Steve Coll is a smart dude and an outstanding author. (Disclosure: I interviewed with him for a job in August 2008). He knows the Intelligence Community very, very well. Coll doesn’t think Leon Panetta is the right man for the job at the CIA. First, let me do justice to Coll’s argument. He lays out four main responsibilities for the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI).
Still, the C.I.A. director has four important jobs: manage the White House relationship; manage Congress, particularly to obtain budgetary favor; manage the agency’s workforce and daily operations; and manage liaisons with other spy chiefs, friendly and unfriendly.
Coll acknowledges that Panetta is well qualified to manage relationships with Congress and the White House, but he doesn’t think Panetta is well-suited to manage the workforce, daily operations, or our relationships with other spy chiefs around the world. Specifically, (and this is where Coll’s argument is strongest) Panetta hasn’t been involved in national security in the post-9/11 world, and that puts him at a disadvantage.
The essential problem is that Panetta is a man of Washington, not a man of the world. He’s seventy-years-old, spends his time on his California farm, and he’s been out of the deal flow, as they say on Wall Street, for about a decade; he knows California budget policy like the back of his hand, but what intuition or insight does he bring to the most dangerous territories in American foreign policy—Anbar Province, the Logar Valley, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas? Compared to his counterparts in Pakistan, Jordan, Israel, Britain, etc.—the critical relationships in national security that the C.I.A. Director alone can manage—he is a relative novice not only about intelligence operations but also about the foreign-policy contexts in which they occur.
In fairness to Coll, he also recognizes that Panetta will have value.
He will make sure the White House is protected from surprises or risks emanating from C.I.A. operations; he will ensure that interrogation and detention practices change, and that the Democratic Congress is satisfied by those changes; he will ensure that all of this occurs with a minimum of disruptive bloodletting.
Yet, Coll doesn’t think Panetta’s strengths outweigh his weaknesses. And, while I don’t dispute Coll’s main arguments, I do disagree on this last point. Panetta’s strengths do outweigh his weaknesses. They do so because Coll exaggerates Panetta’s weaknesses and gives short shrift to his strengths.
It’s important to remember that Panetta was the chief of staff to the president of the United States for several years in the mid-1990’s. In that role, Panetta worked every day with our Intelligence Community, including the chiefs. He worked with foreign heads of state and their high-ranking emissaries. Panetta was the second most important consumer of intelligence and knows what is useful and what is not. Coll doesn’t pay enough attention to Panetta’s relevant experience as chief of staff.
Panetta has two other key areas of experience. As Director of the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) he worked on the classified intelligence community budget. Having familiarity with that process is a major bonus for any Director. Panetta also served for 16 years in the House of Representatives, including as chairman of the House Budget Committee. It would be hard to find anyone with a better sense for the requirements of Congress.
Coll does well to identify Panetta’s main weakness. Panetta has not been working with intelligence chiefs in Pakistan, France, Germany, Israel, and Britain, and he will have to play catch-up on the issues. But Coll fails to mention that Panetta served on the Iraq Study Group which took a look not just at Iraq, but at our overall strategic position and interests in the world. Panetta may not be versed in the details of the Logar Valley in Afghanistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan, but he can learn that stuff very quickly.
The reason Panetta is a strong choice is that he is an outsider who has publicly opposed torture. But he isn’t just a front-man to put a happy face on U.S. intelligence, he’s a very competent manager with all kinds of very valuable experience. Steve Kappes is a master-spy, but he can’t bring a quarter of the assets to the table that Panetta can bring. Let Kappes run operations. Everything will be fine.
