http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=hsnews-000002993910Send Dollar Bill to the CIA
By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff
Anyone connected to post-Sept. 11 “harsh interrogation measures,” no matter at arm’s length, is apparently disqualified to run Barack Obama ’s spy agency.
Hence the immolation of former National Counterterrorism Center chief John Brennan, the president-elect’s closest intelligence adviser, as the lead candidate to run the spy agency.
The left-wing hit job on Brennan showed that liberals may have a taste for covert action after all, the spooks chuckle.
“Almost anyone working at the agency since [Sept. 11] is tainted,” says retired CIA veteran Milt Bearden, a former Pakistan station chief, expressing the facts of life.
“If he wants experience, get an old-timer who left before that. Or go with a completely new face, maybe someone like a [Richard] Holbrooke, though I doubt he’d take it.”
Or get it. The veteran diplomat’s vice-chairmanship of a hedge fund is said to be problematic.
Can anybody who could do the job, get the job?
“Beats me,” said a well-wired former senior intelligence official. “Brennan’s hands were not very dirty at all. He was apparently thrown under the bus because some ill-informed bloggers thought they were [dirty] and the transition folks didn’t have the will to explain that they were wrong.”
A former national security official and friend of Brennan, who asked not to be identified, is disgusted by what happened.
“Ninety-nine percent of” what the CIA has been doing since Sept. 11 “is not related to torture, but now everybody is tarred with this brush,” he said.
“The dirty little secret, “ he added, “is that very little has been going on since [Sept. 11] that hasn’t gone on for the last 30 years.”
By that standard, almost anybody who’s worked in operations — like the much-touted former CIA station chief Jack Devine, or the current heads of the agency’s clandestine services, Stephen Kappes and Michael Sulick — has a skeleton in the closet.
“They are going to have to go outside of that circle,” says a recently retired CIA division chief
