CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
May 28, 2009 – 12:01 a.m.
Balancing Act Builds Panetta’s Bona Fides
By Tim Starks, CQ Staff
When President Obama announced Leon E. Panetta as his pick to lead the CIA, some intelligence veterans bristled at the news. The agency had emerged from a divisive period under directors Porter J. Goss and George J. Tenet, and the last thing it needed, these critics groused, was a new director from outside the intelligence community.
Moreover, they added, Panetta’s profile as a veteran Washington insider — a former Democratic congressman from California (1977-93), and chief of staff in the Clinton White House — made him a particularly bad fit for a job where loyalty to the agency matters most.
Yet today, four months since he was picked, Panetta’s political background may be proving his greatest asset. Not only has he won over some detractors who had questioned his loyalty to the agency, he also appears, for now, to be successfully balancing the CIA’s need to keep its work quarantined as much as possible from external political influences and the mandate to improve the agency’s congressional relations, which had soured during George W. Bush ’s presidency.
Two recent episodes involving intelligence messes left over from the Bush administration have showcased Panetta’s political acumen as he fights to maintain the CIA’s institutional stature. The first was Panetta’s handling of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ’s charges that the CIA misled her in 2002 about enhanced interrogation methods. Panetta’s May 15 response, stating that “it is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress,” solidified his own standing in intelligence circles, while pushing back against Pelosi’s claims.
The same week, Panetta’s CIA also rebuffed the right, when former Vice President Dick Cheney requested that the agency declassify documents pertaining to the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Cheney, an outspoken defender of the methods, said he was confident that the public would be impressed with the results that those techniques had yielded. But the CIA quashed Cheney’s request, citing pending litigation that concerned interrogation matters.
The new CIA chief also petitioned Obama to reverse an earlier decision to release additional photographs documenting the abuse of detainees. Panetta “argued against the release of the photos,” said an intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk more openly.
Panetta will need his political skills in the weeks and months ahead as he tries to improve the CIA’s relations with Congress at a time when many Democratic lawmakers are pressing for further investigations into Bush-approved interrogation practices that Obama is now calling “torture.”
There are, of course, other pressing matters to occupy intelligence chiefs and their overseers in Congress: the issue of intelligence shortcomings in Afghanistan, for instance, or Panetta’s recent candid admission that the agency lacks full knowledge about the location of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. But for better or worse, grappling with the Bush legacy still remains a critical challenge if the CIA is to reclaim its autonomy. And the efforts of civil-liberties-minded lawmakers to revisit alleged abuses from that time will continue testing Panetta’s hard-earned political prowess.
The Pelosi confrontation has helped convince some skeptics that Panetta won’t simply cave before the demands of Democratic leaders on the Hill. Veterans of past flare-ups between Congress and the intelligence community also note that in the Pelosi episode, Panetta displayed the instincts of an old Washington hand: choosing his words carefully and sidestepping the specifics of the Speaker’s allegation.
“He’s going to be very careful,” said William Nolte, a professor at the University of Maryland who once directed legislative affairs for the National Security Agency. “There may be controversies, but he’s not going to be sticking his thumb in people’s eyes.”
Hill Overtures
One of Panetta’s strongest rationales for shoring up the agency’s relations with Congress actually came courtesy of outgoing Bush CIA Director Michael V. Hayden . In his final news conference as director, Hayden told reporters that the agency was in good shape. But he added that if there was “one thing I wish were better,” it would be “a better relationship with Congress.”
Panetta promptly picked up on that idea during his February confirmation hearings. He vowed to cut back on the use of limited briefings with congressional leaders in favor of briefings for the full Intelligence committees. That delighted members on both sides of the aisle, who argued the previous administration abused the limited procedures to keep many lawmakers in the dark on intelligence matters.
During the hearing, Panetta’s political dexterity was evident when he was able to give Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein , D-Calif., the impression that he sided with her on interrogation practices and other intelligence questions, while also assuring Vice Chairman Christopher S. Bond , a Missouri Republican, that he would be open to the views on those issues staked out by Republicans. The Senate confirmed Panetta by voice vote.
Similarly, Panetta steered a careful middle course when the Senate Intelligence panel initiated a review of Bush-era CIA interrogation methods in March. Panetta appointed former Sen. Warren B. Rudman (1980-93), a New Hampshire Republican who commands broad respect from members of both parties, to handle the committee’s inquiry.
Even in drafting his rebuke to Pelosi, D‑Calif., Panetta alerted lawmakers that he would be sending the note to agency employees. But he also introduced his first major point of dissension with Congress when he elected to send it over their objections.
Some Democrats took issue with the letter’s claim that agency records indicated that Pelosi was directly briefed on the harsh interrogation techniques, which she claimed CIA officials had kept concealed from potential opponents in Congress. “As I understand, Mr. Panetta’s notes don’t reflect that,” said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland. “Mr. Panetta was not there, and he wasn’t the director.”
Yet even as sparks flew around the letter’s content, observers again noted Panetta’s careful phrasing: He stated that it was not the CIA’s “policy or practice” to mislead Congress — something quite different from a denial that Pelosi had been misled.
