President Barack Obama is permitting CIA Director
Leon Panetta to weaken the Agency’s’s
Office of Inspector General (OIG). The OIG has
produced the only official and authoritative
study of the abuses of the CIA detentions and
interrogations program; it also has published
seminal studies of the CIA’s involvement
in the shoot down of a missionary plane in Peru
in 2001 (and the subsequent cover-up of its
role) as well as the controversial 9/11 accountability
study.
These reports angered senior CIA managers and
led to efforts by three successive directors
(George Tenet, Porter Goss, and General Michael
Hayden) to restrict the investigative work of
the office. Panetta is continuing the campaign
they began. Although John Helgerson, the inspector
general who produced these reports, announced
his retirement seven months ago, Panetta and
the White House have not named a replacement.
They clearly prefer that the OIG remain without
the strong leadership it requires to pursue
difficult investigations in the face of management
resistance.
The creation of an independent, statutory OIG
at CIA resulted from the Agency’s involvement
in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s. CIA’s
internal investigation of its role in that scandal
was inadequate, particularly in comparison with
congressional and independent investigations.
CIA had an administrative inspector general,
but he was appointed by the CIA director, had
limited access to sensitive information, and
had no more than a handful of professionals
on his staff.
The congressional oversight committees were
not given full access to his reports and not
even the Justice Department received all IG
reports of suspected illegalities. In fact,
it was the efforts of CIA director William Casey
to prevent the Attorney General from receiving
reports on Iran Contra illegalities that led
Senators Arlen Specter and John Glenn to sponsor
a bill to create an independent IG, appointed
by the President and responsible to Congress.
CIA director William Webster opposed the bill,
and President George H.W. Bush signed it reluctantly
in 1989; as a former CIA director, Bush feared
that an independent IG would be “out of
control,” a junkyard dog that could not
be controlled by the bureaucracy. Bush waited
a year before appointing Frederick Hitz, a lawyer
and former CIA operations officer, as the first
statutory IG. Hitz and his successors did perform
independently, producing reports critical of
the Agency’s performance in a number of
areas.
Helgerson, appointed in 2002, proved more tenacious
than many expected, even criticizing CIA director
Tenet and other senior CIA leaders in the 9/11
report. His tenacity angered Agency directors,
however, and they have subsequently tried to
weaken the office, primarily by attacking the
professionalism of its work.
If the Agency’s director believes the
work of the OIG is flawed, he has several options.
He can go to Congress, the president’s
intelligence oversight board, the President’s
Commission on Integrity and Efficiency—the
watchdog of the government’s inspectors
general—even to the president himself.
Instead, CIA’s leadership chose to mount
an unprecedented attack on the OIG.
In 2006, in an effort to intimidate the OIG,
Goss ordered a leak investigation that led to
the unprecedented polygraphing of the IG himself
and the firing of a senior OIG official for
having unreported conversations with journalists—even
though the conversations had nothing to do with
the leak investigation.
Hayden, seeking to rein in the OIG, appointed
a special assistant, Robert Deitz, to ”investigate”
the office, an action that infringed on the
IG’s independence and that Congress should
have stopped immediately. (Deitz was Hayden’s
General Counsel at the National Security Agency
when Hayden was director there, and crafted
the internal legal opinions to justify warrantless
eavesdropping.) Deitz’s so-called investigation
was designed to intimidate the OIG.
Hitz, who had served as IG from 1990 to 1998,
labeled Hayden’s internal investigation
an effort to “call off the dogs.”
He said that it would “lead to an undercutting
of the IG’s authority and his ability
to investigate allegations of wrongdoing.”
It is difficult enough to gain cooperation from
the rank and file for an IG investigation; once
Agency officers understand that their leadership
is not respectful of the office, the OIG’s
ability to ferret out the truth becomes far
more difficult.
Hayden’s intimidation campaign ignored
provisions in the 1989 law that required the
CIA director to inform the Congress of any attempt
to hinder the IG in the execution of his duties.
His efforts were consistent with the Bush administration’s
campaign to weaken the role of the IG throughout
the government, including trying to limit a
bill in the House of Representatives to strengthen
the independence of IGs by giving them seven-year
terms and to permit the White House to fire
them only for cause.
Helgerson announced his retirement the same
week Panetta was confirmed as CIA director.
Panetta, however, has not named a new IG and
has continued to convey disapproval of the work
of the office by his defense of actions that
were criticized in the IG’s report on
detentions and interrogations. Perhaps as a
result, Helgerson has started talking to journalists.
This is an unusual step for a CIA officer, even
one who is retired; it is particularly surprising
for Helgerson, who is extremely discrete.
In a statement last week, Helgerson emphasized
that the CIA had conducted waterboarding in
a manner inconsistent with the understanding
between the CIA and the Justice Department and
that the CIA had reneged on its assurance that
repetitive use of this technique would “not
be substantial.” Helgerson concluded that
the CIA was “abusing this technique.”
Helgerson also questioned whether it had been
necessary to use “enhanced interrogation
techniques” and recommended the creation
of a panel of experts to “evaluate the
quality of intelligence gained as related to
the specific techniques used.” Helgerson
took issue with Panetta’s claim that the
CIA itself had commissioned the OIG’s
2004 study, stating that he had initiated the
2004 report because many officers had told him
that CIA techniques were “fundamentally
inconsistent with long established U.S. Government
policy and with American values, and were based
on strained legal reasoning.”
Helgerson added that he “could not walk
through the cafeteria without people walking
up to me, not to complain but to say ‘More
power to you.’” He emphasized that
it is the mission of the IG to make sure that
CIA operations are “efficient, effective,
and run in a manner that is consistent with
law and regulation, and to recommend improvements
as appropriate.” He expressed particular
disappointment with the fact that all ten of
the OIG’s recommendations had been redacted.
The fact that Panetta and President Obama have
not nominated an individual to replace Helgerson
is not surprising. It is surprising, however,
that both Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairman
of the Senate intelligence committee and Congressman
Silvestre Reyes, chairman of the House intelligence
committee, have ignored the issue. The weakening
of the OIG by CIA leadership is an affront to
Congress, particularly to Feinstein and Reyes;
they are demonstrating a dereliction of duty.
Panetta and the White House are obviously slow
rolling the appointment, leaving a weak acting
IG in place as long as possible, probably searching
for just the right candidate to acquiesce in
their campaign to weaken the only effective
oversight body that exists to investigate CIA
activities.
Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the
Center for International Policy and adjunct
professor of government at Johns Hopkins University,
is The Public Record’s National Security
and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years
with the CIA, the National War College, and
the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of
Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
Copyright 2009 The Public
Record
