steve kappes

In the interest of obsessive Kremlinology, something else worth noting from the Washington Post’s timeline of Obama’s decision to declassify last week’s torture memos. Notice that two of the officials arguing against disclosure are White House senior counterrorism adviser John Brennan, a CIA veteran, and CIA Deputy Director Steve Kappes. Those guys are pretty well [...]

In the guts of this Washington Post tick-tock about President Obama’s decision to release the torture memos comes an account of a meeting at CIA headquarters in December between Obama emissaries and top outgoing CIA officials. The agency officials, including still-Deputy Director Steve Kappes, made a case for Obama to retain torture techniques not including [...]

Remember how I wondered on Friday if soon-to-be-White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan and CIA Deputy Director Steve Kappes would be the the real power brokers in President-elect Barack Obama’s intelligence community, despite the announced appointments of Adm. Dennis Blair (Ret.) as director of national intelligence and Leon Panetta as CIA director?
Mark Hosenball of Newsweek, [...]

Everyone in the blogosphere — Glenn, I’m looking in your direction — who may have thought that John Brennan was kneecapped just because he didn’t become CIA director should check out what President-elect Barack Obama had to say about Brennan during the Blair/Panetta rollout:
I’m pleased to announce that John Brennan – a close advisor, CIA [...]

Later this morning, President-elect Barack Obama is expected to make it official and announce that Adm. Dennis Blair (ret.) and former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta are his choices to lead the intelligence community. The friction between Panetta and Sen. Dianne Feinstein is over, and there hasn’t been any significant opposition to Blair [...]

Personally, I hate using the phone and look forward to the day when text-based communications replace phone calls as a matter of course. But last night aspiring CIA director Leon Panetta called Sen. Dianne Feinstein — she called him back, so there was a bit of phone tag — and secured the support of the [...]

My CIA sources on Monday were surprised but not so dismayed by the news that Leon Panetta is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to head the agency. Jeff Stein’s CIA sources yesterday? Much more dismayed.
Writing in his CQ column, Jeff talks to veterans of the CIA’s operations directorate — the people who recruit spies, gather information, [...]

Via Josh Marshall, Mark Mazzetti reports for The New York Times that Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) choice for CIA director, Steve Kappes, might remain deputy director as part of a plan to mollify the new chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee ahead of confirmation hearings for President-elect Barack Obama’s reported pick to head the agency, [...]

First Read reported that Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) choice for CIA director is current deputy director Steve Kappes. Kappes, unlike Leon Panetta, is a consummate intelligence professional. He played a key role in the nuclear disarmament of Libya, speaks Persian and Russian, and was purged by Porter Goss in 2004 for insufficient political loyalty to [...]