Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, just issued a statement practically begging the Obama administration to work with her to restructure the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the five-year-old bureaucratic anomaly seated atop the country’s 16 intelligence agencies. “I have long More…
Both Eli Lake and Greg Miller report that President Obama personally asked Steve Kappes last year to remain the CIA’s deputy director. Kappes’ boss, Leon Panetta, announced yesterday that Kappes will be retiring next month. Under the Kappes Continuity — he ascended to deputy director in More…
In response to my speculation that CIA Deputy Director Steve Kappes is stepping down because of Jeff Stein’s recent critical profile of him in Washingtonian, CIA spokesman George Little replies, “The notion that Mr. Kappes is retiring because of a magazine article is just ludicrous.”
In a surprise development, the CIA just announced that longtime and well-respected Deputy Director Steve Kappes will retire from the agency in May. Kappes was the initial favorite of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to be CIA director, and Leon Panetta’s ultimate decision to retain Kappes as his deputy was More…
That’s a shocking account about Steve Kappes, then the powerful associate deputy CIA director for operations, provided by The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein in a new Washingtonian profile of the powerful and widely respected deputy director:
According to an internal investigation, [Kappes] helped tailor the agency’s paper trail
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
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
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 More…
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