by Leon Panetta
At the end of our meeting, I directed that the program be suspended and that we conduct a full review of its activities. And I asked for time the next day to meet with the full membership of both intelligence committees in the House and Senate. Briefing them, I told them of the program, as well as my decision to end it. The leaders were supportive and grateful that nothing had come of this ill-conceived idea.
My decision to end the program was not popular with senior people in the agency, even Kappes, but I felt it was important to do because allowing it to continue risked further undermining our credibility with Congress.
In addition to canceling that program, I also ended other contractor work for the CIA, including an agreement we had had with another firm since 2002. As President Bush disclosed, the CIA had operated “black sites” to interrogate Al Qaeda detainees. This contract pertained to the operations at these sites. Since President Obama had ordered them closed, there was no need for these contracts. Again, some people were upset, but I thought it was an important step in putting the past behind us.
• • •
In the aftermath of 9/11, Congress, as it is wont to do, went searching for explanations for how such an attack could have slipped through American defenses. The impulse to uncover mistakes and correct them was commendable, but rarely do lawmakers content themselves with just acknowledging slipups. Instead, they fix systems, and in this case they attempted to fix our national security apparatus by creating a new position, the director of national intelligence. In theory, that person acts as a coordinator between the various intelligence agencies, making sure that the National Security Agency, FBI, and CIA, for instance, share relevant information, so that a person or plot under scrutiny by one agency doesn’t slip by the others.
That’s all well and good, but the problem with the position is that the director of national intelligence doesn’t really have a staff to produce his own information, so he is regularly caught between wanting information and having to rely on others to get it. In the case of Blair and me, that resulted in an ugly struggle for control over certain CIA assets. It was during the spring of 2009 that Blair first raised an idea with me: Because CIA station chiefs around the world also had a line of responsibility to the director of national intelligence, Blair proposed that he be allowed to name those officers. I told him I was willing to talk about ways that the station chiefs could represent the director, but I was strongly opposed to letting him pick those chiefs. They worked for the CIA, were paid by the CIA, and had come up through the ranks of the CIA. Their job, fundamentally, was to manage the liaison relationship—the relationship with the host government’s intelligence service—a classic CIA mission. I could not relinquish my authority over them, nor was he in a position to judge them. What I suspected was that in some cases, Blair intended to select officers from other intelligence agencies to serve as his representatives.
Blair took me aside at a lunch honoring the judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and brusquely let me know that he was going to send out his directive to the intelligence community instituting his change. I asked him not to and requested a meeting to discuss it further. Then Blair invited me to attend a ceremony at the DNI offices at which he would announce the new titles for our station chiefs. I debated refusing to attend, but went and used the opportunity to warn Blair that I remained opposed to his idea. He ignored my request and that same day signed the new policy, which was forwarded to the field by his staff that evening as “Intelligence Community Directive 402,” containing the changes.
There was no way I could stand for that—his unilateral action had not been through the National Security Council process, and he took it knowing of my objections. I called in Kappes and directed him to send all our people a follow-up to Blair’s e-mail. The cable, dubbed a WWSB (“World Wide Stations and Bases”), was terse and direct. It stated that the DNI’s revisions to Directive 402 were to be ignored. Period.
Needless to say, that left things in an uncomfortable position, and I followed up by explaining to Jim Jones and Tom Donilon what I’d done. They agreed that Blair had bypassed the process, but did not immediately take my position on the substance of the issue. Instead, the matter was sent to Vice President Biden to investigate and decide. The vice president met with Blair and me separately, and though I don’t know precisely what Blair told him, I made myself clear. “I’m prepared to work this through,” I said, “but I’m not about to let the DNI name my station chiefs.”
About a week later, Biden summoned all of us together and gave us a short memo. It provided some of what Blair was after—assurances that station chiefs would represent his office—but made clear that naming them remained a function of the CIA. I responded that I still had a few reservations, but that I accepted the conclusion and was ready to move on. Blair, on the other hand, curtly announced, “No, I can’t accept it.”
I was slack-jawed. A little note on Washington politics: When the vice president of the United States is assigned the job of mediating a dispute and announces his decision, your job is to accept it. Instead, Blair asked for an audience with the president, effectively seeking to overrule Biden. Donilon told Blair that was not going to happen, and Blair went away mad. Shortly thereafter, Biden made his recommendations final. In early December, the fax machine outside Mary Elfmann’s desk whirred with an “urgent” fax from the Situation Room. It contained a memo from Jones clearly stating that the CIA retained authority to name station chiefs. Case closed.
