CIA chief is a defender with influence

Just hours before he publicly responded last week to the Senate Intelligence Committee report accusing the CIA of torture and deceit, John O. Brennan, the CIA’s director, stopped by the White House to meet with President Barack Obama.

Ostensibly, he was there for an intelligence briefing. But the messages delivered later that day by the White House and Brennan were synchronized, even down to similar wording, and the larger import of the well-timed visit was hardly a classified secret: After six years of partnership, the president was standing by the embattled spy chief even as fellow Democrats called for his resignation.

That’s not to say there was no friction between the West Wing and the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters after the release of the scorching report. Irritated advisers to Obama believe Brennan made a bad situation worse by battling Democrats on the committee over the report during the past year. Some who considered Brennan the president’s heat shield against the agency when he worked in the White House now worry that since being appointed director, he has “gone native,” as they put it.

But in the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Obama has forged with Brennan. It is a relationship that has shaped the policy and politics of the debate over the nation’s war with terrorist organizations, as well as the agency’s own struggle to balance security and liberty. And the result is a president who denounces torture but not the people accused of inflicting it.

“The quandary that Brennan faces is similar to the quandary that Obama faces,” said David Cole, a national security scholar and law professor at Georgetown University. “Both are personally opposed to what went on and deeply troubled by what went on and agree that it should never happen again. And both are ultimately dependent on the CIA for important national security services.”

Indeed, rather than give his own speech on the report’s accusations against the CIA, Obama left it to Brennan to be the administration’s public face.

“It is fairly remarkable that the lead responder here is the director of the CIA,” said Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s top counterterrorism official during Obama’s first term and now at Dartmouth. “But that may be a reflection of the administration’s original decision to cordon off the issue and not have a broader partisan blood bath over the Bush White House’s involvement in torture.”

In responding to the report, Brennan walked a line between his president and his agency. He again embraced Obama’s decision after taking office to ban interrogation techniques like waterboarding, nudity and sleep deprivation. But he criticized only the “limited number” of CIA officers who exceeded broad Justice Department rules governing interrogations.

And he flatly rejected the committee’s contentions that the interrogation program was not central to thwarting terror plots and that the agency had misled the public about its effectiveness, although he said it was unknowable whether detainees talked specifically because of the brutal methods.

Current and former colleagues said Brennan had an institutional responsibility to guard his building.

“If John were retired and had a few drinks in him, he might have a different tone to him,” said William M. Daley, Obama’s former chief of staff. “But he can’t, nor should he, do anything other than what he’s done.”

Changing Roles

But guarding the building is a markedly different role than Brennan played as Obama’s counterterrorism adviser in the first term, when he helped recalibrate the terror war by trying to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by reining in perceived excesses.

“On all of the debates, he was on our side on almost all of them,” said a former White House official, who like others did not want to be named describing internal deliberations.

Brennan, 59, who spent much of his career as an Arabic-speaking CIA officer, has been a central figure in Obama’s world since the beginning of his presidency. Built like a linebacker, with a hardened face, close-cropped retreating hair and an intense gaze, Brennan looks the part of a grim counterterrorism agent. More than one Obama aide compared him to a grizzled city cop, and all of them testified to his herculean work ethic.

A native of North Bergen, New Jersey, Brennan attended Catholic schools and Fordham University, spent time in Indonesia and Egypt and earned a master’s degree in Middle East studies at the University of Texas at Austin before answering a newspaper ad for the CIA. He rose through the ranks to become station chief in Saudi Arabia and a favorite of George J. Tenet, then the CIA director, who made him his chief of staff and later the agency’s deputy executive director.

“He was a pretty good analyst. He was a bright guy,” said Melvin A. Goodman, a former CIA officer who is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a sharp critic of the agency. “But he always had a reputation of sucking up to power and moving in the direction of power and not being able to exercise any independence.”

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Brennan helped set up the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, later reorganized as the National Counterterrorism Center. But he was not made its permanent director and, disaffected with President George W. Bush’s administration, he retired from the CIA in 2005 and became a public critic.

Brought into Obama’s orbit, Brennan was the new president’s first choice to become CIA director, but that unraveled when Democrats protested his association with Tenet’s leadership. During Bush’s tenure, Brennan had opposed waterboarding but not every brutal interrogation method and said then that the United States would “be handicapped if the CIA was not, in fact, able to carry out these types of detention and debriefing activities.”

