19-08-09 Crisis at the spy agency

CIA Director Leon Panetta’s emergency testimony to Congress about an illegal assassination program has set off a crisis at the spy agency.The Daily Beast’s Joseph Finder exclusively reports that:

• The secret assassination ‘program’ wasn’t much more than a PowerPoint presentation, a task force and a collection of schemes—it never got off the ground

• Panetta’s three immediate predecessors—George Tenet,Porter Goss,and Michael Hayden—have spoken to him,and that he now sees that no laws were broken.

• Panetta has frantically tried to rectify his gaffe,but now faces increased Congressional oversight.

CIA Director Leon Panetta stunned Washington earlier this summer by disclosing,in an emergency closed-door briefing to Congress,that for the last eight years,the agency he now runs illegally concealed a secret terrorist-assassination program.The reaction was predictably explosive.The House intelligence-oversight committee launched a major investigation.Here was official confirmation,from the very top,that the CIA in the Bush years had been flagrantly and systematically violating the National Security Act of 1947.“If we briefed Congress on every single foreign intelligence collection activity,” one former CIA director tells me,“we’d be a very small intelligence agency attached to a massive congressional briefing agency.” But according to a half-dozen sources,including several very senior,recently retired CIA officials,clandestine-service officers,and Cabinet-level officials from the Bush administration,the real story is at once more innocent—Panetta was mistaken;no law was broken—and far more troubling:an inexperienced CIA director, unfamiliar with how his vast,complicated agency works,unable to trust senior officials within his own agency,and desperate to keep his hands clean,screwed up.The Daily Beast has learned that shortly after his electrifying June 24 disclosure,Panetta spoke personally with each of his three predecessors—George Tenet,Porter Goss,and Michael Hayden—and only then realized the mistake he’d made about the program.An innocent mistake,but the consequences of his gaffe,which he’s unable to admit without damaging his own reputation further,will likely subject U.S. intelligence capabilities to unnecessary and intrusive oversight for years to come.How did a mistake of this scale happen? My sources corroborate the following narrative:On June 23,in the course of a routine briefing by the head of the National Counterterrorism Center,Panetta first learned about the assassination squads.Alarmed,he terminated the program at once and called the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,Rep.Silvestre Reyes (D-TX).He told Reyes he’d discovered something of grave concern,and requested an urgent briefing for the House and Senate intelligence committees as soon as possible.Less than 24 hours later,he was on the Hill, "with his hair on fire," as a Republican member of the House committee put it.“The whole committee was stunned,” said Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA).Afterward,seven Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee sent Panetta an indignant letter:“Recently you testified that you have determined that top CIA officials have concealed significant actions from all members of Congress,and misled members for a number of years from 2001 to this week," the Democratic lawmakers wrote.They demanded he “correct” his statement back in May that the CIA does not mislead Congress.Ten days later,one of them leaked the letter.Panetta had set in motion a chain reaction of atomic proportions.“It was like shoving a rod into that nuclear mass,” a veteran senior CIA officer told me.A lot of Democrats had been waiting for this moment:an opportunity to shine daylight on the abuses of intelligence during the Bush-Cheney years.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,an object of controversy,even ridicule,after charging that the CIA had lied to her about waterboarding,now felt vindicated.The CIA,trapped at last in its tangled web of lies,owed her an apology!