Finding Successor to Former Intelligence Czar Will Be Tricky for Obama

By most accounts, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair was blindsided last week when President Barack Obama agreed to accept his resignation. According to one former senior US official who recently talked to Blair about his tenure in the "Intelligence Czar" post, Blair spoke about his plan to stay in the job until the end of Obama's first presidential term. But Blair also acknowledged that in order to succeed as the nation’s spy supremo, he had to demonstrate that his office had some control, or at least influence, over the CIA and its director, Leon Panetta, who bested Blair in a couple of hard-fought turf fights.

Now that Blair is on his way out, he'll never get that chance – although it’s unlikely that he could one-up the wily Panetta anyway. Meanwhile, intelligence officials,  watching warily as the White House tries to find a successor for Blair, are wondering whether any new intelligence czar will be able to overcome the bureaucratic, political and legal obstacles that hampered Blair from establishing his office's full dominion over 16 fractious and sometimes ultra-competitive agencies.

Numerous current and former U.S. national security officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive matters, said that the Pentagon's most senior intelligence official, Defense Undersecretary James Clapper, is the leading candidate to succeed Blair. Two of the officials said they have heard that Clapper, a retired three-star Air Force general, has already been offered the Intelligence Czar job and is now deciding whether to take it. (Spokespeople at the White House and Pentagon did not immediately respond to requests for comment).

When Blair's resignation was first announced last week, Clapper's name was the the first which occurred to Declassified as his most likely replacement. However, instead of touting him as the favorite (as most media reports did), after hearing some heated discussions about whether Clapper was really the best candidate to set right an office that has been shaky since its creation, we decided to list several categories of candidates who Washington's chattering classes were debating as possible candidates for the Intelligence Director post.

As of Monday, Clapper remained the oddsmakers' overwhelming favorite to replace Blair. But more information is surfacing which could be used to build a case against him.

Clapper is viewed by some Democratic national security officials as one of the three most senior Bush Administration "holdovers" who have been kept on by President Obama (the others are Clapper's current boss, the hugely esteemed Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department undersecretary in charge of economic and anti-terrorism sanctions). While nobody suggests that Clapper is a Republican partisan, one of the national security officials said there would be disappointment among Democrats if a high-profile job like intelligence czar went to a former Bush official.

Clapper also is nowhere near as popular with critical intelligence oversight committee members and staffers on Capitol Hill as figures like Gates or Panetta. National security officials familiar with oversight matters say that Clapper has a reputation for giving briefings in which he sometimes appears boring or unresponsive to members. His underlings have antagonized congressional committees by allegedly appearing arrogant and failing to respond quickly enough to congressional concerns. Two officials said that Clapper has clashed with some Congressional officials over ultra-secret Pentagon intelligence programs, presumably involving hugely-expensive hardware such as spy satellites.

Clapper, who earlier in his career headed two of the Pentagon's main intelligence units -- the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency -- historically has supported the concept of a strong National Intelligence Director's office; he reportedly prematurely left his post as chief of the NGA (the agency responsible for targeting and analyzing spy satellite imagery) after clashing with Bush-era Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over whether the intelligence czar's powers over intelligence agencies which belong to the Pentagon should be increased (Clapper believed that they should).  

One national security official familiar with both the intelligence community's and congressional oversight committees' take on the Intelligence czar's office and its powers said that appointing Clapper -- an intelligence technocrat with no known strong political connection to the President or Capitol Hill -- would "perpetuate the failing enterprise" that many experts believe is the Intelligence Director's office. This official suggested that only two current Obama Administration officials would have the political and bureaucratic clout to do the Intel Czar's job as it is meant to be done -- leading the 16 spy agencies from the top. But one of those two officials -- White House counter-terrorism coordinator John Brennan -- not only is probably more powerful in his current job than he would be as Intelligence Czar but also would have political problems with the left wing of the Democratic Party in any Senate confirmation battle (because he defended former CIA colleagues who carried out controversial Bush interrogation policies). The other formidable candidate for the intelligence czar's job -- CIA director Panetta -- is described by associates as happy in his current job and not interested in the nominal promotion.