Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace

by Leon Panetta

  Her earlier concerns having been alleviated, Senator Feinstein endorsed my appointment, complimenting my integrity, drive, and judgment and expressing confidence that I would balance national security and national values. Kit Bond, the committee’s ranking Republican, also supported me and said he was confident I would “use all appropriate and lawful means” to protect the nation from harm.7 That was enough to bring along the committee, which supported me unanimously. The full Senate approved me by voice vote the next day.

  On February 13, 2009, I stood in front of twenty senior officers in the Director’s Conference Room on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters, placed my left hand on a Bible, raised my right hand, and repeated the oath that I had taken so many times before: to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Steve Kappes did me the honor of administering those words. We were now partners in what was a lifetime’s work for him and a new undertaking for me.

  TEN

  “Tell It Like It Is . . . Our National Security Depends on It”

  The Central Intelligence Agency was founded in 1947, part of a restructuring of American defense and intelligence services under President Truman. The act created the U.S. Air Force, as well as the Department of Defense and the National Security Council, and it consolidated intelligence gathering under the auspices of the new CIA. The CIA would become the nation’s first permanent intelligence agency—the Cold War made it more difficult to distinguish between war and peace—and this new entity was authorized to conduct clandestine activities, though to what extent was murky.

  Some limits were clear: The CIA was forbidden from conducting domestic intelligence, was given no policy-making authority, and was denied the power to issue subpoenas or otherwise compel testimony. To emphasize its independence from the policy-making branches of the government, its headquarters were built outside the District of Columbia. That served two purposes: Land was cheaper in the suburbs, and, the thinking went, it was better to have spies kept at arm’s length from the government.

  Today, the George Bush Center for Intelligence—named after the only director to become president—sits on a busy thoroughfare, Route 123, which bisects the tidy neighborhood of McLean, Virginia. From my office, I could see Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia through the canopy of shade trees and over the glimmering Potomac River. It was a beguiling setting, and in a sense a misleading one. In February 2009, the agency I now headed still was physically far from removed from Washington, but was now at the center of its debates over war, peace, and politics. It stood at a defining, challenging moment, as critics questioned its values, its professionalism, and its capacity.

  I settled into a routine. Each morning, I awoke by 6 a.m., watched some TV as I dressed, and then met my lead security agent in front of my house. Without fail, he opened the door of the waiting SUV at 7 a.m. sharp. I rode in the back, and next to me was a brown leather-bound binder prepared by a young analyst named Amy. It was a version of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), and contained twenty to thirty pieces of raw traffic—reports of intercepts of key targets overseas (known as signals intelligence, or SIGINT), and from assets or friendly intelligence services (known as human intelligence, or HUMINT). The traffic was followed by short “articles” dissecting a particular question or problem raised by a senior government official. After culling through the PDB, I turned to a compilation of news clips about the CIA and foreign policy issues, also waiting for me in my car. In front of me was a secure cell phone, though the truth is that I rarely used it. The phones were clunky, and the sound quality was poor.

  The motorcade flew up the GW Parkway, banked into the CIA campus, and flashed our sirens to signal to the gate guards to wave us through. Then the vehicles made a sharp left into a driveway and plunged into the underground garage for the executive officers. I hopped out of the car, walked ten steps, and entered a small elevator, operated by another security officer, which took us directly to the seventh floor. Before walking into my office, I relinquished one possession: my cell phone. No phones were allowed inside the agency. The director’s office was no exception.

  Greeting me each day were my two special assistants, Mary Jane Scheidt and Mary Elfmann. Mary Jane was the gatekeeper, sitting just outside my office, turning away anyone without a proper appointment. She also kept my schedule and handed it to me each morning on a printed card in a plastic sleeve. The proof of her indispensability was the fact that there were two peepholes in my office door—one for most people of normal height and one about six inches lower, for Mary Jane. Mary Elfmann and her successor, Dora Kale, kept the office humming. I was also supported by a pair of midcareer executive assistants who were on a one-year rotation in the office supporting Hayden. In addition to accompanying me to all my meetings and taking copious notes, they helped brace me for the tough decisions I would be asked to make. One, Sheetal, agreed to stay on with me through my first year; she was determined to teach me what it took to be director.*

  At 7:30 a.m., a small team gathered for my morning intelligence briefing, which I held at the conference table in my office. Amy sat to my right. Steve Kappes typically took the seat at the other end of the table. Jeremy was part of this small group, which regularly also included Mike Morell, or a senior member of his team, and later his successor, Fran Moore. Later, that group also was expanded to include Stephen Preston, the agency’s brilliant general counsel, whom the president nominated on my recommendation.

