Despite the personal intervention of Vice President Joe Biden, the White House has been unable to resolve a bitter turf battle between the CIA and the office of the Director of National Intelligence over who gets to name the top US intelligence officer in foreign countries.
The inability of the White House to resolve the dispute, more than five months after it surfaced, has raised new questions about the Obama Administration's decision making process on sensitive national security and intelligence issues, according to several current and former intelligence officials who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters. In the last few weeks, Biden personally tried to sort out the feud between CIA Director Leon Panetta and his nominal superior, DNI chief Dennis Blair, the officials said. But Blair has resisted accepting a proposed resolution of the issue.
The dispute over naming the top spy chief in overseas posts grows out of reforms imposed on US intelligence agencies by Congress in the wake of 9/11.
Post-attack inquiries by Congressional investigators and the 9/11 Commission disclosed that the CIA and FBI mishandled clues which could have led them to some of the 9/11 hijackers and possibly enabled authorities to disrupt the plot. To ensure greater sharing of vital intelligence reports between historical rivals like CIA, FBI and the pathologically-secretive National Security Agency, a Pentagon spy unit, Congress established the Intelligence Director's office and gave it considerable power to ride herd on 16 intelligence agencies, including CIA, NSA and, to a lesser extent, FBI.
Previously, the role of coordinating the activities of competing agencies was supposed to have been performed by the Director of the CIA, who also held the title of "Director of Central Intelligence." But the CIA director's authority to order around other agencies was limited.
Traditionally, the CIA's station chief in every foreign country where US intelligence agencies had a presence was considered the senior US intelligence representative. But among the new powers the Intelligence Director was awarded by Congress was authority to supervise the CIA's relationships with foreign spy agencies. With this ambiguous authority granted to him by Congress, Mike McConnell, the Bush Administration's last Intelligence Czar, started examining whether he ought to be able, in rare cases, to designate his own "DNI representative" in foreign countries. A DNI rep's authority theoretically could supersede that of the local CIA boss.
McConnell's consideration of the issue led to jockeying between the Intelligence Czar's office and the CIA, then headed by retired Gen. Michael Hayden, himself both a former Director of NSA and former deputy intelligence czar. The CIA argued that its station chiefs should continue to be the supreme US intelligence representatives overseas and that any change would undermine the agency's historically close relationships with agencies like Britain's MI-6, Germany's BND and Israel's Mossad. Last January, Hayden and McConnell left office without resolving the issue.
Not long after his confirmation as President Obama's new Intelligence Czar, Dennis Blair, a retired four-star Navy Admiral, began his own examination of the foreign liaison issue. By last spring, he was asserting that he should have the power to name his own supreme US intelligence rep in foreign countries, even if this meant sometimes usurping the CIA station chief's traditional role.
Under heavy pressure from his own employees - particularly clannish career spies in the CIA's undercover operations division, known as the National Clandestine Service - Panetta strongly argued that CIA station chiefs should retain their historical role as top US intelligence representatives.
Blair and Panetta were unable to resolve the issue. So last spring, the dispute was sent for resolution to James Jones, the former Marine General Obama appointed as White House National Security Advisor. (At one point, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report on an intelligence authorization bill which appeared to strongly back Blair's position.) However, by mid-Summer, Jones still hadn't sorted out the dispute. So the issue was referred upwards to Vice President Joseph Biden.
Biden discussed the issue with Blair and Panetta, eventually working out a potential settlement. A meeting to ratify the tentative agreement was set for late summer, but then postponed several times when it proved difficult to assemble the principals, including Biden, Jones, Blair and Panetta. Eventually, a meeting did occur about a month ago; officials would not specify the date.
Although details of the meeting remain tightly guarded, current and former officials familiar with the dispute said that the outcome was essentially a big victory for Panetta. One of the officials said that Biden's view was that CIA station chiefs should as a rule remain supreme US intelligence representatives in the countries where they are based. "It was a clear win for Leon," said a former senior official who has been following the closed-door debate closely. One consolation for Blair would be that they would be encouraged, or even pressed, to call themselves "DNI Representatives."
Some people familiar with the meeting believe that it was supposed to be clear that the CIA had won, but everal officials said that since the meeting Blair has indicated he still believes that the issue is not settled. According to insider accounts, Blair has continued to seethe over the issue.
A person familiar with Blair's views said that his office believes the issue is still under "review." Spokespersons for the CIA and Biden declined to comment.
