As any reader of suspense novels knows, it’s hard to keep good spies down.
Punish them, banish them, take away their trench coats, they nonetheless survive.
A case in point would be Judith A. “Jami” Miscik, the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence who was forced out in 2004.
She landed on her feet at Lehman Brothers as the global head of sovereign risk until that company went bankrupt this year.
But now she’s back in the news as a member of the Obama-Biden transition agency review team.
Miscik is heading up the intelligence community assessment, along with John O. Brennan. He was also a high-ranking official at CIA, and he served as head of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Brennan and Miscik will analyze current intelligence policies and practices. And they’ll make recommendations about personnel appointments at the CIA, and other intelligence agencies.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the presence of two CIA veterans heading the team suggests that Obama is not looking for radical change at the CIA.
“He’s going to take a very centrist approach to these issues,” Roger Cressey, a former counterterrorism official who served in the Clinton and Bush administrations, told the Journal. “Whenever an administration swings too far on the spectrum left or right, we end up getting ourselves in big trouble.”
But according to Politico, a kind of business-as-usual approach to the CIA could be controversial, as Brennan and Miscik can be linked to CIA interrogation practices that some say constitute torture.
Nonetheless, Brennan, currently the president and CEO of The Analysis Corporation, a group that consults on intelligence matters, could end up heading the CIA, the Journal reports.
Miscik’s job prospects at CIA would seem to be more uncertain, if only because she carries more baggage from her last few years at the agency.
She gets points for leading the group of analysts that produced the unfortunately ignored August 2001 report “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.”
She loses points for spearheading a later war-justifying report that determined that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Then again, Miscik is praised for standing up to subsequent administration pressure to find a link between Al Quaeda and Iraq, a link that her analysts said wasn’t there.
Her resistance didn’t help her career prospects, however. In December 2004, she was removed as deputy director for intelligence.
The intelligence community review team is part of a larger national security review group created for the Obama transition.
It’s led by Sarah Sewell, the faculty director for the Carr Center on Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She’s a former deputy assistant secretary for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance in the Defense Department during the Clinton administration.
The National Security team includes the Homeland Security Review Team, lead by R. Rand Beers and Clark Kent Ervin.
Beers, the head of the National Security Network, a private company, was a staffer at the National Security Council during both Bush presidencies and the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
Ervin, who, like Sewell is a former Rhodes Scholar, currently heads the Aspen Institute’s Homeland Security program. He was the first inspector general in the Department of the Homeland Security.
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