TURF WAR; BLAIR AGAINST HIS EGO
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/turf-warrior
Turf Warrior
Can Dennis Blair save U.S. intelligence?
James Kirchick
January 25, 2010
In the shadow of the intelligence failure that culminated with Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab lighting an explosive aboard a Detroit-bound flight, the
titular head of the U.S. intelligence community was busy fighting another
war. For months, in fact, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, the director of national
intelligence (DNI), had been waging an epic bureaucratic offensive. His job
had been created in the wake of September 11 to foster cooperation and
accountability among the 16 agencies sifting through the mounds of inbound
data about threats to U.S. interests. Turf wars, the job¹s congressional
creators theorized, had prevented spooks from the sort of sharing that would
piece together plots. So a strong leader was needed to heal these rifts in
the government.
Under Blair, however, these rifts have grown worse. His sworn bureaucratic
foe is CIA chief Leon Panetta, who, at least on paper, reports to him. But,
when Congress sculpted Blair¹s job, it left plenty of ambiguity about the
extent of the DNI¹s authority over the CIA, which seemed bound to create the
very squabbling that the reforms were intended to stifle. Blair has
compounded this problem with his knack for stirring intramural controversy.
He seems to relish the occasions when he can snatch power from Panetta. Over
the course of the past year, he has demanded the right to appoint the top
American spy stationed in each foreign country, a power traditionally
reserved for the CIA director. He has hammered the agency for botching the
Afghanistan war and attempted to assert more control over covert operations,
from paramilitary units to drone strikes in Pakistan. (Blair declined
requests for an interview.)
All in all, relations between the DNI and CIA have never been worse. Last
summer, a source close to Blair fumed about Panetta¹s ³insubordination² to
The Washington Post¹s David Ignatius. The White House eventually dispatched
National Security Advisor Jim Jones as a special envoy to negotiate a truce
between the men. When Jones failed to make peace, Vice President Joe Biden
took a turn at brokering a cease-fire. According to the Los Angeles Times,
Jones ultimately crafted a formal agreement that clarified the relationship.
Among other things, it preserved the CIA¹s direct line of communication to
the White House and the privileged role of CIA station chiefs. Even though
Panetta signed the document, Blair refused to give his consent. His huffing
finally forced Jones to unilaterally issue a memo last month imposing a
clearer division of labor.
Blair¹s obstreperousness doesn¹t shock those who have worked with him in the
past. As one former Pentagon official told me, he ³doesn¹t suffer fools
gladly and his definition of fools is fairly expansive. Sometimes that can
[mean everyone] up to and including the secretary of defense and even
presidents.²
The fact that relations between the most powerful members of the
intelligence community are fraught is not a comforting thought at the
present moment. Following the foiled Christmas plot, President Obama has
waxed outraged over the bureaucracy¹s failure to ³connect the dots.² Blair¹s
job description has always made him responsible for ensuring the efficacy of
a system that flows intelligence to appropriate analysts with a minimum of
bureaucratic friction. With so much so obviously broken in this system, the
question is, does he have the temperament and organizational chops to get
the job done?
That Dennis Blair would ascend to the highest ranks of government surprises
almost no one who encountered him on his rise there. Even those who don¹t
like Blair concede his smarts–and those who admire him tend to gush.
Richard Danzig, who served as secretary of the Navy in the Clinton
administration, told me that Blair exudes ³seasoned maturity² and ³obvious
kinds of stature.² He¹s the ³smartest-in-the-classÂtype person,² says Hudson
Institute defense analyst Richard Weitz. Hailing from New England Yankee
stock and Naval aristocracy, Blair is the sixth generation of his family to
serve as an officer. After graduating second in his class from Annapolis in
1968–a year that also included the notorious Oliver North, Senator Jim
Webb, and current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen–Blair
scored a Rhodes Scholarship. Next came a White House fellowship, followed by
a string of top intelligence jobs, including a stint on the National
Security Council (NSC) staff in the Reagan administration. ³He went
everywhere with a pad, constantly writing notes,² says one former NSC
staffer who served with Blair. ³I thought to myself, ŒThis guy¹s writing a
book.¹²
While he obviously impressed his superiors, Blair¹s headstrong tendencies
could also make him a nuisance. In 1999, he assumed control over the United
States Pacific Command (PACOM), which controls all U.S. military operations
in the Pacific theater. Forty-three countries were under his purview, along
with 300,000 military personnel. It was a vast assignment that placed him in
proximity to many impending crises. The first of these to strike on his
watch came in Indonesia, where government-backed militias waged a violent
campaign against an independence movement on the island of East Timor.
