Shots in the Dark

12 Responses

• Standing Eagle
  1/7/2024 10:54 am

  I’ll bet you $20 it’s not even a little bit of a bad choice. And I’ll give you odds.

  You know who was a REALLY bad choice? Porter Goss, chosen because he was once in the CIA. Also, Dusty Foggo, a two-bit crook from within the bureaucracy.

  Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller are not the good guys in this scenario. And neither are anonymous “intelligence officials.”

  Just as in the DOJ, what we are getting here is ACTUAL CHANGE, advanced by people with competence and credibiltiy. Thank God!

  SE

• richardbradley
  1/7/2024 11:01 am

  I’m not against change, SE. Just wonder what Panetta’s relevant experience is. My concern would be that the lifers will steamroll him.

• SE
  1/7/2024 12:09 pm

  How would it be better to put a lifer in charge who won’t even need steamrolling?

  Panetta is as canny as they come. If any outsider can avoid being steamrolled he’s exactly the one.

• richardbradley
  1/7/2024 12:11 pm

  As canny as they come? He’s always struck me as a fundamentally decent man, and certainly not a dumb one. But canny? That’s certainly not the vibe he gives off. Do tell, SE.

• RT
  1/7/2024 12:50 pm

  I’ll go with SE and particularly with Robert Baer on this one:

  http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1869824,00.html

• Right Choice
  1/7/2024 1:04 pm

  Panetta is obviously being chosen not to micromanage intelligence functions but to get the agency going in the right direction, his particular skills being organizational in nature. He is a skilled bureaucracy wrangler, and a consummate DC operator while also being a decent guy — not to mention, a liberal. I think it’s exactly the sort of choice that makes sense. (Unlike Bill Richardson perhaps.)

• Anonymous
  1/7/2024 2:13 pm

  Come on… how can SE be an expert in matters of national intelligence, and the career of Leon Panetta, too?

• SE
  1/7/2024 2:45 pm

  I didn’t claim any expertise, I just threw $20 on the table and said I’d take fifteen or so once Panetta is proven successful. The poster “Right Choice” above says many of the things I was thinking, which is what knowledgeable people WITHOUT THEIR OWN INTEREST in the outcome are saying about Panetta’s extraordinary competence and breadth of experience.

  http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/spytalk/2009/01/cia-man-spies-reaction-to-pane.html

  Here’s an opinion I agree with, although it’s admittedly based on other people’s descriptions of Panetta’s strengths.

  —
  CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, by e-mail from London.
  “Other qualities [crucial to the position] are capacity to make decisions when there are no easy options and to take responsibility for them, situational awareness about the secondary and tertiary consequences of those decisions, good judgment about what is right, true, or advisable when presented with conflicting assessments — a common situation in a field where you are almost always dealing with incomplete information. An instinct for dealing with people — at the core of the job. The capacity to communicate clearly to a work force that needs an understanding of the larger picture in order to fit their discrete jobs into the broader mission.” McLaughlin concluded, “From what I know of Panetta, he should be good at most of these things.”
  —
  I’d also adduce the fact that G.H.W. Bush did a pretty good job (I think) as CIA director, despite knowing nothing about intelligence in advance.

  Here’s the opinion I disagree with, and this time I have evidence:
  —
  “The central problem at CIA is that it is not doing a very good job of collecting the information it was created to collect,” Faddis said. “To fix that you need to get down in the weeds and really address the nuts and bolts of how CIA is performing its mission.”
  —

  I disagree with this pretty strongly, because I have a different vision of where the country has gone wrong.

  I think of course the lack of human intelligence from inside Al Qaeda is a very serious problem, but the BIGGER problem is represented the intelligence failure that led to the Iraq War. And that was NOT repeat NOT a lack of information. It was a lack of integrity. The White House ordered up the result it wanted, and George Tenet gave it to them, playing way down all the countervailing evidence and leading the country into a malconceived and disastrous war. Not knowing things is a much smaller problem at the CIA of late than not acknowledging what you DON’T know.

  The most important feature of a CIA director, then, is not loyalty to the intelligence apparatus as constituted; it is loyalty to the TRUTH.

  MOREOVER, Faddis then contradicts himself by depicting the problem as completely other than a lack of intelligence-world savvy. The issue he predicts Panetta having is not a matter of not getting into the weeds, but a matter of having the strength of personality not to be snowed by middle-managers.
  —
  “When Panetta ends up sitting in a room with the senior ’spooks’ from the agency, and they start with the smoke and mirrors and obfuscation, how is he going to cut through that?” Faddis asked, echoing a common view. “He’s not.”
  —
  That cutting-through-the-BS skill is just the kind of thing McLaughlin says Panetta DOES have.

  Ironically — and foolishly — he then says immediately that Panetta will then end up “like Porter Goss,” having no effect. But the WHOLE POINT of the Goss appointment was that he DID have intelligence experience, having been a mid-low-level operative himself.

  The real problem after Tenet was not that Goss knew nothing about the intelligence business. It was (though I speak more hesitantly about this) Goss’s inability to get the respect of the bureaucracy (it’s also likely that he was an ideologue distracted by category mistakes and random agendas handed down from neocons all over).

  Do I know a huge amount about all these things? No. But part of being an intellectual is being able to evaluate sources, and knowing which ones have an ox being gored that biases their stance. John McLaughlin is much more trustworthy than Dianne Feinstein, or some CIA apparatchiks climbing the ladder themselves, in this regard.

  The concern of the ground-level CIA operatives seems to be that no real change is coming with Panetta. But a director fully acculturated in the status quo would surely bring even LESS change. Who would they have favored? Are they saying something coherent? I’m interested to learn more about the concerns.

  Let’s see if the middle-management obstacles can be busted through by someone who knows a lot about management. My opinion overall is just that knowing a huge amount about the intelligence ‘business’ is not crucial to that effort, as long as one has trustworthy advisors and the ‘juice’ that goes with White House access.

  Fingers crossed.

  Standing Eagle

• SE
  1/7/2024 2:59 pm

  I notice that Faddis himself is no longer in the CIA. So I might not have evaluated that source as carefully as I should have. I’m suspicious, though, of his claim that he’s in touch with ‘rank and file’ CIA people, as opposed to mid-level folks who want to make the CIA more muscular in its own right, rather than more accountable. (Faddis himself was an operations guy, frustrated by the CIA’s troubles in deploying hard military might from the Pentagon — http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/spytalk/2008/10/cia-agent-says-pentagon-botche.html ).

  Anyway, if anyone with more actual knowledge wants to weigh in, that’s fine. My point was just that I’ll give you four to three that you’re wrong, and that Panetta, coupled with Admiral Blair as DNI, will accomplish a lot of things an intelligence insider wouldn’t've.

  Continuing to trust Obama — perhaps a bit reflexively — but my God look at this outstanding pick for OLC!

  http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/01/05/olc/index.html

  SE

• SE
  1/7/2024 3:03 pm

  Just posted a couple more caveats, but they didn’t go through. Maybe they’re waiting to be moderated. Anyway, I hope no one thinks I know a whole lot about Faddis.

• SE Unmasked
  1/7/2024 3:42 pm

  I think you are in fact a spook.

• SE
  1/8/2024 10:15 am

  Why does someone always have to bring race into these discussions? Can’t we all just get along?

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