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Dianne Feinstein vs. the C.I.A. [1]
['Condé Nast', 'Connie Bruck']
Date: 2015-06-22
Feinstein spoke to him again, and then, loudly enough to be heard, ordered, “Do.” Udall moved to another subject.
At the hearing, Brennan was imperturbable. When Wyden, Feinstein’s strongest adversary on privacy issues, asked whether the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act applies to the C.I.A., Brennan said, “I would have to look into what that act actually calls for and its applicability to C.I.A.’s authorities. And I’ll be happy to get back to you, Senator, on that.”
The torture issue has dogged Brennan. Obama, at the beginning of his first term, had wanted to make him director of the C.I.A., but backed away after human-rights advocates pointed out that Brennan had been the agency’s deputy executive director from 2001 to 2003, when many of the worst abuses occurred. (Brennan has said that he had “some visibility into some of the activities” of the detention program but that he was “not in the chain of command.”) Instead, Obama brought Brennan into the White House, as his counterterrorism adviser. Brennan told Charlie Rose recently that in those early days Obama “did not have a good deal of experience” with intelligence-related subjects, but that in the intervening years he had “gone to school and understands the complexities.” Brennan met with Obama frequently, helping to orchestrate a vast expansion of the targeted-killing program, and shaping the various “kill lists.” In the White House, he was described by other officials as Obama’s “father confessor,” who allowed the President comfort as his decisions took the lives of thousands of suspected militants, along with an unknown number of civilians.
“John had a Jesuit education, he is a practicing Catholic, and I’ve heard him in meetings at the agency, talking about the theories of just war,” a former C.I.A. officer who has known Brennan for many years said. “He weighs things carefully.” The former intelligence officer said that Brennan was “a Dudley-Do-Right character, a guy who is convinced he is wearing the white hat. He has always wanted to be close to power—because, I think, he is convinced he can do good by being there.”
Robert Grenier, the former director of the C.I.A. Counterterrorism Center, has been friendly with Brennan since they were junior officers, and he has described Brennan as “highly ambitious and a talented bureaucratic infighter.” He told me that the agency’s leaders had such confidence in Brennan that, in 1996, they promoted him from an analyst to Riyadh station chief. The political skills that made him a good choice for that position were evident in his White House job, Grenier continued. “I’ve never seen anyone from that perch exert the kind of influence and even, to a certain extent, direct control,” he said, citing the targeted-killing program. “Unlike most of his predecessors, he actually understands the whole system from the inside. So he was in a position, with the weight of the President behind him, to really push himself into the middle of the process, and to control it.”
When Obama nominated Brennan as C.I.A. director, in January, 2013, Brennan made his way dexterously through the confirmation process. During a hearing before the Intelligence Committee, Chambliss mentioned a private conversation in which Brennan had disparaged the committee’s report as “a prosecutor’s brief, written with an eye toward finding problems.” Rockefeller recounted a quite different conversation. “You told me that you were shocked at some of what you read,” he told Brennan. “I would hope . . . that you will make parts of this . . . required reading for your senior personnel so they can go through the same experience you went through. Are you willing to do that?”
“Yes, Senator,” Brennan replied. “I am looking forward to taking advantage of whatever lessons come out of this chapter in our history and this committee’s report.”
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At Langley, Brennan’s performance caused consternation. “Career people back at the C.I.A., watching this, were dismayed,” John Rizzo, the agency’s former acting general counsel, recalled. “He seemed overly in agreement with the Democrats, and he made preliminary comments about what he’d seen in the report—said it was shocking.” At the hearing, Brennan earnestly promised to be forthcoming with the committee, and to “speak truth about power.” Early in his testimony, he acknowledged that there was a “trust deficit” between the committee and the C.I.A. “If I am confirmed,” he said, “I would make it my goal on day one of my tenure and every day thereafter to strengthen the trust between us.”
At the close of the hearing, Feinstein told Brennan, “I’ve sat through a number of these hearings; I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone more forthright or more honest or more direct.”
In late January, 2014, as the fight over the C.I.A.’s search of the Senate computers continued, Brennan presented a security briefing to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a strong supporter of the torture report, and Reid offered some unsolicited advice. “He told Brennan, ‘You’re wrong here,’ ” a senior Senate staffer recalled. “ ‘There is no justification for breaking into the staff computers. Just say you did it. Say you’re sorry. John, it’s Dianne Feinstein. You are questioning her credibility, and she is an unimpeachable person.’ But Brennan said no. He was defiant.”
Instead, Brennan intensified his attack. On February 7th, the C.I.A.’s acting general counsel, Robert Eatinger, filed a crimes report with the Department of Justice. He stated that information made available to him suggested that a Senate staff member had exploited a security vulnerability “to access, copy, and bring across the firewall C.I.A. documents to which he or she did not have authorized access,” and that at least four other staff members had “accessed and printed these C.I.A. documents on multiple occasions.”
According to Feinstein, the staff had identified the Panetta documents sometime in 2010 by using a search tool that the C.I.A. had provided. She told me that her staff members were unnerved by the C.I.A.’s attempt to instigate criminal charges. Still, she resisted going public. “Feinstein worked every internal lever she possibly could,” the Senate aide said. “It was frustrating to some of us, because we thought the only way you could have accountability over the C.I.A. was to start informing the public.”
