The Spies Who Love Obama
Washington Dispatch: Why some of Bush's intel professionals are now working for a Democrat—and how they'd reform the CIA. Part Two in a series on the candidates' national security policies.
September 25, 2008
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As has become painfully clear since 9/11, intelligence is only as good as the worldview of the person receiving it. The team of former intelligence professionals who have come together to advise Barack Obama describe a candidate who they believe is open-minded and intellectually inclined to absorb information—not just the recognized current threats (terrorism, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, a resurgent and more belligerent Russia), but the ones on the horizon (nuclear terrorism, water wars, climate change and the conflicts it could generate). But they also are urging him to rethink the architecture of the intelligence community to grapple with both current and emerging threats, and to do away with the Bush administration's legacy of excessive secrecy and its tendency to view complex international challenges in black-and-white terms.
"The world is a very complicated place and there are not always easy solutions to a lot of the problems out there," says John Brennan, a top Obama intelligence advisor and former senior CIA official who co-founded the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and the National Counterterrorism Center, a post-9/11 effort to integrate the US government's terror threat intelligence. "If you look at the world in black and white, you miss a lot of the subtleties out there. 'Either with us or against'—the world is not divided into good and evil a lot of time. Despite America's military might, a lot of these problems do not lend themselves to kinetic solutions"—i.e. the use of force. And world dynamics are likely to get more complicated and nuanced, not less, by 2025. An intelligence forecast being prepared by the US intelligence community for the next president "envisions a steady decline in US dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy," according to the Washington Post.
Obama himself articulated his approach to intelligence in a speech in July. "It's time to update our national security strategy to stay one step ahead of the terrorists," Obama said at Indiana's Purdue University. "It's time to look ahead—at the dangers of today and tomorrow rather than those of yesterday."
But even though matters such as politicized intelligence, torture, domestic surveillance, and preventing terror attacks are among the most controversial issues of the Bush legacy, intelligence has remained largely a stealth topic in the presidential campaign.
Intelligence advisers to Obama say the topic's relative absence may actually be appropriate: "This is not an issue for the campaign," says one former White House official now advising Obama. Adds a former senior CIA operations officer who is also a member of the campaign's intelligence working group: "The only way we can correct it is to have a bipartisan, national interest audit of what it's currently doing, figure out what works, and make the best recommendations and implement them. And you don't want to see this pitfall the election."
Aside from Brennan, the campaign's intelligence working group (which is coordinated by former National Security Council official Rand Beers) spans a range of national security professionals who have served in senior leadership, operational and legal positions in the National Security Council, CIA, and defense intelligence agencies, including many who served both Republican and Democratic administrations. Among them: Former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, former senior CIA operations officers Art Brown and Jack DeVine, retired Ltn. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, retired Ltn. Gen. and former head of the Defense Human Intelligence Service Donald Kerrick, former CIA lawyer and special advisor to the CIA director Kenneth Levitt, former CIA general counsel Jeff Smith, former CIA Near East division chief Robert Richer, and former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson. Former CIA lawyer and Clinton-era NSC official Mary McCarthy has stepped back from her previous role coordinating the group due to private sector work demands. One participant described the group's priorities for a prospective Obama administration to me this way: "The intelligence community is a complete mess. Intelligence reform—try to fix it. Improve morale. CIA is dysfunctional. Rectify a lot of stuff that was done by executive order in secrecy, and bring more transparency. Better protection of civil liberties. Improve oversight of CIA on these activities."
Meanwhile, national security experts in the McCain camp characterize their candidate as a Washington veteran who doesn't need a working group to advise him on the issues. "John has been in town for three plus decades," says Gary Schmitt, a former executive director of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board who occasionally contributes advice to the McCain campaign. "McCain is his own guy and he has been his own guy. McCain can pick up the phone and call [former deputy secretary of state] Rich Armitage whenever he wants."
But some of Obama's intelligence advisors say their experience with the recent administration has shown that leaders who think they already know it all can lead to disaster. "Old man Bush was a great guy," says one veteran intelligence officer now supporting Obama, who requested anonymity. "He was truly interested and sensitive to intelligence. But this Bush administration has done terrible damage to the intelligence business. They have operated a perpetual campaign, treated intelligence as a political tool, and never fully appreciated why it must be non-partisan and objective and can't be tampered with."
"It's time," he continued, "for a very serious change."
Want more? Read the following intel stories by Laura Rozen, national security correspondent for Mother Jones.
CIA Veterans Are Scared of McCain
Hollywood and the CIA: The Spook Stays in the Picture
Watercoolered: the CIA's Double Secret Probation
The Story Valerie Plame Couldn't Tell
Defending Valerie Plame: Who is this Punk?
