It Doesn't Take Intelligence: 'Change' Is Coming

By James Gordon Meek

It’s a curious thing about elections: they have consequences. Still, Washington’s favorite parlor game (for those who have parlors) at the moment is the peculiar effort to divine which Bush appointees will be sticking around in Barack Obama’s first term. The slogan was “Change We Need,” folks, not “Bush Act III.” Of course, with Rahm Emanuel and John Podesta as the President-Elect’s sherpas, you could argue this is really, “Star Wars: Return of the Clintonistas.”

So maybe SECDEF Bob Gates will stick around to run the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for a year. He’s universally regarded as a decent human being and a breath of fresh air after Don Rumsfeld. (Plus, Gates likes to sit down, whereas Rummy liked to “stand 8-10 hours a day,” as he famously wrote on a torture memo about “stress positions” at Gitmo.)

But what about the Director of National Intelligence, retired Navy Adm. Mike McConnell, who’s been on the job for less than two years?

Sources within his office, which oversees 16 U.S. intel agencies, say he’s “willing” to stay for a little while to provide Obama a transitional security blanket. But Team Obama has not called to discuss his future, those same sources told the New York Daily News' Mouth of the Potomac Blog this week. And you can bet McConnell’s job security wasn’t a topic when he briefed Obama in Chicago last Thursday on foreign threats.

Much speculation centers on John Brennan, a highly respected retired CIA official who stood up the National Counterterrorism Center in 2004 and is advising the President-Elect. Among many things Democrats like about the softspoken Brennan are his anti-torture views.

“Best guess for DNI, right now, is Brennan,” one graybeard in the intelligence community told me today. “Despite rumors to the contrary, I don’t think McConnell really wants to stay.”

Then there’s retired Air Force Gen. Mike Hayden, the CIA director, who has restored morale to the spy agency after Porter Goss made spooks so miserable they were forced to leak like the Bismark. Hayden told Pittsburgh radio station WDVE on Monday that he’s never met Obama, but said “I’d be honored if the President-elect would ask me” to stay at CIA. The spymaster also complimented the Illinois senator as “very well read, very smart.”

“[Hayden] doesn’t have any expectations one way or the other,” another senior intelligence official said. “Hayden likes the work, he has a high regard for the people there, and he cares deeply about the mission. Those are the factors that he would consider [if asked to stay].”

Many Democrats are cool on Hayden, however, since he was director of the National Security Agency after 9/11 when it began warrantless surveillance of many U.S. phone calls. Hayden also defended CIA destroying interrogation videos, though loyalists griped that the abusive sessions were all authorized by his predecessor, Clinton holdover George Tenet.

In a brilliantly-timed speech before the Atlantic Council today, the politically-astute Hayden took a sharp turn away from President Bush’s well-worn talking points on fighting terrorism and essentially endorsed Obama’s campaign position that the “central front” is in the Afghan-Pakistan tribal belt.

“Today, the flow of money, weapons, and foreign fighters into Iraq is greatly diminished, and Al Qaeda senior leaders no longer point to it as the central battlefield,” Hayden declared.

Only two months ago, Bush told the National Defense University in a speech: “Al Qaeda leaders have repeatedly declared that Iraq is the central front of their war with America.”

“We will know the national security lineup by December 15,” the first intelligence source predicted.

NOTE: Late Thursday, Congressional Quarterly reporters Keith Perine and Tim Starks reported their interview with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s likely incoming chairman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said of Hayden and McConnell, “My view is that it’s time for a new start.”

TrackBack