockefeller was worried that Panetta "has no intelligence experience," an aide told Starks,  "because he has believed this has always been a position that should be outside of the political realm."

Panetta's limited intelligence experience demands that his deputy "be an insider and must have strong internal management skills," a senior retired operative told me.

I, too, was one of those who thought the president-elect should find someone who knows their way around the Langley labyrinths well enough to fend off self-serving bureaucrats and whip that place into shape, especially by getting rid of mid-level managers who are routinely described to me as unimaginative and overcautious.

But the public, and by extension, Obama, obviously doesn't share as high a regard for "intelligence professionals" as we inside-the-Beltwayers.  

Indeed, to many people, "intelligence" and "professional" hardly belong in the same sentence after the surprise attacks of 9/11, the Iraq WMD fiasco, the continuing success of Osama Bin Laden in eluding capture, and, of course, the false confessions of top bin Laden lieutenants under torture.

The infamous "Curveball" episode, in which CIA bosses took the word of a lone informant they never even talked to as the main basis for declaring Saddam Hussein had biological weapons, showed the agency's standards of accuracy "were lower than a tabloid newspaper's," in the words of one disgusted CIA operations veteran.    

Among Washington's big hitters, moreover, running the CIA was no longer considered a plum, I was told, since the creation of the National Intelligence Directorate displaced the agency as the President's daily briefer and primus inter pares in the spy community.

People who might've jumped at the chance to run it in the past now saw it as second seat in the violin section, some longtime intelligence observers were telling me.

"I wish I could say that I disagree, but I can't. It's spot on," said one top former intelligence agency head, reflecting a sentiment I heard from others.

"Everybody wants to run the whole show, especially since it gives them 'player' status in Washington, and the opportunity to hobnob with the President. Never mind that the [intelligence] community they preside over is broken, long overdue for an overhaul, and mainly turns out crap."

But if the "intelligence professionals" take a deep breath, they may find that Obama's choice is the best thing that could happen to the CIA, at least in one regard: the former White House budget director, chief of staff, congressman, onetime Republican (a Nixon appointee) and longtime Washington power broker is hardly likely to play second fiddle to a mere general or admiral occupying the DNI's chair.

One way to look at the not-yet-announced appointment is that Obama is putting his own man at the top of a very sensitive agency, one that could make or break his presidency, in the same way that JFK installed his brother Bobby at the Justice Department.

Adm. Dennis Blair, the all but officially announced DNI nominee, is not likely to miss that.

Harry B. "Skip" Brandon, a former deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI, compared Obama's selection of Panetta to Jimmy Carter's appointment of federal judge William H. Webster to run a troubled FBI in 1978. Nine years later, President Ronald Reagan turned to Webster to take over an even more troubled CIA, which was caught up in the so-called Iran-Contra, arms-for-hostages scandal.

"He could bring a bipartisan credibility to the CIA," Brandon said of Panetta, "and calm the troubled waters there." He could also be "an honest broker on Capitol Hill," Brandon said.

And as more than one close observer put it, "No one's saying Leon who?"

By all accounts, moreover, Panetta was a strong manager and effective chief of staff in the Clinton White House, "an honest, straight shooter," in the words of one Obama booster who asked not to be named.

And from his stints as OMB director, and before that, chairmanship of the House Budget Committee, "he knows the entire scope of the intelligence budget," this person added. As chief of staff, he also sat in on the President's daily intelligence brief.

More recently, Panetta was a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which  recommended a timetable with U.S. troop withdrawals.

But it's not likely he'll get a free pass in his confirmation hearings.

As I wrote earlier today, Panetta's nomination is likely to give Republicans fresh ammunition to reopen questions about the Clinton administration's counterterrorism record, which Republican critics maintain was lackluster at best after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993.

Panetta was budget director and later chief of staff during the first Clinton term.

Considering the Republicans had the White House when the 9/11 hijackers came calling, of course -- and by most accounts sloughed off warnings headlined "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" -- there's only so far they can take that line of attack.

But if only one thing is clear from the Panetta nomination, it's this: President Obama intends to make a clear break with the intelligence policies and personnel of the Bush administration.

"Having served in Congress in the wake of Watergate and the domestic surveillance abuses that surfaced during the 1970s, Mr. Panetta understands how a democratic government should operate," said Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., a member of the House Intelligence Committee and chair of its oversight Panel since 2007.

"We need the CIA to collect reliable, actionable intelligence in ways that respect American values and honor the Constitution," Holt added.

"Mr. Panetta's background and reputation indicate he would serve the intelligence community, the President, and the country well." 

Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the former Pacific forces commander who once coordinated military operations at the CIA, is still on tap to become the nation's next top intelligence officer, despite an unexplained delay of an official announcement from President-elect Obama, sources familiar with the process say.

Blair has been touted as a shoe-in for the nomination by unnamed congressional and other anonymous sources.

But weeks have passed since his name first surfaced as a cinch for the Obama administration's director of National Intelligence.

Even in the absence of a formal announcement, however, Blair is being prepped for confirmation hearings on his expected nomination.

 "I know he's being prepared for his hearing," said a top former intelligence official, who also asked for anonymity in exchange for talking freely about the process.  

In contrast, the president-elect's national security team has had trouble finding an appropriate candidate to become the CIA's next chief.

One knowledgeable source said that the Obama team was "back to zero" on finding a CIA chief, an assertion rejected by a transition official.

Running the spy agency has become less attractive to personalities who once might have sought the position, sources say, ever since it was subsumed by the new national intelligence directorate (ODNI), set up after the surprise 9/11 attacks.  

"A lot of people don't want the job," said the source, because the CIA chief is no longer top dog in the fractious, 16-agency intelligence community, and no longer gives the President his daily briefing.  The Obama team has gone down "some blind alleys" in finding the right person, the source said.

Whereas in pre-9/11 times the job might have been a springboard to bigger things, now "it's a career ender" because it requires direct supervision of such contentious policies as renditions and interrogations.

"You've got to just really love it," a former top CIA official said,  "because it's too painful otherwise."

In 1995, Blair was appointed associate director of the CIA for military support, "responsible for direction and coordination of Intelligence Community support to military operations," acording to the agency's Web site.

"[In] reality the risks to maritime flows of oil are far smaller than is commonly assumed," Blair and Kenneth Lieberthal wrote in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs. 

"First, tankers are much less vulnerable than conventional wisdom holds. Second, limited regional conflicts would be unlikely to seriously upset traffic, and terrorist attacks against shipping would have even less of an economic effect. Third, only a naval power of the United States' strength could seriously disrupt oil shipments."

"According to a participant who would speak only if he was not identified, that led Cambone to stalk over to Blair after the meeting, jab his finger into his chest and declare that he expected more out of him," Newsweek said.

"Blair worked on a report that helped the Air Force decide to pursue a multiyear contract for F-22 Raptor fighter jets. At the same time, he was on the board of EDO Corp., a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin on the F-22 project. After news reports about the apparent conflict of interest, Blair resigned as the head of IDA and his board seat at EDO."