After Obama’s election, Brennan argued that he had not been part of the interrogation program and “opposed different aspects” of it while concurring with others. He acknowledged that he had once argued for keeping open the secret CIA prisons but that conditions had changed and “I’ve changed my views.”

A Relationship Deepens

In the end, he had to settle for the White House job, but that may have worked out better for him because it sealed his relationship with Obama, a former law professor with little national security background.

“Somebody like the president, who doesn’t have that background, will end up gravitating to someone who does,” Daley said.

Whether it was a would-be underwear bomber or shootings at Fort Hood, Brennan exuded a confident competence that reassured a new president and his staff.

“I slept better knowing that John Brennan never does,” recalled David Axelrod, then Obama’s senior adviser. Another former aide described Obama and Brennan as “kindred spirits.”

In a low-ceilinged, windowless basement office next door to Denis R. McDonough, who would later become White House chief of staff, Brennan was entrusted with an outsized role, managing the “kill lists” for drone strikes. He could order airstrikes in Yemen without getting further approval from the president.

“Brennan’s control over his area was as complete as anyone’s control over anything in the White House,” another former senior official said.

He came to be identified with the escalation of America’s secret war in Yemen and the successful raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but he was also an ally of those resisting more hawkish policies in Afghanistan and Libya, and advocated freeing wrongly held detainees at Guantánamo.

He also made it easier for the president to restrain CIA adventures; he could grill the agency as no other Obama adviser could.

“He understands them intimately and was constantly raising hard and tough questions,” said Harold Koh, then the State Department’s legal adviser and now a Yale Law School professor.

But neither Obama nor Brennan was eager to take on the CIA too often.

“The CIA gets what it needs,” Obama declared at one early meeting, according to people there.

“He didn’t want them to feel like he was an enemy,” said a former aide.

Fighting an Inquiry

Brennan likewise was protective of CIA interests. He tried to excise the word “torture” from White House documents, only to be overruled. And when Leon E. Panetta, who became Obama’s CIA director, negotiated an agreement with the Senate Intelligence Committee for an inquiry into torture, Brennan erupted.

“It did not take long to get ugly,” Panetta recalled in his memoir. “Brennan and I even exchanged sharp words.”

Brennan could not reverse the deal, but since becoming CIA director last year he has fought constantly with Democrats on the committee over the torture report. During one meeting, Brennan grew red-faced and pounded his fist on a table.

“The CIA is not a rogue organization,” he said.

Relations worsened when senators accused the CIA of penetrating a computer network designated for the committee’s use and reading staff emails to find out how the committee might have obtained an internal CIA study of interrogations ordered by Panetta when he was director. The CIA inspector general admonished five agency officers and Brennan apologized, but relations remained raw.

Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat on the committee, said on Saturday that he had yet to receive answers about Brennan’s exact role in the episode.

“To stonewall about getting information about what he knew and when he knew it is really unacceptable,” he said. “Brennan has gotten away with frustrating congressional oversight. He shouldn’t have gotten away with it, but so far he has.”

Several Obama advisers said privately that Brennan made a mistake by letting the situation grow so toxic. In October, McDonough flew to California to smooth things over with Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee chairwoman, and personally discuss redactions to the torture report.

Last week he became the agency’s prime defender, much to the chagrin of some of the president’s allies.

“There’s a difference between loyalty and leadership,” said Elisa Massimino, president of Human Rights First, an advocacy group. “Brennan may be showing loyalty to the agency by trying to make sure none of his people are in legal peril. Leadership would be if he used this crisis as an opportunity to make clear what the standards are going forward.”

As for Obama, advisers said they doubted he believed the interrogation program yielded useful intelligence but that he was unwilling to publicly contradict Brennan. Instead, the president made sure the CIA got what it needed: cover against its critics.

Michael V. Hayden, the former CIA director who has led the public defense against the Senate report, said he “deeply appreciated” Obama’s measured words about the tough choices his predecessor faced after Sept. 11 and his praise for the “patriots” of the CIA.

“Given what he’s said in the past,” Hayden said, “this is about the best we could have hoped for.”

This story was originally published December 14, 2014 at 9:05 PM.