WASHINGTON, May 11 (UPI) -- Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte this week launched a strategy of trying to reassure veteran CIA analysts, intelligence community sources told UPI.
The sources said that the announcement of Stephen Kappes, the widely respected former Director of Operations at the the CIA as the deputy to Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, President George W. Bush's choice as the next CIA director, as part of a strategy to restore morale in the CIA's analytical division, that has been ravaged by the resignations of senior staff and savage infighting under outgoing CIA Director Porter Goss.
In his two-decades-long career at the agency, Kappes 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," a veteran of the CIA's Directorate of Operations told UPI.
But the veteran CIA agent said another concern among agency staff was about the future of the CIA's analytic function. "There was a huge battle over analysis," he said.
The establishment under Negroponte of multi-agency centers to deal with key issues like terrorism and proliferation had "gutted" the CIA's own analytic capacity, the veteran CIA agent said.
"They took all the best people," he said.
Kappes' name was floated by Negroponte at an unusual event this week -- a press briefing following the president's announcement where the director of national intelligence took reporters' questions about the Hayden nomination for the better part of an hour.
Negroponte also used the event to tamp down fears about the analysis question, saying Hayden would ensure that the CIA remained, "as its name suggests, central to our intelligence community."
"With respect to analysis," the agency would continue to be "the intelligence community's center of excellence" with a "breadth and depth of analytic expertise (that) is unparalleled," the DNI said
Later, Negroponte said, "The intent [of his remarks] was to convey a message of reassurance that going forward, we want to build on the existing strengths of the CIA."
However, the former senior veteran CIA official was blunter. Negroponte's remarks were designed "to stop analysts jumping out the windows," but they were not misleading, the source told UPI.
"Will the CIA continue to do all-source analysis?" he asked. "Yes. Will it continue to do it better than any other agency in the [intelligence] community? Yes."
But the former official also acknowledged that the CIA's traditional status as the 800 pound gorilla of the intelligence community's analytic function -- with the final say over judgments in key documents like National Intelligence Estimates and Presidential Daily Briefs -- was over.
"Analysis is now a distributed function within the [intelligence] community," said the former official. "That's done. It's over. Suck it up and move on ... because that decision's been made."
Analysts at the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, the former official said, continued to work with agents to "target, mount and run operations" designed to disrupt, capture or kill terrorist cells and their leaders.
"That synergy [of having analysts sit next to agents] has been one of the main ingredients of the [Counter-Terrorism Center's) amazing successes against al-Qaida and its leadership," said the veteran.
However, the former CIA agent said that synergy would be impossible to reproduce elsewhere.
But the former official said there was also a need for analysts to do the kind of strategic planning that went on at the National Counter-Terrorism Center -- one of the inter-agency intelligence centers created on Negroponte's watch.
That was big-picture thinking encompassing such questions as "how much emphasis to put on al-Qaida versus Hezbollah or Hamas?" said the former official.