Two months after assuming his command, Blair met with General Wiranto, the
leader of the Indonesian military, with instructions from Washington to warn
him that, unless he stopped supporting the militias, the United States would
cut off all contacts. Yet, as Washington Post reporter Dana Priest recounts
in her book, The Mission, Blair never issued that warning. Instead, he
invited Wiranto to a military seminar in Honolulu, where he promised to
train Indonesian soldiers in crowd control. And he told the Senate Armed
Services Committee that the Indonesian military was playing ³a difficult but
generally positive role.²
What did this positive role entail? The Indonesians were supporting militias
responsible for killing not only large numbers of East Timorese–perhaps as
many as 7,000–but also 16 United Nations election observers. The militias
forced 20,000 independence supporters into prison camps, where they were
kept with hardly any food. But such humanitarian concerns were secondary.
Blair considered maintaining strong ties with the Indonesian military to be
far more important.
When the Clinton administration threatened to expel the handful of
Indonesian military officers studying in the United States, Blair
successfully urged the NSC to reverse this decision. ³At no point,² Priest
writes, ³did Blair ask the special operations officials who worked most
closely with Indonesia to reach out to contacts they had developed … to
try to arrest the violence.² In other words, he repeatedly freelanced and
deftly used his allies in Washington to make the case for a very different
sort of policy.
Those who knew Blair during these years say that he clearly aspired to be
chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But, in the early days of the Bush era, he
found himself locked in combat with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In
part, their conflict was structural. Rumsfeld wanted increased oversight of
the combatant commanders by installing civilian representatives in each of
their headquarters. ³Rummy wanted to break the Joint Chiefs¹ dominance,²
says a former NSC staffer.
But there were substantive differences over Pacific Rim policy, too. Blair
believed that the United States had unwisely cast its lot with Taiwan–he
reportedly told a congressional panel in 1999 that the island is ³the turd
in the punchbowl² of Sino-American relations (Blair disputed the context of
the remark)–and advocated a less adversarial stance toward China. This
position, which was shared by most of Blair¹s predecessors at PACOM, would
repeatedly bring him into conflict with the Bushies. The first instance came
when a Chinese fighter pilot collided with a U.S. EP-3 spy plane flying in
international airspace. When the damaged U.S. jet managed to land on Hainan
Island, just off the coast of China, the Chinese held the 24-member crew in
custody. As Blair worked with Joseph Prueher, the American ambassador to
China, to negotiate their release, the civilians at the Pentagon were
horrified at their conciliatory tone. One official recalls them issuing
³accomodationist messages to the Chinese on the naïve theory that a quick
apology and abasing ourselves would work.² Rumsfeld worried that they
neglected to exact any costs from the Chinese as they hammered out an
agreement. Indeed, the Pentagon reeled at the concessions that were made.
Even though the EP-3 was in perfectly reparable condition, they consented to
China¹s demand that the plane be dismantled by American military contractors
and shipped home in crates.
In May 2001, just a month after the EP-3 incident, Blair took his
differences with the defense secretary public. A study commissioned by
Rumsfeld had warned that U.S. bases in the Pacific would become increasingly
vulnerable to Chinese attacks in various conflict scenarios and recommended
that the United States shift its resources to capabilities like missile
defense and space weaponry. Blair disagreed, not only with the
recommendations, but also with the threat assessment. ³I think that using
this projection of what the Chinese are now doing as a rationale for the
U.S. having to flow back out of Asia is just wrong,² Blair told The New York
Times in a front-page story. The article quoted him recommending that the
United States spend more time working on its ³alliance structure² rather
than fretting about exaggerated warnings of Chinese bellicosity.
It was the public voicing of these doubts that bruised Blair¹s relationship
with Rumsfeld–and his chances for promotion. The circumstances of his
departure are murky. While officials at the Pentagon say that he left after
failing to win the Joint Chiefs job, Blair privately claimed that he was
fired. According to one official who worked with Blair, ³He said that to me,
to many people. I¹ve heard it repeated back more than a half-dozen times.²
Dissident status in the Rumsfeld Pentagon obviously makes for a good
credential in Democratic foreign policy circles. But Blair still wasn¹t a
natural denizen of the Obama camp. After retiring from the Navy, Blair
joined a series of corporate boards and became president of the Institute
for Defense Analyses (IDA), a federally funded think tank that advises the
Pentagon on weapons procurement. In 2006, it was revealed that Blair served
on the boards of two corporations that made parts for the F-22 fighter jet,
whose continued construction IDA had endorsed (and which Congress canceled
last year). Blair acknowledged that he was involved in two reports endorsing
the plane. An inspector general investigation was launched at the behest of
Senator John McCain and his colleagues John Warner and Carl Levin. The
inquiry concluded that Blair ³took no action to influence the outcome of
either study,² but it also found that he ³violated IDA¹s conflict of
interest standards.² In July 2006, Blair resigned from one of his corporate
board positions; after heightened media scrutiny, he quit the presidency of
IDA, too. Blair blamed much of his fate on the Arizona senator, a bitterness
that hasn¹t abated. ³He portrayed himself to me and many others as a victim
of John McCain, whom he found to be irresponsible and wrongheaded,² says one
former colleague.
