CQ HOMELAND SECURITY
Dec. 5, 2008 – 8:15 p.m.
Send Dollar Bill to the CIA
By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff
Anyone connected to post-Sept. 11 “harsh interrogation measures,” no matter at arm’s length, is apparently disqualified to run Barack Obama ’s spy agency.
Hence the immolation of former National Counterterrorism Center chief John Brennan, the president-elect’s closest intelligence adviser, as the lead candidate to run the spy agency.
The left-wing hit job on Brennan showed that liberals may have a taste for covert action after all, the spooks chuckle.
“Almost anyone working at the agency since [Sept. 11] is tainted,” says retired CIA veteran Milt Bearden, a former Pakistan station chief, expressing the facts of life.
“If he wants experience, get an old-timer who left before that. Or go with a completely new face, maybe someone like a [Richard] Holbrooke, though I doubt he’d take it.”
Or get it. The veteran diplomat’s vice-chairmanship of a hedge fund is said to be problematic.
Can anybody who could do the job, get the job?
“Beats me,” said a well-wired former senior intelligence official. “Brennan’s hands were not very dirty at all. He was apparently thrown under the bus because some ill-informed bloggers thought they were [dirty] and the transition folks didn’t have the will to explain that they were wrong.”
A former national security official and friend of Brennan, who asked not to be identified, is disgusted by what happened.
“Ninety-nine percent of” what the CIA has been doing since Sept. 11 “is not related to torture, but now everybody is tarred with this brush,” he said.
“The dirty little secret, “ he added, “is that very little has been going on since [Sept. 11] that hasn’t gone on for the last 30 years.”
By that standard, almost anybody who’s worked in operations — like the much-touted former CIA station chief Jack Devine, or the current heads of the agency’s clandestine services, Stephen Kappes and Michael Sulick — has a skeleton in the closet.
“They are going to have to go outside of that circle,” says a recently retired CIA division chief.
Send Dollar Bill to the CIA
“There are a couple of great officers who hands are not ‘dirty’ and could manage the agency well,” contends another recently retired senior official.
Melvin Gamble comes to mind, he said. The just-retired chief of the Africa Division and deputy chief of the European Division knows where the bodies are buried and has decades of operational experience that would be respected in Langley’s hallways.
Executive experience is crucial to success there, say most intelligence insiders. And that makes the current occupant of the CIA chiefs, Gen. Michael V. Hayden , the best-qualified candidate of all, said one agency official.
“Almost all directors have had knowledge of intelligence — either as a producer or as a consumer — but the ability to manage a large complex organization is also necessary,” he said.
“That’s why Hayden is really ideal, to my mind. He’s managed a large complex organization, and it happened to be an intelligence agency” — NSA — “before coming here.”
But he added, “Of course, everyone here realizes he’s history, for political reasons.”
You want somebody clean?
CIA insiders are generally loath to consider anyone from Capitol Hill. The brief, sad tenure of Porter Goss comes quickly to mind.
But one name I heard floated Friday gave pause to the spy world consensus: Dollar Bill.
Dollar Bill Bradley.
The former New Jersey Democratic senator (1979-97), presidential candidate and NBA star — so named for the $500,000 contract the Princeton grad and Rhodes scholar landed with the New York Knicks — impressed many a CIA official when he served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).
“I distinctly remember briefing Bradley on counterintelligence and other intelligence matters and being blown away by how serious, informed, and supportive he was,” James Olson, a former head of CIA counterintelligence now teaching at Texas A&M, said by e-mail.
“I don’t know if he’d even be available or interested, but Bill Bradley was one of the best SSCI members I worked with. He knows this stuff and has the clout, political savvy, and integrity to get the job done.”
Send Dollar Bill to the CIA
Mention of Bradley’s name drew mostly slow nods of approval in my soundings Friday.
Not that Bradley, who’s spent most of the years since he retired writing books (http://www.billbradley.com/) and hosting a radio show, is a natural to be top spook. After all, he’s never run anything more complicated than a fast break.
But neither, you might say, has the next president of the United States — unless you count his improbable winning campaign. The brainy athletes might well make a good team.
Mr. Obama: Go for the open man.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
Comments
Kudos for this article! Yes, Bill Bradley would make possibly the very best CIA boss. And I say this even though I am still not convinced the CIA is worth having at all. It has cost the US extraordinary political capital everywhere it has gone in the world, most especially on US university campuses. Nevertheless, given our ruling elite's addiction to the illusion of intelligence, put someone in there like Bill Bradley. Who knows, as unlikely a win as Obama pulled off, Bradley might actually persuade spookville do something persuasively intelligent, persuasive to the doubters. We sure need the persuasion. As things now stand, the CIA has earned the reputation of producing less intelligence than non- and anti-intelligence. Thus the left wing's uproar over anyone who has cooperated with it and not screamed and yelled about that in the past. Kudos to the left wing nuts for finally getting something right.
