Jane Harman Sacrifices Intelligence for Politics

Admin Note: Originally published at the California Chronicle and reprinted with express permission. See Mike’s other recent story published at No Quarter, “POTUS, Pelosi and Panetta Promise Partisan Political Pandering.” Mike is a former CIA officer, and he and Larry are good friends.

On July 25th 2009, Representative Jane Harman (D-CA) of Los Angeles became the latest U.S. government official to formally declare that she was putting politics above her responsibilities for American intelligence in publishing an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times.

In taking this action, Harman adds herself to a growing list of public officials in this decade, including a vice president (Cheney), a Speaker of the House of Representatives (Pelosi), a CIA Director (Panetta) and, yes, the President of the United States himself (Obama), who are willing to abrogate the public’s trust and weaken this country’s defense in a pathetic attempt to bolster their personal and partisan political fortunes.

There is, however, one difference in Ms. Harman’s recent self outing as a politician above all else.

In her LA Times treatise, she puts her fundamental ignorance of basic matters of intelligence on full and irretrievable public display. Considering what Harman wrote, rather than headlining her Op-Ed as “What the CIA hid from Congress,” the editor would’ve been more accurate to title it, “What Harman doesn’t understand about her oversight responsibilities on a select committee.”

Harman leads off her “igno-rant” by correctly stating that as a member of the so-called “Gang of Eight,” composed of the four top Republican and Democrat leaders of the Senate and House (two each), and the Chairman and Ranking Members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) (two each), Federal law requires that she and other Gang members be briefed on the CIA’s “covert” (her quotation marks) action programs. Does the text of this law put “covert” in quotation marks? No, but Harman chooses to do that herself in her article, signaling through mocking spite that this is a political hit piece, rather than a public representative informing her constituents of what she has discovered from her solemn oversight duties.

The esteemed representative then continues on to describe just which briefings on CIA covert operations that she felt she and other Gang members were deceived by, to wit: quarterly briefings at the White House on the Terrorist Surveillance Program by General Michael Hayden during the period 2003 through 2006. Harman goes on to say that then Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, was present at the briefings; as were other, unnamed CIA officials. It is about at this point that anyone with even the most basic knowledge of the U.S. government, let alone the intelligence community, starts scratching their head and saying, “Huh?”

From March 1999 through April 2005, Mike Hayden was Director of the National Security Agency (NSA). NSA’s principal mission is the collection and analysis of signals intelligence. What was the Director of the National Security Agency doing giving quarterly briefings to the Gang of Eight on a CIA covert action program? The answer is, he wasn’t. He was briefing the Gang on something entirely different, an NSA intelligence collection program. Apparently, in her rush to join her colleagues in publicly accusing the CIA of lying, Harman overlooked the fact that Hayden’s briefings had nothing at all to do with the CIA, let alone CIA covert action.

But wait, if they had nothing to do with the CIA, then what was the Director of the CIA, George Tenet, doing attending the briefings? Answer: Tenet was at the briefings not in his capacity as Director of the CIA, but wearing his second hat as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), the then semi-titular head of the entire U.S. intelligence community. The DCI position was disestablished and replaced in 2005 by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). One would expect that Harman would understand this distinction, as she was the Ranking Member of the congressional committee that drafted the 2005 legislation that made this change. But I guess that an organizational relationship that is required to be understood by every military intelligence Second Lieutenant, not to mention every CIA trainee, is a bit much for the Ranking Member of HPSCI. It’s all so confusing, isn’t it Jane?

I wonder what Representative Harman thinks that it does for the morale of CIA officers, both those operating alone overseas on the pointy end of the spear as well as those who toil in windowless rooms at Langley, when one of their former Congressional overseers so boldly and publicly impugns their integrity and honor while simultaneously displaying such a remarkable lack of understanding of her own responsibilities?

I am told by former colleagues back in Washington that CIA employees feel embattled and betrayed by their own government (and, indeed, their own Director), and that morale is as low as it was in the days of the feckless leadership of Jimmy Carter and Stansfield Turner. I remember those days, and I sympathize with the current generation of intelligence officers trying to do their job while they are disrespected by both the ignorance and actions of Representative Harman. But to answer my original question, I think that Rhett Butler said it best: Frankly, she doesn’t give a damn.

After reading Harman’s LA Times opinion, I couldn’t help but think back to my days as a CIA trainee. One day, an instructor asked a Socratian question on the missions of various agencies of the intelligence community. Predictably, the class springbutt proceeded to answer it with an overly long and entirely incorrect spiel. “Thank you,” the instructor said, “that was a valuable lesson for all of us. If you don’t know the answer, stay in your seat and shut up.”

Mike Gorbell is a retired intelligence officer from California’s Central Coast.