A new direction for the CIA

IN SELECTING Leon Panetta to be the next director of the CIA, President-elect Barack Obama has opted for sound judgment and political savvy over intelligence experience.

Panetta is a good choice to help Obama end CIA involvement in torture. Because he will have Obama's ear, Panetta may also be better suited than most career intelligence officers to defend the agency's bureaucratic interests in the Washington scrum.

As a former eight-term congressman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and chief-of-staff in the Clinton administration, Panetta has the know-how and management skills to defend the agency's turf against military competitors and cure the CIA of its most harmful malady - the politicizing of intelligence.

During the Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld acted out a cold-war grudge against the CIA. Having wrongly convinced themselves that the agency had underestimated Soviet military capabilities, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and like-minded officials came to office assuming that CIA analysts were sure to miss the signs that Saddam Hussein still had an active, covert nuclear program and usable stocks of biological and chemical weapons. A special office was set up in Rumsfeld's Pentagon to rummage through raw intelligence data and find evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that the CIA had overlooked.

When the CIA under former director George Tenet caved in to this pressure, marshaling faulty evidence to be able to claim that Saddam still had chemical and biological weapons, the agency violated its own professional code. Instead of providing policy makers with uncooked analysis of uncorrupted data, the CIA produced the intelligence Cheney and Rumsfeld needed to justify decisions that had been made without regard to crucial realities.

Under Panetta, the CIA will no longer cut the cloth of intelligence to suit the designs of policy makers. And Panetta can be counted on to enforce the rule he set down last year, when he wrote that the United States "must not use torture under any circumstances."

Panetta's lack of an intelligence background can be overcome if he has the right deputies under him. CIA veterans would like him to retain current Deputy CIA Director Stephen Kappes. Since liaison with foreign intelligence services is key to defending against terrorist networks, it is crucial that Panetta has seasoned professionals like Kappes around him to enhance cooperation with intelligence agencies of other nations.

In intelligence as in other areas, Obama will set the course. It will be up to Panetta to steer the CIA on that course. There is no reason he should not be as good as any CIA career official in carrying out that mission.