I would be happy if all you torture freaks would just go sit in a cave somewhere and leave us alone for the next 4 years. I'm tired of having you in our discourse. I'm sick of the mess you made of this country. Go away and don't come back.
This is very much like the "few bad apples" argument with police. If 99% are good, how were the 1% allowed to do the bad things? Turning a blind eye to abuse, whether it's the police or the CIA makes you an accomplice, when your job is a position of authority. This is a concept that seems to have been lost on those entrusted with the power of life and death over others.
You write: CIA insiders are generally loath to consider anyone from Capitol Hill. The brief, chaotic tenure of Porter Goss comes quickly to mind. Lets consider GWH Bush. He ran the CIA and used it to help him get Reagan and then himself elected. He had no spook experience. The CIA will do what it can to protect itself from politicians and will hide its most hideous errors to best of its abilities. Being accountable for unwarranted breaches of law is what citizen are resonsible for not CIA operatives. How about asking the CIA to clean its own house? Surely it is willing to punish its own rogues and flagrant brown nosers?
Perhaps the CIA needs to be broken into a thousand pieces as JFK threatened to do. Its purpose serves no good, from what I can see, and often serves only evil. For those who consider Hayden a good pick, I suggest the difference--between someone who spies on its own citizens to someone who tortures--represents a moral dilemma of another kind altogether.
Never, ever, ever should we allow any apologist for torture to attain high office at the CIA or anywhere else in the new administration. No to waterboarding, no to stress positions, heat and cold extremes, sleep deprivation or sensory deprivation. Torture must be fully abolished and never allowed to happen again. Torture is a crime and is absolutely unacceptable as government policy period.
If Obama really wants to stick it to the Bushies he ought to name Valerie Plame Wilson as the new CIA Director. :-)
Those who sat on the sidelines could have spoken up and stopped the torture or at least given the public some information and let us USE it. But no, they were so concerned about covering their asses and keeping there special perks. Screw them all. What they ALLOWED the Bush admin to do to one of their own is despicable and torture techniques they promulgated are worse. And Greg, BINGO. Plame for CIA Director.
Whatever your opinion about Brennan's withdrawal from consideration for DCIA is, you should accurately report the reasons people objected to him. It was not a case of guilt by association. Brennan actively, vocally defended the practice of rendition several times. Of course, in the case of rendition, it's not U.S. agents that are torturing. But U.S. agents are sending people to countries where they will be tortured. Brennan also said, about torture by U.S. agents, "There has been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists. It has saved lives." If someone believes that torture saves lives, then obviously he sees some value in torture, and that it is not entirely beyond the pale. This is not someone I want representing me and my country. If, as they say, "America does not torture," then why allow for a cost-benefit analysis if torture? Should we analyze the costs vs. the benefits of genocide? Or mass rape as a war tactic? No. Certain things are beyond the pale, no matter how tactically compelling we may think they are. Furthermore, opposition to torture does not just come from the "liberal bloggers" (no names named, as usual) and the DFHs, but also from top army and intelligence officials. I'm sure you read the recent op-ed in the Washington Post by Matthew Alexander, who worked on the team that captured Al-Qaeda's # 2 guy in Iraq. Torture does not work as a technique for getting accurate information, he says. Instead, he and his team relied upon smarts, rapport, cultural understanding, and investigation skills. And it worked. So Brennan's insistence that torture has value because it provides useful information is not only morally repugnant but also factually wrong.
what a bunch of whiny cry babies these CIA types are. I can only imagine how they cry themselves to sleep over what Bin Ladin is saying about them, compared to how they react to some liberal bloggers. And FYI, bloggers have been whining about a lot of Obama's picks, and Obama hasn't changed his mind about any of them, so maybe instead of crying about liberal bloggers, maybe you should criticize Obama, you know, the guy who actually made the decision.
"[N]o matter at arm's length" is just another way of saying he was there, thought it was wrong, and did nothing about it. This makes him, not an innocent bystander, but an accomplice. We are learning from the thousands of American dead, from the more than 30,000 American injured, and the estimated 1 million Iraqi dead, the CIA needs to be run by someone with the backbone and strength to say "no" or, better yet, "I don't know." John Brennan was unable to do that so he is not qualified to lead the CIA
"Anyone connected to post-Sept. 11 "enhanced interrogation measures," no matter at arm's length, is apparently disqualified to run Barack Obama 's spy agency." Absolutely. Don't fret, there are plenty of unpaid positions at the gulag.
What's that you say Mr. Goebbels? Dr. Mengele is the only man capable of doing my circumcision? Well if YOU say he's the only man who can do it, what choice do I have but to give him his own hospital? Rule of Law fool of law drool of law, its all meaningless, its time for the RULE OF MEN. That stuff in the declaration about all men being equal and the constitution's bar on cruelty is just words.
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