  I discovered right away that it was hard to be casual at the CIA. Entering the briefing on one of my first days, I asked Mary Jane for a cup of coffee. Before I knew it, the kitchen staff wanted to know how I took my coffee, what kind of cup I preferred, how hot it should be. The next morning, a full coffee service arrived in my office on the CIA’s finest blue-and-gold bone china for everyone in the meeting. The coffee was good. That was the good news. The bad news was that I had to reimburse the government for the cost of the service. I canceled it. Instead, I brought my own mug—it said CIA—CALIFORNIA ITALIAN AMERICAN—and poured my own coffee in the staff kitchen.

  My credentials for running the CIA were not in the area of covert action or intelligence gathering. I was put there because I knew something about how to run an organization, and two things I recalled from my time with Clinton were the value of a defined daily schedule and the necessity of including key staff members in decision making. Beginning my first week, I convened my top staff every morning at 8:30 a.m. We met in a wood-paneled room, with the CIA seal at one end and a picture of the president at the other.

  I sat in the middle of the table, Steve and Jeremy to my left, and Scott White to my right. Filling out the table were the four directorate heads, along with a three-star air force general, Mark Welsh, who was our main liaison to the Pentagon; our public affairs chief, Paul Gimigliano (later George Little); our congressional liaison, Bill Danvers, who worked with me in the Clinton White House and who I specifically picked for the job given the importance of that role; our general counsel, first John Rizzo, later Stephen Preston; and the agency’s comptroller, Susan Bromley.

  I opened the meeting each day with a report of any meetings or interactions I’d had with the White House or foreign leaders. Then Jeremy would read the schedule for the day. Steve and Scott would give brief reports on items they were working on. Then we went around the table, starting with the National Clandestine Service chief, Mike Sulick.

  That may not sound revolutionary, but those sessions represented a cultural change at the CIA, and the senior staff didn’t immediately know how to respond. At first the staff was aghast that I would discuss sensitive operational details in front of the comptroller or the public affairs chief. But I knew from my White House days that the most important thing I could do was to get the senior team on the same page. If an officer screwed up overseas, I wanted to know about it. If a technology demonstration had failed, I expected to be
told—before reading it in the morning clips. And if the White House was hassling us during a policy meeting downtown, I wanted to know, so I could raise it at the appropriate level.

  “I’m going to be honest with you,” I said at one meeting. “I need you to be honest with me. The last thing I want is for something to be going on in the bowels of this place that I don’t know about.”

  Two days a week, we’d follow the general staff meeting with an “NCS update”—a deep dive on operational activity that had occurred during the previous forty-eight hours, including any important reports from our assets. Truth is, I didn’t find these meetings terribly illuminating. The reports were laden with jargon and code names. It was hard to divine the larger significance of these single updates wholly ripped from their context. They did, however, educate me on the painstaking and complex work of espionage. Our officers operate undercover overseas, requiring the agency to build multiple aliases and cover organizations for them. A simple meeting in a European capital may require our officer to travel to three or four cities before meeting her asset, so she can definitively establish whether she’s being followed. “Surveillance detection” is a building block of any good espionage operation.

  The days were filled with briefings from various agency components, meetings with visiting heads of foreign intelligence services, and meetings of the National Security Council Principals—the top brass of the administration’s national security team—usually in the White House Situation Room. Once a week, on Tuesdays, we briefed the president himself on counterterrorism issues. Brennan organized that session, and I prepared for it by bringing in the relevant case officers and letting them walk me through the issues.

  For lunch, I made it as often as possible to the agency cafeteria on the first floor. I stood in the salad bar line with everyone else and paid for my meal. I genuinely enjoyed the chance to bump into the people of the agency and hear what they were thinking. It may sound like a small gesture, but it kept me in touch with our employees and let them see that I was at work. And by the way, the food in the cafeteria was not too shabby—CIA stations around the world are generally recognized for the quality of their food, and the cafeteria’s cuisine offerings were as diverse as the world that the CIA covered.

  The days were long, but I made a point of huddling with Jeremy and the immediate office staff before any of us left for the evening. We called this “EA time” (for “executive assistant”), because it was the best chance for my two executive assistants to catch me up on what I could expect in tomorrow’s meetings. They ran through the schedule. I usually had a few questions, and then we broke for the evening.

  My nights often continued from there, and many evenings included an official dinner in my dining room, down the hall from my office. These were white tablecloth, bone china affairs, usually for a visiting intelligence chief. Three or four from our side would dine with three or four from theirs. If I was lucky, no interpreter was needed. I got to select the menus, and I had an Italian chef—Freddie—so the food was outstanding.

