MELISSA BLOCK, host:
More now on this question of intelligence experience. Tim Wiener is author of the book "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA." I asked him whether most CIA directors have come to the job with backgrounds in intelligence.
Mr. TIM WEINER (Author, "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA"): Most of them have had either military, military intelligence or intelligence experience. It is not a prerequisite, but it certainly helps with the officers of the CIA.
BLOCK: Helps with the officers?
Mr. WEINER: Well, the CIA is an organization with a military ethos, especially the spies who work overseas. They will respond to presidential commands, but they want to have someone that they trust. And experience cements that trust.
BLOCK: Is it at all a predictor of success within the agency?
Mr. WEINER: It doesn't have to be. President Eisenhower famously said that it takes a strange kind of genius to run the CIA. That genius has been hard to find. People who are counted as successes within the intelligence community - for example, Richard Helms, who ran the CIA under Presidents Johnson and Nixon - have not always been successes with the White House. Helms was fired by President Nixon.
What, clearly, Obama is looking for is a break from the past policies of the Bush administration. And he's also clearly going to give some decision- making authority here, probably a lot, to Bob Gates, who is the secretary of defense and a former director of Central Intelligence, and Admiral Blair, who is going to run the superstructure that now runs American intelligence, the Directorate of National Intelligence. The CIA is likely to be, as it has been ever since the end of the Cold War, more and more a second-echelon agency that provides support for military operations.
BLOCK: If the appointment of Leon Panetta does go through, would you see him as a tough agent for change, as a real advocate for reform within the CIA?
Mr. WEINER: He is on record as opposing the past practices of the Bush administration with extraordinary renditions and with harsh interrogations deemed tantamount to torture. That will be a clear break.
BLOCK: You know, another aspect of all of this is that apparently, Barack Obama's original choice was John Brennan, a former CIA official. But because of his ties with controversial interrogation and detention programs, he was scrubbed. And they were looking for somebody basically with clean hands here. In other words, you might not be able to have it both ways.
Mr. WEINER: Clearly not. And the challenge here is going to be, how do you find that clear reporting authority that runs both ways? The agency's rank and file in the clandestine service have been pushed to absolute extremes. You've got a very young workforce compared to the past, relatively inexperienced. President Bush ordered the CIA to increase by 50 percent the ranks of its clandestine service officers and analysts. To get that many people that fast has been a real, real challenge.
BLOCK: You know, you wouldn't have to look too far back to the case of Porter Goss, who was a former CIA officer, also a former congressman with extensive experience in intelligence, and widely seen as having a pretty disastrous, I think, tenure at CIA, no?
Mr. WEINER: He did because he came in with the feeling that the CIA had somehow subverted President Bush in its analysis of and predictors of what was happening in Iraq. And he tried to clean house but in the end, the house cleaned him. He lasted less than two years.
George Bush the elder came in with very little experience in these fields and built morale. But in terms of satisfying presidents, that is the goal here. You have to look at the record and see that experience in intelligence operations - Bob Gates is a prime example, who served under President Bush in 1991 and 1992 - of getting the intelligence harmonized with American military and diplomatic goals is the toughest job. It has taken somebody with experience, generally, to serve those high purposes.
BLOCK: Well, Tim Weiner, thanks so much for talking with us.
Mr. WEINER: Thank you.
BLOCK: Tim Weiner is author of "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA."