Departing CIA Spy Chief Regrets

January 15, 2009, 5:35 pm
By Mark Mazzetti
Michael V. HaydenMichael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, gave an exit interview to reporters at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va.

Michael V. Hayden, the departing director of the Central Intelligence Agency, struck a defiant and occasionally combative tone on Thursday as he vigorously defended the C.I.A.’s network of secret prisons and its aggressive interrogation methods.

Giving no ground to critics who argue that the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program used torture and produced little information about the workings of Al Qaeda, Mr. Hayden credited the C.I.A. with striking repeated blows on the terror network, and said that any effort to investigate the past would breed risk aversion in the ranks of the clandestine service.

He dismissed congressional efforts to force C.I.A. interrogators to abide by the military’s interrogation rules, saying it was a “real shot in the dark” to expect that a slate of non-coercive interrogation methods would be effective against Al Qaeda’s senior leaders.

The C.I.A. years ago abandoned some of its most aggressive techniques, including “waterboarding.” But Mr. Hayden still defended the agency’s response in the weeks and months after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the now controversial decisions by senior C.I.A. officials “for whom doing nothing is an immoral choice,” he said.

“The agency did none of this out of enthusiasm. It did it out of duty and it did it with the best legal advice it had,” he said.

Mr. Hayden, who retired from the Air Force last summer after nearly 39-year military career, has drawn fire for his outspoken defense both of the C.I.A. program and the Bush Administration’s domestic eavesdropping program, which he ran as head of the National Security Agency.

He is being replaced at the C.I.A. by Leon E. Panetta, a former congressman and White House chief of staff.

With days remaining in his tenure at the C.I.A, he said he would be proud to be remembered for advocating a muscular strategy against Al Qaeda.

“When the history of this agency during this period is written, the last thing you’re going to say that it was risk averse. Trust me,” he said.

Since last summer, he said, American and Pakistani operatives have taken aim at Al Qaeda’s hub in the Pakistani mountains. There have been dozens of airstrikes by C.I.A. operated Predator drones in recent months, although Mr. Hayden would not acknowledge the existence of the attacks.

Mr. Hayden said that the attrition rates at the C.I.A. are at an historic low, that tens of thousands of applicants submit resumes each year, and that the agency would soon reach the goals for new analysts and clandestine officers set by President Bush in 2004. But he said that the C.I.A. would continue to bring in a steady flow of new recruits, even if it meant early retirement for some agency veterans.

Hackles in spy circles over selection of Panetta as CIA chief

By Philip Klein
September 9.09
Barack Obama's choice of Leon Panetta, the former congressman who went on to serve as chief of staff for President Clinton, to head the Central Intelligence Agency has members of the intelligence community scratching their heads.

To defenders of the choice, Panetta's reputation as a competent manager and loyalty to Obama may help to shake up the agency and keep it from undermining the White House. But several ex-CIA officials contacted by TAS greeted the pick with trepidation.

"Everybody is shocked and concerned about his lack of any intelligence experience," a former senior officer at the CIA told TAS, asking that his name be withheld because he still does some work with the agency. "What kind of signal is this sending?"

One fear the ex-official raised is that the pick is an indication that Obama, like President Clinton before him, does not have much of an interest in intelligence. Another possibility is that Panetta can be a repeat of the failed tenures of Stansfield Turner under Jimmy Carter and John Deutch under Clinton -- both of whom
were outsiders brought in to reform the agency.

Initially, John Brennan, who had a strong intelligence background, was seen as the leading candidate to head the agency under Obama, but he withdrew his name from consideration after coming under fire from liberals, who associated him with Bush administration detention and interrogation policies. Panetta has been a fierce critic of such practices.

To skeptics, the fact that interrogation policy played such a crucial role in the selection process indicates that the incoming administration may not understand the broader scope of the agency's responsibilities.

"People think the left-wing bloggers are running the asylum now," the ex-CIA official lamented. "They want to completely neuter the agency."
However, he noted that if Stephen Kappes were to remain as deputy director to run the day-to-day functions of the agency, it would be a reassuring signal to the rank and file.

An additional source of confusion resulting from the appointment is what Panetta's role would be relative to retired Admiral Dennis Blair, who has been chosen as director of national intelligence, a position created in the wake of the September 11attack to oversee all intelligence agencies.

"When he was chief of staff, Panetta was the gate keeper who controlled the president's schedule," explained another former CIA official. "I find it very difficult to believe that he would be at ease reporting to or through Admiral Blair. Who's in charge? Is the director of the CIA in charge of the final product that reaches the president? Or is the Office of National Intelligence?"

To this former official, the nation would have been better served if Obama had appointed somebody who had CIA field experience, who understood the institutional culture, and who is apolitical, rather than a Democratic Party loyalist who may only tell the president what he wants to hear.

In contrast, Ken deGraffenreid, who was a senior intelligence official in the Reagan White House and also at the Department of Defense during the current Bush administration, presented a critical assessment of the state of the CIA.

A significant portion of his workload at the Pentagon involved trying to undo many of the things the CIA did to weaken the Bush administration, deGraffenreid said, including leaking intelligence reports to the media that undermined the administration's foreign policy. This is how deGraffenreid sees the Panetta move making sense for Obama.

"If you put a loyalist in there who runs things, maybe he is in a position to block some of the shenanigans that the CIA pulls," he said. "Panetta is probably a good political move from the perspective of protecting Obama's rear end."
According to deGraffenreid, those in the CIA have lost sight of the fact that they're not supposed to craft foreign policy.

"They're out of constitutional control and they've become incompetent at their basic function of getting secrets," he said. "If the criticism of Panetta is that he does not have intelligence experience, my answer is, so what? Let's get down to brass tacks. Does he know what's wrong and is he going to bring that agency under constitutional control?"

While politically speaking it may prove a savvy decision for Obama to have Panetta at the CIA, he said that it's unclear if either the president-elect or his choice to head the agency understands that "it's a Herculean task to do what needs to be done for American intelligence."

"It's unclear to me whether Obama understands the degree to which we need intelligence in this world, because he's mostly a domestic guy," deGraffenreid said. "From the campaign it didn't seem that he had a very realistic understanding of the dangers in this world."