  One of the first issues to confront me in the new job was a holdover from the Bush years that had been a prominent part of my confirmation and that now posed complicated problems for the CIA. The issue was enhanced interrogation, and the problem that confronted Obama early in his presidency was how much of that program—its legal and moral underpinnings, as well as its efficacy—should be made public, now that he had ordered a stop to it. Bringing that question to a head was a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union demanding the release of memos that provided the legal underpinnings of the program. Specifically, the ACLU, using the Freedom of Information Act, was seeking copies of three Bush-era legal memos that analyzed various interrogation techniques in terms of American law, international norms, and American obligations under its membership in the United Nations, as well as a fourth memo that analyzed those same techniques if used in combination with one another. They were known colloquially in the press, if somewhat misleadingly, as the “torture” memos. I say misleadingly because the bottom line of the memos was to uphold a number of rough interrogation tactics as not violating American or international prohibitions against torture.

  Soon after I arrived in my new office, Greg Craig, then serving as White House counsel to President Obama, asked whether I would object to the release of the memos. Candidly, I didn’t give it much thought. I told him I believed their release would help put the past behind us and move on, and therefore I had no objection. I figured that was the end of it, but a few days later, Acting CIA General Counsel John Rizzo learned that the president was preparing to make the memos public. I was out of the country on CIA business when Rizzo got the news, and he was alarmed enough to take the matter to Kappes. Unable to reach me, they decided they should at least alert the former CIA directors who had had a role in the interrogation program, so Rizzo called George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Mike Hayden. All three shared Rizzo’s concern, and before I had heard that a decision was imminent, they had begun marshaling supporters of the program to lobby the White House against its chosen course.

  I liked John Rizzo. He was Italian, which of course I appreciated, a bit of a character, and an unusual sight to behold. Barely five foot five, with a snow-white beard, he dressed like he had walked right out of Esquire—pink socks, orange pocket squares, ornate cuff links, Gucci loafers, and hand-tailored suits. Despite his somewhat outlandish look, John was well respected in legal circles and an iconic presence at the CIA. He had been on the verge of leaving when my appointment was announced, but I’d asked him to stay until his successor could be confirmed, and we’d struck up a professional friendship; I was grateful to have his knowledge of the agency’s history and command of the legal issues it confronted.

  Which does not mean that I was happy with him when the White House tracked me down and brusquely demanded to know why my predecessors were stirring up trouble over the release of the documents. I called Rizzo and told him to knock it off. I then called Rahm Emanuel and asked him to put the release on hold until I could get back to the country and confer with Rizzo and others at the agency. Rahm agreed.

  Back at Langley, Rizzo opened our meeting by profusely apologizing for unleashing the former directors. He had meant only to extend them a courtesy so that they were not surprised by the memos’ release, he said, not to provoke them into challenging the decision. I told him to forget it, though I did make clear I’d rather he not do that again. We then turned to the substance of the issue. Rizzo knew this subject intimately—in fact, he was the one who had requested the legal review, and the memos were addressed to him. He vehemently insisted that releasing the memos would damage agency morale and undermine American commitments to allies to keep this program secret. After hearing him out, I was convinced that he was right and I’d been wrong. I alerted John Brennan that I had changed my view of the memos, and I laid out for him in writing my view of the issue. Yes, there was the value of transparency, I acknowledged, but I also concluded, repeating some of Rizzo’s arguments, that releasing the documents could expose agency methods and operational details, as well as abrogating promises of confidentiality to friendly countries, including those that had allowed the CIA to conduct interrogations within their borders. Beyond that, Rizzo persuaded me that it was unfair to our officers to expose these methods; the officers who had applied the techniques had done so only after being assured that they were legal. To make public these documents retroactively would only reinforce the demand for the officers to be punished. It seemed wrong to me to ask a public servant to take a risk for his country and assure him that it was both legal and approved, then, years later, to suggest that he had done something wrong.

  The debate over the release of the memos was hard-fought internally. Rahm Emanuel agreed with me. Dennis Blair, whom I initially thought shared my view, unexpectedly came down on the side of releasing them. The president kept his own counsel.

  On the afternoon of
April 15, with a court order pending that required the administration to turn over the documents, I learned that the president was close to deciding the issue. Obama was scheduled to leave for Mexico the next day, and I worried that he might announce a decision to make the memos public before leaving on his trip. I felt it imperative that he not do that without at least hearing the case from my people. I called Rahm, explained the situation, and suggested that the president meet with some senior CIA officials before making a final decision. Rahm’s response: “Bring ’em down.”

  Jeremy quickly rounded up seven of our top people in the relevant parts of the agency—the head of our Counterterrorism Center and chief of operations for the center, the deputy director of our Clandestine Service, deputy chief of the Near East Division as well as that division’s chief legal officer, and our deputy general counsel. We piled into two SUVs and drove from our Langley headquarters straight past the White House gates. We bounded up the stairs from the West Wing basement to the area outside the Oval Office, where the president greeted us as we entered, cheerfully calling out, “Come on in, fellas.”