A Double Agent At The CIA?

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | 10 July 2009

National Security: If CIA Director Leon Panetta really has claimed to his old friends in Congress that the agency was lying to them, the impact will be unprecedented. Do we have a mole running Langley?

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Related Topics: General Politics

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Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee on June 26 fired off a nasty letter to CIA head and former high-ranking Democratic Rep. Leon Panetta. The thrust was that their former House Democratic colleague is a liar.

Signed by Reps. Anna Eshoo, Alcee Hastings, Rush Holt, Jan Schakowsky, Adam Smith, Mike Thompson and John Tierney, the curt message said:

“Recently you have testified that you have determined that top CIA officials have concealed significant actions from all Members of Congress, and misled Members for a number of years from 2001 to this week. This is similar to other deceptions of which we are aware from other recent periods.”

The Democrats’ letter went on to ask Panetta to “correct” publicly a May 15 statement to CIA employees that it was against agency policy and practice, and “against our laws and values,” to mislead Congress.

Could it be any clearer that these members of a congressional panel in charge of intelligence matters — more than half of the House Intelligence Committee’s Democrats, including the three top-ranking majority members under the chairman — consider the intelligence community to be the enemy?

The letter reads not like the national security concerns of the elected representatives of the people, but rather like an ACLU cease-and-desist threat.

It would be a mistake, however, to view Panetta as an aggrieved party. CIA spokesman George Little was quick to try to douse the flames stirred up by the Democrats’ letter, telling the Washington Independent shortly after the communication was made public late Wednesday that their claim that Panetta said the CIA misled Congress is “completely wrong” and that Panetta “stands by his May 15 statement.”

But clearly Panetta testified to something big in closed session that Democrats are now using to clobber our spies.

Another letter, from House Intelligence Committee chief Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, to the panel’s ranking Republican, Peter Hoekstra, charged that Panetta’s secret testimony suggested the committee “has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and (in at least one occasion) was affirmatively lied to.”

Reyes and other Democrats on the committee won’t tell the public what exactly the so-called “significant actions” concealed from Congress were, or what the “affirmative lie” was.

Ironically, they’re hiding behind a smoke screen of governmental secrecy, with one House aide telling Politico that “the details behind the letter are apparently at very high levels of classification.”

As Republicans have already surmised, it smells more like a very low level of politicization. The goal of this seems to be to immunize House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from accusations that she lied about what the CIA told her regarding enhanced interrogations during the Bush administration’s first term.

As Hoekstra told CBS on Thursday, “it looks like they’re working on the political equation” rather than “trying to foster a bipartisan consensus on national security.”

Hoekstra went on to call Reyes’ letter “one of the most bizarre episodes in politics that I’ve seen in my time here in Washington.” That’s saying a lot. But it’s even worse than that.

According to Reyes, Panetta’s closed testimony “may well lead to a full committee investigation” of the CIA. Will there be a new Church Committee-style witch hunt, which crippled our spies’ abilities and destroyed their morale in the 1970s?

All of this comes as debate nears on the Intelligence Authorization Bill. As part of the debate, Democrats intend to require that details of covert actions be revealed to the entire membership of the Senate and House intelligence committees, not just the eight leaders of both parties from the leadership and intelligence panels.

With the unfolding terrorist threats the U.S. faces in coming years, the last thing we need are preemptive congressional assaults from Congress against our spies — especially if their ammunition comes from the CIA director himself.