That wasn’t the only instance where Blair and I disagreed. Apparently after a series of meetings with a foreign ambassador, he concocted the loony notion that we should enter into an agreement with that country under which both countries would agree not to spy on each other. That may sound appealing on the surface—we’re ancient allies who don’t wish each other harm—but it’s shortsighted to forswear gathering intelligence from anyone, since you don’t know when you might need to know something that’s not publicly available. Moreover, entering into such an agreement with one country would invite others to make the same request. How could we justify not calling off spying in other countries? And would we really expect those countries to honor those agreements? When Blair presented this idea to the National Security Council, it was met with embarrassing silence; Jones put the matter to a vote of the National Security Council Principals, and Blair was the only one to favor it. Jones and Donilon directed him to dial it back, deepening Blair’s discomfort, as he’d already led the other country to believe we had a deal.
There was at least one good outcome from that dustup. Donilon, recognizing the need for better communication between the CIA and the office of the DNI, chaired a weekly intelligence meeting at the White House. That was helpful on sensitive operational issues, and made sure the White House was aware of what we were up to.
In the middle of 2010, Blair was replaced by Jim Clapper, who was deft and scrupulous. In fact, Clapper may be the perfect person to serve in the difficult position of DNI. Although he’s been criticized for testimony he gave to Congress regarding the work of the NSA, he’s an intelligence expert, and he’s open-minded, forceful, and yet respectful of the agencies he’s asked to coordinate. I am still not sure whether the position is worth it, but if the government has to have it, Clapper is ideal for the job.
• • •
Although the White House backed me in those disputes with Blair, I had my differences with the president’s senior national security staff. Our most frequent flash points came over the issue of how much of the agency’s work I could share with the press, public, and Congress. I felt that I should reveal as much information as was prudent, especially since the rationale for putting me in charge of the agency was in part to restore confidence in its work. Secrecy hardly fostered that confidence.
The White House, particularly NSC chief of staff Denis McDonough and Tom Donilon, were of the view that the CIA director should not deliver major speeches or g
ive press interviews. (Part of their concern stemmed from their discomfort with the way my predecessor, Mike Hayden, had so publicly defended enhanced interrogation.) I understood their point, but I felt the White House was clamping down too hard and did not trust its senior officials enough. Moreover, it meant that those officials who knew the most about certain subjects were excluded from important public debates, skewing the conversation in ways that sometimes did the administration’s policies a disservice. Some of my colleagues on the national security team, notably Bob Gates, found the restraints insulting; for me, it was not so much an insult—I didn’t take it personally—as it was a bother. I had to submit speeches for White House approval, and when I would forward requests for interviews, the White House would take weeks to respond, effectively killing the idea without ever saying so directly. That penchant for control may have been an understandable reaction to the problems of the Bush years, but it was in my view an overreaction that deprived the White House of some of its more capable public spokesmen. An additional consequence was that David Plouffe or David Axelrod—political advisers—were most often those who represented the administration. They were capable spokesmen, but because they came out of politics, their highly visible role had the effect of overemphasizing the political side of important policy decisions.
Some of the same undermined the administration’s relations with Congress. Among those close to him, the president was believed not to have found his time as a senator very rewarding and to be disdainful of Congress generally. I never witnessed that disdain directly, but I did pick up evidence of it within his senior staff. They often made it clear that they didn’t want any agency head revealing executive branch deliberations to members of Congress or cutting their own deals with members on policy questions.
One example sticks out. Chairman Feinstein, with ranking member Kit Bond’s reluctant concurrence, decided early in the Obama years that she wanted to launch a comprehensive study of the Bush-era interrogation policies. She requested access for her staff to every operational cable regarding the program, a database that had to be in the hundreds of thousands of documents. These were among the most sensitive documents the agency had. But Feinstein’s staff had the requisite clearances, and we had no basis to refuse her.
Still, I wanted to have some control over this material, so I proposed a deal: Instead of turning over the documents en masse to her staff, we would set up a secure reading room in Virginia. Her staff could come out to the secure facility and review documents one by one, and though they could take notes, the documents themselves would stay with the CIA. I thought it was a sound compromise and a good deal for the agency, so I didn’t think to clear it with the White House. I soon found out they saw it differently.
I was summoned down to a meeting in the Situation Room, where I was told I would have to “explain” this deal to Rahm. About a dozen of us—including Blair, Brennan, Preston, Donilon, and McDonough—piled into one of the smaller side conference rooms off the main Situation Room. It did not take long to get ugly.
“The president wants to know who the fuck authorized this release to the committees,” Rahm said, slamming his hand down on the table. “I have a president with his hair on fire, and I want to know what the fuck you did to fuck this up so bad!”
I’d known Rahm a long time, and I was no stranger to his language or his temper, so I knew when to worry about an outburst and when it was mostly for show. On this occasion, my hunch was that Rahm wasn’t that perturbed but that Obama probably was and that others at the table, particularly Brennan and McDonough, were too. Rahm was sticking up for them by coming after me. Before I had a chance to defend myself, Blair chimed in.
