Vic Socotra

06 January 2009

Central Intelligence

(LT James Panetta, USNR with VADM Dan Olver, USN-Ret. Photo by Vern Fisher, Monetery Herald)

I was busy enough that the news seeped into my consciousness. I was juggling two e-mail streams, the personal one and the business one. The latter was kicking my butt, since there are five task orders to deal with and the proposals are likely to be due in only a couple weeks, either before Dr. King’s holiday and the Inauguration, or right after.

The timing will serve only to determine which set of weekends are ruined, though of course they could get creative and spoil both.

Meanwhile, toggling back and forth to Spook Net, the messages were chattering off the chart with the news about the President-elect’s picks for the intelligence community. It was hard to stay centered. I was already reeling with the abrupt exit of Governor Richardson from the Cabinet line-up over unproven allegations of impropriety. It was an abrupt vanishing act, sort of like what happened to poor John Brennan whose name was briefly floated as the replacement for Mike Hayden at Central Intelligence.

I got an e-note from Bill later, saying not to worry and he will be back. It is too damn bad these things happen. It just comes with the territory here in Washington where there the greatest amount of intelligence is a central low-cunning.

Take Mike Hayden, for example. He is a serene and cerebral fellow who well knows the central value of an aggressive program of self-aggrandizement, but nothing could have saved him in his job. The Blogosphere has been howling for his head and like the Jacobins of the French Revolution.

John Brennan hadn’t done anything wrong, of course, but that is beside the point. The True Believers accused him of breathing while the Bush Administration “took the gloves off” in the fight on terrorism. John was a career spook, and well respected, but he did continue sustained respiration during the period.

Of course, you and I did, too. That may be why the phone did not ring this week.

The TB’s are after Denny Blair, too, the prospective replacement for Mike McConnell. Over the holidays, they accused Denny of complicity with the Indonesian Junta during the run-up to the 1999 referendum on independence for East Timor. They darkly claim that he “ran interference for the Indonesian Armed Forces” as they committed “crimes against humanity on an awesome scale.”

I looked back on my notes from the period and recalled vaguely that Denny had been nominated to be CINCPAC by President Clinton, whose policies he carried out phlegmatically. By extrapolation, that would make Hillary ineligible to be Secretary of State, since she is known to have consorted (periodically) with the President. There is no point in pointing things out to the howling mob.

It would only further inflame their righteous anger.

There are two things happening here. The sane members of the new Administration are trying to craft an effective management team for a large, highly complex and inter-linked set of institutions that happen to be at war.

The left wing base of the party is not concerned with that as much as conducting a pogrom against the bureaucrats who have conducted the nation’s affairs at the direction of the lawful Commander in Chief.

The crimes with which they are attempting to tar Denny Blair are probably too old, and too closely associated with a Democratic president to stick. I don’t know, and it is too soon to tell. But that may have been part of the decision-making process that resulted in the designation of Leon Panetta, former director of the Office of Management and Budget and White House Chief of Staff to be the next Director of the CIA.

There was an immediate reaction, which included wide-spread wailing and gnashing of teeth even within the President’s own party. Apparently the nomination had not been coordinated with Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), the incoming chair of the Intelligence Committee in the senior chamber, nor with Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA), who is departing.

Both feel that someone who understands the Agency would have been a better pick, but of course everyone who meets that criteria has been known to be breathing right through the whole Bush Presidency, and thus would be unacceptable to the TB’s.

The cries of dismay revolve around the fact that Leon has no experience in the business, which is a valid enough point, unless you consider that any experience at all makes you a criminal in the eyes of the human right community who must be placated in the interest of the larger priorities of the New Administration.

It worked that way in the Clinton years, which I recall with some fondness. They at least knew they did not know anything about us, or how we worked. They had some central intelligence, painfully learned by running into the buzz-saw at the Pentagon early on, and thereafter essentially left us alone. They allowed the budget to keep us on a tight leash, but a sort of truce ensured general tranquility.

It also allowed us to slide into 9/11, of course, but while central to an intelligent discussion, that is a different matter altogether.

Leon was one of our masters then, since he controlled the purse-strings from OMB, and later he sat in on the President’s Daily Brief in the Oval Office, the flagship product of the CIA.

Considering the pressure against Denny Blair, picking Leon for the high-profile but much diminished post at Langley makes all the sense in the world. I am not that concerned, or better said, I am concerned about everything and this is not one of the things at the top of the list.

In all the furor about his lack of hands-on experience, a couple key points have been left out of the Panetta resume. He was an Army intelligence officer in his youth, assigned to Fort Ord in Monterey, so at least he served, which is more than Dick Cheney did.

There is one other thing you may have missed. Leon’s son James was just decorated last month with the Bronze Star for service in Afghanistan. James is one of our clan, a reserve Naval Intelligence Officer who was called from his job as an assistant DA in the gritty city of Oakland to do six months active duty at Bagram Air Base. While he was there, he supported special operations forces by “providing intelligence for special operations forces to identify and locate high-level al-Qaida targets.”

The Panetta family has made their contributions to the nation. If Leon needs some independent input on intelligence operations in the field, he has someone to advise him that he can trust, implicitly.

That is an unusual thing in this town, where sometimes the central advantage for career advancement include knowing nothing at all about what you are doing.

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