The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (33 page)

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Months before the election, the intelligence community began preparing for a new president, and the director of national intelligence at the time, Mike McConnell, asked me—at the time serving as CIA’s director for intelligence, the Agency’s chief analyst—to play a large role in the transition. As had been done historically, the intelligence community offered national security briefings to the candidates. Along with a team, I briefed John McCain—who, given his long service in Congress, particularly on the Senate Armed Services Committee, did not need a briefing. He knew as much as we did about national security.

And, along with another team, I provided Sarah Palin with her first-ever national security briefing. I was impressed with Governor Palin’s interest in what motivated individual foreign leaders, and it was clear she had a natural understanding of people and how to deal with them. But her knowledge of the world was diametrically opposed to that of her running mate. She knew almost nothing about the key foreign policy and national security issues of the day. In contrast to the many questions she asked about people, she asked almost none about the issues themselves. She was in over her head, she seemed to me to know it, and it was not her fault. I felt sorry she had been put in that situation.

In addition to giving oral briefings to the candidates, we prepared briefing papers for the senior officials that the new president
would bring along with him. We also prepared two briefing packages for the president-elect himself—a package on CIA’s most sensitive programs (of which fewer than ten copies were made) and a book of short biographies of all the world leaders who were likely to call the winner to congratulate him.

We also prepared—with the permission of the Bush White House—to start providing the President’s Daily Brief to the winner as soon as possible after the election. But the White House added a crucial caveat—only the president-elect and those he had already publicly named to a senior national security post could receive the PDB. No one else.

This was not the White House playing politics. This was President Bush continuing his eight-year practice of limiting the number of people who received the PDB, in order to protect the information in it. During my one year briefing the president, it had fallen to me on several occasions to make the case to add someone to the dissemination list. Bush would always ask tough questions about the person’s need to know—and these were senior officials in his own administration. In each case he would say to me, “The more people who receive the PDB, the more you will water it down.” He was right. That was exactly the way it worked.

McConnell also requested that I go to Chicago—or Phoenix, if McCain had won the election—for the transition, to be the on-scene coordinator for getting the president-elect up to speed on intelligence matters. McConnell had chosen two senior analysts to be the newly elected president’s daily intelligence briefers, but McConnell wanted me in the room as well. In a reversal from my Bush briefing days, I would now be doing the color commentary, while others would be doing the play-by-play.

With Obama’s victory, McConnell said that he wanted to do the first two briefings himself for the president-elect—they were set
for Thursday and Friday, November 6 and 7, starting just two days after the election. McConnell requested that I and one of the two daily briefers join him, so that he could introduce us. The briefing was set for nine a.m. in a secure conference room at the FBI’s field office in Chicago.

Just before nine the president-elect walked in, all smiles, accompanied by several of his aides who had handled national security matters during the campaign and who were destined for top jobs in the administration. The group included Denis McDonough, Mark Lippert, and Jim Steinberg. After introductions and congratulations, McConnell apologetically made it clear that his instructions were that only Obama was to receive the briefing, not the others. The president-elect in turn made it clear that he wanted his team in the room. I appreciated the president-elect’s position. What he was asking for made perfect sense: he wanted to have conversations with his senior aides about the policy implications of what he was reading and hearing. McConnell, however, stuck to his White House guidance—although I was thinking, “Now is the time to be flexible, let them all in the room, and ask for forgiveness from the White House later. This is about building relationships that will last for the next four or eight years.”

The smiles and sunny attitudes disappeared. Neither side wanted to budge. Obama and his team caucused in a nearby office, with the president-elect eventually returning and saying, “OK, I’ll take the briefing today, but from tomorrow on you can just send it to me to read myself—until you include my guys.” The intelligence community had gotten off to a very bad start with its new boss.

While the plan had been for McConnell to stay in Chicago for one night and for me to stay for several weeks to oversee the daily PDB sessions and facilitate other substantive briefings for Obama during the transition period, that no longer seemed to make any
sense, since he had no desire to take any in-person briefings without his team. So McConnell and I decided to fly home, but the Air Force jet that had brought us to Chicago had departed and it was not due back till the next day.

We improvised. Although the DNI’s security detail did not like it, McConnell decided that we would fly back to D.C. on a commercial jet—it would save us time and save the taxpayers money. McConnell and I—and two of his security agents—were whisked through O’Hare Airport security and put on the plane before the other passengers boarded. On the plane we met two federal air marshals who happened to be assigned to the flight to Washington’s National Airport. A conversation ensued between the marshals and McConnell’s security detail. The marshals asked, “Are you guys armed?” Answer: “Yes.” The marshals went on, “Well, just so you know, we are armed as well, and so are both the pilot and copilot of the flight.” I was thinking, “If anyone tries to hijack this plane they are in for one helluva surprise!”

A couple of weeks later the Bush administration relented and agreed to allow a couple of designated Obama aides to be present for the briefings. I returned to Chicago and, working with McDonough and Lippert, began to coordinate a wide-ranging series of briefings for the president-elect and his team on matters such as counterterrorism, counter-proliferation, Middle East peace, and regional hot spots. I worked hard to improve relations that had turned as frosty as a Chicago winter, and ended up spending the better part of a month in the Windy City.

I found the president to be reserved in many of the briefings, asking few questions. McDonough and Lippert, on the other hand, asked many questions in front of their boss and shared their views on issues. The president-elect listened intently to what they had to say. It struck me that they felt comfortable enough with their boss
to talk for lengthy periods and even to take over the conversation. To me this signaled that Obama was willing to listen to the views of others and to create an environment where his subordinates felt they were welcome to speak—incredibly important traits, I believe, in any decision-maker.

