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Despite reform pledges, Panetta enables CIA’s bad old habits
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Over the past few weeks, Leon Panetta has emerged as an obstacle to real reform and accountability at CIA. Rather than exerting strong leadership, Panetta is toeing the line on CIA’s pet parochial concerns, such as protecting CIA officers and contractors from investigative scrutiny and insisting on suppression of information widely known via media coverage.
When the Obama transition team named Leon Panetta as CIA Director earlier this year, his advocates portrayed him as a no-nonsense Beltway veteran who would ‘fix’ CIA, which had been beset by a series of embarrassing intelligence failures and scandals, starting with 9/11, continuing on to the Iraqi WMDs, and a global, mistake-riddled program of torture and extrajudicial detention of terrorist suspects.
Panetta’s deeds and words, however, show that he has become a creature of CIA culture.
Several weeks ago, Mark Hosenball of Newsweek reported that Panetta limited CIA information requested by the Senate intelligence committee as part of its probe into detentions and interrogations. Although Panetta had wanted to release all relevant information to the Senate committee, senior clandestine service officers persuaded him to inform the Senate that CIA would release only redacted documents to investigators. Panetta also indicated to the Senate panel that CIA would stall, with the excuse that CIA would have to review over 10 million documents.
Congress isn’t the only branch of government to get the brush-off from CIA Chief Panetta.
Last week, Panetta requested that a Federal judge stop the release of documents detailing the interrogation and torture of terrorist suspects held by the CIA in secret overseas prisons. Panetta’s filing cited the possibility of inflamed anti-American sentiment, much as President Obama claimed when he stopped the release of a new batch of photos documenting abuse of detainees in US custody in Iraq. Never mind that that much of the content of the documents is already known from press reports and foreign government documents.
Panetta is also helping bolster CIA’s reputation for not getting along with other spy agencies.
Last month, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair informed the intelligence community that the DNI office would choose which senior US intelligence officers to head up US intelligence missions overseas. The move ran counter to a long-standing tradition that CIA station chiefs always act as the senior US intelligence official in a foreign country.
DNI Blair reasoned that in specific cases, placing officials from intelligence community agencies other than CIA would make more sense. For example, the DNI might want to install a senior Drug Enforcement Agency officer in a Latin American country where counternarcotics is the focus, or put a National Security Agency officer in charge in an allied country that shares eavesdropping information with the US, such as the United Kingdom or New Zealand
In response, Panetta told CIA employees to ignore Blair’s directive.
CIA rank-and-file have long felt slighted by the DNI office, which was created in the wake of 9/11 intelligence failures and has effectively diminished CIA’s leadership role in the intelligence community. Panetta’s rebuff of the DNI was intended to assuage CIA hallway concerns about decreasing relevancy, but it has had the effect of creating a bureaucratic impasse between the DNI and CIA that is undoubtedly distracting from more substantive intelligence matters, such as finding Osama Bin Laden, or foiling the next terrorist attack.
An expansive New Yorker article by Jane Mayer offers more detail about how Panetta converted from CIA reformer to CIA excuse-maker. Mayer reports that protecting CIA employees from unfair prosecution and career-ending investigations is one motivation for not holding CIA officers more accountable for abuses.
But the main reason for Panetta’s switch from supporting a thorough and transparent investigation into CIA abuses is pure Washington politics: the Obama White House thinks a truth commission or prosecutions would appear “vindictive, and possibly, inflam[matory].”
Panetta told Mayer, “It was the President who basically said, ‘If I do this, it will look like I’m trying to go after Cheney and Bush’. . . he just didn’t think it made sense. And then everybody kind of backed away from it.”
Protection of junior and mid-level CIA personnel from politically motivated prosecution is a laudable by-product of Obama administration jockeying for a moral advantage over political rivals. After all, these are the government employees who can least afford to ‘lawyer up.’
Unfortunately, Mayer and others have reported that CIA under Panetta has failed to discipline field officers whose incompetence resulted in some of the most embarrassing and avoidable episodes of the extraordinary rendition program.
Mayer cites the case of the CIA officer responsible for the abduction and imprisonment of Khaled el-Masri, a German national whom the CIA mistakenly took into custody in Macedonia and then airlifted to a dank prison in Afghanistan. Masri spent some five months in CIA captivity, even though the team that abducted him knew almost immediately that they had nabbed an innocent man. Mayer’s sources say that the CIA officer in charge has never been disciplined, and indeed has since earned two promotions.
Another rendition-gone-wrong is the now infamous ‘Italian Job.’ Investigative reporter Matthew Cole reported in the March 2007 GQ how a CIA team kidnapped Abu Omar, a small-time Islamic extremist cleric, from a street in Milan, Italy in 2003. The operation was poorly coordinated between CIA and Italian security services, and as a result, 26 US government employees (presumed by Italian authorities to be CIA) are currently on trial in absentia over the Abu Omar kidnapping. According to Cole, the senior officer in that case, Jeff Castelli, has also been promoted—twice. Italian and US press reports separately identify Castelli as CIA’s former Rome Station Chief.
Meanwhile, detainee deaths that occurred on CIA’s watch have also gone uninvestigated, let alone unpunished.
In one sense, Panetta is doing the right thing by his new charges at CIA. The history of politicians betraying intelligence officers is long and bipartisan, and Panetta is making good on a promise to protect rank-and-file employees from litigation and/or prosecution. Many CIA officers believe that they performed their duties in the War on Terrorism in good faith, with appropriate legal cover from policy makers (read: White House, National Security Council, Department of Justice).
However, Panetta is not protecting CIA’s long-term interests by sweeping homicides, naked incompetence, and knowing violations of human decency under the rug—or by avoiding a full accounting of the past eight years. His efforts at limiting outside scrutiny in order to preserve morale and discipline must be accompanied by a visible program of self-policing and transparency.
A sustained campaign of shielding CIA from accountability will ultimately doom the agency to even more marginalization than it has endured since the advent of the Office of the DNI and blistering criticisms of CIA failures related to 9/11 and Iraqi WMDs. Other Federal agencies and foreign governments will become wary of dealing with CIA, and it will lose out on attracting the best young people to replenish its ranks of operations officers and analysts.
And finally, CIA’s current path is likely to result in extremely troubled relations with Congress. In the past, the House and Senate intelligence committees used the legislative branch’s funding and lawmaking power to control or eliminate specific intelligence activities.
It worked on cutting back Contra funding in the 90s, and it could work on renditions and overseas prisons in the 21st century.
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Abu Omar ·
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Leon Panetta ·
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