Inspired Choices for DNI and CIA?

At first blush Barack Obama has bested both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in his choice of leaders for the intelligence community. Retired Admiral Dennis Blair was named as the Director of National Intelligence and former White House Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta, snagged the Director of the CIA. If you look back at the people that Bill Clinton and George Bush put in charge of the CIA, then the choice of Panetta seems particularly inspired. Why?

The ideal candidate is someone who is smart, who is not looking to feather his or her nest to reap economic benefits, and who understands that the President needs an honest broker. Look at the Clinton choices–Jim Woolsey, John Deutch, and George Tenet. Horrible choices and a terrible legacy. And George Bush did no better–George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden. Hayden is awful because he has perpetuated the militarization of the intelligence community. Goss played politics. And Tenet? Two words. SLAM DUNK! Enough said about that clown.

So how does Panetta stack up?

He served honorably in the Army. He was a Republican before he was a Democrat. He established a track record in Washington of being a non-partisan. Most importantly, he did not use his public service as a platform to enrich himself. Look at what Jim Woolsey and George Tenet did. Undistinguished tours at the CIA but they managed to get their millionaire ticket punched. The last person we need running the CIA is someone who sees it as the best job they have ever had and an opportunity to cash in.

Look at what Panetta has done since leaving the White House. He genuinely has focused on public service and educational activities. That does tell me something about the man’s character. If he brings that attitude to the CIA then the institution will be well served.

The CIA today is not the CIA I knew. During my time at the Agency the Director of CIA had many of the authorities now transferred to the Director of National Intelligence. The Director of the CIA was in charge of the daily publication of the Presidential Daily Brief. That job is now in the hands of the DNI.

One of the most damaging legacies of the Bush Administration with respect to he intelligence community is the militarization of the community. There used to be a healthy tension between the military and civilian intelligence portions of the community. Bush has infiltrated former military officers, who have no prior intelligence experience, into jobs that they are not qualified to do. This is especially true with respect to the analytical function of the community.

The one thing I do not know about Leon Panetta is whether or not he has the balls and the spine to tell President Obama unpleasant news. Almost every President since the end of World War II has had some pet foreign policy issues. And more often than not the CIA was not willing to present the President analysis that contradicted his policy. Lyndon Johnson, for example, did not want to hear that the U.S. military operations in Vietnam were not reducing the threat from North Vietnam. Ronald Reagan did not want to hear that the Contras were not being effective as a military threat. George W. Bush did not want to hear that the Islamists in Afghanistan/Pakistan posed the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. So it goes.

Will Leon Panetta be willing and able to tell Barack Obama uncomfortable truths? I think so, but we will have to wait and see.

UPDATE–I forgot to mention another critical factor. One of my CIA buddies reminded me of it tonight as we discussed the Panetta choice. My friend says the most important consideration is whether or not Panetta has the gumption to fire someone. No one at CIA has been fired or disciplined. Take the 9-11 failure, for example. Zero accountability. Another CIA officer, now retired, made the same point recently in an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune:

This is the article I never intended to write. For former CIA officers, the tipping point between debate-generating critique and “if they had only listened to me” pontification is easy to cross, and I had hoped to avoid the latter by simply refraining from attempts at the former. So let’s be clear, I am not claiming to have been prescient. It took more than three years outside the agency for me to truly understand its problems and to see a possible solution.

To start with the bottom line, the CIA’s human spy business is not answering the hardest questions. How can I know this, three years out of touch with the secret stuff? The answer is simple: because Osama bin Laden is still the head of Al Qaeda. And no one has been held accountable for failing to catch him.

By the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, every serving CIA officer – indeed, every American – knew that the agency had one prime mission: “Get him!” But, after more than seven years and billions of dollars, we have failed. I recognize much has been done to damage Al Qaeda but, make no mistake, no amount of “rendition” of bin Laden lieutenants can mask our failure to bring to justice the man who ordered 9/11.

There are other failures too, less dramatic perhaps but of even greater consequence. The clandestine creep of nuclear know-how threatens to put the worst weapons into the worst hands. If North Korea or Iran, or Shangri-La for that matter, claims the right to develop a nuclear fist, our intelligence services should know every detail about that program. Yet we collectively fail over and over again when North Korea tests a missile or nuclear reactor construction in the eastern Syrian desert come as a surprise. If the CIA’s human spy arm was operating as a private business, it would be running at a loss. Think Detroit, not 007.

Why? First, the agency is simply too insular. It does not sufficiently tap into the expertise that exists across the breadth of America. The human spy components of the CIA live in a cocoon of secrecy that breeds distrust of outsiders. This is one reason very few officers have BlackBerrys. Despite their reputation as plugged-in experts on other countries, many CIA officers do not even have Internet access at their desks. Worse yet, they don’t think they need it.

Second, the CIA has a terrible problem with quality control. When I was still there, for example, CIA spies reported on several occasions that Al Qaeda had plans to attack American military bases overseas – in countries that a quick Web search would have shown had no such bases. Quantity outweighed quality as folks in the spy business focused not on accuracy or impact, but on increasing amounts of product.

And that brings us to perhaps the most numbing factor, the lack of performance accountability. In my years in the agency, I cannot recall a single case where anyone was fired for failing to perform. I cannot even remember anyone being demoted. There is no job-threatening penalty for mediocrity. Think of this on Jan. 20, when we’re likely to see bin Laden sending an inauguration greeting to the new president.

You can read the rest of Art Brown’s views here.

Panetta appears to be a decent, honest, smart man who is not bent on feathering his own nest. Given his prior experience as an intelligence consumer at the highest level in the U.S. government he at least understands what the intelligence community needs to produce in order to ensure the President has the best information. I am pleasantly surprised by the Panetta choice.