Feinstein’s staff wrote a speech about the C.I.A.-Senate fight for her to deliver on the Senate floor, but for several weeks she resisted. In early March, articles about the conflict appeared in the press, including two in which unnamed sources suggested that the committee staffers had “hacked” into the C.I.A. network to obtain the Panetta review and that the C.I.A. had spied on the Senate staff’s computers. Brennan said, “I am deeply dismayed that some members of the Senate have decided to make spurious allegations about C.I.A. actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.” On the weekend of March 8th, Reid called Feinstein several times. “She was saying, ‘I want to be fair, I want to be in the middle—I’m chairman,’ ” the senior Senate staffer recalled. “And Senator Reid was saying, ‘Look, you can’t stand by anymore! The C.I.A. is leaking stuff. They’re making your staff out to be the bad guys!’ ”
Feinstein reserved time on the Senate floor for Tuesday, March 11th, but even that morning her staff was not certain that she would give the speech. Ultimately, she told me, in her efforts to reach a private resolution with Brennan, “there comes a point where the stonewalling is such that you have to break through.” At about 9 a.m., Feinstein, dressed in a purple suit, walked to the lectern. “Let me say up front that I come to the Senate floor reluctantly,” she began. As her anger gradually built, the room was still. She summarily rejected the notion that her staff had hacked into C.I.A. computers; the documents had appeared on the Senate side of the network, and her staff members had printed them out. In 2013, Feinstein said, when the C.I.A. delivered its response to the report, the staff members noted major disparities with the Panetta review. The terms that she had originally negotiated with Panetta suggested that the C.I.A. had to approve any documents that left the facility in Virginia. But the staff members, who knew that the agency had rescinded hundreds of files from the computer system, including the Panetta review, were afraid that it would confiscate the printouts. They redacted the names of non-supervisory C.I.A. personnel, along with information that might help locate detention sites, and then hauled the documents to the secure committee space in the Hart Building. Inside an inner office, they locked the documents in a safe.
Feinstein said that the C.I.A.’s search of the staff’s computers might well have violated the constitutional principle of separation of powers, as well as the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and an executive order that prohibits the C.I.A. from conducting domestic searches or surveillance. The crimes report that the C.I.A. had filed with the Department of Justice, she said, was an effort “to intimidate this staff.” She noted that it had been filed by the C.I.A.’s acting general counsel, who had been a lawyer in the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, and was mentioned by name more than sixteen hundred times in the report. “How this is resolved,” she concluded, “will show . . . whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee.”
After Feinstein spoke, she went to the Senate Democratic Caucus weekly lunch. As she entered the room, her colleagues gave her a standing ovation. The Senate aide said, “I think it made her feel like, O.K., I’ve done the right thing. But then, within forty-eight or seventy-two hours, she was hearing from Chambliss and other Republican members of the committee: ‘Why did you have to go out there and do that? It was so partisan of you!’ And she started to feel, again, like, Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.”
Brennan, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations later that morning, said, “As far as the allegations of C.I.A. hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s—that’s just beyond the—you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.” Although he stammered slightly, he spoke with his customary conviction, seeming disturbed only by the temerity of the accusation. Several weeks later, on Fox News, the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden dismissed Feinstein as “emotional.”
On the morning of November 27, 1978, Dianne Feinstein, then forty-five years old, told reporters in the San Francisco City Hall press room that she was thinking about getting out of politics. She had been elected to the board of supervisors in 1969, and had become its first woman president. But she failed in a bid to become mayor in 1971 and again in 1975; the second time, she did not make the runoff. She had entered that race as the front-runner, so “it was a big shock to the town, and to her,” Jerry Roberts, who covered Feinstein’s career for the San Francisco Chronicle, said. “She really got squeezed between the left and the right.” Her opponents were George Moscone, a progressive aligned with the labor movement, and John Barbagelata, whom Roberts described as “sort of a Tea Party precursor.” The fight was strenuous. “In the middle was Dianne, basically a technocrat, saying, ‘Let’s have civility.’ ” Feinstein told me she concluded that she was not electable.
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An hour after the press conference, Feinstein, in her small office on the second floor of City Hall, saw her fellow-supervisor Dan White run past. White, a former police officer, had resigned from the board three weeks earlier, but he wanted his job back. She called out to him, but he ignored her. Minutes later, she heard gunshots and smelled cordite. She went to her door and saw White race out of the building. In an office down the hall, she found Supervisor Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay elected official, face down on the floor, surrounded by blood; she reached for his neck, hoping to find a pulse, and her finger went through a bullet hole. She soon learned what had happened: after Moscone refused to give White his job back, White had shot him and then gone on to Milk’s office.
Feinstein grew up in San Francisco, and her private life captured something of the city’s combination of propriety and license. Her father, a professor of medicine, was Jewish; her mother, a volatile, emotionally unstable woman from St. Petersburg, was Russian Orthodox. When Feinstein was entering ninth grade, her mother enrolled her in the exclusive Convent of the Sacred Heart, reasoning that she would benefit from exposure to the social élite. At the convent, situated in a mansion in the Pacific Heights neighborhood, the pupils wore white gloves and curtsied to their instructors. The nuns emphasized to the students that their purpose was to make a difference, and that they should not be limited by their gender. Although Feinstein was never a committed feminist, she resisted restrictions in her professional life. At Stanford, she was the vice-president of her class—the highest office a woman could hold. After graduating, in 1956, she eloped with a prosecutor named Jack Berman, and had a daughter, Katherine; when they divorced, three years later, Feinstein carried on for a time as a single mother. Then, in 1962, she married Bertram Feinstein, a neurosurgeon twenty years her senior.
Soon after finding Milk’s body, Feinstein appeared near the doors of City Hall, where a large crowd had gathered. “It is my duty to make this announcement,” she said. “Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed.” People shouted in horror, and Feinstein struggled to keep her composure. Her lips moved silently, and then she said, “The suspect is Supervisor Dan White.”
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/22/the-inside-war
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