SpyTalk

The Great Mentioner is busy, busy, busy these days, feeding the media frenzy for names of people "under consideration," as they say, for top positions in the Obama administration - including the spy agencies.

The Wall Street Journal's estimable Siobhan Gorman weighed in Tuesday with her own interesting mentionables to lead the CIA and the National Intelligence Directorate, making the point that none of them could be accused of palling around with terrorists.

Bill Ayers, in other words, is not on the list.

"Most of those being discussed as candidates for director of national intelligence and director of the CIA have staked out a middle ground between safeguarding civil liberties and aggressively pursuing nontraditional adversaries,"  wrote Gorman, singling out former CIA official John Brennan as a leading candidate to return to the spy agency as its boss.

"Mr. Brennan is a leading contender for one of the two jobs, say some advisers. He declined to comment on personnel matters. Gen. James L. Jones, a former North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander; Thomas Fingar, the chief of analysis for the [national] intelligence director; Joan A. Dempsey, who served in top intelligence and Pentagon posts; former Rep. Tim Roemer of Indiana, who served on the 9/11 Commission; and [California Democratic Rep. Jane] Harman have also been mentioned. Ms. Harman has also been cited as a potential secretary of homeland security."

Liberals would swoon over Fingar, I suspect. As head of State Department intelligence in the first Bush administration, he was the only intelligence official who called it right on Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. And he oversaw the writing of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program that many credit - or blame - for blunting what seemed like an imminent Bush administration attack on Iran.  

None of the others mentioned are likely to upset Obamamaniacs too much, either.

But Brennan shouldn't be a slam dunk, caution some intelligence insiders, who say Brennan's operational dossier is too thin for the post.

Brennan got the Terrorist Threat Analysis Center (now the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) up and running after 9/11, they acknowledge, but he wouldn't have gotten the job if he hadn't been then-CIA Director George Tenet's executive assistant. He has no counterterrorism field experience.

One CIA official who absolutely should be back in Washington running something, say some, is David Cohen, who left Langley after 9/11 to join the NYPD as Deputy Director for Intelligence. 
 
Cohen hates publicity. The NYPD's hiring statement was brief:

"From 1995 to 1997, Cohen directed the CIA's Directorate of Operations, where he oversaw the agency's worldwide operations, managed the CIA's global network of offices and personnel, and maintained agency relationships with foreign intelligence and security services. From 1991 to 1995, Cohen was deputy director of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, where he guided the agency's analysis program, which reviewed every political, economic, and military assessment prepared by the CIA for the President and his senior national security advisors. Cohen's career at the CIA was marked by his leadership in combating global terrorism, international organized crime, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

One intelligence insider said Cohen should replace Charlie Allen as chief of Information and Analysis (IA) at the Homeland Security Department.  When Allen came to DHS in  2005, he'd already spent a half century at CIA.

"Cohen has built the best homeland security Intel organization in the country" at the NYPD, this person said,  "much better than DHS/IA and comparable with both the DI and DO [the CIA's directorates of Intelligence and Operations] but at a localized level."

Many would agree.