When the Obama administration looked poised to nominate career intelligence analyst John Brennan to head the CIA, the left revolted over his stated support of controversial Bush-era policies, since recanted. Brennan took himself out of the running, but that didn't in any way prevent continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations on national security policy, torture excepted.
Obama ended up nominating former Clinton aide Leon Panetta to head the CIA. As Jeff Stein details in a devastating piece for the Washingtonian, the blessing of senior Democrats for that appointment seems to have depended a great deal on Panetta taking Steve Kappes, another career agency official, as his deputy -- and the person who would be really be running things.
According to Stein, as the CIA's assistant director of operations, Kappes presided over some of the worst intelligence failures of the past eight years -- not just torture, but the indictment of CIA officials over the capture of Abu Omar aka Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr from Milan, which resulted in the conviction in absentia by Italian authorities of CIA agents who had planned and executed his abduction. There was also the torture of German citizen Khaled El-Masri, who was released without charge after several months and "dumped on a highway in Albania." The CIA had resisted releasing Masri even though it had become apparent they had captured the wrong guy.
Stein goes pretty hard on Kappes, but the most explosive charge, if true, has to be Kappes' alleged involvement in covering up the murder of an unnamed detainee in the CIA interrogation site in Afghanistan known as the "Salt Pit":
The detainee froze to death after being doused with water, stripped naked, and left alone overnight, according to reports in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. He was secretly buried and his death kept “off-the-books,” the Post said.
According to two former officials who read a CIA inspector general's report on the incident, Kappes coached the base chief—whose identity is being withheld at the request of the CIA—on how to respond to the agency's investigators. They would report it as an accident.
Kappes of course, didn't talk to reporters on the record like Brennan did, which probably helped cultivate the mystique that's helped him survive Washington. It's also why no one knew enough to raise a fuss about the guy. Stein's profile reads like another tale of moral hazard in the CIA, where impunity leads to failure because there are never any consequences for crossing the line as long as you have the right people on your side.
Spencer Ackerman has filed a FOIA request for the above-mentioned inspector general's report.
-- A. Serwer
