The Way of the Knife (28 page)

There was another reason that Obama, Brennan, and other senior members of the new administration would come to rely on targeted killing as an important instrument of counterterrorism. During the campaign, Obama had often spoken about how the secret detentions and interrogation techniques of the Bush era had sullied America’s image, and during his first week in office he announced a plan to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and ban all of the coercive interrogation methods used by the CIA since the September 11 attacks. The decision was immediately denounced by Dick Cheney, the former vice president, as a cynical move by a callow president playing politics at the expense of national security. If there was a major terrorist attack while Obama was president, Cheney warned, it would be Obama’s fault for denying the CIA the tools it needed to keep the country safe.

Cheney’s vituperative comments, coming immediately after he left the White House, were a significant breach of the standard protocol that an outgoing administration doesn’t criticize the incoming president—at least in the early months. But the Cheney critique was meant as a warning shot, a signal that any evidence of Barack Obama being “weak” on national security issues would become grist for partisan attacks against the new president.

As he sat in the meetings with the new team, John Rizzo, a career CIA lawyer who had achieved a degree of infamy for his role in getting Justice Department approval for the CIA’s detention-and-interrogation program, was struck by the hawkish tone of Obama’s aides. “They never came out and said they would start killing people because they couldn’t interrogate them, but the implication was unmistakable,” Rizzo said. “
Once the interrogation was gone
, all that was left was the killing.”

The options for interrogating prisoners weren’t, as Rizzo said, “gone.” But interrogation and detention had clearly become a briar patch for the new administration: Besides the decision to shut Guantánamo Bay within a year, there were also concerns among Obama’s team that capturing prisoners and handing them over to foreign governments could ignite liberal criticism that the administration was outsourcing torture. At the same time, no prominent member of President Obama’s own party had criticized drone strikes, and Republicans were hardly in a position to challenge the new president for fighting
too
aggressive a campaign against terrorists. The political conditions were set for an escalation of the secret wars.

The meetings over two days at Langley were the first sign that President Obama planned to rely on the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command in ways that not even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had, as America’s primary tool to conduct lethal operations. Seven years after the September 11 attacks, the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan had exhausted the American public and drained the American purse. More important, though, the tools of secret war had been calibrated and refined during that period, and Obama’s team thought they saw an opportunity to wage war without the staggering costs of the big military campaigns that topple governments, require years of occupation, and catalyze radicalization throughout the Muslim world. As Brennan described the Obama administration’s approach during one speech,
the United States could use a “scalpel
” rather than a “hammer” to carry out war beyond war zones.

Obama wasn’t the first liberal Democratic president to embrace black operations. John F. Kennedy gave final approval for the Bay of Pigs operation and ramped up covert operations in Vietnam. And, for all the time that Jimmy Carter spent railing against CIA adventures as a presidential candidate, he ended up authorizing a string of covert actions during his final two years in the White House.

But Barack Obama was also the first president to enter the White House who had come of age after the Vietnam War and the roiling events of the 1960s and 1970s that had fostered cynicism among an earlier generation about the CIA and, more broadly, about the use of American power overseas. In one 2010 interview, Obama told reporter Bob Woodward that he was “probably the first president who is young enough that the Vietnam War wasn’t at the core of my development,” and so he grew up with “
none of the baggage
that arose out of the dispute of the Vietnam War.” It was an answer to a question about the tensions between the military and civilians during the Vietnam era, but clearly Obama also had a view of the CIA that was generationally different from that of baby boomers like Bill Clinton.

The CIA’s ascendancy during the Obama administration wasn’t just about the age of the man sitting in the Oval Office, or about the nature of the threats Obama learned about each day during his intelligence briefing. It also had to do with the fact that Obama’s first CIA director turned out to be, in terms of his ability to advance the spy agency’s interests inside the executive branch, the most influential CIA director since William Casey during the Reagan administration.

—

LEON E. PANETTA SEEMED
at first an extremely unlikely choice to take over the CIA. He had no professional background in intelligence or military affairs outside of a two-year Army stint in the 1960s. During his years as a Democratic congressman representing a coastal pocket of Northern California, he never served on the committees overseeing either the Pentagon or the CIA. He was outwardly warm and avuncular but also a fierce backroom negotiator and fighter who slung four-letter words around a room as frequently as he did prepositions. He had had glancing contact with the intelligence world during his time as President Clinton’s chief of staff, but that had been a very different era and a very different CIA.

When Panetta took over as CIA director, he had literally no idea that the CIA was killing people around the world. By early 2009, the CIA’s targeted-killing campaign using drones in Pakistan was being extensively reported in the press. And yet, incredibly, Panetta was shocked to learn during his initial briefings for the CIA job that he would be, in effect,
a military commander for a secret war
. “He was a total blank slate on intelligence issues when he walked into the door at Langley,” said Rizzo, who had helped prepare a set of briefings for Panetta before his Senate confirmation hearings. But what he lacked in tangible experience in issues of life and death he made up for in Washington savvy. Panetta had two of the qualities the ever-paranoid CIA looked for in a director: clout and respect within the White House and a willingness to defend the CIA’s turf against the agency’s perceived enemies in Washington.

Both of these qualities were tested immediately, after White House officials decided to end a long-standing legal battle and declassify the internal memos authorizing the CIA’s interrogation methods during the early years of the Bush administration. Panetta had already made his views on the interrogation methods known during his confirmation hearings, saying unequivocally that they were nothing short of “torture.” The statement had sent shocks through parts of the CIA’s clandestine service and created suspicions that the new CIA director was going to be the second coming of Stansfield Turner, an outsider that a liberal president sent out to Langley to rein in what the White House believed was a spy agency out of control.

