CIA

WASHINGTON -- Gen. Michael V. Hayden arrived at the CIA a year ago with a clear directive: Quell turmoil at the agency. By all accounts, he has done that. Now comes the harder part: building a post-9/11 spy agency. In 2004, President Bush directed the CIA to expand the number of spies and analysts by 50 percent in response to a 9/11 Commission finding that the CIA needed to transform its spying capabilities. Meeting the president's goal is going to take longer than originally anticipated.

WASHINGTON -- At a conference in El Paso, in mid-August, Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, heaped praise on a man whose exploits, he joked, had been the inspiration for the television show 24. From fast cars to fine wines, Reyes said, the appetites of the man, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., are the stuff of legend. Then turning serious, Reyes hailed Rodriguez's three decades of undercover work for the CIA, where he recently stepped down as head of its clandestine service, and called Rodriguez an "American hero."

WASHINGTON -- A review of classified documents by former members of the Sept. 11 commission shows that the panel made repeated and detailed requests to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2004 for documents and other information about the interrogation of operatives of al-Qaida and was told by a top CIA official that the agency had "produced or made available for review" everything that had been requested. The review was conducted earlier this month after the disclosure that in November 2005, the CIA destroyed videotapes documenting the interrogations of two Qaida operatives.

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 By Ron Suskind In this troubling portrait of the war on terror, America's intelligence agencies confront not just al-Qaida but the Bush administration's politicized incompetence. Suskind follows the triumphs and failures of the "invisibles" - the counterterrorism experts at the NSA, the FBI and especially the CIA - as they painstakingly track terrorists' communications and financial transactions, interrogate prisoners and cultivate elusive al-Qaida informants.

WARSAW, Poland -- A contentious report that accuses 14 European nations of being complicit in more than 1,200 CIA flights that were used to shuttle terrorist suspects to secret prisons around the world was adopted yesterday by the European Parliament. The vote in Strasbourg, France, was 382-256, with 74 abstentions. Parliamentarians who supported the resolution said the report exposed how European governments had turned a blind eye to human rights violations. Many of those who voted against it said the 76-page report was short on hard evidence and seemed to display an anti-American bias.

"Allen Dulles: Master Spy of American Espionage," by James Srodes. Regnery. 515 pages. $34.95.Much like the Central Intelligence Agency he helped create, Allen Dulles was something of an enigma and a paradox.Here was a Wilsonian liberal, a gentle man who spent his early career on disarmament and collective security, only to conclude his years by lording over an agency during its time of greatest excess. His agents trotted about the globe, overthrowing governments and targeting leaders for assassination.

CIA has become a synonym for failure.It no longer provides policy-makers with the kind of accurate and timely intelligence needed to protect the United States, nor does it deliver to taxpayers a fair return on their money. It is time, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat, has suggested, to consider dismantling the CIA and restructuring the nation's intelligence establishment.The CIA's latest failure was its inability to foresee the nuclear tests conducted by India, which precipitated Pakistan's tests.

Tomorrow morning, Buzzy Krongard disappears."Take good notes, 'cause this is the last interview I'm ever gonna give," the 61-year-old investment banker said last week, reclining in an easy chair, Cuban cigar pointed straight at the ceiling.The Baltimore native has walked away from a lucrative job as vice chairman of Bankers Trust New York Corp., the parent of BT Alex. Brown Inc. and the seventh-largest bank in the country.At an age when most executives contemplate retirement, Krongard is headed into the darkness, trading the cordial world of high finance for the intrigue of the Central Intelligence Agency.

THE CENTRAL Intelligence Agency is desperately in search of a new role.By becoming peacekeeper between Israelis and Palestinians, the agency would go a long way toward mitigating its indecorous past. It is a good place to start for an outfit that has caused domestic headaches and foreign embarrassments.The Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Richard C. Shelby Alabama, expressed concern about the designated role and said he will hold hearings. They should be substantive; neither the agency nor the White House should alone define the future of an agency that, at times, has seemed a government unto itself.

In the late summer of 1984, the CIA faced what secret documents called the "potential for disaster." Congress was debating a full cutoff of funding for the Reagan administration's covert Contra war in Nicaragua. At that delicate political moment, legal proceedings in a major drug bust in San Francisco threatened to publicly link CIA-Contra operations with cocaine trafficking.A CIA official summed up the Agency's concerns over publicity this way: "What would make better headlines?" The agent, identified only as Ms. Jones, told investigators that the CIA quietly intervened in the case because it could have had an "explosive" impact on the Agency's mission.

