CQ HOMELAND SECURITY
Oct. 24, 2008 – 6:55 p.m.
Rank-and-File Spies Seem to Be Leaning Toward Obama
By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff
In normal times you might expect intelligence types to support John McCain , who has said he would like to turn the CIA into something like the far more nimble World War II-era cadre of spies and saboteurs, the OSS.
It’s an idea that’s suddenly attractive to a lot of disillusioned veteran CIA operatives, who think the present CIA has grown too big, cautious and sclerotic for today’s needs.
But this is not a normal year, to say the least. And the signals I’m picking up from the direction of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., suggest that the spies are going for Barack Obama .
“Normally, at least a while back, and certainly in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, people around the CIA would tend to vote Republican,” says a recent covert agency retiree, asking not to be identified because he still consults with the spy agency.
“But I think that’s changed, probably because of Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.
After years of derision and insults from neoconservatives who coalesced in the Bush administration, old hands say, they’re getting their revenge.
“I think a lot of the intelligence community, and particularly the CIA, has been pissed off at the neoconservatives, going back to first Red Team effort,” a group of 1970s-era hawks that challenged the Carter administration’s CIA estimates on Soviet weapons, says a national security official who has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
“There’s been a longstanding distrust by conservatives of the intelligence community and particularly the CIA,” he said, asking not to be identified because he occupies a sensitive position.
Campaign insiders say former CIA Director George J. Tenet and virtually his entire senior management team at the agency are standing behind Obama — in the shadows, naturally — not that a public endorsement by the top intelligence officials who helped bring us Iraq could do the Democratic candidate any good.
To be sure, McCain has the backing of former CIA Director James Woolsey and other ex-CIA notables, like Duane R. “Dewey” Clarridge, who mined the harbors of Nicaragua for President Ronald Reagan during the long ago wars in Central America. And Gary Berntsen, who led one of the first CIA teams into Afghanistan, is heading Veterans for McCain in New York.
But as far as I can tell, the loyal Republicans among CIA veterans tend to be the retirees whose ranks were decimated during the 1990s, when the Clinton White House and Congress took knives to the corps of Cold War-era spies.
And the current undercover rank and file are listing toward Obama, say CIA insiders (with the exception of the ex-military types who dominate the agency’s paramilitary wing, who tend to be Republican hawks).
There’s been “a presumption that the intelligence community is more like the military than the foreign service,” said the former national security official. “And I think that’s a horribly gross generalization. But I think the foreign service tends to be more Democratic than the military, or more liberal than conservative, whatever the right label is.”
Rank-and-File Spies Seem to Be Leaning Toward Obama
But Democrats say that’s been going on for some time now, at least back to the presidential quest of John Kerry , who attracted a substantial following of former military and intelligence officials.
The Obama campaign’s go-to guy on intelligence, John Brennan, was an interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center after 9/11. He and other former national security officials on the campaign have said an Obama administration would take a hard review of all of the Bush administration’s intelligence practices.
Obama’s national security advisers are also concerned about the accelerating exodus of top-flight covert operators from the CIA, as was reported here last week, as well as at the departments of State and Homeland Security.
“I’m not in a position to say how he would seek to change those institutions, just as I cannot say what specifically his policies would look like,” says Rand Beers, the Obama campaign’s unacknowledged national security transition head.
“But we all have to ask whether the institutions that work in the area of national security affairs are fully capable of carrying out the missions and meeting the challenges that they are supposed to,” Beers added, “and I think the answer is no.”
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
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