But the very opposite happened. Panetta became a CIA champion, beloved by many at Langley but criticized by others who said that, like so many CIA directors before him, he had been co-opted by the agency’s clandestine branch. Within a month of his arrival he had managed to delay the release of the interrogation memos and forced a debate inside the White House about the propriety of spilling all the details of the defunct prison program.

Panetta had by that time experienced firsthand the influence that the CIA’s Directorate of Operations has over spy chiefs at Langley. Both Stephen Kappes and officers at the Counterterrorism Center warned him that
releasing the memos
would devastate morale inside the CTC. The warning came with an implied threat: He risked permanently losing the support of the agency’s clandestine workforce before he had even figured out how to get from his office to the CIA cafeteria. Panetta had spent enough time in Washington to know the implications of what he was hearing. He risked becoming another John Deutch or Porter Goss, men who had clashed with the Directorate of Operations and found their tenure at the agency to be nasty, brutish, and short. Panetta was sold.

He was on his first overseas trip as CIA director when he learned about the White House’s plans to declassify and release the interrogation memos—complying with a federal judge’s order in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. He immediately called Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and urged him to put off the release. The two men had known each other from the Clinton White House, and it was Emanuel who had pushed for Panetta’s appointment to the CIA. Emanuel went along with Panetta’s request, and in the weeks that followed, Panetta made an impassioned case at the White House for keeping the memos secret,
winning Emanuel over to his side
. It was a curious, almost otherworldly moment: A man who had publicly accused the CIA of breaking American law by committing acts of torture was forcefully arguing that the details of those acts be kept secret from the public.

Panetta ultimately lost the debate, and President Obama ordered that the memos be released. But it hardly mattered for the new CIA director. By insisting that the White House at least debate the issue, he had proved to the agency’s rank and file that he had clout inside the new administration. More important, he had gone to the mat on an issue that was deeply important to the clandestine service. He had shown, as many inside the CIA saw it, that he was part of the team.

—

IT WAS ANOTHER MATTER
entirely for the man who, at least on paper, was Leon Panetta’s boss. Admiral Dennis Blair, who had been sent to the CIA during the Clinton administration to serve as a liaison to the Pentagon, had vaulted up the Navy’s senior ranks in the years since and ended his military career as a four-star admiral in charge of the U.S. Pacific Command. The job had given him oversight of more than a third of the earth’s surface, and his orders were obeyed by troops spread across hundreds of thousands of square miles. But Blair, now retired from the military, was taking over a job that remained ill defined four years after the Bush administration created the Director of National Intelligence position under pressure from Congress and the 9/11 Commission to account for the intelligence failures preceding the September 11 attacks and the Iraq war. Some had envisioned the intelligence post to be a powerful job, riding herd over a fractious collection of spy agencies housed in different departments. But Donald Rumsfeld’s allies in Congress were successful in neutering the new position, and the Pentagon retained much of the intelligence community’s budget. These bureaucratic knife fights meant that by the time Blair took over the post in early 2009 both the Pentagon and the CIA had ensured that he would be little more than a figurehead.

Making things worse, Blair saw right away that he was an outsider in a close-knit group of advisers who had been with President Obama through much of the grueling campaign—a group Blair referred to disparagingly as the “Long Marchers,” in reference to the military retreat over thousands of miles by the Chinese Communists in 1934. His suspicions were borne out during an early scrape with Panetta. Blair began pushing for the authority to appoint the senior American spy in each country overseas, a designation that by tradition automatically went to the CIA’s chief of station. It was a relatively minor issue, but Panetta and his deputy, Stephen Kappes, saw it as a threat to the CIA’s authority and lobbied the White House to reject Blair’s plan. With the proposal languishing at the White House during the summer of 2009, Blair decided he didn’t need to wait for a White House decision and issued an order directing the change. He informed Panetta about his decision during a short, tense phone call. Panetta slammed down the phone.

“That guy is a fucking asshole,” he told a group of aides gathered in his office. The very next day, a secret cable from Panetta was blasted to all CIA stations overseas.
The cable carried a simple message
: Ignore Blair’s directive.

Not used to having his orders disobeyed, Blair complained to James Jones, Obama’s national security advisor, that Panetta was being insubordinate and ought to be fired. The White House sided with the CIA.

Blair had long held a dim view of the CIA’s history of covert-action programs. He believed that too many presidents, too often in American history, used the CIA as a crutch when their advisers couldn’t agree on how to handle a particularly thorny foreign-policy issue. And, he thought,
covert-action programs usually
lasted years beyond their value to the country.

So when, during his first year in office, President Obama ordered a review of the roughly one dozen covert-action programs the CIA was carrying out at the time, from the drone strikes in Pakistan to a campaign to sabotage Iran’s nuclear work, Blair hoped the process would be a chance to inspect the wiring on each program and decide whether it made any sense to continue it. Instead, the summer 2009 meetings effectively rubber-stamped all of the CIA’s secret ventures. At the meetings, Stephen Kappes argued forcefully for why each program had been a success and needed to continue. By the time a “principals committee” meeting was scheduled for the fall, when President Obama’s top national security advisers would make final decisions on the covert-action programs, not one of them was under consideration for cancellation.

Blair watched with frustration as the process unfolded. He approached Robert Gates, the defense secretary who had spent most of his Washington career in the CIA. Gates had seen his share of covert actions blow up, and Blair knew that Gates had clout inside the White House. Gates agreed with Blair that they should draw up a list of basic principles to guide decisions on covert-action programs. The list of six principles they cobbled together were fairly innocuous: They included a provision that covert-action programs should constantly be evaluated for transition to noncovert activities and another that the programs should not undermine “
the development of stable
, non-corrupt, and representative governments that respect the human rights of their citizens.”