WASHINGTON, May 11 (UPI) -- Bush administration officials this week tried to reassure lawmakers and the American public about the CIA's future.
The extraordinary decision to float the name of Stephen Kappes, the candidate for deputy CIA director before his putative boss, Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, was even formally nominated Monday was one of a series of steps taken by U.S. officials this week to calm widespread concerns about the future of the agency.
They included a number of rare breaches of the usually rigid protocol that surrounds the announcement of presidential nominees, including what one expert called the "virtually unprecedented" sight of a senior official pre-empting the president by previewing a mid-morning Rose Garden event on breakfast news shows.
A chorus of normally loyal Republicans spent last weekend fretting on national TV that it sent the wrong message to the CIA to be putting a military man like Hayden, a four-star Air Force general, in charge at a time when many insiders believe the agency's new role, leading the collection of human intelligence by U.S. agencies, is under stealthy assault from the Pentagon.
Hawkish Democrat Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., a ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said the agency was "in freefall" and complained that "in the past year-and-a-half, more than 300 years of experience has either been pushed or walked out of the door."
But within the CIA, and more broadly in the sprawling and sometimes fractious collection of agencies referred to as the intelligence community, there were different concerns, say several former and serving intelligence officials, who all asked for anonymity, or declined to be quoted at all, because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Floating the name of Kappes -- a widely respected former head of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, the arm of the agency which recruits agents and runs operations -- as deputy was designed to neutralize several different lines of criticism or doubts about Hayden all at once, according to one former senior intelligence official familiar with the effort.
"The two concerns are one, he's military; two, he doesn't have a background in human intelligence," said the former official of Hayden, who has spent most of his career in so-called technical collection -- like the electronic eavesdropping he ran at the National Security Agency.
"By putting out the Kappes name," the former official said, "they neutralized those concerns pretty effectively, I'd say."
But none of the officials that United Press International spoke to for this article said they regarded Hayden's military status as a real issue -- "It's for the pundits and blabbermouths," was how one dismissed it.
Several referenced Hayden's decision whilst NSA director to testify to congress during the debate over intelligence reform in favor of removing his agency from the Department of Defense.
His testimony reportedly angered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who spent that summer of 2004 fighting a rearguard action against draft legislation giving the putative intelligence czar it created authority over Pentagon spying efforts.
In 2003, Rumsfeld had appointed a close and long-time aide, Steven Cambone, to a new post as Pentagon intelligence chief, where he has led a re-structuring and aggressive expansion of the Department's intelligence operations, which now include the deployment of undercover military teams abroad to spy on, track down and kill the leaders of al-Qaida and other U.S. enemies in the war on terror.
"There has always been a strong military presence at the CIA," said the former official. "The concerns (at the agency) are not about Hayden, they are about Rumsfeld, [Vice President Dick] Cheney and Cambone."
Another former senior official, a retired veteran of the Directorate of Operations who maintains contacts with former colleagues, agreed, saying that Cambone's activities were viewed with suspicion at CIA headquarters, where there was fear that the encroachment of the military into human intelligence "was going to cause chaos in overseas collection," and that some saw him as a "Rasputin-like figure."
CIA Spokesman Paul Gimigliano told UPI that accounts of widespread concern in the agency about its future were overblown. "The men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency are focused, as always, on their mission," he said in a statement.
"We have record numbers of highly talented people coming through our front door, and it's quite wrong to think that our experienced hands have all left. It's the difficult work of trying to keep America smart and strong that motivates our officers. That holds true through every change of leadership."
Kappes, a charismatic former marine, was responsible for one of the agency's rare recent public successes in the fight to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He was the CIA's point man in its dealings with Libya, which ended with the regime there abandoning its effort to acquire chemical and biological weapons.
In his two-decades-long career at the agency, he had "the experience against hard targets," and demonstrated the "methodical, disciplined approach" required for success in the human intelligence business, which he knows "like no-one else," said the veteran of the CIA's Directorate of Operations.
The former senior intelligence official said flagging the appointment of Kappes was also designed to show how seriously the administration took their plan to make the CIA the leader of U.S. efforts in human intelligence.
"There was a sense that [outgoing CIA Director Porter] Goss wasn't really with the program on that one," said the former official, noting that at a speech earlier this year to CIA staff at the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters, the director had referred to the CIA's four directorates -- operations, analysis, administration and science and technology -- as "four equal tribes."
The former official said Goss was seen as lacking the creativity and vision to really grasp the opportunity presented by the creation last year -- within the CIA -- of the National Clandestine Service, the new organization that will lead and set standards for all human intelligence collection by U.S. agencies.
Kappes was seen as "the man with the plan" for human intelligence.
