Report: Obama picks former Clinton aide to head CIA

Jan 5, 2009, 20:10 GMT

Washington - President-elect Barack Obama has chosen former congressman and White House chief of staff Leon Panetta to head the Central Intelligence Agency, the New York Times reported online Monday.

If confirmed by the Senate, Panetta would take over an agency responsible for tracking down al-Qaeda leadership, and also one that has experienced turmoil during the administration of President George W Bush.

Panetta, 70, is widely respected in Washington as a bipartisan operative, but he does not have a deep background in the field of intelligence. He served as a member of the Iraq Study Group, which made recommendations in 2006 for revising policy in Iraq.

Panetta was former president Bill Clinton's chief of staff in 1994 and was credited with turning around a rocky start during the first two years of the Clinton White House. He served as a congressman from California from 1977 to 1993.

Obama has said he wants to bring changes to the CIA and other US intelligence agencies to make them more efficient. The CIA rank-and- file has been skeptical to embrace CIA directors perceived as outsiders.

The CIA has been criticized for its failure to predict the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, providing faulty intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons' programmes, and for using questionable methods or possibly torture during interrogations of suspects in the war on terrorism.

The Obama transition team has not announced plans to publicly nominate Panetta as CIA director. The Obama team has also not confirmed media reports that retired Navy admiral Dennis Blair has been chosen to oversee all US intelligences agencies, including the CIA.

Blair, 61, served as chief of US Pacific Command from 1999 to 2002 before retiring and holding positions on company boards and heading a Pentagon-funded think tank. Pacific Command manages all US military operations in the Asia-Pacific region.

If confirmed by the Senate, Blair will become the director of national intelligence, coordinating the espionage and information gathering activities of the nation's 16 intelligence organizations.

In addition to the CIA, those include the Defence Intelligence Agency and the super secret National Security Agency, as well as outfits in the Army, Navy, Air Force, State Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Blair would also be responsible for providing the president with daily intelligence briefings, usually the first order of business for a president every morning.

Naming the chiefs of the intelligences agencies would bring Obama another step closer to filling his senior national security postings. He nominated Senator Hillary Clinton as secretary of state on December 1 and announced that Defence Secretary Robert Gates had agreed to stay in the post. Retired Marine general James Jones will become his national security adviser.

The director of national intelligence, or DNI, was created in 2004 after a commission investigating the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks found the espionage community failed to communicate effectively throughout the various bureaucracies.