Who Will Run CIA?

By Jeff Stein | November 6, 2008 3:48 PM | | Comments (1)

With snow already falling in Afghanistan, Barack Obama's not likely to wait long to pick America's next top spy.

For my two cents, it's as hard to imagine the president-elect keeping Mike Hayden at the CIA as it is him picking Anthony Lake for the job, no matter how much we're hearing about Obama naming Republicans like Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar to top national security posts.

Notwithstanding Hayden's restoration of calm professionalism at the agency after years of turmoil, he was a loyal soldier in the Bush administration's secret warrantless wiretapping program, as director of the NSA before moving to the CIA. 

That will never sit well with most Democrats, at least some of whom will think of Hayden, fairly or not, as a potential fifth columnist. 

Obama will want somebody he knows and trusts running herd on the agency's spies 
and analysts.
But it's also got to be somebody who knows his or her way around the spy shop, where, as former CIA Director Porter J. Goss discovered, the knives can come out fast for a captain who rocks the boat. 

"The consensus seems to be that this job is Anthony Lake's, should he decide to accept it," Helene Cooper reported in Thursday's New York Times. 
 
"That's a big question though, as Mr. Lake, a close adviser to Mr. Obama, has told friends he's not sure he wants it. His failure to win Senate confirmation the last time he was nominated to head the C.I.A., under Mr. Clinton, left him with a bad taste in his mouth."
 
To that I'd add a Clinton Corollary: Don't make it easy for Republicans to beat you up before you move into the White House. Clinton never really recovered from his misbegotten announcement of a new "don't ask-don't tell" policy on military gays during the 1990 transition.
 
Anthony Lake is one of the most insightful and articulate national security officials around, for my money. But the fact is that Republicans have been dining out on his career since 1970, when Lake resigned from Henry Kissinger's White House national security council staff in protest over the secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. 
 
All things considered, Lake and everybody else around Obama would probably be happy if he were given another task, such as revitalizing the President's Foreign Policy Advisory Board (PFIAB), whose power to oversee the work of the intelligence agencies was gutted by President Bush. 
 
That would free Obama to turn to other Democratic stalwarts who can find their way up Route 123 to Langley on their own.
 
Rep. Jane Harman, in particular, might like the job. By all accounts the feisty Democrat earned as much respect from intelligence professionals as she did scorn from fellow Californian and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for her bipartisan approach to fixing and improving the CIA.
 
A CIA nomination would get her out of Pelosi's hair and out of the House Homeland Security Committee, where she's been languishing since the speaker passed her over as House Intelligence Committee chair in favor of former border patrolman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas.
 
It's often said that Harman is difficult to work with, to put it kindly, but the CIA may need someone with as finely tuned a BS meter as Harman's to fix its long ingrained problems. 
 
Another Democrat who comes to mind is Tim Roemer, the former Indiana congressman (and intelligence committee member) who had a high profile on the 9/11 Commission.
 
Roemer now serves on the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, a bipartisan commission created by Congress in 2007, and is president of the Center for National Policy.

At least in the eyes of many Democrats, Roemer would be a good pick to execute the new administration's expected no-toture policy.
 
"Torture," he wrote in the Washington Monthly, "trades the illusory promise of short-term gain for the near certainty of eventual loss. It tries to convince us that we can defeat terrorists on the cheap by avoiding the long, hard work that counterterrorism entails." 
 
Roemer certainly worked hard enough for Obama's election, especially in Indiana, to be considered for at least some kind of high national security position, if not at CIA, then Homeland Security.
 
But Obama's go-to guy on intelligence throughout the campaign was former career CIA official John Brennan, who co-founded the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and National Counterterrorism Center,  post-9/11 efforts to integrate terror threat intelligence.
 
Obama could well send him back there, if he doesn't bring him into the White House in some capacity. 

Brennan's views mesh perfectly with the president-elect's.
 
"If you look at the world in black and white," Brannan told Laura Rozen at Mother Jones magazine, "you miss a lot of the subtleties out there. 'Either with us or against'--the world is not divided into good and evil a lot of time. Despite America's military might, a lot of these problems do not lend themselves to kinetic solutions"--i.e. the use of force."

But Brennan would have some making up to do if he goes back to Langley. In that same interview he called the intelligence community "a complete mess" and the CIA "dysfunctional."
 
His fix?
 
"Rectify a lot of stuff that was done by executive order in secrecy, and bring more transparency. Better protection of civil liberties. Improve oversight of CIA on these activities."

[The above quotes were wrongly attributed to Mr. Brennan, rather than an anonymous intelligence source quoted in the same piece.  I regret the error.]  
 
With views like that, no matter how accurate, at least some Republicans would have a field day beating up on Brennan.
 
The current occupant of the top spy's seat, meanwhile, remains outwardly calm, urging CIA employees not speculate about the future and keep their noses to the grindstones.

"Mike Hayden is not worried about it," said an intelligence official who asked not to be named.  "He is focused on doing the job." 

But he wouldn't mind being asked to the dance, the official said.
 
"If he is asked to stay on at CIA, that's something he would consider at that time.  He likes the work, he has a high regard for the people there, and he cares deeply about the mission.  Those are the factors that he would consider."

More from CQ Politics

Tags: Barrack Obama, Chuck Hagel; Richard Lugar; Nancy Peosi, CIA, John Brennan; Anthony Lake; PFIAB, Michael Hayden, Silvestre Reyes, Tim Roemer

    Comments

  1. The key here is not to think of this as one appointment but two: whoever is picked to be D/CIA must be someone who can work well with the DNI, and vice versa. They have to consider this in tandem.

    Key questions to ask:

    How does a new D/CIA maintain or improve analytic and collection standards for the Agency?

    How does a new D/CIA affect morale at CIA HQS?

    What tone does a new DNI set for the Community as a whole and for cooperation with CIA? The DNI experiment will fail without CIA buy-in.

    Posted by: frood Author Profile Page | November 8, 2008 1:49 PM

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