CIA Chooses a Safe Male to Run Clandestine Service
http://www.andmagazine.com/content/phoenix/12941.html
I can only imagine the wry smile on G's face when
she got the news: You gotta take a bullet for the team.
It was a moment John Le Carré might have scripted.
The CIA denies that "G"-- whose name the agency insists keeping under wraps
even though it's "widely known in intelligence, diplomatic and journalistic
circles," as the AP put it -- was denied the job of running CIA's corps of
spies because she ran a secret interrogation center where at least two
accused terrorists were waterboarded multiple times over and lobbied hard to
destroy the videotapes.
The coup de grace came when Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, made clear her desire that the job go to someone
else. Certainly the White House was not displeased, either.
And so the new head of the CIA's National Clandestine Service is "a
57-year-old longtime officer who served tours in Pakistan and Africa and was
recently in charge of the agency’s Latin America division, according to
public records and former officials," The Washington Post reported.
He was identified in a tweet Wednesday by John Dinges, author of The Condor
Years: How Pinochet and Chile Brought Terrorism to Three Continents, as
Francis (Frank) Archibald, "a former chief of the Latin America division and
paramilitary specialist."
Most likely Archibald was chosen because there's not a whiff of scandal in
his background, as far as we know. "Bland" is a word that comes to mind.
The irony here is that three of the four people directly involved in the
decision to pass over Gina were hip deep in renditions and harsh
interrogations themselves yet remain in good odor: CIA
Frank Archibald, a former Pakistan station chief, most recently Latin
America chief, gets the job.
Director John Brennan and two members of his selection advisory panel,
Stephen Kappes and John McLaughlin.
Brennan was the agency's deputy executive director at the outset of the
controversial programs.
Kappes, a much-lauded former CIA official, was assistant deputy director for
operations when the renditions and enhanced interrogations programs were
implemented after 9/11. According to CIA sources I talked to in 2009, he
"helped tailor the agency's paper trail regarding the death of a detainee at
a secret CIA interrogation facility in Afghanistan, known internally as the
Salt Pit."
Moreover, when Obama's intelligence transition team visited Langley in 2009,
according to an authoritative story in The Washington Post, it got a pitch
from Kappes and other CIA officials to "retain the option of reestablishing
secret prisons and using aggressive interrogation methods."
"It was one of the most deeply disturbing experiences I have had," said
David Boren, the moderate Oklahoma Democrat and former Senate Intelligence
committee chair who led the transition team.
"The main thing that people misunderstand about the program is, it was
intended to encourage compliance," John McLaughlin, deputy director of the
CIA during the the waterboarding era, told TIME. "It wasn't set out to
torture people. It was never conceived of as a torture program."
Good to know. And G's got to be smiling at that, too, as she packs her
things in a cardboard box and heads for the elevators.
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