Former Agents Say Stop Picking on the CIA

WASHINGTON, July 12, 2009— -- Former spies and some political leaders are saying that a lack of trust between Congress and the CIA is putting the county's security in jeopardy.

"It's one of the last nails in the CIA's coffin. It's finished. It's over. It's done," said former Central Intelligence Agency operative Robert Baer, whose exploits in the Middle East was the model for George Clooney's role in "Syriana."

The intelligence agency is back in the hot seat again after reports today that the agency, for eight years, withheld information from Congress on a secret counterterrorism program on the direct orders of then Vice President Dick Cheney.

Also today, word came that Attorney General Eric Holder is likely to push forward with a criminal investigation into the Bush administration's interrogation practices on suspected terrorists.

"I know I've been lied to," Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., said.

The rift between Congress and the CIA has been so bitter that when analysts have headed to Capitol Hill, the agency gave them this stock response: "I'm sorry, but I will be unable to continue our dialogue if you continue to question my integrity or that of my agency."

"The danger is today that we might go too far," Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas. "And that could cause us to not have that critical bit of intelligence that could protect this country."

Not all intelligence experts agree.

"There's absolutely no reason to believe that congressional oversight will lead to terrorist attacks," said former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke and ABC consultant. "And that's essentially what some people are saying … morale will go down and we'll be risk averse, and we won't talk to the FBI, we won't do our jobs and we'll all die of terrorist attacks. That's way exaggerated."

Clarke added that the "CIA has become a master of saying to Congress: 'If you do your job and supervise us it will hurt our morale. If our morale is hurt we won't be able to do our job.' That is largely a myth."

CIA insiders say they haven't seen anything like this since the 1970s, when the Church Committee probed extreme tactics such as hiring the mafia to kill Cuba's Fidel Castro.

"We're heading back into this Frank Church atmosphere in this Senate and in this Congress, where, basically, where people use the CIA as a whipping boy," said Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H.

The congressional hearings lead to new rules barring the FBI and CIA from sharing intelligence -- rules now blamed for allowing Sept. 11 hijackers to carry out their attacks.

"You have people running for the doors there, continue running for the doors, and it's going to hurt our national security," Baer said. "It's going to interfere with stopping another 9/11."

With rising criticism and poisoned relations with Congress, the agency's headquarters feel like a morgue, he says.

Another blow for morale could come if Attorney General Holder and the Justice Department go through with an investigation of CIA interrogators trying to find out if they broke the law by torturing detainees and going beyond the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, like waterboarding, that were approved by the Bush administration.

Officials say the appointment of a special prosecutor is likely, raising the possibility of high-profile prosecutions of career CIA operatives. Republicans say that's a bad idea.

"This continued attack on the CIA and our intelligence gathering organizations is undermining the morale and capacity of those organizations to gather intelligence," Gregg said.

This comes as Democrats in Congress are vowing their own investigation into the agency's failure to tell Congress about a secret program that went into the planning stage shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"To have a massive program that is concealed from the leaders in Congress is not only inappropriate; it could be illegal," said Majority Whip Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill.

When the current CIA director Leon Panetta found out about it, he scrapped the program and briefed the Congressional intelligence committees. One Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee says Panetta told them that Cheney had ordered the program kept secret.

"He was told the vice president had ordered that the program not be briefed to the Congress," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. "I think that is a problem obviously."

There's been no comment from Cheney, but the former vice president's allies say the agency did not need to brief Congress because the program had not yet gone into operation.

The swirl of investigations seems to be exactly what President Obama has repeatedly said he does not want.

"I think that we should be looking forward, and not backwards. I do worry about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively," Obama said in April.

But looking backward is exactly what is happening. With a special prosecutor likely to be named and congressional Democrats preparing their own investigations, the debate over the Bush administration's actions after the Sept. 11 attacks remains front-and-center in Washington.