Fixing the Post-Bush Nation: Interviews With Former CIA officials:
Milt Bearden: The Bush legacy, in its most reduced and understandable form, will be that the limits of American democracy, and all its institutions, have been exposed.
William D. Murray: The CIA's greatest strength—and why the Department of Homeland Security will be hard to fix.
Paul Pillar: The peril of waging war on a credit card.
Valerie Plame Wilson: Why we need to stop outsourcing the CIA, fast.
Photo from Barack Obama's campaign website.
Laura Rozen can be reached at lrozen [at] motherjones [dot] com.
The CIA realizes that if Obama becomes President, they will be able to do whatever they want. We do not need an out of control CIA calling the shots. Vote McCain.
These seem to be really moronic statements when you take into account that the CIA is normally interested in the kind of secrecy Bush Administration's ideology supports.
Maybe the issue is appreciating the balance needed between secrecy, military force, and diplomacy is a complex one and needs a leader which understands that complexity. That success in securing our country means having more than one strategy, understanding that nothing is black and white. That we need a leader who has more than one train of thought to understand our present and future challenges.
In short, maybe the Central Intelligence Agency believes we need a leader who is-intelligent.
Does has a locatable profile?
If its any consolation, my country is as politically corrupt as yours (and it is politically controlled by yours, although we don't get a vote in your elections). But we cannot cure the rot by blaming it all on one government or political party - either in my country or yours.
No - but they've certainly been dismayed by the this administration, and we can understand why they are hoping for a responsible and knowledgeable administration who will acknowledge and act on threats. Remember, it was Bush who refused to do anything about the 9/11 threats. The intelligence professionals (I've talked to one) think that if Gore had been president in 2000, there's a good possibility that 9/11 would have been averted. The CIA wants someone in the White House who will be serious about defending the US. McCain is not that person - he seems interested only in promoting himself, contrary to his "country first" bulls**t.
Sorry - I meant 2001
I hope Ray McGovern and his VIPS group are included in the, hopefully, upcoming Obama administration.
And finally, Some people say that all of this Republican corruption is just politics as usual.
I do not agree with that assessment. The Repubs have created a kind of politics that are corrupt and crim9nal that is beyond anything I've ever seen in my 65yrs. The last time this kind of condition existed was when Hitler, the Nazis and the Fascists attempted to destroy the free world. This current situation is, to me, of a similar level of evil. And evil is the exact word I want to use.
And on top of it all is the fact that the Religious Right is at the very core of this evil, given it's endless support of the Republican party. And my religion is a part of that evil, just as it was before, during and after WWII.
Wake up MAN !never vote for a desperate
old phoney man who spent 26 years in Washington & what did he do ? he's nothing but the same like any corrupted
politician who lived a privilege life &
thanks to nepotism in America.what else?
Navy service ! he was greatly rewarded for it.by the way,it was 40 years ago !
Today we're talking about the highest office in the land and I don't think the country another president who believes in regime change ideology.
NOTE: He's talking about regime change in Russia !Believe me when I tell you that I have no horse in this race,but I'll say to McCain/Palin.................
THANKS BUT NO THANKS !
I know this will sound really friggin' weird, but I for one am really happy Mother Jones is there for me. Mother Jones is a haven of lucidity in a maelstrom of lunacy.
The present administration really scares the [deleted] out of me. I'm serious! Mother Jones addresses my concerns so that I don't feel like a voice carried away by the storm anymore.
May Mother Jones live long and prosper.
Spitfire
any disagreement between those corporations and any country and soon problems are created and those countries must Re-consider or else !!
Right now we have a problem with two South American countries who already have expelled our diplomatic mission in
Bolivia & Venezuela & the main streem media are Hush Hush about it.I expect to hear about these 2 countries & the U.S.and here's someone who knows more about the subject matter .
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yTbdnNgqfs8
That's a good 'slap on the table' post Massimo.
It doesn't matter who becomes president for the overall foriegn policy. Whichever one becomes president will only mean a surface dressing change in the CIA. The CIA serves two aligned ideologies. One is that the nationalist belief in the US manifest destiny. The other is in the ruling of the wealthy through violence backed capitalism. Both are foundations and supportors of empire.
Good article Laura Rozen. But we know that terrorists have always existed and that this 'war on terrorism' is only a support of and window dressing for empire building so whomever becomes president, however that may change the CIA is pretty much just discussing how the furniture is being rearranged while the house is on fire.
I agree with you Spitfire. I treasure Mojo. Any mainstream mag that addresses some of the elephants we have in our living room does our democracy good.
I'm just a bit more concerned about the whales in the upstairs bedrooms. The structure can't take much more.
If we were REALLY smart, we wouldn't need federal agencies to tell us to shut the lights off when we left the room to save electricity...