WASHINGTON - -The CIA is deploying teams of spies, analysts and paramilitary operatives to Afghanistan, part of a broad intelligence "surge" that will make its station there among the largest in the agency's history, U.S. officials say. When complete, the CIA's presence in the country is expected to rival the size of its huge stations in Iraq and Vietnam at the height of those wars. Precise numbers are classified, but one U.S. official said the agency already has nearly 700 employees in Afghanistan.

TOM WARDELL BRADEN, 92 Commentator, ex-CIA agent Tom Braden, a former CIA operative who became a syndicated newspaper columnist, liberal co-host of the CNN talk show Crossfire and author of Eight Is Enough, a 1975 memoir that inspired a popular television series, died of natural causes Friday at his Denver home, his family said. He was 92. Mr. Braden was the father of eight children whose misadventures provided amusing grist for many of his newspaper columns and led to the ABC comedy-drama Eight Is Enough, which aired from 1977 to 1981 and starred Dick Van Patten.

Leon E. Panetta has shown himself to be an astute, accomplished and politically adept public servant. But all his management skills and political acumen can't make up for what he lacks as President-elect Barack Obama's nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency - real experience in the spy business. The much-maligned agency gets more right than it gets credit for and could use an outsider to assess its problems and challenges in the post-9/11 world. But without a mastery of the basic techniques of intelligence-gathering and an understanding of the conflicts within the bureaucracy, Mr. Panetta would be hard-pressed to inspire its professionals and re-invigorate their pursuit of its mission.

WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama has selected Leon E. Panetta to serve as the next director of the CIA, apparently concluding that a spy chief who understands politics might be more important than one with deep experience in intelligence matters. The surprise pick of Panetta, a former congressman and Clinton administration official, would give Obama a CIA director with unquestioned loyalty to the White House and an experienced managerial hand to steer the new administration away from intelligence scandals.

WASHINGTON -- A review of classified documents by former members of the Sept. 11 commission shows that the panel made repeated and detailed requests to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2004 for documents and other information about the interrogation of operatives of al-Qaida and was told by a top CIA official that the agency had "produced or made available for review" everything that had been requested. The review was conducted earlier this month after the disclosure that in November 2005, the CIA destroyed videotapes documenting the interrogations of two Qaida operatives.

WASHINGTON -- The CIA has agreed to make documents related to the destruction of interrogation videotapes available to the House Intelligence Committee and to allow the agency's top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, to testify about the matter, congressional and intelligence officials said yesterday. But it remained unclear whether Jose A. Rodriguez, who as chief of the agency's clandestine service ordered the tapes destroyed in 2005, would testify. Officials said Rodriguez's appearance before the committee might involve complex negotiations over legal immunity as the Justice Department and the CIA are reviewing whether the destruction of the tapes broke any laws.

WASHINGTON -- At a conference in El Paso, in mid-August, Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, heaped praise on a man whose exploits, he joked, had been the inspiration for the television show 24. From fast cars to fine wines, Reyes said, the appetites of the man, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., are the stuff of legend. Then turning serious, Reyes hailed Rodriguez's three decades of undercover work for the CIA, where he recently stepped down as head of its clandestine service, and called Rodriguez an "American hero."

WASHINGTON -- The destruction of hundreds of hours of videotape of interrogations of al-Qaida operatives, including Abu Zubaydah, could complicate the prosecution of Zubaydah and others, and underscores the deep uncertainties that have troubled government officials about the interrogation program. Officials acknowledged on Friday that the destruction of evidence like videotaped interrogations could raise questions about whether the CIA was seeking to hide evidence of coercion. A review of records in military tribunals indicates that five lower-level detainees at Guantanamo were initially charged with offenses based on information that was provided by or related to Zubaydah.

WASHINGTON -- The CIA faced the threat of obstruction-of-justice investigations yesterday from the Justice Department and congressional committees over the destruction of videotapes of al-Qaida interrogations. The Justice Department said it would review calls for a formal inquiry into the destruction of the tapes, while the House and Senate intelligence committees said they were opening investigations of their own into the episode, which Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, a West Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Senate panel, called "extremely disturbing."

WASHINGTON -- The CIA had no documented game plan to fight al-Qaida and failed to marshal its resources fully to counter the threat in the years leading up to the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to an internal CIA report released yesterday. The long-awaited report highlighted a "persistent strain in relations" between the CIA and the National Security Agency that continued into 2001 and had "a negative impact" on the intelligence agencies' collective effort to fight al-Qaida. It assigned primary responsibility for the pre-Sept.