Freshly retired from the Army, Gen. David H. Petraeus will be
sworn in today as Director of Central Intelligence. The Princeton
Ph.D. is a brilliant, charismatic man used to command and
diplomacy. But leaving the military and entering a highly
politicized bureaucracy, he faces some daunting challenges.
Petraeus, famous for devising and conducting the
counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, is credited
for succeeding in both even though those accomplishments are
entirely Sisyphean. They have created conditions under which we can
withdraw in a moment of relative calm, but what we have won with
blood and treasure will dissolve soon after we leave. In these
Sisyphean results is a metaphor for what will happen when he tries
to transform the spy agency while it is under extreme pressure to
produce a lot more of the valuable intelligence our nation
needs.
Petraeus has, for years, been one of the nation’s top
intelligence consumers. Now he reverses roles: as DCI, he will be
the principal intelligence producer, leading an agency beset by
poor morale, politicization, and an inability to produce current
and accurate intelligence on many of America’s most dangerous
adversaries.
The CIA’s
relationship with Congress
is one of the
two sources of
the agency’s
morale problem. From
his own experience,
Petraeus knows how
volatile Congress can
be. You can be
a hero one day
— as his
confirmation hearing and
94-0 vote evidence
— and a goat
the next. He
must remember the
September 2007 hearing
in which he and
Amb. Ryan Crocker
testified about the
Iraq war. Then-Senator
Hillary Clinton called
the two men
liars, saying that
their testimony required
“a willing
suspension of
disbelief.”
That episode will color relations between Petraeus and
Hillary, and it should make for some amusing moments in Obama
cabinet meetings. Petraeus — the new guy on the block — will have
to guard himself against the byplay between the two bureaucracies.
The Joe Wilson venture to Niger in search of Iraqi uranium deals,
and the subsequent Valerie Plame name blame game nearly brought
down the Bush administration. From beginning to end, the whole
thing was the product of the cooperation between the State and CIA
bureaucracies with — as former Vice President Cheney points out —
the consistent cooperation of Colin Powell and his deputy, Dick
Armitage.
The CIA’s relations with Congress have been very tense
since the Bush administration’s case on Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction — built on then-CIA Director George Tenet’s assurances
that it was a “slam dunk” — fell apart. Just as damaging were the
allegations of detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison that
surfaced over seven years ago. Though the CIA had nothing to do
with Abu Ghraib, the allegations of CIA torture brought accusations
from congressional Democrats — most vocally from then-House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi — that the CIA was lying to Congress. Those
accusations have never been withdrawn.
Petraeus’s predecessor — Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
— thought the situation was so bad that he penned an unprecedented
op-ed in the Washington Post two years ago. In it, Panetta
said the CIA’s relationship with Congress had deteriorated into
“an atmosphere of declining trust, growing frustration
and more frequent leaks of properly classified
information.”
That atmosphere, as several intelligence sources told me,
pushed the CIA into a “CYA” mode of operation, hampering
significantly intelligence gathering and analysis. CIA morale was
boosted enormously by the successful bin Laden raid, but the
problem is too deep to have been cured. Petraeus’s first task will
be to restore confidence in the CIA both internally and in Congress
to fix part of the morale problem.
The other source of the morale problem was the ongoing
Justice Department investigation into CIA detainee interrogations.
At about the same time Petraeus was confirmed for the CIA job,
Attorney General Holder announced that the investigation was being
ended except in regard to the very few cases in which detainees
died in CIA custody.
That there are no coincidences in politics isn’t a cliché:
it’s an aphorism. Was Holder’s action the price the price the Obama
administration paid for getting Petraeus to take the CIA job? That
seems entirely likely. If Petraeus forced Holder’s action to be
part of the deal under which he’d take the DCI job, he will have
raised his own reputation among the CIA’s employees (and the CIA’s
morale) substantially.
The politicization of the CIA goes back at least to the
Clinton era, when the president fudged CIA findings in making
public pronouncements of policy. As Donald Rumsfeld’s “Intelligence
Side Letter” to the 1998 Ballistic Missile Threat Commission report
said, “However it is manifested, ‘fudging’ has a corrupting
influence on both the policy making and the intelligence
communities.”
Petraeus, as a military commander, hasn’t led a highly
politicized agency before. He will struggle with leaks and adverse
publicity whenever he crosses the embedded CIA
bureaucracy.
That bureaucracy produced the infamous 2007
National Intelligence Estimate, which said the intelligence
community had “high confidence” in finding that Iran had stopped
its nuclear weapons program years ago. That NIE was a political
document, aimed at pressuring the Bush administration to lessen its
pressure on Iran. As CIA Director, Petraeus will at least be able
to prevent recurrence of that sort of political mistake.
Petraeus’s third problem — transforming the CIA into a
spy agency that can produce more actionable intelligence — is
probably the most difficult one. We cannot get current and accurate
information on a host of adversaries — Iran and China chief among
them — which are what intelligence professionals call “denied
areas.” He needs to build everything from spy networks to analysts’
language skills to correct that and will have to deal with a
president whose signature on required “presidential findings” that
authorize covert action will be tough to get.
Petraeus’s aims will be created by need and informed by
his battlefield experience. He knows well that spies and informants
who comprise “humint” — human intelligence — cannot be equaled in
intelligence gathering. No matter how good or how many your
satellites may be, they can’t replace the information that spies
and informants can obtain. Which means he will have to face —
again — the issue of “enhanced interrogation
techniques.”
Petraeus, by his reputation and experience, is precisely
the right person to make the case that the “EITs” have to be
restored. President Obama, in one of his first acts, prohibited
them. But now, after the CIA found Osama bin Laden, the value of
the EITs cannot be questioned.
Petraeus can revive the enhanced interrogation techniques
by starting to talk about their absolute value as two of his
predecessors — George Tenet and Gen. Mike Hayden — have gone on
record to say.
As I
wrote last year, Tenet’s memoir says that what the
terrorist detainees gave us under the EITs “was worth more than the
CIA, NSA, the FBI and our military operations had achieved
collectively.” Hayden, in a June 2 op-ed in the Wall Street
Journal, credited the EITs — used on three detainees — for
leading the CIA to bin Laden. Given their value, and that these
techniques are not torture, Petraeus could — and should — build a
case to resume their use. But to do that, he will have to take on
his president and Eric Holder.
Petraeus has probably trekked up mountains in Afghanistan
that were easier to climb than that political hill. He can either
make the attempt, or fail in his principal mission: to transform
the CIA into the effective intelligence agency our nation
needs.
In the Iraq and Afghanistan counterinsurgencies,
Petraeus’s Sisyphean performance can be forgiven because of the
constraints imposed on his command by presidents and adversaries.
The terror-sponsoring nations (such as Iran, Syria and Pakistan)
were — and remain — immune to action which could have enabled
some permanent results from Petraeus’s counterinsurgency campaigns.
There will be no forgiveness if Petraeus fails at CIA.
Our nation was vulnerable on 9/11 because of successive
failures in gathering and analyzing intelligence. The Iraq war was
begun, in good faith, on the basis of another massive intelligence
failure. And still — a decade after 9/11 — we still don’t have
reliable, penetrating intelligence on Iran, China, North Korea or
even WikiLeaks.
Current, accurate and well-analyzed intelligence is the
foundation of national policy. Without it, national security
policymaking is nothing more than guesswork.
