Thursday, May 9, 2013

CIA Chooses a Safe Male to Run Clandestine Service

 

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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