“If the president’s hair is on fire,” he retorted, “I want to know who the fuck set his hair on fire!”
It went back and forth like this for about fifteen minutes. Brennan and I even exchanged sharp words when I, unfairly, accused him of not sticking up for the agency in the debate over the interrogation memos. Finally, the White House team realized that whether they liked it or not, there was no way we could go back on our deal with the committee. And just like that, the whole matter was dropped.
That was the end of that, but it belied a deeper disagreement over how best to manage our relations with Congress. In my view, the administration’s reticence to include Congress was shortsighted. Because of my background, my inclination was to bring Congress into sensitive matters, both for its input and as a defensive measure to prevent later second-guessing. Those impulses were not often shared by the White House in those early months.
Having cut the deal to let Feinstein’s aides review the interrogation materials, I then set up a task force to manage the process—organizing the documents and creating procedures for accessing them. I also asked the task force to prepare summaries of the material so we would know what had been read and what implications the documents might have for the CIA. Importantly, those summaries were supposed to be just that—not analysis of the material or conclusions drawn from it, merely synopses to help us stay on top of the process.
Those synopses subsequently have come to be known as the “Panetta Review,” though I was not aware of what the final review concluded beyond the summary of the documents. Since then, the oversight committee and the CIA have publicly fought over the handling of the material. That’s a shame, because both have important responsibilities. Congress is entitled by law and common sense to provide oversight to the work of its intelligence agencies, and the CIA and other agencies have an equally serious duty to protect classified information. Neither of those responsibilities need come at the expense of the other.
I firmly believe that American national security is best protected when there is a partnership between Republicans and Democrats and between the executive and legislative branches. When trust breaks down, as it did in the spring of 2014 when Chairman Feinstein accused the CIA of spying on her staff conducting the review, it erodes the effectiveness of our intelligence operations and inhibits sound congressional oversight. The focus turns to finger-pointing and investigating past actions rather than to cooperating to protect the national security. As Winston Churchill once said, “If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”
• • •
Mending relations with Congress, elbowing for position within the administration, and ridding ourselves of a destructive relationship with certain contractors were among the more important Washington tasks I faced in those early months. But the CIA’s real work was across the globe, identifying threats to American security and, where possible, neutralizing them, either on our own or in cooperation with the many intelligence agencies with whom we were allied. The threats to security were dizzying in number and complexity.
Late that summer we received a particularly unnerving one. One well-known terrorist—a short, grandiose brute thought to command some sixteen thousand Pakistani and foreign fighters in the area of South Waziristan—was believed to have acquired an extraordinarily dangerous weapon and was boasting his intention to use it.
The terrorist was well known to American officials, but in the Bush years officials had not pursued him because his terrorist energy was directed at Pakistan, not the United States. In May 2008, however, he invited Western journalists to a feast and then announced before them his jihad against American forces in nearby Afghanistan. After that, he began sending fighters across the border to kill Americans.
Worried that he was preparing an even more lethal attack, I alerted my counterpart in Pakistan, Ahmad Shuja Pasha, then the head of Pakistan’s main intelligence service, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence). Pasha and I would become well acquainted over the next few years, but at that point we had met only twice—once during my first trip as CIA director, which included a stay in Pakistan, and once when Pasha visited the United States in April 2009, when we met at Langley.
Pasha was an intriguing, enigm
atic figure who carried himself with a military bearing, perhaps the result of having served as a general in the Pakistani military before being handpicked by Ashfaq Kayani, then the chief of army staff and the most powerful man in Pakistan, to run ISI. Pasha understood English perfectly, though his spoken English was often halting and too soft to hear. Like others in the officer corps, he had a whiff of a British accent.
I was impressed by his moderation, sense of history, and worldliness. During dinner with President Asif Ali Zardari on my first visit to Pakistan, Pasha told me that the problem in western Pakistan stemmed from the replacement of the malik, the secular tribal leader, with the mullah, the religious authority. He inveighed against the number of madrassas in which poor Pakistani youth were being molded, and yearned to draw his country into the future. Yet for all of Pasha’s charm and sincerity, what I did not know was how much he was willing to take on militants within his own country.
What I had to tell Pasha in the summer of 2009 was a matter of common concern for both of us. Pakistan was waging its own battle with the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), the Pakistani Taliban group responsible for the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. In 2008, a leader of that group was believed to have orchestrated the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, killing more than forty people, including Americans who were staying at the hotel; one guest whom I knew personally barely escaped with her life. On my first trip to Islamabad, I drove by the site, but it still was too dangerous for me even to stop and observe a moment of silence.