By Melvin A. Goodman
The Baltimore Sun
January 7, 2009
President-elect Barack Obama has
made an outstanding move in naming Leon E. Panetta
to reform the beleaguered Central Intelligence
Agency. Mr. Panetta is a savvy and sophisticated
political operative who was a consumer of intelligence
as chief of staff in the Clinton White House in
the 1990s. He is a former director of the Office
of Management and Budget who understands the need
for cost-cutting in the intelligence community.
And as a former member of the Iraq Study Group,
Mr. Panetta knows how the Bush administration
and the CIA corrupted the intelligence process
to take the country into an unnecessary war seven
years ago.
The argument against Mr. Panetta
is that he is not an intelligence insider, but
that is more virtue than vice. Intelligence insiders
have done little over the past two decades to
prevent intelligence failures. They failed to
understand the decline of the Soviet Union because
the process had been politicized by William J.
Casey and his deputy, Robert M. Gates. They failed
to provide strategic warning of the 9/11 attacks,
and they permitted the corruption of key intelligence
products in the run-up to the Iraq war. Intelligence
insiders, moreover, were responsible for enthusiastically
endorsing such CIA practices as torture and abuse,
extraordinary renditions and secret prisons. Mr.
Panetta was not a part of this history.
To function effectively, Mr. Panetta
must understand certain truths about the CIA.
First, he would be moving into
a political culture that has been dominated by
the cover-up of key intelligence failures. No
CIA officer was punished or even reprimanded for
producing spurious intelligence products such
as the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction that was released
shortly before the congressional vote in October
2002 to authorize force against Iraq. CIA leaders
at the highest level drafted then-Secretary of
State Colin L. Powell's address to the United
Nations, which made the phony case for war to
an international audience only six weeks before
the invasion. And CIA officers continue to resist
the efforts of Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra
of Michigan to expose the cover-up of the shoot-down
of a private plane in Peru that led to the death
of a missionary worker in South America.
Second, the 9/11 intelligence
failure was not the result of institutional problems
with information sharing; rather, it was the result
of sloppiness and incompetence in the sharing
of key information. More than 50 analysts and
operatives from the CIA, the FBI and the National
Security Agency had access to information that
key al-Qaida operatives had entered the United
States, but none of these individuals took the
necessary action to pass the information along
- even though there were well-defined mechanisms
for doing so. Mr. Panetta must seek to re-establish
the CIA's role in strategic analysis and create
a well-managed and more disciplined cadre to ensure
that information is being handled properly.
Finally, Mr. Panetta needs to
understand that the creation of a director of
national intelligence in the wake of the 9/11
intelligence failure has led to a more centralized
system of intelligence that stifles creative thinking
and runs the risk of more politicized intelligence.
The director, moreover, lacks the bureaucratic
clout to challenge the Pentagon's control of key
intelligence agencies. But by naming a retired
admiral with limited experience to be the next
director, Mr. Obama may have decided to downgrade
the position of the so-called intelligence czar.
After three uninspired selections
in the field of international security (Mr. Gates
as secretary of defense, Hillary Clinton as secretary
of state and retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones
as national security adviser), the naming of Mr.
Panetta offers the promise of genuine change.
But Mr. Panetta must touch base with key critics
of the intelligence community - such as members
of the 9/11 commission, key staff members of congressional
oversight committees, and the CIA's own inspector
general - who are in a position to offer outside-the-box
thinking on what the CIA should be and what it
should do.
Melvin A. Goodman, senior fellow
at the Center for International Policy, is a 24-year
veteran of the CIA's intelligence directorate
and the author of "Failure of Intelligence:
The Decline and Fall of the CIA." His e-mail
is goody789@comcast.net.
Copyright 2009
Baltimore Sun