How Blair got the DNI position remains opaque. Before being approached for
the job, he¹d only spoken once with Obama, way back in 2006. ³He was not
particularly involved with President Obama in the campaign,² says Danzig,
who was a top foreign policy adviser during the race. So, when Blair
received the job offer, he professed shock. ³I was quite surprised to
receive a phone call from him asking me to join his team,² Blair told
reporters in March. Whatever the circumstances of his recruitment, Blair
clearly had a profile that appealed to Obama: intellectual, a proven history
of engaging adversaries, and a willingness to candidly express his opinion
with superiors. The latter quality jibed with the prevailing liberal
critique of the intelligence community, which held that, in the Bush era,
analysts bent their evidence to win the approval of their political bosses.
But it is this maverick quality that has landed Blair in several
controversies. The first began when word leaked that he had asked Charles
Freeman, who had served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia and director for
Chinese affairs at the State Department, to be chairman of the National
Intelligence Council, the government¹s top intelligence analyst. The choice
raised the ire of a diverse group of Israel supporters, China hawks, and
Darfur activists. For instance, of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Freeman
once wrote to an e-mail listserv that the ³truly unforgivable mistake of the
Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip
the demonstrations in the bud.² In his position as head of the Middle East
Policy Council, a Saudi-funded think tank, Freeman published an ³unabridged²
version of the controversial ³Israel Lobby² essay by professors John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Until February 2009, Freeman had served on the
international advisory board of the Chinese National Offshore Oil
Corporation, a government-owned conglomerate with stakes in Sudanese
petroleum.
As controversy swirled, Blair steadfastly defended Freeman. Testifying
before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he said, ³I¹m better off getting
strong analytical viewpoints … than if I¹m getting pre-cooked pabulum
judgments that don¹t really challenge.² But his backing of Freeman did
little good. Just hours after Blair left the Senate hearing room, Freeman,
likely bowing to pressure from the White House, withdrew his name from
consideration. In a rambling letter blaming ³the Israel Lobby,² Freeman
claimed to be done in by ³unscrupulous people² who were ³intent on enforcing
the will and interests of a foreign government.²
A few days before Freeman bowed out, Blair¹s spokeswoman acknowledged that
he did not seek prior White House approval of the selection, a rather daring
move given the problems a figure like Freeman posed to so many
constituencies. And, even after the controversy, Blair told reporters, ³I
thought [Freeman] was a good pick, I still think he would have made a great
National Intelligence Council chairman, but it wasn¹t to be.²
Introducing Blair for his January confirmation hearings, Senator Dianne
Feinstein cited a description of the incoming DNI as ³one of those who could
think outside the box.² That was, in essence, what attracted him to Freeman.
Both men envision themselves as truth-tellers working amid a sea of
conformists.
But this headstrong quality has thrust Blair into the center of myriad
intraadministration debates. His assessment of Tehran¹s nuclear program, for
instance, stands at odds with the evaluations of our European allies,
international watchdog agencies, and even other branches of the U.S
government. Last March, Blair told a Senate committee, ³Whether [the
Iranians] develop a nuclear weapon which could then be put in [a] warhead I
believe is a separate decision which Iran has not made yet.² That¹s a strong
stance, without much hedging, and inimical to the view of Mike Mullen,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Just a day after Blair¹s testimony,
Mullen told a Washington audience, ³I believe that Iran is on a path to
develop nuclear weapons. We can debate the timeline, but it¹s very clear to
me that that¹s their path and that¹s what their leadership is about.² A
frustrated Feinstein told Congressional Quarterly, ³You have one admiral
saying one thing and one admiral saying another, I¹m not going to get into
the middle.² As late as September, according to Newsweek, Blair¹s office
told the White House that it continues to stand by the conclusions of the
2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not presently developing
nukes.
All this has played out against the backdrop of Blair¹s contretemps with
Panetta. And, while their squabble has nothing directly to do with the
Abdulmutallab case, it is reflective of a dysfunctional intelligence
culture. But, thus far, none of these failures has redounded against Blair.
That¹s because, as much as Blair has a talent for provocations, he also
knows when to cool his jets. ³He¹ll be very good at staying below the radar.
This has been key to his career,² one of Blair¹s former colleagues told me.
And so, the man who officially has ownership over the intelligence community
has largely avoided blame for this spectacular intelligence failure.
In a sense, for Blair to succeed in this next chapter, he will have to
overcome his own temperament. He¹s a self-styled maverick, ever willing to
prod. Or, as his friend Strobe Talbott says, ³He¹s a speak-truth-to power
guy.² That¹s an admirable quality for an analyst, but it may not be the
ideal defining quality for someone tasked with taming a sprawling
bureaucracy. To enact the improvements that the president has demanded,
Blair must accept a truce in his battle with the CIA; he will need to
bolster the morale of agencies that feel trampled, fostering a sense of
collective mission. In other words, Blair will only be able to execute this
agenda by fighting another turf war–and this time, his enemy will be his
own ego.
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