Shifting the tanker

Further evidence that changing the course of the supertanker of state is not easy for any captain, the New York Times reports this morning that the selection for Director of the CIA is proving a little bit of a headache for President-elect Obama. Preferred choice and bureaucratic insider, John O. Brennan, has been kiboshed due to his links to the CIA during the last eight years of shameful misbehaviour. A retired intelligence guy says that this decision has created anxiety amongst the CIA ranks that "if you worked in the C.I.A. during the war on terror, you are now tainted."

So what?, you might say. Certainly, there isn't anything wrong in principle with letting people know that if they commit crimes, even under the orders of a delinquent president, that these might continue to blot their copybook after the delinquent has moved back to Crawford. Perhaps this might persuade career intelligence agents to think twice in future about the wisdom of obeying orders to torture people. (Moreover, appointing 'the best man' instead of a loyal ally in the case of the policing arms doesn't always work out too well: Clinton's George H. W. Bush holdover, Louis Freeh, at the FBI was a bit of a disaster, for instance.)

The moral case for reform is clear. But the problem is that the CIA isn't going to go away just because it's been sent to the doghouse, and change may not arrive most quickly by taking an adversarial attitude to a large and subtly-powerful institution. Rumsfeld's war on the army, trying to force reform through by harassment, is a textbook example of how not to engineer change in a large institution. Any director will require at least some goodwill to ensure that a notoriously independent agency doesn't go off and start doing things on its own. Truman and Eisenhower created a beast that was intentionally free from external oversight, and despite the best efforts of congressional reformists in the 1970s it substantially remains that way.

Obama's strategy with the arms of the executive so far seems to have been to try to co-opt them with trusted insiders, and presumably to bring them along in any reform aspirations. Selecting an outsider may turn out to be the best thing in this case - they'll have the benefit of not being tainted by the agency's reputation to date. But they'll have to be twice as good to earn the support of the agency they're supposed to be running...

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