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The congressional hearings on Iran-Contra and on Robert Gates's nomination to head the agency revealed many examples of how Casey and Gates politicized intelligence analysis. Although appointed by the President, a Director of Central Intelligence needs to resist pressure to play politics.
Some Directors of Central Intelligence have played the political game - most of them ineptly, it turns out. Helms, for example, bent over backwards to accommodate President Nixon - to the point of perjuring himself before Congress.
Yet Helms never could overcome Nixon's paranoid suspicion of him as one of that "Georgetown crowd out to get me." Chalk it up to our naiveté as intelligence analysts, but we were shocked when James Schlesinger, upon succeeding Helms as director early in Nixon's first term, announced on arrival, "I am here to see that you guys don't screw Richard Nixon!"The freshly appointed DCI supplemented the news about his main mission by announcing that he would be reporting to Bob Haldeman, not Henry Kissinger.
No Political Agenda
A director must not have a political agenda. Ironically - and to his credit - George H.W. Bush, who had been chair of the Republican National Committee before being named Director of Central Intelligence, was careful to avoid policy advocacy.
But even he found it impossible to resist political pressure to appoint "Team B," a group of extreme hardliners, to review intelligence community estimates on Soviet strategic forces.
Neither must a Director of Central Intelligence have a personal agenda.
The tenure of John Deutch provided a case study in the disasters that can attend overweening ambition on the part of a director. Deutch made no secret that he was accepting the job only as a way station to replacing his close friend William Perry as Secretary of Defense.
Thus, it should have come as no surprise that Deutch made rather callous, calculated decisions to improve the chances for his candidacy.
Deutch gave the Pentagon his full cooperation in covering up the fact for several years that about 101,000 (the Pentagon's current estimate) U.S. troops were exposed to chemical warfare agents, including sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gases, at the end of the Gulf War.
And in 1996 he ceded the Central Intelligence Agency's entire imagery analysis capability to the Pentagon, lock, stock, and barrel.
Deutch was devastated when President Bill Clinton picked William Cohen to succeed Perry, and he left the Central Intelligence Agency with such a long trail of grave security violations that he needed one of President Bill Clinton's last-day pardons to escape prosecution.
(Deutch's personal agenda was so transparent that, aside from the people he brought with him to the Central Intelligence Agency to do his bidding, there was hardly a soul sorry to see him go.)
No Director of Central Intelligence should come from Congress, the quintessential example of the kind of politicized ambience that is antithetical to substantive intelligence work. For example, outside intelligence circles, it was deemed a good sign that, as a congressional staffer, George Tenet had been equally popular on both sides of the aisle.
But this raised a red flag for seasoned intelligence professionals. As we had all learned early in our careers, if you tell it like it is, you are certain to make enemies. Those enjoying universal popularity are ipso facto suspect of perfecting the political art of compromise - shading this and shaving that.
However useful this may be on the Hill, it sounds the death knell for intelligence analysis. In addition to having come from Congress, Tenet had zero prior experience managing a large organization. He played the political game, and he has presided over two disasters: September 11 and Iraq.
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