Why CIA Veterans are Scared of McCain

[cascadiance]

Source: Mother Jones

Washington Dispatch: Four years ago, the candidate called the CIA a "rogue organization;" now he’s advised by a former Chalabi promoter and Agency-basher. No wonder the spooks are spooked.

By Laura Rozen
August 29, 2008

This is part 1 of a two-part series on the main presidential candidates’ intelligence policies. Next week we'll look at Barack Obama. Tall, broad-shouldered, mustached, Michael Kostiw looks like the former oil man and CIA case officer in Africa he once was. Now, as Republican staff director for Senator John McCain on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, Kostiw, 61, is probably the closest top former CIA official to the Republican presidential candidate, and is discussed as a possible candidate for a senior intelligence position should McCain win the presidency. But his relationship with his former Agency is complex. Standing in his large office in the Senate Russell building on a quiet day during August Congressional recess, Kostiw shows off a pair of wooden statuettes that were given to him by an African nation's ambassador—and long-time top official in his country’s government—to Washington. The envoy, Kostiw says, is an old contact that he proposed trying to recruit two decades ago when he was a CIA case officer in the country. But his Agency boss at the time waved him off the recruitment, saying "that guy isn't going anywhere."

It's a small but telling anecdote in an almost two hour conversation with a man whose career trajectory from CIA Soviet East Europe division operations officer to Texaco oilman to co-chair of the International Republican Institute to top Porter Goss and McCain Senate aide may signal what a McCain presidency would mean for the intelligence community—and why many from the CIA are quietly worried about a McCain presidency. The Bush years have been brutal for the CIA, which was pilloried for getting Iraq intelligence wrong while accused of downplaying and withholding intelligence from the White House that would have justified military action. Many current and former US spies expect a McCain administration guided by neoconservatives to treat them with hostility and mistrust. They also say McCain would likely weaken the CIA by giving broad new spying authorities to the Pentagon, which the CIA officials believe is more amenable to giving policymakers the intelligence they want, while being subject to less Congressional oversight.

These critics point especially to the McCain campaign's top national security advisor Randy Scheunemann—who ran a front group promoting war with Iraq and the fabrications of controversial Iraqi exile politician Ahmad Chalabi, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and who has lobbied for aggressive NATO expansion. Scheunemann's record, they argue, encapsulates everything wrong with the past eight years of Bush leadership on intelligence issues, from a penchant for foreign policy freelancing and secret contacts with unreliable fabricators to neoconservatives' disdain for the perceived bureaucratic timidity of the CIA and State Department, to their avowed hostility for diplomacy with adversaries. If McCain wins, "the military has won," says one former senior CIA officer. "We will no longer have a civilian intelligence arm. Yes, we will have analysts. But we won’t have any real civilian intelligence capability."

"McCain would be an absolute disaster," says a second senior recently retired US intelligence operations officer. "He is prejudiced against the CIA. The day after the 2004 election when Bush won, McCain came on TV and gave an interview in which he said something to the effect of, 'The CIA tried to sabotage this election. They’ve made their bed and now they have to lay in it.' … I used to like McCain but he is inconsistent." Columnist Robert Novak quoted McCain in November 2004 as saying, "With CIA leaks intended to harm the re-election campaign of the president of the United States, it is not only dysfunctional but a rogue organization."

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Read more: http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/08/why-cia-veterans-are-scared-of-mccain.html

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Hmmm... The way she's describing things here, insiders in the CIA perhaps fear McCain's leadership more than Bush! And that they will try to work around the "liberal" vestiges of the CIA (like Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings), and move more towards their clandestine operations working inside the Pentagon. Sounds kind of scary!

And connections to folks like Porter Goss and Dusty Foggo too!

[Politicalboi]

1. McCain

Older than Alaska.

[Wizard777]

2. Do you think McCain will oust Maliki and install Chalabi?

There is a lot I'm not liking about this.

[ret5hd]

3. A repug staff director for mccain is a shoplifter???

This article says so:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Michael-Kostiw-CIA3oct04.htm
<snip>
In late 1981, after he had been a case officer for 10 years, Kostiw was caught shoplifting in suburban Langley, Va., sources said. During a subsequent CIA polygraph test, Kostiw's responses to questions about the incident led agency officials to place him on administrative leave for several weeks, according to four sources who were familiar with the events but who asked not to be identified.

While on leave, Kostiw told friends he decided to resign. Agency officials at the time arranged for misdemeanor theft charges to be dropped and the police record expunged in return for his resignation and his agreement to get counseling, one former official said.

CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said Saturday that Kostiw had declined a request for an on-the-record interview. Goss also has refused to discuss the matter.
</snip>

[cascadiance]

4. Sheesh, that and Goss and Foggo's Watergate hooker parties...

... These guys are just criminals all the way around!

[awoke_in_2003]

5. "the candidate called the CIA a "rogue organization;" "

Well, even a busted clock is right twice a day.

[WatchWhatISay]

8. Maybe, but the fact that he said they were rogues Four Years Ago

Probably means he's on their side now.

[FatDave]

9. It's crazy.

I agree with McCain on something!

[Jackpine Radical]

6. A good rule of thumb--

It is never smart to spook the spooks.

[antisoros]

7. Chalabi Was A Puppet For Iran

Randy Scheuneman shouldn't be lobbying. The LA Times reported that he was once arrested for unlawful possession of a fire arm, when he was a NRA lobbyist. He wasn't convicted. Too well connected I guess.

[dmr]

10. Iraq n/t

[Ghost Dog]

11. "Because the CIA tells them stuff they don't want to hear"

McCain is influenced by a circle of hardline Republican legislators and congressional staff as well as disgruntled former Agency officials "who all had these long-standing grudges against people in the Agency," the former senior intelligence officer said. "They think the CIA is a hotbed of liberals. Right-wing, nutty paranoia stuff. They all love the military and hate the CIA. Because the CIA tells them stuff they don't want to hear."

But Kostiw says such fears are overblown. He insists that McCain's national security inclinations are more independent than the neoconservative caste of his campaign's advisory brain trust would suggest. "McCain on intelligence will favor an OSS-type agency," Kostiw said, referring to the CIA's World War II-era predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. What does that mean? "An effective intelligence professional element that will take risks and will be responsive to civilian control and made up of the best and brightest officers the US has to offer." A civilian agency? "It has to have a civilian function, but will have a vast military element as well. I always say, you have to keep the Central in the Central Intelligence Agency."

"Lots of people talk to John on foreign policy matters—not just Randy Scheunemann," Kostiw adds, ticking off a list of realist Republican foreign policy hands: Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, General Jim Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former defense secretary James Schlesinger. But are these people really in McCain's inner circle? "The inner circle is the critical issue," Kostiw concedes.

"There has been a battle within the McCain campaign between neoconservatives and realists, but by and large, neoconservatives hold the high ground," says a former White House official now advising the Obama campaign on intelligence issues, on condition of anonymity. "And some of their positions have been deeply troubling," he added, citing McCain's proposal to kick Russia out of the group of eight leading industrialized countries.

The intelligence and the foreign policy, like the public zeitgeist through the media, and the economic data and everything else, must be selected and shaped into a form that will support the overriding unilateral strategy of US and allied corporate hegemony and US and allied military "full-spectrum dominance".