Panetta Faces First Big Test in Choice of CIA Deputy

By CQ Staff | January 9, 2009 5:45 AM | | Comments (0)

Next door at our Spytalk blog, Jeff Stein writes:

Am I the only person who sees some irony in the demands of some key Democrats that Steve Kappes be kept at the CIA as the price of their support for Leon Panetta to run the spy agency?

To be sure, Kappes, now the CIA's No. 2, is "highly regarded," as everyone keeps saying, inside and outside the CIA. He has been a station chief in Moscow and Kuwait and in recent years pulled off a Hollywood-like secret operation to get Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi  to ditch his nuclear weapons program. His subordinates virtually gush over him.

He has been called "the best spy to emerge from the CIA in a generation."

Former CIA operative Gary Berntsen, who led one of the first teams into Afghanstan, said Kappes is "probably the finest man I've worked for in my career.  You would know what he wanted from you but it was clear that people would have the flexibility and the lattitide to make those difficult decisions on your own, which is  what we need."

But if the choice of Panetta is meant to signal a complete break with the Bush administration's CIA, why would Democrats like Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., the incoming chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, intimate that her price for supporting Obama's pick of Panetta was to keep Kappes as his deputy?

One reason is obvious: Outside of listening in on intelligence briefings as Bill Clinton's chief of staff, and reviewing CIA spreadsheets as OMB director, Panetta can't seriously be said to have "intelligence experience," no matter how furious the Obama team's spinning.

But Panetta's reputation as a top-notch manager is unchallenged. Wags joke that he was the first adult to join the Clinton White House in 1994 and clamp down on the dorm-like late-night bull sessions that passed as staff meetings. The idea is that he'll bring intellectual, organizational and fiscal rigor to a CIA badly in need of it, while Kappes rides herd on the spies.
 
But will Kappes be Panetta's loyal consigliore, or double-dealing protector of the way things are?
 
Can he be said to be the new leader's agent of "change," implementing a break from the agency's record as obedient servant on water-boarding, secret extraditions to foreign dungeons and warrantless wiretapping? 

Kappes' resistance to the regime of Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican congressman Bush chose to run the agency in 2004, is notorious.

But Goss' defenders maintain that the public never got the whole story.

"He was certainly a good ops officer," a former top CIA official during the Goss era, which ended in 2006 with a near mutiny in the operations ranks, said of Kappes.

"It wasn't that that we had a problem with that, it was his management," the official said, saying Kappes had repeatedly ignored pleas by Goss' imported congressional staff -- derided as the "Gosslings" -- to find someone to head the agency's New York office during a heightened terrorist alert against the city.  

The lionization of Kappes among ops veterans at the CIA still rankles some officials from that era, who think Goss got a raw deal.

"I would say that if Kappes is kept on," said one, still bitter,  "Panetta will need to watch out for the first time he crosses him.  There will be more nasty leaks and innuendo and 'experienced' officers leaving in a huff."

Many close observers of the agency have cautioned that Panetta should avoid bringing along an outside retinue to staff his executive offices at Langley, like Goss did when he imported his staff from the House Intelligence Committee, where he was chairman.

For that reason alone, Feinstein and others say Panetta needs "experienced intelligence professionals" to show him the ropes.

But even one of Kappes's many admirers thinks not.

"They need someone with experience but who is not associated with the last few years," offered this person, a senior CIA manager during the reign of George Tenet. "Steve or anyone else from the current group will waste a ton of time explaining why what they have done is good."  

But another official who had a box seat at CIA during the Goss stint suggests another, darker reason for keeping Kappes on: Finding someone else could be the NFL fielding replacement players during the strike years back.

When Goss came in, "Talented officers refused to take on leadership roles simply because they were annoyed that their choice for DCI, John McLaughlin, was not chosen by the President," he said. 

Which all means Panetta is going to get a quick education in the CIA's culture even before he turns to the Global War on Terror.

Panetta, argues another official from the Goss era, "is doomed with this arrangement, one way or the other. 

"He should be insisting, if 'change' is really what the Obama administration wants at CIA, that he gets to clean house," the official said.

"Otherwise, he will be managing and working against cross purposes with those who carried out the very policies they believe to be inhumane and improper."

Feinstein press secretary Phil LaVelle said the senator is confident that national security officials in the Obama administration will dictate a break from Bush-era practices at the CIA. 

"Senator Feinstein is quite clear that the abuses of the past were illegal and unacceptable, and she's introduced legislation to prevent them from occurring in the future," Lavelle said in a response to a query. 

"Senator Feinstein also expects that President-elect Obama will dictate changes from the past, and she expects any CIA director to carry out that direction."

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