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One of the briefings I organized, held on December 9, was the president-elect’s first orientation about the most sensitive operations of the intelligence community—covert action. These are operations conducted by CIA with the express written authorization of the president through the use of a presidential finding. They are among the most sensitive and secret actions of the US government, and any new president needs to be briefed on them before being sworn in—because they are his programs and he needs to be comfortable with them. This brought the rendition, detention, and interrogation issues to the table for the first time with the new president.

While I was unable to attend—I was back in Washington—the briefing was led by my boss, CIA director Mike Hayden. As part of the agenda, Hayden gave the president-elect and his team their first in-depth briefing on enhanced interrogation techniques. Hayden, hoping that the session would ease the president-elect’s opposition to the program, explained that there was much misinformation about these techniques. Hayden stressed the valuable intelligence gained by the program and emphasized that only six enhanced techniques were available for use; he also emphasized that those still authorized, like the original list of ten, had been deemed by the Department of Justice not to be torture. To make the point he demonstrated one of them, the open-hand facial slap, on Deputy DNI David Shedd.

Several months later I heard from several of Obama’s top aides
that the president-elect had reacted to the briefing in a way quite different from what Hayden had intended. It actually convinced the president of the impropriety of the techniques and cemented his view on what to do about them. On January 22, 2009, President Obama’s second full day in office, he signed an executive order banning the use of all the enhanced techniques and ordering that any future interrogation by any government agency follow the rules laid out in the Army Field Manual. He also directed CIA to close any remaining detention facilities (which had been emptied in 2006) and never operate them again. Although it went largely unnoticed by the media, the president did an about-face on the practice of rendition. He subtly endorsed the continued use of renditions—calling them “short-term transfers”—but in doing so he required greater oversight from the executive branch.

In announcing the new approach to renditions, detentions, and interrogations, Obama made clear that he did not want to look backward at what the Bush administration had done. He wanted to move forward. He wanted to put the past behind us. Indeed, he had told George Stephanopoulos a few days before signing the executive orders that he was not interested in a broad investigation of Bush-era interrogation programs.

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It quickly became clear that not looking in the rearview mirror was wishful thinking. Obama’s first choice to be CIA director was John Brennan, the co-leader of the president-elect’s transition team for the intelligence community and an advisor on national security issues to Obama when he was on the campaign trail. But Brennan had been the number four in the Agency’s hierarchy when the detention and interrogation program was established in 2002, and human rights groups came out strongly against his nomination.
Brennan, not wanting to subject the president to an early nomination fight, withdrew his name from consideration. Obama instead brought Brennan into the White House to be his counterterrorism czar, a position that did not require Senate confirmation.

Obama then turned to Leon Panetta to be his chief spy. In his confirmation hearing to become the new CIA director, liberal members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) insisted on asking Panetta if he thought that waterboarding amounted to torture. Panetta said yes. CIA officers who had been involved in the program, and who had been assured by the Department of Justice that waterboarding was legal and not torture, were not happy. Panetta eventually won over these officers, but it was a rough start.

The look backward would continue in March 2009, when the SSCI decided by a vote of fourteen to one to do a review of CIA’s defunct detention and interrogation program. Chairman of the Committee Dianne Feinstein and Vice Chairman Kit Bond, in a joint press statement, said that the purpose of the review was “to shape detention and interrogation policies in the future.” They noted that the review would include a close look at documents, as well as interviews of Agency officials. Feinstein later told me that she was motivated by a strongly held view that it was morally wrong for the Agency to have used EITs, and that the Agency should never do so again, no matter who the president is. Feinstein said that she wanted the committee’s report to be the nail in the coffin. The timing of the investigation reflected the fact that Feinstein had become chairman of the committee in January 2009.

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Senator Feinstein is someone I got to know well during my time as deputy director. She has strongly held opinions on many issues. I have deep respect for her passion about national security and the
importance of intelligence to keeping the country safe. There are few members of the Senate who can match her in these regards. She is also innovative. During Panetta’s early tenure as director, she began what would become a series of “coffees” with the committee. Instead of the members’ sitting on a dais with the director or me at the witness table, we would all sit around a table together. The atmosphere was much more informal and the dialogue much richer. Feinstein even brought coffee and doughnuts—Krispy Kreme glazed—to the sessions. These sessions were so successful in keeping the committee fully informed that the concept spread to the House Intelligence Committee.

I cannot overstate the importance of congressional oversight. Since CIA is a secret intelligence organization operating in a democracy, it is vitally important that CIA’s two oversight committees—the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and its House counterpart—satisfy themselves and make clear to the American people that CIA is operating within the law and that it is operating effectively.

During my seven-and-a-half years on CIA’s senior leadership team, I saw ups and downs in our relationship with the committees for a variety of reasons. I believe it is the responsibility of both the leadership of CIA and the leadership of the committees to make the relationship work, but at the end of the day the onus is on the CIA director.

I saw the relationship work best under Leon Panetta. Panetta’s approach was that he, I, and the rest of the leadership team—indeed, the entire Agency—should be completely open and forthcoming with the committee. When Congress believes—either accurately or inaccurately—that CIA is trying to hide something from them, things go downhill. Panetta also did the small things to help the relationship—for example, a phone call just to touch base or hosting a dinner in the director’s dining room—all of which paid dividends.