The CIA, Post-Obama

When the new casts out the old, an incoming administration has the opportunity to review its predecessor’s approach to the Central Intelligence Agency. When this is done, the focus is usually on the ethics of Langley and politically disturbing covert action. The Obama administration was prototypical in this regard: In conjunction with Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the president went after the most controversial parts of his predecessor's war on al Qaeda. He accused George W. Bush of condoning torture and the CIA of devising the means required. The Senate committee staff released a scathing review of Langley's post-9/11 detention and enhanced interrogation program (while largely ignoring the question of whether senior Democrats in Congress had known of and approved the unconventional methods).

Democrats also went after the Bush administration's use of rendition. Its application under Bill Clinton, who started transferring real or suspected Islamic terrorists into harsh allied hands, and Barack Obama received much less attention. News stories about the unpleasant practice under Democrats were inevitably thin, revealing the political preferences of the leakers. Some Democratic officials even suggested that the CIA under Clinton and Obama had exercised a virtuous version of rendition: Agency operatives overseas ensured that air-lifted radicals weren't abused in countries where street thieves, let alone jihadists, are routinely beaten.

Obama and like-minded Democrats wanted to shame the CIA publicly, to ensure its personnel would never again use severe methods. They will undoubtedly prove successful—unless another Islamic terrorist attack inside the United States results in the slaughter of thousands. If this were to occur, anger, patriotism, and a bipartisan desire to protect one's own could well see CIA officers again on the cutting edge, doing things that most of Washington today would prefer take place, with deniability, out of sight in Egypt or Jordan.

Unless Donald Trump is serious about pushing the CIA back into enhanced interrogation—and the odds are high that the incoming director, Republican congressman Mike Pompeo, will just do what his predecessor and the Pentagon did when confronted with the interrogation/incarceration/trial conundrum as regards Islamic terrorists (kill them with drones or put them into foreign prisons)—Pompeo will not have to deal with the agonizing morality play that Obama's CIA director John Brennan has faced since he moved into Langley in 2013. I can sympathize with Brennan. According to two former senior CIA officers involved with detention and enhanced interrogation, Brennan, an analyst who rose through the agency often doing jobs traditionally assigned to case officers, never once expressed reservations when the program was being designed and implemented. But as director, Brennan had to keep in tune with the president, if not the Democrats of the Senate Select Committee, some of whom gave the impression they wouldn't mind seeing CIA officers prosecuted. He also had to work with senior operatives who knew him well and didn't esteem his quick evolution on "torture."

Since the 1970s, case officers, who collect human intelligence and run covert action, have generally viewed Republicans as more fun, Democrats as more tormenting. Analysts tend to be more politically conventional: A big majority of the personnel in the Directorate of Intelligence is probably Democratic. But neither the open nor closed side of the house appreciates outsiders questioning the institution's basic competence in intelligence collection and analysis. Democrats and Republicans have rarely done so, though Republicans have occasionally been meaner in their queries about fundamentals since they aren't as morally disturbed and distracted by the CIA's presidentially mandated sojourns into controversial covert actions. It's hard to think of Democratic equivalents to Republican intel staffers like Angelo Codevilla, a serious intellectual whose 1992 book Informing Statecraft is a devastating critique of the CIA's inadequacies, and Taylor Lawrence, a Senate staff director in the late 1990s with a Ph.D. from Stanford who questioned the bang-versus-buck performance of the CIA and the National Security Agency.