“None of this happened on his watch, so he’s not defending himself,” said Florida Democrat Bob Graham, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who counts Panetta as a friend. “He is defending the institution, which I think is one of his responsibilities.”
Charles Battaglia, a former staff director of the Senate Intelligence panel, agrees that protecting the CIA’s institutional integrity was the main point of Panetta’s letter, which had, after all, been addressed to CIA employees, not to Pelosi or other congressional leaders. “What we may be seeing is an individual who is trying to establish his own bona fides within his organization,” Battaglia said. “He was a little suspect coming in to people up there who really didn’t know Leon Panetta.”
And in a demonstration of his juggling skills, the week after the Pelosi flap became public, Panetta was back at the job of putting Congress in a broader information loop to take up questions relating to intelligence policy.
“I’m going up tomorrow morning to meet with the congressional group and just have coffee and talk about some of the issues that are involved with it,” Panetta said in a speech before the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles. “I think we ought to have more of those opportunities. ... I think I would rather operate on the basis of ‘let’s talk about it, tell me what your concerns are; I’ll tell you what my concerns are,’ and do it in a way in which we can be honest with one another.”
Panetta has participated in 30 congressional hearings, meetings or calls, according to agency spokesman George Little. That, Battaglia notes, is the best way for a director to establish amicable terms with Congress: to get into the habit of being forthcoming. No one on a congressional oversight committee, he said, likes being surprised.
The Institutional Position
Panetta has taken other steps to defend the CIA as an institution, both publicly and behind the scenes. At his confirmation hearings, he rejected calls for the prosecution of agency employees who conducted interrogations using techniques such as waterboarding, if they were approved by the Justice Department.
Panetta was less successful during deliberations on what to do with Justice Department memos providing the legal justification and descriptions of the harsh techniques. Obama released those documents. Panetta’s position, said the intelligence official, “was that the legal analysis in the memos should be released but not the description of interrogation methods.”
While Panetta’s defense of the agency’s outlook failed to win Obama’s support in the matter of the so-called torture memos, he has won over at least one earlier critic, former CIA official Robert Grenier.
“For me, the critical issue has always been whether he would be willing to stand up for the institution against unfair detractors, and I think he’s clearly done that,” said Grenier, now chairman of global security consulting at Kroll, an international risk consultancy firm.
As some in Congress clamor for further investigation of Bush-era intelligence practices, Panetta used his talk at the Pacific Council — his first public speech since taking office — to lay out his philosophy about such oversight efforts. He again struck a careful balance between flashing a yellow light on the notion on the agency’s behalf and defending Congress’ traditional prerogative to investigate executive branch activities.
“My view is I’m not going to tell the Congress or anybody else what they should or shouldn’t do with regards to this issue,” Panetta said. “I do believe it’s important to learn the lessons from that period.” But he added: “What I’m most concerned about is that this stuff doesn’t become the kind of political issue that everything else becomes in Washington, D.C., where it becomes so divisive that it begins to interfere with the ability of these intelligence agencies to do our primary job, which is to focus on the threats that face us today and tomorrow.”
The divide between defending the institution and strengthening relations with Congress can actually be bridged via a robust defense of the agency’s interests, said Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Ornstein suggests that it’s possible that neither party is at fault in the Pelosi flap — that CIA officials speaking in typical bureaucratese believed they told lawmakers one thing, and Pelosi heard another. If Panetta earns the faith of his employees, he can instruct them on how to brief Congress in a way lawmakers will understand, improving the chances that they will listen.
Graham said, however, that Panetta can effectively resolve tensions with Congress and shore up the agency’s standing if “Leon continues to be Leon — a very level-headed, thoughtful, smart, Washington-savvy man.”
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel agrees that the best policy is to let Panetta be Panetta. “Leon understands inherently what a president needs to know from the intelligence community,” Emanuel said in an e-mailed statement. “And this president relies heavily on his sound judgment and candor on intelligence and national security matters.”
Others note, though, that Panetta will continue being a robust advocate for the agency’s interests. “Anybody who thought that Panetta, moving into this job, would be anything other than the fiduciary for the CIA didn’t know Panetta,” said Ornstein. “Basically, his first responsibility is to follow the president’s policy, but right at the top of his list of responsibilities is to protect and enhance the institution.”
Comments
PANETTA SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN NAMED HEAD OF THE CIA. To wit, his panel guest list for the Panetta Institute's forums include a who's who of right wing criminals: the PNAC'rs among others. Panetta gave these crooks a forum for their lies and fear mongering, as if they were valid, upstanding members of this nation's community. THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A RED FLAG FOR OBAMA. There is much to fear in this appointment, as there is in Obama's choice of economic advisers: those who crafted the demise of the U.S. economy under Clinton (Summers, for one), and who aided and abetted the raping and pillaging of this nation under Bush. America is going the way of the Romans: the end of this corrupt and violent nation (with an indifferent and self-involved population) is near, the engine of greed and corruption is speeding down the track... or over the edge if another analogy is needed.
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